Starmer’s Stinker

How unfortunate that our newly minted Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP), Keir Starmer QC, has begun 2009 by voicing his support of Westminster’s proposed ‘super database’.

By contrast, the DPP’s predecessor, Sir Ken Macdonald QC, declared before Christmas that the Government’s plan to record and store all UK communications data (including e-mails, VOiP and mobile calls) to be a ‘hellhouse’ of private information.

Pandora’s Box is more like it, if you ask me.

As if the civil liberties and human rights issues the new database raises weren’t serious enough, what I find particularly alarming that the new database is apparently to be run by the private sector, ‘in a bid to increase access for law enforcement agencies’ (The Guardian, 9/01/09).

I can see the Government Tender Document now, can’t you? ‘The Home Office, the UK’s biggest data loser, seeks private contractor to store sensitive personal information for several months before breaching national security by misplacing a laptop containing millions of call and e-mail transcripts on the 4.50pm express bound for Charing Cross.’

For history will repeat, believe me.

It was one of the more sensible recommendations contained in last year’s Walport Report – better data handling protocols for government departments. The wider data handling community’s yet to hear how that hornets’ nest of issues is to be tackled when this super-stupid-whatever-the-hell-it’s-to-be-called-database is put back on the agenda.

Sorry Jacqui Smith, but you’re on a hiding to nothing, in my opinion.