Pirate Big Brother

It is pretty clear that the Government (at least here in the UK) is incapable of delivering any large IT project on time, within budget, or indeed at all.

For example, the BBC recently scrapped a multi-multi- million pound project to make all of its archive digitally available to its own program producers. For another example, a recent NHS infrastructure project to make patients' records available to all healthcare professionals has come expensively unglued. There are many, many more such examples, each wasting hundreds of millions of pounds and almost always failing completely.

As a more immediately relevant example, there was the recent case of a four year old child who was starved and beaten to death, because none of the relevant agencies (doctors, teachers, police, social workers) had easy access to information from the others which would have enabled them to see the bigger picture. No doubt another massive government IT project will be launched, like the Titanic, to try to remedy this. It will of course fail.

What is needed, therefore, is for the hacker community to step up to the flagpole and see who takes the bull by the horns. I have a feeling that a competent hacker group could, for example, access relevant data from the police, hospitals, social workers etc, and analyse it meaningfully en masse.

Give a geek in a darkened bedroom a few weeks, and I suspect she could develop an algorithm to sift through hacked data and detect patterns suggesting child abuse. Provide an email hotline where the hacker can, anonymously, report that Child X has visited three different A&E departments seven times over the last year; has a father who has been convicted of violent assault; and is in the lowest percentile for bodyweight.