Robin Wilton's esoterica

The House of Commons Home Affairs committee of MPs will hold an enquiry into the case made by police in support of a proposed (but rejected) 90-day detention limit.
The chairman of the committee, Labour MP John Denham, said: He was still "not particularly clear at all" how 90 days had been chosen as the preferred detention time limit.
I find it disturbing that the proposal got all the way through to parliamentary debate with this shortcoming, expecially bearing in mind how much pressure the Government applied in trying to push the bill through.

I have a trivia question for you: Where could you find the following, geographically co-located: Clapham Junction, Tower Hamlets, Sebastopol, Winnipeg, along with Salvation Corner, Daylight Corner and Suicide Road? And don't bother Googling for them, I think I have picked cunningly enough for that not to be a useful option. ;^) Spoiler warning: answer is in the Commments.

I promised some more on this topic from last week's conference, so here are some thoughts on what the four points of the Ministerial Declaration look like through my Identity goggles... 1: Inclusion: "No citizen left behind" This is a fascinating one to have as a first statement, in my view. From the broader e-government perspective it clearly means that we should take care, as we stampede towards the e-delivery of public sector services, that we don't thereby leave segments of the community behind. As we use IT to make services more accessible and responsive, we have to ensure that that doesn't actually take them beyond the reach of those who perhaps are most dependent on them. For instance, these days one is as likely to be given a URL as a Helpline number... so what about people who are sight-impaired or simply don't have the means to access the internet? Four recent reports on UK local e-government (including reports from the Social Exclusion Unit and the Royal National Institute for the Blind) have been critical of the extent to which issues like these are addressed. The declaration commits member states to 'actively include the disadvantaged'. In identity terms, what could 'inclusion' mean? Well, one set of examples surfaced recently in the great ID Card debate: it turns out that biometric facial recognition is measurably less reliable for certain ethnic groups. And of course, there are those who would find it impractical or impossible to present, say, fingerprints or iris scans to identify themselves. Factors like these need careful handling if the 'inclusion' objective is to be met. 2: Use of IT for efficient and effective delivery of services. This reflects a desire to cut the costs of interacting with government (for businesses in particular) and to cut the cost, for government, of delivering services. In identity terms there's a lot we can consider here. --- In the G2B context, removing 'friction' in the e-procurement supply chain by making use of federated authentication and authorisation. --- In the G2G context, federating authentication and authorisation between application 'silos', which improves user experience and user productivity while reducing the cost of managing identity across the enterprise. Similarly, federating identity is an important foundation for the all-important 'enterprise view' of provisioning and policy enforcement. --- For G2C interactions, efficient and effective delivery of services might mean, for instance, personalising the online experience and pro-actively offering the citizen relevant services or options. It might also mean providing some form of federated or single sign-on, or simpler ways for citizens to manage important records such as birth certificates and marriage licences. 'Efficiency' may also mean minimising waste, and therefore ensuring that benefit provision is closely linked to entitlements; which in turn might rely on establishing someone's identity or status, or simply accurately recording previous claims. In fact, it's hard to find 'effectiveness and efficiency' criteria which are not in some way linked to notions of identity. entitlement or status. 3: Deliver high-impact, customer-centric services. This one may look a little platitudinous at first sight, but I think it makes sense on inspection. After all, we are still at the stage where e-access to government services is not the norm or the assumed default. Until it is, one of the best ways to encourage take-up is to focus on those services which make a real difference to the citizen. The thing to avoid, after all, is the "big deal" reaction. (The opposite of love, they say, is not hate... it's indifference). Making things truly customer-centric, again, is likely to imply some consideration of the identity of the service requester. Delivering high-impact services tends to imply a high-trust relationship with the citizen. If the citizen doesn't trust the e-government service provider, they are unlikely to go online for anything high-impact --- and high-trust relationships are unlikely to be anonymous ones... 4: Simple, secure access to government services across the EU, based on mutual recognition of electronic identifications. Don't panic, I really don't think this is a charter for a European ID Card. The background information I link to below is usefully clear on the matter of electronic IDs versus Identity Cards, and section 6 of the Q&A is well worth a read for the note of realism it brings to that area of debate. This item of the declaration formulates a characteristically EU-style problem: first, it leaves it up to member states what forms of electronic ID those states implement and with what scope. Second, it reminds the states that what they do should not lead to the imposition of barriers to the free movement of labour, goods and services within the Union. Third, it recommends that member states reconcile the first two objectives by sharing information and experience, and basing their plans on stable and interoperable technical foundations. As I mentioned in Sunday's introductory post, this item is backed up by a broader statement outlining the need for interoperability between electronic authentication schemes of varying scale and extending across the public and commercial sectors alike. Under those circumstances, it's hard to imagine any viable solution which is not (a) federated and (b) based on open, interoperable standards. Here's a link to the background Q&A about the Declaration on the EUROPA website.