Database in a state
A very good article in Prospect magazine, “Long Live the Database State” by Tim Kelsey, brings into focus some key issues about the sharing of personal data to provide better public services. I’m not agreeing or disagreeing with the article here (although on balance I do think that the sharing of cryptographically-protected anonymised personal data is probably a good thing), but I did note this statement:
It is true that government departments and ministers have lost [personal] data. But there has yet to be a case, according to John Suffolk, the government’s chief information officer, in which this data loss has harmed a single person
He can’t possibly know whether this is true or not. But when I read this I immediately thought of the well-known case of the British drug investigator who lost her handbag with a memory stick in it containing details of drug enforcement operations.
The loss risked the lives of undercover agents and informants who have now had to be relocated. He said the total cost of aborted operations was £100 million.
[From UK spy on drug mission loses secret file at airport - UK - World - NEWS - The Times of India]
No loss or harm? Well, it depends, of course, on what you mean by “loss” and “harm”. For example, is being blackmailed by a corrupt police officer harm? I think it probably is. Is it a “loss” of your personal data if council staff browse through it because it’s interesting to them?
Councils are failing to prosecute staff caught using a sensitive government database to snoop on celebrities and members of the public, disclosures under the Freedom of Information Act have revealed. Computer Weekly has established that staff from at least 34 local authorities have misused the Department of Work and Pensions’ (DWP) Customer Information System (CIS) database to look up personal details of the public.
[From Government database snoops escape prosecution | 7 Aug 2009 | ComputerWeekly.com]
Well, if my drug dealer cousin needs to find out where some single mother lives so he can go and beat her up, it’s fair enough for me to use the computer at work to help him, isn’t it? It’s not really “harm”, she deserved it. I’m scaremongering aren’t I? I mean, that sort of thing never happens, does it?
A pensioner was killed after a couple used a policeman friend to trace him and then attacked his home in a dispute over a supermarket parking space, a jury was told yesterday. Bernard Gilbert, 79, died of a heart attack after a brick was thrown through his window.
[From Pensioner died in attack on his home after parking space row - Times Online]
If you put everything in a government database that can be accessed by millions of people, then you may as well simply publish all of the information of the Internet. In fact, you could argue that people would soon adjust to their personal data being public and that society would be better off in that state than in its current state, where doctors think that their sexual preferences are private but they are actually published on the interweb.
If you give the British state the power to invade privacy and infringe personal rights then they always end up abusing it. The new extradition treaty needed to challenge international terrorism ends up being used not for terrorists but for an autistic UFO nut, the surveillance powers needed to subvert Al Qaeda’s dastardly plots are used to spy on parents trying to get their children into half-decent schools. Is this a British disease? No, actually.
Inland Revenue staff are continuing to pry into people’s private tax files despite a rash of sackings in recent years, new figures show… Most of the sackings resulted from investigations begun in 2003 as a result of an uproar over so-called “celebrity surfing” by department staff keen to pry into the details of prominent New Zealanders such as Paul Holmes and Jonah Lomu. However, many staff were fired for accessing their own or family members’ files.
[From IRD staff continue prying into taxpayers' files - National - NZ Herald News]
We need a different vision of not the database state but the responsible, audited, secure data sharing state.
In the future, everyone will be famous for fifteen megabytes [posted with ecto]