The Musings of Harry

The Identity Cards Bill had its last day of report in the House of Lords yesterday. The issues discussed were generally not as critical as the issues discussed earlier — compulsion and cost — but nevertheless, some important ground was covered, and some good amendments passed.

Unfortunately, amendment 76 was not among them. The Lords failed to pass this amendment, which would have required the Secretary of State to produce regulations specifying the people and organisations to whom information on the NIR could be disclosed.

Among other things, the amendment included these requirements:

• To specify the nature of the information being disclosed;
• To ensure that the disclosure of information is proportional and necessary;
• To ensure that the information is remains accurate and secure;
• To guarantee, “as appropriate”, the rights of people about whom information is disclosed;
• To require that information is kept only for an appropriate period, and to ensure that it is deleted in compliance with the Data Protection Act.

These safeguards were important, and their failure to pass is worrying. The result of the vote was deeply surprising: it tied, with 155 for and 155 against. The rules require that a majority be in favour for an amendment to pass, so it was disageed to. I might have a look over the results of the vote and see who voted against it!

It’s not all bad news, though: some things were passed yesterday; in particular, amendments pertaining to the role of the National Identity Scheme Commissioner. The first was a technical amendment that made the commissioner an appointee of the Crown, rather than of the Secretary of State. The purpose of this amendment was to distance the role of the Commissioner from that of the Secretary of State: if the Commissioner were appointed by the Secretary of State, they would essentially be an employee of the Secretary of State, and would thus lack impartiality. This is important, because a part of the Commissioner’s role is to “review … the arrangements made by the Secretary of State …”.

The second important amendment passed was to require that the Commissioner report directly to Parliament rather than through the Secretary of State. Hopefully, this will mean that the scheme will have real parliamentary oversight, since the ability of the Secretary of State to spin the contents of the report in their favour will be limited.

Spy Blog has some interesting comment on an unmoved amendment to leave out clause 31, which is worth reading.

Third reading is on the 6th, but I’ve been reliably informed that it’s unlikey that anything much interesting will happen. The next big stage is the Bill’s return to the Commons, which could happen as early as the 13th of February — now is the time to write to your MP!

Last Wednesday during Prime Minister’s Questions, I discovered that we may have a budding Jack Thompson here in the UK (how depressing). Keith Vaz appears to be jumping on the blame-games-for-violence bandwagon following the violent murder of one of his constituents.

His question to the Prime Minister was prompted by some research conducted at the University of Missouri. In positively Goldacre-esque fasion, I feel compelled to point out that what has been reported by the media about this study does not really appear to be what the study said. As is often the case — but not always — New Scientist has a reasonably good account of the study. Of course, I say this without having read the paper — it hasn’t been published yet — but it sounds more balanced! Compare the BBC headline (“Violent games ‘affect behaviour’”), to New Scientist’s (“Violent video games alter brain’s response to violence”), and you start to see what I mean. Affecting behaviour is completely different from affecting brain response. Brain response might affect behaviour, but such a link is by no means something that can be assumed.

What the study really seems to indicate is that violent video games desensitise people to violence. This is entirely to be expected, and is no big deal. We get the same thing from comics, TV and films all the time. There’s some other stuff in there about hostility but it’s not described in any great detail — it’ll be interesting to read the paper when it arrives.

Blaming games and films for violent behaviour is a fallacy, and a fairly obvious one: post hoc. “Man X played Manhunt, then man X killed man Y, therefore Manhunt made him violent”. What is, in my opinion, far more likely, is that violent people enjoy both real and simulated violence, and are thus likely to enjoy violent games and the violent murder of others. What made them violent in the first place is a much more complicated and difficult question, which is why politicians like Vaz and Thompson tend not to bother trying to ask it.

At the end of last year, I wrote to Andy Burnham, one of the ministers responsible for bringing in ID cards. My local No2ID group (of which I am a member) had organised a debate that Burnham spoke at in advocacy of the government’s scheme. After the debate, many questions remained unanswered - predictably, we ran out of time - and so I wrote to the Home Office to get some responses to the issues we didn’t get round to covering. I recently received their response, and thought it would be good to share it with everyone!

Most of the contents of the letter I received back was pretty standard. Many of the phrases used in the letter are identical to ones used by Baroness Scotland and Lord Bassam during the Lords debates, so it’s fairly obvious that they’re all singing from the same hymn sheet. There were, however, some interesting parts.

The first is a glorious bit of meaningless technobabble:

“… access to the NIR internally will be deployed to enforce role and duty separation amongst staff and full system auditing and pro-active alert functionality will ensure all susyem events are audited.”

(Emphasis mine)

This kind of thing really indicates that the people who are designing the broad outline of the scheme are managers, and not technical experts. That, or they hoped that a bit of tech-sounding-stuff would appease people who don’t know better. In my response, I’ve asked, as politely as possible, for a fuller explanation.

Their letter also confirms some things. The bill says that failure to comply with the scheme will be punished using a ‘civil penalty’. We were unsure about the legal implications of this (I’m reliably informed that a penalty is, in principle, a criminal sanction, making a ‘civil penalty’ somewhat of a contradition in terms). It seems clear now that civil penalties are basically the same as fines, except that failure to pay will be dealt with as a debt, and thus will not lead to imprisonment. I find it very likely that the recovery of debts resulting from civil penalties will be dealt with similarly to the recovery of debts resulting from failure to pay council taxes, and the like. The logical though extreme conclusion of this line of reasoning was succinctly pointed out by a fellow No2ID campaigner: instead of taking your freedom, they’ll take your house.

There’s other stuff in the letter that could be discussed; I’ll post more later. Of course, I’m going to reply to this letter, and I’ll post even more if anything interesting comes back!

I just read over at Freedom to Tinker that the Analog Hole Bill that is being considered in the US has an interesting parallel to the National Identity Cards bill, which has just passed through the Lords.

One of the technologies implemented by the Analog Hole bill is VEIL, which you can read about here. The technology involved, which is central to the issue at hand - the bill would require that this technology be used - has been created by a private company, which will not release the specifications unless one signs an NDA and pays them $10,000. The technology used to decode VEIL signals is not covered by this agreement; I’m not sure who gets that or how. The Congress of the US is, therefore, debating whether or not to pass a costly bill which would implement technology that the public cannot read about and understand.

The similarities this has with ID cards are clear: the government will not release detailed costings because of ‘commercial confidence’, and will not (or, perhaps, cannot) reveal much technical information about the scheme. We are thus placed in a similar situation: without knowing detailed costings and specifications for the technology, our representatives cannot make an educated decision about the legislation’s merit.

Thankfully, the House of Lords has recogised this, and has demanded that the government provide these costings. For the sake of our American cousins, I hope something similar happens there!

I’ve had a few-month-long hiatus from blogging, but the bug seems to have returned. I have decided, however, not to post unless I have something interesting to say - please forgive any extended posting gaps caused by lack of creativity!

As is probably evident, I’ve also moved from Blogger to Wordpress. This is worth doing. I wish I had heeded the advice I read when I started this whole thing to not use services like Blogger - they’re not nearly as good as having everything under your control.