Mark White writes on the Sky web site about eBorders:

The Government has stated that all passenger traffic will be monitored under the system by 2014, with 95% monitored by the end of this year.

Tim Reardon, from the Chamber of Shipping, represents the ferry companies – who carry more than 20 million passengers in and out of UK ports each year.

He told Sky the current system would cause enormous disruption for ferry passengers: “The e-Borders system as the Government has proposed it offers the nasty prospect of extra hassle and extra cost to passengers, for no benefit whatsoever.”

Of the programme for implementation, Mr Reardon said: “There’s no prospect at all of that happening within the timescale that the Government has suggested. They have suggested that it will happen by the end of this year. It won’t.”

The e-Borders programme has also run into legal difficulties, with the European Commission ruling late last year that passengers within the EU cannot be forced to give advance details and any such scheme within EU borders would have to be done on a voluntary basis.

Under government plans, the eBorders database will reatain details of everyone’s journeys in and out of the country for 10 years, along with personal details they gave to carriers, such as contact details and the names of others in their party.

Alex Stevenson writes on the Politics.co.uk web site:

MPs deemed to have committed “crimes against democracy” will be targeted by a new third-party pressure group at the general election.

The Power2010 campaign plans on spending nearly £1 million it has received from the Rowntree Trusts to target constituencies where the sitting MP is judged to have consistently opposed reform of Britain’s political system.

Former Home Office minister Tony McNulty is the first MP to be attacked. His Harrow East constituency will be plastered with “wanted” posters and thousands of floating voters will receive literature highlighting his alleged opposition to cleaned-up politics

Power 2010’s announcement of the campaign against Mr McNulty is here.

Tony McNulty helped push the Identity Cards Act 2006 through parliament by citing a variety of alleged benefits, including controlling illegal immigration. Although he later admitted exaggerating the arguments for ID cards, he refused to apologise.

Joe Fay writes in The Register:

Back in January, Hillier told the commons that there had been 3,800 applications/appointments as of January 18. Her answer almost coincided with one from Home Secretary Alan Johnson, who said that 3,700 applications had been registered as of January 16, suggesting a mid-January surge of applications running at 100 a day.

At that point the scheme was only being piloted in Manchester, though non-Mancs were free to register their interest in the scheme. An earlier answer had said that as of January 14, 1,300 Mancunians had applied “and attended an enrollment appointment”.

The figures disclosed yesterday refer to a wider area and, excluding all the applications made prior to January 18, suggest a run rate as low as 14.5 applications (not appointments) per working day since then in the Northwest.

There was no explanation for the apparent drop in interest. Perhaps the easing of January’s big chill means people have other things to be getting on with. Maybe people have given up biometrics for Lent. Or perhaps the earlier figures were boosted by journalists and other oddballs trying to be the first in the UK to get an ID card.

James Slack writes in the Daily Mail:

TV crime shows may have created the myth that DNA can solve almost every grisly crime – but the reality is very different.

As few as one in every 1,300 crimes reported to the police is solved by the national DNA database, according to a report released by MPs yesterday.

The research shows that – despite the massive expansion in the Government database – only 3,666 crimes are detected every year with links to an existing DNA profile.

That is one in every 1,300 of the 4.9million crimes carried out, and just one in 350, or 0.3 per cent, of the 1.3million crimes solved by police, according to the home affairs select committee.

The very low figures will come as a surprise to viewers of TV programmes such as Crimewatch, Waking the Dead and Cold Case, where DNA is often vital to cracking the case.

They will also heap new pressure on ministers over their plans to continue to store the DNA of innocent people for up to six years. Critics believe the database is another step towards a Big Brother society.

The Home Affairs Committee report can be read online here.

James Sturcke and Denis Campbell write in the Guardian:

Doctors’ leaders are warning government ministers that the NHS is jeopardising its relationship of trust with patients by creating a vast atabase of personal medical records. GPs say they fear patients’ rights are being overlooked, that “scaremongering” is being used to get people’s agreement for the database, and that hackers could illegally access the central computer.

They report:

Some GPs are refusing to release their patients’ details until each one has specifically agreed. “We will not upload anyone’s records without their explicit consent,” said Dr Neil Bhatia of Yateley, Hampshire. “We control the data records and we are responsible for its release. No one can force us to upload it without a court order.”

Wirral primary care trust in Cheshire was recently warned that pursuing summary records could be illegal. Despite these reservations, it accepted almost £70,000 from the NHS to pay for packs to be sent to patients.

Prof Ross Anderson, a security expert at Cambridge University, said there was no guarantee that only NHS staff treating someone could access their records.

Hundreds of thousands of health service personnel would have a swipecard to enter the system.

“You just can’t keep a secret if 300,000 people have access to it. All celebrities should definitely opt out … the sort of things you can find on SCRs, such as prescriptions for anti-retroviral drugs, can also be highly stigmatising.”