Compare the reactions. Nick Clegg:

“Three million people now have passports that expose them to a greater risk of identity fraud than before. We need an urgent redesign of the biometric passport and a recall of all insecure passports once a new protected design is available. In the interim the government should provide commercially available RFID-shields for passports to those with the insecure design.”

The Home Office:

“This doesn’t matter.”

And these people want us to trust them with our biometric data on a giant national database.

While we’re talking about civil liberties, here’s an excellent quote about 90-day internment from today’s Telegraph via Radio 4′s newspaper review:

Habeas corpus is a fundamental part of the British constitution. The liberty of subjects must not be subordinated to the preferences of a prime minister, however trustworthy, or to the convenience of police forces. Mr Blair sometimes acts as if being locked in a cell for 13 weeks was equivalent to waiting for holiday snaps to come back from the developer.