Robin Wilton's esoterica

It's been a long time since I blogged about Formula One; the farce of Indianapolis 2005 left a serious dent in the sport's reputation (and of course this year's row over allegations that McLaren made improper use of technical information passed to them by a Ferrari engineer hasn't helped much either).

This year's Japanese Grand Prix at the Fuji circuit was the scene of both brilliant wet-weather driving, and an all-too familiar failure of the sport's governance processes. In discussion with the teams, race director Charlie Whiting agreed to start the race behind the safety car because of the extremely wet conditions. He stipulated that for the same reasons, cars should fitted with the 'extreme wet' tyres - heavily grooved treads to displace the maximum volume of water. As it happened even that turned out not to be enough; in a later period behind the safety car, cars were going off the track even at low speed and with the 'extreme wet' tyres.

Despite this instruction, both Ferrari cars started the race on intermediate tyres. Felipe Massa lost control at safety-car speed and went off the track. He was subsequently given a drive-through penalty for re-taking the place he lost by so doing. Whiting then told Ferrari to bring their cars in and change to the full-wet tyres, or face the 'black and orange' flag which obliges the driver to return to the pits at once and rectify a technical problem. Ferrari did so, but complained that they had not seen the email in which Whiting had stipulated full-wet tyres.

Something here stinks. All the other teams saw and acted on the email; even the ITV commentators had seen it before the race started - yet Ferrari claim they did not. Either they are being pretty brazen about a deliberate decision to ignore it, or there's a fundamental flaw in the processes through which the race director notifies teams of safety issues and requirements.

As both safety car periods clearly showed, conditions were bad enough to make it unsafe to race. There's no doubt that any team running on intermediates was gambling not just with the rules, but with the safety of other drivers on the circuit. I am, frankly, amazed that Ferrari were not penalised for failing to comply with an explicit safety-related instruction from the race director.

There could have been a tragic accident as a result of this. As it is, the tragedy is that brave, skillful and determined performances by many of the drivers (notably Hamilton, Kovalainen, Raikkonen and Sutil) were devalued by poor management of the race and the rules. F1 management needs to get its act together and demonstrate some integrity and transparency. As things stand, it's letting down the teams, the fans... and the drivers who risk their lives in races like today's.

At the Digital ID World (DIDW) conference this week in San Francisco, the Liberty Alliance announced the winners of the second annual IDDY Awards. The winners were:

- eBiz.Mobility, for a in interoperable 'one-touch' online mobile payments service;

- the New Zealand Government, for its user-centric identity management framework for transformational government;

- NTT Labs, for SASSO - a mobile-phone based strong authentication module;

- Reardon Commerce, for their Personal Assistant - delivered using "Software as a Service" principles.

You can read the details and find supporting case study materials here.

It's fascinating to see these things developing over the course of a couple of years, and having had the privilege of being on the judging panel both years, I'm gratified and impressed at the way in which, on the one hand, leading-edge technology has evolved into large-scale implementations, while on the other hand, innovation continues and new implementation opportunities continue to open up.

Innovation begets innovation... 

Amnesty International's "Protect The Human" week will start on Oct 13th 2007; also during that week, Amnesty will launch its "unsubscribe" campaign. This paragraph from the "unsubscribe" website sums up the campaign succinctly:

"In Jordan a teenage boy is dragged along the ground behind a Toyota pick-up truck.

In Gambia a man is seized by masked men, hooded, bound, flown to an unknown destination and tortured. In Morocco a UK resident reports being detained and cut with a scalpel all over his body.

The ‘excuse’ given for each of these abuses can be summed up in four words – ‘the war on terror’. It’s an excuse used not only by countries allied to the US – such as Pakistan and Jordan - but also by countries with their own very specific agendas to pursue. From the giants of China and Russia to the east African state of Eritrea, the ‘war on terror’ has come to be seen as a green light of approval to
secret detention, ‘disappearances’ and torture.

Since the attacks on the USA on 11 September 2001 and the subsequent 'war on terror' we have been calling on governments to respect human rights in their counter-terrorism efforts. At first many ignored us, but there is now a growing realisation that security cannot be achieved by resorting to unlawful practices. We demand an end to these practices, an end to impunity and a respect for human rights."

To find out more about how to unsubscribe, and what it is you're unsubscribing from, visit the website here. There are also downloadable website widgets and buttons, and tips on how to unsubscribe through Web 2.0: Bebo, Myspaec, Facebook, Flickr and Second Life will all be hosting various forms of unsubscription.

Just a quick housekeeping note to let you know that the POSIWID site has moved, and I have updated its entry in the blogroll accordingly. The site is now here, and the feed for it is here. I'm not sure if they're having a house-warming, but do drop by and have a read anyway - it's worth it.

There have been some headlines in the last couple of days about Orange/FT's decision to offer OpenIDs. I headed over to the OpenID Directory Blog to read about it, and was minded to leave a comment. The blog post welcomes the entry of a major telco into this market, on the basis that the OpenIDs issued by Orange will imply a knowledge of the user's name, address and payment details.

My comment was - "not necessarily". More specifically: it depends on how Orange issue those OpenIDs, and what steps they take in the enrolment process to verify the claimed identity of the applicant. For instance, if I can get an OpenID on the basis of having an Orange pay-as-you-go SIM bought for cash, then it's quite possible that Orange would not know my real name, address, billing or payment details. I don't know, not being an Orange customer, whether that is the case.

So why am I saying all this here, instead of leaving a comment over there? Well, the OpenID Directory blog offers OpenID as one of the supported authentication mechanisms if you want to leave a comment, so I thought it would be appropriate to use my Sun OpenID to log in. After all, that has worked in the last day or two at a couple of other sites.

Unfortunately it still isn't working at the ODB, and the mechanics of the failure are interesting:

- on the ODB page, I enter the URI for my Sun OpenID;

- I am correctly redirected to that page, where I authenticate successfully;

- I am redirected back to the ODB site, where the ODB login page is displayed, inviting me to enter my ID and password. It also displays a message saying "Server denied check_authentication" (i.e. something discouraging but fairly meaningless).

Two things strike me about this:

- first, obviously, it's frustrating that I can't authenticate to this site, when I know my OpenID is working elsewhere;

- second, under the wrong circumstances, the flow exhibited by the ODB website would make for a very plausible phishing attack.

 

"Britain has been tested and not found wanting. This is who we are."

Gordon Brown used his first Labour Conference as Prime Minister to give everyone a pat on the back for surviving all the challenges the first few months of his premiership has thrown at the nation... flooding, terrorist attempts on Glasgow Airport and central London, outbreaks of foot and mouth.

It was that last one, in particular, which prompted a snort of derision. Please first consider the following statements:

1 - Britain currently faces a greater threat of chemical/biological attack than it did, say, 10 years ago. [True/False]

2 - If you ask people what's the first thing about the UK which pops into their head, they will probably say "rainy". [True/False]

3 - The single highest priority for a chemical/biological analysis centre is containment. If it can't do that, it shouldn't be allowed to do anything else. [True/False].

According to the official reports, the recent outbreaks of foot and mouth all have their origins in the state-run labs at Pirbright. The official report said that viral material escaped from the labs because of high rainfall and defective drainage. Five years ago, at a time when public fear over the possibility of terrorist attacks ('dirty bombs', chemical/biological contamination) was being stoked by large-scale public exercises like this, a government review of the labs specifically identified issues with funding, maintenance and the state of the facilities: "not commensurate with what might be expected for work with infectious diseases".

You might be tempted to conclude that the coded message of Gordon's speech was actually this: "Look, I know Tony made a complete arse of everything and left the entire policy landscape strewn with cluster bombs, but thank goodness un-flash Gordon has his hand on the wheel now, eh?".

Well, yes, except that we should also remember that the catastrophic run on the Northern Rock bank happened under the financial and regulatory system over which Mr Brown presided from May 1997. Northern Rock is a publicly-quoted savings bank and mortgage lender. Yesterday's Financial Times noted that its market capitalisation now represents less than 1% of assets.

Oh, well done, old thing... jolly well done.

One of the speeches which made quite an impression on me last Friday was given by Catherine Trautmann, a French MEP (Member of the European Parliament) in the Party of European Socialists (PES).

This is only a highly selective set of quotations, but I haven't found the full text online anywhere yet. They are also not verbatim, as she spoke in French, but they are from notes I took at the time, so should be close to the message, if not the exact wording.

On privacy:

"Privacy needs to be seen as a cross-border policy issue from the outset"

"The EU is defined as a democratic space to the extent that it is underpinned by a desire for respect for privacy"

"Cybercrime, people-trafficking and exploitation cannot [i.e. must not] be used to justify opaque decision-making with regard to privacy rights"

On the asymmetry of the relationship between citizens and government: 

"There is much talk of transparency in e-government, but one must always remember that state transparency and citizen transparency are not the same" [in the sense that requiring transparency of the state in its dealings is reasonable, but requiring transparency of all a citizen's personal dealings is not].

"There is a high degree of asymmetry in most forums (e.g. online debate) even if these are established ostensibly to encourage e-participation" [in other words, even where the citizen is invited to take part, it is not from a position of equal influence].

On e-voting:

"e-voting projects to date have tended not to meet, to a satisfactory extent, all the polling criteria one would hope for in terms of being independent, free, transparent and conducive to greater voter participation".

Now, whether or not one agrees with Ms Trautmann's policy position, I think it's interesting that she was so forthright in expressing views which swing the pendulum so far in favour of citzens' rights to things like

- a genuinely international approach to privacy policy;

- transparency of the working of government, policy-making and voting;

- the balance of power between the voter and the executive.

Even (perhaps particularly) in this week of the UK Labour Party conference, I'd forgotten what it was like to hear an actual Socialist... which is interesting, when you consider that the UK's Labour MEPs are all members of the PES.

... but I'm not sure who's agreeing with whom. I blogged a few days ago about European Information Commissioner Peter Hustinx' 'Opinion' on Member States' implementation (or not) of the European Data Protection Directive. In essence, he suggested that the Directive didn't need changing, member states just needed to get on and do a better job of complying with it. Today, the most recent newsletter from Privacy Laws and Business sketches out a fascinating sequence of blasts and counterblasts:

- the UK Information Commissioner, Richard Thomas, has apparently used the most recent meeting of the Data Protection Forum to say that, actually, the Directive is indeed in need of being overhauled, as it is "highly confusing and overly prescriptive", and that to suggest otherwise, as the Commission did, is "deplorably complacent"

- Mr Hustinx apparently then took the opportunity to agree (!), saying that the Directive ought indeed to be reviewed in the 3-5-year timescale;

- meanwhile, the Commission itself has complained that an examination of the UK's implementation of the DPD reveals: "failings in the implementation of the following: the definitions (in particular that of personal data); the scope of the Directive’s application to manual files; the conditions for processing sensitive data; fair processing notices; data subject rights; the application of exemptions from these rights; remedies for individuals; the liability of organisations for breaches of data protection law; the transfer of personal data outside of the European Union; and the powers of the Information Commissioner. The corresponding articles are 2, 3, 8, 10, 11, 12, 13, 22, 23, 25 and 28.

Apart from that, one assumes, they've got it spot on. It's a bit like the entry on Sex in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:

"SEX: None.

For further information see Guide Chapters seven, nine, ten, eleven, fourteen, sixteen, seventeen, nineteen, twenty-one to eighty-four inclusive, and - in fact - most of the rest of the Guide."

With everyone successfully dazed by this balletic skirmishing, the news that the House of Lords is recommending a consultation exercise to plan UK legislation in the knotty area of Breach Notification is likely to hit the reader like a deftly executed estocada. The good news is that there is a substantial body of prior experience in this area. I hope the consultation exercise manages to capitalise on it.

"(21.09.2007) Minside har vunnet en europeisk pris for fremragende e-forvaltningsløsninger. Minside er et offentlig servicekontor på Internett, med Brønnøysundregistrene blant tjenesteeierne. Prisen ble utdelt under EUs fjerde ministerkonferanse om e-forvaltning i Lisboa."

"Minside (Mypage) has won a European prize for outstanding e-government solutions. Mypage is an internet-based public service bureau, with the Brønnøysund registry among the service providers. The prize was awarded at the EU's fourth ministerial e-government conference in Lisbon."

I'm delighted for the Minside and Brønnøysund teams, not only because all those I have met have been great fun, but also because they are keen proponents of the Liberty Alliance open specifications for federated identity, and in particular their implementation in Sun's Access Manager product... which just made it slightly surreal to hear the Brønnøysund registry cited as a reference project by Pierre Liautaud, Microsoft Vice President for Western Europe, in his address to the conference on Thursday. Mind you, he also offered the view that "projects can happen faster in countries where you don't have to go through a complex procurement process", which was an odd message to be delivering to a European Commission-sponsored e-government conference. Maybe he was just a bit punch drunk from some of the week's other events.

Anyway, if you would like to look into the Mypage project in more detail, here's a good set of case study materials, collected on the Liberty website.

Here's a photo of the happy winners. I hope they won't mind me noting that some of them were not looking quite so daisy-fresh the next morning, but who could begrudge them a celebratory glass or two?

The list of winners is posted here. Other winning projects were:

- The HoReCa1 project  from the Netherlands - a one-stop site for hotel, restaurant and cafe licensing applications;

- Besancon.clic, from France - a recycling project for used computers;

- DVDV, from Germany - an online registry of administrative services.

From Italy, the OLPS (Online Police Station) won a public vote for 'most inspiring good practice'.

Arguably the world's most famous mime, Marcel Marceau has died at the age of 84. Presumably his pall-bearers will have to appear to be carrying him in an invisible box. 

A quick update from the Ministerial eGovernment conference in Lisbon, where the text of the conference's Ministerial Declaration has just been released. This Declaration follows on from the one which emerged from the Manchester eGovernment conference in November 2005, and also has to be set in the context of other major EU instruments such as the Service Directive... all of which can make for somewhat heavy reading, as the formal nods are made to all the various documents, strategies and policy statements which the drafters have to acknowledge... 

The four headline items of the Declaration are these:

1 - Cross-border interoperability,

2 - Reduction of administrative burden,

3 - Inclusive eGovernment,

4 - Transparency and democratic engagement.

I know I occasionally make this kind of promise, but I really am going to try and revisit each of these points in subsequent posts to go into them in a little more detail, especially from the prespective of public policy in identity and privacy. On that note, the first thing you might notice is that there's nothing in those headline items about identity and privacy... but panic not: after setting out the four main recommendations, the document does go on to bundle in a number of others which for whatever reason did not make it into the 'big four'. They include:

- engaging in a technology-mediated process of transformational change,

- promoting privacy and protection of identity, while making 'comprehensive use' of electronic identity and authentication...,

- exploring the potential of eGovernment to contribute to climate protection and energy savings, by reducing pollution and consumption,

- a general exhortation to exploit eGovernment for the twin aims of growth and job creation.

So whatever your particular policy hobby-horse, there's a fair chance of finding something in the Declaration to hitch it to, with one exception: I haven't found anything in there yet which mentions the sordid subject of money.

Peter Hustinx, the European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS), has published an 'Opinion' regarding the current EU Data Protection Directive. In Eurospeak, an 'Opinion' is not legally binding (as a Directive or Regulation would be), but is nonetheless a politically influential statement. I won't try and explain further. Oleg Gordievsky (I think in his book "KGB - The Inside Story") noted that the structure and processes of the European Commission were so confusing that they essentially were enough to prevent systematic intelligence-gathering by the cold-war Russian secret services.

The full text of Hustinx' report can be found here.

The bottom line, as it were, is that Mr Hustinx agrees with the European Commission that the existing Data Protection Directive does not need to be amended: rather, Member States ought to focus on achieving better implementation of it.

Here, though, is a summary of his recommendations, from the excellent Hunton and Williams Privacy and e-Commerce alert service:

Mr Hustinx stresses the importance of:

(1) full implementation of the Directive;

(2) considering the impact of technological developments on the Directive;

(3) having a global perspective and further developing rules on international data transfers;

(4) ensuring that personal data are protected despite law enforcement demands;

(5) adopting more sectoral data protection legislation (for example, regarding RFID);

(6) greater use of infringement procedures against the Member States;

(7) encouraging the use of interpretative communications by the Commission to clarify important questions;

(8) enhancing the use of non-binding instruments to increase compliance, such as privacy seals; and

(9) better defining the role of institutional actors, in particular the Article 29 Working Party.

I think it's both revealing and encouraging that, having identified the basic principle ("implement, rather than change the law"), his next three bullet items call for a greater focus on technological change, cross-border data transfer, and the balance between privacy rights and law enforcement access. I think he's right.

In other news, Google's CPO, Peter Fleischer, has called for governments and businesses to agree a common set of world-wide privacy principles. In his view, "The minority of the world's countries that have privacy regimes follow divergent models. Citizens lose out because they are unsure about what rights they have[,] given the patchwork of competing regimes".

I think he's being optimistic. A knowledge of one's privacy rights, in any given cross-border e-commerce or web application, would not make it materially easier to protect one's data, safeguard one's privacy, assess the risk involved, identify breaches and/or inappropriate use, or persuade lew enforcers to act on the case. Still, it's good to see Google thinking about the problem. 

The House of Commons Defence Committee (that's the Committee which looks at Defence-related issues, not the Committee for defending the House of Commons...) has published a report which is deeply critical of the ("appalling") standard of much of the barracks accommodation used by UK armed forces. Interestingly, it says that Defence Estates (the agency  responsible for managing the armed forces' real estate) has done good work but needs to do better, and that more investment is needed.

In its conclusions and recommendations, it notes that Defence Estates reported "staggering" over-achievement against some of the targets set for it by the Ministry of Defence. In fact, the report sets a somewhat skeptical tone concerning whether these targets are reliably indicative of good performance, or whether they were simply artfully chosen.

The report seemed to me to be particularly critical of the budgetary aspects of the whole scheme, especially the poor management of contracts with third parties, and the lack of any link between cash raised from sale of assets, and investing in improvements to housing stock. It also seems to me that it is not entirely fair to place the blame for this at the door of Defence Estates... given that they are the implementers of MoD and defence spending policy, rather than the makers of it.

If ever there was an argument for some degree of hypothecation in public sector funding, surely this is it. Hypothecation is the 'ear-marking' of funds raised for a specific purpose related to the way in which the funds were raised. For instance, hypothecated petrol duty might be spent on research into sustainable energy, and/or re-invested in the transport infrastructure. However, in the UK system, government revenue goes into a huge pot in the Treasury and is then re-allocated regardless of where it came from.

The MoD has sold off a lot of real estate assets in recent years - either to third party subcontractors who then continue to provide services to the Armed Forces (logistics, medical supplies and parachute packing are examples), or simply for re-use or redevelopment. It seems utterly bizarre that the profits from such sales should not be re-invested in improving the remaining real estate assets - particularly when these are known to require urgent, sustained and comprehensive attention.

Maybe it's just a cunning way of ensuring that returning squaddies yearn for the comforts of a rocky sangar in Helmand.

The New Zealand privacy commissioner, Marie Shroff, has used New Zealand's first Privacy Awareness Week as the launch platform for some discretionary guidelines on good practice in cases of data breach. She stops short of a California-style regime of compulsory notification, instead advising a risk-based approach along the lines of 'contain, quantify, notify, remediate' - where the notification step would depend on the output of the preceding assessments.

There's a nice set of documentation here. 

Digital ID World (DIDW) 2007 is on at the San Francisco Hilton from September 24th-26th.

The Liberty Alliance will be there, both for the second annual Identity Deployment of the Year (IDDY) awards and for what promises to be a very interesting Concordia workshop. As this article neatly puts it, Concordia is an open forum bringing together identity system purveyors and those who want to describe particular 'use cases' for their deployment.

This, the third Concordia workshop, will look at use cases and interoperability in the areas of government, energy and higher education. My own experience is that each of these is a highly significant area in its own right:

- in the public sector, there's never been more activity centred around questions of identity and interoperability - particularly concerning the inchoate relationship between public- and private-sector credentials and their interchange for accessing services.

- questions of energy usage, energy independence, sustainability and 'off-setting' are extremely topical, and it's not hard to foresee requirements for both interoperability between suppliers of fungible energy sources, and trans-national schemes. Issues of personal charging and auditability can't be far below the surface.

- in higher education, I'm keenly aware (not least from last week's TERENA workshop in Prague) that the issues of interoperability, trust and federation are pressing, and are being debated with great insight.

Personally, I'm delighted to see that not only is the IDDY programme continuing to find new implementations to celebrate, but Liberty is also finding new and relevant ways in which to contribute to DIDW and the identity community at large. 

I can't be there myself, I'm afraid, and the glee of getting the words 'inchoate' and 'fungible' into a single blog post doesn't really make up for it.

Lord Justice Sedley, an appeals court judge, has apparently recommended that all UK citizens should have their DNA recorded in a national database "for the absolutely rigorously restricted purpose of crime detection and prevention".

There are currently said to be 4 million entries in the existing national DNA database; according to the judge, the current system is "unjustifiable and biased against racial minorities". He also says: "We have a situation where if you happen to have been in the hands of the police then your DNA is on permanent  record. If you haven't, it isn't".

I think this gets to the nub of the main issue: the key phrase, to my mind, is "in the hands of". Under the current system, DNA samples can be taken from individuals whether or not it is believed they have comitted a crime: for instance, witnesses to a crime may be required to provide a sample; people arrested but not charged are recorded; people charged and found innocent are recorded; it is said to be 'almost impossible' to have your DNA removed from the database once it's in there, even if you are proved to be entirely innocent.

I agree with the judge that the database doesn't contain the right records, but in my view it should contain fewer, rather than more. To add the whole population, simply on the off-chance that their record might subsequently support a hypothetical prosecution, is completely disproportionate.

By almost direct analogy: the jail system is not 'unjustifiable' because it discriminates between those people who have committed a crime and those who have not: that is exactly its purpose. A jail system would be unjustifiable if it failed to discriminate between people who have been convicted of a crime and those who have not. And that is the unfairness in the current DNA database.

It also seems to me that the judge is ill-advised to advocate a universal database on the basis that it would be "for the absolutely rigorously restricted purpose of crime detection and prevention". First, I try to imagine the use of DNA records for crime prevention without imagining the total collapse of the presumption of innocence... and I find that very difficult. Second, I try to imagine a nationally (and presumably under some circumstances internationally) accessible DNA database of 60 million entries with an 'absolutely rigorously restricted purpose', and I find that even more difficult.

This also has a bearing on the judge's reasoning about racial bias. As I read it, his argument is that "where there is ethnic profiling going on, this means that disproprtionate numbers of ethnic minorities get onto the database". To me, this speaks of a problem of policy control: first, is there a justifiable case for ethnic profiling in the first place, and second, wouldn't the problem he describes be solved if the records of those not convicted had to be deleted from the database. That is the system in operation in Scotland.

Others have raised the question of whether the judge's proposal would be practical. I am tempted to say "if the government considers it is practical to have a national identity database (including facial and fingerprint biometrics, it ought to consider it practical to have a national DNA database... even if not quite yet".

I am relieved to read that Gordon Brown's spokesman cited bureaucratic, logistical and civil liberties concerns when asked if the government planned to extend the DNA database in this way.

08:50, July 2007, Newark, CA. Hotel lift-lobby.

"Made any money yet?"

It was an odd question to hear from a complete stranger, not least because I'd only just finished breakfast - alone. Perhaps it indicated a set of preconceptions about me. If it did, I had no reciprocal set... though a strong whiff of vodka breath provided an initial clue.

He wasn't a happy man. It emerged that he was back in the Bay Area just for the weekend, to check up on what his kids had done to the house in his absence - and apparently the findings weren't good.

"How old are your kids?", I asked, visualising a classic teen 'home alone' toga party.

"34", he said. "They're twins. I can't even tell one from the other."

He got out of the lift at that point. The question of what destruction the twins had wrought remains unanswered - as does the question of whether he was simply seeing double...