Identity assurance – the clock is ticking, your moderation is awaiting comment

28 September 2012 and a reply to yesterday's enquiry has whizzed in from GDS, followed by a reply to the reply:

steve # Thanks for your comment, David. Firstly, please don’t take our lack of posts as evidence of inaction. We’ve actually been incredibly busy over the summer and are expecting a bumper crop of posts in October, to share what we’ve been up to. So, watch this space. Secondly, DWP are still working to resolve final contractual issues. The outcome will only be made public when final contracts are signed. Steve 28/09/2012 steve # Furthermore, this notification will come from DWP, not Cabinet Office or GDS, as it is their framework. 28/09/2012 dmossesq # Please Note: Your comment is awaiting moderation. Dear Mr Wreyford Thank you for your reply. I don’t mistake the absence of posts for inactivity – as I said, surely there must have been some activity in view of the importance of Universal Credit. You say that “DWP are still working to resolve final contractual issues”. Ex-Guardian man Mike Bracken made it clear on 1 March 2012 that Identity Assurance belongs to the Cabinet Office and not DWP: “… this approach ensures that, ultimately, HMG-wide Identity Assurance is supplied across central departments via a common procurement portal (to HMG agreed standards) and governed by the Cabinet Office”. Presumably GDS are involved in those “final contractual issues” just as much as if not more than DWP*. The absence of posts does create a vacuum, though, which draws in all sorts of flotsam … The Department for Business Innovation and Skills (BIS) midata initiative, for example. Why are GDS using BIS to try to legislate for Personal Data Stores/Inventories (PDSs/PDIs) instead of doing it themselves? And GOV.UK – why waste a lot of time and money re-writing central government websites? Is it to provide consistent hooks for PDS-based identity assurance in all government communications over the web? A PDS is a dynamic dematerialised ID card, isn’t it. The public won’t “wear it”. Neither will the banks if the Cabinet Office try to insert PDSs into the nation’s payment systems. If Google and/or Facebook turn out to be on the list of GDS-approved suppliers of identity assurance services, then DWP and everyone else will have wasted their time negotiating any contractual issues, final or otherwise. Again, the public won’t wear it. And the GOV.UK team will have wasted their time. And BIS will have wasted their credibility … Goodness, just look at all that dust, you never can tell what the vacuum’s going to draw up, can you. The sooner GDS can tell an expectant public what you’ve come up with identity assurancewise, the better. ———- * While writing this reply of mine, your second reply popped up, trying to push responsibility back on to DWP. Too late, Mr Wreyford. The Cabinet Office burnt their bridges when they made DWP withdraw their December 2011 OJEU notice. You know that. If Universal Credit fails for lack of identity assurance, that will be the Cabinet Office’s fault now and not DWP’s. 28/09/2012

The last comment will only appear on the GDS blog after moderation by them and only if they want it to appear.

Identity assurance – the clock is ticking, your moderation is awaiting comment

28 September 2012 and a reply to yesterday's enquiry has whizzed in from GDS, followed by a reply to the reply:

Government Digital Service, G-Cloud, log-rolling, size matters

... do you think that Whitehall's gone mad?

[Skyscape has subsequently changed its name to UKCloud: "London – August 1, 2016 – Skyscape Cloud Services Limited, the easy to adopt, easy to use and easy to leave assured cloud services company, has today renamed and relaunched as UKCloud Ltd (www.ukcloud.com), to reinforce the company’s exclusive focus on supporting the UK public sector in the digital transformation of services".]

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One of the ways Whitehall plans to transform itself is to retain more SMEs – small and medium-sized enterprises. The big brutes like IBM are lumbering behemoths, so it is said, they're slow and they cost a fortune. SMEs would put a spring in Whitehall's step.

This is all tied up with G-Cloud, the plan to stick government data in the cloud, thereby making government services efficient, trusted and green. Or so it is said.

And so it was that the G-Cloud blog was really pleased to be able to announce on 18 September 2012 that:

We’re really pleased to be able to announce the first major sale of Infrastructure As A Service. Government Digital Service have signed a contract with Skyscape for: 1) Compute as a service 2) Compute as a service (test & development) 3) Storage as a service This is all intended to support  the exciting work they’re doing on .gov.uk to revolutionise the way citizens access information and services online ... The purchase also shows that government is ready to embrace low cost utility cloud services and is  buying from SME’s ...

The G-Cloud team made the public statement above about how marvellous GDS are and quite independently GDS made a public statement about how marvellous G-Cloud is, coincidentally on the very same day:

In the past, we might have looked at dedicated servers or possibly even our own rack in a datacentre somewhere ... The cloud has transformed all of this. Through the G-Cloud framework we are able to simply and rapidly buy highly reliable, highly cost-effective hosting services ... To meet the needs of GOV.UK, we are planning to work with a number of different Infrastructure as a Service providers. We are happy to announce that the first cloud hosting provider we are working with is Skyscape ...

GOV.UK is the replacement for every single central government website + Directgov + Businesslink, please see "Single government domain" on GDS's list of projects. They'll all go. They'll all be replaced with one single domain, GOV.UK.

It's not as though there's any sign of GDS working on identity assurance or assisted digital. DWP are left waiting for identity assurance, Universal Credit is in limbo and millions of claimants are stuck in the poverty trap. All GDS are doing is re-writing a lot of websites that already exist.

They haven't finished yet and it's still in testing but GOV.UK is the only output from GDS so far, it's their only visible raison d'être. And they've decided to host their baby not on servers at a government data centre or at a big brute of a lumbering behemoth, but on Skyscape's servers.

And who, you ask, are Skyscape?

Take a look at the "Company information" bit of the Companies House website, enter "Skyscape Cloud Services Ltd" and you, too, will discover that the company's registered office is in Corsham, that it was incorporated on 3 May 2011 as company no.07619797 and that it has yet to file any accounts. Click on "Order information on this company" and you'll find that it's a £100 £1,000 company with 10,000 100,000 1p-nominal shares to its name.

Smaller than IBM, yes – but perhaps a little too small? GOV.UK depends on a £100 £1,000 company?

The G-Cloud team find this exciting and revolutionary. GDS find it simple, rapid, highly reliable and cost-effective. And they're happy.

But are you? Are you happy? Or do you think that Whitehall's gone mad?

Government Digital Service, G-Cloud, log-rolling, size matters

... do you think that Whitehall's gone mad?

[Skyscape has subsequently changed its name to UKCloud: "London – August 1, 2016 – Skyscape Cloud Services Limited, the easy to adopt, easy to use and easy to leave assured cloud services company, has today renamed and relaunched as UKCloud Ltd (www.ukcloud.com), to reinforce the company’s exclusive focus on supporting the UK public sector in the digital transformation of services".]

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One of the ways Whitehall plans to transform itself is to retain more SMEs – small and medium-sized enterprises. The big brutes like IBM are lumbering behemoths, so it is said, they're slow and they cost a fortune. SMEs would put a spring in Whitehall's step.

This is all tied up with G-Cloud, the plan to stick government data in the cloud, thereby making government services efficient, trusted and green. Or so it is said.

And so it was that the G-Cloud blog was really pleased to be able to announce on 18 September 2012 that:

We’re really pleased to be able to announce the first major sale of Infrastructure As A Service. Government Digital Service have signed a contract with Skyscape for: 1) Compute as a service 2) Compute as a service (test & development) 3) Storage as a service This is all intended to support  the exciting work they’re doing on .gov.uk to revolutionise the way citizens access information and services online ... The purchase also shows that government is ready to embrace low cost utility cloud services and is  buying from SME’s ...

Identity assurance – the clock is ticking, your comment is awaiting moderation

27 September 2012 9:30-ish, posted on the Government Digital Service (GDS) blog here and here:

dmossesq # Please Note: Your comment is awaiting moderation. Steve Wreyford’s post on OIX is the latest on the ID assurance blog and is dated 14 June 2012, three months ago. Has there been no activity on identity assurance since then? Surely there must have been some, GDS are due to announce by the end of September – 85 hours time – which bidders have been approved to provide identity assurance services as per the 1 March 2012 notice in OJEU. When will we be told who the winners are? 27/09/2012

Identity assurance – the clock is ticking, your comment is awaiting moderation

27 September 2012 9:30-ish, posted on the Government Digital Service (GDS) blog here and here:

dmossesq # Please Note: Your comment is awaiting moderation. Steve Wreyford’s post on OIX is the latest on the ID assurance blog and is dated 14 June 2012, three months ago. Has there been no activity on identity assurance since then? Surely there must have been some, GDS are due to announce by the end of September – 85 hours time – which bidders have been approved to provide identity assurance services as per the 1 March 2012 notice in OJEU. When will we be told who the winners are? 27/09/2012

What price privacy? $2.08

With thanks to SheffieldForum.co.uk –

"For everything Sheffield"

You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it.

So said Scott McNealy, CEO of Sun Microsystems, and many people say they agree with him. Let's call those people "Roundheads".

Cavaliers believe that privacy is an essential ingredient in the recipe for human beings. Miss it out, and you cook up something different, not a human being.

Our location can be tracked by the mobile phone companies. Google records every website we visit. Our entire life history is on Facebook. Our every instantaneous emotional reaction is documented on Twitter. GCHQ want to store all our email headers. David Cameron wants to give all our medical records to researchers. The Department for Business Innovation and Skills wants us to maintain Personal Data Stores with so-called "trusted third parties" we've never met. DWP and the Cabinet Office want the same, so that we can all transact with the government on-line. The G-Cloud Puritans want to store all this data in the cloud with Amazon and others on servers that could be anywhere in the world ...

"There's something wrong with all this", say the Cavaliers. "No there isn't", say the Roundheads, "get over it". And so the argument continues, forever unresolved.

Except, sometimes, even the Roundheads briefly grasp the need for privacy, the importance of privacy, its value:

Claims that the privacy of direct messages sent between Facebook users had been compromised and that the messages were appearing publicly on users' timelines are false, the social networking service has said. There was confusion on Monday amid reports in France that non-public messages sent in the years from 2007 onwards had started to appear in timelines, sparking many users to check back in the fear that potentially embarrassing private messages had become widely viewable. Facebook's share price fell 9.1% to $20.79 at the close in New York on the back of the fears, the biggest drop since 27 July. The stock has slumped 45% since its May initial public offering, and hasn't traded above its $38 IPO price since the day after the share sale.

It is disputed whether people are right to fear that Facebook's privacy controls have failed. That's not the point.

The point is that the fear – whether or not it's well-founded – knocked 9.1% off Facebook's share price.

What price privacy? $2.08

With thanks to SheffieldForum.co.uk –

"For everything Sheffield"

You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it.

So said Scott McNealy, CEO of Sun Microsystems, and many people say they agree with him. Let's call those people "Roundheads".

Cavaliers believe that privacy is an essential ingredient in the recipe for human beings. Miss it out, and you cook up something different, not a human being.

Our location can be tracked by the mobile phone companies. Google records every website we visit. Our entire life history is on Facebook. Our every instantaneous emotional reaction is documented on Twitter. GCHQ want to store all our email headers. David Cameron wants to give all our medical records to researchers. The Department for Business Innovation and Skills wants us to maintain Personal Data Stores with so-called "trusted third parties" we've never met. DWP and the Cabinet Office want the same, so that we can all transact with the government on-line. The G-Cloud Puritans want to store all this data in the cloud with Amazon and others on servers that could be anywhere in the world ...

"There's something wrong with all this", say the Cavaliers. "No there isn't", say the Roundheads, "get over it". And so the argument continues, forever unresolved.

Public spending 3

Each week, writing in the Guardian, Polly Toynbee gives a master class in public finance.

From today's lesson:

What would fairer tax look like? Council tax is the most regressive – the more expensive the property, the lower the proportion of tax paid – so correct that first, and then turn to a mansion tax. Britain's wealth taxes have atrophied. Inheritance tax doesn't work, capital gains entirely forgiven at death. As for the 50p top tax rate, because the rich had a year's notice they took their income in the year before it was introduced. Then, as soon as the cut to 45% was announced a year ahead, they delayed their income until it came in. This two-year tax planning, says the IFS, cost the exchequer £18bn. That's the same as the £18bn cut from the poorest. It shows just what colossal discretionary sums float among the few at the top: a one-off levy could solve half the national debt while barely touching their lifestyles.

The national debt stood at £1,250.3 billion on 31 December 2011. Half of that is about £625 billion. £625 billion, £18 billion, what's the difference, they're all the same, numbers.

Can anyone think what a "one-off levy" of £625,000,000,000 that barely touched the lifestyles of the rich would look like?

Public spending 3

Each week, writing in the Guardian, Polly Toynbee gives a master class in public finance.

From today's lesson:

What would fairer tax look like? Council tax is the most regressive – the more expensive the property, the lower the proportion of tax paid – so correct that first, and then turn to a mansion tax. Britain's wealth taxes have atrophied. Inheritance tax doesn't work, capital gains entirely forgiven at death. As for the 50p top tax rate, because the rich had a year's notice they took their income in the year before it was introduced. Then, as soon as the cut to 45% was announced a year ahead, they delayed their income until it came in. This two-year tax planning, says the IFS, cost the exchequer £18bn. That's the same as the £18bn cut from the poorest. It shows just what colossal discretionary sums float among the few at the top: a one-off levy could solve half the national debt while barely touching their lifestyles.

The national debt stood at £1,250.3 billion on 31 December 2011. Half of that is about £625 billion. £625 billion, £18 billion, what's the difference, they're all the same, numbers.