WHAT THE GOVERNMENT KNOWS ABOUT YOU

WHAT THE GOVERNMENT KNOWS ABOUT YOU

WORK
One of the government's largest databases is the Department for Work and Pensions' customer information service (CIS), which contains detailed information on 85 million people, living and dead. The CIS records details such as employment, ethnicity, immigration status, workplace disputes and information on people who live at the same address.

INCOME
A host of financial and personal information is held under the umbrella of HMRC, which lost the two CDs containing 25m records. Systems from organisations such as the revenue and the Child Support Agency are centralised and operated by the outsourcing company CapGemini, which recently extended its contract with HMRC until 2018. That deal is now worth Ł8bn

TRAVEL
The Passport Agency, now under the direct control of the Home Office, holds about 70m records of British passports, active and cancelled. Not only your trips abroad, but also where you live. The Foreign Office also holds details of visa applications, some compromised this year when a subcontracting company leaked information from the British high commission in India.

POLICE RECORDS
The police national computer, based in Hendon, north London, holds nearly 100m pieces of information such as criminal records and details of arrests. As a result of the Bichard inquiry into the Soham murders, there is now greater sharing of this information between the 43 police forces in England and Wales.

MEDICAL DETAILS
The Ł12bn scheme to renovate NHS computer systems is the largest public sector IT project in the world. At its heart is the creation of a digital file containing details of medical history, GP and hospital visits and information about family members. Campaigners are concerned that NHS employees will have unfettered access to deeply private information.

TRANSPORT
With a central register of everybody who holds a driving licence, the Driving and Vehicle Licensing Agency is regarded as having one of the most accurate databases in government. More than 42 million people are registered, including those with provisional driving licences, as well as 33m individual vehicles and links to contact details and insurance information.

DNA
Britain's DNA database is the largest in the world, with more than 4m samples gathered from anybody who is arrested in the UK. The digitised bank of information contains only a small identifying string of genetic code, rather than a person's entire DNA sequence, though complete samples are kept in storage in case of future developments.

CHILDREN
Contactpoint, a cross-department information sharing programme, holds the names, addresses and personal details of all children in England. It can also contain information on sexual history, mental health and substance abuse. The database can be accessed over the internet by authorised workers in schools, the NHS or social services, as well as some voluntary groups.

An astonishing Ł380 a minute will be spent on surveillance in a massive expansion of the Big Brother state. The Ł200million-a-year sum will give officials access to details of every internet click made by every citizen, on top of the email and telephone records already available. It is a 1,700% increase on the cost of the current surveillance regime. State bodies including councils are already making one request every minute to spy on the phone records and email accounts of members of the public. The number of snooping missions carried out by police, town halls and other government departments has rocketed by 44% in two years to a rate of 1,381 new cases every day.

Ministers say the five-year cost of the existing regime is Ł55.61million, an average of Ł11million a year. This is paid to phone companies and service providers to meet the cost of keeping and providing private information about customers. The cost of the new system emerged in a series of Parliamentary answers. It is to cover payments to internet service providers so they can store mountains of information about every customer for a minimum of 12 months, and set up new systems to cope. The actual content of calls and emails is not be kept, only who they were from or to, when they took place and where they were sent from.

Police, security services and other public authorities can then request access to the data as part of investigations. Some 653 bodies are currently allowed access, including councils, the Financial Services Authority, the Ambulance Service and fire authorities and prison governors. The new rules allowing access to internet records will be introduced by Parliament before the end of the year. They are known as the Intercept Modernisation Programme. Ministers had originally wanted to store the information on a massive Government-run database, but chose not to because of privacy concerns.

Alex Deane, director of campaign group Big Brother Watch, said, "The Government is preparing to make British people pay through the nose so that they can track our movements online." However, a Home Office spokesman said the costs involved were entirely separate from those necessary to comply with the European Data Retention Directive, which requires the storage of phone and email records. He added, "Communications data is crucial to the fight against crime and keeping people safe. We have made clear that there are no plans to collect and hold the content of everyone's communications." (Source: Daily Mail, Oct/09)

Electronic facial mapping by two British police forces have set up facial mapping data banks in order to match suspected criminals with surveillance video or film, according to a report in the Independent. South Wales has photographs of 150,000 individual suspected or convicted criminals; Essex police have a database of 90,000 offenders, and is trialling a scheme with a Scottish company, Forensic Technology Ltd, using picture overlays to match physical features. Adrian Clark, a senior lecturer in electronic engineering at Essex University, is quoted as saying that the police are trying to automate the facial mapping process; Ken LInge, the principal photographic officer with Essex police suggested that 'video overlays prove identification in a similar way to finger-printing, and in four or five years there will be a national system of facial recognition'.

The Home Office and police chiefs are working on a national system, that might be used at airports, stations or public events to 'spot' known offenders, before they cause any trouble. The head of research and development at British Telecom, Peter Cochrane, is another who is convinced that "within five years there will be a system that will allow police the ability to put a name to any face picked up on any closed circuit TV in the country". This development will raise concerns among civil liberty campaigners, who will worry about the use of any national photographic database, and who has access to the information that is stored. Britain's police look set to be the first in the world to be equipped with a new "spy on the street" security camera system, which can recognise the faces of crime suspects and alert officers within seconds.

The system, which is going on a six-month trial in east London from next week, is capable of checking 1,000 faces every second, and its developers say it can see through disguises like hats, glasses and facial hair. But civil rights campaigners today warned that the computer-based "facial mapping" system, known as Mandrake, may lead to an increase in wrongful arrests, as innocent people are mistaken for villains. Mandrake works by checking key features on the faces of people filmed by closed-circuit television cameras and comparing them with those of suspects whose photographs are held in a database within the computer. A signal alerts the operator whenever a match is made, but all matches must be double-checked by the operator before any further action is taken, to avoid wrong identifications.

The system has been tried by Hertfordshire officers policing football matches at Watford, but the trial being carried out by the Metropolitan Police in partnership with Newham Borough Council is the first time it has been used on the streets. A total of 140 CCTV cameras and 11 mobile camera units in shopping streets in Forest Gate, East Ham and Stratford will be linked up to the Mandrake computer. Council spokesman James Flynn said that the system would be monitored by Newham employees, who will pass details of "hits" on to police. He said, "It has the potential to speed up the job of our operators considerably. At present, operators have to scan ten or so screens at a time, looking out for known faces. The idea behind Mandrake is that it can constantly check all of the cameras."

He added, "Our operators will not have any personal details on the people on the database, just a picture and a reference number provided by the police. They will pass on sightings to police, and it will be up to the police officers what they do with the information." The Ł65,000 trial will be a key test for the Mandrake system, developed by Slough-based Software and Systems International, and may lead to it being adopted by police forces across the country. Patricia Oldcorn of SSI said, "It is important to remember that the system is only as good as the cameras used to pick out the suspects. In that sense, the system works like the human eye and the human brain. If a person can't quite see who he is looking at, he will not make a positive identification."

The first people to be targeted by Mandrake will be suspected muggers, burglars and shoplifters whose photographs are in police files, but it is believed that the system may also be able to work with e-fit pictures. The civil rights watchdog Liberty is worried about possible breaches of human rights and data protection legislation. Liberty questioned claims that the system had an 80% success rate. Its campaigns manager Liz Parratt warned, "The accuracy of facial mapping is very limited. You only need to look at a handful of photos of celebrities to see how very different the same people can look in different photos." (Source: Tash)