Bill Gates Shows His True Identity

And so it starts to come out:

Microsoft is angling to work on India’s national identity card project, Mr. Gates said, and he will be meeting with Nandan Nilekani, the minister in charge. Like Mr. Gates, Mr. Nilekani stopped running the technology company he helped to start, Infosys, after growing it into one of the biggest players in the business. He is now tasked with providing identity cards for India’s 1.2 billion citizens starting in 2011. Right now in India, many records like births, deaths, immunizations and driving violations are kept on paper in local offices.

Mr. Gates was also critical of the United States government’s unwillingness to adopt a national identity card, or allow some businesses, like health care, to centralize data keeping on individuals.

Remind me again why we bother listening to this man...

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The State of the Database State

A recurrent theme in these posts – and throughout Computerworld UK – has been the rise of vast, unnecessary and ultimately doomed databases in the UK.

But those stories have been largely sporadic and anecdotal; what has been lacking has been a consolidated, coherent and compelling analysis of what is going on in this area – what is wrong, and how we can fix it.

That analysis has just arrived in the form of the Database State report, commissioned by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation from the Foundation for Information Policy Research (FIPR).

On Open Enterprise blog.

gIMP My Foot

Jackboot Jacqui is at it again:

The government Interception Modernisation Programme (gIMP), a plan by spy chiefs to centrally collect details of every phone call, text, email and web browsing session of every UK resident, will be in place by 2012, according to a Home Office minister.

Apparently:

because communications providers already hold information about who contacts whom, when and how, the gIMP would not represent a major change. "We are not proposing that data that have never been collected are held," he said. "The question is how in the future, with all the changes that are coming we can still have access to something that we regularly use today for serious crime and counterterrorism." The final system will be fully compatible with human rights legislation, he said.

This shows once again that the Government either doesn't understand - or feigns not to understand - that putting together disparate information *is* a huge change, precisely because it allows all kinds of *new* info to be gathered about the public thanks to correlations and cross-linkings that are not evident when the data is held separately. Crudely speaking, this is putting together the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle to see something whole.

Jacqui Wants "Openness"

Jacqui Smith has set out plans to give the police and security services more powers to gather phone and e-mail data.

But wait:

"I want this to be combined with a well-informed debate characterised by openness, rather than mere opinion, by reason and reasonableness," she told the IPPR.

Well, that's alright, then. Except:

"What we will be proposing will be options which follow the key principles which govern all our work in this area - the principles of proportionality and necessity."

What, like ID cards, you mean?

Note, too, that when she says this:

"There are no plans for an enormous database which will contain the content of your emails, the texts that you send or the chats you have on the phone or online."

There is also this:

Plans to collect more data on people's phone, e-mail and web-browsing habits are expected to be included in the Communications Data Bill, due to be introduced in the Queen's Speech in November.

Which, assuming it's correct, means that "web-browsing habits" - IP addresses et al. - *would* be stored, which are potentially even more incriminating that email, texts or chats....

Data Snooping Mission Creep

Oh, look, what a surprise: it's not just for anti-terrorism:

Local councils, health authorities and hundreds of other public bodies are to be given the power to access details of everyone's personal text, emails and internet use under Home Office proposals published yesterday.

And, look, they still haven't learned about the dangers of centralised databases:

The government has already indicated that it intends to go one step further this autumn by introducing a draft communications bill which would require all the telecommunications companies to hand over this data to one central "super" database so that the police and other public authorities will be able to access it directly without having to make a request each time to the individual company holding the records.

Well, at least that will make it easier to steal....

Metaweb, not Betterweb?

Is it just me, or does this sound like a horribly retrograde move?

A new company founded by a longtime technologist is setting out to create a vast public database intended to be read by computers rather than people, paving the way for a more automated Internet in which machines will routinely share information.

The company, Metaweb Technologies, is led by Danny Hillis, whose background includes a stint at Walt Disney Imagineering and who has long championed the idea of intelligent machines.

...

The idea of a centralized database storing all of the world’s digital information is a fundamental shift away from today’s World Wide Web, which is akin to a library of linked digital documents stored separately on millions of computers where search engines serve as the equivalent of a card catalog.

A single database for all the world's digital information? Since when did massive, centralised, single point-of-failure systems come back into vogue? Google's holdings are bad enough.

Thanks, but no thanks.

Update: To be fair, it seems to be adopting a sensible licensing policy, so maybe there's hope yet:

We want to make it possible for you to add high quality structured information to your websites, mashups and applications without worrying about restrictive corporate licenses. All data is licensed Creative Commons Attribution. We only ask that you link back to us.

In addition, Tim O'Reilly has a more upbeat (perhaps because better-informed) assessment here. I can see a little better what they're trying to do, but I'm still not convinced by the centralised nature of it. Opinions?