As a report condemns government databases... Big Brother is wasting your billions
While worried homeowners pored over Google's new Street View map yesterday to see whether it contained intrusive images of their homes, a far more worrying story emerged about the burgeoning use of surveillance powers.
A report by Ross Anderson, professor of security engineering at Cambridge University and one of the country's foremost experts on the use of information technology, paints a picture of a Government obsessed with personal datacollection which is costing taxpayers billions, infringing our privacy and putting us all at risk of crime and identity theft.
No fewer than 11 of the databases developed by the Government, concludes Professor Anderson, are 'almost certainly' illegal.
Collection obsession: The Government spends £16 billion a year on data-gathering
Many more are costing a fortune but failing to do the job which they are supposed to. The Government is spending £16 billion a year on data-gathering, and plans to spend another £105 billion on information-gathering projects over the next five years.
Even in an age of multi-billion pound bank bailouts, these are staggering sums which, needless to say, are sucking money out of frontline public services where it is really needed.
Obsession
As the author of a book on the terrifying growth of the surveillance society, I spent more than a year researching the subject - and what struck me was the mania that exists in Government and the public sector for gathering information on us.
Creating databases has become one of the Government's great get-out clauses. Whenever faced with a crisis or scandal, its gut-instinct is to say it will tackle the problem by collecting data. Terrorist threat? Let's create a national ID register - even though none of the July 7 bombers ever sought to conceal their identities, only their intentions.
In 2002, Tony Blair launched a database of medical records for everyone in the UK
Soaring crime? Let's expand the national DNA database, even though the vast majority of crimes are committed by a small population of criminals, already on it.
But, as Professor Anderson has made clear, the databases have not only failed to solve the problem, they have often made it worse, while at the same time invading our privacy.
When, in 2002, Tony Blair launched Connecting for Health, a £6.2 billion project to create a database of medical records of every man, woman and child in the country, he claimed it would boost the efficiency of the NHS.
'If I live in Bradford and fall ill in Birmingham I want the NHS to be able to treat me,' he said.
How fortunate it is that he didn't fall ill 20 miles further north, in Stafford. Last week's devastating report by the Healthcare Commission into standards at Stafford Hospital shows what happens when an obsession with data takes over from common sense.
There, hundreds of patients may have died as a result of 'appalling' care, the commission suggested.
But even as stories were emerging of patients so thirsty they were forced to drink out of vases, and wards described as war zones, the Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust tried to claim its only problem was with its data- collection system, which it said had exaggerated its death rates.
In this mad world of warped priorities, data collection takes precedence over patient care. Since 2002, the costs of Connecting for Health have doubled to an astonishing £12.7 billion, sucking even more cash from real medical services.
Two of the four contractors working on the system have pulled out and its implementation has been put back four years to 2015. But even when it is operational, some GPs have said they will refuse to put patients' data onto it for security reasons.
At present, somebody stealing medical records has to break into your surgery and obtain passwords to gain access to computer files.
In future, it will take only an NHS worker to leave a laptop on a train and the medical history, including drug-use and sexual orientation, of millions of Britons will be available to everyone.
Commission found that hundreds of patients may have died because of 'appalling' care at Stafford Hospital
Hardly a week goes by without another scandal concerning the mass leak of private data by a Governmental organisation. No doubt, it will soon be children's health, education and the social service's records which go missing on a laptop.
Improbably, the Government asserts that Contact Point, a new £224 million database including records of every child in the country, will help prevent future scandals such as that of Victoria Climbie and Baby P.
It won't, of course. Victoria Climbie and Baby P died not through lack of a computer system but because doctors and social workers who came across them failed to spot obvious signs of harm.
All Contact Point will achieve is to put vulnerable children at risk. A database is only as good as the data which gets fed into it. Contact Point will quickly fill up with masses of insignificant information such as treatment for minor falls in the playground, while children from problem families - on whom it is harder to collect data - will get lost amid the fog of information.
Freedom
Moreover, the records and addresses of every child will be available to several hundred thousand public sector staff. Does it not occur to ministers that there will be paedophiles among those with access?
When the DNA database was set up in 1995, its intention was to hold genetic samples from convicted criminals. Since then it has undergone severe 'mission creep'.
Among the 4.5 million people now on it are a pair of girls arrested for drawing a hopscotch grid in chalk on the pavement. Others have been added simply after talking to the police.
On the Today programme yesterday, justice minister Michael Wills made the fatuous remark that Sean Hodgson, freed last week after serving 27 years in jail for a murder he did not commit, would never have won his freedom 'if it wasn't for DNA testing and databases'.
It is quite true Mr Hodgson was released after it was found that his DNA did not match that on exhibits from the murder scene. But it didn't need a database to free him: it just needed the court to take one sample of DNA from Mr Hodgson.
Excessive use of the DNA database is itself in danger of causing miscarriages of justice. Few people object to the use of DNA to help solve crimes, where it involves matching DNA from a suspect to material found at the scene of a crime.
Serious
It is a very different matter now that police have started actively looking for suspects by routinely scanning through millions of DNA samples. Theoretically, the chances of a false match are one in a billion, but that is only when you can obtain a perfect DNA sample.
In practice, DNA collected from a crime scene is rarely perfect: remember how Madeleine McCann's parents were arrested by Portuguese police and invited to confess to manslaughter after DNA samples taken from the boot of their hire car were 'matched' with Madeleine's?
It later became quite clear that it was a partial match of no significance whatsoever.
It is a matter of deep regret that the Government refuses to learn the lessons of the world's first criminal database: a 'rogues' gallery' of criminals' photographs established by Parisian police in the 19th century.
When it was confined to the faces of a few serious offenders, the database proved highly effective: witnesses presented with the photographs quickly picked out the face - if any - which matched their recollections.
But as the number of faces on the database grew and grew as petty offenders were added, it became steadily less and less useful: the sea of faces was too overwhelming.
Today's database-builders don't seem to understand that the more the authorities watch us, count us and photograph us, the less they actually see.
• Ross Clark is author of The Road To Southend Pier: One Man's Struggle Against The Surveillance Society.
