Robin Wilton's esoterica

Some interesting comments from Peter Fleischer in this article today. He is Google's global privacy counsel. Towards the end of the article he is quoted as saying that the current generation is one which is in transition between the ways in which we managed our pre-digital identities, and the ways in which we will come to manage our digital ones.

He predicts that both the technology to do this and people's attitudes will evolve over the next handful of years. I agree that it will do so markedly from the perspective of the end-user - though you will find plenty who believe that it is already too late to put the toothpaste back in that particular tube.

I will be very interested to see whether that pace of change is matched by practical and relevant legislation in this area. I suspect that, in that sense, William Gibson has definitely got it right:

"The future is already here. It's just not widely distributed yet."

Selective silence, at least. 

Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett is cricitised in this article today for allegedly failing to engage in a meaningful parliamentary discussion in advance of an imminent EU summit meeting. It seems to me that reticence about our political relationship with the European Union is nothing new.

If you go on holiday to other EU countries it's not uncommon to see, for instance, billboards for construction projects with a note that the work is part-funded by the EU. I've seen them in France, Italy, Spain and Germany, for instance. I can't remember ever seeing one in the UK.

And it's not because the EU doesn't subsidise us - though one might be forgiven for attributing it to that, given the rarity of any mention of EU funding for UK projects. In the period from 2000-2006 the UK received €15.85bn from the EU's Structural Funds. For the period from 2007-2013, it will receive €9.6bn - and yet if the topic of Britain's 'net contribution' comes up, it's generally only discussed in terms of the rebate negotiated by Margaret Thatcher 23 years ago.

The upcoming summit will deal, in part, with what to do about Germany's current attempts to use its leadership of the Union to revive the stalled EU Constitution. I'd like to think that topic would be approached with more openness that we seem to see on the matter of EU subsidy.

Peter Hain, currently Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, has been commenting on proposals to give police the 'automatic right to stop and question anyone in the UK about suspected terrorism'. A refusal to co-operate could lead to a fine of up to £5000, and would presumably also be an arrestable offence (as all offences now are, under this government's laws). As an arrestable offence it could also be used to trigger a DNA sampling and addition to the national DNA database.

We can assume that Mr Hain will have been well briefed about 'stop and search' before he took up his NI Secretary role, as 36 years ago the Stormont government introduced internment there after discussions with UK Prime Minister Edward Heath:

Mr Hain expressed concern that the introduction of such powers could alienate sections of the community and encourage terrorism. His expressions of concern were somewhat undermined by a strange lapse in time-perception:

"We've got to be very careful that we don't create the
domestic equivalent of Guantanamo Bay, which was an international abuse
of human rights, acted as a recruiting sergeant for dissidents and
alienated Muslims and many other people across the world."

I can't understand why he uses the past tense. 

Kevin Chu is right - today is the 30th anniversary of the release of "Star Wars". He has a far better anniversary story than I do, given that he actually appears, visibly, in one of the re-jigged special edition films. My own is piffling by comparison, but here it is.

Some time not long after the film was released, I was at home on school holidays. 'Home' in this case was the British Embassy compound in Jeddah. The embassy used to get a batch of films every so often (probably about 3 a month, if I remember right). I think they were flown out by the air attaché. I remember the same thing from other postings, and although the films often represented a rather eclectic and unpredictable selection, they made up for a lack of cinemas and English-language television. How times have changed. (Cue rambling reminiscences... "We had to make our own entertainment in those days, my lad... make no mistake...")

Anyway, the good thing about this system was that someone (in this case, me) got to be the projectionist. All the films were on 16mm celluloid, on spools about a foot in diameter, and the film 'leader' had to be carefully threaded through the projector. When you got it right, the projector whirred, the room went dark and the small audience fell silent.  It was all most satisfying.

When you got it wrong... well, I'll tell you about that another time.

A colleague asked me, and when I told him he suggested I should blog it... so here you go.

Another of life's little mysteries cleared up.

8^) 

Free information, still running around in the open. Quick, read it before it's rounded up and exterminated.

This story adds another, worrying dimension to the current legislative disgrace over FoI exemption for parliament. If the government are using David Maclean's amendment to gauge the level of public revulsion and it goes through, it seems clear we can expect the government to write its own further exemptions from the Act. 

Just how self-serving the current amendment is becomes blatantly clear when one reads that Lord Falconer 'said the government remained neutral on exemption, because of "considerable support in the Commons" for it'. Of course they're in favour of it; it is their own misbehaviour which they stand to conceal if the exemptions are granted. Given the option, only someone principled, honest or stupid would vote otherwise.

Lord Falconer is the Secretary of State for Justice. 

As UK householders continue to ask themselves (mostly on a fortnightly basis) where all the rubbish is going to go, anyone keeping an eye on government policy might well be asking where all the rubbish keeps coming from.

The Environment Secretary is apparently bringing forward proposals to allow local councils to impose charges for households which don't recycle enough household waste. In the rarified atmosphere of government policy-making that probably sounds like a great and logical idea: strong financial incentives to recycle more household waste. Further down the policy chain it sounds like a recipe for abuse of the system by all concerned.

For a start, it is based on an assumption that all households are currently able to recycle as much waste as they can reasonably be expected to produce. That assumption is false. There is currently no connection between the amount of recyclable waste I produce and the amount my council is prepared to collect - either at the kerbside or at municipal bins within walking distance.

As a result, I and many householders like me take surplus recyclable waste to a 'tip', driving an average round trip of 10 miles. I've illustrated some of the implications of this in a previous post. However, if I'm going to have to make the trip, I will make the maximum use of it - so I will load the car with anything recyclable, even if that means that I have nothing left to contribute to the next kerbside collection. If I could not afford to do this, I would have no option but to 'overload' the kerbside collection process, and presumably get charged for doing so. A rather regressive policy for a Labour government.

Then let's assume that I go as green as I can; imagine I boycott supermarkets which won't cut down on bulky cardboard and plastic packaging, I compost anything compostable and put the other biodegradable waste into a wormery, and I eventually reach the nirvana of a 'zero garbage footprint'. At that point, presumably, the council will fine me a huge sum for failing to recycle anything at all.

It just not possible for the council to assess, by monitoring  kerbside collections, how much one household recycles relative to another, particularly as long as their collection policy is not linked in any way to the actual type and volume of waste produced. How the Environment Secretary thinks that can be converted into a fair and enforceable charging strategy is a mystery to me.

Then there's the point that in this district, the council refuses to take cardboard as 'compostable waste'; not because cardboard cannot be composted, but because they have not bought the kind of machine that can do this in under 12 weeks, and so they can't turn a quick enough profit on it through sales of the resulting compost.

All in all, I can see this policy resulting in fines for people who can't afford them, increased carbon emissions by people who can, and a quick and dirty way for councils to cut cost on their recycling responsibilities while charging the rate-payer for doing so.

The realities of multi-ethnic and migratory populations continue to make it hard to make simple policy statements about ID Cards. Any implementation based on some kind of segmentation of the target card-carrier population inevitably raises questions about consistency, national sovereignty and (for instance) the rights of EU citizens not to be obliged to carry the identity card of another EU state.

Today's BBC article highlights parts of the 'racial discrimination' minefield which legislation and policy must negotiate. It's always going to be hard to segment your target population and still argue that you're not discriminating, isn't it?

"My bill is necessary to give an absolute guarantee that the correspondence of members of parliament, on behalf of our constituents and others, to a public authority remains confidential"
David Maclean (Con) - proponent of the Private Member's Bill

With 5 minutes to go, and after 4 hours 55 minutes of opposing filibuster, the Bill's author, David Maclean, called for a vote (technically, I think, a Motion for Closure). With the tacit support of the Labour party (whose Parliamentary Committee emailed Labour MPs to encourage them to vote in favour), the Motion was passed, and the Bill will now go to the House of Lords.

Revealingly, the Wikipedia article on Private Member's Bills notes that "in some cases, measures that a government does not want to take responsibility for may be introduced by backbenchers, with the government secretly or openly backing the measure and ensuring its passage."

It's impossible to resist the conclusion that the Labour government wants this legislation to go through, despite the fact that it undermines a major piece of their own legislation (the Freedom of Information Act) and runs counter to their stated policy. That they can do so by means of a Conservative Private Member's Bill, thus keeping their legislative hands 'clean', must be a source of some glee.

I think Mr Brown has just missed the first opportunity (of his acknowledged leadership, at least) to reclaim the public's trust in his party. But then, during his time in the political wings, he has made an art of being absent or silent, when presence or speech might have obliged him to take a public position one way or the other.

I'm sure you will at some stage have sat in a lesson, lecture or sermon and wished that the speaker would just shut up and sit down. I seriously hope the supporters of David Maclean's Private Member's Bill feel the same way right now, and just as fervently hope that the Bill's opponents manage to talk it out for the requisite 5 hours of debate (ending at 2:30pm BST).

It's only a day since Gordon Brown, in a speech celebrating his unopposed nomination as Tony Blair's successor, headlined by promising to "build trust", based on "a more open form of dialogue with citizens and politicians".

It would be a great start, then, for his party to connive with the Conservative opposition in passing a Bill which exempts parliamentarians from the Freedom of Information Act passed by the government he is about to lead.

Among other things in Trondheim, someone pointed me at this clip on YouTube. It deserves to be shared...

I don't know if this is an implementation glitch, a bug, an incompatibility issue or something else, but I'm constantly frustrated in my attempts to leave comments on certain blogs. Kim Cameron's is one, and Mike Jones' is another. Both require a login in order to leave a comment, and both (unsurprisingly) prefer their blog readers to authenticate using an Infocard.

I don't have any Infocards.

Fortunately, both blogs also offer a 'log in with a userID and password' for people like me. Unfortunately I can't get that option to work. I hover over the 'Register' button and it helpfully promises to take me to (in Kim's case) http://www.identityblog.com/wp-register.php . The promise is an empty one, though; all that actually happens is that it loops me straight back to the log-in page again. So the 'choice' appears to be 'Infocard, or something broken'.

I would leave a comment to let them know I'm having a problem...

Did some returning space probe explode in the atmosphere without my noticing it, showering the Earth with a mysterious radiation which re-animates Private Member's Bills which should have died months ago?

Unbelievable as such a scenario might seem, it is surely no more bizarre than the sight of Labour's parliamentary committee emailing Labour MPs to encourage them to support the shamefully regressive (Conservative MP's) proposal to exempt Parliament from the Freedom of Information Act (FoI Act).

Liberal Democrat MP Norman Baker described it as "highly irregular" for the committee to ask "Labour MPs to support a Conservative Bill which was in opposition to Labour's official policy and its own FoI Act".

Martin Salter, a member of the Labour committee in question, said the committee was 'backing the bill because it would "plug the dangerous and unintended consequence" of private correspondence between an MP and a constitutent being released'.

This is a most revealing comment. First, it indicates that in drafting, debating and passing the FoI Act in the first place, the implication that it might apply to themselves clearly escaped the Labour legislators; second, it shows that they must have devoted a similar lack of attention to what the Act actually provides, as it explicitly protects against exactly this kind of disclosure.

Two things are blindingly clear:

1 - The FoI Act does not pose the threat to constituents' privacy which the Bill's proponents claim; in fact it includes provisions which explicitly protect that privacy*.

2 - The overwhelming public interest weighs on the side of parliament being subject to FoI, rather than an exempt from it;

On that basis, if MPs from both main parties vote in favour of this Bill on Friday, it can only be out of a desire to use the parliamentary process to serve their own interests over those of the public.

The crowning irony is that at the same time as they seek a blanket exemption from the constraints of their own legislation, the same MPs are actively pursuing policies of national identity and public-sector data-sharing which allow the aggregation citizens' personal data on an unprecedented scale.

How long will it be before they claim exemption from those laws too?

*Thanks to Richard Veryard for rightly querying my original assertion here, which was unhelpfully inaccurate. What I should have said was: "constituents' privacy is adequately protected by explicit exemptions under the Freedom of Information Act (specifically, Section 40 - Personal Information and Section 41 - Information provided in confidence)". Of these, section 40 explains how the Data Protection Act's definitions of personal data should apply when interpreting the Freedom of Information Act's provisions in this regard.

Amongst the new and nearly-new headlines about -

- the Information Commissioner's ruling that the government must publish the 'gateway reviews' of the identity scheme decision-making process, and

- revised figures which raise the projected cost of the ID Cards scheme from £4.91bn to £5.31bn (or £5.55bn, depending who you listen to),

you may have missed the announcement that Tony Blair is to resign. Actually, he's not resigning, according to a Downing Street spokesperson yesterday. He is "setting in motion a chain of events which will culminate in the appointment of his successor". Not resigning.

There, there, semantics. The pain and mauling might stop soon. About June 27th, if you're lucky. Now that would be a great day to bury bad news. Gordon - I'd start giving it some thought now, if I were you.

It's all contextual, this identity thing. You realise that when, this being Norway, you're sitting next to some stranger in the sauna and it turns out you're both here for the same OECD conference on Identity and Privacy.

Then you meet the same stranger later and realise it's him, so you say "Oh.. I almost didn't recognise you with your clothes on..."

Whereupon he makes to undo his trousers, saying "Well, if it's two-factor authentication you need...". I quickly decided to trust his self-asserted identity instead.

John Reid is to quit the post of Home Secretary after holding it for just over a year.

Just five weeks ago he announced a massive restructuring of the Home Office, splitting it into two parts: a Ministry of Justice, to be run as part of the Department for Constitutional Affairs, and a Home Office rump responsible for terrorism, security and immigration.

Apparently his departure will be timed to coincide with Tony Blair's from Number Ten, and is designed to give Gordon Brown "space" to establish himself as prime minister (rather than, presumably, give Gordon Brown the option of either replacing him, or inviting him to stay in post and see through the fundamental changes he has set in motion).

You might think that all this makes perfect sense, in the strange logic of political life. I couldn't possibly comment.

A quick update with the results of yesterday's voting in this district.

As you can see, whatever the voters did want, they didn't appear to want Labour. Assuming, of course, that they were given the option. In my ward, the choice was limited to 2 Conservative and 2 Labour candidates: pick any two.

Note to the Lib Dems: you can't win a seat if you don't put up a candidate...

This is what I was going to blog earlier. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has just published the third of its current global assessment reports, as part of the programme it has been undertaking since 1990.

According to this report and graphic, they look at seven key areas in which carbon emissions could be reduced. What interests me as a consumer is that, assuming one has some control over one's own domestic heating and insulation, "Buildings" is the category which offers the most scope for reduction - while "Travel" (the first-world bugbear of the day) comes a lowly sixth out of seven.

Indeed, only 3 out of 7 categories look like ones in which the consumer can play a direct part (buildings, travel and waste), and in each of those the consumer is far from the only actor. It would be interesting to see if the full report breaks those categories down further into "domestic" and "industrial".

If the Bank Holiday weather stays fair in the UK, sales of spring barbecues will rocket and the prospects of a carbon-neutral weekend will take a beating. But then, I didn't see an IPCC category for "Barbecues", so I guess we're in the clear.

... but we'll return later to the topic of climate change.

In the meantime, another request for help - and a link to something for you to read over the Bank Holiday weekend.

First, the request for help: can anyone help me trace an inaccurately-remembered quotation? I can't remember who said it or their exact words, but the gist of it was this:

"Sloppy writing does not necessarily denote poor expression. It may be perfectly accurate expression of sloppy thinking."

Anyone out there recognise it?

Second (and the connection will become obvious), here's a link to an article by the admirable Andrew Marr. It is rather too long for the average modern attention-span - but then, you lot aren't average ;^)

Back on the 'voting' theme again: there's some kind of consternation in wards which experienced a high proportion of postal ballot fraud in the 2004 elections, because this time around the number of applications for postal votes is apparently much-reduced.

At least on the basis of the quotations in this article, I can't say I understand the position of Bridget Prentice, Minister for Constitutional Affairs - though I can't say whether that's because she has a consistent position which has been poorly reported, or an inconsistent position which has been accurately reported...

For instance, talking about compulsory proof of identity - introduced in Northern Ireland as a pre-requisite for adding someone to the voting register - Richard Price QC said it had been 'a complete success'. Mrs Prentice disputed this, saying that voter registration "dropped very markedly after individual registration was brought in and it hasn't really gone back to the same figures again. By implication, it's OK to have bogus electoral registrations, provided they serve to keep the numbers up.

She is also quoted as saying (and again, I have no way of telling whether these were taken out of context) that the new system for postal voting, in which voters have to provide a signature and date of birth, is "as secure as possible". I'm assuming she means 'for a postal voting system based on a register without compulsory individual registration'... otherwise presumably nothing could improve the security of the system.

Mr Price, turning to the subject of electronic voting, noted that in any system where an authentication PIN is posted to voters on the (current) electoral register, anyone in a given household might receive a PIN and use it to cast a vote. However, according to Mrs Prentice,
"because of all the checks and balances that are put into electronic voting that [sic] in some way it is an even more secure system than postal voting". 

I'm sure it is possible for elextronic voting on a mass scale to be more secure than postal voting, but the article doesn't give examples of the kind of checks and balances Mrs Prentice has in mind. Perhaps some kind of premium-rate phone-in system?

At any rate, the pilot projects which reported to the Dept for Constitutional Affairs appear to have specifically avoided electronic or online voting, focussing instead on:

- security and administration
- early voting
- electronic counting
- vote signature checking
- postal vote tracking
- signing for ballot papers

When the time does come for the UK to undertake large-scale electronic voting, its architects could do a lot worse than to learn from the RIES system plemented in Holland - rolled out in 2004 and winner of a 2006 "Best Practices in Innovation" Public Service Award from the UN. The scheme is not without its critics - but the value of prior experience is often as much about what could be improved as about what goes well.

RIES successfully meets these fundamental requirements for a voting system, and does to while allowing voters to cast their votes online via the internet, without changing or adding to their normal home PC set-up: 

"No person should be allowed to vote more than once; the vote should be confidential; each correctly cast vote should be counted; and the voters should be able to trust that their vote is counted."

I'd be happy if our non-electronic polling systems could achieve that. 

Apparently campaigning in the upcoming local elections is 'reaching a climax' today. Could have fooled me. If this is a climax, I've been doing something very wrong for the last few decades.

Here's a quick tally of the campaigning activity visible to our household so far:

OK, those statistics can be a bit confusing, so here's a summary: none, niente, nada, nichevo, zip, zilch. Not a sausage.

The irony is that you've got Blair urging voters to take the polls seriously and not just use them to  give him a farewell 'kicking' at the ballot box, and Brown saying that the polls will be a verdict on all of [them], not just Tony Blair. And yet I've never known a local election in which party political statement of the issues has been so conspicuously lacking. I can't think of any better way to ensure that voters will use their ballot papers in the most superficial way possible.

In this district, I happen to know that one of the biggest local government questions of the decade is currently being considered, and yet none of the parties has put it to voters as an issue at all. There is an angry split between the County Council and the District Councils as to whether the country should cease to have those two levels of local government and move instead to a single unitary authority. It cannot but have a profound effect both on local representation and on local services, and yet apparently it's not worth mentioning to the electorate.

Heaven help them if they start bitching later about 'lack of voter engagement'.

In other election news: Peter Mandelson appears to have taken up a new role at the European Commission, as Commissioner for the Bleedin' Obvious. Looking back on The Blair Years, he sagaciously observes:

"We were perhaps too ready to place emphasis on our management of the media in those early years of government, rather than concentrate on a more policy driven process".

Who says politicians are impervious to criticism?

Here's an interesting hypothetical use-case for you to mull over.

Imagine a local authority operates sheltered housing for people who are vulnerable or need particular assistance; access to the houses needs to be controlled (not least because some of the occupants are particularly vulnerable members of society, for whatever reason), but equally, appropriate access needs to be provided so that social care workers can provide the necessary help.

The local authority has installed PIN-pads on the doors, so that residents and support staff alike can get in. For each resident, therefore, there's no key to carry around and lose, and only one PIN to remember... but for the support staff there are dozens. As a result, the temptation is to keep a list of the PINs for each household, and take it with you on your rounds. You can see where this is going...

If such a list were to go missing, it could create a rather nasty problem - and even if nothing untoward happens as a result, the incident is likely to arouse feelings of disquiet and insecurity among people who may not be well placed to deal with them.

Any suggestions for a better solution?

Bear in mind that the local authority is probably strapped for funds, and doesn't necessarily have the money to run round all the sheltered housing installing iris scanners, for instance.

Answers/suggestions gratefully received via the comment box...