Ian Bell writes in the Sunday Herald about Home Office plans to centrally log all ‘phone calls:

So how much time would, could, or should a government spend monitoring this Babel? How worthwhile might the enterprise be? How much would the effort cost? Would the security of staggering quantities of data ever be guaranteed? Could such a project ever be brought to fruition? Oh, and a small detail: by what right?

We are, reportedly, about to find out. Not dissuaded by its serial failures to manage giant IT projects in everything from the NHS to air traffic control, the Home Office means to press on with the biggest communications database of them all. Forget the ID cards cock-up. Forget - the government wishes you would - an official inability to secure a few laptops and memory sticks, far less the nation’s privacy. Forget that all previous promises as to controls, safeguards and misuse of data have been breached. Forget even that the plan, in a country on its uppers, could cost the equivalent of another couple of banks. They want it.

Don’t forget two things, however. First, this “interception modernisation programme” is to be privatised. Which is to say that a commercial entity will be asked to “manage” - spy on - our most intimate personal information. For New Labour, the distinction between what might, just, be allowed by a citizenry to an elected government, and what might be allowed to a bunch of suits turning a quick buck, has been eradicated.

Secondly, remember something more significant. Not “it won’t work”, though that certainly amounts to a very good bet. Try this: why is it that no other government in the world, from a basic paranoid dictatorship to a terror-obsessed United States, is even contemplating this version of universal surveillance? Is the Home Office right, for once, while everyone else is wrong? Have they been sold a pup by software hustlers? Do they truly believe that knowledge of your emails to auntie in Australia is actual power? Or has the logic of technology begun to seem inexorable: we can do it, therefore we must?

John Oates writes in The Register:

Almost one in ten records within the Inland Revenue’s frameworks database contain errors, the government has admitted.

The frameworks database feeds information into various other databases held not just by HMRC but other departments too.

He points out:

The frameworks database only contains quite simple information - first, second and surname, title, sex, data of birth, address and National Insurance number. Which begs the question of how many errors more complicated government records contain. It costs £7.5m a year to maintain it.

Even more worrying of course is the government’s continued enthusiasm for more and more databases, and the ID card scheme, which makes such errors ever more damaging and difficult to correct.

According to the Daily Telegraph’s comment-writer:

There is anger that an all-encompassing database being planned by the Government might be run by a private company.

The new multi-billion system will be outlined in the New Year in a consultation paper on the Home Office interception modernisation programme.

A number of private-sector organisations may be invited to tender for the contract to collect all communications data, including from broadband phone calls and chatrooms. The content itself is not gathered, but rather who is called, when and for how long.

Any outrage at the involvement of private firms is misplaced, however. They could not do the job any worse than the Government, whose ability to lose our personal data is well documented.

The anger should be directed at the project itself. If there is one thing that must stop in the year ahead it is this Government obsession with hoovering up all the personal information it can get its hands on.

Robert Verkaik writes in The Independent:

Britain must rethink plans for a database holding details of every email, mobile phone and internet visit, Europe’s human rights commissioner has said in an outspoken attack on the growth of surveillance societies. Thomas Hammarberg said that UK proposals for sweeping powers to collect and store data will increase the risk of the “violation of an individual’s privacy”.

Plans for the database of emails, phone calls and internet visits are to be published by the Home Office in January. These proposals have already been described by the Government’s own terrorism-law watchdog as “awful” and attacked by civil liberty groups for laying the basis of a Big Brother state.

Kaya Burgess writes in The Times:

The Labour administration in 1978 believed the introduction of ID cards would be “unacceptable” and “objectionable” in the fight against illegal immigration, confidential documents released today show.

The comments were in a draft statement due to be given to the Commons by Merlyn Rees, the Home Secretary, who wrote that the introduction of identity cards “would require major changes in practices and powers reaching far beyond immigration control”.

He added: “In the past such changes have been contemplated only in war: the Government does not believe they could be justified on immigration grounds alone.”

Martin Beckford writes in the Daily Telegraph:

Parents will be encouraged to have their children’s personal details hidden on the Government’s child protection database in a move by a rebel council that could sabotage the £224 million project.

The Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea is launching a publicity campaign to let families know how much information on them will be held by ContactPoint.

In defiance of Government guidance, it will tell them they can have details kept from the estimated one million officials who would otherwise be allowed to access them.

If parents around the country decide to have their records shielded, it risks undermining the effectiveness of ContactPoint as a way for authorities to share information on England’s 11 million children.

Henry Porter writes on the Guardian Comment is Free web site:

During 2008 it became clear to what extent the British government was pushing ahead with the database state, which incidentally would have brought admiring sighs from Havel’s old foes in the Czech secret police, the StB. The British state has decided to know everything about us – who we email or talk to on the phone or how we use the internet (the proposed Communications Data Bill that has been temporarily shelved), where and when we go abroad, how we pay for the trip, what we do after leaving this country. It wants to know about movement in this country by car and plane. It retains information from the use of Oyster cards in London, which it hopes to roll out across the country, and of course from the London congestion charge. It also wants to know about every child in minute detail and share the information with one million people but not – of course – the parents of that child.

In its strange obsession to “manage identity”, as if all along people have been waiting for the state to define who they are, the government has started to issue foreigners with ID cards – a disgracefully xenophobic act – and when the first cards are given to Britons the process of verification, and therefore government tracking of each individual, will begin.

Robert Winnett writes in the Daily Telegraph:

Richard Timney has written a series of letters to the Redditch Advertiser, in the Home Secretary’s constituency, defending controversial plans for ID cards and attacking the Conservatives.

In the letters, Mr Timney fails to declare that he is married to Ms Smith or that he is paid £40,000 a year to act as her Parliamentary assistant. Ms Smith has kept her maiden name .

The Home Secretary only has a majority of 2,716 in her Redditch seat and the constituency is a key target by the Conservatives and the local newspaper is seen as crucial.

Mr Timney’s latest letter to the local paper on December 8th attacks the Conservatives for failing to back his wife’s controversial plans for ID cards. He wrote: “If the Tories were serious about protecting Britain’s borders, they would be supporting ID cards - not standing on street stalls campaigning against them…The Conservatives have made the wrong decision again!”

ZDnet reports:

Home secretary Jacqui Smith has said that 1,142 messages from the public to the Identity and Passport Service (IPS) between November 2006 and October 2008 were classified as ‘wants an ID card’. This made ID-card requests “by far the most common subject matter”, Smith said on Thursday, in response to a parliamentary question from Liberal Democrats home affairs spokesperson Chris Huhne.

The IPS received 3,073 items of correspondence on the scheme between 1 November, 2006, and 31 October, 2008. Smith told Huhne that the IPS did not sort the correspondence according to support for or opposition to the scheme.

Smith also said that the method and cost of a web-based system allowing people to check their details on the National Identity Register has not yet been decided.

What sort of people will have access to the databases containing everyone’s details?

Ordinary people. Fallible, corruptible, and - yes, sometimes - criminal people.

People like this.

A middle-ranking civil servant was convicted of murdering the son of his former lover in revenge when she ended their relationship… Paul, who was a civil servant responsible for the child protection data base at the Department for Children, Schools and Families, was described by police as a coward.

There’s no way to know that someone who appears to be an ordinary civil servant with no previous convictions will turn out to be utterly untrustworthy. But the fewer databases, and the fewer people with access, and the fewer details on the databases, the more chance you have that the person with access to your details can actually be trusted with them.

Theresa May responds to reader’s questions in The Spectator:

“There has been a lot of comment about the Damien Green case and how this relates to MP’s specific rights as the opposition. I’m concerned that MP’s are considering themselves a special case instead of considering the overall civil liberties perspective of such an overbroad law. Do you have any thoughts as to whether the law in general should be modified instead of MP’s rights being clarified?”

MPs are not above the law and should definitely not be treated as a special case. But it is vital that we are able to do our job of representing our constituents effectively and holding the government to account. We must be able to speak out in Parliament on issues and must be able to treat our constituents’ affairs with confidentiality. What is called parliamentary privilege is really the people’s privilege. The Damian Green affair jeopardized this because suddenly the police were able to access his confidential files, and remove equipment from his office which made it difficult for him to do his job. Crucially it broke the trust of confidentiality between an MP and their constituents. That is why MPs have been so concerned about it.

But you are also right to say that we need to guard our civil liberties carefully as they have been under attack from this Government for example with their proposals for first 90 day then 42 day pre-charge detention, ID cards, and increased government ‘Big Brother’ style snooping. These all undermine the freedoms that our democracy was built to maintain. There are some serious issues at stake here and we need a government that understands the importance of defending our freedoms.

Simon Jenkins writes in The Guardian about large, centralised public administration projects:

Anyone inquiring after the £12bn NHS computer will know that this useless piece of equipment has nothing to do with efficiency or public benefit. It is merely the ultimate macho investment, a vast contract suitable for real men to play with, bespeaking big jobs for ex-officials and big freebies for ministers. The computer is to NHS bosses what ID cards are to the Home Office and aircraft carriers are to the MoD. They confer virility on ministers and managers alike, more so than equipping the poor bloody infantry on their respective frontlines. Gordon Brown at the weekend lauded the “bravery” of dead marines in Afghanistan, ignoring the added bravery required because he’s blown billions on jets, submarines and aircraft carriers rather than boring field armour.

Nick Cowan writes in the Yorkshire Post, advocating direct democracy:

Referendums up until now in Britain have had to be triggered by Parliament, so the Government can pick and choose when to hold one. But a popular referendum mechanism would allow a petition of citizens to demand a ballot on any law passed by Parliament, giving the people the final say on it. I suggest we borrow the mechanism used in California, since it’s the most populous American state but still manages to get several measures on referendum ballots. A petition of five per cent of votes cast at the last General Election would be necessary to challenge parliamentary legislation, a large but hardly insurmountable number judging by the popularity of petitions on the 10 Downing Street website.

Take ID card legislation. Consistently touted by the Civil Service and whoever happens to be Home Secretary as the answer to everything from benefit fraud to international terrorism, ID cards and their associated national database are increasingly understood by the public to be another case of the bureaucracy expanding to meet the needs of an expanding bureaucracy. This makes them a potential candidate for the people’s veto.

Tom Whitehead writes in the Daily Telegraph:

Those in favour of the card now stand at just 55 per cent after dropping from 60 per cent in August.

At the same time, opposition to the £4.7 billion scheme grew from 24 to 26 per cent in the same period, the Home Office’s own polling showed.

In a further blow, the Government is the second least trusted organisation to keep data safe, with only online retailers such as Amazon or eBay generating less confidence.

Nicole Kobie writes in IT Pro:

The identity card scheme has caught its first illegal immigrant, the Home Office has said.

Foreign nationals – those people from other countries looking to stay in the UK – started being interviewed to receive biometric identity cards last month.

Indian-born Ranjit Singh applied to stay in the country on the basis of a common law relationship with a Briton, meaning that under the new rules he was forced to give his fingerprints to the UK Border Agency at an ID centre in Sohlihull on Monday - the first day such fingerprinting took place.

After his fingerprints matched that of a failed asylum seeker of the same name, Singh admitted to immigration officers he’d previously made a “bogus asylum application,” the Home Office said.

Henry Porter writes on the Guardian web site:

Preying on the intellectual dysfunction on the right, Jack Straw went to the Daily Mail to announce his new policy of rebalancing the Human Rights Act on its tenth anniversary. He proposes to end the aspect he calls the “villain’s charter”, adding responsibilities to obey the law and to be loyal to the country.

The poor fools at the Daily Mail swallowed Jack’s bait and put the story on the front page, in the process completely forgetting about their “long running campaign” against police state Britain, which they made so much of last week.

What they fail to understand is that Jack’s policy on the HRA, the new measures on data sharing in the Coroners and Justice Bill, the ID card, the seizing of information from the House of Commons server during the arrest of Damian Green and even the debate in the Commons yesterday, when the government went back on assurances to inquire properly into the Green affair, are all of a piece.

The Human Rights Act has achieved many things, but it must be evident that it has failed lamentably to protect our privacy from the state and has not defended us against the general erosion of Britain’s ancient liberties, which, significantly, began at the moment the HRA was brought into law by Labour. Simply examining the effects of the state tracking device known as the ID card, or the children’s database ContactPoint, which goes live at the end of January, is enough to tell you that the HRA has not guaranteed Article 8, the right to respect for privacy and family life.

Still, it was under the HRA that two innocent men, who objected to the police retention of their DNA, took their case to the European Court of Human Rights and won – a judgment that the befuddled souls at the Daily Mail trumpeted.

According to The Register:

The Identity and Passport Service has cut down its shortlist for the biggest contract within the National Identity Scheme.

It has dropped IBM from the competition for the application and enrolment procurement, leaving CSC and Fujitsu in contention. In September, IPS said that all three firms were on the shortlist for the deal, which home secretary Jacqui Smith recently estimated would be worth £350m-450m.

However, IBM is on the shortlist for the smaller card design and production contract, along with Fujitsu and Thales, worth £250m-350m according to Smith. This deal looks the most vulnerable in the event of the identity card’s cancellation, which both the Conservative and Liberal Democrat parties have pledged to do if they win power.

David Leppard writes in the Sunday Times:

Jacqui Smith, the home secretary, has suffered fresh embarrassment from a new Whitehall leak disclosing that ministers are seeking new powers to search the homes of staff working on ID cards.

An 11-page confidential Home Office document – which was sent to a campaigner against ID cards – suggests that the employees’ homes could be entered without the need for a police warrant.

The latest disclosure comes amid the continuing political furore over the police raid on the House of Commons office of Damian Green, the Tory immigration spokesman accused of receiving leaked Home Office documents.

The measures outlined in the document appear to be designed to prevent the employees of five companies, all bidding for work on the ID cards scheme, from leaking damaging information about work on the national identity register.

This register is expected to contain the names, addresses and private information about tens of millions of Britons if it comes into operation as Labour plans in four years’ time.

Dominic Grieve, the shadow home secretary, condemned Smith for trying to take on more state powers. “It is bad enough that the government is wasting £19 billion on this expensive white elephant during a recession – but sinister that the home secretary is invoking even more powers to cover up what is a disaster waiting to happen,” he said.

The NDA is available from Wikileaks.

Matthew Parris, writing in The Times, reflects on the power of rapidly-accessible databases to invade individual privacy:

As a learner driver in the field of internet capabilities, I am only just beginning to understand the vast new potency of access to lists, whether in the hands of governments, businesses or private individuals. I realise how important is the security - or lack of it - of lists in the Government’s hands; and what an enormous step would be the creation of a universal list: a national identity card register.

The Daily Mail’s leader-writer says, of the ECHR DNA database ruling:

The verdict vindicates the Mail’s long campaign against the terrifying march of intrusive, authoritarian government.

In addition to the DNA database, millions of CCTV cameras make us the world’s most spied-upon society. Even local councils spy on us as we empty our dustbins.

The intimate medical records of 50 million people will be computerised by 2012, and sensitive details of 11 million children will soon be stored on the new ContactPoint database, to which a million public sector workers may have access.

And, if Home Secretary Jacqui Smith has her way, every British adult will have an identity card linked to a computer holding 49 separate pieces of personal and biometric information about them.

In a week when we have seen anti-terrorist police ransack the Parliamentary offices of an elected representative of the people, how can we possibly be confident the Government will use this information responsibly?

Indeed, when they are not selling it, disclosing it to unauthorised people, or storing it illegally, they are losing it.

The greatest sadness of all is that it took a European Court ruling to prove what most people have instinctively felt for years: that civil liberties in Britain are under threat as never before from an authoritarian Government which no longer really believes in the freedom of the individual.

The Independent’s leader-writer reaches a similar conclusion:

Yet this is simply one victory in a much larger war against a Government which refuses to recognise the limits of the state’s role in our private lives. Ministers show no sign of relenting in their efforts to foist costly and intrusive ID cards on us. The Immigration and Citizenship Bill in the Queen’s Speech this week would allow state officials the power to demand proof of identity from the public on a whim. And then there are proposals in the new Coroners and Justice Bill to give public bodies the unrestricted ability to transfer our personal information between themselves.

This Government has proved itself again and again to lack any understanding of either the acceptable boundaries of official intervention in our personal lives or the overwhelming necessity to safeguard the public’s private data. With yesterday’s judgment the juggernaut has been slowed, but not stopped. The campaign to protect our civil liberties goes on.

The paper also carries a good analysis of the wider data-sharing and data-retention issues, and a comment piece by David Davis MP.