Ministry of Defence tells contractors not to answer certain UK census questions over security fears The Ministry of Defence has ordered its contractors not to answer certain questions on the UK's once-in-a-decade census – despite threats of £1,000 fines being handed to people who don't complete the national survey. "It's a crime to ignore the census. You can be prosecuted if you don't complete the census," says GOV.UK's …
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My (handwritten) passport from the 1970s has "Government Service" in the relevant field. It probably covered everyone from the nice lady at the Post Office who sold you a stamp to David Callan. I think my favourite classification at the time was "Gentleman", which meant access to sufficient wealth to not need "employment".
>Please contact the MMB
>the Ministry of Murder and Bombs?
Milk Marketing Board = the shadowy organization behind all conspiracy
I mean how much marketing does milk need? It tastes of milk, you drink it !
Or if you are sensible you leave it alone until it's been turned into cheese in the proper manner.
In a comedy spy thriller starring Dirk Bogarde and Richard Morley. Morley is the 'spymaster' figure. After recruiting Bogarde's character he receives a call from Bogarde on his direct line. Asked how he got it, Bogarde says "I noticed it when we met in your office". The line is duly transferred to the Milk Marketing Board.
There isn't one for MDF that I'm aware of.
The Potato Marketing Board (at least that's what it said on the door) in Cowley used to be Intel's HQ many year's ago. I used to be a member of the Amateur Computer Club and they occasionally held meetings there.
>Milk Marketing Board = the shadowy organization behind all conspiracy
Exactly! They only want you to think it was disbanded about 20 years ago. Really, it's still there, and I can now reveal that..... What? Oh hang on, I think there's someone at the door. Just a.[,d csdc;jdnkm............
Called my dad on his mobile and his PA answered which was odd. He was apparently in a meeting with a Government bloke and his phone had to stay outside. When he got home and I asked he said he and a few others at work had had a visit from someone from the Government. I queried why somebody from HMG had visited them. He said wasn't able to disclose anything from the meeting to anyone else, sorry about that.
I obviously knew what the firm did, I knew from him and the press about a major building project they were involved with. Putting 2 & 2 together I got four and asked if it was related to X. He didn't say anything but he was lucky he never played poker as you could see the shock in his eyes. After the colour had returned to his face I pointed out how I knew what I'd just told him. I showed him a couple of sites on the internet with info.
He told me - although unconvincingly - that what I'd just said was pure speculation. He couldn't talk to me about anything (i.e. confirm or deny) to do with it. Given I might breach the Official Secrets Act I'm not going to say anything more about it. It was amusing that he (and other senior people) had to be read into something that I already knew about. He did tell me years later that he was told he'd been vetted & cleared. If he hadn't he wouldn't have been allowed into the meeting.
"BAE/Senior Engineer or Capita/Hell Desk Slave don't give too much away"
Employer: Government
Job Duties: Clerk, Data analysis, EE, ME, HMFIC
It would be silly to think that somebody is going to write down "Satellite image interpretation, MI6" or "Nuclear bomb engineer". It would be better if the MoD just instructed people to be very general in answering the questions which is all the government really needs to be getting on with the census. Somehow I doubt that it's of importance to know that a delivery driver has a milk float run or works at the local take-away. Either one might get binned as "Transportation, Goods".
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[...] "sex" is seemingly a binary choice ... ?
That binary assumption did surprise me. Over the last 50 years there has been enough research on chromosomes and epigenetics to show that a person's sex can be incorrectly determined from physical characteristics. There have been publicised cases where the wrong call was made at birth in assigning male/female as the sex.
Intersex is a term for such phenotypes.
There is even "bilateral gynandromorphic" - where the two halves of the body develop separately as male and female viz a testicle on one side - an ovary on the other. The human embryo cells roll together to make a tube. Hence various seams down the front of your body. The two edges can be affected differently by sex determining hormones before they join.
No, Tom. Complex life on Earth, whether plant or animal, is sexually dimorphic. In the animal kingdom, there are only two sexes - the one that follies the developmental path to produce sessile gametes (female), and the one that follows the developmental path to produce motile gametes (male). This applies to humans. There is
value in knowing about the number of people who consider themselves trans, but that is an overlay on the male/female data.
There is a species of lizard with Z and W 'sex' chromosomes. The inverted commas are because sex in many reptiles depends on the temperature of incubation of the eggs. Above a certain temperature ZZ lizard are female, below that temperature ZZ lizards are male and ZW lizards are female. It is therefore possible to have a population of all ZZ lizards half of which are male and the other half female.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16331408/
"The bearded dragon, Pogona vitticeps (Agamidae: Reptilia) is an agamid lizard endemic to Australia.
...
Here we used molecular cytogenetic and differential banding techniques to reveal sex chromosomes in this species. Comparative genomic hybridization (CGH), GTG- and C-banding identified a highly heterochromatic microchromosome specific to females, demonstrating female heterogamety (ZZ/ZW) in this species. "
Isn't life wonderful?
I didn't refer to chromosomes or other equivalent, because I know about the ZW sex determination in birds, etc. I was very specific - those that follow the developmental path to produce either motile or sessile gametes.
Using intersex as an argument is flawed - it is a developmental disorder that says nothing about dimorphism.
Regarding fungi - I don't really count them as complex organisms, perhaps wrongly.
In some cases of developmental disorders, sex can be nominated based on functional reproductive probability if that can be determined rather than external genitalia. Sometimes a person has to mature before that can be assessed. A fraction of those people will have no reproductive possibilities (natural). People with these abnormalities are way off of the curve and a census isn't improved by making the distinction. It might be relevant in medical and public health studies to determine if there is an environmental cause.
People that choose a gender identification in their adult years that is different from their sex is a data set for mental health researchers. It's a bit too weird for a biological male to identify as a lesbian female. A coupling like that could produce offspring if the male didn't have surgery/take drugs. It's seems contrary to nature's normal way of having a species propagate. But hey, my background is engineering with some medical/biology, not headology.
> It's frowned upon to boast about holding it because that marks you out as a person of interest to hostile foreign countries.
Back when I had security clearance it was classified to the level of the classification that you held that classification. In fact the existence of a classification of level X was itself classified to level X, so logically you could never be aware of the existence of a security clearance unless you held that security clearance.
Pointed this out when my next employer was looking for staff who had security clearance to work on a defence project. We decided on a "if I asked you if you held clearance level X would you be able to confirm that" ? question
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As judges have a nasty habit of seeing through clever logic, we had organisations including Apple publishing Warrant Canaries, stating at regular intervals that no such subpoenas had been received.
Apple no longer state that.
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"It's the same logic as "if I asked you if you had been served a national security letter - would you legally be able to deny it?""
Which all means that when you sign up for that manure, you damn yourself from the onset. If you say, you go to jail. If you don't say, you go to jail.
Best not to get involved with governments bar voting people out of office.
Only if you asked just the one question.
Would you be able to confirm any of the following security clearances:
AWA - BRT - FSS - TSP - ERT.... have a reasonable list of acronyms and only one be valid.
Anyone knowing of higher levels which you might have accidentally included would of course be aware of the lower level as well.
Any one used to dealing with historic census returns learns to treat the answers with a degree of caution. It's not unusual to find a couple in their 50s or 60s with daughters aged about 30 and 2. I also recall one family who lived on the canals who were always, it seems, born wherever it was they were moored at the time of the census. And the 1841 census has a 5 year old Queen Caroline.
Responses on other official documentation can be equally misleading. I recently came across one man who declared himself as "Gentleman" on his marriage register but three years later was a gamekeeper.
It's quite a fun past time to find oddities in the census data.
For the older censuses it is important to remember that up until the early 20th Century (so all the publicly available censuses) a significant fraction of the population couldn't read or write, so the the census was filled in for them by a census taker, who may not have written down exactly what they were told.
My wife has a hobby of genealogy, and she's actually quite good at it. One of the things she has to cope with is different spellings of unusual (and some not so unusual) names, when one census taker had a different guess at how the name was spelt from the last or following census.
Trying to track people who move from one place to another when their names may not have been recorded correctly can be a real problem.
You also have people who switch their first names around at different times, give known names rather than their christened names, or deliberately want to disappear and try to give different information in different places. It's all a bit of a game, really, and one that a lot of amateur genealogists (and some so-called professionals) get wrong, and then post incorrect information onto Ancestory and FindMyPast, poisoning the record!
My wife does not count a link until she can find at least two separate pieces of evidence linking people together.
> give known names rather than their christened names.... give different information in different places
My first company was sorting this out for N. Ireland - back in the time of the euphemisms.
When people (or at least 50% of the people) used a dozen different spellings of a Gaelic name on any official form.
I've heard quite a lot of genealogists complain about the "professional" genealogists from the US who when going through their client's USAian's UK genealogy always seem to somehow relate the family to royalty or the landed gentry somewhere. It makes a complete mess of whole family trees and requires so much double checking of the records.
> Let's face 99.999% of people in the US are of Irish decent on St. Patrick's day
I can remember visiting the USA, and being introduced to a friend of a friend, who proudly waved a certificate at me which "proved" they were 1/16th Irish (or somesuch).
They seemed completely oblivious to the fact that this same certificate indicated that they were also around 8/16th German. I didn't have the heart to ask why this didn't take precedence.
Personally, I'm originally from Manchester, and have seem to have a fairly hefty dose of Teutonic/middle-European genes. Which does seem to make life easier when wandering the continent, though it does occasionally lead to people asking me questions in a language I don't recognise.
(In one particular case, the owner of an "international" store up in Bradford actually followed me around the shop and tried to talk to me in three or four languages before giving up and falling back to English. I'd just gone in to see what wierd and wonderful beers they had...
> UK genealogy always seem to somehow relate the family to royalty or the landed gentry somewhere
Not too hard, Charlemagne FTW
"I've heard quite a lot of genealogists complain about the "professional" genealogists from the US who when going through their client's USAian's UK genealogy always seem to somehow relate the family to royalty"
Psychics do the same thing with past life tales. They'd never get any business if they told people that their ancestors were pigherds or scullery maids. Men will be related to Genghis Kahn and women, Joan of Ark. Monarchy with living descendants is harder to get away with as there are too many records. A famous historical person with and ended known lineage can be hard to check up on.
I've traced back to a couple of clans and I think both paths are rancid Yak butter. I need to do the work myself. I get the impression that companies that hit dead ends make stuff up so people don't dispute the credit card charges. They'd have to already have the data to hand over a lineage for thirty quid. It's a ton of work as I've found out. I really should have talked more with grandad when I was a lad.
In the not too distant days before UK formal adoption processes - it was not unusual for people to give an excess offspring to people who needed a heir. That meant the sudden appearance of a child with a new name in one household - and a disappearance from the old household.
Our family tree had at least one documented informal transfer like that.
I've got one like that. A childless couple took in the husband's nephew. In a society of small farms and no welfare society except the parish poor relief or, later, the workhouse, a family depended on the next generation to take over the load. Sometimes it was a middle or younger son. The deal seems to have been that that son would be the one who inherited the farm; older son(s) would marry and be set up with their own farm. I've even seen a will which mentioned an indenture which seemed likely to have been a formal agreement on those lines. It can show up as a late marriage. That happened with my 5x great-grandfather's family where one son remained unmarried until the father died (and then married very soon after) although even younger sons had married. Sometimes it went wrong. Same 5x ggfather's only younger brother was clearly the intended as the successor but died a few months before 6x ggfather. The vicar's Latin inscription in the burial register showed that even he was upset by the turn of events.
The family arrangement was often that the eldest son inherited the farm and produced the next generation. The youngest often had the choice of joining the armed forces or a religious order. Often the other sons were expected to keep the family business running - and to give the eldest's progeny a good start.
It has been mooted that gay younger brothers were advantageous to a family line. Their own genes were propagated to some extent through ensuring the survival of their nephews and nieces.
> oddities in the census data
My favourite was one I found when browsing the returns for a parish in Cornwall for the 1861 census, taken on the 7th of April. At first I thought I had found an early instance of civil disobedience, because the form clearly had the words "Census Crapp" on it. Closer inspection, though, showed that the entry was the last one for the family of John and Emma Crapp: "Tom Census Crapp; Son; Born this day; Cornwall, Ladock". So Tom Crapp was never going to forget that he was born on Census Day!
In several languages the first-born boy is named either "son" or the number for "one". Many years ago it was a common English humorous expression to refer to "number one son" and "number two son". As it was often used by a Chinese detective character of that era - it suggests that it is possibly a way Chinese boys can be named?
To be honest, the census people should keep all the information in your census secret, and the MoD shouldn't trust them to do that, so their advice is totally right. Now where does that leave us if we don't work for the MoD... Same. The census people should keep everything in your census secret, and you shouldn't trust them. As one politician said: "If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear" with the reply "I thought the rule for the census was if you _have_ something to hide you have nothing to fear".
Of course if the government were at all competent they would be trying to destroy trust in the census.
The conservative chaps over here replaced the census with a "government statistical survey" which determined that there were no poor people living in any city or any rural areas and so social funding could be cut.
>>if the government were at all competent they would be trying to destroy trust in the census.
They are going one better - Abolishing it altogether. This may well be the last official Census ever taken. They think they can get the data by trawling through other data sources. Which of course leaves the data open to manipulation or plain ignoring.
Living abroad I'd forgotten about the census...... I have to wonder why they bother. Other governments are able to make just as much of a screw up of planning without a census so I'm not sure I can see the point.
I remember reading that the Ministry for Transport had "moved on" from predict and provide for road planning, which always seemed to me to be a bit of an excuse for having failed to either correctly predict or provide.
Wasn't it the Labour government (they're all as bad as one another) who closed schools despite knowing that in a few years there'd be higher numbers again?
There is a real discussion about whether this will be the last census in the UK. The alternative that has been mooted is to buy the data from the likes of Google and Facebook, and combine that with information that the government already holds, on the belief that all people will have to have at least some internet (or whatever follows the Internet) presence in 2031.
I guess that this will depend on whether the cost of buying the data becomes less than the cost of running the census, and whether the intrusive snooping of these internet companies will generate accurate enough information. Don't know whether they will have to deviate from GDPR in order to do it, though.
The advantage is that the census is broadly fair and honest.
Would you trust the home office to provide data about the number of undocumented immigrants, needing social services / schools / hospitals in a given area - to the same government that would have to fund it ?
Would you trust the home office to provide data about the number of undocumented immigrants, needing social services / schools / hospitals in a given area - to the same government that would have to fund it ?
The simple answer is no.
However, I also do not think that the Census can provide sensibly accurate information in this regard.
Peter Gathercole: "The alternative that has been mooted is to buy the data from the likes of Google and Facebook, and combine that with information that the government already holds, on the belief that all people will have to have at least some internet (or whatever follows the Internet) presence in 2031."
Well, I do not now have, and never have had a Facebook account, and the Gmail account in my name was set up by fraudsters who used it (amongst other fraudulent bank accounts ) to defraud certain financial institutions of some of my savings and pension plans*. So I'm to entirely sure the proposal above would be a particularly good idea.
I know that there are homeless people with mobile phones, but there are some without. In years past there were dedicated Census recorders who went out finding people sleeping rough and helping them to complete the census forms. (Genuinely brave souls, I expect.). So there will always be a requirement for some direct contact, if a proper job is to be done.
*They got about £80k, but as they only attacked the companies, I seem to have got it all back, eventually, although it was very stressful at the time (and still is a bit TBH). If you are missing some important post (Pension company statements, bank statements, other financial documents, remember to check with all your financial services providers that they have not seen any attempts to close your accounts, and to be aware of possible fraud. You can set up extra security on telephone banking too, but I digress... And in other financial news HMG has disbanded the dedicated Joint Fraud Taskforce, which coordinated the banks, police and financial regulators (I money article on Wednesday 17th March).
I was not supporting using data gleaned from internet companies. There are several members of my extended family who have very close to zero footprint on the Internet, only having very minimal interaction via me when no other option was available (for example, the planning application and objection process run by my local council that has no alternative paper system any more, which I think is a bit age discriminatory, and possibly against the law).
But in ten years time, that could be very different.
I actually think that the census is a good way of getting a different slant on the population data, and as my wife is a amateur genealogist who uses old census data on a regular basis, I think it should be maintained.
But I don't make government policy, and you have to admit that running a census must cost quite a bit, even if you get 60% of it filled in by the people directly. I must track down where I read the story about it being the last census. I think it may have been a discussion piece on the BBC news website.
Off Topic:"the idea that "they're all as bad as one another" was palpable rubbish"
Do you seriously think that any of the useless shower that are likely to form a Westminster government in the event of an election are any better than any other!
They're all a bunch of fucking politicians, more concerned with covering their own arses and filling their own pockets than governing the country!
David Cameron has recently been trying to influence Rishi Sunak to support a now failed financial institution by sending text messages to his personal phone.
It seems the man who inherited £2million tax free from his father (courtesy of it being in an offshore account) and felt that Jimmy Carr's tax affairs were fair game for discussion in the House of Commons is still 'in touch' with the will of the people, perhaps.
The "predict and provide is dead" line triggers me as well. AFAIK it's not just DoT - it's across the board in the public service delivery functions. And yes, it's a cop-out from an onus to deliver. Prediction and *perfect* provision is a red herring, and there is no excuse for abandoning " predict and do the most possible to provide".
a list X company at the last census (as I am now, different company though).
I don't remember any such guidance then and it seems silly really. Putting my main day to day tasks as 'engineering' is hardly giving much away.
The 'postcode only' guidance is particularly hilarious given the size of most locations (unless I put my home in there which might be viable as I am working from home the vast majority of the time anyway - depending on which maps are used my postcode will put you either 1/4 mile west or 1/2 mile east of my actual location).
Paranoia; we've heard of it.
I think work location is a bit of a joke at the moment, anyway. My work location is in Hampshire, but I think I've spent less that 20 days there in the last year, and I live in South West England.
Not sure what I should put down, actually, especially when the exact location is not supposed to be broadcast for similar reasons to the OP.
Looks like it:
Ascension Island, Tristan da Cunha and Saint Helena all issue their own postage stamps, which provide a significant income. The three territories each have their own Royal Mail postal code:
Ascension Island: ASCN 1ZZ
Saint Helena: STHL 1ZZ
Tristan da Cunha: TDCU 1ZZ
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Helena,_Ascension_and_Tristan_da_Cunha
"If you put down 'engineering' and give your work postcode as RG7 4PR"
I popped it into Google, quite funny really as it appears the street view car accidently went into their car park and was swiftly spotted and given a talking to by security staff before being sent on their way. Can you imagine trying to drive into a place like that with a whopping great camera strapped on your roof?
Most of the census this year is online. We are all supposed to fill it in on Sunday.
Question 1: How much of Sunday will the census website be unavailable "due to high volumes of traffic"?
Question 2: If by some miracle the true answer to question 1 is "none", could the ONS share how they managed it?
Question 3 (for advanced commenters only): Assuming the answer to question 1 is "most of it", how would you have done it instead?
In answer to your question 3.
Having become totally increasingly irritated and confused trying to navigate any government website I opted for a paper census form. I applied over a week ago and it has still not arrived so whether I will be able to fill it in on Sunday is a moot point.
One way or the other it looks as if the powers that be have managed to stop a lot of people fulfilling their legal obligation and submit their return on time.
This morning it was working well. It clearly wasn't put together by the usual crowd. The only annoying thing was that with the longer pages trying to navigate down a list of radio buttons to the Save and Continue button by down arrows flipped the selection down to the next box.
I did most of it on Saturday. No problems or delays. Submitted it on Sunday with again no problems.
I have in the last year or so also done Inheritance Tax and Probate online - both of which were quite straightforward - as much as I thought they could be for potentially complex issues. (There was one problem where an invisible value might have been persisted after another value was changed)
Given how bad some web-sites can be I was pleasantly surprised how straightforward these gov.uk sites were. Presumably gov.uk have decent budgets for this sort of work.....
I'm not sure what people have been looking at to find the "usual crowd" badly implemented but these all seemed quite reasonable.
You don't have to complete it on Sunday. You may complete it any time after receiving it as long as the information that you provide will be the same as you expect it to be on Sunday. I completed mine last week... pretty damn sure that I won't be finding some additional person to stay overnight on Sunday.
Yep filled mine in this afternoon whilst waiting for a system to deploy - took about 5 minutes.
With the employment questions I just put down self employed (it contractor) working for my own limited company as a company director (it sounds better than everything myself).
Regarding the postcode question where I am it identifies 1 of 10 houses on the same street but that is what you get for being urban....
Well, for starters I'd wonder who put my information into whatever holiday or private letting app they were using. People really should check things properly before just turning up.
Also, as soon as Mary started to claim "immaculate conception" I'd suggest that it would be much better for her relationship with Joseph that either she slept around a bit, or the both of them really need to go to a sex therapist or use working contraceptive if they are unaware how babies happen. Kids these days.... just why aren't the schools and parents teaching sex education? It's not like my days where we looked forward to having the afternoon off and got to stare at a really bad VHS copy of some info-documentary on a screen that was a long way away and on some form of wheeled trolley...
...and anyway, those institution the likes of TravelLodge which are currently open are rarely above 60% occupancy even on a good day so they need to get their story straight when looking for free lodgings!
Congratulations, have a few beers --->>
But don't cause a disturbance of the peace*, or get carted off to hospital, otherwise the police/hospital will have to add you to their census, and you will need to amend yours.
*In 100 years time, when your descendents research your family tree, they will find out you were a bit of a jailbird. Don't do it!
Q1 - as already mentioned, you don't have to fill it in on Sunday. I'm sure/hoping they realised the population of the country may all want to do it at the same time. They've had some years to think about this after all!
Q2 - Just check Linkedin next week, I'm sure there will be plenty claiming to have built it, not like they need to hang around now, plus the hardware vendors supplying the kit, assuming it all goes ok. I haven't seen any website crash stories yet, so assuming someone is pedalling at the correct speed.
Q3. - how would I have done it, raffle ticket to determine my place in a queue (we are British at the end of the day) and a cup of tea and wait my turn, watching out for pushers in :-)
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Do things the right and proper way.
Name: Yeshua bar Miriam
Place of birth: Bethlehem
Place of Residence: Nazareth
Occupation: Building Contractor
Religion: Jewish
Employer: Nazareth City Council
Dependents: 12
Legal Status: Son of God
British Citizen: no
British Resident: no
Do I think that this census is a waste of time?: yes
That should have interesting results…
Just think how many more people would complete it if they offered 10 lucky census respondents a prize of £1000 each.
Which would save a lot of money pursuing non-responders afterwards.
Although thinking about it, there would probably be lots of fines for people claiming that 600 people live in their house.
When I got my nuclear clearance I was told I was not allowed to travel to certain countries as "they knew who had that clearance". I wonder where they found that information and whether census information is more or less secure than knowing who has restricted access clearance.
Alan
PS -for any Chinese spies, I don't have it any more
When I held an SC clearance for work, our headquarters security team were at pains to remind me that I had to notify them of trips overseas. When I asked if this was me asking for permission or just letting them know, they smiled and said that provided North Korea didn't suddenly become a popular holiday destination I'd have little to be concerned about.
One of the security team was ex-SAS and we used to chat about some of the 'exciting' things he'd done in the past while waiting for meetings to get going. Made his rather plain LinkedIn profile look a lot more interesting...
I was on a bid for the previous Census (2011). I was told that after the forms had been processed everything was destroyed. Whatever was in the envelope, would be completely and utterly destroyed. I did wonder what would happen if they received, say, human remains (legal obligation to report to the Police if they could be less than 35 years old), valuable items, or just important documentation - like someone's will. There is a mediocre detective novel in there somewhere.
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Hah... rant: when my wife applied for UK citizenship, at a time when it was unclear what would be happening in the Mess Formerly Known As Brexit, we were less than amused to discover that part of the necessary proof required the applicant to ask the government for tax and employment records... to tell a different bit of the government.
"ask the government for tax and employment records... to tell a different bit of the government."
Nothings changed. Some of our staff need multiple security clearances for multiple contracts and although they all ask almost identical questions, each is run, administered and operated commercial organisations who, for security reasons, are not allowed to talk to each other. Some things really should not be put out to tender. Or at least not separate tenders from different parts of government.
Gov have access to:
Online acitivity via ISP.
Location via mobile phone provider.
Spending, via card provider (visa, Amex etc)
Savings: via Bank
Dependents, job, income and pension... : via DWP (mostly targetting employers >employee)
Education: via DPE
also records of incarceration, hospital stays, arrests, complaints to councils, registered voters, lotalty cards, motor vehicles insurance, NHS prescriptions, gps, DVLA.... literally EVERYTHING.
to pay yet another bunch of cash for stats is ridiculous.
But this is government we're talking about. Collecting up all those records for just one person is probably beyond them. Doing it for the entire population is just ridiculous. (In other words, they aren't paying for the information. They are paying for you to collect it up for them.)
here... move along
Considering I spent time working for <redacted dept.> in HM defence ministry, the advice given to us at the time was
Job title : Civil servant
Job location: Minstry of defence
And THAT was it.. you put nothing about what you actually do, or where you actually work.
And you filled the rest of the form honestly.
I like it that neither the Security Service nor the Secret Intelligence Service has published their advice to their employees. And I've not seen the advice that Police forces give to their CHIS's* either.
After all 'Describe what you do: 'I spy on international drug smugglers and people traffickers for UK's Special Branch, and only commit serious criminal offences if these have been specifically approved in advance by my handler" might just raise a few eyebrows...
*CHIS = Covert Human Intelligence Source.
"urges them not to give full and complete answers to questions 41-42, 44, and 50."
Thank you for that tidbit of information. With some common sense, I can produce a list of all those folks that you do not want me to know about.
Why would the government publicly release those guidelines?
https://www.ons.gov.uk/help/cookies
We use Google Analytics and Hotjar software to collect anonymised information about how you use ons.gov.uk. We do this to help make sure the site is meeting the needs of its users and to help us make improvements to the site.
We do not allow Google or Hotjar to use or share the data about how you use this site.
Google Analytics stores information about:
how you got to the site
the pages you visit and how long you spend on them
what you click on while you are visiting
Hotjar stores information about:
whether you have participated in a Hotjar survey
the way in which you interact with a page
what you click on while you are visiting the site
That means Google and Hotjar know the answers you give. Information that they do not need to know, and it is none of ONS' business to know if I have participated in a Hotjar survey.
We do not allow Google or Hotjar to use or share the data about how you use this site.
It still means they have given Google and Hotjar access to your answers, if not directly, then by inference
A thousand up-votes for that.
And why, pray, were there any Google scripts on the site for NoScript to block?
When was the last time Google didn't do something just because they had been asked not to?
Tomorrow's news: Google apologises for accidentally siphoning up the entire census, "it was a rogue engineer wot dun it".
A few weeks ago the UK Office of National Statistics (ONS) sent me a letter asking me to use the supplied login code to fill in an online survey form. Several of the questions were the same as the census - including full name and possibly address. The latter would have been correlated with their letter address and the unique login code anyway.
After I had filled it in - a different letter arrived reminding me to do the form. A little while later another reminder letter arrived. At which point I logged in again - and the web page told me my form had been completed ok. Very strange why they didn't check my filled in form status before sending two reminders.
"After I had filled it in - a different letter arrived reminding me to do the form."
They use the same software as the cable TV company. After I pay my bill, it takes at least one and sometimes two reminder cycles before they notice I've paid. I have a suspicion this is why my rates keep going up. They are spending piles of money to send me notices and call my phone, always saying "if you've already sent your payment, please disregard this notice". If I'm late, I'll get 4-5 calls per day to tell me "the status of your account has changed". I assigned a silent ringtone and often click the box to send calls straight to VM.
I'm tempted to sign up for a mobile number where I don't set up the VM, don't turn the phone on with a use plan that only costs me ten or twenty a year if I don't use it. I will give me an emergency back up phone that I can keep loaded with my address book. I can also use it to contact any of the companies that tend to call too often as they'll have the number on file. Hmmmmmmm.
"As such I think the first thing that needs to be done is to find out who the staff are who have decided that the process isn't secure and to sack them."
Think the steps need to be;
Complete a GDPR DPIA for this Census project.
Complete an InfoSec review of the platforms and tech for this Census project.
Ensure all staff have completed their "Data Handling" courses
Ensure all data is encrypted in transit and at rest.
Ensure that the data is accessed, with full audit trails, once it has been submitted - along with repercussions for those who are accessing people's accounts for the hell of it. (e.g. looking up celebrities etc)
I was surprised to see that some of the fields were freeform text, like the "what do you do all day?" one IIRC.
That will make for interesting analysis. Do they have a squad of warm bodies who are going to interpret our vague ramblings and work out that I do the same as some of my colleagues who will have described it differently?
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