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.

According to this article in The Grauniad, the UK government is set on ignoring the recommendations of yet another report it commissioned (this time the Digital Britain Report, last time the Gowers Report) and are set to introduce proposals for a two strikes law on suspending/removing internet access from those accused by rights’ holders of illicitly sharing copyrighted material online (official government details). (more…)

The Counter Terrorism Act 2008 includes the provision:

76. Offences relating to information about members of armed forces etc

(1) After section 58 of the Terrorism Act 2000 (collection of information) insert:
“58A Eliciting, publishing or communicating information about members of armed forces etc

(1) A person commits an offence who:

(a) elicits or attempts to elicit information about an individual who is or has been:

(i) a member of Her Majesty’s forces,

(ii) a member of any of the intelligence services, or

(iii) a constable,

which is of a kind likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism, or

(b) publishes or communicates any such information.”

This is in addition to a prior claim in December 2008 where the Home Secretary informed the National Union of Journalists that photography in public places may be restricted when it “may cause or lead to public order situations or inflame an already tense situation or raise security considerations”.
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I’ve painfully pushed my way through “Cult of the Amateur”, despite its huge flaws. As mentioned last time, the author constantly follows the “broken window fallacy” in all his economic arguments so far.

A couple of sections cover the issues of accountability in the press and the undermining of advertising. Keen offers up examples of where mainstream media have been caught out, including outright lies, poorly researched stories etc. He offers these up as examples of the higher quality of the infrastructure because of the sanctions then applied. However, the very fact that these failings exist in the mainstream media rather undermine his case, particularly as there’s no way of knowing how many flawed articles aren’t spotted. He also excoriates the self reinforcing groups “talking only to themselves”. These groups are no worse than the existing examples of biased media, for example “Fox News”. One of the differences between mainstream media and the new online media is that new media does not generally make the same claim to lack of bias, or claim to “authority” made by existing media. (more…)

The UK government has commissioned a review of children’s access to online material. Are we about to see an attempt by the UK government to introduce CDA, COPA or ChIPA-style laws over here, and without the protections of a constitutional guarantee to freedom of speech that led to those acts being substantially struck down by the US Supreme Court?

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I’ve definitely been here too long. I got my first piece of “junk mail” today.

OK, so it should have been expected. When I first arrived I bought a digital camera from Yodobashi camera. At the time, I signed up for one of their “loyalty cards” which give a ten percent bonus from each purchase which can be used on future purchases. Since I’ve bought a moderate amount of stuff from them, this has been a decent deal. But, to sign up I had to give them an address. Their summer catalogue arrived today, my first piece of junk mail in Japan.

Suggestions that the UK government is to introduce a new police power, that of questioning without concrete suspicion has been called a move towards a police state by some, and likened to the US’ illegitimate permanent detention centre at Guantanamo Bay on Cuba. While I think the latter is hyperbole, the former is a more reasonable statement. What, after all, is a Police State? It is a state in which the police have arbitrary power, which they may exercise without reason, without explanation and without significant oversight. The over-use of anti-terrorist stop-and-search powers by some forces shows that unrestrained powers supposedly aimed at anti-terrorist operations can easily be overused (abused?) by officers.

Police already have the power to stop and question individuals, where they can show a reason to do so. So this is not about giving the police a new power of questioning, it is about removing the requirement for reasonable explanation of their actions. It is the requirement that police be able to explain their activity that prevents this being an arbitrary power.

Even worse is the suggesstion that refusing to answer the questions posed by a policeman would be classed as interfering with police business and in itself constituting an offence. The current government has already reduced the right not to incriminate oneself. This would be a further blow to that. Either you answer the police’s questions, or you are guilty of an offence by that refusal. This is a further erosion of human rights. All the rhetoric by government officials here, suggesting that anyone opposing these powers is “more concerned with the rights of terrorists than those of their potential victims” ignores the fact that the subjects of these powers will, in the vast majority of cases, be ordinary citizens, not terrorists.

Finally, imagine the world if Labour is re-elected in 2009 or 2010. In 2013 ID cards are planned to become compulsory. It is no surprise that these proposed new powers include the idea of “questioning as to identity”. It will likely become, effectively, an arrestable offence not to be able to prove one’s identity, i.e. to have an ID card with one at all times. “Ihre Papiren, bitte!” indeed.

The UK ID Card and Database

There are many objectionable aspects to the UK government’s ID Cards bill. Some of them are philosophical and fundamental, some are political and some are practical. Both the Conservative and Liberal Democrat parties in the UK have policy commitments against the ID card policy and have stated that if they come to power after the next general election (due by mid-2009 at the latest) that they will repeal the act and scrap the cards and the underlying database. Here are some of the arguments against the UK ID card system and database:

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I’ve just spoken to BBC Online researcher Joe Campbell about the effectiveness of CCTV systems in crime prevention and detection. This was as background for material regarding the Woolmer case, where the hotel had CCTV cameras trained on nearby corridors but, as is often the case, the analogue tapes used to record the images had been so heavily used that they were “fragile”.

Despite the rush to deploy CCTV cameras all over the UK in the late 80s and 90s, there was almost no significant research into their effectiveness. Indeed, Norris and Armstrong (The Maximum Surveillance Society: The Rise of CCTV) suggest that politicians did not want to know whether it was effective or not.Since finding the money centrally to promote jointly funded local schemes to deploy CCTV was relatively simple and the public believed that they helped to reduce crime, politicians would rather spend the money and be seen to be doing something rather than find out if what they were doing was effective (and exactly what is effective out of the various options) and be held properly to account for their efforts in tackling crime. In particular, no cost/benefit evaluations were done which considered the use of the money spent in other ways to reduce crime, either by providing other law enforcement measures or simply providing better street-lighting, or more facilities for young people (since much of the crime that CCTV has targetted is public order and low-value thefts).

Only recently have some studies suggested that CCTV has been effective:

Crime Prevention and Community Safety: An International Journal (2004) 6, 21–33: Evidence-based Crime Prevention: The Effectiveness of CCTV by Brandon C Welsh and David P Farrington.