Jason Kitcat

Ella got her first passport yesterday – a British one with new-fangled biometric data and RFID chip to boot. Some observations:

* The new process involves printing a scan of the holder’s photo directly onto the page. The resulting quality is rather poor.

* The whole information page is now like a giant inflexible smart card due to the ultra-heavy-duty lamination and chip. Which begs the question, why not just use proven smart card technology which is more secure than RFID?

* The chip and aerial are visible and look vulnerable. I wonder what happens if they break? Does the passport fail to be valid in places like the USA?

* There doesn’t appear to be any shielding in the cover to prevent skimming of the RFID chip. I’m not going to count on some unspecified encryption so I’m definitely in the market for some kind of shielding passport holder. Probably more than one as the Home Office lost both my wife’s and my passport so we’ll end up chipped soon enough.

I was in the bank the other day when a women in front of me went up to the counter and asked to take out £2,500 from her account. She couldn’t have her money though as she hadn’t brought her driving license or passport. We’ve heard this one before but it gets better… Her passport had expired a year ago and she only had an old driving license at home (without photo etc). This perplexed the rather rude young lady behind the counter who had to speak to a supervisor who called a manager.

I never saw the conclusion to this little saga though I was offered a savings account at an abominably poor interest rate because I paid a few hundred quid into my account. Harrumph.

I love the fact that, for now, identity is distributed so that you can use a wide variety of documents to prove yourself. I’m sure the bank would have gone back to the actual rules and accepted something other than a passport or driving license because of course nobody has to have either of those. In fact you should probably get a tax break for being without both as you must be a particularly environmentally friendly soul.

We are all doomed to go to hell in a handbasket when the new national ID programme comes into force. Thankfully our civil service is doing their best to undermine the programme before it gets going – excellent work chaps.

These uber-passport and ID card projects remind me ever so much of electronic voting. The basic chronology is something like:

1. Politician hears about some new-fangled technology and decides it’s a good idea.
2. Raises idea with colleagues who all think technology is “good” and tell him to go for it.
3. Politician tells civil servants to get cracking on it.
4. Civil servants have no knowledge or expertise about this technology but do their best.
5. Either the project never gets completed because it’s not feasible or something is made at huge expense which is insecure and a white elephant.
6. Politician quietly moves on to another pet project.

For the sake of my taxes I sincerely hope ID cards croak before we get much further.

The lovely people at the Home Office managed to lose my passport, my wife's passport, our marriage certificate and a whole lot of financial paperwork. Enough for a really comprehensive identity theft I'd say.

The package was sent to the wrong address and somebody signed for them. You can see their signature (and hence proof of delivery) on the Royal Mail website. But e-government is not a concept well understood in our wonderful Home Office. They wouldn't accept the Royal Mail website as proof. No, I had to write to Royal Mail and procure written proof. On receipt of this proof (which took weeks to arrive) I now have to forward it to the Home Office in Croydon who will stew on it before hopefully getting somebody to do something about it all.

Being Polish my wife at least has her ID card that she can travel with (not that I'm advocating ID cards, oh no) but not I. Thankfully I'm also Canadian but my passport is about to expire. So I zipped up to Trafalgar Square to visit the Canadian High Commission. Goodness they were so friendly and efficient – and the forms were so clear and easy to complete. How wonderful… I love visiting Canada.

Everything I hear on the grapevine from current and former people involved in Home Office activities is that we are only beginning to scratch the surface when it comes to the trouble the department is in. It is very seriously dysfunctional and its ever expanding remit only makes matters worse. How on earth will they ever deliver ID cards?

Last year I was feeling very frustrated with the lack of ultra-simple location-based search in the UK (or anywhere that I know of). Loads of organisations have been throwing together very specific but useful search tools that give you bits of data based on your postcode. Using your postcode you can find your nearest schools, Salvation Army centre etc. Many people know their postcode, it's a gloriously simple location search tool.

Local Directgov takes the approach that you visit Directgov and then choose a task such as paying tax. You then identify your local authority using postcode or other details. If they have a link for your authority they then pass you on. But this is very traditional gov and task-centric.

Last year I whipped together InMyArea.org. It's a very simple search system which uses your postcode to provide a list of services available locally. So if you enter BN1 1AL you'll see the Brighton libraries link because I told the system to show that to all BN postcodes.

But more interestingly there are services like LearnDirect or Neighbourhood Statistics which plug the postcode you supplied into their own searches giving you a shortcut into their data. I took this approach because I realised that getting all these folks to standardise on some XMLish search discovery standard was a tall order for the moment. Ideally I could use RSS type technology to parse their search results right into the InMyArea results page but getting today isn't likely. Hence my simple click-through mechanism for plugging into 3rd party searches.

Some other notes: * I put in a sponsored column because I could. I have no idea if it's a good idea or not, but I thought it was worth playing with. * The database is just populated with a few examples, please do submit some more… * I added the Flickr photo feed for colour based on sterling advice from Tom Steinberg

So…InMyArea is quick and simple. There's no genius code there but I think it provides a quick source of localised data for everyday use. What do you, dear readers, think? Is it an idea worth developing? Should I pitch it to somebody (I've run it past the DirectGov folks already) or do something with it?

Whaddyafink?

UPDATE: Looks like it's not a goer so I've archived the site. Thanks for your input folks.

It's a simple, wonderful idea which is well overdue. Election Alarm Clock is a simple, nice site to email or SMS you when an election is coming up. 'Nuff said.

via egovmonitor