Letter to the Daily Telegraph about data protection and civil liberties

12.01.00pm UTC (GMT +0000) Tue 26th Feb 2008

Sarah wrote to the Daily Telegraph about the need to improve our traditional security measures, before we embark upon foolish and futuristic attempts to improve security. She wrote:

Dear Sir,

While I applaud the purpose of the Greenpeace protesters against Heathrow expansion (Telegraph, Feb 26th), I am deeply alarmed that they were able to 'walk apparently unchallenged through Terminal 1', cross the tarmac and clamber onto an aircraft.

Meanwhile the EU and the US plan to collect vast amounts of data on every international passenger. At the last count I reckoned there are schemes in place or envisaged for 10 different EU databases with biometric information. Our own government wants to go even further and demand fingerprints from people even on domestic flights, ferries and trains.

All this raises major civil liberties worries, from inaccurate data being stored, identity mistakes meaning people are wrongly suspected, lack of ability to get corrections, wrongful or corrupt access, and sheer incompetent loss as we have seen so much of lately.

I find it therefore not only shocking but offensive that Big Brother UK and Big Brother Europe are being constructed ostensibly in the name of security when the simplest physical security measures are neglected. If more effort was put into traditional checks and intelligence-led policing instead of the seductive 'magic bullet' of massive surveillance, the authorities might actually detect, stop and convict more terrorists.

Yours sincerely,

Baroness Sarah Ludford MEP

(Letter unpublished)