One of my clients hit the nail on the head this morning. We're being told to check no odd withdrawals are being taken from our accounts, but if these details have fallen into criminal hands, then surely they could be sold off a few thousand records at a time, over many months or years.
So it seems that those people who could be affected will be checking for a long long time yet.
And we are supposed to give all our personal and private details to this Government for ID cards?? Many say to me "If you've nothing to hide then you've nothing to fear." Well, this is the very reason why that argument is so false - I say "We have everything to fear"!!!
And have you heard the pathetic attempts to head opposition off at the pass with this twaddle about biometric data? That won't protect the data in the National Identity Card Register from the twats running it!!! When I get the summons to go to my local "interrogation centre" to be registered by the government goons I shall be wearing a large yellow Star of David in protest.
That's my point exactly and one that Darling (whom I shall never forgive for the damage he did to light rail systems when he was the transport minister) simply hasn't grasped. He trotted out that bollocks that the national identity database would somehow be magically immune to this sort of thing both in his commons statement and in his interview on the Today programme and disappointingly neither David Cameron or Jim Naughtie picked him up on it.
I fear that the problem is a lack of understanding of how these things work. And the (perhaps deliberate) confused, inconsistent and interchangeable use of the terms "ID card" and "National Identity Database" doesn't help.
I manage large applications that have sophisticated access control and fine-grained user privileges. But at the end of the day, I'm the database administrator. I've complete access to the physical database and the raw data. It's trivially easy for me to alter anything or export every last bit of data into any format I choose.
Sure, you can encrypt data so it's not visible to people like me who maintain the system infrastructure, but, you don't put the data in unless you expect to take it out so it's always going to end up visible in an unencrypted form somewhere.
Granted, in most cases individuals may only have access to a limited dataset at any one time, but the nature of these things - irrespective of wether it it public or private sector, and be it sales figures, customer lists, share prices, electoral registers or any other data you care to think of - is that once you have a sufficiently large volume of data, the top brass in the organisation will want to have reports on that data.
You know they'll ask for reports on all kinds of statistics and exceptions. They'll want to trawl through the data for various patterns (even if it's just to find new taxation possibilites). The temptation will just be irresistible to any government. Which means that somebody has to develop those reports and validate them and those people will almost inevitably have access to a mass of unencrypted data.
While systems may be protected from malicious attacks from outside, to think that the data in the national identity database will be immune, to either intentional or accidental dissemination by someone with legitimate access to it, is frankly naïve.
And that's just one of the reasons why I have always found to the whole ID card/identity database idea so abhorrent.
One of my clients hit the nail on the head this morning. We're being told to check no odd withdrawals are being taken from our accounts, but if these details have fallen into criminal hands, then surely they could be sold off a few thousand records at a time, over many months or years.
ReplyDeleteSo it seems that those people who could be affected will be checking for a long long time yet.
And we are supposed to give all our personal and private details to this Government for ID cards?? Many say to me "If you've nothing to hide then you've nothing to fear." Well, this is the very reason why that argument is so false - I say "We have everything to fear"!!!
And have you heard the pathetic attempts to head opposition off at the pass with this twaddle about biometric data? That won't protect the data in the National Identity Card Register from the twats running it!!! When I get the summons to go to my local "interrogation centre" to be registered by the government goons I shall be wearing a large yellow Star of David in protest.
ReplyDeleteMr Plod,
ReplyDeleteThat's my point exactly and one that Darling (whom I shall never forgive for the damage he did to light rail systems when he was the transport minister) simply hasn't grasped. He trotted out that bollocks that the national identity database would somehow be magically immune to this sort of thing both in his commons statement and in his interview on the Today programme and disappointingly neither David Cameron or Jim Naughtie picked him up on it.
I fear that the problem is a lack of understanding of how these things work. And the (perhaps deliberate) confused, inconsistent and interchangeable use of the terms "ID card" and "National Identity Database" doesn't help.
I manage large applications that have sophisticated access control and fine-grained user privileges. But at the end of the day, I'm the database administrator. I've complete access to the physical database and the raw data. It's trivially easy for me to alter anything or export every last bit of data into any format I choose.
Sure, you can encrypt data so it's not visible to people like me who maintain the system infrastructure, but, you don't put the data in unless you expect to take it out so it's always going to end up visible in an unencrypted form somewhere.
Granted, in most cases individuals may only have access to a limited dataset at any one time, but the nature of these things - irrespective of wether it it public or private sector, and be it sales figures, customer lists, share prices, electoral registers or any other data you care to think of - is that once you have a sufficiently large volume of data, the top brass in the organisation will want to have reports on that data.
You know they'll ask for reports on all kinds of statistics and exceptions. They'll want to trawl through the data for various patterns (even if it's just to find new taxation possibilites). The temptation will just be irresistible to any government. Which means that somebody has to develop those reports and validate them and those people will almost inevitably have access to a mass of unencrypted data.
While systems may be protected from malicious attacks from outside, to think that the data in the national identity database will be immune, to either intentional or accidental dissemination by someone with legitimate access to it, is frankly naïve.
And that's just one of the reasons why I have always found to the whole ID card/identity database idea so abhorrent.