As the Defence Secretary, Des Browne, prepares to make a statement in parliament about the loss of an MoD laptop with some 600,000 sets of personal details on the disk, it's salutary to reflect on another comment in the MECAS radio documentary I mentioned in my previous post. In the Lebanese civil war of the 70s, one contributor noted, there were ethno-religious killings on the basis of people's ID cards... which included data as to the holder's religion.
Yes, you may say, but the UK ID card will not hold such data, and we're not having a civil war. True - but this is 30 years on. It's not a matter of whether the data is on the card itself, but whether the data on the card can be used to index (and therefore search for) those details in other linked or shared repositories. Then it becomes a question of how effective the controls are on the sharing and exchange of sensitive personal attributes. And civil war or not, it would be optimistic to assume that the different religious affiliations of UK residents are of interest to nobody of evil intent.
On Radio 4 this morning, the Information Commissioner, Richard Thomas, expressed the need for a broad and deep cultural change in the handling of personal information in the public sector 'before we even get to considerations such as whether the data is encrypted'. I think he suggests a very valid perspective: that the technological considerations are superfluous if the cultural and policy aspects are not effectively addressed.
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Just exposing your home address data on an ID card could be enough to get you injured or killed.
Thirty years ago, and even today, it really did / does matter, whether you live near the Catholic Falls Road or the Protestant Shankhill Road areas of Belfast.
The very first research project approved for the DWP Longitudinal Study (not a one off statistical exercise, but a permanent link between the DWP social security and pensions data and the HMRC tax and employment datasets, on a national scale) was one which fed people's race and religion into a Geographical Information System.
The reason for this was to monitor the effectiveness of various employment programmes, and compliance with the anti racial discrimination laws and policies.
However, the well meaning bureaucrats and politicians have created the perfect tool for any future para-military death squads or secret police arrest squads - a list of victims, with route map instructions of exactly where to go and murder or murder them in any particular area.
Posted by Watching Them, Watching Us on January 21, 2008 at 12:54 PM GMT+00:00 #