WRITTEN ON October 29th, 2008 BY William Heath AND STORED IN Foundation of Trust, What do we want?

Richard Thomas appears to launch himself on a courageous collision course with our own correspondent, Permanent Secretary at Large and Data-sharing Czar Sir Bonar Neville-Kingdom.

The Information Commission, famously pragmatic in his approach to data protection, makes the fundamental point that megadatabases present privacy problems, according to an Alan Travis piece in The Guardian

The proliferation of ever larger centralised databases is increasing the risk of people’s personal data being lost or abused, the government’s official privacy watchdog claims today. The warning from the information commissioner, Richard Thomas, comes as he discloses that reported data losses have soared in the past year [yeah, and table seems not to include the MoD ones]…The new figures show that the [massively underresourced] information commissioner has recently launched investigations into 30 of the most serious cases. The 277 breaches include 80 reported by the private sector, 75 within the NHS and other health bodies, 28 reported by central government, 26 by local authorities and 47 by the rest of the public sector.”It is alarming that despite high-profile data losses, the threat of enforcement action, a plethora of reports on data handling and clear information commission guidance, the flow of data breaches and sloppy information handling continues,” Thomas says in a speech today.

Hm. Sir Bonar will have a thing or two to say about that in the internal Cabinet Office newsletter I’d have thought. [Thought: perhaps Sir Bonar would make a good Information Commissioner. He's got the right attributes: understands Whitehall, safe pair of hands etc]

Travis also points out that Jacqui “Spammer” Smith fessed up yesterday to what we picked up months ago, ie they’re getting on with the evil IMP giant centralised database of all email, text, phone and web traffic despite the fact that Ministers have decided to delay the legislation needed to set it up because they can see they’re on to a Parliamentary loser.

Instead they’re doing the “phoney figleaf” consultation route. This will be based on familiar questions like

Do you think our loyal security services should be given proper up-to-date equipment to help them try to prevent terrorism and the massacre of innocents?

It will probably NOT be based on questions like

1. Are we so petrified, have we so lost our common sense, courage and phlegmatic British values that we should install a massive snooping engine so that bureaucrats have intrusive access to every aspect of everybody’s work, creative, cultural, social sexual and religious life?

2. Should we bequeathe to the future an interlocking set of mechanisms of total state control in order to reduce littering and graffiti?

3. Do we seriously think that wasting more billions of pounds on high-risk technology projects start to resolve the human and social sources of conflict in society?

As Richard Thomas, who along with Sir Ken MacDonald seems to be the only person paid from the public purse allowed to speak common sense on these issues, is quoted:

“It is time for the penny to drop. The more databases that are set up and the more information exchanged from one place to another, the greater the risk of something going wrong. The more you centralise data collection, the greater the risk of multiple records going missing or wrong decisions about real people being made.”

Well said, Friend. But the thing going wrong is far bigger than you imply.

The more “Spammer” Smuts and her cohorts are driven by fear to use this technology to control everyone rather than being content to see how it engages people and liberates our hearts and minds, the more they stoke up potential future conflict in society. That’s deeply irresponsible, it misunderstands the potential of the technology and it’s the very opposite of the legitimate function of government.

UPDATE: I relent on the use of the provocative name “Spammer” Smuts. Apparently there was one quite a nice woman called Jacqui Smith, and she’s probably in there somewhere, protected by the armed mindguards of groupthink.

Wibbi the Home Secretary had a more Churchillian level of courage, compassion and common sense? Life is not Spooks. Life is, well, the original blessing.