Friday 29 August 2014

The magic of open data #1

"Sharing information across government databases
will dramatically increase governmental powers –
otherwise the UK government wouldn't have proposed it."
Professor Sir Nigel Shadbolt, Chairman, Open Data Institute


Lough Erne in County Fermanagh, Northern Ireland, "is a particularly scenic waterway, renowned for its beautiful setting. The area is popular for angling and watersports, with waterskiing, Rowing and wakeboarding being amongst the most popular; the stretch of water alongside the Broadmeadow, Enniskillen, has hosted stages of the World Waterski Championships annually since 2005, and in 2007, a pro-wakeboard competition, 'Wakejam' was hosted by the Erne Wakeboard Club (EWC) after successful national wakeboard competitions in the previous years. Canoeing is also a popular recreational sport on the Erne".

That's what it says in Wikipedia and that's where, on 18 June 2013, after a hard day's fishing and wakeboarding, the G8 canoed back to shore and issued their famous Declaration (para.7):
We, the G8, agree that open data are an untapped resource with huge potential to encourage the building of stronger, more interconnected societies that better meet the needs of our citizens and allow innovation and prosperity to flourish.
It is this Declaration that caused David Gauke MP, Exchequer Secretary to the Treasury, blithely to recommend standing the British Constitution on its head so that whereas we used to imagine that personal data submitted to the government would by default be treated as confidential, in future it will instead be treated as open, public and available to all:
... the UK helped secure the G8’s Open Data Charter, which presumes that the data held by Governments will be publicly available unless there is good reason to withhold it. (p.4)
Queen Méabh (Maev)
by Joseph Christian Leyendecker
Is it something in the water? "In Irish mythology and folklore, there are three tales about how the lake was formed and got its name. One says that it is named after a mythical woman named Erne, Queen Méabh's lady-in-waiting at Cruachan. Erne and her maidens were frightened away from Cruachan when a fearsome giant emerged from the cave of Oweynagat. They fled northward and drowned in a river or lake, their bodies dissolving to become Lough Erne ...".

It may not have been a fearsome giant that emerged from the cave of Oweynagat, of course. It may actually have been Rt Hon Francis Maude MP, Cabinet Office Minister, "JFDI", as he's known, who frightened poor Erne and her maidens to death. Whitehall folklore has it that he once told the Information Commissioner's Conference:
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 ...
And it may not have been water that they were drinking when the G8 were "helped" – to use Mr Gauke's word – to agree to this inversion of the settled order (para.11-13):
Principle 1: Open Data by Default

We recognise that free access to, and subsequent re-use of, open data are of significant value to society and the economy.

We agree to orient our governments towards open data by default.

We recognise that the term government data is meant in the widest sense possible. This could apply to data owned by national, federal, local, or international government bodies, or by the wider public sector ...
The UK held the Presidency at the time and within limits they could launder their own policy through the G8 but what on earth possessed them to dream up open data by default?

Mr Gauke tries to blame Shakespeare:
Getting to this stage:
The Government published its response to the Shakespeare Review of Public Sector Information on 14 June 2013 ... (p.2)
That's Stephan, by the way, not William.

Stephan Shakespeare is the CEO of YouGov, the polling organisation, and he wrote An Independent Review of Public Sector Information [PSI].

We need to familiarise ourselves at this point with some of the lyrical vocabulary of our ancient and magical land. Here in the UK, Ordnance Survey, the Met Office, the Land Registry and Companies House are the four Trading Funds that together constitute the Public Data Group (PDG). The PDG brings in £143 million a year in revenue for the Exchequer by selling maps and weather forecasts and such like.

And Mr Shakespeare thinks that that's ridiculous. He wants to break the antique spell we live under in the UK and drag the country into the information age by giving away PSI for free to entrepreneurs. The eruption of innovation that results will expand the economy. That's the idea, at least:
It seems a straightforward decision to invest £143m to make Trading Fund data widely available is a relatively small price to pay to leverage wider economic benefits far exceeding this by orders of magnitude. (p.30)
But just when you think you've found a convincing prophet, he goes and spoils it by saying that:
Forecasting future benefits is also hard to predict. How businesses and individuals might use datasets in the future to generate new products and services and by implication impact economic growth, is equally unknown. (p.30)
In other words there isn't the slightest justification he can advance for saying that the unspecified wider economic benefits of giving away this PSI for free would exceed £143 million by uncounted orders of magnitude.

It can't be Shakespeare under whose influence the wetland sprites (Maude and Gauke?) were acting at Lough Erne. Who then?

Perhaps Tim Kelsey.

Mr Kelsey was for a while the Executive Director of Transparency and Open Data in Mr Maude's fiefdom, the Cabinet Office. A magnificent job title, and a doughty champion of open data he is and has been for years – this, for example, is a pronouncement he made in an article published in July 2009, Long live the database state:
If the next government, of whichever party, wants a better public sector it must encourage more use of personal data; not less. What should be done? Data sharing must be made easier, first by removing the legislative obstacles to sharing government databases.

... no one who uses a public service should be allowed to opt out of sharing their records ...

Nor can people rely on their record being anonymised ...
Unfortunately for Mr Kelsey, his so-called "care.data" plan to collect all our previously confidential medical records and give them away to researchers fell apart in February 2014 when patients and doctors lost confidence in him. It can't have been him casting the open data spells four months later at Lough Erne and intoxicating the G8.

Which suggests that the guiding light may have been the charming Professor Sir Nigel Shadbolt, chairman and co-founder of the Open Data Institute, and the author of The spy in the coffee machine – the end of privacy as we know it (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)
Actually, he isn't the author, he's the co-author of that book, with Kieron O'Hara, his sometime PhD student. And Dr O'Hara is the sole author of Transparent Government, Not Transparent Citizens: A Report on Privacy and Transparency for the Cabinet Office, a work referred to by Stephan Shakespeare in his PSI report (p.34). And Professor Sir Nigel appeared in front of the Public Administration Select Committee (PASC) to give evidence jointly with Stephan Shakespeare. And Tim Kelsey and Professor Sir Nigel are or were both members of the Data Strategy Board and, as such, assisted with the production of Stephan Shakespeare's PSI report (p.4). And so it goes cabalistically on.

When Professor Sir Nigel and Stephan Shakespeare appeared in front of PASC they were bemoaning the fact that the Post Office Royal Mail had just been privatised and had taken the PAF with them onto their balance sheet. The PAF is the Postcode Address File and would have been given away to entrepreneurs for free if our two witnesses had had their way.

The Hon Bernard Jenkin MP, chairman of PASC, agreed.

Somewhat surprisingly.

After all, Professor Sir Nigel and Stephan Shakespeare gave no indication whatever how giving away the PAF for nothing would have made the economy grow.

And the PAF generates income. Naturally the government wanted to realise the best price possible for the Post Office Royal Mail. That's the coffee in the coffee machine you can smell. Wake up.

They've had more luck with Companies House:
Free Companies House data to boost UK economy

Companies House is to make all of its digital data available free of charge. This will make the UK the first country to establish a truly open register of business information ...

This is a considerable step forward in improving corporate transparency; a key strand of the G8 declaration at the Lough Erne summit in 2013.

It will also open up opportunities for entrepreneurs to come up with innovative ways of using the information ...
The "digital data available" from Companies House includes the title, name, address, date of birth, nationality and profession of every director and every company secretary of every company in the UK – "the end of privacy as we know it".

Do they imagine that thousands of very bright people haven't been thinking of "innovative ways of using the information" for several decades now? What are they supposed to have missed? Companies House don't say. Just like Stephan Shalespeare, who couldn't tell us how many orders of magnitude his leveraged wider economic benefits would exceed the PDG income by.

There's one obvious application of the Companies House data. Suppose you're a 50 year-old female Hungarian surveyor living in Kent and suppose that you want to establish a false identity for some entrepreneurial purpose. Not so easy in the past but now, with the Companies House data available to you for free, you can search for suitable matches in the comfort of your own home. Thank you Messrs Maude, Gauke, Jenkin, Shadbolt, O'Hara, Shakespeare and Kelsey – the answer to Queen Méabh's prayer.

Apart from that, there's no telling what sort of innovation these people are talking about. It just looks like hope. Or guesswork. Will giving away an entire country's personal data inspire innovation? How? Why? Are there any examples? If it's that easy to create innovation, are the universities wasting their time doing research? Are we wasting our money funding it? Why bother granting corporate tax relief on R&D? Is there no downside? Can nothing go wrong? Which economy will benefit? Suppose the innovators are all Estonian – how does that help the UK economy?

You may not be able to answer those questions and all the other related questions that occur to you. We know that Tim Kelsey can't. Neither can Stephan Shakespeare – he just says that anyone standing in the way of open data wants people to die of cancer and wants children to be unhappy. Shroud-waving. Blackmail.

But Professor Sir Nigel is a different kettle of fish. Very different. Can he answer the questions? Can he move the debate on from the enchanted world of Lough Erne, out of the twilight and into the open?

That is the subject of a future post which if it is ever written will be based on this talk he gave:


Prof. Sir Nigel Shadbolt - The Fifth Paradigm: From Open Data to Social Machines

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Updated 26.3.15

God but Tuesday was an odd day.

Tuesday 24 March 2015, out of the blue, inattendu by any of us proles, came the surprising announcement that Public Servant of the Year ex-Guardian man Mike Bracken CBE CDO had been appointed the UK government's Chief Data Officer thereby making him Public Servant of the Year ex-Guardian man Mike Bracken CBE CDO CDO given that he was already the Chief Digital Officer.

Not that that need concern normal people.

But Twitter went wild, as hundreds of breathless congratulations poured in from all over the world the second best one being:


It's a good question. Along with how do you fit it in with being executive director of the Government Digital Service and senior responsible owner of the pan-government identity assurance programme, GOV.UK Verify (RIP)?

The best tweet was:


Rarely can 94 characters have been freighted with quite so much meaning.


Updated 8.10.15

Tim Kelsey's care.data was meant to start operations 18 months ago in April 2014. That's when, for the first time, the medical records maintained by our GPs (general practitioners/family doctors/the primary care providers) were supposed to be collected centrally by NHS England. There was vociferous opposition from patients and GPs centred on the absence of any thought in care.data about the confidentiality of medical records. NHS England postponed the start by about six months to the autumn of 2014, NHS England acts in response to concerns about information sharing – statement from Tim Kelsey, National Director for Patients and Information.

In October 2014 we learned that there wouldn't be a national roll-out, just a regional pilot, "GP-led clinical commissioning groups in four areas of the country are to help develop the care.data programme as it moves into a ‘pathfinder stage’ ...".

And when would this pilot start?

Clearly not in autumn 2014. In December 2014, the Independent Information Governance Oversight Panel said that the care.data pilot could start just as soon as 27 currently outstanding questions were satisfactorily answered and seven tests were passed.

In written evidence to the Health Committee dated 9 February 2015, the chairman of the Health & Social Care Information Centre revealed that over 700,000 people had opted out of care.data and that "the HSCIC does not currently have the resources or processes to handle such a significant level of objections".

In March 2015 Tim Kelsey told us care.data on hold until election.

By June 2015, after the election, you could take your pick. Either those 700,000 people could opt out of care.data but they could forget about receiving any healthcare. Or their opt-outs would be ignored and their data would be sold to insurance companies anyway. Will Jeremy Hunt ensure that “700,000” patient opt-outs are respected?, medCondifential wanted to know, while the Telegraph newspaper warned us that Nearly 1million patients could be having confidential data shared against their wishes.

And now?
Tim Kelsey to leave NHS England

17 September 2015 - 12:00

He has been appointed commercial director at Telstra Health, a division of Australia’s leading telecommunications provider where he will lead development of new digital and mobile solutions for patients, professionals and citizens around the world ...

Updated 3.11.15

There's something odd about a tweet of Nigel Shadbolt's today.

We know that he and Stephan Shakespeare were hacked off at the Post Office Royal Mail keeping control of the Postcode Address File (PAF) when it was privatised.

Maybe so, but that's the law, the PAF was and is the Post Office Royal Mail's intellectual property (IP) and, if there's some value to be derived from it, it would have been remiss of the management to give it up.

Entrepreneurs can still access the PAF, it's not lost to them. They just have to pay for the privilege.

Did the UK economy lose anything thereby? There is this assumption in some versions of the case for open data that free access to data causes innovation and/or that paid access inhibits innovation.

It is questionable whether that assumption is true. There has not yet been an explosion of innovation caused by Companies House's data becoming freely available. The considerable innovations of DueDil, on the other hand, all took place while the data had to be paid for.

Which makes Sir Nigel's use of the word "contaminated" sound more like something coming out of the mouth of a fundamentalist zealot than the urbane academic we are used to.

Flicking through your copy of Volume 38 of the Journal of Contemporary Asia, you will have come across this on p.546 ...
While the bourgeoisie was relatively small, its representative ideology none the less penetrated other classes. Members of the proletariat could be corrupted by modes of thinking characteristic of the bourgeoisie and take up the "stand" of this class (Mao, 1974a: 73; The Polemic, 1965: 33, 421-2). The proletariat was therefore compelled to wage an ideological struggle to divest members of its own class of bourgeois contamination, and to remould the thought patterns of the bourgeoisie (Ch'en, 1970: 107, 117, 123; Mao, 1977b: 409-10, 504).
... and you may agree that we can do without any recurrence of Maoist "ideological struggle", otherwise the speech given today by the eminently bourgeois Matt Hancock, Cabinet Office Minister, on the topic of data-driven government takes on a sinister, minatory hue.

Mr Hancock has established a "Steering Group of digital and data visionaries" who will drive the agenda on data-sharing and data-driven policy-making. That Steering Group includes Sir Nigel, among others. Here's hoping that none of these stoutly proletarian visionaries becomes contaminated.


Updated St Patrick's Day 2016

The G8 fell for it, see above, or at least pretended to fall for it:
We, the G8, agree that open data are an untapped resource with huge potential to encourage the building of stronger, more interconnected societies that better meet the needs of our citizens and allow innovation and prosperity to flourish.
That was back in June 2013.

Matt Hancock, Cabinet Office Minister, fell for it, or so he said, when he launched the current consultation on data-sharing:
There is huge potential for improving citizens’ lives through data sharing in the UK. The consultation we launch today will help make sure we get data right and bolster security whilst making people’s lives better.
The Chancellor fell in with falling for it in yesterday's Budget:
1.251 This Budget sets out steps to ensure the benefits of digital technology are felt by all businesses and individuals. The government will ... provide up to £5 million to develop options for an authoritative address register that is open and freely available – making wider use of more precise address data and ensuring it is frequently updated will unlock opportunities for innovation ...
The Government Digital Service plan to declare the new national identity assurance scheme to be live in a few weeks time. It's nothing but a machine for collecting your personal information and sharing it widely in the UK and abroad, out of your control.

The pretence that these initiatives are intended to expand the economy is just that, a pretence. Opening up data to all and sundry does not cause innovation.

The G8 Declaration is quire clear. The intention is to invert the Constitution (p.4) ...

... the UK helped secure the G8’s Open Data Charter, which presumes that the data held by Governments will be publicly available unless there is good reason to withhold it.

... all in the name of the bone-headed plan to compile the registers which, together, will constitute a "single source of truth" for Government as a Platform.


Updated 22.3.16

The information-sharing paradox

The G8, we were saying on St Patrick's Day, and the Cabinet Office and the Treasury all want to make more data open. Once it is available to all at no cost, innovation will be the inevitable result and the economy will expand by orders of magnitude, according to Stephan Shakespeare of YouGov, although he can't explain how – where there should be a coherent argument, there's just a hole.

It's not just the G8, the Cabinet Office and the Treasury. Companies House have fallen for it, too. And now they're having to confront the obvious problem, Our register: advice on protecting your personal information. (Don't get your hopes up. Their advice is useless.)

And it's not just the UK. The sensible Australians have got the bug. In the name of their "National Innovation and Science Agenda", Oz government wants much more personal data sharing, hat tip Kat Hall.

This is a global epidemic. With no solution. Because how do you combat a global epidemic? With massive information-sharing ...


Updated five days after St George's Day 2016

As noted on St Patrick's Day, please see above, there is a national log-rolling exercise being conducted in respect of open data. That exercise was assisted yesterday with the publication by Sir Jeremy Heywood, the Cabinet Secretary, of Open data - the revolution is here.

"Open data is data that anyone can access, use or share ... It really has changed people's lives for the better: the value is well proven", says Sir Jeremy.

"The value is well proven"? Follow Sir Jeremy's link and you will find reference to a PwC report, research from Lateral Economics, a McKinsey estimate, a CapGemini study, a Transport for London claim, the results of some Open Data Institute research and the findings of the Landsat Advisory Group that the 42 year-old Landsat mission has not been a waste of public money.

The value of open data remains well questionable. When Sir Jeremy follows up with "I believe the Civil Service can play a central role in harnessing these benefits", the question arises what benefits?

It gets worse. "At both national and local level, government holds huge amounts of data and more is generated every day. People rightly expect us to protect their personal data. But with general and anonymised data we can now achieve things that would have been considered impossible only a decade ago" – what impossible things can Sir Jeremy do now?


"The Government has already published over 27,000 datasets, covering almost £200 billion of public spending, since launching data.gov.uk in 2010. We have done this to be open and transparent about the information we hold ...". OK so far, Sir Jeremy's data.gov.uk is a Good Thing, to the extent that it helps the public to hold the government to account ...

... but then we get "but also so that others, inside and outside of government, can take that data and use it to build new and exciting products and services". What exciting products and services? Sir Jeremy's Companies House, for example, has opened up the personal information of hundreds of thousands of company directors (none of it anonymised by the way) and there's not a single exciting product or service to be seen as a result.

It is only prudent to be well sceptical about Sir Jeremy's assumption that open data inspires innovation and causes the economy to expand and improves people's lives.

Also about his claim that personal information will be treated with respect by his Government Digital Service (GDS), the bizarrely-chosen seat of his Government Data Programme, "... we are aiming to transform the way government stores, manages and uses data. The data team at Government Digital Service is ...".

The Privacy and Consumer Advisory Group have devised a set of nine principles for identity assurance. While claiming to abide by all nine, GDS have flouted the lot with their GOV.UK Verify (RIP) identity assurance scheme which is due to go live tomorrow. Sir Jeremy's revolution is here, indeed.


Updated 1.5.16 1

There was a documentary about the Queen on telly the other day. The programme covered the abdication of the disgraceful wrong 'un Edward VIII and the accession of George VI. There is evidence that, on the King's untimely death, Lord Mountbatten sought to bring back the wrong 'un and have him re-enthroned. At which point in the programme one transcendently magnificent lady, a cousin of the Queen's, delivered herself of the following: "it was always said of Lord Louis that if he swallowed a nail he would shit a corkscrew".

Let's call that property mountBatten(). It's a relation between any number of nails of any sort and any number of corkscrews of any sort. It's obviously not a very pleasant property. But in politics it can be occasionally necessary, all hewn of crooked timber as we most unfortunately are, it has its place.

Not least, we expect our cabinet secretaries to possess it. They must have thousands of other properties as well but it must be the case that cabinectSecretary.mountBatten(). Otherwise they can't do the job and they're no use to us.

When Sir Jeremy Heywood sort of promises that we can all enjoy the imprecise benefits of open data while nevertheless retaining our anonymity, as he did the other day, as noted above, it must be clear to everyone that this is more at the corkscrew end of the body politic's digestive tract than the nail end.

You can forget anonymity if the open data initiative that we are promised for this month, May 2016, proceeds. Professor Ross Anderson says so. So does Professor Martyn Thomas. Professor Sir Nigel Shadbolt looks as though he may agree.

They're just professors, of course, what do they know, you may ask. But it's not just them. GDS also have warned about the risk posed to anonymity by open data:
Update, 29 March 2016: We are now able to publish a CSV file (663 kb) containing the data used for the web tool for 7 of the 9 demographic variables provided by the ONS omnibus survey. This is combined with our model's estimate of the individual's probability of being verified by certified companies over time. This is the maximum number of variables we could make public, whilst preserving the anonymity of respondents.

Updated 1.5.16 2

The Electoral Commission once engaged the Government Digital Service (GDS) to do some data-mining work. It didn't go well. It was a painful experience. It ended in failure. The Commission's July 2013 report on the exercise includes:
• There were considerable delays to the original timetable for establishing this pilot. A significant cause of the delays was the lack of capacity and resources within Cabinet Office (and the Government Digital Service (GDS), which is part of Cabinet Office) due to their workload related to the transition to IER ...

• For the national data mining, Cabinet Office’s original intention was that pilot areas should adopt a fairly standardised approach to checking the data received and contacting the individuals identified, to ensure that results were comparable. In practice, however, the nature and extent of follow up work varied widely.

• Much of this variation was caused by practical difficulties, for example the need to spend more time than expected in ensuring the accuracy of the data received. However, some of the variation could have been avoided if there had been fewer delays and a greater level of support provided by Cabinet Office to pilot areas. In particular, a few areas told us they felt unsupported and were unclear about what to do ...

• It is not possible to produce an overall figure for the cost of this pilot. This is because we do not have final costs for all pilot areas or any costs for Cabinet Office (including GDS), who conducted much of the work.

• We are also therefore unable to estimate the cost per new elector registered or the likely cost of any national rollout. Any estimates of these would need to include the cost of coordinating and managing the pilot (the role taken by Cabinet Office in this pilot), as any future work with data mining would require some form of central coordination ...

• The reasons that so many existing electors and ineligible individuals were returned on the data include poor data specifications from Cabinet Office ...

• Inconsistent address formatting and incomplete addresses are likely to have contributed to the significant numbers of existing electors returned in the data (Cabinet Office could not provide the data which would have allowed for a definitive assessment) ...

• In order to answer this question [Is data mining a cost effective way of registering new electors?], we would need to assess the cost benefit of data mining by, for example, calculating the cost per new elector registered. However, we are unable to do this as Cabinet Office could not provide details of their expenditure on the pilot. As they managed the process and conducted much of the matching and data processing, their costs could be significant and are crucial in reaching any realistic assessment of cost effectiveness ...

– The addresses appeared to be more complete than those held in other national databases but a poor data specification from Cabinet Office meant that the format was inconsistent ...

The findings from this pilot do not justify the national roll out of data mining ...

In addition, there were numerous issues in this pilot with the communication and support provided by Cabinet Office ...

Cabinet Office need to ensure that they maintain good communication between themselves, the data holding organisations and EROs [electoral registration officers] throughout the process, including after data from the national databases has been returned to EROs ...
It's a long time ago, of course, well before yesterday, but there is no evidence of GDS making any more successful trips into the world of data science.

Later that year, on 16 October 2013, Mike Bracken, who was chief executive of GDS at the time, gave a speech to the Code For America Summit. "The Efficiency and Reform Group have saved about £10 billion of Whitehall costs", he told delegates, and "this figure represents about 4% of the UK's gross domestic product".

No. £10 billion was about 0.6% of GDP at the time, not 4%. That sort of a mistake must bring tears to the eyes of the Office for National Statistics (ONS). Mr Bracken nevertheless became the government's chief data officer in March 2015.

He left GDS last September, 2015. It's not obvious that GDS have since developed any greater respect for numbers. They say that their forlorn identity management scheme, GOV.UK Verify (RIP), can only go live if the account creation success rate reaches a minimum of 90%. It's currently 70%. GDS want GOV.UK Verify (RIP) to go live anyway.

"In May we will be publishing the latest instalment of our next National Action Plan as part of the Open Government Partnership". That's what the Cabinet Secretary said the other day.

The ONS are in on that plan. So are the ODI, the Open Data Institute. And data.gov.uk ...

... and GDS. How did they get in there? Their inclusion can't be based on their record. It's not exactly an example of data science in action, is it.

The magic of open data #1

"Sharing information across government databases
will dramatically increase governmental powers –
otherwise the UK government wouldn't have proposed it."
Professor Sir Nigel Shadbolt, Chairman, Open Data Institute


Lough Erne in County Fermanagh, Northern Ireland, "is a particularly scenic waterway, renowned for its beautiful setting. The area is popular for angling and watersports, with waterskiing, Rowing and wakeboarding being amongst the most popular; the stretch of water alongside the Broadmeadow, Enniskillen, has hosted stages of the World Waterski Championships annually since 2005, and in 2007, a pro-wakeboard competition, 'Wakejam' was hosted by the Erne Wakeboard Club (EWC) after successful national wakeboard competitions in the previous years. Canoeing is also a popular recreational sport on the Erne".

That's what it says in Wikipedia and that's where, on 18 June 2013, after a hard day's fishing and wakeboarding, the G8 canoed back to shore and issued their famous Declaration (para.7):
We, the G8, agree that open data are an untapped resource with huge potential to encourage the building of stronger, more interconnected societies that better meet the needs of our citizens and allow innovation and prosperity to flourish.

Wednesday 27 August 2014

midata – still waving, still drowning

The following article was published in Digital by Default News (DbyDN) on 21 August 2014:
Initiative to explore how citizens can be empowered with their own data

Five organisations have come together to run a three-month feasibility study to explore how to empower citizens with their own data. The miData Studio initiative is a collaboration between Ctrl-Shift and Milton Keynes Council, the Cabinet Office, Open University and Connected Digital Economy Catapult.

The project aims to create an open, collaborative environment where citizens, the council and developers explore how empowering citizens with their own information can enable better services, better quality of life and efficiency in the delivery of public services.

The project will develop exemplar use cases that deliver benefit to the council and citizens and the local economy more generally.

The project will look for new ways for citizens to gain control of their information, exploring how they can give controlled access to trusted service providers for the services they want or need. It will also act as a pilot for the Cabinet Office’s identity assurance scheme in a local authority context.

This overarching project aim is to empower citizens with their own data in a way they can trust. The project will create a space for learning about working with citizens’ data, building a safe environment to try things out and study what works and what doesn’t work. Crucially the project aims to understand how to do this in such a way that individuals are in control of their data.
It was 3 November 2011 when Ed Davey first announced midata:
Today’s announcement marks the first time globally there has been such a Government-backed initiative to empower individuals with so much control over the use of their own data.
Little did we expect then that it would be the best part of three years before anyone started to "explore" how midata might work. But only now, if DbyDN are to be believed, is a "feasibility study" being launched.

In fact, not mentioned by DbyDN, Craig Belsham introduced us to the midata Innovation Lab (mIL) on 2 May 2013. Over the following few months mIL produced five deeply discouraging prototype apps.

Professor Sir Nigel Shadbolt gamely claimed that these five viruses apps would allow us to "get to the future more quickly" and Mr Belsham posted What we learnt from the midata Innovation Lab on 28 November 2013 but mIL has never been heard from again.

Now we have the "miData Studio" instead. And what is the planned output from their feasibility study? Working services? No. Just some "exemplar use cases" – the miData Studio could take even longer to get to the future than mIL.

There will be five "collaborators" in the miData Studio according to DbyDN – "Ctrl-Shift and Milton Keynes Council, the Cabinet Office, Open University and Connected Digital Economy Catapult".

Or should that be six? "The project aims to create an open, collaborative environment where citizens, the council and developers explore how empowering citizens with their own information can enable ...". It looks as though "citizens" also will need to be collaborators.

Or should it be 11? "The project ... will also act as a pilot for the Cabinet Office’s [non-existent] identity assurance scheme  in a local authority context". How can the studio deliver its exemplar use cases if the identity assurance scheme's five surviving "identity providers" aren't collaborating.

And however many collaborators there are, will the identity assurance scheme (RIP) prove any more successful in Milton Keynes than it did in Warwickshire?

It's all very well for DbyDN to say that the miData Studio will explore how citizens "can give controlled access [to their personal data] to trusted service providers" but how is anyone going to overcome Chris Chant's objection that trust is just not on the menu?

"Truth, not trust". That's Mr Chant's watchword. The pursuit of trust is a "doomed strategy".

Do any of the collaborators in the miData Studio have it in their gift to grant citizens control over their personal data? How? "Trust frameworks", as Ctrl-Shift tell us, are like unicorns. They don't exist. There's no way to enforce the rules. Control isn't on the menu any more than trust is. Or empowerment.

What are the prospective investors in the Cabinet Office's identity assurance scheme supposed to make of this project? They thought they were being invited to invest in a service that already exists.

It's only a 225-word article that DbyDN published but it raises a lot of questions.

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Updated 29.12.14

Still waving, Mydex published Nine ways the personal data store can transform public services on 23 December 2014. Their contention is that, when it comes to "local authorities and public sector organisations", Mydex:
1) Delivers massive cost savings
2) Increases data quality
3) Enables joined up services and streamlined customer journeys
4) Supports more personalised services
5) Enables citizens to get things done online
6) Reduces risk and ensures compliance
7) Builds trust
8) Supports operations such as identity assurance
9) Saves time, offers convenience and increases satisfaction
Really?

These may well be some of the presents local authorities and public sector organisations would ask Father Christmas for. But is Mydex Father Christmas? Are these presents in Mydex's gift? Who believes that? Why?

And who believes Mydex's claim at the bottom of the page? Remember Sony:
Mydex provides the individual with a hyper-secure storage area to enable them to manage their personal data, including text, numbers, images, video, certificates and sound. No-one but the individual can access or see the data.

Updated 30.12.14

Wikipedia:
Walter Mitty is a fictional character in James Thurber's short story "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty", first published in The New Yorker on March 18, 1939, and in book form in My World and Welcome to It in 1942. Thurber loosely based the character on his friend, Walter Mithoff. It was made into a film in 1947 ...

Mitty is a meek, mild man with a vivid fantasy life: in a few dozen paragraphs he imagines himself a wartime pilot, an emergency-room surgeon, and a devil-may-care killer. The character's name has come into more general use to refer to an ineffectual dreamer, appearing in several dictionaries. The American Heritage Dictionary defines a Walter Mitty as "an ordinary, often ineffectual person who indulges in fantastic daydreams of personal triumphs". The most famous of Thurber's inept male protagonists ...
ElReg:
European data law: UK.gov TRASHES 'unambiguous consent' plans

The UK government has raised objections to current EU proposals that would require businesses seeking to rely on "consent" as the lawful basis for processing personal data to ensure that that consent has been unambiguously given "for one or more specific purposes".

It said those proposals are "unjustified" and called on EU law makers to instead turn to the definition of consent under existing EU data protection rules instead for setting the legal standard businesses would need to achieve for consent under the draft new General Data Protection Regulation ...
The ElReg article is written by Out-Law.com, an outlet of the firm of lawyers Pinsent Masons, who follow this sort of thing and provide expert commentary.

In brief, the EU's 1995 Data Protection Directive is due to be replaced with a much-debated General Data Protection Regulation:
  • Should consent for your personal data to be processed be given unambiguously or is that unjustified as the UK government apparently argue? Is it adequate for that consent to be unambiguous or should it be explicit? Under what conditions can data be processed without consent? Is it lawful to create profiles of individuals from their personal data? How can you be said to freely give your informed consent if you actually have no alternative?
  • Assuming the 28 members can agree the answers to these questions, and about 3,000 more, how should they set about enforcing the regulation within the EU? And what about the rest of the world – what do the EU do if Russia, say, pays not a blind bit of notice?
As ElReg/Out-Law.com/Pinsent Masons say:
The European Parliament agreed on its version of the Regulation earlier this year and is waiting for the Council to reach its own consensus on the reforms before trialogue discussions on a final version of the text, which would also involve the European Commission, can be opened.
It's a trialogue (?) between the European Council of Ministers, the European Parliament and the European Commission.

That excludes other people.

DMossEsq, for example.

If DMossEsq offers you total control over your personal data, you can safely ignore the offer as having been made by some sad Walter Mittyish character subject to delusions of grandeur.

As it happens, DMossEsq is making no such offer. He recognises that it's not in his gift. But there are other people out there with a "vivid fantasy life". Remember – the power lies with the EU, and not with Walter Mitty.

midata – still waving, still drowning

The following article was published in Digital by Default News (DbyDN) on 21 August 2014:
Initiative to explore how citizens can be empowered with their own data

Five organisations have come together to run a three-month feasibility study to explore how to empower citizens with their own data. The miData Studio initiative is a collaboration between Ctrl-Shift and Milton Keynes Council, the Cabinet Office, Open University and Connected Digital Economy Catapult.

The project aims to create an open, collaborative environment where citizens, the council and developers explore how empowering citizens with their own information can enable better services, better quality of life and efficiency in the delivery of public services.

The project will develop exemplar use cases that deliver benefit to the council and citizens and the local economy more generally.

The project will look for new ways for citizens to gain control of their information, exploring how they can give controlled access to trusted service providers for the services they want or need. It will also act as a pilot for the Cabinet Office’s identity assurance scheme in a local authority context.

This overarching project aim is to empower citizens with their own data in a way they can trust. The project will create a space for learning about working with citizens’ data, building a safe environment to try things out and study what works and what doesn’t work. Crucially the project aims to understand how to do this in such a way that individuals are in control of their data.
It was 3 November 2011 when Ed Davey first announced midata:
Today’s announcement marks the first time globally there has been such a Government-backed initiative to empower individuals with so much control over the use of their own data.
Little did we expect then that it would be the best part of three years before anyone started to "explore" how midata might work. But only now, if DbyDN are to be believed, is a "feasibility study" being launched.

Saturday 23 August 2014

RIP IDA – gander rejects goose's sauce

No need to say it, it goes without saying, it should be obvious to all but, just in case it isn't obvious to all, IDA is dead.

IDA is the Cabinet Office Identity Assurance programme. And it's dead.

----------

There are 23 problems with UK government IT, Chris Chant told us, and they could all be solved by the adoption of cloud computing, he said.

You may or may not agree but the Government Digital Service (GDS) certainly do. They're all for cloud computing. Like all go-ahead people.

GDS have been responsible for the CloudStore for just over a year now. It's been a patchy service, admittedly, but central and local government departments were enjoined to buy all their IT requirements there. Or from the Digital Services framework, a rival website that suddenly appeared, or from the Digital Marketplace, which is due to replace the CloudStore at the end of next month.

"Help test the Digital Marketplace alpha - your comments will be used to design the beta version of the Digital Marketplace", said GDS. So someone did. You can, too. Just nip in to the beta version, enter "identity" in the Show services box, and look what you get – 518 hits.

That's 518 identity-related services available to any users of the Digital Marketplace. No need to reinvent the wheel, someone else has already done the hard work, just buy the components you need and assemble them into the identity assurance service you need. It's quick, it's cheap and it's open.

That's the spirit of cloud first. Don't pretend that government is different from other IT organisations. Don't waste years developing your own solutions. Take advantage of the products and services that already exist. All 518 of them, in this case.

That's what GDS say.

Except that, although that's good enough for everyone else, it won't do for GDS and their identity assurance service. Oh no.

No, they're different, they need to write their own identity hub. Because of course there aren't any available off the shelf. And they need to pay five "identity providers" to develop bespoke dialogues to create on-line digital identities as though no-one's ever done that before.

23 well-known mistakes to choose from, they're trying to make them all, with the predictable result that IDA is years late and probably over budget ...

... but we don't know that because the Major Projects Authority ignore the development of an identity assurance system for 60 million Brits and don't report on it, not major enough, ...

... the whole project is shrouded in secrecy by GDS, an organisation which claims to promote openness: "As our design principles say, if we make things open, we make things better".


What would Chris Chant say?

Oddly enough, we know the answer. He says it's a waste of time. The "trust framework" on which IDA relies cannot be achieved. That's the 24th problem. "Truth, not trust", he says. You'll never achieve trust. It's a "doomed strategy". RIP.

----------

Updated 24.6.15

Government as a Surveillance Platform (GaaSP)

In the ten months since the post above was published IDA has made little progress:
  • Its name has been changed to "GOV.UK Verify (RIP)".
  • "Identity providers" have become "certified companies".
  • The word "registration" and its cognates have been lopped off IDA's vocabulary – now, people "have their identity verified for the first time", they no longer "register" with GOV.UK Verify (RIP).
  • Ditto the word "secure" and its cognates. GDS now offer "safety", not "security".
In particular, nothing was heard of GDS's identity hub – that part of GOV.UK Verify (RIP) which securely safely connects government departments and "identity providers" together with us proles.

Nothing, that is, until the other day when The Register magazine ("ElReg", to its friends) spotted an article by four academics,  Toward Mending Two Nation-Scale Brokered Identification Systems.

As most sentient beings will know, the academics first define several properties which it is desirable for an identity hub to possess and then demonstrate that GDS's identity hub doesn't. They conclude that as it stands the hub is not secure, it does not protect our privacy, it could provide the platform for mass surveillance and it "conflicts with the political sensitivities that arguably lead to the rejection of identity cards".

Unlike most of us, ElReg have actually talked to one of the academics, Mr George Danezis, and they quote him as follows: "This is a field where a number of solutions already exist ... maybe it was a case of 'not done here' syndrome". Or as we might say, it's alright for the dumb geese to go out and buy a hub off the shelf, but we ganders need our own special one.


RIP IDA – gander rejects goose's sauce

No need to say it, it goes without saying, it should be obvious to all but, just in case it isn't obvious to all, IDA is dead.

IDA is the Cabinet Office Identity Assurance programme. And it's dead.

----------

There are 23 problems with UK government IT, Chris Chant told us, and they could all be solved by the adoption of cloud computing, he said.

You may or may not agree but the Government Digital Service (GDS) certainly do. They're all for cloud computing. Like all go-ahead people.

Thursday 7 August 2014

Cloud computing goes up in smoke

Cloud computing, we have been told for years, is a no-brainer. It's cheaper than operating your own IT facilities in-house. It's more flexible – you can scale up and down as required. It's more secure. And it's greener.

Some organisations have expressed reservations but they have been ignored. Politicians, civil servants, the media and, of course, the suppliers of cloud computing services have succeeded in presenting cloud as a set of technologies which it is responsible to adopt.

Amazon, Google, Apple and Microsoft, among others, have thrived as a result. Businesses all over the world have been outsourcing their IT to these cloud computing suppliers, destroying their in-house competence and happily making themselves dependent on/beholden to outsiders.

Not just businesses, but governments, too.

In the UK, central government has contracted with third party suppliers to store a lot of their data (our data) and to operate many of their applications. They plan to put more data and applications into the cloud as soon as possible. They have created the G-Cloud team (government cloud) and CloudStore, a virtual supermarket where government departments can buy cloud services. And they have lured local government into doing the same, mocking local authorities who fail to follow the fashion.

The government initiative was championed by the charismatic Chris Chant.

Now it appears that the sales pitch was all wrong.

Who says?

Chris Chant.

For some months now, he's been tweeting teasers about trust and truth, e.g.


"Truth better than trust" – what does that mean? At first, nothing. But the other day it became clear. Chris is linked to an organisation called Rainmaker and Rainmaker is promoting an Estonian product called Guardtime. And what does Guardtime do? Guardtime "brings integrity, transparency and accountability to digital society". And not a moment too soon, because:
With an estimated 95% of all enterprise networks having been compromised, it is no surprise that every day the news headlines inform us of a new data breach, a new loss of intellectual property, more damaged reputations and increased legal liability.

Indeed, the loss of intellectual property and personal information has been described as the biggest transfer of wealth in history.
How do we stop our property being stolen like this? Use Guardtime.

And how does Guardtime help? Take a look at Cloud Insecurity and True Accountability, a primer for CIOs on Guardtime and Keyless Signature Infrastructure (KSI) for Attributed Networking written by Matthew C. Johnson, CTO of Guardtime (hat tip Tim Hanley).

Reading the primer may not help you to understand how Guardtime works. It is reminiscent of blockchains, the technology underlying Bitcoin. But what is clear is that its advocates including Chris Chant believe that it is needed because you can't trust the suppliers of cloud computing services:
Handing over competition sensitive, Personally Identifiable Information (PII), or related Intellectual Property information to a Cloud Provider is indeed an exercise in extreme trust without the ability to independently verify Cloud Provider coherence to purported security guarantees, controls, and associated contracts.

In 2014, in light of the CSA [the Cloud Security Alliance] assessment and analysis of threats to Cloud Providers [The Notorious Nine: Cloud Computing Top Threats in 2013], as well as governments’ perceived nefarious interactions with the telecommunications and data storage, social media, and search industries [see Edward Snowden passim]; it has become evident that blind trust in the service provider is a doomed strategy.
Weirdly, Chris Chant and Tim Hanley's Guardtime tweets telling us that G-Cloud's "doomed strategy" can't be trusted are posted on G-Cloud's Twitter timeline. Make of it what you will.

----------

Updated 8.8.14 #1

"Some organisations have expressed reservations" about cloud comptuting, it says in the post above, "but they have been ignored". Which organisations?

Back in October 2012 we listed several. The OECD, for example, and ENISA, the EU's Network and Information Security Agency, who said that cloud computing "should be limited to non-sensitive or non-critical applications and in the context of a defined strategy for cloud adoption which should include a clear exit strategy". It's time to bring the list up to date.

For the moment, let's add just one name to the list – the Law Society.

In April 2014 the Law Society issued a practice note for its members – solicitors in England and Wales. Lawyers are meant to protect their clients' data and keep it confidential. The practice note sets out a number of matters on which lawyers should satisfy themselves before using cloud computing.

Read the practice note, and you'll see that it's very hard for lawyers to obtain that satisfaction. Read the Guardtime Primer, and you'll see that it's impossible.

If Guardtime and Rainmaker and Chris Chant and Tim Hanley are right, it follows that members of the Law Society shouldn't use cloud computing.

Updated 8.8.14 #2

"What", you will have been asking yourself, "about the Public Services Network (PSN)?".

Just to remind you:
The Public Services Network (PSN) will substantially reduce the cost of communication services across UK government and enable new, joined-up and shared public services for the benefit of citizens. PSN is creating one logical network, based on industry standards, and a more open and competitive ICT marketplace at the heart of the UK public sector.
Gluttons for punishment can pursue their further researches on the PSN website.

The rest of us can take refuge in a chatty little 22-pager issued in January 2014 by the Cabinet Office, Public Services Network – PSIIF Trust Framework v1.0. "PSIIF" denotes Public Sector Internal Identity Federation. And (para.1.1):
A trust framework is made up of Business (Legal/Commercial/Policy), Technical and Implementation/Operational obligations on the members and providers of services within the PSIIF. This document defines the obligations, the mechanisms in place to ensure these are met and how these fit into the technical operation of the federation.
You know what the PSN is, and the PSIIF. And you know what a trust framework is. One more thing (also para.1.1):
The PSIIF will exist and be operated within the framework of the Public Services Network Authority (PSNA), but will extend to G-Cloud services and potentially 3rd Sector organisation providing service to the public sector that are not directly connected to the PSN, which have a requirement to identity the public servants using those services.
Now flick forward to Section 3 – Trust Model (para.3.1):
The establishment of trust between different organisations has always been a significant challenge in the development of effective Single Sign On across the public sector. Different organisations can have quite different interpretations of acceptable minimum levels of identity verification and of authentication, as well as a healthy scepticism about whether their fellow members are truly following their declared policies. This issue is not restricted to identity but has historically applied also to networks and shared services.

The development of the Public Sector Network requires that all participants in the network have trust in all users of the network to ensure that all organisations protect their endpoints. The same holds true for all users of G-Cloud services. The PSN and G-Cloud have implemented an accreditation and compliance model that allows all organisations to trust all users of the PSN and G-Cloud at the stated level of trust ...
"The PSN and G-Cloud have implemented an accreditation and compliance model that allows all organisations to trust all users of the PSN and G-Cloud at the stated level of trust"?

No.

Things have changed since January.

By the end of July, G-Cloud had moved to a system of self-accreditation:
The transition to the new G-Cloud Security Approach, which asks for self-assertion, and the Digital Marketplace will be soon coming into effect. This means that suppliers on G-Cloud will no longer need to get Pan Government Accreditation (PGA).

G-Cloud will stop accepting submissions for PGA from 30th of July 2014.
Now how much can "all organisations trust all users"?

And that's not the only change.

If Estonia and Guardtime and Rainmaker and Chris Chant and Tim Hanley are right, you can never achieve trust anyway. Trust isn't on the menu and it's a "doomed strategy".

In that case, bang goes G-Cloud. Bang goes IDA, the identity assurance service (RIP). And bang goes the PSN.

What do the G-Cloud team have to say in response?

Nothing. Not a thing. Chris Chant and Tim Hanley have undermined the legitimacy of G-Cloud and effectively accused the team of leading people on, under false pretences, but either the team haven't noticed or they don't consider those charges to be worthy of a response.

Not so, Chris Chant. Two big changes – (a) self-accreditation and (b) the notion of a trust framework is a nonsense. And what does he say? Rien ne change, nothing has changed:


You can only admire the chutzpah.

Updated 12.8.14















"Rien ne change", says Chris Chant on 8 August 2014.

Which is strange when you see what he was saying on 30 July 2014 about how Rainmaker "totally disrupts UK cloud security capability" ...

... and what he was saying on 31 July 2014 about how "Cloud security has changed in the UK from today" and "today is the day everything changes for cloud security in Europe" ...

... and then there's that Rainmaker tweet on 18 June 2014 which he retweeted, "things will never be the same again".

He used to think that Guardtime would change everything. Now he doesn't. What changed?

----------

He's been quite busy promoting Guardtime – there are 15 tweets alongside.

Guardtime's message is perfectly clear.

They say :
Trust of a Cloud Service Provider is nonsense without the instrumentation and metrics to develop a formal sight picture into how reliable they really are and what they are doing with your data, services, and applications. (p.7)
and
How can you possibly trust the service provider to say, ‘it’s not our fault, we are not liable’, when there is no evidence to confirm or contradict the statement and what little evidence that might be presented is entirely shaped from the perspective of that service provider. (p.8)
and
Cloud Service Providers have been hesitant and stonewalling integrity verification and transparency technologies. The reason? Compromise of your data or exploitation may or may not indemnify them for losses and has direct effects on insurance and reinsurance of both your and their assets.

If they (or you) can’t prove what was lost or compromised on their watch and how it occurred – if the evidence doesn’t exist, they can claim they are not liable. “Prove it”. (p.11)
and
Today, the Cloud Provider cannot provide proof you can trust that your company’s hosted data, applications, and services have integrity – that your critical data has not been manipulated without your knowledge or that it has been migrated to unauthorized locations (stolen) or altered. (p.13)
To overcome those problems, Guardtime say, you should use their Keyless Signature Infrastructure (KSI).

They may or may not be right but Chris Chant certainly agrees with them. 15 times.

You'll never get trust, he says, but at least with Guardtime you'll get the truth, which is "essential for any network or data storage asset", he was telling us on 4 July 2014.

Essential. I.e., without Guardtime, cloud computing customers are missing something important, "trust can never be enough" (5 August 2014). With Guardtime, "Uk orgs and citizens no longer have to have confidence in that their data is secured, they can now verify the fact" (4 August 2014).

That seems clear enough. But then, would you believe it, something else changed and now Chris says there's nothing wrong with using the cloud even if you don't have Guardtime:







It's getting very hard to keep up with Chris's changes. Trust is hard. Truth is hard. Meaning is hard.

Perhaps Mr Singleton can help. Shed some light on the matter. He's the boss of the G-Cloud team. Is using the cloud without Guardtime a "doomed strategy" or isn't it?

Updated 9.9.14

It's not just Chris Chant and Tim Hanley who now support the Rainmaker contention that trust in the cloud can never be achieved. They are joined at Rainmaker by several other senior former Whitehall officials:
  • Mark Forth – Mark spent the majority of his career as a Civil Servant and has worked as the Commercial Director for HMRC, Home Office and DCLG ...
  • Jan Joubert – Jan has extensive experience in the technology industry and supported the development of the UK G-Cloud market by ...
  • Michael Bateman – Michael took G-Cloud through its first and second iterations ...
  • Rhys Sharp – Ex-CTO at SCC, Advisor to HMG on G-Cloud programme, Senior Strategy consultant to Legal & General, Co-Op Financial Services (oops) ...
  • Mark Poole – Ex-Chief of Staff, Cabinet Office e-Delivery Team, System and Service Implementation and Integration specialist – Defra, Home Office ...
  • Peter Fagan – Ex-Security Manager – Government Gateway Critical National Infrastructure, GovConnect, GCF email scanning service, IA review for 2011 Census, National Lottery franchise assessments, original CLAS scheme member ...
Maybe there's something in it. Maybe all this talk of "trust frameworks" really is a waste of breath.

Maybe, for example, tScheme is wasting its time. tScheme and every EU member state. The Department for Business Innovation and Skills's paper on electronic signatures turned up yesterday and there, on p.6, we read that:
tScheme Limited (see: http://www.tscheme.org/index.html) is the UK’s Trusted List Scheme Operator (TLSO) and creates, hosts and maintains the UK’s Trust Service-status List (TSL) on behalf of the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS). Every Member State has its own TSL and each of these is referenced from a central list that is maintained by the Commission (see: EU Trusted list certificate providers - further info and policy).
If Rainmaker are right, Rainmaker and all those senior officials, then yes, tScheme is wasting its time.

Updated 2.10.14

Yesterday the UK abandoned the tax discs we have always displayed in our windscreens to demonstrate that we have paid our Vehicle Excise Duty (VED).

That led to a last-minute flurry of people trying to pay their VED using the new system recently deployed by the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA) on GDS's award-winning GOV.UK.

Ever fashionable, GDS insist on using the cloud. The VED system is deployed in the cloud, we must assume, and you can write the script yourselves.

You know about the cloud. Capacity expands instantaneously to meet demand, it's resilient, nothing can knock it over.

Except that, according to the Guardian and all other media outlets:
DVLA tax disc renewal website buckles under pressure of high demand

Tax disc renewal site taken offline by ‘unprecedented demand’ as new service comes online and tax disc by post is phased out

The DVLA’s new vehicle tax site has crashed due to the large volume of people attempting to renew their tax online after paper discs were abolished in favour of digital records.

The site was experiencing more than 6,000 visits a minute at 9.43pm on Tuesday, according to the DVLA, but remained up but by Wednesday morning when the new rules came into effect it was overwhelmed.
This is getting embarrassing. Again. You could drive an untaxed coach and horses through that cloud sales patter.