Opinion Piece in The Guardian from 2008
There can be few more astonishing confessions in modern politics than the prime minister's admission on Sunday that the government is unable to guarantee the security of our personal information on the state's databases. This admission shatters all the previous claims that the government has made that its obsession with creating vast databases can in any way improve the safety and security of the citizen.
Of course, he had little choice. Since the government first proposed the mother of all these databases, the ID card register, barely a month has passed without some monstrous data loss. It started with 25m tax credit records, went through innumerable lost laptop computers, included everybody from civil servants to ministers leaving records in trains, pubs and restaurants, and concluded this week with a lost flash drive compromising the security of the government's entire Gateway system. Soldiers' lives, our bank account, tax, passport and driving licence details, even the addresses of children, have all been compromised by these failures.
And another article in the Independent from 2008
^The identity card scheme was said to be in "intensive care" as leaked Whitehall documents showed it faced a new delay of two years.
The cards were set to be issued to Britons from 2010, when they apply to renew their passports, but private Home Office documents show the introduction is set to be put off until 2012.^
The likely postponement follows a series of fiascos over the security of personal data held by the Government.
But this one from 2006 is the best
THE GOVERNMENT’S SUGGESTION THAT ID CARDS ARE VOLUNTARY
Referring to the provision that would make ID cards obligatory on renewal of a passport…
"Not if your work takes you abroad, they aren’t [voluntary]. Not if your parents live abroad, or your spouse or partner is from abroad, they aren’t. Not if your children travel abroad and get sick or into trouble, they aren’t. And it is a novel interpretation of voluntary that the price of a foreign holiday is a requirement to be put on the National Identity Register."
GOVERNMENT ABUSE OF DATA IT HOLDS
"Now, after the way this government treated Martin Sixsmith, Pam Warren, Rose Addis and others, seeking information about them and using it to destroy their reputations, I would not trust them with data about my life."
"THE PLASTIC POLL TAX"
"Even on the government’s figures, the price of passports for a family of four will go from £134 today to £372. On the LSE’s figures, the cost could be as high as £300, per person, or more than £1,000 for a family of four. A plastic poll tax that no one will volunteer to pay."
GOVERNMENT INCOMPETENCE
"Even simple databases are beyond the Home Office, such as the firearms register which they were asked to set up 8 years ago which is still not operational. If they are incapable of setting up a firearms register in eight years, why should we imagine that they are capable of setting up the register required under this Bill in an acceptable and workable way?"
THE FACT THAT THE ID CARDS DATABASE WILL HAVE 20,000 ACCESS POINTS
"Microsoft’s national technology officer has said that a central identity database could worsen the very problems it was intended to prevent, such as terrorism and identity theft. He said that “ministers should not be building systems that allow hackers to mine information so easily.”
ID CARDS ARE CONSISTENT WITH OTHER ATTEMPTS TO RESTRICT BRITISH CIVIL LIBERTIES
"The way the government has gone about trying to deliver this Bill is of a piece with so much of what they have done to then hard-won rights of British people. The gradual erosion of jury trial. The attempt to criminalise free speech. Stopping some people making peaceful protests, while ignoring others inciting violence. Locking people up for months without charge or trial. The increasing retention of more and more data on innocent people – even DNA samples of innocent children."
What has changed?
Its all the more true than it was. The irony of who said this is staggering.