Category Archives: Government

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It is an often lamented truism that the UK no longer has manufacturing industry – people point at the closed steel plants of the north while recollecting a golden age of manufacturing where the UK built the wheels of industry around the world.

The statement that we no longer make things isn’t entirely true of course. Sure, we may not manufacture steel anymore, but instead we manufacture robots and jet engines.

The trend is a simple one – as technology advances and more sophisticated technologies touch more aspects of our lives, what jobs there are require an increasing degree of technical knowledge to perform.

Each worker is able to produce objects of higher economic value (robots vs steel girders), which means more money and more tax revenue, but as the economy becomes increasingly optimised towards high tech, the upshot is that, as a percentage of the economy, the number of low skilled jobs is decreasing.

The future looks pretty dire for the low skilled

Increased automation and technological advancements have always pushed sectors of the work force out of their jobs, from the mill machines of the 18th and 19th centuries to self service checkouts at the local superstores.

In the latter example, a single member of staff can now do the job of a row of checkout clerks, supported by maybe a trained engineer to fix faults in all the stores in a given region. Soon, maybe these too will become redundant (perhaps replaced by RFID scanners to scan your bags and bill your credit card automatically when leaving the store).

Being computer literate is already a requirement for virtually every job in the modern workplace, and in a few years time, not being able to code will be as big an impairment as not being able to read and write.

Bluntly, if you don’t have training in sophisticated and marketable high tech skills, you likely will be out of work soon and will also likely never have a job again.

A smart and socially responsible government would be ploughing every penny they can into education and welfare. Education to bring the technical competence of the population up to a level where they stand a chance of competing for the few ultra high skilled jobs the economy of the future has, and welfare to prevent the increasing number of those who are not skilled or lucky enough to have a job from becoming so desperate that they overthrow the government.

Managed decline

Educating a populous is of course expensive, requires long term thinking and is hard work. A more cynical short term thinking government may opt for a managed decline of a nation’s economy.

They may for example decide to cut back on education for the majority of the population and funnel what little money is left towards educating the elite classes. They may decide to cut back on welfare and make what little is left dependant on forced labour, which those in the desperate position to need welfare are not in a position to refuse.

This approach may even work in the short term if the media is managed correctly and the right spin is put on the situation, that is until the tide of human suffering rises high enough for the murmurs of discontent from the slave castes turn to cries of revolution. For those in power who think only as far as the next election cycle this would all be somebody else’s problem, and one likely to be watched with disinterest from a tropical tax haven.

Known problem

A couple of years ago I attended a conference which discussed various aspects of public sector and government, and education in particular. During this event I got taken aside by someone who apparently did something fairly high up in the department of education, probably because of my previous work on Elgg which has been linked – for better or worse – to the field of E-Learning.

During our rather meandering conversation on education and politics, he admitted that the education time bomb, as he called it, was a widely acknowledged problem, but that they had no solution whatsoever for it.

He went so far as to admit to me that given the lead time involved for any solution to have an effect it was almost certainly too late to do anything about it in any case.

His candour shocked me, and I asked what he suggested as a recommended course of action; “Leave.”, was his reply, “Before it gets really bad.”

Things look pretty bleak for the generations of wasted talent to come.

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I suppose it shouldn’t come as any surprise that a government goes back on its word once they get to power, but it nonetheless disappoints to discover that LibCons have resurrected Labour’s batshit insane Intercept Modernisation Programme.

Now called the Communications Capabilities Development Programme and containing a few superficial tweaks (namely dispensing with a centralised database), it is still the same impractical authoritarian mass surveillance nightmare that Labour tried to push through before they were rightfully ousted at the last election – hopefully never to return.

As with IMP, the CCCP CCDP plans to record details of phone calls, text messages, location, emails, IMs and social network activity.

As with IMP the content of messages isn’t to be recorded – just when, where, from and to whom. I suspect this concession was down to data processing limitations more than anything else, but as I’ve remarked on before this actually makes it a whole lot worse as it introduces the very easy to fall victim of guilt by association fallacy.

Consider the following situations:

  1. I am so incensed by RabidManWithAHookForAHand’s views that I email him to say he’s an idiot. He replies and a flame war ensues.
  2. I meet someone at a party, we get chatting and I add them as a friend on Facebook and we exchange a few IMs. Later they turn out to be a animal rights activist.

Without context, both these situations would likely flag me up as a person of interest.

Content or no, the deluge of irrelevant data this sort of mass surveillance would produce must surely make it harder to spot the anything that is important. The signal to noise ratio must be particularly poor.

Blanket surveillance such as this sacrifices much and gains little, lets the government go on “fishing expeditions” and will do very little to protect us from terrorists (if you accept the government’s assertion that the barbarians are at the gate, which personally I doubt very much).

Historically of course the biggest threat to life and liberty a population has faced has nearly always been posed by their own government.

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Unless you have been living under a rock for the last few days, you will be aware that the whistle blowing website Wikileaks has recently published a massive collection of US government memos dating back to the 1960s.

Even the issuing of a D-Notice has failed to prevent the reporting of some of the contents of these memos here in the UK (welcome to the reality of the world in the 21st century guys), and I suspect the impact will be felt for years to come.

The leak was met with almost universal applause from the public, and almost universal condemnation from governments around the world. This startling disconnect and the reason’s why it marks a change in expectations that government has yet to fully grasp has probably been best explained in this article. News agencies in the most part (FOX not withstanding) have been treading a fine line; drooling over the scoop but at the same time giving a disparaging sniff of disapproval.

Suffice it to say, governments around the world have got used to the idea that surveillance goes only one way and that the public at large will happily accept that “Government Knows Best”.

Wikileaks is drawing a lot of attention. Once discounted as a bunch of trouble making nerds, it is now increasingly a thorn in the side of major governments – who are being forced to go through the full body scanner and are now having their unmentionables exposed for their citizens to pick over and pass judgement on.

Incoming chairman of the House homeland security committee Peter King recently described Wikileaks as a “Terrorist organisation” only reminiscent of how Joseph McCarthy once described the ACLU.

There is now a real danger that Wikileaks and its founders will get put on the various terrorist blacklists (or worse). This will essentially pull the rug out from under the organisation since it would mean severe penalties for anyone or any organisation who aided Wikileaks in any way – including activities such as processing payments or hosting their website.

The reason why Wikileaks will fail? Simple, its a single point of failure, and an increasingly prominent target.

The real tragedy is that the more successful it becomes and the more embarrassment it causes to those who seek power without accountability, the faster it will hasten its own demise. I predict that in a few months or years Wikileaks will be taken down in a blaze of ill thought out legislation that will cause untold damage to the rest of us.

The hole left behind is a vital one to fill, but it has to be filled by something distributed and open rather than one site run by one (albeit dedicated) set of individuals.

Wikileaks 2.0

In order to survive, the successor of Wikileaks must – I think – meet at least the following requirements (although this if off the top of my head, so its by no means a complete list):

  • Be distributed. The platform will be a collection of interconnected nodes rather than a single site (bonus points if a node is only aware of its “neighbours” rather than the entire network.
  • Be open. The specification of what a node should do and how it communicates should be an open and peer reviewed document. This will mean that multiple interoperable implementations can be built.
  • Be self repairing. New nodes can be added and will announce. While every document in the system need not exist on every node, the system will ensure that there is never less than X copies in the system.

What we’re talking about here really is a somewhat customised form of CDN and the technology already exists to do all of this.

The Wikileaks of the future then would be one of many websites which sit with their toes in the same pool of data.

Discuss.