The government should scrap two key IT projects and recast
them in a way that fits a truly digital Britain, says Microsoft's
former national technology officer for the UK.
Jerry Fishenden, who last week left Microsoft after 12 years,
said the
national ID cards scheme and the
Interception Modernisation Programme, otherwise known as the
government's Big Brother database, reflected an out-of-date
understanding of what the digital world was truly about.
Fishenden said the privacy and security of personal data on the
web was the crucial issue facing society as more and more
information is stored in digital format.
It was vital that people can authenticate themselves to service
providers, but also that people could confirm that the service
provider was who they said they were, he said.
But he said Whitehall operates in discrete departments or
"silos", so "nothing joins up".
Fishenden, a member of the London School of Economics thinktank,
Policy Engagement Network, said even David Blunkett, the
original sponsor of the present ID card scheme, has lost faith in
it, and that the Conservatives had promised to scrap it as their
first act on entering government.
Recent work showed how individuals and enterprises could adopt
"minimal disclosure" techniques to provide secure positive
authentication of their respective online identities, he said.
He said that Microsoft bought
U-Prove technology last
year, which carried out research in this area, and showed it to the
ID card project team, apparently without result.
Fishenden said government plans to modernise its wire-tapping
capacity for the internet showed a lack of understanding of the
technology. It was easy to disguise a coded message as a normal
e-mail simply by pre-agreeing what the message meant, he said.
In addition, spy or criminal IT experts could use tools like
OpenVPN to ensure that IP
addresses could be disguised and used only once, leaving no pattern
for law enforcement officials to find, he said.
"
Microsoft's paper on laws of identity >>".