Fresh questions have been raised over the Government's ID card project as it emerged that PA Consulting (at the centre of the criminal data fiasco) is at the heart of the £20bn ID Cards project.

Home Office ministers have placed the company at the very centre of the controversial ID card project. Its consultants were each paid £160 an hour for working on the mechanics of the ID system as well as for pushing it through the legislative process, documents released by the Government show.

Between 2004 and 2007 the company also picked up at least £31m from the Department for Work and Pensions, £20m from the Department for Communities and Local Government, £17m from the Ministry of Defence, £16m from the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, £9m from the Department for Education and its successors and £3.5m from the Cabinet Office.

The loss of the memory stick is the latest in a string of data blunders by Government departments.
(read the full story in The Telegraph)

The time has come to stop this madness now.

The legal questions need to come thick and fast, with the primary question being WHO OWNS THIS DATA that government departments keep putting into the public domain.

The UK Government has no right to this data. Do not willingly give this data to the government or anyone else.

The only way to stay safe and protect your identity........don't tell the government anything.

I contend that this data belongs to us, the people, the ones to which this data refers.
Government have no right to collect it in such vast quantities beyond its initial use, that they have no right to share it with anyone, that they have no right to retain it beyond its original purpose, and that they certainly do not have any right to pass it over to 3rd parties for processing, research or for onward sale.

Governments and Civil Servants must be brought back into line quickly, and reminded in no uncertain terms that they work for us, not us for them.
They must be reminded that they have a duty of care to the citizens of this country, which they have abysmally abused.
They must be reminded that the laws in place for Data Protection apply to them as well as to everyone else, and that we expect to see some pretty high profile prosecutions occurring as a result of these data losses.

The bottom line is as follows: I own all personal information about me. I do not give any government official or civil servant permission to use that data in any other way than to perform the task for which I gave that information in the first place. Any other use of that information in any other way without my express permission in my view is illegal.

If the Home Office wants to play with databases, then the first move must be to disbar ANY companies, politicians or civil servants who lose personal data, enter them on a personal data disbar database and ensure that they never handle such data again, backed up with severe punitive penalties including prison.

We must also ensure that any compensation awarded by the courts should never come from taxpayer funds, but from the firms and individuals who lost the data.

This is worse than the paedophilia trip that the Home Office is so hung up about, this is the rape of a nation.