Today I received my electoral registration form. As usual, no changes - so very easy.

However, I did not one logical fallacy on the form.

We are supposed to register everyone at the address on the 15th October - but in order to save the costs of a reminder message, they would like people to do this by the 15th September. This is a physical impossibility if one is striving for accuracy!

As no changes are expected, I took advantage of the ‘as far as I am aware’ clause and registered by phone (you dial a number, and key an ID and pin code, printed on the form).

So, the Government has managed to lose a USB stick containing the details of tens of thousands of criminals.

We should not focus on the fact that this is the data of criminals - that will be of little concern to many - but instead look at what’s happened here in terms of data protection. Once again it has been possible to copy records en masse, save them to removable media unencrypted and walk out with them.

This time it was a USB key, but in the past it has been CD Roms. Discs have been lost containing the data of 4 million people, of 25 million people and there have been many other cases.

This does not breed confidence in the future security of the ID database - a massive bonanza for identity theft if it got into the wrong hands.

It simply should not be possible to export large amounts of data without a high clearance…. and such clearance should only be given to people who have been drilled until their ears bleed about safeguarding that data. In particular, if on usb, it is attached to a lanyard and doesn’t leave your neck until it is wiped. Even then, the data should not be on any removable media unless encrypted (and this should be automatic to prevent the human-error factor).

More to the point, if the data has to be moved from A to B, what is the problem with an encrypted ssh tunnel from one system straight to the other? What’s wrong with ‘dropping’ fields which are not needed at the receiving end before sending?

These data losses indicate a massive systemic failure in the design of government systems, a carelessness with the data with which they’re entrusted, and a laissez-faire attitude at the highest levels. Just as the loss of the child benefit discs was not the fault one one low-level civil servant, this should not be pinned on the unfortunate who dropped the usb stick (though they should know better). This should be viewed as a failure of design - people should not have been able to do this, even if they were trying to be malicious.

It’s just another case which demonstrates the flaws behind the concept of an ID card database, which if ever compromised would be the biggest boon to identity theft ever seen.

“When Gordon Brown called on the British Library to stage an exhibition about Britishness he perhaps envisaged a patriotic celebration of the national identity. ” begins the story in The Telegraph.

It continues to tell of the new exhibition called ‘Taking Liberties‘ - which is a very British response to such a request from a Prime Minister seeking a publicity tool. It’s an exhibition looking at Civil Liberties in the UK, and how they’ve been slowly but steadily eroded since 1997.

David Davis, the former shadow Home Secretary who recently stepped down from the Parliament to force a by election on the issue of civil liberties, said: “It is an astonishingly good idea but is clearly a snub to the Prime Minister and must be accurately embarrassing for him. Gordon Brown likes to talk about Britishness a lot without understanding that liberty is at the core of Britishness. It is our institutional DNA. Our history and tradition of freedom run longer and deeper than any other country.”

(snip)

Iconic objects such as the Magna Carta, the death certificate of Charles I and Cromwell’s Oath of Loyalty from 1857 will be on display among less well known items some of which have never been on display before.

The exhibition will open on the 31st October and end on the 1st March 2009. Be careful what you ask for, you might just get it.

The British Library is at St. Pancras - very convenient for tube and rail connections.

Number 10 has modified their site to use wordpress, and it does look good.

At first.

Unfortunately, they’re not using the full power of wordpress - I note in particular that comments are switched off for everything at the same time that they’re talking about ‘dialogue’.

What I find particularly amusing is that the first, most obvious link on their homepage, which promises us "Number10TV" and the ability to "watch the PM’s introductory film." gives this result:

I think the phrase they need is ‘Whoops’.

Epic Fail. Says it all really.

Original heads-up from ocaoimh.ie

When starting from scratch (as opposed to migrating a site over from another URL or software system), there is really little excuse for broken links in wordpress, especially when you’re paying developers to manage it for you. Hundreds of thousands of people, if not millions, manage it quite comfortably…. and there is especially no excuse for a broken link on something that takes up half the screen on the homepage - the first thing people see.

Update: The 404 has been fixed.

‘The Nasty Party’ used to be a term applied to the Tories. This is most emphatically no longer the case.

Putting aside historical issues for a moment and looking at recent weeks:

Kathz wrote about an issue (mirror) which I noted, but did not post about until now. That is of Labour playing nasty in Crewe.

The Labour Party is putting out an official leaflet which carries a picture of the Conservative candidate and the question, “Do you oppose making foreign nationals carry an ID card?”

Maybe the Conservative party policy isn’t clear on the issue. But Labour (government) policy isn’t just about foreign (non-EEC, by the way) nationals. Soon we shall all have to carry ID cards. The government is preparing to collect our biometric details so that it can store them on a database. The ID scheme targeting foreign nationals is simply starting with a soft target - people who don’t have votes.

The Labour leaflet in Crewe hasn’t been published to open up a debate on ID cards. The government has made it very clear that the introduction of ID cards is not open to debate. This leaflet is about race. It’s about fuelling fear and race hatred to hold a vulnerable seat in a parliamentary by-election. The implication of the leaflet is that foreigners are dangerous and only the Labour Party will keep them under surveillance.

Spreading suspicion is dangerous. Mistrust is often a two-way process.

(Another source)

In other news, Labour want to institute a database recording the internet activity and phone calls of everyone in the country ‘just in case’. (source)

Jonathan Bamford, the assistant Information Commissioner, said: “This would give us serious concerns and may well be a step too far. We are not aware of any justification for the State to hold every UK citizen’s phone and internet records. We have real doubts that such a measure can be justified, or is proportionate or desirable. We have warned before that we are sleepwalking into a surveillance society. Holding large collections of data is always risky - the more data that is collected and stored, the bigger the problem when the data is lost, traded or stolen.

Let us all recall that Government doesn’t have a good track record with large databases, with multiple leaks over the past year - including the one leak of the records of some 25million families.

As an interesting aside, Guido notices that the number of stress related sick days at the treasury has dramatically reduced since Brown became PM.