Robin Wilton's esoterica

From early days, Tony Blair's premiership has often been portrayed as 'presidential', in the sense that he's perceived as operating with a circle of very close friends and colleagues whose roles do not necessarily conform to the formal structures of state power. The number of unaccountable, politically appointed 'special advisers' on matters like policy, press/PR 'management and so on has also provoked extensive commented, including a rebuke from the Commissioner for Standards in Public Life - who felt that not enough was being done to curb the power of these unelected post-holders.

Something else which characterised the early days of the Blair era was the 'Cool Britannia' phase... for a while, what was different about this PM was that he was someone capable of inviting rock stars to Number 10 for a glass of chardonnay.

So it's interesting to see one of those former guests, Noel Gallagher, going public to express some fairly bitter disillusionment at the way things have turned out since then. He's even-handed in his cricitism though, and also lays into David Cameron, who he describes as "a songwriter who's eternally ripping off someone else's song". Well, if anyone should know, Oasis should, I guess. I bet the Kinks' copyright lawyer is reaching for his legal pad even as we speak. And that faint buzzing noise you can hear is probably John Lennon and George Harrison revolving in their respective resting-places.

Be that as it may... Gallagher also accuses the media of 'portraying Blair as a president, and in doing so, turning him into one'. There's a doctoral thesis somewhere in there on 'The Nature of Cause and Effect in 21st Century Politics'...

But what it made me think of immediately was the same day's headlines about UK policy-making on the difficult question of nuclear power. The news story was, in summary, this:

Greenpeace have just won a High Court case in which they claimed that the government's consultation on nuclear policy was fundamentally flawed, that the process was a 'sham' and a 'rubber stamping exercise', and that therefore the decisions taken on the basis of that process were not legitimate.

The government has agreed to re-do the consultation, but the President's simple and immediate reaction was:

"This won't affect the policy at all".

Sorry, obviously I meant "Prime Minister's reaction".

I was asked to give a talk recently on the Identity Management aspects of civil contingencies, disaster management and the Critical National Infrastructure (CNI). It was an area I had not focussed on in great depth before, and it was a really useful opportunity to do some research and think about it in detail.

It's a security truism that the best-planned systems are often blind-sided by an attack which ignores or subverts some basic assumption - and I suspect this applies equally to civil contingency and CNI plans.

There was a BBC article yesterday about proposals to use the web to set up 'digital neighborhood watch' services to help with accidents, emergencies and disasters. The basic idea is to define a network of online resources where citizens can post information/questions, and access what has been posted there by others.

It put me in mind of some of the post-Katrina "missing and found" websites I visited while I was researching the 'civil contingencies' piece. Some of those sites had tens of thousands of entries... and a percentage of the entries had quite detailed personal information - posted, of course, for the best of reasons.

I saw posts with phone numbers, names, addresses, names of relatives ('mother's maiden name'...) and so on. It made me reflect that there are less well-intentioned people out there who might be looking for:

- the name and address of someone who is, by implication, not at home;

- the personal details of someone who is dead or missing, and whose identity could be 'adopted' for use elsewhere, for disaster relief funds, for benefit claims, for credit applications and so on;

- an opportunity to 'disappear' under one identity and re-surface - as someone less indebted, for instance.

It seems to me that there's a perennial risk here. Clearly, web technology offers simple, accessible and robust ways of publishing and accessing information, and that in turn could be enormously useful in an emergency. But in our rush to 'do something because it can bring benefit', we need to pause for thought occasionally and consider things like the following:

These days, the average collaborative website creates a near-permanent record of whatever data people post to it. In making it possible for people to post their personal data under emergency conditions, are we taking any corresponding measures to help secure that data for the time when the emergency has passed...? Or is that toothpaste definitively out of the tube by then?

I think we need to develop some much more mature models and tools for managing this kind of information, and build them into the operational systems, so that if there's a disaster or emergency, the 'failsafe' mechanisms are already in place.

As I said in my talk last week...

"There's a good time to be planning and implementing this stuff... and 'after the event' isn't it".