IFSEC Presentations Revisited: The Earl of Erroll on Unlocking the Internet of Things and Securing the Future

Kicking off day one in the Safe Cities Lounge, Lord Erroll – actual name Merlin Hay – discussed Smart Cities from the perspective of someone who is a cross-bencher in the House of Lords.

A man of many titles – Merlin Sereld Victor Gilbert Hay, 24th Earl of Erroll, 25th Lord Hay, and 24th Lord Slains to name but a few – Lord Erroll is an independent member of the House of Lords.

If Merlin, however, conjures visions of an ancient mythical past, then he certainly has the family history to back it up. His ancestors, apparently, backed a certain Robert the Bruce in 1314 and were rewarded with great wealth upon his triumph. Another ancestor who backed the wrong side and wound up losing his head – literally.

“Game of Thrones is like ancient Scotland,” he joked: “You went out for dinner and you didn’t know if you’d come back incredibly wealthy or dead.”

Hence the rise in the takeaway business North of the Border…

Watch a video interview with Merlin Hay from the show floor below…

Vulnerabilities

The modern security landscape is rather less fraught, but changing dramatically in nature. While conventional crimes are in long-term decline, cyber crime is soaring and the ‘smart city’ concept is only creating more vulnerabilities.

Which global cities are truly ‘smart’? asked Lord Erroll. He answered his own question with the response that he didn’t believe there was even one on the planet.

“It will only happen when we get the technology everywhere – and we’re not there yet,” he opined.

Bemoaning proliferating jargon – ‘Cyberville’, ‘Digital City’, ‘Flexicity’ and ‘MESH City’ were a few on his slide. “Debating how many angels can dance on a pinhead does not move us forward,” he said. There’s too much talking about the issues, he suggested – and not enough acting on them.

No surprise then that Dubai’s simple, non-techy slogan vis-à-vis creating a smart city should be among the most pleasing to the speaker: “Dubai wants to be the happiest city.”

“Transport for London (TFL) can cope well generally, but not at peak overload,” he added. “It’s in situations like these where smart technologies will really come into their own. If registration data of people who attend events that cause congestion on transport nodes is shared – and background analysis conducted – then authorities could tell people to leave out of a different exit, one that isn’t overloaded.

“If the government wants to make services more efficient and citizens’ lives easier, then it does unfortunately create vulnerabilities. There’s a danger of modern systems being too clever, leaving vulnerabilities to would-be attackers.”

As he often did himself (presumably referring to his adversaries in Parliament), cyber security professionals have to think like the enemy if they are to recognise where priorities should lie in safeguarding systems against attack.

Suggesting that we eschew the Singaporean zero tolerance model – fines for the most trivial civil offences – Lord Erroll also voiced his hope that authorities would recognise the imperfection of people even as technology became ever smarter.

“If we have a big disaster early on [in the nascent internet of everything], then people won’t use the technology, but at the moment there is a lot of hype,” he said.

Lord Erroll, who is playing a major role in the HyperCat project (a consortium and standard driving secure and interoperable Internet of Things (IoT for Industry), believes that “innovation comes from collaboration” and sharing data – a cornerstone of the IoT – is all about that.

“Interoperability and cross-pollination reduce friction for the citizen, but too many people in numerous industry’s are apt to think hierarchically – in silos,” lamented Lord Erroll. “Smart water, smart waste, smart this, smart that – but it won’t work unless people start thinking in silos.

“There’s not enough cross-funding,” he added. “The government spent £2bn on smart metres but if we put that into broadband instead, we could have had other good things coming out of it.

“If you have a data set, then what is it? How do you read it? It’s this reuse of info that I think will be useful and the government thinks so, too.”

Fascinatingly, Lord Erroll warned that the hyperbolised, embryonic world of wearables is hurtling to a looming, rather less glamorous bulwark: EU Privacy legislation. The EU data protection act, GDPR, which looks set to come into play by the end of the year, will undermine the very sharing of data that makes smart watches, heart monitors and countless other incarnations so exciting.

“The quantified self is personal data, so these laws may stop you doing with it what you want, even for people’s benefit,” he continued.

“There is no right to data ownership at present in the UK. The real problem comes with names and addresses. What is wrong with local authorities keeping it up to date?”

‘Agency’ is the watchword here, he claims. Huge, expensive government initiatives, have collapsed because of ‘cases like these on the fringe’, says Erroll.

So much is at stake when it comes to getting it right…

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