Pouvons-nous faire confiance au gouvernement au-dessus des cartes d'identification ?

La perte de deux disques d'ordinateur contenant les groupes personnels et encaissants de 25 millions de personnes a inévitablement émis des doutes frais au-dessus des plans du gouvernement pour nous inciter tous à avoir des cartes d'identité. Il y a bonne raison de ces soucis.

Si le gouvernement ne peut pas être fait confiance pour sauvegarder l'information sensible contenue sur les disques perdus peut il être faite confiance pour s'occuper d'un registre national d'identité qui contiendrait une richesse d'information utile pour des criminels et des terroristes. Ministers will no doubt assure us that the system for protecting the data on the national identity register will be so robust that we need have no fears. A few weeks ago, however, they probably would have said the same about the information provided by child benefit claimants - the information which has now gone astray.

There is a fundamental point here. We live in a society where the Government and other authorities are entrusted with more and more information about us. We are under almost constant surveillance from a battery of CCTV cameras in every town and city. The police have a growing database of people’s DNA profiles, many of whom have not been convicted of any crime. ID cards will shortly mean that even more information will be stored about us.

All of this sensitive data is held on trust. We have no idea whether Governments in the future might misuse this information or, more likely, simply mislay it in a similar blunder to the one we have witnessed this week.

This error should give us all pause for thought, particularly over the issue of ID cards. Are we really happy to have yet more data stored about us? Will it really make us more secure, as the Government claims, or more vulnerable? It is difficult not to feel a sense of deep unease about the further cataloguing of the entire population.

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