Surveillance: You ain’t seen nothing yet

NO2ID
Sep. 05, 2006

Civil liberties and privacy campaigners welcomed this evening’s Channel 4 exposé and recent coverage of the security dangers and ‘two tier’ privacy of the Children’s Index, but warned that much worse is yet to
come.

Phil Booth, NO2ID National Coordinator said:

“Now that they hear it is coming for their children, people are waking up fast to the dangers of the surveillance state. But they need to look closer. The Children’s Index will hold all sorts of information on parents, too. The legislation seems almost purpose-built to unlock a surprising range of previously private information under the cover of ‘child protection’, getting it nice and ready for the National Identity Register – the adult version of the children’s database that lies at the very heart of the ID scheme.”

Guy Herbert, General Secretary of NO2ID said:

“The Children Act 2004 requires private information about families to be shared widely, and it explicitly negates long-established principles of confidentiality for educational, legal, or medical purposes – even for tax records. All this will lie on who-knows-what computer files indefinitely, and it is the object of the exercise to link it all up with individual cross-reference numbers. Yet you won’t know what this system says about your family or whether it connects you to anyone else. Already the government has come close to abolishing privacy and – paradoxically enough – it has done so almost invisibly, silently, secretly.”

Ends