WRITTEN ON January 16th, 2009 BY William Heath AND STORED IN Data nitwittery, Foundation of Trust, Identity, What do we want?

I’ve put some thoughts on the appointment of the new Information Commissioner Chris Graham on my personal blog

If the appointment is confirmed after the MPs’ hearing, Chris will take over as our only real official bulwark against official secrecy, surveillance society and database state. Our bulwark is their obstacle – to data sharing, CRM-driven marketing and a “war on terror”-driven approach to personal data…
His predecessor Richard Thomas contributed some worthwhile reports and memorable soundbites. But the core problem, which he ducked, is that UK data protection law does not conform to what European data protection law requires. The European authorities are quite clear on this, and Thomas himself would confirm privately that our UK implementation of the European directive was imperfect. But he did not seem to see any problem with that. He seemed to view our approach as commendable British pragmatism….

if [his successor] turns over this particular stone, what will emerge is that a considerable amount of public-service data processing in the UK – the Transformational Government policy – is illegal. For now the government IT community seems not to care about this. But if and when they recognise the problem, they’ll find the UK Parliament cannot fix it.

This means Ctrl and Z (Cmnd and Z for Apple users) on a colossal scale: years, billions. And the sooner the better.

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