I’ve been re-reading the report of the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee – Identity Cards Technologies: Scientific Advice, Risk and Evidence in preparation for an interview this evening. It is full of wonderful sarcasm couched in parliamentary politeness, and I recommend it to you, if you care to understand how Britain is governed and/or have a taste for black comedy. MPs are as much bemused spectators as the rest of us.
Nobody knows what the Home Office is up to, because it refuses to tell anyone – even select committees – any more than it can get away with. It does have 180-odd people now working on its Identity Cards programme. But I begin to wonder if they themselves know what they are about…
In case you think I am exaggerating, this is from section 30 of the report:
In written evidence, Microsoft said that “the current phase of public consultation by the Home Office has primarily focused on issues of procurement”. Jerry Fishenden [NTO for the UK] from Microsoft elaborated that “every time we came close to wanting to talk about the architecture, we were told it was not really up for discussion because there was an internal reference model that the Home Office team had developed themselves, and that they did not feel they wanted to discuss their views of the architecture”.
I’m a bit of a word-fetishist. Out of pedantry, I like to say what I mean, no more or less.
But also it’s more than pedantry, as the section quoted from the report shows: the correct usage of words – to paraphrase Ayn Rand, ‘A is A’ – or, more precisely the incorrect and loose usage in this quoted section, is one of the most profound political obstacles faced by the rationalist right against the sentimental pull of the left.
For us ‘justice’ is a process, not an outcome. A Nazi is a statist, collectivist socialist, not Norman Tebbit. And ‘society’ is an intangible, which quite literally cannot be shown to exist.
Likewise ‘architecture’ concerns the roof over one’s head. And ‘internal reference model’? Like ‘public policy’, it means anything you want it to.
Edward,
I hope you are deliberately missing the point. Clear use of language is not the monopoly of left or right, even where language itself is a battleground.
You rather spoil your own point by rattling out some tendentious redefinitions that undermine communication. I think that, “which quite literally cannot be shown to exist,” could do with clarification.
In the passage quoted, Mr Fishenden’s polite circumlocution is normal for the context of giving evidence to a committee. He could hardly have been much clearer, or damning of the Home Office, in the circumstances. “Architecture” has a perfectly good secondary meaning (metaphorical perhaps, but perfectly good) in the underlying organisation and structure of anything. It is entirely standard to talk of the “architecture” of an IT system, meaning the key features and relationships of the software, hardware and data-structures involved.
In order for the ID cards to function, personal data will need to be held on a database. And in order for that database to be secure, it will need some kind of robust encryption. And it’s a basic principle of cryptography that no proprietary cryptographic algorithm can ever be considered robust, because the acid test of cryptography is to publish your algorithm and let every crypto hacker out there try and break it before you go live.
In refusing to discuss their proposed architecture even with their own consultants, the Home Office has adopted an approach to IT security that is so bad that even Microsoft noticed.
(I see this was picked up in s.117 of the report. Too bad the government doesn’t have to listen to Parliament any more).
I understood your point to be about Home Office secrecy – as part of its culture.
I approached the quote from the point of view of a rather different form of obfuscation – that of the abuse of language, and of the corporatist mind-meld of the last decade whereby businessmen and politicians come to sound like each other in their ability to say nothing much of anything. Of Mr Fishenden’s polite circumlocation, are you really telling me you couldn’t have said as much, with half the verbiage and in correct English?
In other words, corporatist-speak achieves the same thing as a policy of secrecy: it stymies accountability, and in large corporate organisations, who wants to be held accountable?
You are of course right to say that it is clear what is meant by use of the word ‘architecture’ in this context, but the fact that repeated use of this word in such a context has anaesthetised us to its misuse as such, does not alter that basic misuse.
And being of the objectivist right, I beg to differ (although Rand of course scorned terms like left and right): I think the clear use of language is a hall mark of the right, while the left proceeds by redefinition and the creation of conceptual relativities e.g. ‘poverty’.
As for my claim that society quite literally cannot be shown to exist, and your demand that this claim should be clarified, I am at a loss. We can show that air exists, albeit air is intangible. But how do you show society exists? What needs to be clarified about my claim?
For that matter, society cannot be shown NOT to exist and belief therein might therefore be deemed ipso facto irrational since it is unfalsifiable. I realise that this sort of talk makes Tory party members, and I think you are one of these, uneasy, but there it is.
Edward Lud,
My beef was more with the vague and catachrestic manner of your claim about “society”, not with the assertion – which again I suspect is a quibble about the connotations others attache to the term.
Guy, I see nothing vague in my assertion re. society.
Your suspicion is in a sense correct: the fact that its devotees define it in different ways is a bit like my point about ‘public policy’ meaning whatever you want it to mean. Indeed the connotations attached to the word point towards its relativity and intangibility.
It is a useful concept in a vague sort of way, but mostly as a rhetorical device.
If you think my claim about society is wrong, why not just say so, and then tell me why?
I realise that is indeed moving away from the topic of your original post, but humour me anyway…
And yes, I did have to go and look up catachrestic.
Edward,
I wholly agree there’s no entity that bears the properties of “society” as it is commonly used by political commentators and politicians. Many of the connotations of “society” are wisps-o-the-will, and in that metaphorical, personalised, sense, there is no such thing as society. I don’t think the word is without significance, however. There are phenomena of human organisation, both cultural and institutional, that it can usefully denote.
xj,
Encryption and data-security is very far from the Home Office and the Cabinet Office mind. The fundamental intent of the system is to enable the broadest possible data-sharing and exchange – a single virtual file on every resident – and to that end a cabinet comittee with representatives from sixteen departments has been set up to encourage as many uses of the system as possible. This is not encouraging.
‘Society’ is an emergent characteristic of interactions that occur within a cultural context, nothing more (or less). The idea that a government can ‘defend society’ is one of the most strange ideas ever. It can defend individuals or groups of people, but not ‘society’ per se.
A government can only ‘defend’ a society by not destroying it, i.e. replacing it with with politically mediated interactions with use commands to impose characteristcs that were previously emergent (i.e. replacing society with politics).