What the database state really means
On Monday, five employees of the Internal Revenue Service, America’s equivalent of HM Revenue & Customs, were charged after allegedly looking at taxpayers’ files for personal reasons. Wired magazine reports that: “employee prying” is “on the rise, with 430 known cases in 1998, and 521 last year”. Who knows how many unknown cases there are? In the days of paper files, snooping on a neighbour’s records was at least slowed by the tediousness of tracking down the files – and by officious workers protecting them. Even today, individuals have some protection from nosy neighbours caused by disparate IT systems that do not bring together a citizen’s data in one place. By contrast, the UK Government’s planned introduction of identity cards is a snooper’s charter - which, as columnist Philip Johnston has rightly pointed out, is about creating a compulsory population database rather than protecting us from identity theft. Indeed, the pressure group no2id says that identity cards “will create vast new opportunities for data-theft”. Such theft is the inevitable effect of the database state. It is not a question of putting specific safeguards in place. People who want access to someone's records will come up with a spurious reason, and IT workers with administrator rights can access whatever they like. The only real protection is to ensure data is not stored centrally. This is something of which the Government still needs convincing. http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/politics/brassneck/may2008/what-the-database-state-really-means.htm
On Monday, five employees of the Internal Revenue Service, America’s equivalent of HM Revenue & Customs, were charged after allegedly looking at taxpayers’ files for personal reasons. Wired magazine reports that: “employee prying” is “on the rise, with 430 known cases in 1998, and 521 last year”. Who knows how many unknown cases there are? In the days of paper files, snooping on a neighbour’s records was at least slowed by the tediousness of tracking down the files – and by officious workers protecting them. Even today, individuals have some protection from nosy neighbours caused by disparate IT systems that do not bring together a citizen’s data in one place. By contrast, the UK Government’s planned introduction of identity cards is a snooper’s charter - which, as columnist Philip Johnston has rightly pointed out, is about creating a compulsory population database rather than protecting us from identity theft. Indeed, the pressure group no2id says that identity cards “will create vast new opportunities for data-theft”. Such theft is the inevitable effect of the database state. It is not a question of putting specific safeguards in place. People who want access to someone's records will come up with a spurious reason, and IT workers with administrator rights can access whatever they like. The only real protection is to ensure data is not stored centrally. This is something of which the Government still needs convincing. http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/politics/brassneck/may2008/what-the-database-state-really-means.htm