Gus Hosein

Age of insecurity

We may have lost the first battle to protect our data, say Gus Hosein and Eric King, but there’s a chance to put things right if we’re ready to have the debate

No Hiding Place

Privacy is a political right and governments must not be allowed to forget it, says Gus Hosein

Serve yourself: shifting power away from the brothers

1. Big Brother is going distributed. Why should Big Brother do all the work, with an (Inter)network of Little Brothers to hand? CALEA’d telcos and banks who “know their customer” are just two examples of intermediaries co-opted through government regulation to store reams of information on their customers. Little Brothers have all the advantages of other distributed systems scalability, reliability, high performance... We need to take decentralisation one step further, and claw back control from Big Brother and his little siblings.

The challenge of identity policies

With these words, Home Secretary Jacqui Smith introduced the 2008 Delivery Plan for the UK’s controversial National Identity Scheme (the Scheme). The Delivery Plan was the most recent statement of intent about the Government’s identity policy, the third such statement since Parliament began debating this issue in 2004. The UK seems no closer to being able to address the challenge Jacqui Smith articulates, despite five years of effort and vast amounts of public expenditure. In 2008 alone, the Identity and Passport Service (IPS) spent nearly £32 million on external consultants [Written Answers — WA 267452].

The prospects for effective identity policies

When devising an identity policy, policy-makers often have a clear vision of what the resulting scheme will accomplish: just about everything. REAL ID was to prevent another 9/11; identity cards in the UK would combat identity fraud and benefits fraud, as well as terrorism and serious crime; biometric passports would prevent bad people from traveling around the world. All these years later it is often easy to look back with fondness at that era of simple solutions such as identity cards to complex problems like global terrorism.

A review of national identity policies

To many governments, a national identity policy is an obvious requirement as they have long had policies and laws that require some form of identification or formal identity document and some policy for when that identity is necessary. These policies may be decades, if not centuries, old developed as the nation-state developed, linked to taxation, instituted to regulate the flow of peoples, or developed due to imperial requirements (Amoore, 2008).

The life cycle of identity policy in the United Kingdom

There are many stages to the life cycle of any policy and identity policy in the UK is no different. There are questions about when the approach to the identity policy arose and in response to which problems. There are the details of the policy’s deliberative process, its eventual approval, its deployment, and enforcement. As this chapter demonstrates, the story of the UK identity policy became increasingly personalized moving away from any neutral, evidence-based norm that policy-making might be intended to follow. Each stage in the life cycle of a policy provides opportunities for the policy to be deflected or translated to address other stakeholders or policy agendas. Nevertheless perhaps the most surprising feature of this case is the way the policy has doggedly tried to keep to a simple narrative of problem, policy, and implementation.

Technological expertise and decision-making

Previous chapters have examined both the role of language about technology in the policy-making process and the ways in which technology is conceptualized by policy-makers. In this chapter, these two elements come together in a review of the ways in which technological expertise relating to the UK’s identity policy was presented.

Due process and the politics of science and technology

Policy-making processes need, amongst other things, good information about the nature of the problem being addressed by the new policy, consideration of the variety of possible solutions or measures, and possibly recognition of the identity of the key constituencies for engagement and building political support. To this, experience has shown that for technologically-leveraged policies the process requires a further component: a detailed understanding of the technologies implicated by the policy.

Intentional ambiguity about technology

Much is made about how our societies have changed in the era of rolling 24-hour news coverage and how governments are far more accountable today than in previous times because of the sheer amount of information that is now made available. Whitepapers, green papers, consultation documents, public speeches, Parliamentary debates, and media interviews are now all available for the public, researchers, and analysts to study. This information can be codified, weighted, interpreted, or counted in order to draw conclusions about the quality and quantity of public disclosure, discussion, and even deliberation.