Does this short movie contribute anything interesting to the discussion?

As this event is getting closer to hand, I am reposting William’s discussion of it from last month.

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

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.

I’m not talking about middle age here. I can buy a memory stick with 4GB of Flash memory for £24.99 here. Assuming memory keeps getting denser, the same stick should hold about 256 gigs in less than 10 years, or about 56 gigs more than my brand new laptop.

That’s about 125 million eBooks of average length.

Looked at another way, useful amounts of memory will be storable on much smaller spaces.

What does it do to information assurance if, for example, a young lady with a tongue stud could be carrying the contents of the British Library in her mouth?

Somebody tell me if I dropped a zero or a decimal place somewhere.

Could anybody please explain to me why all public consultations should not consist of three elements?

1. A meeting to which the public is invited to hear public officials speak about the relevant issue.

2. A website (very much like this weblog) with documents and positions posted for examination that takes comments.

3. A call centre staffed by neutral and briefed operators to serve those who lack web access or prefer to speak their mind as opposed to writing out comments.

Would this not be quicker? Would this not be more open? Would this not engage the public more effectively? Would this not be evidence that government does not depend on apathy to secure its hold on power?

A centralized database of citizen information, validated by biometric marker(s) and used by a variety of government departments for a variety of purposes creates perverse incentives to criminal / terrorist elements.

The more biometrics makes a database trusted, the more it will be used. But the more it is trusted, the more value to a criminal/terrorist for spoofing it.

Will we then create an environment where only the professional bad guys can fake our identity?

Real world question: Is this what we want? Would we be better served with a central database vulnerable to a few, well-equipped bad guys or a series of smaller databases that relate to specific government functions that may be vulnerable to a wider class of (somewhat) pettier criminals?

Is this true?

Is it just me, or do you also notice that every time there has been a visible loss of confidential information from government, there has been a laptop lost in a train or stolen out of a car or something similar?

How difficult would it be to require all laptops used by government workers to come with an RFID chip that caused an alarm to sound every time it was more than a metre away from its owner?

If we were able to perform useful work by dealing with classes of data described in object oriented databases, would more people be able to work with the databases without having access to the data warehoused within?

I would love to get some opinions on this.

I touched on this topic before, but I want to ask a question a different way: If technology makes it possible to provide talking maps activated by an RFID chip in a mobile phone, does government have a responsibility to make this available to the blind? Does it have a responsibility to make a text version available to the deaf? Should it provide localised versions to tourists and immigrants?

Does creating a technological innovation also immediately create a responsibility for how it’s used?

I think all of us, in business and govenment, do a fairly decent job of evaluating the potential of new technological developments with a 1-year horizon.

For example, I think we can all see that mobile phone technology is moving in directions that will have big implications for us (think official mobile fax transmission and reception), but that 2007, halfway over, probably won’t see it.

I think what all of us have larger problems with is what will happen when two technological innovations are combined.

Thought experiment: What happens when all mobile phones have not only an RFID responder chip, but an RFID transmitter ping as well?

Discuss–and show your work.