I had already written and published a book with characters of the period of the Roman invasion when lo and behold I came across M. J. Harper's book on the history of Britain, revealed. I have searched high and low for good books on early Britain and there are not very many. This makes a novelist's research very difficult and almost scary.
"My word!" I thought with great trepidation as I opened the book for the very first time and read the first paragraphs. I flipped through and noted the diagrams inside and said to myself, "These look interesting. This is a book to buy and keep. It is extremely well printed (hard copy). What a lovely addition to my bookshelf!"
I also briefly noted Harper's comments on the theory of evolution. "Well at the very least he might be well read," I thought to myself. There is so much interesting that can be learned by letting the competing sciences review each other. "What if Harper's book makes my own book sound like complete rubbish? After all, I have little to go on, but a very strong hunch." Thus, it was that I eagerly bought the book and within several days, I had read it at least three times. Good books are like that. They cause you to read them several times, and you really do grow in understanding with each read.
My own novels are like that. They are not to be read only once. See.
Reading Harper's book many times changed my mind about the English language. My aim is not academic but informational, so the absence sources would not be a problem. At this stage of reading, I am not seeking to verify, but rather to have a cogently argued case for an alternative view presented. I leave it to others, as I am sure Harper does to begin the process of verification. Indeed, too many references would not only be boring, but could deter me from reading.
The book is carefully argued logic and the author makes a clear case for the need to review what we have understood to be the basis of the English language. Many times I have poured over glossary type books of place names seeking an insight into their origin only to find the expression old english applied to the search in question. When looking for insights it is only to easy to be amazed at how readily the authors have said something without verification. How in the dickens is one supposed to verify something.
Obviously, MJ Harper is on to something much grander than the question of the origins of the English language. He is questioning the method of historical research. He is saying that one needs to see the forests from the trees.
The fact is that in the case of English the absence of verification of the Anglo Saxon origins rests mainly with academia and if they wish to verify there own points on the historical origins, this is their opportunity to present their case. They can refute Harper in a book with all the verifiable sources of their case listed. If they don't, we can probably assume that a lot of hot air has been wasted on theories that don't hold forth under close examination. Problem is that much of the hot air has been like butterflies stirring up hurricanes around the world of trust and faith.
Is past history fiction or fact? Have we been duped by the Romans into a false view of our own history? It's a wonderful set of questions that Oxford and Cambridge or other schooled academics can set to rest, or can they?
I have collected all the other books I can find on the English language and try to see whether any of the authors of these have had any doubts in their minds when they were writing so very convincingly. I watched TV programmes about the Anglo Saxons and pondered whether what there were saying was just a guess or based on partial evidence or something that had been verified. The way the present on the BBC is rather convincing would you not agree. The voice is very authoritative, but are the points made verified, and does one verify?
My approach is to read all and everything about a subject before forming an opinion and even then be flexible in making a judgment. It was Gurdieff who wrote that it is of utmost importance to very everything you hear. If you don't you will live in a world of lies. Its largely a matter or personal style and psychology. Some people need to move along with certainty. They feel they can't go on unless what they know is what they believe.
Others like myself live in a world of uncertainty always thinking that what one knows will be revised by someone else. Its a matter of continuing education that you are open to alternative views and don't get closed down into a problem of a logic net, some way of thinking that entangles you without remission.
Yes, its best to take the view that Harper has many good points in his book. The book is well worth reading alongside a book with more conventional views. If you then try to see for yourself the inconsistencies in the conventional view, you might make progress, but your aim should be to verify, verify, if you can. Where you can't verify the story is up for grabs and it is the best presented and most convincing arguments that will win.
Scratches to Sketches
Thursday, 22 November 2007
A Tale about the Three Hares and the Lost World of Ing
What follows is mythology that is used in the creation of the Wuh Lax series of books, See . The subject of early english language appears in the excellent book by MJ Harper.
The three hares were originally an abstraction in a world where nothing was written down. This world was dominated by hills and the breath of life that moved through the hills was referred to as Breeze.
The Breeze people breathed and through breath they attained life. The faster they breathed the greater was the level of life they attained until they became like the wind and could fly through the air as breeze. The hare breathed fast and moved like the wind and was highly respected by the breeze people, who saw three levels of life based on wind with the last being that of the spirit and made eternal. The hare ran fast in a figure eight which the breeze people used as a symbol for eternity and the spiritual life they were seeking.
The three hares signify three dimensions that concerned them at the time (more on this later, a dimension is a boundary for which it is impossible to cross without transformation; transformation comes with the combining of the four main life forces (water, salt, sand/soil, and organics). In the nature of the universe discoveries have shown that particles can occupy more than one dimension at any one time and it is such properties than enable light that is the mind of man to shape his material universe while aware of the realms of light of invisible universes beyond all imagining.
The breeze people had an alphabet and carved messages on trees, branches, soil, bodies, and sand. They placed stones to define the very large round settlements of their families. The breeze people were the Bri people who eventually took their lead from those settled along the river Tone (now Taunton, where they had their capital city not far from Athelney the capital of the later Saxon rulers of Britain). The people of the breeze settled across the three islands (now Ireland, Britain and Europe). From northwest europe they settled further and further into the east as well.
They became known as the Britons, and their lands as Breton or Brittany, or Britain. They eventually formed a nation that spoke the language of the Ing, a person=hero who in their mythology discovered the property of making metal called bronze from Tin. The Ing was the 'hero' of the Bri people, and his land was known as Ingland, a variation of Tinland. The people of Ingland settled across the island of Ingland, selling tin to make bronze and creating the first wave of civilization (the bronze age) and migrating through Europe travelling as far as the coast of the Mediterranean and well into Asia influencing a broad stretch of the globe arriving eventually in Asia and thence back once more to Ingland, through long extensive trading routes.
The language of the Ing became the source of the European and asian languages See.
Locally in Ingland, the Ing eventually were overrun with the arrival of the darkish curly haired people from Africa and South Western Europe, who spoke a different group of languages and who seized the land from the Bri (breeze) people in order to seize their tin for making weapons. These people were warlike and conquered the Ing. They were known as celts and they absorbed the religion of the Ing into their own. Because of their strange languages and proximity to Roman influence the Romans did not originally recognize the Ing culture. With their swords, and fearsome ways the celts had ruled the peaceful Ing people, but there influence was eventually displaced by that of the Romans.
The celts reign over a long period had caused the Ing to lose and forget their heritage. Thus because their story rotted with the trees, the people of Ing lost their king, the hero and their past became timeless and meaningless. The Romans eventually claimed the culture of Ing absorbing its ideas as their own, and the contribution of the Ing people was lost.
Curiously, a general of the Romans found traces of the people of Ing at Tone when he was conquering the South West of Britain in search of tin and lead. He learned from Corellus one of his generals that the Ing had combined with the celts to form a single people, but that it was only the celts that were warlike. He recognized the importance of the Ing to peace and Roman influence, but he knew that the spiritual leaders now the druids who did not recognize tribal boundaries (between the celts and the Ing) might unite all the people of Ingland as one people to push the Romans off the island. Nevertheless, Romans arranged for a permanent peace with the people of the Ing which obviously stood the test of time.
By way of interest, the Ings (the Ing people) had occuped the whole island of Ingland, but they were mostly to be found in England and they spoke the English language over a wide area. They were very numerous as a people, but had no written word, or at least that is the mythology. With the arrival of the Romans, the warlike and ruling 'celts' retreated to Wales and remoter regions of the island since they would not live under Roman rule. The Ing, the hero worshippers, remained in England and retaught the Romans their full language and spiritual ways which survive to this day as does England, the land of the 'hero.' To their credit, the commercial and military language of the romans died away and was replaced by Italian a language derived from the much older language of the Ing.
The three hares were originally an abstraction in a world where nothing was written down. This world was dominated by hills and the breath of life that moved through the hills was referred to as Breeze.
The Breeze people breathed and through breath they attained life. The faster they breathed the greater was the level of life they attained until they became like the wind and could fly through the air as breeze. The hare breathed fast and moved like the wind and was highly respected by the breeze people, who saw three levels of life based on wind with the last being that of the spirit and made eternal. The hare ran fast in a figure eight which the breeze people used as a symbol for eternity and the spiritual life they were seeking.
The three hares signify three dimensions that concerned them at the time (more on this later, a dimension is a boundary for which it is impossible to cross without transformation; transformation comes with the combining of the four main life forces (water, salt, sand/soil, and organics). In the nature of the universe discoveries have shown that particles can occupy more than one dimension at any one time and it is such properties than enable light that is the mind of man to shape his material universe while aware of the realms of light of invisible universes beyond all imagining.
The breeze people had an alphabet and carved messages on trees, branches, soil, bodies, and sand. They placed stones to define the very large round settlements of their families. The breeze people were the Bri people who eventually took their lead from those settled along the river Tone (now Taunton, where they had their capital city not far from Athelney the capital of the later Saxon rulers of Britain). The people of the breeze settled across the three islands (now Ireland, Britain and Europe). From northwest europe they settled further and further into the east as well.
They became known as the Britons, and their lands as Breton or Brittany, or Britain. They eventually formed a nation that spoke the language of the Ing, a person=hero who in their mythology discovered the property of making metal called bronze from Tin. The Ing was the 'hero' of the Bri people, and his land was known as Ingland, a variation of Tinland. The people of Ingland settled across the island of Ingland, selling tin to make bronze and creating the first wave of civilization (the bronze age) and migrating through Europe travelling as far as the coast of the Mediterranean and well into Asia influencing a broad stretch of the globe arriving eventually in Asia and thence back once more to Ingland, through long extensive trading routes.
The language of the Ing became the source of the European and asian languages See.
Locally in Ingland, the Ing eventually were overrun with the arrival of the darkish curly haired people from Africa and South Western Europe, who spoke a different group of languages and who seized the land from the Bri (breeze) people in order to seize their tin for making weapons. These people were warlike and conquered the Ing. They were known as celts and they absorbed the religion of the Ing into their own. Because of their strange languages and proximity to Roman influence the Romans did not originally recognize the Ing culture. With their swords, and fearsome ways the celts had ruled the peaceful Ing people, but there influence was eventually displaced by that of the Romans.
The celts reign over a long period had caused the Ing to lose and forget their heritage. Thus because their story rotted with the trees, the people of Ing lost their king, the hero and their past became timeless and meaningless. The Romans eventually claimed the culture of Ing absorbing its ideas as their own, and the contribution of the Ing people was lost.
Curiously, a general of the Romans found traces of the people of Ing at Tone when he was conquering the South West of Britain in search of tin and lead. He learned from Corellus one of his generals that the Ing had combined with the celts to form a single people, but that it was only the celts that were warlike. He recognized the importance of the Ing to peace and Roman influence, but he knew that the spiritual leaders now the druids who did not recognize tribal boundaries (between the celts and the Ing) might unite all the people of Ingland as one people to push the Romans off the island. Nevertheless, Romans arranged for a permanent peace with the people of the Ing which obviously stood the test of time.
By way of interest, the Ings (the Ing people) had occuped the whole island of Ingland, but they were mostly to be found in England and they spoke the English language over a wide area. They were very numerous as a people, but had no written word, or at least that is the mythology. With the arrival of the Romans, the warlike and ruling 'celts' retreated to Wales and remoter regions of the island since they would not live under Roman rule. The Ing, the hero worshippers, remained in England and retaught the Romans their full language and spiritual ways which survive to this day as does England, the land of the 'hero.' To their credit, the commercial and military language of the romans died away and was replaced by Italian a language derived from the much older language of the Ing.
Michio Kaku Makes a Timely Impression on BBC Time
My three favourite authors at this very moment are Michio Kaku, MJ Harper, and Ronald Brech. Kaku appeared on BBC 4 to tell us all about how the future of technology was going to shape the directions of change looking forward. Harper recently (2006) wrote a book entitled 'The History of Britain Revealed - The shocking truth about the English language'. Paperback or Hardcopy Ronald Brech in the 1960's wrote a book entitled 'Britain 1984 - The History of the Future' I tried to find a copy of it on Amazon, but could not find one. It would appear that the history of the future 1984 is now known and no book need predict it.
Are you sure? Last year, I debated with my brother whether or not time existed as a dimension. His argument was that I was an idiot. There was no real debate over whether time existed or not. It seemed to him that it was obvious that the whole question was a stupid question. Of course, time exists. I should listen to my brother because he was trained as an astra physicist in Massachusetts. I think he helped find a super nova.
Ooops, I must have made a mistake because time does not exist. I am sure that you believe it does, but I am equally sure that that you are wrong. This is because I am a student of time and have researched it thoroughly for many decades and could not find it anywhere. Everywhere I looked I saw motion and change but no where could I find time. No time does not exist. Time is a figment of the human mind. It simply is not there. I am mistaken, you say. No I am not, say I.
The problem that I have with time is that it suggests that a unique future exists, but having read Ronald Brech's book, we know that it does not exist and no matter how hard we try to predict it, we will fail. The problem is mathematical in that there are more things moving around than things to stop them or control them moving around. Even things that move backward in our illusion of time, such as positrons, cannot be uniquely controlled. This means that the past is not determined any more than the future.
It is said that if you were able to go back in time you would be able to kill your parent and then you would not be born. The problem with this silly argument is that it insults the intelligence of the mathematics I have just described that doesn't allow for a single solution of existence of anything.
What I mean to say is that obviously and mathematically we have a world that has more than one pathway that we would call time if we thought time exists, which suggests that there are obviously multiple paths of time. Ok, you might say, but how many paths of time are there? The answer is that we simply do not know, but the number could be very large as I have not seen any future people saying hello to me recently.
Remarkably, when we examine the past in the way that MJ Harper does, we find that there are many anomalies as he describes them. It would appear that we are not really in a position to say definitively that the English language was originally an Anglo Saxon language or that it had much to do with Anglo Saxon. All we really know is that the people of Britain in the time of the early Romans spoke a language very similar to that spoken in the rest of early Europe. No one to my knowledge wrote the language down in such a way that one in modern times could see, read or hear it.
MJ harper in his fascinating book claims that it is more likely that the sounds of the English language were already part of the vernacular in Briton well before the arrival of the Romans. Its just strange that no one seems to know what the early Britons sounded like. When I wrote my book about the amazing life of Wuh Lax in 50 AD See I took great care in deciding to have my characters speak English. This seemed logical given that the people of the day probably sounded like they spoke English.
Harper is also very good at revealing the pit falls of accepted truths of sciences such as evolution. He shows that the history of the past may be very different from what we would like to think because we only see it in a causal way. We tend to look at things as causal. Some thing causes something else therefore it must have preceding the thing it caused.
I have a very different twist on this idea of causation because if time does not exist as I say it does not exist, who is to say that past times cause future times. It could be the other way around. Suppose that in earthly past a group had uncovered a cold fusion energy machine and had discovered a way to travel very very fast using this machine. This is only fiction since I have no evidence for it, but they could travel slower in time relative to people on earth. I am not sure what technology they would need to travel backward in time, but I think it would have to do with light.
Now what does this all have to do with Michio Kaku and the BBC program on future technologies? The big question in my mind is whether we need to go back in time in order to change the past. Maybe the answer is that we can never go back in time because time does not exist and so the question is irrelevant, or is it. Could a future technology presently being research help me to answer my question about travelling somewhere that does not exist. Michio describes superconductors, metamaterials, invisible cloaks, nanotubes, highways into space, abundant energy sources, nano materials, swarms of nano robots or nanobots, disassembly technologies reassembly technologies, digital fabrication, personal fabricators, teleportation systems, the synergy of technology revolutions, the mastery of matter and life, but he fails to answer my simple question. Do we need to go back in time to change the past? What is the past? For that matter, what is the future?
Are you sure? Last year, I debated with my brother whether or not time existed as a dimension. His argument was that I was an idiot. There was no real debate over whether time existed or not. It seemed to him that it was obvious that the whole question was a stupid question. Of course, time exists. I should listen to my brother because he was trained as an astra physicist in Massachusetts. I think he helped find a super nova.
Ooops, I must have made a mistake because time does not exist. I am sure that you believe it does, but I am equally sure that that you are wrong. This is because I am a student of time and have researched it thoroughly for many decades and could not find it anywhere. Everywhere I looked I saw motion and change but no where could I find time. No time does not exist. Time is a figment of the human mind. It simply is not there. I am mistaken, you say. No I am not, say I.
The problem that I have with time is that it suggests that a unique future exists, but having read Ronald Brech's book, we know that it does not exist and no matter how hard we try to predict it, we will fail. The problem is mathematical in that there are more things moving around than things to stop them or control them moving around. Even things that move backward in our illusion of time, such as positrons, cannot be uniquely controlled. This means that the past is not determined any more than the future.
It is said that if you were able to go back in time you would be able to kill your parent and then you would not be born. The problem with this silly argument is that it insults the intelligence of the mathematics I have just described that doesn't allow for a single solution of existence of anything.
What I mean to say is that obviously and mathematically we have a world that has more than one pathway that we would call time if we thought time exists, which suggests that there are obviously multiple paths of time. Ok, you might say, but how many paths of time are there? The answer is that we simply do not know, but the number could be very large as I have not seen any future people saying hello to me recently.
Remarkably, when we examine the past in the way that MJ Harper does, we find that there are many anomalies as he describes them. It would appear that we are not really in a position to say definitively that the English language was originally an Anglo Saxon language or that it had much to do with Anglo Saxon. All we really know is that the people of Britain in the time of the early Romans spoke a language very similar to that spoken in the rest of early Europe. No one to my knowledge wrote the language down in such a way that one in modern times could see, read or hear it.
MJ harper in his fascinating book claims that it is more likely that the sounds of the English language were already part of the vernacular in Briton well before the arrival of the Romans. Its just strange that no one seems to know what the early Britons sounded like. When I wrote my book about the amazing life of Wuh Lax in 50 AD See I took great care in deciding to have my characters speak English. This seemed logical given that the people of the day probably sounded like they spoke English.
Harper is also very good at revealing the pit falls of accepted truths of sciences such as evolution. He shows that the history of the past may be very different from what we would like to think because we only see it in a causal way. We tend to look at things as causal. Some thing causes something else therefore it must have preceding the thing it caused.
I have a very different twist on this idea of causation because if time does not exist as I say it does not exist, who is to say that past times cause future times. It could be the other way around. Suppose that in earthly past a group had uncovered a cold fusion energy machine and had discovered a way to travel very very fast using this machine. This is only fiction since I have no evidence for it, but they could travel slower in time relative to people on earth. I am not sure what technology they would need to travel backward in time, but I think it would have to do with light.
Now what does this all have to do with Michio Kaku and the BBC program on future technologies? The big question in my mind is whether we need to go back in time in order to change the past. Maybe the answer is that we can never go back in time because time does not exist and so the question is irrelevant, or is it. Could a future technology presently being research help me to answer my question about travelling somewhere that does not exist. Michio describes superconductors, metamaterials, invisible cloaks, nanotubes, highways into space, abundant energy sources, nano materials, swarms of nano robots or nanobots, disassembly technologies reassembly technologies, digital fabrication, personal fabricators, teleportation systems, the synergy of technology revolutions, the mastery of matter and life, but he fails to answer my simple question. Do we need to go back in time to change the past? What is the past? For that matter, what is the future?
I Lost Yesterday But Not Millions of Records
If you were like me, yesterday went by in a blur. So fast did it happen that it was over almost before it began. I was lost, yes lost! I cannot remember when I was more lost. Lost that is in disbelief, total disbelief. No I could not be hearing and seeing what I was hearing and seeing. The world had become almost surreal as though all those standards one has been given for most of one's life were thrown to the wind.
I lost my day focusing on the news that I could not comprehend let alone understand. This news pales in comparison to something I had ever experienced in the computer industry. I could not believe the news that two data disks containing the information of almost half the population of the UK was lost. No one seems to know where, but after several weeks the Chancellor and Prime Minister of the UK have had to conclude that an astonishing amount of very private information was lost.
Now lost is a pseudonym for something very serious. We assume that when data is supplied to a government it gets put onto a secure system and it stays there unless someone accesses that system by means of a tried and tested security method. In the office that lost the information in the UK, there appear to have been two systems, one for one group of people that was very secure and another for another group of people that obviously was very insecure .
Unfortunately, in this specific office, having two systems has meant that the whole system was compromised like having a back door to a bank that remains open for some people to use as long as they have special access to that door. We often hear of computer programmers leaving a back door into secure systems that only they know how to use. By definition, such systems are insecure. One only has to what the American TV series 24 Hours to see the implications of such insecurity. In effect, the data lost in England was not secure and never was. The implications of such levels of insecurity are potentially catastrophic for the entire information world.
Governments, like doctors, are respected for their level of competence, trustworthiness, reliability, honesty, capability, and intelligence. What we have observed is at the very least a lack of skill! At its worse, the loss of data may have been deliberate and will be used by some unknown group.
Today, we must think that we may never know where the data has gone, who has by now copied it, and what the gains are to those that have the data, say even for marketing of goods and services. Think how such data could transform the competitive landscape for small companies struggling to survive against and large organization with such 'secret' information. Think how such information could be used by the terrorist worlds or by secret police organizations and government based groups seeking to undermine.
Now audit systems are supposed to determine whether a system is secure and it would seem that the auditors of this particular office did just that. They found out by their own methodology that the system they were asked to review was insecure. The only problem is that the auditors used an insecure system in order to determine the insecurity of an system that was designed to be secure but was quite insecure. Perhaps there is logic in the auditing system that was used after all. It seems to have unearthed more than one insecure system, an insecure system of data storage, and insecure system of data retrieval, an insecure system of data review, an insecure system of internal audit, and insecure system of external audit. One could go on and on!
Now the issue is whether there is a loss beyond the loss of data which is very serious in itself. If I give you a key and you lose it, then you are responsible for the loss that occurs to me should that key fall into the wrong hands. Right? When, almost but not quite! You could argue that you were insane or incompetent and that I should never have given you the key. Even worse, you could say that you knew that I would lose the key. Even worse, you might say that I told you to give the key to someone else so that I could rob myself for some nefarious reason. Perhaps, there are parallels in the above analogy to what has happened to the lost data in the UK.
In a typical case of theft, the thief knows what he is after having stolen may times before and having been trained in the art of thievery. What do we do if the data was not just lost, but stolen? If the data were stolen which seems very likely then the thief had probably stolen before and knew what to steal and how to use the data stolen. There could even have been an organized group behind the theft who knew how to use the data stolen. If that is the case then more has been lost than data of twenty five plus million people. Much more has been lost! Even worse the liability is now that of the people who gave the data under systems of faith and trust. When you provide data, you trust that the people you have given the data to are trust worthy and do not have nefarious goals beyond those that you can imagine.
The problem with this case is that you might trust one office of government but not the whole of government and when one part of government makes demands on another, you and I might lose that trust. For example, I don't trust CDs as a means of transporting 25 million records. You probably don't either. When we give our data to another group we expect them to use reasonably secure methods of holding and retrieving. At this point, I think one could have truly lost trust in the various offices of government which exchange private information. Why is this. It is because we cannot trust that the methods of the government in data storage and retrieval of private information were or are, in the case of the UK, reasonably secure.
This lack of trust, if were to include the banking system, would bring about a crisis of confidence beyond our imagining.
Needless to say, we must insist that the people who receive our data give us reassurance that they can be trusted throughout their organisation. After all, a security system is only as strong as its weakest link, which I think we can now see in the case of the UK system that lost the valuable data of millions of people.
Now the question arise as to who should resign. My gut feeling is that the whole present government should resign if the data is not found in the next 24 hours. Yes, the whole lot and new elections be held in February. Perhaps that would go part of the way to helping people recover some of the loss in confidence that could occur over the next few weeks and the full implications of what has happened are reflected on in the sanity of day and the insanity of a dream like state we call sleep. Who an sleep soundly after this?
I lost my day focusing on the news that I could not comprehend let alone understand. This news pales in comparison to something I had ever experienced in the computer industry. I could not believe the news that two data disks containing the information of almost half the population of the UK was lost. No one seems to know where, but after several weeks the Chancellor and Prime Minister of the UK have had to conclude that an astonishing amount of very private information was lost.
Now lost is a pseudonym for something very serious. We assume that when data is supplied to a government it gets put onto a secure system and it stays there unless someone accesses that system by means of a tried and tested security method. In the office that lost the information in the UK, there appear to have been two systems, one for one group of people that was very secure and another for another group of people that obviously was very insecure .
Unfortunately, in this specific office, having two systems has meant that the whole system was compromised like having a back door to a bank that remains open for some people to use as long as they have special access to that door. We often hear of computer programmers leaving a back door into secure systems that only they know how to use. By definition, such systems are insecure. One only has to what the American TV series 24 Hours to see the implications of such insecurity. In effect, the data lost in England was not secure and never was. The implications of such levels of insecurity are potentially catastrophic for the entire information world.
Governments, like doctors, are respected for their level of competence, trustworthiness, reliability, honesty, capability, and intelligence. What we have observed is at the very least a lack of skill! At its worse, the loss of data may have been deliberate and will be used by some unknown group.
Today, we must think that we may never know where the data has gone, who has by now copied it, and what the gains are to those that have the data, say even for marketing of goods and services. Think how such data could transform the competitive landscape for small companies struggling to survive against and large organization with such 'secret' information. Think how such information could be used by the terrorist worlds or by secret police organizations and government based groups seeking to undermine.
Now audit systems are supposed to determine whether a system is secure and it would seem that the auditors of this particular office did just that. They found out by their own methodology that the system they were asked to review was insecure. The only problem is that the auditors used an insecure system in order to determine the insecurity of an system that was designed to be secure but was quite insecure. Perhaps there is logic in the auditing system that was used after all. It seems to have unearthed more than one insecure system, an insecure system of data storage, and insecure system of data retrieval, an insecure system of data review, an insecure system of internal audit, and insecure system of external audit. One could go on and on!
Now the issue is whether there is a loss beyond the loss of data which is very serious in itself. If I give you a key and you lose it, then you are responsible for the loss that occurs to me should that key fall into the wrong hands. Right? When, almost but not quite! You could argue that you were insane or incompetent and that I should never have given you the key. Even worse, you could say that you knew that I would lose the key. Even worse, you might say that I told you to give the key to someone else so that I could rob myself for some nefarious reason. Perhaps, there are parallels in the above analogy to what has happened to the lost data in the UK.
In a typical case of theft, the thief knows what he is after having stolen may times before and having been trained in the art of thievery. What do we do if the data was not just lost, but stolen? If the data were stolen which seems very likely then the thief had probably stolen before and knew what to steal and how to use the data stolen. There could even have been an organized group behind the theft who knew how to use the data stolen. If that is the case then more has been lost than data of twenty five plus million people. Much more has been lost! Even worse the liability is now that of the people who gave the data under systems of faith and trust. When you provide data, you trust that the people you have given the data to are trust worthy and do not have nefarious goals beyond those that you can imagine.
The problem with this case is that you might trust one office of government but not the whole of government and when one part of government makes demands on another, you and I might lose that trust. For example, I don't trust CDs as a means of transporting 25 million records. You probably don't either. When we give our data to another group we expect them to use reasonably secure methods of holding and retrieving. At this point, I think one could have truly lost trust in the various offices of government which exchange private information. Why is this. It is because we cannot trust that the methods of the government in data storage and retrieval of private information were or are, in the case of the UK, reasonably secure.
This lack of trust, if were to include the banking system, would bring about a crisis of confidence beyond our imagining.
Needless to say, we must insist that the people who receive our data give us reassurance that they can be trusted throughout their organisation. After all, a security system is only as strong as its weakest link, which I think we can now see in the case of the UK system that lost the valuable data of millions of people.
Now the question arise as to who should resign. My gut feeling is that the whole present government should resign if the data is not found in the next 24 hours. Yes, the whole lot and new elections be held in February. Perhaps that would go part of the way to helping people recover some of the loss in confidence that could occur over the next few weeks and the full implications of what has happened are reflected on in the sanity of day and the insanity of a dream like state we call sleep. Who an sleep soundly after this?
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Sketches from scratches is a provocative blogspot that has grown out of the Wuh Lax experience. It is eclectic, which means that it might consider just about anything from the simple to the extremely difficult. A scratch can be something that is troubling me or a short line on paper. From a scratch comes a verbal sketch or image sketch of the issue or subject. Other sites have other stuff that should really be of interest to the broad reader. I try to develop themes, but variety often comes before depth.
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