Jason Kitcat

In celebration of the Government Gateway’s 4th anniversary Alan Mather has posted a look back on how the Gateway came to life.

The Gateway’s birth was controversial to say the least. I made my own contributions to the fuss through my work with LinuxUser magazine, especially the Gateway to failure article [PDF]. By making a Freedom of Information request (scroll down to see request and response) I managed to squeeze some information out of the Government but also got shouted at the next time I went to visit the Office of the e-Envoy. Ah well… I did get my first mention in NTK and The Register!

Let’s be clear… the Gateway works and four other countries are using it. I can’t judge if it does or doesn’t lose messages – Alan claims not a single message has been lost by the system. Of course there could be more features, better usability and so on – there always can be. For a Governmental IT project, once the initial Compaq mess was cleaned up, the project was fairly successful and there are millions of registered users.

The issue in my mind still is that for a project so fundamental to the future of all e-government interactions things should and could have been done differently. An Open Source, collaborative approach with community buy-in would have been a more citizen-centric way to proceed. And this isn’t a pipe dream – Estonia have taken just such an approach for the development of their digital identity scheme. Governments build hospitals, schools and technology for the people who empower authorities with votes and money. An understanding and respect for this should be evident throughout the life of our government’s IT projects.

It was with some concern that I read this week's Computing. The front page report is that Heathrow airport will be the first to allow frequent travellers to use Project IRIS (Iris Recognition Immigration System). Currently voluntary, this program is part of the eBorders programme being effectively imposed on us by the USA.

How does Project IRIS work? Foreign-passport holders who regularly pop into the UK will be able to register their details, including iris pattern, before leaving our pastures green. On their return the traveller will have their iris re-scanned and if it matches a gate will automatically open letting them proceed on their merry way.

I imagine that there will be the odd official watching these gates in case someone isn't let through. Nevertheless it seems inevitable that visitors using this system will be under considerably less scrutiny than those entering through the traditional stare-and-stamp approach. Authorities, complacently confident that iris scans are a wonderful techno-solution will happily let the robots wave people through.

Personally I don't go for all the immigration or terrorism scare-mongery. But I do hate poorly designed security… Any terrorist with a clean record (ie any sleeper agent, as all the 9/11 perpetrators allegedly were) will love the opportunity to dodge scrutiny that RoboGate offers. By all accounts this automated biometric system is creating a security risk, not preventing one.

The Local e-democracy National Project has paid for the good people at Delib to build some Democratic Games… games that give people a bit of an idea as to how politics and democracy works. I've played around with 'Captain Campaign' and you know what – they're pretty good – not too preachy.

Give them a go…

By far the best selling magazine in Poland is the Polish edition of Playboy. Not a huge surprise, married men openly buy the magazine in the most Catholic country I've ever come across. Sex isn't out in the open as it can seem to be in Germany and parts of Scandinavia, but it's not really something to get fussy about in Poland. They take the view that everyone does it, so what's to get embarrassed about?

Nevertheless Poles aren't targeted, as the French and Italians are, with news magazines and advertising full of topless women. This may be to protect the huge number of priests in Poland, but I can't be sure.

In spite of all this I was still rather surprised to read in the new magazine European Business that over 70% of all Polish mobile picture traffic is erotic or adult related. Can that be? I seriously doubt the figures are so high in the UK, but who knows… I wouldn't have thought a mobile phone's screen was up to the job. I thought wrong and to the mobile networks' delight Poles at least are paying for their erotica.

Once again it seems that sex sells and as with VHS and the Internet, horniness leads the way in technology adoption.