English Defence – another success story for the UK Border Force 2

At 00:27 on 8 January 2013 DMossEsq published English Defence – another success story for the UK Border Force, an article about border control failures in the UK and the US.

The story concerns the leader of the English Defence League – a man known variously as Stephen Yaxley Lennon, Tommy Robinson and Paul Harris – and his trip from the UK to the US and back. There are many border control failures possible and many of them were exhibited in Lennon/Robinson/Harris's trip*. With all of those actual failures to choose from, DMossEsq managed nevertheless to focus on one failure of the UK Border Force that wasn't exhibited.

This mistake has been usefully pointed out by an anonymous commenter.

The newspaper reports of Mr Lennon/Robinson/Harris's trip state that: "He used a self check-in kiosk to board the Virgin Atlantic flight at Heathrow, and was allowed through when the document was checked in the bag drop area". DMossEsq confused "self check-in kiosks" with "smart gates" and concluded that this was an example of the unreliability of the face recognition biometrics used by smart gates. Face recognition biometrics are laughably unreliable but as Mr Lennon/Robinson/Harris hadn't used a smart gate that's irrelevant in this case and DMossEsq wishes to apologise for misleading readers.

How did DMossEsq confuse "self check-in kiosks" with "smart gates"? Frustration. Undischarged anger. Leading to occasional blind spots.

What's frustrating? The Home Office spend a fortune on security systems that depend for their success on biometrics being reliable. Then when you take them to court to make them publish the evidence, they refuse to do so and add that the trials they carried out were so specific that the results wouldn't tell the public anything anyway. In other words, the Home Office have no justification for spending our money on biometrics.

This misfeasance has been going on under every Home Secretary since David Blunkett and under two Permanent Secretaries – Sir David Normington and Dame Helen Ghosh. Now we have a new Permanent Secretary at the Home Office, Mark Sedwill. Let's see if he's any better. Any less frustrating.

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* Border control failures:-

1. Leaving the UK. Mr Lennon/Robinson/Harris managed to leave the UK travelling on someone else's passport, Mr Andrew McMaster's. A UK Border Force officer must have checked at passport control and decided that the photograph in the passport looked enough like Mr Lennon/Robinson/Harris. An understandable mistake. But a mistake nevertheless.

2. Entering the US. Mr Lennon/Robinson/Harris's flat print fingerprints didn't match Mr McMaster's which must presumably have been already on file. He failed his primary inspection and was referred for secondary inspection. He didn't turn up. Instead, he managed to get out of the airport. Flat print fingerprinting registers false non-matches about 20 percent of the time, so it's perfectly normal for people to fail primary inspection, it's not a sign of the technology working properly, rather the opposite. The non-match won't have rung any alarm bells but, nevertheless, he shouldn't have been able to avoid secondary inspection and leave the premises.

3. Leaving the US. Mr Lennon/Robinson/Harris, having entered the US as Andrew McMaster, left using his own passport as Paul Harris. (a) Border control for non-US citizens is meant to match entry and exit details. There would have been no entry details for Paul Harris. As far as the system was concerned, Paul Harris was leaving the US without ever having come in. It looks like a mistake to miss that. (b) His ticket was presumably in the name of Andrew McMaster. Why was the man whose passport was in the name of Paul Harris allowed to leave the US on a ticket in the name of Andrew McMaster?

4. Entering the UK. Why was the man whose passport was in the name of Paul Harris allowed to enter the UK on a ticket in the name of Andrew McMaster?

How could the mismatch between the names on the airline ticket and the passport have been discovered? The expensive answer is "eBorders".

As a taxpayer, you have spent a fortune on ePassports and smart gates. They don't work. In the name of border security, you have also spent a fortune on a system called eBorders, which logs all the details of your flights and is meant to provide the raw intelligence to keep the border safe. Clearly eBorders doesn't work either. Otherwise the mismatch between passport and ticket would have been spotted. You have also spent a fortune making hundreds of Border Force staff redundant, to be replaced by computer systems, and then re-hiring them when the Home Office found the computer systems don't work.

You've spent the money. The systems don't work. The staff don't do anything with the data that's collected. But don't worry. The border is secure.

English Defence – another success story for the UK Border Force 2

At 00:27 on 8 January 2013 DMossEsq published English Defence – another success story for the UK Border Force, an article about border control failures in the UK and the US.

The story concerns the leader of the English Defence League – a man known variously as Stephen Yaxley Lennon, Tommy Robinson and Paul Harris – and his trip from the UK to the US and back. There are many border control failures possible and many of them were exhibited in Lennon/Robinson/Harris's trip*. With all of those actual failures to choose from, DMossEsq managed nevertheless to focus on one failure of the UK Border Force that wasn't exhibited.

Andrew Dilnot and honest political debate in the UK – 2

Whitehall officials are impervious to all requests to explain their mistaken choices.

And yet they are happy to tell us that we need midata to correct our errors.

After you, Whitehall.

After you.

--- o O o ---

We all make mistakes.

That's what the Department for Business Innovation and Skills (BIS) say. Faced with a choice, we make the wrong decision. We need help. Computerised help. And BIS aim to provide that help, through their midata initiative. Applications will process our historical transaction data, they will take into account the products and services currently available from the suppliers, and the right transaction will be brokered for us.

It's not just us proletarians. We all make mistakes. Even Whitehall officials.

It's 10 years since the Home Office published their consultation on what became known as "ID cards", Entitlement Cards and Identity Fraud – A Consultation Paper. Crucial to the system was the belief that all 60 million of us in the UK could be identified by various biometrics, specifically facial geometry and flat print fingerprints.

Utter cockpoppy, the technology's simply not up to it. But the choice had been made. By December 2010, when the Identity Cards Act 2006 was repealed, the Home Office confessed to £292 million of our money having been wasted on the scheme, with nothing to show for it.

The waste goes on. We're wasting money on biometrics in Sarah Rapson's ePassports. We're wasting money on Jackie Keane's Immigration and Asylum Biometric System. That takes in eGates that don't work at UK airports and UK visa application checking systems that don't work all over the world. As part of Project Lantern, the police are deploying mobile fingerprinting equipment that doesn't work. And DWP are threatening to use voice biometrics that don't work for their new Universal Credit system.

It goes on because of one wrong choice made 10 years ago. The reliability of the products wasn't checked properly and adverse evidence was ignored. Typical headstrong proletarian behaviour, no idea what's in anyone's best interests, naïve consumers, too much money burning a hole in their pocket, just buy it because it looks good on TV and sounds modern.

How can you help?

You can write to ministers and their officials. That doesn't help. You can write magazine articles and letters to newspapers and comments on blogs and you can write your own blog. You can speak at public meetings and on the radio. That doesn't help. You can have meetings at the Home Office and ditto. You can respond to government consultations and attend government briefings. Fat lot of good it'll do you. You can write to your MP. He or she will get an answer for you. But it won't help. Whitehall wants biometrics and Whitehall's jolly well going to have biometrics, never mind if they don't work.

So then you have another idea. Get reinforcements. Call on organisations that have institutional power.

When the Home Office start advertising their misbegotten ID cards scheme and making unrealistic claims for the reliability of today's mass consumer biometrics, you report them to the Advertising Standards Authority. Brilliant. Except that there's nothing the ASA can do in this case.

So then you submit a freedom of information request asking what justification the Home Office have for investing public money in expensive systems which depend for their success on biometrics being reliable which they aren't and the Home Office know that perfectly well and therefore know that all or some of our money will be wasted. 2½ years later, thanks to the First-Tier Tribunal (Information Rights), you're 2½ years older and none the wiser, Whitehall continue bone-headedly against all the evidence to waste our money on biometrics.

Then Sir Michael Scholar, chair of the UK Statistics Authority, makes an important point:

One of the reasons I took this job is that having good statistics is like having clean water and clean air. It’s the fundamental material that we depend on for an honest political debate.

Honest political debate? Maybe the UKSA can help. Maybe if they or the Office for National Statistics said that the biometrics technology being considered is not reliable enough, then the Home Office would stop wasting our money? No good. The UKSA can only comment on official statistics. And the statistics adduced from the UK Passport Service biometrics enrolment trial aren't official.

This attempt to help the Home Office to make evidence-based policy and to face up to their mistake – choosing to rely on flaky biometrics – clearly goes back years. Lots of effort. No results. The fundamental material that we depend on for an honest political debate still eludes us.

And then Andrew Watson succeeds through a freedom of information request in getting the National Policing Improvement Agency's own internal report on mobile fingerprinting equipment published.

The report is full of statistics, it's marked "Restricted-Commercial", it's got Northrop Grumman's logo on it and it's been prepared for the Police Information Technology Organisation (the old name for the National Policing improvement Agency). Official, or what?

By this stage, Sir Michael Scholar has been replaced by Andrew Dilnot as chair of the UKSA. Can Mr Dilnot comment on the reliability of mass consumer biometrics? No. The statistics still aren't official enough:

From: xxxxxxxxxx On Behalf Of authority enquiries Sent: 01 August 2012 23:19 To: 'David Moss' Subject: Re: Misleading use by the Home Office and others of statistics associated with biometrics Dear Mr Moss Thank you for your email to Andrew Dilnot regarding biometric information. I am replying on Andrew's behalf. We have considered this matter in discussion with David Blunt, the Head of Profession for Statistics at the Home Office. We share Mr Blunt's view that the studies to which you refer are not official statistics, and we understand from the Home Office that there are no current plans for official statistics in this area to be produced. As you will be aware from our earlier replies, the Authority's statutory remit covers official statistics as set out in the Statistics and Registration Service Act 2007. Our view therefore is that this remains a matter about which we would continue to encourage you to maintain a dialogue with relevant Home Office officials directly. We understand that you attended a meeting with Home Office officials in spring 2010 and, following further correspondence, you received a reply from the National Policing Improvement Agency in June 2010 regarding the specifics of the issues that concerned you. I am sorry that we are unable to assist you further at the present time. Kind regards xxxxxxxxxx Private Secretary to Andrew Dilnot, Chair of the UK Statistics Authority

UK Border Force staff are laid off in the expectation that they can be replaced by biometric technology, then the queues at the airport get too long because the technology doesn't work and the staff have to be re-hired, but still Whitehall remains incapable of justifying its investment of public money in biometric technology which is too unreliable to do the jobs demanded of it. Incapable and unwilling.

Whitehall officials are impervious to all requests to explain their mistaken choices. And yet they are happy to tell us that we need midata to correct our errors.

Andrew Dilnot and honest political debate in the UK – 2

Whitehall officials are impervious to all requests to explain their mistaken choices.

And yet they are happy to tell us that we need midata to correct our errors.

After you, Whitehall.

After you.

--- o O o ---

We all make mistakes.

That's what the Department for Business Innovation and Skills (BIS) say. Faced with a choice, we make the wrong decision. We need help. Computerised help. And BIS aim to provide that help, through their midata initiative. Applications will process our historical transaction data, they will take into account the products and services currently available from the suppliers, and the right transaction will be brokered for us.

It's not just us proletarians. We all make mistakes. Even Whitehall officials.

Festschrift: Sir Gus O'Donnell 2

GOD retires at the end of the year and the eulogies have started. We should be grateful according to the Times:

“There’s not a government that’s come in and said, ‘I want to increase child poverty’. They all want to save the planet. The ultimate goals are good, they just have different ways of going about them.” It sounds rather like Yes, Prime Minister with the civil servants running the show while politicians come and go. “No, we have this very clear view that we advise, they decide,” the Cabinet Secretary insists.

Officials advise, politicians decide? Is there anyone left on the planet who believes that?

We have a wide choice on this blog of examples of how officials have wasted money on NPfIT, FiReControl, ID cards, G-Cloud, midata, ePassports, C-Nomis and Libra, and how there seems to be nothing politicians can do about it.

Consider midata. BIS – the department of Business, Innovation and Skills – wants to spend our money on getting people to store all their personal data in PDSs, personal data stores. They get the minister, Ed Davey, to put his name to a BIS blog post. It is in that sense that the minister has decided. That's on 3 November 2011. The point of midata is that individuals will have control of their data once it's in a PDS. Several commenters ask the same question over the following few days – how? How will people be able to control what happens to their data?

46 days later, today, and there's still no answer. The minister hasn't responded. Either he doesn't know how to respond or he can't be bothered. He's obviously not in control.

His officials are. They have advised. They will proceed, without explaining themselves. And we will pay.

And that's the home civil service for you. The home civil service, of which Sir Gus O'Donnell has been the head for six years since 1 September 2005. Grateful?

Festschrift: Sir Gus O'Donnell 2

GOD retires at the end of the year and the eulogies have started. We should be grateful according to the Times:

“There’s not a government that’s come in and said, ‘I want to increase child poverty’. They all want to save the planet. The ultimate goals are good, they just have different ways of going about them.” It sounds rather like Yes, Prime Minister with the civil servants running the show while politicians come and go. “No, we have this very clear view that we advise, they decide,” the Cabinet Secretary insists.

Officials advise, politicians decide? Is there anyone left on the planet who believes that?

We have a wide choice on this blog of examples of how officials have wasted money on NPfIT, FiReControl, ID cards, G-Cloud, midata, ePassports, C-Nomis and Libra, and how there seems to be nothing politicians can do about it.

Consider midata. BIS – the department of Business, Innovation and Skills – wants to spend our money on getting people to store all their personal data in PDSs, personal data stores. They get the minister, Ed Davey, to put his name to a BIS blog post. It is in that sense that the minister has decided. That's on 3 November 2011. The point of midata is that individuals will have control of their data once it's in a PDS. Several commenters ask the same question over the following few days – how? How will people be able to control what happens to their data?

46 days later, today, and there's still no answer. The minister hasn't responded. Either he doesn't know how to respond or he can't be bothered. He's obviously not in control.

His officials are. They have advised. They will proceed, without explaining themselves. And we will pay.

And that's the home civil service for you. The home civil service, of which Sir Gus O'Donnell has been the head for six years since 1 September 2005. Grateful?

The on the spot answer

This is the (draft and subject to change) answer to a comment posted by one Mr Reader:

Dear Mr Reader

Thank you for trying to put me on the spot. I’ve been trying to put myself on the spot for years. And failing.

Assuming that that continues, when the final enquiry report is in at the end of next month, the most likely outcome is that everyone’s reputation will be tarnished – Brodie Clark, Theresa May and Helen Ghosh – but the daily round will revert to its pre-4 November 2011 pattern, the usual dismal calm will prevail in the Dark Department, there will be no more sense of sudden explosions, nasty surprises and unexpected eruptions.

That’s the 98%+ likely scenario. A dirty taste in the mouth, business as usual re-established.

The outcome with the 2%- probability of happening?

Consider the following Economist article, Friday 11 May 2012:

Brodie Clark speaks quietly and at first no-one heard him say that fingerprint verification is the ninth and lowest priority security/identity check at the border, the least reliable check and the most sensible check to suspend when the disorderly queues in Arrivals begin to threaten safety.

Well everyone’s heard him now, thanks to the alliance between Theresa May, the UK’s Home Secretary, and Helen Ghosh, Permanent Secretary at the Home Office. Their careers both shipped a lot of water in the days following 4 November 2011 and they were determined to find out why.

Clark was supposed to have endangered UK border security by suspending fingerprint checks. But May and Ghosh could find no evidence that fingerprint checks promote border security. There is none. So he hadn’t endangered anything.

True, he had arguably disobeyed his minister. She had specifically instructed that fingerprint checks were not to be relaxed for non-EEA nationals. But did that instruction refer exclusively to the new intelligence-led border security scheme being piloted? Was the suspension of fingerprint checks covered by the 2007 HOWI procedures?

Pure noise. The real question was: why did the Home Secretary instruct that fingerprint checks should not be suspended, given that they’re no use? Answer, because she had been told by her officials that the technology is reliable. Who told her that? And why?

As May and Ghosh looked deeper and deeper into the affair, the tangled web of today’s mass consumer biometrics industry began to unravel. First in the UK Border Agency, where IBM’s National Identity Assurance Service contract was cancelled. That took out Morpho at the same time. (Morpho is a subsidiary of France’s Safran Group, their answer to our BAE Systems.) And Computer Sciences Corporation and VFS Global.

The damage spread to the National Policing Improvement Agency, where they were using Morpho’s products for mobile fingerprinting by police patrols – not any more they’re not. And to the Identity & Passport Service, where they use Morpho for biometrics in ePassports. For the moment. And to DWP, who were going to use voice biometrics for their Universal Credit system, but can only be described now as tight-lipped about their plans.

Who advised the Home office on biometrics? They got internal advice from the Home Office Scientific Development Branch and external consultancy advice from PA Consulting. Not any more they don’t.

How did this fiasco persist, the Prime Minister wants to know, under the leadership of Lord O'Donnell, until last years head of the home civil service, and Sir David Normington, Dame Helen's predecessor? We await the answer with interest.

Projects that depend on these biometrics being reliable were being cancelled all over Whitehall. The taxpayer didn’t know whether to be furious about being deceived for so long by the Home Office or deliriously happy when the savings from all these cancelled projects over the next 10 years topped £20 billion.

This sort of news doesn’t respect borders. Safran Group were relying on Morpho for 20% of their turnover. Once the news had rowed across the channel, their turnover was down by 20%. Former President Sarkozy tried to blame the Anglo-Saxons but then turned on the European Commission, blaming their 2003 OSCIE specification for a pan-European biometric ID card. The European Commission blamed the US Department of Homeland Security and the DHS blamed NIST, the US National Institute of Standards and Technology.

Which was too much for Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in India, where they’re spending billions on Aadhaar, a biometrics-based identity management scheme for 1.2 billion people. At least they were.

And so the truth rolls on, bowling around the world, knocking over civil servants like ninepins wherever it fetches up. In China,  one day Dr Tieniu Tan was a research professor with dozens of successful spin-off companies and, next day, he wasn’t. In Pakistan, first Brigadier Saleem Ahmed Moeen (Retd) was Chairman of NADRA, then there was no NADRA and now the Brigadier really is retired.

And all because of a quietly-spoken Glaswegian, speaking quietly on 15 November 2011, giving evidence to the Home Affairs Committee. Listen to him here. The good bit starts at 12:18.

The on the spot answer

This is the (draft and subject to change) answer to a comment posted by one Mr Reader:

Dear Mr Reader

Thank you for trying to put me on the spot. I’ve been trying to put myself on the spot for years. And failing.

Assuming that that continues, when the final enquiry report is in at the end of next month, the most likely outcome is that everyone’s reputation will be tarnished – Brodie Clark, Theresa May and Helen Ghosh – but the daily round will revert to its pre-4 November 2011 pattern, the usual dismal calm will prevail in the Dark Department, there will be no more sense of sudden explosions, nasty surprises and unexpected eruptions.

That’s the 98%+ likely scenario. A dirty taste in the mouth, business as usual re-established.

Technology securing the border

Poor ... inefficient ... over-hyped ... real risk to the integrity of the control ... immature ... poor quality ... unreliable ... completely fails ... not joined up ... comical ... erroneous ... laughable ... these are just some of the words of praise heaped on the electronic face recognition gates used for passport control at Heathrow Airport, and on the eBorders scheme in general, in Nicola Stanbridge's eulogy broadcast on BBC Radio 4's Today programme this morning.



Hat tip: JGM

Technology securing the border

Poor ... inefficient ... over-hyped ... real risk to the integrity of the control ... immature ... poor quality ... unreliable ... completely fails ... not joined up ... comical ... erroneous ... laughable ... these are just some of the words of praise heaped on the electronic face recognition gates used for passport control at Heathrow Airport, and on the eBorders scheme in general, in Nicola Stanbridge's eulogy broadcast on BBC Radio 4's Today programme this morning.



Hat tip: JGM