Henry Porter writes in The Observer:

Under a plan known by the reassuringly dull title of Transformational Government, a huge process of centralisation has taken place, creating countless opportunities for security breaches, as well as abuse by the state. At the time, the government defined it as ‘transforming public services as citizens receive them and demonstrating how technology can improve the corporate services of government so more resources can be released to deliver “front line” services’.

Anyone emerging from this phrase with a clear meaning in their mind deserves an award, but it has resulted in the demonstration of an almost mathematical truth. The larger the database and the more people who have access to it, the greater the lack of security. Professor Ross Anderson, the leading British expert on this kind of engineering, believes it is impossible to go for scale, security and functionality without one suffering.

He concludes with a call to arms:

I receive hundreds of emails each week from people asking what they can do. The first is to join a local group set up by No2ID, one of the best run campaigns I have seen. Terri Dowty’s Action for Rights on Children (Arch) and Helen Wilkinson’s the Big Opt Out both do very good work, as does the Our Kingdom website. We should write to our MPs – especially Labour MPs – and to local newspapers; contribute to blogs and phone-ins. We should talk to our friends and colleagues about what has been done by Labour’s centralisers and mainframe men, who Anderson properly identifies as Marxist controllers in another guise.

This entry was posted by andrew on Sunday, November 25th, 2007 at 12:00 and is filed under (In)security, Anti, Biometrics, General, UK News Articles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.