When IT Meets Politics

Next week will see the annual Get Safe On-line campaign and also the Internet Governance Forum in Rio de Janeiro - at which the need to improve security will be a major thread. Last week the government response to the report of the House of Lords select committee enquiry on Personal Internet Safety was published. The doctrine of Ministerial Infallibily means that no department can publicly accept in full the recommendations of a committee that it did not appoint. The wording of the response is, however, such that I would expect all the main recommendations to have been adopted before the next General Election - provided they have the necessary support and commitment from industry: users as well as suppliers.

Yesterday the Cabinet Office Mnister, Gillian Merron MP presided over the launch of the annual Get Safe On-line security awareness campaign. The GSOL website now includes material on business, as well as consumer protection and every customer-facing website should have a hot-link. And if you think the material needs improving, join up and help improve it.

Those at the launch event heard the usual barrage of statistics, this time from a survey of 2000 adults conducted by ICM in October. Three hit home.

- 88% of end users (and 99% of SMEs) now have some form of Internet Security software,
- 73% believe some-one else should have prime responsbility for their on-line security, usually those who want them to transact on-line (i.e. only 27% beleive they themselves should have prime responsbility)
- 36% will not bank on-line (and 21% will not even shop on-line).

Yesterday the European Commission published its plans for a Single European Telecommunications Market . Meanwhile the Internet faced a "Bretton Woods Moment" .

The Bretton Woods Conference, which created the world systems for commercial and financial management was even less well reported in the world press in July 1944 than the
Internet Governance Forum on Rio de Janeiro that is happening this week. But the consequences of the IGF meeting are likely to be at least as profound.

"Who do you trust? The Government, Marmite, Michael Fish .. Tesco .. ? So begins Matthew Gwyther, in a Management Today editorial on corporate trust. Debate over on-line trust is even more surreal.

Much will be written about the loss of a couple of CDs of personal data by HMRC. But it is those organisations which track their data and report such losses that are publicly crucified. Those that keep quiet and cover up...

The petition on the No 10 calling for urgent action on an NHTCU replacement has been signed by two of the House of Lords Committee on Personal Internet Safety, many leading lights of the ICT world and not a few journalists

I have grown more than a little tired of listening to the ICT industry lecturing HMG on how to use its products and services to deliver joined-up services. Talk of the pot calling the kettle black.

The growing flood of data leak stories means that few, if any, large UK public sector ICT programmes will be progressed until political confidence is rebuilt. That is a major challenge for an industry that has lost touch with reality

Just before Christmas the Secretaries for Culture and Business, James Purnell and John Hutton, announced a ThinkTank to look at convergence. In parallel we are due to implement the AVMS Directive, which wrecks the economics.

From puberty to senility we are urged to put intimate details on-line via services like Bebo, MySpace, Facebook, Linked-In and Friends Re-United to be trawled by friends, predators, on-line marketeers, anti-piracy lawyers and information aggregators.

This evening the Number 10 Website had 8,245 petitions, on all sorts of subject from the serious to the frivolous. That on e-Crime has now climbed out of the noise. It may have only 348 signatures: but what quality!

The failure of half the bandwidth to the Middle East and India reminds us just how far the theoretical resilience of the Internet is undermined by the vulnerability of the physical communications networks over which it runs.

The speach for which the Archbishop of Canterbury has been attacked goes to the heart of legal and cultural issues that have to be addressed if our globalised, multi-jursidictional, multi- cultural, global information society is to survive, let alone flourish.

Today is "Internet Safety Day" - it also sees the launch of the "Information Security Awareness Forum" - the UK ICT professional bodies coming together to present common and compatible messages to employers and consumers

Across the UK we can see unholy alliances of data protection and security consultants, technology salesmen and regulatory lawyers bureaucrats queuing up to "help" Sir Humphrey "protect" our privacy.

"Whitehall gives ISPs piracy deadline" was the Financial Times summary headline for the UK Government's attempt to move the creative industries "from the margins to the mainstream of economic and policy thinking"

On July 4th 2008 the frogmen of the Global Privacy Alliance cut TATnn and Helvetica, removing 80% of currently operational Internet capacity between the United States and Europe. Simultaneously they struck PCn and PACnn, with similar effect on trans-Pacific capability ...

The news that Yahoo is to move its European Headquarters from London to Geneva, following the location of Google's European Engineering headquarters in Zurich (as opposed to London or Cambridge), confirms the fears I have long expressed over the impact of what is now the Audio-Visual Media Services Directive.

The authors of the House of Lords Select Committee report on Personal Internet Safety are seeking comment on the Government Response with a view to doing a follow up exercise. The Earl of Erroll, explains why, in this “guest blog”.

It takes a child psychologist to navigate the politics of Whitehall and the Internet and produce, on time, a meaty report whose recommendations will be almost impossible to ignore - despite some painful stings - although I would prefer to call them "therapeutic accupuncture"

I have just received an e-mail from "The Excellent Network" on "10 Thinks you didn't know last week" inviting me to click for actions in the coming week. If arrived just after a reference to another data breach at US supermarket chain; I decided not to trust it. I also concluded that my wife was not irrational when she declined to trust the security of our local supermarket.

I have agreed to chair the session on "Ethical aspects related to the use of government on-line services" at the European Commission workshop on "Ethics and e-Inclusion" in early May. In parallel I am mapping "issues and players" for the new UK Internet Governance Forum. As with climate change it looks as though we are walking backwards into a most uncertain future.

How ethical is it to try to persuade the socially-excluded and digitally naive to go on-line when you are not going to provide them with easy to use and secure access or keep the data they enter secure from predators, fraudsters or those who would use it to enforce the "honour" of the family, clan, school, gang or other community?

Most government on-line systems are inaccessible to most of those of those they are most intended to serve - was my personla summary of the of the introductory discussions at the EU workshop on Ethics and e-Inclusion that I attended on Monday. The consequences are not only unethical, they are indefensible by almost any measure other than technophilia.

Over 20% of the population of the world and over 60% of that of the UK population now use the Internet to do business, learn or play. The proportion of criminals who use it to identify and exploit victims is at least similar.  So who is policing it - everyone or no-one?

During one of the plenary sessions at the "Parliament and the Interent Conference" a contributor from the floor said that "Information promiscuity" was a natural reaction to the unholy combination of the surveillance society and data incontinence (losses of personal and other data). That set me thinking.

The Internet Watch Foundation recently placed Wikipedia on its blacklist after a complaint that an article was carrying an image that was illegal under UK law. It rescinded the ban after a wave of complaints from the Internet community. The clash was sad but inevitable. The result is almost certainly a pyrrhic victory.

Were you good little boys and girls in 2008?

Are you entering the worst recession since  .... (pick your own date) with loyal customers and reserve funds in a bank/currency that has not yet collapsed? 

If not, Santa has a copy of Voltaire's Candide for you. 

Andrew Yeomans, who occasionally posts comments to this blog, sent me some very thoughtful comments in response to my entry on the proposals in the Digital Britain Interim Report for a Rights Agency. He believes it will be difficult to avoid, with the amount of well-funded vested interest in exploiting copyright.

HMG has just launched a consultation to extend the remit of Ofcom to promote "efficient investment in infrastructure". The six week timescale is determined by the need to legislate before the next government reviews the very existance of Ofcom. But can we afford a two year wait for a proper review of the UK communications infrastructure, given the stress tests it will face in 2012 if not before? And can we afford to leave that review to Ofcom? 

Those involved in the pre-legislative scrutiny of the Communications Act 2003 which created Ofcom were well aware of the need to subsequently review implementation and perfomance. There were various ideas as to how to achieve this: including a joint committee of both Houses. None came to pass.