Report - Guardian

250 The LSE Identity Project Report: June 2005building up an increasingly dense set of transaction events, across the public and privatesectors, so that the trail could become a general means of tracking and profiling thebehaviour and activities of individuals in society, showing where, when and why anychecks took place.The privacy implications were briefly explored in Commons Standing Committee: 671Mr. Richard Allan: ...Another point that it might be helpful to haveclarified is the scope of the audit trail… Will they form a whole-liferecord? That is the key question. Are we saying that from the momentsomebody gets an identity card, which is going to be fairly swiftly ifthe Government have their way, the audit trail will be kept for wholeof life? If at no point will it be deleted as historic data, the data thatcan be disclosed under clause 20(4) will be potentially intrusive andcomprehensive. The public ought to be aware of the extent to whichthose data will be kept and the circumstances under which they maybe disclosed.Mr. Humphrey Malins: …for how long the audit trail will continue.Will it continue to my death, perhaps 50 years later? By then, whatinformation about me will have been built up on the Register?Virtually all my business and domestic activities, and my travel, willbe on there for people to access. Is there a cut-off point, after a certainnumber of years, when this information will be deleted?...Mr. Des Browne 672 : ... in relation to an individual's civil liberties, Iwould much rather that such information was preserved. I can seearguments why deletion of that information would give a falseimpression of the way in which an individual's information had beenaccessed. Once it was deleted and lost, the fact that information hadbeen abortively accessed on a number of occasions would be lost, andthat might be just the sort of thing that a commissioner would want tocomment on. For clear and understandable reasons, I am not preparedto set out now the parameters for when that information should bestored or deleted. That will develop over time, and it will be a matterfor the commissioner.The Identity Cards Bill (clause 26) provides for the Intelligence Services Commissionerto keep under review the Agencies’ acquisition, storage and use of information from theRegister, and for any associated complaints to be dealt with by the Investigatory PowersTribunal, but neither appears to be explicitly empowered to access any portion of audittrails relating to Agencies’ usage (i.e. a clause analogous to Cause 24(4)). In fact, theBill does not require a comprehensive audit trail of access by intelligence and seriouscrime agencies, or by any other parties. Clause 3 and Sch.1(9) only provides that anaudit trail may be recorded. The analysis below presumes these provisions are671 Identity Cards Bill Standing Committee, Hansard, January 27, 2005,http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200405/cmstand/b/st050127/am/50127s02.htm.672 http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200405/cmstand/b/st050127/am/50127s04.htm.