What is Ideal Government ?

It consists of the following:

1.  Answerable post-holders ( who are prosecuted and convicted, when abuse of position is demonstrated to be present, and active )

2.  Personally-accountable individuals who consult ( and do not change the laws to remove choice, forcing consent as a prior default )

3.  Those with a consumer-voted proven track record of trustworthiness ( established in a profession of care, eg. People Empowerment )

4.  Persons who honourably act as whistleblowers ( reporting all criminal activity to public watchdog organizations and Ombudsmen )

5.  Proactive individuals ( who improve every working practice, structure, organization they have to work with - receiving recognition/thanks )

6.  Those who do not apply one law to themselves & their cronies - whilst enforcing target-group “ Governance “ restrictions on the rest

7.  People of heart and conscience, who feel the sufferings of others as their own ( acting to end the destruction of two-thirds of the world )

8.  Postholders who promote on the basis of ability, capability, and track record - not on the basis of defending existing vested interests

That just about lets out most people - admitting the 10% born leaders, who, in the days when principled officeholders existed, really made a difference - and were esteemed accordingly !

“ Reputation: it’s what you make, by unselfishly taking thought for others .. or what you lose, by pursuing exclusive self-interest “, old saying

Thanks Les! Stay in touch!

There are times when technological language concerning eGovernment tends to obscure the real purpose of new innovations.  Use of this type of language can make open debate about new innovations more difficult and can remove eGovernment even further from the understanding of the man or woman on the street—which must surely be bad practice when governments are trying to drive eService take-up.  Another example is semantic interoperability—aren’t these just fancy words for cataloguing and indexing?

RFIDs are primarily being developed in the private sector, e.g. for tracking products as they leave the supermarket shelves, but they may have eGov applications (tagging of prisoners on day release for example).  There are also privacy concerns, which governments will have to deal with.  Some background on the Commission’s consultation processes (from article on e-Forum):

The Commission’s language on RFIDs has so far been favourable. Information society commissioner Viviane Reding, for example, was quoted is a Commission press release saying, “RFID tags are far cleverer than traditional bar codes. They are the precursors of a world in which billions of networked objects and sensors will report their location, identity, and history. These networks and devices will link everyday objects into an ‘internet of things’ that will greatly enhance economic prosperity and the quality of life.”

However, Reding also highlighted privacy issues concerning the tags, noting, “We need to build a society-wide consensus on the future of RFID, and the need for credible safeguards. We must harness the technology and create the right opportunities for its use for the wider public good.”

The Commission established an RFID inter-service group in 2005, to coordinate the gathering, analysis and internal dissemination of information concerning RFID technology. The Commission is calling for common standard for the technology to ensure RFID interoperability across borders.

The public debate on RFID launched by the Commission will work through a series of workshops to build consensus on key issues associated with the use of RFID. These workshops will address RFID applications, end-user issues, interoperability and standards, and frequency spectrum requirements. They will take place in Brussels between March and June 2006 and their conclusions will assist the European Commission in drafting a working document on RFID. This document will be published in September in an online consultation. Additional feedback obtained will then be analysed and integrated in a Commission Communication on RFID, to be adopted before the end of the year. This feedback could lead to amendments of the e-privacy-Directive which is up for review this year. The Communication will also address the need for other legislative measures for RFID, such as decisions on allocation of spectrum.

In order to face this issue, and after the debate turned to be non consensual, the “ministère de la Culture” has recently provided a website where the law is explained and where people, particularly artists and websurfers, can share their own points of views about some documents. A lot of people seem skeptics, since there is no forums (only blogs attached to documents), since it is not explained if messages are censored or not, and since documents present a one way point of view. First steps towards electronic Democacy tools here ?

www.lestelechargements.com

It’s one year old today (see James Cronin post on UK Ideal Government) and they’ve released what they call WriteToThem Zeitgeist which gives all sorts of stats on how much people write to their MPs and how often people respond.

It includes the hilarious epoisode of one MP, Ian Liddell Granger, who tried to improve his rankings by sending himself messages.

It’s enough to restore one’s faith in democracy, n’est-ce pas?

The crack is attributed to Delft smartcard security specialist Riscure, which here explains that an attack can be executed from around 10 metres and the security broken, revealing date of birth, facial image and fingerprint, in around two hours. Riscure notes that that the speed of the crack is aided by the Dutch passport numbering scheme being sequential...The process is explained in greater detail by Bart Jacobs, Research Director of the Institute for Computing and Information Sciences, University of Nijmegen, in presentations to be found here. These make it clear that a skimming exercise could potentially yield all biometric data from a passport (or indeed a biometric ID card), giving ID thieves and would-be forgers a considerable leg up in the construction of fakes..

The vote means that member states will have to impose on internet service providers and telecommunication operators an obligation to store all traffic and location data for fixed and mobile telephony as well as e-mail, web-browsing, instant messaging and other internet services. The data will have to be stored for a period of six to 24 months and must be made accessible to authorities investigating on non-specified “serious crimes”.

Greens, Liberals, NGOs and industry groups have serious reservations - see the EDRI wiki. One has to ask whether this is an intelligent decision reached in a reasonable manner, and whether this a good procedure for laying the foundations of an e-enabled Europe.

It makes me wonder what is the best response. We could be happy and grateful in the confidence we’re less likely to suffer from criminality as a result of this decision. We could think about how to circumvent its effects - become more secretive, use crypto, aliases and anonymous services. We could watch the legislation get bogged down at great expense in the national legislatures and in its implementation.

Or we could continue with the campaign against the policy. But this begs the question of what next steps are available, given that defeating it in the European Parliament was probably the best hope for industry and NGOs. I doubt we’ll get get farmers muck-spreading government offices from their tractors on this one.

Bruce Schneier says about wholesale surveillance

Once this information is collected, it will be misused, lost, and stolen. It will be filled with errors. The problems and insecurities that come from living in a surveillance society more than outweigh any crimefighting (and terrorist-fighting) advantages.

This is a subject on which it’s very hard to articulate what an “ideal” vision of e-enabled public services would be like - the solution that places least temptation in front of corruptible officials, that costs the least, that allows us to live lives free of the fear of intrusion, manipuation and discrimination yet helps the police do their job when confronted with malevolence. 

They’re the same principles we flagged here then discussed here. The workbook is here (pdf) and the original concept is set out here by Matt Poelmans and others based on work from Tilburg University. And yes, the word “Charter” goes back to John Major’s Citizens’ Charter.

Every European needs this.