Wednesday 22 May 2013

IDAP: the stories our MPs are told

Here in the UK there is an organisation called the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology (POST):
POST is Parliament's in-house source of independent, balanced and accessible analysis of public policy issues related to science and technology.
On 25 April 2013 POST published Managing Online Identity to brief MPs and peers about Whitehall's plans for the UK's Identity Assurance Programme (IDAP).

In some respects the briefing note is admirable – "A Home Office report estimated that cybercrime costs the UK economy £27bn a year", it says at one point, before adding "this figure received widespread scepticism".

It would have benefited, though, from a bit more scepticism like that.

For example, the briefing note makes two references to Whitehall's digital-by-default plans:
UK Government’s Identity Assurance Programme
Many public services are managed and delivered via online interfaces. This is part of the new ‘Digital by Default’ model for government services ...

Benefits
Managing who can access personal data is one of the major benefits of personal control over online data and identity. Online accounts may be used by a person or company to identify who may see data, what they may see and what they may use it for. This control supports a shift in many companies and government offices to a ‘digital by default’ model for connecting with customers ...
It might be fairer to MPs to warn them that these plans have been roasted by four professors. Absent that, our MPs might be gulled into thinking that digital-by-default will work or even that it's already working.

An entirely dispassionate briefing note on IDAP might also have recorded the fact that the Government Digital Service (GDS) promised as late as January 2013 that IDAP would be "fully operational" for 21 million claimants on DWP's services by March 2013.

In the event, there is no sign of IDAP and the Department for Work and Pensions have had to make alternative arrangements involving old-fashioned face to face meetings, telephone calls and the post.

"Key features of the identity programme", the briefing note tells us, "are that it must":
  • be designed around the user
  • be both private and secure
  • establish a common level of security and trust between users, identity providers and Government.
It's unlikely, now that no-one any longer bats an eyelid at the phrase "hate crime", the playful invention of a novelist, but there may still be some MPs who believe the phrase "identity providers" should appear in inverted commas.

What is an "identity provider"? The UK has eight of them, "PayPal, Post Office, Cassidian, Digidentity, Experian, Ingeus, Mydex and Verizon", several of them no MP will have heard of, and there is no special reason why anyone would be prudent to trust them with all of his or her personal data, which is the Whitehall proposal.

It is at least questionable how you can enhance your privacy by storing all your personal data with an "identity provider". That step rather looks like the very opposite.

And as to security, is there anyone left in Westminster or elsewhere who takes promises of on-line security seriously?

The newspapers have stories every day of security breaches and on 2 May 2013 Bloomberg had a long report on how the designs for fighter jets have been stolen by hackers from Lockheed Martin and how hackers spent three years camped on QinetiQ's websites, stealing secret designs and using them as a base from which to try to hack NASA.

What is there today to stop the same happening to the UK's eight "identity providers"? POST provides no answer.

IDAP: the stories our MPs are told

Here in the UK there is an organisation called the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology (POST):
POST is Parliament's in-house source of independent, balanced and accessible analysis of public policy issues related to science and technology.
On 25 April 2013 POST published Managing Online Identity to brief MPs and peers about Whitehall's plans for the UK's Identity Assurance Programme (IDAP).

In some respects the briefing note is admirable – "A Home Office report estimated that cybercrime costs the UK economy £27bn a year", it says at one point, before adding "this figure received widespread scepticism".

It would have benefited, though, from a bit more scepticism like that.

Is CloudStore entirely legal?

Hosting GOV.UK in the cloud to cost GDS record-breaking £600,000

Government Digital Service signed a deal with Skyscape last month

By Derek du Preez | Computerworld UK | Published 10:29, 10 October 12

(GDS) infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) deal with Skyscape to host single domain website GOV.UK, which was procured through the G-Cloud, is worth an estimated £600,000.
There are rules for us members of the EU. Procurement rules. Procurement rules we have to abide by:
EC Procurement Thresholds
The European public contracts directive (2004/18/EC) applies to public authorities including, amongst others, government departments, local authorities and NHS Authorities and Trusts. The European utilities contracts directive (2004/17/EC) applies to certain utility companies operating in the Energy, Water, and Transport sectors.
Click on the link and you'll see that above certain threshold values, contracts can't be awarded without competition. They have to be announced – an onerous business – in OJEU, the Official Journal of the European Union, and all suppliers have to be able to bid. Please see also ERDF National Procurement Requirements – (ERDF-GN-1-004), a document issued jointly by the European Union and the Department for Communities and Local Government (p.2):
Robust and transparent procurement is required to ensure that Grant Recipients:
  • Consider value for money (VFM)
  • Maximise the efficient use of public money and;
  • Maintain competitiveness and fairness across the EU.
The above considerations should be applied on all occasions, regardless of whether or not the value of the procurement is above or below the OJEU thresholds and regardless of whether or not the Grant Recipient is a contracting authority subject to public procurement rules.
There are various thresholds:

PUBLIC CONTRACTS REGULATIONS 2006 - FROM 1 JANUARY 2012

SUPPLIESSERVICESWORKS
Entities listed in Schedule 1£113,057
(€130,000)
£113,057
(€130,000)
£4,348,350
(€5,000,000)
Other public sector contracting authorities£173,934
(€200,000)
£173,934
(€200,000)
£4,348,350
(€5,000,000)
Indicative Notices£652,253
(€750,000)
£652,253
(€750,000)
£4,348,350
(€5,000,000)
Small lots£69,574
(€80,000)
£69,574
(€80,000)
£869,670
(€1,000,000)
Is GDS's £600,000 contract with Skyscape above the relevant threshold? If so, is the award of the contract through CloudStore illegal? Should the invitation to tender have been published in OJEU?

The UK's G-Cloud team are currently having a bit of a purple patch, congratulating themselves on government departments and local authorities now beginning to use CloudStore for millions of pounds-worth of procurements:
G-Cloud celebrates three major milestones

Posted on May 4, 2013 by denisemcdonagh

A little over a year since we launched the CloudStore, we are starting to see sales gain a real head of steam, with nearly 1,000 invoiced purchases, sales of over £18.2m to the end of March, and many more going through. At the Home Office alone,  where I am IT director, we are in the middle of putting through more than £6m of orders, and I’m expecting to see those numbers keep on rising, both in my department and across government. For getting us this far, I’d like to say a huge thanks to my team and to all you G-Cloud supporters out there, not least our growing number of suppliers.
Are all these contracts legal or are some of them side-stepping the European public contracts directive (2004/18/EC)?

Is CloudStore entirely legal?

Hosting GOV.UK in the cloud to cost GDS record-breaking £600,000

Government Digital Service signed a deal with Skyscape last month

By Derek du Preez | Computerworld UK | Published 10:29, 10 October 12

(GDS) infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) deal with Skyscape to host single domain website GOV.UK, which was procured through the G-Cloud, is worth an estimated £600,000.
There are rules for us members of the EU. Procurement rules. Procurement rules we have to abide by:
EC Procurement Thresholds
The European public contracts directive (2004/18/EC) applies to public authorities including, amongst others, government departments, local authorities and NHS Authorities and Trusts. The European utilities contracts directive (2004/17/EC) applies to certain utility companies operating in the Energy, Water, and Transport sectors.

Biometrics: a response from the Center for Global Development

Biometrics: will the Center for Global Development reconsider? was published on this blog 10 days ago on 12 May 2013.

A response from the Center for Global Development has now kindly been sent.

On the principle of equal prominence, their response is reproduced here:
Alan Gelb said...

We agree with a number of points raised by David Moss. One is the importance of releasing field performance data; other programs should be held to this standard. We recognize that biometrics is not a panacea. Our previous working paper that reviewed some 160 cases noted several problematic examples, particularly in the area of elections. It is far too early to assess the UID program record in delivering more effective and inclusive services. Where we differ from Moss is that we see the data that it has released on inclusion and accuracy as a very significant benchmark for biometric systems in developing countries, and a major advance on the use of laboratory data. These appear to be the most extensive field data released so far.

The UID data are of interest for other countries; the hypothetical example of Ughana illustrates what such a system should be able to achieve for a “typical” country with about 30 million people. It is easy to scale the results for country size. We estimated that for a country as large as India there would be somewhat over 3 million false positives during enrolment, a large number for manual follow-up but probably doable. For a small country like Haiti the number would only be around 300.

On multiple identities, no system will be able to guarantee 100 percent accuracy. Certainly not the systems in place in the rich countries where identity theft is hardly unknown! The question is not “whether it works or not” but the precision of one system versus another and relative cost-effectiveness. For some applications, such as access to a health insurance program, one might accept a modest level of duplicate or false identities. For others, such as access to a nuclear facility, we want to minimize them – just as we would want very high standards for aeroplane safety, to take the example cited by Moss. These might involve different biometrics and also passwords or other identifiers; the most demanding applications can apply whatever other additional checks they choose outside the scope of national identification. For a national ID system the reported rate of 0.035 percent for UID seems low enough to discourage most deliberate efforts to acquire multiple identities.

Any identification system will have to cope with people who are unable to enroll using biometrics and with identification and authentication errors. The UID data offer useful pointers to likely numbers.

UID does not, therefore, provide answers to every question -- it is far too early for that and we do not claim that it does. It remains to be seen how the program is or is not picked up by various applications and how it negotiates the political winds that arise with any system of identification. But we hold to our conclusion that the data released provides a very significant benchmark on the capabilities of biometric systems in developing country conditions and one that should be studied carefully by other countries.

To correct the record, we do not assert that the number of bilateral comparisons is the square of the population, n. It is 0.5*n*(n-1) which rises (as we note) with the square of n. As n becomes large, it approaches 0.5*n*n; since no identification system will cover 100% of population, we rounded n off to 1 billion for India. If we accept the field estimate of 0.057% false positive rate against a data base of 84 million, the rate for a 1:1 comparison would have to be very small, in the range of 7 in one trillion. The implied precision can only be possible with the combined use of multiple biometrics, which is another of the lessons from the UID exercise.

Alan Gelb,
Senior Fellow,
Center for Global Development

21 May 2013 22:17

Biometrics: a response from the Center for Global Development

Biometrics: will the Center for Global Development reconsider? was published on this blog 10 days ago on 12 May 2013.

A response from the Center for Global Development has now kindly been sent.

On the principle of equal prominence, their response is reproduced here:
Alan Gelb said...

We agree with a number of points raised by David Moss. One is the importance of releasing field performance data; other programs should be held to this standard. We recognize that biometrics is not a panacea. Our previous working paper that reviewed some 160 cases noted several problematic examples, particularly in the area of elections. It is far too early to assess the UID program record in delivering more effective and inclusive services. Where we differ from Moss is that we see the data that it has released on inclusion and accuracy as a very significant benchmark for biometric systems in developing countries, and a major advance on the use of laboratory data. These appear to be the most extensive field data released so far.

The UID data are of interest for other countries; the hypothetical example of Ughana illustrates what such a system should be able to achieve for a “typical” country with about 30 million people. It is easy to scale the results for country size. We estimated that for a country as large as India there would be somewhat over 3 million false positives during enrolment, a large number for manual follow-up but probably doable. For a small country like Haiti the number would only be around 300.

On multiple identities, no system will be able to guarantee 100 percent accuracy. Certainly not the systems in place in the rich countries where identity theft is hardly unknown! The question is not “whether it works or not” but the precision of one system versus another and relative cost-effectiveness. For some applications, such as access to a health insurance program, one might accept a modest level of duplicate or false identities. For others, such as access to a nuclear facility, we want to minimize them – just as we would want very high standards for aeroplane safety, to take the example cited by Moss. These might involve different biometrics and also passwords or other identifiers; the most demanding applications can apply whatever other additional checks they choose outside the scope of national identification. For a national ID system the reported rate of 0.035 percent for UID seems low enough to discourage most deliberate efforts to acquire multiple identities.

Any identification system will have to cope with people who are unable to enroll using biometrics and with identification and authentication errors. The UID data offer useful pointers to likely numbers.

UID does not, therefore, provide answers to every question -- it is far too early for that and we do not claim that it does. It remains to be seen how the program is or is not picked up by various applications and how it negotiates the political winds that arise with any system of identification. But we hold to our conclusion that the data released provides a very significant benchmark on the capabilities of biometric systems in developing country conditions and one that should be studied carefully by other countries.

To correct the record, we do not assert that the number of bilateral comparisons is the square of the population, n. It is 0.5*n*(n-1) which rises (as we note) with the square of n. As n becomes large, it approaches 0.5*n*n; since no identification system will cover 100% of population, we rounded n off to 1 billion for India. If we accept the field estimate of 0.057% false positive rate against a data base of 84 million, the rate for a 1:1 comparison would have to be very small, in the range of 7 in one trillion. The implied precision can only be possible with the combined use of multiple biometrics, which is another of the lessons from the UID exercise.

Alan Gelb,
Senior Fellow,
Center for Global Development

21 May 2013 22:17

Monday 20 May 2013

Shakespeare on duty

Stephan Shakespeare, Constitutional expert, writing in An Independent Review of Public Sector Information (p.5):
Consider the role of government: it exists to decide the rules by which people can act, and to administer them: how much, by what method, and from whom to take resources; and how to re-allocate them.
Bit more to it than that, surely, but let's see where this bleak definition takes him.

Shakespeare wants the government to adopt a strategy for public sector information (PSI):
The strategy should explicitly embrace the idea that all PSI is derived from and paid for by the citizen and should therefore be considered as being owned by the citizen. It is the therefore the duty of government to make PSI as open as possible to create the maximum value to the nation. (p.11)
We already know that Shakespeare doesn't believe it when he says that PSI is owned by "the citizen". The citizen's property is to be expropriated and given to "businesses, especially SMEs". The citizen doesn't reap the benefit of their intellectual property. Businesses do, especially SMEs.

More or less reluctantly, the idea is forced on him, it's the government's "duty", no less. It's the government's duty to collect PSI and give it to businesses. And it's the duty of citizens to provide this data (p.14):
We should have a clear pragmatic policy on privacy and confidentiality that increases protections for citizens while also increasing the availability of data to external users. We can do this by using the developing ‘sandbox’ technologies, or ‘safe havens’ ... that allow work on data without allowing it to be taken from a secure area.
"Data should never be (and currently is never) released with personal identifiers", but you never know with Shakespeare, there might be another duty along any minute.

A duty which requires, for example, the identity to be revealed of all women who have had more than one abortion. For insurance purposes, perhaps, increased risk of cancer – one way and another, for the greater good of society.

There are all sorts of "protections" available, as Shakespeare says, like anonymisation and pseudonymisation and encryption but, with the best will in the world, they don't always work, you can't trust them. That shouldn't stop Shakespeare's plan to increase "the availability of [personal] data to external users", he says.

"A National Data Strategy for publishing PSI should include a twin-track policy for data release, which recognises that the perfect should not be the enemy of the good", we see on p.11, followed by "public sector bodies should commit to publishing all their datasets (in anonymised form) as quickly as possible without using quality concerns as an obstacle" on p.12. So when it comes to publishing your medical data, and when all the "protections" have unfortunately failed, just remember (p.15):
We currently have an unrealistic degree of expectation of any data controller to perfectly protect all our data - an attitude that inhibits innovation. Following 'best practice' guidelines should be enough, so long as we are willing to prosecute those who misuse personal data. otherwise we will miss out on the enormous benefits of PSI. [What enormous benefits of PSI? He never tells us.]
Fat lot of use it is to you if the miscreant is prosecuted after the event. It's too late by then. Your privacy has been irreversibly ruptured. Too bad. You had an "unrealistic degree of expectation". That's your problem. The National Data Strategy must proceed.

Suppose the security breach is achieved by someone abroad. Someone beyond the jurisdiction of English law. Then the miscreant can't even be prosecuted. Still the National Data Strategy must proceed. Prosecution is as irrelevant to Shakespeare's purposes as his claim that all PSI belongs to citizens.

He's not entirely ruthless, old Shakespeare. He does grant that ...
We should encourage continuing vigorous debate to achieve the right balance between the benefits and risks of open data (including whether citizens might in certain cases be enabled to opt out of open data).
... but only in brackets and only for some citizens (unspecified) in some cases (unspecified) where they may be able to opt out but, by default, everyone is opted in, it's our duty and any socially irresponsible person trying to opt out will be accused of standing in the way of Shakespeare and finding the cure for cancer. (Shouldn't that be "cures" plural and "cancers" plural? Ed)

That's personal data taken care of. No outstanding problems there. What about university research data? Back to p.9, where Shakespeare says that data scientists must ...
... recognise in all we do that PSI, and the raw data that creates it, was derived from citizens, by their own authority, was paid for by them, and is therefore owned by them ... This should be obvious, but the fact that it needs to be constantly reaffirmed is illustrated by the way that even today, access to academic research that has been paid for by the public is deliberately denied to the public, and to many researchers ... aided by university lethargy ... thereby obstructing scientific progress.
We can't have that. We can't have scientific progress being obstructed.

But it's going to be tricky.

Nigel Shadbolt is a professor at Southampton University. He has started several companies to put his research findings to work including one called Garlik, which he sold to Experian. He is paid a salary by citizens, the university is funded by citizens, you'd think that would be enough but, no, he earns more money by writing and by acting as the consultant to a TV series.

"This should be obvious", the company sale proceeds, the royalties and the fees all properly belong to citizens. The tricky bit, when Shakespeare dutifully asks for our money back, is that as the chairman and co-founder of the Open Data Institute, Nigel Shadbolt is the leading character in Shakespeare's dramatis personae.

A few questions there for the National Data Strategy but let's move on. What about data that belongs to private sector companies, rather than mere individuals or state-funded universities? Shakespeare wants that data as well, to feed to his apps.

This is all to do with evidence-based policy (p.17):
Each government department and wider public sector body should review whether the PSI that they currently hold is being used to maximum effect in developing, evaluating and adapting policy. It should explain what data it used to support any new policy and above all what data will be collected (and published) for continuous measure of its effectiveness.
Government has a duty to act responsibly with public funds, in a businesslike and rational way, and openly. No-one would disagree. The government and the civil service don't always achieve these aims. Come to that, neither does Shakespeare. Never one to let the perfect drive out the good, he's devised his National Data Strategy/Policy and now, back to front, he wants someone to go out and find the evidence to support it (p.16):
Recommendation 7
We should look at new ways to gather evidence of the economic and social value of opening up PSI and government data ...
Never mind Shakespeare, back to private sector companies and their data (p.17):
Where there is a clear public interest in wide access to privately generated data, then there is a strong argument for transparency (for example in publishing all trials of new medicines) ...

A company working with government should be willing to share information about activity in public-private partnerships, as information about activity in public-private partnerships held by private companies is not currently subject to the Freedom of Information Act. This could be greatly enhanced without the need for legislation by creating a field in procurement forms asking for the company’s open data policy regarding the sought contract.
No "need for legislation"? Just a new "field in procurement forms"? Here, Shakespeare's musings come up against a tough and unrelenting reality. He'll find the opposition from private sector companies a lot harder than anything he evidently expects from individuals and universities.

Take an example.

The UK government has a number of policies which depend for their success on mass consumer biometrics being reliable. The government's own trials proved that they're not reliable but they proceed anyway, despite the evidence and despite the admonitions of the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee. Hopelessly un-Shakespearean.

Among others, there is the government's Immigration and Asylum Biometric System (IABS). That was pursued on the basis of a successful trial of biometrics conducted on behalf of the government by IBM.

Could the public see the IBM trial report, please, asked Citizen Moss? No, said the Home Office, and the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) agreed, citing several exemptions to disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act.

Citizen Moss appealed against the ICO's Decision, it's all set out here, and two years later the Information Tribunal did its duty and upheld the Decision – the IBM trial report should not be published.

IBM said the report belonged to them and not to the Home Office and if it had to be disclosed then they might never be able to work for the Home Office again. The Home Office agreed that the report belonged to IBM even though the Home Office had provided the test data (five million pairs of fingerprints) and specified the acceptance tests and awarded IBM a £265 million contract. They also agreed that they wouldn't be able to do their job if IBM and other private contractors refused to help them. It is their duty, therefore, to withhold the report.

As a clincher, IBM and the Home Office said that the report doesn't prove that the biometrics chosen meet IABS requirements anyway.

That's the law, Citizen Moss was refused permission to appeal, it's not in Shakespeare's gift to change the law and IBM, or whoever, will not be fooled by Shakespeare's schoolboy ruse of "creating a field in procurement forms". They may simply point out that either he means it when he says that "businesses, especially SMEs" can enjoy the benefits of their intellectual property or he doesn't. Either way, they have duties to their shareholders and to the biometrics companies who participated in the trial.

According to the acknowledgements in Shakespeare's report (p.3), he polled, among others. Dixit Shah and Craig Summers of IBM UK. What did they tell him? Was he listening?

Shakespeare on duty

Stephan Shakespeare, Constitutional expert, writing in An Independent Review of Public Sector Information (p.5):
Consider the role of government: it exists to decide the rules by which people can act, and to administer them: how much, by what method, and from whom to take resources; and how to re-allocate them.
Bit more to it than that, surely, but let's see where this bleak definition takes him.

Sunday 19 May 2013

The traditional Shakespearean line

He gets off to a cracking start, Shakespeare. The cure for cancer. And happy children:
Is that exciting? It couldn't be more exciting: from data we will get the cure for cancer as well as better hospitals; schools that adapt to children’s needs making them happier and smarter; better policing and safer homes; and of course jobs.
That's Stephan Shakespeare, not the other one, and he's chatting about Phase 2 of the web revolution on p.5 of An Independent Review of Public Sector Information. "The size and coherence of our public sector", he says, "combined with government’s strong commitment to a visionary open data policy means that we have the opportunity to be world leaders in the enlightened use of data". "Strong"? "Visionary"? "Enlightened"? "World leaders"? Flattery?

Some of us remember the 1970s and the invention of the computerised management information system, MIS, which became a decision support system in the 1980s, DSS.

But that's just its age in the benighted computer world. The discovery that you need data to make decisions is a lot older than that – isn't there a bell ringing somewhere at the back of your ur-memory, recalling the first vizier telling an early Ptolemy that collecting a few facts might be a good idea, before risking life and limb running up a pyramid in the middle of nowhere? And the pharaoh's ageless response?

Is you-need-facts-to-make-a-decision the most frequently re-discovered nostrum in history? (No. "Ne'er cast a clout till May is out". Ed)

Any salesman hawking his wares with this tediously familiar and groan-inducing line had better have a breathtakingly convincing story to tell.

Does he? Stephan Shakespeare – what is his story?

Is he promising to find the cure for cancer? No. Is he promising that your children will be happy? No. What about apple pie – golden brown pastry every time? No.

His story is purely speculative. Government, he says on p.5, "has a strong institutional tendency to proceed by hunch, or prejudice, or by the easy option". That is an exact description of the way Shakespeare is proceeding.

"In our consultations", he says on p.11, consultations about public sector information (PSI) ...
... business has made clear that it is unwilling to invest in this field until there is more predictability in terms of supply of data. Therefore without greater clarity and commitment from government, we will fail to realise the growth opportunities from PSI.
Never mind government, we could do with a bit more clarity from Shakespeare:
  • What are these "growth opportunities" he keeps banging on about?
  • What is this "greater economic benefit" that we read about on p.14?
  • "To promote and support a more beneficial economic model" there should be a review, Shakespeare says, of how organisations like Companies House, the Land Registry, the Met Office and Ordnance Survey are "rewarded for their activities to stimulate innovation and growth" (also p.14). In what way is his "economic model" more "beneficial"? What "growth" will it "stimulate" and how?
  • "Following 'best practice' guidelines should be enough, so long as we are willing to prosecute those who misuse personal data. Otherwise we will miss out on the enormous benefits of PSI", he says on p.15 but what "enormous benefits" is he talking about?
  • "There is huge potential here for building social and economic value if we are willing to invest smartly" (p.16). That doesn't become true simply by repeating it. What is this "huge potential"? How much "social and economic value"?
Shakespeare is threatening the country with missing a great opportunity but he doesn't tell us what it is.

We've been here before. 293 years ago, to be precise, in 1720 when, according to the Department for Business Innovation and Skills (BIS):
A company was promoted “For carrying-on an undertaking of great advantage but no-one to know what it is”. After receiving £2,000 from subscribers the promoter emigrated.
And more recently, last month, April 2013, when Mr James McCormick was found guilty of selling novelty golf ball finders as bomb detection devices. They worked, he said, but he couldn't say how.

Shakespeare needs to tell us what the difference is between him and Mr McCormick and he needs to tell us what this "great advantage" is – "no-one to know what it is" is less than convincing.

Even less so when we read on p.15 that:
We cannot rely only on markets and government departments and wider public sector bodies to maximise the potential of this relatively new and fast-developing field in which we are positioned to be a world leader.
But these are precisely the parties he's told us we can rely on.

What's more, we already have thousands of researchers in the universities and in industry and in charitable foundations and in government doing precisely the job he is promoting. Does he think he's invented the idea of cancer research? What difference is he trying to make?

Apparently, not a lot (p.6):
This review does not call for any significant increase in spending on a national data strategy, nor any additional administrative complexity; rather, it calls for a broadening of objectives together with a sharpening of planning and controls.
How much "broader" can the "objectives" of the Office for National Statistics, for example, be? And what is a "sharpening of planning and controls" when it's at home?
We should look at new ways to gather evidence of the economic and social value of opening up PSI and government data ...
... he says on p.16. But surely his claim that "opening up PSI" will be of enormous "economic and social value" is based on evidence. Isn't it? He says not. Cart before the horse, he's had the idea and now he wants someone else to find the supporting evidence. No need to wait for the evidence, though, his hunch should become government policy immediately. A strange approach for a political pollster, which is what Shakespeare is.

(So strange that you have to wonder. Market research/political polling is normally very precise and very logical. All the results are strictly categorised and any inferences are made minutely carefully. Did Shakespeare write this absurd farrago of a report? Or was it Bacon?)
Currently we can measure the costs of producing and publishing data, but we have no model for evaluating the economic or social benefits 'downstream', and so we may be undervaluing these activities, leading to under-investment of resources. (also p.16)
What's happened to the "huge potential" he was so sure about, and the "enormous benefits of PSI" he was promising? They've just gone up in smoke. It was just a hunch all the time. Shakespeare doesn't even have a "model" for "evaluating" them.

You need facts, Shakespeare. Facts. To make a decision, you need facts. Everyone knows that. You haven't given us any. Cracking start. Poor follow-through. No cigar.

The traditional Shakespearean line

He gets off to a cracking start, Shakespeare. The cure for cancer. And happy children:
Is that exciting? It couldn't be more exciting: from data we will get the cure for cancer as well as better hospitals; schools that adapt to children’s needs making them happier and smarter; better policing and safer homes; and of course jobs.
That's Stephan Shakespeare, not the other one, and he's chatting about Phase 2 of the web revolution on p.5 of An Independent Review of Public Sector Information. "The size and coherence of our public sector", he says, "combined with government’s strong commitment to a visionary open data policy means that we have the opportunity to be world leaders in the enlightened use of data". "Strong"? "Visionary"? "Enlightened"? "World leaders"? Flattery?

Some of us remember the 1970s and the invention of the computerised management information system, MIS, which became a decision support system in the 1980s, DSS.

But that's just its age in the benighted computer world. The discovery that you need data to make decisions is a lot older than that – isn't there a bell ringing somewhere at the back of your ur-memory, recalling the first vizier telling an early Ptolemy that collecting a few facts might be a good idea, before risking life and limb running up a pyramid in the middle of nowhere? And the pharaoh's ageless response?

Is you-need-facts-to-make-a-decision the most frequently re-discovered nostrum in history? (No. "Ne'er cast a clout till May is out". Ed)