Jasper Gerard, writing in the Daily Telegraph, argues that money being spent on ID Cards would be better spent elsewhere:

I’m no hero, as proved by my earlier example, but it struck me how many citizens have become so cowed that they would rather see a girl attacked than risk intervening. We desperately need to reclaim our streets but we should be realistic about the violence we are now up against. Rather than indulging in nostalgia for clipped ears, we should expand community courts where miscreants are forced to face their victims and make good their damage. Oh, and I can tell you how one squiggle of a pen would make our streets safer: if the Home Secretary scrapped ID cards and used the money to employ 10,000 police officers. Chief constable, we need more felt collars, not clipped ears.

The BBC reports:

The Scottish Parliament is expected to vote decisively against the introduction of ID cards later.

However, the policy is reserved to Westminster and the first cards will be issued this month to foreign students entering Britain.

It is planned to make them available to everyone in the UK by 2012.

An SNP motion condemning ID cards as an expensive invasion of civil liberties is expected to be backed by all parties, except Labour.

The Scottish Government has rubbished the plan, claiming the UK-wide scheme would cost £5bn, but would not boost security or deter crime.

Ben Russell writes in The Independent:

The first wave of ID cards to be issued to British citizens has prompted airline pilots to threaten a strike rather than accept the documents.

Aviation workers have warned that proposals to make airport staff register for the cards from next year would do little to improve security. The British Airline Pilots Association (Balpa), which represents 10,000 of the 12,000 commercial pilots and flight engineers in Britain, said its members were being treated as “guinea pigs”. Jim McAuslan, Balpa’s general secretary, said the Government’s “early warning system should be flashing” over opposition to the plans.

The paper also carries an editorial on the subject:

They say that if you want to boil a frog, you don’t throw it into scalding water as the creature will simply leap out. Instead, you turn up the heat slowly.

The Government’s strategy on ID cards has been to turn up the heat slowly on us all. Foreign nationals will be the first to receive them; then Britons who work in tight security zones such as airports. People who renew their passports will be next to be given then. Eventually, a general roll-out.

Except that there are already signs of resistance. The airline pilots’ union, Balpa, is objecting to the fact that its members who work from Manchester and London City airports will be expected to carry the cards from next autumn. They regard it as an unwarranted and excessive intrusion by the state.

Good luck to them. The more frogs that jump out of the pot, the more likely we are to upset this entire costly and illiberal project.

According to a Kablenet report published by ZDnet:

Less than 30 percent of the UK public wants to enrol for ID cards at private-sector retailers, despite the home secretary’s promotion of such locations.

Only 25 percent of more than 2,000 people questioned for the government’s Central Office of Information would consider having their fingerprints, photo and signature recorded for an ID card in a supermarket, according to research commissioned by the Identity and Passport Service (IPS). This increased to just 26 percent for a petrol station, 28 percent for a department store and 29 percent for a local shop.

People responded more positively towards post offices, which would be considered by 53 percent, local authorities (63 percent) and banks (66 percent). But the preferred locations for ID-card enrolment were passport offices and police stations, with results of 84 percent and 85 percent respectively.

Despite the findings, however, two weeks ago home secretary Jacqui Smith indicated her intention to press ahead with high-street enrolment. “Enrolment should be able to happen at the convenience of the customer, on the high street, at the nearest post office, or at the local shopping centre,” she said.

David Leppard writes in the Sunday Times:

Ministers have been accused of trying to introduce compulsory identity cards through the back door, despite promises that people will not have to carry them.

Lawyers at Liberty, the civil liberties group, say that little noticed clauses in the draft immigration and citizenship bill introduce new powers to make people produce identity documents or face arrest. The bill is expected to be in the Queen’s speech next month.

At issue is a clause in the bill which says that anyone who is to be examined by an immigration officer “must produce a valid identity document if required to do so”. Failure to produce an identity card or otherwise prove identity will become a criminal offence. At present, producing a passport counts as proof of identity.

It had been thought the clauses applied only to people entering the UK at ports.

But Liberty says a separate clause in the bill extends powers of examination to new categories of people. They include anyone in the UK — whether a British citizen or not — who has ever left the country.

Chris Williams and John Ozimek write in The Register:

More than three times as many officials will be able to access sensitive information on every child in England and Wales held in the forthcoming ContactPoint database than estimates circulated by the government suggest, research by The Register has found.

ContactPoint is now scheduled to launch in January. It will store and share data including every child’s name, home address and school, and information about their legal guardians. The government has argued it could help prevent cases similar to the horrific death of Baby P, whose tormentors were convicted at the Old Bailey yesterday.

Publicly available staffing figures from education authorities, the NHS, social services and other organisations show that more than one million government employees will have access to ContactPoint.

The Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF) has told parliament that only 330,000 will use the delayed centralised data sharing system.

The Register also carries further analysis and comment here.

The Guardian leader-writer reflects on Paul Dacre’s recent comments on a privacy law:

Mr Dacre would prefer parliament, rather than judges, to determine the boundaries of privacy. There is some merit in this, but public opinion over privacy might turn out to be more complicated than newspapers think: people might, for instance, feel some sympathy for Ms Miller and her ilk - and be more concerned about government (or newspaper) snooping, centralised databases, computerised NHS records, DNA banks, identity cards and the widespread use of private detectives to ferret out private information. Parliament did, of course, vote for the Human Rights Act, which Mr Dacre finds “wretched”. The challenge for the industry self-regulator, the Press Complaints Commission, is to decide on whether to turn its back on its rights-based jurisprudence (Mr Dacre is chair of its code committee). If the PCC were to get too out of step with the courts’ view of privacy, there would be less and less incentive for people to opt for self-regulation or mediation over litigation. Mr Dacre has launched a robust and interesting debate, but it is much broader than one judge and one spanking sports boss.

Nick Clegg responds to comments on his tax-cutting proposals on Times Comment Central web site:

But I want to go further. More fair tax cuts for people who really need help. Where’s the money to pay for it? How about redirecting spending from the NHS computer systems that never see the light of day; surveillance databases that make us the most spied upon nation in the world; and pointless ID cards that won’t help catch criminals? By the time we’re fighting a general election we will have identified £20bn of mis-spent money. No vague gestures at ‘red tape’ – we’ll let people know exactly what current spending we’re redirecting. And then we’ll explain how we think that money should be spent on our public spending priorities instead – like children, housing, the elderly - with any money left over going on further fair tax cuts.

Jenny McCartney writes in the Sunday Telegraph:

The loathsome Government plan to treat ordinary British citizens with the suspicion due to convicted criminals continues apace. It emerged last week that the Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, is inviting the Royal Mail, shops and private firms to bid for multi-million-pound contracts to fingerprint millions of us. When the scheme gets under way after 2009, the chosen company will dutifully collect prints from all 10 fingers, and a face scan, from anyone who applies for a new British passport or one of the new ID cards.

In the unlikely event that you are already twitching to apply for one of the prospective ID cards, my sympathies are limited. But what of the unfortunates who will be compelled to get an ID card by their employers, or who merely wish to renew their passports, perhaps with a view to taking an occasional holiday from our freshly authoritarian state?

Numerous experts have already observed that the scheme will do nothing to guarantee our security. Indeed, if the data stored on the card is compromised, it could radically increase our insecurity.

Janet Street-Porter says much the same thing in her column in the Independent on Sunday:

According to Jacqui Smith we’re gagging for ID cards. Demand is so high that the Home Office plans a fast-track system so applicants can enter their data on a pre-registration website, enabling them to have an ID card in a year, two years before the original date of 2011. Really? Who’s so desperate to hand over all 10 fingerprints and facial scans to the Government? I haven’t encountered anyone. The Government is inviting private contractors to collect this biometric data. But saying that the contracts will be awarded to firms that undergo security vetting doesn’t make me feel safe. This also applied to the government consultants who’ve mislaid memory sticks and computer disks in the past few months.

Christopher Hope writes in The Daily Telegraph:

The fee for a new passport is set to rise by a third to over £100, Jacqui Smith has disclosed.

The Home Secretary also revealed that the cost to taxpayers of new identity cards will double from £30 to £60.

The huge rises were necessary to pay for taking facial readings and fingerprints for new biometric passports and ID cards.

The controversial cards aim to replace bank statements, driving licences and birth certificates for anyone looking to confirm their identity. However, critics have lambasted them for being costly, invasive and unnecessary.

Meanwhile, Alan Travis, writing in the Guardian, reports the announcement of new and increased estimates of the Home Office’s costs:

Despite this effort to reduce the costs of creating a national network of ID enrolment centres, the latest cost report for the scheme shows that the projected overall bill continues to creep up. The bill for issuing ID cards to all foreign nationals who are long-term resident in Britain, which began this month, has risen by £7m since March to £326m. The cost for British nationals has also crept up in the last six months by a further £45m to £4.7bn over the next 10 years. This figure does not include the costs to any other government department of using the ID cards to check identities.

James Slack writes in the Daily Mail:

The Royal Mail, shops and private firms are today being invited to bid for multi-million pound contracts to fingerprint millions of Britons for ID cards.

Home Secretary Jacqui Smith is placing the private sector in charge of gathering the biometric details of anyone who applies for a passport or the controversial new cards.

People will have all ten fingerprints and their face scanned.

The hugely sensitive biometric data will then be passed on to the Government’s Identity and Passport Service for inclusion on the new National Identity Register.

The paper asks whether the public will want private firms to store fingerprints for ID cards:

The Home Office planned to use 80 Government offices to interview and scan millions of applicants joining the National Identity Register. But people in rural areas would have had enormous distances to travel.

If the Government can encourage Royal Mail or a firm with a presence in many towns to bid, such as Boots, these distances can be reduced.

But, to a public horrified by the string of recent data scandals, these arguments may not prove sufficient.

If a person’s fingerprints fall into the wrong hands, it could be devastating. Their identity could be stolen.

Thus, they may be reluctant to trust their local post office or chemist to put their biometric details safely on the Government’s identity database.

Jimmy Burns writes in the Financial Times:

Controversial plans to make thousands of airport workers the first British nationals to be issued with biometric identity cards have been scaled back because of continuing opposition from the airline industry.

Ministers will announce tomorrow that the planned roll-out in the sector will begin next October, later than originally anticipated, and will be limited initially to an 18-month trial in two airports.

Manchester and London City airports have signed up in principle to the scheme after the government agreed to fund the trial, introducing the first wave of ID cards free of charge to the users and providing a further £500,000 towards improvements in pre-employment checks at the two airports.

Unions have voiced concerns about their members facing a £30 charge for an identity card before they can apply for an airside pass, while the industry generally remains concerned that the ID scheme will increase costs without bringing significant security benefits.

Christopher Hope writes in the Daily Telegraph:

Parliamentary answers from three Government Departments reveal that up to 260 officials were disciplined or dismissed “for alleged breaches of data protection requirements and inappropriate use of personal or sensitive data” in the past year.

Most of the people - 192 - were disciplined or dismissed at HM Revenue and Customs, which last November admitted losing personal details of 25 million people from the child benefit database.

As many as 45 officials could have been disciplined for data protection and personal information breaches at the Home Office agencies including 15 from the Identity and Passport Service in the year to the end of March.

Another 20 civil servants were disciplined at agencies run by the Department for Work and Pensions in the 12 months to the end of March.

James Brokenshire, the Tories’ home affairs spokesman, said: “It’s disturbing that so many Home Office officials have been sacked or reprimanded for data protection breaches.

“It underlines why plans for a national ID register and a new huge central database of phone and email details are flawed and fraught with such risk and danger.

David Davis writes on the Guardian Comment is Free web site:

There can be few more astonishing confessions in modern politics than the prime minister’s admission on Sunday that the government is unable to guarantee the security of our personal information on the state’s databases. This admission shatters all the previous claims that the government has made that its obsession with creating vast databases can in any way improve the safety and security of the citizen.

James Slack writes in the Daily Mail:

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.

The Gateway website allows members of the public to access hundreds of government services including self-assessment tax returns, pension entitlements and child benefits.

There are 12m people registered on it, and it had to be temporarily suspended.

It is the latest in a string of similar blunders, including the loss of the details of 25m Child Benefit claimants, and information on tens of thousands of the country’s worst criminals.

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.’

MPs said the Premier’s admission called into doubt the wisdom of pressing ahead with plans to massively expand the amount of sensitive personal information held by the State.

Both major opposition parties said the £4.5 billion ID cards scheme should now be scrapped.

Mark Ballard writes in The Inquirer:

The UK Home Office has said it will not be using criminal data types to test the National Identity Register, a week after it said it would be using criminal data types to test the National Identity Register.

The Home Office has arranged to borrow millions of fingerprint records from the US Federal Bureau of Investigations - in both rolled (printed) and flat (electronic) formats - to test the UK’s Identity Card Scheme. Last week, a spokeswoman for the Home Office said it would be using rolled FBI prints to test the National Identity Register, the heart of the UK’s Identity Card Scheme.

This was odd. Criminal databases including the UK’s own IDENT-1 store images of rolled prints because they need to be of a high quality to stand up in a court of law. But the NIR was going to use flat prints because it only needs quality enough to identify people, not convict them.

No2ID, a campaign group, had suggested that the Identity and Passport Service might test the NIR with rolled fingerprint data so that Identity Records can be matched against those stored in criminal databases. It would second the National Identity Register as a fish farm for criminal investigations, said No2ID.

Dean Carroll writes in Public Servant magazine:

The claims from ministers that ID cards will help to prevent terrorism are “absolute bunkum” according to a leading figure within the electronic security arm of GCHQ.

Instead, the cards are an essential part of the transformational government agenda that will require all public bodies to share information in order to reduce costs and bureaucracy – claimed lead consultant at CESG Harvey Mattinson.

Philip Johnston, writing in the Daily Telegraph, analyses David Blunkett’s assertion that it is “economically illiterate” to suggest that savings would be made by abandoning plans for a national ID database:

In 1995, a 10-year adult passport cost £18. Today, it will set you back £72. When the passport is combined with an ID card, the standard fee will be at least £100.

That represents a five-fold increase over 14 years and suggests that a large share of the development costs of the ID scheme has already been absorbed in the passport, for which we pay so that will not fall on public funds.

But developing the database will - even if the Government has already pared back the cost by abandoning Mr Blunkett’s initial plan to collect “clean” information from scratch and will rely only on one biometric, the fingerprint, rather than a more secure one, the iris.

The Government says 70 per cent of the cost of the ID card would be spent in any case on the ePassport, but attempts to get a breakdown are resisted on the convenient grounds of commercial confidentiality. The financial waters are being muddied so we cannot work out the true price of Labour’s folly.

Simon Jenkins uses his final column in the Sunday Times to attack both the National Identity Scheme and the Intercept Modernisation Programme:

Last week GCHQ lobbyists took to the press declaring that any opposition to Smith’s surveillance plan would be “disastrous” for national security. They even wheeled out the familiar back-up argument for those who might regard £12 billion as a ludicrous overreaction to terrorism alone. Without the 500,000 intercepts placed on mobile phone calls each year, The Times reported, “we could not begin to solve any kidnap whatever”. Likewise the proponents of ID cards call them “vital” for public services and those of the NHS computer “a life saver” for accident victims. They are nothing of the sort.

A feature of this campaign is its sheer mendacity. Smith last week promised that her surveillance regime would cover only details of electronic communication, not contents. This is incredible. It reminds me of the old Home Office lie that all phone taps “require the home secretary’s personal authority”. Smith’s apparatchiks want to read the lot.

A similar line was spun last year by James Hall, the head of Home Office “identity and passport services”, in claiming that identity details would be safeguarded and not sent abroad. At the last Lisbon conference, European Union members agreed to “cross-border interoperability . . . highlighted in electronic identity and e-procurement”, with Lady Scotland, the attorney-general, in active participation. Hall must have known this.

ID cards were defended by David Blunkett, a former home secretary, as to “protect identity”. He knew they would be churned out from a Bombay back street at £5 a time. The government does not know the meaning of the term “safeguard”. A year ago all 25m recipients of child benefit were told their personal details, addresses and bank accounts had been handed to contractors and lost.

According to Out-law magazine:

The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has said that a single database of phone and internet usage records would undermine the “British way of life”. The privacy watchdog has said that it will scrutinise Government plans for storing that information.

Home Secretary Jacqui Smith last week talked for the first time about what the Government’s records-storage law the Communications Data Bill might look like. She has said that the Government will consult the public on the issue. The ICO said it would fully participate in that process.

“It is likely that such a scheme would be a step too far for the British way of life,” said an ICO statement. “Creating huge databases containing personal information is never a risk-free option as it is not possible to fully eliminate the danger that the data will fall into the wrong hands. It is therefore of paramount importance that proposals threatening such intrusion into our lives are fully debated.”