The DOBlog

Category: Other Thoughts

  • Little victories..(?)

    The good news

    The Minister for the Environment today announced the establishment of a Commission to review the electoral constituencies. This is exactly what he said couldn’t be done a few weeks ago, before the constitutional challenge to the current state of the constituencies was launched as the ‘final census figures weren’t in’.

    The figures that were available were good enough though to form the basis of funding allocations under the Local Government Fund.

    So after weeks of denying there was a problem that needed to be sorted out, Minister Roche as convened a commission to sort out the problem. I wonder if he will have to “bash some heads together” like he did when he went to Galway to part the waters?

    The even better news

    The even better news is that there could now be a full 6 months for Fianna Fail and the Progressive Democrats to club together and push through all those reforms they had promised as part of their election manifestos policy statements about things that might be important in an election. They’ve costed them all and were just looking for a fresh mandate to do them.

    Sure, hasn’t the constitution given them a few more months to deliver the goods.

    53 promises from Bertie equates to about 10 a month. I wonder if they’ll start with the promises in FF’s Economic policy manifesto document ? Or will the PDs get their way and tinker with stamp duty?

    Will they put something in place in the next 6 months to address the flaws in the processes underpinning the Electoral Register (look for posts earlier than 18th April on this one!)? After all, Minister Roche seems to be getting into his problem solving, head-bashing stride.

    Come on gang… a lot done, more to do.

    …or will they still leap lemming -like into the arms of the Electorate before the end of June?

  • Better late then never..

    RTE today have a story about the changing demographics revealed by the Census.

    This story mentions specifically the possible need for an additional TD in Dublin West as a result of the 8000 population growth in the area that the Census shows.

    RTE have, unfortunately, failed to point out the other constituencies that are under represented and the half-dozen or so that are over represented. They do, however, make the point that the cities in Ireland (of which there are only 5) have lost population share to other areas…

    Of course this information was available in the public domain since the 29th of March and forms the basis of the Constitutional challenge to the Electoral constituency boundaries (or rather the failure of the Government to rework those boundaries in light of the census data).

  • Electoral Constituencies…

    Interesting developments (well developments at least) over in the Hight Court…

    The Constitutional challenge to the Electoral boundaries will be heard next week. This isn’t really news to those of us who have been keeping an eye on mcgarrsolicitors over the past few weeks.

    What does it mean? Well it means that any chance of calling an election this side of the middle of May is shot to hell – rumours of emergency legislation not with standing.

    I wonder what Noel Whelan of Irish Times fame makes of this attempt by citizens to exercise not just their right of free speech but also their right to have a proportionally representative election? As a barrister, political pundit and a former political organiser with Fianna Fail (see his biog at this LINK) I’m sure he’d have an opinion to express.

  • Election in the offing…

    There is an election in the offing here in Ireland. However there are (or rather should be) some concerns still about the quality of the electoral register.

    Over on the IQ Network site there is a short article about the importance of timeliness of information as a measure of its quality and accuracy..

    An important aspect of Information Quality – Timeliness
    IQ Network – the IAIDQ CoP in Ireland – Wednesday, 25 April 2007

    Also, on the Labour Party website there is a piece about issues uncovered in the door to door scrap and rework cleanup that was done late last year on the Electoral register…

    All in all I have an uneasy feeling, particularly as the fundamental root causes don’t seem to have been addressed.

  • What the…? – Irish Political coverage ignores the Elephant in the room

    I’m frankly baffled. We are in the run up to a General Election here in Ireland. All the media pundits are quoting 24th May as the date of the (as yet unannounced) election. This would require our parliament to be dissolved at the latest next week.

    Ireland runs a Proportional Representation/Single Transferable Vote system. It is built into our Consitution. There is a large body of legal opinion around the thresholds at which the ratio of elected representatives to number of people in a constituency breaches the Constitution. We are, it seems, at that point in 10 consituencies out of a total of 43. This has resulted in a Constitutional challenge in the High Court by two Independent TDs (Members of Parliament) to the holding of any election until the balance of Proportional Representation is restored through changes to the make up of Consituencies.

    The fact that key demographics had changed and there was a risk that the Electoral Constituency boundaries or numbers of representatives in each consituency might need to be altered was identified in September 2006 when the preliminary figures from our Census were published. There is no legal obligation on the Government to act or react to these however. The final Census figures were published on the 29th of March. These should be acted on or else there is the risk of any election being declared unconstitutional.

    The risk is that if the Dáil (our parliament) is dissolved prior to an election the running of which is declared unconstitutional until the parliament (the one that has been dissolved) addresses the issue of the Electoral contituencies then we could find ourselves with a bit of a governmental and Constitutional crisis.

    Yet the media continue to focus on the dog and pony show but ignore the Gorrilla in the room. The Executive arm of Government continues to barrel down the path to an election without any apparent appreciation of the risk that exists, both to the simple fact of an election and to the essence of our Constitution. Why has the existence of this Constitutional challenge not been publicised more? Why are the media giving the politicians sound-bite time to puff their agendas ahead of an election being called but they don’t ask the relevant politicians why we find ourselves at a juncture where the Constitutionality of our Electoral system is being challenged due a disproportionality in representation?

    The chronic lack of leadership and accountability on the part of the Government Minister charged with monitoring and managing how our Electoral Register and our Electoral Processes operate is shocking. However at least it is consistent with his lack of leadership and lack of willingness to be accountable for anything other than a soundbite on the news (he was going to ‘bash some heads together’ over the Galway water crisis apparently).

    To tie this back to my theme of Information Quality Management, Deming called on management to adopt a “constancy of purpose” and to wholeheartedly take on “the new philosophy” while breaking down barriers between people/organisations and driving out the fear that prevents the delivery of quality.

    Why does the relevant Minister seem to act in a manner that could only serve to drive in fear and increase the barriers that might exist that would prevent a good job being done? What is our incumbent Government’s purpose that they are constant to? What is the philosophy that they are pursuing?

    I’m off to Paddy Powers to place a bet that the Election won’t be called this side of June. Congratulations to Catherine Murphy and Finian McGrath for taking a stand on this issue.

  • First Post Anniversary… Electoral Register Processes Still Broken

    The DobBlog is 1 year old today.

    What have we achieved? Well, about 50,000 words on the state of the Irish Electoral Register, syndicated publication of an article based on those words in two International newsletters for IT/Business Intelligence professionals and a wordpress template I’m finally not unhappy with.

    The electoral register is still buggered (that’s a technical term). The scrap and rework (as predicted) was inconsistent and hasn’t fixed the underlying problems. As soon as the clean up stopped, the register has begun to drift to inaccuracy again.

    The Government continues to be cavalier about the issues involved in our electoral system… a number of constituencies will be under represented in the next Dail because of the failure of the Government to react to the population changes in the Census. That’s assuming the election can go ahead given the Constitutional challenge that has commenced.

    The understanding of the importance of good quality information and well designed processes to gather and use that information has grown however amongst a small (and growing) group of occasional visitors to the blog.

    Hopefully the next 12 months will bring enlightenment to Government on some of the issues I’ve blogged about this year and perhaps they will seek out good practices. Hopefully as well we will see some critical commentary in the media on these types of issue. I lost count of the number of pieces I submitted to Irish media during the year. My hit rate outside of Ireland this year is 2 for 2… domestically it is 0 for lots more.

  • DoBlog is 1 year old this month

    Last night I was doing some housekeeping on the site and I noticed that the year-ometer on the DoBlog is about to turn over. The first post on www.obriend.com (as it was then) was on 18th April 2006. It was about the Electoral Register.

    With an Election looming in the next few weeks it is worth revisiting where we are on that particular issue.

    • The Electoral Register issues are still not resolved
    • There does not appear to have been any substantive analysis of the actual root causes (apart from some work I did off my own bat as a concerned citizen)
    • The work that was done to ‘correct’ the Register was managed inconsistently between Local Authority areas, which means that we may not have improve the accuracy all that much.
    • That work was completed a while ago… the Register will have degraded in quality again since
    • It seems that entire housing estates (even in the Minister’s own constituency) may have been dropped off the Register

    Over on McGarr Solicitors site I paraphrased Paul Simon to describe the state of the Register -“Still broken after all these years”. It is. The scrap and rework was botched and it wasn’t even the right thing to do.

    With most elections or polls in Ireland now being decided by the narrowest of margins it is more important than ever that everyone of us who can vote in the forthcoming General Election does vote. It was once said that in a democracy you don’t always get the government you want, you get the government you deserve.

    So vote. Vote diligently.

  • ka-BOOM – the Information Age Explosion is upon us.

    CNN.com has an interesting report on a study that was conducted by IDC, an industry think tank and research company, into the volume of information that we are creating and storing – and more importantly who is creating that information.

    IDC estimates that the world had 185 exabytes of storage available last year and will have 601 exabytes in 2010. But the amount of stuff generated is expected to jump from 161 exabytes last year to 988 exabytes (closing in on 1 zettabyte) in 2010.

    IDC estimates that by 2010, about 70 percent of the world’s digital data will be created by individuals. For corporations, information is inflating from such disparate causes as surveillance cameras and data-retention regulations.

    The growth in ‘long tail’ activities like blogging and YouTube are contributors to this. Explosions can wind up as one of two things – an impressively awe inspiring fireworks display of elegance and beauty… or a shock and awe filled detonation. The fact that this explosion of information is being driven by individuals raises a significant risk that as the quantity increases the quality decreases. We are seeing elements of this risk in the recent story about the Wikipedia expert who was making it up as he went along and had lied about his credentials.

    However, this issue of alleged experts with either non-existent qualifications or qualifications which may not be what they appear to be is not restricted to just the Internet – it is an off-line issue too. We really can’t ignore the Diploma mills churning out PhDs who might not have the level of skills one might expect from the title.

    What can Information Quality professionals and Bloggers do to help maintain quality levels and keep collateral damage from this explosion to a minimum?

    • When blogging, first do no harm. Make sure you verify sources for your stories as much as you can and respond to any comments that report errors or innacurracies in your posts – in short act with the sort of standards we would expect from journalists (although which we might not always get)
    • Try and develop an understanding of good practices in terms of structuring your content (categories in WordPress are metadata for example)
    • As Microsoft said in a recent advertising campaign here in Ireland – “Information that cant be found is information that can’t be used”. Quality of information includes the quality of how that information is presented – designing your sites so they are accessible to people with visual problems is a good practice. Likewise having a logical structure on your site and your content is also important.

    Reading the figures that IDC have produced (which incidentally used some proprietary internal research so might not be capable of being replicated in an independent study) makes me think of the advice that Peter Parker’s Uncle Ben gives him in the first Spiderman Movie… “With great power comes great responsibility”.

    WordPress, Youtube, Wikipedia and similar tools have placed a great power in the hands of the wired individual. However just because it is on the web (no poor pun intended) it does not mean that the rules of the real world have switched off. Under the Common Law Tort of Negligent Misstatement there is a duty of care on all people who are providing information to ensure that that information is correct. Admittedly to succeed in suing someone for negligent misstatement you need to show that your reliance on the information and any loss you incur were reasonably foreseeable and that the person publishing the information owed a duty of care to you specifically (are you their ‘neighbour’ in a legal sense? Are you a class of person that the publisher of the information should have considered might be a consumer of their information?).

    With great power comes great responsibilty. Dr Ben Goldacre, a columnist with the Guardian Newspaper in the UK, who’s article about questionable qualifications I’ve linked to above, ends that particular article in a very eloquent way that sums up why we need to ensure that we maintain quality standards as the volume of information available grows. I unashamedly pinch it because it is very good – I’ve just added some emphasis (please read the full article to put this in its original context)…

    “I am writing this article, sneakily, late, at the back of the room, in the Royal College of Physicians, at a conference discussing how to free up access to medical academic knowledge for the public. At the front, as I type, Sir Muir Gray, director of the NHS National Electronic Library For Health, is speaking: “Ignorance is like cholera,” he says. “It cannot be controlled by the individual alone: it requires the organised efforts of society.” He’s right: in the 19th and 20th centuries, we made huge advances through the provision of clean, clear water; and in the 21st century, clean, clear information will produce those same advances.“

    Blog wisely. Blog well.

  • Biometric passports… secure or not?

    Also on the Register this morning is a worrisome story where the Daily Mail has done an experiment to see just how secure UK biometric passports are.

    Short answer – not very really. For a start the data on the card can be read wirelessly, but requires a decryption key to read it.

    It seems that the encryption key used to encrypt the biometric chip data is not exactly rocket science to break being made up of the passport number, the holder’s date of birth and the passport expiry date.

    So let’s say my new passport number is XYZ1234, my date of birth is 1977-12-12. Both these pieces of information are available on the passport itself, so if someone has your passport in front of you they can recreate the key without any difficulty.

    Even if they have only scanned your chip (sounds naughty doesn’t it), passport hackers (in the UK at least) have enough clues on the envelope itself to get them some of the way. The one key piece of info that requires effort is the date of birth. So down the Central Registry office with us to get info on that (or google the person to see if they have a Bebo profile of have put info about their birthday on the web anywhere).

    The passport office identifier is on the mailing label and the passport expiry date will usually be within 10 years of the post mark on the envelope. Please note – the envelope has not been opened yet.

    Ahhh says you… “but the hacker will still have to get those facts in the right order to break the code. Even my ATM only lets me try 3 times. This technology is surely more secure than that”.

    Me arse. It seems that Harry the Hacker can keep going until he cracks the code and gets all your details (including photo and other bio-facts) from the chip.

    So, how secure is the Irish system? Do our new biometric passports have a similar vunverability. In my clippings from the Irish Time at home I have a front-page photo of our Minister for Foreign Affairs holding up his new biometric passport when they were launched last year. Clearly visible is his passport number.

    So one piece of data down. His date of birth is pretty easily accessible (www.fiannafail.ie narrows it down for us) and we know that biometric passports came into effect in Ireland in 2006. All I need is a bit of cheap kit and a scanner to steal his passport without touching his pockets.

    Sweet.

  • Crazy yanks

    Found this initially in Metro free newspaper and also on The Register.

    This man is clearly somewhat paranoid about ‘the man’ being able to recover data from his hard-drive. However, as pointed out by the Reg, the misguided belief that deleting any files on your computer removes them from existence is just plain wrong.

    In the past I worked as a LAN admin and occasionally we had to replace old PCs with newer models. The standard operating procedure for ensuring that data on the hard-drives could not be recovered did not involve deleting anything or even a format of the drive. No, we used a nailgun. Two nails into the drive meant it was unusable. Four was overkill but fun.

    The fact that HP, who own Compaq who sold the drive encryption software this gentleman used, seem to have settled tells me either two things:

    1. Either Compaq’s software was not as robust as its marketing claimed
    2. HP’s lawyers decided it was too expensive to litigate and just cut a cheque in full settlement – it is interesting that HP do not appear to have admitted liability

    Why would HP have settled? Perhaps the means by which authorities can circumvent their software represents a proprietary secret that would be come public record if aired in court. Imagine the fun hackers would have if they knew exactly how to get around drive-based security on your machine.

    For the record – this is person sold modified weapons that caused even American eye-brows to raise (a rifle with a silencer – so you don’t wake Bambi while taking out his mother obviously).