With more Closed Circuit TV camera’s per head of population than any other country and more and more databases (particularly about children) being built by government organisations to help us, we continue to see the onward erosion of our privacy.
Phillip Johnston in his Daily Telegraph column Home Front shines a focused light on the moves by this current UK government to further eradicate our privacy by repealing parts of the Data Protection Act, all we are told, to help protect us better!
The latest government document ‘Information-Sharing Vision Statement’ [pdf download here] is described by the NO2ID campaign as:
Going against established good practice and its own past legislation, the Government has decided it need not have to follow the rules for everyone else. Government departments will be empowered to swap information whenever useful for them – without the knowledge or consent of the persons involved.
NO2ID also add that:
Once you are numbered and fingerprinted, under potential requirements for the national ID card, all official and almost all private information about you can be collated. From now on, assume that anything you tell to an official will not only go on your file, but may be sent on to anyone at all in ‘the public interest’. And ‘public interest’ has just been redefined by the Identity Cards Act 2006 to mean ‘official convenience’.
It looks like that in the end, your information will be now be made available to thousands of civil servants under a ‘snoopers charter’ without any further need to ask you for your permission again.
With the introduction of the Children Index (not for everyone of course) and the use of other interconnected databases, we are on track to become one of the most monitored societies in the world. George Orwell would be proud.
Taking the advice from the NO2ID blog and my previous posts on the similar debates about a Trident missile replacement, I would urge all readers to write to your MP’s voicing your urgent concerns about the Privacy Issues, ID Cards and the Trident Debate.
Tags: Privacy, ID Cards, Children Index, CCTV, Big Brother, Data Protection
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