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Surveillance State

Our every action tracked, logged and stored throughout our lives

The previous government planned to link many databases to a National Identity number that would have been included on your ID cards and National Identification Register - as such these other databases would have become part of the extended nature of the Database state that will be linked to your personal bio-metric information.

We have to ensure that the promises of the new Coalition government to reign in the power of the Surveillance State are real - let us look at the range of threats to our civil liberties:

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Further information on a range of issues

The Foundation for Information Policy Research is an independent body that studies the interaction between information technology and society. Its goal is to identify technical developments with significant social impact, commission and undertake research into public policy alternatives, and promote public understanding and dialogue between technologists and policy-makers in the UK and Europe.

The Open Rights Group is a fast-growing NGO focused on raising awareness of issues such as privacy, identity, data protection, access to knowledge and copyright reform.

Orgwiki is a mine of useful information related to digital rights. It was created by the Open Rights Group to support us in our aim to protect those rights but, like other wikis, is a collaborative effort - anyone can add to it.

UK Liberty - A blog on issues relating to liberty in the UK.

Information Commissioner's Office - "the UK's independent authority set up to promote access to official information and to protect personal information"

 

 

e-Borders

 

The Coalition in their programme state “We support E-borders and will reintroduce exit checks.” – the threat remains the same as with the previous government

The Home Office had claimed e-Borders will "transform our border control" by gathering information on all travellers entering or leaving the country by air, sea or rail. – well to some extent they are right but only for the worse as the government continues in its desire to create the most intrusive surveillance state ever created

The scheme, launched as a pilot called "Project Semaphore" in 2004, has already started to compile biographical information on all travellers from the UK, with 53 pieces of intrusive advance information being obtained from carriers, such as airline and flight number, details of reservations and payment.

The Home Office will generate "travel histories" for all passengers collecting our biometrics, including fingerprints, DNA, iris patterns and face recognition, which have already started to be contained in passports.

The e-Borders scheme began to go live in April, automatically generating details of an estimated 250m journeys into and out of the UK each year which will be stored on a central database. The information gathered by the e-Borders scheme will be stored for up to 10 years at the database centre in Wythenshawe, Manchester. There are also plans to expand the use of biometric data and gather it as a key part of the e-Borders database. An iris recognition scheme is already in operation at Heathrow and several other airports around the country.

The Home Office also says it has the right to share information from this database with other unspecified organisations where "necessary ... to enable them to carry out their functions".

In a report for the Institute for Public Policy Research, Frank Gregory, professor of European Security at the University of Southampton, warned that it will be possible to fool the system. The report said: "There are two key problems with the e-Borders programme. First, it will not reveal if the person matching the identity documents has created a false identity and, second, 'watchlist' scrutiny only works if a suspect person continues to use a 'flagged' name."

Chris Grayling MP, described his concerns regarding e-Borders as "The justification is always about security or personal protection. But the truth is that we have a government that just can't be trusted over these highly sensitive issues. We must not allow ourselves to become a Big Brother society."

UK: e-Borders plan to tackle “threats” - Statewatch article (PDF)

UK introduces 'E-Borders' programme, proposing more surveillance and profiling of all - Privacy International

Copy of the proposed OWOS e-Borders ad (PDF)

 

The DNA Database

 

The new Government has promised to change the law so that innocent people's DNA profiles are removed in line with the law in Scotland - where most people who were found not guilty or had no further action taken following arrest would have their records taken off the DNA database immediately. Whilst those arrested for violent or sexual offences would have their DNA profiles retained temporarily.

This would mean changes to the Crime and Security Act - which was adopted prior to the election. It allows the retention of innocent people's DNA records and fingerprints for 6 years after arrest

John Reid when he was Home Secretary, in response to a parliamentary question said that 3,457,000 individuals are on the database, of which a third have no criminal record.

The UK police now over 5% of the UK population on the National DNA database, more DNA samples than any other country.

There is however no evidence to support the claims that by holding more peoples records, more crime will be solved. Yet there is supportive evidence of abuse of the information held on the police database is increasing.

" Since April 2004, the police in England and Wales have been able to take DNA samples without consent from anyone arrested on suspicion of any recordable offence. Recordable offences include begging, being drunk and disorderly and taking part in an illegal demonstration. Both DNA profiles (the string of numbers used for identification purposes) and DNA samples (which contain unlimited genetic information), are kept permanently, even if the person arrested is never charged or is acquitted.  A massive expansion in the number of individuals on the Database has not led to any noticable increase in the likelihood of identifying a suspect." - GeneWatch

 

NHS Summary Care Record on the Spine

Currently the government has plans to upload all of our confidential patient records onto a new system called 'the spine' the plans are eventually to link this system to the NIR. There is therefore a real risk that your private medical records will be put onto a unsecured system that is accessible from outside agencies e.g. Police, Social services. It will also mean that more civil servants have easy access to your personal data.

The NHS Confidentiality Campaign - (TheBigOptOut.org) was set up to protect patient confidentiality and to provide a focus for patient-led opposition the government’s NHS Care Records System. This system is designed to be a huge national database of patient medical records and personal information (sometimes referred to as the NHS ’spine’) with no opt-out mechanism for patients at all. It is being rolled out during 2007, and is objectionable for many of the same reasons as the government’s proposed ID database.

NHS IT Info - These pages constitute a dossier of information relating to concerns over the current progress and direction of NHS Connecting for Health's National Programme for Information Technology (NPfIT). This dossier has been compiled over recent months by the set of signatories to open letters calling for an independent inquiry into and detailed technical review of NPfIT, as we continued to learn about the Programme, and is now made available here to a general readership.

E-Health Insider - Library information on National Programme for Information Technology (NPfIT)

 

Contact Point/The Children’s Index

The Children Act 2004 made provision for a national child database which will contain records for every child under 18 and include contact details of parents/carers and education and health services involved with child. If adopted it will play a central role in the future ID card scheme - the Coalition government has proposed the The Identity Documents Bill which will address some of the issues with the growth in the database state, but we are still waiting on detail that will answer the many questions regarding the massive growth of the database state

 

- "New government policies designed to safeguard children could put them at increased risk by diverting resources and creating a surveillance culture where parents are sidelined, according to a report published today by the Information Commissioner.

The report, 'Children's Databases: Safety and Privacy', analyses the databases being built to collate information on children in education, youth justice, health, social work and elsewhere. These systems are linking up through the new Information Sharing Index.

The government hopes that sharing information on children will improve child welfare in the UK and reduce the incidence of serious child abuse such as in the Climbi case.

However, the report's authors point out that extending Britain's child protection systems -- from the 50,000 children at substantial risk of serious harm to the 3-4 million children with some health, education or other welfare issue -- means that child protection will receive less attention."

The full FIPR report - "Children’s Databases – Safety and Privacy" requires PDF reader

 

National Vehicle Tracking Database

From 2006, Britain began to monitor and record the movements of every vehicle on the road.

"A new national surveillance system will record the movements of every vehicle on the road for at least two years. A network of cameras will automatically read every passing vehicle registration plate and this information will be used to create a database of vehicle movements. Police and security services will be able to use this information to analyse the movements of every driver in the country for several years.

Thousands of existing CCTV cameras are being converted to read number plates using Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) technology. These cameras will provide coverage 24/7 on all motorways and major roads as well as cities, towns, ports and petrol station forecourts.

A central database will be installed alongside the National Police Computer in London to store the details of 35 million number plate "reads" taken per day. The information recorded will include time, date and precise location. The camera sites will be monitored by global positioning satellites.

Subsequent developments after the initial launch of the scheme in March 2006 may include extending the storage period to five years and incorporating more cameras into the network, thus increasing the capacity of number plate "reads" per day from 35 million to 100 million." - full details from the OpenRights Group wiki page on the ANPR database

The new Coalition governmen has made no mention of the ever growing network of cameras tracking our cars movement round the country – the threat still remains the same as previously

 

Criminal Records Databases

The Manifesto Club aims to challenge the cultural trends that restrain and stifle people’s aspirations and initiative. Our aim is to bring together people whose ideas don’t necessarily fit into the politics of left and right, but who share a belief in the potential for developing human beings’ creativity and knowledge

Criminal Records Bureau

 

Other Issues

 

The Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA)

There are proposals to back track on some of the measures that have eroded our civil liberties – we are still waiting for the detail

Unregulated CCTV and Surveillance

There are measures to “further regulate CCTV” – although we have a long way to go in reeling back the extent of the spiders web of CCTV systems across the UK

 ID Cards and the National Identity Register

One of the most high profile pieces of legislation put forward concerns the ID Cards Act and other associated and linked databases - The Identity Documents Bill

There are some possible loopholes that have been revealed in the Bill – which we hope will be amended as the Bill progresses through parliament. Two such examples are:

- Although it is stated that “all the information recorded in the National Identity Register is destroyed before the end of the period of two months beginning with the day on which this Act is passed.” – we must also know what has happened to the copies of the data that has gone to other agencies

- There needs to be clarification on the safety of our “personnel information” – to ensure that it also includes all biometric data gathered

We also hope that the scrapping of ID cards for foreign nationals will follow after the passing of this Bill.

Also see the OWOS ID Card pages

Fingerprinting

The government states that it will “outlaw the finger-printing of children at school without parental permission” yet we have not heard about any details of the point-of-crime and mobile fingerprinting schemes

Digital Economy Act

Ofcom has released its Draft code of practice to reduce online copyright infringement - the government has yet to answer the critisism of the Act forced through in the washing-up process at the end of the last parliament.

Interception Modernisation Programme

The Interception Modernisation Programme is still growing and there is no specific reference to the security services in The Identity Documents Bill, we will have to wait to see what is contained in the further proposed legislation

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