Robin Wilton's esoterica

To my regret, I missed the announcement of Oscar Peterson's death at Christmas. In my childhood, if you said "astronaut", people would have said "Neil Armstrong"; if you said "footballer" they would have said "Bobby Charlton"; if you said "jazz musician" they would have said "Oscar Peterson". He was one of those genre-breaking people who opened up the world of jazz to people who otherwise would have had nothing to do with it.

That was still true in 1984 when he performed his "Easter Suite", televised for London Weekend Television's South Bank Show. I remember thinking "I'd really like to watch that... but my parents are unlikely to want to sit through it". I need not have worried; we were all entranced. You can get a DVD of the performance, and I thoroughly recommend it. The trio at the time - Peterson, Martin Drew on drums and Niels-Henning Orsted Pedersen on bass - was as good a combo as you're ever likely to hear. If you want a CD introduction to Oscar Peterson's music, you can do a lot worse than his album in the Compact Jazz series.

Coincidentally, Oscar Peterson has been on the CD player in the car a lot over the last week - specifically, his 1986 "Bach Suite", of which the first track is just a showstopper. You can get some idea of it from a rather crunchy clip on YouTube, here, though unfortunately the fabulous opening chord coda of the CD version is missing.

One of my favourite Oscar Peterson records is an LP: Verve's "Something Warm", which dates back to 1962. In many respects it should be a disaster... it's a live performance, I believe recorded at The London House (Chicago), and the background noise of people having a good dinner is often obvious. At one unfortunate point, someone appears to lose a juggling competition with a tray of cutlery. But for all that, there's a vibrancy to the music which isn't far short of magic.

Thanks for the music, Oscar.

Yesterday, the House of Commons Justice Committee published its report into the Protection of Private Data (written in the aftermath of the HMRC data breach). It calls (among other things) for criminal penalties for data breaches, greater powers and resources for the Information Commissioner's Office, and the introduction of breach notification legislation.

It draws attention to the ever-increasing levels of inter-departmental and international data-sharing which is expected to underpin future egovernment programmes. HTML and pdf versions of the report are online here.

It's OK as far as it goes, but I can't help feeling that in some areas its focus is already behind the times. Yes, cross-border data-sharing needs the informed attention of the policymakers (look at the prolonged high-level legal dispute over the disclosure of air passenger PII to the US authorities, for instance); yes, the ICO arguably needs better resources and more 'teeth' - but as I suggested back in December, meaningful improvements will come from fundamental changes in the culture of data custody practice, and harsher enforcement alone will not achieve that.

That cultural shift must address the issues of inter-departmental public sector data sharing, but even that would be too retrospective. There's also the issue of data transfers which cross the boundaries between public and private sector organisations, and those receive little if any mention in the report. Then there's the knottier question of how to protect such data "beyond first disclosure". If we accept that mass quantities of personal information will be transferred between one organisation and another, whether in the public or private sector or between the two, then what measures - technical, legislative, regulatory and procedural - can/should be taken to protect it against further, inappropriate disclosure?

Answers on a postcard, please...