government – Miscellaneous Details

What to do with anonymous trolls

The debate over the contents of the draft Online Safety Bill continues.

New plans to protect people from anonymous trolls online – GOV.UK
The government recognises too many people currently experience online abuse and there are concerns that anonymity is fuelling this, with offenders having little to no fear of recrimination from either the platforms or law enforcement. […]

So today the government is confirming it will add two new duties to its Online Safety Bill to strengthen the law against anonymous online abuse. The first duty will force the largest and most popular social media sites to give adults the ability to block people who have not verified their identity on a platform. A second duty will require platforms to provide users with options to opt out of seeing harmful content.

Sounds reasonable?

Filter out ‘unverified’ accounts, tech giants told – BBC News
The DCMS acknowledged that people use anonymous accounts for a variety of reasons, including whistle-blowing, exploring their sexuality or sharing their experience in an authoritarian company. However, it said users should be given tools to “control who can interact with them”.

But here’s Benedict Evans’s take on it, from a recent newsletter. And even the government agrees that he knows what he’s talking about.

The UK’s content regulation hairball
The UK’s Online Harms Bill began as a pretty sensible and narrowly defined effort to solve one kind of problem: make a list of specific kinds of harmful content, and create an obligation for platform companies to make reasonable best efforts to minimise them. Unfortunately it’s now become a grab bag of hobbyhorses and every random terrible Internet regulation idea from the last decade.

The latest idea is that somehow if the Internet wasn’t anonymous, no one would behave badly, and so big Internet platforms need to give everyone an option to verify their identity, and an option to hide content from people who aren’t verified. This is a bizarre overreach – the UK wants YouTube offer people in Vietnam, Argentina and New Zealand an option to upload passports. Yet since this of course has to be optional, no one will actually do it, so the switch to turn off unverified content will just hide everything and be completely useless. Meanwhile, there have been any number of studies in the last few years demonstrating that the vast majority of problematic accounts are not anonymous anyway. This is regulation by press release – we expect better.

Photo Soumil Kumar

Coronavirus guidance variants

One of the issues education providers have during this pandemic is keeping up with all the ever-changing guidance.

Higher education providers: coronavirus (COVID-19) – GOV.UK
Information on the return of students from January 2021 and NHS Test and Trace channels. Updated ‘Students returning to, and starting higher education in spring term 2021’ with changes to when students can return to campus, updates on testing asymptomatic students and international students, and added information about Erasmus+.

Actions for schools during the coronavirus outbreak – GOV.UK
What all schools will need to do during the coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak from the start of the autumn term. Updated with latest changes to: system of controls, attendance, recruitment, free schools meals, estates, wraparound care, physical activity in schools, remote education, catch up, assessment and accountability, and exams.

Providing apprenticeships during the coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak – GOV.UK
Find out how apprenticeships will continue during the coronavirus (COVD-19) outbreak. Added a new version of ‘Providing apprenticeships during the coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak’ with updated information on face-to-face training and when to consider a break in an apprenticeship.

Protective measures for holiday or after-school clubs and other out-of-school settings for children during the coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak – GOV.UK
Protective measures for providers of community activities, holiday or after-school clubs, tuition and other out-of-school settings offering provision to children during the coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak. Updated the home education section with further information on vulnerable children who have difficulty engaging in remote education. Also added a section on Test and Trace Support Payments.

Coronavirus (COVID-19): guidance for children’s social care services – GOV.UK
Advice about coronavirus (COVID-19) for local authorities and their partners to help support and protect vulnerable children. Updated sections on ‘Educational settings’ and ‘Alternative provision (AP) schools and providers’ within the main guidance document.

Photo DfE

Oops! I did it again

Whilst MI5 gets accused of unlawfully handling their data, the police just lose theirs.

Home Office urged to explain 150,000 arrest records wiped in tech blunder – The Times
Priti Patel has been urged to explain an “extraordinarily serious security breach” after The Times revealed a technology blunder wiped more than 150,000 fingerprint, DNA and arrest history records off police databases. The error may allow offenders to go free because biometric evidence left at crime scenes will not be flagged up on the Police National Computer (PNC).

Priti Patel under fire as 150,000 police records accidentally lost – The Guardian
The Home Office released a statement from the policing minister, Kit Malthouse, but the shadow home secretary, Nick Thomas-Symonds, said this was not good enough and called on Patel to provide an urgent statement.

Don’t worry about it, though. They’ll have that deleted data back in no time.

Police scrambling to recover more than 150,000 records wiped from UK database – The Independent
The policing minister, Kit Malthouse, said Home Office and law enforcement officials were working “at pace to recover the data”. “While the loss relates to individuals who were arrested and then released with no further action, I have asked officials and the police to confirm their initial assessment that there is no threat to public safety,” he added. “A fast time review has identified the problem and corrected the process so it cannot happen again.”

Dratted ‘housekeeping’, eh? 150k+ records deleted off UK’s Police National Computer database – The Register
It is reported that Home Office staff are trying to get some of the deleted information back. This implies, strongly, that they cannot simply restore the deleted information from backup files.

Well, as has been pointed out on Twitter, accidents happen.

Britain destroyed records of colonial crimes – The Guardian
Review finds thousands of papers detailing shameful acts were culled, while others were kept secret illegally.

And happen.

114 child sex files linked to MPs have ‘vanished’ – Express
A total of 114 files linked to allegations of paedophile activity in Westminster may have been destroyed, MPs were told yesterday.

And happen.

Grenfell files ‘lost forever’ after laptop wiped, inquiry hears – ITV News
Some emails, documents and design drawings relating to the Grenfell Tower refurbishment appear to have been lost forever after being wiped from a laptop, the inquiry into the fire has heard.

And happen.

Home Office destroyed Windrush landing cards, says ex-staffer – The Guardian
Evidence of UK arrivals discarded despite case worker protests, says former employee.

Update – 16/01/2021

A day later and that initial total is now seen as a little on the low side.

Starmer urges home secretary to ‘take responsibility’ as it emerges 400,000 police records deleted in ‘human error’ – Sky News
Home Secretary Priti Patel has come under fire since it was first reported by The Times that 150,000 records were lost, although it is now understood the figure is much higher. Some 213,000 offence records were wiped from the Police National Computer, along with 175,000 arrest records and 15,000 person records.

Police probes compromised after computer records deleted – BBC News
[The letter from the National Police Chiefs’ Council] says that some of the records had been marked for indefinite retention following earlier convictions for serious offences. And it reveals that a “weeding system”, developed and deployed by a Home Office PNC team, started to delete records wrongly last November. The process was only brought to a halt at the start of this week. […]

It comes after about 40,000 alerts relating to European criminals were removed from the PNC following the UK’s post-Brexit security deal with the EU.

Tackling poor behaviour in schools

A press release from the DfE today.

Experts to help tackle poor behaviour in schools – GOV.UK
Schools with exemplary behaviour practices are being invited to lead the Government’s £10 million programme to improve discipline, as part of work to raise school standards across the country. Supported by renowned behaviour experts, these schools will work in partnership with those that need help to turn around their behaviour culture, equipping heads and senior leaders with the tools they need to tackle poor discipline.

Education Secretary: We’re going on a discipline drive in schools – GOV.UK
We plan to build partnerships between schools which are leading on this issue with those who want to turn their own cultures around, allowing institutions with poor behaviour to learn from those with the best. They’ll be led by former teacher and behaviour expert Tom Bennett, along with a team of current and former headteachers with broad experience of creating disciplined environments in their own schools

So who are these experts?

Revealed: The experts leading £10m behaviour programe – Tes News
The seven-strong team will work alongside headteachers and leaders from 20 outstanding schools in order to improve behaviour in around 500 schools which are struggling with poor behaviour. The group is being led by the DfE’s behaviour tsar Tom Bennett, who is the founder of ResearchED, an international conference of teachers that aims to boost knowledge of current research among the profession.

DfE reveals Tom Bennett’s new behaviour taskforce – Schools Week
Bennett, the DfE’s lead behaviour adviser, said: “There are some incredible schools out there making miracles happen every day, but many schools who, often through no fault of their own, face huge challenges getting there. Behaviour hubs will support these schools with the schools who know how to turn things around.”

Exclusive: DfE behaviour expert ran unlawful exclusions – Tes News
Mark Emmerson, chief executive of the City of London Academies Trust, was in charge of The City Academy in Hackney in 2016, when pupils were voluntarily “withdrawn” by parents – without these absences being recorded as fixed-term exclusions.

Let’s hope they succeed. It’s an emotive topic for sure, but only an idiot would imagine there are any simple fixes or easy answers here.

Ban phones and queue in silence for better GCSEs, says Gavin Williamson – The Telegraph
Gavin Williamson has urged schools to implement stringent discipline regimes, such as lining up in silence before lessons. He said that often “common-sense solutions” can be used to curb unruly behaviour as well as lead to outstanding academic results.

Point proven, then. Meanwhile, here’s an overview of some of the research on what might influence student behaviour.

Are parents to blame for bad behaviour? – Tes News
As hysteria mounts over knife crime, school exclusions and persistent bad behaviour, “I blame the parents” is once again a common refrain. But to what extent does parenting affect how a child behaves in school? Considering the number of parenting courses on offer through schools, and through government services, the perception is clearly that the impact is significant. But, as always, it’s a bit more complex than that.

Well said. Meanwhile.

Stylish maps of bureaucracy

Finding where you fit in a large organisation isn’t easy sometimes. It can be difficult to see the whole picture. These very stylish organisation charts might be just the ticket.

Organograms | UK Government – Peter Cook
Organograms (also known as org charts) show the structure of organisations – in our case UK Government departments. The gallery presents an overview of a number of government departments (from May 2014). Click a department to explore it in more detail.

I love the moiré effects when you zoom in on some of them. (via FlowingData)

I couldn’t help but think of Sam Lowry’s labyrinthine struggles with Brazil’s Ministry of Information, when I saw these sprawling government department charts. So it was nice to read, this morning, about Jonathan Pryce’s Oscar nomination—best newcomer, indeed.

New from the DfE

The GOV.UK website is enormous, and with new publications and announcements being released every day, it’s easy to miss something important. Thankfully, most topics, departments and even ministers have a ‘get email alerts’ link that’s really helpful. I’ve signed up for email alerts from the Department of Education. Here are a few recent publications that caught my eye.

Advice for schools on how to prepare for Brexit
Including: Informing pupils and staff from the EU about the EU Settlement Scheme; EU pupils and staff arriving after Brexit; School places for EU nationals and UK pupils returning to England from the EU after Brexit; Data Protection; Food supplies; Medical supplies.

Teacher workload advisory group report and government response
This report from the Teacher workload advisory group sets out recommendations and principles to reduce the unnecessary workload associated with data and evidence collection. The government has accepted all the recommendations in full.

Understanding child and adolescent wellbeing: a system map
A report on the factors that influence children and young people’s (CYP) wellbeing from the perspective of CYP practitioners. This research used system mapping to capture the perceptions of the 21 children and young people’s (CYP) practitioners who participated in the study.

Known unknowns

An introduction to what promises to be a fascinating new blog from Anna Powell-Smith, “about the data that the government should collect and measure in the UK, but doesn’t.”

Missing numbers
Across lots of different policy areas, it was impossible for governments to make good decisions because of a basic lack of data. There was always critical data that the state either didn’t collect at all, or collected so badly that it made change impossible.

Eventually, I decided that the power to not collect data is one of the most important and little-understood sources of power that governments have. This is why I’m writing Missing Numbers: to encourage others to ask “is this lack of data a deliberate ploy to get away with something”?

By refusing to amass knowledge in the first place, decision-makers exert power over over the rest of us. It’s time that this power was revealed, so we can have better conversations about what we need to know to run this country successfully.

MI5’s poor surveillance data handling

It’s not often a data protection or records management news story gets this much press attention.

MI5 accused of unlawful handling of surveillance data
MI5 has been accused of “extraordinary and persistent illegality” for holding on to data obtained from members of the public. The human rights organisation Liberty has taken the security service to court over the way that it gathers and stores information under the Investigatory Powers Act.

MI5 ‘unlawfully’ handled bulk surveillance data, lawsuit reveals
“The documents show extraordinary and persistent illegality in MI5’s operations, apparently for many years,” said civil liberties organisation Liberty, which is bringing the case. “The existence of what MI5 itself calls ‘ungoverned spaces’ in which it holds and uses large volumes of private data is a serious failure of governance and oversight, especially when mass collection of data of innocent citizens is concerned.”

MI5’s use of personal data was ‘unlawful’, says watchdog
The security service MI5 has handled large amounts of personal data in an “undoubtedly unlawful” way, a watchdog has said. The Investigatory Powers Commissioner said information gathered under warrants was kept too long and not stored safely. Civil rights group Liberty said the breaches involved the “mass collection of data of innocent citizens”. The high court heard MI5 knew about the issues in 2016 but kept them secret.

Liberty’s challenge to UK state surveillance powers reveals shocking failures
The challenge, by rights group Liberty, led last month to an initial finding that MI5 had systematically breached safeguards in the UK’s Investigatory Powers Act (IPA) — breaches the Home Secretary, Sajid Javid, euphemistically couched as “compliance risks” in a carefully worded written statement that was quietly released to parliament.

This was first reported last month…

MI5 slapped on the wrist for ‘serious’ surveillance data breach
Home Secretary Sajid Javid has confessed to Parliament that MI5 bungled the security of “certain technology environments used to store and analyse data,” including that of ordinary Britons spied on by the agency. In a lengthy Parliamentary statement made last week, Javid obliquely admitted that spies had allowed more people to help themselves to its treasure troves of data on British citizens than was legally allowed.

Sajid Javid admits MI5 committed serious safeguard breaches
In a written statement to parliament last week that was not widely noticed, Javid said he was notifying MPs of “compliance risks MI5 identified and reported within certain technology environments used to store and analyse data, including material obtained under the Investigatory Powers Act”.

… but now the story has been picked up by everyone, including the Middle East Eye…

UK’s MI5 spy agency handled surveillance data unlawfully, court hears
An internal agency review warned more than three years ago that storage systems may have become “ungoverned spaces”, which would mean that they were operating in breach of both UK and European law. Despite this, MI5 continued to build new electronic storage systems which did not allow the agency to review its contents and decide what material should be deleted, as the law requires. The problems were withheld from the official watchdog, the Investigatory Powers Commissioner, until earlier this year, the High Court was told.

… and even Russia Today and Sputnik News are getting in on it.

‘Extraordinary & persistent illegality’: UK’s MI5 accused of mishandling bulk surveillance data
MI5 has no control of its storage of vast volumes of people’s calls, messages, web browsing history, as well as other personal data that the agency has managed to obtain on the basis of surveillance warrants, which were often issued under false pretext, the High Court heard on Tuesday in a legal challenge brought by the human rights organization Liberty.

Outcry as High Court finds MI5 engaged in ‘unlawful’ storage, handling of bulk surveillance
Ten internal documents from senior MI5 officials, including an 11 March letter from director Sir Andrew Parker, revealed significant non-compliance issues in how citizens’ data had been kept and used, including a subsequent cover-up of internal failures and that “data might be being held in ungoverned spaces in contravention of our policies”.

Let’s hope some good comes from all this.

Setting precedents for privacy: the UK legal challenges bringing surveillance into the open
These debates highlight the importance of collective efforts to assert respect for privacy and other rights as a core part of public life. We are on the cusp of a positive shift in power towards open public debate and accountability about data and the way it is used against us.

Money – too much, not enough

Nicer problems to have.

Mind my Picasso… superyacht owners struggle to protect art
Pandora Mather-Lees, an Oxford-educated art historian and conservator, started giving lessons after a billionaire asked for help to restore a Jean-Michel Basquiat painting damaged not by sea spray, but by breakfast cereal. “His kids had thrown their cornflakes at it over breakfast on his yacht because they thought it was scary,” Mather-Lees said. “And the crew had made the damage worse by wiping them off the painting.”

[…]

Tilman Kriesel, founder of an art advisory firm, told the conference one client asked how to display a Rothko that was too tall for a yacht’s grand saloon. “We turned the piece by 90 degrees,” he said. “The artist would probably be turning in his grave, but we took a deep breath and said ‘it’s your painting, do what you like’.”

Another of Kriesel’s clients had a piece by the Japanese modern artist Takashi Murakami that he wanted to display in the “beach club” – the rear of superyachts where owners access jet skis and other water toys – but again it was the wrong size. “In the end we cut it up to make it fit,” he said.

Meanwhile.

What it’s like to slash millions from Council budgets: Local Authority leaders speak out
Local authorities have already lost 60 per cent of their central government funding over the last decade, substantially more than any other area of government. And it is in the loss of valued frontline community services that the impact of this austerity drive is most keenly felt by communities across England.

Regardless of their political stripes, the council leaders each called on central government to invest in local government saying the cuts have now gone far enough. […] So acute are the financial challenges that even the most basic services – such as libraries, school lollipop patrols, street lighting, road repairs, cemetery maintenance, gritting – are now being considered for savings.

And that’s what makes all the time, energy and money wasted on Brexit so shameful.

I’ve never really thought about yachts before. They sound horrible.

The lonely life of a yacht influencer
“Nah, I’m nobody you’d know,” he assured me. “I’m here to take some pictures and post some video stories of the yacht, which a brokerage group is trying to sell. The watch is a loaner from a friend. I wear it, take a picture of my wrist and tag his company on my Instagram account. It’s just a small part of the hustle.”

Life and death on a superyacht: ‘If something goes wrong, they can just raise the anchor and leave’
While it is a dream job for some, other deckhands and chefs have horror stories of working punishing hours. Accidents, injuries and deaths are also commonplace, with union leaders believing working on superyachts to be more dangerous than life on oil rigs; over the past few years at least three young Brits have died while serving their billionaire bosses.

IT in the dock

Things aren’t going well in the courts at the moment.

HMCTS suffers major IT issues
Significant IT issues at the HM Courts and Tribunal Service (HMCTS) have caused chaos across the UK’s courts as users have been unable to connect to the network and use IT systems that require access to it.

The issues began last week and are mainly affecting devices trying to connect to the main Ministry of Justice (MoJ) network, which is used by the department as well as all its agencies and several arm’s-length bodies.
Law courts in chaos as IT meltdown disrupts thousands of cases
The communication failures, which started last week, are a significant embarrassment for the Ministry of Justice, which is investing £1.2bn in a high-profile programme promoting online hearings which aims to replace the legal profession’s traditional reliance on mountains of paperwork.

The IT breakdown meant that staff at the MoJ were unable to send emails, wireless connections went down, jurors could not be enrolled and barristers could not register for attendance payments. Courts were left unsure of when some defendants were due to appear and some court files could not be retrieved, leading to prosecutions being adjourned.

The Register had reported on this a few days before, when the problem seemed to be restricted to just their CJSM (Criminal Justice Secure eMail) system.

Lawyers’ secure email network goes down, firm says it’ll take 2 weeks to restore
For reasons that were not immediately clear, Egress Technologies, provider of CJSM, said in an emailed update to users seen by The Register that restoring CJSM would involve wiping their mailboxes for up to two weeks.

It’s now more serious than that.

Nationwide UK court IT failure farce ‘not the result of a cyber attack’ – Justice Ministry
The Ministry of Justice has said a data centre outage was responsible for the widespread collapse of the UK’s civil and criminal court IT infrastructure over the past days.

In a statement to Parliament today, justice minister Lucy Frazer pinned the fault on Atos and Microsoft, saying there had been an “infrastructure failure in our suppliers’ data centre”.

Here’s a report from 2016, highlighting the issues the department was facing…

Ministry of Justice IT systems are ‘fragile and precarious’, say MPs
The Ministry of Justice (MoJ) must get to grips with its poor IT systems or risk “further demoralising essential staff”, the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) has warned. […]

“ICT systems in probation are inefficient, unreliable and hard to use,” the PAC said. “In a service that relies on successful joint working between multiple partners, it is essential that ICT supports, rather than frustrates, effective and efficient collaboration. This is far from the case for probation.”

… which led to the £1,000,000,000 plan to “transform courts with better use of technology”.

UK justice system set for ‘wholesale shift’ to digital
The reform programme foresees “a wholesale shift to accessing justice digitally” and flags up two “significant developments” that will affect the way courts and tribunals operate: “The first is our aim for all cases to be started online, whether or not they are scheduled for the traditional system or for online resolution. The second will be the completion of some cases entirely online, which will be much more convenient for everyone involved.”

How was that received? With not much confidence, it seems.

PAC doubts justice system transformation programme will be a success
Public Accounts Committee says it’s difficult to see how the government’s “extremely challenging” £1.2bn project to overhaul courts through use of technology “will ever work”.

I don’t know if that’s related to today’s IT breakdowns there, but it makes you wonder.

Not going Microsoft's way

Government plan to adopt ODF file format sparks standards debate
“The recommendation of HTML for browser-based editable text and PDF as the default for non-editable documents is uncontroversial, as they can both be read on most computer platforms. However, when it comes to exchanging drafts of documents between government departments, or between government and citizens or suppliers, the choice of an editable file format is proving more controversial.”

As always with these things, it’s best to see what The Register has to say, especially about Microsoft’s hissy fit in response.

Twitter strategies, visualising data, managing projects

Template Twitter strategy for Government Departments
You might think a 20-page strategy a bit over the top for a tool like Twitter. After all, microblogging is a low-barrier to entry, low-risk and low-resource channel relative to other corporate communications overheads like a blog or printed newsletter. And the pioneers in corporate use of Twitter by central government (see No 10, CLG and FCO) all started as low-profile experiments and grew organically into what they are today. But, having held back my JFDI inclinations long enough to sit down and write a proper plan for BIS’s corporate Twitter account, I was surprised by just how much there is to say – and quite how worth saying it is, especially now the platform is more mature and less forgiving of mistakes.

50 great examples of data visualization
50 of the best data visualizations and tools for creating your own visualizations out there, covering everything from Digg activity to network connectivity to what’s currently happening on Twitter.

University of Edinburgh Records Management Section – advice on freedom of information, data protection and records management
The Records Management Section provides help and advice to all units of the University on information management issues including records management practices and procedures, data protection and freedom of information. We are also responsible for the Central Records Registry and the day-to day management of the records of the central administrative areas formerly known as Policy and Planning.

University of Edinburgh Projects Web Site
A one stop source of information about University IT projects – Templates and methodologies to assist in the successful management of projects – A filing system and repository for project related documentation – A communication vehicle for keeping stakeholders informed about project progress.