There's no time to crow over the government's loss of 25 million people's details; no time to rejoice at the obvious mortification of Gordon Brown, Alistair Darling, his sidekick, Andy Burnham, Jacqui Smith and Harriet Harman.

 

These people will not be deterred by the calamity of last week. They are shameless. In a month or two they will bounce back. The ID card scheme will be relaunched and Jacqui Smith will continue with her plans to demand 53 pieces of information from people before they travel abroad. The Children's Index, the Children's Assessment Framework, the National Health database, the ever-expanding police DNA database will all continue to scoop up information. Why? Because the control of the masses is coded in the deepest part of Labour's being.

 

So let me just say it now: the politicians we saw ranged before us on the front bench last Tuesday, like defendants in a mass trial, are dangerous, misguided and incompetent; and they are still in a position to cause havoc.

 

Under a plan known by the reassuringly dull title of Transformational Government, a huge process of centralisation has taken place, creating countless opportunities for security breaches, as well as abuse by the state. At the time, the government defined it as 'transforming public services as citizens receive them and demonstrating how technology can improve the corporate services of government so more resources can be released to deliver "front line" services'.

 

Anyone emerging from this phrase with a clear meaning in their mind deserves an award, but it has resulted in the demonstration of an almost mathematical truth. The larger the database and the more people who have access to it, the greater the lack of security. Professor Ross Anderson, the leading British expert on this kind of engineering, believes it is impossible to go for scale, security and functionality without one suffering.

 

The ID card database (cost: from £5.5bn to £13bn) and the NHS Spine (cost from £12bn to £20bn) are the largest now planned. We are assured that both will contain fail-safe security measures, but that is what we believed about the Revenue and Customs database. Helen Wilkinson, who has been leading a campaign against the uploading of information from GPs' records to the national database since she was wrongly identified in NHS records as an alcoholic, has an alarming story from last week. A man went to visit a friend in hospital, couldn't find him and asked someone for help.

 

The hospital worker swiped a card and suddenly a list appeared of every person in every bed in every British hospital. Think journalists, private investigators and those thieves who want to know which homes might be empty. :o

 

Some 300,000 people will have access to the NHS database. There are already stories about the records of a well-known patient being viewed for entertainment by 50 hospital staff in the North East. <_< 'Imagine a doctor or professor leaving a laptop on a plane that includes the entire nation's health records,' said Anderson. 'It's not impossible.' Indeed, at the last count there had been 14 lapses in major government IT projects in the last two years.

 

It's not just about patient privacy or the outrageous decision by Whitehall to override the need to gain people's consent before their records were uploaded; a failure of the internet or large-scale power cuts could leave hospitals without access to x-rays or medical records.

 

The government won't describe the final form of the National Identity Register, the database that will verify an ID card when it is swiped and record every important transaction in a person's life. However, we know that hundreds of government agencies will have access to it. That means a very large number of people. Abuse of the Police National Computer by officers illegally working for private inquiry agents is not unknown. After the HMRC scandal, is it really such a stretch to imagine them gaining access to the ID database?

 

 

See whole article here : http://observer.guardian.co.uk/comment/sto...2216588,00.html

I absolutely agree wholeheartedly with this brilliantly written and highly precient article... All of us who regard freedom, liberty, privacy and the need to keep our personal details safe from incompetent and/or unscrupulous maggots who would undoubtedly abuse these vast databases absolutely NEED to resist the power of the State at all costs.... I dont give a sh!t what their justifications for these schemes are, it is clear to me that the events of the past week have proven that this Govt (or really ANY Govt if we are being honest...) just cannot guarantee or assure us that our details will be safe from ID thieves, incompetent employees or from faceless corporations, private firms or state departments wishing to "buy" our details in order to do Christ knows what....

 

The events at the HMRC have left me compeletely opposed any and ALL large Govt database schemes - it's simple really, the bigger the database, the more people who have potential access, the greater risk of abuse.... The NHS database (at a cost of £20 BILLION to the taxpayer...) will have 300.000 people with access to it, how the fukk can the Govt possibly vet 300,000 people and assure us that no abuse of that system will occur....? They cant even tell if they have illegal immigrants working in the House of Commons bar ffs..... Do any of us seriously want our medical records to be in the hands of the sort of incompetent arseholes who caused the havoc at the HMRC during the week...? I sure as hell dont.....