The House of Commons Justice Committee has today released a report into the protection of public data. The report is a good summary of the state of play and, in particular, of developments since the Chancellor announced to Parliament in November last year that HMRC had lost confidential records affecting 25 million UK citizens.

The report recommends a data breach notification law, criminal penalties for data controllers who are responsible for reckless or repeated security breaches and greater powers and resources for the Information Commissioner’s Office. Currently, the Information Commissioner receives roughly £10 million each year to conduct all of his data protection activities.

These recommendations echo those made by the House of Lords Science and Technology Committee in August 2007, recommendations that the Government rejected almost entirely. Perhaps the public outcry following the HMRC data security breach will help Government think again.

Today’s report is explicit about the real risks associated with big databases containing personal data that are open to large numbers of licensed users, and mentions the children’s database ContactPoint, as well as the planned National Identity Register. It also notes further risks associated with obligations to share data with EU member states:

“If data held by the Government is available for inspection outside the jurisdiction, then the importance of restricting the amount of data held, as well as proper policing of who had access to it, takes on even greater importance.”

On Monday next week Kieron Poynter of PricewaterhouseCoopers will publish his report into the failures that led to HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) losing 25 million confidential records about UK citizens claiming child benefit. The HMRC fiasco, and privacy debacles before and since, demonstrate a public sector culture of complete disregard for the privacy and security of individuals in the UK.

There will be a Ministerial statement about the Poynter Review in the House of Commons on Monday afternoon. If you haven’t already, please write to your MP today and ask her or him to put your concerns to policy-makers during this session. This culture of disregard for personal privacy combined with the Government’s continued belief in the aggregation and sharing of vast amounts of personal data across agencies is a privacy timebomb.

If you’re unsure how to write an effective missive to your MP, then read the ORG wiki’s handy guide. What follow are some key points and requests to put to your MP for you to choose from - click on the links for further ideas and resources.

• How does Government propose to tackle what is clearly a culture of disregard for citizens’ personal and confidential data?
• Why does Government persist in telling the “fairytale of biometrics”
• Shouldn’t Government be ashamed that it has consistently brushed aside the advice of computer security experts?

You could also ask your MP to sign the Early Day Motion proposed by Annette Brooke MP which calls upon the Government to reconsider its decision to proceed with the children’s database ContactPoint.

A culture of disregard

Discgate was not an isolated incident. Seven months before the DVDs went missing, HMRC had already established a practice of recording sensitive data onto DVDs, secured only with a password and dispatched via internal mail. Emails sent back and forth about this debacle, the largest ever data breach to hit the UK, cite cost as the reason given for not filtering personal details out of the data. But how much is your privacy worth to you?

This is not just about the HMRC. The ORG wiki’s log of UK privacy debacles has been struggling to keep up with the public sector bodies who have been queuing up to admit data breaches since the HMRC announcement. The HMRC data breach may be the biggest but it was not the first and it will not be the last.

If you’re MP is wondering why a junior employee was able to download the information to CDs in the first place, then they’re in good company:

“I would question whether anybody should be allowed to download an entire database of this scale without going through the most rigorous pre-authorisation checks.”

“It was a really shocking example of loss of security.”

Information Commissioner Richard Thomas

“How you can have a system which allows you to copy a whole database onto a disk is of concern,”

“Clearly there are issues about when the data was accessed and by whom. They should have had access controls and authorisation levels to make it physically impossible to burn a disc off the database without the say-so of the chairman of HMRC. Why isn’t the technology there to do that? It isn’t rocket science.”

Assistant Information Commissioner Jonathan Bamford

The Information Commissioner described the HMRC breach as “the worst the ICO has encountered” and said it called into question the security of the entire system of data sharing in government. He called for a review of the national identity register, a call which echoes a marked shift in public opinion on ID cards, and a recommendation for more debate about ID cards from thinktank Demos, who concluded a year-long study of data-sharing last week. The Government’s data minister, Michael Wills MP, has said that plans for the national ID register need looking at again. Ask that your MP pressures the government to re-examine the flawed National Identity Register.

On 27 November, children’s Minister Kevin Brennan announced an independent assessment of the security procedures surrounding ContactPoint, to be conducted by Deloitte. An Early Day Motion asking Government to go further, and consider recommendations to scrap the idea, is currently collecting signatures: please encourage your MP to sign.

The fairytale of biometrics

For people in technology, one of the most worrying developments since this crisis has been ministers’ using it as an excuse to push for solutions based around biometrics, solutions that would actually increase the privacy risks we are exposed to. Six leading academics (including two Open Rights Group Advisory Council members) recently wrote to the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights to express their dismay at how biometrics are seen as a magic fix for improving security:

“These assertions are based on a fairy-tale view of the capabilities of the technology and in addition, only deal with one aspect of the problems that this type of data breach causes. … Furthermore, biometric checks at the time of usage do not of themselves make any difference whatsoever to the possibility of the type of disaster that has just occurred at HMRC. This type of data leakage, which occurs regularly across Government, will continue to occur until there is a radical change in the culture both of system designer and system users. The safety, security and privacy of personal data has to become the primary requirement in the design, implementation, operation and auditing of systems of this kind.”

Professor Ross Anderson, Security Engineering, University of Cambridge
Dr Richard Clayton, University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory
Dr Ian Brown, Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford
Dr Brian Gladman, Ministry of Defence and NATO (retired)
Professor Angela Sasse, Department of Computer Science, University College London
Professor Martyn Thomas, CBE FREng, Software Engineering, University of Oxford

These technologies are unproven and will not be ready for commercial deployment for another 15 years. Ask your MP to encourage the Government to listen to the facts on biometrics.

Brushing aside expert advice

Unfortunately, the skills and knowledge necessary for successfully procuring, managing and securing computer systems are not commonly possessed by Government Ministers or senior managers in the civil service. This might not be such a problem, were the Government to listen to the advice that has been readily offered by expert groups during the quest towards Transformational Government, and their warnings about giving thousands of people access to large, centralised databases. But then, why should it, when apparently it doesn’t even listen to warnings from its own internal auditors?

“Again and again and again these warnings have been made in different contexts by expert groups and the Government has not been interested.”

Professor Ross Anderson

We are living in an age where systems dealing with our identity must be designed from the bottom up not to leak information in spite of being breached. Perhaps I should say, “redesigned from the bottom up”, because today’s systems rarely meet the bar. … There is no need to store all of society’s dynamite in one place, and no need to run the risk of the collosal explosion that an error in procedure might produce.

Britain’s HMRC Identity Chernobyl - Kim Cameron (Microsoft’s Chief Architect of Identity)

Ask your MP to encourage the Government to heed the warnings of these and other experts.

Together, we can stop the Government’s privacy timebomb. If you haven’t got time to write to your MP today, please write on the weekend. The more missives MPs receive on Monday morning, the more they will recognise the public mood on this issue, and the more likely they will be to raise their objections in Parliament on Monday afternoon.

Yesterday, Home Office minister Jacqui Smith announced that she had signed a certificate to exempt Transport for London and the Metropolitan Police from certain provisions of the Data Protection Act. The move will facilitate the transfer of bulk data from the TfL’s congestion charging cameras, which the Met will be permitted to use when investigating threats to national security. The data - collected using automatic numberplate recognition (ANPR) cameras which encircle the capital - can reveal the movements of all motor vehicles in and out of the city centre.

Oversight of the new arrangement comes in the form of an annual report to the Information Commissioner’s Office. But until the ICO are given sufficient clout to effectively enforce the current Data Protection regime, should we really be convinced that this represents enough of a check on new data sharing powers?

Today, news sources are reporting that leaked Home Office documents reveal plans to extend these powers “for all crime-fighting purposes”. According to this report from the Guardian, the DTI had expressed reservations over such a move, since it is likely that associated privacy concerns would slow down proposed road-pricing schemes that have already attracted public pushback. Earlier this year, a petition against road-pricing attracted 1.7 million signatures. In his response, the then Prime Minister Tony Blair assured petitioners that “any technology used would have to give definite guarantees about privacy being protected - as it should be.”

Spyblog has a thorough analysis of the legality or otherwise of function creep in ANPR systems, drawing on the Annual Report of the Chief Surveillance Commissioner (pdf), which, coincidentally, went online yesterday. For more information on ANPR technology, and Association of Chief Police Officer’s proposals to “deny criminals the roads”, see ORG’s wiki resources page. And don’t forget that if you’re concerned about the effective scrutiny of our data protection laws, you can help contribute to the ORG response to an ICO consultation on Data Protection Strategy.

Trustguide reports on our views, beliefs and needs regarding trust, security and privacy in relation to new technologies. We like it very much - It should be required reading for politicians! Over the last 15 months HP and BT, in conjunction with the DTI, hosted workshops across the UK on a broad range of topics (detailed below). The document is full of participant-responses and is a treasure trove of quotes for journalists.

Topics under consideration:

• Trust versus risk
• E-Commerce: Risk and Responsibility
• Factors that impact on risk taking
• Mitigated risk
• ID cards: An aid to security?
• Use of Biometric data
• Privacy and health information
• E-Government and Public Sector IT
• Awareness and education
• Use of public access terminals

Read the rest of this entry >

The talk that I gave at Trinity College, Dublin, kindly hosted by Dr Eoin O’Dell as part of his Dublin Legal Workshop series and organised by Digital Rights Ireland, is now up online. You can watch the video of my talk and TJ McIntyre’s - Director of DRI - response, followed by the question and answer session.

In my talk, I take a general look at the government’s attitudes to privacy, then discuss ID cards, data retention, the national vehicle tracking database and children’s privacy.

Thanks to Ole Tange who took the video.

Whilst I was in Dublin last weekend, I did a videocast for Trinity College bloggers Technolotics. Thanks very much to Gareth Stack and Francis McGillicuddy for giving me the chance to talk about digital rights, copyright reform, privacy, data retention, automatic vehicle tracking and a bunch of other stuff. The ‘cast is available in audio or video (avi or Google video, although you’re best off downloading the video rather than trying to play it in your browser if you go for the avi).

Wired reports on a Department for Transport pilot scheme to test RFID chipped car numberplates here in the UK, with battery powered chips that can broadcast their identity up to 300ft. Considering that we don’t have that many toll bridges or roads here, and the congestion charge is limited to London, I wonder what the justification for this would be. What problem do we have that RFID chipped plates would solve?

If they want to use RFID chips to allow people to pay bridge tolls or the congestion charge, why make them embedded in the number plate and not a hand-held device one could leave in the glove compartment or transfer from car to car? If it’s about geolocation of stolen cars, well, we already have transponders you can buy that can do that for you.

So what is it about? Identifying speeding motorists as they go past speed cameras? Would the rise in income from fines justify the cost of chipping 25 million cars on our roads? Or is this about location and prosecution of tax and insurance evasion? Trouble is, the DVLA claim they can do from their desks now just by checking their database, so that’s not a compelling argument either.

So let’s see: The government are wasting our money testing an expensive solution that doesn’t actually solve any real problems and which no one in their right minds would want. If they tell us it’s for ’security’ and to ‘crack down on terror’… well, words fail me.

Originally posted on Chocolate and Vodka.

RFID, automatic vehicle tracking, privacy