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Britain celebrates the UDHR
"How is Britain to mark the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights?
"With the continued development of £12bn plans to set up a vast data silo to store information on all phone calls, emails and internet connections? Another soviet style article from Jack Straw, which tells us how the inventory of freedoms has increased under Labour? Or the issue of ID cards to foreigners by a government that knows the public don't give a damn about the rights and privacy of foreigners?
"Somehow we always knew that Jacqui Smith would be at the centre of this important anniversary but you have to hand it to the government: nobody had predicted that human rights and freedom in Britain would be celebrated with the arrest and fingerprinting of an opposition MP by terror police, the search of his premises, hard drives and telephones, the taking of his DNA and the attempted intimidation of his wife, Alicia." —Henry Porter
The nanny state marches on
"The Government is caught between an instinctive paternalistic bossiness (smoking, binge-drinking, lack of exercise, ID cards and over-eating) and a laissez faire liberalism (24-hour drinking, flexible gaming laws, downgrading (then upgrading) cannabis and betting on Sundays). No wonder everyone is confused." —Philip Johnston
The limits of policing
It seems there is a silver lining to the shocking trampling of parliamentary democracy by the Metropolitan Police in their arrest of Damian Green MP and ransacking of his home and offices. Parliamentarians have finally discovered a limit to the authoritarian "nothing to hide" rhetoric of Blair and Brown. Blinking, they survey the several thousand new criminal offences they have created over the last decade; the vast new powers they have given the police; and the culture of fear Labour has stirred up as a blunt electoral wedge against the opposition. (As an aside, theories of cognitive development suggest that at around 11 years of age children should be able to imagine the consequences of events for others without direct personal experience.)
It will be interesting to see the details of this episode emerge over the next few days. How will the Speaker of the Commons explain the permission given to the police to enter Parliament? Did the police lie to the Serjeant at Arms? Were search warrants required? Did the Home Secretary authorise the interception of Damian Green's communications, in contravention of the Wilson doctrine?
As Jackie Ashley comments in today's Guardian: "all parties should take this opportunity to stand back and ask what kind of policing we want in this country. Yes, there is a terrorist threat which is both real and complex. Yes, it is right to look at police powers, as well as to support a larger and more sophisticated security service. But this does not mean we need to follow the US model, with local politics and local policing becoming synonymous, and the growth of an invasive, super-policing agency armed with extreme surveillance techniques, operating above the reach of mere MPs."
Free speech and the Queen of England
Earlier this month the Queen (very indirectly ;) hosted a conference on freedom of expression online. No Frontiers: Free Speech and the Internet, held at Cumberland Lodge in Windsor Great Park, featured presentations from a number of writers, researchers and activists — including yours truly. Jonathan Heawood and Siobhan Butterworth covered the event for the Guardian. You can also see my slides.
Let's talk nukes
"In these drastically straitened times, we need to stop being a nation of people who could tell you in pounds and pence the curtain allowance given to MPs, but can barely get in the ballpark on how much we spend on nuclear missiles. Those who used to chuck all sorts of luxuries into their supermarket trolleys without really paying attention to the price are suddenly all over their weekly budgets; and these same people should start thinking about major public spending the same way. It's time to start talking about nuclear weapons again — and I for one shall be boosting the economy by getting a Scrap Trident badge made up without delay." —Marina Hyde
Privacy and behavioural targeting
On Tuesday night I spoke at an advertising industry event on behavioural targeting. Websites increasingly attempt to display ads to users based on their previous behaviour — particularly the sites they have just visited. Clearly, this has the potential to create privacy problems unless done very carefully.
Neil Maybin has published a good summary of the evening's discussion.
Wanted: an opposition
"One reason Brown astonished everyone by bringing back Peter Mandelson was that, whatever else, Mandelson is genuinely clever and able, and most members of the present cabinet are conspicuously neither.
"Despite that, it's hard to escape a sense there is something wrong with the Conservatives. These Tory boys may be clever, but they are too often silly. There's an indefinable feeling of a smirk about to break through; a frivolous flavour of undergraduate politics hangs over them." —Geoffrey Wheatcroft
The lumpen celebritariat
"The celebritariat—and the illusion of easy access to it—has played the role in postwar Britain that my father expected to be played by the educational meritocracy. The Rise of the Meritocracy ends with a riot at Peterloo in which the disenfranchised masses overthrow their new masters. This is largely because the meritocratic class has become so efficient at identifying the most able children at birth that the ones left behind have no hope of making it. Will the day come when the celebritariat endangers its own existence by becoming a self-perpetuating elite, closed off to new members? There are signs that this is beginning to happen, with the children of famous people inheriting their celebrity status, just as aristocrats inherited their parents estates. It sounds odd to say it, but for those like my father who dream of turning Britain into a socialist paradise, the greatest cause for hope may be the existence of Peaches Geldof." —Toby Young, son of social activist and sociologist Michael Young
Internet! Panic!
It seems that former Home Secretary John Reid has only just discovered some of the Internet scare stories of the 1990s. He tells the Daily Telegraphbreathlessly:
"We have to recognise that on the net you can practically get the full DNA of the First World War flu that killed 24 million people."
If Mr Reid had taken the time to read any of the literature on this subject, he might realise that there is more to weaponising flu, anthrax and other biological agents than finding usually-inaccurate sets of instructions or DNA sequences online. He could start with Simson Garfinkel's Database Nation, first published in 2000. For an update he could even read my Terrorism and the Proportionality of Internet Surveillance. Maybe he should have done this before he started making policy in this area as Home Secretary.
I am slightly embarrassed to see that University College London is to host Reid's new thinktank, the Institute of Security and Resilience Studies.
NHS medical research plan threatens patient privacy
Vive la resistance! Following the Home Office, it seems Department of Health insiders are now also realising that gross invasions of privacy are not a magic solution to every social ill.
Harry Cayton, chair of the new National Information Governance Board for Health and Social Care, has told the government to quash plans to share patient records with researchers without consent:
There is pressure from researchers and from the prime minister to beef up UK research. They think of it as boosting UK Research plc. They want a mechanism by which people's clinical records could be accessed for the purposes of inviting them to take part in research, which at the moment is not allowed. I think that would be a backward step.
It would be saying there is a public interest in research that is so great that it overrides consent and confidentiality. That is not a proposition that holds up.
We believe this is a breach of good practice in confidentiality and consent, and have questioned if there is a sound legal basis for it.
DoH minister Alan Johnson has given a typical government response treating the Information Governance Board's concerns as just another consultation submission that will be given minimal attention. It doesn't help that Information Commissioner Richard Thomas earlier this year gave medical researchers a free pass on access to patient data.
This is another timely reminder that figleaf "governance" arrangements are no substitute for data minimisation in protecting privacy.
Conservatives: we blew it
"The law cannot be made identical with morality. Scan the list of the Ten Commandments and see how many could be enforced even by Rudy Giuliani." —P.J. O'Rourke in an obituary for American conservatism
Brideshead Revisited
Given my distinct distaste for foppish aristocratic wannabes, it took a long flight to Mumbai to persuade me to watch the recent Brideshead Revisited adaptation. The movie is little more than an extravagant travelogue set between Oxford, Castle Howard in Yorkshire, Venice and Morocco. However, I was intrigued as to why such a fusty old Tory as Evelyn Waugh had written what seemed to be such a damning attack on Catholicism and the upper classes.
According to that lodestar of literary criticism Wikipedia, the novel was intended to persuade post-war atheists of the redeeming nature of faith and the gentle qualities of the English artistocracy. This was somehow translated into a film that showed the Catholic church destroying the lives of everyone it touched, and contrasted the straightforward hard work of the middle-class narrator Charles Ryder and his father (and fleetingly, his working-class Yorkshire NCO) with the decadant Marchmain family. Perhaps director Julian Jarrold is a secret class warrior. If so, I thoroughly approve ;)
At last, we get the real US back
Blogzilla is mid-way through a zip around India, which is why things have recently been quiet. But even halfway around the world, the US election result was huge news. India's first interest is in Obama's intentions regarding Kashmir. However, the immediate boost in US standing and soft power brought about by his election is clear.
As a great fan of the US and its system of government, my strongest emotion last Wednesday while watching Obama's victory speech live in Mumbai was relief. Relief at the end of the excresence of an administration of war criminals who had mounted a coup d'etat against the US Constitution. Relief at the rejection of a vice-presidential candidate whose proudest attribute seemed to be ignorance. Relief most of all that in Andrew Sullivan's words: "With men and women finally back in power I can trust to act reasonably and ethically and within the rule of law, I feel less hesitation in getting on with life."
Obama clearly cannot be the saviour of pre-election hype. But once he has closed Guantanamo Bay, stopped the CIA from torturing detainees, and started to act once again as if the Constitution applies to the President, we might start to see the return of the US's reputation as a beacon of freedom that George W. Bush has done so much to destroy.
Judge Dacre dispenses little justice from his bully pulpit
"Who wouldn't prefer Mr Justice Eady protecting people's reasonable right to privacy than Judge Paul Dacre waving his chequebook from his tawdry pulpit, deciding who shall be whipped in public for which sins…
"These are things a free press will always do. Sometimes it campaigns for good causes, sometimes for bad ones. However, the right to strip naked anyone the press chooses is surely one of the most morally dubious abuses of press freedom yet devised." —Polly Toynbee on Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre's criticisms of the Human Rights Act
Bebo kids will value privacy when adults do
"When we tell kids to safeguard their privacy from everyone except governments, merchants, advertisers, entertainment giants, schools, Transport for London and parents, we tell them that we're not really serious about this stuff. Worse, when we allow our own private information to be taken by all these parties, we tell them that privacy is the cheapest coin of all. When BT secretly installs spyware in our browsers and captures all our clicks in order to serve ads to us, our lack of outrage tells our kids everything they need to know about the value of privacy.
"Kids do care about their privacy, but blatant hypocrisy in 'pro-privacy' campaigns triggers kids' lie detectors and sends them fleeing in the opposite direction. Give your kids honest, useful privacy information and watch them become deadly privacy ninjas — hope for a world in which citizens understand security and demand effective measures from their governments." —Cory Doctorow
Conservatives for Obama
Conservatives (as opposed to the neo-con crazies that run the current Republican party) are lining up behind Barack Obama for president. Christopher Hitchens writes:
This is what the Republican Party has done to us this year: It has placed within reach of the Oval Office a woman who is a religious fanatic and a proud, boastful ignoramus. Those who despise science and learning are not anti-elitist. They are morally and intellectually slothful people who are secretly envious of the educated and the cultured. And those who prate of spiritual warfare and demons are not just "people of faith" but theocratic bullies. On Nov. 4, anyone who cares for the Constitution has a clear duty to repudiate this wickedness and stupidity.
2. Conservative reform. Until conservatism can get a distance from the big-spending, privacy-busting, debt-ridden, crony-laden, fundamentalist, intolerant, incompetent and arrogant faux conservatism of the Bush-Cheney years, it will never regain a coherent message to actually govern this country again. The survival of conservatism requires a temporary eclipse of today's Republicanism. Losing would be the best thing to happen to conservatism since 1964. Back then, conservatives lost in a landslide for the right reasons. Now, Republicans are losing in a landslide for the wrong reasons.
1. The War Against Islamist terror. The strategy deployed by Bush and Cheney has failed. It has failed to destroy al Qaeda, except in a country, Iraq, where their presence was minimal before the US invasion. It has failed to bring any of the terrorists to justice, instead creating the excrescence of Gitmo, torture, secret sites, and the collapse of America's reputation abroad. It has empowered Iran, allowed al Qaeda to regroup in Pakistan, made the next vast generation of Muslims loathe America, and imperiled our alliances. We need smarter leadership of the war: balancing force with diplomacy, hard power with better p.r., deploying strategy rather than mere tactics, and self-confidence rather than a bunker mentality.
Home Office to deploy mobile fingerprint scanners
The Guardian is today reporting plans to equip police with mobile fingerprint scanners. While it is a sensible use of technology to save the police from arresting suspects simply in order to take their fingerprints at the station, suppliers are already salivating at the potential for feature creep — for example, including cameras linked to a national facial recognition database.
It is almost almost inevitable that once fingerprinting becomes much faster and cheaper, it will be used much more widely. How happy would you feel at being randomly stopped in the street and fingerprinted by a police officer "just in case"? How often is this likely to happen in the streets of Brixton and Hackney, compared to say Oxford?
A nation of suspects and informers
"I was once an advocate of joined-up government, because I wanted efficiency. But too often joined-up government seems to mean joined-up fascism. In June, a select committee of MPs heard some astonishing evidence from respected campaign groups. One, Parents Against Injustice, gave instances where people whose children were being taken into care had not been allowed to challenge the allegations against them. The Association for Improvements in the Maternity Services (Aims), said that midwives were being turned into 'health police'. Jean Robinson, of Aims, said that she had seen case after case where health visitors and midwives were not supporting postnatally depressed mothers but reporting them to police and social workers, whose interventions largely made things worse." —Camilla Cavendish
"Is Jacqui Smith, the home secretary, a pocket dictator? Is there no drop of liberalism in her veins, no concept of personal freedom, no fear of a repressive state? Or is she just another home secretary? This month she apparently felt obliged by dark forces beyond her control to add another weapon to the armoury of illiberal power. She wants to record at her Cheltenham communications headquarters every mobile phone call, text and internet message of every Briton living. This is close to madness." —Simon Jenkins
Home Office blanches at Big Brother database
How astonishing. It appears that the government's authoritarian appetite for a massive central database of all UK communications is facing opposition even within the Association of Chief Police Officers and the Home Office.
ACPO's Data Communications Group member Jack Wraith told the Sunday Times: "If someone’s got enough personal data on you and they don’t afford it the right protection and that data falls into the wrong hands, then it becomes a threat to you.” A leaked memo reveals that officials believe the plans are “impractical, disproportionate, politically unattractive and possibly unlawful from a human rights perspective.” No2ID has a list of the practical difficulties. Lord Carlile QC, the independent reviewer of terrorist legislation, said that the idea was "awful."
Two years ago I wondered in these pages when the penny would drop with the British public and the media about the attack on civil liberties. It is plainly beginning to. The public is worried about the shoddy laws the government tries to rush past them with its phony calls for consensus and reasonableness.
Playground national security policy
"After the [42 days] vote in the House of Lords, one heard the home secretary saying something like, 'Well nobody can say I'm not tough on terrorism'. As though the implication was there are people who aren't. Which strikes me as very odd. Because most of the people in the House of Lords whose contributions to that debate I'd read were serious people, who'd possibly spent a life, as I have, trying to protect the country from serious threats. So the implication that, you know, a politician was going to say 'I'm tougher on terrorism than you are' struck me as …" —Dame Stella Rimington, former director-general of MI5
Losing the war on trust
"The home secretary's entire argument about the [terrorist] threat and its nature has to rest on our taking many of her assertions on trust. If we can see that the government can't even be accurate about past threats, why should we believe their analysis of current ones? Why should we give up every last vestige of privacy in our private lives because the government asserts that this may be helpful to them sometime in the future? The Home Office may have recognised the need to win this argument, but it hasn't constructed an effective one yet." —Jenni Russell
Woman killed over Facebook relationship status
The Press Association reports the horrifying aftermath of a breakup:
A jealous husband who stabbed his wife to death because he felt "humiliated" over a posting she made on the social networking website Facebook was jailed for life today.
Wayne Forrester told police he was "devastated" that wife Emma had changed her online profile to "single" four days after he had moved out.
Forrester, an HGV driver, drove to the marital home in New Addington, near Croydon, south London, armed with a kitchen knife and a meat cleaver in the early hours of February 18.
Fuelled by cocaine and alcohol, he attacked his wife as she lay in bed, beating her, tearing out clumps of her hair, and stabbing her in the head and neck.
"H L Mencken said practical politics was the business of 'keeping the populace alarmed, and hence clamorous to be led to safety, by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary'. Today’s hobgoblin has been a war on terror. The credit crunch is not imaginary. It should cause government to concentrate on things that matter. It should mean no more macho distractions such as 42-day detention, extravagant surveillance and Home Office-generated anti-Muslim prejudice. There should be no more crazy defence projects and bloated security programmes." —Simon Jenkins
Freedom not Fear
To Parliament Square this morning, for an event organised by ORG and No2ID as part of the international Freedom not Fear day. Photographers from around the country have uploaded hundreds of images of the UK's slide into a surveillance state. The ORG/No2ID production team cleverly combined them into a collage that was revealed to the fascination of hundreds of tourists milling around. Let's hope it encourages more people to think about where exactly the authoritarian technology programme of this government is taking our society.
