Data nitwittery

What happens when a government that doesnt care about our personal data builds huge centralised databases (Was: Why do we need data protection...Does data protection matter? Why? How can we convey this to the MSM?)

16 May 2008

Sensible health-records option #3 emerges as CfH stretches to infinity and beyond

The UK’s expensive and dysfunctional clunking great fist of a centralised health records system is going to take four years longer than expected, says the NAO. According to Kable’s mothership The Guardian

A £12.7bn upgrade of IT systems throughout the NHS in England will not be completed for at least another six years, four years behind schedule, parliament’s spending watchdog disclosed today. Revealing that the scale of the delay to the system was worse than previously thought, the National Audit Office said plans for a national electronic record of the medical files of 50 million patients might not come to fruition until 2014-15.

Grrrr....yawn.

Meanwhile the real world moves briskly in a far more attractive direction. An IBM-Hipaat alliance is the latest - after Google-Cleveland Clinic and Microsoft Healthvault - to offer user-controlled online health records. They send me a press release:

The IBM-HIPAAT collaboration extends patient-driven privacy to Electronic Medical Records (EMRs), Electronic Health Records (EHRs), Personal Health Records (PHRs) and Health Information Exchanges (HIEs). Combined IBM and HIPAAT technologies allow patients to easily specify who is granted access to their personal health information (PHI), what information can be accessed and when. They enable caregivers to implement and enforce patient consent directives, providing “break the glass” access to PHI and EHR data in emergency-care situations, where appropriate.

This commercially-available patient-directed solution is a privacy-based approach to securely controlling PHI access across diverse healthcare applications and settings. When installed in HIE environments as the “consent engine,” Privacy eSuite empowers patients and designated providers to create and record privacy directives. The software then evaluates a provider’s authorization to access a patient’s PHI based on such directives. With the combined offerings, a patient can restrict a particular clinician from accessing PHI, even if that clinician – based on medical role – would typically be granted such access. All access requests are recorded and an audit trail is created.

Nothing on pricing but I bet it wont be costing UK taxpayers anything in tne £6bn-30bn price range bandied about for Connecting for Health.

Wibbi we canned our daft centrally-controlled electronic health records system and the D’oH! just asked Google, Microsoft and IBM-Hipaat to confirm to a standard the NHS was prepared to work to. Then we could choose which sort of electronic patient record we used, and our data wouldn’t be subjected to bossy fishing expeditions from national terrorist-prevention services trying to work out whether we eat the right amount of fruit and veg, or the wrong sort of shellfish. Why will it take so many years and so many billions of pounds before we come to our senses?

I suppose the four year delay gives people more time to opt out of centralised health records. I hope our opt-out is final; it would be a drag to have to renew it every year like a pointless TV licence or car tax disk. 

 

01 May 2008

Look at these lovely tax details!

In cock-up Britain the tax authorities needlessly copy personal data to CDs then lose them. Clinton’s staffers stole the ‘W’s from White House keyboards when the apparently perfectly intelligent George Bush 2 took over at US&A. In Machiavellian Italy an outgoing administration deliberately posts everyone’s tax details, including salary, on the web (in this extraordinary story from the Beeb), apparently to poke Berlusconi in the eye.

Openness about tax is the norm in Scandinavia, but a complete shocker for Italians. Tax-dodging is somewhere between rife and socially acceptable in Italy. The outgoing administration must have been exasperated beyond reason at the thought of a crooked tax dodger getting back into power.

We knew the vast mounds of personal data held often unnecessarily by government were already at risk from nitwits and criminal insiders. We’d better add “piqued outgoing administrations” to the list of risks.

Wibbi government reduced its risk and liability by minimising its holdings of non-essential personal data, anonymising wherever possible, and encrypting the small proportion it is essential to keep? Not that it would have helped Italy here.

Wibbi the technical immortality attributed to Silvio Berlusconi were quickly proved to be a phantasm? Or is that unkind...he is entertaining, in a John Prescottey sort of way.

Wibbi we could take the best of Italy and and the best of Scandinavia and be enlightened and responsible with decent weather, good food and sublime artistic sensibility and sense of humour to boot? Well, we can but ask…

 

04 Apr 2008

Good dinner with bad memes

I can’t reveal the identity or affiliation of any participant at the tasty and interesting dinner I attended last night. I believe (under the revised Rule) I can say it was at the House of Lords. I can definitely say there are some very dodgy memes flying around.

One is the notion that we can decline to “buy into” the European legislative framework and case law behind the UK’s data protection act and data sharing plans. The European Convention on Human Rights and Data Protection directive have legal force here. We can’t just dismiss them as Euro-constiutional claptrap, insufficiently pragmatic for us Brits (any more than I can say I think our laws on tax or whatever aren’t quite right and that I don’t really “buy into them").

Another is a distinct, probably unintended but seriously wrong elitist vibe which suggests it’s intolerable for the media to intrude into the lives of those who run the country, therefore the top 5% need extreme protection from revelations about their private lives. But when conversation turns to hoi polloi people are spoken of as immigrant tax-dodging scroungers of social services and healthcare. Our national situation is one requiring monolithic ID management and a toxic soup of data sharing. Facing the national problems we do a general loss of privacy isn’t a great price to pay. 

People who desperately need a giro cheque will give away any amount of personal information to feed the kids. That’s why they need every bit as much statutory and practical privacy protection as anyone else. We’re all in this together. Just as we’re equal in the eyes of the law so too the systems we create must be good enough for one and all of us in how they protect our personal data and leave us in control of our own lives.

By all means put casual service-sector workers in businesses with 125% staff turnover (Rentokil, apparently) on 50% emergency tax rates while the employers and the system works out who they are, and that they haven’t claimed their allowances already.

The other weird meme is this self-repairing bubble of mutual self-congratulation. Reasonable people tell you in all seriousness that everything is fine and that Whitehall generally and the CIO profession in particular is doing a great job. The same people will reel off a list of dire specific shortcomings, whether it’s procurement processes, large government web sites, political interference, Transformational Government, Connecting for Health, DirectGov search. But as fast as they acknowledge specific shortcomings, the bubble of self-belief self-heals. I can’t work that one out. Surely there are some mistaken assumptions underlying this?

 

29 Feb 2008

Nitwittery continues apace; investigations mount

Greater Manchester police sent round anti-terrorist officers when a highly confidential Home Office CD was found hidden between the keyboad and the circuit boards of a laptop sold on eBay says the Beeb. Clearly anther isolated incident, and everthing will be fine:

“Investigations are now under way. It would be inappropriate to comment further while they are ongoing.”

But what was on such sensitive disks? Could it be the Crosby report? Or the business case for the ID System?

Data nitwittery is alive and well. We’ve not noted the leaks for a bit, and I need a proper meet-up with Glyn at ORG to check the database of known leaks. Anyway, this Beeb story already points to several more. On 7 Feb:

Murder case notes, a gangster dossier and papers detailing threats to the UK were all found in Greater Manchester after being lost by the authorities. Documents relating to the recent murder of Mohammed Arif Iqbal were found in a city centre pub, while photographs of gang members were found under a bush. Papers in the third incident belonged to an official from the Serious and Organised Crime Agency (Soca). Greater Manchester Police and Soca are investigating the crime data losses.

In Jan it reported MoJ lost personal details from court cases on two CDs in the post

“An investigation is under way so it would be inappropriate to comment further at this stage.”

Des Browne reported there had been three losses of MoD laptops with personal details he added

In his statement, the defence secretary announced a full investigation “into how these weaknesses came about” by Sir Edmund Burton, chairman of the Information Advisory Council.

So just how may investigations are now going on? I’ve long since lost count. We could set up a business offering outsourced data-loss investigations.

Data on the laptop stolen in Edgbaston on 9 January included passport, National Insurance and driver’s licence numbers, family details and NHS numbers for about 153,000 people who applied to join the armed forces. Banking details were also included for around 3,700 people, he said. Letters are being sent to all involved. Ministers were informed on 14 January that the information was not encrypted.

It’s good that the reporting is happening at last and keeps happening. People are still shocked (if not surprised). Wibbi, clearly, that there were fewer losses and fewer investigations were necesary. But seriously, Wibbi Transformational Government were built not on increased data sharing against this background of chaos, but rather on an increased respect for people generally and for their personal data in particular.

 

28 Feb 2008

Bradshaw avoids the NHS data question

Ollie Letwin asked a good question about how the NHS processes people opting out of the centralised health record. Here’s what the Minister might have said

“We quite appreciate, in the light of our recent data cock-ups, that many people will have reservations about signing up to national centralised health records run by the government. That’s fine; they’re entitled to their views. We shall simply make sure that the centralised NHS service we deliver is so safe, so worthwhile and so eminently worthy of trust that in due course they decide they want to sign up.

“In the meantime we’ll respect their wishes and continue to offer them the best service we can. Oh, and if they choose to sign up with a personal health information provider (such as Google or Microsoft) we’ll make sure our interfaces can interoperate with these systems as standards emerge. After all, by looking after their own records, they’re saving us money and effort, aren’t they, and getting exactly what they want. In fact, it’s really quite a good idea.”

You can see what Ben Bradshaw did say here. For some reason he just waffled, perhaps hoping the question will go away. But it wont, because the alternatives to centralised NHS records are going to be getting better so fast.

Because they’re politicians, they seem to assume that anything that opposes them is “politically motivated”. It doesn’t seem to occur to them that there are people who don’t give a damn about the politics of it all. We just want to be responsible for our own data, and to be treated with respect, as if our wishes mattered. Not to spend life going through some bureaucratic mincing machine with the sand of don’tcareist incompetence scattered liberally through its delicate workings. 

 

05 Feb 2008

Blackberries squashed by the great clunking fist of nitwittery

Civil servants were strip searched and passed through metal detectors on the way on to work his morning, and 3500 tons of iPods, memory sticks, mobile phones, Palm handhelds and camera memory cards were crushed and sent to landfill. That’s a fib, obviousy. It would be ludicrous. But so too is this story from ZDNet:

Government BlackBerry devices and PDAs have been grounded by the Whitehall-wide ban on the movement of unencrypted personal data. The devices have fallen foul of the department-wide ban imposed by cabinet secretary Sir Gus O’Donnell in the wake of the revelations about the Ministry of Defence data loss last month that resulted from a stolen laptop. The Cabinet Office confirmed that any government electronic device, even down to a mobile phone, would have to have any personal data encrypted before it could leave Whitehall premises.

How pointlessly frustrating must this be for officials who like to use contempory communictions tools to work effectively? Won’t it just drive them over the edge to become grasping Ernst-Accentouche-Deloitroids, devoting their ingenuity to hoovering cash out of the public purse?

Wibbi we applied across the board common-sense and professional policies based on deep respect for each and every individual, that the buggers of prisons, MPs, lawyers and everyone else would realise in a Damascene flash that they are the servants and not the masters and that we movd towards public services that were professionally and formally designed, with the participation from the outset of those whom they are intended to help, to be fit for purpose. 

 

01 Feb 2008

Britain: “a dark outrider among liberal democracies”

Tim Garton-Ash (aka Bwezhnev) adds his considerable voice to the urgent national concern about the database state. In a Guardian CommentisFree piece he writes

This has got to stop. Britain’s snooper state is getting completely out of hand. We are sleepwalking into a surveillance society, and we must wake up. When the Stasi started spying on me, as I moved around East Germany 30 years ago, I travelled on the assumption that I was coming from one of the freest countries in the world to one of the least free. I don’t think I was wrong then, but I would certainly be wrong now. Today, the people of East Germany are much less spied upon than the people of Britain...An over-mighty executive, authoritarian busybody instincts at all levels of government, a political culture of “commonsense” bureaucratic judgments, rather than codified rights protected by supreme courts and, until recently, a gung-ho press forever calling for “something to be done”: this fateful combination has made Britain a dark outrider among liberal democracies. The birthplace of laissez-faire liberalism has morphed into the database state. We have more CCTV cameras than anyone. We have the largest DNA database anywhere. Plans are far advanced to centralise all our medical records and introduce the most elaborate biometric ID cards in the world. All this from a government which, having collected so much data on us, goes around losing it like a late-night drunk spreading the contents of his pockets down the street…

. It’s compact, powerful stuff - worth a full read.

He attracts a lot deal of comment, mostly less abusive than other CommentisFree pieces. David Moss asks what the IPS actually does all day:

In any normal business, if you tried to convince the board to market a product you can’t describe to people you cannot name for reasons which, after six years, you still can’t list, you would be ignored. Imagine what the Dragons in the Den would do to IPS if they turned up to make a presentation.

David has done an open letter to get Gordon Brown off the hook arguing that mobile phones already provide the functionality we need from ID cards. He concludes:

The government cannot disregard reality. Reality is daily attracting ridicule to the NIS and daily destroying confidence in the government. The NIS cannot achieve its objectives. It cannot help to fight crime and terrorism or to deliver more efficient public services. Meanwhile, thanks to the global mobile phone network, we already have a superior ID card scheme anyway, so we don’t need the NIS – that is the government’s escape route from mirage and back to reality.

 

28 Jan 2008

HMRC’s two-tier privacy system

If government didn’t see the importance of protecting people’s personal data, you could call it stupid. But they’re not stupid at all - they’re very clever.  Just as yes Minister spelt out over and over again 20 years ago, they’re very clever indeed, and more amoral and cynical than one would believe possible.

That’s the conclusion I take from the revelation that, as The Times put it,

HM Revenue and Customs has set up a secret “two tier” security system for online tax records giving extra protection to a small group of MPs, royals and other VIPs...the HMRC admitted that 29m ordinary taxpayers did not benefit from the same high levels of protection as MPs and other members of a small elite.

It’s not that they don’t understand that protecting people’s data is important. They just don’t care much about hoi polloi, as long as we’re productive economic units and pay our taxes. More anon. 

 

10 Jan 2008

More nitwittery (our refs devpolice/toddler and NHSLondon/HIVcancer); Privacy wibbi

The ever-alert HJ Affleck points out the latest nitwittery episodes (from the Beeb): a confidential police document about a vulnerable toddler is found in a street in Cornwall. and hundreds of documents containing HIV and cancer test results are found on a street in south-west London.

We don’t want Schadenfreude at the expense of public servants who didn’t mean to do a bad thing. We want the evidence to achieve irresistible critical mass. Central Whitehall advocates of e-government, latterly called “transformational” government, think they can amass personal data with impunity and that to share data is a benefit almost in itself. While they refuse to engage with common sense from the outside they’ll plough on inexorably until evidence to the contrary is utterly irresistible. So it’s helpful to see it pile up, and it will continue to do so.

Wibbi the Cabinet Office advocated maximal anonymity and privacy-enhancing technologies. And adherence to the letter of the human rights act would be a good start: wibbi the Cabinet Office radiated its spirit. 

 

07 Jan 2008

Nitwit learns the seriousness of data nitwittery

Marvellous story from the Beeb:

TV presenter Jeremy Clarkson has lost money after publishing his bank details in his newspaper column. The Top Gear host revealed his account numbers after rubbishing the furore over the loss of 25 million people’s personal details on two computer discs. He wanted to prove the story was a fuss about nothing. But Clarkson admitted he was “wrong” after he discovered a reader had used the details to create a £500 direct debit to the charity Diabetes UK.

In his own inimitable manner he describes his process of enlightenment. Before, it’s very “nothing to fear”

“All you’ll be able to do with them is put money into my account. Not take it out. Honestly, I’ve never known such a palaver about nothing,”

After, it’s sadder wiser bunny

“I opened my bank statement this morning to find out that someone has set up a direct debit which automatically takes £500 from my account,” ...Clarkson now says of the case: “Contrary to what I said at the time, we must go after the idiots who lost the discs and stick cocktail sticks in their eyes until they beg for mercy.”

I expect we’ll see a similar process of enlightenment eventually among Ministers, political advisers, Whitehall perm secs and chief execs. Eventually even the CIOs will get it.

 

04 Jan 2008

Justice Committee, Info Commissioner, Dr Walport, and CST try to bring sanity to the nitwittery

The House of Commons Justice committee has published a protection of public data report. As PA puts it

Officials in the public and private sectors should face criminal charges if they put people’s data security at risk through carelessness or impropriety, an influential group of MPs has said.

Managers should also be obliged to report losses of data and other breaches to the Government’s information watchdog...The MPs warned that the massive HMRC breach was not an “isolated example”, and there was evidence of a “widespread problem within Government relating to establishing systems for data protection and operating them adequately"..."There is currently no criminal offence of a data controller (such as a private business or a Government department) intentionally or recklessly disclosing personal information,” the MPs wrote..."Furthermore, the current criminal offences only cover individuals and non-Governmental bodies or organisations; Government departments or agencies cannot be held criminally responsible for data protection breaches.”

It came out on a quiet news dayso they got their headlines. But the report also reminds us of some earlier work that I had missd or forgotten. This includes the CST report Better use of personal information: opportunities and risks (2005) which was co-authored by Dr Mark Walport who is now workig with the Information Commissioner on the PM’s review of data protection. About Transformational government the 2005 CST report said

Concerns about invasion of privacy, accountability and government’s ability to deliver the benefits of data-sharing need to be at the heart of an open dialogue. The key here is trust.  Without an open dialogue on all the implications of better linkages between, and access to, personal datasets, there is a risk that the public will be mistrustful of government’s actions.  At the same time, there is a great risk that technology will drive these developments forward in an uncontrolled way. It is essential to do this properly, with appropriate controls, rather than allow the changes solely to be driven by technology. Through extensive engagement with the public and civil society groups, government needs to put regulatory and governance frameworks in place that minimise and manage the risks, while ensuring that the benefits are delivered. Without this intervention, the risks will not be controlled but nor will the potential benefits be realised.

 

23 Dec 2007

More nitwittery: our ref NHS/nine trusts/zillions of health records

Oh nuts. Fat wadges of patient data have gone missing, report the Beeb and the Sunday Mirror which said

Sensitive details about adults and children were lost in 10 incidents at NINE separate NHS Trusts. The revelation is the latest twist in the data crisis besetting Gordon Brown’s Government.

Health Secretary Alan Johnson’s department last night confirmed details - kept on computer discs or memory sticks - had gone missing. But the Department of Health refused to reveal how many patients were involved or the exact nature of the blunders.

Cases include the loss of a CD holding 160,000 children’s names and addresses by a Trust in East London and the loss of 244 cancer patients’ details by the Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells health trust in Kent.

In one case, in Norfolk and Norwich, medical papers on patients with lung, breast and colon cancer were dumped in a wheelie bin.

It offers speculative comment to the effect these cases add up to the worst data breach so far, that it’s the tip of the iceberg given what procedures in the NHS are like, and that it puts the NHS spine project at risk. (They mean at risk of being busted as socially unacceptable. It has been evidently very much at risk for some years now).

 

18 Dec 2007

Data nitwittery: our ref HMRC/Cardiff/6500

The “lost data” headlines keep coming with bewildering speed (meticulously recorded by ORG). From the Beeb today:

Revenue loses 6,500 people’s data

The personal details of 6,500 customers belonging to a pension firm have been lost at an office of HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) in Cardiff. Names, addresses, date of births, national insurance numbers and pension contributions were included on a data cartridge which has been lost.

It had been sent by courier in September from Countrywide Assured.

The HMRC has apologised about its seventh such loss of data and has told the Information Commissioner. A spokesman said it was “unlikely” the information could be accessed by anyone unauthorised and said it was treating the incident “extremely seriously”.

It seems this is one of the seven incidents reported to the Information Commissioner which Dave Hartnell mentioned to the Treasury Select Cttee last week. The isolated incidents are coming out so thick and fast we cant keep track of them.

One point is we don’t want a collapse in public-servant morale. What we do want is a deep recognition that the lackadaisical treatment of data which people are forced to reveal is, well far from ideal. And that there’s a socking great set of Wibbies they’d better to get to grips with sharpish:

- apply a principle of maximal anonymity
- use privacy-enhancing technologies
- treat people’s personal details as if it were as valuable as cash or as dangerous as plutonium
- relearn empathy and respect, and remember as the former PM once said that government is the servant and not the master

 

17 Dec 2007

Pearson/DSA nitwittery: some more scraps

There’s a bit more in the FT about the company responsible for the latest data-nitwittery episode (as you might expect, given it’s a sister company in the same Pearson group)

Pearson said the data was held in Iowa because that is the company’s world wide data centre for Pearson Shared Services, which supports subsidiaries that include Pearson Vue, a company with a global network of test centres.

The company’s contract with the agency stipulated that the data would be stored there, a spokesman said. The lost disk drive was a backup of data made for disaster recovery purposes. It had been transferred to another facility in Minnesota for storage before being returned to Iowa.

 

“The government misses the point on Poynter”

In the first stage of his review for the Chancellor Kieron Poynter makes these urgent recommendations (already carried out):

- A reminder to all staff from the Chairman of HMRC of the importance of data security with some specific guidance;
- The appointment of a senior official to the new post of Director of Data Security;
- The appointment of Data Guardians in each area of HMRC;
- The imposition of a complete ban on the transfer of bulk data onto removable media without adequate security protection such as encryption;
- The disabling of the download function on all personal and laptop computers in use across HMRC to prevent their use to download data onto removable media.
- The utilisation of secure couriers and appropriate tamper proof packaging in the transport of bulk data stored on removable media.

Meanwhile the Met Police and the IPCC are investigating HMRC, and the NAO is doing its own investigation.

I think I heard Ruth Kelly on Radio 5 saying

People want their data shared

(to which Peter the grumpy golfer retorted “Well not like this they don’t").

It took the government three days to publish Poynter’s six-pager. Within hours (or was it minutes?) it got a response from FIPR, which restates the points it has been making for years. From their press release:

The Government misses the point on Poynter
--------------------------------------------

The Foundation for Information Policy Research (FIPR) believes that the Government’s response to the interim Poynter report shows that they just don’t understand what has gone wrong. Their refusal to abandon the headlong rush towards Transformational Government—the enormous centralised databases being built to regulate every walk of life—is not just pig-headed but profoundly mistaken.

Both Alasdair Darling, commenting on the HMRC fiasco, and Ruth Kelly, telling the House about the loss of 3 million people’s personal information, told us that once `lessons have been learned’ and `procedures tightened’ the march to ever-larger database systems will continue.

Before Transformational Government came along, only small amounts of data were lost—but as the new databases cover the whole population, everyone’s affected now, not just a few unlucky people.

Transformational Government means putting all of the eggs into one basket and it is creating:

* The multi-billion pound identity card scheme, to hold data on the whole population

* The National Health spine, which will make everyone’s health records available for browsing by a million NHS workers

* ContactPoint which will record details on every child in England, with details of their parents, carers and indicators of whether they
have any contact with social services. Three hundred thousand people can look that information up.

* A universal pensioner’s bus pass scheme which will hold the data on 17 million people, and in principle will let any bus driver learn
your age and address—when all that it should record is an entitlement to free travel.

Ross Anderson, Chair of FIPR and Professor of Security Engineering at the University of Cambridge said, “the Government believes that you can build secure databases and let hundreds of thousands of people access them. This is nonsense—we just don’t know how to build such systems and perhaps we never will. The correct way to design such systems is to localise the data, in a school, in your local GP practice.  That way when there is a compromise because of a technical failure or a dishonest user then the damage is limited.

“You can have security, or functionality, or scale—you can even have any two of these. But you can’t have all three, and the Government will eventually be forced to admit this. In the meantime, billions of pounds are being wasted on gigantic systems projects that usually don’t work, and that place citizens’ privacy and safety at risk when they do.”

Richard Clayton, FIPR Treasuer said, “Personal data ought to be handled as if it were little pellets of plutonium—kept in secure containers, handled as seldom as possible, and escorted whenever it has to travel. Should it get out into the environment it will be a danger for years to come. Putting it into one huge pile is really asking for trouble.  The Government needs to completely rethink its approach and abandon its Transformational Government disaster.”

If you’re not a Friend of FIPR yet you can join here. For £25 you get a year of FIPR Alerts plus a warm feeling (or a minute or two of Kieron Poynter’s time). FIPR is cheaper than ORG at £60 which might be enough to have a quick cup of tea with Kieron Poynter, but FIPR and PWC dont give you the professional staff with lovely ponytails.

It’d be great value if a good sprinkling of government IT professionals joined both FIPR and ORG at taxpayers’ expense. 

 
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