NOTHING TO HIDE NOTHING TO FEAR - RIGHT?

It's really reassuring to know that our government is introducing all these shiny new databases to protect us from all these dangerous terrorists roaming our streets (can't say I've met any lately though....), of course we are reassured that the data is always accurate, safe and if we have not done anything wrong then we don't have anything to fear - do we?

1m French out of work thanks to dodgy data - UK next?

Get vetted and go... on the dole

By John Ozimek • Get more from this author

Posted in Government, 30th January 2009 12:39 GMT

As the UK prepares to put in place its shiny new vetting database later this year, analysis of a similar project in France reveals a devastating degree of inaccuracy, leading to real hardship for a very large number of people.

A report (pdf) issued last week by CNIL, the French Data Protection Agency, reveals that as many as a million people have lost jobs – or didn’t get them in the first place – because of inaccuracies in the police STIC database (Systeme de Traitement des Infractions constatés, or "criminal record check system").

Police databases have been very much in the news in the course of 2008, following the creation, by decrees published on 1 July 2008, of two new intelligence databases, EDVIGE and CRISTINA.

The purpose of CRISTINA (Centralisation du renseignement intérieur pour la sécurité du territoire et les intérêts nationaux) is the "Centralisation of domestic intelligence for homeland security and national interests". Because CRISTINA is classified as being for defence purposes, its contents are deemed to be an official secret and details of what is held on it remain a mystery.

But that's not the case with EDVIGE, which provoked such outcry that the government backed down in November 2008, agreeing instead to bring forward proposals for a modified system, known as EDVIRSP.

Objectors to EDVIGE were horrified to learn that it would have gathered information on any person having applied for or exercised a "political, union or economical mandate or playing a significant institutional, economical, social or religious part as well as information on any person, starting from the age of 13, considered by the police as a "suspect" potentially capable of disrupting the public order".

Opposition was swift and brutal, with thousands of people demonstrating in over 60 cities. Faced with petitions and up to a dozen separate legal challenges, the French government decided to cut its losses and back down. While detail of what will be held in EDVIRSP is still not known, it is believed that it will specifically exclude information relating to people’s health or sexual orientation.

But what then of STIC? The CNIL report reveals that STIC, created in 1995, but only officially acknowledged since 2001, is accessed by the police approximately 20m times a year. That alone represents a massive degree of surveillance and checking.

However, CNIL's President described STIC as "more dangerous than EDVIGE", because of the huge number of errors that CNIL has discovered recorded in it.

READ MORE at:-
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/01/30/stic/