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.

Professor Ross Anderson, UK computer security expert and Chair of the Foundation for Information Policy Research, appeared on Newsnight last night, to discuss the HMRC data loss fiasco. He labelled the fiasco “an accident waiting to happen”, and calmly, methodically, indicted the Government for brushing aside the advice of security experts who have been warning them against the centralised, top-down approach they have been taking to electronic government.

I hope Professor Anderson will not object to my transcribing his words in full, and linking to the reports he mentioned and the government responses that have brushed aside expert concerns.

“But if we return to the matter in hand, I’m afraid that there is a policy issue here not an operational issue because the government has repeatedly, over the last few years brushed aside one lot of advice after another about the growing problems of privacy and safety with aggregating more and more data.

We wrote a report for the Information Commissioner in November last year pointing out that the proposed children’s databases were both unsafe and illegal. That was brushed aside.

Lord Broers’ House of Lords Science and Technology Committee reported earlier this year saying that the government needed to get its act together on personal internet security. A large part of that was Treasury responsibility, better regulation of online banking. That was brushed aside.

The Health Committee reported in September saying that people needed a right to opt out of the large central databases of personal medical information that the NHS is collecting. That was brushed aside.

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

The current issue of Private Eye has an eight-page special report into the NHS Programme for IT and Connecting for Health. The report, by Richard Brooks, gives a history of the project since its ill-fated conception in 2002, and highlights the work of Computer Weekly and e-Health Insider in bringing the less functional aspects of the emerging system to the attention of the public.

What struck me most is the ticker tape running along the bottom of the report, which gives examples of what £12.4bn - the amount the National Audit Office estimated the system would cost over ten years last year - could buy for the NHS. According to Private Eye, £12.4bn would pay for:

• 26,000 doctors for ten years, or
• 65,000 nurses for ten years, or
• The NHS’s record 2005/6 deficit - 23 times over, or
• Every hospital built since 1997 - three times over, or
• 200 years of currently “too expensive” Alzheimer’s drugs, or
• 500,000 full courses of herceptin treatment for cancer patients.

Unfortunately, the report is not available online - although it will likely end up in the Private Eye shop at some point. It should be available from UK newsagents until 13 March.

Last week, news emerged that the board of South Warwickshire General Hospitals NHS Trust is allowing clinicians in their Accident and Emergency department to share smart cards. Apparently, at an average of between 60 and 90 seconds, login times were compromising efficiency in this very busy hospital department.

Although Connecting for Health had previously advised that sharing of smartcards is considered misconduct and could result in disciplinary action (see this July 2006 .doc briefing note), in a statement issued on 1 February they appeared to back off from this advice, suggesting that “responsibility for the security of patient information ultimately lies with individual Trusts, hospitals and NHS organisations.”

And although the BMA’s GP IT subcommittee spokesman, Paul Cundy told Computer Weekly magazine the actions of the trust “drive a coach and horses through the so-called privacy in the new systems”, CfH stated there was “no question of the confidentiality of patient data having been compromised by South Warwickshire General Hospitals NHS Trust.”

Even when you’re not in a life or death situation, over a minute is a long time to wait to log in. CfH is now working with its suppliers to reduce log in time to something that works in practice as well as in theory.

In the meantime, this story raises one vital question: where in the NHS does ultimate responsibility for patient privacy lie?