03 Jul 2009

Do we need identity cards, and soon?

We need to be able to authenticate ourselves online. The Government’s Identity Card scheme is in part an attempt to do this, and it’s really bad, but we do need some sort of system that offers more than traditional proofs of identity.

I’ve just read Alan Johnson’s article at Comment Is Free. Other than to say that it’s the same old Home Office nonsense, I shan’t deconstruct it further—Longrider has already done that with characteristic style (NSFW). What I’m more interested in is the sentiment expressed by Johnson’s headline: “We need Identity Cards, and soon”. While it is wrong, it does hint at a real problem, and one which has not been convincingly solved.

 

30 Jun 2009

Alan Johnson scraps compulsory ID Cards

Hurrah! In a step forwards for common sense and a step backward for the Benighted ID Scheme they’ve just scrapped compulsory ID Cards, and abandoned the airside workers scheme (Telegraph - Ian spotted it first)

He said the cards will now only be issued to Britons on a voluntary basis meaning no one will ever be forced to have one, effectively paving the way for the scheme to be scrapped altogether.

A pilot scheme for airside workers, which marked the first attempt at making the £4.9 billion programme compulsory for British nationals has been abandoned.

Mr Johnson even admitted the suggestion the cards would help combat terrorism was exaggerated as he accepted the Government should never have allowed “the perception to go around that they were a panacea for terrorism”.

Instead, the Home Office is now concentrating on the cards being useful for youngsters to prove their age when going in to pubs.

So let us rehearse the dance of the intellectual pygmies!

 

ID Cards: Beginning of the End?

According to this report, Alan Johnson is abolishing compulsory ID Cards, starting with “air-side” airport workers.

As always, the precise detail of this decision is crucial. But let’s hope that this decision marks the beginning of the end of the crazy ID project which has wasted so much money and so much valuable talent.

Let’s hope that the government soon sees sense over the other IPS projects and other intrusive government databases.

 

29 Jun 2009

Safeguarding your identity hits the blogosphere

Philip Virgo likes the new IPS policy which is called Safeguarding your identity. I’m not so sure:

Philip: It’s late and I havent read it carefully. But the whole statement is built on the assumption that goverment should be our identity provider for online services.

But I think there’s a strong case to be made that it should not. It concentrates too much power.

Our personal data is our own, and it’s valuable. We dont want it to become concentrated in government, out of our control.

We want a competitive market in user-friendly and flexible online identity provision services. This policy is about coercion, not choice. It says its about empowerment, but it’s not.

Far better to say:

“People need to access stuff online, including government services. Therefore we’re announcing that from today we’ll accept a range of independent identifiers for all our various services. But if you want a sensitive service it’ll need to be a secure one.

“As new ID services become available we’ll be happy to add them to the list of accredited services.”

 

28 Jun 2009

“Why we, not government, must own our own data”

Bang. That makes a hat-trick of Ideal-Government agenda nails hit on the head by Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition this week. Liam Maxwell’s CPS pamphlet ‘It’s ours - Why we, not government, must own our data” is a must-read. And a tonic.

Essentially it’s a long-overdue VRM manifesto for government IT, which also places a lot of emphasis on design. We’ve always felt that better design and (from the moment Adriana first introduced me to it in 2007) VRM will set this lot straight faster than anything else.

As Maxwell sets it out:

A clear choice is emerging for the future of government IT:

− Either to continue with the Transformational Government
agenda. This relies on the State holding, in the words of the
Treasury’s adviser, a “deep truth about the citizen, based
on their behaviour, experiences, beliefs, needs and rights”,
with huge centralised databases directing public services
to the point of need (as judged by the State).

− Or to abandon expensive and failing centralised IT
projects and yield control of personal information to
individual citizens. This is the approach that has been
increasingly effective in the private sector.

At Ctrl-Shift we look for the transformation of Traditional Customer Information (TCI) when it is joined by Volunteered Personal Information (VPI). This is made possible by a VRM utility such as Mydex. The organisation-centric communications paradigm is joined, and hugely enhanced, by the pesonal communications paradigm of VRM.

The paper is very strong on the question of design, and the fact that user-centric design is spoken of but not practised.

Of course there are nits to pick. VRM is far from yet proven in the private sector, which has a great deal to answer for in its shortcomings of how it handles personal data just as government does. I don’t think you can do away with the central databases entirely or promise to halve government IT spend, as Maxwell suggests.

Take the example of UK education, which spends around £3bn a year on IT. Almost all of that is spent through schools, further and higher-education. The whiteboards, the learning materials and coursework, the admin systems - all are largely unaffected by VRM. It’s at the centre where VRM does its detoxing work: the national databases of children, learners, obesity and attendance records. The data sharing plans. This is what pours concrete into the heart of our relationship with the state - a relationship which is meant to serve us and offer us choice and personalisation. But concrete is cheap. These cost at most a couple of hundred million a year. We wont save much money on IT by inviting learners to start to use a personal portable education record, especially if we still need most of the the central systems.

What we will do is start to release immense value. Learner-driven education can be far more flexible and adaptive, and support people through lifelong learning far better than education administered by central databases of Traditional Customer Information. It could cut a staggering amount of waste, creating a user-driven “just in time” education service.

So we can’t halve IT spend. But we can release far more value than that medium term.

It’s wonderful to have VRM squarely on the UK government agenda. I recall a similarly forward-looking pamphlet from another Liam in 1996 - Liam Byrne. Look what happened to him. Now, after the Neville-Jones and Cameron speeches this looks like co-ordinated action. It’s been a good week.

 

26 Jun 2009

David Cameron on surveillance, accountability and empowerment with information

[updated] Here’s a socking great Tweet from David Cameron to Imperial College. He lambasts control state Britain, ID cards, ContactPoint, RIPA and the surveillance state. These things are, as we have said many times, far form Ideal. But he goes on speak with some conviction and some detail on a positive agenda of transparency, accountabiliy and personal empowerment.

Information is power - because information allows people to hold the powerful to account.  This has never been more true than today, in the information age. The internet is an amazing pollinator, spreading ideas and information all over the globe in minutes. It turns lonely fights into mass campaigns; transforms moans into movements; excites the attention of hundreds, thousands, millions of people and stirs them to action.  And constantly accelerating technology makes information infinitely more powerful.

We see the power of this information in Iran. Every time the Iranian state has tried to choke the flow of information to dampen down the protests, people have turned to technology to share and access information.  When the state cut off text messages to stop people coordinating their protests, the protesters switched to social media like Twitter and Facebook.  When foreign journalists had their visas taken off them, people on the streets started uploading video clips onto YouTube.  And when the government tried to monitor internet traffic and ban popular websites, people outside Iran set up proxy internet servers so Iranians could continue to access information anonymously.

He talks of a wide range of public data:

We’re going to set this data free.  In the first year of the next Conservative Government, we will find the most useful information in twenty different areas ranging from information about the NHS to information about schools and road traffic and publish it so people can use it. This information will be published proactively and regularly - and in a standardised format so that it can be ‘mashed up’ and interacted with. What’s more, because there is no complete list that can tell us exactly what data the government collects, we will create a new ‘right to data’ so that further datasets can be requested by the public.

There’s a danger this strictly non-partisan blog may start to appear to favour Punch over Judy here (I feel Tom Watson looking over my shoulder as I sit). Full credit for the Power of Information work, full stop. But the personal data agenda is so wrong. The authoritarian, expensive and unimaginative policies we’ve critcised as far from Ideal for five years are all dreamt up under Labour, and defended - often in an unimpressive and even insulting manner - by Labour ministers whose thinking seems solidified in centralised bureaucratic concrete. They’re bad listeners at the top of government.

The LibDems and Greens have always been pretty cool on this stuff, but now it’s a concerted and co-ordinated burst of Tory Wibbies. We can just sit here and tag them “We told you so”. Some very good people must be advising the Tories (it’s not me). And they’re listening.

I do wonder, as a postscript, what good loyal Labours and LibDems who “get it” make of recent speeches by Pauline Neville-Jones and David Cameron. Hey, even my local MP Jeremy Hunt is at it. Does the desire to see the right thing done in the information age transcend visceral party loyalty?

 

The government “does not recognise danger posed by surveillance” - Lords

The Lords’ Constitution Committee has given its verdict on the government response to its report Surveillance: Citizens and the State

we are disappointed that the Government’s response does not fully appreciate the danger posed by surveillance to privacy and the relationship between individuals and the state. We regret that the Government have not agreed to a number of important recommendations which sought to assist the executive in promoting the responsible and proper use of data processing, including data sharing, together with other modes of surveillance.

Man, this penny is going to drop soon…

 

24 Jun 2009

“The individual is the rightful owner of personal information”

Cracking speech by Dame Pauline Neville-Jones. She concludes:

As I made clear at the start, the individual is the rightful owner of personal information and the state is merely possessor and should behave as a responsible custodian.  We need to roll back the advance of Big Brother and restore this fundamental right of our citizens.  Restoring privacy today must mean a clear statement on the part of those who have custody of personal information of their purpose in retaining it and of their commitment to its proper management.  This will necessarily involve a review of most of the government’s centralised databases, their use and access to them regulated.  It leads to the unavoidable conclusion that that the Information Commissioner should emerge as one of the important offices of state in the twenty first century.

Right on, Dame Pauline. But take the next step: the individual is also the right point of integration for personal data. That’s how to deliver personalised services in a flexible, just, legal and cost-effective way.

 

Putting government data online by TBL

Nice Tim Berners-Lee note about putting government data online, tweeted by the director of digitla engagement.

 

22 Jun 2009

Gateway reviews to be published

Hurrah! It looks as if Richard Thomas is going out with a bang. And well done Computer Weekly

The information commissioner has ordered the opening of confidential files on a wide range of high-risk IT projects, including the ID cards scheme, joined up police intelligence systems and the NHS National Programme for IT (NPfIT). It is the most far-reaching decision under the Freedom of Information Act for government IT.

The key quote for me is Thomas’ rejection of the reasons for secrecy

interviewees should meet the “high standards of professionalism that their positions demand”.

Damn right. 

 

21 Jun 2009

and another one: our private briefing to Sir James Crosby

While digging out old presentations I found this private briefing to (the xxxxx-xxxxxxxxxxx) Sir James Crosby who at the time was advising Gordon Brown about ID management.

private briefing for Sir James Crosby by William Heath
View more OpenOffice presentations from William Heath.

The presentation set out the communications problems surrounding the ID debate so far, and showed how narrow a “market” there was for what the Home Office was offering once one segmented the market with any clarity. To this day I dont believe any such thinking ever went into the Home Office’s business case.

I got the impression Sir James realised it was a terrible idea that government should do this. So he decided that banks should do it, without realising that that was also a terrible idea. His ideas were so blunt and radical they were buried I think for a couple of years (someone may recall more precisely). All credit to him for trying to break the Groupthink stranglehold. But low marks for suggesting an equally inappropriate alternative, and a self-serving one at that. Right, that’s enough old presentations for tonight.

 

Original IdealGov presentation restored

A distinguished Twitterer points out that the link to the original IdealGov presentation I did in Nov 2004 to Ian Watmore, then UK government CIO, is broken. So I’ve dusted down an old PC, found the original, and put it up on Slideshare:

IdealGov ideas for Gov CIO Nov 2004
View more OpenOffice presentations from William Heath.

The point we were Twittering about was that Tom Watson asked if Kate Lundy was the most progressive politician in the world. I felt her three pillars of open government:

* Citizen-centric services
* Open and transparent government
* Innovation facilitation

published in June 2009 were excellent, but not dissimilar to the three themes that IdealGov readers brainstormed in mid 2004:

- co-design with users
- build a foundation of trust
- quick win suggestions

Our phrasing goes a bit deeper, because there’s a lot more to trust than transparency, especially when you consider the crucial issues of handling personal data. And there’s a great deal more to co-creation than being user-centric. A laser-guided missile can be user-centric.

So this goes cheerfully in the “We told you so” category which is becoming over-used. I’ better get the old files restored and the whole blog reassembled on Wordpress (know anyone reliable who’s up for that?) I much preferred Stephen Young of PlatformOne’s original design. Meanwhile thank heavens that old computers sometimes still work, and for Slideshare.

 

20 Jun 2009

Article 29 working party on proposed amendments to EU e-privacy directive

My FIPR colleague Douwe Korff points out the opinion of the article 29 working party on proposed amendments to the e-privacy directive (Opinion 1/2009 of 10 february 2009, WP159)…

 

19 Jun 2009

Jerry Fishenden on how we “force quit” the Benighted ID Scheme

Oh hurrah. Jerry “The Thunderer” Fishenden is a free man. His NTOUK blog no longer refers to Microsoft UK’s national technical officer, but to Jerry’s own New Technological Observations from UK perspective.

He’s also serving up it with hot salsa in The Register. Topic One: the Benighted ID Card Scheme:

UK Identity Card 1.0 is in deep trouble. It’s running late, and if the Conservative Party wins next year’s election it’ll be scrapped. Its original architect has changed his mind, and even some Cabinet members are starting to see it as a needless expense. But if we pull the plug, what then?

The cards may go away, but the issue won’t. Problems associated with identity, privacy and security will remain burning issues facing both the technology industry and wider society. But the irony is that the UK is well placed to develop a model identity framework for the 21st Century. Unlike many other countries, we don’t have the problems of any existing, legacy national identity scheme to encumber us. We have a clean slate. We could have got this right and shown the art of the possible.

Read the whole thing.

Jerry is a former public-service IT director, former officer of da House, well connected politically and brainier and more creative than most people you come across in a lifetime. He’s always been pretty to the point. Now the constraints of corporate-speak are cast aside I’m looking forward to many more instalments.

This first issue he hits is right on the money. His former employer (along with BT and very few others) have consistently talked sense on it. The axis of Home Office-Intellect is locking down big contracts for bad systems destined for technical, social and political failure. But the answers have long been there, if only people were to ask the right questions.

So let’s hit Control-Alt-Delete on the current system and get that reboot started.

Great start Jerry - thanks.

 

18 Jun 2009

Twitterverse turns green re Iran

reposted from williamheath.net:

Following the example of the Iranian football team the Twitterverse is turning green. What do the Mullahs make of that I wonder? Tweeting against fundamentalism and old-fashioned cockocracy. When I went into the sector in 1982 nobody told me that mixing government and IT would end up with a global community tickling dictatorships to death.

I find this post hard to tag. It’s not what we meant by “Greener government IT”. And “We told you so” isn’t right: we didn’t!

 
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Ideal Government

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