Britain's information watchdog gives warning today that the country risks “sleepwalking into a surveillance society” because of government plans for identity cards and a population register.
Richard Thomas, the Information Commissioner, says that there is a growing danger of East German Stasi-style snooping if the State gathers too much information about individual citizens.
He singles out three projects that he believes are of particular concern. They are David Blunkett’s identity card scheme; a separate population register planned by the Office for National Statistics; and proposals for a database of every child from birth to the age of 18.
Times article
Another article and links from The Register
Needless to say, all this was said in SchNEWS months and years ago...
SchNEWS on ID cards: from May... The implementation and running of the (ID card) system is likely to be taken up by Schlumberger Sema, a company which is already conducting trials with the Passport Agency to produce biometric ID cards. Schlumberger, who have been bought by Atos Origin, say that their “best of breed solutions can help your company achieve a smart and robust level of security.” Sounds great.
Schlumberger have a history of ever-so-slightly-less-than-popular schemes, extracting tax payers money to make a quick buck and at someone elses expense. Under the government’s ‘Benefit Integrity Project’ people receiving benefits because of illness or disability were asked to prove they couldn’t work. Usually it takes around an hour for a doctor to check someone’s illness or disability. But Sema, who were often paid by the visit, managed to rattle off check ups within a matter of minutes. As a result thousands of people lost their benefits. The government eventually scrapped the programme due to “a serious error of judgement”.
The company does have some experience in the spying game though. Sema’s got the benefit of John Deutch, disgraced former Director of the CIA, on its board. Deutch has a bit of a murky track record in the Pentagon too, helping to oversee the US invasions of El Salvador, Nicaragua and Grenada, which led to thousands of deaths during the 1980s. His experience with data secruity’s not too hot either. He was dismissed from the CIA for keeping 17,000 pages of, according to the CIA, “enormously sensitive material at the highest levels of classification,” on his home computer which was also used by his children for school work and surfing the net.
A track record like that on the protection of sensitive data might be problematic as Blunkett has justified the scheme on the basis that “our liberties will be strengthened if our identity is protected from theft”. Privacy International’s Director, Simon Davies, however, warned “The technology gap between governments and organised crime has now narrowed to such an extent that even the most highly secure cards are available as blanks weeks after their introduction. Criminals and terrorists can in reality move more freely and more safely with several fake “official” identities than they ever could in a country using multiple forms of “low-value” ID such as a birth certificate.”
But it might not just be criminals who are after our data. The scheme will rely on computers being used with all our private information by thousands of people, especially the Boys in Blue. The Police Complaints Commission has admitted that “there will always be a few officers willing to risk their careers by obtaining data improperly.” And that’s the police! We don’t think there’s any danger of private companies misusing our information to make a bit more money though.
SchNEWS on the children's database: Also from May... A couple of months ago the government published the Children’s Bill, which is supposed to protect children from abuse. But rather than putting more money into social services so that social workers are not overstretched and understaffed it will create an Orwellian database of every child in the country (11 million people) which will do little to protect children at risk from harm. Now call us paranoid, but isn’t a vast database another step towards a total surveillance society where your every move is traced and if you don’t conform to a defined set of behaviours then you are labeled subversive or anti-social?
SchNEWS predicts the rise of interlinked databases, poulation registers and ID cards back in 1995
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