New Plan In UK For "Big Brother" Database

POPE Mad Mitch writes "The BBC is reporting that Tony Blair is going to unveil plans on Monday to build a single database to pull together and share every piece of personal data from all government departments. The claimed justification is to improve public services. The opposition party and the Information Commission have both condemned the plan as another step towards a 'Big Brother' society. Sharing information in this way is currently prohibited by the 'over-zealous' data protection legislation. An attempt to build a similar database was a key part of the, now severely delayed, ID card scheme."

Re:Good luck...

[setirw]

American intelligence agencies are now looking to Wiki [nytimes.com] solutions for sharing intelligence, and it's far superior to any previous databases. Although it hasn't existed long enough to draw final conclusions, many say it works well. Perhaps UK intelligence agencies will follow America's lead and do the same?

Does this ring a bell?

[jamstar7]

OK, so they'll organise it just like in 'Brazil', then charge you for collecting your data?

Scale & Risk

[Henry 2.0]

It seems perverse that anyone would consider this a remotely reasonable plan.

The article doesn't look at the technical side of doing this at all, but its pretty obvious that todo what they are talking about doing here, it means restructuring the data for hundreds if not thousands of applications that are in use now.

Why is the UK government so gung-ho on these 'MegaIT Projects'?

Lets hope this dosen't get traction, but as with most things 'New Labour', I can only imagine this is signed and sealed now that the public are being made aware

25 years early: Britrockers Judas Priest

[Anonymous Coward]

Up here in space, I'm looking down on you,
My lasers trace, everything you do,
You think you've private lives, think nothing of the kind
There is no true escape, I'm watching all the time!

CHORUS:
I'm made of metal, my circuits gleam
I am perpetual, I keep the country clean.
I'm elected, electric spy,
I'm protected, electric eye.

Always in focus, you can't feel my stare,
I zoom into you, you dont know I'm there.
I take a pride in probing, all your secret moves,
My tearless retina takes, pictures that can prove.

Electric eye (in the sky)
Feel my stare (always there)
There's nothing you can do about it, develop and expose,
I feed upon your every thought, and so my power grows!

I'm made of metal, my circuits gleam
I am perpetual, I keep the country clean.
I'm elected, electric spy,
I'm protected, electric eye.
I'm Elected - Protected - Detective - Electric - Eye.

- Judas Priest, Electric Eye, 1982.

25 years ago, this was cheesy hair-metal dystopic science fiction.

Sucks to be us.

Mega IT projects suck

[RichPowers]

The UK already has a history of over budget information-sharing projects. In related news, the FBI also wasted $100 million on the fiasco that is the Virtual Case File database. If intel agencies are really interested in sharing data, maybe they should follow the CIA's example of using secure Wikis?

In any event, I agree with the other commentators that this is a pork project more than anything.

Re:European Digital Privacy Directive?

[BasilBrush]

What in particular in the European Digital Privacy Directive do you imagine prevents sharing data between government departments?

Cost of Information

[herwin]

When I was working on similar systems in America, we estimated (in our internal risk analyses) that information in a local police database accessible to the average user could be acquired by unauthorised outside users for about $1000. The corresponding figure for a national police agency database was about $10,000. If the information was more valuable than that, additional safeguards were needed. The UK Government proposal is basically flying in the face of that.

Re:UK, US, doesn't matter really

[Anonymous Coward]

Tell one government department about a move or a death, and they all know.

That's already true. Several years ago in an attempt to reduce the junk mail I was getting, I wrote "Deceased" on one of the pieces of junk mail and put it back into my mailbox. I stopped getting any mail at all shortly thereafter, until I cleared it up with the post office. Even so, a few weeks later a letter from Social Security (IIRC) appeared in my mailbox with information on death benefits or some such thing. It turned out to be a major hassle to convince everyone that rumours of my death were highly exaggerated. ;-)

Re:Scale & Risk

[Alioth]

No. Blair's government uses a 'dutch auction' style of legislation to pass odious stuff.

What they do is propose something outrageously distateful, which gets parliament in uproar - while all the time they only planned something merely somewhat distateful. Parliament gets uppity, votes on it, and gets the legislation watered down to the 'somewhat distasteful' level, thinking they've won a victory. Basically, the government proposes the most draconian legislation possible and lets parliament scale it back to something they will accept, which is probably much more draconian than if they had just tried to pass what they wanted to pass in the first place.

Re:Scale & Risk

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Yes, they've done this repeatedly, most obviously with things like detention without trial, where the 90 days originally requested were scaled back to "only" several times the historical limit and the limit used in pretty much every other first world nation.

It's really odd how this works. It's as if everyone is so used to the government (with its unjustified absolute majority in Parliament) forcing through any legislation they want, no matter how unpopular, that the people making the decisions now consider the default to be the bad alternative proposed by the government and not status quo, and judge any revised proposals in that light. I'm not sure whether this is a more damning indictment of the calibre of people who make decisions in our country, or of the electoral system that gives an absolute majority to a group that gained the support of only just over 1/5 of the electorate.