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The Royal College of Nursing has just won a case against a bureaucratic body in England that many may not have heard of, the Independent Safeguarding Authority (ISA). The victory is a fairly minimal one: it has been ruled that the ISA must confirm to some elements of fair procedure, and may not ban people from their professions automatically without hearing. None of the professional bodies or establishment human rights organisations such as Liberty appears to be challenging the principle of state vetting in employment. They are fussing about the procedure.
But to me this is an epitome of the degree of state intrusion into our lives that is now accepted in Britain as completely normal.
Here, from the Nursing Times report, are summaries of the cases on the basis of which the most recent ruling was made:
Mr O is a nurse with an exemplary record. Mr O’s wife left their children alone for a short time while Mr O was at work. Mr O’s wife was arrested and detained overnight and subsequently cautioned. Mr O attended the police station the following day voluntarily and was also cautioned. There is no suggestion that Mr O was aware that his wife intended to leave the children alone. However, on 2 March 2010, over nine months since Mr O accepted the caution, the ISA wrote to inform him that it had automatically included his name on the Children’s and Adults’ Barred Lists for a full 10 years. Mr O remained on the Barred Lists until 24 July 2010 until his name was removed after representations were made by the RCN. During this time he was unable to work as a clinical nurse.
Mrs W is a nurse who was automatically included on the Barred Lists for 10 years by ISA on 7 June 2010 after she had accepted a caution for leaving her 11-year-old son at home on his own when she went shopping. Mrs W’s case was referred to the Nursing and Midwifery Council which made a finding after an investigation that she had no case to answer. Mrs W was unable to work as an agency nurse as she was prior to being placed on the Barred Lists and remained on unpaid leave. This placed her under significant financial pressures as a single parent responsible for her son. Mrs W was removed from the auto bar list on 18 August 2010 after the RCN made representations on her behalf.
For those who are unfamiliar with English criminal law, “accepted a caution” is a sort of plea bargain in the hands of the police. If one accepts a caution, one is admitting an offence in return for no further action being taken by police (except keeping a record on you, fingerprints and DNA, till you reach the age of 100). One might believe one was avoiding punishment. That would almost certainly be suggested by police (whose figures are improved and paperwork decreased by disposing of offences by caution). Nevertheless the routine admission of a minor offence can be used by distant bureaucrats (whether they give you a hearing or not) to deprive you of your career (and in the case of British nurses wasting hundreds of thousands of taxpayers money in training). And not only that but such a decisions makes it a criminal offence for anyone to employ you in any capacity in medicine, education or social care. Mr O and Mrs W would have been barred not just from professional nursing, but scrubbing the lavatories in a school after hours, or driving a bus for the elderly. (Or even, by a bureaucratic version of magical contagion, a bus for carers for the elderly. see pdf Q.35)
And cautioned for what? In the one case leaving a near teenager alone for a short while. In the other for allowing (allowing!?) one’s wife to leave the children for less than a working day. Who knew these were criminal offences?
I want children to grow up to be independent. That means them learning to manage themselves as early as they can. Leaving your children on their own for short periods, perhaps overnight or for a weekend, with proper provision and knowledge of who to call in case of problems, is not criminal. It is fine. It is laudable.
But we live in a state that demands you not use your judgement, that cannot bear the possibility of error and learning. It fears mistakes enough that there are now rules about how you may bring up your family, requiring all minors to be treated as needy infants. All adults, on the other hand, whether at home or in their working lives, are deemed to be cruel monsters unless restrained by the threat of excommunication from the benevolent database.
The state knows what is right. The ISA was originally to use a checklist to assess lifestyles for ‘risk‘, though that has been deferred for the moment. You are either among the elect, or you are damned – and the ISA has a list saying which is which.
The vile ContactPoint database, which held details about every child in England and was accessible to hundreds of thousands of professionals has been switched off.
I have to say that in pulling the plug the government has confounded my gloomy predictions that no matter who won the election civil liberty and privacy would be equally poorly served.
Good comment to a BBC article on the subject here:
I work with large data sets professionally (I am a data architect working with large companies). ContactPoint was always going to fail, either disastrously through its own failings, or through an eventually inevitable political decision. The experience of data management within public and private organisations is that almost any data set like this will eventually end up on a laptop or a memory stick which then gets lost, and that users need to be carefully trained and monitored to ensure appropriate use. That was never going to happen here, with 300,000 users in a number of organisations, roles and lines of business, spread across the country.
Dr Robert Daniels-Dwyer, Oxford
However Simon from Doncaster feels differently:
David Cameron, in my view, will be directly responsible for any child who is abused in whatever form as a result of scrapping this system. How long before another Victoria Climbie? Well, with the cut backs to child social care, expect more and more and no doubt it will be local authorities who take the blame. This government is a disgrace.
Where did you say you worked again, Simon?
My good friend Stateside, Russell E Whitaker, is, like an increasing number of Facebook users, getting annoyed at how any privacy settings that might seem to be available on the service are not being respected and have in fact been eroded, according to this report. Now, I have always taken the view that the internet is not a fully robust thing from a privacy point of view, but then again, if a business claims to respect privacy, but it turns out there is a problem, then users are entitled to feel angry.
I have a FB page, but I never put sensitive personal stuff on there and I tend to prune so-called “friends” pretty ruthlessly if I find that anyone is taking liberties with me. But I take the risk, at least for the moment.
But the beauty of this technology and indeed of capitalism is that complaints about an issue – such as privacy – are already spawning new ventures and ideas. I am not sure how this venture will work out (based in NY) but I wish it the best of luck.
I am fairly seriously prosopagnosic. That may be why I am so skeptical about identification in general, but the research into the condition is beginning to militate quite strongly against the presuppositions many people in the law-and-order business make about the utility of photo-ID.
The BBC has an interesting radio programme on how bad people are at facial-recognition, here:
Health Check
The points in this that I suggest are important for policy are:
1. Most people are not in fact very good at matching strangers to their photographs. People tend to be much better at recognising people they know than people they do not know, and mistakenly generalise what you could call ‘Easy Matching’ from their experience with their familiars. This is not a mistake you would make if, like me, you find recognising people you know hard.
Looking at someone’s ‘photo-ID’ on a one-off occasion will ordinarily be hit-and-miss, unless you are one of the rare people the radio programme calls “super-recognisers”.
2. A significant number of people (the programme suggests 3%) are sufficiently bad that it handicaps them in everyday life, but generally they do not realise it. I was 30 before I understood I had a problem, though I can recall incidents back to 6 or 7 years old that are examples. Yet officialdom assumes that anyone can recognise others from pictures, to the degree suggested by the false Easy Matching supposition. There is no testing of passport control staff, police, security guards, bar-staff… anyone, who is expected to do the matching.
Yet 3% or thereabouts not only are ordinarily useless at it but are being put to an impossible task. They may well compensate intuitively by responding to other behavioural or bodily clues that have nothing to do with facial features—the Clever Hans syndrome. I know I do. But I was not always aware that is what I was doing, or that I was different in that respect from other people.
Some Hypotheses:
Photo-ID for age-checking is rather like voice-stress or polygraph “fraud detection”. There is no real evidence for its accuracy, yet the story that it ‘obviously’ works is so plausible to so many, that few even question it. There is a massive confirmation bias, and it is probably not acting as more than an intimidatory deterrent.
Software facial-recognition is thought of as pretty bad for the purpose that it is put to (fact) – but it may well be better than 90%+ of people under the same circumstances of matching strangers in large numbers, and infinitely better than the small fraction of checkers who, unknown to themselves and their employers, are getting it wrong almost all the time. Criticisms of the technology are often as based in the mistaken Easy Matching idea as support for it. Both sides of that argument assume people are better than machines. But in practice ID-ing travellers and drinkers doesn’t do a lot. It is an imposition and a cost on everyone, but the attitudes struck in security theatre do not stop competent imposture.
Flash and dash is close to useless, but there’s a huge industry of ID badges built on it. The false assumption is that replacing a doorkeeper who knows everyone (and in most cases will therefore recognise them quite well), with picture-passes that ‘anyone can check’, is more efficient and more secure. Quite the reverse. But look at the reception area in any large firm and what to you see? Picture passes with RFID tracking of the pass and bored temps concerned that you display a badge properly, operating on the assumption that your badge is you.
(Technology keeps ever more track of those tokens, however. So, as long as you are compliant, regardless of the fact that linking ID with people does not work, ID does work as surveillance.)
There is now in the system a prejudice and an interest in not facing (ha!) these ideas. Everything in fact tends towards dismissing them. The authoritarian mindset is particularly prone to confirmation bias (Cf. the catastrophic DNA database arguments), and Clever Hans will sucker them every time. The most modern fashions in government are close to superstition.
Yesterday Google remembered its Don’t be Evil maxim and announced A New Approach to China:
We launched Google.cn in January 2006 in the belief that the benefits of increased access to information for people in China and a more open Internet outweighed our discomfort in agreeing to censor some results. […]
These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered–combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web–have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China. We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.
This has been long time coming – and by long I mean a few months as apparently Google has recalled most of their engineers from China leaving behind skeleton staff in September last year – and yet vastly overdue. The move is surprising as the world got accustomed to ‘business’ justifications for dealing with totalitarian states – size of the market, encouragement of progress, which in turn breeds freedom, benefits to the oppressed, er, markets. Blah, blah, blah.
In as much as progress is encouraged by competition and customer sophistication, this argument is valid. In as much as these need to evolve in a framework based on the rule of law, lack of corruption, some respect for property rights and notions of individual rights and freedom, it clearly doesn’t apply to countries like China. During the Cold War, the detente of the 70s and its aftermath have shown that trading with the communist countries does not have marked impact on their political ruling class. Actually, it does as they are the ones who benefit from any foreign investment and trade. Both Coca-cola and Pepsi were widely available and I do not recall any tangible improvement to dissidents’ existence. Fair enough, Google is in business of information distribution and filtering, which is far more relevant to any regime opposition, however, what with compromise and censorship, it has ruled itself out that ‘game’ some time ago. As for technology transfer and indigenous competition they certainly had a constructive role – Baidu, the local search engine has most of the search market, having learnt much from the likes of Google.
A cynic might say Google has not much to lose by exiting China, the revenue from that market was ‘immaterial’ by their own account. Let the cynics have their moment. There are enough people and companies who worship Google as the ultimate modern corporation, or simply as a success story, and the signals this move would send can only be good. And long overdue.
I am not holding my breath for other companies to follow. There is no comment from Yahoo or Microsoft as yet but I suspect this quote by Tang Jun, former President of Microsoft China sums up a lot of thinking in the business world right now.
For Chinese netizens, it does not matter whether Google quits from China or not. But this was the most stupid decision they had ever made since giving up China was giving up half of the future world.
Mr Tang Jun is right, of course. The Chinese government and its business champions are hardly going to notice and bother even less. They have been hoovering up some of the best software engineers the Western businesses have made redundant in the last couple of years and growing their own breed too. All of the search engines in China have helped the Chinese government to censor speech, some of which we covered here before. Other companies, namely Cisco’s Panopticon Chinoiserie, have assisted in more active ways, though last year, the government tried, but failed, to force computer manufacturers to install a censorship program on their new PCs called Green Dam. Perhaps there is hope but, for now, count me among the cynics.
This is not a joke.
Well, it is a joke. However, the Home Office does not seem to realise this.
Reading the comments at The Register is always good value in times like this, too.
Somebody please tell me that this is really a withering piece of satire dreamed up by Guy Herbert. Please.
A number of governments – the UK and German – have used information stolen from a Liechtenstein bank in a bid to hunt after alleged tax evaders. And now, there is a story that data has been stolen from HSBC Private Bank (Suisse), divulging data on scores of French clients. The French government, you will not be surprised to learn, gentle reader, is probably not all that shy of using stolen material. It will be interesting to see what happens to such data. Here is another news report.
As I keep saying in my defence of tax havens, bank secrecy is not really about allowing dodgy folk to squirrel away ill-gotten gains, which is the usual image presented these days. (That is not to say that such secrecy has not been abused in the past). In past ages, groups fleeing persecution – such as Jews from Nazi-controlled Europe – availed themselves of banking secrecy in order to protect what was left of that wealth. We should not be so naive as to imagine that even without a repeat of such horrors, there is not a need for client privacy to be rigorously enforced. It is monstrous that governments should use stolen material in this fashion, but then, as the founding editor of this site likes to remind us, the state is not your friend.
And then ask yourself: What is to be done? What can I do? How far am I prepared to go?
John Osimek reports for The Register:
The government obsession with collecting data has now extended to five-year-olds, as local Community Health Services get ready to arm-twist parents into revealing the most intimate details of their own and their child’s personal, behavioural and eating habits.
The questionnaire – or “School Entry Wellbeing Review” – is a four-page tick-box opus, at present being piloted in Lincolnshire, requiring parents to supply over 100 different data points about their own and their offspring’s health. Previously, parents received a “Health Record” on the birth of a child, which contained around eight questions which needed to be answered when that child started school.
The Review asks parents to indicate whether their child “often lies or cheats”: whether they steal or bully; and how often they eat red meat, takeaway meals or fizzy drinks. […]
The BigBrotherWatch campaign has a rather neat idea for a networked protest against the bully state, designed to encourage people to notice how much of it has insinuated itself into everyday life.
You put a standard sticker on some physical evidence of intrusion, threat, surveillance, overregulation, nannying… by or authorised by, an official body. You photograph it. You send in the photograph to them and/or publish it by other means… and that’s it. There’s a running competition for the best pics.
It is a smart use of the networked world to do something that is not quite the direct action loved by old-fashioned activists, but more directive action, to get the public’s attention on the world around us and how needlessly oppressive it has become. And it is a game, too.
Alex Deane of BBW tells me he has already had hundreds of requests for stickers, and some very serious and respectable think-tankies appeared to be taking them at a meeting I attended last night.
I wonder whether anyone will manage to tag an FIT unit?
This comes as no surprise whatsoever…
All telecoms companies and internet service providers will be required by law to keep a record of every customer’s personal communications, showing who they are contacting, when, where and which websites they are visiting.
Despite widespread opposition over Britain’s growing surveillance society, 653 public bodies will be given access to the confidential information, including police, local councils, the Financial Services Authority, the Ambulance Service, fire authorities and even prison governors. […] John Yates, Britain’s head of anti-terrorism, has argued that the legislation is vital for his investigators.
The Scotland Yard Assistant Commissioner said: “The availability of Communications Data to investigators is absolutely crucial. Its importance to investigating the threat of terrorism and serious crime cannot be overstated”.
It is just a bit ironic that is comes on the day celebrating the Berlin Wall coming down. It is not enough to just defeat this legislation, the likes of John Yates and all his ilk need to be driven from positions of power because these are the Orwellian people who are the true clear and present danger to our very civilisation. The threat from terrorism is real, but the threat from our own insatiable security state is even greater.
Well, I cannot say I am remotely surprised.
An estimated 11.3 million people – including parents who join school rotas to take pupils to sports events – already face having their backgrounds checked to allow them to work with children.
But Sir Roger Singleton, the chairman of the Independent Safeguarding Authority, said the scope of the database could increase significantly because companies would fear losing business if they did not have their employees vetted.
It is really hard to know how a satire publication like the Onion or Private Eye can make a living these days.
Via Iain Dale’s blog, I came across this nifty piece of Conservative Party electioneering poster art. As Mr Dale says, this is incredibly prescient. Of course, the glee of Mr Dale in finding this is somewhat undermined by the fact that the Conservatives have not, to put it mildly, covered themselves with glory on this issue down the years, even though, to be fair, that it was Churchill’s Conservatives who axed ID cards and the final bits of rationing in the early 1950s. But whatever quibbles one might have, there is little doubt that today, Labour MPs will struggle ever to be taken seriously on the civil liberties issue. That is for certain.
Last night I listened to a great talk by Henry Porter, the journalist and book author, and the spy fiction novelist Charles Cumming. For Porter, civil liberties issues form a part of his latest book. Recommended.
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We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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