{"id":1180,"date":"2011-03-29T04:16:34","date_gmt":"2011-03-29T12:16:34","guid":{"rendered":"\/?p=1180"},"modified":"2011-04-02T02:39:32","modified_gmt":"2011-04-02T10:39:32","slug":"lazy-headmasters-versus-the-laws-of-identity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.identityblog.com\/?p=1180","title":{"rendered":"Lazy headmasters versus the Laws of Identity"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ray Corrigan\u00a0routinely\u00a0combines legal and technological insight\u00a0at B2fxxx\u00a0– Random thoughts on law, the Internet and society<\/a>, and his book\u00a0on Digital Decision Making<\/a> is essential.\u00a0\u00a0His\u00a0work often\u00a0leaves me feeling uncharacteristically optimistic –\u00a0living proof that\u00a0a new kind of legal thinker is emerging with the technological depth\u00a0needed to be a modern day Solomon.<\/p>\n

I hadn't noticed\u00a0the UK's new Protection of Freedoms Bill<\/a>\u00a0until I heard\u00a0cabinet minister Damian Green\u00a0talk about it as he pulverized the UK's centralized identity database<\/a>\u00a0recently.\u00a0 Naturally I turned to Ray Corrigan for comment, only to discover that the\u00a0political housecleaning had\u00a0also swept away the assumptions behind widespread fingerprinting in Britain's schools, reinstating user control and consent.<\/strong><\/em>\u00a0<\/p>\n

According to TES Connect<\/a>:<\/p>\n

The new Protection of Freedoms Bill gives pupils in schools and colleges the right to refuse to give their biometric data and compels schools to make alternative provision for them.\u00a0 The several thousand schools that already use the technology will also have to ask permission from parents retrospectively, even if their systems have been established for years…<\/p>\n

It turns out that Britain's headmasters,\u00a0apparently now a lazy bunch, have\u00a0little stomach for trivialities like civil liberties.\u00a0 And\u00a0writing about this, Ray's tone\u00a0seems that of\u00a0a judge who has had an impetuous and over-the-top barrister\u00a0try to bend the rules\u00a0one too many times.\u00a0\u00a0It is satisfying<\/em> to see\u00a0Ray send them\u00a0home<\/a> to study the\u00a0Laws of Identity <\/a>as\u00a0scientific laws governing identity systems.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0I hope they catch up on their homework…<\/p>\n

The Association of School and College Leaders (ASCL) is reportedly opposing<\/span><\/a> the controls on school fingerprinting proposed in the UK coalition government's Protection of Freedoms Bill<\/span><\/a>.<\/p>\n

I always understood the reason that unions existed was to protect the rights of individuals. That ASCL should give what they perceive to be their own members’ managerial convenience priority over the civil rights of kids should make them thoroughly ashamed of themselves.\u00a0 Oh dear – now head teachers are going to have to fill in a few forms before they abuse children's fundamental right to privacy – how terrible.<\/p>\n

Although headteachers and governors at schools deploying these systems may be typically ‘happy that this does not contravene the Data Protection Act’, a number of leading barristers have stated that the use of such systems in schools may be illegal on several grounds. As far back as 2006 Stephen Groesz, a partner at Bindmans in London, was advising<\/span><\/a>:<\/p>\n

“Absent a specific power allowing schools to fingerprint, I'd say they have no power to do it. The notion you can do it because it's a neat way of keeping track of books doesn't cut it as a justification.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The recent decisions in the European Court of Human rights in cases like S. and Marper v UK<\/span><\/a> (2008 – retention of dna and fingerprints) and Gillan and Quinton v UK<\/span><\/a> (2010 – s44 police stop and search) mean schools have to be increasingly careful about the use of such systems anyway. Not that most schools would know that.<\/p>\n

Again the question of whether kids should be fingerprinted to get access to books and school meals is not even a hard one<\/span><\/a>! They completely decimate Kim Cameron's first four laws of identity<\/span><\/a>.<\/p>\n

1. User control and consent – many schools don't ask for consent, child or parental, and don't provide simple opt out options<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

2. Minimum disclosure for constrained use – the information collected, children's unique biometrics, is disproportionate for the stated use<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

3. Justifiable parties – the information is in control of or at least accessible by parties who have absolutely no right to it<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

4. Directed identity – a unique, irrevocable, omnidirectional identifier is being used when a simple unidirectional identifier (eg lunch ticket or library card) would more than adequately do the job.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It's irrelevant how much schools have invested in such systems or how convenient school administrators find them, or that the Information Commissioner's Office soft peddled their advice<\/span><\/a> on the matter (in 2008) in relation to the Data Protection Act.\u00a0 They should all be scrapped and if the need for schools to wade through a few more forms before they use these systems causes them to be scrapped then that's a good outcome from my perspective.<\/p>\n

In addition just because school fingerprint vendors have conned them into parting with ridiculous sums of money (in school budget terms) to install these systems, with promises that they are not really storing fingerprints and they can't be recreated, there is no doubt it is possible to recreate the image of a fingerprint from data stored on such systems. Ross, A et al ‘From Template to Image: Reconstructing Fingerprints from Minutiae Points’<\/span><\/a> IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, Vol. 29, No. 4, April 2007 is just one example of how university researchers have reverse engineered these systems. The warning caveat emptor applies emphatically to digital technology systems that buyers don't understand especially when it comes to undermining the civil liberties of our younger generation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cHaving to get permission from every single parent will be a huge bureaucratic burden and very difficult to achieve.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":68,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[48,17,2,40,11],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.identityblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1180"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.identityblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.identityblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.identityblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/68"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.identityblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1180"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.identityblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1180\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.identityblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1180"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.identityblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1180"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.identityblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1180"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}