Database State

Major report out this morning commissioned by the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust in Britain taking the Brown government to task not merely for the dubious policy choices involved in the extension of many public sector surveillance and record-keeping databases but for their very illegality.

Comments by ZD Report, the Daily Telegraph’s bloggers, the Guardian, Computer World and Computer Weekly.

The report assesses 46 databases across the major government departments, and finds that:
A quarter of the public-sector databases reviewed are almost certainly illegal under human
rights or data protection law; they should be scrapped or substantially redesigned. More than
half have significant problems with privacy or effectiveness and could fall foul of a legal
challenge.
Fewer than 15% of the public databases assessed in this report are effective, proportionate
and necessary, with a proper legal basis for any privacy intrusions. Even so, some of them still
have operational problems.
Britain is out of line with other developed countries, where records on sensitive matters like
health care and social services are held locally. In Britain, data is increasingly centralized, and
shared between health and social services, the police, schools, local government and the
taxman.
The benefits claimed for data sharing are often illusory. Sharing can harm the vulnerable, not
least by leading to discrimination and stigmatization.
The UK public sector spends over £16 billion a year on IT. Over £100 billion in spending is
planned for the next five years, and even the Government cannot provide an accurate figure
for cost of its ‘Transformational Government’ programme. Yet only about 30% of government
IT projects succeed.

The following databases are flagged Code Red – as in breach of law:

the National DNA Database, which holds DNA profiles for approximately 4 million
individuals, over half a million of whom are innocent (they have not been convicted,
reprimanded, given a final warning or cautioned, and have no proceedings pending against
them) – including more than 39,000 children;
the National Identity Register, which will store biographical information, biometric data
and administrative data linked to the use of an ID card;
ContactPoint, which is a national index of all children in England. It will hold biographical
and contact information for each child and record their relationship with public services,
including a note on whether any ‘sensitive service’ is working with the child;
the NHS Detailed Care Record, which will hold GP and hospital records in remote servers
controlled by the government, but to which many care providers can add their own
comments, wikipedia-style, without proper control or accountability; and the Secondary
Uses Service, which holds summaries of hospital and other treatment in a central system to
support NHS administration and research;
the electronic Common Assessment Framework, which holds an assessment of a child’s
welfare needs. It can include sensitive and subjective information, and is too widely
disseminated;
ONSET, which is a Home Office system that gathers information from many sources and
seeks to predict which children will offend in the future;
the DWP’s cross-departmental data sharing programme, which involves sharing large
amounts of personal information with other government departments and the private sector;
the Audit Commission’s National Fraud Initiative, which collects sensitive information from
many different sources and under the Serious and Organised Crime Act 2007 is absolved
from any breaches of confidentiality;
the communications database and other aspects of the Interception Modernisation
Programme, which will hold everyone’s communication traffic data such as itemised phone
bills, email headers and mobile phone location history; and
the Prüm Framework, which allows law enforcement information to be shared between EU
Member States without proper data protection.

The Recommendations on how data should be collected, held and managed by government are worth reading:

The databases that this report has rated as ‘Red’ should be scrapped or redesigned
immediately. ‘Amber’ databases should be subject to an independent review to assess their
privacy impact and any benefit to society they may have.
Sensitive personal information should normally only be collected and shared with the
subject’s consent – and where practical people should opt in rather than opting out.
Government should compel the provision or sharing of sensitive personal data only for strictly
defined purposes, and in almost all cases, sensitive data should be kept on local rather than
national systems.
Individuals should be able to enforce their privacy in court on human-rights grounds without
being liable for costs – the state has massive resources to contest cases while the individual
does not.
Citizens should have the right to access most public services anonymously. We have been
moving from a world in which departments had to take a positive decision to collect data, to
one where they have to take a positive decision not to. This needs to be challenged.
The report also makes a further set of recommendations on how government should go about
developing and building IT systems more effectively in the future.
The procurement and development of new database systems should be subject to much
greater public scrutiny and openness.
Civil servant recruitment and training should aim at selecting and developing those with the
ability to manage complex systems.
The threshold for referring IT projects to complex OJEU procurement procedures should be
raised to £10m from the current limit of only £130,000 – this will favour medium-sized
systems rather than unmanageable large projects.
The government should make its Chief Information Officer a Permanent Secretary reporting
to a senior cabinet minister.
There should never again be a government IT project – merely projects for business change
that may be supported by IT. Computer companies must never again drive policy.