Thursday 20 June 2013

Digital-by-default – an eternal mystery?

In connection with the enquiry into digital-by-default, Rt Hon Francis Maude MP, Cabinet Office minister and Postmaster General, gave evidence to the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee on Monday 17 June 2013:



There were many questions about digital-by-default before he gave his evidence – please see for example Digital-by-default, an open letter to the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee.

And having given his evidence now?

They remain unanswered.

Digital-by-default – an eternal mystery?

In connection with the enquiry into digital-by-default, Rt Hon Francis Maude MP, Cabinet Office minister and Postmaster General, gave evidence to the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee on Monday 17 June 2013:



There were many questions about digital-by-default before he gave his evidence – please see for example Digital-by-default, an open letter to the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee.

And having given his evidence now?

Sunday 16 June 2013

Tomorrow – the distributed self

After the collapse in 2010 of the Home Office's ID cards scheme, the NIS (National Identity Service), Whitehall claimed to have learned the lesson.

The 20 September 2010 meeting for Whitehall and its suppliers made it clear that the whole idea of the NIS is now anathema and the Home Office are outcasts, whose contagious touch must be kept away from the new idea – identity assurance.

At the centre of the old NIS lay the National Identity Register, the NIR, a single database with one record per person enrolled into the scheme. At least, that was the plan. It never happened.

Talking to the Information Commissioner's Conference on 6 March 2012 about the new scheme, IDAP, the Identity Assurance Programme, Francis Maude, Cabinet Officer minister, said: "at no point does information need be held on the same server to be correlated".

No NIR. IDAP in the clear?

No.

It's a conjuring trick.

More fully, what Mr Maude said was:
... the technology has moved on and so can we. There is now an option to share data momentarily allowing us to check for matches – with no Big Brother database in sight ... In a world of dispersed data sets, we can bring fragments together instantaneously and momentarily to corroborate – without ever creating a central database ... It’s about bringing together the data at a point in time - to provide the necessary confidence - and then disaggregating it again. At no point does information need be held on the same server to be correlated ...
The NIS was meant to rely on a single, central database. It's not clear but Mr Maude's plan for IDAP may be to use several distributed databases. There is nothing new about distributed databases, the technology for which "moved on" 30 years ago, in the 1980s.

Distributed databases may be geographically and physically separate. But they constitute one logical database, supporting data-matching just as well as the centralised model.

Or perhaps Mr Maude's plan is to use a Google-type program in the middle of IDAP to search far-flung, disparate databases. Again, nothing new about that.

Either way, distributed databases or Google, same effect. Same problem. There's still an NIR. Lesson not learned.

Mr Maude likes to use the term "data-linking" to distinguish IDAP from the "data-sharing" planned for the NIS. There is no distinction. IDAP threatens the same loss of privacy as the NIS.

IDAP is subject to the same law enunciated by Neil Fisher of Unisys back on 31 October 2011:
Any project with "identity" in the name is doomed to failure.
You know that's true. IDAP was meant to be "fully operational" by March 2013. It wasn't and it still isn't – despite what the Guardian call the "elite" team responsible for it at GDS, the Government Digital Service.

Keep your ears open tomorrow for Mr Maude the Conjuror's announcement about the new design principles for identity assurance.

When you hear him promise secure storage of your data in the cloud, remember, there is no such thing.

When he asserts that the suppliers are trusted third parties, ask yourself, who says they're trusted? Trust has to be earned. That takes years. It can't be granted by fiat.

When he claims that there is an "ecosystem" of private sector "identity providers" competing for your custom, just check, how many of them really are private sector companies. The Post Office? Mydex? They rely largely on central and local government contracts and on their influence over government policy.

These "identity providers" haven't adapted slowly, generation by generation, and survived a hostile nature that kills off all but the fittest. They don't exist in an ecosystem. IDAP is more like intelligent design. Or even creationism:
  • It's not an ecosystem.
  • The "identity providers" aren't all competitive private sector companies.
  • It's up to you to judge whether the suppliers are to be trusted and it could take years before you have enough evidence to reach a verdict.
  • As the media tell us every day, there's no such thing as a secure website. There are hackers out there against whom even the US military seem to be defenceless.
  • And then there's the NSA, the US National Security Agency, with PRISM and Boundless Informant, not to mention access to your mobile phone usage.
There will be three upturned cups on the table. Identity. Efficiency. And trust. Mr Maude will pop privacy under one cup and dextrously swirl them all around. After the beguiling patter and the colourful handkerchiefs, which cup contains privacy?

You know the answer to that one.

Tomorrow – the distributed self

After the collapse in 2010 of the Home Office's ID cards scheme, the NIS (National Identity Service), Whitehall claimed to have learned the lesson.

The 20 September 2010 meeting for Whitehall and its suppliers made it clear that the whole idea of the NIS is now anathema and the Home Office are outcasts, whose contagious touch must be kept away from the new idea – identity assurance.

At the centre of the old NIS lay the National Identity Register, the NIR, a single database with one record per person enrolled into the scheme. At least, that was the plan. It never happened.

Talking to the Information Commissioner's Conference on 6 March 2012 about the new scheme, IDAP, the Identity Assurance Programme, Francis Maude, Cabinet Officer minister, said: "at no point does information need be held on the same server to be correlated".

No NIR. IDAP in the clear?

No.

It's a conjuring trick.

Is data-sharing between consenting adults now legal?

Pat Russell is the Deputy Director of the Social Justice Division at the Department for Work and Pensions.

"Improved information sharing of personal and anonymised data between central government and local agencies – and between agencies on the ground", she says on the Institute for Government blog, "has been recognised as being vital to delivering better outcomes at lower cost".

Oh dear.

The Guardian newspaper said on 24 April 2012 that the government planned to increase the level of data-sharing and next day they were reprimanded by Francis Maude, Cabinet Office minister, for misrepresenting him.

"This is not a question of increasing the volume of data-sharing that takes place across government", he said, "but ensuring an appropriate framework is in place so that government can deliver more effective, joined-up and personalised public services, through effective data-linking".

Has Miss Russell fallen into the same trap of confusing data-sharing with the completely different business of data-linking? Will she, too, be reprimanded?

Maybe not.

She says: "One of the key learning points from the project [an example of effective data-sharing] was that there is a lot of mythology around and that many of the information sharing issues are cultural rather than technical or legal".

It's not clear whether Mr Maude disapproves of culture as much as Ms Russell but, like her, he certainly doesn't like myths: "I want to bust the myths around the complexities of data sharing ... we aim to find effective ways of using and sharing data for the good of everyone".

Ms Russell acknowledges that "of course, we all recognise that there have to be safeguards in place". But when is a safeguard a myth? She doesn't tell us. Neither does Mr Maude.

Mr Hague [that's William Hague, UK Foreign Secretary] was busy telling us last week that there are safeguards limiting the uses to which GCHQ put intelligence data. One assumes that they don't share it with HMRC, for example. Or with DWP or the Department of Health or the Department for Education. Or do they? Is that a myth?

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Updated 9.3.16

For all his protestations to the contrary, Mr-now-Lord Maude was clearly in favour of massive data-sharing between government departments.

His successor as Cabinet Office Minister, Matt Hancock, is no different. "Data is the fuel for the digital revolution", he is quoted as saying, as though it means something.

"The very best policies and services", he adds, without giving any examples, "are developed around information that’s current, relevant and makes sure you can access government services just as easily as iTunes".

iTunes?

These quotations are culled from a 29 February 2016 Cabinet Office press release, Launch of new data sharing consultation. Apparently "data sharing in the UK [will] bolster security whilst making people's lives better". Unless it undermines security, of course, and wrecks people's lives.

If you can countenance the notion that the Cabinet Office knows how to improve your life and if you are happy to sweep away the "myths" – or "laws" as we used to call them – which prohibit data-sharing, then you may be impressed by the benefits suggested.

What benefits?

Among others, "government can share data to ... support the administering of fuel poverty payments ... [and prevent] authorities sending letters to people who are deceased". Is data-sharing the only solution to these problems? How about a rational energy policy, for example? Lower fuel bills would reduce the number of people who freeze to death and so reduce the number of deceased people the authorities have to write to.

You thought the Cabinet Office was going to promise that data-sharing would eradicate terrorists, paedophiles and tax-dodgers, didn't you. No. Perhaps they've noticed that these problems persist despite the enormous amount of data already at the disposal of the authorities.

The Cabinet Office claim that the Troubled Families programme needs more data-sharing and then undermine their case hopelessly by linking to a document that claims the programme is already succeeding brilliantly with the current data-sharing arrangements.

Normally the government asserts that the incidence of "fraud against the public sector" is microscopic but for the purposes of this press release it has ballooned and apparently the crisis can only be solved by ... more data-sharing, which will also reduce the £24.1 billion of debt the government has incompetently failed to collect.

It's not just the government. More data-sharing will help "citizens manage their debt more effectively", the Cabinet Office say. How? No idea. What about the government debt of £1½ trillion? No idea.

More data-sharing would "support accredited researchers to access and link data to carry out research for public benefit", but again there is no room for any examples. And no mention of the fact that we already have procedures for carefully controlled research (para.1.16) ...

... which just leaves us with our old favourite (and an old favourite of the Russian Tsars') – more data-sharing would allow us to carry out the national census more efficiently ... sorry ... more like iTunes.

It's not just the Cabinet Office. Shakespeare's at it, too. And the NHS. Even Her Majesty's Treasury.

Professor Sir Nigel Shadbolt, chairman and co-founder of the Open Data Institute, published The spy in the coffee machine – the end of privacy as we know it in 2008:
... sharing information across government databases will dramatically increase governmental powers – otherwise the UK government wouldn't have proposed it. (p.95)

... we should never forget that bureaucracies are information-thirsty, and will never stop consuming. Indeed, they will never even cut down. They will break or bend their own rules, and any prior specification of how information use will be limited, or data not shared, is not worth the paper it is printed on. (p.212)
No mention of improving people's lives there. Eight years later, you might like to bring that up in your response to the consultation. That, and Government as a Platform.


Is data-sharing between consenting adults now legal?

Pat Russell is the Deputy Director of the Social Justice Division at the Department for Work and Pensions.

"Improved information sharing of personal and anonymised data between central government and local agencies – and between agencies on the ground", she says on the Institute for Government blog, "has been recognised as being vital to delivering better outcomes at lower cost".

Oh dear.

The Guardian newspaper said on 24 April 2012 that the government planned to increase the level of data-sharing and next day they were reprimanded by Francis Maude, Cabinet Office minister, for misrepresenting him.

"This is not a question of increasing the volume of data-sharing that takes place across government", he said, "but ensuring an appropriate framework is in place so that government can deliver more effective, joined-up and personalised public services, through effective data-linking".

Has Miss Russell fallen into the same trap of confusing data-sharing with the completely different business of data-linking? Will she, too, be reprimanded?

Sunday seems like a good day to ask "what is work?"

Towards the end of Jon Manel's report on the Government Digital Service which occupied five minutes of BBC Radio 4's World At One on 10 June 2013 he interviews an "evangelical preacher" called Stephen Kelly who is also the government's chief operating officer.

Mr Kelly says (30'58"-31'59") that it takes his computer seven minutes each day to boot up and that that's like three days a year wasted.

By a curious journalistic operation, Sue Cameron had pre-figured this comment of Mr Kelly's in her 5 June 2013 Telegraph article, Wash the dirty Whitehall linen in private, minister. "You have to ask if someone, somewhere is being economical with the truth", she says. "One insider tells me that, thanks to Mr Maude’s openness agenda, information about Whitehall PCs is easily available. He says the figures indicate that ... the average boot time is two minutes, not seven".

Mr Kelly is wrong about the "average boot time".

And that's not all he's wrong about.

The three days a year he refers to would, indeed, be wasted if he sits gaping at his screen, waiting for the machine to boot up, doing nothing else all the while, his mind empty. But surely there is work the chief operating officer could be getting on with while his machine is springing into action at the speed of light?

And, once his machine has booted up, does he imagine that he is then ipso facto working and doing something useful?




Sunday seems like a good day to ask "what is work?"

Towards the end of Jon Manel's report on the Government Digital Service which occupied five minutes of BBC Radio 4's World At One on 10 June 2013 he interviews an "evangelical preacher" called Stephen Kelly who is also the government's chief operating officer.

Mr Kelly says (30'58"-31'59") that it takes his computer seven minutes each day to boot up and that that's like three days a year wasted.

By a curious journalistic operation, Sue Cameron had pre-figured this comment of Mr Kelly's in her 5 June 2013 Telegraph article, Wash the dirty Whitehall linen in private, minister. "You have to ask if someone, somewhere is being economical with the truth", she says. "One insider tells me that, thanks to Mr Maude’s openness agenda, information about Whitehall PCs is easily available. He says the figures indicate that ... the average boot time is two minutes, not seven".

Mr Kelly is wrong about the "average boot time".

And that's not all he's wrong about.

Friday 14 June 2013

GDS PR blitz

10 June 2013, the BBC Radio 4 world news programme World At One (WATO) carries a 5-minute report (27'32"-32'55") by Jon Manel on GDS, the Government Digital Service.

11 June 2013, WATO carries another 8 minutes (24'58"-32'55") of Mr Manel's report on GDS.

12 June 2013, Mr Manel publishes Inside the UK Government Digital Service on the BBC website.

13 June 2013, the Guardian publish a 6'50" video by Jemima KissGov.uk: how geeks opened up government featuring ex-Guardian man Mike Bracken (executive director, GDS), ex-BBC man Tom Loosemore (deputy director, GDS) and ex-Morgan Stanley man Francis Maude, their political boss (Cabinet Office minister).

What are GDS trying to tell us?

Listen, read, watch and what you learn is that GDS's staff are young, everyone dresses informally and each team has a fluffy mascot:
There is an inflatable guitar - a red one. You cannot fail to miss [notice?] the bunting. And then there are the mascots.

"For us, the Platform Team, it's an otter. His name is Jerry," one woman explains pointing to a brown and white soft toy with a rather sad expression on its face ...

As for the young civil servants in the GDS headquarters, some of them seem to have an almost evangelical spirit about them.
Some people will find the evangelical spirit which moves GDS charming. Others won't.

The idea is to model public administration on successful web companies, as ex-Guardian man Mike Bracken tells us in the Guardian video. But do Google and Facebook, for example, provide the right model?

The idea is to promote openness in government. GDS's single government domain project, GOV.UK, and their Identity Assurance Programme (IDAP) are major projects. But the Major Projects Authority verdicts on GOV.UK and IDAP have not been published.

An elite team of digital experts has sparked a radical shake-up in the way the government does its business. Some of the UK's best designers and developers are working on building a new single website for all government departments – gov.uk – but their influence has gone much further.
That's the rubric under the 13 June video on the Guardian website.

Pace Jemima Kiss, at least four professors are unconvinced that the team – or at least the Government Digital Strategy – is elite. And Dr Martyn Thomas, visiting professor at the universities of Oxford and Bristol, makes a fifth unconvinced professor – he told the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee that it's impossible to measure the quality of software systems developed with GDS's so-called "agile" methods.

The idea is to avoid the spectacularly poor value for money of some government IT contracts. An unimpeachable objective.

But how will GDS achieve it?

To be told, as we are in the Guardian video, that GDS are trying to improve the search algorithm on GOV.UK is no answer.

So-called "open systems" aren't the answer either, according to the four professors.

Will the "oligopoly" – as Jon Manel calls them – of government contractors fall in with GDS's plans for shorter contracts? Why should they? There's no need to while the big departments of state continue, as they do, to sign long contracts.

Is it the case that GDS's "influence has gone much further", as the Guardian claim? Francis Maude ends the Guardian video saying that there is enormous demand in Whitehall for GDS's services. Is there?

The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) spend about £200 billion a year. When Jon Manel asks about DWP's Universal Credit (UC) initiative in the 11 June WATO report, the otherwise jocular ex-Guardian man Mike Bracken becomes guarded, "not that close to it", he says (31'29"), a response which Mr Manel glosses as "not our fault, guv".

GDS hijacked IDAP from DWP and then promised to have it "fully operational" for UC by March 2013. It wasn't and it still isn't. Leaving UC high and dry.

"Not that close to it"? Ex-Guardian man Mike Bracken is the senior responsible officer owner for government-wide identity assurance and there's no getting away from it.

The Department of Health spend about £120 billion a year. What are GDS doing about their computer systems? Or the systems at the Department for Education? And what are we to make of BBC money man Paul Lewis's warning on Twitter yesterday:



Apart from GDS, the only government body we hear from in this PR campaign is HMRC, in the 11 June WATO report. The clamorous demand is muted – Lin Homer, chief executive, describes GDS as "bumptious" but adds that there's nothing wrong with that.

She can afford to be kind. GDS haven't laid a glove on her £8 billion ASPIRE contract. Or on her website, www.hmrc.gov.uk, which GDS falsely claim to have incorporated into GOV.UK.

Meanwhile, GDS have some involvement with the plan to make us all enrol on-line on the new electoral register to be used for the 2015 general election. Why don't the BBC and the Guardian tell us anything about that major project?

What about GDS's involvement with the Department for Business Innovation and Skills midata project? And the related Shakespeare Review? What about their new-found responsibility for G-Cloud? What are GDS's plans for the Government Gateway? And what do GDS have to say about cybersecurity?

MPs are worried about digital-by-default – something else the BBC and the Guardian don't mention. Something like 16 million people in the UK will not be able to use the proposed web-based, digital-by-default public services which GDS are meant to deliver. They launched the assisted digital project on 28 July 2011 to try to solve the problem. And in today's weekly GDS diary, 14 June 2013, what does ex-Guardian man Mike Bracken tell us?
Also this week  GOV.UK won two D&AD awards for our content design and the Assisted Digital team had their first market engagement event with suppliers.
Nearly two years after the starting pistol was fired, they had their first meeting with suppliers?

It's early days, you may say, GDS can't be expected to have achieved much yet. Maybe. But in that case the PR is premature. Francis Maude is up in front of the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee on Monday to give evidence on digital-by-default. Let's see what that adds to the campaign.




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Update 17.11.13:

15 November 2013: Government Digital Service: the best startup in Europe we can't invest in
So what is it that GDS knows that every chairman and chief executive of a FTSE100 should know?
And what is it that every chairman and chief executive of a FTSE100 knows that GDS should know?

GDS PR blitz

10 June 2013, the BBC Radio 4 world news programme World At One (WATO) carries a 5-minute report (27'32"-32'55") by Jon Manel on GDS, the Government Digital Service.

11 June 2013, WATO carries another 8 minutes (24'58"-32'55") of Mr Manel's report on GDS.

12 June 2013, Mr Manel publishes Inside the UK Government Digital Service on the BBC website.

13 June 2013, the Guardian publish a 6'50" video by Jemima KissGov.uk: how geeks opened up government featuring ex-Guardian man Mike Bracken (executive director, GDS), ex-BBC man Tom Loosemore (deputy director, GDS) and ex-Morgan Stanley man Francis Maude, their political boss (Cabinet Office minister).

What are GDS trying to tell us?