Taken from the Independent
// Sunday 27 March, Census Day, is now rapidly approaching. The Office of National Statistics is preparing a big propaganda campaign starting with TV adverts. The total cost of the census to the taxpayer is estimated at over £450m.
Census forms are kept secret from the public for 100 years. But EU legislation allows the 2011 census to be shared with all 27 member states, and under the Statistics and Registration Service Act raw census data may be acquired by the police, the intelligence agencies, immigration authorities, tax inspectors, DWP investigators, foreign governments or private sector or academic "approved researchers" etc. It is impossible to guarantee there won't be a security breach or that data once captured will be used legitimately, or to assume anyone would know if it were not.
Thousands of people will be involved in gathering the information in the census, and it will be processed by large commercial contractors, including the US weapons firm Lockheed Martin, America's largest arms manufacturer, which won the £150m contract to run the census on behalf of the Office for National Statistics (ONS). All US-based companies are subject to the US Patriot Act, which allows the US government to have access to any data in the company's possession, and this could give the US government access to detailed and personal data on the UK's entire population. //