OFSTED: How a school fakes their data. Part1

OFSTED, the UK Goverment’s school watchdog is supposed to protect childrens’ education, through investigations, recording, and monitoring a schools performance.

Over the next few days and weeks, this site will show how these numbers are faked in some instances and, more importantly, how these children are, quite literally, put in danger. E.g. Ambulances not being called for children with head injuries, sexual abuse unreported.  It appears that the OFSTED system of investigation is slightly less reliable than MPs Expenses claims.

But like the  MPs, it is the Schools and Heads at fault, not the system.

In the first part of this series, we will look at one school which, for legal reasons, we will only identify as School1 at the moment.  Though in the future, the name of the School1 should be identified.

School1 it is inside the M25, is has a fairly large student population, a 0ver a thousand pupils. Its OFSTED rating, is pretty good, just below Outstanding, and its certainly not on special measures. So, from the outside, it seems a reasonable place to send your child.  But, this is simply not the case.

The scores are faked by the School, mainly through the senior staff conducting a a series of measures that can only be described as fraud. The incidents that occur at the school are truly awful, but by “following the rules” and ‘bending’ them, more than a little bit, School1 is able to get away with virtually anything they want. Below are some of the highlights of events that have occurred in this school:

• A pupil (child) was sexually abused, at school, by a pupil and the police were not called.
• A teacher was hit over the head,  twice, with a chair requiring surgery to his ear by a pupil. The child who did that is still in school and  the police were not called. Bad for the statistics
• A teacher was hit in the face with a brick by a pupil. The child is still at the school, and the police were not called. Bad for statistics.
• Children are allowed out of exams, for significant periods 30 minutes to an hour, unmonitored, and then back into the exam room exam. That has to help the exam statistics.
• Pupils that cause real problems are deleted off the register, therefore resolving that statistical problem.
• A child, Boy J, is repeatedly assaulted, and the victim of ABH, but the school does not call the police
• Ambulances and Police are not allowed to be called without the heads permission, to try and reduce the number of calls to school (to help the statistics). It is this latest incident, that is reported below.

This month a child, who recently had lost part of their sight  as a result of  being the victim of another incident in the school, was stamped on the head by another pupil. The child was clearly in truma, with a stamp mark on his face, possible bleeding from the eye, and all the warning signs of head truma that a lay person would spot. This was not kids playing this was a stamp to the face. This incident alone is awful, but at the school, which  is so used to violence,  nothing was done for quite a while.

The parents were not called for some time, despite requests by junior staff for this to be done, and the police where not called at all.

But most concerning is the ambulance was not called for 20 minutes, as staff had to follow school policy (or effectively lose their job). For 20 minutes the child was left, untreated, with no ambulance being called until the Head, who is not a doctor, or a medical proffesional, gave the all clear to call an ambulance. Only then, when the Head decided it was ok for an ambulance to be called, was proffesional medical treatment sought.

Would you want your child to go to this school?

This week more such incidents, and how School1 fake their OFSTED results, will be published.

MIT: Data and Privacy Conference

The highly regarded Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MIT, is holding a conference on data and privacy in October 2009, entitled Engaging Data.

Below is their call for papers.

Engaging Data: First International Forum on the Application and Management of Personal Electronic Information.

Hosted by SENSEable City Lab, Massachusetts Institute of Technology – Oct. 12-13, 2009

Call for Papers

Over the past decade, the development and use of digital networks has produced an increasing wealth of new data. Handheld electronics, locative media, telecommunications networks, and a wide assortment of tags and sensors are constantly collecting a rich stream of real-time information on various components of our lives and the environment we inhabit, including our movements, purchases, social interactions, Internet activities, and many more.
These data afford a wide range of research opportunities in the social and natural sciences that will create a multitude of beneficial information and services. Affected areas range widely and include, among others, workplace efficiency, traffic management, tourism, marketing, logistics, e-commerce, entertainment, urban and architectural planning, disaster response, security, environmental sustainability, and social interaction.

Advances in this field are progressing cautiously, however, as the public, commercial and social entities, and the government are only just beginning to understand this new condition of pervasive sensing and data mining as well as the associated framework required to manage it. Conflicting standards on privacy and fear of entering upon uncharted territories hinder companies, researchers, and others from engaging in activities that make responsible use of potentially sensitive data. Moreover, regulation has not kept pace with the changing digital infrastructure, and as a result different stakeholders currently face different restrictions on data usage. In short, we still lack a complete understanding of the societal value in this data and the influence on society by its use, and much still remains unexplored.
It is becoming imperative to develop a new framework of standards and best practices for collecting, storing, analyzing, reporting, sharing, and protecting valuable electronic data created by new technologies and services. The Engaging Data: First International Forum on the Application and Management of Personal Electronic Information is the launching event of the Engaging Data Initiative, which will include a series of discussion panels and conferences at MIT. This initiative seeks to address the above issues by bringing together the main stakeholders from multiple disciplines, including social scientists, engineers, manufacturers, telecommunications service providers, Internet companies, credit companies and banks, privacy officers, lawyers, and watchdogs, and government officials.

The goal of this forum is to explore the novel applications for electronic data and address the risks, concerns, and consumer opinions associated with the use of this data. In addition, it will include discussions on techniques and standards for both protecting and extracting value from this information from several points of view: what techniques and standards currently exist, and what are their strengths and limitations? What holistic approaches to protecting and extracting value from data would we take if we were given a blank slate?
These issues and questions will be addressed through invited talks, paper presentations, and panel discussions. The forum will serve as a platform to exchange ideas, discuss the latest developments in this field, address significant issues, and create visions for the future.
The forum is seeking original contributions in the form of both position papers and technical papers. Of particular interest are papers that open new paths for research, express a creative vision for the future, and contribute to a lively debate.

Topics
Papers are solicited that propose principals and approaches to building a viable social ecosystem for using information mined from human interactions with digital networks. Each paper must touch on the technical, security, social, legal/political, and financial aspects of the issue, although it is expected that papers will concentrate more on some aspects than on others.
Topics of interest within these aspects include, but are not limited to, the following:
Technical
Uses and concerns associated with data collection and mining:
1. Information mined by an endpoint party to a communication, including:
• Types of information mined from consumer devices by endpoint parties (e.g. VoIP routers and radio
handsets)
• Accuracy and use of location analyses based on IP addresses, Internet traceroutes, etc.
• Sharing of mined data with third parties
• Methodologies to analyze and visualize this data
2. Collection, storage, and use of information gathered from wireless networks, including:
• Location-based tracking and other forms of mobile sensing
• Mobile phones, cordless phones, walkie-talkies, wireless microphones
• Femtocells
• RFID systems
• Wi-Fi Networks
• Implications for “white spaces” signal-sensing devices
• Increased personalization of communications (i.e. device is commonly unique to a particular individual)
• Sharing of data with third parties
3. Collection of information on traffic flow patterns in fixed networks, including:
• How uses and concerns vary based on whether flows are segregated by endpoint, time-of-day, bandwidth
usage level, application type, etc.
• Optical and non-optical networks
• Broadband networks
• Personal area networks (PAN), Local-area networks (LAN), Wide-area networks (WAN), etc.
4. Information collection inside the network
• Packet inspection, e.g. collection of IP addresses, HTTP cookies, etc.
• Significance of IPv6 in providing static IP addresses that may be specific to particular devices and/or their
locations
5. Soundness of data
• Veracity, completeness, etc. of data collected from multiple perspectives, e.g. multiple sensors and/or
points inside the network
• Algorithms and other tools to deal with incomplete, contradictory, and incorrect data
6. Data protection
• Effectiveness and adequacy of encryption, anonymization, aggregation, hashing algorithms, and level of
accuracy of information at ensuring customer privacy
• Metadata standards and preservation formats
Financial
1. Business and incentive models/structures
Security
Social issues associated with data collection and mining:
1. Consumers and Privacy
• Privacy concerns and countervailing interests concerning the authentication of electronic identities and
transactions
• Consumer awareness, e.g. how common it is for people to read privacy policies
• Consumer access to, control of, and awareness of information collected about them
• Ethical considerations and implications of data mining for both individuals and society
• Social norms and expectations of privacy
Legal and political issues associated with data collection and mining:
1. Standards for protecting and extracting value from data
• Strengths and limitations of existing standards
• “Blank slate,” holistic approaches to protecting and extracting value from data
• Applicability of set standards, e.g. EC Data Protection Directive, to the US, developed vs. developing
countries, globally
2. E-government services
• Appropriateness of permitting private entities preferential rights of access or redistribution of such data
• Conformity with citizen expectations and assurances of the privacy of such data
3. Legal and regulatory concerns
• Requirements, if any, for prior review and approval of proposed collection and use of data (IRB, etc.)
• Acceptable methods of obtaining consent for the use of various types of information
• Requirements of consent from parties related to the information, e.g. from only one party related to the
information or from all parties related to the information
• Responsibilities to disclose mining of information (who must disclose such activities and to whom must
disclosure be made, e.g. direct customer of service, correspondents of direct customer, etc.)
• Role of regulation in the exposure of information collected on network activities
4. Risk and Mitigation
• Evaluation and mitigation of risks of research, government, and commercial activities involving data
collection and mining
• Methods of risk avoidance
Author Guidelines
Position papers must be 4-6 pages in length, technical papers 6-8 pages in length. Papers must be written in English
and follow the standard IEEE format (two-column, single-spaced, 10-point font, on US Letter size paper). Please
submit papers in PDF format. Templates can be found here

Each submitted paper will be peer-reviewed in a double-blind fashion.Please remove any mention of author names and affiliations in the entire submission, and if referencing previous work of the authors, use the third person. Papers will be evaluated according to originality, relevance, technical soundness, significance, and clarity. At least one author must register for the conference to have the paper published in the proceedings. The most exceptional papers in each category will be presented at the conference and published in the conference proceedings. All papers will be handled electronically and should be submitted online. An electronic submissions system will be available shortly.
Important Dates
Deadline for submission of full papers: July 13, 2009
Notification of acceptance: August 10, 2009
Camera-ready papers due: August 31, 2009
Early registration: August 31, 2009
Conference dates: October 12-13, 2009
General Chairs and Program Committee
General Chairs Carlo Ratti, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Assaf Biderman, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Technical Contributions Co-Chairs Alex (Sandy) Pentland, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
David Lazer, Harvard University
Program Committee Ben Adida, Harvard University
Albert-László Barabási, Northeastern University
Dirk Brockmann, Northwestern University
John Clippinger, Harvard University
Alissa Cooper, Center for Democracy and Technology
Simon Davies, Privacy International
Laura DeNardis, Yale University
William Dutton, University of Oxford
Deborah Estrin, UCLA
Marcus Foth, Queensland University of Technology
Dean Gallant, Harvard University
Myron Gutmann, University of Michigan
Gary King, Harvard University
John Krumm, Microsoft Research
William Lehr, MIT
Marc Rotenberg, EPIC
Karen Sollins, MIT
Rebecca Wright, Rutgers University
Jonathan Zittrain, Harvard University

For questions regarding paper submissions, please contact Caitlin Zacharias, email address  czachar at mit dot edu.
SENSEable City Laboratory
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Suite 10-400
77 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, MA 02139 USA
T ++1-617-2537926
F ++1-617-2588081

Why you should not let the Government have your data…just ask the CIA

There are many reasons not to let the government collect every email, tape every phone call, and monitor every website you visit, from the simple invasion of privacy, to the fact the that government lose data more often then the English football team miss penalties.

One of the reasons that you should not want the government to have a complete break down of your activities, is that goverments change.  You may trust your current government, you may have voted for them, belived in their policies, and even donated to them, so the notion that they record your activities would not be a problem because they are only looking out for your best interests.  

But what about when the government changes? What about if a government is elected that does not like you, your interests, your views, or your activities? When one adminstration leaves, and is replaced by another one, the previous one does not wipe all their files, delete their databases, or erase the recordings, but they hand them over to the incoming power.

• 15 years ago who would have though that getting a copy of the anarchist cook book would have made you a terrorist?
• 10 years ago, who would have though that being a train spotter, could get you arrested?
• 5 years ago, who would have thought that your internet activity would be recorded and profiled by third party companies for profit
• 3 years ago, who would have thought that the government would openly propose to centralise all communications data about eveyr person in the UK?

Laws change with governments, and what is or is not acceptable can change radically with a new administration. The most recent “victim” of this is the CIA. Under the Bush government the CIA happily set up black sites and torture sites. The CIA kidnapped people off the streets in the Europe, Asia, and the US, flew them to distant lands and tortured them, some of them were even guilty. The Bush government not only allowed this but encouraged it.

But, after 8 years of Bush in steps Obama, and everything changes, and these actions are not only banned, but dispised. This week memos and documentation relating to the CIA blacksite and torture programme have been released. This exposes the CIA agents to legal action, both within the US and the rest of the world. The CIA are outraged at this lack of privacy, that their details have been misused. One could argue the Nurembourg defence didn’t work 60 years ago, and will not work now.

No doubt the Jews in the 1920’s did not think that registering as a Jew in Germany, Austria, or Poland could ever have any negative effect.  Then came the yellow stars; its a long way from recording information to labelling people, but its even a bigger jump from labelling people to death camps, but, still it happened.

This example, though extreme, demonstrates very vivdly, what happens when governements change. Both your livelihood and life can be put at risk, if they have enough data against you, no matter how innocent you are.

Fortunately there has only ever been one incident of a government collecting social and demographic information on people, and using it torture and slaughter them on a huge level, and that was in Germany in the 1930s and 40s.  This would never happen again…..except for in the following countries

Cambodia, Yugoslavia, Russia, Iraq, East Timor, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, South Africa, Rawanda, Sudan, Sierra Leon….In fact finding a continent or decade when this has not happened is almost impossible.

Massive Chinese Hack

Apparently there has been a massive hack into thousands of different government computers around the world, coming from a Chinese network.

It is reported that the network had infiltrated 1,295 computers in 103 countries. The report comes after a 10-month investigation by the Information Warfare Monitor (IWM).

While China has denied involvement, and there is no proof that the Chinese government is responsible for this activity, increasingly the West is publishing reports about cyber incursions by the Chinese

Tax: Where is your Tax Data?

Switzerland, and its lesser known neighbour Liechtenstein, are famed for their secret bank laws.  Having “swiss bank account”, has always been portrayed in the movies and popular culture as a symbol of wealth and anonymity, and rightly so.

For generations the Swiss have protected the data, privacy, and money of their customers, from bankers to Nazi’s; they have kept the same level of secrecy.

This has often allowed people to use Switzerland as a tax haven. While tax fraud in Switzerland is illegal (and they will assist in an investigation into that),  there is a far tighter definition of this than others would hope for and tax “avoidance” certainly is not a crime in Switzerland for this reason getting data on the clients of Swiss bankers has always been problematic.

But now ,as the recession starts to really hit the US economy,  it appears that an extra billion here or there is increasingly important and pressure is being applied to Switzerland and Liechtenstein to get hold of this money.

On February 18th Liechtenstein’s Prime Minister-designate,  Klaus Tschuetscher, stated that:

While Liechtenstein will maintain banking secrecy as a “legitimate pillar of our understanding of citizenship and the law…..This will only be possible by taking a cooperative approach”

On 18th  February  2009 the Swiss bank UBS provided the details of over 200 customers to the US tax authorities, IRS,  as UBS and the US came to an agreement on secrecy and tax investigations; UBS also had to pay a fine of $780 million.

The decision to release the details seems to have come from the Swiss government as the Swiss Financial Markets Supervisory Authority (FINMA) ordered UBS to reveal the account details of customers targeted by the US justice investigation. This is such a big step it also effected the Swiss franc, which dropped in value on the news.

The Swiss Finance Minister, Hans-Rudolf Merz, tried to calm the market and stated that: “It is evident there has been tax fraud [at UBS] … [but] bank secrecy will stay”

However on 20th February  2009, just a day later, the US filed more suits against UBS for another 52,000 details.

Is the age of banking secrets comming to an end?