IT Klondike!

Several publications are linking to a survey of Labour's 10 most notorious IT schemes. The Independent claims that government has spent £26 billion on computer systems that have suffered severe delays, run millions of pounds over budget or have been cancelled altogether. The surprise is that all the papers seem astounded by this.

Also, they all repeat the canard that Labour is not intending to push the roll-out of ID cards and the NIR is not even mentioned. Nonetheless, there are useful summaries of the major schemes, some of which I had not heard of.

ANPR used as cash cow.

The Independent on Sunday reveals that police are using controversial car-surveillance technology aimed at catching criminals and terrorists to target members of the public in order to meet government performance targets and raise revenue.

Police whistleblowers also claim that intelligence stored on the national Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) database is "at least 30 per cent inaccurate", which has led to the wrongful arrest of innocent motorists and the seizure of their cars.

Smart meters - are they such a smart idea?

The European Union said in 2006 that smart meters should be made mandatory, but voters in the Netherlands have vigorously opposed a compulsory rollout and succeeded in persuading politicians to vote against it. The fears are that data on energy consumption could be misused by criminals, police or insurance companies. Dutch consumer and privacy organisations were concerned that information relayed as frequently as every 15 minutes could allow employees of utility companies to see when properties were empty or when householders had bought expensive new gadgets. See here.

The UK government intends to spend £8.1 billion establishing a smart meter system and database. The present trials, which are being conducted with four of the leading suppliers, are throwing up potential problems, including issues about access to properties and the need for rewiring and repiping. Datamonitor is warning that the introduction of smart metering will rival the creation of the internet as a telecommunications project and will stretch utility industry practices and processes to breaking point.

The Department of Energy and Climate Change wants to see 47 million meters in 26 million properties by 2020 and states:

Data protection and system security are crucial issues for the success of the rollout and operation of the smart metering and will be a vital part of the implementation work we will be doing. We will take a rigorous and systematic approach to assessing and managing these issues.

Well they would say that wouldn't they?

Vote against the database state

You can vote against ID cards and the database state here. Power 2010 has decided on 5 reforms of the UK parliament and scrapping ID cards and rolling back the database state is in second place.

Post Office diversifies.

A FOI request has just revealed some interesting information about the government's struggle to ramp up 'biometric enrolment' of the general population. The plan is to enrol you on the scheme and take your fingerprints, facial photo and signature in Post Offices across the UK, if you apply for a passport from the end of 2011.

The UK Border Agency's 'Commercial Strategy On Future Biometric Enrolment Accommodation and Services' makes it quite clear the Home Office doesn't have the capacity to handle mass registration:

We have considered using IPS (which is part of the Home Office anyway) to provide these services... but they provide scant geographical coverage,and have limited space for processing the additional footfall of enrolment applications."

So much for the value of the interrogation centre network, expensively set up in the past few years, and now being quietly wound down again.

The official documents have been mysteriously - and inconsistently- blotted out in places. Most references to costs are excised; the planned timetables are shown, but what logically should be references to how much has been done, where, are all black. Confident? In different versions of the same documents the same bits are not redacted. Competent?

Will it actually work, if it is available on time? They don't seem to think so. One Post Office presentation refers bizarrely to people whom the system can't even record:

The system can allow up to three attempts, before offering to accept and forward the last photograph if the Customer agrees, on the basis that not all people are ICAO [International Civil Aviation Organisation] conformant.

As David Blunkett put it in another context, "impossible, not nearly impossible, impossible".

Thanks to NO2ID newsletter 140.

Public private partnership, not?

Companies that fall foul of the data breach laws now risk a maximum fine of £500,000. It is not clear at this time whether the same principle applies to Government departments that lose sensitive data! See here.
Thanks to the Daily Mail for the chart. NB This is from November 2007 and now the DNA database holds 5.5 million profiles.

ID database will track NI numbers

The Home Secretary has admitted in a Parliamentary answer, see here, that the Identity and Passport Service (IPS) is collecting National Insurance numbers from every person who applies for an ID card, and storing them on the National Identity Register - the ID card database.

As from next year it will be compulsory to apply for entry on the National Identity Register in order to receive a passport, this means that all passport applicants will also have their NI number collected and stored for life.

Mr Johnson's answer failed to mention other categories of information, in addition to what is currently recorded on the passport database, that are to be held on the National Identity Register.

Phil Booth, NO2ID's National Coordinator, said:

The National Identity Scheme has never been about a card - it's about tracking you throughout your life, linking your details by the numbers.

This admission confirms the Home Office's intentions for the scheme. It wants to track you through every government and private database it can - and your NI number's just the start.

It is also worth mentioning that the Electoral Commission tells us that: from 2011 onwards, we will report annually to Parliament on the progress of the voluntary collection of personal identifiers - National Insurance number, signature and date of birth - from electors, to make sure that the conditions are appropriate before any move to compulsory provision of identifiers.

Just say NO.

A parent rants about being asked to provide reams of personal information to her child's Sure Start nursery. She just said "no". How refreshing, see here.

No, thank you, I do not want or need support.

I do not want my children's details being passed onto any of the incompetent people with whom I have had the misfortune to work.

I do not want other agencies in government meddling with the lives of my children and getting it wrong, again.

I do not give my consent for their details to be added to ContactPoint. In it I see only danger to children. No, thank you.

Bravo renegade parent.

IPS spends more on bad spin

The Register alerts us to an attempt at ID card propaganda that would make even Joseph Goebbels squirm. See here.

ID card scheme expands early

The Home Office has now begun to require Tier 2 foreign nationals to register for ID cards when renewing their visas – three months earlier than it had originally planned.

Tier 2 includes skilled workers, ministers of religion, sportsmen and women, representatives of overseas businesses and dependants. Guy Herbert of No2ID said that the government already had plenty of information on the identity of Tier 2 immigrants and the scheme was superfluous and wasteful.

Alan Johnson has confirmed that the National Identity Register contains National Insurance numbers. This means that the register could be used to cross-reference with other government databases, including tax and benefits.
See here and here.

STOP PRESS - NDNAD solves 0.67% of crimes!

The Home Affairs select committee has been told that, of the nearly 5 million offences reported to the police last year, 33,000 were solved thanks to a direct match with a stored DNA profile, see here.

Britain's national DNA database (NDNAD) with more than 5.5million individuals registered, solves one in every 150 crimes and it's the largest in the world.

Conservative campaigns

The Conservatives have started electioneering and have two campaigns of interest to us. One is to reclaim your DNA and the other is to stop ID cards. To give them their due they have been criticising the surveillance state and national databases for some time, even if this is a general election ploy. We hope that they also intend that innocent people who have their DNA removed from the DNAD will have their personal information removed from the police national computer. Regarding ID cards they say:

Brown says he's scrapping compulsory ID cards: he either doesn't not know what he’s talking about, or he's deliberately pulling the wool over people’s eyes. Anyone who makes an application for a ‘designated document’ such as a passport has to enter personal information - including fingerprints and other biometric details - on the National Identity Register. This is compulsion by stealth. We don't want or need all our private information on a vast state database, with potential for another data loss disaster.

Now what is Conservative policy on fingerprints in new biometric passports? Also, we just hope that these promises are better than other cast-iron guarantees given by Mr Cameron!

Safe in their hands?

There is a postcode lottery relating to the removal of the records of innocent people from the DNA database.

South Yorkshire police force does best, complying with 83% of requests for deletion, see here. Other forces including Cambridgeshire, Gloucestershire and Nottinghamshire have refused to remove any profiles. Essex, Greater Manchester and Thames Valley — wouldn't even provide any information on the grounds that it would be too costly.

We also discover via FOI requests that more than 400 officers and support staff have been sacked or given warnings after being caught looking at inappropriate material online and some officers have also been dismissed for using police databases to check out people’s backgrounds for personal reasons. See here.

The information provided by 47 police forces showed that on average nine members of staff have been punished for flouting IT rules in every force. In this respect, South Yorkshire was the force with the worst record, with 53 members of staff caught on inappropriate sites.

Also, remember that since 2005 if you have had your DNA taken, you will also have a record on the Police National Computer, see here, and evidently there are no plans to delete this accompanying identity data on the Police National Computer.

Data collection, terrorism and confusion.

After the recent plane bombing attempt, expect more 'reasons' for the collection, storage and investigation of your personal data. Here is an interesting fact-

After Sept. 11, we Americans indulged our faith in the god of technocracy. We expanded the country’s information-gathering capacities so that the National Security Agency alone now gathers four times more data each day than is contained in the Library of Congress. See the NYT.

As the UK government increases the amount of personal data it keeps on its citizens exponentially, so it makes it more difficult to protect said citizens. Trying to put the personal information of everyone on registers entails huge amounts of time and manpower. And the effect of all this? Well, if you want to find a needle in a haystack, don't increase the size of the haystack.