as it should be
& the transparency that eGov is heading for, courtesy of MySociety
Sphere: Related ContentArchive for the 'E Government' Category
No, I don’t particularly trust government with my data - but then I fully expect all organisations to at some time abuse the trust I’ve placed in them.
There’s two types of problem here - errors (a polite way of saying ‘incompetence’, and ‘breaches of trust’ where data given in good faith is then used for a different purpose. In so many ways the web makes these errors & breaches of trust transparent - I’m sure these things went on in the past, but folk just didn’t know about them.
The only answer is to take responsibility for your own privacy.
The long term solution would be to have an efficient personal recourse & compensation system. At present there is no commonly agreed straightforward way to alert a company to loss or misuse of your data - and no sense of an appropriate value for compansation.
A friend who had £500+ stoln through a credit card fraud “fixed” the problem with one phone call to Lloyds TSB (well done them for dealing with it so quickly). But he’ll be without £500 for 10 days or so: what’s that worth? And for all the background fraud protection that does go on in business, nobody seems to be asking why the data was in the wild in the first place. In the particular case of financial data, chip & pin doesn’t seem to be the answer: fraud rose after its introduction. If we customers can help by changing our behaviour, then being guided on what behaviour to change would be a good start.
The Government’s reward for finding lost families data is less than the commercial rate for name & address data; appended family & financial data would cost several times more than the reward offer for a single use of the data.
One can only wish the Data Privacy Consultation well; i’ll look into it to see if I can contribute, constructively. The folk I’ve met from the Information Commissioner’s office have always been just the kind of folk you’d want in charge of your data. I hope they can spread some of their good karma & thinking to other government departments & businesses.
Sphere: Related ContentWhile needing to take time to absorb the full 68 page report, the Open Rights observation team’s findings of crashes, display errors and poor security aren’t encouraging. Perhaps the problem is that “E-voting is a ‘black box system’, where the mechanisms for recording and tabulating the vote are hidden from the voter. This makes public scrutiny impossible, and leaves statutory elections open to error and fraud.”
As a rule of thumb, open standards win out over closed systems: a ‘black box’ might look like the thing to invest in, but time & again an open, transparent approach wins out. While I’m no fan of the Government Gateway, it does work: millions submit tax returns and pay VAT through its login. It handles significant peaks in activity around tax deadlines.
And the eGU’s mission is:
“The e-Government Unit (eGU) is the largest unit in the Cabinet Office. We are responsible for
- formulating information technology (IT) strategy and policy
- developing common IT components for use across government
- promoting best practice across government
- delivering citizen-centred online services”
my highlighting
Which begs the question, if it’s good enough to handle money, why would we need a different user identification system for voting?
UK govt plans to hobble FoI, while hailing its success, because it costs too much to free some information.
The answer is not to count the administration cost more carefully, to see how many requests break the £600 allowable cost threshold: It’s to make information mre readily available without human intervention.
Some data is here:
http://www.dca.gov.uk/foi/reference/constitutionalAffairsCommittee.htm
Link: UK govt plans to hobble FoI, while hailing its success | The Register .
Sphere: Related ContentUK.gov may allow data sharing on 40 million bank accounts…
The web thrives on transparency - but not this kind of transparency!
The problem with the DTI sharing data is that no permisssion has been given: by using older accounts DTI appear to be getting around this…. but, when the DPA was introduced, business had an 18 month period of grace during which they could seek permission from customers. After that they could not use the data.
Why would the rules be any different for government?
Link: UK.gov may allow data sharing on 40 million bank accounts | The Register .
Sphere: Related ContentInnovative, (goading? 
political weblog project from Bloggerheads:
Link: The Political Weblog Project.
And with luck, in 4-5 years time there’ll be even more political blogs - maybe it’ll become the natural way to talk to & hear from your representatives.
Election Links: UK elections - DoWire.Org.
The Guardian is asking readers to write to unregistered Clark County voters, advising them on how to vote.
It’s pulled a lot of 1776 responses on Perfect World - no surprise there. How would we Brits feel if well-intended French folk advised us how to vote?
Still (as a Scot) I do sometimes wonder how English folk feel about the Scots having their own parliament, providing a disproportionate number of Cabinet & gov party mp’s, (it’s a cultural thing!) and still voting on English issues in the British parliament.
Sphere: Related ContentAh now this is neat - (java example here )
Wouldn’t it be interesting to see in the UK for our next election - much more interesting since in some consitiuencies there’s a real three-way fight - and it’s not always the same three parties.
Sphere: Related ContentMayor dispatches cops to bust blogger-critic. Loic says,
Christophe does not like the way the city mayor manages the city, spends the public money and says it on his blog, every day. He has been very successful doing that, with hundreds of inhabitants of Puteaux reading and commenting his blog everyday and many national newspapers that talked about his blog.
Christophe criticizes the city management so much that they have tried to stop him for months, the city mayor has even sent him threats over the phone that he recorded and blogged, of course.
Today, he has been stopped in the street by the Police Municipale (the local French Police) who tried to arrest him for his blogging. Fortunately for Christophe, the National Police arrived immediately as they found what was happening weird, and let him go.
Link (Thanks, Loic!) [Boing Boing]
6:35:05 PM
13 May 2004
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=7561&;mode=thread&order=0
Let’s assume for now the the upset had nothing to do with voting methods, and everything to do with voters. Which is how things should be
8:22:44 PM
06 May 2004
E-Voting Commission Gets Earful. In a tiny room packed with activists, reporters and concerned citizens, the Election Assistance Commission hears testimony from makers of e-voting machines and the people who oppose them. Michael Grebb reports from Washington, D.C. [Wired News]
I hea rthat there’s evoting going on in India right now - why is it good enough for them, & not for us?
7:55:19 PM
05 May 2004
29 February 2004
last chance for now?
Electronic Vote Faces Big Test of Its Security. Super Tuesday will be a big test for new touchscreen voting machines. But computer experts are worried about security issues. By John Schwartz. [New York Times: Technology]
8:17:35 PM Google It!
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26 February 2004
5:31:33 PM Google It!
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how others see us
from the CIA World Handbook
United Kingdom
llicit drugs:
gateway country for Latin American cocaine entering the European market; major consumer of synthetic drugs, producer of limited amounts of synthetic drugs and synthetic precursor chemicals; major consumer of Southwest Asian heroin; money-laundering center
train set
The British Secret Is Out: They’re Mad About Trains. The debate over Britain’s railways evokes deep and conflicting memories, reaching into the way Britons see the state of their nation. By Alan Cowell. [New York Times: NYT HomePage] According to this analysis, it seems that -statistically - our trains are no more or less safe now than before privitisation. So why not let things go back towards the way they were, with communities managing trains & track?
10:16:42 AM Google It!
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the really useful website
http://downingstreetsays.org is (almost) from the horse’s mouth reporting of Number 10’s twice daily press briefings. Raw, & without the Press’ filters.
10:10:11 AM Google It!
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19 February 2004
elections will never be the same again
Blogs Pump Bucks Into Campaigns. A Democratic candidate buys $2,000 of advertising on a blog and gets $80,000 in campaign donations in two weeks. Was it a fluke, or the beginning of a new campaign cash cow? By Chris Ulbrich. [Wired News]
9:21:42 AM Google It!
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18 February 2004
oh dear…
Concerns over US e-voting. Two leading US experts on e-voting say the forthcoming presidential vote could be more chaotic than the last. [BBC News | Technology | UK Edition]… this isn’t really c21st progress, is it?
and it’s not here in California or here in Eire either.
3:37:42 PM Google It!
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12 February 2004
is London going open source?
Er… MS UK sponsors open source deployment workshop. Satan sponsors pope? MS UK sponsors own P45s? [The Register]
Now that’s bold: sponsoring the opposition when your product is known to be under scrutiny.
These microsoft guys deserve to succeed with cohones like that.
6:17:08 PM Google It!
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if the USA’s e democracy is in first gear, what gear is the UK in?
It’s very rare for me to quote so much from elsewhere - so this must be important!
The UK’s probably in a high gear - but low ratio. (4×4 or HGV analogy: the guys who build roads move as fast as they can - but it’s a heck of a lot slower than the traffic on the finished road. We’re going as fast as we can, but on low, slow, steep, sticky roads. The tarmac is right up ahead.)
I envy the USA’s primaries - it’s giving them a change to rehearse the ‘real’ election that comes later this year. We’re not getting this degree of activity or thought over our Local or European elections in May/June. If we did, the next general election (Spring ‘05?) would make much more use of the techniques being learned in the Primaries.
Doc Searls wrote:
Are we still parked?.
Anybody who drives a stick shift knows the hardest part is first gear; because you’re trying to change a body at rest to a body in motion. In the rest of the forward gears, you’re just managing motion.
This comes to mind reading Micah’s reflections on the Digital Democracy Teach-In this morning.
For all the intense discussion going on online and in the hallways about what the Dean campaign did or didn’t do right, and on how social software tools can empower people, I’m amazed by how little interaction this community seems to have with people who actually know something about social movements, political organizing and power analysis. Perhaps that’s a reflection of how new to politics so many of the people here seem to be, and that’s ok. After all, DeanforAmerica (my shorthand for the decision to try to run an "open-source"-style campaign, as opposed to Howard Dean the candidate for President) clearly inspired many people both in and outside of the hacking community and the A-list blogging community to get excited about personal political participation, and hopefully that will be a lasting thing.
But people here talk like all that’s needed is better tools, and then people will pick them up and take back their country from the powers-that-be. There’s almost no sense of how hard organizing actually is, or why.
He also says,
I have a clue
Wondering what will happen next with the movement-in-formation that we’ve seen in and around the Dean campaign? One answer is to watch this url: www.ChangeForAmerica.com/blog.
His point: we’re going to need a lot more than blogs and tools. We’ll need to be organized.
Bonus link: Gary Turner’s "Dotgov" Bubble Burst.
[The Doc Searls Weblog]
6:12:44 PM Google It!
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11 February 2004
an interesting experiment in democracy
Munich Open Source Plows Ahead. A German city’s plan to switch to open-source applications has encountered some bumps in the road, but supporters say it will all work out. By Michelle Delio. [Wired News]
& let’s hope others follow & share the burden
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