Do you really trust this lot with your data?

Government staff are misplacing their security passes at a rate of 23 a day, it has emerged. Almost 17,000 civil service passes have been lost or stolen over the past two years. Around two thirds of the misplaced cards have been misplaced by staff at the Ministry of Defence (MoD).

The figures follow a series of other security lapses by civil servants, including an incident where highly sensitive intelligence files on al-Qaeda were left on a train by a senior Whitehall official. In January last year, a laptop with the details of 600,000 people on it was taken from a Royal Navy officer’s car in Birmingham, and in November 2007, two CDs with details of 25 million Britons were lost after being posted from a Revenue and Customs office in Tyne and Wear.

This government cannot and should not be trusted with our personnel information. All this latest incident does is demonstrate the serious issues around data security should National ID cards be introduced.

Fight for our Freedoms

"I'm a liberal – I'm against this sort of thing." That's what Harry Wilcox, a dry cleaner from North London, said when asked to produce his ID card in the 1950s. He drew the line.

It's time we drew that line again. The actions of two repressive parties – first the Conservatives, now Labour – have robbed us of too many of our fundamental rights and freedoms.

The Liberal Democrats are proposing the Freedom Bill - http://freedom.libdems.org.uk - and here's a selection of the measures it incorporates:

• Scrap ID cards for everyone.
• Restore the right to protest in Parliament Square.
• Scrap the ContactPoint database of all children in Britain.
• Remove innocent people from the DNA database.
• Reduce the maximum period of pre-charge detention to 14 days.

You can read the full set at http://freedom.libdems.org.uk/

Data plan is draconian

The government plans to allow people's details to be shared across government departments and agencies.

The Information Sharing Orders would remove data protection restrictions that mean information can only be used for the purpose it was taken.

The plans are not confined to public bodies - private companies in any country could also see people's information, and there would be a greater risk of information being lost.

Among other measures in the bill is one to allow some inquests in England and Wales to be held without juries.

Heads must roll over Home Office data loss fiasco

The Information Commissioner’s Office has ruled that the Home Office breached data protection laws when a memory stick containing the personal information of thousands of prisoners was lost.

This latest judgement is another nail in the coffin for public trust in the Government. Institutionalised disregard for our personal data continues to worsen. It only serves to demonstrate that going ahead with the ID card scheme will pose a real threat to the security of our personal data.

Heads must roll if the slapdash culture is to end.