Mydex: A Manifesto for UK Public Services

One area government IT has made progress is with public data, with the “power of information” policy and the data.gov.uk portal, which recognises the value of ‘unlocking’ data held by the Government for reuse by added value service providers.

Next we need a comparably radical rethink on personal data. This starts with a return to the role of personal identifiers and intermediaries set out by UK officials a decade ago, and as recently adopted by the Obama Administration. This means:

• assume that access to on-line public services will be through a market or ecosystem of accredited third-party identifiers (issued for example by a range of existing online services, credit bureaux, or banks
• drop the false notion that it’s generally essential to know who people are
• challenge the assumption that personal data is “owned” by service-providing departments to be shared at their convenience
• instead, recognise that the individual is not only the rightful owner, but also the only technically feasible point of integration of exponentially growing volumes of personal data, and therefore the only possible place where “personalisation” can happen
• recognise furthermore that structured, scalable personal data managed by individuals is set to become the source of immense new economic value, and that the individual is a rightful
beneficiary.

This change in mindset includes a specific challenge to secret parts of government entrusted with keeping Britain safe. A safe society isn’t the outcome of dysfunctional public services designed to aid surveillance.

Britain has a far better chance of being secure with public services designed to work for individuals and front-line public servants, which respect human rights and dignity. When the data are cleaner, the relatively small number of exceptions stand out more clearly.

On-line identifiers need to work under the user’s control, with minimal disclosure and revealing information only to justified parties. They need to be consistent and convenient (see Kim Cameron’s “Laws of Identity”).

In the short term the UK can copy the US administration: announce that future access to online services will be via third-party identifiers, and then provide for the emergence of a “trust framework” so a range of identifiers are accredited for suitable purposes. Many services can be accessed anonymously, and for many more all that is needed is a consistent user experience. It’s not always necessary to identify people to check their entitlement.

But sometimes individuals will need to invoke stronger identification credentials online: for “Know Your Customer” processes or to meet the most stringent visa requirements for example.

Government IT therefore needs to anticipate a world where individuals are equipped with

• highly evolved personal data stores
• the ability online to invoke strong authentication or verification
(e.g. proof of qualifications, licences, credit, nationality or identity)
• selective disclosure, i.e. the ability to share the minimum necessary in a particular circumstance.

This doesn’t require major new procurement. It means:

• review each main service function to take into account the role
of user-driven records for health, education, welfare, transport, or
other areas such as the Census or the London Olympics
• quickly participate in at least two live prototypes of user-driven
services across multiple organisations supported by independent
online verification services
• where there is benefit, re-engineer the public services (health,
education etc) users can drive new services.

Just as the existing “Power of Information” has created new APIs to allow structured public data out of government systems to create new value, so this “empowered citizen/customers” agenda will see new APIs that allow structured personal data in. This means public services can be driven and personalised by users, and new service packages created for them by third parties.

This “empowered citizen/customers” agenda might even reveal a revised role for the National ID Register as a voluntary service offering online verification as part of a trust framework, for the most demanding cases.

Happily, the urge to save money will usher in the right identity policy and in turn protect our privacy.

The area to focus on is data logistics. When Alan Mitchell and I browsed through hundreds of complaints about public services recently we observed that very few are about privacy and none at all about problems with identity. But the vast majority point to poor information logistics. The key person – official, professional, or the unhappy individual – just didn’t have the right information at the right time.

This causes irritation, frustration, offence, and vast expense. It’s extremely annoying for individuals not to be able to get hold of information they need, to have the wrong information, or to have to give the same information over and over again. It’s unjust, time-consuming and possibly worse to get the wrong treatment or service because the service cant get the information or has the wrong information.

It’s unnecessarily expensive for public services to attempt to maintain hundreds of different records about the same person (but neither feasible nor desirable to amalgamate them into panoptical mega-records). If you provide services on the back of incomplete and inaccurate data there’s every chance the service will be poor and unnecessarily expensive.

And it’s hard to plan and prioritise if you’re not in touch with your customers and people try as far as possible to withhold data from you. If we built churches using the last census there would be a few Jedi cathedrals lying empty.

If we can fix this (and we think it can be done) then people can get better, more responsive service, restored individual responsibility with a path to empowered self-service. HM Treasury also gets a triple dose of cost savings.

It means restoring control over personal data to the individual and building trust on the side of the individual.

User-controlled digital identifiers within an identity assurance framework are prerequisite, and that is just what Cabinet Office is now quietly proposing. Better privacy is a by-product (and a legal requirement, let’s not forget). But the compelling reason to pursue better data logistics with user-driven services is saving money.

Oh look – it’s just happened. President Obama has launched a “Blue button” service which lets US veterans download their health record. Here’s a sample of what the record looks like. And there’s a “developer challenge” to get hackers to do cool things for the people who have just got their data back.

Simple. Cool. How long until it happens here? Let’s set a date. Who’s health is it anyway? Who’s data is it anyway?

The idea is we can all do it en masse at various celebratory events.

Choreography is by Aliya Saleem, filming, editing and captions by Richard (shortly to be Lord) Allan, music borrowed on a wave of goodwill from the Pet Shop Boys. The whole thing, triggered by a comment in Parliament by David Blunkett, is a tribute to the relentless hard work of many activists especially Phil and Guy at No2ID, Simon and Gus at PI, the JRRT, everyone at FIPR, ORG and beyond and to many of our more enlightened politicians and journalists.

Jerry and I had a second meeting (we can’t really say where or with whom) at which it was Jim who led in setting out the case for personal control over personal data. There’s growing interest in the “framework of trust” idea for on-line identity. Now adopted by the Obama administration it was, after all, originally UK policy a decade ago. Technically it still is.

So the good news is: the UK had a good policy; it’s is still in place (including some legal underpinning), just unimplemented; the US has led decisively down this route which creates a market and gives confidence for UK government; there’s a new climate of listening and political realism, and we have the courteous and mutually respectful dialogue #CMRD. The bad news? The UK lost a decade. *sigh*

Reasons For Not Introducing Fingerprinting To [xyz] School

Privacy is a fundamental human right which underpins our dignity. One important concept of privacy concerns information privacy, the establishment of rules governing the collection and handling of personal data such as credit information, and medical and government records. It is also known as “data protection”.

George Orwell’s 1984 paints a bleak view of a future where information privacy is not respected. Although fingerprinting in the [xyz] cafeteria may not compare with 1984, the principle remains the same. There are legitimate uses for biometric testing such as tracking criminals, preventing terrorism and (arguably) border control, but its use for a marginal increase in efficiency in the cafeteria is disproportionate.

By capturing biometric data in exchange for lunch, we are unnecessarily exposing our [children] to several direct and indirect risks, for example:

Loss of Respect for Personal Information. Fingerprinting at school conditions children to embrace the idea of Big Brother-style biometric tracking. The patterns of activity we develop during early years clearly set the tone for how we behave in later life.

Identity Theft. Encouraging our children to give out their thumbprints on a daily basis leads them to think this is a natural activity. Who else will they give their biometrics to, without consulting their parents and asking questions like “why, and what will it be used for?

Criminalisation. If a child has never touched a fingerprint scanner, there is zero probability of being incorrectly investigated for a crime. Once a child has touched a scanner they will be at the mercy of the matching algorithm for the rest of their lives. In 2008, Jim Knight, then minister for schools and learning, said that the police could help themselves to the children’s fingerprints if they are trying to solve a crime – regardless of whether they have ever previously been in trouble with the law. The abuse of biometric information turns us from a nation of free citizens into a nation of suspects.

UK law states that privacy invasion must be proportional to the threat. [IS THIS TRUE?] Access to lunch does not warrant capture of biometric data. The alternative to fingerprinting is the use of swipe cards, a proven and uncontroversial technology. Swipe cards share all of the efficiency benefits of fingerprinting except that boys may lose them. Boys are used to carrying, losing and replacing Oyster cards. If TFL is able to handle the odd missing card, why can’t [xyz]? Substantial efficiency gains are achieved whichever system we adopt. Only one of them de-humanises our children and degrades their human rights. As leaders of an outstanding school we should not trivialize the capture of personal information, we should not unnecessarily impose a fingerprinting system upon our [children].

Opposition from Politicians and Business

“Are you not concerned about the impression children are going to get of what it is to live in a free country and what it is to be British if, in order to get the right school meals, they have fingerprints taken? It seems to me completely astonishing.” Baroness Carnegy, Conservative, 19th March 2007, speaking in the House of Lords

“The practice of fingerprinting in schools has been banned in China as being too intrusive and an infringement of children’s rights? Here, it is widespread. We have even had a head teacher tricking three year-olds into giving their fingerprints by playing a spy game. Will the Government ban schools from carrying out this practice, unless parents specifically opt into the system following full and independent information about the so-called benefits of the system and the dangers of identity fraud?” Baroness Walmsley, Liberal Democrat, 19th March 2007, speaking in the House of Lords

“People have to be stark, raving mad to use conventional biometrics to improve the efficiency of a children’s lunch line.”
Kim Cameron (chief architect for identity at Microsoft), 5th April 2007

Further Reading

http://www.identityblog.com/?p=734
http://www.archrights.org.uk/issues/fingerprints/fingerprinting.htm
http://www.privacyinternational.org
http://www.leavethemkidsalone.com
http://www.no2id.net
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld200607/ldhansrd/text/70319-0002.htm#0703193000008
http://www.identityblog.com/?p=725

Let’s do this together. Let’s say “wouldn’t it be better if” about how tech affects transparency, costs and the quality of public services and how they affect our lives.

@ntouk and I have long since been fed up with what one senior Whitehall official yesterday called “this £trillion attempt to drag us into 1983”. Many of us have had a go at the draft government IT strategy on the Opposition’s makeITbetter site. Officials across Whitehall are now furiously revising it, so let’s hope the final published version is better.

Meanwhile we can speak freely. We can look to the realities of the wider world, and we don’t have to pretend that everything to date has been fine. Now it’s time to find our voice and say what we want.

The Centre for Technology Policy Research and IdealGov are launching a six-week competition, which everyone wins. Everyone who contributes is invited to a party. And everyone can, like, bring stuff (as we did to mypublicservices).

Practicalities. Please add any comments of suggestions about the process to this post. The final crowd-sourced “White paper of Wibbi” will be created on an open wiki here. Please feel free to register and edit, or to add comments at the end.

Party: IdealGov and CTPR are chipping in £1000 to the launch party to which everyone who has contributed is invited. There will be prizes including signed photos of our very own tech mandarin Sir Bonar Neville-Kingdom.

Political engagement:An Opposition front bench team has already agreed to listen attentively to our results. We have also extended invitations to Labour and LibDem leaderships and to officials to attend the party or have the results presented. [UPDATE: Big news: still on day one and we’ve now also heard back that this will get presented to a LibDem front bench team and to the people drafting the Labour manifesto. This is subject to the project attracting enough substantial input of quality. So this is now definitely an opportunity to put good ideas in front of all three main UK parties. We’re also up for inviting SNP, Plaid & Greens to launch party. Everyone needs a good government IT policy.]]

This initiative is formally adopting the principles of #CMRD, the “courteous and mutually respectful dialogue” called for last week by Michael Wills and first practised at an Intellect/Identity and Passport Service event this week.

Above all, we need to state in plain lay terms the role of contempory technology in future public services should be. Specifically, our work will need to cover off the main headings:

– governance of public-sector IT
– technical architecture which supports the real-world intention
– procurement of technology and tech-based services
– design that works for front line staff and users
– basis for participative public services
– public data
– personal data
– trust, dignity & legality under human rights & DP law
– political engagement, openness and trust in the political process
– and above all saving vast, vast amounts of money.

This is not a time to splash out. The country’s broke. So first we need to spend less on IT, existing contracts notwithstanding. But then it’s two orders of magnitude more important that our IT plans support far more efficient public services.

Suggesting we deploy hundreds of PA consultants (or Deloitte or whoever) to mooch around filling out timesheets and expense claims for absurd day rates is not going to get you invited to the party. But any suggestion that draws the best expertise available into the gift economy (and by no means are all consultants nitwits) is most welcome.

This project is not a platform for venting anger at wrong headedness or past mediocrity (whoops! did I just do it? Old habits…) Take that frustration but use it to say what you want in the spirit of the #CMRD. Please bring your beliefs, principles, and passion, but the IdealGov and CTPR moderators will give short shrift to anything actionable or which reeks of partisan preconceptions. Scepticism is justified, but cynicism not.

We may need a “babies and bathwater” section to set out for controversial systems such as CfH or the ID Scheme what must go but what also should be retained. We should give praise where due, eg for Power of Information work. And our suggestions must be practical enough to keep the lights on, ie to keep essential services running uninterrupted while new and better plans emerge.

Contributions from all stakeholders are welcome: officials, industry, front line staff, anyone who speaks from personal experience of public services. Pertinent Art is always welcome, because it can speak to our condition so powerfully.

We last did this in 2004, remember. Now its time to do it again.

We also tested out the IdealGov wiki for comments in advance: many thanks for these. We’ll see more of the wiki in future.

The IPS/Intellect dialogue was much better than I had feared it might be. Not uncritical, but constructive. The only violence on show was violent agreement.

Perhaps the new “contructive and mutually respectful dialogue (#CMRD on Twitter) has finally started, the week after Michael Wills first called for it. Thanks to IPS for the engagement.

IdealGovernment has wanted this for years. But – as he himself proves – it won’t be easy. Let me get some things off my chest. Then let the new era of civilised and mutually respectful dialogue commence.

I don’t agree with everything Mr Wills said, so I’ve taken his speech and commented in line. Attention conservation notice: this is quite a long post

Databases lie at the heart of this revolution. They offer the opportunity to improve dramatically the efficiency and responsiveness of public services. Take the Tell Us Once project, for example.

But the TellUsOnce problem won’t be solved by databases. If it was, you could have solved it by 2005 (as you promised you would in 2000).

OTOH a VRM platform would show this problem solved for so little money that the invoice wouldn’t even cross your desk – a fraction of the cost of yesterday’s “One Place” web site (which in turn you could have had for free a decade ago if you had practised respectful and courteous dialogue and listened to Stef).

The increasing sophistication of data management has sparked serious public concern about privacy and civil liberties

We’d be fine if the approach were sophisticated. It’s the crudeness, combined with raw power, that concerns us.

Go onto Google UK and search for ‘UK government big brother state’ and you get one and a half million entries.

WTF? Is this how we gauge if it’s of public concern? As a joke maybe, eight years ago. Oh look: go onto Google UK and search for: ‘Wills eejit or ****?’ and you get 1.21m entries. Does that make it the question everyone is asking?

He talks of ‘striking a balance’ between security and liberty. He’s no Benjamin Franklin. It’s not about striking a balance. It’s about getting it right because we need both privacy and security in the systems which underpin essential public services. Mr Wills claims that kids can’t get free school meals, that voters can’t vote without data sharing by public bodies. This is absurd. He says hardly any constituents complain about surveillance but they demand CCTV in their hundreds.

To reconcile all this we need, he says

“democratic discourse, rational and mutually respectful discourse, wary of anyone, on any side of the debate, who claims a monopoly of wisdom. These issues are complex and difficult and resolving them will require intellectual rigour, a willingness to learn from experience and to engage continually with alternative points of view. Only through such a democratic iterative process can we hope as a society to resolve this issue satisfactorily.”

Hurrah. This could be straight out of the Ideal Government guide to, well, ideal government. We like that.

Sadly, such a rational, respectful discourse, so essential to the creation of public policy on this crucial issue, has been largely absent in recent years, replaced all too often by reciprocal caricaturing and stereotyping, with understanding and respect all too seldom present. And this matters.

This is true too. I must say I welcome his recognition of it, and his acceptance that

Government must take its share of the blame for this failure of discourse.

Mr Wills’ spin doctors had leaked his speech to a class-obsessed tabloid journalist David Aa. I can see now that when I saw the next bit in that hostile context I misread it:

Too often, we have 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.

Mr Aa is paid to be annoying, and it works. In my irritation I took the extract to mean that government was defensive and should be more assertive, but Mr Wills’ point here (and the context makes it clear) is a more subtle one which I welcome.

He then says companies make mistakes too. True, but we withdraw our business from them when they are mediocre. They’re not entrusted with passing laws, taxing us, and trying to run public services. He goes on

Where government gets it wrong, we are learning to hold our hands up and take immediate steps to put matters right. The loss of Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs disks triggered radical reforms of data security in government.

Her Majesty’s data was not on that disk. Mine was. Nevertheless, horrified, many of us welcomed that loss, because it finally started to show how bad things had really got.

Did it trigger radical reform? Well, it certainly triggered half a dozen reports from tame senior officials and management consultants. It triggered episodic bans on Blackberries and memory sticks, and the glueing up of USB ports. But we have yet to see the radical reform we need which is to restore control of personal data to the individual.

When we recognised that data sharing provisions in the Coroners and Justice Bill had been too widely drawn we immediately withdrew them.

It’s true. Eventually they did. This would be a good moment for Mr Wills to thank the selfless NGOs who campaigned so hard to rectify this awful mistake he was trying to make. But instead he speaks of

opponents…too quick to assume the worst of government without any evidence to support their assumptions, replacing argument with rhetoric.

But…but…but how then did the unpaid NGO volunteers successfully win the argument against your proposed policy and show it was so ill-conceived? Do you recall how hard you and your officials resisted?

Michael: you and your colleagues will find this cultural change you call for harder than you yet realise. But as long as you try, and appear sincere in your endeavour, we will support you every step of the way. Have we all taken on board the rules you call for? No rhetoric. OK. No rhetoric.

To reject all the benefits that databases offer the public, simply because a mistake might be made, is to strike the balance in the wrong place.

1. Name the benefits. 2. This isn’t about striking a balance, it’s about doing it the right way.

Should we really avoid trying to do all we can to prevent another Soham tragedy?

Oh, please leave the memory of those poor girls in peace! Why blame your poor personal data practices on them, and on the equally unfortunate Victoria Climbie? Michael: this is rhetoric.

Or stop doctors accessing vital medical records?

Doctors can have it with my permission. I choose not to share it with bureaucrats and the forces of law and order. That preference will not endanger society.

Or fetter the provision of welfare entitlements, such as free school meals, for the most vulnerable?

Just get your act together. Deliver the services to which people are entitled, without hoovering up their data when they are at their most vulnerable and brewing it up into HMG’s patent toxic soup.

Basic principles for protecting the use of data are that it should be proportionate and necessary

Indeed. Furthermore, that in the absence of a specific and lawful purpose there should be informed consent. Assuming that 12 year olds understand this and are cool about it is not sufficient. Allowing hundreds of thousands of officials access to childrens’ records or to identifiable medical data is unlawful, just as taking and retaining the DNA of innocents has proven to be.

But you acted all surprised when you lost the Marper case. And you’re behaving as if we had a proper implementation of the EU data protection directive, and are acting all surprised that Europe is taking enforcement action against the UK.

We don’t live in a database state as much as a database society.

Yes, but we’ll sort ourselves out with the Twitterverse. Government runs the state part of it. That’s what you’re screwing up, because of the history of groupthink and the poor dialogue you rightly point to. That’s what we want whoever wins the next election to sort out. Hey! It could be you! Maybe.

They deliver real benefits for the public and it skews debate about the challenge they pose to all of us if anyone ignores this or pretends otherwise.

Let’s see if we can find real evidence for these benefits, because there’s a strong case to be made that the database state is designed to serve an unholy alliance of administrative convenience and security fears.

Meanwhile it is becoming everywhere apparent that a wholly organisation-centric “CRM” approach to life is nothing like as advantageous to the public, or indeed to large organisations, as it was sold as being by the management consultants which Alistair Darling has just banned.

What’s it costing you per data subject to keep records up to date in WUYJ, MIAP, BusinessLink, ContactPoint, eCAF, CfH? How accurate are the data? How complete? And how much duplicated? How much is explicitly permissioned by the data subject? Is it proven to a legal standard that in every case government is holding only data which is necessary and proportionate in a democratic society? Can you demonstrate clear auditable and informed consent?

But, like all technologies, databases can do damage if misused. The issue is not whether to have them but how they can be deployed without damaging privacy.

Ah! Phew! Hooray!

It’s a question of balance and the challenge is how to strike it.

No it’s not! It’s not about balance, any more than climbing to the moon on a ladder is a question of balance. I don’t care how good your balance is: it’s the wrong way to go to the moon.

You get accurate data at lower cost and personalised services without privacy intrusion by putting people back in charge of their own data. The Internet works at both ends, you know. You just can’t have every part of public services grab every piece of data they can about everyone, take away the barriers to data sharing, then hope to create an accurate picture of everything such that you can eliminate fraud, keep the public safe, and provide personalised services. Try doing the maths.

You know all that great “Power of Information” work the government has done on opening up APIs and letting public data out? Sometime soon a Secretary of State or a PM will announce, in a second such major policy shift, that the really big prize is in how we work with personal data. Government will relinquish the desire to own and control it. You will open up government APIs and let people’s structured, scalable private data in, under thier control. You will leave people in charge of their own lives, which is how reality is because we have to put all the pieces together anyway.

I repeat: this is not a question of striking the right balance. It’s about creating a secure platform for personalised services and new value. Getting it wrong, which we described in our report Database State, wastes vast amounts of money and of people’s time; it fails to deliver good customer services and breaks the law. We the taxpayer are thus intruded upon, failed by public services, caused to waste endless time sorting it out. We’ll have to pay to get it wrong and then pay again to see it all put right.

But where we should have a constructive dialogue, we have all too often an impoverished discourse where slogans substitute for evidence.

Too true. I’ve seen so much of that from government politicians and officials. I’m so weary of it. So many of us are so weary of it. But it cheers me up when NGO-world gets creative and cheeky. I love the pertinent art, the campaigning. Not just because it’s often witty, but also because it’s based on a deeper truth, coupled with a better sense of human nature, than your officials have served you up with.

The Rowntree Report on what the authors called the Database State is a good example of how the public discourse is flawed.

It shows how bad things have got. It’s pretty shocking that the fact that much of what you’re constructing falls outside what it is legal to do in Europe should come as such a surprise. It has taken you a full NINE MONTHS to reply to it. Did you really not consider these questions before you embarked on Transformational Government, and mixed up the security agenda with the public-service agenda? Was that wise? Don’t shoot the messenger here.

This could have made an important contribution towards meeting the challenges of new technology. The subject matter was important and its academic authors have a distinguished provenance.

I think you’re building up to shooting the messenger.

However, a detailed reading of the report reveals it was riddled with factual errors and misunderstandings and reached conclusions without setting out the evidential base for doing so.

Argh! You just shot the messenger!

So opaque was its methodology that it has taken months to work through it to respond in detail.

Stop shooting! Remember, this is the new era of respectful dialogue!

The methodology is clear as day. We wrote up 46 large databases (with precious little help from government). We discussed them against European criteria for legality. During the course of the work the Marper judgement confirmed that the DNA database was indeed illegal. We gave all our references.

I’ll get on to the government’s response in due course. It has taken their however many dozens of staff nine months to reply, so working at the same pace I should be ready to reply by around 2030-2050.

I hope that all those who read the original report and provided publicity for it will do similarly for today’s response to it.

I’m sure they will if it’s interesting, credible and passes the Mandy Rice-Davies test.

It is important that we now move beyond rhetoric

I think I may find myself quoting this again, perhaps frequently We may need a new acronym to go alongside Wibbi: IMBR.

new and detailed dialogue between all concerned to ensure that we seize the opportunities of this new information age while protecting ourselves against its risks. So when government is considering how data might be used for the public good, the voices of users and practitioners can be heard. That requires an open, constructive approach on both sides.

Yup, we all sign up to that. High bloody time.

To that end, I am announcing today that the Ministry of Justice will host an event early in the New Year to consider how we approach the data sharing aspects of reforms to the electoral register.

Alright then. But not in Feb; I’m in Iran.

He goes on to talk about cross-referencing the electoral roll with the NI number. Well, you need to do something to make this process more secure. Not so sure about the NI number: it might suddenly look as if we have 80m registered voters in the UK.

Those identifiers will not be available to the public, for obvious reasons – they are solely for the electoral registration officer’s use.

Not obvious to me at all Michael – I think you have organisation-centric assumptions engrained so deeply you’re not even aware of them.

I also intend to jointly host an event with Delyth Morgan from the Department for Children, Schools and Families which will focus on ContactPoint.

Clearly it would have been helpful to have this dialogue before you specified the system and started spending hundreds of millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money on it with Cap Gemini. So when we say “better late than never” it is with quite a heavy sigh.

We can never be complacent about databases – the challenge in getting the balance right

No it’s not about balance! It’s about getting it right!

But we can only do this on the basis of a rational and mutually respectful dialogue between all concerned. I hope the measures I have announced today can be the start of such a dialogue

Indeed. IMBR. I think you, your speechwriters and spin doctors will find this a major cultural adjustment. You’re clearly not there yet. But we will support and uphold you in your attempt to do just that, and for my part (I cant speak for anyone else) I shall try to do the same.

Was this whole long rambling post worth doing? Is Mr Wills going to get his act together and sort this out? I checked out his currency with one of Westminster’s most effective and reliable lobbysists. The verdict: “I wouldn’t expend too much effort on trying to enlighten him.” I find that harsh. He’s still a Minister after all.

Let us give Mr Wills credit for officially ushering in – if not yet himself exemplifying – the era of mutually respectful and courteous dialogue about the right way for government to work with personal data in public services. From the moment I click on “Publish” on this post I undertake to exemplify it myself. Hurrah!

there’s always been a normal, civil expectation of basic cooperation when police ask straightforward questions.

I think that’s absolutely right – isn’t it part of something sometimes called consensual policing? Of course there have always been parts of the population less inclined to trust the police or cooperate with their activities – sometimes for good reason. But by and large most people have trusted the police and have cooperated on instinct.

But have things now changed? Are people in general less happy now with identifying themselves and cooperating with the police? Is there any research on this?

Certainly the terms of the debate have changed – since ID cards were introduced; since lots of innocent people found themselves on the DNA database; since anti-terror laws have been used to stop cyclists and and search 11 year-old girls; since more transparent public debates on police tactics in light of Ian Tomlinson, kettling etc. Have these things caused people to question whether the actions of the police really are on behalf of the consenting, ‘moral majority’? Does the perception that the State operates in a way which assumes we are all potential criminals cause increasing numbers of previously trusting people to respond in a defensive, untrusting way instead of that old fashioned civil expectation of cooperation? If that’s at all right, it seems to me it’s a Bad Thing.