Robin Wilton's esoterica

With all the focus currently on Southern Lebanon it's all too easy to forget what started before that and is still continuing in Gaza.

UN humanitarian assessor Jan Egelund is unequivocal:

"This is very clear, a disproportionate use [of power]," Mr Egeland told reporters.

"Civilian infrastructure is protected. The law is very clear. You cannot have any interpretation in any other way."

BBC article

The UN Security Council put forward a resolution calling on Israel to halt the offensive, but it was vetoed there by the US. According to former UK Foreign Secretary Lord Owen, it was tactically better to delay any such resolution until political negotiations such as those currently being undertaken by Condoleezza Rice increased the prospects for success.

As we've already heard in the G8 'open mic' incident, Tony Blair was unsuccessful in his attempts to get George Bush's permission to prepare the way for Condoleezza.

Let's hope that, when it comes to it, UK influence over US foreign policy in the region extends to more than buying George a nice sweater.

Just before I left for the airport, I bumped into James Cromwell outside the hotel. I know movie stars probably get really fed up with people doing this, but I'm afraid I did go up and importune him... and he was really good about it.

I didn't go so far as to ask for an autograph, but we had a nice chat. He's working on a TV series for ABC: "Masters of Science Fiction", and also told me to look out for a couple of his upcoming films to be released soon in the UK:

- Becoming Jane

and

- The Queen

With all due respect, I think Spider-Man 3 might be more my kind of thing ;^)

but it's nice that he thought I was at least somewhat cultured. At some point, I'll blog my Bamber Gascoigne encounter and you'll see why.

Binary Star System plus satellites.

Kim Cameron (Microsoft), Marc Canter (Broadband Mechanics)

Just to prove I was there ;^)

I should also point out - Kim doesn't usually eye me with quite such suspicion!

... and somewhat jet-lagged, as usual. Actually, the flight itself was pretty good; I got a seat with extra legroom, and managed to get some sleep (helped by that, plus earplugs, eyeshades, melatonin and an inflatable neck-pillow... hey, I've had enough red-eye flights too uncomfortable to sleep, so I'll use whatever it takes!)

My suspicions should have been aroused when my luggage arrived on the carousal at Heathrow within about 30 seconds of my getting there - this was all going too smoothly. Then the shuttle bus to the long-term car park arrived pretty much as I came out of the terminal building. Something fishy was definitely going on.

Fortunately, one can generally rely on the M25 (a huge 5-lane car-park cunningly disguised as an orbital motorway around London, for those who haven't experienced it) to soak up any time gained at other points in the process.

In this case, it was a combination of:

- first day of most schools' summer holidays;

- Farnborough International Air Show (a little way down the M3);

- Torrential rain some way further down the M3

So it ended up taking 3 1/2 hours to get home, rather than the usual 2. Nice.

The last session I was able to attend in Vancouver before heading for the airport was a really interesting one proposed by Dick Hardt of Sxip; he wanted to investigate the possibility of finding a replacement for the term "user centric". Given how over-loaded I feel that term has become, and how many different interpretations there ar eof what kind of identity system it represents, I thought that was a really good idea.

Among those weighing in with an opinion were Kim Cameron, Marc Cantor, Peter Davis, Kaliya Hamlin, Brett McDowell, me, and several others (apologies to those whose names I didn't capture at the time - if you're from the University of British Columbia, you know who you are... and thanks for your great input!).

The most useful aspect was that Dick set out what he had intended by the term, as a means of distinguishing his concept of "user centric" identity systems from what he could see in the market already, which was:

(1) 'domain-centric' identity systems; i.e. those where your authentication is only valid in one place, system, application or service provider;

(2) 'federated; identity systems, where your authentication is valid across multiple service providers, but only if those service providers (and IDPs) have a prior agreement in place which makes it so.

So Dick's concept of user-centric systems would be distinguished from both these in that it would allow you to present your credentials (self-generated or IDP-issued) to multiple service providers even if there was no federation-style set of 'circle of trust' agreements in place between them.

At least, I think that's the conclusion we came to. And given the diversity of starting-points in the room, that in itself was a worthwhile achievement.

Unfortunately, by the time we'd done that, there wasn't time to get consensus on any new name for that kind of system. We concluded with a promise to continue the discussion via the Identity Gang site. I'll head over there when I'm less frazzled...

OK, I didn't achieve quite the real-time bloggage I hinted at yesterday, but it was for good reason.

I ended up leading a session on the common themes across Identity Theft and Privacy Protection, and then acting as scribe for two other sessions: one on the basics of law as applicable to identity management, and the other on provacy policy enforcement.

I also sat in on sessions on identity management in e-health, and the Liberty 'People Service' specifications. Summaries for the IOS sessions are being published via a wiki on Phil Windley's site.

I caught the last third of a CFL football game this evening on TV in Vancouver, and it was a nailbiter.

With less than 60 seconds to play, the Winnipeg Bombers led Edmonton 19:14.

Edmonton scored what looked like a match-winning turn-over, capitalising on it with two touchdowns in quick succession. Scoreline - 22:19

With the clock counting down to (and during the play, hitting) zero, Winnipeg had posession right at their end of the field. Milt Stegall caught the ball and ran it in for a full 100-yard play.

Final score - 25:22 to Winnipeg.

Lebanon's Prime Minister has described his country as having been 'torn to shreds' by Israel's attacks over the last week.

The initial justifications put forward for bombing the international airport and the main highways, and for enforcing a naval blockade of the country was (as in Gaza) "to prevent the movement from place to place of Israeli hostages".

I do not condone the seizure of the Israeli soldiers, but it is clear that, whatever the motive of the attacks on the transport infrastructure, the bombing of power stations, oil depots and civilian locations is collective punishment, pure and simple.

This is a disgraceful, repugnant episode and it needs to be stopped.

I'm currently a long way from home - at the Liberty sponsors' meeting in Vancouver. For the first time to date, Liberty has made this an open session - non Liberty members can attend.

It's been extremely interesting, because it's mixed existing Liberty participants with others who have a lot to say about identity but haven't so far been saying it in the same room. So today we were joined in some of the Public Policy group meetings by people from Red Hat and Sxip, as well as Kaliya Hamlin.

Kaliya will be un-organising (if that's what you do to an un-conference) the Identity Open Space which has been organised for Thursday and Friday, so over the next two days I expect an even broader mingling of the various identity tribes.

This is the first time there's been such a deliberate wholesale mixing of what have so far tended to be quite separate communities; it's a reflection on the rapid evolution of the whole identity concept that such a gathering can not only take place, but is a huge positive step.

It should be a blast - and in the nature of Open Space events, I think you can expect some more 'real-time' blogging over the next couple of days. Not just here, but I would also keep an eye on the blogs of people like Kaliya, Paul Madsen, Kim Cameron, Eve Maler and others.

I first saw this on a 'politically activist' website, and assumed that it must be a spoof. But when I found the same thing reported on the BBC and in the Independent, I had to start believing it's genuine.

This is the level at which discussion of the planet's most dangerous conflict is conducted:

Prime Minister Tony Blair, talking to President George W Bush at the G8 summit meeting: "Because obviously if she [Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice] goes out [to the Middle East], she's got to succeed, as it were, whereas I can go out and just talk."

That's it, Tony - aim high.

If you have the words to express just how depressing that is, do leave a comment.

BBC transcript

The Independent's annotated transcript

Bill Goodwin has written a piece in Computer weekly today on the recent concerns expressed about the UK ID Cards scheme.

It was the first time I've been interviewed by Bill, and I have to say, having read the article, I feel a bit sorry for him in retrospect; it looks as though he got pretty much the same feedback from all his interviewees - to the extent that writing the article must have consisted of:

1 - take standard set of comments as expressed by all interviewees;

2 - divide into one chunk per interviewee;

3 - take one quotation from each chunk;

4 - allocate one interviewee name to each quote.

It's good that the message was so consistent, though: "if the ID Cards scheme is being re-evaluated, take advantage of this opportunity to engage in an open and meaningful discussion of the aims and requirements of the proposed system". given the existing levelg of public-domain comment on the plans, there is no reason to suppose that that means prejudicing any subsequent procurement exercise.

Then, of course, there's the unstated question: how far will the re-evaluation go? Is it merely, as the Prime Minister has indicated, a question of when and how the system will go ahead, or could the review conclude that in practice, the risks outweigh the required investment and the expected benefit?

A couple of comments start to suggest flawed logic in the justifications being presented for what Israel is undertaking in Gaza and Lebanon.

Hezbollah's capture of two Israeli soldiers last week was timed to divert attention from Tehran's nuclear programme, the Israeli PM has claimed." BBC News article - "Israel claims Iran link to crisis"

First - I would far rather that Iran did not have nuclear weapons. That said, I cannot see any way in which Israel's current actions would persuade Iran that it should not seek to acquire them.

Whether Israel can weaken Hezbollah sufficiently for the rest of the Lebanese government, of which it is part, to assert its authority and extend the power of the Lebanese army down to the Israeli border is doubtful at the moment." BBC News article - "No easy options in Mid-East crisis"

Second - if the aim is to weaken Hezbollah so that the rest of the Lebanese government can reassert control over the whole country, then the destruction of the transport, power and fuel infrastructures are measures which clearly and directly undermine that very aim.

So there's a mismatch between the stated and the actual aims. As long as that persists, the prospects for meaningful external intervention seem bleak, which means the prospects for those under the bombs and rockets are even bleaker.

We have bindweed (convolvulus) in our garden. It's a pernicious weed. It spreads underground, and when it finds the opportunity to surface, it quickly climbs up and chokes other, more desirable plants. It can spring up from even the smallest dog-end of broken root, generating huge amounts of vegetation and, of course, reinforcing underground.

There doesn't seem to be any reliable way of eradicating it, and the counter-measures are tedious: you can dig up the roots (provided they aren't in amongst other roots), you can rip off all the above-ground greenery you can see (disentangling it from the plants it is strangling), you can kill it off with systemic weedkiller. This last method is the most effective, but of course if you aren't careful, you kill the plants around the bindweed.

Of course, there's another option: kill everything; sacrifice the desirable plants, take everything back to bare earth and then take care that only what you want is allowed to spring up again. Some of the bindweed has made its way over from next-door's garden. Ultimately, I feel, I may just have to kill off everything over there too, so I don't get these annoying incursions. Screw the neighbours' "rights".

The problem is, I want a garden and I do want to get on with my neighbour - so the last two options really don't make any sense.

Which is why I cannot regard what is going on in Gaza and Lebanon now with any equanimity at all.

The influence of Hezbollah is undoubtedly a problem - but it is not one which has sprung into existence overnight. It is one whose spread has been encouraged by failing to maintain good relationships with the neighbours, lack of attention to the health of the desirable shoots of democracy (remember the optimism which attended the Cedar Revolution?), and ignoring the dull, painstaking process of weeding out the bindweed without bulldozing the plants around it.

The quick, immoral, shortsighted fix is to reach for the gasoline and the matches. But if I want a garden and neighbours, I guess I'm going to have the goodwill and determination to do it the boring, hard way. Someone has to.

These two quotations are from an article on the BBC website today:

"Prime Minister Tony Blair says ID cards will "most certainly" be introduced in the UK - despite reports that the scheme is in difficulty."

"Mr Blair said people would need to have biometric passports in the near future and ID cards were important to the security of the UK."

In a way, it's the second statement which is more revealing. It maintains the implication that ID cards and passports are one and the same thing, and it continues the blurring of the 'need' to have a passport with the compulsion to have an ID card.

If the ID card scheme is genuinely to be reviewed under Mr Reid's re-prioritisation exercise, those are some of the kinds of misconception which could usefully be cleared up.

I don't quite understand the logic of this yet. Here, from a Guardian article yesterday, is project director Nigel Seed, explaining how the scheme might be simplified:

'The contracts have been put off while the Home Office carries out a full review of all its activities in the wake of the foreign prisoners scandal.

The project director at the Identity and Passport Service, Nigel Seed, said: "It is a sensible delay. What we do not want to do is go out the wrong way while the Home Office is still looking at the solution."

Describing the possible options for a simplified card, he added: "We are trying to make it as simple as possible, so there is as little information on the card as possible."

However, the central biometric database - the key objection by civil liberties groups on privacy grounds - will continue to hold the full range of biometric data, including iris scans.'

According to an earlier passage in the same article, the range of biometrics stored on the card itself might be reduced to "only a digital photograph, or possibly two fingerprints". Which is, if I remember correctly, all that the ICAO standards require anyway.

There is clearly a fundamental design point at issue here: to what extent should the ID Card system rely on data held on the card, on a centralised database, or on both? Interestingly, ICAO themselves took the following view in 2004:

"ideally, the biometric template or templates [by which they meant the 'database record'] should be stored on the travel document along with the image, so that travellers’ identities can be verified in locations where access to the central database is unavailable or for jurisdictions where permanent centralized storage of biometric data is unacceptable.

The ICAO goes on to say that central databases allow for additional security confirmation checks, but are not necessarily required. It may be interesting to see if national governments recall this option, or if they rather change their national laws to allow for centralized storage, as allowed in other ICAO documents. Creative compliance may be a tool of both the state and non-state actors. Already the EU is moving towards a centralized registry of fingerprints from the passport enrolment process." [Source: Privacy International, March 2004]

This also tends to highlight the different design and functional objectives of ICAO's biometric passport plans and the UK National Identity Register scheme, which is more clearly intended as a domestic law-enforcement database (and of which the ID Card just happens to be a distributed component).

I have a couple of comments during this period of review and 're-sequencing' (to borrow the term used yesterday):

- First, this could be a great opportunity to look again at whether it makes sense to try and meet the functional, social and political objectives of (an optional) cross-border travel ID and (a compulsory) national law-enforcement ID with a single system;

- Second, while I am absolutely in favour of Mr Reid's Home Office taking this chance to re-assess their plans, I'm not convinced that that process should be directly driving changes to the technical architecture, which is what Mr Seed's comments imply. Experience suggests that that's the worst possible way to make changes in a large and complex technology project.

The weekend's revelation that senior civil servants have serious misgivings about the viability and timing of the ID Cards programme is now followed by news that the 2008 deadline is likely to slip.

According to this article on the BBC site, the process of sending tender invitations out to potential vendors has been indefinitely postponed.

It could be that this is (among other things) an opportunity to open discussions about those of the system's requirements which remain unclear.

Subsequent statements in the article say that Home Office plans must be 'sequenced' in a way which is "coherent and addresses the priorities of British citizens as the home secretary has identified".

I noted back in March that implementation of the ID card legislation would necessarily span the office of at least one home secretary, at least one prime minister and potentially a government. It seems that the arrival of a new home secretary has already had quite an impact on the plans. The rest of the ramifications have yet to emerge.

Never let it be said that we shy away from the big questions on this blog... so, what is this 'knowledge' stuff, anyway?

Catching up on the blogworthy things which happened towards the end of last week: I had a very interesting time on Saturday, going back to Oriel College for one of my former philosophy tutor's occasional 'Alumnus Philosophy Days'.

We heard two papers - one on 'What is Knowledge' and one on 'Persistence and Relativity'. As I never had anything to do with Philosophy of Physics, that second one was a bit of a challenge. The first one was OK by comparison, but some stuff had to be hauled out of very deep mental storage!

The weird thing was that both topics related to Identity (at least through my identity-bigot glasses... ;^):

As far as 'Knowledge' is concerned, the question of what counts as 'me knowing that you are you' is as good an example to take as any, and of course brings in factors like the validity/robustness of credentials;

When it comes to 'Persistence', one of the questions philosophers raise is 'what does it mean for an object to persist over time?'; if you change one leg of a table, the table still 'persists', but it's not identical in all respects. In the same way, we tend to want to say that I was Robin Wilton 20 years ago and I'm still Robin Wilton today, even if all the cells in my body have gradually been replaced in the meantime.

The proposal put forward by Professor Quassim Cassam on Saturday was based on work by Timothy Williamson, who says that there are a bunch of verbs like 'see that', 'deduce that', 'hear that', which are used to create statements which entail knowledge.In other words, if I "see that it's raining", then I know that it's raining.

There was a lot of argument around whether using 'see that' in that sense is just a synonym for 'know that'... but I think one has to give Williamson the benefit of the doubt and assume that he's thinking of something less trivial than that. I mean, he's currently the Wykeham Professor of Logic at Oxford - and has previously held posts at Oxford, Edinburgh University and Trinity College, Dublin, so I 'deduce that' he's onto something. ;^)

As I understand it, what he's trying to get at is that there are what he calls 'pathways to knowledge'. Some of those are direct sense experience (I'm being rained on), some are rational (I can apply rules to work out that 2 + 7 = 9, without any external sense data), some are 'testimonial' (you tell me that it's raining).

The position he's trying to improve on is that 'knowledge is justified true belief' - in other words, that if I believe that P, and P is true, and I'm justified in believing it (i.e. don't just happen to believe something true for bogus reasons), then I know that P is the case. (Where 'P' is some proposition, like 'Manama is the capital of Bahrain').

That analysis was OK up to the 60s, when Edmund Gettier came up with a counter-example to it. Since then, people have suggested that knowledge might be 'justified true belief plus x', where x is some magic ingredient.. but every time someone comes up with a candidate, someone else finds another counter-example.

I think the promising thing about Williamson's approach is that it opens up the opportunity for acknowledging that there may be different magic ingredients in different cases... each being one of his defined 'paths to knowledge'.

This may all be nonsense, of course*, because it's my probably-flawed interpretation of what Prof. Cassam said about Williamson's ideas. In a fit of sheer optimism I've sent off for a copy of his book, and that may or may not lead to further blogging on this topic.

Either way, I owe a big thank-you to David Charles for organising the day, which - socially and intellectually - was undiluted pleasure.

*Footnote: a bit of subsequent investigation suggests that my paragraph about 'different magic ingredients' probably is nonsense... or at least a mis-representation of Williamson's thinking. As I now understand it, he is not looking for a mystery ingredient at all, but rather is seeking to define what it is about knowledge that makes it knowledge. Looks like I'm going to have to try and read his book after all ;^)

I've blogged a number of times before on the subject of privacy... for example, here on my theory that vocal advocates of digital privacy are currently regarded with much the same bemused scepticism as 'Greens' used to be before Green became Good (or a Vote-Winner), or here on some of the yet-to-be resolved issues regarding privacy and freedom of information, or here on privacy and RFID...

In fact, I seem to have droned on about it quite a bit. Sorry about that. Well, last week I had the opportunity to be surrounded by other people with a similar interest in privacy, as I was invited to speak at the PRIME standardisation workshop in Zurich. As the title suggests, the workshop was an opportunity, under the aegis of the PRIME (PRivacy and Identity Management in Europe) project, to discuss what areas of standardisation might be appropriate for a European privacy initiative.

I was there to describe what the Liberty Alliance is doing in the privacy area, but also to take a slightly different slant on privacy and look at it from the 'identity theft' perspective. However, it was also an opportunity to catch up with Kim Cameron again, and bat around any ideas we might have about topics for the Identity Open Space in Vancouver next week. This is such a vibrant technology area at the moment that I am expecting the IOS to be genuinely fun (honest!) - so if you're in the area, seize the opportunity and come along. Here's the wiki for it, hosted by Phil Windley.

Lots to blog about today, even if I steer clear of topics like football and tennis finals ;^)

Most of it will have to come in subsequent posts, but this one had to come top of the list: William Heath, over at the Ideal Government blog, alerted me to the Sunday Times article about a leaked exchange of emails between civil servants involved in the ID Cards programme.

Apparently ministers have asked for a scaled-down plan which would still allow the government to meet its commitments to introduce cards, but at least some of their advisers feel that even this would not be viable 'for a generation'.

It's normally government policy to say they 'don't comment on leaked documents'; it will be interesting to see if this is an exception.

Says it all, really.

Liberty has been doing a lot recently to try and increase awareness of what it is, what it does and why...

If you are in any way involved in the whole Identity thing, for instance, you will probably have seen that Liberty is collaborating with the IIW to run an 'Internet Open Space' alongside the next planary sessions in Vancouver later this month, and that the plenary sessions themselves have been opened up to anyone planning to attend the IOS.

That's all well and good, and something to look forward to - but it's even more heartening, in a way, to see this: Kaliya Hamlin seems to feel very positive, not just about the specs themselves but about the whole process of opening this debate up to include the (so far) non-Liberty 'influencers' in the identity space.

It's been clear to me over the past, oh, year I guess, that there's been the risk of a bit of an 'us and them' mentality between Liberty and other Identity thought leaders. I don't think it has been in any way intentional, but that's just how things evolve by default sometimes, when you have bright people thinking hard about stuff. I'm happy to see that risk being effectively mitigated!

The idea that one man bearing a placard should be arrested under the provisions of the Serious and Organised Crime Act sounds absurd.

The placard in question bore the following quotation: "In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act." The source of that quotation? George Orwell's "1984".

Not only was Stephen Jago arrested for carrying it in a 'designated area' - the police also recorded in evidence the fact that he was carrying copies of an article by Guardian and Vanity Fair contributor Henry Porter, entitled "Blair's Big Brother Britain", which they described as 'politically motivated'. The article, that is, not Tony Blair. Heaven forbid.

This all has echoes of a number of other instances in which the far-reaching powers of SOCA appear to have been turned to questionable use. The cases of Walter Wolfgang and Brian Haw are among the highly-visible recent examples, but there are others, as one can see here.

SOCA may have been drafted with good intentions, but one has to wonder what the checks and balances are which can prevent it from being abused. This recent arrest seems to strike at the heart of freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and the freedom to protest peacefully. That's not a comfortable feeling.

On the same day, clinical psychologists have reported that one in three people in Britain suffers from paranoid fears. Thank goodness, dear reader, that there's just the two of us. (Psst. Let me tell you something about the other fellow...)

Footnotes from the Independent:

- Here's the article by Henry Porter which can get you arrested if you read it in the wrong place.

- Here's a piece about someone questioned by the police for reading the Independent newspaper near Downing Street.