The Conservatives will this morning describe their plans to reverse the rise of the surveillance state. Espousing three principles: that individuals, not the state, own personal information; that when government holds personal information, it is on trust; and that government must be accountable to its citizens.
These principles give rise to a number of policies that include:
- scrapping the National Identity Register and ContactPoint databases;
- resolving the ongoing illegality over government use of the DNA Database;
- restricting local government access to personal communications data;
- establishing a Bill of Rights to protect privacy from the surveillance state.
I'll be providing a full analysis of the policy statement shortly.
