ID cards: Dangerous?

The government could create a "big brother" culture similar to that seen in Cold War Eastern Europe, ministers have been warned.

Britain's information watchdog said that the UK might be "sleepwalking into a surveillance society" because of the government's plans for identity cards and a population register.

Richard Thomas, the information commissioner, told the Times newspaper that there are "dangers" with schemes such as ID cards.

He also singled out the population register planned by the Office for National Statistics and proposals for a database of every child from birth to the age of 18 as cause for concern.

"My anxiety is that we don’t sleepwalk into a surveillance society where much more information is collected about people, accessible to far more people shared across many more boundaries than British society would feel comfortable with," he told the Times.

Franco

He warned that the schemes ran the risk of raising the spectre of Cold War Eastern Europe or Spain under Franco.

"I don’t want to start talking paranoia language, but data protection has a strong continental European flavour," he says.

"Some of my counterparts in Eastern Europe, in Spain, have experienced in the last century what can happen when government gets too powerful and has too much information on citizens.

"When everyone knows everything about everybody else and the government has got massive files, whether manual or computerised."

A spokeswoman for the prime minister welcomed Thomas' comments, saying he "has made an important contribution to the debate about ID cards during this consultation period".

"There will be full scrutiny of the scheme," she added.