Police

European Courts have been great; just one fumble to correct

ianwaring Google, Internet, Journalism, Newspapers, Police, Politicians Leave a comment

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We have an outstanding parliament that works in the Public Interest. Where mobile roaming charges are being eroded into oblivion, where there is tacit support in law for the principles of Net Neutrality, and where the Minister is fully supportive of a forward looking (for consumers) Digital future. That is the European Parliament, and the excellent work of Neelie Kroes and her staff.

The one blight on the EC’s otherwise excellent work has been the decision to enact – then outsource – a “Right to be Forgotten” process to a commercial third party. The car started skidding off the road of sensibility very early in the process, albeit underpinned by one valid core assumption.

Fundamentally, there are protections in place, where a personal financial misfortune or a criminal offence in a persons formative years has occurred, to have a public disclosure time limit enshrined in law. This is to prevent undue prejudice after an agreed time, and to allow the afflicted to carry on their affairs without penalty or undue suffering after lessons have been both internalised and not repeated.

There are public data maintenance and reporting limits on some cases of data on a criminal reference database, or on financial conduct databases, that are mandated to be erased from the public record a specific number of years after first being placed there. This was the case with the Spanish Gentleman who believed his privacy was being violated by the publication of a bankruptcy asset sale well past this statutory public financial reporting boundary, in a newspaper who attributed that sale to him personally.

In my humble opinion, the resolution of the court should have been to (quietly) order the Newspaper to remove (or obfuscate) his name from that article at source. Job done; this then formally disassociated his name from the event, and all downstream (searchable) references to it likewise, so achieving the alignment of his privacy with the usual public record financial reporting acts in law.

By leaving the source in place, and merely telling search engine providers to enact processes to allow individuals to request removal of unwanted facts from the search indexes only, opens the door to a litany of undesirable consequences – and indeed leaves the original article on a newspaper web site untouched and in direct violation of the subjects right to privacy over 7 years after his bankruptcy; this association should now have no place on the public record.

Besides timescales coded into law on specific timescales where certain classes of personal data can remain on the public record, there are also ample remedies at law in place for enforcing removal (and seeking compensation for) the publication of libellous or slanderous material. Or indeed the refusal to take-down such material in a timely manner with, or without, a corresponding written apology where this is judged appropriate. No new laws needed; it is then clear that factual content has its status reinforced in history.

In the event, we’re now subject to a morass of take-down requests that have no legal basis for support. Of the initial volume (of 10’s of 1,000’s of removal requests):

  • 31 percent of requests from the UK and Ireland related to frauds or scams
  • 20 percent to arrests or convictions for violent or serious crimes
  • 12 percent to child pornography arrests
  • 5 percent to the government and police
  • 2 percent related to celebrities

That is demonstrably not serving the public interest.

I do sincerely hope the European Justices that enacted the current process will reflect on the monster they have created, and instead change the focus to enact privacy of individuals in line with the financial and criminal record keeping edicts of publicly accessible data coded in law already. In that way, justice will be served, and we will no longer be subjected to a process outsourced to a third party who should never be put in a position of judge and jury.

That is what the courts are for, where the laws are very specific, and in which the public was full confidence.

Starting with the end in mind: IT Management Heat vs Light

ianwaring Amazon, Enterprise IT, Future Trends, Management, Marketing, Metrics, Open Source, Police, Politicians, Quality, Software Leave a comment

A very good place to startOne source of constant bemusement to me is the habit of intelligent people to pee in the industry market research bathwater, and then to pay handsomely to drink a hybrid mix of the result collected across their peers.

Perhaps betrayed by an early experience of one research company coming in to present to the management of the vendor I was working at, and finding in the rehearsal their conjecture that sales of specific machine sizes had badly dipped in the preceding quarter. Except they hadn’t; we’d had the biggest growth in sales of the highlighted machines in our history in that timeframe. When I mentioned my concern, the appropriate slides were corrected in short order, and no doubt the receiving audience impressed with the skill in their analysis that built a forecast starting with an amazingly accurate, perceptive (and otherwise publicly unreported) recent history.

I’ve been doubly nervous ever since – always relating back to the old “Deep Throat” hints given in “All the Presidents Men” – that of, in every case, “to follow the money”.

Earlier today, I was having some banter on one of the boards of “The Motley Fool” which referenced the ways certain institutions were imposing measures on staff – well away from a useful business use that positively supported better results for their customers. Well, except of providing sound bites to politicians. I can sense that in Education, in some elements of Health provision, and rather fundamentally in the Police service. I’ve even done a drains-up some time ago that reflected on the way UK Police are measured, and tried trace the rationale back to source – which was a senior politician imploring them to reduce crime; blog post here. The subtlety of this was rather lost; the only control placed in their hands was that of compiling the associated statistics, and to make their behaviours on the ground align supporting that data collection, rather than going back to core principles of why they were there, and what their customers wanted of them.

Jeff Bezos (CEO of Amazon) has the right idea; everything they do aligns with the ultimate end customer, and everything else works back from there. Competition is something to be conscious of, but only to the extent of understanding how you can serve your own customers better. Something that’s also the central model that W. Edwards Deming used to help transform Japanese Industry, and in being disciplined to methodically improve “the system” without unnecessary distractions. Distractions which are extremely apparent to anyone who’s been subjected to his “Red Beads” experiment. But the central task is always “To start with the end in mind”.

With that, I saw a post by Simon Wardley today where Gartner released the results of a survey on “Top 10 Challenges for I&O Leaders”, which I guess is some analogue of what used to be referred to as “CIOs”. Most of which felt to me like a herd mentality – and divorced from the sort of issues i’d have expected to be present. In fact a complete reenactment of this sort of dialogue Simon had mentioned before.

Simon then cited the first 5 things he thought they should be focussed on (around Corrective Action), leaving the remainder “Positive Action” points to be mapped based on that appeared upon that foundation. This in the assumption that those actions would likely be unique to each organisation performing the initial framing exercise.

Simon’s excellent blog post is: My list vs Gartner, shortly followed by On Capabilities. I think it’s a great read. My only regret is that, while I understand his model (I think!), i’ve not had to work on the final piece between his final strategic map (for any business i’m active in) and articulating a pithy & prioritised list of actions based on the diagram created. And I wish he’d get the bandwidth to turn his Wardley Maps into a Book.

Until then, I recommend his Bits & Pieces Blog; it’s a quality read that deserves good prominence on every IT Manager’s (and IT vendors!) RSS feed.

So, how do Policing Statistics work?

ianwaring Blind Alleys, Police, Politicians, Statistics Leave a comment

Metropolitan Police Sign

I know I posted a previous note on the curious measures being handed down to police forces to “reduce crime”. While the police may be able to influence it slightly, in the final analysis they only have direct control over one part of the value chain – that of producing the related statistics (I really don’t think they commit all the crimes on which they are measured!). The much longer post was this: http://www.ianwaring.com/2014/04/05/police-metrics-and-the-missing-comedy-of-the-red-beads/

I’ve just had one of my occasional visits back to “Plumpergeddon” – not recommended in work environments for reasons that will become apparent later – which documents the ebbs and flows of the legal process following a mugging and theft (of a MacBook and a wallet containing a debit card) in London in November 2011. It is, to put it mildly, a shocking story.

The victim of the crime – and owner of the MacBook – had installed a piece of software on his machine that – once he’d enabled a tick box on an associated web site – started to “phone home” at regular intervals. Taking pictures of the person using the computer, shots of what was on the screen at the same time, and both tagged with it’s exact geographic location. He ended up with over 6,000 pictures, including some which showed sale of goods on eBay that matched purchases made on his stolen credit cards.

I’m not sure exactly how the flow of incidents get rolled up into the crime statistics that the Met publish, but having done a quick trawl through the Plumpergeddon Blog, starting at the first post here and (warning: ever more NSFW as the story unfolds, given what the user started paying for and viewing!) moving up to the current status 29 pages later, the count looks like:

  • 1 count of mugging
  • 1 theft of a MacBook Pro Personal Computer, plus Wallet containing Company Debit Card
  • 2 counts of obtaining money (from a cashpoint with a stolen card) by deception
  • 9 counts of obtaining goods (using a stolen debit card, using a PIN) by deception
  • 2 counts of obtaining goods (using a stolen debit card, signing for them) by deception
  • 11 counts of demonstrably selling stolen goods

So, I make that 26 individual crime incidents.

The automated data collection started off within 4 weeks of the theft phoning home (it took one shot of the user, a screenshot and reported location and connection details every 10 minutes of active use). He ended up assembling circa 6,000 pieces of evidence (including screenshots of the person using his MacBook, and screenshots documenting the disposal of the goods purchased with the stolen card using three separate accounts on eBay). All preserved with details of the physical location of the MacBook and the details of the WiFi network it was connected to.

Many ebbs and flows along the way, but the long and short of it was that the case was formally dropped “for lack of evidence”. This was then followed by a brief piece of interest when some media activity started picking up, but it then sort of ebbed away again. In May 2013, news came back as “The case file is back with the officer, and the case is closed pending further leads.”

Four weeks ago, the update said:

I Am No Longer the Victim. Apparently. I was told last night in a police station by a Detective Constable that because the £7,000 I was defrauded of was returned by my bank after 3-4 weeks, and the laptop was replaced by my insurance company after 4 months, I am no longer considered the victim for either of those crimes. I was told that my bank and insurance company are now the victims.

I assume this must mean that when a victim of an assault receives compensation, the attackers subsequently go free? Any UK based lawyers, police or other legal types care to shed some light on this obscure logic?

Cynical little me suspects i’m being told this because the police don’t want to pursue charges over those crimes, even though (as most readers will know and as I said in my previous post) I’ve done practically all the legwork for them.

I must admit to be completely appalled that a case like this. Given the amount of evidence submitted, it should have solved a string of fraudulent transactions and matching/associated Sale of Stolen Goods, that could have incremented the Metropolitan Police “crimes solved” counter like  jackpot machine. 26 crimes solved with all the evidence collecting leg work already done for them.

So, where does this case sit on the Metropolitan Police Statistics? Does it count as all 26 incidents “solved” because the insurance company have paid out and the debit card company have reversed the fraudulent transactions?And above all, is the Home Secretary really satisfied that she’s seeing an appropriate action under her “reducing crime” objective here??

The guy is still free and on the streets without any intervention since the day the crimes were committed. Free to become the sort of one-man crime wave that Bill Bratton managed to systematically get off the streets in New York during his first tenure as Police Chief there (I recall from his book The Turnaround that 70 individuals in custody completely changed the complexion of life in that City). Big effect when you can systematically follow up to root causes, as he did then.

However, back in London, I wonder how this string of events are mapped onto the crime statistics being widely published and cited. Any ideas?