a-cubed.info

There has been a recent spate of reports regarding Research In Motion and their difficulties with various surveillance-oriented regimes (UAE, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan) demanding access to the emails sent from the famous and popular Blackberry mobile communications system. The most recent addition to the countries demanding such access is India. I find it interesting that they are targetting the Blackberry in this way. Standard email protocols provide exactly the same facility as the proprietary systems used by Blackberry and many other smartphone systems to send and receive email to remote servers with end-to-end encryption so that only if the user device is cracked or the server is located in-country, can the government access the communications data (modulo claims of encryption cracking capabilities of Forth Worth and GCHQ).

More flexible smartphones such as the iPhone, Mobile Windows- or Android-based systems can of course be set up with standard email servers anywhere in the world. Are these the next target, or are the users of Crackberries seen as the most likely to be “misusing” (according to the governments in question) email? This attempted fragmentation and re-bordering of the internet was analysed by Goldsmith and Wu a few years ago in Who Controls the Internet? Will open platforms such as the Android be banned in favour of iPhones but only if Apple follows RIM’s example and limits email apps to in-country servers? What about travel to these countries? Will entry into Pakistan with an iPhone be followed by a revocation of any app allowing out-of-country encrypted communications?

In a clear abuse of the parliamentary process and a travesty of democracy, the Digital Economy Bill had its second reading in the House of Commons yesterday, a process which now allows the final passage of the bill to be pushed through “wash-up”. The reason this is a travesty is that the wash-up process is supposed to be for bills with cross-party support and few concerns about the detailed provisions needing further parliamentary scrutiny, to avoid clogging up the post-election parliamentary timetable with uncontroversial matters getting in the way of (supposedly) the new governments’ manifesto commitments. Neither of these is truly the case for the Digital Economy Bill. While the Conservative and Labour Front Benches may have whipped sufficient of their MPs into line this did not have all-party support. It was not (and is not) uncontroversial. Claims that it had received significant debate in the Lords ignores the constant cries from the current government about how undemocratic our Upper Chamber is. When the Lords blocks something the government doesn’t like, it’s undemocratic, but when it serves as a mechanism for the near-dictator Lord Mandelson to push through a piece of captured legislation then it’s sufficient democratic scrutiny for a major bill. The Digital Economy is incredibly important to the UK and a bill to support and develop it needed to be put through the appropriate parliamentary scrutiny and crafted with balance on all sides of the discussions. Ramming something through with Henry VIII powers, a lop-sided set of proposals which run the risk of destroying significant chunks of internet access and business through chilling effects if not legal action, all because Lord Mandelson got his ear bent by a rich representative of a dinosaur industry, is not democracy, it’s corruption and abuse of power.

Larry Lessig changed his tack in the US from lobbying for more sensible copyright (and related rights) laws to the issue of corruption in US politics and the capture of the law-making process by small groups with large amounts of money. After the DEBill fiasco in the UK, it’s easy to see why he felt that move necessary.