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Jackboot Jacqui is at it again: The government Interception Modernisation Programme (gIMP), a plan by spy chiefs to centrally collect details of every phone call, text, email and web browsing session of every UK resident, will be in place by 2012, according to a Home Office minister.Apparently:

Our dear Home Secretary decides to ignore what we proles think again: His warning follows an admission yesterday by Jacqui Smith that the technical work on creating a giant centralised database of all email, text, phone and web traffic will go ahead, despite the fact that ministers have decided to delay the legislation needed to set it up and instead put the proposal out to consultation.Democracy? I've heard of it.

That's Stella Rimington, former head of MI5. Her Guardian interview is so packed with good sense that I'll have to quote it at length: A former head of MI5 today describes the response to the September 11 2001 attacks on the US as a "huge overreaction" and says the invasion of Iraq influenced young men in Britain who turned to terrorism. In an interview with the Guardian, Stella Rimington calls al-Qaida's attack on the US "another terrorist incident" but not qualitatively different from any others. "That's not how it struck me. I suppose I'd lived with terrorist events for a good part of my working life and this was as far as I was concerned another one," she says.

...can Jacqui be far behind? All visitors to internet cafés in Beijing will be required to have their photographs taken in a stringent new control on the public use of cyberspace. ... According to the latest rules, by mid-December all internet cafés in the main 14 city districts must install cameras to record the identities of their web surfers, who must by law be 18 or over. There are more than 250 million internet users in China, approximately 10 times more than there were in 2000. ...

Jacqui Smith has set out plans to give the police and security services more powers to gather phone and e-mail data.But wait: "I want this to be combined with a well-informed debate characterised by openness, rather than mere opinion, by reason and reasonableness," she told the IPPR. Well, that's alright, then. Except: "What we will be proposing will be options which follow the key principles which govern all our work in this area - the principles of proportionality and necessity." What, like ID cards, you mean? Note, too, that when she says this:

There's hope: academic John Daugman, a former member of the Biometrics Assurance Group (BAG), which reviewed the scheme, said its reliance on fingerprints and facial photos to verify a person's identity will cause the system to collapse under the weight of mismatched identifications. Daugman, an expert on iris recognition, said fingerprints and facial photos are not distinctive enough for telling the UK's 45-million-strong adult population apart. Daugman said that, even if the error rate was as low as one in a million, the 10 to the power of 15 comparisons needed to verify the indentities of 45 million people would result in one billion false matches.

....just in case they need reminding: Dominic Grieve has said it is “high time” Labour abandon their "ill-fated" ID cards project after Jacqui Smith unveiled the design of ID cards for foreign nationals. The Shadow Home Secretary stressed, “ID cards are an expensive white elephant that risk making us less - not more - safe.” And he said the Government were “kidding themselves” if they think ID Cards for foreign nationals will protect against illegal immigration or terrorism - as they don't apply to those coming here for less than three months.

Since we now know this: Home Secretary Jacqui Smith has blamed a private contractor for losing the details of thousands of criminals, held on a computer memory stick. Ms Smith said the government had held the data securely but PA Consulting appeared to have downloaded it, contrary to the rules of its contract. ...it's clear they don't have the foggiest idea about security or managing personal information, giving us yet another reason to scrap the doomed ID card project which they have played a major part in driving.