Oh! This puts me in such a bad mood.
https://twitter.com/jjvincent/status/560082501075742721
Lord King is author of amendments tabled last week to the Counter Terrorism and Security Bill. They would have granted the government surveillance powers without proper checks and balances. Arguing in favour of the changes, Lord King admitted he did not use social media and did not understand apps like WhatsApp or SnapChat. Continue reading “Dear Lord King: Ludditry is not cool, it's dangerous”
Surveillance changes the "Psyche of the Community"
When we debate surveillance (whether its CCTV or snooping on our e-mails) the debate is usually framed as a trade off between civil liberties and security. Its the right to privacy versus the right to be protected from crime. Often, civil libertarians seek to win the argument by highlighting how the State can be tyrannical, oppressive, corrupt… or unworthy of trust. Our governments are compared literary dystopias like Airstrip One in Nineteen Eighty-Four or to real-life dictatorships like North Korea. These arguments are persuasive to some.
But as I have discussed previously, this approach does not persuade everyone. And by deploying these arguments, civil liberties campaigners actually leave themselves exposed. What if you do not believe that (say) the UK is as bad as North Korea? What if you think that, on balance, Teresa May, Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe and Robert Hannigan are actually on our side and not out to seize tyrannical control of the people? All this chat about nefarious government agents acting like the Stasi will simply not persuade.
When we talk about surveillance, we need to talk about The Observer Effect. In physics, this is the concept that says that by measuring something, you change it. And we’re talking about surveillance, The Observer Effect means that simply by watching someone, you change their behaviour. Continue reading “Surveillance changes the "Psyche of the Community"”
The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report needs to be converted to HTML, pronto
The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence has release a shocking report into the CIA use of torture during America’s post-9/11 panic. The New York Times has a handy 7 point summary, pointing out that the torture was more brutal and extensive than previously supposed, that it was ineffective, and that CIA officials lied to Congress and made exaggerated claims to journalists about the effectiveness of the programme.
Its truly sickening and should not have happened. The USA is supposed to be better. It has set a terrible example to brutal human rights abusing regimes like Iran. Ayatollah Khameni has been pointing out America’s hypocrisy.
They claim #humanrights &trample its basics in their prisons,in interactions w nations &even w their own ppl.#TortureReport #Ferguson 2/8/10
— Khamenei.ir (@khamenei_ir) December 10, 2014
It looks like the United Kingdom might have been complicit in the torture programme too.
For those of us who want to read the full report, a 525-page PDF version is available on the webspace of Senator Diane Feinstein.
Plenty of journalists have been writing about the report. Andrew Sullivan has ‘live-blogged’ his reading of it. When they do cite a paragraph, they can’t link directly to it. It strikes me that far more people would be able to read an engae with the report if it were in HTML format. This is a ‘live’ example of the principle behind my Leveson Report (As It Should Be) project.
The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report should be converted to HTML as soon as possible, preferably hosted by a civil liberties NGO or a newspaper. It took me a while to convert the Leveson Report into HTML but a crowdsourced effort could convert this torture report in a matter of days, if not hours.
Parliament Stitches Up The People
Today the Prime Minister and his Deputy announced ’emergency’ legislation to legalise the mass collection and retention of data. The laws will be rushed through parliament next week.
I have a lot to say about this: Continue reading “Parliament Stitches Up The People”
Why do our leaders dismiss our fears over civil liberties?
It seems to be a cast iron rule of politics that our leaders will become more authoritarian when they take office. The standard explanation for this is that they simply become drunk on power. But at the Time for A Digital Bill of Rights? parliamentary meeting yesterday, Liberal Democrat MP Tim Farron gave a more nuanced explanation:
No-one will assent to rules that imply that they may abuse their power.
There is a tendency in the debate around mass surveillance to attribute malign motives to everyone in government and the security services. This in turn alienates those in power, and promotes the belief that civil liberties campaigners are shrill, paranoid exaggerators! So this alternative formulation, which avoids the cod-psychological explanations about power, corruption, and malign motives, is very welcome.
Farron went on to point out that this does not absolve those politicians of blame for neglecting civil liberties. What they forget, he said, is that our laws need to be constructed so as to protect citizens from future corrupt governments. This rather obvious point is often lost on Ministers who are concerned with the here-and-now.