Gordon Brown today admitted the Government cannot promise to keep safe the millions of pieces of sensitive personal information it has gathered on the British public.
The Prime Minister's remarks came amid an urgent inquiry into how a memory stick with user names and passwords for a key Whitehall computer system was found in a pub car park, James Slack writes in the Daily Mail:.
Mr Brown said:
'It is important to recognise that we cannot promise that every single item of information will always be safe because mistakes are made by human beings. Mistakes are made in the transportation, if you like the communication of information.'
The Libertarian Party said that as a first step the £4.5 billion ID cards scheme should now be scrapped immediately.
Other major projects that need to be scrapped include a £12.7bn NHS NPfIT system for the electronic storage and sharing of patients' records, ContactPoint - a database containing sensitive details about every child in the country, due to be launched next year, and the £12bn Central Database holding details of every phone call, text message, email or website visited by every person in the UK to name but a few.
The Libertarian Party is committed to scrapping all of the intrusive databases that the government operate or are planning, including the ANPR database, the National DNA database (except for those who have been convicted of serious crime), the national fingerprint database (except for those who have been convicted of serious crime), the PNR (passenger name record database), the HIPS database and the Work and Pensions Longitudinal Study (WPLS) which links tax records with social security, benefit, pension, ISA, TESSA, PEP and other investment information with names and addresses and national insurance information.
It has also emerged that a public official is sacked or reprimanded almost every working day for data protection or other personal information breaches.
Parliamentary answers received from four Government departments alone reveal that at least 230 officials were disciplined or dismissed in the last year for inappropriate handling of sensitive data.
Analysis of reports of data breach notifications reveals the Government has lost the personal information of nearly 30 million people in the last year.
It is not good enough that Government collect this data initially, and now it is clear that the Government cannot safeguard your data, and Gordon Brown's admission today only confirms that.
The Libertarian Party view is that Government should therefore not collect this data in the first place.
The Libertarian Party is the only party that has promised to put an end to this Politics of Fear, scrap all these intrusive databases, and repeal the many thousands of draconian laws enacted over the past 11 years.
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2 comments:
"...ContactPoint - a database containing sensitive details about every child in the country..."
Well not quite every, child: we all know that the children of important people - ie pols and celebrities - will be exempt.
Do as I say, not as... etc etc
Christina Speight worked out how to fix all this: just pool all data centrally and lose all of it all in one go. Or just publish it all on-line. That way it won't matter any more what happens in future.
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