Monthly Archives: May 2009


Roy Wood (co-founder of the bands The Move, Electric Light Orchestra and Wizzard) has been speaking to the Birmingham Sunday Mercury about ID cards: Remember, the cards would originally need to be issued on the basis of providing ID in the first place, such as a driving licence or birth certificate. I already have this documentation. Why the hell do I need to go out and spend another sixty quid on even more ID?

Identity cards are another invasion of privacy says rocker Roy ...


Timothy Garton Ash writes in the Guardian about the checklist of reforms he plans to press for in the aftermath of the MPs expenses scandal. Here’s item 8: Roll back the database state: I’m glad to see Cameron point to the megalomaniac national identity register scheme as evidence of “an increasingly Orwellian surveillance state”. But we need a set of specific commitments on issues ranging from ID cards through email snooping to the elephantine DNA database, with deadlines for action. To reverse the now legally entrenched intrusive practices of the Home Office, the police and the secret services is a Herculean task.

If this great reform is to be durable, we need ...


Matthew Hickley writes in the Daily Mail: Ministers covered up the theft of highly-sensitive personal information on key military personnel including their extramarital affairs, debt problems and drug abuse. The details were volunteered in strictest confidence by 500 individuals undergoing high-level security vetting before being given access to Top Secret material. Military insiders fear their loss could leave many senior officers open to blackmail. The files were left unencrypted on a computer hard drive which was stolen from a cupboard in a supposedly secure area of an RAF base eight months ago. Police have failed to find any trace. Defence ministers confirmed the theft publicly within weeks of it happening last year. But they kept secret from Parliament the embarrassing truth that the files contained the most sensitive personal details imaginable relating to hundreds of senior military figures. Privacy campaigners voiced disbelief yesterday over the poor security given the nature […]

Ministers covered up theft of RAF files



Ben Parsons writes in the Brighton Argus: A pensioner and his daughter said they were victims of a “police state” after an anti-terror unit pulled over their car because it had been spotted at a political protest. The pair’s experience is expected to provoke a civil liberties debate when they feature in a major TV documentary tonight. They say surveillance coupled with anti-terror powers mean innocent people are criminalised merely for appearing on police databases. John Catt, 84, and his daughter Linda, 49, are appearing tonight in “Who’s Watching You?” the first of three BBC2 documentaries about surveillance. They had a marker placed against their car on the Police National Computer by Sussex Police after attending three anti-arms demonstrations against EDO MBM Technology in Moulsecoomb. Months later an automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) camera in central London flagged them up as “of interest to public order unit Sussex”. They were […]

Brighton pensioner slams “police state” after terror police tag car


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Jamie Doward writes in The Observer: Jacqui Smith, the home secretary, has been warned that the government risks further damaging the public’s faith in politics after it emerged that plans for the police to keep innocent people’s DNA profiles for up to 12 years will become law without a Commons vote. Opposition parties and civil liberty groups united to condemn plans that are being steered through parliament while MPs are distracted by the expenses row. The Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats claim the government is seeking to make controversial changes to the national DNA database via a “statutory instrument” because it fears losing a vote that would be required if they were introduced by the more conventional method of primary legislation. The same edition of the paper carries an article with comments by Sir Alec Jeffreys, the inventor of DNA profiling.

Fury as Commons denied DNA vote


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Philip Johnston writes in the Daily Telegraph: Normally when the British get irritated, we respond with a resigned and embarrassed shrug rather than shout and bellow. We are not like the French who take to the streets at the drop of a hat to chuck cobblestones at the police. But our characteristic mildness as a nation is being tested to destruction by our politicians – whether in national or local government – who have forgotten that if they must interfere in our lives, to do so only when it is absolutely necessary. We have the worst of all worlds – not only are we over-governed; we are badly governed as well. We are snooped on more than the average North Korean, harried by marauding armies of parking enforcers and wheel-clampers; pestered by health fascists and safety obsessives and shaken by speed humps. If we smoke we are told where to […]

Life under Labour: the worst of worlds



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Iain Dale, writing on the Guardian’s Comment is Free web site, says the Government uses a false dichotomy between Liberty and Security to suppress civil liberties: On the back of this argument, Labour has passed more criminal justice laws than were passed in the previous 100 years. More than 3,000 new criminal offences have been created, the use of stop and search has exploded and at every opportunity the government has attempted to increase the amount of time a terrorist suspect can be detained for questioning without trial. Not content with this alone, it empowered everybody from the police to local councils to spy on private citizens with greater ease, little oversight and for almost any reason. It has constructed enormous databases containing every aspect of our lives while failing resolutely to consider the risks associated with the accumulation of such data in a format for which security is anything […]

We are failing the test of civilisation


Neil Collins writes in his Reuters column about Standard & Poor’s evaluation of the British economy’s “negative outlook”, the usual precursor to a downgrade of S&P’s rating of an issuer’s debt: As the rating agency’s reality check concludes: “A government debt burden [of nearly 100 percent of GDP] if sustained, would in S&P’s view be incompatible with an AAA rating.” Loss of that rating would lead to a higher cost of government borrowing, damaging the chances of avoiding the trap. Were the Labour administration not in total funk, it might seize on this report to admit that its spending plans are not sustainable. Capital projects, like the NHS IT scheme, ID cards, Crossrail, aircraft carriers, the Eurofighter and much else will have to go, and the next government will have to impose real cuts in the core spending of education, health and welfare. S&P’s warning shot shows that the phoney […]

A reality check from Standard & Poor’s


John Oates writes in The Register: The Home Office has confirmed there is still no timetable for the rollout of ID card readers, without which carrying out effective ID checks is impossible. So even though the government is continuing to foist the cards on foreigners, airside workers at City of London and Manchester airports and pilots, there is no way to check the cards are genuine. Official advice is to flick the cards with a fingernail because they make a distinctive noise. Home Office minister Phil Woolas told the House of Commons yesterday that there was no schedule for the distribution of ID card readers to police stations, border entry points, job centres or local authorities.

More doubts on ID card readers



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According to The Register: In response to questions from GC News, the IPS said the National Biometric Identity Store (NBIS), which will be built by the Identity and Passport Service under a £265m contract with IBM, will hold both the original images and the derived templates of faces and fingerprints of applicants for passports, identity cards and visas. The templates derived from these images will be used for automated matching purposes, but the retention of images as well means the system could function as a national database of fingerprints. An IPS spokesperson said the NBIS will be “separate and distinct” from Ident1, the existing national police fingerprint database.

Home Office: IPS to hang onto snaps of fingerprints


Marcel Berlins writes in the Guardian: Any utopian system of electronic surveillance (of emails, phone calls, etc) or data sharing would first establish its particular purpose. Why do we need it? One reason we’re so suspicious of identity cards is that we’ve not been given any convincing reason why they’re necessary. Second, the bodies that would be entitled to the information would have to be carefully restricted. We have a great fear that information provided for one purpose will be used, and misused, by another. Third, there must be workable safeguards that such restrictions will be strictly adhered to, that no one who is not entitled to access personal information gets to do so, and that people’s privacy, apart from the strictly defined, necessary exceptions, will not be breached. A government’s guarantee is not enough.

Dealing with the dichotomy of data stockpiling


John Leyden writes in The Register: The Government has announced plans to push ahead with the next phase in launch of a controversial child protection database, despite ongoing concerns about the security of data held on the system. The delayed ContactPoint system, which is due to include names and addresses on every child under 18 in England, will be accessed by frontline care workers in real-life trials for the first time from this Monday. Security experts contacted by El Reg remain concerned that information housed on the database might leak out despite ministerial assurances on security provisions that will accompany the roll-out of the directory system. From Monday onwards social workers, police, schools and health officials will have access to data held on the ContactPoint database. The start of frontline trials, announced in the House of Commons last week by Children’s Secretary Ed Balls (Hansard extract below), follows repeated delays […]

ContactPoint child database goes live despite security fears



James Slack writes in the Daily Mail: Personal data gathered for the controversial ID cards scheme will be made available to the taxman. HM Revenue and Customs officials will be able to trawl through a person’s financial transactions for hints of any undeclared earnings or bank accounts. The revelation last night renewed fury about the £5.5billion ID cards project. There was already widespread concern that the Home Office, police and security officials would have access to the scheme’s database. But campaigners said handing information to tax inspectors was a sinister development. The powers that give ‘Commissioners for Revenue and Customs’ access to the ID cards audit log were buried away in orders laid before Parliament earlier this week – at the same time as the full extent of the expenses scandal was emerging. Meanwhile, the Matt cartoon in the Daily Telegraph also links ID cards to the MP’s expenses scandal.

Taxman can use database of ID cards to track our ...


Francis Elliott and Philip Webster write in the Times: Ministers will be expected to spend the summer preparing for an autumn relaunch intended to narrow the Tory lead. Departments are being encouraged to introduce public service reforms and switch spending from capital to resource accounts to soften the impact of the cuts needed. “Our theme will be ‘building Britain’s future’ — that we will continue targeted investment against the Tories’ blanket cuts,” said a senior minister. Nevertheless, Mr Brown is under growing pressure to match Tory pledges and abandon some expensive and controversial projects. There is, for example, growing Cabinet support for a proposal to replace ID cards with universal biometric passports.

Gordon Brown told: close poll gap or don’t bother fundraising


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Angela Epstein writes in the Manchester Evening News: Hello, my name is Angela Epstein. Well, you knew that, of course, since it says so at the top of the page. Oh yes, and that’s my picture up there, too. That’s already half the information you’ll find on the proposed ID cards, which are set to be trialled in Manchester this autumn. All that’s missing is my date of birth. Well, a lady doesn’t like to declare her age. And you also don’t have my finger prints. But come and shake my hand and they’re all yours. As you can see, I simply don’t have a problem with this kind of information getting into the public domain. You want more? Well, at the age of 12 I got a distinction in my grade three piano exam. My mum calls me Angie-Pangie (don’t even go there). I like to sing Live Forever […]

Opinion – Angela Epstein