Following meekly in the undistinguished footsteps of the Queen of Complacency, Polly Toynbee, Johann Hari, writing in the Indy, has turned his attention to the always thorny issue of government, databases and personal data, and put up a sterling effort at becoming Polly Pot’s ‘Prince Consort’…

The Seventies pop screecher Leo Sayer announced last week that living in the Celebrity Big Brother house is “like being in Abu Ghraib”. When another contestant pointed out that the tortured Iraqis weren’t being paid hundreds of thousands of pounds and didn’t have the option of popping into the diary room for a chat, he conceded. “Okay, I see what you mean,” he said. “It’s more like Guanatnomo Bay.”

Err, that’s Guantanamo Bay, surely, unless a few days in the BB house has caused Leo to begin morphing into Jade Goody.

I don’t know why everyone laughed.

See above, if the quotation is accurate and not just an uncorrected typo of your own contrivance.

The people who will ritually jerk their knees today by declaring that Tony Blair’s proposals for a simple centralised Whitehall database are “a step towards tyranny” sound startlingly similar.

Is this database, about which there has been much speculation but little by way of concrete facts, actually such a simple thing? Is there even going to be such a database? Apparently John Hutton thinks not…

Pensions Secretary John Hutton told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme the proposals were a “routine part of the process of engaging with the public services”.

The government was not creating a giant database and people would not have to allow details to be shared, he added.

Still Johann continues…

The Prime Minister is proposing to make it easier for government departments to share information. The Department for Work and Pensions will be able to find out from the Department of Health which pensioners are so sick they count as disabled, so they can give them the hundreds of extra pounds they are entitled to every month. The Housing Department will be able to find families who are slipping into financial chaos and help them out before they turn up at their local town hall one day, clutching their kids and some hastily stuffed boxes, after being evicted. The Land Registry will be able to catch more middle-class people who cheat on their council tax returns by not declaring home extensions. If it succeeds - as it has in most democratic countries - the state machinery will become smoother, faster and more efficient.

Johann - you seem to know an awful lot about precisely what this new ‘data sharing’ ’system’ (it’s unlikely to be a physical system such as a central database) is intended to achieve and also remarkably glib about some of your suggested ‘benefits’ this system will have. Have you been briefed in advance, or are you merely taking a guess as to what this might mean - and have you really thought about what some of your example might imply?
For the DWP to ‘find out’ from the Department of Health, which pensioners are ’sick’ enough to qualify as being disabled would surely necessitate both the DWP and DoH being given detailed access to individual medical records. Does that not mean violating the doctor-patient privilege? Is that not exactly what many people are most concerned about in relation to the creation of the NHS spine? That it will open up their medical records to scrutiny by non-medical personnel who have no business (or need) to be inquiring into such personal matters.

Yes, early intervention in cases where families are financially overextended could help prevent many from becoming homeless, but does that necessarily mean that we should blithely give Housing Departments carte blanche to go rooting through our personal financial affairs?

And why the Housing Department? Are they universally best placed to be providing debt counselling? I mean I know that some Housing Departments do have advice teams that carry out such tasks, but others don’t and rely instead on referring people to the CAB and other voluntary sector debt advice services - are we then to give them access to to people’s bank accounts as well?
Why would the Land Registry, specifically, be trying to catch people cheating on their Council Tax? Surely that would work the other way around, with Council’s using the Land Registry for that purpose and not vice versa? And even then, surely it must be the case that the most appropriate source of such infiormation would be the local planning system and not the Land Registry, as any extension large enough to impact on the Council Tax Band of a property would surely require planning permission before being built?

Sorry, Johann, but either you, or the government (if this comes from a pre-announcement breifing), just don’t appear to have thought through properly and, if you’ll excuse the expression, most of the ideas present have all the quality of having been pulled out of someone’s arse.

Yet these proposals are already being presented by the Conservatives - and many on the left - as yet another step into 1984, part of a proto-tyrannical package ranging from CCTV cameras to Asbos to the DNA database that they cite as evidence Britain is sleepwalking into a surveillance society.

Most of the people who are tetchy and tense at news of more government powers are good people with good worries. Blair’s government has abused civil liberties. They reintroduced internment, and only ditched it in favour of the almost-as-awful house arrest because the House of Lords forced them to. They allowed British airspace to be used to “render” human beings for torture in secret US prisons in Eastern Europe. They slashed back jury trials. They imprisoned refugees and their children in camps, for the “crime” of seeking asylum. They tried to criminalise fierce criticism of religion. I wouldn’t trust that old Stalinist John Reid with a kitten, never mind fundamental freedoms - so everything the Government proposes needs to be scrutinised carefully.

No shit, Sherlock!

But there is a danger that, in response to these real abuses, we have ended up with a right-wing reflex reaction. If we assume all state action undermines human freedom, we will end up opposing smart measures that help people along with the ones that cause real harm.

Perhaps - but then if we also begin from a position of solid scepticism, we also force the government to put forward a solid, cohesive and coherent argument for such measure rather than fob people off, as has been the case in relation to ID cards, with claims of public support based on three year old opinion polls taken at a time when the vast majority of the public had no understanding of the real issues that ID cards would raise, with specious and ever changing arguments, none of which stand up to detailed scrutiny, or simply with a blank refusal to address the arguments of critics - ‘I do not recognise your argument’ or ‘you’re biased and have an agenda’ has been the stock response of Minister’s when faced with detailed and substantive criticism that they’ve simply been unable to answer.

Better (and safer), I think, to assume the worst and require government to show sound evidence to the contrary, than take government assurances at face value.

The philosopher Isaiah Berlin famously drew a distinction between “negative liberty” and “positive liberty”. Negative liberty is freedom from interference by the state. Positive liberty is freedom to achieve your goals - and sometimes, that requires help from the state. Most of us have now sunk into an unspoken belief in negative liberty alone. When we hear the government is acting, we automatically assume there is something to be feared - as though government can only take liberty, and never help us to achieve it.

Have we really sunk into an unspoken belief in negative liberty alone? I don’t think so.

What has happened over recent years is precisely that which Berlin identified (and even feared) might be the consequence of his work on the ‘Two Liberties’; that ‘Postive Liberty’ would be taken up and used (and misused) by government to justify ever more intrusion and control of individuals in their private lives. It’s noticable, for example, that in launching his ‘Respect Agenda’ last year, Blair went so far to a cite Thomas Hobbes as authority for the principles upon which he claimed it was based, and the authority afforded to Hobbes ‘Leviathan’ is a far cry from the balance of positive and negative liberties advocated by Berlin.

Moreover, if one looks at the extent to which Blair has been seeking to extend the authority of the state over its individual citizens, much of this has been to an extent that even Hobbes would have baulked at; his Leviathan was empowered only to keep the citizenry from affecting physical harm on each other, not to mediate their general behaviour in situations where no harm would ensue. What Blair has come to, after ten years in office, is a deeply pessimistic view of society and human nature, one animated by a personal philosophy that is the bastard offspring of the worst that both Hobbes and Berlin had to offer; the Levaithan’s unrestrained authority couple with Positive Liberty’s conceit that the state is acting always for your own good, even when at its most oppressive and overbearing.

I suspect, Johann, that you need to re-read Berlin, and especially some his later re-evalutions of his original work on the ‘Two Liberties’ in order to appreciate just how badly the concept has been abused in recent years - just as Berlin predicted.

Look at the recent creation of a DNA database. Many people (myself included) reacted with an instinctive retch. What right does the state have to store my DNA? But then positive liberty enters the picture. The biggest civil liberties violation happening in Britain - by far - is the epidemic of unpunished rape. Some 50,000 women are raped in this country every year, and only 600 of the rapists ever end up in jail. That’s not a problem of too much state action. That’s the state failing to act. Women deserve the same positive liberty to walk the streets at 3am as anybody else - and the hard evidence shows that the DNA database helps to ensure they can.

Once the DNA database became available to the police, forces across the country started to trawl through their ‘cold’ rape cases, the ones lying dormant in their files with no new leads. By checking the old blood and semen in the archives against the database, they found literally hundreds of rapists and jailed them before they could rape and rape again. (We know from all the research that rapists rarely stop with one woman). To pluck one small police force at random: Avon and Somerset Constabulary have used the DNA database to catch Nigel Palmer-Batt, a man who forced his way into a 21 year-old woman’s flat in 1979 and raped her. They used it to catch Jason Reed, who raped a sex worker in 1992. They used it to catch Ron Evans, who raped a woman in Bristol in 1977 and sexually assaulted another woman two years later. The list goes on. All this has been achieved with only 5 per cent of us being stored on the database. If all of us were, rapists would have real reasons to be afraid.

Would they [rapists] really have reason to be afraid, Johann?

I think your understanding of the value of a DNA database is somewhat over-optimistic - remember DNA evidence alone is NOT proof of rape, merely proof that sexual intercourse took place. At best, all such a database can provide, for certain, is the identity of the alleged rapist - whether or not a conviction then follows is largely a matter of what additional evidence can be supplied by the prosecution to support the contention that a rape actually took place.

Before getting caught up in your little CSI fantasy world, there are a couple of things that you should consider carefully.

First, in terms of public perceptions of the use and value of forensic evidence, you should carefully acquaint yourself with what, in the US, has come to be called the ‘CSI effect’. Real life is not like a television police procedural drama and the forensic evidence presented in court rooms is rarely as conclusive or compelling as that compiled by Grissom or Horatio Caine - in the main because very few forensic laboratories possess even a fraction of the bleeding edge technology on display in the TV shows, some of which is so unrealistic as to be laughable. Try enhancing an out of focus snapshot in Photoshop and getting anything like the image quality and resolution you see one CSI in a matter of seconds, and you’ll soon appreciate the problem.

Programmes like CSI have, inadvertantly, raised public expectations of forensic evidence in the US to such an extent that some Judges have taken to explicitly reminding jurors that real life isn’t like CSI and the forensic evidence that they’ll see in the course of the case upon which they are to deliberate is neither so conclusive or neatly packaged and that they may have seen on TV - there have even been reported acquittals in which the failure of real-life forensic services to deliver Grissom-grade evidence has been cited as a primary reason why the State failed to secure a conviction, even though other evidence was sufficiently compelling for the prosecutor to believe that a conviction was merited.

Second, and specific to Britain’s own rapidly growing DNA database, while one cannot dismiss its successes in enabling the police to clear up a number of previous ‘cold cases’, before one goes down the road of advocating universal storage of everyone’s DNA ’signature’ one must ask just exactly what proportion of those previously unconvicted rapists found themselves on this database without having got there by virtue of other criminal activity and whether this, in turn, would serve to justify a universal system.

The Big Sister state has saved thousands of women from rape by taking this positive action. The DNA database has become a feminist tool. But if we only see the world through our anxiety about negative liberty, we won’t see all these women who have been rescued. This is hardly a lone example. Thanks to CCTV, many people - particularly women - feel safer at night. Thanks to Asbos, people living on some of the poorest estates in Britain have been saved from constant intimidation. These are net gains for freedom.

Sorry, Johann, but this is absurd.

There is no concrete evidence, as yet, to show that the DNA database has saved a single woman from rape - the use of this technology is simply too new and too recent to make such an unqualified assertion.

Nor can it stated with any degree of certainty that it will save women from rape, or at least not in the kind of numbers that would reasonably justify universal DNA registration of all citizens.

Johann appears, at least in part, to think that universal registration will serve as a deterrent to potential rapists - and to some small degree it might have just such an effect on some, but that presupposes that uppermost in rapist’s minds at the time the carry out a rape is the fear of being caught and punished for their crime. Such a presumption is, I think, stretching credibility rather too far.

As already noted, DNA evidence is not conclusive proof of rape, its only proves that sexual intercourse took place, so such has evidence will have little or no bearing on what are almost certainly the vast majority of rapes, in which the alleged assaillant is know to the ‘victim’ either as a pre-existing sexual partner, date or even just someone they’ve met on a night out, given that in most such cases the contended issue is not whether intercourse took place but whether that intercourse was consensual.

Moving to the other extreme, that of the pathological/predatory rapist, it questionable, again, as to whether such a rapist will be deterred by the fear of being caught as a consequence of DNA evidence. Not only might such a rapist be operating under a compulsion that overrides any such considerations, but one would expect some of the more ‘intelligent’ specimins to modify their modus operandi in ways designed to try and circumvent the use of DNA evidence, which could mean anything from using a condom to avid leaving semen in the victim, to using bleach and other chemicals to try an obliterate the crime scene (yet another facet of the ‘CSI effect’ is that some criminals are starting to learn how to cover their tracks more effectively due to information obtained from the programme) to murdering the victim and disposing of the body.

Yes, statistically speaking, some women could be considered to have been ’saved from rape’ (and perhaps murder as well) where use of a DNA database results in a serial rapist being caught relatively early on in their ‘career’ - such a success would, of course, be of only limited comfort to those who have still been raped before he was caught.

But, and this is the other sign of the coin, there is also the risk that rather than act as a deterrent, such a database may in some case increase the risk of women being murdered by their assailant in the course of or following a rape, either because their attacker feels that they have nothing to lose by such actions or because the one way in which DNA identification might be circumvented is if the victim is killed and the body never found. Even in relation to rape, the creation of a universal DNA database is not universally beneficial or even a zero-sum game.
Given that Johann advances the detection of rape as a primary justification for univeral DNA registration and that female involvement is such crimes is necessarily negligable (although not entirely impossible), his argument is only really applicable, in full, to half the population - the male half. So one wonders quite what argument he might advance in favour of universally registering the other (female) half of the population - surely not ‘equal treatment’, which would be about as thin and unconvincing as it is possible to conceive of.

But a rigid, no-exceptions belief in negative liberty is still tempting, because it allows you to have a quick response to every proposal: state bad. You don’t have to look at the detailsor the victims. You can feel morally superior. Yet in reality, freedoms often compete with each other. It is a very small violation of liberty to have a swab put in your mouth for a DNA sample; it is a very large violation of liberty to be raped. People who really want to maximise human freedom have to make hard decisions in weighing one against the other.

Nice comparison here, Johann - apples and oranges, I believe.

The comparison here is not between a small violation of liberty arising out of the act of taking a DNA swab and a large violation of liberty - rape - but between a temporary violation of liberty - many, if not most rape victims do ‘come to terms with their experience’ over time and go on to live fulfilling, and fulfilled lives - and a permanant violation of liberty that changes, fundamentally, the relationship between citizen and state and treats all citizens, implicitly, as suspects.

If we’re going to play the old ‘what about the victim’ game, then perhaps we should be asking how rape victims feel about their own DNA profiles being stored on a universal DNA database, alongside those of their assailant. Some may feel that a small price to pay for justice - assuming they get justices, which as I’ve already pointed out is still far from certain - others may be horrified at such a prospect.

Actually, that’s an interesting question an one that I’m not sure has ever been asked explicitly. One has to remember that at least the beginnings of the present DNA database were compiled illegally by the Police. Before the passing of the Criminal Justice and Police Act 2001, the law permitted the Police to keep DNA records only on those convicted of a criminal offence, anyone whose charged were dropped or who was acquitted should have been removed from the database and their samples and fingerprints destroyed, restrictions which the Police ignored until they were caught in the act, at which point the government stepped in to legalise not only the retention of information from those who had been charged but not convicted, but afford retrospective legitimacy to the action of the Police in disregarding the previous law.

And since the Criminal Justice Act 2003, anyone arrested for any reason, even that of mistaken identity or a false allegation, can have their DNA and fingerprints taken and retained by the Police.

I wonder - in some cases a fairly standard ‘defence tactic’, especially in relatively low-level matters (like common assault) is often to level a counter allegation against the other party, which could theoretically mean that not only does the present DNA database include records of entirely innocent individuals, it may even include records of people who only contact with the Criminal Justice System is as victims of crime. How many there might be who fit that category one cannot guess - and I suspect an enquiry would elicit the stock answer, ‘we do not hold that information centrally and it would too expensive to compile’, but it remains a distinct possibility.

We all have to do this, slowly, agonisingly, with every government proposal. Often this will lead rational people to oppose the government proposals of the day. For example, I can’t see any gains in human freedom flowing from ID cards, and I can see plenty of drawbacks - like giving the police an excuse to harass young black men who are simply walking the streets.

Johann - there is a rather important point you are missing here. Leaving aside legislation such as the Data Protection Act for a moment, the single greatest barrier to large scale sharing of information between many government departments is the absence of a common unique identifier for personal data. The DWP and DoH cannot currently marry up their respective records with sufficient accuracy and reliability to make data sharing worthwhile because each system uses a different method of identifying individuals and the data associated with them - the DWP uses the National Insurance Number, which is not issued until one reaches the age of 16, while the DoH (and NHS) use the NHS Medical Number, which is issued shortly after birth, and there is no central index which cross-reference these two numbers.

So what do you think ID cards and, especially, the National Identity Register with its National Identity Registration Number, are for.

For many, I guess that news of this proposed new data sharing regime across government has come as a bit of a surprise - not me, I was discussing just this exact thing more than five years ago with officers from local government, the NHS and the Police (amongst others). What is now coming to light is not something new or even something that the government has only recently come up with as a policy. What these proposals are, in reality, are the real raison d’etre behind the entire policy that has led to identity cards.

This is what ID cards have been introduced for; not to combat terrorism, cut identity fraud or assist in curbing illegal immigration - any benefits they might deliver in those areas are entirely ancilliary to their real purpose, which is to provide government with a single, unique, identification number for every individual, against which every piece of personal data held by government (local and national) can be cross-reference, connected together and shared/exchanged. ID cards, or rather the National Identification Registration Number, is not only what makes these data sharing proposal possible, they proposals would be as near impossible as makes no difference without it.

Finally, we have revealed, the biggest lie - well omission of fact - perpetrated by government in the introduction of ID cards, the real purpose of the system.

But the automatic we-must-stop-this-Government-plan paranoiablocks out thought, and has percolated into ridiculous areas. Recently, Patricia Hewitt suggested computerising the NHS’s medical records. This would save hundreds of lives: I know of at least one person who died because she was taken ill out of GP hours and her written records couldn’t be easily accessed. Yet when I discussed this on the radio recently, many in the audience reacted as if it was part of a semi-Ba’athist plan to erect a police state. No doubt this sensible new Whitehall database will sound to them like the thud of a jackboot.

Yes, Johann, there are many potential benefits to be gained from the NHS spine and the computerisation of medical records…

…but there is also much potential for such systems to be abused.

Databases aren’t the problem. All they do is hold information and supply that information to users in response to the user asking a ‘meaingful question’.

The problem is the government, the state and its many agents and the real question being asked, and which should always asked is can we trust them.

Can we trust them to keep this information secure?

Can we trust them to only use this information for our benefit?

Can we trust them to use this information only for the purposes for which they have either individual or democratic ‘permission’ to use it?

Well as the history of the DNA database demonstrates, the answer to the last question is no.

On first being permitted, by law, to retain DNA information, the Police were given clear directions in statute by the government as to when and how they could retain that information - i.e. on one securing a conviction.

And what the Police did is disregard the law and conceal the fact that they retained DNA information illegally for five years, until their actions were brought to light by a case in the High Court.

And how did the government (admittedly a different government to that which introduced the first law) respond to the discovery of the Police’s unlawful conduct?

Was there an inquiry? Disciplinary action? Dismissals? Prosecutions?

No. What the government, under this current Prime Minister, did was move the legal goalposts - change the law to suit the interests of the Police and legitimise their previous unlawful conduct.

Now, Johann, I have three questions for you.

1. Does that [the history of the DNA database] not constitute good reason for maintaining a distrust of government when it comes to their dealings in our personal information?

2. Does that not also suggest that any assurances that might given about the use to which personal information (and now data sharing) at the time that laws and regulations are passed should be considered to be largely meaningless. Parliament is sovereign, which means safeguards, even in legislation, are only as good as the will of Parliament (which is near enough the will of the government in recent years) to uphold them? and

3. Should we not do everything possible to prevent further government encroachment into our personal lives, ever as the expense of delaying and deferring the possible benefits of some of this technology, until such time as we, as citizen, have put in place secure and reliable safeguards against the misuse of personal data by government and the state - safeguards put in place not by Acts of Parliament, that be easily overturned by future governments, but by a full constitutional Bill of Rights, enacted by plebiscite (referendum) in such a way as to remove its principles and protections beyond the sphere of governmental interference.

Is it not, in fact, long past time for us to become a truly modern democracy in which it is the democratic will of citizens and not parliament that is actually sovereign.

When did we all start singing Leo Sayer’s songs?

Is my memory at fault, or did Leo once cover ‘Send in the Clowns’ - if he did then some of us have been singing that song in relation to the government and its obsession with information technology and databases for quite a while.

Any one who believes that the civil liberties objections to the introduction of identity cards and the near unchecked growth of the database state and the surveillence society are ‘shockingly feeble‘ or a very middle-class disorder would do well to take the time to read both the Information Commissioner’s Office’s ‘Issues Paper: Protecting Children’s Personal Information’ and the Foundation for Information Policy Research’s report on which it is based, Children’s Databases – Safety and Privacy before writing off such concerns.

Towards the end of the Victorian era, a number of loosely related pseudosciences underwent a surge in popularity, the best known of which were those of physiognomy and phrenology. Both purported, falsely, to enable their practioners to make judgments and even predictions about the character of individuals based solely on certain physical characteristics, either the outer appearance in general, but particularly the face, in the case of physignomy, or the shape of the head in phrenology. Both drew their popularity, in part, from false attributions that were used to suggest that these pseudosciences had been validated by what were, at the time, some of the newest and most modern (and fashionable) advances in science; Darwin’s Theory of Evolution by Means of Natural Selection and the emerging social science of Psychology and both found their way into, amongst other things, the developing field of criminology, where it was suggested that they could be used not only to identify criminals but also to predict which individuals would, and would not, possess crimial traits or tendancies.

Both were, of course, complete and utter rubbish.

One concern is what we might call ‘e-discrimination’. In the past, it has been well documented that children who were black, or from poor neighbourhoods or travelling families, suffered disproportionate police attention because of the expectation that they would be more likely to offend. The expectation could easily turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy. A system that attempts to predict which children will become delinquent, by totting up negative indicators from health, school and other records, runs the serious risk of recreating the same problems – especially as the information, analysis and professional opinions it contains will be made available to many of the public-sector workers who come into contact with the child. A perfectly law-abiding youngster from a difficult home background, who has perhaps struggled to overcome learning and health difficulties, may find at every turn that teachers expect less, and that police attention is more likely. As the causes of this discrimination are online, the youngster cannot mitigate them simply by dressing neatly and being polite. The data and algorithms used as a basis for discrimination might not be accessible to the victim (whether practically or at all) and thus a victim of unjustified discrimination might end up with no recourse. This raises serious data protection concerns relating to the appropriateness of collecting, processing and retaining the data.

Children’s Databases - Safety and Privacy, pp2

And…

Nor is the criminal-justice community happy. Britain’s most eminent criminologist, Professor David Farrington FBA (whose work has been used extensively to justify the children’s database program) sounds a warning note:

“Caution is, however, required. In particular, any notion that better screening can enable policy makers to identify young children destined to join the 5 per cent of offenders responsible for 50-60 per cent of crime is fanciful. Even if there were no ethical objections to putting “potential delinquent” labels round the necks of young children, there would continue to be statistical barriers. Research into the continuity of anti-social behaviour shows substantial flows out of – as well as in to – the pool of children who develop chronic conduct problems. This demonstrates the dangers of assuming that anti-social five-year-olds are the criminals or drug abusers of tomorrow, as well as for highlighting the undoubted opportunities that exist for prevention.”

Children’s Databases - Safety and Privacy, pp3

Now, perhaps, do you understand why civil libertarians are so concerned about these developments?

This is not paranoia speaking, but experience.

Given the capability to monitor almost every aspect of a citizen’s life, the state will ultimately find a way to do just that no matter how much it promises not to at the time that the monitoring systems are constructed. All it takes is time.

Justifications can be found, maybe even manufactured. Safeguards can be rolled back and then dispensed with. The state’s use of surveillence, monitoring and profiling will expand to meet its technical capabilities; after all if it has those capabilities, why not use them to their fullest extent.
When the collection of DNA samples was first introduced in the 1990’s, the Conservative government of the day imposed strict regulations, which required the Police to destroy any samples and profiles obtained in the course of an investigation that were found to have no relevence to the case.

The Police disregarded the law and retained those profiles.

By the time this came to light, the government had changed and New Labour was in power. How did they respond to the revelation that the Police had disregarded the law in order to compile a DNA database containing profiles individuals to which they had no legal right?

They changed the law not only to permit the retention of DNA profiles but applied these changes retrospectively to legitimise what the Police had already done.

That’s not speculation, that actually happened within the lifespan of this present government.

How then can we trust a future government to abide by commitments given now as to how these systems will, and will not be used?

We can’t. In fact due to the doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty and the principle that no parliament may bind a successor we cannot build in any safeguards against the future use, and abuse, of these systems by the state.

Physiognomy, or rather its modern equivaltent, profiling, appears to be back with a vengence.

(hat tip: Not Saussure)

It’s not often I have anything positive to say about the Lib Dems, but just for today I’ll make an exception in the case of their proposed ‘Freedom Bill’ or ‘Great Repeal Bill’, which they also called it.

Okay, so its pretty much a gimmick with little real prospect of going anywhere other than the Lib Dems website, but at least the list of illiberal laws they want to get rid of is pretty good one to be going on with, and with a bit of luck it should spark off a bit more debate on the subject of personal liberty.

1. Restrictions on protests in Parliament Square - Sections 132 to 138; Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005

No complaints with this one at all.

2. Identity Cards - Identity Cards Act 2006

Nor this one.

3. Extradition to the US - Part 2, Extradition Act 2003

Fine, again, although would have been better to qualify this as ‘Fast Track Extradition to the US’ - it’s not the we object to extraditions to the US outright, we’d just prefer them to follow a fair and equitable judicial process.

4. Conditions on public assemblies - Section 57, Clause 123, Anti-Social Behaviour Act 2003

Removal of more curbs on the right to peaceful protest? Yep, good one.

5. Criminalising trespass -Sections 128 to 131, Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005

And again, no real problems with one either.

6. Control orders - Section 1, Prevention of Terrorism Act 2005

Do we want to get rid of indefinite house arrest without trial? Yeah…

7. DNA retention - Sections 78-84, Criminal Justice and Police Act 2001, Sections 9-10, Criminal Justice Act 2003

Nice to see S78-84 of the 2001 Act get a mention - that’s the Act we passed to cover the Old Bill’s arse after it was found that they’d been illegally retaining DNA samples for years.

8. Public interest defence for whistleblowing, Official Secrets Act 1989

Ah, yes - the Ponting Bill. See, its not just Labour that passes shitty illiberal legislation.

9. Right to silence, Sections 34-39, Public Order Act 1994 - England and Wales

And another Tory Act makes the top ten. Yeah, lets have the right to silence back and not the ‘you sort of have the right to silence but if you don’t cough we’ll string you up anyway’.

10. Hearsay evidence, Sections 114-136, Criminal Justice Act 2003

And another good one to finish on.

Okay, so there are a few omissions from the list that need to be added;

Blasphemy - for starters.

Something to tone down our berserker libel laws which are so pernicious that even Americans come here to sue.

The section in the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act that deals with data encryption keys that the govenment haven’t enacted due to their inability to figure out how to make it work.

The Inquiries Act - for obvious reasons.

The Emergency Powers provisions in the Civil Contingencies Act - anything that allows the suspension of the Courts and Habeas Corpus is a bad idea.

And given time, I’m sure that I’ll think of plenty more to be going with, especially anything that provides for the creation of a centralised database of personal information that’s not required for the purpose of criminal justice, licencing or tax/benefits.

There’s been a couple of noteworthy responses to Mr Eugenides fisking of Polly Pot’s recent Blairite love-in that, in turn, deserve a response.

Tom, at Let’s Be Sensible, seems to be trying to be, well, sensible in taking issue with Mr E’s humourous commentary on vegetable masturbation and proves…

…well only that tastes vary.

Like so many oither things in life, humour is in the eye of the beholder - either you find Mr E’s depiction of Polly Pot fantasising over Gordon Brown while masturbating with a carved organic carrot purchased from Tesco, or you don’t, in much the same way that some people find Richard Pryor hilariously funny, while others prefer the Chuckle Brothers, at least until they’re served with an order under the Mental Health Act.

Elsewhere, Pootergeek takes Mr E to task for pulling apart Polly’s use of logical fallacies and then throwing in one of his own…

What case does Mr E offer in reply? The “what if a bad government took control?” one. Yep, a fallacy so limp that no one can be bothered to give it a fancy Latin name (though I’m happy to be corrected).

Someone better versed that I could probably put an exact name to the fallacy that Pootergeek claims on Mr E’s behalf, which would certainly fall within the bounds of an appeal to consquences (argumentum ad consequentiam to give it its fancy latin name) with shades of an appeal to probability and a hefty dose of both misleading vividness and a parade of horribles - the outcome of introducing ID cards, that is, not Mr E and Pootergeek.

Aside from noting that Pootergeek wanders right into a logical fallacy of his own by framing much of his critique in the form of an appeal to ridicule - humour invariably entails the use of fallacy, in the form of exaggeration and hyperbole, and is therefore best avoided as a counterargument to another fallacy - he also makes a few assertions that don’t really stack up when looked at seriously, for example:

it’s partly because the supposed civil liberties arguments are so shockingly feeble and so poorly made that Tony Blair can get away with backing a centralised database of citizens on the grounds that it would be more “modern” to have one than not to.

The civil liberties arguments in relation to ID cards are certainly not feeble but they are complex and problematic in the sense that one is dealing first with an abstract concept (civil liberties) and second with a situation in one is required to exercise soem predictive judgment in suggesting both what consequences might flow from their introduction and whether those consequences should be thought of as either good, bad, or a mixture of both.

This creates a problem in that it tends to encourage arguments that rapidly degenerate into an exchange of fallacies - those arguing against their introduction resort to the much discredited ’slippery slope’ line of argument against which their supporters will usually wind-up throwing in the ‘no true Scotsman’ fallacy in the form of ‘no democratic government would ever…’.

Neither is entirely correct.

Slippery slopes tend to rely heavily on painting scenarios which offer the worst possible outcome, as in the classic canard that suggests that legalising gay ‘marriage’ will lead to the end of civilisation as we know it. If you want to see the slippery slope argument in action, just pop over to Mad Mel’s as it a standard feature of almost all her output. It is also equally fallacious to suggest that just because something hasn’t already happened it can’t or won’t happen, which is the general gist of the argument deployed by supporters of ID cards.

Nor, however, is either entirely incorrect, either.

Slippery slopes can, on occasion, come to fruition - hence Pastor Neimoller’s oft quoted statement that begins, ‘First they came for…’ and if they don’t, then quite obviously the position of those who argued that the sky isn’t going to fall is vindicated.

The civil liberties argument in relation to ID cards is, consequently, not ’shockingly feeble’ but requires a complex value judgment as to the consequences that will emerge, if any, as a result of their introduction, one that requires serious and careful contemplation if one is to arrive at any valid conclusions.

That Blair is able to deploy the argument that we should introduce ID cards purely because they represent modernity is not a function of the weakness of civil liberties argument but of a more general malaise that afflicts British political and media culture as a whole. Over the last 30 years or so, under first Thatcher and latterly Blair, Britain has developed an attention deficit political culture in which large swathes of the population have been conditions by both politician and the media to expect and respond to certain things either postively or negatively.

Strong leadership, party unity and simplistic solutions that promise immediate action (i.e. dog bites child therefore ban all dogs) have been relentless promoted as ‘good’, while debate, dissention, argument and complexity have been pushed as being ‘bad’.

To consider, fully, the civil liberties implications of introducing ID cards requires one to consider a whole raft of complex issues and possibilities with due reference to extant historical precedents, which in many instances are the best we have to go on in trying assess where prevailing trends in government may lead, a process that is the antithesis of the prevailing political and media culture, which values, instead, the immediate gratification of a conditioned Pavlovian response to propaganda in the form of soundbites.

Notwithstanding the legitimate civil liberties objections one can raise against ID cards for which there are strong historical precedents - and it should be noted that this includes pointing out that direct comparisons to countries such as Sweden, France and Holland are wholly invalid not only because none of those countries back up their own use of ID cards with anything like the all-encompassing database system that will sit behind the UK’s system but because of fundamental differences in legal culture between common law and civil code countries - perhaps the single greatest argument in favour of extreme caution is simply that the vast majority of the British population do not sufficiently understand the issues, as they arise out of ID cards and the development of what has been called the ‘database state’ and the ’surveillance society’ to genuinely make informed choices as to how far, and and what pace we should proceed down that road, if we should go there at all.

One of the signature characteristics of the ID cards debate over the last two years or so is that the govenment has consistantly both relied on deception and refused outright to engage in meaningful debate with the schemes opponents on any complex issue, whether this the potential impact on civil liberties or simply the question of costs. Throughout, its stock response to any awkward or problng question has been simply to announce that it either rejects the view of opponents outright or refuses even to recognise the arguments.

In such circumstance, when a government refuses to enter into open public debate on legislation it is seeking to pass, the only wise, sensible and prudent response is not to permit them that legislation.

Every so often one finds a politician making a comment or statement in which something causes you to pause for a second and say to yourself, ‘just what, exactly, are they actually saying here?’

Such a statement can be found right at the beginning of Tony Blair’s recent attempt to sell ID cards to the readers of the Telegraph, which he opened with the following statement:

On any list of public concerns, illegal immigration, crime, terrorism and identity fraud would figure towards the top. In each, identity abuse is a crucial component.

All of which looks straightforward enough and nothing more than the usual govenrmental rhetoric of the day, until one looks a bit more closely and notice that he refers specifically to ‘identity abuse‘. What a curious turn of phrase - not identity theft or identity fraud, which one might expect, but identity abuse. What, one wonders, is it that he’s actually referring to in using that specific phrase and how, exactly and in what context, does one abuse identity?

Looking at Blair’s list of public ‘concerns’ (and disregarding the reference to identity fraud as a tautology) each of the three remaining issues; illegal immigration, crime and terrorism are certainly fields in which the fraudulant use of identity may feature. When one could say with certainty that it is a crucial component is somewhat more open to question.

One can certainly enter the UK illegally and subsist in UK society without the need to make use of a fradulent identity if one is prepared to avoid all normal ports of entry and make ones living in the ‘black economy’ - indentity is a factor in illegal immigration only if one seeks to seeks to enter the country by legal channels, albeit on the back of having provided false information, seeks to avail oneself of public services or employment opportunities, which require you to interact with the state or, of course, in seeking to evade capture and deportation but it does not follow that questions of identity will arise in all instances of illegal immigration.
The same can be said of crime. There are crimes in which identity is a factor and use of a false identity central to the crime itself, but many more in which is no particualr relevance at all, except in the context of evading the attentions of the police. And when one comes to consider the question of terrorism, the question one has to pose is that of which is actually the more important, the concealment of the identity of a putative terrorist or the concealment of their intent, preparations and activities?

False identities may, for example, help to facilitate activities that support and sustain terrorism, such as money laundering, but even there its questionable as to the extent to which such activities rely on the fraudulent use of personal identity as opposed to, for example, the fraudlent use of a business identity such as a ‘financial shell’ to conceal the nature of the transactions not the identity of those carrying out the transactions.

It is also the case, particularly in relation to illegal immigration and terrorismm where the putative terrorist is not a UK citizen, that while the individual(s) in question may have supplied a false identity to the UK authorities, the documentation provided in support of their claim to a particular identity may well be entirely genuine as a consequence of the primary fraud having been undertaken elsewhere, as happens where ‘false’ (as in innaccurate) but otherwise legitimately produced identity documents are obtained by way of the bribery of public officials.

For each of Blair’s non-tautological exemplers, the use of false or fradulent indentities may be a factor or they may not - none is entirely contingent on identity fraud in order to function noe, necessarily, sufficiently contingent on it to merit referencing it as a crucial component of such activities.

Can we infer, from any of this, precisely what Blair may have meant when he referred specifically to identity abuse? I think we can.

In referring to identity abuse, Blair is referring not simply or exclusively to the fraudulent use of identity but more globally to any situation in which an individual seeks to conceal their ‘true’ identity from the state irrespective of their reason or purpose in doing so. What this suggests, by direct inference, is the existance of a fundamental belief on Blair’s part that the state has an absolute and overarching right to know the full identity of each of its citizens and of any individual within its borders at all times and in all circumstances.

This, as should be obvious, is a fundamental inversion of the relationship between the state and its citizens; one in which the state ceases to derive its existance and authority from a social contract in which the citizen voluntarily cedes certain privileges and authorities to the states (such as monopoly on the use of force/violence within its bounds) in return for state acting to preserve the citizen’s rights, freedoms and liberties and affording the citizen a measure of security from external and internal threat and becomes, instead, a discrete entity in its own right with its own inalienable rights and entitlements outside of any social contract and derived from its very existance and from its ‘ownership’ of monopoly on the use of force/violence, which it may exercise irrespective of the wishes of its citizenry.

The former condition, in which the state is defined and bound by a social contract, is a hallmark of democracy, the latter of a feudal monarchy or totalitarian regime in which the state is exclusive tool of the ruling elite and not a servant of the people.

None of this should come as any particular surprise, as this view of state as an entity distinct from its citizenry has been a consistant sub-text of much of government policy in recent years and, indeed, animates the entire ‘rights -vs- responsibilities’ debate the the present government has sought to initiate and sustain on each and every occasion upon which events have conspired to afford them the opportunity.

In this 2005 article from the Guardian, Blair deploys what has been, for some time, one of his favourite canards, that of seeking to recast the parameters of the debate in terms of conflicting ‘liberties’ in which the state is portrayed as defending that which, in his opinion, is the most important.

But this is not a debate between those who value liberty and those who do not. It is an argument about the types of liberties that need to be protected given the changing nature of the crimes that violate them. And it is an attempt to protect the most fundamental liberty of all - freedom from harm by others.

In that same article, in which he defends the introduction of anti-social behaviour orders, Blair incorporates a reference to the supposed ‘balancing’ of citizens’ rights and responsbilities…

However, it wasn’t just a question of matching legal rights with legal responsibilities. It was about changing the legal processes by which such rights and responsibilities are determined.

This being a more or less direct reference to a programme of change first set out by Blair in 2002, in the following manner:

With these new opportunities come responsibility. The street crime initiative, for example, has been one of the most successful partnerships between government and the police in living memory. But the truth is people don’t feel more secure and they know the system is not yet working as it should. It has become inceasingly clear what the problem with the system is:

· A nineteenth-century criminal justice system trying to solve twenty-first-century crimes;

· Too little joined-up working between police, CPS and other agencies;

· Too little focus on the hard core of persistent offenders who commit more than half the crime;

· Court procedures that are cumbersome;

· Justice weighted towards the criminal and in need of rebalancing towards the victim;

· Police not freed up and given the flexibility to focus on the crime and antisocial behaviour;

· Punishment that often does not fit the severity of the crime.

So this autumn we will focus on tackling these problems. We are pursuing radical reform of the Criminal Justice System, tackling anti-social behaviour and restoring social cohesion to fragmented communities.

What makes these articles both interesting and revealing is, first, that Blair consciously recasts the duty of the state to afford its citizen’s a measure of security in terms of its being both a right and a fundamental liberty, rather than a contractual obligation from which the state derives, in part, its legitimacy, and second, in setting out the framework for what he calls ‘reponsibilities’, Blair set out a programme ciouched exclusively in terms of defining and augmenting the power of the state to enforce those ‘responsibilities’ on its citizenry, which, by extension, recasts these reponsibilities in the form of their being the citizen’s duties to the state and not the responsibilities of citizens towards each other, this being a particular nasty fiction promulgated by Blair on the back of complete misreading of Isaiah Berlin’s ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’.* [see endnote]
In doing so, Blair is implicitly overturning the fundamental basis of the social contract, which far from being an arrangement between citizen and state entered into voluntarily and for the mutual benefit of both parties, has now become a coercive arrangement under which the state no longer derives legitimacy by means of preserving the rights and securing the liberties of its citizens and affording them a measure of security necessary to facilitate their unfettered enjoyment of both but rather offers protection to its subjects in return for the performance of certain duties of benefit to the state and for which the state will apply sanctions (and exercise its monopoly over the use of force/violence) should its subject seek to demur.

Britain may well possess all the trappings and outward signs of a democracy, but these do not serve the purpose for which they are intend, which is to periodically effect the renewal of the social contract and afford the state its legitimacy, rather they serve only to apply a thin veneer of respectability to what is, otherwise, little more than a large-scale protection racket, as can be seen most clearly, here, in his Telegraph article:

It was also very clear from last week’s arguments about surveillance and the DNA database that the public, when anyone bothers to ask them, are overwhelmingly behind CCTV being used to catch or deter hooligans, or DNA being used to track down those who have committed horrific crimes. And that’s what surveys suggest, too, about their position on ID cards. 

ID cards, a DNA database, CCTV and the rapidly developing ‘database state’ being, of course, the price that Blair seeks to exact in return for the state’s protection.

…

Endnote.

By way of irony, Blair wrote to Berlin shortly before the latter’s death in 1997 in an effort to debate with Berlin both his ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’ and more generally the way forward for ‘the left’ following the demise of Soviet-style state ’socialism’, and in his letter made the following observations.

The brief discussion in the interview of the relationship between your two concepts of liberty is, I think, illuminating. The limitations of negative liberty are what have motivated generations of people to work for positive liberty, whatever its depradations [sic] in the Soviet model. That determination to go beyond laissez-faire continues to motivate people today. And it is in that context that I would be interested in your views on the future of the Left.

And

As you say, the origins of the Left lie in opposition to arbitrary authority, intolerance and hierarchy. The values remain as strong as ever, but no longer have a ready made vehicle to take them forward. 

Berlin was, sadly, too ill to reply and died shortly after receiving Blair’s letter, which was prompted by a reprint in Prospect of an interview given by Berlin to Stephen Lukes soem five years previous - a fact that Prospect neglected to mention at the time.

One cannot help but wonder, in the circumstances, quite waht Berlin might have made of Blair, both then and now, when it has become entirely apparent both that Blair has long since abandoned the values of opposition to arbitrary authority, intolerance and hierarchy that he professed, at the time, to be as strong as ever having sat for ten years at the apex of the British political hierarchy and become, in that time, the very epitome of arbitrary authority, and that Blair has entirely vindicated Berlin’s critique of ‘positive liberty’ in which he argued that it politically dangerous because it afforded the political elite a justification for curtailing the ‘negative liberties’ of citizen’s ‘for their own good’ by conducting himself in just such a fashion.

Let’s get the recommendations out of the way first.

Over at Comment is Free, AC Grayling does a fine job of dismantling Tony Blair’s defence of ID cards, on which I’ll have a little more to say in due course. Henry Porter, writing on the same subject, is of course well worth reading too.

Meanwhile, Mr Eugenides not only makes a long overdue appearance on my blog roll but provides a glorious fisk of Polly Toynbee’s ‘me too’ response to Blair’s comments that is perceptive, beautifully constructed and uproariously funny in a manner entirely befitting the host of the Swearbloggers round-up…

Finally, as for the fatuous Tesco point (we already know what you buy, Polly; you buy carrots from the organic section, whittle them into passable facsimiles of Gordon Brown’s cock, and then shove them up your sopping minge; but it’s never enough, is it, Pol? “Nnnnng! Nnnnggg! More! I’ve had enough of trickle-down! There are huge holes that need to be filled with hard cash NOW! Gyuuuuuuh! Spend on me, Gordon! Spend as much as you can! Yes! Yeeeeeerrrrrrss!”)

…

Hopefully, by now, you’ve managed to stop choking and cleaned-up the coffee you’ve just spluttered uncontrollably over your keyboard, in which case I can finally get around to my own comments on Polly Pot’s article.

There really is no purpose to be served by following humbly in the wake of the genius of Mr Eugenides and trying to add my own fisk. Why seek to improve on perfection when one knows in advance that one will fail?

All of which leaves only one useful point of debate, that of how and why a newspaper columnist who, if reports are correct, earns the princely sum of £140,000 a years for visiting her lovingly crafted golden showers of wisdom on the unsuspecting readership of the Guardian, should manage to turn in such a piss-poor piece of commentary.

The answer, if one has followed the ID cards debate in any detail, is a painfully simple one - she is by any possible measure one could apply here, commenting from a position of complete and abject ignorance on the subject matter at hand - or to put it a tad less gently, she hasn’t got the first fucking clue what she’s talking about.

If you’ve not followed the link to her article, take the time to do so now… and remember that but for the occasional high days and holidays, dear old Polly Pot turns in two such articles a week, which means approximately 100 a year. So what you’re reading amounts to £1400 worth of steaming bullshit with all the usual stench and none of the horticultural benefits.

And how do we know that Polly is talking out of her arse - apart from the obvious reason (It’s Polly!).

Well aside from her absurd reliance on three year old statistics to show public support for ID cards, which (inconveniently) are compromised not only by age but by the little matter of the 77% of those who responded to the MORI poll in question by also pointing out that they knew next to fuck all about ID cards at the time the poll was taken, the real big giveaway is that, throughout the whole piece, she appears to rely solely and exclusively on the opinions of one Anthony Charles Lynton Blair, of London (England) as sole and exclusive authority for her arguments, a man well known in technical circles for his self-admitted inability to cope with the task of sending of a fucking e-mail.

It would be unfair, of course, to suggest that Polly has rather missed the point in writing her article, but only because she’s congenitally incapable of recognising the fucking point in the first place, nowhere more so that in her observation that:

Certainly, the accuracy of information is vital - everyone needs the right to check and amend their records. But the chance of errors will be lessened, not increased, as technology advances.

Technology does, indeed, ‘advance’ over time, however as anyone who has ever worked professionally in a technical discipline, particularly in information technology, knows all too well, this has absolutely no bearing whatsoever on the validity and accuracy of information held in large-scale database systems.

Now, being a jargon-friendly profession with a suitably mystifying propensity for creating acronyms for every conceivable occasion, one might well expect that IT professionals have their own precise terminology and explanation for such a phenomenon… and indeed we do - in fact we have quite a few, of which one in more common use is referred to as a ‘PBCAK’ error, a term which as any suitably experienced BOFH knows, is a direct and extremely apt reference to the primary cause of data validation, integrity and accuracy errors in any computer system.

What? Oh, you want to know what PBCAK stands for?

Okay, well to start with we need to get you through the initiation ceremony - you didn’t think I was just going to let you in on the secrets of the professional without some sign of commitment, did you?

So, you just roll up your trouser leg (the left one, obviously) and wait right there while I nip off and fetch the contract, quill pen and craft knife… oh, before I forget, you don’t happen to a black cockerel handy do you? Sorry, but I do have to ask, you understand… that nice Mr Beelzebub in Accounts gets most upset if we don’t complete all the paperwork in the proscribed manner…

…

…Okay, okay. Yes, I am kidding.

Look PBCAK stands for nothing more complicated than ‘Problem Between Chair And Keyboard’, a cause of error also known by its serial number, which is ID-10-T.

Yes, it really is that simple - and Mr Beelezebub will be round later with the paperwork - all we’re talking about here is plain old-fashioned human error and, by extension, that unique and singular commodity that is both infinitely renewable and always in more than sufficient supply - human stupidity.

It doesn’t matter how advanced technology gets, if there’s a human in the loop anywhere in the system then there is human error and this will be so for as long as the sun shines, the world turns on its axis, bears shit in the woods and people have holes in their arses.

It has been said, wrongly, for many years that there are only two certainties in life: Death and Taxes. There are actually three certainties: Death, Taxes, and the fact that if you let a user anywhere within typing distance of computer system, they’ll manage to fuck something up and usually within the first five minutes.

There is, however, a further certainty in life, the existence of which has only recently been postulated, this being that editoral staff at the Guardian are alrady fully aware of the fundamental nature of the PBCAK error…

… because she insists in writing articles for them every Tuesday and Friday.

Since the first formally proposed by this government, opposition to the introduction of identity cards and, particularly, the national identity register has gone down two interlinked routes; one has been objections on civil liberties grounds and the manner in which ID cards alter the relationship between the citizen and the state, the other has been technical/cost objections, under which  we’ve long argued that the whole project would be fraught with technical problems and impossible to deliver on time and within the government’s publicly-stated costs, not least because of the state’s abysmal record in delivering large scale IT projects.

And so we come this report in the Times:

TONY BLAIR’S flagship identity cards scheme is set to fail and may not be introduced for a generation, according to leaked Whitehall e-mails from the senior officials responsible for the multi-billion-pound project.

The problems are so serious that ministers have been forced to draw up plans for a scaled-down “face-saving” version to meet their pledge of phasing in the cards from 2008.

However, civil servants say there is no evidence that even this compromise is “remotely feasible” and accuse ministers of “ignoring reality” by pressing ahead.

One official warns of a “botched operation” that could put back the introduction of ID cards for a generation. He added: “I conclude that we are setting ourselves up to fail.” Another admits he is planning Home Office strategy around the possibility that the scheme could be “canned completely”.

The Times have also, helpfully, published the full text of the leaked emails, from which one finds not only a litany of problems, none of which come as any surprise to those of us who’ve campaigned against NIR from the outset, including:

the (un)affordability of all the individual programmes,

the very serious shortage of appropriately qualified staff and numbers of staff,

the lack of clear benefits from which to demonstrate a return on investment,

the concerns about the lack of requirement documentation, and in addition:

that ministers probably will not make a quick decision on papers submitted so the July date will slip badly,

the likely hiatus caused by the summer holidays,

the need surely to at least brief the new cabinet committee (IM),

the need to involve the players on the yet to be established Public/Private forum,

almost certainly a requirement for a Gate 0 on the programmes and Gate 2’s on the projects,

All of which looks to be a recipe for disaster if ever there was one. with the admission that there is a lack of clear benefits from which to demonstrate a return on investment being partcularly pertinent at a time when the government is fighting tooth and nail to keep a DWP report on the costs , benefits and risks of ID cards out of the public domain.

What is also worth noting here is that this appeal relates to the refusal of the DWP to release this report to a Member of Parliament, Mark Oaten, following a question in the House of Commons - so much for  for the government being accountable to parliament then…

I don’t often pull stuff out of the comments boxes, but the following response from Nigel Sedgwick, to a recent piece of mine on government IT cost overruns (specifically on the NHS electronic patient record system) and how this is likely to relate to the National Identity Register and ID cards, is worth bringing out into the light of day:

Concerning costs of the National Identity Scheme (NIdS), you might like to look here: Technical Aspects of the National identity Card, and particularly at slides 34 and 35. [Somewhat technically minded people might also find useful, the rest of the presentation.]

There is the issue of setting up the whole scheme, including enroling the whole adult population. This should be separated from the costs of using the scheme for any particular purpose beyond those arising from registration (ie checking identity for any particular purpose). This is because there is no compelling need to use the NIdS for any particular purpose. It should, surely, only be used for each particular purpose if the use offers benefits to that particular community (or provider and users), and hence offer reduced cost, improved benefit or both (a point the original posting seems to miss).

It is thus unreasonable to lump in all costs of possible particular uses with the initial cost of setting up the scheme and registering the adult population (though both of those should be considered together, at least initially).

This is somewhat different from the NHS computer system, where it certainly is the case that the initial costs should include the cost of transferring all existing records (paper and computer) to the new system. On the NHS system, the £20billion actually comes out at around £340 per person in the UK. Although I think that cost per head should be lower, it does not strike me as totally unreasonable, given that (as you say) the largest portion is the data transfer from legacy systems including manual records. However, I do agree that this costs should have been in the original budget. More fool those (would that be Parliament) for not checking the budget properly prior to approval. [But we have that on the NIdS too. Why did they approve it without a proper budget?]

Back to the NIdS, there is no equivalent to the transfer of legacy data that is not included, at least in the costs I give on slide 35. That is because, substantially, there is no legacy data that is required for any purpose beyond the initial registration (which I assume could have a reference number typed in, or scanned in for non-UK reference documents, within the allocated 1/12 of a working day’s effort by a registration clerk).

I hope this all helps with the truth.

Best regards

Okay, in the interests of complete transpareny lets get the matter of the provenence of Nigel’s comments out the way straight from off by quoting from this memorandum submitted to the Home Affairs Select Committee in January 2004…

INFORMATION ON THE AUTHOR‘S [Nigel] TECHNICAL BACKGROUND

 2.  My technical experience spans 29 years since graduating from Imperial College in Physics (BSc, ARCS in 1974); I also have a degree in Computer Science (MTech, Brunel 1980). I am a member of: the Institution of Electrical Engineers, the British Computer Society and the Institute of Acoustics. I work on pattern matching and digital signal processing, through my personal trading company (Cambridge Algorithmica Limited), undertaking technical consultancy and contract research and development. This work is principally in the fields of biometrics, automatic speech recognition and data modems. Much of my work has been for the UK Government, and is of a highly technical nature. In the field of biometrics, I personally have worked on speaker verification/identification, dynamic (hand-written) signature verification and multi-modal biometric combination.

  3.  In the middle of last year, I was appointed to the British Standards Institute Committee IST/44 on Biometric Standards, in the capacity of Principal UK Expert.

To be scrupulously fair, Nigel has not made any effort at all to conceal his identity and/or background, he is what he is, a technical consultant who has worked for the UK government in the field of biometrics. His personal trading company, Cambridge Algorithmica, is not on the current list of suppliers who’ve expressed a formal interest in tendering for contracts relating to ID cards and NIR. Whether he might have an indirect personal interest, either as a external consultant to one or more of the companies who have expressed an interest or, on the other side of the fence, as a consultant working for the government on technical evaluations of tenders/equipment, I can’t say nor do I think that matters either; Nigel’s track record has been consistantly in favour of ID cards and the NIR throughout, and from long before there was any prospect of contracts being put on the table, so any personal gain that might accrue from their introduction in incidental to his support for the system.

Having read through Nigel’s presentation I hope he won’t mind me saying that he comes over as being a bit of good old-fashioned boffin - and as a techie myself that’s not a term I consider perjorative. Technically his work seems pretty sound even allowing for the usual room for legitimate scientific dispute about some of his conclusions, however like many boffins his main flaw is not his technical ability but his tendency to base his arguments on how things should be rather than how things are actually likely to turn out, a criticism that he will have heard before from John Lettice of The Register - this being the classic boffin flaw*.

*As to why ‘boffins’ are prone to this kind of error in thinking, the answer is simply that that’s pretty much what they’re trained to do from the outset. It’s a function of scientific methodology - most scientific experimentation begins with the construction of idealised scenarios in which the researcher attempts, whether by technical means or use of assumptions and constants, to control and minimise the impact of as many variables as possible in order that they may manipulate the one or two factors which actually interest them and which should then, hypothetically, provide them with the answer they’re looking for.Scientists are, quite literally, taught to deal in ideal situations, which tends to colour their thinking even in dealing with complex real world systems that defy such simplifications.

The problem I have with Nigel’s comments, as you might expect, lies in these statements:

There is the issue of setting up the whole scheme, including enroling the whole adult population. This should be separated from the costs of using the scheme for any particular purpose beyond those arising from registration (ie checking identity for any particular purpose). This is because there is no compelling need to use the NIdS for any particular purpose. It should, surely, only be used for each particular purpose if the use offers benefits to that particular community (or provider and users), and hence offer reduced cost, improved benefit or both (a point the original posting seems to miss).

It is thus unreasonable to lump in all costs of possible particular uses with the initial cost of setting up the scheme and registering the adult population (though both of those should be considered together, at least initially).

Nigel thinks its unreasonable and unfair to consider, at this stage, the likely full costs of a fully-loaded system, which would include not only the costs of the NIR system but the on-costs of linked to it the many public sector information systems that will be hooked up to make use of identity verification - I don’t.

The difference in outlook here is one that is very much based on our differing technical backgrounds - his looks primarily to be in research and development, mine, from my days working in IT, is in data processing, data control and systems administration - he deals with how things should work, I deal in how they actually work in practice and the two are very different disciplines.

The single overriding factor which dictates that we consider the full costs of implementing identity verification across the public sector is the final bottom-line - however you slice it, the costs of implementing these systems will end up being borne by the taxpayer either directly, as in the purchase cost of the ID cards themselves or in increased charges for some goverment services, or indirectly through taxation and/or cuts in services to release funds to pay for implementing these systems. Remember, the promise made to the Treasury was that this system would be ’self-financing’, although it was never specified fully quite what self-financing would actually mean.

One aspect of the self-financing nature of the project is obvious - we’ll be required to pay for the ID cards themselves, but even if we allow for the government’s stated figures and projected costs actually being somewhere in the right ballpark - which is far from certain in itself - the income generated from the sale of ID cards thermselves with come nowhere near to covering the costs of upgrading other systems to connect to and link in with the identity verification services that the system will provide.

We know, for example, that the DVLA will make extensive use of identity verification - how? Because this is build directly into the legislation.

This will almost certainly require extensive upgrades to the DVLA’s IT systems for starters - costs that aren’t included in the publicly stated costs of NIR. Remember its not just the DVLA’s database that needs to up upgrades but all the systems that use that database and, like the NHS system, there will be massive legacy data issues to deal with when the two systems are linked - unless the government plans to force all drivers to reapply for new licences and rebuild the DVLA’s records from scratch.

All that has to be paid for, one way or another, either by a hike in the price of a driving licence or through general taxation (or a combination of both). Yes, there may be efficiency savings in the long run, but to what extent these will offset the upfront costs of implementation is entirely unclear and uncertain.

At least, one could argue, agencies like the DVLA and Criminal Records Bureau, which will also be a heavy user of identity verification, have some direct means of recouping their costs, even if it does mean increasng the price of a driving licence or criminal records certificate - but what about those agencies that don’t directly charge for their services, like HM Revenues and Customs and the Department for Work and Pensions, which deals with welfare benefits and NI contributions. If the NIR is to remain self-financing then these agencies will have to pay not only for the costs of upgrading their systems to connect to NIR and carry out indentity checks but also, presumably, for the verification services they use out of their own budgets, which are, of course, funded by the taxpayer.

And again, as with the DVLA, these agencies will be required to deal with massive upgrade and legacy data issues - for example, Britain has a working-age population of around 30 million people and a total adult population of around 47 million people… and, currently, the National Insurance Database hold 73 million ‘live’ entries.

Okay so some of that discrepancy between NI numbers and adult population can be accounted for in terms of ex-pats who have an NI number but who live and work overseas, and some of the records will relate to migrant workers who, having worked in the UK at some time in the recent past, have wither returned to their home country or moved on to work elsewhere, so one can quite reasonably expect there to be some discrepancy between the number of ID cards in circulation - if they become mandatory - and the number of live NI records on file. Whether 26 million is a reasonable level is another matter entirely, which I suspect will mean another massive exercise in sorting out legacy records and data cleansing.

The National Identity Register is not a stand-alone system, nor was it ever intended to be, why is why the question of what it will cost, across the board, to implement its use across the public sector is all too relevant to the wider debate on this issue.

In actual fact, verifying the identity of individuals is, in most respects, the least important of the NIRs functions within the public sector - the real prize for government is not the ability to verify the identity of its citizens but the ability to link together it many information systems into a single meta-system in which near enough every piece of personal information its holds about UK citizens can be connected and cross-referenced - tax records, benefit records, immigration and nationality records, driving licence records, criminal records, medical records, council tax records, social services records, education records - the whole damn show.

As for what this will all cost in the long run - who knows for sure. Certainly much more than than the figures the government have quoted and probably much more than even the LSE’s estimated costs.

NIR will extend into near enough every facet of the citizen’s dealing with government, central and local, and beyond. Going back to Nigel’s idealised scenario, one of the clear and obvious differences between the system he scoped out fro his presentation and the system that the government are looking to put in place lies in the amount of information revealed to those using identity verification services. Nigel appears to be proposing a zero knowledge-based system in which the only information revealed to the end user is a yes/no answer to the question of whether an individual is who they purport to be. The actual system that the govenrment are putting in place will reveal far more information than that, if one judges how it will function from the list of information that the law will allow the system to disclose and, crucially, one thing it will disclose is individual National Identity Registration Numbers, with no restictions on their recording and use by third parties, particularly private sector businesses, other than the wholly inadequate provisions of the Data Protection Act.

The inevitable consequence of this will be the development of parallal meta-systems within the private sector, the most obvious of which will be that which will spring up in the financial services industry - NIR provides the one missing element necessary for private businesses to construct these systems, the unique, individual registration number from which one can easily and reliably connect all manner of personal information together and all, more or less, outside of any legal or governmental controls. If one understands the potential of these private systems then one also understands that the ‘benefits’ of reliable ID checking are nothing to the private sector when compared to the potential offered by being able to reliably connect together all manner of personal data held across numerous private sector systems into detailed and reliable individual profiles. The serious money to be made out of NIR lies not in the government’s identity verification services but in the harvesting and mining of data held in the private sector to construct detailed individual profiles for sale to financial instutions, marketing companies and just about anyone else who might pay for such information.

There is more to the government’s obvious economies of truth when it comes to the full scale and scope of what NIR makes possible than simply how much it will all cost, only when one does understand this in full do the real civil liberities implications become clear - the public might just buy into the idea of the Police and Security Services having access to the kind of detailed profile information that NIR makes possible, but not the idea Tesco, Sainsburys and ASDA will also be able to pull of much the same kind of thing.

To give Nigel some deserved credit here, his presentation does put forward the one acceptable form that a nationa identity system could take, give or take some quibbling over the exact contents of the register itself, that of a zero knowledge based system which verifies identity without revealing personal information to the end user - but then that’s not what we’re getting.

What we’re getting, instead, is a massively expensive uber-system in which the benefit to individual citizens is the least consideration.

Not unsurprisingly, the news that the NHS’s new electronic patient record system is running more than two years late and looks likely to cost more than three times the £6.2 billion cost that was touted at the time that the project was given the go ahead  - or was that £2.3 billion and ten times the cost as the Register noted here - has drawn a fair bit of comment and criticism.

Tim Worstall, ever with his eye on the economic picture, notes that the now £20 billion cost of the system amounts to 1.5-2% of Britain’s output for a single year, while both he and Longrider draw obvious parallels with the Government’s other massive database project, the National Identity Register, which the state claims will cost £6 billion, a figure disputed by the London School of Economics, who put its estimate of the cost of the system at around £18 billion - three times higher, yet again.

What neither have spotted, buried as it is in the FT’s report on this issue, is the real parallel between the two projects, one which doesn’t just suggest that the real costs of introducing ID cards and the NIR will be much higher than the government’s quoted figure, but also the extent to which citizens will bear the brunt of these costs.

The key statement in the FT’s article is this one:

He [Lord Warner] also admitted that the full cost of the programme was likely to be nearer £20bn than the widely quoted figure of £6.2bn. The latter figure covered only the national contracts for the systems’ basic infrastructure and software applications, he said.

Hospitals and other parts of the NHS would, however, spend billions more on training staff, buying PCs and upgrading and assimilating existing systems over the decade-long programme, Lord Warner said in an interview with the Financial Times.

The extra money did not mean the programme would cost more than expected, he said, but instead reflected the full expense of switching existing IT spending from outdated systems to the new ones.

Notice two things here; first the £6.2 billion figure quoted for the cost of the system covered only the national contracts for the systems’ basic infrastructure and software applications and not the localised costs of staff-training, purchasing and upgrading local computer systems and, seemingly, transferring existing systems and data, if it is only infrastructure and software applications included in the £6.2 billion. This last point , that of the costs of transferring and validating existing data is a rather curious one as this is by far one of the most expensive line items in the total bill for setting up such a system, particularly where records are still held primarily on paper and in handwritten form, making the transfer process a very labour intensive task and, as such, one would have expected these costs to be reflected in the figures quoted for the system.

Second, Warner goes on to say that…

the extra money did not mean the programme would cost more than expected, he said, but instead reflected the full expense of switching existing IT spending from outdated systems to the new ones

If that is the the case then not only is he admitting that the government and/or NHS have knowingly given the public a false estimate of the costs of the system, but one also has to ask the question as to whether this figure has ever been quoted in Parliament and in what context, as if it has and the Minister in question did not make it explicit that the figure given related only to part of the full cost of the system then it may well be that an apology for misleading the House will need to be made.

Regardless of whether this is the case or not, what is clear is that a false picture of the real cost of this system has been given to the public - and it appears knowingly if Warner’s remark that the extra money did not mean that the programme would cost more than expected is taken at face value.

Now, lets apply this to ID cards and the National Identity Register, which means referring to this article from The Register

The £6 billion cost of the ID cards system, like that of the £2.3 billion or £6.2 billion cost of the NHS system is based on the costs of the core ID cards system, i.e, what the government is getting for its money appears to be the NIR itself, plus all the infrastructure, kit and equipment necessary to load the NIR with data, including the controversial biometric data and issue the ID cards themselves, alongside passports.

What doesn’t appear to be included are the costs of linking and integrating other system, which will use the NIR to verify identity, into this new infrastructure - or if these costs are included then, at best, they relate to the costs of linking only a limited number of systems (CRB, Driving Licences and Immigration) to the NIR - nowhere in the government’s costings do they appear to have accounted for the costs of integrating other systems, such as Revenues and Customs, Benefits, Contributions (i.e. NI), Police National Computer, into the NIR, systems where it should be obvious to all but the most slavering of idiots such links and connection will be made. In fact, one obvious question to ask about the NHS system is whether not it has been designed, or redesigned at any stage, to enable it to link into NIR in order the verify identity - remember ID cards were touted as eventually becoming an ‘entitlement card’ for access to public services - and if so when was this done and what costs were associated with it.

It’s also worth noting that the Register article quoted Charles Clarke, then the Home Secretary, talking in terms of offsetting some of the costs of NIR by generating income from departments such as the CRB and DVLA, to offset the cost of ID cards to the public, in addition to generating further income from private sector users - at the very least this will mean banks, building societies, finance/mortgage companies, insurers, etc. but will likely go far beyond that in practice.

And let’s not forget that Local Government systems will also link in to NIR in order facilitate identity checks in their electronic systems; at the very least that’s Council Tax, Housing Benefit, etc without going into employment checks, social services, and so and and so forth.

It seems that few if any of the costs of linking and integrating these systems to NIR are included in the government’s quote figures - which goes a long way toward explaining why the LSE came up with a figure three time higher than the government for the cost of the system.

Who’s going to cover these costs? One way or another, we are…

Over time some the implementation costs may be offset by efficiency savings, which may mean that some of the costs of implementation are recouped, but that’s still a pretty big ‘if’ to be dealing with and the reality is that any such saving will take a considerable amount of time to work through the system and the full extent to which efficiency savings will cover these costs is highly uncertain - what typically happens with any technology based ‘product’ is that development costs are lumped into the price that users pay up-front, in order to recoup those costs as quickly as possible and only when those costs have been covered does the price then fall. Tthis is why a few years ago, for example, the cost of a desktop colour laser printer dropped from around £4,000 to less than £1,000 in the space of a year, what happened was simply that the companies making these printers reached the point where they had recouped enough of their R&D costs in sales revenue to make it worth their while dropping the price in order to stimulate market growth.

In short, if NIR is to be self-financing then one way or another we’ll be paying through the nose in the early years to cover development and implemetation costs and only when these have been covered, with the price fall, if at all.

Quite how we’ll be paying and in what for has yet to become clear. The government expects to obtain some revenue from its own departments, but that inevitably means either increased charges for NIR-linked services, like CRB checks, Driving Licences, etc, or that costs to these departments will have to be absorbed into existing budgets - meaning potential cuts in services/jobs - or covered by increase budgets, meaning increased taxation or government borrowing to offset the costs. The same basic principle applies in terms of linking local government systems to NIR, in fact more so as Council have much less scope that central government when it comes to borrowing, so unless they’re given extra money by central government to implement new systems then there’s only one place these costs are coming from and that’s Council Tax.

One should also beware of government projections on revenue from its own departments and services. The perfect example of this is the Criminal Records Bureau, which set its inital costs for Criminal Record Certificates on the assumption that part of the cost of the system would be offset by providing basic certificates which would be available to all employers, covering unspent convictions in addition to the standard and enhanced certificates required from people working in positions of trust or with children and/or vulnerable adults. The basic certificate was to be the cash cow that kept down the costs of the other two, but when it didn’t materialise - and it still hasn’t - the cost of the standard and enhanced certificates suddenly doubled, with little or no advance warning.

Then there’s the private sector who, more than anyone else, are likely to pass on any costs incurred in linking to NIR, including charges for identity verification, on to their customers and will do so more quickly as well - its a simple equation, increased costs equals reduced profits, etc…

Will an ID card actually cost £300 as the LSE suggested? No, not up front - having pinned there arguments on a fixed cost in pushing ID cards through Parliament any substantial increase in the up front cost of an ID card
would be political suicide, especially if the first cards are issued on time, which would mean their appearance within, at most, 18 months of the next general election. Could they end up costing taxpayers/citizens £300 or more once all the hidden costs are factored into the equation - very probably, which is the point the LSE were making all along.

The real lesson to be learned from this week’s revelations about the costs of the NHS system, lessons that need to applied to our thinking on ID cards, are not simply that government IT projects go overtime and overbudget, but how the government actually conceals the real cost of such systems.

I’m no economist, but like everyone else who followed the passage of the ID cards bill (as it was then) and campaigned against it throughout, I noticed how sensitive and issue price was, even amongst the many who didn’t - and probably still don’t - understand the full rage of issues that ID cards and the NIR raise for every citizen/taxpayer - and one thing I think we do need is for someone who is an economist and who understands how government finance works, to go back over the LSE’s figures, bring them up to date and then extrapolate the full costs of the system not in terms of an ID card will cost x amount but in terms of if ID cards are actually issued at the govenrment’s set price then the hidden costs in tax, council tax, cuts in services, bank charges, etc, etc, will be… giving a breakdown of approximately how these hidden costs will apply.