Dadblog

Ah, genius: an Onion layer on Google Maps.

I’m in Moscow for a few days, of which more later, but right now just to say - wow.

This is lovely

This is a great idea which is looking a little neglected: a blog which sets to take on discussions of subjects discussed on In Our Time. Hasn’t been updated since the antimatter show in October, though.

The current sense of disbelief across the board at the behaviour of people inside HMRC, and their complete lack of concern about the safety of our data, shows the extent of the disconnect between our assumptions about how institutions operate and how they actually operate. The fact that civil servants can chuck millions of lines of data onto a CD and then pop it in the post is completely predictable and understandable, as is the even more telling news that HMRC refused to cut down the data they were sending because this would cost money.

These days, the only incentive that really works inside the civil service is financial. All anyone wants to do is keep to a budget. Where work is contracted out, the cost of the contract is by far the most significant input into deciding who gets the work. If corners can be cut to save money, corners will be cut. Were these civil servants incentivised on factors like quality of service, or protection of public rights? No. Because these things are “soft” incentives. They can’t be quantified, and are thus ignored.

I’m overstating the case (of course some people work for the sense of the work being done well). But in principle this is the case: where people are not financially incentivised to perform in a certain way, they will not perform in a certain way. And this is the disgrace: that HMRC did not consider it important enough to financially incentivise people to protect our data. And that is unquestionably a failure of senior management.

It works the other way too. I’m currently trying to set up a mobile phone contract with O2 (for reasons I’ve blogged about before). I’ve had to do a fraud check over the phone, then another with faxed documents, and then a third (this morning) with yet another document. Why? Because when my original fraud check was done, a nominal amount of money was checked against the credit card I used as part of the fraud check. But I had just used that credit card to buy a load of Christmas presents on Amazon. The credit card company phoned me to check that the “unusual spending patterns” were justified (they do this every year - apparently not realising that spending patterns often tend to be unusual at this time of year). But the damage had already been done: the O2 payment failed, they put me as a fraud risk, and I’ve been struggling to get off ever since.

Both O2 and the credit card company are responding to incentives: in this case, they are avoiding bad debt, which is becoming more and more of a problem. I’m being squeezed in the middle, because the data they use to respond to those incentives is a little faulty. But my point is that no similar incentives exist for civil servants to look after our data, which is the real scandal. And if you think you’re going to be looked after just because “it’s the right thing to do,” well, I admire your faith in human nature, but I’d be looking for identity theft insurance if I were you.

Shane Richmond asked me to do an imagined post from 2020 on his Telegraph blog, and here it is:

The last professional journalist retired in 2017, following the completion of the Library of Congress YakYak project, which enabled the semantic tagging of every utterance by every public official in the United States and Europe. The Great Newspaper Crash of 2010 led to mass redundancies amongst journalists, with many of them forced to follow the path trodden by rock musicians in the previous decade - live performance.

Just a bit of fun, you understand….

Update: quite funnily, this bit of sub-Doctorow whimsy has made it on to the front of the Telegraph. Me, Boris Johnson and Gordon Brown in the same box: all my ambitions have been achieved….

I was amused to discover the impact of Start the Week on Amazon’s recommendations system. I just added The Great Naturalists to my Wish List, having heard about it on STW this week, and the subsequent page looks like this:

Musicophilia and The Choice of Hercules were the two other books featured on STW. Be interesting to discover whether Monica Grady’s lecture, the last item on the show, was full, although to be honest a lot of what she said was a bit silly (such as claiming that Columbus had no economic imperative for sailing West, and that our urge to explore should be put down to Manifest Destiny rather than The Search For Cash).

From Computer Weekly - Missing child benefit CDs: what went wrong, and why it would have carried on regardless:

Aware that the files on child benefit claimants were sensitive, the NAO in March 2007 asked that HMRC filter the information before sending it to the audit office. The National Audit Office asked for the child benefit records to be stripped of details of the parents, addresses and bank information.

HM Revenue and Customs replied that it could not do this - its systems were not sufficiently flexible. It explained it could download only the whole of the information. So it sent to the NAO, by courier-post, all of the details of parents and children, including some bank account details.

That was when the insecure practice began of HMRC sending unencrypted files to the National Audit Office. No alarm bells were raised over the practice in March 2007.

Everyone involved in data should be reading Computer Weekly.

Long and the short of growing pains that stunt England’s finest - Times Online - Martin Samuel on how we destroy skills-based football by forcing children to play on full-size pitches:

That is the problem. Not John Terry’s £135,000 a week or McClaren’s 3-5-2. You want to talk numbers, I’ve got some crackers right here: the average height of a ten-year-old boy is 4ft 7in and the height of Petr Cech, the Chelsea goalkeeper, is 6ft 5in and they are required to guard the same target and kick the same distance. And we wonder why we can’t play like the Brazilians.

Smart man, Mr Samuel. I can still remember playing football on a full-size pitch with a slope aged 11. Nice. And I write this after the sterling display of skill, commitment, intelligence and organisation which we just put on against Croatia.

BBC economics editor Evan Davis joins Today programme as presenter | Media | Guardian Unlimited:

Davis, who joined the BBC in 1993 as an economics correspondent for BBC radio and daily TV news programmes and became economics editor in 2001, was a popular presenter of Today with critics and listeners during his stint.

Observer radio critic Miranda Sawyer wrote: “Davis, sitting in on the Today programme this week, is that rare thing for a male Today presenter: he actually seems to live within today’s world.

“You feel that such modern practices as, say, web-surfing or nipple-piercing are not unfamiliar to Davis.

“This week he breezed through interviews on finance (he’s the BBC’s economic editor), Harry Potter and the Tour de France, all without once spluttering into bewildered Grumpy Old Man-nerisms.”

He’s a very good blogger too - something which I note John Hunmphrys hasn’t quite got round to yet.