Samizdata

There is a scandal in the UK Department of Health’s IT management. The BBC reports it thus:

The Department of Health has apologised for an apparent security lapse which allowed the personal details of junior doctors to be accessed online.
Channel 4 News reported that a breach on the NHS Medical Training Application Service website allowed public access for at least eight hours. The department said the details had only been available briefly, and only to people making employment checks.
[…]
Phone numbers, addresses, previous convictions and sexual orientation were among details available since at least 0900 BST, it reported. The Department of Health was alerted at 1635 BST and the breach closed at 1705 BST.

The opposition spokesmen were on it straightway, pointing out that if this could happen with temporary information on 7,000 junior doctors, what hope was there for the medical records of the entire country intended be held on the NHS Connecting for Health system, or all those personal details being sought out for the NIR, to remain secure?

All very well and good. They won’t be. And we should thank Andrew Lansley MP for taking the opportunity to point it out. But I cannot help feeling let down by the response of media and politicians. “Insecure!” they bleat.

Nowhere, yet, have I heard or read in the mainstream discussion of this incident what seems to me the most screamingly obvious and fundamental questions. What business is it of the DoH to supervise the selection of individual doctors for individual hospital placements at all? And what the hell is it doing collecting information about doctors’ religions, sexual preferences and criminal records in the first place? If you have committed a crime the nature of which debars you from being a doctor, then you’re no longer a doctor, so you should not be on the list. If you have not then your crimes are as irrelevant as your religion or your sexuality, and they should not be. No doubt they were also as carefully classified as to race and ethnic origin as would satisfy apartheid authorities re-equipped with modern computers.

When are people going to rebel against the presumption that government may pigeonhole as it pleases, and anything a bureaucrat with a checklist asks he is entitled to know?

Unless you have a damn good reason, I decide what I’ll tell you about myself based on the nature of our relationship. Information is power. Information is intimacy. Forced disclosure of private information is data-rape.

Those 7,000 young doctors were only incidentally abused by the feeble security. They were deliberately data-raped by the Department of Health first.

Not a film review. Truth is more horrifying than fiction, sometimes.

The truth in question being the willingness of those close to power openly to advocate ever more interference with you and me, not ad hoc for venal, corrupt, human reasons, but in order systematically to enforce the currently approved good life on society.

From the BBC (Public Policy Research¹ is by subscription, and I am not subsidising the bastards any more than I already do from taxes):

Jasper Gerard argues in PPR: “When it comes to booze, society seems to have lost its senses.”

He says current regulations are failing to tackle the growing trend of under age and binge drinking. By raising the age threshold, he claims: “It is at least possible that those in their early and mid teens will not see drink as something they will soon be allowed to do so therefore they might as well start doing it surreptitiously now.”

Alternatively, he proposes getting 18-year-olds to carry smart cards which record how much they have drunk each night and making it an offence to serve more alcohol to anyone under-21 who had already consumed more than three units. [Cant for a pint and a half of ordinary beer – or one decent cocktail – GH]

He conceded that no measure would stamp out youthful drinking entirely, but said it was time for a crackdown.

I note the BBC has this story under ‘health’, rather than ‘politics’. It does not have a ‘neo-Puritanism’ category (perhaps we should have). Medicalised bullying sails past the questioning pickets of journalism and gets straight into the credulous baggage train. As does technological bullying. And here we have medicalised state bullying enabled by technology. Woo-hoo!

One can not quote this fragment of C.S. Lewis too often:

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber barons cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.

It may spoil the mesodiplosis, but those first too mays should be ises. The robber baron pursues his own whims and pleasures, regardless of others; the neo-Puritan is only happy when the lives of others are under control.

¹ = The journal of the Institute for Public Policy Research, the tank in which New Labour thinking goes on.

.. because someone else may be watching, too.

Pippa King is rightly outraged by the bad bargain Bury schools appear to be getting for taxpayer’s money with their their “cashless” fingerprint-based school meals systems. However, I do not think that is the most disturbing element of the story.

There is nothing wrong in principle with using a biometric instead of a separate token to charge an account. And cash-handling is expensive, so you need to minimise it. When I was a child, the school took dinner-money once a week and issued paper tickets: one ticket, one meal. What you ate for your ticket was up to you, though choice was limited. Poor children entitled to free school meals were handed the tickets free, and what money changed hands from whom was invisible to all other children. Each stage involved discrete self-checking transactions in truck/tuck, with no need for continuing accounting for individuals.

Having created individual accounts, the system might still be a simple acounting tool, if those accounts were private. But much more than that is happening here.

Pupils even register points for making healthy choices and are rewarded for healthy eating.

And this being information on ‘risk’ to children – the risk of eating chips, in this case – it will be shared with other authorities, common law confidentiality is expressly excluded [Children Act 2004, s12]. But the information need not be collected; it is because it can be.

The concept of limited government power under law is almost dead: any system in the hands of a British public authority, whatever its ostensible purpose, now acquires a function in surveillance and behaviour control.