Courses

Jim Harper

Senior Fellow

Cato Institute

Jim Harper is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, working to adapt law and policy to the information age in areas such as privacy, cybersecurity, telecommunications, intellectual property, counterterrorism, government transparency, and digital currency. A former counsel to committees in both the U.S. House and the U.S. Senate, he went on to represent companies such as PayPal, ICO-Teledesic, DigitalGlobe, and Verisign, and in 2014 he served as Global Policy Counsel for the Bitcoin Foundation.

Blog Posts

‘I am a Liberal’: How one man brought down Britain’s national ID system

December 10, 2016
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Role of Government

Sixty years ago this week, Clarence Harry Willcock refused to show his identity card when stopped by police in Finchley, London. In short order, he became the last person in the United Kingdom to be prosecuted for refusing to show a national identity card. It’s an interesting history lesson — unless the pendulum is swinging back in the direction of national identification. As re-told in some detail on Wikipedia, compulsory identity cards were re-introduced in the U.K. during World War II. After the war ended, the policy of requiring them to be carried and shown to authorities on demand did