The inquiry heard evidence from Alexander Owens, a former police officer who had been hired by the ICO in 2003 to investigate the illegal trade in stolen personal data. Owens' investigation, Operation Motorman, discovered evidence that various newspaper journalists had bought data illegally obtained from government employees.

Owens said that he had compiled enough evidence to prosecute everyone in involved in the supply chain of stolen data, including journalists. But he alleged that the deputy ICO at the time had said: "We can’t take the press on; they are too big for us".

This was grist to the mill of the ICO's critics, who argue that the while it regularly fines local authorities, often after they have confessed to data breaches themselves, it shirks from going after bigger, more powerful targets. 

Richard Thomas, the Information Commissioner at the time of Operation Motorman, gave evidence in the inquiry a week later. "Thanks goodness we did not prosecute the journalists," he said. "The impact for the office would have been very, very demanding indeed."

The ICO is undoubtedly in a difficult position. So great is the potential for technology to abuse or misuse personal data that it is difficult to imagine the ICO ever having enough resources to address the problem fully. It always has to take a view on whether a case is worth pursuing given the resources it has available.

But there are nevertheless occasions when one might hope for a little more bite from the ICO.

For example, as the Leveson inquiry was going on, a story quietly broke of a woman whose credit rating was damaged by a glitch in Barclay's Bank's credit checking software. This lead to her mortgage application being turned down – an example of how data management blunders by large institutions can have potentially devastating effects on people's lives.

Having investigated the case, the ICO gave the following statement: "We decided that it is unlikely that [Barclays] has complied with the requirements of the DPA ... because it appears unlikely that Barclays has processed the complainant’s personal data fairly. However, the Information Commissioner has decided that further regulatory action is not appropriate at this time.”

There may be more to the story. But these do not sound like the words of a regulator that is likely to take on the country’s most powerful organisations, the very organisations whose abuses of data can be the most damaging.

But Estonia is a special case, in many ways. For one thing, the country is arguably the world’s most sophisticated adopter of e-government.

As Ilves explained to the London Conference on Cyberspace in October 2011, 90% of the country’s tax returns are filled in online, 25% of votes in this year’s elections were cast online and 76% of the population regularly uses the Internet. “Information technology and its use by the state is at the core of our modernisation strategy,” he said.

Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude, who was hosting the conference session that Ilves spoke at, paid tribute to Estonia’s example of what can be achieved by offering public services online.

What he didn’t mention was the fact that the UK coalition government’s approach to e-government differs in one very significant way to Estonia’s.

Central to the Baltic state’s e-government programme is one of the most widely adopted national identity registers in the world. More than 90% of the country’s 1.1 million inhabitants carry a state-issued ID card. It is used not only to access online public services, but also to authenticate banking transactions and purchase tickets for public transport.

For Ilves, the ID card scheme has been pivotal to the success of Estonia’s public sector modernisation. “If you want safe and secure e-government, you can’t do it without an ID card,” he said at the London conference.

However, that is exactly what Maude and his colleagues intend to do. With its Identity Assurance Programme, the government plans to devolve responsibility for identifying citizens to private sector organisations, such as banks or credit rating agencies. It is currently developing a federation hub that will allow these identity providers to integrate with government websites securely.

It makes sense that the UK needs to take a different approach to that of Estonia. Creating an ID register for 60 million-plus people is a very different challenge to building one for just over a million. And there is every sign that government is aware of the privacy and identity management issues associated with this approach, and is taking them seriously.

Nevertheless, we are moving from a situation where responsibility for authenticating citizens (so they can access the public services they are entitled to) is the duty of the state to one where it is up to profit-seeking organisations to decide who can be trusted.

This could have far-reaching consequences for citizens, especially those who have fallen out of the typical sources of identity confirmation – employment and residency – and who are therefore most reliant upon public services. And yet, there has so far been little discussion of this significant change to one of the core mechanisms of our society.

There are, he explains, the projects that pay for themselves because they address a specific and defined business challenge. These are the easiest to secure investment for, as they have the explicit backing of the business.

Then there are rationalisation and optimisation projects, van der Ouderaa explains, which may not address a specific business need but nevertheless fund themselves via operational cost reductions.
The
But then there is the third kind. These are IT infrastructure and integration projects that serve the long-term, strategic interests of the organisation, but whose business benefit is difficult to calculate, and which may not deliver any benefit for years to come. “These projects are like building a new motorway,” says van der Ouderaa. “Everybody will benefit, but nobody wants to pay for it.”

These projects are especially hard to fund when IT cost is viewed with extreme scrutiny, as it is today. Van der Ouderaa suggests that the chance of these projects receiving funding is a function of the CIO’s leadership abilities. It is almost a matter of convincing the business to invest “on good faith”, he suggests.

However, these large-scale integration projects often involve organisational integration too, and some question whether the typical CIO has the authority to make that happen. “I don’t know if the CIO can drive that through,” says James Hunt, senior financial services consultant at data warehousing provider Teradata. “If it involves business change, it must come out of the business.” In the case of integrating risk data with marketing and finance systems, Hunt says, “it will take a business leader who is sufficiently technologically savvy to recognise the value”.

That raises a question – do business leaders who understand the strategic value of information integration exist? And if not, do CIOs have the vocabulary with which to articulate that value? Meanwhile, a recent study by Gartner has found that chief financial officers are increasingly involved in IT investment decisions. As a result, the CIO’s responsibility is to ensure that the CFO “is educated on technology”.

It appears, then, that articulating the economic benefits of long-term information integration projects is a key skill for today’s CIO, lest they be ignored altogether.

Have you successfully developed terms of reference with which to discuss these benefits with the business? Or are you struggling to find them right now? If so, I’d be interested in hearing your experiences, as this is something that Information Ageplans to research on behalf of our readers.

Many people, including web creator Tim Berners-Lee and the government of Finland, have argued that access to the Internet should be an internationally protected right.

But is this like arguing that access to water pipes should be a right – commendable, but focused on the wrong issue? What matters is the water that comes out of the pipes. Is the same true of the Internet and information?

Well, in this case maybe Berners-Lee and the Finns have the right idea. It may not be exactly the point, but legislating for access to the Internet seems more practical than rules protecting access to information.

For one thing, what information do people need? There is a clear difference between the information people use to work and live by, and the information with which they entertain themselves. The argument for protecting Internet access focuses on the means, and lets people decide what is important.

Nevertheless, the thought experiment raises some issues that are by no means theoretical. UK chancellor George Osborne announced in May 2011 that the government’s ambition is to become the “world leader” in open data, and that it will release “some of the most valuable datasets still locked away in government servers” during the coming year.

What information does the government hold that could improve people’s lives? And whose interests should inform the choice of which information to release? I don’t know the answers to these questions, but suggest that we should figure them out before the machinery of open data is set in stone.

Meanwhile, there is another side to this coin. In certain circumstances, it is the ability to limit information that should be the human right, as in the cases of privacy and data protection.

No personally identifying information is published on open data websites such as data.gov.uk, so these two issues have not come into conflict. But Osborne is now talking about opening up healthcare data to scientific analysis – will it be so easy to protect anonymity when handling this highly sensitive kind of information?

The information revolution has been going for decades, if not centuries, but it continues to disrupt some of the longest-established institutions of society. I wonder whether we have a mature enough understanding of how information relates to human rights to make sure that they are protected through that disruption.

Both have recently launched software that allows workers to monitor the activity of their peers in a constant stream of status updates, supposedly allowing real-time collaboration and therefore improved business agility.

But at what cost will this constant stream of information come? Recent research at the University of California, San Francisco, suggests that younger workers would take it in their stride, but older employees may struggle to ignore what may often be useless information.

Professor Adam Gazzaley and his team at UCSF’s Neuroscience Imaging Centre found that younger men and women (aged around 25) were better able to ignore irrelevant information and concentrate on a given cognitive task than a group of older subjects (aged around 70).

They found that working memory, which people use to juggle information when performing mental tasks, is more likely to be disrupted by irrelevant distractions in older people, making it harder for them to maintain their train of thought.

“The impact of distractions and interruptions reveals the fragility of working memory,” remarked Professor Gazzaley. “This is an important fact to consider, given that we increasingly live in a more demanding, high-interference environment, with a dramatic increase in the accessibility and variety of electronic media.”

This raises the point that the benefits of a system that allows for more frequent, real-time updates must be balanced against the potential impairment on concentration. It also supports the theory that consumer web-based technologies could widen generational divides within the workforce.

Closer to home, a scientist at the University of Cambridge has been drawing comparisons between Twitter and the human brain itself. Speaking at the Cambridge Science Festival, Professor Ed Bullmore said new techniques for analysing the functions of the brain reveal them to bear more than a passing resemblance to communications networks such as the popular microblogging service.

“We are ‘taking the brain out of the skull’ to look at it directly in comparison to many superficially different information-processing systems,” he explained.

To illustrate the point, he asked attendees to write tweets containing a particular phrase, ‘#twitterbrain’. The network of Twitter connections between audience members could then be analysed, and compared with the network-like functions of the brain.

And how did they compare? “We found that the #twitterbrain network was somewhat like the brain network in being small-world and modular with highly connected hub nodes,” explained Professor Bullmore. “However, the brain network was more clustered and less efficient than the twitter network.”

The reason for this is that Egypt is one of the most bountiful offshore sources of workers with both IT and German-language skills. Almost half of the company’s business derives from its native Germany.

I asked Van Megen about how business was effected by the revolution that took place in the opening weeks of this month. It was “scary”, he admitted, and the company lost four days’ work because staff were placed under curfew.

But SQS had the necessary contingency plans in place, he said. German clients, which include Deutsche Bank and Deutsche Post, were serviced from the company’s ‘near-shore’ facility in Gorlitz, Eastern Germany. “We saw just how good it is to have many different locations.”

Now, he says, it is back to “business as usual”, with Cairo staff working overtime to get through the backlog.

None of SQS’ clients have said they want their work to be taken out of Cairo, he says, but the revolution has taught them some valuable lessons about offshore outsourcing. “It became very clear that if you want lower prices, there is a risk premium you have to pay.”

SQS has reassured Egypt’s telecommunications minister Dr. Tarek Mohamed Kamel that it remains committed to Cairo as an outsourcing destination. That said, Van Megen remarked that it has decided to look for more German-speaking workers in Pune, where its Indian facilities are based (not as hard as it may sound, thanks to a number of German automotive companies with engineering resources there).

The real damage, Van Megen believes, is to Egypt’s reputation. “What they built up in four or five years has gone in four weeks,” he said. “This will make it much more difficult for new companies to move to Egypt.”

I asked Van Megen whether any of SQS’ employees were involved in the revolution. “We recommended that they keep themselves out of the demonstrations, and what we heard is that they all did,” he told me. “They are among the 10% most privileged people [in Egypt] – they earn so much more than a policeman, for example. Maybe that was the reason why we haven’t seen any accidents happen with our people.”

The Lord Chief Justice, Lord Judge, claimed that users of sites such as micro-blogging platform Twitter could flood the Internet with messages in an attempt to influence jurors’ opinions. This could pave the way for a deluge of mistrials, he argues. “We cannot stop people ‘tweeting’, but if jurors look at such material, the risks to the fairness of the trial will be very serious, and ultimately the openness of the trial process on which we all rely would be damaged,” Lord Judge told an audience in Belfast.

This is not the first time that digital media have been identified as a challenge to the legal process. In early 2009, a juror in a US drugs case admitted that he had been using Google outside court to research the defendant. Upon further enquiry, the judge found to his dismay that eight more jurors had been digging about on the Internet for the same purpose. In the end, he felt he had no choice other than to call a mistrial.

In principle, however, the process should be immune from outside pollution. In both the UK and US, jurors may only form a verdict based on the information given in court hearings.

However, breaches of this requirement are common, research suggests. Analysis published by Reuters Legal in December 2010 concluded that more than 90 verdicts handed down in the US since 1999 had been challenged due to alleged use of electronic communications during court proceedings.

More than half of these incidents have occurred in the past two years, the analysis says, suggesting that advances in mobile technology and social networking are causing the problem to snowball.

Using Twitter in the courtroom is one way of incurring the wrath of a judge, but apparently the site’s users must also watch what they say outside court. Earlier this year, UK citizen Paul Chambers ‘tweeted’ a hoax bomb threat regarding Nottingham’s Robin Hood Airport. Chambers was arrested and eventually convicted for sending a “menacing electronic communication”.

After he lost an appeal to the High Court in November, thousands of Twitter users expressed their annoyance at the decision by re-posting Chambers’ original message. Authorities have said that they have no plans to take action against those who did so.

I’m not sure if I share Cameron’s certainty. Sure, there is no physical law that dictates that IT innovation must take place on the West coast of America, and no shortage of brainy technologists here in the UK. And, of course, we already have a technology hub to be proud of in Cambridge (which we profile in the November issue of Information Age).

But wondering why we can't have an equivalent of ‘Silicon Valley’ of our own is a lot like asking why we can’t have our own Hollywood.

One of the main reasons is that Hollywood already exists. The film industry lives, works and socialises there, and anyone who wants to make it big in the movies knows exactly where they should be. In films, as in technology, the UK’s best talent often finds its way to California.

There are, of course, regions that rival Hollywood. The film industries of both Mumbai (Bollywood) and Nigeria (Nollywood) both produce more films than their US counterpart.

I would argue that the reason that Bollywood and Nollywood have thrived is that the films they create are very different to Hollywood blockbusters and serve different markets.

When announcing £200 million of investment in tech hubs across the UK in October, Cameron name checked “Skype, Facebook and Twitter”, fast growing web companies whose success, he said, might be emulated by UK companies.

I wonder whether that is a goal worth pursuing. Would it not be better to give the UK’s technology industry its own identity, rather than trying to compete in a race that has already been won?

So what does London have that San Francisco’s Bay Area does not? Most conspicuously, it has a global financial capital.

Many of the country’s finest technological minds can currently be found working for London’s banks and financial institutions. If the government could encourage these people to pursue an entrepreneurial career, London could quite feasibly become a financial technology exporter – to a greater degree than it already is – with obvious benefits for the economy.

To me, that seems like a more viable strategy than crossing our fingers and hoping that the ‘new Google’ will wash up on the banks of the Thames.

Since the publication of that article, Sergei Beloussov, the Russian-born CEO of virtualisation provider Parallels, got in touch to give his own thoughts on what he thought was a pessimistic assessment of the country’s latest attempt to attract IT investment.

“The marketing and PR of the Russian IT industry both internally and externally creates motivation for people to innovate, which creates motivation for investors to invest,” he claims. “That’s already happening – people are writing about it and people are thinking about it.”

Beloussov also praised Russian government-led initiatives such as tax incentives and loosening of restrictions on importing foreign workers and technologies, as well as the foundation of the Skolkovo Valley technology enclave near Moscow. These measures "level the field with other places that compete in technology," he says.

The Parallels CEO reiterated that Russia has an enviable history of technology leadership. “When Russia was first becoming an industrialised country, it was creating all kinds of innovations,” he observes, “both in the pre-revolution era, and especially in the Soviet era - like nuclear bombs and nuclear submarines.”

And he said that the country had little option but to build on this pedigree. “Natural resources tend to run out,” he says, “so converting to a knowledge and innovation-based economy makes a lot of sense.”

In his own effort to spur Russia’s next technology revolution, Beloussov has founded Runa Capital, a $30 million investment fund that will target pre-start-up stage Internet and software projects in Russia. He is joined by other high-tech industry figures who are familiar with this notoriously complex market, including Ilya Zubarev, co-founder of back-up firm Acronis and Igor Daniloff, founder of anti-virus software company Dr Web.

Runa is searching for early stage projects with the capability to “go global”, as Beloussov puts it, although the initial capital it provides will be small, with a ceiling of $2 million. “Most of the investments will be in hundreds of thousands of dollars,” he explains. “In many cases [these projects] may not have even a main product, and certainly no revenue and no customers or partners, and then we provide the funding until these things materialise.”

The Parallels CEO concedes that it will take many years for Russia’s technology industry to realise anything like its full potential. But he is more interested in the cultural impact the resurgence of that industry might have.

Gradually, Beloussov says, people in the heartland of the former Soviet Union are shedding their aspirations to become petty government officials and managers and discovering their entrepreneurial spirit. “Up until recently there was no motivation for young people to actually go and do innovation-based businesses," he said. "But that’s changing."