Who guards the guards?
Libertarian rhetoric often invokes civil liberties as the sine qua non of civilised society, but does sound and fury about scrapping ID cards and databases merely create obstacles to a potential goldseam of progressive government?
In the outline of the Lib-Con (or, if you prefer, Con-Dem) agreement released today, for example, is a sketch of a magnificent-sounding “Great Repeal Bill” on civil liberties. It promises to draw back New Labour’s horrid “illiberal hand of the state, creeping further into our lives” (the words of Cameron in a letter to voters), in the following way:
The scrapping of the ID card scheme, the National Identity register, the next generation of biometric passports and the Contact Point Database… Further regulation of CCTV… [and] a new mechanism to prevent the proliferation of unnecessary new criminal offences. (From the parties’ written agreement)
They have ample justification for their misgivings
Dr David Lester
Your contributer has not addressed what I see as the major drawback to a more widespread database state, and that is that imposing any sort of security on the data is nigh on impossible, given the number of people with access to these databases.
For example, everyone on the ContactPoint database should expect to receive notification at some stage that their details have been lost or inadvertently published.
This is not — as is sometimes suggested — entirely the fault of individuals, either users or designers; though both have often contributed to the loss of data. Instead, I suggest, it is the inevitable consequence of the tension between ease of use (and hence widespead uptake of a tool), and confidentiality.
Put simply: the easier a system is to use, the fewer security features it will have to have, and the more users it will generate. At this stage, the Law of Large Numbers cuts in, and it becomes inevitable that there is going to be a data breach. Indeed, as a good engineer and given the requisite performance data, I can even predict the mean time between data breaches!