Robin Wilton's esoterica

I see from today's International Herald Tribune that the US Senate voted to bar detainees in Guantanamo from challenging their detention through US courts. If made law, this would have the effect of reversing a previous decision by the US Supreme Court that the detainees did have such a right. It seems to me that this turns the issue of detainees' rights into the proverbial political football. That is, an issue which is kicked around by a number of parties in pursuit of their own aims and with no regard to the well-being of the football itself. First, given that we are talking about apparently indefinite detention, that seems to me to lack natural justice. Second, it is to avoid this kind of outcome that the international community drafted the Geneva Conventions. Unfortunately, as has been extensively discussed, the detaining authorities have contrived to bypass or ignore such conventions. If the recent reports of so-called 'black sites' are to be believed, this has been done on a large scale and making use of the territory of a number of other states. I think that is regrettable in human rights terms, and in the long term will prove to have undermined the moral high ground which the 'war against terror' seeks to occupy.

I know I promised more about last Wednesday's meeting, but it was a busy week, and this has been a busy and somewhat truncated weekend. So; the meeting was hosted by Baroness Anelay, and the two main protagonists were Andy Burnham, MP (Parliamentary Undersecretary of State at the Home Office) and Simon Davies of the LSE. There were a number of Peers in attendance, and a small cluster of what I later found out were Party Whips. Messrs Davies and Burnham have squared up to each other before, either in print (Simon was intimately associated with the London School of Economics' report in the ID Cards Bill) or in person --- they had in fact had a similar debate the evening before this discussion. My role on Wednesday was just to provide a quick indication of the so-called 'industry perspective'. Below I ascribe particular views and statements to people, notably Mr Burnham. I cannot claim these are verbatim quotations, but they are made based on my recollection and contemporaneous notes. I believe they are accurate, but am open to correction by anyone whose memory is clearer than mine... Simon and the Minister exercised some of the familiar arguments about lack of clarity in the costings of the whole scheme, and one point which emerged (seemingly for the first time) was that the Home Office calculations are, to put it simply, for 'their end of the system' only. They do not include the cost of integration with any departmental systems, this being something the departments themselves will have to bear. "They will want to do this because of the benefit to them of making use of the National Identity Register (NIR)". It is pretty clear that the Home Office expects to pay for the registration and issuing processes and the operation of the database itself; I would infer from Wednesday's comments that the Home Office will not be paying for whatever is intended to read the credentials at the point of verification, or of course for the integration mentioned. Although it was not discussed in this meeting, I think this raises the question of how the 'client' departments are going to fund such things, given that they all have strict Gershon (cost-reduction) targets to meet. The relevance of this is that the government seem now to be quoting a cost of £30 per card. If that is only going to pay for the Home Office's costs, where's the rest going to come from...? From my own selfish point of view, the most useful clarification from the Minister came in response to the concerns I raised about the scope and scalability of the proposed system. The NIR is a centralised repository; according to the proposals, it will consist of the register of information, and an auditable record of every access request. I had also thought it would include 'entitlements' information about the user, but I was put right on that point. It will not. In my view, the latter is a good thing. Entitlements, along with other transactional and historic data about a user, do not belong in a centrally-administered Home Office database. They belong in the department which 'owns' them... or rather, the department which has 'data custodian' responsibility over them on behalf of the user to whom they relate. It was unfortunate, Mr Burnham said, if the Bill had given rise to the impression that the NIR would store entitlement- or attribute-level data about the user; indeed, Data Protection principles would probably prohibit this. The intent was for it to store those credentials which could act as the 'key' to unlock such data back at the owning department. Again, in my view that is a good thing. It represents a much more federated architecture, and one in which responsibility for the entitlement- and attribute-level data stays with those who have some form of charter for its use. I have a residual concern about the wisom of trying to co-locate the audit log with the NIR; I think that runs the risk of at least doubling the throughput required of the system, for a function which is not directly related to its primary purpose of accurate and timely authentication. I also have a concern about something Mr Burnham said right at the end of the session, in response to a comment by the Secretary General of the NO2ID campaign. He said "I can see no privacy implication in supplying a biometric to be stored in the National Register". That worries me. I can see a vey clear privacy implication. If I deposit a facial biometric with the National Register, that biometric could be checked without my knowledge or consent using 'passive' technology such as CCTV. I think as privacy implications go, that's a biggie, and I would feel happier if the Minister concerned was, well, concerned.

I'm here for a meeting tomorrow, and this evening have taken the opportunity to eat something which is almost certainly illegal in England. My starter at dinner consisted of:
--- Carpaccio of beef (i.e. raw and very thinly sliced) --- bleak roe (I dunno, I had to Google it. Turns out it is the roe of vendace (Coregonus albula), a Baltic sea-water fish. The roe is very small, salmon-pink, and lightly salty, with none of the 'fish-oil' taste you seem to get with caviar or lumpfish roe) --- raw onion --- sour cream --- a raw egg yolk It was fantastic. I don't think it is actually illegal to serve raw egg yolks in England, but I know you would be hard pressed to convince, say, a work-place restaurant (or, as we used to call them before they all got outsourced, 'office canteen') to serve you one. "Health and Safety", they will say, pursing their lips and whacking the whole plate under the grill for a few minutes just to make sure there aren't any nasty listeria bugs in the raw egg, sizing up the carpaccio as the ideal vehicle to a new and blossoming lifestyle in your digestive tract. One place I worked at instituted an 'omelette bar' as part of the "healthy choice" programme. It sounded great: you told them what fresh ingredients you would like scattered on your omelette, and they would cook it to order for you. There it was, gurgling to perfection in the omelette pan... and just as you thought it was heading for your plate in peak condition, it would be whisked away again and grilled until it had uniformly achieved the texture of carpet underlay. The mere appearance of floor-foam was not enough, either: the dangerous egg-based confection had to be repeatedly poked with a probe thermometer to make sure it was nice and dry all the way through. Mmm. Rubbery.