At 00:27 on 8 January 2013 DMossEsq published English Defence – another success story for the UK Border Force, an article about border control failures in the UK and the US.
The story concerns the leader of the English Defence League – a man known variously as Stephen Yaxley Lennon, Tommy Robinson and Paul Harris – and his trip from the UK to the US and back. There are many border control failures possible and many of them were exhibited in Lennon/Robinson/Harris's trip*. With all of those actual failures to choose from, DMossEsq managed nevertheless to focus on one failure of the UK Border Force that wasn't exhibited.
This mistake has been usefully pointed out by an anonymous commenter.
The newspaper reports of Mr Lennon/Robinson/Harris's trip state that: "He used a self check-in kiosk to board the Virgin Atlantic flight at Heathrow, and was allowed through when the document was checked in the bag drop area". DMossEsq confused "self check-in kiosks" with "smart gates" and concluded that this was an example of the unreliability of the face recognition biometrics used by smart gates. Face recognition biometrics are laughably unreliable but as Mr Lennon/Robinson/Harris hadn't used a smart gate that's irrelevant in this case and DMossEsq wishes to apologise for misleading readers.
How did DMossEsq confuse "self check-in kiosks" with "smart gates"? Frustration. Undischarged anger. Leading to occasional blind spots.
What's frustrating? The Home Office spend a fortune on security systems that depend for their success on biometrics being reliable. Then when you take them to court to make them publish the evidence, they refuse to do so and add that the trials they carried out were so specific that the results wouldn't tell the public anything anyway. In other words, the Home Office have no justification for spending our money on biometrics.
This misfeasance has been going on under every Home Secretary since David Blunkett and under two Permanent Secretaries – Sir David Normington and Dame Helen Ghosh. Now we have a new Permanent Secretary at the Home Office, Mark Sedwill. Let's see if he's any better. Any less frustrating.
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* Border control failures:-
1. Leaving the UK. Mr Lennon/Robinson/Harris managed to leave the UK travelling on someone else's passport, Mr Andrew McMaster's. A UK Border Force officer must have checked at passport control and decided that the photograph in the passport looked enough like Mr Lennon/Robinson/Harris. An understandable mistake. But a mistake nevertheless.
2. Entering the US. Mr Lennon/Robinson/Harris's flat print fingerprints didn't match Mr McMaster's which must presumably have been already on file. He failed his primary inspection and was referred for secondary inspection. He didn't turn up. Instead, he managed to get out of the airport. Flat print fingerprinting registers false non-matches about 20 percent of the time, so it's perfectly normal for people to fail primary inspection, it's not a sign of the technology working properly, rather the opposite. The non-match won't have rung any alarm bells but, nevertheless, he shouldn't have been able to avoid secondary inspection and leave the premises.
3. Leaving the US. Mr Lennon/Robinson/Harris, having entered the US as Andrew McMaster, left using his own passport as Paul Harris. (a) Border control for non-US citizens is meant to match entry and exit details. There would have been no entry details for Paul Harris. As far as the system was concerned, Paul Harris was leaving the US without ever having come in. It looks like a mistake to miss that. (b) His ticket was presumably in the name of Andrew McMaster. Why was the man whose passport was in the name of Paul Harris allowed to leave the US on a ticket in the name of Andrew McMaster?
4. Entering the UK. Why was the man whose passport was in the name of Paul Harris allowed to enter the UK on a ticket in the name of Andrew McMaster?
How could the mismatch between the names on the airline ticket and the passport have been discovered? The expensive answer is "eBorders".
As a taxpayer, you have spent a fortune on ePassports and smart gates. They don't work. In the name of border security, you have also spent a fortune on a system called eBorders, which logs all the details of your flights and is meant to provide the raw intelligence to keep the border safe. Clearly eBorders doesn't work either. Otherwise the mismatch between passport and ticket would have been spotted. You have also spent a fortune making hundreds of Border Force staff redundant, to be replaced by computer systems, and then re-hiring them when the Home Office found the computer systems don't work.
You've spent the money. The systems don't work. The staff don't do anything with the data that's collected. But don't worry. The border is secure.
Thursday 10 January 2013
English Defence – another success story for the UK Border Force 2
At 00:27 on 8 January 2013 DMossEsq published English Defence – another success story for the UK Border Force, an article about border control failures in the UK and the US.
The story concerns the leader of the English Defence League – a man known variously as Stephen Yaxley Lennon, Tommy Robinson and Paul Harris – and his trip from the UK to the US and back. There are many border control failures possible and many of them were exhibited in Lennon/Robinson/Harris's trip*. With all of those actual failures to choose from, DMossEsq managed nevertheless to focus on one failure of the UK Border Force that wasn't exhibited.
The story concerns the leader of the English Defence League – a man known variously as Stephen Yaxley Lennon, Tommy Robinson and Paul Harris – and his trip from the UK to the US and back. There are many border control failures possible and many of them were exhibited in Lennon/Robinson/Harris's trip*. With all of those actual failures to choose from, DMossEsq managed nevertheless to focus on one failure of the UK Border Force that wasn't exhibited.
Tuesday 8 January 2013
Facial recognition blarney
TheJournal.ie is an Irish news website that invites its users to shape the news agenda. Read, share and shape the day’s stories as they happen, from Ireland, the world and the web. On 29 December 2012 TheJournal.ie carried the following article:
Good luck Ireland, but don't rely on Public Services Cards to "clamp down on social welfare fraud".
Let's do a bit of sharing and shaping, as requested, with one of yesterday's stories from around the world – yet another revelation that facial recognition doesn't work, when it was reported that the leader of the English Defence League sailed through the Heathrow Airport security checks using another man's passport.
Facial recognition on the way for social welfare claimants
The rollout of a new Public Services Card will mean new technology to ensure claimants are who they claim to be.
SOCIAL WELFARE CLAIMANTS will be faced – literally – with cameras to determine their identity when a new generation of identity cards is rolled out early next year.
The new Public Services Card, which has already being phased in and will be introduced nationwide in 2013 – will require welfare recipients to stand in front of a camera so that their facial image can be recorded and printed onto their new card.
Once the rollout has been completed, visitors to Social Welfare offices will have another picture taken and referenced against the original to vouch for their identity.
The moves are the Department of Social Protection’s latest attempts to clamp down on social welfare fraud.
Good luck Ireland, but don't rely on Public Services Cards to "clamp down on social welfare fraud".
Facial recognition blarney
TheJournal.ie is an Irish news website that invites its users to shape the news agenda. Read, share and shape the day’s stories as they happen, from Ireland, the world and the web. On 29 December 2012 TheJournal.ie carried the following article:
Good luck Ireland, but don't rely on Public Services Cards to "clamp down on social welfare fraud".
Let's do a bit of sharing and shaping, as requested, with one of yesterday's stories from around the world – yet another revelation that facial recognition doesn't work, when it was reported that the leader of the English Defence League sailed through the Heathrow Airport security checks using another man's passport.
Facial recognition on the way for social welfare claimants
The rollout of a new Public Services Card will mean new technology to ensure claimants are who they claim to be.
SOCIAL WELFARE CLAIMANTS will be faced – literally – with cameras to determine their identity when a new generation of identity cards is rolled out early next year.
The new Public Services Card, which has already being phased in and will be introduced nationwide in 2013 – will require welfare recipients to stand in front of a camera so that their facial image can be recorded and printed onto their new card.
Once the rollout has been completed, visitors to Social Welfare offices will have another picture taken and referenced against the original to vouch for their identity.
The moves are the Department of Social Protection’s latest attempts to clamp down on social welfare fraud.
Good luck Ireland, but don't rely on Public Services Cards to "clamp down on social welfare fraud".
English Defence – another success story for the UK Border Force
The leader of the English Defence League is a man called Stephen Yaxley Lennon. Or Tommy Robinson. Or Paul Harris.
Whatever his name is, he has just been sent down for ten months for trying to get into the US with a passport he borrowed from Andrew McMaster. He succeeded in leaving the UK on the McMaster passport. But they rumbled him at the US border.
The Press Association story about Mr Lennon/Robinson/Harris's trip to New York is carried by just about every media outlet in the English-speaking world. See for example the Daily Mail's Leader of far-right English Defence League jailed for 10 months for using someone else's passport to get into the U.S. And just about everyone sees in it the story they want to see.
Fraser Nelson, the esteemed editor of the Spectator, sees it as evidence that flat print fingerprinting works – that's the technology used by the Americans to discover that it was questionable whether this traveller really was Andrew McMaster:
There are good reasons to believe that Mr Nelson draws the wrong conclusion about biometrics.
There are other questions.
How did Mr Lennon/Robinson/Harris manage to leave JFK and spend the night in New York? How did he subsequently manage to fly out of the US and back to the UK? He flew in as McMaster and out as Harris. There was no record of Harris having entered the US. How did the US authorities manage to let a man who had not come into the country leave it? I-94 exit controls are supposed to match entry controls ...
Let's leave all those complicated issues to resolve themselves as and when more detail is released. Let's look at something simple.
Mr Lennon/Robinson/Harris managed to leave the UK on a false passport:
Whatever his name is, he has just been sent down for ten months for trying to get into the US with a passport he borrowed from Andrew McMaster. He succeeded in leaving the UK on the McMaster passport. But they rumbled him at the US border.
The Press Association story about Mr Lennon/Robinson/Harris's trip to New York is carried by just about every media outlet in the English-speaking world. See for example the Daily Mail's Leader of far-right English Defence League jailed for 10 months for using someone else's passport to get into the U.S. And just about everyone sees in it the story they want to see.
Fraser Nelson, the esteemed editor of the Spectator, sees it as evidence that flat print fingerprinting works – that's the technology used by the Americans to discover that it was questionable whether this traveller really was Andrew McMaster:
 | The head of the English Defence League has learnt the hard way that those fingerprint scanners at JFK actually work. gu.com/p/3cqgq/tw |
There are good reasons to believe that Mr Nelson draws the wrong conclusion about biometrics.
There are other questions.
How did Mr Lennon/Robinson/Harris manage to leave JFK and spend the night in New York? How did he subsequently manage to fly out of the US and back to the UK? He flew in as McMaster and out as Harris. There was no record of Harris having entered the US. How did the US authorities manage to let a man who had not come into the country leave it? I-94 exit controls are supposed to match entry controls ...
Let's leave all those complicated issues to resolve themselves as and when more detail is released. Let's look at something simple.
Mr Lennon/Robinson/Harris managed to leave the UK on a false passport:
Those "self check-in kiosks" or "eGates" or "smart gates" or whatever you want to call them have cost the British taxpayer a fortune. And they don't work. Will the UK Border Force please stop wasting our money on eGates? And will they please stop pretending that eGates provide any sort of border security?
He used a self check-in kiosk to board the Virgin Atlantic flight at Heathrow, and was allowed through when the document was checked in the bag drop area.
English Defence – another success story for the UK Border Force
The leader of the English Defence League is a man called Stephen Yaxley Lennon. Or Tommy Robinson. Or Paul Harris.
Whatever his name is, he has just been sent down for ten months for trying to get into the US with a passport he borrowed from Andrew McMaster. He succeeded in leaving the UK on the McMaster passport. But they rumbled him at the US border.
The Press Association story about Mr Lennon/Robinson/Harris's trip to New York is carried by just about every media outlet in the English-speaking world. See for example the Daily Mail's Leader of far-right English Defence League jailed for 10 months for using someone else's passport to get into the U.S. And just about everyone sees in it the story they want to see.
Fraser Nelson, the esteemed editor of the Spectator, sees it as evidence that flat print fingerprinting works – that's the technology used by the Americans to discover that it was questionable whether this traveller really was Andrew McMaster:
There are good reasons to believe that Mr Nelson draws the wrong conclusion about biometrics.
There are other questions.
How did Mr Lennon/Robinson/Harris manage to leave JFK and spend the night in New York? How did he subsequently manage to fly out of the US and back to the UK? He flew in as McMaster and out as Harris. There was no record of Harris having entered the US. How did the US authorities manage to let a man who had not come into the country leave it? I-94 exit controls are supposed to match entry controls ...
Let's leave all those complicated issues to resolve themselves as and when more detail is released. Let's look at something simple.
Whatever his name is, he has just been sent down for ten months for trying to get into the US with a passport he borrowed from Andrew McMaster. He succeeded in leaving the UK on the McMaster passport. But they rumbled him at the US border.
The Press Association story about Mr Lennon/Robinson/Harris's trip to New York is carried by just about every media outlet in the English-speaking world. See for example the Daily Mail's Leader of far-right English Defence League jailed for 10 months for using someone else's passport to get into the U.S. And just about everyone sees in it the story they want to see.
Fraser Nelson, the esteemed editor of the Spectator, sees it as evidence that flat print fingerprinting works – that's the technology used by the Americans to discover that it was questionable whether this traveller really was Andrew McMaster:
|
| The head of the English Defence League has learnt the hard way that those fingerprint scanners at JFK actually work. gu.com/p/3cqgq/tw |
There are good reasons to believe that Mr Nelson draws the wrong conclusion about biometrics.
There are other questions.
How did Mr Lennon/Robinson/Harris manage to leave JFK and spend the night in New York? How did he subsequently manage to fly out of the US and back to the UK? He flew in as McMaster and out as Harris. There was no record of Harris having entered the US. How did the US authorities manage to let a man who had not come into the country leave it? I-94 exit controls are supposed to match entry controls ...
Let's leave all those complicated issues to resolve themselves as and when more detail is released. Let's look at something simple.
Monday 7 January 2013
Public service in the UK 2013-style – ex-Guardian man Mike Bracken
Under the guidance of ex-Guardian man Mike Bracken, the Government Digital Service (GDS) have turned parts of Martha Lane Fox's digital-by-default revolutionary manifesto into reality. At least what passes for reality in the Cabinet Office.
Is her manifesto really revolutionary?
It certainly looks like it when she says:
Yes.
In his review of his first 18 months in the job, the Executive Director of Digital says:
Is her manifesto really revolutionary?
It certainly looks like it when she says:
It looks as though the delivery tail should wag the policy dog. But has it worked out that way?
Directgov [=GDS] should own the citizen experience of digital public services and be tasked with driving a 'service culture' across government which could, for example, challenge any policy and practice that undermines good service design ... It seems to me that the time is now to use the Internet to shift the lead in the design of services from the policy and legal teams to the end users ... Directgov SWAT teams ... should be given a remit to support and challenge departments and agencies ... We must give these SWAT teams the necessary support to challenge any policy and legal barriers which stop services being designed around user needs.
Yes.
In his review of his first 18 months in the job, the Executive Director of Digital says:
Looking at the highlights of what we have delivered, it is notable that delivery of services, whether they be information or transactional, has come before final strategy work is completed. Or put more simply, in an analogue world policy dictates to delivery, but in a digital world delivery informs policy. This is what agile means for Government and its services, and if delivered in this way, the ramifications are profound.
Public service in the UK 2013-style – ex-Guardian man Mike Bracken
Public service in the UK 2013-style – Tim O'Reilly
Under the guidance of ex-Guardian man Mike Bracken, the Government Digital Service (GDS) have turned parts of Martha Lane Fox's digital-by-default revolutionary manifesto into reality. At least what passes for reality in the Cabinet Office.
Are they getting it right?
How would they know?
These questions have been exercising the ex-Guardian man and he has sought the blessing of the prophet Tim O'Reilly by way of an answer, or sign. Quite what O'Reilly knows about government or about the UK is not clear, nor is there any explanation how he got into the GDS building, but there is footage of him officiating at the Eucharist where GDS's faith in the web was renewed.
Are we right to use such religiose language?
Undoubtedly.
In his review of his first 18 months in the job, under a photograph of the prophet looking as though he may have eaten a bad locust while he was still in the desert, the Executive Director of Digital includes this:
Are they getting it right?
How would they know?
These questions have been exercising the ex-Guardian man and he has sought the blessing of the prophet Tim O'Reilly by way of an answer, or sign. Quite what O'Reilly knows about government or about the UK is not clear, nor is there any explanation how he got into the GDS building, but there is footage of him officiating at the Eucharist where GDS's faith in the web was renewed.
Are we right to use such religiose language?
Undoubtedly.
In his review of his first 18 months in the job, under a photograph of the prophet looking as though he may have eaten a bad locust while he was still in the desert, the Executive Director of Digital includes this:
Tim O’Reilly said of the Government Digital Strategy: “This is the new bible for anyone working in open government”