The lady's for turning

We've taken the odd swipe at Jacqui Smith over the last few months, so it only seems fair to applaud her decision to scrap the Home Office's planned über-database of communications data.

The database would have collected data on all electronic correspondence, such as the time, date and length of communication (and, of course, who contacted whom).

Humble Jacqui said that she recognised the public's concerns that a giant database would be a further step toward a surveillance society. And, in a nice little turn of phrase, she said, "To be clear, there are absolutely no plans for a single store."

No longer any plans, Jacqui, no longer.

Of course the cynics will say that Labour couldn't possibly get away with ploughing hundreds of millions of pounds into a deeply un-popular government IT project in light of last week's austerity budget.

We couldn't possibly comment.

Anyway, the upshot of all this is that ISPs are now responsible for intercepting and storing the data that crosses their networks. To this end, the Home Office have earmarked £2 billion to help ISPs to expand their storage capabilities.

Mobile and fixed line operators will be required to process and link the data together to build complete profiles of every UK internet user's online activity. Police and the intelligence services would then access the profiles, which will be stored for 12 months, on a case-by-case basis.

Don't be surprised if even this plan is quietly dropped by the Conservatives after the 2010 election.

A final point - John Reid, the frankly terrifying former Home Secretary, argues in an opinion piece today that communications data is vital to identifying serious criminals. In his short but predictably manipulative piece, he kicks off with a tear-jerker about a murdered 17 year old whose killers were brought to justice by communications data. This, he says, happened in 2007.

So you see, Reid shoots himself in the foot before he's reached the end of his first paragraph, by showing that police then already had adequate access to communications data.

He then comes up with a classic piece of patronising lip service: "Used in the right way, and subject to important safeguards, communications data can play a critical role in keeping us safe."

Presumably, these would be the safeguards that ensured only 36,989,300 pieces of personal information were lost by the government in 2008. As for using it in the right way, it's as if he hadn't heard of the scandal of local authorities using the RIPA legislation to spy on dog fouling and catchment areas.

If we really do need a giant central database, they'll need to do a lot better than this to convince the public.

David's Damascene Conversion

Here at Data Grub we’ve so far held off from writing about ID cards, in part because this long-running saga has been so comprehensively covered in most mainstream media.

But we couldn’t let the Rt Hon David Blunkett get away with Tuesday’s speech at, of all places, Essex University. Blunkett, the original panegyrist of ID cards in this country, used his speech in part to propose scrapping compulsory ID cards.

So, what prompted David’s Damascene conversion, especially given that he’s often expatiated on the benefits of ID cards in his News of the World column and was at one point trousering a decent sum as adviser to Entrust, a company interested in bidding to run the UK card scheme?

Well, let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Blunkett went on to recommend that all UK citizens be required to have a fancy biometric passport which is, in effect, an ID card with a handy notebook attached for shopping lists. (Let’s be honest, when was the last time Bermondsey Bob needed a visa?)

Blunkett proposes that ID cards be voluntary but that biometric passports – which contain exactly the same information and will be linked to exactly the same database – will be compulsory. That way, the government can spin ID cards as a handy “mini-passport” that fits snugly into your wallet.

But even if compulsory passports are merely ID cards in disguise, one wonders what his rational is for jumping horses now, especially given that the current Home Secretary is still keen on the cards. Could it be that he wants the law on the statute books before the Tories’ inevitable election in 2010?

Blunkett and his successors have been trying to get make ID cards mandatory for donkeys’ years, but couldn’t do so until a large proportion of the population started carrying them voluntarily.

That’s clearly not going to happen in the next 12 months; but plenty of people have passports – make them compulsory and you’ve got your ID database system sorted.

Of course, all this completely ignores the question of whether ID cards might not, in fact, be quite a Good Thing after all. In spite of the government’s claims that they will prevent benefit fraud and halt terrorists in their tracks, Data Grub remains to be convinced of their utility.

Should Jacqui Smith decide to take Blunkett’s advice by making passports compulsory, it’ll be interesting to see if she employs the traditional ID card arguments (fraud, terrorism) or if Labour spins it some other way.

Watch this space.