In a positive step forward, the Government has announced that more than 1.1 million DNA profiles belonging to innocent people have so far been destroyed to allow new laws to be brought into force. In addition, 6.3 million DNA samples containing sensitive biological material, which are no longer needed as a completed DNA profile has been obtained, have also been destroyed.

Big Brother Watch has campaigned on this issue for several years, raising concerns that the Protection of Freedoms Act 2012 failed to adopt the Scottish system of retention meaning that English and Welsh citizens could find that their details are retained and shared in situations where someone from Scotland or another country would not have to worry about something that happened many years in the past.

For more than one million innocent people to have their DNA taken and stored is a stark warning of how the last Government got the balance between security and freedom badly wrong and highlights that public safety can be protected without a constant assault upon our privacy and civil liberties.

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Would you be surprised to hear that a manager at the Information Commissioner’s Office, the very organisation that was set up to “uphold information rights in the public interest, promoting openness by public bodies and data privacy for individuals”, has said that consumers only like to complain about privacy if companies mess up?

At the IAB’s Mobile Engage conference, and ICO manager of business and industry, Dave Evans, said: “Consumers are not interested in privacy but they become interested if you get it wrong.” He added: “If you give them what they want but you get it wrong in the process then they [consumers] start to care where the data came from.” However, having taken a look at the ICO’s own research it seems like Evan’s isn’t even a little bit right!

A 2011 survey commissioned by the ICO showed that: almost nine out of ten respondents were concerned about the way personal information is handled, with 89% of respondents being concerned about protecting people’s personal information. This makes protecting personal information the second highest concern in terms of social issues raised in the survey, and it has been every year since 2007. There was also a high level of concern from respondents (59%) that they have lost control over the way their personal information is collected.

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“We who are living in the west today are fortunate. Freedom has been bequeathed to us. We have not had to carve it out of nothing; we have not had to pay for it with our lives. But it would be a grave mistake to think that freedom requires nothing of us. Each of us has to earn freedom anew in order to possess it. We do so not just for our own sake, but for the sake of our children, so that they may build a better future that will sustain over the world the responsibilities and blessings of freedom.”

Margaret Thatcher.

Local authorities in Scotland have rushed to install even more CCTV cameras, which are proved to be an expensive and evidentially unsuccessful means of surveillance.

The public would be far safer if the money was spent on street lighting, proper policing and actually punishing criminals when they are caught, rather than giving them a slap on the wrist and putting them back on the streets. In too many towns we now have a CCTV on every street corner, yet never see a police officer there.

New figures have ignited fears that CCTV is “spiralling out of control” in Scotland after councils and police forces have spent more than £8 million to maintain their CCTV systems in the last year alone. There are now at least 4,114 public-space CCTV cameras and mobile camera vans across Scotland, with hundreds of staff employed to monitor them. The figures show that this is an increase of 1,000 cameras in less than a year.

The increase in cameras comes at a time when many other local authorities are, in fact, reassessing their use of CCTV, which has resulted in a decrease in the use of cameras.

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This letter, signed by Big Brother Watch and 19 others, appears in today’s Guardian.

Dear Editor,

The Leveson Inquiry was set up to address “the culture, practices and ethics of the press, including contacts between the press and politicians and the press and the police”. Our views diverge on whether the outcome of the Leveson process — and the plans for a new regulator — are the best way forward. But where we all agree is that current attempts at regulating blogs and other small independent news websites are critically flawed.

The government has defined a “relevant publisher” for the purposes of press regulation in a way that seeks to draft campaign groups and community-run websites covering neighbourhood planning applications and local council affairs and campaign groups into a regulator designed for the Guardian, Sun and Daily Mail.”

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Several MPs have contacted us to ask why the Communications Data Bill is such a big deal – so how helpful that this week the perfect example came along!

The Government claims the bill is necessary to address three data types: Reconcile IP addresses, capture weblogs and to deal with third party data.

In practice, what would this mean? Well, the first data type is required to give the police “the ability to reconcile an Internet Protocol (IP) address to an individual”

So, where you have a mobile phone operator that shares a small number of IP addresses, it has to allocate these to its customers as they are needed. In a few minutes, the same IP could be used by several customers so you need to try log which customer is using an address when.

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In a greater step towards transparency, South Yorkshire and Cleveland Police Forces have announced that they will publish full details of dismissals and resignations due to disciplinary circumstances on their websites.

Having raised several concerns about the level of transparency and accountability in the aftermath of  data breaches this is a welcome step. Our research has shown that over a period of three years: 243 Police officers and staff from forces around the country received criminal convictions for breaching the Data Protection Act (DPA); 98 had their employment terminated for breaching the DPA; and 904 were subjected to internal disciplinary procedures for breaching the DPA.

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Do not adjust your screen – we bring good news from the Home Office.

From Lord Leveson’s report to the increasingly heavy-handed arrests for social media, freedom of speech was a major issue for Big Brother Watch in 2012 and we were at the fore of calls to change the law.

Today we had a glimmer of hope 2013 will be the year the tide turns and freedom of speech is enhanced and protected.

Speaking as the Crime and Courts Bill returned to the Commons for its second reading, the Home Secretary confirmed the Government would accept Lord Dear’s amendment to the legislation and support amending the Public Order Act 1986 to remove the word ‘insulting’ from Section 5 of the Act.

This is a triumph for David Davis MP, Peter Tatchell, Rowan Atkinson, the Reform Section 5 campaign and all those who like Big Brother Watch supported the campaign – from the National Secular Society to the Christian Institute.

In a civil society, it is not for the police to intervene when someone feels they have been insulted. The Home Secretary and her Coalition colleagues should be applauded for this important reform.

This is a simple change but one that will do a huge amount to protect free speech. As the Director of Public Prosecutions and his predecessor both recognised, this change does not diminish the abilities of the police to arrest people for threatening or abusive language, nor does it make it harder to prosecute incitement.

We said at the time of the Government’s opposition to the amendment in the House of Lords it was a bizarre position to take and are very pleased that common sense has prevailed.

Of course, this is not the end of the campaign to defend freedom of speech. The Communications Act 2003 (responsible for the #twitterjoketrial ) and the Malicious Communications Act 1988 (the Poppy arrest) are both in dire need of reform – new guidance is not enough.

We hope after today’s announcement the Home Office is inclined to explore these issues too.

We recently wrote about the Government’s plans to shake up the judicial review process by making it “leaner and faster”.  However, it would seem that yet again the Government has prescribed a solution that doesn’t fit the problem.

The recently published 2020 Vision: An Agenda for Transformation, highlights that ‘criminal’ and ‘other’ applications for judicial reviews has barely risen since 1997 (see graph). However, judging from the evidence presented in the same essay, what has risen is the number of reviews based on immigration. Charlie Elphicke MP notes that “It’s not hard to see why there has been increasing concern in the past decade. In 1997, the number of applications for judicial review was 3,848. By 2011 the number had risen to 11,200. Read more