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Ladies and Gentlemen: My name is Bonar Neville-Kingdom. I’m very pleased to be invited to speak to you today at Opentech in my capacity as Her Majesty’s most senior civil servant concerned with Information and Communication Technologies (or “ICTs"). I am also, as you probably know, the Prime Minister’s data-sharing czar. I sit at the confluence of the flows of shared personal data around Whitehall and therefore “own” all the aggregated personal data held by government.

I’ve been asked to say a few words today about the benefits of how government uses Opentech and ICTs to provide Intercept Modernisation, Personalised Services, and Safeguarding your Identity.

Perhaps an appropriate starting point is my own inspiration in this work: the divinely-inspired words of the poet Rumi when he speaks of his love of the Almighty, the compassionate, the all-seeing, the all-knowing and all protecting.

I share these words with you today because I think we can say, without immodesty, that something of the sublime spirit of his poetry is reincarnated in our policies for intercept modernisation, for Transformational Government and for Safeguarding your identity.

Intercept Modernisation is merely a plan to maintain the UK’s lawful intercept capabilities in an ever more dangerous world. Devised by a team working under myself, it will ensure our capability lawfully to intercept and exploit data when fighting crime, terrorism and other social abnormalities is not lost. We achive this by the deep inspection of packets. Working with our private sector partners including Serco and PHORM, the project is making excellent progress, and will prove exceptional value for money.

Transformational Government is the way that we deliver personalised services to every man woman and child. We do this by joining up our central holdings of personal data. The Prime Minister has this week announced a legal right for every citizen to have their full medical record uploaded to the central database, with compensation if this is found not to be the case. Similar principles will apply to pupils, to drivers, and to every other aspect of our lives.

Finally I’d like to say a word about Safeguarding your identity which from this week brings our identity policy into the C21st. It is all about empowering people to use the identity government issues them in ways which benefit them and society. Government clearly holds the central role in enabling that process, and we must have a transparent and consistent approach to safeguarding identity information, including online services.

Every Child Matters, Ladies and Gentlemen. And so too does every patient, every personal assistant and every driver. Transformational Government, Intercept Modernisation and Safeguarding your identity make these principles manifest. They are, to conclude, the service which we in Whitehall humbly offer to you all.

To the classicists among you I might say they are both the sine qua non, and the nec plus ultra of a stable and prosperous Britain. Or again, to use a metaphor from the very heart of our Christian Western culture these ICT policies emanate as the Three in One and the One in Three.

The world looks with envy and admiration upon what we have been able to achieve with our Opentech in this country. Indeed my driver awaits to take me to Sunningdale for a workshop with senior Iranian and Chinese delegates who wish to emulate some of our success stories. This is a promising sign for British exports and British jobs.

Ladies and Gentlemen – on that note may I thank you for your kind invitation and – if might say so myself – your rapt attention. I wish you all a very good day.

ENDS

You can now join Sir Bonar on Facebook and on Twitter

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.

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!

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.

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.”

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.

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?

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…

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.