Robin Wilton's esoterica

I don't like telesales 'cold calls'. I dislike them when there's a human being on the other end, I dislike them even more when they are 'robocalls' (where a human being only gets put on at the other end if I pick up), and I'll turn the antipathy up another few notches if it's a 'silent robocall'... the kind Barclays have just been fined for, where the robocall gets put through, but all the telesellers are busy, so no-one actually bothers to call the punter. It's the telephonic equivalent of ringing the doorbell and running away.

Now, bad as telesales calls are, I can imagine worse kinds. For instance, imagine getting cold-called, but by a political campaign firm; then imagine that you get a political campaign cold-call consisting entirely of negative spin about 'the other guy', rather than positive stuff about the campaigner in question. That's just bound to make a great, convincing impression, isn't it? I mean, if someone did that to me, I'm sure I'd switch my vote to the cold-calling critic without a moment's hesitation.

No?

I didn't think so.

The Home Secretary's announcement of plans to increase the capacity for interception and retention of all forms of electronic communication records has - as one might expect - prompted a wave of articles in which the words "massive database" and "Orwellian" are de rigueur.

Whether or not I end up resorting to those terms, there are at least two things about the announcement which concern me. Both are reported in the BBC article linked to above.

The first is alluded to by Lord Carlile (a QC, Liberal Democrat peer and also the government's independent adviser on terrorist legislation), when he says that ""The raw idea of simply handing over all this information to any government, however benign, and sticking it in an electronic warehouse is an awful idea if there are not very strict controls about it." [my italics]

I suspect that what he meant was that it is an awful idea in the "all your eggs in one basket" sense, and that by "strict controls" he meant defences to keep unauthorised users out. However, experience suggests that the greater risk actually arises out of authorised access requests - and that these are much harder to control effectively. I have had more than one conversation with data controllers in large organisations which went something like this:

"Oh, yes... we've had Section 29 requests from the police. Sometimes I just can't believe what they think they can ask for. I've made myself quite unpopular a few times by refusing an inappropriate request and telling them to go away and come back when they can do it properly. Thank goodness the request came to me, and didn't just land on the desk of someone who hadn't had any DPA training - I mean, a junior member of staff probably wouldn't have the nerve to say "no" to the police, and we could have ended up breaking the law".

Section 29 is the part of the Data Protection Act (DPA) which allows a data controller to disclose a third party's data for law enforcement purposes... but it is not a blanket exemption from applying the Act: for instance, it does not give the data controller permission to disclose data in response to a 'fishing' request (that is, a non-specific request such as 'tell me the details of all your employees who live in Middletown').

The same data controllers often then go on to say things like this:

"In the end, I had to go to the police and say 'look, if your people don't use Section 29 properly it just wastes our time and theirs; let's get some proper processes sorted out, so that you've got some trained, nominated people in place who can contact trained, nominated people in our organisation, and then we'll know it's being done right. We may still have to say no occasionally, but you'll know that you're getting a considered response, and we'll know we're only getting qualified, legitimate requests for access'. These days it all works pretty well... but it takes a lot of ongoing effort and training to make sure our people are kept up to speed - and the volume of requests certainly isn't going down."

The picture which emerges is one where technology (authentication, authorisation, access control, etc.) plays an important but only partial role. The larger, more difficult and more expensive part is creating a substainable culture of awareness, expertise and good practice. In the absence of that, you can throw all the technology you like at the problem and still fail to meet the real objective.

The Home Secretary says she wants to legislate, but only after a period of consultation. The important question is: if that's the message, will she want to hear it?

The second aspect which concerns me is one of the examples she cites to justify this increase in surveillance capability. She says

"If [the way in which we intercept communications and collect communications data] does not [change,] we will lose this vital capability that we currently have and that, to a certain extent, we all take for granted. The capability that enabled us to convict Ian Huntley for the Soham murders..."...

I read that a couple of times and then went searching for anything which explained how communications interception contributed to Ian Huntley's arrest. After all, what that case is perhaps most notorious for is the failure of different law enforcement agencies to make effective use of information which they already had; the Bichard Inquiry was abundantly clear on that principle. Eventually I found mention (on the ever-incisive Spy Blog, here) of three relevant factors:

• Ian Huntley's girlfriend, Maxine Carr, said she was with Huntley in Soham on the evening when his two victims went missing. According to the phone records, her phone was used in Grimsby at the time, thus undermining the credibility of her statement and - by implication - his alibi.
  
• Phone records were also used to trace the last known mobile phone mast with a connection to the handset of one of the two murdered girls, Jessica Chapman; however, as the Spy Blog post indicates, there appears to be at least five miles-worth of room for doubt about the accuracy of that information as an indicator of exactly where the phone itself was at that time.
• This data was retrieved and used within two weeks of the crime - which raises the question of whether it is proportionate to legislate for such data to be retained for two years.

Hmm. Bank Board Members must be quaking in their Lobbs. Gordon Brown has said he is "angry" about irresponsible risk-taking and excessive bonuses among those who run our financial institutions. We have been led to expect that any bailout of failing banks, using tax-payers' money, will have strings attached. So what might the small print look like?

Here's an example, from the Investor and Media Relations page of LloydsTSB, one of three banks which has been 'told it must have additional capital if it is to access government-backed sources of liquidity':

Remuneration of Board Directors

o Although they will be entitled to take cash as an alternative, Lloyds TSB
will ask executive directors to receive their 2008 bonus entitlement in
Lloyds TSB shares. These will be subject to a restriction on sale until
December 2009.

o Going forward, for the merged group, in addition to complying with the
ABI industry best practice code, remuneration will reflect long term value
creation and take account of risk. Reward for Board Members will take
into account internal relative compensation packages and perceived
fairness in the current economic climate.

o No rewards for failure: where a Board Member loses the confidence of
the Board, they should be able to be dismissed at a cost that is
reasonable and perceived as fair.

o Commitment to FSA Code on Risk Based Remuneration

Thank goodness Gordon is only 'angry'. If he'd been really furious, we might have seen something punitive.

I heard on the lunchtime news today that Gordon Brown is to press for a complete overhaul of the governance system for the global banking system. One question this raises, given the current state of our own domestic banking system, is whether anyone will rush to take the advice of someone who, as Chancellor, presided over its governance for the last decade. Presumably Mr Brown will be recommending that, if and when crises arise, governments and regulators should act in concert, not in conflict.

Unfortunately,  there again, his advice may not be entirely welcome: there has also been quite a bit of media coverage recently of Mr Brown's reaction to the Icelandic banking crisis... a web search on the following will point you towards further reading: "Anti-terrorism, Crime and Security Act 2001, Iceland".

You may be wondering what the Anti-terrorism, Crime and Security Act has to do with Icelandic banks... and so does much of the coverage. According to this article on the BBC site, the Act allows for foreign assets held in the UK to be frozen

'if the Treasury "reasonably believe" that "action to the detriment of the United Kingdom's economy (or part of it) has been or is likely to be taken by a person or persons, or action constituting a threat to the life or property of one or more nationals of the United Kingdom..."'  [here's a link to the relevant section of the Act]

The Icelanders are, needless to say, both bewildered and insulted that the step has not only been taken, but taken in a spirit of some acrimony and aggression, and under legal provisions which equate them to terrorists. Bear in mind that the ATCSA was passed a scant 3 months after the September 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center.

It's a salutory lesson illustrating the principle that, once a power is on the statue books, its use is governed by current expediency, and not by whatever motivation put it there in the first place.

That, in turn, is a sobering thought as the government sets out its plans for collection, on a massive scale, of internet, landline, mobile phone and email traffic data.

In a vote yesterday, peers rejected the government's proposals for 42-day detention without charge, by a majority of some 191 votes. There are currently 732 members of the House of Lords, the bulk split between Conservative (201), Labour (213) and Cross-bench (203) groups. The actual voting numbers were 309 against to 118 in favour.

So what happens next? Well, in principle the Lords can only delay the passage of a bill, not prevent it: if the House of Commons wants to do so, it can force a bill through even if that bill has been repeatedly voted down by the Lords. However, in practice, repeated rejection by the Lords usually leads to the bill being altered to make it more acceptable - or to the proposal being withdrawn altogether. That's what has happened in this case. The government has removed the 42-day proposal from the Counter-Terrorism Bill and re-drafted it as a separate one-pager, to be shelved in the Home Secretary's office and brought out again in case of an emergency.

Some of you may be wondering why they didn't just do that in the first place. After all, the proposal's past wouldn't lead one to expect anything other than a very rough ride. One earlier vote, on 9/11/2005, on a 90-day detention period was the occasion of Mr Blair's first defeat in the House of Commons, and most recently, the current bill only passed through the Commons by 9 votes. In that vote, 36 Labour MPs rebelled against their own whips, forcing the government to rely on the votes of 9 Democratic Unionist Party MPs. Both the Government and the DUP strenuously denied that any kind of a deal had been done to 'buy' their votes. For those of a more sceptical turn of mind, this Guardian article suggests some of the areas in which the interests of the DUP could have offered some leverage to anyone inclined to use it.

Even as late as last week, Gordon Brown was sticking to a hard line on the bill, maintaining that 'it was the right thing do to' in the face of advice from his own ministers, who were apparently warning that an attempt to force the bill through against the wish of the Lords would be "politically suicidal". As today's BBC article points out, among those advising against the bill were Lord Irving, Lord Falconer and Lord Goldsmith, the first two of whom have served as Lord Chancellor and the third as Attorney General - and presumably all three of them must have had a pretty clear idea of the prevailing sentiment among their... peers (no pun intended).

What of that shelved one-pager, then? The Home Secretary lambasted opponents of the original bill in the wake of its defeat, accusing them of ignoring the terrorist threat to public safety, and preferring to 'cross their fingers and hope for the best'. So if her dire warnings were to be justified, what would be the government's swiftest route to action? To exercise powers which are already on the statue books, or hold off on detaining anyone until the shelved bill can be dusted off and rushed through parliament.

In the face of that kind of logic, Nick Clegg, leader of the Liberal Democrats, described the failed proposal in these terms: "The push for 42 days' detention was more about ministers posturing and looking tough than it ever was about fighting terrorism."

He might think that. I, of course, couldn't possibly comment.

There's an old joke about being cautious when you see a light at the end of the tunnel... it could be an oncoming train. (There's another one which warns that it could be New Jersey, but that's not very charitable). I suppose it depends how optimistic you want to feel...

Apparently up to 1.7m people who have expressed some level of interest in joining the UK armed services have had their personal details go missing on a hard drive which had been on an EDS site, under a contract they have with the Ministry of Defence. According to the Armed Forces Minister, Bob Ainsworth, the data could include include details such as "next of kin details, passport and National Insurance numbers, drivers' licence and bank details and National Health Service number", for those individuals who got to the stage of completing an application form.(Incidentally, it's not clear at this stage whether these are the same people affected by this January's loss of a Royal Navy laptop containing details of 600,000 applicants to the Navy, Marines or RAF...).

Either way, age demographics being what they are, many of those applicants can probably console themselves with the thought that their details have already been compromised as a result of last year's HMRC data breach. If you recall, that exposed information relating to families drawing Child Benefit - an entitlement which ends when the child turns 16 (or 18 if they are in full-time education). Realistically, then, many young people of an age to be considering a career in the forces will have been in the age-group affected by the HMRC loss. Light, or oncoming train?

If there's any further scrap of consolation to offer this unlucky generation, it is that, although their banking details may have been compromised, those details are probably worth a lot less now than they were a few months ago. Light, or...?

As you have probably noticed, the proportion of public-sector related material on this blog has been creeping up somewhat, relative to the rest. That reflects the increasing amount of work I find myself doing in the areas of privacy and public policy.

With that in mind, it makes sense to add Bill Vass to my blogroll. Bill is the COO of Sun's Federal business unit, so he knows a lot of interesting stuff and talks to a lot of interesting people.

Another link between Bill and me is that Wayne Horkan has recently helped both of us 'clean up' the layout of our blogs. Those of you visiting esoterica should notice that it looks crisper now, and is more consistent across different browsers.

Thank you, Wayne!

Maple and shad-bush,

The garden's autumn colours

Recall Shakotan.

In the wake of the HMRC breach, you may remember that I described the questionable equation according to which the 'cost' of disclosing 25m unsecured records is more acceptable than the £5,000 it would apparently have cost to extract from those 25m the few hundred records which were all the Audit Commission actually wanted.

This reflects a couple of general truths about the current state of technology:

1 - in the absence of pressure to the contrary, it is now easier to store data than to destroy it (especially selectively); it is easier to share data than to compartmentalise it; it is easier to aggregate data than to segregate it; it is easier to visualise data than to conceal it.

2 - that 'pressure to the contrary' is in most cases non-technical. It's the governance we apply to data, the processes which control our use of data, the culture which determines whether we see data as an asset or a liability.

Bearing that in mind, you can revisit point 1 and substitute the word "cheaper" for the word "easier".

Yesterday the UK government announced its plan to allocate around £500bn to try to restore confidence in the global financial system; £50bn for share purchases in failing financial institutions, £250bn of guarantee funding for bank debt, £200bn in short-term loan provision by the Bank of England. This is in addition to £119bn already pumped into Northern Rock, and £14bn into Bradford and Bingley.

For comparison, as the chart in this BBC article illustrates, total annual public spending in the UK is $618bn, of which healthcare spending accounts for £111bn and education for £82bn.

One implication seems clear to me. The financial rescue plan cannot but create a massive deficit in the public account. Whatever the government's plans were for public spending over the coming years, the reality must surely be that public spending is in for a tight time. In that context, the pressure to reduce spending on information governance measures will be extreme, and the tendency will swing in favour of what is technologically easier and cheaper: aggregation, communication and retention of data - usually without the expensive luxury of being selective.

That, in turn, puts pressure on the technology community to redress the balance. We must do more to make the technology reduce the cost and effort of effective governance - and that is likely introduce new challenges of perspective, and of design philosophy.

That was the jab Gordon Brown aimed at David Cameron in the run-up to the Conservative Party conference. Cameron, of course, is far too well-mannered to respond by observing that 9 years in waiting did not seem to have prepared Gordon Brown terribly well for the top job. After all, here we are in the midst of an economic crisis, with families feeling the financial pinch, and high-street banks failing around us because of the dubious status of their mortgage loans.

I have to wonder, then, at the thought process which must have preceded Gordon Brown's decision to re-instate Peter Mandelson as a Cabinet Minister; Mandelson, you may recall, had to resign from the Blair cabinet 10 years ago because of the dubious status of his own mortgage loan (an undeclared £373,000 from the then Paymaster General, Geoffrey Robinson). He then had to resign a second time, in 2001, following allegations that he had improperly intervened in the passport application process for a wealthy donor to the Millennium Dome project Mandelson was running at the time.

The BBC's Radio Five Live today had an interview with Chris Patton (Lord Patton of Barnes), the former Conservative Cabinet Minister and last Governor of Hong Kong. At one point Patton remarked that Mr Mandelson might be "just the man to convince UK businesses that they need more regulation".

This being radio, it was quite impossible to see whether his tongue was in his cheek or not.

It may sound like a modern version of "rock, paper, scissors" - but actually it was just the shortest way I could come up with to express some strange anomalies in the way data breaches are handled. There's news today that a civil servant who left two classified documents on a train is to be charged under the Official Secrets Act.

According to this BBC article, the official concerned will be charged under Clause 8 (1), which runs as follows:

(1) Where a Crown servant or government contractor, by virtue of his position as such, has in his possession or under his control any document or other article which it would be an offence under any of the foregoing provisions of this Act for him to disclose without lawful authority he is guilty of an offence if—

(a) being a Crown servant, he retains the document or article contrary to his official duty; or

(b) being a government contractor, he fails to comply with an official direction for the return or disposal of the document or article,

or if he fails to take such care to prevent the unauthorised disclosure of the document or article as a person in his position may reasonably be expected to take.

In other words, leaving classified documents on a train is care-less. And that's official. The penalty for a guilty verdict under Clause 8.1 is summary conviction and a sentence not exceeding three months, or a fine. Incidentally, it looks as though the Official Secrets Act 1989 is now less strict in some respects than the current law in force. Clause 11 says that offences under Clause 8.1 are not arrestable offences; but I believe that the current government has since legislated to make all offences arrestable ones. As you will probably recall from previous posts, one side-effect of being nicked for an arrestable offence is that you can be required to contribute a DNA sample to the National DNA Database.

As it happens, the documents in this instance were apparently handed to the BBC by whoever found them, and thence to the police, who presumably returned them to the department in question. It's interesting, then, that under Clause 8.1 of the Act, there's no mention of presumed or actual damage - only of 'poor care-taking'. OK - you may say - as the BBC and the police can be considered unlikely to have passed copies to Al Qaeda, there may have been no actual damage. However, for a disclosure to be considered 'damaging' and therefore an offence under the Act, it is not necessary to prove actual damage.

According to Clause 1 (4) (b), a disclosure of information is damaging if "it is of information or a document or other article which is such that its unauthorised disclosure would be likely to cause such damage".

And there we come to the nub of it; despite public sector data breaches having hit the headlines with alarming frequency over the last couple of years, this is the first time I can remember the OSA being applied. Clause 5 is the interesting one here. Its title is "Information resulting from unauthorised disclosures or entrusted in confidence", and it runs:

"(1) Subsection (2) below applies where—

(a) any information, document or other article protected against disclosure by the foregoing provisions of this Act has come into a person’s possession as a result of having been—

(i) disclosed (whether to him or another) by a Crown servant or government contractor without lawful authority; or

(ii) entrusted to him by a Crown servant or government contractor on terms requiring it to be held in confidence or in circumstances in which the Crown servant or government contractor could reasonably expect that it would be so held;"

Given that this would seem to make the OSA applicable to a number of recent public sector data breaches, one has to wonder why it is only in the case of a classified paper document that it has been applied, and not in cases of the inappropriate disclosure of digital data.

A few decades ago, I was in the market for some cheap formal-wear. Thanks to some diligent, semi-random searching, I managed to find a morning tail-coat which was a perfect fit. For some reason, though, the same outfitter was quite unable to furnish me with trousers to match.

Admittedly, there was a tangled heap of remaindered trousers in the same closing down sale, but bizarrely, the remaindered coats and remaindered jackets seemed to cater for quite different body types. Search as I might, most of the trousers I unearthed seemed to cater for a 48-inch waist and a 24-inch inside leg. Not my ideal in any respect, I'm afraid... this blog isn't called 'racingsnake' for nothing.

Anyway, all this was brought to mind by the news that Mr and Mrs Brown have decided to donate their 'conference outfits' to charity. It's an interesting bit of spin. Time was, in the Blair era, when Labour were castigated for inordinate electioneering expenses on frivolities like hairdressing and designer suits. The problem is, it just doesn't seem credible to claim that Gordon has done the same. If he has, and what's on offer is a one-off Paul Smith suit, that tells us something about this gesture. On the other hand, if he's been prudent and frugal, as one might expect, then is the donation of an off-the-peg two-piece quite that big a deal?

In the 15th centiry they had a name for this... Morton's Fork.

I'm able to catch some of the US pre-election news nearly real-time at the moment, and am captivated by some of the moves in what can only sensibly be described as a game. For instance, in the last 24 hours...

In response to the financial crisis, Sen. John McCain announces that he's suspending his campaign so as to be able to drop everything, fly to Washington and weigh in on the most pressing current issue. An opponent notes somewhat sourly that Sen. McCain hasn't voted on anything in Congress since April this year.

Barack Obama makes a couple of observations - first, that past of the art of being president is to be able to deal with more than one thing at a time... Second, that introducing presidential [candidate] politics into a crisis such as this is apt to cause more trouble than it fixes. (In the meantime, acceptance of the proposed $700 billion bail-out seems to be on, then off again, on a daily basis).

Subjectively, McCain is looking more rattled; first the slightly unsubtle showboating about "this is so serious I'm going to drop everything and head for DC... so have a pre-election debate if you want, but I may not be there". For goodness' sake - you're not the president... you're (currently) only one senator. Legislate, or campaign... prioritise! And second, quite simply, what is going on with his left eyelid when he's being interviewed on TV? I fear for the man's health... it so often looks as though he's about to succumb to a stroke. Twenty years ago they would probably have been asking "Is this the man whose finger we want on the button?"

I got the chance this lunchtime to leaf through today's copy of the Palo Alto Daily News, and spotted this great paragraph from their article about the proposals to pump $700bn into the American financial system:

"The FBI is looking at potential fraud by mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. and insurer American International Group Inc." said two officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the investigations.

I just loved the implication that the overriding concern here was that we should not know who it was that was disclosing (to the congressional hearing on the proposals) that the FBI was conducting an investigation. I mean, it's kind of on the public record already that the financial institutions have messed up, and presumably if the FBI turn up and start asking questions, they admit that that's who they are...

The next sentence in the article was a winner too, in its own way:

"The inquiries, still in preliminary stages, will focus on the financial institutions and the people who ran them, one senior law enforcement official said."

No kidding.

There's always been a steady cultural flow from the US to the UK, whether it's been political (monetarism, market economics), gastronomic (fast food), televisual (soaps, movies) or whatever. One of the US trends which hasn't really made it to the UK yet is the practice of women concatenating their maiden name and their husband's family name (Hillary Rodham Clinton being one such example). An illustrative UK example might be Cherie Blair - whose Wikipedia entry describes as being 'known professionally as Cherie Booth'. She has retained her maiden name in the professional role she established before marrying.

I see from today's edition of USA Today (3A - "Name controversy halts ballot printing") that the name of Mardi Anne Levey - a would-be election candidate in Broward County, Florida, is at the heart of a procedural wrangle over the distribution of ballot papers. Apparently, not wanting to run for election "on the coattails" of her husband Dale Cohen (a Broward Circuit Judge), Levey wanted to use her maiden name on the ballot papers. Another judge, however, ruled that this violated election law.

In the UK, as far as I know, you can stand for election using any name you want (as long as the use of that name is not fraudulent or done to escape prosecution; there's probably an obscenity clause as well...). It's a practice much used by Screaming Lord Sutch and the Official Monster Raving Loony Party which he founded in the 60s. For instance, here's the archive of some of the characters who have stood for election on the OMRLP ticket, including Bananaman, Mad Cow-Girl and Mr R.U.Seerius.

Back in July, I was in Stockholm to take part in the Liberty Alliance plenary meetings and to run the 7th of our series of Privacy Summits. Travelling in and out of town on the tunnelbana (metro) it was hard not to spot the following distinctive advertising hoardings:

The rightmost poster, if you'll forgive a slightly loose translation, reads: "Stockholm is celebrating the condom. Will you come too?" [ahem]

One of the most damning things a teacher can write on a piece of work, I always reckon, is the infamous "B minus: could do better"... with all it implies of latent ability and lack of application. I'm not sure Gordon Brown's current approval ratings would even qualify him for a B, frankly, but nevertheless he has used the Labour Party Conference to promise that he 'will do better'.

He also hailed Labour as being a 'pro-business, pro-market' party, while simultaneously praising last week's decision to impose a ban on the short-selling of falling stocks (and thus removing one way in which the market self-regulates by adjusting valuations).

According to this BBC article about an interview with Andrew Marr, he also criticised City of London financial institutions for 'irresponsibility', saying that current problems had 'come out of America'. If what he was referring to is over-exposure to bad housing debt because of the sub-prime mortgage problem, it's a bit rich to be blaming the financial institutions as opposed to, say, any regulatory regime which allows them to accumulate such an over-exposure.

But of course, criticising the regulatory regime would be tantamount to admitting that his own tenure as Chancellor had been less than prudent.

He also announced that he is considering imposing limits on City bonuses; again, hardly a pro-market move on the face of it. After all, if those risks damage the institutions in question, the practice will quite quickly self-correct. Mr Brown is apparently of the view that offering large bonuses encourages excessive risk-taking tilted too heavily towards the short term. As a taxpayer whose prudent, long-term retirement plans have been undermined by Mr Brown's raid on pension funds, and a decade of inexorable indirect tax increases, I find that hard to swallow.

Headline news in Norway today concerns the country's first major public sector data breach. Apparently eight major newspapers were sent tax information by the Tax Authority (this information is, I'm told, intended to be in the public domain) - but accidentally included was a full list of Norwegian taxpayers' National Identity Numbers (personnumrene). The Norwegian NI Number happens to incorporate the citizen's gender and date of birth.

According to the story on the Dagbladet website, the leaked data would be quite enough, say, to order a mobile phone over the internet using someone else's identity.

I'm told that the Tax Authority's spokesman said: "This was a new service, and something went wrong.  We have never had an incident like this."

As regular readers will know, I've written several times before about the UK's National DNA Database (NDNAD... I wonder if that is correctly pronounced "nid-nad"...). In previous posts, I have been mainly concerned about the practice of retaining DNA profiles and samples even if the individual concerned is subsequently not found guilty of anything, or not even charged with an offence.

However, this small but gem-like piece on the Kable website points to two more areas of concern.

First, the more the database grows, the greater the costs associated with it. Even separating the NDNAD's running costs from those associated with the forensic service in general will not hide the increases for long, as the ramp-up in sampling and profiling generates the need for more and more accredited commercial forensic labs. Accreditation and monitoring represent an ongoing cost (as the Pirbright lab experience showed all too clearly).

Second, and, in my view, just as fundamental: is the database actually fit for purpose? Bear in mind what we're told about biometrics in general and DNA in particular: that they are the only way to ensure that each individual is uniquely identified by a one-to-one match between the person and the corresponding record in the database.

And yet, according to the Kable piece, the Home Office's own estimate is that in fact, the NDNAD achieves this only with a level of about 85% reliability. In an estimated one case in six, there is a duplicate record on the database despite the use of DNA as the identifying biometric.

This week's major privacy headline comes to us courtesy of the Littlehampton Gazette. Now there's a sentence you don't see very often.

There have been two articles recently in the Gazette, reporting on the local (Arun) Council's determined stand against some of the more objectionable aspects of the Audit Commission's National Fraud Initiative. You may remember that I observed, nearly two years ago, that their policy achieved the remarkable double of being both discriminatory and a 'fishing' exercise: they insist on being sent the banking details of all local authority employees (while not imposing the same requirement on other public sector groups such as services personnel, central government civil servants, and so on).

Arun Council apparently got the details straight from the horse's mouth, when the director of the NFI, Peter Yetzes, explained to them that the measure was justified because "everyone has the potential to commit fraud". The head of Arun's audit committee, councillor Barbara Oakley, described this as "an insult to the decent, hard working staff in the fire service, local government and the NHS who are all now regarded by him as potential fraudsters".

Gordon Brown has been wondering, lately, how to 'celebrate Britishness'. How about re-instating the presumption of innocence?

Gordon Brown seems to be locked into some kind of strange competition to see whether he or Lehman Bros. can lay people off faster. So far, since Saturday, he's got rid of Siobhan McDonagh (an assistant government whip), Joan Ryan (Labour Party vice-chairman), and Barry Gardiner (Prime Minister's special Envoy on Forestry). All were openly calling for a leadership contest to either confirm Mr Brown's tenure or replace him.

When I checked the headlines this morning (5 hours ago), one of them said "Downing Street sources say [Scotland Office] minister David Cairns has not told them that he has any intention of resigning". By 3:15 the Beeb had had to spike that story and replace it with one announcing the acceptance of Mr Cairns' resignation.

They say a week's a long time in politics. This one still has another four days to run...

There's an animated discussion going on at the moment about EU proposals to include IP addresses in the category of "personal data". This piece by Wendy Grossman is as good a summary as any. In that context, this article on the CNET site is also interesting. It concerns ITU plans to implement an 'IP Address Traceback' function in the telecomms infrastructure.

Reading the CNET article, one might be forgiven for concluding that the whole thing was a dastardly plan dreamt up by the Chinese government as a way of regulating/suppressing use of the internet in their jurisdiction. However, probing a little further, I followed the link to one of the ITU's supporting documents, drafted by Tony Rutkowski of Verisign; in that short paper, which you can read here on the ITU website, he notes that in both the EU and the US, legislation has already been introduced which lays the foundations for requiring traceability of the origin of an online communications session.

That said, it's interesting to see the list of editors assigned to work on this for the ITU: the team of five includes representatives from China, Korea, Japan, and two from the US: Gregg Schudel from Cisco and Dick Brackney from the US DoD. I don't think I would be mis-representing Dick if I said his reputation is as something of a hawk in the security/privacy field; if you search, you will more often find his name followed by the letters NSA than DoD.

As far as the NSA is concerned, the CNET article has this to say:

It's not surprising, then, that the CNET article concludes with this expression of concern from Marc Rotenberg of EPIC:

"When NSA takes the lead on standard-setting, you have to ask yourself how much is about security and how much is about surveillance," said the Electronic Privacy Information Center's Rotenberg. "You would think (the ITU) would be a little more sensitive to spying on Internet users with the cooperation of the NSA and the Chinese government."

A couple of weeks ago I blogged about the reported loss of personal data on a memory stick at PA Consulting. At the time, the Home Secretary unhesitatingly blamed PA for failing to process the data according to the terms of the agreement in place with them. The next step is reported today, as she has apparently cancelled the contract for the work PA were doing.

In one sense, I suppose it is commendable that data breaches are being taken seriously and that there are consequences when something goes wrong. On the other hand, there are some questions which the available reports leave unanswered...

For example, I have to wonder exactly how it became apparent that the data had been lost. Imagine you have been sent, say, a spreadsheet (NB - I have no information about what actually happened in the PA case... this is purely hypothetical), and you open it on your PC/laptop to work on it. You finish whatever it is you needed to do, and save the file.

I know in a lot of organisations, the default (and in some organisations the only) option would be that the file is saved on a server. In others the user would have the option of saving to disk or to removable media.

Now imagine you have saved the file to a USB stick, and you then delete the original (from email, server, temp file or wherever). Then you lose the stick. Hmm. Tricky. You might have to go back to the originator and admit that you've lost the file... and you would look a bit of a plonker.

On the other hand, imagine that the copy you wrote to the USB stick was only a backup... the original is still in your inbox as an email attachment, or on the server, or wherever. Under those circumstances, losing the USB stick, being aware that you had lost it, and owning up to having done so would look rather different. Indeed, it would suggest really quite good processes for tracking assets and for reporting their loss (despite the initial cock-up of losing the stick in question).

As I say, this is all entirely hypothetical. I have no idea which (if either) was the case at PA, where I bet some unfortunate people are having a pretty miserable time of it.

Well, the world hasn't been sucked inside out... yet. The Large Hadron Collider at CERN was finally switched on today for its first full-circuit test, though as it was just to fire a clump of protons in one direction, the experiment hasn't yet reached the stage where the much-feared "micro black hole" could theoretically appear and devour us all. Which is nice.

The BBC article on the subject hints at amazing powers on the part of Lyn Evans, the project leader. Apparently, shortly after the switch was flicked, Lyn remarked "There it is" as the proton beam completed its first lap. Wow. According to the same article, the proton beam ultimately goes round the circuit in about 1/11,000 of a second - so my initial thought was that Lyn must have amazingly fast reflexes.

Then I looked into it a little further on the excellent LHC Outreach site, here, and found this handy description of the various stages which would precede a full circuit of the collider:

How long does it take for a proton to go from zero to 14 TeV ?

When a proton leaves the source, it crosses the linac and reaches the PSB in a few microseconds. In the PSB it is accelerated from 50 MeV to 1.4 GeV in 530 ms, then after less than a microsecond it is injected in the PS where it can either:
- be accelerated/manipulated/extracted in 1025 ms
- or wait for 1.2 more seconds before being accelerated, if it's part of the first PSB batch to the PS.

Then it is sent to the SPS where it waits for 10.8, 7.2, 3.6, or zero seconds whether it's part of the first, second, third, or fourth PS batch to the SPS. The SPS accelerates it to 450 GeV in 4.3 seconds, and sends it to the LHC.

So the time it takes from the source to the exit of the SPS is between
0.53 + 1.025 + 4.3 = 5.86 seconds
and
0.53 + 1.2 + 1.025 + 10.8 + 4.3 = 17.86 seconds

Then our proton has to wait up to 20 minutes on the LHC 450 GeV injection plateau before the 25 minutes ramp to high energy, and these 45 minutes dominates [sic] the transit time.

The 450 GeV mentioned is, as it were, the 'entry speed' onto the collider. Thereafter, the 'ramp to high energy' consists of successive 'kicks' which bring the circulating proton beam up to its full close-to-light speed of 7 TeV. Through the wonders of the Web, I am able to tell you that TeV stands for Teraelectrion volts, and that

7 teraelectron volts = 1.12152352 × 10^-6 joules

If you need/want to know what electron volts are, I suggest you look on Wikipedia... I gave up Physics when I was 15 ;^)

In my inbox today was one of those spam mails which first looks like random text cut-and-pasted in to fool the filters; then it looks like something fed through an auto-translator; then it starts to make some kind of surreal pseudo-sense.

Here's a snippet:

It also included the following useful phrase:

"It is essential to avoid the indicated contradiction in therms"

I'm guessing that's when I want the heating on and you want the heating off...

OK - it's time to own up to a guilty pleasure. I've been watching F1 again, even though I said some time ago that I'd had enough of the way in which the sport is governed. I tuned in to the Belgian Grand Prix this weekend; it's a great circuit, and the unpredictability of the Ardennes weather often makes for a very turbulent race. It was here in 1998, for instance, that the Jordan team won its first Grand Prix after a massive wet-weather pile-up at the start.

This year again, things got really interesting when rain intervened within a few laps of the end, turning parts of the 7km circuit into a skating rink. In the last three laps, the fight for first place produced some outstanding driving from both Kimi Raikkonen and Lewis Hamilton, with Hamilton in the lead at the point when Raikkonen finally lost it and went into the barriers. That appeared to be it - except that after the race, the stewards reviewed the result and added a 25-second penalty to Hamilton's time, demoting him to third place. Apparently, their view was that he had gained a place unfairly after leaving the track at the "Bus Stop" chicane... despite the fact that after the incident, he slowed enough to let Raikkonen pass, only then overtaking at the "La Source" hairpin.

One result of the penalty was that Nick Heidfeld rose from third to second - but it's hard to grudge him the result, as he had the quick thinking to switch to wet-weather tyres at the last minute, streaking past half a dozen cars struggling to stay on the track on slicks in those last few laps. What must surely stick in Hamilton's throat, though, is that by default, the win went to Felipe Massa, who (despite qualifying in second place) had not figured at all in the race since being overtaken by his teammate Raikkonen, from fourth on the grid, in the first lap.

It's just one of those mystifying rule-book decisions which seem so arbitrary that they undermine the drivers' attempts to race fiercely but fairly. Yet again, the drivers have done their best, but the sport's administration makes the whole thing look shabby and stage-managed. Disgraceful.

There's news of another UK public sector data breach today, as the prison service is reported to have lost a portable hard drive after confiding it to subcontractor EDS some time before July 2007. Apparently the drive contained personal details of up to 5,000 prison service officers.

From one perspective, this could just be written off as the media pouncing on any public sector data loss because it's a hot topic at the moment. From another perspective, though, it's interesting to see the potential cost of the breach being taken into account, in a way which it does not seem to have been in previous instances.

According to the Chairman of the Prison Officers' Association, the breach "could ultimately cost the taxpayer millions", because "if the information lost is personal and sensitive, it may well mean staff having to move prisons, move homes and relocate their families."

At this stage, none of the reports suggests that the information has (in the phrase used after the HMRC breach) fallen into the wrong hands. By contrast, no such calculation seemed to be made at the time of that previous breach, despite the fact that it involved the taxpayer details of millions of citizens.

I'm sorry I missed the origins of this story while I was on holiday, but fortunately it has leapt back to life giving me a second chance.

Yesterday, many of the news headlines concerned Gordon Brown's apparent reversal of a proposed one-off £150-pound payment to help offset expected rises in household energy bills this winter. What I hadn't realised was the the original rumours started circulating after a senior civil servant was overheard discussing the idea with a colleague while travelling to London by train. Sir Brian Bender, a Permanent Secretary at the Dept for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (DBERR), is reported as saying that the payment would be aimed at "ordinary people"... more specifically, those drawing child benefit.

Perhaps this was intended as some kind of oblique compensation for all those whose child benefit records were lost in the HMRC data breach. I couldn't possibly comment.

Sir Brian's conversation took place in a First Class carriage of the 15:05 from Leeds to London; according to the rail company's website, a first-class single on that service costs £154... just fractionally more than the rebate under discussion.

What I found more interesting, though, was that a fellow passenger was able, from the overheard conversation, to identify Sir Brian by searching for his photo on the DBERR website. Not quite two years ago, David Blunkett was expressing the view that "As you walk down the street you expect to be able to have a private conversation". Oh, the irony.

Still, I suppose it's good to know that not every public sector data breach in the UK is attributable to ill-considered use of technology. 

There's an Italian joke which goes something like this:

Q - "In Milan it's a rule; in Rome it's a suggestion; in Naples it's a decoration. What is it?"

A - "A traffic light."

Visiting Brussels recently, it occurred to me that in the matter of pedestrian crossings there might well be a parallel joke in Belgium. The next thing which struck me was that, for an object of no functional purpose whatsoever, Brussels' pedestrian crossings exhibit a variety and a degree of creative effort I can't remember having seen anywhere else. Well, given that one definition of "work of art" is "something on which creative effort is expended, but which serves no utilitarian purpose", I did the only rational thing possible; I started to view them not as mundane pieces of street furniture, but as objects of aesthetic appreciation.

Lovely.

PS - it has since been pointed out to me that Brussels' pedestrian crossings do indeed have a functional purpose: they provide oncoming drivers with a more accurate aiming-off point.

Computerweekly.com have announced the winners of their "Best IT Blog" awards for 2008, and in the 'Law and Governance' category, the honours went to:

- The IPKat team, for their blog on IP, IT and privacy/confidentiality issues; a worthy winner; IPKat comments on a wide range of aspects of patent law, copyright, and so on... guaranteed to be a lively topic for years to come, in this world of global asset mega-brands and the information economy.

- McKenna Long and Aldridge, for their blog on RFID law - runners-up. This blog has a weekly newswire, supplemented by occasional specific blog posts.

Many congratulations to both teams for their well-earned recognition!