The Government are advertising in the Sunday Times for a commissioner to oversee the controversial ID cards.

The family of illegal immigrants busted last year for running a fake passport factory in London have been jailed.
 
The police haul included 60 blank Spanish passports, 150 Portuguese passports, 32 Italian passports, 200 blank Portuguese identity cards, 150 UK national insurance cards, £1,400 in cash and a variety of forged utility bills.

The ringleader received a five-and-a-half year [...]

I would like to add my name along with the Barcode Nation as a whole to the following letter from today’s Guardian:

With the approval of parliament, our government is planning to hold more information about us than ever before. It wants a national identity database of every UK citizen, identity cards for many UK residents, DNA [...]

The Guardian has published a very useful guide to the Identity Cards Act 2006. As well as describing the main provisions of the act, the article goes on to discuss the background leading up to it and significant coverage of the criticisms, notably from Liberty and NO2ID.
Well worth a read. It’s also a useful link [...]

Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg has announced his party’s new Commission on Privacy, involving such champions of civil liberties as Shami Chakrabarti and Henry Porter.
“With Britain now among the most watched upon countries in Europe, there has never been a more vital time for proper scrutiny and protection of privacy.
“Under this increasingly authoritarian Government, a [...]

In my post yesterday looking at betting odds for the date of the next general election, I hinted that a change of government could be a positive step for civil liberties campaigners.
 
I’ve now stumbled across this excellent piece from the ever impressive James Graham. He questions where the Conservatives will go with Human Rights if [...]

One of the big hopes of civil liberties campaigners is that a change of government will bring an end to Labour’s creeping surveillance state. Of course the reality will be somewhat different, but if the politicians keep to their word, we should at least see an end to ID cards and ContactPoint.
 
But when might that [...]

Travellers who had trips ruined by Passport Service mistakes have claimed £500,000 in compensation in the past five years. The figures revealed by The People show claims of up to £2,000 due to passport and visa application errors.
 
It makes you wonder how much the government has budgeted for compensation payments when the inevitable problems with [...]

It seems not a week goes past now without another example of public sector officials misplacing our private data. The latest dose of stupidity comes from a NHS Trust staff member in Lancashire. The health worker lost a memory stick being used to backup 6,000 records from clinical databases at HMP Preston.
The memory stick was [...]

…it may just land you with a visit from Plod.
 
The BBC’s Five Live Breakfast sparked a flurry of anti-surveillance texts this morning following their story on internet companies being forced to keep records of our emails.
 
From March, new legislation will force ISPs to keep information about every e-mail sent or received in the UK for one year. [...]