The Sunday Times Leading article: A curb on free speech
It is reassuring to learn that Richard Thomas, the information commissioner, is fighting on the side of the angels against the “surveillance society”. These are the state agencies that hold a growing body of personal and possibly inaccurate information on even the most inoffensive members of the public. It is comforting, too, to hear him lambast the high street banks, as he did in an interview yesterday, for leaving their customers’ financial records in bin bags on the pavement, vulnerable to identity thieves. One can but applaud his horror that a father was on police records as a suspected paedophile for five years after a dinner lady overheard his daughter say, “My dad bonked me last night”, when she meant that he had tapped her on the head with an inflatable hammer.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper/0,,176-2426869,00.html