Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill

One of the problems of present society is the immense spread of data retention. For instance, the police now undertake number plate recognition of motorway traffic and in inner cities without any statutory authority whatever. There is a DNA base relating to children, with a disproportionate amount of data on black children. The amount of data collected on everybody is generally unsatisfactory. If you have a very large database with a lot of people having access to it, it is automatically insecure. We have a very serious problem with regard to these databases, which have grown like Topsy and without people noticing. There has been a perfectly good, sound reason for this, that and the third thing, but we have grown into a surveillance and data-bloated society. Something must be done to reduce this practice and to ensure that data are properly controlled. In a free society, the state should not be able to hold all this information on everybody as that is open to tyranny. It is a very serious problem and this is but a first effort at addressing it.