The Guardian actually include some mathematics in an article about ID cards here, to demonstrate reliability problems with biometric schemes. Nice overview and includes a discussion about the UK government's plans to share database information across government departments.

"Ian Brown, director of the Foundation for Information Policy Research, says that governments will find it hard to resist linking data, for example, to tackle obesity by monitoring attendance at leisure centres. "It gives government so many more ways of interfering in people's day-to-day lives," he says. "They say we're not building a big central database. But they don't need to." A series of linked databases will do the job just as well. "

Findlaw issue a reminder that the EU have decided to set up an Internet Security Agency.

Some Republicans are signing up to support the Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act of 2003, which would make paper trails compulsory. They join about 70 Democrats currently support the bill. This, surely, has got to be a cross party issue? At least the Demoncrats and Republicans in Fairfax county seem to see it like that. The Republicans in that case were first off the starting blocks in initiating a complaint about irregularites in the electronic voting. Donna, as usual, has some really interesting material and links on the e-voting controversy and in particular the EFF and students case complaining about Diebold's use of the DMCA to quash online exposure of their embarrassing internal memos. Diebold are now claiming that even publishing parts of the memos constitutes copyright infringement. This is no-brainer territory for me as far as democracy is concerned but things are different in lawyerland.

A judge in Argentina has used the data protection laws as a basis for issuing what is believed to be the country's first injunction to stop a spammer sending unwanted emails.