The Ministry Of Truth

It seems Jackie Ashley has finally woken up to the fact that we’re doomed – doomed, I tell you.

I’m not complaining, like.  But why today?  Why now?  Was she (along with the rest of Harry Potter’s pals) not awake over the past two years while this whitest of white elephants in the corner was going through Parliament and billions of our money was being spunked up a rope?

With the national database for ID cards looming, just how much do you trust the government to keep your identity details safe?

Last year… the child benefit records for a mere 25 million people, including dates of birth, national insurance numbers and bank and building society details, were lost by HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC)…

You might think: well, a one-off, any organisation makes the odd mistake.  As it happens, the HMRC had lost details of 15,000 people when they were sent to Standard Life the previous month [and] an HMRC laptop was lost with the details of 400 Isa holders on it…  And there were other similar incidents, going back at least to 2005. Indeed, according to parliamentary answers HMRC had in the previous year been responsible for a modest 2,111 data-protection breaches.

Then in December it was revealed that more computer discs had gone missing, this time in transit between local authorities and the Department for Work and Pensions…  This time the number of personal details involved was unclear, but it was large.  One council, Kirklees, lost CDs with 45,000 names of people claiming housing benefit.  At about the same time, nine English NHS trusts admitted losing the records of hundreds of thousands of patients.

Next up, learner drivers. Ruth Kelly, the transport secretary, had to admit that the records of 3 million people who had sat driving tests from September 2004 to April 2007 had been lost from a hard disc in Iowa. Like the child benefit discs, the details had not been properly encrypted and, again, a “total error in procedure” was blamed.

This year has begun in the same vein. On Friday, hundreds of documents containing details of benefit claims, photocopies of passports and mortgage payments were found dumped at a roundabout near Exeter airport. And on the same day we learned about the loss of a Ministry of Defence laptop containing passport, national insurance and banking details of 600,000 people who had expressed some interest in joining the Royal Navy, Marines or RAF…

[S]urely, after one ear-splitting, headline-grabbing warning after another, from different departments, month after month, there might be a bigger lesson here, one that goes beyond tightening this procedure or that, one rather larger in scope than internal inquiries or even prosecutions, can deal with?

Remember that this year the full national identity register, the essential core of a compulsory ID card scheme, will get properly started: from now, anyone aged over 16 applying for a passport has all their details, fingerprints, face or eye scans included, added to the register.

[A]lthough for the next two years people can opt out of having the cards, from 2010 anyone renewing or getting a passport will be included.  The cards, and thus your involvement in the national identity register (which will be stored on three government databases) don’t become compulsory until after the next election – if Labour wins it.  And nobody has told us if carrying the things will be compulsory too – though plenty of the arguments in favour of them fall if you don’t have to carry them.

Legally, this is all done and dusted.  After five defeats in the Lords the parliamentary process is over, the scheme is taking shape, big IT contracts have been signed and the computer industry have been snarling at the Tories and Lib-Dems for threatening to ditch it.  Ministers still think they are on to a winner.

Well, it seems to me that after the events of the past few months, they are wrong and that any voter who notices the news already knows what will happen.  We know that millions of sensitive details will be lost.  We know that material of huge use to criminals will be sent in the post, stolen, mislaid, dropped in car parks, will fall off the back of lorries and will be sent by accident to radio talkshow hosts.  We know this because whatever the system, whatever the rules, from Tyne and Wear to Iowa City, they are operated by humans.  And people get bored, tired, drunk, have bad days, think they’re about to be fired, are greedy and, in general, make mistakes.

The government is going to introduce a single system for all our identities.  And I promise, you can’t trust it.  First, it will leak like a battered old bucket.  Oh yes, there will be ministerial statements.  Apologies.  Inquiries.  Expensive new IT consultants will be brought in.  Tough and unbreakable procedures will arrive.  And still it will leak like a battered old bucket – except that it will be the most expensive battered old bucket in the history of the world, and we will keep pouring in money to the IT industry in the years to come.

Second, it will be riddled with errors.  Great-grannies will be jumped on by armed police at Newcastle airport because of an administrative or human error.  Identities will be confused.  And third, whatever promises there are about keeping some things, health things, or criminal record things, off one database, these walls will be breached.  There is always an emergency, a special case, on the way.

This is a fantasy of control…  The national identity register will make us less safe, not more so.  However late the hour, it should be scrapped.