Coruscating criticism from the Information Commission of the idea of putting together a huge new database of all our emails, mobile calls and internet use hasn’t put Labour off the idea.
Instead government minister Lord West has told Parliament that, “it is very early days as to where we go on this.” In other words – we are still thinking about going ahead with this.
And therefore – we need to keep up the pressure on this issue. It’s very easy to write to your MP, and here again are our top four arguments you can use:
1. It would be a huge intrusion on our privacy and civil liberty.
2. It would present a massive risk of misuse – either hacking from the outside or abuse from staff on the inside.
3. It would involve spending millions on a big government IT project: now, what’s the chance that turns out to be a really really inefficient way of spending money?
4. If you’ve got that amount of money and IT expertise to deploy, is this really what you’d put top of your priorities for improving the country? Improving the NHS’s IT records would bring far more benefits (and save far more lives) for example.
To contact your MP visit www.writetothem.com and ask your MP to raise this issue with the Home Secretary. You can use the four points above as the basis of your email, but remember the more individual the message the better its impact.
You can also help spread the word by blogging about this campaign on your site and linking through to https://www.libdemvoice.org/category/database
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One Comment
Sorry, but it is worse than that.
The Government are thinking of creating a huge database. A database is something you create so that you can serch and/or manipulate the data it contains. If you do not know who is to search a database, for what information you propose to search nor through what types of algorithm you wish to search, and if you have not considered how you wish to manipulate that information, the chance of your database being “fit for purpose” is neglgible. Further, you will have assembled information in a form that other and potentially malicious users are likely to find ways of using for their own purposes.
That is to say, in addition to the points quoted by the campaign, the project is likely to endanger national security