What's the matter with our leaders, that they can imagine we welcome mass surveillance? A blogger suggests the answer

To the Cabinet Office, it is quite unremarkable to suggest that we should all apply to private sector companies for an electronic ID so that we can transact with the government, see for example this post by ex-Guardian man Mike Bracken – Establishing trust in digital services. Given that there are 60 million of us here in the UK, those private sector companies would have to be pretty big to manage the volumes. As big as Facebook, for example, who already have 30 million active users in the UK. Or Google, the company that "walked Francis Maude through the identity ecosystem". At least that's what ex-Guardian man Mike Bracken says in Thoughts on my recent trip to the West Coast with Francis Maude, Minister for the Cabinet Office.

To ordinary human beings, the idea is utterly inept.

To the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills, it is quite unremarkable to suggest that we should all collect together our personal data in a file and give it to suppliers so that they know what we want to buy from them, please see for example Ed Davey, problem-solver – midata. Only a mooncalf could possibly agree (The case for midata – the answer is a mooncalf).

To ordinary human beings, the idea is utterly inept.

To the civil service all across Whitehall, it is quite unremarkable to suggest that all the personal data about us held by the government should be stored on computers operated by the likes of Google and Amazon. Whereas the suggestion is of course actually bonkers – Cloud computing is bonkers or, as HMG put it, a "no-brainer".

To ordinary human beings, the idea is utterly inept.

To the Home Office, it is quite unremarkable to suggest that all our phone calls, emails, web browsing etc ... should be monitored by GCHQ.

To ordinary human beings, the idea is utterly inept.

Whitehall and the senior politicians put in to bat for Whitehall clearly have a very odd idea of human nature. It's worth trying to work out what's odd about it. It doesn't help simply to keep saying that it's odd. We need to make a bit of progress. And in that endeavour the blogger Scott Grønmark has taken the first important step.

Mr Grønmark says that in 2005 it occurred to him that the government has many of the symptoms of autism – Talk to the hand! - why all organisations turn autistic – and that he is thinking of writing a book about it. He has returned to the subject about 10 times over the years (according to Google). Let's hope that he does finally write that book.

What's the matter with our leaders, that they can imagine we welcome mass surveillance? A blogger suggests the answer

To the Cabinet Office, it is quite unremarkable to suggest that we should all apply to private sector companies for an electronic ID so that we can transact with the government, see for example this post by ex-Guardian man Mike Bracken – Establishing trust in digital services. Given that there are 60 million of us here in the UK, those private sector companies would have to be pretty big to manage the volumes. As big as Facebook, for example, who already have 30 million active users in the UK. Or Google, the company that "walked Francis Maude through the identity ecosystem". At least that's what ex-Guardian man Mike Bracken says in Thoughts on my recent trip to the West Coast with Francis Maude, Minister for the Cabinet Office.

To ordinary human beings, the idea is utterly inept.

Cloud computing is bonkers or, as HMG put it, a "no-brainer"

The failures of government IT projects are well-known and have been for decades, during which the problems have been intractable. Now a solution is being championed by Her Majesty's Government – cloud computing.

What is cloud computing? And is it the answer?

HMG runs a blog called G-Cloud (the government cloud), on which last Friday Adrian Scaife from the Ministry of Justice posted an answer to the first question above, "A No Brainer":

Cloud computing is so easy to understand that even simple folk like me get the idea.

Mr Scaife should know all about the traditional problems of government computing. He works for NOMS, the National Offender Management Service, the travails of which have rarely been out of Private Eye for the past eight years. To pick just one of the hiccoughs suffered, in March 2009 the National Audit Office published a report on the NOMS computer system which includes this:

3.17 At the end of October 2007, £161 million had been spent on the project overall. We have not been able to ascertain precisely what this money was spent on because NOMS did not record expenditure against workstream before July 2007 ...

This patrician insouciance of Whitehall's when it comes to public money is just one of the aggravating features of government IT collected together in a report by the Public Administration Select Committee, Government and IT- "A Recipe For Rip-Offs": Time For A New Approach, a report which with good grace Mr Scaife refers to. It's a long report and readers may care to start with the contribution entitled Whitehall, Red Light District beginning at page Ev w7 to get the flavour of it. Clause 5 deals with cloud computing.

Mr Scaife's post promotes five alleged benefits of cloud computing which he says will help to solve the current problems of government IT:

No CapEx – you can stand up services in days, hours or in some cases minutes – try before you buy: spin up an AWS instance, sign up for Google Apps for Business or an Office 365 free trial and touch and feel it for yourself ... Metered Services – you only pay for what you use.  If it doesn’t fit the bill, switch it off.  If it does work you can grow it incrementally ... Scalability, flexibility, elasticity – All baked in.  You want to add a couple of hundred gigs of storage, another 50 or 5000 users, a new tenancy for an application, just switch it on.  And when your business changes and you don’t need it any more – no exit costs, just switch it off ... Cheaper – the economies of scale the global-class cloud providers can realise drive unit costs to a level that can never be achieved through an on-premise approach.  In many cases, cloud services are free at the point of use because of these economies of scale, and because they are typically monetised by advertising – you can normally lose the ads for a paid business version of a cloud service ... Vendor-led Innovation – One of the great things about cloud is that you don’t have to do upgrades, the cloud provider does it.  New features, patches, and upgrades are all part of the package.  Because the global market is a competitive place, as well as getting better, services can get cheaper too: AWS reduced their prices twice in 2011 ...

If there is no CapEx, no capital expenditure, then what Mr Scaife foresees is a new world in which government doesn't buy any expensive computers (any servers) itself. But someone has to buy them. The people buying them are AWS, Amazon Web Services, and other suppliers of cloud computing services. Someone must pay for all the spare capacity which would allow HMG to "scale up" any time it wants to, no delays involved. And someone must keep paying for it when HMG decides at the drop of a hat to "switch off". All that redundancy must be reflected in the costs.

What we're looking at is a return to the 1970s and timesharing. Back then, most companies couldn't afford mainframes or minicomputers and so they rented time on computers provided by the likes of GEISCO – General Electric Information Services Company – and Comshare and other smaller bureau operators. Timesharing costs went through the roof and the whole business was gratefully abandoned when PCs arrived in the 1980s.

HMG is welcoming the timesharing zombie back into Whitehall. And Mr Scaife, at least, offers no reason to believe that costs won't go through the roof again just like the last time.

Mr Scaife's post barely considers the potential disadvantages of cloud computing. The document is more like a piece of sales literature than a balanced assessment.

There are other opinions of the new world being sold to us here:

• The OECD, for example, recommend that "cloud computing creates security problems in the form of loss of confidentiality if authentication is not robust and loss of service if internet connectivity is unavailable or the supplier is in financial difficulties".
• ENISA, the EU's information security agency, casts more doubt on the advisability of cloud computing, concluding that "its adoption 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".
• Larry Ellison, the founder of Oracle, says frankly: "The interesting thing about cloud computing is that we've redefined cloud computing to include everything that we already do. The computer industry is the only industry that is more fashion-driven than women's fashion. Maybe I'm an idiot, but I have no idea what anyone is talking about. What is it? It's complete gibberish. It's insane. When is this idiocy going to stop?"
• And as for Richard Stallman, he says that cloud computing is a "trap":

... Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation and creator of the computer operating system GNU, said that cloud computing was simply a trap aimed at forcing more people to buy into locked, proprietary systems that would cost them more and more over time. "It's stupidity. It's worse than stupidity: it's a marketing hype campaign," he told The Guardian. "Somebody is saying this is inevitable – and whenever you hear somebody saying that, it's very likely to be a set of businesses campaigning to make it true."

The Guardian quote one actual user of real live cloud computing services as follows:

We went ahead and moved our business to public cloud computing about 18 months ago. It has been a nightmare, there have been times when the company is down because our collaboration software, Basecamp, is unreachable. We also have an Amazon cloud solution. How secure is this, what if there is a breach? How do you even call Amazon, they don't even have a phone number for us? The level of transparency is not there.

Mr Scaife's assumption is that cloud computing offers greater security than can be achieved in-house. But how do you know? According to the Guardian again:

Despite these efforts, tough issues remain. One is that organisations often cannot perform audits to verify the vendor's claims. Google, for example, does not allow it. "It does more to impede the security, letting everybody in to take a look at everything," Feigenbaum says.

Google is another supplier of cloud computing and Eran Feigenbaum is their director of security for Google Apps. Are we really to believe that Google can provide higher security than HMG?

Maybe. We are used to finding fault with HMG. That doesn't mean that Google are faultless.

Let's be clear what Mr Scaife is talking about here. All our tax records, all our state education records, all our state healthcare records and state housing records, all our National Insurance and state pension records, all our criminal records, ... could be stored on Amazon web servers or Google web servers or anyone else's web servers.

Where would those servers be? Where would our data be? They could be anywhere. Anywhere where Amazon/Google can provide their allegedly scalable and flexible services most cheaply. Who has jurisdiction over the data if it's in Vanuatu (formerly the New Hebrides but now the Ripablik blong Vanuatu)? How do you enforce any British law there?

HMG might or might not be able to keep control. The US have taken steps to do so already, and not just to control their own data:

There is also concern about the US anti- terrorism legislation called the Patriot Act, which gives the US government a right of access to any data stored on US soil, and possibly any data on servers belonging to a US company, if it is deemed necessary for security investigations. In some cases, that is not an acceptable risk.

Mr Scaife acknowledges this problem:

Special needs The operation of separate and parallel ICT systems for government departments is analogous to operating separate water or electricity supplies for government departments.  It is expensive, often unnecessary, and the benefits are dubious.  At the same time, government is in a unique position in that it must both protect assets of national security, and that it must provide adequate protection of the personal data entrusted to it.

If government is going to protect national security and the confidentiality of personal data, then that surely points firmly against cloud computing and Mr Scaife's putative cost savings won't be available after all. Alternatively, if HMG is determined to try to achieve those putative savings, will the population no longer be relying on HMG? Will we be relying instead on the good will of Amazon and Google? Is the job too difficult, and HMG is giving up on the business of government?

Having asserted that government's responsibilities are unique, three paragraphs later Mr Scaife says:

Government is now beginning to recognising the potential cloud has to help us deliver ‘better for less’, to drive down costs and to improve services.  Our job now is to seize the opportunity to capitalise on that.  Cloud is a ‘no-brainer’, but we need to avoid getting into a tiz about how scary it sounds to us and how ‘special’ we think we are.

Clearly, his point is that government computing requirements are not unique after all – "we need to avoid getting into a tiz about how ... ‘special’ we think we are". He thinks that's an argument for adopting cloud computing. It isn't. It's the reverse.

Anyone using the cloud has lost control of their data and of their costs. Do lawyers store your confidential data in the cloud? Let's hope not. They shouldn't. There's nothing special about government in this respect. HMG shouldn't adopt cloud computing either, any more than lawyers. Not if they're going to maintain national security. Not if they're going to take the confidentiality of personal data seriously. And not if they have a brain.

Public administration in the UK is in a parlous state. No-one doubts that there are real problems. Cloud computing is not the answer.

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PS For what it's worth, DMossEsq posted a comment on the G-Cloud blog raising some of the questions above. The comment has been published but the last sentence, including a link to this article, has been removed. It's a small thing but was the comment edited in the UK? Or Vanuatu? How will you defend your position if your tax records are edited? And what if they're copied by Google, at the request of the US government? While framing your answers, please follow Mr Scaife's advice and try to "avoid getting into a tiz about how scary it sounds to [you] and how ‘special’ [you] think [you] are".

Cloud computing is bonkers or, as HMG put it, a "no-brainer"

The failures of government IT projects are well-known and have been for decades, during which the problems have been intractable. Now a solution is being championed by Her Majesty's Government – cloud computing.

What is cloud computing? And is it the answer?

Official: stillborn French biometric ID card scheme not just extra-terrestrial but also unconstitutional, 13 times over

Remember France? Remember 6 March 2012 when the French parliament decided to introduce national biometric ID cards? In a scheme reminiscent of Vichy? 60+ members of the National Assembly and 60+ members of the Senate referred the law to the French Constitutional Council. What does the Council make of it?

The Conseil constitutionnel published its Decision no. 2012-652 DC yesterday, 22 March 2012. They're not pleased.

Since it's been re-numbered, the law has 10 articles. Four of them are completely unconstitutional according to the Council. So are bits of two other articles:

Sont déclarées contraires à la Constitution les dispositions suivantes de la loi relative à la protection de l'identité : - les articles 3, 5, 7 et 10 ; - le troisième alinéa de l'article 6 ; - la seconde phrase de l'article 8.

The Council has 10 objections to the way the scope of a law supposedly concerned with identity fraud has crept into terrorism and many other areas. And three objections to the use of the proposed biometric ID cards for eCommerce.

These 13 counts of unconstitutionality are laid out in the Commentary which accompanies the Decision and summarised in the Council's press release, in which the law is judged to be disproportionate and to infringe people's right to privacy:

Eu égard à la nature des données enregistrées, à l'ampleur de ce traitement, à ses caractéristiques techniques et aux conditions de sa consultation, le Conseil constitutionnel a jugé que l'article 5 de la loi déférée a porté au droit au respect de la vie privée une atteinte qui ne peut être regardée comme proportionnée au but poursuivi. Il a en conséquence censuré les articles 5 et 10 de la loi déférée et par voie de conséquence, le troisième alinéa de l'article 6, l'article 7 et la seconde phrase de l'article 8.

When it comes to the use of the proposed ID cards for eCommerce and digital signature, where Serge Blisko considers that the government had taken off into the stratosphere, the Council say:

Par ailleurs, le Conseil constitutionnel a examiné l'article 3 de la loi qui conférait une fonctionnalité nouvelle à la carte nationale d'identité. Cet article ouvrait la possibilité que cette carte contienne des « données » permettant à son titulaire de mettre en oeuvre sa signature électronique, ce qui la transformait en outil de transaction commerciale. Le Conseil a relevé que la loi déférée ne précisait ni la nature des « données » au moyen desquelles ces fonctions pouvaient être mises en oeuvre ni les garanties assurant l'intégrité et la confidentialité de ces données. La loi ne définissait pas davantage les conditions d'authentification des personnes mettant en oeuvre ces fonctions, notamment pour les mineurs. Le Conseil a en conséquence jugé que la loi, faute de ces précisions, avait méconnu l'étendue de sa compétence. Il a censuré l'article 3 de la loi.

In other words – less dignified words – the government haven't got a clue how the cards would be used for eCommerce or, to put it another way, they don't know what they're talking about. Or legislating about.

Yesterday was a bad day for the banks – they continue to be responsible for frauds perpetrated against them, they haven't yet managed to introduce digital signatures to pass that risk off on their accountholders. It was a bad day for the astrologers and stamp-collectors of the biometrics community. It was a bad day for the latter-day leech-farmers of the moribund plastic card community. It was a bad day for industries seeking illegal State aid. And generally a bad day for the attempted resurrection of Vichy.

On the other hand, it was a good day for democratic government and for the French people. A very good day.

Official: stillborn French biometric ID card scheme not just extra-terrestrial but also unconstitutional, 13 times over

Remember France? Remember 6 March 2012 when the French parliament decided to introduce national biometric ID cards? In a scheme reminiscent of Vichy? 60+ members of the National Assembly and 60+ members of the Senate referred the law to the French Constitutional Council. What does the Council make of it?

EXCLUSIVE: Man in shower gets wet

1. In the year to 31 March 2012 public expenditure is estimated to be £710 billion. According to yesterday's Budget, Whitehall expects to spend £683 billion over the next year, a tiny reduction of 2.4% in nominal terms, very slightly more in real terms, taking RPI inflation into account.

Gordon Brown was always very good at hiding expenditure, behind PFIs and peculiar corporate structures like Network Rail – we have to hope that £683 billion doesn't omit any expenditure that is known about but not being declared.

2. Of that public expenditure, £50 billion in 2011-12 was interest on the national debt and that figure is expected to fall a respectable 8% to £46 billion in 2012-13.

If our credit rating falls and interest rates rise, the good news will evaporate. If interest rates double, then £46 billion becomes £92 billion, an 84% increase on 2011-12.

3. The Exchequer was expecting to collect £589 billion of revenue in 2011-12 and expects £592 billion in 2012-13, a tiny increase of 0.51%, which is good, but better would be to see a significant decrease. Individuals and companies are less likely to waste their money than Whitehall.

The attention being paid to tax avoidance could have some surprising victims – that great scourge of tax avoidance, the Guardian, relies for income on its Cayman Islands joint venture with Apax Partners and if they have to start paying the tax they owe – if the GAAR is pointed at them – then the newspaper could go out of business in one year instead of three.

4. In 2011-12, the nation borrowed an estimated £121 billion to keep itself in the manner to which it has become accustomed. The deficit in 2012-13 is expected to fall to £91 billion, a tidy reduction of 24.2%. Do we really have to wait five more years for a balanced budget?

With the economy flat and the national debt little short of £1 trillion – yesterday's figure was £985 billion – the media still manage to sound surprised that people are worse off. How do they do it? Which maths lesson did they miss at school? Addition? Subtraction? Were they asleep throughout the Autumn of 2008?

Just to remind them, Gordon Brown had to fly off from the 2008 Labour Party conference to "save the world", or at least the UK, from the mess he and Ed Balls and Sir Gus now Lord O'Donnell had created. There was a problem then and there still is. Wishful thinking hasn't made it go away.

EXCLUSIVE: Man in shower gets wet

1. In the year to 31 March 2012 public expenditure is estimated to be £710 billion. According to yesterday's Budget, Whitehall expects to spend £683 billion over the next year, a tiny reduction of 2.4% in nominal terms, very slightly more in real terms, taking RPI inflation into account.

Stillborn (mort-né) French biometric ID card scheme killed by crude mistake in technocrats' design

Remember France? Remember 6 March 2012 when the French parliament decided to introduce national biometric ID cards? In a scheme reminiscent of Vichy? Time to take a look at the quality of the design decisions taken at this early stage. Do the technocrats know what they're doing?

We must start as ever with the immaculate speech given by Serge Blisko on 13 July 2011 ("the speech that just keeps on speaking"):

Le groupe socialiste au Sénat s’est d’ailleurs interrogé sur le fait que cette deuxième puce « services » soit gérée par le ministère de l’intérieur. Avez-vous besoin, en qualité de ministre de l’intérieur, de connaître les habitudes d’achat et de consommation ou les allées et venues de millions de citoyens ? Nous sommes là dans un monde tel que décrit par Orwell dans 1984, et dont l’obsession du contrôle me semble hors de propos s’agissant de la protection contre l’usurpation d’identité. Ce véritable problème ne demande pas un déploiement stratosphérique permettant de tracer les déplacements et les achats des individus !

The new ID card will have two chips (puces) in it, one of them to allow you to deal with the State (the puce régalienne) and the other for eCommerce (the puce commerciale). M. Blisko says that the effect of the latter would be to open your life to minute surveillance, the Minister of the Interior could learn all your buying preferences and he or she could know everywhere you go.

That Panopticon facility goes way beyond the putative objective of the legislation, which is meant to be restricted to identity theft (l’usurpation d’identité). In fact according to M. Blisko, it leaves the planet altogether and launches into the stratosphere.

---

Source: University of Tennessee, Knoxville

RECIPE: Mix plastic cards (50 million) and surveillance (24/7) into a large pan. Stir in taxpayers' money (several billion Euros) ...

Let's leave those ingredients to simmer for a while.

In the interim, consider instead this point. If each card is 1mm thick and if you need 50 million of them to certify the French population then, if you placed the cards one on top of the other, you would have a pile of plastic 50km high. M. Blisko is right. Your pile of plastic cards would reach from the Assemblée Nationale all the way up to the top of the stratosphere. (NB: Mont Blanc = 4.81km)

If you had been a Tsar of all the Russias, what wouldn't you have given for plastic cards to use in your propiska system! The прописка was an early form of Russian ID card issued in the nineteenth century to help to govern the population. Plastic – that twentieth century invention – would obviously have made propiski more durable than the mere paper that was available to the Tsars. If only plastic had been available, the Tsars would have ordered a 50km high pile of it like a shot.

They would. But we can't. We know that the earth and the seas are already polluted with too much plastic. If there is any alternative, we should use it and not add to the pollution. Is there an alternative?

What are the plastic cards needed for? Answer, to carry the puces which support secure transactions, whether régalienne or commerciale. Couldn't we put the puces in something else, instead of yet another plastic card? Yes. We could put them in a mobile phone (a portable).

As it happens, not only could we put chips in mobiles phones, we already are putting chips in mobile phones, as the redoutable M. Blisko effectively says:

Aux débuts du commerce sur internet, il y avait beaucoup de fraudes. Actuellement, afin de permettre un échange sécurisé, en particulier lors d’achats dépassant certains montants, il existe des mots de passe, des codes à utilisation unique qui peuvent être envoyés sur téléphone portable, des confirmations par mail, etc.

Payment systems – and therefore identity management systems – are moving to mobile phones. Everything is moving to mobile phones. The mobile phone is an ineluctable evolutionary process in society. Nothing can stop it. Anything that gets in the way is mown down contemptuously.

That includes the old 85mm x 54mm plastic card business. It's outdated and irrelevant. It's dead. As dead as leech-farming (la cultivation des sangsues?). And there's no point trying to revive it. Any tax money thrown at it is tax money wasted.

Today's Tsar of all the Russias would issue digital certificates, not plastic cards. And he would transmit them to people's mobile phones, he wouldn't post them. But not, apparently, today's French technocrat.

A true forget-nothing-learn-nothing Bourbon, the modern French technocrat is prepared to ignore the advent in the last millennium of the mobile phone. He is happy to propose a nineteenth century scheme for use today. In the ancien régime he still inhabits, so what if that means polluting the planet? And so what if it means wasting stratospheric amounts of taxpayers' money?

---

Our dish of plastic cards and surveillance is ready now. And very unappetising it looks, next to mobile phones:

• People voluntarily pay for mobile phones themselves ...
• ... and they voluntarily take their mobile phones with them wherever they go.
• Mobile phones can be tracked. They have to be. That's how the mobile phone networks work. So you can be tracked.
• The networks record who you call and who calls you. They have to. To connect the calls and to charge for them. The effect is that the networks know who your contacts are ...
• ... as well as where they are.
• And what's more, unlike the national biometric ID card, the mobile phone actually exists and has all these facilities for traçage now.
• As we move around with our mobiles switched on, we are already all of us permanently projecting our identity onto the record, as we have been for years.

Children identify with their mobile phone and their mobile phone identifies them. The mobile phone is an ID card. It just is. It is the culmination of his dreams for any totalitarian (le comble de ses rêves?). It is a rich and succulent main course whereas by comparison the old-fashioned and unimaginative, pedestrian and under-powered plastic card scheme proposed by the French government is a sickly, thin gruel.

Which suggests a surprising conclusion. Inattendu (unexpected) but just for once, perhaps M. Blisko is wrong?

Perhaps the Interior Minister isn't interested in the ID card as an instrument of surveillance as M. Blisko alleges? The Minister's already got mobile phones for that.

The plastic cards are a mistake. They mean that the scheme cannot work for surveillance or for anything else, including the fight against identity theft. The national biometric ID card scheme is not yet born but it is already dead. So why does the Minister want it? It's a mystery.

When in doubt, follow the money. Then it can become clearer.

There are two big transfers going on:

• Firstly, with the introduction of digital signatures under the Minister's scheme, risk is being transferred from the banks to the accountholders, and money therefore is being transferred the other way.
• Second, a collection of suppliers, including astrologers and stamp-collectors and as we now know latter-day leech-farmers, will be paid public money to create a new identity management network that's not needed – it's not needed because France already has several mobile phone networks.

More and more, this Vichy law of 6 March 2012 looks like nothing more than an illegal State subsidy to a number of favoured industries, at least one of which (85x54 plastic cards) is already dead.

Stillborn (mort-né) French biometric ID card scheme killed by crude mistake in technocrats' design

Remember France? Remember 6 March 2012 when the French parliament decided to introduce national biometric ID cards? In a scheme reminiscent of Vichy? Time to take a look at the quality of the design decisions taken at this early stage. Do the technocrats know what they're doing?