If I could commission one government IT project

That’s the topic of my (first!) posting today over at Liberal Conspiracy:

I’ve been pretty critical of two massive government IT projects – the existing plans to introduce mandatory identity cards with a huge database behind them and also the Home Office talk of a database of all phone calls and emails made anywhere in the country.

My criticisms in both cases are three-fold: the money involved could be better spent on other projects (such as giving us more police rather than keeping huge databases of the activities of innocent people), they involve a huge infringement of our liberties and privacy, and – thirdly – big IT projects like this are likely to go wrong and to be vulnerable to misuse.

But I’m not a Luddite. Over time I’ve found embracing IT innovations has made my life easier and made me more efficient – whether it was years ago buying a laser printer to speed up production of casework letters or more recently starting to use the text-messaging based blogging service Twitter to help keep residents informed of what I’m up to as an MP.

Indeed, the idea of organising information in an efficient way so that it helps people make decisions and find out what’s going on is fundamentally a very liberal approach – getting computer code to do the heavy lifting so that individuals can find out and act.

So this has got me thinking – if I could commission just one IT project from government, what would it be?

You can read the rest of the piece here and there’s an interesting response over at Puffbox.

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Lynne, the massive new ‘we are watching you’ database intended to be behind the ID card was scrapped in the late 2006 revision of the project. Its now a case of progressively cleaning existing databases (DWP, passport) and adding more people to them.What we do need to look at is how the ID cards will be verified, and its clear that the concept of dedicated verification terminals is unworkable, because there would have to be millions of them and the result cannot be directly used in other systems (e.g. local authority, employer HR, FE College, university, even banking). Verification by using a Call Centre is unfair and insecure to put it very mildly.And the phone and email data asked for is already there, held by service operators, because all govt claim to want is ‘traffic data’ (source, destination, time and date). Internet web page access traffic data is, however, a different problem.

dreamingspire on 24th Jun 2008 at 10:26 am said:

Lynne, the massive new ‘we are watching you’ database intended to be behind the ID card was scrapped in the late 2006 revision of the project. Its now a case of progressively cleaning existing databases (DWP, passport) and adding more people to them.What we do need to look at is how the ID cards will be verified, and its clear that the concept of dedicated verification terminals is unworkable, because there would have to be millions of them and the result cannot be directly used in other systems (e.g. local authority, employer HR, FE College, university, even banking). Verification by using a Call Centre is unfair and insecure to put it very mildly.And the phone and email data asked for is already there, held by service operators, because all govt claim to want is ‘traffic data’ (source, destination, time and date). Internet web page access traffic data is, however, a different problem.

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