It’s totally irrelevant that IPS officials weren’t involved in the debate when VS staff were acting as their proxies by interfering in the “open” debate to promote and defend IPS’s policy stance.

Virtual Surveys director Ray Poynter may try to demonstrate the project’s ‘openness’ by saying “Over 50 million online ads were placed… to promote the site” yet a cursory forensic analysis of the mylifemyid.org web site code suggests very much the opposite.

Though the site is now closed, user may still use their browsers to view a ‘hidden’ file that has been left on the server at http://mylifemyid.org/robots.txt. For those who don’t understand the code in this file, the following information may shed some light on its significance.

Morel’sGhost correctly makes the point about the data on mylifemyid.org being a “public record”. Now, in theory this could have happened without any effort or expenditure by the UK Gov or its suppliers. As many web researchers will know, some sites such as the Internet Archive Wayback Machine (IAWM - web.archive.org) store historical snapshots of web sites. While not perfect, these snapshots are, effectively, public records. And they’re archived at no charge to the owners of the sites they index.

However, IAWM was blocked from archiving the information on the mylifemyid.org site. And so was every other search engin’s web crawler (robot) that abides by instructions to refrain from indexing sites they encounter (which means all the major search sites / archivers). This block was achieved on the mylifemyid server by using a “Robots.txt Query Exclusion” – in simple terms, a file on the web server that tells any indexing web crawler (such as Google’s googlebot) to ignore the site and refrain from indexing it.

As you can see if you scroll to the end of this file at http://mylifemyid.org/robots.txt there’s a line of human-readable comment that says it all:

# [nall]: generally we don’t want to be indexed
Disallow: /

So much for efforts to “promote the site”!

[Technical note: while mylifemyid.org has been ostensibly taken off-line, those who created and/or administered the site left far more data on the server than is appropriate for a site associated with promoting Security and ID for all. An analysis of the robots.txt file reveals that a Drupal file called install.php is still on the server, along with various other files that it would have been prudent to NOT make live on a public site.)

Refer to: http://www.economist.com/world/britain/displaystory.cfm?story_id=12432440&mode=comment&intent=readBottom
for full details.

Within days of posting that comment in the Economist, the incriminating code was removed from the MyLifeMyID site.

Coincidence?

IPS has just launched a public consultation on its secondary legislation. Should be up on the website now.

On the subject of mylifemyid, VS were asked to set up a an open research community. This meant that IPS could set some questions and let VS get on with it. Users were also able to run their own discussion threads. So, if officials had been on the site it would not have been a research community, it would have been a discussion forum.

Should there now be a discussion forum so that anyone can speak to officials?

Big news tomorrow…