The Cabinet Office has recently published summary details of each unpublished dataset that they know about, and asked people to say what they’d use it for.
The source data from a scrape was a bit messy, as some of the original categorisation was unclear.
I’ve put something together which shows you one dataset, to see if you can use that dataset, and tweet if you (or someone you know) might be interested in it. With 10,000 new datasets, that’s a lot, and knowing what to search will be narrow ideas (and you need to have your search term included in the random short descriptions).
If you’re after a lower intensity method, this shows you one at a time, and lets you tweet if it’s useful. It’s quite addictive, and hopefully useful to the @datagovuk team.
A friend of a friend asked:
Can anyone recommend credible, well-sourced books that go into real detail about what the security services are able to do, surveillance-wise? Reading that they have the ability to turn a mobile phone into a remote microphone without it being switched on seemed far-fetched, but I really want to know more – it’s so easy to cross over into “conspiracy theory” type stuff, but the Snowden revelations recently make me think the whole damned lot might be true.
It’s a short question, with few clear answers, and a lot of conjecture. So here’s an effort with what I’ve seen, read and inferred, and has nothing to do with what my day job may say in any formal statement. The very short answer is “no”, we don’t yet know. That will take a year or so to understand what we have now, and all the implications: this will take time. But that’s not helpful for now.
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Disruptive Proactivity