Liberty News

A database built to hold the fingerprints and personal details of millions of ID card holders has today been publicly destroyed.

Around 500 hard disk drives and 100 back up tapes containing the details of 15,000 early adopters have been magnetically wiped and shredded.

They will soon be incinerated in an environmentally friendly waste-for-energy process.

This signals an end to the National Identity Register which was built to hold the details of people who applied for an ID card.

The scheme was scrapped by the coalition government and the cards ceased to be valid legal documents on 22 January.

Home Office minister Damian Green helped shred the last of the hard disk drives at an Essex industrial site today.

Laying ID cards to rest demonstrates the government's commitment to scale back the power of the state and restore civil liberties, he said: This is about people having trust in the government to know when it is necessary and appropriate for the state to hold and use personal data, and it is about the government placing their trust in the common-sense and responsible attitude of people. This is just the first step in the process of restoring and maintaining our freedoms.'

A scheme for vetting people who work with children is to be scaled down.

The Daily Telegraph reports that following a review of the Vetting and Barring scheme, criminal record checks will only be carried out on those who have intensive contact with the young.

As a result, ministers agreed to vet adults only if they saw the same group of children or vulnerable people once a week or more, rather than once a month as originally proposed.

It is estimated that this will halve the number of people who will be vetted from the 9 to 11 million people previously caught up by the scheme.

At the same time, the government will announce that criminal record checks are to be sent to individuals first - before they go to potential employers - to allow them to challenge any mistakes.

Also minor offences will be removed from the checking process.

A Home Office spokesperson said an official announcement would be made shortly.

Internet companies are set to be barred from collecting information on people's use of the internet in a tightening of data privacy rules.

Ministers have started a review that will lead to restrictions on the practice of using people's internet habits to draw up individual profiles in order to target advertising at them, sources say.

The European Commission warned last year that it would take the UK to court unless it tightened up the law. It said such profiling did not appear to be covered by the Data Protection Act.

The review is also expected to strengthen people's rights to withdraw consent from having their personal data used. People could also be given the right to have data permanently deleted.

Brussels is also pressing for a body to be set up in the UK to monitor internet firms to ensure they comply with the law.

In order to neutralize Sweden's incoming implementation of the European Data Retention Directive, Bahnhof, the Swedish ISP and host of Wikileaks, will run all customer traffic through an encrypted VPN service.

Since not even Bahnhof will be able to see what its customers are doing, logging their encrypted traffic will be unrevealing.

In 2009, Sweden introduced the Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Directive (IPRED). The legislation gave rights holders the authority to request the personal details of alleged copyright infringers. This prompted Jon Karlung, CEO of ISP Bahnhof, to announce that he would take measures to protect the privacy of his customers. Shortly after Bahnhof ceased logging customer activities and with no logging there was no data to store or hand over.

Now, in the face of Sweden's looming implementation of the European Data Retention Directive which will force them to store data, Bahnhof will go a step further to protect the anonymity and privacy of their customers. Soon, every Bahnhof customer will be given a free anonymizing service by default. In our case, we plan to let our traffic go through a VPN service, Bahnhof's Jon Karlung told SR.

An app has been launched to coordinate status, information, maps and messages for London protestors

The service, which went live with tie in with an organised student protest in London, runs in mobile web browsers and promises to display a wide range of information about the protest, including live updates about any trouble that might be brewing between the police and protesters along the route. Users can submit information about the current situation via Twitter, Google Latitude, Flickr, TwitPic and SMS.

For those without a web browser on their phone, Sukey will be tweeting out updates, which users can subscribe to using SMS alerts.

The name Sukey stems from the nursery rhyme Polly put the kettle on , in which a character called Sukey takes it off again .

As of 22nd January 2011 identity cards can no longer be used to prove identity or to travel in Europe.

The cards have been scrapped by the government under the Identity Documents Act.

Within days the National Identity Register - which was designed to hold the details of card holders - will be destroyed.

Immigration minister Damian Green said:

Laying ID cards to rest demonstrates the government's commitment to scale back the power of the state and restore civil liberties.

It is about the people having trust in the government to know when it is necessary and appropriate for the state to hold and use personal data, and it is about the government placing their trust in the common-sense and responsible attitude of the people.

The Identity and Passport Service (IPS) (new window) has written to all existing cardholders and informed international border agencies, travel operators and customers of the change in law.

Nick Clegg has made a speech touching on many liberty related threads mentioned on Melon Farmers.

He introduced government intentions:

This nation is built on a faith in fair play. On a historic hostility towards those who seek to impose their will on others. Innocent until proven guilty. Equal before the law. Each individual able to think and speak without fear of persecution.

So the Coalition Government is going to turn a page on the Labour years: resurrecting the liberties that have been lost; embarking on a mission to restore our great British freedoms.

We aren't wasting any time, and we are ambitious about what we want to achieve. In the next twelve months we want to undo the damage of thirteen years. 2011 will be the year we give people's freedom back.

We'll do it in three key ways.

1. by reversing the widespread, everyday assaults on liberty that swept across Britain during the Labour years.
2. by restoring the right balance of liberty and security in the measures taken to tackle terrorism – recognising we can and must have both.
3. by ending the practices of closed and secretive government; giving people the information and freedom they need to hold us and other institutions to account.

He outlined a timetable for the Freedom Bill and Repeals Bill

Our very first piece of legislation halted ID cards and scrapped the National Identity Register.

ContactPoint – the Government database containing the personal information of every child in England – has been switched off.

We set up Your Freedom, a website to gauge people's views on their liberties, and they flooded-in in their thousands. Views that are now directly shaping Government policy, like work we are doing on reforming the vetting procedures for volunteers and criminal records checks.

The Secretary of State for Justice now carefully scrutinises all proposals to create new offences to make sure that they are absolutely necessary. This Government won't criminalise behaviour lightly

In the coming weeks we will be publishing our review of counter-terrorism.

By next month we will be putting forward a freedom bill: legislation that will bring together a number of measures, for example to better regulate CCTV; to properly control the way councils use surveillance powers; to limit the powers of state inspectors to enter into your house; and to end the indefinite storage of innocent people's DNA.

We will also be publishing a draft defamation bill to enhance freedom of speech.

In September, the independent review of the UK's extradition arrangements we commissioned will report.

And Ken Clarke will continue to work on putting together a Repeals Bill to wipe unnecessary and obsolete laws and regulations from the statute book.

So at least the Repeals Bill still gets a mention and that the maybe there was a misunderstanding over its move to the Home Office.

Commentators didn't seem very impressed by Clegg's words about Control Orders. They seem likely to be resurrected as something else a little too similar to what they were before.

Offsite Comment: Nick Clegg's civil liberties speech strikes a welcome blow against libel tourism

See  article from  guardian.co.uk by Simon SIngh

Simon Singh, who recently had a run in with back quacks in the libel courts, was impressed by Clegg's speech. He wrote:

So, was Clegg's speech as momentous as the Lib Dem conference vote in 2009, or the Mass Lobby in March 2010, or Lord McNally's commitment in the summer? The simply answer has to be yes .

In just a few minutes, the deputy prime minister highlighted all the key areas of libel that need to be addressed, pointing out that:

We want public-spirited academics and journalists to be fearless in publishing legitimate research. Not least when it relates to medical care or public safety. The test of a free press is its capacity to unearth the truth, exposing charlatans and vested interests along the way. It is simply not right when academics and journalists are effectively bullied into silence by the prospect of costly legal battles with wealthy individuals and big businesses.

...Read the full article