ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at the Government Data Network, showing how this provided the architecture for an acceleration of the deepening and widening of links between government datasets. This chapter also discusses the Information Society Initiative (ISI). This was a plan developed under the government of John Major to promote the spread of information technology both in society and the state. As part of the ISI, the government published plans to deploy a computerised system, called government.direct, which would marshal a lot of its relations with the public into one unified system and was explicitly designed to fundamentally reshape the relationship between the people and the government. This was presented to the public as a benefit that would ease their consumerist-style transactions with state bodies, but within government, it was acknowledged that this system would permit the recasting of all government population data into one matrix. government.direct = Nov 1996.
