The system gets bigger...

Quick note. Spy Blog has info and questions on the "demise" of the Citizen Information Project, now that the Identity System Bill has gone through.

Making Jack a Dull Boy

This is good - the National Union of Teachers (NUT) recognise the importance of playing, and the possible demise of it in schools. In a time when "work-life balance" is being spouted by every street corner lifecoach around, and programmes about getting away from stuffiness are all the rage, why shouldn't children get a slice of the cake too?

Somewhere along the line, someone discovered that you could push people to limits. Tell people they want money for long enough, and they'll throw themselves in the road for you. Now work out that "telling" involves an entire educational system - work hard, play soft, and you'll get the magic beans at the end of the day - and you start to put the system into overdrive.

Is play dangerous? If it is indeed "imaginative" then how does that affect children? Doesn't imagination involve coming up with your own thoughts, developing your own sense of who you are? Not that I'm cynical of the "education" system (oh, ok, I am really), but the whole idea of "playfulness" really goes against the hard-working, hard-shopping, economic grain that the majority of the system seems to foster.

There's a fine line between "playfulness" and "rebellious" or "non-serious", for example. In the mind of the politician (or, indeed, the CEO, etc), "targets" and "imagination" are at loggerheads. The term "Imagination" conjures up images of crazy potheads deciding that plugging the PC into a cat would be "a great idea". The twist is that the same sense of imagination is needed - shock, horror, et al - to be creative, which is where all that lovely "innovation" that consultants love to talk about comes from. Heh.

Anyway, the NUT actually ties all this in with self-harm, which is an interesting link:

"General secretary Steve Sinnott said there was "increasing evidence of the damage to children's health and well-being" - with more self-harm among teenagers."

I'd love to see the research behind this. Maybe we're just breeding a nation of Goths.

(On a sidenote, this is one of the best ideas I've ever seen...)

Welcome to the Terrordome

The Terrorism Act has arrived today.

"(3) For the purposes of this section a publication is a terrorist publication ... if matter contained in it is likely-

(a) to be understood, by some or all of the persons to whom it is or may become available as a consequence of that conduct, as a direct or indirect encouragement or other inducement to them to the commission, preparation or instigation of acts of terrorism; ..."

-- Part 1, section 2

"I pursue my enemies and overtake them;
I will not turn back till I have destroyed them.
I strike them down, and they cannot rise;
they fall defeated at my feet.
You have girded me with strength for the battle;
you have cast down my adversaries beneath me;
you have put my enemies to flight.
I destroy those who hate me;
they cry out, but there is none to help them;
they cry to the LORD, but he does not answer.
I beat them small like dust before the wind;
I trample them like mud in the streets."

-- Psalm 18

This is after a quarter of an hour flicking through a Bible, and adopting "terrorism" to infer violence. More time, and a wider definition (i.e. the legal definition), and I'm sure there would be reasonable grounds to have most things banned. An interesting exercise, I think.

(On a side note, is it illegal to encourage yourself to commit acts of terrorism? My own writing is certainly "available" to me...)

The Problems with Profiling

The Observer hits a few top stories that tie in well together today - both relate to profiling, and the weaknesses inherent in placing so much trust in such a system.

The first, that a leaked inquiry reveals there was no direct Al-Quaeda link to the 7/7 bombs, highlights the main problem with profiling - that data within the system is only useful/valid so long as the factors "outside" of the system are "stable" too.

A little confusing? OK, in other words, if you have a system set up to find potential terrorists based on who's talking to whom, it only works so long as potential terrorists ONLY talk to existing known ones, to put it simply.

The problem we have now, though, is that the consequences of political action after political action have led to a number of people turning to terrorism independently (see Guardian story, and much older article). Profiling is no good at picking up "isolated" cells like this. The problem is further compounded when one remembers (or, in the case of many politicians, "realises") that you don't actually need to be a potential Peer to make a bomb. (Hell, you don't even need more than about 50p to just pretend to have a bomb, which would shut a station down for an hour or two.)

For too long, "terrorist training camps" and "terrorist networks" have been blamed for the spread of terrorism. But "terrorism" in its current form is nothing more than simple violence, which is as old as the hills. The true causes of violence have been around forever for anyone to "inquire" into, yet they continue to be ignored.


The second article, is both a reminder that a) profiling is highly dependent on the weakest link, and b) we look first to more profiling as the solution to the problems caused by a society of surveillance.

"Drivers use address scam to cheat speed cameras" picks up on a "loophole" (bug? feature?) involving the use of legitimate "business" addresses to avoid automatically-generated fines. By registering a car and its insurance at a "dummy" address, the Police have nowhere to look for the real owner.

Definitely a feature, but one that will probably be phased out as we continue the slide to be normalised, processable by the machine that looks over us. Proof comes at the end of the article:

"...the planned introduction of automatic number plate recognition cameras ... would be harder to deceive.

"A Home Office spokesman said the national identity register being introduced to back up planned ID cards would help..."

Primed and ready for a surveillance state.

Some privacy quotations

A couple of quotes on privacy for the weekend, taken from a paper by Michael Curry entitled "The Digital Individual and the Private Realm"*. The first is a reminder on the importance of privacy, and why people who claim that "if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear" are just wrong. The second is a reminder about how we deal with memories, the past, and change in ourselves...

"...the private realm performs important functions in the life of the individual and the group. It is in private that people have the opportunity to become individuals in the sense that we think of the term."

"We all assume that there are things about us that others will forget, and we are thereby able to feel that we live in a society where there is the possibility of redemption."


* Wow, I get paid to read this stuff? Something went right somewhere... ;)

We're already there

Further to my last post on social mapping, one thing I've been meaning to blog recently is the "Targeting Benefit Fraud" advertising campaign being run by the DWP. Some adverts are available from the above site.

The slogans run along these lines: "We can compare all sorts of information. So if you're not completely honest, we'll find out." Another one notes that, "We can compare information across government departments", to the same effect. We can see, then, that it's not as if such profiling of the individual is a surreptitious, covert operation.

The tones of the ads are both ominous and a forebearer of how the relationship between government and individual will continue to develop. Technology is here. Currently, it's being used in areas where people have responsibility to the government - i.e. accurate reporting and fraud avoidance. Curiously, it's these areas (where the technology already supposedly is in place) that ID cards are supposed to extend into as well, so perhaps there's some overlap planned there.

Honesty is a funny thing, linked intrinsically with trust. Technology used as it is replaces the need for the trust that we're used to, or at least it's supposed to (as there may be other means to fool the system). A false sense of security aside, perhaps there's nothing wrong with technology used in this way - after all, fraudsters are basically freeriders in the ubiquitous public system.

The slightly scary thing is that such a line - that we're no longer responsibile for our own responsibility, as it were - is now completely, tacitly accepted by the general population. The shift in power has already been made, and no-one's taken any notice.

This is the split between Orwellian vision and reality. 1984 presents a picture so obviously, drastically different to our "own" - an image designed and intended to shock - that we focus on that as what to "look out for" in a Big Brother government. But the people in Orwell's Airstrip One world are obviously asleep to that which controls them. Control comes slowly, and keeping an eye out for it is mostly like watching paint dry - change happens, but we're too busy watching other, "more interesting" stuff at the time, all the time.

It's only a small jump from technology looking to catch traditional fraudsters, to that which seeks to monitor all interactions of importance, for reasons stated previously. The important thing is that we're already half way there, and that going backwards is a lot harder than forwards.

Social Cartography: Mapping the Electorate

Yesterday I wrote another lovely letter about ID cards to my MP - I figured it was fun to strike while the topic is hot.

I'm blogging it here as I think it sums up quite nicely the main reason why I hate the Bill. Namely, when people say that the ID Bill represents "a fundamental shift in the relationship between the citizen and the state", the horrendous thing is not (completely) that the government can see what each individual is doing. The horrendous, yet little-discussed threat is that the government is being handed a map of interpersonal communication and interaction on a total scale. Thus, even if I can see what information the government has "on" me, I am still lacking some information that they have the rights to - information about how I fit in with everyone else.

Why is this a drastic alteration in the state-citizen relationship? Because links are everything. We are social creatures - indeed, governments (along with firms, organisations, schools and unions) are born from our social nature. But these links are complex, and we generally have a difficult time understanding them simply because they are bigger than any single individual. But under a national database of "trusted" contact linkages, the people that "own" the data as a whole suddenly get a very fresh look at how things work.

Take a look at visual complexity to get an idea of how important such maps are - for example, check out the Internet traffic flow map or (more relevantly) the online community map. By tracing the points of contact - the links along which interaction and, by implication, information, trust and friendship are exchanged - you can form an image (whether as a 2D JPG or a notional database structure) to determine strong points and weak points, direction of informational flow, etc. This is the beauty of maps. Once you know what the major bridges are and what routes exist, it becomes extremely easy to start disrupting the network, either by taking out the nodes themselves, or (if that proves too "high publicity") just severing the links.

Thus, the ID Bill represents, effectively, a very feasible form of social chemistry - by which I do not mean a scientifically proven method for MPs to attract members from the opposite benches gender with. Just as we, as a culture, have learnt to control our environment through an understanding of the "networks" of molecules, particles, forces, etc, so now do we have the tools available to start a similar understanding of how our own structures work.

In order to arrive at that comprehension, we need to trace the links and the flows that we see only from our own point of view every day. If ID cards - whether they have PINs, biometrics or nothing more than visual validation - are introduced on a large scale, not only will we have a system that gives us a completely false sense of security (as people without ID cards* won't be part of the system, plus there will always be alternative networks to route information** through), but we'll have one that hands this level of mapping to a government who have no political or legal need to share it with the rest of us.

Will it get abused? The future is uncertain. But democracies are all about uncertainty - hence the call for accountability, transparency and involvement. Why, then, are we taking the risk of losing out on this? Why are we prepared to trust the any government with this in particular, especially when public confidence in our elected is at a generally all-time low?

* i.e. The rest of the world. For now.
** Where information = money, loans, etc.

Addendum: Bah, last time I use that particular blog-posting tool. Apologies to anyone who tried to read it before linebreaks were re-introduced...

Little News Round-up, and Linguistic Battles

A quick few news links...

The FT reports that ID cards could have PINs* (not PIN number numbers), which would extend the range of verification techniques, all the way from a quick visual check, through PINs, to biometric validation (although there's no reason why you need the card for this one, if you're connected to the central database).

(* N.B. The article is supposed to be limited access, but in the hardcopy version, it stopped where the preview stops anyway...)

The hacker in me thinks that more complex security = much more chance of a "way in", or around the system, especially when it comes to automated validation. A system can be set-up for both a "simple" (PIN) check and an "advanced" (biometric) check, with the more advanced one being mandated at the human level, so route round the human (weak) side of things, and it's all of a sudden a lot easier to validate "yourself". Danger, Will Robinson.

Local rag, The Argus had a couple of interesting stories the other day: An apparent increase in "yob" culture" in Brighton, and a note on a Home Office report that says Brighton has 20,000 CCTV cameras, 3rd only to London and Manchester.

No attempt seems to have been made to link the two stories up, but a Liberty spokesperson hints at the problematic limitations of using observation to control behaviour:

"People often feel very uncomfortable being surrounded by hundreds of cameras and in our opinion they often do very little other than monitor innocent citizens."

"Innocent" citizens, maybe. Unfortunately, insobriety has a peculiar effect, freeing us from those social inhibitions that act upon us to regulate our behaviour as we perceive ourselves to be perceived by others. The effect that beer has which results in being able to sing loudly at 3am is exactly the same effect which prevents us from worrying so much about being monitored on CCTV. Indeed, if you believe the TV documentaries, the presence of a camera nearby can often accentuate the urge for exhibitionist behaviour.

In short, CCTV is a social phenomenon, not a technological one - but alcohol is a "cure" for that exact same aspect of "monnitoring", whether it's a solution for monitoring in the workplace, or monitoring elsewhere.


A final observation is also to be made regarding the last story here and the current tennis match over ID Cards between the 2 houses. In one, the debate is centred around the definition of "torture", while in the other the debate is around the definition of "voluntary". I've touched on this before, but the use of language is increasingly important in politics, just as it is in marketing. Accessibility to policy and accountability depends on understanding, shared comprehension. Hammering out this comprehension through language that means the same thing on both sides of the fence is essential, but keep an eye out for its abuse...

Evidence vs Suspicion

Jack Straw manages to avoid investigation into rendition flights by shifting the burden of proof, claiming that if it had been going on, "it is a fair bet that somebody would have spotted this". In other words, if you can hide something well enough (reading "hide" equally as "repress", "obscure", "mock" or "plain ignore") then it might as well not be happening, and in that case there's no need to check it out.

Precaution is a funny word. In a time when more and more people are being tagged as suspicious until proven innocent, precaution is becoming a way of life. (Precaution and paranoia often start to get blurred too, but that's for another post.) Yet here, once again, we can see it's one rule for the masses, and another for the boys in charge.

Suspicion and evidence are 2 very different things, but the way things are going, the latter will soon be the de jure of the people in charge of the investigations, while the rest of us, whose "power" extends to an exercise in formality once every 4 years, gets left with the fear.

Terrorific

Charged with possessing information likely to be useful to a terrorist.

Anyone got a list of information that might be "useful" to a terrorist? How about bus timetables?

Sun Tzu's Art of Prayer?

A quick note on the Blair's God stuff - which seems to be keeping the media (ok, the BBC - haven't checked much of the papers out) on track to only highlight one side of the issue - the moral side. Blair's always played the moralistic trump card over the question of judicial legality, which has succeeded in pushing the debate further away from the military/diplomacy side.

Reg Keys does get it though:

Reg Keys ... said Mr Blair was "using God as a get-out for total strategic failure"

Yup. It doesn't completely matter why you went to war. There are further questions about why it went so badly wrong once the decision had been made.

Researchers may want to compare the decision to "tactics" used to deploy IT in government departments. Hint: "Visionaries" only see what they want to see. Reality is a harsh judge of dreamers.

P.S. Things are a bit quiet here recently. I'm still very much thinking about what's involved with technology and politics - moreso than ever, and a lot of the energy is going into much "larger" (bigger-than-blog) thinking, such as essays for academia. Hopefully the two worlds will collide painfully soon enough.

Tracker watching

The BBC has a quick look at mobile phone tracking services.

Guantanamo not British

The UK Government would never have set up Guantanamo Bay, says Lord Falconer. No, we would call it something different.

Smell the propaganda machine distancing the UK from the US.

Hallucinations for the believers only

Excellent - hallucinatory tea fine for "talking to God" purposes. In America. The NY Times reports that "... the government's "bold argument" that the Controlled Substances Act, the basic federal narcotics law, "simply admits of no exceptions" could not be reconciled either with the religious freedom law or with administrative practice under the act itself."
The quote from the above article from Chief Justice Roberts' opinion is also one worth noting:

"The government's argument echoes the classic rejoinder of bureaucrats throughout history: If I make an exception for you, I'll have to make one for everybody, so no exceptions."

He then went on to say that the very point of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act was to require consideration, on a case-by-case basis, of claims to religious-based exemptions from laws of general applicability.

I find it... amusing that faith - rather than, say, responsibility, "scientific evidence" or medical relief (although I'm never sure where we've got to on that last one) - is the grounds upon which laws can be discriminatorily applied. Perhaps in today's world, what we profess to believe is more powerful than who we actually are. Perhaps the hidden religious depths behind most world leaders spark a seed of mutual recognition, and the fear of hypocrisy. A perfectly mature, responsible individual can be denied the use of somethig potentially dangerous simply because it's for her or his own sake. If you have the chutzpah to proclaim transcendence, though, then you might have a chance.

Jiminy Cricket wears a curly wig

In Austria, David Irving is sentenced to 3 years for denying the Holocaust in an interview 17 years ago. Since then, he's changed his mind:

"I said that then based on my knowledge at the time, but by 1991 when I came across the Eichmann papers, I wasn't saying that anymore and I wouldn't say that now," Irving told the court.

Even Deborah Lipstadt, who Irving tried to sue for libel in the UK in 2000, recognises the ridiculous of the situation:

"I am not happy when censorship wins, and I don't believe in winning battles via censorship... The way of fighting Holocaust deniers is with history and with truth"

Personally, as a commentator, I don't profess to have any historical knowledge on the matter. On this point, I freely admit to believing in something merely because others have told me about it. While I like to question assumptions, it would become rather silly to disbelieve everything and anything until I had verified it with my own eyes.

But I do indeed digress. Or do I? The question, then, is whether history is a science, or an art. The science of determining what has happened, or the art of maintaining an archive, and drawing links and lines of cause and effect through time. In the end, of course, it will be a bit of both - we need to establish truth, but we also need to understand where we have come from. The important point is to learn from our past.

But the concern here, legally speaking, is this split between the two - how much one can risk affronting emotion in the search for knowledge. Nobody argues with the idea that much of history is written by the winners, which is effectively another way of saying that history becomes what people want it to become. Memories are filled with soul, and our souls are generated from our memories.

I haven't time to delve to deeply into Irving's past, and his legal clashes with Lipstadt. If, as he says, he has changed his tune following his own, personal discovery of further "evidence", then he is acting as a scientist. Lipstadt is right to point out that this is a much preferred method of resolution than "simple" censorship.

Yet with the gradual onslaught of the psychological and juridical science domains, we are left increasingly with a view of the individual as an automata. We are painted as being rational and "free" so long as we remain on societal track. Our decisions are our own. But once we enter the justice system, quite often we lose this shield of perceived "freedom". Our actions are unhelpable, our motivations are driven by forces we cannot control, forces that exist naturally but that somehow occur outside of sense of "choice".

Increasingly, then, a single action is extrapolated into our mindset in totality. Pop Media amplifies this "dehumanisation", turning the middle aged man who accidentally catches sight of a 14-year-old girl in a short skirt into a raging paedophile. We have mastered the links between "effect" and "cause" and, because we have statistics to prove it, we believe the link and nothing more. Or less.

What are the implications for the idea of human fallibility, for occasional frailty? When we end up with a judicial system that becomes so keen to extract (penal) guilt from intention, and that loses the power to believe in the reversibility of the human "conscience"? If Irving is basing his opinion on what he knows, and changes his opinion accordingly, but still gets 3 years for what he now knows is wrong, where does that leave the rest of us? How can we even trust history so long as it has some emotional content to it?

Clay Shirky brought this up as the most dangerous idea for coming decades. Richard Veryard notices move from questioning to employability in education. Just how easy is it to forget that we may actually have some control over ourselves, and some say in the world we live in?

Some new ground, but same old arguments

Hurrah, some movement. New legislation will be required to make ID cards compulsory. Meanwhile, Blair trots out the usual rubbish:

"People have this idea that there's a problem in civil liberties with people having an identity card and an identity registered today when across all walks of our life this is happening."

Politicians just don't get this idea that it's not how necessarily much information is out there about you - it's about who has access to how much in one go. Yes, there are serious concerns abut publically-available information (via Google, for example), which need to be addressed. Gathering all the information together under the eyes of a pompous government isn't an "inevitable" step in the slightest.

Sainsbury's do not need to know how often I visit the Doctor's, just as insurance companies are not allowed to know the results of genetic tests for diseases. This is a much, much bigger issue than people realise, or that I have time for today. Maybe soon.

Wake up to Brown's terror threat

Gordon Brown plays the "fear for your lives" card this weekend, a day before votes are due to be cast on the latest round of the ID card push. How odd. Time and time again, the Home Office have told us that ID cards were never intended to be a panacea or a sole solution for terrorism, witness:

"I must emphasise that we have never said that the identity cards scheme is intended to be the sole solution to ... terrorism. The scheme is therefore not being designed to be the primary method of combating these problems." - letter from Des Browne, 13 Jan 2005. Emphasis mine.

Yet on Radio 4's Today, Brown's cited as saying:

"If you take the Ricin plot ... there were 12 main suspects, they had 120 separate identities ... If you take one of the 11 September terrorists in America, he was operating with 20 false identities so he could not be spotted.

"It is absolutely crucial to the disruption of terrorism that you can spot quickly where multiple identities are being used."

Well, make up your minds. Do you want us to be scared or at ease?

The above Today quote is from an article concerning Blair missing the vote due to technical difficulties - his plane's engine has a problem. That's the problem with technlogy, isn't it? It always fails just at the most inopportune moments. Maybe it's a hint.

Meanwhile, back in UKPS...

Blogging must go in waves... nothing for ages, then about 3 in a day.

I've finally gotten around to reading - and recommending - an article from the Register last week about the introduction of passport biometrics and its link with ID Cards.

Having just watched an episode of "Yes, Minister", my policynical-radar is twitching, and now I realise it would be wrong to think that Whitehall doesn't have some arguments-in-preparation going on. The article is pretty lengthy, but the gist of it is that much of what the ID card promises (biometrics, databases, etc) is already underway for passports anyway. Once it's in place, saying "oh, but we already have 75% of the infrastructure in place" will probably become a very convincing argument. Who wants to scrap a plan once the money's been spent on it? And who gives a fiddling monkey about what effects it'll have aside from the financials?

Not us, hum.

Reading for Today

If you read one thing today (apart from this post), make it Chick Yog's post on ideas, supermarkets, political debate and jet-propelled nurses:

Chicken Yoghurt: Battlefield Medicine

An ID card for each identity

A "curious" BBC news story from yesterday: Transsexuals 'to get 2 ID cards':

Transsexuals who have yet to have a sex-change operation will be entitled to two ID cards, Home Office Minister Lady Scotland of Asthal has said.

One would be in their gender at birth and the other in their legally-acquired "gender of designation".

It doesn't make clear whether this is as a "side-effect" of the proposed legislation, or a "feature" that the Lords have introduced. Alas, I haven't the time to check Hansard on it ("peer review", a-harr), so consider this a "bookmark for later" post.

The idea of what constitutes a unique "identity" is certainly a fascinating one...