Quarter of all British govt databases are illegal
* A quarter of all major public sector databases are fundamentally flawed and almost certainly illegal. These should be scrapped or redesigned immediately;Database State (Thanks, Ian!)* The database state is victimising minority groups and vulnerable people, from single mothers to young black men and schoolchildren;
* Children are amongst the ‘most at risk’ from Britain’s Database State, with three of the largest databases set up to support and protect children failing to achieve their aims;
* Data sharing is a barrier to socially responsible activities. It is deterring teenagers from accessing health advice and undermining goodwill towards law enforcement;
* Only 15% of major public sector databases are effective, proportionate and necessary;
* We spend £16 billion a year on public sector IT and a further £105bn spending is planned for the next five years – but only 30% of public-sector IT projects succeed.
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NoOOO!!!
MY loving caring Goverment would never break the law..would they?
They would never set up a big brother surveillance state to rival that of the worst dictatorships of the last century.That would be unthinkable!
They only want to look after us all...
+++sarcasm gland overheating+++
It would be nice to have a brief explanation of HOW they violate human rights laws. While I think that out of control sharing of people's personal data is a problem, I am having difficulty thinking of how it would be illegal to share between government agencies.
I hope that is explained further down the article but it should have been in the executive summary or the introduction (probably both).
Have you downloaded the paper? It's free and detailed.
I am _not_ in support of the surveillance state. I must say, however, that statements like "fundamentally flawed and almost certainly illegal" always raise my propaganda-awareness flag.
Why are the authors certain that it is illegal, or not? Haven't they any lawyers in their group who can decide whether or not they're illegal? "Almost certainly" is a phrase designed to influence all of us to believe they're illegal, without actually presenting the facts of whether they are, or not.
It's the flipside of the torrent argument. Is storing the data illegal? Don't pick on the database, it's the consumer of the data that should be called into question.
Bloo, that's them giving as much of their professional opinion as possible without being so arrogant as to tell us these things in unprovable (withon the power of their organisation) absolutes. You should be thankful they aren't spouting off half truths, but that they take the time to encourage people with the actual power to determine the legitimacy of each of the things they object to.
99% is not 100%. But it is 49% more than 50%.
@3 - I downloaded it this morning but was on the way to work and only had a few minutes. Perhaps I am alone in not knowing the legal ramifications violating privacy wrt UK human rights laws.
The only thing I can think of is privacy of medical records or perhaps lawyer confidentiality.
Sleze, here's the situation as I understand it: the Human Rights Act was intended to integrate into English and Welsh law (there's an equivalent for Scottish law, too) the provisions of the EU Declaration of Human Rights, itself a more-or-less-clause-by-clause steal from the UN Declaration of Human Rights, which was largely lifted from the US Bill of Rights in the wake of the Late Unpleasantness in 1945.
However, there are some differences; some good, some bad.
For example, the EU DoHR watered down the right to freedom of speech by permitting exceptions for health and public morality (D'oh!). That's an example of a bad difference. But on the other side of the balance, it brought in an explicit right to privacy (which you won't find in the US Constitution, as amended).
The right to privacy isn't an absolute (there are exceptions for law enforcement, as you'd expect) but it's there as a guiding principle, and has the force of constitutional law behind it. That is: it's taken as a starting point that violating people's privacy without a good and legal reason is wrong, and each such violation needs to be justified -- rather than the traditional approach of merely privileging specific information such as medical records or legal counsel.
Sleze.. credit card records, bank statements, tax returns, your kid's test scores, your online habits, passport entry/exit information (countries you've been to), jobs you've applied for, political affiliations you have or had..
You could be excluded or harrassed for doing the "wrong" thing in any of these categories. They are all deserving of the right to privacy.
Color me skeptical. I've scanned through the whole document, and while it does a great job of summarizing what they don't like about these various databases, it does almost nothing to explain what laws are being violated or how they're being violated. Unless I skipped over something important, there are zero references to actual laws.
Let's put it this way: imagine the tables are turned and the government puts out a report of this length telling you that what you're doing is illegal. And yet it doesn't tell you which laws you've violated, only that there may be the potential for some abuse in what you've done. Who among us would accept that?
Come on, what's so wrong with setting up a database to support and protect those children who are failing to achieve their aims? They need the most support of all!
Thanks for the post, Cory. I have to say, although you've got your reasons not to move back here to Canada, you offer pretty compelling ones to leave the Motherland...
#10:
This is a fair comment - illegality in a public body is a massively serious issue.
The reason for "almost certainly" illegal is that you'd need a court judgement to decide if they conclusively are one way or the other. You can run through the law as it's in textbooks and statute but you need to go to court to apply it and see if your opinion is backed up.
It's because you can often read it to satisfy whatever bias you personally hold and whoever you're telling might have a very different one. I'm certain the Government disagree about the legality of their IT services, for example, and only one of the parties is going to be right.
It's not so much about getting a handy lawyer to look at it, you'd need a judge.
if the king does it, it's not illegal.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/mar/22/gordon-brown-terrorism
Tales of Database Terror from the private sector:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/7927487.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/7928807.stm
Why do I find myself thinking the response from the government will be:
"We're really very very sorry about the illegal databases. So to solve the problem, we're replacing them with one single database that we promise is completely legal. Honest. Oh, and step this way for your little plastic cards."
"Quarter of all British govt databases are illegal"
That's a wildly overstated headline. This is a report by a decidedly biased organization that, as #10 points out, never really delivers the goods to support that contention.
But because of Cory's own biases we're not going to get an even-handed treatment.
instead of whining, go dredge up your evidence they are legal. Who's stopping you?
Oh, that histrionic Cory Doctorow! He should have just quoted the BBC: A quarter of all government databases are illegal and should be scrapped or redesigned, according to a report. Oh, wait...