Sometimes there's so much going on, it's hard to know where to start ... the three year delay of ID cards, the global stock market crash, the effective nationalisation of Northern Rock and unwinding of the government's "stable" economy, the not so liberal LibDems to vote against any referendum on the European Constitution Lisbon Treaty. What do you think of the week's big issues?
What better present could Her Majesty the Queen want from her Government on her diamond wedding anniversary than the effective guarantee that they will not be able to introduce their ill-conceived ID card scheme?!
Rather ironically, as the news was breaking today about HM Revenue and Customs' loss of the names, addresses, dates of birth, and bank account details of every family in the country in receipt of child benefit, I was reporting back at work on a computer security review I recently conducted across our international organisation, and reminding colleagues of the need for every computer and all electronic communication to be protected by basic precautionary measures such as boot passwords, regularly updated anti-virus and anti-spyware software, firewall, and encryption.
Of course, even with encryption, the passphrase is typically the weakest link in the information security of most individuals and most organisations. Top passwords include "password", "passwd" and "pass" and, among Christians, "godblessyou" and "Jesus". Then there are simple keyboard combinations such as "123456", "asd123", and "qwerty". And, of course, people's names, dates of birth, postcodes, favourite hobbies, and favourite sports teams. All of which, since we've most of us got wise to the need for including digits as well as a mix of upper and lower case letters, are frequently followed by a number, more often than not a single digit, and usually "1" — making "password1" one of the more commonest passphrases. And simply choosing a word (in any language, even if it is slang or other jargon) won't delay any hacker with a basic dictionary search programme.
The other problem with most people's passwords is that they use the same one (or two) for their online banking, their email accounts, the various sites they login into online, and their computer (if this has any at all, it may only be a Windows login password, which offers very weak protection, rather than a boot password and screensaver password). So, once a hacker or fraudster obtains one password, they are well on their way to stealing their victim's identity.
So, if you find your password described above, now might be a good time to protect your identity and personal information a little more securely. Try to include non-alphanumeric characters and make each phrase at least eight characters in length. And perhaps choose a phrase rather than a word and use the initial letter of each word in the phrase as your password, with a couple of easily remembered substitutions, e.g. "Tk2mc1nmDOB!" (The key to my computer is not my date of birth!)
In any event, any parent will, of course, definitely want to change their online banking passwords and "memorable information" if it includes any of the details possessed by HMRC. I hope the above advice helps somebody sleep more peacefully tonight.
At the start of the month, Lord Justice Sedley described the national DNA database as indefensible, unfair and inconsistent and called for the DNA of every citizen to be included. Then last week the Nuffield Council on Bioethics published a report suggesting that police should only be allowed to store permanently bioinformation from people who are convicted of a crime and that the potential benefits of establishing a population-wide forensic DNA database would not be great enough to justify the cost and intrusion to privacy at the current time. So who's right?
A poll was conducted for tonight's Panorama, Give Us Your DNA, indicating that 66% of the population would be in favour of everyone's DNA being sampled when they reached the age of 18, but that 64% would oppose samples being taken at birth. Thus, the programme suggested, the main objection against a universal DNA database is simply its being impolitic, rather than in any way inefficient. However, a senior forensic scientist who is the Director of Forensic Institute, Professor Allan Jamieson, believes that people put too much faith in DNA and are giving it an infallibility which it does not have. As he explained to the interviewer, "We've shaken hands. My DNA will be on your hand. You may touch something outside of this room that I have never touched, and therefore my DNA will be somewhere where I have never been."
As a geneticist, I would have few reservations about equipping the police with a tool that has proven invaluable in helping them to solve crimes, so long as adequate safeguards were in place to protect against the possibility of mistaken identity — such as not allowing cases to proceed where DNA alone is the only evidence. After all, even fingerprints, which cannot be carried off by anyone else, are not infalliable determiners of identity, as the case of PC Shirley McKie proved ten years ago.
In the current climate of CCTV, biometric passports and identity cards, however, and with our country already increasing resembling a police state or surveillance society, I cannot see how any expansion of the existing database could be achieved without damaging the relationship between citizens and the police, between people and government. No longer innocent until proven guilty, citizens treated with dignity and respect, we increasingly risk being reduced to potential suspects to be monitored and controlled by every means at every junction. Yet, healthy relationships are surely key to the social well-being of society, just as they are to the social well-being of individuals. Therefore, unless we want to lose what remains of our community structures, we must resist any moves towards a national DNA database.
![Royal Mail bin [Credit: funkypancake]](http://www.funkypancake.com/blog/2006/11/DSC03359.jpg)
Want to know why your Royal Mail delivery is so unreliable? An Australian colleague has just found out. She had to send six forms of identification, including her passport and Australian driver's licence to the DVLA in order to get a British driving licence. She also had to enclose two "special delivery" envelopes for their safe return.
On the day that the items were returned to her, the envelope had simply been posted through her door. Apparently, she learned from the neighbour, the postman had arrived and was complaining about nobody being home and muttering something about passports and driving licences, so the contractor working on scaffolding on the neighbour's house offered to sign for the package. Personally, I get on wonderfully with both my neighbours, but I would not expect either side to be able to sign for a special delivery that I might otherwise miss. I most certainly wouldn't expect a random contractor working next door to be able to get away with signing to confirm that I had received the item.
Obviously, my colleague is just relieved she hasn't now lost her identity to the fraudsters — an envelope with so many unique items of personal identification could no doubt have been worth a fortune to someone...
"If they do not get the permanent card, they cannot live here, they cannot get government benefits, and that is a way for the government to control the population in the future."
Remember all those science fiction films/books showcasing police states that feature retina or face recognition scanners? Well, the future has arrived:
At least 20,000 police surveillance cameras are being installed along streets here in southern China and will soon be guided by sophisticated computer software from an American-financed company to recognize automatically the faces of police suspects and detect unusual activity.The article in yesterday's New York Times goes on to note that "New York police announced last month that they would install more than 100 security cameras to monitor license plates in Lower Manhattan by the end of the year. Police officials also said they hoped to obtain financing to establish links to 3,000 public and private cameras in the area by the end of next year; no decision has been made on whether face recognition technology has become reliable enough to use without the risk of false arrests."
Starting this month in a port neighborhood and then spreading across Shenzhen, a city of 12.4 million people, residency cards fitted with powerful computer chips programmed by the same company will be issued to most citizens.
Data on the chip will include not just the citizen's name and address but also work history, educational background, religion, ethnicity, police record, medical insurance status and landlord's phone number. Even personal reproductive history will be included, for enforcement of China's controversial "one child" policy. Plans are being studied to add credit histories, subway travel payments and small purchases charged to the card.
Just last November, Home Office minister Liam Byrne declared of the Conservatives, "All that they offer in place of ID cards is the chaos of a damaging, distracting and disruptive reorganisation of three agencies on the front line into a single border force. That idea is outdated and is rooted in a concept of a frontier that is long past. It is simplistic and dangerous in the disruption that it poses."
Today his new leader, Gordon Brown, announced, "To strengthen the powers and surveillance capability of our border guards and security officers, we will now integrate the vital work of the Border and Immigration Agency, Customs and UK Visas overseas and at the main points of entry to the UK and establish a unified border force."
Now all we need is for the new "Conservative" Prime Minister to ditch his misguided obsession with ID cards...
...Oh yes, and to give us the referendum we were promised on the Constitutional Treaty that Open Europe's analysis shows is 96% of the original European Constitution, already rejected by the French and the Dutch...
Prompted by the anonymous comment about the latest 13% increase in the projected cost of ID cards, due to become compulsory for everyone applying for a new passport from 2009, I am opening this thread for any other readers who spot items of "bad news" being buried today.
I'll add to the list with this morning's government admission that 28 NHS trusts are failing to ensure non-emergency hospital patients are kept in single-sex accommodation — incidentally also yet another of Blair's broken promises, as he committed himself to end mixed-sex accommodation in the NHS in his original 1997 general election manifesto.
Quoting an article to appear in next month's issue of IEEE Spectrum, Newswise asks:
"What if your boss asked you to have a chip implanted in your arm? Would you do it? What if it meant getting a higher salary? ... In the last few years people have begun to have tags planted in themselves--a move that could have serious repercussions for our privacy and freedom."Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags can be used to pinpoint the physical location of whatever the tags are embedded in
