China is investing all-out in an army for smart cyberwarfare, according to a Herald Tribune report on the Pentagon’s annual report on the build-up of Chinese military power.

“China has determined to go for high-tech military modernization, and that requires a lot of expertise from officers and soldiers,” said Andrew Yang, a specialist in the Chinese military at the independent Chinese Council of Advanced Policy Studies in Taiwan. “The PLA is also developing new doctrines and concepts to go with these high-tech systems that require more refined education systems.”

Who would you back in a cyberwar? A billion very smart and pretty ruthless Chinese, or 220m Americans who invented computers, the Internet, and have the openness to publish an annual risk assessment of their opponents? The Chinese aren’t too chuffed about the report:

“It is a grave violation of the norms governing international relations and brutal interference in China’s internal affairs, to which China expresses strong dissatisfaction and resolute opposition,” said a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, Jiang Yu, in remarks posted Monday on the ministry’s Web site.

It must be worth investing quite a lot to start averting this particular war right now.

Jaco Aizenman writes

You may want to consider including the human right of having or not virtual personality for the July 9 event?

I’m a bit perplexed by this. Surely “human rights” has a specific meaning, despite the misleading and sloppy usage in Britain by politicians and the media. Human rights are specifically enshrined in law. Is anyone proposing a law about whether or not we have a virtual personality?

Well yes, it seems. In Costa Rica, where Jaco is based, a senior judge called Magistrate Carlos Chinchilla is leading work on taking just such a law through Congress. What’s the thinking behind it? We in the UK might have something to learn from this.

The DTI event on 9 July gives us six weeks to get our heads clear about the salient hard questions facing the UK about ID in an e-enabled society.

There is plenty going on and plenty being said in every community involved. Policemen are standing up and challenging the government (also here); prompted by the ICO Parliament is reviewing the whole area; companies such as Sun, Microsoft and Google have trenchant and unresolved views, after the Home Office’s undignified firefight with the LSE HM Treasury (which has the clout to pay the bills) is revisiting all the sums in the cold light of day. Meanwhile the IPS has a job to get on with, and banks are quietly dumping liability onto their customers, who find no-one is interested in helping them.

The trouble is, in a phrase I heard Nick Bohm use, the assertions from these different communities pass through one another like angry ghosts in the night. What we need to do is connect these entrenched communities to make a conversation. It will be very hard, but rewarding.

I think the technical community is making the most rapid progress in its thinking. I can’t keep up; I’ve over 1400 unread emails in my “identity workshop” list. But crucially it has learned the lesson that identity services must be user-controlled, intuitive and easy to use. My primer for the key contempory issues and developments we need to get our heads round here might include:

Liberty Alliance - home page here, , Wikipedia entry here, created in shocked reaction to Microsoft’s clumsy centralist Hailstorm plan it offers standards and guidelines for federated identity management.

Kim Cameron who is leading Microsoft’s in-house campaign for enlightenment on this issue. His blog is here and his seven laws of ID are here

Stefan Brands, a Dutch cryptographer based in Montreal hardwired for protection of privacy and human dignity. He sits patiently on answers to the key ID questions the world is not yet even asking. His company is Credentica and his blog is here.

Jeff Jonas, the Vegas-based software entrepreneur (now part of IBM) and highly effective sleuth who is now seeing the light about the implications of such work for human dignity and privacy. His blog is here.

and finally Ben Laurie of Google who understands all this stuff. Splendidly sceptical, I place Ben in that tradition of cussed British non-conformism in which our good decisions have always been rooted. His blog is here and his current three laws of ID are here.

Government folk please note: when these technical people talk of “laws” they’re exploring principles that work technically and socially. They’re not trying to do you out of your job of drafting legislation. Please be patient and understand what they’re trying to say.

Technical folk please note: government folk get phreaked out if you say you’re drafting laws, just like you do when they try to legislate about IT.

That’s my starter anyway. Glad to hear of other people’s.

Try out the new feedback widget to tell us what you think about Blindside. It’s by Laurence Coburn of Rateitall, the generic rating engine. Laurence’s work is an example of how it just gets easier and easier to give feedback and rate the services you get. This is surely a promising development, with terrific potential when used responsibly.

What are the essential unanswered questions for the UK about ID infrastructure, government’s role and its effect on business and consumers? What are the opportunities for unlocking value, wealth creation, efficiency and what are the threats to privacy and public trust?

The DTI is planning a get-together to start the process of looking at this on 9 July. There are important questions still out there, and DTI has allocated £10m for research projects to look into them to get answers starting from the autumn.

This isn’t a re-run of the ID card policy debate. We live in a democracy, Parliament has spoken, and those who want Parliament to speak again and say something different next time have to go through those channels. That’s Home Office/IPS’s patch anyway, and they are co-sponsors of the get-together. So the approach is, taking the work of IPS as a given in this landscape, what are the great known unknowns, including areas like privacy and consent.

Let’s go into the ID-enabled future with our eyes open. DTI will particularly welcome attendance at this event from people interested in undertaking the research work.

If you’re interested in coming email your details to editor [at] blindside .org.uk for now; online registration will be available soon.

Update: You can now register online by clicking here, or here or by emailing the rather miraculous Susan Pickrell at susan.picrell@kable.co.uk.

I forgot to post this…From The Guardian

A three-week wave of massive cyber-attacks on the small Baltic country of Estonia, the first known incidence of such an assault on a state, is causing alarm across the western alliance, with Nato urgently examining the offensive and its implications.While Russia and Estonia are embroiled in their worst dispute since the collapse of the Soviet Union, a row that erupted at the end of last month over the Estonians’ removal of the Bronze Soldier Soviet war memorial in central Tallinn, the country has been subjected to a barrage of cyber warfare, disabling the websites of government ministries, political parties, newspapers, banks, and companies.

We’re relocating Blindside. You shouldn’t notice any difference except that it will be unavailable from 11pm Tuesday to 7am Wednesday. So save those posts…

A kind correspondent points me to this mid-90s book The Panoptic Sort: A Political Economy of Personal Information by Oscar H. Gandy here for those who can use Questia or here at Amazon

This book aims to inform the reader about exactly what is at stake when the bureaucracies of government and commerce compile, share and make use of an almost unlimited amount of information to manage the social and economic systems within their spheres. The author describes and analyzes today’s panoptic operation, which depends on the ability of operators to classify and sort information about individuals in such a way that techniques of correct training or rehabilitation may subsequently be applied more efficiently.

Sounds like the business. Has anyone read it and taken it on board, I wonder?

I don’t get this.

There was an article in The Times a year ago about people in Shoreditch getting the world’s fastest Internet service - 2Gb/sec.

Ministers have earmarked £12 million for the Shoreditch project as the centrepiece of its New Deal for the Communities.

That piece has been Dugg over 2000 times, with the American cousins commenting “why can’t we get speeds like that over here” etc.

This sounds like ongoing news, and the sort of thing a spinning government would want to crow about. But there’s no other reference to this project I can find. And the “powerhouse” at the centre of it, Telehouse, has nothing to say about this great project and indeed no news at all since 2006.

What gives? Did the project stop? Has some weird veil of discretion been drawn? Or is it not what it appears to be in The Times‘ piece, ie is it some shoddy Sky-TV-like initiative being pumped up to be something it isn’t by the shabby Murdoch tabloid? Here’s more of the original piece:

Introduced this month, the system will allow 20,000 households to surf the web and download material at speeds up to 2,000 times faster than present services. Users will, for example, be able to download all 32,640 pages of the Encyclopaedia Britannica in less than seven seconds, managers of the government-funded project said.Most commercially-available broadband connections operate at a speed of 2 megabits per second (2Mb/s), but the Shoreditch project can access internet images and content at a speed of up to 2 billions of bits per second (2Gb/s).

The key to the speed of the new system is a high-security “powerhouse” located in London’s Docklands. The Telehouse data centre houses 13,000 square metres (140,000 sq ft) of fibre-optic telecommunications and IT infrastructure required to power the most high-speed connections.

Nicknamed “CTU”, after the high-tech counter-terrorist headquarters in the American television series, 24, the Telehouse centre is said to be one of the most secure locations in Britain.

It is designed to provide back-up power for Britain’s vital network services in the event of a terrorist attack and its environmental sensors ensure that high-powered connections, such as the Shoreditch project, do not melt through excessive heat.

Any clues?

Update - the project seems to be called Digital Bridge and it refers to only one press article about - from The Sun, which tends to support the Wapping great fib theory. Digital Bridge seems to be an ISP offering community TV and Sky-like drivel over normal phone lines.

KPMG offers us the Profile of a fraudster based on 360 cases of financial fraud in companies.

70% of fraudsters were 36-55 years old.

85% were male.

68% acted independently.

89% were employees ie insiders

I guess we can assume the people likeliest to leak our personal details from the IPS’s Identity register would fit a similar profile. KPMG’s research suggests we need to protect our whistleblowers, as they’re the most successful route for revealing fraudsters. So more strength to the arm of that little-known NGO Public Concern at Work.