ntouk.com - Jerry Fishenden's technology policy blog

The impact of technology can often have profound and unforeseen consequences. Take for example the recent controversy around the police entering Parliament in order to raid the offices of Damian Green MP, Shadow Minister for Immigration.

In pre-digital times, it would have been possible to restore the sanctity and rule of Parliamentary privilege to the Parliamentary estate to protect MPs from unwarranted intrusion by the state, or officers acting on behalf of the state such as the police. After all, MPs often receive information in confidence from their constituents and others. They rightfully need to be able to preserve such confidentiality, as journalists are likewise able to ensure the confidentiality of their sources. Ensuring that the Parliamentary estate offers such protection would be relatively easy to enforce.

But the digital age has changed all that. Take for example an MP who receives a confidential communication via email or text message whilst on the Parliamentary estate. Inside the estate itself, that communication and its contents will (hopefully) remain confidential. However, as soon as the MP steps outside of the estate, he can potentially be stopped by the police and the contents of his laptop and mobile phone inspected, making any Parliamentary privileges around confidentiality somewhat pointless.

So, where are the boundaries to be drawn around Parliamentary privilege now that the physical boundaries of the estate have little relevance? Not only does technology in practice mean that the rules of the game have changed, but proposals such as the interception modernisation programme will potentially exacerbate the problem, enabling third parties to track patterns of communication between an MP and his or her network of contacts (as indeed will also happen to journalists and their sources, and police and their undercover informants). And encryption is no answer either: under RIPA, anyone (including MPs) who refuses to unencrypt the contents of say their laptop can be arrested and potentially prosecuted.

This seems to me another example of why we need a better understanding of the impact and potential of technology (good, bad and ugly) to inform public policymaking, as well as the Parliamentary and legislative agenda. Whilst we have a Chief Scientific Adviser community to help inform the R&D deliberations of Whitehall departments, there is no equivalent available to help inform technology policy. The problems this is causing lie everywhere around us.

The proposals to reconstitute the Boards of Whitehall departments to bring in experienced non-executive directors from outside may in part address this. But also we need to think about how the overall vision and strategy for technology policy is set in the UK. That is, even with such changes, how we best establish leadership of technology policy and clear co-ordination and planning across Whitehall, not just within its functional silos.

So one thing I am particularly keen to see is whether any good ideas emerge from the current 1,000 GBP ideal government IT strategy competition that will help make headway into this issue. Many of the failures and problems we witness at present seem to me to hinge around an inadequate governance model.

I have been working with a small team to develop ideas around this topic that we shall be exploring during 2010. But in the meantime I welcome all ideas about how we can best work together to define a better governance model. One that will, in time, help us reach a situation where the types of outfall highlighted by "the Damian Green affair" can be better anticipated and tackled, with demonstrable benefits to our wider UK democracy.

Unless we make such changes, we will only witness more and more ill-designed and uninformed decisions taken around technology, with inevitable and unfortunate consequences for us all. So please, come along and add your thoughts to the competition.

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