Damian Green (Conservative shadow immigration minister) writes on the Guardian Comment Is Free web site:

As the delays have grown, public support for ID cards has shrunk. The combination of the lost discs with 25 million people’s financial details, the 5,000 illegal immigrants cleared to work in the security industry, and the half a million false names on the DNA database have convinced people that putting all their most private information in the hands of the British state might not be the best of way of keeping it safe and secure.

As a final killer blow, the government has lost the intellectual argument for the scheme, mainly because it keeps changing its case. At various stages, ID cards have been necessary to protect us from terrorism, illegal immigration, and benefit fraud. But former home secretaries, academics and senior figures in the IT industry have lined up to demolish each individual argument.

I hesitate to suggest that the prime minister does something popular, right, and helpful for the public finances. This is not the usual role of opposition politicians. But the time has come, Gordon. Put yourself and us out of this particular piece of misery. Scrap the ID cards scheme now.

Mark Ballard writes in The Inquirer:

Following years of criticism that the ID scheme will amount to nothing more than an expensive bodge, the Identity and Passport service said it has slashed the cost by nearly a £1 billion.

But opponents say it has cut corners to cut costs and British citizens will suffer the consequences, while the Home Office has had to create a rush job mini-ID scheme to meet its own 2009 deadline.

The IPS said today that its cost estimate for giving ID cards to every UK national and running the system for 10 years had been cut from £5.43 million to £4.56 million.

It had done this, it said in its quarterly ID costs report, by deciding to leave the “open market” to capture citizens’ biometrics, effectively outsourcing the cost of enrolling people onto the ID scheme.

Margaret Smith writes in The Scotsman:

We have seen only recently just how incompetent the Government is at keeping our personal information secure. Last year, HM Revenue and Customs lost computer discs containing the personal information of about 25 million people, including their bank account details and National Insurance numbers.

This is on top of the DVLA in Northern Ireland losing the personal details of 6000 people and the loss of details of three million theory test candidates.

It is estimated that the market value of these “identities” lost by HMRC was around £1.5 billion, making this a golden opportunity for fraudsters. It serves as a clear demonstration of the dangers of large databases, and the problems with securing personal details, even with “trusted” organisations.

The danger of databases increases with every increase in the amount of data they hold. A comprehensive national identity database, holding 50 pieces of personal information about every person in the UK, would be the most dangerous database of all. Yet the Government are still determined to press ahead with this scheme.

Bob Marshall-Andrews, writing in The Sunday Telegraph, analyses the reasons for Labour’s losses in the local elections:

The second, barely acknowledged, cause of rejection is the growing and palpable concern at the continued erosion of civil liberty. Populist attacks on civil liberties have long been the stock-in-trade of New Labour and it was an essential ingredient of the project to outflank and ambush the Tories on law and order.

At first this may have worked, but it has produced a growing sense of alarm which has finally found expression. This alarm is now fuelled by the (albeit unjust) perception of the Prime Minister as a gloomy authoritarian who tolerates no dissent.

…

So to the second apologia: “I will listen and learn”. If this is serious then I propose the following political week for the Prime Minister, which will bring about a dramatic revival in Labour’s fortunes.

Monday: announce an immediate programme to return power and responsibility in public services to the excellent professionals who operate within them with an associated substantial reduction in targets and other official impertinence.

Tuesday: termination of the identity card programme, with the billions saved to be spent on the alleviation of poverty, sensibly increased security intelligence and improved conditions for service personnel injured in conflict.

Ian Gibson MP writes in the Independent, analysing the fallout from the local elections:

So what can be done to reignite Labour Party members and avoid self-combustion? We need to be talking of positive policies which improve people’s lives and will show Labour at its best. We have been in power for 10 years and it’s time to take stock. We must look at which policies have worked and which have not; we must look at what the public wants. We must move on from Blairite policies on ID cards, Trident missiles and futile wars with astronomical costs. The need for affordable housing and a national council house building programme remains. We must be seen to be “moving forward” on issues like carbon neutral housing, flooding, cliff erosion and seabed change. These are problems we encounter with constituents week in and week out.

John Kampfner makes similar observations on the Guardian Comment Is Free web site:

Labour has one last chance to salvage something from this debacle. But nothing will be achieved by waiting for Gordo. He promises to “listen”, but either he listens to the wrong sort, or the people that could force him to show some political courage are reticent to do so.

MPs must tell him to stop challenging his own party on issues that are a lose-lose, such as the 42-day pre-trial detention. He should stop his tactical wheezes. He should show some passion - even those who might disagree with him might respect a Labour leader who sought to stem, let alone reverse, the rampant inequalities in British society. He should abolish the costly Trident scheme. He should ditch ID cards. He should embrace civil liberties.

The Computing newsdesk blog notes another extension of the database state:

A couple of weeks ago a Computing reader wrote to the editor:

“Mike Byrne is concerned that he might one day have to present his ID card when buying petrol. He need not worry - this is not necessary. At Birchhanger Green services on the M11 I recently observed a notice that all registration numbers are checked against the Police National Computer (PNC) before the pump is enabled - and that this information will be retained.”

…

Turns out that the systems examine a vehicle’s licence plate against the PNC WITHOUT giving the cashier, or the petrol company, access to the database.

The driver is then cleared or flagged, and the cashier has the option to enable the pump. The whole process takes a matter of seconds.

Interestingly, it seems that should a car do a runner, the cashier then has the option of adding the record to a police database.

So although Shell / Esso / BP employees cannot access the database, they can add records to it by flagging cars that have done a runner.

Tom Shepherd writes in the Oxford Mail:

Campaigners fighting the Government’s plans for ID cards are claiming a victory after four Labour candidates seeking election to Oxford City Council on Thursday opposed the scheme.

And today, city councillor and Lord Mayor John Tanner, who is seeking re-election in his Littlemore seat, told Oxford campaign group NO2ID he also did not support the Government’s proposals.

NO2ID contacted each of the 101 candidates fighting for election to half the city council’s 48 seats to find out where they stood on the controversial issue.

NO2ID chairman Chris Rimmer, from Kennington, said although the scheme was a national one, it seemed likely local authorities would end up footing much of the bill.

He said candidates from the Conservative Party, Liberal Democrats and Green Party opposed the scheme, but five Labour candidates also said they were against the idea of a compulsory ID card system.

Mr Rimmer said: “When we carried out a similar exercise at the last local elections, there was a deafening silence from Labour candidates.

“This time it appears they have seen how unpopular the policy is and are not afraid to declare themselves against it.

“With even grass-roots Labour activists turning against it, surely now the time has come for Gordon Brown to scrap this highly intrusive, expensive and potentially damaging scheme.”

Peter Facey writes in on the Guardian Comment is Free site about the publication of Stuart Wilks-Heeg’s report on UK elections:

One temptation the government must resist is to respond to demands for greater ballot security by waving the national identity card in our faces. Sadly, I would not be at all surprised if the government were to insist that, in future, voters will have to produce their “voluntary” identity cards at the polling station.

Yet, as Wilks-Heeg points out, the system works perfectly well in Northern Ireland by allowing people to use any form of photo ID. Most use their driver’s licence or passport, while there is the option of applying for a basic photographic identity card specifically for voting purposes. Such a scheme can be introduced inexpensively and quickly. By contrast, the national identity card is now due to take more than a decade to roll out across the country - and that is assuming no future government scraps the scheme. We need action now.

Owen Bowcott writes in The Guardian:

Airline passengers are to be screened with facial recognition technology rather than checks by passport officers, in an attempt to improve security and ease congestion, the Guardian can reveal.

From summer, unmanned clearance gates will be phased in to scan passengers’ faces and match the image to the record on the computer chip in their biometric passports.

Border security officials believe the machines can do a better job than humans of screening passports and preventing identity fraud. The pilot project will be open to UK and EU citizens holding new biometric passports.

The puzzling thing about this plan is that automated facial recognition is horribly inaccurate:

Phil Booth of the No2Id Campaign said: “Someone is extremely optimistic. The technology is just not there. The last time I spoke to anyone in the facial recognition field they said the best systems were only operating at about a 40% success rate in a real time situation. I am flabbergasted they consider doing this at a time when there are so many measures making it difficult for passengers.”

Gus Hosein, a specialist at the London School of Economics in the interplay between technology and society, said: “It’s a laughable technology. US police at the SuperBowl had to turn it off within three days because it was throwing up so many false positives. The computer couldn’t even recognise gender. It’s not that it could wrongly match someone as a terrorist, but that it won’t match them with their image. A human can make assumptions, a computer can’t.”

Matthew Cookson writes in Socialist Worker:

The PCS civil service workers’ union has pledged to combat any plans for compulsory redundancies in the Glasgow Identity and Passport Service (IPS).

Management has announced that it wants to axe 100 jobs from the department’s Cowcaddens site.

Paul McGoay, the PCS IPS group president, told Socialist Worker, “A 90-day consultation period about the job losses is now taking place, but we could be faced with compulsory redundancies.

“This is down to the treasury making every civil service department carry out ‘efficiencies’. It is also to do with the fact that the IPS has been tasked with producing ID cards, and we need to make more ‘efficiencies’ to pay for them.

John Kampfner writes in the Daily Telegraph:

Labour MPs wonder whether Brown really believes that detaining terrorist suspects for up to 42 days is part of his mission. Does he really love identity cards? Does he genuinely believe that renewing the Trident nuclear system is worth the tens of billions of pounds? Does he salivate at the thought of low-earning childless couples paying higher tax? So why does a man with so few credits in the bank risk so much on fights that are not worth having?

Mr Kampfner gives a list of what he says many MPs from all sides want:

• No to ID cards
• No to extension of pre-trial detention to 42 days
• Greater emphasis on civil liberties
• Faster constitutional reform
• More ambitious climate change targets and greater enforcement
• More ambitious targets to build affordable new homes
• More positive approach to the EU
• Faster withdrawal of troops from Iraq

Jenni Russell writes about Gordon Brown in The Guardian:

It is the disjunction between values and actions that is so damaging for Brown. He claims to believe in social justice, economic prudence and individual liberties, yet his record shows remarkable inconsistencies on all three. He presided over a boom based on cheap credit and mega City bonuses, while inflicting the giant mortgage on the nation that is the private finance initiative (PFI). His final budget snatched money from the poorest purely in order to score a quick hit against the Tories, but he never had the courage to bring in higher taxes at the top. His government found billions to bail out Northern Rock, but refused to find the £40m to refund the struggling families who had saved for Christmas clubs through Farepak.

As for freedoms, his instincts lead him to favour intrusion, oversight and control. Not only is he pushing ID cards and detention without trial, but his government has given councils and 318 other bodies unprecedented powers to spy on citizens suspected of the most minor offences. Even his introduction of tax credits to help working families has been fatally flawed, because the process of claiming them has been made so bureaucratic, punitive, intrusive and censorious that many of those who go through it end up hating the government and its agents.

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Mark Ballard, writing in The Inquirer, analyses the High Court’s judgement in the ID card Gateway FOI case:

Justice Stanley Burnton, the presiding judge, made an aside on the hopes of anti-ID card campaigners that the Gateway Reviews might prove damning to the programme as a whole.

“If there were a ’smoking gun’ in the reviews, the case for disclosure would, on one view, be considerably strengthened,” said Burnton.

“I have read both reviews. There is, in my view, no ’smoking gun’,” he said.

It stands to reason, he said, that if there had been a smoking gun, then the government wouldn’t have gone ahead with the ID Scheme in the first place, would it?

As Burnton isn’t an IT expert, we can probably reserve judgment on that argument until the reviews are published. It quite puts the whole question of this case for transparency in a logical deadlock: the whole thrust of the requests after all was the belief that the government pressed ahead with the scheme in total disregard of any amount of sensible advice that it shouldn’t. So yes, Burny, it well might.

The Sunday Telegraph’s Westminster commentator “Portcullis” writes:

More confusion over the Government’s ill-fated ID card scheme after the Home Office minister Meg Hillier explained the system’s security measures to MPs in the wake of a string of Whitehall blunders.

She told the Home Affairs select committee: “The National Identity Register, essentially, will be a secure database… hack-proof, not connected to the internet… not be accessible online; any links with any other agency will be down encrypted links.”

By the time the transcript of Miss Hillier’s evidence was published, however, in the official Commons record, the words “hack-proof, not connected to the internet” had mysteriously been removed.

Did someone realise the claim was a hostage to fortune?

The Glasgow Herald has recently published a letter from Geraint Bevan on the same subject:

One can readily understand why civil servants might have cringed at the phrase “hack-proof” and requested its removal; no database can ever be described as such. However, erasure of “not connected to the internet” is a far more serious matter. When the Identity Cards Bill was being debated by parliament, ministers routinely gave conflicting information about whether this supposedly secure database would be connected to the internet. At times, it was claimed that citizens would be able to check and update their details online. On other occasions, it was claimed that the database would be physically isolated. After wasting two years and many millions of pounds of our taxes, without even a single plastic card being issued, it seems the Home Office is still unsure about this basic question.

If the National Identity Register is not connected to the internet, it will not be able to fulfil any of the dreams of ministers. If it is connected to the internet, it will not be secure.

Perhaps Meg Hillier could consult her advisers and let us know which of these unsatisfactory options has been selected, or when a decision will be made.

Stephen Howard writes in the Glasgow Herald:

A High Court judge yesterday quashed decisions to make public details of two early assessments of the government’s controversial ID cards scheme.

But Mr Justice Stanley Burnton said a different Information Tribunal should look again at the request under the Freedom of Information Act.

He said his ruling is not a judgment on whether the gateway reviews should or should not be disclosed and that would have to be determined by the tribunal.

James Slack writes in The Daily Mail:

Spending on consultants by the Home Office has rocketed by 2,000 per cent under Labour to almost £150m a year.

The total amount lavished on management consultants and other so-called experts over the past decade is £545m.

One of the major reasons for the expenditure is trying to get the controversial ID cards project off the ground.

…

In 1997/98, the Home Office’s total spending on consultants was £7.6m. By last year, it had rocketed to £147.9m.

Spending by the Identity and Passport Service - the arm of the department in charge of the ID cards project - has gone up in the same period from £237,000 to £30m.

The BBC carries a report on Tuesday evening’s London Mayoral hustings, including the one run by NO2ID:

Mr Paddick told the meeting that like his party leader, Nick Clegg, he would rather go to prison than carry an ID card - and he criticised the use of Oyster travel card records to track people’s movements, saying it was “the beginning of a police state”.

“I resent the fact that just because I have auto top-up on my Oyster card, that means Transport for London can monitor exactly where I am whenever I go by bus and whenever I go to an underground station”.

He said he would restrict the use by police of Oyster data and congestion charge cameras, except for suspected terrorist offences and violent crime - a pledge echoed by Mr Johnson.

Mr Johnson attacked ID cards as “morally and economically bankrupt” and pledged to cut his card up and “sprinkle it on my cornflakes”.

He went further than party leader David Cameron by speaking out against the issuing of ID cards to non-EU migrants, which begins this year, saying it was “creepy and wrong”.

Jamie Doward writes in The Observer:

Two of Britain’s leading civil liberties groups are to offer a £1,000 reward for the fingerprints of the Prime Minister or Home Secretary - a move that could leave both groups open to prosecution for incitement.

The anti-ID cards group No2ID and the campaign organisation Privacy International will this week take out spoof ‘Wanted’ posters in tube stations and pub lavatories offering the cash to anyone who can lawfully obtain either the fingerprints of Gordon Brown or Jacqui Smith. An initial print run of 10,000 has been commissioned.

The posters, resembling those issued by US sheriffs hunting outlaws in the Wild West, are backed by an internet campaign and accuse Brown and Smith of ‘identity theft’. They stipulate that ‘the fingerprint must be obtained lawfully and can be located on a beer glass, doorknob or any object with a hard surface. Corroborating evidence is required to ascertain the identity of these thieves.’ The £1,000 reward will then be paid to the charity of the ‘bounty hunter’s choice’, as the posters put it.

The poster can be downloaded here.

Laura Morris, writing in the Cambridge Evening News, reports the comments of the ID cards minister and NO2ID campaigners during the former’s visit to Cambridge:

Ms Hillier said: “The two things I would say to the N02ID campaigners are first, the act of Parliament has been passed and ID cards will be brought in. Secondly, if they have a passport I don’t know why they are worrying as they are already on the passport register - ID cards will work in a very similar way.

“Once they get to grips with it and start using them they will be less worried.”

Mr Watson said: “Public opposition to the dangerous and unnecessary ID card scheme is growing.

“The public does not want ID cards, nor the wholesale sharing of valuable personal data between Government departments they would allow.

“I work in the IT industry and I just don’t think the technology available will work to maintain a database of information this large.

“Ms Hillier says she’s here to listen to feedback; she should listen to the voice of the majority and scrap the ID card scheme immediately.”

Christine O’Neill, writing in the Scotsman, analyses to what extent the Scottish Parliament can extricate Scotland from the ID cards scheme:

With ID cards there are a number of legal questions that arise for a Scottish Government that may wish to oppose the introduction of such a scheme. The first is whether the Scottish Parliament is empowered to legislate in relation to ID cards. Although having such a power could not prevent Westminster from passing a UK-wide scheme, it could enable the Scottish Parliament to modify or even revoke that scheme at some future date.

The answer depends at least in part on whether it can be said the making of law on ID cards is “reserved” to Westminster. Needless to say, the Scotland Act 1998 is silent on the specific issue of an ID card scheme, so a more detailed analysis of that Act is necessary. Would an Act of Parliament about ID cards be an Act relating to the defence of the realm, data protection or the questions of nationality, immigration and the “issue of travel documents”? If so, it is pretty clear Westminster enjoys the exclusive right to legislate. If, however, an ID card scheme is not about immigration control and is instead characterised as being about access to public services – something successive Scottish administrations have rejected – then that would appear to be an area in which Holyrood could have a role.