Post Political Times

Euro Ducks

The UK takes over the Presidency of the European Union today and will hold it for the next six months. There is an official website for the UK Presidency which has the thrill-a-minute readability factor that is so common to official EU sites.

What fascinated me most was the logo. This has white birds flying across a blue background looking for all the world like those series of three ducks that appear stuck on the walls of suburban semis in naff 1970’s comedy shows.

Either the UK Government is hip to retro styling or there is some other story here.

Identity Cards Make Strange Bedfellows

The No2ID campaign held a public meeting in London last night with an interesting array of speakers.

George Galloway spoke in his new guise as a Respect Party MP. I have no time for his politics and the far-left sorts who have coalesced around Respect. God help us if ever they were to have any serious power. But it is still a pleasure to listen to George speak. He gets points for pure oratory and last night the substance was pretty good as well.

For the Lib Dems, newly-elected Lynne Featherstone MP put the case against ID cards that the party has consistently argued throughout this process. The only difficulty she had was in the sheer number of arguments against the cards which there are from a liberal standpoint.

The surprise of the evening was perhaps Dominic Grieve, a Conservative MP who gives every impression of being the arch-traditionalist. Fortunately, he is so much the traditionalist that he adheres to old-fashioned British civil liberties as though he had had a hand in drafting the Magna Carta himself.

He made an eloquent case against the cards and the over-weening state which I know will resonate with more Conservatives than their previous support for the plan on Michael Howard’s instructions. David Davis has likewise blossomed since being allowed to say what he really thinks and not what was deemed to be least risky ahead of an election.

Tony Benn was the only Labour party speaker on the platform. Again, I have no time for his politics but love to hear him speak. He made a number of jokes about the House of Lords that perhaps reflect the divide between a man who spent much of his career avoiding that exclusive club by the Thames and most of his colleagues who have done all they can to get into it.

And Shami Chakrabati of Liberty gave a highly informed view from an NGO perspective that was both entertaining and effective. She seems to be one step ahead of the rest of us though. The point about passport applications being tied to ID cards was raised in the discussion. People who do not want to have ID cards will have to renew their passports before they are required to take a card with any new application. This may lead to a rash of ‘lost’ or ’stolen’ passports next year. Shami told the meeting that someone had just burgled her house but taken very little except her passport. Nice one, Shami.

Oh, and there were a few plugs for an ID card pledge that is running on the PledgeBank site at the moment. This is hugely successful with thousands of signers. It’s worth checking this out and the other pledges on the site.

Drop Designated Documents

So, the Identity Cards Bill was given a Second Reading last night. This comes as no surprise really as Labour ‘rebels’ will be negotiating behind the scenes rather than wanting to derail the Government so soon. They may be asking for concessions on this Bill or on entirely different issues.

The top amendment that should now be pressed is to break the link between ‘designated documents’ and having to accept an ID card. What this link means in effect is that when you apply to have your passport renewed you have to take an ID card.

This happens whilst the scheme is supposed to be voluntary. i.e. it is voluntary except if you wish to travel (which the 80% odd of us who have passports do) when it compulsory.

Amendments should be made dropping Clause 10 of the Bill which insists that those issuing designated documents require an ID card to be issued at the same time.

If this change were made, then the Government would still be able to have its manifesto commitment to introduce a voluntary ID card scheme. And it could still make this compulsory at some future date if Parliament approves of this.

But it could not make 80% of us take a card during the voluntary phase. The Passport Agency could offer us one and explain that getting one later may cost more money but this would be our choice.

If the cards really are beneficial and convenient then we can expect to see people taking them up. But those who want to travel but do not want an ID card until and unless it is made compulsory by Parliament would have the option of declining the offer.

The Government have no real argument against this if the scheme is truly voluntary at this stage. They can say it may cost more but it is for the individual to decide whether or not to take the risk of extra expdense and not a nanny Government.

Of course, the reality is that they want those applying for passports now to all have to take ID cards to reduce the unit costs for later applicants under compulsion. But the Lords would be entitled to hold firm on an amendment preventing this whilst respecting the convention on manifesto commitments.

Ordering Pizza the ID Card Way

The Independent on Sunday carried a piece yesterday about the Government selling ID card data to help fund the costs of the project.

This has some grounding in fact from what we already know. The legislation allows the Government to offer a service to companies for checking people against the database. This service would presumably be sold to banks, utility companies etc.

In theory though this should just be their basic identity details and they should only be given a yes/no on the identity of the person rather than any additional data. We shall see.

Meanwhile, I was sent a link to this great flash presentation by the ACLU which has some relevance here…

(also posted by me on Ideal Government)

Moving Mobiles

I recently changed my mobile phone provider as many of us do from time to time. I needed to take my number with me and so had to go through the number portability process.

Well, customer-friendly it ain’t. You have to call your current provider to get the PAC code. You then have to call the new provider to give this to them. At some point within a week or so the switch is made. In the meantime, you have a temporary number.

There are several problems with this approach.

The temporary number is a pain as people register this as a new number for you if you use it as they tend to just reply to incoming messages and calls.

Timing the ending of the old contract so that you do not either lose credit or overpay for it is ‘challenging’.

You have to make the calls yourself to customer ’service’ lines that like to keep you waiting… and waiting…

I know that the companies do not want to encourage switching but they could surely make it easier than this?

I would expect in a truly competitive market to be able to walk into a shop, have the calls made there and then to the provider I am leaving, and, with the appropriate authorities given and verified, to walk out with my old number working on my new mobile. If I lose my mobile, then my current provider can enable a new phone very quickly on the same number, so I cannot see any technical barriers to this sort of rapid switching. But maybe I am missing something?

Just When You Thought It Was Safe…

While I am no longer paid to be a politician as my day-job, some of the major political issues that interest me as a citizen have not gone away. Next week, I will be returning to two of my perennial favourites – Identity Cards and Software Patents.

On Tuesday, the Lib Dem group in the European Parliament will be discussing what to do when the Directive on Computer-Implemented Inventions, which affects the patentability of software within the EU, comes before its next plenary session. This has meant some substantial email exchanges over the last couple of days and some lengthy conversations over the next couple, especially with Chris Davies MEP, leader of the Lib Dem group.

And by happy coincidence, Tuesday is the day that the House of Commons will be debating the re-introduced Identity Cards Bill. There has been some excellent discussion on this recently over at Ideal Government where you can read about the report by experts at the LSE on identity technology and the Government’s reaction to this.

William Heath who runs Ideal Government has also made the find of the month with this wonderful singing dog and chorus line…

Hotels on the Net

All has been quiet here lately for the very good reason that I have been catching up on some holiday time after the election.

Most recently, I found a hotel called La Quinta Roja in the north of Tenerife in the Canary Islands.

On the personal side, I can’t recommend the place enough as the building is fantastic, the staff could not be more friendly, and the village of Garachico a top place to spend a few days. They are just about to go into a prolonged period of fiestas in July and August including a reenactment of a volcanic eruption that hit the place in 1706 so it will be a little noisier than when I visited but a lot of fun.

On the technical side, I find some of the websites that Spanish hotels in particular have put together very charming. My other favourite is for a hotel called La Rectoral in Taramundi, Asturias. This is very flash-dependent but is worth the bandwidth.

I am fascinated by the change that the net has made to the travel business as I now do almost all holiday booking on the basis of how hotels present themselves on their websites and then respond to email requests. I have seen some figures for the proportion of bookings that now happen online but have made a note to myself to try and track down some authoritative information on this.

Hacking British Politics

A couple of computer ‘hacking’ stories have caught my eye over the last week.

The first is that of Gary McKinnon, accused of breaking into US military systems, and now threatened with extradition to face a potentially long sentence in an American jail.

The second is the nomination of four sites in the New Statesman New Media Awards – PublicWhip, TheyWorkForYou, NotApathetic and Directionlessgov.

This second citation may not seem like a hacking story but it is. It is all about ‘hacking’ British politics – taking the code of politics, pulling it part, throwing in some creativity and technical wizardry and producing something new and ‘value-added’.

While the first story it can be argued is not really a hacking story at all but a ‘cracking’ one – breaking into private systems for fun or some other more mysterious or malicious purpose (in this case alleged to be all about UFOs, judge that as you will).

In ancient computer times, way back in BCI (Before Consumer Internet), there was a linguistic debate about using the terms hacker and cracker correctly. I revived this distinction briefly on a couple of occasions during the recent Committee Stage of the Identity Cards Bill and the Civil Contingencies Bill Committee in 2004 and introduced the relevant Ministers to the term ‘cracker’.

This was partly to lighten up proceedings but also reflects a more general concern I have that Governments can be persuaded to take measures against ‘hackers’ that may inhibit the ability of people to cut code far more broadly than those necessary to prevent ‘cracking’. We need to watch out for this in any legislation on Computer Misuse, copyright protection and patenting. Every effort should be made to distinguish actions done with harmful intent from those that are properly using intelligence to enhance human knowledge.

And in the meantime, long live British political hacking, for which I would propose the following motto: Ex accidens lux.

Lovely Links

All sorts of bits of the interweb are now coming together in ways I find fascinating.

I started using a chat programme called Trillian yesterday to talk to people using a venerable internet chat protocol called IRC. What I had not realised until using it was that it highlights any suitable phrases you use and links them to their entry on Wikipedia.

This can be a little distracting as you look up the encyclopedia entries for everything that is mentioned but sometimes this can be very helpful and informative.

What it does represent is the start of a really functioning web. Wikipedia is a great example of collective working to provide a good public resource. When this is linked well into other internet activities then this does bring real added value.

Local Democracy

I visited Kingston (upon Thames not Hull) today to hear from Councillor Mary Reid about progress on the e-democracy projects that have been taking place in local government over the last 18 months. Mary is Chair of the committee that has overseen these.

I must admit to being something of a sceptic about the extent to which government can fill this space as I see democratic developments as being generated by people outside the institutions of power. However, I was pleasantly surprised at just how much has been achieved by this programme.

What is especially impressive is the open way in which all the experiences are presented on the website – www.e-democracy.gov.uk – so that others can benefit from them. The case studies and guidance should prove very useful for public bodies in the UK and elsewhere and potentially helpful tools have been developed such as the Groupserver product that offers a free opensource system for online forums.

I shall spend some time browsing the site and digesting the various reports and expect there to be a lot of valuable material within it. The question now is whether this will go any further with local authorities who have not taken part in the pilots using the expertise. It would be ironic if local authorities in other countries ended up making more use of this Government-funded work than those in the UK.