Every British Citizen To Have a Personal Webpage

Hugh Pickens writes "The Telegraph reports that British Prime Minister Gordon Brown is about to announce that within a year everyone in Great Britain will be given a personalized webpage for accessing Government services as part of a plan to save billions of pounds by putting all public services online. The move could see the closure of job centers and physical offices dealing with tax, vehicle licensing, passports and housing benefits within 10 years as services are offered through a single digital gateway. [This] 'saves time for people and it saves money for the Government — the processing of a piece of paper and mailing it back costs many times more than it costs to process something electronically,' says Tim Berners-Lee, an advisor to the Prime Minister. However, the proposals are coming under fire from union leaders who complain that thousands of public sector workers would be made jobless and pointed to the Government's poor record of handling personal data. 'Cutting public services is not only bad for the public who use services but also the economy as we are pushing people who provide valuable services on the dole,' says one union leader."

Comments

Surveillance.

[daniel.waterfield]

It also makes us nice and easy to keep an eye on. All our activity now leaves a nice little easy to follow trail. Much nicer for the government to follow than before.

Re:Surveillance.

[migla]

Yes, but on the other hand I'm thinking that this'll bring all the UK populace into the digital database age and people will be asking people for advice and the people with the most powerful memes will be the fuck-you-big-brother-type-geeks and it will lead to a united, informed people. Soon enough they will be lining the streets, chanting "El Pueblo unido jamas sera vencido!" and it will be known in the history books of the next century as the spark of the new enlightenment and actual democracy. Or did I dream it?

Re:Surveillance.

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

With suitably malicious design, it could be a very convenient tool for surveillance(a visited link scanner seeded with a list of URLs that the feds might be interested in your having visited, would be a trivial example, various sorts of cookie snooping, cross-site scripting, history inference, and so forth attacks could also be used, in addition to boring old IP geolocation and date/timestamping).

However, in absence of these sorts of fairly overt malicious features(which would fly right past the noobs; but would be hard to hide from security researchers for more than a few minutes), I'm not sure that a move from a paper 'n civil servants based frontend to a web based frontend actually makes all that much difference. In both cases, you are doing some nontrivial data dump/exchange with the state, either because some law obliges you to, or because you want the state to do something for you based on that information. That act of data transfer is the point of the exercise, and occurs in either case. Also, unless the British civil service is far behind the times, the data end up being dumped in a big database somewhere no matter which frontend you use. It isn't as though a people and paper frontend implies a people and paper backend, just a more expensive translation process.

With the exception of fairly visible malicious techniques, a web site doesn't provide all that much useful information in itself. Any attempt by the state to use such techniques should, of course, by resisted fiercely by both technological and political means; but fretting about cookies is largely a distraction from the serious area of data disclosure, which is whatever forms you are going to the website explicitly to fill out.

Re:Surveillance.

[selven]

people with the most powerful memes... lining the streets, chanting "El Pueblo unido jamas sera vencido!"

Nah, they'll be chanting "Yo puedo tiene cheezburger"*

*Amazingly, Google Translate understands it perfectly

Re:Surveillance.

[davester666]

Yes. Go to this page to find out all the information you need to steal this persons identity.

Re:Surveillance.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, how dare the government track things such as applying for a passport and paying taxes

Re:Surveillance.

[rtb61]

Technically you never steal a person's indentity, you use other peoples information to fraudulently pay for products and services> Those people that you have duped, then fraudulently attempt to recover that money from an innocent third party. That third party is fully entitled to seek criminal charges against the company that sought to charge them for services and products that they did not provide to them.

At the moment credit card companies are playing, well to be blunt, fuck the end user games by claiming identity theft, that's a big lie, it is the legal responsibility of the person who accepts credentials provided are valid and they should be liable for the full costs of targeted innocent third parties with fraudulently charges. However this puts the whole credit card system under threat, technically proprietors who accept false credentials should be charged until they can provide evidence that leads to the arrest of the guilty party, really who would want to take that risk, so the credit card companies play marketing games and shift the focus to innocent third parties who must now prove their innocence.

What?

[AnonGCB]

Did anyone else think this was talking about the British Government reinstating a nationalized Geocities?

Re:firpanopticone?

[physicsphairy]

Britain is putting their citizen observation stations EVERYWHERE, even in the middle of words.

Re:firpanopticone?

[SoVeryTired]

Yepanopticons it is

people who provide "valuable services"?

[rubycodez]

so there are thousands of government workers that could easily be replaced by a small pile of silicon chips and a bit of electricity, and they are said to provide "valuable service"? I have an idea, let them go work and provide something of actual value, or let them starve to death. win / win either way.

Re:people who provide "valuable services"?

[jabithew]

Yes, to quote Yes Minister;

Sir Humphrey: It sets a dangerous precedent.
Jim Hacker: What, you mean if we do the right thing now we might have to do it again later?

Re:people who provide "valuable services"?

[Burnhard]

Who or whom marked this guy as a troll? He's absolutely spot on. The Unions see the public services as job creation schemes, rather than providers of useful facilities for citizens. This tells you all you need to know about why public services are so bloated and give poor value for money.

Re:A computer for all?

[Manip]

Actually yes. They already are. If you are on low income you can apply for a grant to buy both a laptop AND internet connection.

Copyright infringement

[bcmm]

So, how does this fit in with the plans to disconnect the families of people who are accused of copyright infringement? I guess media companies are going to be able to get anyone they don't like prosecuted for tax evasion too?

It's about time

[Katatsumuri]

The amount of paperwork and legwork to get anything government-related done is untolerable in this day and age. We should have been enjoying electronic government for at least 15 years by now. Finally someone up there is getting it.

Now half of the posts here will be about the stupid "personal webpage" phrasing that has nothing to do with the actual idea, and the other half will be about an Orwellian apocalypse. Which may be well-grounded, as British government earned some bad reputation in regards to privacy.

However, I would still argue that this is a step in the right direction, and it is inevitable in the long run. We as a technical community should suggest ways to protect privacy with proper modern protocols, not with the obscurity of 18th century style paperwork.

I also hope that the governments in other countries will follow the example.

Re:A computer for all?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually yes. They already are. If you are on low income you can apply for a grant to buy both a laptop AND internet connection.

Of course, you'll have to visit your personal webpage to apply for this, as the physical offices will be closing.

government services = oil spill

[pydev]

'Cutting public services is not only bad for the public who use services but also the economy as we are pushing people who provide valuable services on the dole,' says one union leader

Hey, let's engineer a couple of oil-spills, too! Jobs for thousands of people, and those people will be performing valuable services!

I don't see the issue...

[SanityInAnarchy]

...after all, we're talking about access to stuff which was traditionally handled with paper. The only difference is that an electronic trail is easier to follow than a paper trail -- but here, "easier" only means "less time-consuming," or, alternatively, "cheaper."

Here in the US, we have the option of filing our taxes online, or mailing in a paper form. Either way is going to include our social security number, along with a bunch of other personally identifying information. Either way might lead to our personal information being leaked or abused. The only real difference is that the online version is faster and potentially more secure -- properly done, I'll trust cryptography long before I'll trust the postal service.

Same with vehicle licensing, passports, housing, everything else they mention -- again, which of these is something you used to be able to do anonymously? In what way does merely putting these in a web browser make it easier to keep an eye on you?

Even if you find some marginal benefit to paper -- and it will be marginal -- is it worth the cost, the increased amount of fuel burned transporting it, the paper, the increased amount of fuel used to harvest the wood, make the paper, and recycle/destroy/bury it once used? How about the increased cost to the state of employing all those people to deal with the paper -- the same people who are currently whining about losing their jobs -- how much would it be worth to have them doing something actually productive instead of something a webserver could do for them?

Denmark Already There

[Jezral]

Denmark already has a similar thing. We can perform most actions dealing with the government online, and we even get a gratis certificate for digital signing and encryption of emails. I haven't had to go to a government or city office in years.

Re:Oh god

[dangitman]

It's myspace all over again!

No, this is FaceGovernment. Much cooler.

We have this in Norway already..

[hyfe]

We have a single website for this in Norway already (norge.no), it's bloody usefull. Everything you need from the government is either there, or linked to from it. They even run free phone/sms/e-mail support.

There's nothing sinister about it, it certainly hasn't magically removed the bourecrazy, but it is another of the many small reasons I'm slightly smug to be norwegian; The land where stuff for the most part just works (which still doesn't stop people from whining though).

Maybe it's mutual

[Gonoff]

I'm not even sure I want to even visit the UK anymore

And I would really like to go to the USA again. The problems are getting there, getting in and being safe.
Getting there, we are forced to go through a ridiculous amount of control and surveillance - and that is from a Brit.
Getting in involves getting past your (in)famous immigration. I will get asked questions, may have my property confiscated and may even get jailed for hitting some drone on the fist with my face.
Safe? In the USA? According to the media, everyone carries - law abiding, police, bankers and other criminals.

I once went in uniform. Got to the base and was issued an M16. Next time, I want an M1 Abrams!

Police state? Yes we had someone shot by them here once - Jean Charles De Menezes in 2005. He was unusual. Normally, you need to at least pretend or carry a chair leg or something. Your police are described as a little more trigger happy.