WRITTEN ON December 8th, 2009 BY William Heath AND STORED IN Bad stuff, Design: Co-creation, Design: user-oriented, Foundation of Trust, Political engagement

Murdoch’s tabloid columnist David Aaranovitch has stepped up as first cheerleader in Michael Wills’ long-promised riposte to our highly successful and influential Database State report earlier this year for JRRT. He’s no doubt well paid to use forceful language, and strike provocative poses. But he doesn’t get it.

What the hell has Facebook, the greatest of all public noticeboards for the inner landscape of our dreams, got to do with surveillance? Oh Lord, oh Lord, how much of this stuff the entitled middle classes can turn out without blushing.

David: Facebook holds and shares the details of 350m people in ways almost none of them understand. It’s an extraordinary and largely positive phenomenon. But have you ever looked at how it works and considered its implications? This is not a class thing.

He detects a “fashionable paranoia about data and surveillance” and dismisses the concerns raised in Database State as semi-apocalyptic.

My worry that that the report’s authors, far from being dispassionate in their assessment of 46 government databases, had in fact been chosen as much for their ready-made opinions as their expertise. Looking back I understated the problem. Four of the six authors of the report were almost better described as parti pris campaigners than experts.

But David, we chose ourselves. Our affiliations are clearly stated and blindingly obvious. When you rang me and vented at me for 10-15 minutes you had no idea who I was and hadn’t read my blog. Google exists, you know? Even though your boss seems to wish it didn’t.

It seems to have taken you *nine months* to work out the well-documented good work Terri Dowty does. Now you “reveal” it as some great hidden truth. Is this the valuable journalism Mr Murdoch says we’re all going to want to pay for on-line? Don’t you understand it’s perfectly possible to be a campaigner and yet to be well informed? Why do you think people become campaigners FFS? Through wilful ignorance? Because they read facile columns full of class-obsessed and fashion-conscious invective?

You’ve managed to work out Michael WiIls works for the government. But you’ve eaten up his chocolate-covered waffle without a sceptical glance.

Mr Wills also accepts that government must take blame for the poor level of debate because it has too often been “overly defensive and dismissive of criticism. Government believes it is acting benignly and legally and has not adequately recognised the fears of those who believe this is not the case.”

This is tripe. The poor level of debate on technology in public services isn’t because the government hasn’t been shoutey enough. It’s because the government is too assertive and indulges in groupthink, failing to take other views into account. At a shallow level they have a good intention, but they fail to realise the less desirable consequences of their ill-thought-out implementation.

I wouldn’t say there’s a deep underlying malevolence, but the poor manner in which they engage with others who have a different good intention is tantamount to malevolence. Your own article illustrates this very well.

Central to this is their documented failure to listen effectively to the views of scientists (not that I claim to be one, but two of my co-authors are) and also of service users and front-line practitioners. This is why NHS CfH has failed, as even the government now admits, and why the ID Scheme and ContactPoint will fail.

But [Wills’] overall point is this: proper use of new technology by the State allows a far more effective delivery of services to those that need them and a much better level of information about what is happening in society so that needs can be predicted and met. For the poor at any rate, such benefits are more than speculative.

This is true. But would David or Michael understand what proper use of technology is? Do CCTV cameras everywhere, ANPR, centralised databases, state-issued identifiers and audit trails and the removal of barriers to data sharing constitute proper use of technology by the State, allow effective services, and help all of us? That’s the debate we need to have.

We’ve been having it here since 2004 David. Did you ever join in, or were you too busy striking a contrarian pose to whatever was fashionable that day?

Wouldn’t it be better to have user participation in a design process of co-creation? Of course it would, as we’ve said here since 2004 and as the government has belatedly acknowledged in its Smarter Government white paper published yesterday.

Perhaps this is why, unnoticed by the Rowntree report, bodies such as Barnardo’s and the NSPCC had welcomed the Contactpoint database. They, at least, were not operating on the libertarian assumption that almost everything the State does is malign, or that an exaggerated notion of privacy always outweighs something that, to be old-fashioned, we might call the “public interest”.

We didn’t write about this in the report, but it’s not news to any of the authors or indeed to anyone who has taken an interest in this. The untold story is just how and to what extent funding arrangements for these charities has changed in recent years, the extent to which they are now dependent on state funds, and the political price exacted for that dependence. Are there any quality journalists around who might like to look into that? Be warned: it would require research, and not just opinion.

Aaronovitch gripes on about the census and how important it should be accurate. More than five years ago on IdealGov I wrote about how the Finnish census, which is register-based, is so much better than ours and also so much cheaper it can be done annually. It’s because the data quality is good and levels of trust in government are high. What’s more the Finnish government works constantly to try to earn ever higher levels of trust. David – we want something much better than what you’re asking for.

Oddly, the Rowntree Reform Trust, which is largely run by Liberal Democrat grandees, gives as its objectives the promotion of civil liberties and social justice.

There’s nothing in the least odd about that. What are the objectives of your employer News International? To prop up the UK tax base? Hardly. At least the JRRT pays it’s full share of UK tax. That’s why it can act as a campaigning organisation.

I think the libertarians, the aged hippies and the privileged have taken over the argument and that their cultural preferences have tilted the balance against social justice. Of course, the rich have themselves; the poor have only the Government

So the well-paid and powerful columnist can fire off a broadside of ad-hominem and ad feminam attacks, but miss the fundamental point. The poor and needy have every bit as much right to dignity and privacy about their affairs as the wealthy. But now they have no choice but to submit their data to insecure and often ineffective public services.

Informational self-determination – enshrined as a right for example in the German constitution – isn’t a class thing. It should be for everyone, whatever Michael Wills says, and whatever David Aa says. Pfff.