[Dave Birch] Well I managed to get myself invited to the launch of Forum friend Sir Bonar Neville-Kingdom‘s new book. As the government’s technology outreach czar, he makes a point of having his personal assistant Patricia use all forms of new information and communication technology. He has, of late, been dictating tweets for her to place on the Twitter and now, to ensure that these valuable insights into the heart of British government IT policy are preserved for posterity, they have been gathered together in “The Twitters of Sir Bonar Neville-Kingdom“. I wasn’t sure about the current regulations concerning the photographing of key civil servants, but I managed to sneak a few pictures and have put them on Flickr for the general public to peruse. Here are a few of them so that you can see what was going on (I spotted known activists in the crowd and am perfectly prepared to hand my footage over to the relevant authorities on the condition of pseudonymity).
Given Sir Bonar’s famous “ring of soup” formulation for government identity management services, I was keen to ask him how he sees the evolving balance between privacy and surveillance. In particular, I was curious about his views on Umair Haque succinct note that
The internet itself isn’t disempowering government by giving voices to the traditionally voiceless; it’s empowering authoritarian states to limit and circumscribe freedom by radically lowering the costs of surveillance and enforcement.
[From The Social Media Bubble - Umair Haque - Harvard Business Review]
Unless we take steps to build an identity infrastructure that embodies certain protections, encodes certain balances, then I think it is perfectly reasonable to anticipate a path whereby governments become authoritarian by default, simply becuase they can and not because of any directed or debated policy. I don’t think that you have to be some kind of privacy nutter to find this a concern: unfortunately, I was not able to put this point to Sir Bonar because he had to leave for a pressing bottle of claret, but I perhaps I will be able to catch up with him again in the not-too-distant future.
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