How many “soft releases” does the Government’s ID card scheme need?

It was introduced in November 2008 -  but “only” for foreign nationals who come to the UK under a visa, to work, study or marry.

Then this autumn, “only” airside workers at Manchester and London City airports were selected as the scheme’s next guinea pigs.

Not content with targeting people on the basis of nationality or occupation, Jacqui Smith has announced her latest “volunteers”: the City of Manchester.  Oh, and young people.

From The Guardian:

“The Home Office said it was trying to identify some parts of the country where people would be able to apply for ID cards on a voluntary basis from the end of this year.

“There are already plans to make them available to young people on a nationwide basis from 2010, before offering them to all adults over the following two years.

“But Jacqui Smith, the Home Secretary, also wants to establish “beacon areas” where all adults would be free to apply for one before the national roll-out. On a regional visit today, she said that Manchester was “in the running” to be one of these areas.”

Obviously the aim is for us all to have one, but with 50,000 ID cards planned to have been issued to foreign nationals by April, we’re way past the thin end of the wedge already…

You can sign the Liberal Democrats’ petition against ID cards here.

Dizzy Thinks highlights the Home Office’s love of flying, when we’re all supposed to be cutting carbon emissions:

“Last year, the Home Office, achieved the staggering figure of 3,115,863 air miles on domestic flights alone. Meanwhile the Home Office did 1,626,114 miles on short-haul and 3,980,766 on long-haul. Apparently this is OK though because the Home Office “ensures the Department offsets carbon dioxide emissions from its official air travel.”

“Frankly this is beside the point. We, the proles, are constantly being told that climate change is going to kill the entire world. That we should avoid unnecessarily wasting energy, certainly not take domestic flights when the trains will do. We’re bombarded with adverts about “Acting on CO2″ and here we have the Home Office doing the equivalent of about 12 round trips from London to Edinburgh every day for a whole year?!?”

..not ours - theirs!

The Home Office’s top civil servant, Permanent Secretary Sir David Normington called in the police after 20 leaks occurred in two years.

Explaining his decision to contact Scotland Yard, he told the Home Affairs Committee that the person leaking Home Office information was “despicable and disloyal.”

The Evening Standard has the story:

“He said he was concerned about the damage the leaks were doing to the operation of the Home Office and about how close to the heart of the Home Office the leaker was. There were also worries about any links between the Home Office leaks and wider leaks of national security information across Whitehall.

“It was the knowledge that the person or people must have had access to the Home Secretary’s office and to her papers that gave us a great deal of concern that national security information was at risk,” he said.”

Unfortunately the Home Office is happy to share “registrable facts about individuals in the UK” because it’s “in the interests of national security“

A private firm will be asked to manage a database of all UK communications traffic, according to a consultation paper to be published shortly by the Home Secretary.

Despite assurances that laws will be tightened to minimise losses and accidental leaks of private information, Sir Ken Macdonald, former Director of Public Prosecutions said,

“Authorisations for access might be written into statute. The most senior ministers and officials might be designated as scrutineers. But none of this means anything.

“All history tells us that reassurances like these are worthless in the long run. In the first security crisis the locks would loosen.”

 

From the Guardian:

“Until now most communications traffic data has been held by phone companies and internet service providers for billing purposes but the growth of broadband phone services, chatrooms and anonymous online identities mean that is no longer the case.

“The Home Office’s interception modernisation programme, which is working on the superdatabase proposal, argues that it is no longer good enough for communications companies to be left to retrieve such data when requested by the police and intelligence services. A Home Office spokeswoman said last night the changes were needed so law enforcement agencies could maintain their ability to tackle serious crime and terrorism.”