This book examines the fraught political relationship between British governments, which wanted information about peoples lives, and the people who desired privacy. To do this it looks at something that Britain only experienced in wartime, a centralized and up-to-date list of everyone in the country: a population register. The abolition of this wartime system is contrasted with later attempts to reintroduce registration, and the change in the political mind-set driving these later schemes to develop centralised webs of so-called objective data is examined. These policies were confronted by privacy campaigns, studied here, but it is shown how government responses succeeded in turning political debates about data into technical discussions about computerization; thus protecting its data, largely on paper, from oversight. This reformulation also shaped the 1984 Data Protection Act, which consequently did not protect privacy but rather increased governments ability to gain knowledge of, and hence power over, the people.
Kevin Manton teaches History and Politics at both the School of Oriental and African Studies and Birkbeck College, University of London, UK. He is the author of numerous articles on British history.
Chapter 1: Introduction.- Chapter 2: War-time System of National Registration.- Chapter 3: The Abolition of National Registration.- Chapter 4: Data for Day-to-Day Intervention.- Chapter 5: People and Numbers.- Chapter 6: The Younger Committee.- Chapter 7: Defending Data.- Chapter 8: The White Papers.- Chapter 9: The 1984 Data Protection Act.- Chapter 10: Conclusion.
