Christopher Hope writes in the Daily Telegraph:

Sensitive data for more than four million people was lost by Government departments in the past year, on top of the high profile loss of child benefit records.

Following the loss of details for 25 million child benefit claimants in November, Whitehall departments have begun including information on personal information losses in their annual financial statements.

Analysis shows that beyond the child benefit fiasco, Government departments were last year losing data at the rate of more than 300,000 people’s details a month in the year to April it emerged last night.

Some politicians are making the link to government database plans:

The Tories’ shadow Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude said: “This shows that the government cannot be trusted to protect people’s personal details.

“Ministers should think again about its even more risky and intrusive projects such as the identity card database, the all-encompassing children’s database and the property database for the council tax revaluation.

“Tougher safeguards are needed to protect the privacy of law-abiding citizens from the government.”

Etan Smallman writes in The Times:

Trust Britain’s youth to be characteristically ungrateful. The Government goes to all the effort of making a website for 16 to 25- year-olds to express their views on identity cards, and all they get in return is a solid mixture of scorn, sneering and scepticism smattered across their fancy new forums.

In a bid to get the country’s youngsters on board the controversial scheme, the Home Office has launched MyLifeMyId.org, where 16 to 25 year olds “can have their say about identity issues in the UK.”

But anyone browsing the discussions on the site would be hard pushed to find a single positive comment, with contributors branding the controversial scheme as “creepy,” “dirty” and “illegal” and the website itself as an “online propaganda machine”.

Chris Hastings, Beth Jones and Stephanie Plentl write in The Daily Telegraph:

When Gordon Brown called on the British Library to stage an exhibition about Britishness he perhaps envisaged a patriotic celebration of the national identity.

What he would not have expected is the resulting event, Taking Liberties, which encourages visitors to contemplate the perilous state of civil liberties in modern Britain under his Government.

The exhibition, which is the most ambitious in the British Library’s history, is in direct response to a call from Mr Brown for the institution to hold a display of patriotism, and critics have described it as a “snub” to the Prime Minister.

Visitors will be asked their views on issues such as ID cards and detention of suspects for up to 42 days, both of which are key Government policies.

Exhibits will be displayed in space in the shape of a clenched fist. As visitors progress through the exhibition, the space gets smaller and smaller to give the impression of confinement. Each visitor to the exhibition will be given a personal ID number.

Christopher Hope writes in The Daily Telegraph:

The personal details of 45,000 people, including dates of birth, criminal records, National Insurance numbers and court information, were lost by a single Government department last year.

The Ministry of Justice’s (MoJ) annual accounts show the data was lost in nine separate incidents in the past financial year.

The worst incident, in June last year, saw the loss of names, addresses and some bank details of 27,000 people working for suppliers to the MoJ.

Opposition parties are making the link to the National Identity Register:

Liberal Democrat Justice spokesman David Howarth MP said: “Yet again the Government has shown that it cannot be trusted with citizens’ personal data.

“How can ministers possibly argue for the introduction of a universal ID Card scheme when they can’t even keep safe the data they already have.”

Alan Travis writes in The Guardian:

The national identity card scheme faces fresh problems following a warning from the government’s top scientific advisers that the quality of fingerprints from 4 million people aged over 75 may be too poor to be used to prove their identity.

The “gold standard” integrity of the national identity scheme would depend on all 10 digits of the hands of everyone in Britain over 16 being accurately recorded on the central register, but experts have now told Home Office ministers that it is “hard to obtain good quality fingerprints” from the over-75s.

They warned that “exceptional handling” arrangements would have to be made to handle the registration of those whose fingerprints are not up to scratch. This would have a “large impact not only on the technical elements of the scheme but [also] on businesses processes, schedules and costs”.

American experts estimate between 2% and 5% of adults have poor quality fingerprints, which means ridges on the fingers are not sharply defined enough to be reliably copied by an automatic scanner.

The warning is contained in a report slipped out before Parliament rose for the summer recess from the biometrics assurance group, which is made up of independent experts from Whitehall, the industry and universities and chaired by the government’s chief scientific adviser, Professor John Beddington. The group was set up to review the science behind the ID card scheme.

Fergus Shanahan writes in The Sun:

But help has to be offered to EVERYONE and not just those receiving child benefit.

Handouts are just gimmicks, anyway. And they have to be paid for - usually through tax.

We need long-term solutions.

Brown should cut petrol and diesel tax, axe wasteful Labour pet projects like ID cards and freeze town hall recruitment.

Colin Coyle writes in the Irish Sunday Times:

When John Welford fumbles in his pockets for change as he boards the bus, fellow passengers often nod sympathetically at the pensioner and ask him if he has forgotten his free travel pass. Those who strike up a conversation with Welford will come away thinking that he is either paranoid or has discovered an unsettling plan by the authorities to introduce a national identity card by stealth.

Welford, an Edinburgh pensioner, is interested in the introduction of the Irish public services card, a seemingly innocuous travel pass to be distributed to the country’s 640,000 free travel recipients next year. He sees a parallel between the introduction of the card in Ireland with the rollout of the travel pass in Scotland.

Two years ago, Welford returned his bus card and asked for it to be destroyed. His fear is that the apparently benign identity card, which contains a name, photograph and unique number, is a Trojan horse, the first step by the Scottish government to usher in a national ID by the back door.

There are echoes of his suspicion in the comments of privacy campaigners last week in Ireland. They claim that although the public service card will be introduced as a free travel pass, it may gradually form the basis of a national identity card.

Nadine McBay, writing in Metro, reviews Lucy Porter’s Edinburgh Fringe show, and gives it 4 stars:

Her gentle rants about ID cards and reminiscences about buying Lidl gin may be closer to amusing after-dinner ramblings than hard-nosed stand-up, but that’s her attraction. Someone who can find sweetness even in the man who stole her credit card, Porter is a kitten with enduring appeal.

The show is at at the Pleasance Courtyard in Edinburgh until 25th August.

Richard Ford and Sam Coates write in The Times:

Opposition MPs accused the Government last night of being naive in believing that new microchipped passports would be foolproof against criminals involved in identity theft.

After The Times disclosed that new passports could be cloned and manipulated in minutes and would then be accepted as genuine, MPs also gave warning of serious implications for the security of the Government’s £4.7 billion identity card scheme.

The identity card project, which starts this year when cards are issued to foreign nationals from outside Europe, relies on microchips similar to those cloned in minutes by a computer researcher as part of tests conducted for The Times.

Chris Huhne, the Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesman, joined calls for the whole project to be scrapped. “The Government is clearly incapable of creating a criminal-proof gold standard for identity,” he said.

Politics.co.uk also reports the criticisms:

Shadow home secretary Dominic Grieve said: “It is of deep concern the technology underpinning a key part of the UK’s security can be compromised so easily.

“What is worse - the same technology will underpin the government’s identity card scheme, which risks making us less safe.”

Phil Booth, national coordinator of No2ID said the experiment showed ID cards would actually make people more open to identity fraud.

“By putting your private information on a chip on a passport or ID card, designed to let it be skimmed-off for official purposes, the whole centralised approach to ID makes it easier for your life to be perfectly stolen,” he said.

“The government cannot be trusted to look after your identity.

Steve Boggan writes in The Times:

New microchipped passports designed to be foolproof against identity theft can be cloned and manipulated in minutes and accepted as genuine by the computer software recommended for use at international airports.

Tests for The Times exposed security flaws in the microchips introduced to protect against terrorism and organised crime. The flaws also undermine claims that 3,000 blank passports stolen last week were worthless because they could not be forged.

In the tests, a computer researcher cloned the chips on two British passports and implanted digital images of Osama bin Laden and a suicide bomber. The altered chips were then passed as genuine by passport reader software used by the UN agency that sets standards for e-passports.

Mr Boggan points out:

The tests also raise serious questions about the Government’s £4 billion identity card scheme, which relies on the same biometric technology. ID cards are expected to contain similar microchips that will store up to 50 pieces of personal and biometric information about their holders.

Nick Heath writes in Silicon.com:

A prototype of the UK ID card biometric database will be delivered by French firm Thales for £18m.

The defence contractor will design, build, test and operate an early version of the National Identity Register (NIR) and ID card application system for airport workers, which will go live from the second half of 2009.

The bill for the system has increased by £8m over previous estimates and the contract will run for four years.

ZDnet also notes that the estimated cost of this contract has increased by 80% over the course of 3 months:

In May, Identity and Passport Service (IPS) executive director Bill Crothers said the contract to establish the interim scheme would be worth “in the order of £10m”. A deal with the UK Border Agency for a case-management system will follow by the end of 2008, but the major contracts — creating the main scheme and worth around £500m each — are not scheduled to be awarded until next year, with ID-card production coming last.

Jenni Russell writes in The Guardian:

The new dividing line between Labour and the Tories is less about a left-right split than about an authoritarian approach on one side and a more liberal one on the other. And Labour are on the wrong side of it. Many of their social and economic policies may have failed, but where they have succeeded is in developing a targeting, controlling, distrustful state. From the micromanagement of civil servants, teachers, doctors and the police, to ID cards, super databases and the growth of surveillance, the government’s answer to too many problems has been the removal of autonomy from individuals and more oversight from Whitehall.

The Conservative analysis is that this over-controlling state is not only disastrously unpopular, it is also one of the key reasons why Labour, despite all its spending, has failed to achieve its goals. Endless supervision has been an expensive distraction, and has sapped energy and morale out of public life.

Sylvia Pfeifer writes in the Financial Times:

A controversial national identity card scheme took another step forward on Friday when the Home Office awarded the defence group Thales a four-year contract to help deliver the £5bn-plus programme.

Under the £18m contract, Thales will design, build and test a system to issue the cards, along with a computerised national identity register aimed at preventing fraud.

Gerry Braiden, writing in the Glasgow Herald, reports the Identity and Passport Service’s announcement of 114 job losses at its Glasgow office:

Mark Serwotka, PCS general secretary, said: “This news comes as a bitter blow to people who deliver a world-class service and will lead to a poorer service and an end to the processing of passport applications in Scotland.With more office closures and job cuts in the pipeline we believe resources are being diverted to implement the controversial and costly ID-card scheme.”

Guy Herbert writes in The Guardian, responding to an article arguing that the state has an automatic right to our personal information:

What unites us is we are thinking of society rather than the goals of the state. To criticise a bureacratic grand projet in principle is not “implying personal information is property rather than a social construction that would not exist but for government”. Quite the contrary. To ask important questions about what personal information and privacy are, and should be, is to repudiate such know-nothing nostrums. Personal information is important because it is constructed in relationships, because it mediates trust, and because making official relationships obey coherent rules maintains the legitimacy of government functions. It is the stuff of all our lives - not property - but worthy of at least as much respect.

Miles Erwin writes in Metro:

A million innocent people should have their records wiped from the national DNA database, a ‘citizen’s inquiry’ told Gordon Brown last night.

Criminals who have served their time should also have their details wiped off the system, according to the £50,000 report, which was ordered by the prime minister in January.

The growing use of the database was ‘a step towards a totalitarian state’ at a time when people did not trust the government with their personal data, the inquiry found.

Instead, the records should be taken away from the police and the Home Office and run by an independent body, it suggested.

James Slack, writing in the Daily Mail, points out that the “National database” is actually run differently in Scotland:

Ministers claim that many of those cleared of the offence which first landed them on the database were later trapped by their DNA when committing another.

But the public mistrusts this argument, which appears to rest on the grounds that when someone is arrested there is ‘no smoke without fire’.

Ministers have failed to explain why they cannot follow Scotland’s lead. There, samples of those cleared of wrongdoing are routinely deleted.

In 2005-2006, 21,748 samples were destroyed north of the border, with little noticeable impact in the fight against crime.

Nick Heath writes on the Silicon.com web site:

The thousands of UK ePassports stolen on Monday are likely to sell for up to £20m on the black market, say privacy experts.

A van carrying about 3,000 blank ePassports and visas was hijacked on route to RAF Northolt, near London.

While the Home Office claims that “high tech checks” render the blank ePassports useless, privacy experts say they could be used to fool everyday ID checks, for limited travel abroad or be fitted with cloned chips.

Simon Davies, director of Privacy International, said: “It’s unlikely that the stolen passports could easily navigate the UK borders but a criminal could use one indefinitely for ‘flash and go’ purposes. Alternatively the passports could be used for at least a few months for entry to most countries in the world.

“The presence of so many potentially strong false identities would have a very high black market value - perhaps in the range of £20m - and so a criminal enterprise would easily justify making the investment to hack the chip.”

As Labour’s soul-searching after the Glasgow East bye-election defeat continues, a number of Labour figures have been writing about possible policy changes for the party.

Diane Abbott, Labour MP for Hackney North and Stoke Newington, answers questions in The Independent:

Q: What should Labour do to get people back on their side? (Alex Sweetland, via email)

A: We could start by dropping ID cards, scrapping Trident and pulling out of Iraq. We could follow that up by revamping the taxation system to make it fairer, i.e. taking more low-paid people out of the taxation system altogether and putting up taxes on the super-wealthy.

Neal Lawson, chair of the pressure group Compass and former adviser to Gordon Brown, writes on the Guardian’s Comment is Free site:

There is a huge range of radical and popular ideas the Labour government could take up – if they wanted. Instead, they choose to fritter away what’s left of their support on issue like 42 days and ID cards, while refusing to talk up the more social-democratic work that goes on in areas like children’s development.

Also writing on the Guardian Comment is Free site, Micheal Meacher MP asks:

A fourth level at which the anger and despair so manifest in the local elections has to be addressed is by reconnecting government to electors who feel cast adrift. It is repeatedly said that this government will be a listening government, but people need the evidence that they are being listened to when government actually changes course. The encroachment on civil liberties by a police surveillance state is widely seen as having gone too far, but is the government prepared to withdraw ID cards, excessive travel checks, or gratuitous storage of personal information on government databases?

The BBC reports the deliberations of Labour’s 184-member National Policy Forum at Warwick University over the weekend:

Controversial government policies such as building a new generation of nuclear power stations, a welfare crackdown and ID cards were also all approved, a Labour spokesman said.

Henry Porter writes in The Observer about the need for a privacy law:

Put in simple terms, the citizen is deemed to owe more to the state than ever before and in an era of anticipation - intelligence-led policing, early intervention in problem families and so forth - data sharing is essential for the authorities. What we should understand is that in this vast, bossy, communitarian project, a theft is taking place of a prized possession - privacy, the thing that once defined us.

When Andy Burnham, the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, said: ‘The individual has no right to anonymity; the state has a right to know who you are’, he unwittingly expressed the essence of Labour’s programme.

The state has the right to know only a few details about us, but not who we are, just as it has no business monitoring our movements, communications and sharing our personal information with foreign powers. Or, for that matter, giving private companies access to 4.2 million profiles on the national DNA database, one million of which belong to innocent people.

Privacy law is being made in the courts piecemeal by judges responding to the supposed guarantees of the Human Rights Act. This is unsatisfactory. What we need is a new privacy law that takes in all these developments - not just the ones that appear before Justice Eady - and resolves the problems identified by Labour in its murmured deliberations about privacy and the database state. There are few more important issues that face this government or the next.