France digitally transformed a key part of its public service into a thing that does not function. Consider it a warning, says Jason Walsh
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Forgive me for writing about something that has happened outside the Anglophone world; I know that no-one pays any attention to other EU countries, but do bear with me for a moment as this is important.
France’s National Agency for Secured Documents (ANTS), the service used by the public to deal with sundry state functions, such as passport and driving licence renewals, was down for more than a fortnight.
The closure, which began on 24 April, follows, of course, a cyber attack. A reported 19 million accounts have been compromised since the 15 April assault, but we’ll just put that aside for now - and, yes, it is rather a lot to put aside, but there are bigger issues at stake in this mess.
I will not bore you with the full details but, while the site was down for what was euphemistically called ‘maintenance’, “it is [was] not possible to register for the written or practical driving tests” as they “require the assignment of a NEPH number (harmonised prefectural registration number)”. Nor could addresses be changed on vehicle log books.
Car sales still required changes of ownership to be registered, so it was “therefore recommended to use the Simplimmat mobile app (simplimmat.gouv – beware of fraudulent sites)”. Uh huh.
Happily, France’s unfairly mocked bureaucracy means that identity documents, such as passports, could still be obtained from the town hall. One to think about, that.
No-one can seriously claim at this point that they are unaware of the fragility of digital systems and the ability of sundry bad actors to take them offline. It’s not just bits, either. Even at the atomic level we have built our systems on a foundation of sand.
The oft-repeated claim that the Internet is resilient, having been designed to withstand nuclear war, is at best a misunderstanding. As I wrote here in 2021, packet routing means individual blobs of data can be re-routed, yes, but that’s not quite the same thing as claiming some computer hanging off the Internet can magically heal itself. In any case, a few snips to subsea cables would make the entire Internet resiliency debate moot.
Besides, aren’t we continually being told about asymmetric warfare? Aren’t new AI models discovering that computer systems are all more porous than Swiss cheese? And isn’t quantum computing – if it ever actually gets out of the cryolab – going to break every digital lock in the world?
Now, let’s have a think about what this actually means. Why is it the case that digital services, particularly ones that matter more than ordering more garbage from online retailers, is an improvement over doing things in person? Why are bank branches being closed? Why are the ones that remain often unable to perform basic banking services? Why do governments want us to talk to demented chatbots? Why is there an assumption that ‘digital first’ is an improvement? And what does ‘digital first’ mean when there is no second? In short, why do so few of these systems ever have manual, in-person back-ups?
Let’s tell the truth: even when the systems are not broken they are broken. Readers of this publication should be well aware that the elderly, their parents for example, are finding themselves excluded from participation in society because we collectively decided that public services should be delivered via JavaScript and relational databases. This was an obvious, and serious, mistake.
Here’s the rub: it will happen to you. One fine day you will wake up and you will find yourself baffled by the latest trends in user interface design, you will be bamboozled by the Byzantine security measures used to patch up poorly designed software, and you will be brickwalled, finding out that systems are programmed for the majority and that you, all of a sudden, are an edge case getting bounced from pillar to post. I guarantee it. And if it hasn’t happened yet, just wait a while.
So why does this constant degradation of the texture of daily life go on? Because we let it happen. Businesses extracting rent from the government is a bit ‘so far, so what’ – hey, it’s easier than making and selling things – but the lesson that needs to be learned here is much more fundamental than the fact that propaganda about markets is propaganda.
There is nothing inherently easier or better about doing things online. No, sitting in Nutgrove Motor Tax office was not my idea of a good time, but at least you got to speak to a person. When a politician next talks about digital transformation we should remind them that replacing people with devices is a mistake. And to stop trying to do things on the cheap.