‘One Client. One GOVNL.’ One hack away from disaster

Prince Edward Island in late April is what you might expect: it hasn’t put on its cheery touristwelcoming face yet, the snowmelt on the rural roads seems to demonstrate that Bud Lite is everyone’s favourite driving beer, and the air, in the right places, is full of the earthy, feral smell of composting manure.

Except for the drivers — who seem to know implicitly that the police aren’t pulling anyone over until they’re 20 kilometres an hour above the speed limit, and try to crowd you up to that speed by kissing your back bumper — the pace on the island is pretty measured. The roads are festooned with lumps of soil, and yes, even the scattered seed potato.

And the government of Newfoundland and Labrador is preparing for a digital future.

This week, Premier Dwight Ball and Tom Osborne, the minister responsible for the government’s chief information officer, launched the next step of “The Great Leap Forward.” (No, sorry, that was Chairman Mao and communist China. Ball and Company were announcing the next step of The Way Forward. My bad.)

What does this have to do with P.E.I.?

Wait for it.

The next step for the Ball government, apparently, is one-stop digital government.

But why should I explain it when they can?

“The plan gives details of a future-state, digital platform through which all connections with government are integrated, allowing residents to access services, information and transactions when and how they want,” the news release on the digital way forward said.

“Through this plan, government will fully realize the new approach of ‘One Client. One GOVNL. One Relationship.’ The public will see government as one organization regardless of the individual or department with whom they interact.” Buzzwords aplenty — and a little bit of apprehension. (I don’t know about you, but I’d rather be able to deal with a hands-on individual with the government-granted ability to make a decision on an issue than to “see the government as one organization.” I like my governments responsible and awake to individual concerns, rather than giving me a good stamp with a cookie-cutter approach. But that’s just me.)

But what the government seems to be offering is a kind of online one-stop-shopping.

For Russell.wangersky.20122301, things will be rosy indeed.

“A single government-wide digital ID will provide residents with one set of authentication credentials for all services and applications, and will allow government to accurately identify, track and consolidate all data for a particular resident across their entire relationship with government,” the news release says.

(I await with great delight and unbridled joy the insertion of my unique digit identifier chip under the skin of my forearm, so government will know to withhold my medical care based on my completely unacceptable beer consumption, as logged into my ID by the cash registers at Newfoundland and Labrador Liquor Corporation.)

But I promised you P.E.I. I know you haven’t forgotten that: Bud Lite and cow manure, an angry cattle farmer on a rural road who pulls all of the junk mail out of his mailbox and throws it in the ditch, a farmyard cat that survives a panicked road crossing and seems to believe it can catch and eat a pair of crows that outweigh it by 10 pounds. So here we go.

Last Monday, the province of Prince Edward Island had its websites seized by a ransomware hacker, who encrypted all of the information on the sites and demanded bitcoin ransom be paid to de-encrypt the information. It’s a common ploy for smaller users: lock up the data and demand a ransom, and maybe, if you pay, you get your data back. Maybe you don’t. It’s happened to bigger players too: universities and hospitals.

The P.E.I. government did not pay any ransom, just took it all down and reloaded.

“The software we were using had a particular vulnerability that was exploited by this hacker in order to modify the site,” a P.E.I. government spokesman said.

No personal data was taken, the spokesman said, and the site was rebuilt from a backup. A near-miss, then.

But that’s only a shot over the bow.

I remind you of the saying — from Voltaire, not from Spiderman’s Uncle Ben — that “With great power, comes great responsibility.”

If every connection I have with government — from my birthdate to my address to my social insurance number to my credit card numbers to my driver’s licence to — hell, any communicable diseases I’ve ever had — are all going to be balled up together in one global file, they’d better have a security regime that’s downright unrivalled in the Western World.

Show me a universal identifier, and I’ll show you the Holy Grail of hacking.

Russell.wangersky.20122301 is not amused.