I don't understand how our Government works. I understand that tough decisions often need to be made - but sometimes those decisions are so utterly without reason that you have to wonder if politicians spend most of their days "painting their noses".

The UK used to have a public sector postal service - the Royal Mail. Postmen need to know to where they were delivering mail. Postal Codes were created to help divide up the country into easily sortable destinations. And so, over time, a Postcode Address File was created. It listed every address in the UK and was the canonical source of data about UK locations.

Given that this was a public database, created with public money, for the public good - you would expect that this data would be available to benefit the public. It was not.

The Royal Mail kept their data behind lock and key - if you wanted access to it, you had to pay. Heavily.

Five years ago, the Earnest Marples project began in order to free our postcodes. They wanted the UK's nationally owned data to be available to the public at no cost. The project was swiftly killed by Royal Mail's lawyers.

Things dragged on, as they often do, until earlier this year when our Coalition Government decided to privatise the Royal Mail. I won't dwell on the fact that the sale cost the country billions of pounds. But I will point out that they also privatised the PAF. Now a private company controls our post codes and can charge pretty much what they like for access.

It's rare that I agree with a Tory MP, but Bernard Jenkin - the head of the Public Administration Select Committee was completely correct when he said:

The sale of the PAF with the Royal Mail was a mistake. Public access to public sector data must never be sold or given away again.

Sale of postcodes data was a 'mistake' say Committee - 17/03/2014

So, given that our Government professes to love Open Data - and knowing how decent location could generate billions of pounds of economic activity - what should be done?

I know! Let's pay the Open Data Institute £383,000 to recreate the data set!

Look, the ODI are properly awesome, but why are we paying them hundreds of thousands of pounds to recreate something we used to own? That's madness.

The Government is now paying a private company to create a service to deprive revenue from another private company which underpaid for a service which we sold them, even though we didn't have to, which makes a profit for the company which is still partially owned by the Government. Clear as mud.

Of course, the Government were warned in advance that privatising the PAF was a mistake. The people who warned them? The ODI!

No less a person than Sir Tim Berners-Lee criticised the sale and said:

Of course it is disappointing that the Address File has not been made public, a blow to the efficiency of UK businesses large and small. But we have hope.

The decision has been made to leave the file in the care of the Royal Mail. The Royal Mail may well decide to do the right thing and make it available as Open Data. This will allow the UK to participate in the explosion of location-based and mobile services happening around the world.

The Telegraph - 19 Apr 2013

So the ODI made "very forceful" protests to the Government and warned of the economic folly. Now, in a self-fulfilling prophesy, the ODI are being paid by the Government to fix the mistakes the ODI warned against!

This raises a few questions.

How will the ODI's dataset be different from the recently privatised PAF?

We can't have paying customers of the Royal Mail and consumers of this new open dataset working to incompatible standards - that would be a nightmare.

And, if they are compatible, will the Royal Mail take steps to recoup their loss of revenue? Either by changing their data so it is no longer compatible or simply suing?

Finally, maintaining a dataset which is constantly changing incurs a significant cost - at least, that was always the justification for charging for PAF access - so how much will we have to pay the ODI each year to ensure their data is up to date?

This is such a messed up situation. Can someone please give me directions to the nearest pub?

When I was a child, I prayed to God to send me a bicycle. The Priest told me God doesn't work like that; so I stole a bicycle and prayed for forgiveness.

Emo Philips (probably)

There's a noble tradition in hackerdom of finding creative ways around obstacles. My personal favourite expression of this desire to get things done quickly is the maximum "far better to seek forgiveness than beg for permission."

It's something I practice both at work and for my private projects. It's much easier, faster, and more fun to get on and do things without the tedious rigmarole of filling in forms, creating business plans, and generally seeking permission. But now, I'm beginning to wonder about the limitations of such an approach.

Hijack This

I remember going to a talk by the Space Hijackers at an OpenTech conference. The mischievous anarchists were talking about how they set up an agit-prop May Day fair in a busy high street. They made a big show of extolling the virtues of not asking permission. Desperately trying to show how cool and counter culture they are.

I asked if they'd bothered talking to any of the shop keepers whose businesses they had disrupted.

"Nah mate! Don't bother asking for permission; you won't get it!" was their predictable reply.

I pointed out that, while the council may have refused them permission, perhaps the people who lived and worked there may have been more tolerant. Perhaps they would have liked to have helped, to have sold their wares, to have been able to participate rather than just be bystanders. Invading people's space makes for a good story - but when you trample on people's hearts, it's hard to capture their minds to your causes.

This point seemed lost on the "artist", who mumbled something about annoying the police being more important than pissing off local people. Oh, and you should never have to ask for permission.

(You can listen to the audio from the OpenTech session. My question is around 13m 20s.)

That's when I first started having my doubts about forgiveness as an initial approach.

Aaron Swartz

More recently, I've been reading about the upsetting case of Aaron Swartz, the gifted young hacker who seemingly killed himself after years of Government harassment.

Two of his largest hacks had invoked the same basic cause - liberating information which (he and many others felt) had been unjustly locked away. It is said that he hacked PACER and JSTOR to retrieve hundreds of thousands of documents in order to liberate them.

I think that his cause was just - restricting access to publicly funded work and the public law is an unconscionable crime and freeing the data is the correct thing to do. But there is no doubt that his methods caused him a great deal of legal troubles. By appointing himself arbiter of right and wrong he effectively alienated those people within the system who may have been prepared to help him.

Perhaps if Aaron and the Space Hijackers had asked permission they would have been rebuffed anyway. Perhaps the action they wanted to happen would have taken place over a different timescale or in a different manner. Perhaps lip service would have been paid but no action taken. Perhaps there were good reasons why the status quo should be maintained.

Or perhaps not. We'll never know.

Lost Your Marbles

I think the tale of EarnestMarples.com is an interesting study. The UK's postcodes data were locked up tight. The team behind EarnestMarples took it upon themselves to liberate the data and, unsurprisingly, got all sorts of legal threats.

What happened next is that they were able to have a very constructive meeting with the Post Office which - along with the current vogue for Open Data - led to Ordnance Survey releasing the data.

Approaching the Post Office and Ordnance Survey initially may have saved a lot of time and worry.

The Risk is in Your Hands

Because of unilateral action, people opened themselves up to legal challenge and a world of hurt.

Sometimes the fight is righteous and justified. Sometimes revolution, subversion, and hacking are necessary. Sometimes the system is so broken that it needs to be destroyed and reformed.

And sometimes, only sometimes, we should ask the people running the show if we can help change their minds before we bluster in like a bull in a china shop.

I feel like a quisling for writing this. I don't want to live in a world where we have to ask permission for every little act. I want to be free to experiment. But I don't want to see my friends in jail, or worse.

It's the authorities who have the attitude problem - not us. We are righteous, but they have bigger sticks. And that's what scares me. That's what makes me want to temper my approach to begging forgiveness. I'm afraid of the fear we generate in the hearts of the powerful.

...[hackers are] chased down like someone starting wildfires. Why? Because they scare the crap out of officialdom. Because they tend to be cheeky, and there is nothing which angers bureaucracy like mockery. Mockery kills careers and brings down stupid fiefdoms and idiotic rules faster than anything else. Play - which is part of creative technology and its ethos of making the world better - is scary to traditional authority.

And traditional authority reacts poorly to being afraid.

Nick Harkaway