I think it is worth noting that the police continue to ignore the ruling in S & Marper, claiming that they are awaiting guidelines from the Home Office – yet the law says that retention is at the discretion of the Chief Constable concerned. One would have thought Chief Constables would be interested in complying with the law and judgements. The Home Secretary has seven days left to provide them with new guidelines.

There is an apparent obsession with collecting ever more data and introducing more systems – it is a modern snake oil peddled by politicians and IT suppliers. But more data does not equal better data.

We recently heard again about eBorders, a system intended to “identify passengers who are a potential risk and alert the relevant authorities”. But the arrest rate is worse than that for ostensibly random stops and searches, and it is costing us billions of pounds.

We recently had further confirmation that there wasn’t a robust cost-benefit analysis for the National ID Card And Ridiculously Bloated Database Scheme. It is striking (but not surprising) that such projects can proceed without a robust cost-benefit analysis. I remain optimistic that the scheme will fail because it seems to meet at least six of the eight common causes of government IT project failure. Yet his failure will cost us billions of pounds – it isn’t finished but has already cost us millions and public sector employees are already accessing our private data on the databases that underpin it.

It is all very well people banging on about paranoia, but can they provide adequate justification for any of these systems? And even if there is justification, are we competent enough to be able to deliver? Precedent suggests not.

Finally, my irony meter exploded this morning when I heard that Government spokespeople had attacked the authors of the JRF / FIPR report for being politically biassed. This is the usual pejorative when they can’t think of anything substantive to say.

Some very basic points about hiring in experts at government level, so departments understand the implications of the technologies, is one key recommendation of the report, but the message to LC readers must be to take technology seriously as a campaigning issue.

That is Open Rights Group’s raison d’etre, campaigning for your digital rights, so please feel free to take a look at our website, join our email list and get involved with active work pressing for our rights – including our human right to privacy.

http://www.openrightsgroup.org/