The Next Anglo-Scale Crisis Will be in Data Protection

Billy Hawkes has his work cut out for him

I've argued for some time that the problem in Ireland is not one of light-touch regulation, but of culture. The failure that led to such catastrophic circumstances was not down to Lehman Brothers, or the Global Meltdown, or Anglo, or the Financial Regulator, but culture. A culture that said 'go on sure you'll be grand,' a culture that basically said take what you can get away with, so long as you don't get caught, a culture that told politicians - jovially - that the only thing, the *only* thing they had to protect was their seat.  That caused an abdication of leadership and responsibility, an absence of ownership, and a complete abandonment of the principles of the nation. So we are - as they in Leinster House so wearily put it - where we are. The implication of that phrase, of course, is that we do not learn from our mistakes, we forget about the past, and we fix the problem we are faced with rather than contemplating the uncontemplable - that we are fundamentally wrong about all sorts of important stuff that's really hard to fix.

The Real Question the NSA Needs to Answer

The tech companies are begging the NSA to let them say how many requests they've acceded to, and my bet is that they'll concede.  It doesn't really matter what the number is, it will be tiny relative to the number of users, and it will seem insignificant to most law abiding, voting citizens.  It seems to me that the plan is that at that stage it will all go away. However, they're answering the wrong question, a favourite tactic of politicians: if cornered, and asked a question you don't want to answer, answer a different question.