WEDNESDAY 2 May 2007 will always stick in Professor Max Buttle鈥檚 memory.
He was about to leave for a conference in Berlin, but was detained by the arrival of the US secret service. Three debt collectors, a social worker and a court bailiff were also anxious to talk to him.
Orwell鈥檚 vision of a Big Brother state that knew everything about everyone had, over the past five years, finally borne fruit. And it was a strange fruit, fertilised largely by computer scientists鈥� urge to do things the Right Way. At last, they had managed to get government to adopt universal standards that allowed the free exchange of data between official computers. And thus they had overcome the bureaucratic friction that had always been freedom鈥檚 invisible friend.
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The arrival on Buttle鈥檚 doorstep of a district nurse with urgent news about his cervical smear test saved the day. Clearly he wasn鈥檛 the woman they were all after.
He could see why the secret service agents were jumpy, though. The previous day had been dubbed 鈥淲eird Tuesday鈥�. Terrorists calling themselves the Atheist Revolutionary Fundamentalist Front had laced Wall Street鈥檚 water supply with hallucinogens. The dollar鈥檚 exchange rate against the euro had briefly been an imaginary number.
And that evening, a suspected atheist had been seen getting into a friend鈥檚 car outside a derelict house in North London. A policewoman鈥檚 helmet-cam fed its image to the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency computer. It recognised the number plate as Buttle鈥檚. The computer instantly cross-checked with the Inland Revenue, the County Court Service, Social Services, the Passport Office, airline booking computers-and the National Criminal Intelligence Service, which contacted the American authorities. Oh, and Health Data plc.
What Buttle would never discover-because it was officially secret-was the conclusion of the internal inquiry into the disappearance of Ms Max Tuttle, suspected atheist. The helmet-cam pictures clearly showed a moth alighting on the number plate at the crucial moment.
Coincidental misidentifications aside, the existence of such a unified database meant that few people could keep any important secrets from the British government. For decades it had collected a great deal of information. Each time it gave itself powers to collect more-notably with the Regulation of Investigatory Powers (RIP) Act 2000 and the Anti-terrorism Crime and Security Act 2001-civil libertarians had warned about the disappearance of privacy. But it was the gathering together of all this data, not its existence or deficiencies in the technology limiting access to it, that threw the whole notion of privacy into question.
That unification had been made possible by the development of XML, the Extensible Markup Language, described by its developer, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), as 鈥渢he universal format for structured documents and data鈥�. In November 2001, the Office of the E-envoy, part of the British government鈥檚 Cabinet Office, mandated XML as the key standard for data integration.
Like everything W3C does, XML is designed to be what computer programmers call, with slightly ironic capitals, the Right Thing. Among other things, its specifications are open and public, ensuring that XML data can be interpreted by programs from any software vendor.
If you open a database of names and addresses created with Microsoft鈥檚 Access program in a text editor program, for example, all you will see is a lot of apparently random bytes. Access is not the Right Thing, because only it knows how to retrieve the contents of the field called 鈥渘ame鈥� in each record in the list. An XML file, by contrast, is in plain text. A record might read
Add a higher-level standard specifying the 鈥渢ags鈥� that describe the data-a 鈥渟chema鈥� in the jargon-and you have the perfect format for ferrying information between databases. Currently the E-envoy is coordinating an effort to do just that.
鈥淭he best defence of our privacy until now has been that government departments are fed up with paying contractors oodles of money to produce custom-built links between databases that are five years late,鈥� says Caspar Bowden of the Foundation for Information Policy Research. XML solves that technological problem, because it allows a simple 鈥渨rapper鈥� to be built around each database to a standard specification.
In April this year, the Cabinet Office published a report on the policy and legal implications of this, entitled Privacy and data-sharing. It uses the language of 鈥渏oined-up government鈥� and 鈥渋mproving service to customers鈥�.
But bear in mind that you are just one of the 鈥渃ustomers鈥� for data about you: the others are government departments and businesses. The report recommends links between all the databases that pointed accusing fingers at Buttle, and it suggests a new Act giving ministers the power to authorise new links simply by placing a proposal before Parliament.
鈥淭here are some signs,鈥� the report notes, 鈥渢hat the level of public concern about privacy is on the rise鈥his anxiety has some parallels with shifting attitudes to food safety over the last decade.鈥� It couches the response to this entirely in terms of 鈥渂uilding greater public trust鈥�. This is to be achieved by 鈥渙penness, transparency and consultation in the policy-making process鈥�-not, note, in the data-sharing process.
Contrast this with the recommendation in January 2000 of the Information Society Forum (ISF), which is charged with advising the European Commission on such matters. 鈥淧rivacy and anonymity are human and citizens鈥� rights. They are vital to citizens鈥� and consumers鈥� trust in the working of the information society. People must have control over the use of their personal data. They must feel free to communicate without being subject to permanent surveillance.鈥�
The ISF praised the European Union鈥檚 Privacy Directive-and proposed firmness in the conflict over privacy with the US, which has resisted legislation ensuring such rights. In October 2001, Congress rushed through the Patriot Act, which, Bowden says, largely copied the provisions of Britain鈥檚 RIP and terrorism Acts. The Pentagon allocated between $1 billion and $5 billion to data integration-though the division between federal and state governments may soak up more than that.
A standard definition of privacy, by Alan Westin, professor of public law at Columbia University, is 鈥渢he right to control how much information others know about you鈥�. But what exceptions should there be, given, for example, a War Against Terrorism? As Bowden notes: 鈥淧rivacy is paradoxical鈥ithout it, people may fear to participate in public life, or support unpopular causes.鈥�
Buttle, meanwhile, got off fairly lightly. Once he鈥檇 come to official attention, however, he faced a tax audit in the course of which his wife learned of an expenses claim for a stay in Bonn when he was supposed to have been in Barcelona.