We've Got A File On You

In the same week as another data scandal, in which the details of suspected criminals were left mouldering on a desk at the CPS for the better part of a year before someone remembered to run checks on them, the Government has announced that they want the "personal details of every traveller". The Guardian reported yesterday that "passengers travelling between EU countries or taking domestic flights would have to hand over a mass of personal information, including their mobile phone numbers and credit card details, as part of a new package of security measures being demanded by the British government. The data would be stored for 13 years and used to "profile" suspects."

Given the Government's recent track record on handling it's citizens data, surely now is not the time to be gathering yet more personal information, especially data as ripe for ID theft as credit card details? Tomorrow's Fish and Chip Paper calls this making "the haystack bigger in the hope of finding more needles" - they go on to criticise the Government's obsession "with the indiscriminate (although it could clearly lead to discrimination) capture of ever larger amounts of information. This smacks of the early days of customer loyalty card schemes where the retailers scrambled to put together massive databases with no real clue how they were going to use them and of the implications for data privacy and security." In fact, few people seem to be in favour of a new database of information, even if it is being introduced ostensibly to counter terrorism - Signs of the Times comments that "mass surveillance measures do little or nothing against criminals but are a great tool for the control and management of the masses of innocent people."

Henry Porter, writing in today's Observer, is even more outspoken, saying "in the name of the great democrats who have occupied the benches in the House of Commons down the ages, what right has the government to know my credit card number, my cell phone number, my destination, or even when I take a trip abroad, or catch the plane to Inverness? Has this been debated in Parliament? No."

This data collection announcement appears to show desperation on the Government's part. Also, the inference the data may be used for "more general public policy purposes" indicates that they don't really have a clear idea what they're stockpiling the information for, but they still want it anyway.