Anthony Barnett (London, OK): A new hero has emerged blinking into the light. Professor Ross Anderson took part in the discussion on Newsnight about the discs fiasco. Could the systems be made safe? No, he explained. As he and others had been saying repeatedly, if you merge databases into a huge single system designed to serve large numbers of users then many people will have access to an increasingly valuable resource. This cannot be secure. The government must surely now take this on board and reverse the creation of a database state.
This is the non-paranoid reason to stop what the government is doing. By allowing nearly 800 quangos and local governments access to our phone records, by placing vast quantities of identity information onto national databases they are exposing us not protecting us. The Prime Minister claimed the opposite in his recent speech on liberty. He said, please note my italics:
And whatever views people have in the debate we are currently engaged in about the management of identity for entry into our country and in other respects, I believe we need a wider debate - right across the public and private sectors - about the right form of independent oversight and parliamentary scrutiny and safeguards.
So notwithstanding the continuing debate about identity cards, it is right that the Information Commissioner - independent of Government - should continue to have, on behalf of the public, oversight of how Government collects, hold and uses data... And it is the British way to insist that we do all we can to protect individual citizens and their rights. So we must always ensure that there is - as we have legislated on ID cards - proper accountability to Parliament...
No Gordon, this will not do and it cannot work. We do not want post-database 'oversight' or 'scrutiny' by a pliant Commissioner of a system that is inherently unsound as Professor Anderson has so succinctly explained. As I quoted recently (hat tip to Guy Herbert of No2ID) from the government's own paper on the National Identity Management Scheme, their officials are saying, "As the Scheme grows, we will continue to engage with the private sector. The identity checking services that you will be able to use to prove your identity will grow in scale... We expect the private sector to play a key role by driving innovation in the use of these services."
What kind of language and thinking is this? What leads to phrases like "the management of identity"? Is this British language, if I may strike a multinational patriotic note? Will Gordon say to Sarah across the breakfast table that he is really worried about young John's "identity management'? Of course not. This is corporate speak: words without life or breath whose only true home is a power point projection. It is shameful that they should be found in a speech on liberty.
Good post about this on Spyblog, a funny one by Iain Dale, while sticks and carrots speculates they could use it as an excuse justify ID cards!
