Category: IT

Minister destroys national identity register

Damian Green has marked the end of the identity card scheme by feeding its drives into an industrial shredder in Essex

After years of debate, hours of a parliamentary time and millions of pounds, I saw minister Damian Green feeding some of the hard drives behind the ID cards system into an industrial shredder in Essex. It was certainly an unusual press trip – see images below.

All articles on ID cards.


Continue reading “Minister destroys national identity register”

A tale of two cameras

Data from two councils, a rural district and a London borough, suggests big differences in spending on CCTV

Using Freedom of Information to find council CCTV costs, usage and efficiency in two contrasting areas of England. More recently, I have mapped comprehensive data collected by Big Brother Watch on this subject.

The debate over the use of CCTV can be rather sterile. The police, local authorities and other parts of the public sector present them as a public good, there “for your safety and security” as station announcements phrase it. Continue reading “A tale of two cameras”

The ANPR secret

Police forces are making extensive use of their numberplate cameras, but proving coy about their locations

This was one of a series of articles I wrote on police ANPR. It eventually led to a Guardian page lead story in August 2012 – based on the information gleaned from the eventual failure of a Freedom of Information request to Devon and Cornwall Constabulary, which revealed a “patchy” national system – and an article for MATTER published in August 2013 which I co-edited.

The cameras mentioned on the M5 were still in place at the end of August 2013. Following the loss of the FoI case there is, of course, no way of being sure if they are run by Devon and Cornwall Constabulary (whose area they are in). Continue reading “The ANPR secret”

Online health records can save lives

The crisis-hit £12.7bn NHS IT programme is under attack from the Tories, but it is working well in Scotland

The much-criticised National Programme for IT only covered England, as each of the four UK nations runs its own healthcare. This article looks at Scotland’s relative success in building its emergency care summary system, covering virtually the entire population. Continue reading “Online health records can save lives”