This report was presented to the previous government that failed to act upon it and halt the illegal trade in personal information. It is with unfortunate irony that members of that previous government including Lord Prescott and Gordon Brown themselves became victims of these practices.

Amazingly the Information Commissioners Office stated that they knew 305 journalists who had used private investigators 3,757 times to obtain personal information illegally. Page 9 of the report has a table of all the papers found to be involved in the illegal data trade in personal information. The News of the World is only 5th on this list. The Daily Mail, Sunday People, Daily Mirror, and Mail on Sunday all ‘beat’ the News of the World in this shameful league table of illegal activity.

Once the furore has died down we need to have a serious think about what we can do to protect privacy. This shouldn’t be reactively driven by the media attention generated by phone hacking, or celebrity super injunctions. Privacy is something that everyone is entitled to, whether they are rich or poor, but as this report and phone hacking scandal demonstrate privacy is under threat.

NO2ID has always tried to focus on the bigger picture. We found ID cards problematic not as unique phenomena but because they formed part of a wider trend we coined the database state. David Leigh & Nick Davies remind us that illegal data checks on Gordon Brown were being carried out by a corrupt policeman who was accessing data on the police national computer (PNC) and selling it onto the press via private investigators. I hate to say ‘we told you so’ but we have been warning that such problems will get worse as a result of the database state’s growth.

As the database state collects more and more personal information and shares it with increasing numbers of people it’s not surprising that it some of it finds its way into the papers. Sadly corrupt officials selling on personal data is something that can be found whenever a large number of officials have access to a database system containing valuable personal information. When you live in a society that engages in mass retention of communications data, the electronic sharing of our medical records and the tracking of our car journeys, it’s no wonder the culture of privacy abuse has spread from the state to the press.

NO2ID is continuing its campaign to protect personal privacy & freedom. We believe everyone’s privacy should be protected in law, and that we should all be entitled to compensation from anyone who misuses our personal information in an unauthorised way. In addition to halting the database state our new petition calls on the government to provide the legal powers for individuals to protect their own privacy. This empowerment of the individual will help hold the power of institutions in check. A new right to compensation would not leave us reliant on the protection of watchdogs, politicians or the police. All of which let down the victims of phone hacking when they failed to halt the illegal trade in personal data.

James Baker is the campaigns manager for NO2ID.

This is why I brought a motion to Liberal Youth Conference in February that was passed unanimously to make restrictions on the legislation party policy; and Liberal Youth subsequently chose for it to go to federal conference in Autumn.

Over 80% of interaction between the individual and the state happens in local authorities rather than central government. This means that when we create our Facebook groups and petitions against proposed anti-liberty government legislation we should be concentrating just as much on the local authorities that will be enacting those powers. In addition to RIPA, this will eventually include the national identity register. If we truly care about the civil liberties of ordinary people, we must concentrate on scrutinising the enactors as well as the legislators.

Before I explain the measures I want to take to conference, I’ll counter the desperate accusation that often gets thrown my way by people (sadly to say, not just within other parties) who have lost the argument.

They accuse us of being against all surveillance because it is always intrusive no matter how much it is used. That is, of course, rubbish; and when they do this they point at the more extreme libertarians who believe that crime is only ever committed by the state. I am comfortable with surveillance being used (proportionately) for serious crimes, i.e. those that attract a prison sentence. Giving an example, I am perfectly happy with a council RIPA officer going to an athletics club with a camera to catch somebody claiming severe disability benefits.

What I am not happy with, however, is councils (like Guildford Borough Council) retaining the data recorded on a suspect for a minimum of six years even if they are found to be innocent. I am similarly not happy with the level (or lack) of scrutiny that goes on by councillors in ensuring that officers and the executive use this power proportionately. It is often mentioned that government inspectors have given the green light for how individual councils use this power, but I am not happy with the same central government who have shown such disregard for civil liberties when writing legislation being given the reigns of scrutiny. It should be possible for councillors and the general public to decide whether or not the power was used properly without biasing court cases or releasing confidential information.

At conference in autumn, should the powers-that-be allow my motion to be debated, I will propose at least the following:
• RIPA should only be used by local councils to investigate serious crimes that attract a prison sentence. Putting bins out on the wrong day, for example, is not a serious crime.
• If somebody is found to be completely innocent of a crime or after a certain length of time the evidence is inconclusive, the data should be destroyed. Councils should not be allowed to decide themselves how long the data is retained for, and it most certainly not be as long as six years.
• The part of the act that allows for telecommunications interception should not be used by local councils. There is no crime investigated by them whereby retrieving the websites visited by individuals or the GPS data from their mobile phones is proportionate.
• Liberal Democrat council groups should be urged to bring a report on the usage of the power to the relevant scrutiny committee every twelve months to keep their council in check. Failing this, they should be urged to use Freedom Of Information to get the same data.

At a time where local councils are struggling to fund vital public services, they should not be using the money they do have spying wrongly on local residents. If these powers are truly needed, then councils should not be afraid of justifying the usage of them to both councillors and the general public. The mantra Jacqui Smith has said to us time and time again when destroying our liberties must be applied to local councils – if they have nothing to hide, they have nothing to fear.

* Chris Ward is a Liberal Democrat councillor in Guildford.

Data leaks, massive government IT projects and ‘data retention’ are creating a sense that things in this area are going in the wrong direction. Perhaps people aren’t aware of all the details – but they know there’s a problem.

Statebook tries to bridge that gap by illustrating the wealth of information the government already holds on you, and how the government wants to get its hands on even more if it can – popularising the research done for the Rowntree Reform Trust’s Database State report.

How is it that we’ve ended up with so much information about us being amassed in such a haphazard manner by the state, with so many risks of breaches of our our human rights?

There are many reasons of course. For a start, data is easier and easier to collect, store and analyse. That’s usually a good thing, but when it comes to our personal data, it can be different. “Data,” says security expert Bruce Schneier, “is the pollution of the digital age.”

But just because there’s an inherent problem with data accumulation, that doesn’t mean government policy should be to ignore it or make it more intrusive and insecure. Yet that seems to be the way government is headed.

This March, for instance, the government tried to push through clauses in the Coroners’ Bill which would have allowed it share data between agencies on the say so of a Statutory Instrument, without regard to Data Protection rules that require our individual consent. Even the Bar Council found this objectionable. Thankfully, largely because of campaigning by No2ID, this was stopped.

Adding to the mountain of data being kept about us, the Data Retention Directive, in force since 6 April, now requires Internet Service Providers to keep detailed information about who we email, and when we log on and off the internet, for twelve months.

And sometime soon, we are expecting the UK government’s Intercept Modernisation Programme (IMP) which will try to make sure it can collate and analyse this communication data. They may place it all in one giant database, for further analysis and easy access. IMP recently made headlines with the government wanting to see who we message on Facebook, in case we are plotting terrorist activities.

It’s not clear that email and Facebook messages are parallel to phone calls of twenty years ago. They are often closer to gossip in the pub. But because the information exists electronically, and can therefore
potentially be tracked, there is an enormous temptation for government agencies to gather this information.

Part of the temptation is the mistaken belief that it can be usefully be used to identify high risk terrorist suspects through ‘data mining’. But the rarity of such cases means that patterns will inevitably show up so many ‘false positives’ to make this approach useless.

The question for Liberal Democrats and other opposition politicians is whether they are ready to tap into the distinct unease of the public, and make the case for civil liberties.

We are often told that civil liberties are difficult, and voters will rush to throw them away in the face of external threats. But in the face of massive technological change, the decisions we make about our data and personal privacy are clearly becoming a public issue, and a genuine threat to our way of life if handled badly. This is a time for liberty, if we are willing to be bold.

* Jim Killock is Executive Director of the Open Rights Group.

Editor’s note: The Independent View is our slot for individuals and groups with no affiliation to the Liberal Democrats to write articles we believe will be of interest to LDV’s readers.

“We’ve heard a lot of about datasharing today. But that datasharing, that so many here today say is an unacceptable intrusion of privacy by the state, can actually help thousands and thousands of children who are eligible for free school meals but don’t get them at the moment… Look, it’s all very well for you to sit here. You’ve probably all had a hot meal in the last week. One in five of the children in my poorest wards have not had such a hot meal in the last week… You can’t walk away from this.”

Now, leaving aside the tendency of Labour politicians to come over all prolier than thou when backed into a corner (and they have the cheek to call us self-righteous…), it is an interesting point. Because however we might like to wrap ourselves up into the language of rights and freedoms, if the database state is working for the average man (or child) in the street, what hope do we have of curtailing it? And Wills’s quote is important for another reason: it highlights the fact that there is a lot more at stake here than simply whether or not we should have to carry ID cards around with us.

This brings me neatly onto The Database State, a new report published by the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust today. The researchers of this report – Ross Anderson, Ian Brown, Terry Dowty, Philip Inglesant, William Heath and Angela Sasse of the Foundation for Information Policy Research – have looked into 46 seperate databases currently being managed by government departments and have assessed each one on its relative merits. Assigning each one a colour according to a traffic light code, this is more than simply a polemic about the “transformational government” agenda but a far broader assessment.

Where the researchers have identified a good example of how data can be managed by government they have said so. Sadly however, they have only green lighted six projects, including the National Fingerprint Database and the TV Licensing Database. Of the remainder, ten have been issued a red light (suggesting the project should be scrapped or fundamentally redesigned) while 29 have been given an amber light (suggesting significant, worrying failings which may fall foul of a legal challenge).

You will probably have heard of many of this reports main targets: the National DNA Database, the National Identity Register, ContactPoint (the national database of all children), the NHS Detailed Care Record and the putative communications database which the government wants to use to store all our itemised phone bills, email headers and mobile phone location history. But that is only the tip of the iceberg. Did you even know we had a National Childhood Obesity Database for instance, tracking the Body Mass Index of every single child in state education?

What is most striking from this report is the extent to which so many of these databases use hearsay and subjective value judgements by public sector staff. The NHS Detailed Care Record for instance will allow anyone with access to the database to write anything on a patient’s record and has no system for quality control. The Common Assessment Framework database, which is a record for sharing information about vulnerable children, is essentially a pool of subjective information about a child and his or her family which will be shared by professionals. A couple of weeks ago, Gordon Brown pledged to make our public services more like eBay in terms of allowing people to rate them, but the truth is it has effectively been government policy for public officials to issue the public with eBay-style ratings for years now.

The fundamental question is, will any of this actually help? The researchers here recognise the potential value of a lot of these projects, and have shown significant restraint in only red lighting 1-in-5 of the projects discussed. But they raise serious questions. For instance, despite the National DNA Database doubling in size in recent years, the number of crimes solved using DNA has remained steady at 1-in-300 (and actually fell slightly in 2007). That is a pretty damning statistic. The introduction of the social services’ Integrated Children’s System did not stop Baby P’s murder and despite the litany of errors that have now been highlighted, Ofsted rated Haringey as “good.” Even before this case, social care professionals were expressing concern about how the system had shifted the balance away from professional analysis and towards complying with a standardised system.

To return to Michael Wills and the children in his constituency who are not getting the free school meals they are entitled to, it is not clear how exactly all this data storage will help them but let’s assume for a moment that they did. At what cost, however? The downside to all this data storage and sharing is that every minor indescretion, and even mistakes on the database, are set to be stored for the perusal of public service professionals for years to come. The report opens with a fictional account of how all this information could be actively harmful for the very children so much of it is intended to help. How will a school teacher, for instance, treat a child who is marked on the ContactPoint register as having had contact with social services (but not specifying the nature)? If a child who is listed on the Home Office’s ONSET system for predicting offenders because of their father’s criminal record, will the police treat her or him differently if they get in a fight? Will they be treated as a victim or a suspect?

Even if the databases themselves were perfect, the people using them can never be. Throughout history, badges of shame have been used to stigmatise people, not help them; why would the modern, whizzy, virtual version be any different? They say there’s no such thing as a free lunch, but this appears to be a particularly heavy price.

It seems that only now are we waking up to the extent of the modern Database State, of which this report is a major contribution. That it has been allowed to progress for so long with so little parliamentary or public oversight is itself a serious indictment of our political system. £100 billion is slated to be spent over the next five years, during an economic downturn when we simply cannot afford it. Yet at the same time, Michael Wills’s government blocks legislation such as the Fuel Poverty Bill – something that will save the lives of some of the most vulnerable, create jobs and protect the environment. If we are to be lectured that these projects are ultimately about helping the most vulnerable in society rather than treating them as suspects, they will have to do better than this.

James Graham works for Unlock Democracy, sits on the executive of the Social Liberal Forum and writes in a personal capacity.

The Lib Dems said plans for secret inquests in England and Wales were “misguided” and they would continue to oppose any moves which “undermined” the jury system. … They would have allowed ministers to apply for orders to remove data protection restrictions preventing the use of information for secondary purposes in certain circumstances.

Justice Secretary Jack Straw had argued that it would mean bereaved families would not have to speak to different departments and agencies many times over when a relative died. But the Liberal Democrats had said data sharing would not just be restricted to public bodies and people’s information could have been give to private companies in any country.

It’s not an issue I know a great deal about – but a chilling sentence in the Beeb report convinced me that the government plans really must have gone too far, for it reveals that even ‘former home secretary David Blunkett had raised some concerns about whether they were justified.’ If even that most authoritarian of Labour figures Mr Blunkett’s reckons it’s going a tad far, then, well, ’nuff said.

Here’s the moment of truth, as recorded by Hansard:

Mr. Sanders: Many of my constituents are very concerned about clause 152 of the Coroners and Justice Bill, and I greatly fear that, whatever reassurance the Minister can give, unless there is some absolutely categorical mechanism for protecting information, people will not be reassured that their details are safe.

Mr. Wills: I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman, and I hope it will give his constituents some reassurance to know that we have withdrawn the clauses that they are worried about.

Personally, I was annoyed enough to join millions of others on the march against the war in Iraq – now it’s time to hold them to account.

I’m not so sure how I will react if and when I get the orders from the Government to present myself at the interrogation centre in nearby Derby and hand over more personal information than is currently demanded from sex offenders.  I’m not certain I’m ready to join Simon Hughes in jail for refusing an ID card.

I’ve never yet been arrested, so my DNA is not amongst the millions of samples wrongly held by the Police.

I have to queue for longer than ever in my surviving local Post Office or the one in the city centre since many so others have been shut.

Now I’m no longer even safe in my own home.  

If I become a debtor – or if my local council again wrongly summonses me for Council Tax non-payment, and sends the summons to an address I have told them I no longer live at – bailiffs have been given new powers to break into my house, use violence against me and physically restrain me.

And if somone accuses me of some nefarious internet or computer crime, the police don’t even need to knock on my door or get a warrant, before remotely accessing my computer and reading my files.  And this is on top of other mad Government plans to track my every move on the internet and every phone call and text I send.

In a long posting last week, James Graham examined the state of play with the current government and civil liberties.  His conclusion – it’s terrifying, and all right thinking people need to inform themselves about what’s going on and then get angry.  Specifically, he said, take these steps:

1. Bookmark the Convention for Modern Liberty website and sign up to their news alerts.
2. Attend a Convention event, either the one in London, one of the regional and national events happening on the same day or a local event. If there is no event happening in your area, start organising one!
3. Join a pro-democracy and human rights organisation. Whichever tickles your fancy (although, obviously, joining Unlock Democracy helps pay my wages!) and get involved.
4. Join or set up a local group. It doesn’t have to be affiliated to anything, and it needn’t be anything more than you and a couple of your mates to start off with.
5. Write to your MP and ask them their starter for ten: “what do you think about the dillution of civil liberties over the past couple of decades and what do you intend to do about it in 2009.” And keep writing to them.
6. Go to the Taking Liberties exhibition at the British Library if you can, before it closes at the beginning of March.
7. Tell everyone you know to do the same.

Couldn’t have put it better myself.