Sir
Your report on privacy highlights the extraordinary extent to which Britain has eroded innocent people's privacy since September 11th; but it's important also to see this in a longer-term context. As Privacy International notes, the erosion of individual privacy and the growing, barely-controlled accumulation and dissemination of ever more information on us by bureaucrats has been going on for many years, and lookss set to continue. This is not a temporary problem: it is continuing and worsening.

This Government has shown an alarming appetite for acquiring personal data and intruding on people's lives without clear good reason or adequate controls. It has even used people's very natural fear of terrorism to justify intrusions that having nothing to do with tackling that threat.

If we are to rein in this control-freak tendency, we desperately need to go back to first principles. The appetite (official and otherwise) and technology for information-gathering on millions of people exists as never before. We need a privacy law to protect our personal information, a law that clearly establishes our basic right to privacy and clearly marks out the exceptions to that rule and the necessary safeguards. A law that pulls together the concepts of individual privacy, free expression and freedom of informatin can genuinely protect all of them - and protect all of us from the unjustified snooping by an over-zealous bureaucracy.

Yours
John Wadham
Director
Liberty
21 Tabard Street
London SE1 4LA