Posts by Guy Herbert

Is the UK.gov IT gravy train heading for the buffers?

@ Optymystic

"No, it is not so and obviously. A policy is not a contract, changing a policy is not a justification for voiding a contract;"

Absolutely. Though it could be motivation for finding grounds to do so.

"... passing a law to make a contract illegal is likely itself to be contrary to law and before you ask, yes, there are hierarchies of laws and rules about what is legal, there are constraints on the powers of parliaments, there are structures for challenge to law makers on, natural law, human rights, constitutionality etc."

Utter drivel. Parliament is supreme. It has several times passed retrospective legislation (notably the Act of 2001 retrospectively legalising arbitrary retention of DNA samples by police), and is not bound by natural law, human rights, or anything but its own malleable procedures. Roughly half of all legislation is interefering in freedom of contract in some way - and that includes ALL of employment law - so your final paragraph is bollocks, too.

MI5 head calls for comms data access

@ Nigel Callaghan - you are mistaken

You are probably thinking of free countries. No judges are involved in the UK in interception - that's on the Home Secretary's warrant - or surveillance (bugging, comms data etc) - that's self-authorised by whatever public authority is exercising the power. As long as the latter are following the code of practice the Surveillance Commissioner is happy, he never enquires into the merits of individual cases.

@ AC 10:39 (and his followers)...

Nope: Surveillance product can already be used in court. No change is being proposed to the rule about interception product, which cannot even be mentioned or implied to exist in court. That's because they don't want to permit discovery of interception product. Comms data and specific bugging can be much more readily ringfenced.

Reg readers in the dark over extreme porn

MoJ hopeless too

Typically poisonous Home Office drafting which the MoJ is trying quite hard to misunderstand.

It is very clearly NOT a criterion for the new s63 offence that the material be obscene within the definition of the Obscene Publications Act 1959.

The increase in the tarriff in s71 is for a specified offence under the older act, and nothing to do with the s63 offence.

The word 'obscene' *does* appear in s63 but there is nothing there or elsewhere to indicate it has a specialised meaning, and the words that it appears with ("...grossly offensive, disgusting or otherwise of an obscene character...") relate to the subjective reaction of an unidentified and uncharacterised person, and do not contain any of the highly specialised meaning of 'obscene' as "tending to deprave or corrupt" used for prosecutions under the Obscene Publications Act.

Furthermore s63 *does* hang on a new definition, that of 'pornographic' which has not been attempted before in English Law. Whether something is 'pornographic' hinges on making assumptions about the intention of the *maker* of the image to provoke sexual arousal. There's no fundamental requirement that material be of a sexual nature or intended to be, for it to be 'obscene' in the specialised sense, so there is no particular reason to find a relationship between the two offences, other save that they both issue from the prurient puritans at the Home Office.

Jacqui Smith denies any knowledge of police search

Contempt of parliament?

"... but the police are still holding at least some of that hardware today. "

If it is true, then by failing to observe that order of the Speaker, the police have committed a serious contempt.

http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld/ldcomp/ldctso43.htm

Lays out something of what the Sargeant at Arms ought to have known.

Teen-bothering sonic device now does grownups too

Why not use the Environmental Protection Act?

Or for that matter complain directly to police of assault occaisioning actual bodily harm. This is a loud noise calculated to cause discomfort, and if it causes discomfort it is probably damaging hearing.

Police vet live music, DJs for 'terror risk'

And what the hell business is it of councils either?

Democratic control my foot. This means the control of the bureaucrats in licensing departments. No election involved.

Even if it were, what makes a gig on private property any business at all of the elected authorities, unless it is a direct nuisance to someone else?

Preventive policing? Don't even think about it

Section 44 searches

"Over the last few years, that limit has been seriously eroded. Section 44 of the Terrorism Act 2000 allows arbitrary stop and search..."

Oh no it doesn't. It may be being used like that, but the legal power is "only for the purpose of searching for articles of a kind which could be used in connection with terrorism" (s45). That is a pretty broad category of articles, but the officer arguably must have that purpose in mind and use of s44 powers in pursuit of other policing objectives is pretty obviously unlawful.

Government Gateway login details found in pub car park

superb timing

The deadline for the submission of Self-Assessment Tax Returns on paper was 31st Oct, having been brought forward this year without huge fanfare. Between now and 31st January only a return submitted online will avoid a £100 penalty.

This might mean a windfall for HMRC of tens of millions.

Interpol proposes world face-recognition database

And of course it doesn't work

Has the robocop concerned not noticed that no-one has ever got automatic "facial recognition" to work even remotely adequately. You're lucky if it automatically recognises a face as a face, never mind whose it is, half the time.

'Extreme' extreme porn law puts Scots out of kilter

@ Sarah Bee

Indeed. Which is why the new and exciting offences surrounding of voyeurism is framed thus are dependent on the conduct being "for the purpose of obtaining sexual gratification." If the News of the World photographs you in the nude through a long lens, that's all right because it is only in order to sell newspapers. What the Home Office wants to punish is anyone having sexual pleasure in an unapproved manner: the experience of any notional "victim" is largely irrelevant.

Compare the "Spanner" case where great lengths were gone to to punish a group of men for doing mildly injurious things to one another for fun, and even greater lengths and expense to sustain the convictions against an appeal.

Labour minister says 14 year olds should get ID cards

I'll volunteer to unpick the scheme.

Just because ministers seem to find it hard to understand doesn't mean it is. The tricky bit is forcing the Home Office to shred and burn all the working papers so they can't simply resurrect the vampire in the next generation.

What ought to be considered while we're doing that should be buldozing Marsham Street and sowing the site with salt.

UK.gov IDs identity vendors

Shortlist of 5

... for five principal contracts. Though it is a slightly different set of 5 from the one they had at Christmas. And it is totally obscure what they are supposed to be doing, but the price of the contracts is known already. Isn't competitive procurement a marvel?

PA Consulting begs for mercy after data loss axing

Perhaps they have an edge...

If they have to sack people willy nilly as a result of losing such a big contract, the next data-stick they might lose could be the archive of 3 years' restricted and secret (apparently there was some, and DV-cleared consultants) correspondence with the Home Office over the ID scheme.

ID scheme plans 50,000 cards by April

Self-justifying (-defeating?) stats

"2.5m fingerprint enrolments have generated more than 19,000 matches..." Wow - that's nearly 0.8%. And the false match rate for fingerprinting on the templates they have chosen is?

"So far, this process has brought to notice more than 3,100 applications lodged using a different identity."

At a cost of £133M (tho' does that include all the overseas visa stuff which has been shoved into the FCO budget, and all the staff costs?), plainly a bargain at £43,000 each.

Researcher gives Elvis and bin Laden fake e-passports

re: Home office has noticed this by the way

When NO2ID and the Daily Mail 'intercepted' a new e-passport (with the holder's permission), in order to demonstrate it cound be skimmed without opening the envelope it comes in, we inadvertently also demonstrated how much better the courier service is than the Post Office for security. Not noticeably. The package was handed at the door to the reporter who just said, "I'm his girlfriend".

It appears that some if not all of the couriers are all self-employed contractors, as well, so there's a certain amount of distance in the relationship between the Home Office and whoever handles live passports.

Thales wins first UK ID card contract

@ Anomalous Cowherd, Rotacyclic et al.

"£18 million to build a database that is going to hold 66 million records?"

No; not to build it. That's someone else's contract: one of the Big 5's. Though this being the IPS/Home Office, all is unnecessarily obscure and mysterious in order to discourage TV journalists from taking an interest. It appears Thales are going to be paid to write the missing basic spec for the system.

Oh yes, we're more than 4 years in and there's still no actual spec. And they claim to know that its it is all going to cost slightly less than the number they thought of in 2005.

It's official: The Home Office is listening

"Objective need"....

Might be what as "necessary in the public interest", which sounds OK until you read the Identity Cards Act 2006, s1(4):

"For the purposes of this Act something is necessary in the public interest if, and only if, it is—

"(a) in the interests of national security;

"(b) for the purposes of the prevention or detection of crime;

"(c) for the purposes of the enforcement of immigration controls;

"(d) for the purposes of the enforcement of prohibitions on unauthorised working or employment; or

"(e) for the purpose of securing the efficient and effective provision of public services."

I have a prize for anyone who can come up with anything a government department might want to do that isn't therefore "necessary in the public interest" - gotta love that "only if".

Home Office to order fingerprinting of air passengers

Not quite that bad

"Oh, except Blair gave us the Parliament Act and now there's nothing to stop Brown pushing through anything he likes, regardless of what the Lords say..."

I think you'll find it was Asquith and Attlee who gave us the Parliament Acts. The Parliament Acts cannot be used to extend the life of a parliament, so to do what you suggest would require using the Parliament Acts to amend the Parliament Acts to remove that exception, or the Lords' veto altogether. There probably isn't enough time or unthinking lobby fodder left in this parliament to do that. The present Government has worked steadily at tilting the balance of the constitution for 11 years, and it has attempted to make slavish loyalty the principal virtue of MPs, but there really isn't a majority on the Labour benches who would back an obvious attempt at a coup.

...

The point to notice is that this is the *Home Office* trying to take advantage of HMG's incredible weakness and suggestibility to ram through ever more authoritarian measures before someone gets a grip.

Jeremy Clarkson tilts at windmills

This argument ought to have been settled...

... or at least clarified, by someone who is actually capable of understading the basic maths involved.

I refer you to the late Chris Lightfoot, passim, but especially:

http://ex-parrot.com/~chris/wwwitter/20040106-dont_take_a_curve_at_50_per_we_hate_to_lose__an_argument.html

Criminal record checks: More often wrong than right

Not even nearly what it seems

@ Magnus

"So, some sex offenders are foiled but at least the same number of innocent people are labelled as deviants for life and can't help out with their children's after school activities etc."

Nope. Some "unsuitable people" are foiled. "Unsuitable" being in the eye of a would be employer, volunteer administrator, professional body or whatever, all of which are under pressure (not least from insurers and risk averse regulators) to be better-safe-than-sorry. You could, and in many cases would, be "unsuitable", therefore, if you've been officially suspected or accused (not the same thing) of something not strictly relevant, or if you have an irrelevant criminal conviction, or even if you have a minor criminal conviction that prior to the Glorious Revolution of Caringness would have been deemed spent, and you wouldn't have had to reveal to anyone.

Result: Numerous highly skilled people lucky if they can find work as a hod-carrier (supermarket checkout involving contact with children, old-people and money).

Example:

http://education.guardian.co.uk/egweekly/story/0,,2288192,00.html

The war on photographers - you're all al Qaeda suspects now

So why no prosecution?

Of the officers concerned for obtaining property by deception and/or threatening behaviour, that is. The most worrying thing about all this is not the stupidity of the panic - there are plenty of stupid panics - but the tacit assumption that any spod in an official uniform may exercise whatever powers his imagination grants him with impunity.

Post Office aims to collect ID card fingerprints?

Note provenance of story

This comes via the Guardian's political editor, not in the business pages. It doesn't quote any Post Office executives.

It is also economically moronic. Pouring uncounted billions (you don't really think the Home Office has the capacity either to count or to care about the budget, do you?) into the ID scheme, in order to give a rounded-up £200m a year in notional turnover to the Post Office, is a spectacularly bad bargain for the taxpayer compared with a direct subsidy.

It is also not as good as a direct subsidy. The 'endangered' post offices wouldn't get enough extra business to save them this way, because it would be spread across the country in proportion to population, maybe with a weighting towards areas of higher economic activity, given it'll be forced in with passports and CRB certificates. Them as 'as gits.

Conclusion: this is spin out of government, still looking desperately for excuses that will make the public love ID. "It'll save Post Offices," looks very desperate indeed.

God makes you stupid, researchers claim

Decline in pirates...

It might have done, you know: Fewer pirates > more shipping > increase in global wealth and health through trade and spread of technology > more population. Pity for the theory that piracy is on the rise.

That said, even though a correlation between religiosity and stupidity sounds plausible, the research as presented sounds awfully feeble. Why pick on FRSs and not, say, Bishops - or history dons - as a group representative of intelligence?

A quarter of UK adults to go on child protection database

BTW it is not just children

It is anyone who works with "vulnerable groups" - that includes the elderly and the disabled. Want to hire a girl to do aunt Edna's shopping next Wednesday when you are in Torremolinos? Get her an enhanced CRB check first, or get your own criminal record. (And what a record! Evading a protective check! You think you are going to be allowed back in the oncology department again, even if they are a bit short of your speciality?)

Great excuse to get the ID scheme up and running, isn't it?

<blockquote>As we move towards wider participation in the scheme, IPS will also offer a tailored service for those who work in positions of trust, who choose to have an identity card, and who wish to use that to fast-track checks on their status as part of their job.

Working with the Criminal Records Bureau, a trial conducted by IPS shows that the time taken to perform a criminal records check could be cut from 4 weeks to as little as 4 days, with extremely high levels of user satisfaction.</blockquote> - Jacqui Smith, 6 March 2008

Europe agrees on exchange of criminal records

How does that work then?

"This is essential in order to provide adequate responses to crime <em>but also to prevent new crimes from being committed.</em>"

Huh?

NHS IT: what went wrong, what will go wrong

@ Shabble - Got it in one!

"My suspicion (going by observations of how NuLabour works) is that Blair/Brown want to create a system that effectively micromanages the whole of the NHS. A single recording structure that tracks everything from drugs prescription costs to heart transplant failure rates would be very useful to a control-freakish central government."

Indeed, which is why defining standards and leaving the records themselves in the hands of clinicians or (shock horror, something the DoH has fought against since Lloyd George) patients, just won't do.

Look up the Secondary Uses Service

http://www.connectingforhealth.nhs.uk/systemsandservices/sus

- a transparent misnomer, since it immediately comes clear once you read it that 'Secondary Use' is the primary bureaucratic motivator for the whole damn thing.

Tories would have to compensate ID vendors

Worth noting...

That the cost of these contracts is just for preparatory work. (Creative accounting is being used to pretend some of it would have to be done anyway, not as part of the ID scheme.) It's not for a scheme that would actually run or do anything; and nor is the full multi-billion now-stretching-to-15-year-long programme good for more than creating inconvenience to the public and a single reference point for fraudsters, kidnappers, et al. The Home Office justs wants the scheme for its own aggrandisment and has absolutely refused to quantify the costs to other branches of government, which are expected to make their own 'business cases'. Using it for anything at all, integrating it with any other systems, would be extra.

We can therefore reconcile ourselves to losing the deposit (even though compensationless cancellation by statute does seem attractive) because by doing so we don't have to pay the full cost of buying the subsiding and dry-rot-riddled house.

Government announces shortlist for ID card contracts

@AC: Petrol cans

"Did you know that you can only fill up a maximum of 2 petrol cans at a petrol station and that each can can only be a maximum of 10 litres."

It's a piece of bureaucratic control-freakery left over from the 1973 OPEC crisis, when massive powers to control the distribution of fuel were assumed, not a lot to do with terrorism at all. But doubtless that is the present excuse for retaining them.

Goes to show that stopping ideas such as ID cards is easier than scrapping them. There is no ingenuity like that of officials in retaining and elaborating old regulations, and repurposing them when challenged.

UK.gov plans central database for all your communications

Re: Idiots

"For fucks sake, how will you tie URL's to a person - Mr A goes to cybercafe A and goes to A.com then he goes to cybercafe B and goes to B.com - how the fuck do you tie them together."

Oh, the Home Office has thought of that: get Mr A to present his ID card and get the cybercaff to log is against his session.

This isn't a technological schema, it is a bureaucratic concept: every part of government that wants information on the people will have to ask the Home Office for it - for reasons of "efficiency". Bingo! The Home Office is the master department, and everyone in Whitehall will have to recognise that <strike>building a ....</strike> <em>Working together to protect the public</em> is the most important mission statement of them all.

Online ID checks to limit teen booze and knife purchases

Scaredy-cat mountain.

Isn't the "real problem" at the bottom of this not evasion of the law but the construction of the law by populist kegislation on the basis of moral panics, Ms <strike>Moral's</strike> Moran's bill merely being the capstone to a great pile of legislation to 'protect' the kidiwinks against things, most of which aren't very dangerous if they are dangerous at all.

You don't have to be much over 30 to remember when every Boy Scout wore a sheath-knife as part of his uniform. It was about as threatening as his woggle.

Even the drinking-age is really just a hopped-up version of one step in 19th century temperance movement's prohibitionist strategy. But constantly pressured to rise *now*, because official policy is to currently to be scared of everything and make damn sure everyone else is too.

Fedora 9 - an OS that even the Linux challenged can love

...that even the Linux challenged can love?

Since the both article and the comments were almost entirely incomprehensible, I'm afraid you've all just made me even more frightened of trying to run linux.

Retailers risk libel nightmare over 'no-work' database

@ Glyn Roberts

"With a police background check any returned results would surely be confirmation of guilt of a crime, or at the least issues that have been reported to the 'proper' authorities and therefore much more reliable."

Er, nope. The whole point of the poisonous enhanced-disclosure CRB check is to turn up police records short of conviction (that is, unsubstantiated allegations which might easily be mistaken or malicious), or offences that would previously have been regarded as spent, and hold them against individuals.

Just because the information has been given to the Witchfinder General in his august and expert authority does not make it any more reliable than if you heard it from Mrs Miggins - he probably did too.

BT's 'illegal' 2007 Phorm trial profiled tens of thousands

Ipso facto

"BT has claimed that it has no way of telling which of its customers it Phorm profiled" -

Isn't that in itself potentially illegal, because it has no way of fulfilling a data-subject access request?

HMRC blows £1.4m on two-word slogan

Par for the course

@ Mark

Which is precisely the function of spokesmen for all government agencies: change the subject, while implying that this is the same as answering the question. It's a skill.

Brits split on ID cards

Would love to know why, indeed

I have a few plausible guesses to hand, but I would love to know _why_ the people who think it is a good idea do so.

Yes, they are largely uninformed, though that's scarcely surprising seeing as even the ministers promoting the scheme can only do so reading off an IPS script. But they must have some positive reason even if it is only "because Joan Ryan says so and she seems like an authority figure I can surrender my own judgment to."

Why, for probably atypical example, does AC @ 13:11 think, "Of course it's a good idea..." ? "Of course" implies s/he thinks his/her reasoning is obvious, but it is profoundly obscure to yours truly.

[Still awaiting a NO2ID icon for Reg comments.]

Is it or isn't it? Brown keeps bottling the ID card question

Nothing new here, move along please...

Brown's just retailing precisely the same <strike>lies</strike> misleading presentations that ministers have all through the sorry affair, only with considerably less verbal dexterity than Clarke, Blunkett, Blair... "A vote in Parliament" - under whips - big deal. "Not compulsory" but to be made a requirement to live anything like a normal life. You might progressively have to give up the opportunity to travel, drive, have a bank account, get education or medical treatment, become a security guard or hospital porter, get any kind of non-casual work, instruct a lawyer, in order to avoid registration, but that will of course be your choice. No one will arrest you for failing to apply for an ID card, though one imagines you might be compulsorily registered when you are banged up for vagrancy offences. (That's how French ID cards started: gypsy control.)

And the emphasis on feelthy foreigners isn't even new. They've been pressing this button repeatedly for over a year, as the only one that has any real pull with the public.

Can we have a NO2ID icon please?

UK pushes token security line on child database

@ think of the children

Not until they are 31 in some cases deemed to have diminished capacity or increased vulnerability. It is just that everyone will be on it till they are 18. By which time their notional identity will be nationally managed, or something.

Google: Kill all the patent trolls

It is almost entirely a US problem

"Sadly , there is a cure for patent trolls , but it requires the creation of a central world wide patent registrar..."

Rot. Patent trolls are a relative rarity outside the US. Both the patent system and the legal system contribute. The patent system is FUBAR precisely because the Patent Office takes the attitude displayed by IBM and Apple: examination doesn't matter because the courts can sort it out - completely ignoring that the grant of a patent *creates* a privilege that didn't previously exist, and that the idea of a court under rule of law is to settle real conflicts of law or interest, not sort out the administration of factitious privileges. The US costs and damages rules compounds the problem, because it means aggressive litigants are disproportionately rewarded if they win and inadequately penalised if they lose.