WEDNESDAY 2 May 2007 will always stick in Professor Max Buttle’s memory.
He was about to leave for a conference in Berlin, but was detained by the arrival of the US secret service. Three debt collectors, a social worker and a court bailiff were also anxious to talk to him.
Orwell’s vision of a Big Brother state that knew everything about everyone had, over the past five years, finally borne fruit. And it was a strange fruit, fertilised largely by computer scientists’ urge to do things the Right Way. At last, they had managed to get government to adopt universal standards that allowed the free exchange of data between official computers. And thus they had overcome the bureaucratic friction that had always been freedom’s invisible friend.
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The arrival on Buttle’s doorstep of a district nurse with urgent news about his cervical smear test saved the day. Clearly he wasn’t the woman they were all after.
He could see why the secret service agents were jumpy, though. The previous day had been dubbed “Weird Tuesday”. Terrorists calling themselves the Atheist Revolutionary Fundamentalist Front had laced Wall Street’s water supply with hallucinogens. The dollar’s exchange rate against the euro had briefly been an imaginary number.
And that evening, a suspected atheist had been seen getting into a friend’s car outside a derelict house in North London. A policewoman’s helmet-cam fed its image to the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency computer. It recognised the number plate as Buttle’s. The computer instantly cross-checked with the Inland Revenue, the County Court Service, Social Services, the Passport Office, airline booking computers-and the National Criminal Intelligence Service, which contacted the American authorities. Oh, and Health Data plc.
What Buttle would never discover-because it was officially secret-was the conclusion of the internal inquiry into the disappearance of Ms Max Tuttle, suspected atheist. The helmet-cam pictures clearly showed a moth alighting on the number plate at the crucial moment.
Coincidental misidentifications aside, the existence of such a unified database meant that few people could keep any important secrets from the British government. For decades it had collected a great deal of information. Each time it gave itself powers to collect more-notably with the Regulation of Investigatory Powers (RIP) Act 2000 and the Anti-terrorism Crime and Security Act 2001-civil libertarians had warned about the disappearance of privacy. But it was the gathering together of all this data, not its existence or deficiencies in the technology limiting access to it, that threw the whole notion of privacy into question.
That unification had been made possible by the development of XML, the Extensible Markup Language, described by its developer, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), as “the universal format for structured documents and data”. In November 2001, the Office of the E-envoy, part of the British government’s Cabinet Office, mandated XML as the key standard for data integration.
Like everything W3C does, XML is designed to be what computer programmers call, with slightly ironic capitals, the Right Thing. Among other things, its specifications are open and public, ensuring that XML data can be interpreted by programs from any software vendor.
If you open a database of names and addresses created with Microsoft’s Access program in a text editor program, for example, all you will see is a lot of apparently random bytes. Access is not the Right Thing, because only it knows how to retrieve the contents of the field called “name” in each record in the list. An XML file, by contrast, is in plain text. A record might read
Add a higher-level standard specifying the “tags” that describe the data-a “schema” in the jargon-and you have the perfect format for ferrying information between databases. Currently the E-envoy is coordinating an effort to do just that.
“The best defence of our privacy until now has been that government departments are fed up with paying contractors oodles of money to produce custom-built links between databases that are five years late,” says Caspar Bowden of the Foundation for Information Policy Research. XML solves that technological problem, because it allows a simple “wrapper” to be built around each database to a standard specification.
In April this year, the Cabinet Office published a report on the policy and legal implications of this, entitled Privacy and data-sharing. It uses the language of “joined-up government” and “improving service to customers”.
But bear in mind that you are just one of the “customers” for data about you: the others are government departments and businesses. The report recommends links between all the databases that pointed accusing fingers at Buttle, and it suggests a new Act giving ministers the power to authorise new links simply by placing a proposal before Parliament.
“There are some signs,” the report notes, “that the level of public concern about privacy is on the rise…This anxiety has some parallels with shifting attitudes to food safety over the last decade.” It couches the response to this entirely in terms of “building greater public trust”. This is to be achieved by “openness, transparency and consultation in the policy-making process”-not, note, in the data-sharing process.
Contrast this with the recommendation in January 2000 of the Information Society Forum (ISF), which is charged with advising the European Commission on such matters. “Privacy and anonymity are human and citizens’ rights. They are vital to citizens’ and consumers’ trust in the working of the information society. People must have control over the use of their personal data. They must feel free to communicate without being subject to permanent surveillance.”
The ISF praised the European Union’s Privacy Directive-and proposed firmness in the conflict over privacy with the US, which has resisted legislation ensuring such rights. In October 2001, Congress rushed through the Patriot Act, which, Bowden says, largely copied the provisions of Britain’s RIP and terrorism Acts. The Pentagon allocated between $1 billion and $5 billion to data integration-though the division between federal and state governments may soak up more than that.
A standard definition of privacy, by Alan Westin, professor of public law at Columbia University, is “the right to control how much information others know about you”. But what exceptions should there be, given, for example, a War Against Terrorism? As Bowden notes: “Privacy is paradoxical…without it, people may fear to participate in public life, or support unpopular causes.”
Buttle, meanwhile, got off fairly lightly. Once he’d come to official attention, however, he faced a tax audit in the course of which his wife learned of an expenses claim for a stay in Bonn when he was supposed to have been in Barcelona.
