UK government exploiting Paris terror attacks to expand mass surveilance

I have an article in The Conversation this morning about the UK government's unconscionable exploitation of the terror attacks in Paris last week.

Copy of original unedited version below.

Je Suis Charlie

No one has seen anything like the demonstrations on the streets of Paris on Sunday 11 January 2015 since the end of World War II. 

Three deranged men murdered 17 people last week and millions mobilised, not just in the French capital but throughout the country, united in solidarity to express sympathy for the victims’ families and friends, intolerance of hatred and terrorism, and publicly acknowledge the country’s distress, defend freedom through satire and, no doubt, a whole host of other personal reasons unique to each individual on those streets.

Political leaders were out in force too, uncomfortably linking arms at the front of the crowd. What is it the cynics say? Never waste a crisis or photo opportunity? 

I must admit my own response to the talking head wind-bagging on the Charlie Hebdo attacks and other murders was less than charitable; noting the opportunist hypocrisy on the part of political leaders calling for more mass surveillance in response to the attacks to be almost staggering. 

David Cameron and Theresa May judge conditions to be ripe for promoting a re-introduction of the snoopers charter and railroading through of the Counter Terrorism and Security Bill which could result in the jailing of university staff refusing to report students suspected of undefined extremism.

The French Prime Minister, in echoes of the appalling failures of Blair-Bush-ism, has called for a war on terrorism.

I was wrong in one respect at least.

It is cynical, opportunistic and hypocritical but not in the least surprising that politicians would use the Paris attacks to further their own agendas. Neither is it surprising they would fly to Paris for the mass commemorations. There is a good chance the likes of David Cameron would have been roundly abused, possibly even with satirical cartoons, if he had declined to show up. Cameron is flying to the US to discuss the Paris murders with President Obama later this week, as well as plans for GCHQ to work more closely with the NSA.  More closely? If the Snowden revelations are to be believed it is hard to see how they could be any closer.

In light of the politicking/electioneering, I do have a question or two for Mr Cameron and perhaps a suggestion or two for the mainstream media hacks who do get access to him. 

Now you’ve been to Paris to stand up for free speech, will you repeal laws like section 127 of the Communications Act 2003 which criminalises offensive speech?

How exactly will the further expansion of mass surveillance in the UK cure the problem of known terrorists committing murder? (If anyone should doubt we already have mass surveillance in this country, I suggest typing ‘Snowden’ or ‘Tempora’ or ‘OpticNerve’ ‘DRIPA’ or ‘GCHQ’ or ‘NSA’ into your favourite search engine and perusing the results at your leisure. Alternatively spend some time with The Guardian’s NSA files).

The French intelligence and security services could not keep track of the Kouachi brothers, known extremists, to a sufficient degree to prevent the Charlie Hebdo attacks. Likewise Amedy Coulibaly who murdered a police officer and 4 others in a supermarket.

France has blanket electronic surveillance. France has armed police. France even has the ID cards so beloved yet so tantalisingly eventually out of reach of Tony Blair and his succession of home secretaries. France has an inquisitorial justice system the purveyors of the Counter Terrorism and Security Bill’s ‘prevent’ duty seem to be hankering after. France arguably also has a constitution that mass surveillance, at least, offends against.

None of it was enough to stop the Kouchais and Coulibaly.

If it takes a conservative 20 intelligence and securitystaff to monitor a suspect 24/7, where do we get and how to we provide the 1.2 billion staff and associated resources to watch the 60 million people in the UK?

Not going to watch the 60 million 24/7? Which ones and how many will you watch in addition to the known dangerous individuals you are already unable to keep track of? 

Which, for example, of the resources currently devoted to extremely dangerous suspects will be diverted to watching grumpy academics disinclined to engage in their ‘prevent’ duty, under section 21 of the Counter Terrorism & Security Bill to report students prepared to voice non-standard views.

Little noticed last week the Parliamentary Human Rights Joint Committee issued their fifth report. By coincidence, it happened to be a legislative scrutiny of the Counter-Terrorism and Security Bill. In it they criticise the Bill as an attack on freedom of expression and academic freedom. They even recommend universities be exempt from the section 21 preventing terrorism duty:

6.11 In our view, because of the importance of freedom of speech and academic freedom in the context of university education, the entire legal framework which rests on the new "prevent" duty is not appropriate for application to universities. We recommend that the Bill be amended to remove universities from the list of specified authorities to which the new duty applies. 

That might, should a blue moon ascend and associated flock of pigs fly past and the government accept this recommendation, be good news for universities and irascible academics. But where does it leave the rest of the public servants burdened with this ill-defined, liberty-bashing, preventing terrorism duty?

Two final questions and a suggestion.

If the Paris terrorists had been white middle class Manchester United supporters declaring their motives to be love of Alex Ferguson and all things Red Devilish, would political leaders have been so keen to gather in commemoration; and condemn Man Utd supporters as extremists we need new mass surveillance laws to guard against?

How, in the name of all that is holy, if I may borrow a phrase from the violent religious extremists that cause rational thinking human beings due concern, can anyone consider it a respectable or defensible position to require everyone in public service to spy on each other and the rest of the population?

The suggestion? 

Try typing ‘Stasi’ 'NKVD' and 'KGB' into your favourite search engine and looking through the selection of offerings it throws up. Then ask yourself why the West spend over 40 years fighting a Cold War against the Soviet Union and its allies, if all we wanted to do was construct the architecture of a surveillance state that would make those guys weep with envy...

Why e-voting is a bad idea

Entertaining Computerphile 8 minute video on why electronic voting is a bad idea.

The unsustainable crisis in public services

The crisis in hospital accident and emergency departments is in the news. The crisis in policing has practically identical systemic roots. As do the crises mental health, the ambulance service, all corners of the NHS, care for the elderly and disabled, the prison service, criminal justice and legal services, the border control & immigration services, social services, social welfare, transport... the education system is a certified basket case.

When you divide complex, deeply interconnected and interdependent public service systems up into competing quasi-autonomous silos and then instruct the leaders of those silos they will be evaluated on the basis of single figure simplistic targets or metrics - e.g. A&E waiting times - you cannot be surprised when the silos focus on those metrics at the expense of everything else; including the effective operation of the individual silo, not to mention the (up to 99% of) work they used to provide as a service to other parts of the overall public services system.

People can't get to see a GP, so they call an ambulance or go to A&E. A&E can't cope so they sit in corridors or ambulances whilst A&E waiting times go up or get massaged. Ambulances can't get to emergencies because they are waiting to offload patients at busy A&Es or because they are dealing with non emergency cases to meet the 8 minute target. There is inadequate support for the elderly and frail so they are in hospitals rather than having appropriately tailored care in appropriate environments. Police officers are dealing with vulnerable seriously mentally or physically ill people because ambulances and other services are overstretched and unavailable, in thrall to their very own distortionate targets.

It would be ridiculous to say one rectangle was bigger (and better) than another because it had a longer base, without knowing what the height of either was. It would be ridiculous to say we can produce better pigs by weighing them. Yet somehow, and in the surreal political and media frenzy of the run up to a general election, it is ok to "measure" complex public services this way.

The political normalisation of this insanity throughout the public sector has to stop.

But it won't.

We are completely incapable, as a society, in this world of short attention spans, social media outrage mob rule and 24/7 attention-grabbing-focused news media, of holding a mature public debate on any of this.

Single words, phrases, soundbites, expressions, nuances, personality traits are rabidly seized upon by the media, political opponents and the outrage mob as sticks to beat anyone who ventures an opinion outside of the mainstream. The Tory, Lib Dem and Labour gangs can't help themselves, even amidst their almost total rabid agreement on everything lest they upset the Murdoch press or the Daily Mail, they choose to attack each other, rather than develop enlightened evidence based policies. They have nothing to debate in policy terms because they are committed to the same failing policies.

I learned at the weekend of a dedicated, bright, enthusiastic, successful young teacher deciding to leave the profession after several years because of the unreasonable demands the schooling system visited upon her, her colleagues and the kids in her school.

Someone doing an enormous amount of good, 24/7, for the children in her care, decided she no longer had the physical or emotional capacity, as an individual, to compensate for the systemic insanity of an education system failing the majority of children.

It takes an enormous amount of integrity to walk away from something of huge importance to you, when you realise you can no longer make a sustainable difference, in spite of the occasional and even spectacular pockets of success.

She's now in temporary employment in the retail sector and enjoying, for the moment, the serenity of closing the book on the job, as soon as she leaves at the end of each day. The retail sector's current gain is the education system's enormous loss.

Update: edited for a couple of spelling errors.

Ches Lincoln

One of the Open University's true online learning pioneers, Ches Lincoln, sadly died on Christmas Eve.

Ches was a brilliant, cheery, kind, caring, deeply enthusiastic technophile who had the core integrity and values of the OU woven into the very fabric of her DNA.

Whether as a technology tutor or one of the key architects of the technical infrastructure that dragged the OU into the internet age, through the vehicle of a course known as 'T171: You, your computer and the Net', she put her heart and soul into the people and systems that crossed her path.

John Naughton, another of the key brigands behind T171, often describes T171 as a "success disaster". It was the first entirely online undergraduate course in the world and pulled in 900 students for the pilot in 1999 and 13500 for the full launch the following year. In an institution in those days used to 3 to 5 year development cycles, we had to build the technical infrastructure from scratch in 9 months with the organisational equivalent of string and glue and a tiny team. We recruited and trained over 500 associate lecturers to tutor online when there were only a handful of people in the country who had ever done online teaching. And the whole experience, though successful in student recruitment and operational terms, nearly killed the university because of the vast structural changes that had to be accommodated in such a short space of time. (The 100-hour weeks were not exactly conducive to my own good health at the time either, though I've cut that to 60 since and Ches's sudden and all too early demise is making me reconsider seriously dropping to the 37 the OU computer says I do...).

So T171 remade but nearly broke the OU at the turn of the century.Yet without Ches, John, Martin Weller, Andy Reilly, Ernie Taylor and a small number of others it could never have come to fruition.

No matter how complex or difficult a problem was thrown her way, technical or personal, Ches never turned down a request for help from students, friends or colleagues. She always had time for people and displayed a level of care, understanding and compassion that was immeasurable in this world of short attention spans, tick box metrics and generally insane behaviour on the part of large organisations.

Ches you will be sadly missed.

The NSA is Coming to Town

Uncomfortably funny seasonal music video from the ACLU, The NSA is Coming to Town

Note to Virgin Media Web Safe team re APPG website block

On the advice of Virgin Media Twitter responder LB, I've written to their Websafe people at websafefeedback@virginmedia.co.uk

Hi folks,

Just to let you know Virgin Media WebSafe seems to be blocking my access to the website of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Extraordinary Rendition. One of your folk on Twitter suggested I email you about it.

Twitter, if it's any help, is also blocking me posting tweets including the url of the site, 

http://www.extraordinaryrendition.org/

Both your bots and Twitter's seem to think the site is compromised with malware. If so it would be appropriate to alert them. If not, given the publication of the US Senate report on torture yesterday, it is an inopportune time to be blocking a parliamentary site connected with such subject matter.

Regards,

Ray Corrigan


-- 
Ray Corrigan, Senior Lecturer in Maths, Computing and Technology, Open University

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Note to chair of APPG on extraordinary rendition

I've written to the chairman of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Extraordinary Rendition, Andrew Tyrie MP, explaining Virgin Media and Twitter appear to be still blocking access to their website.

Dear Mr Tyrie,

Just a short note to let you know that my efforts to access the website of your All Party Parliamentary Group on Extraordinary Rendition last night proved futile, since my communications service provider, Virgin Media, were blocking access to it. I basically got re-directed to a page saying:

"Sorry, Web Safe has blocked this site

This site has been blocked by Web Safe because it's listed as having malicious content. It could put your personal and financial information at risk or cause damage to your files.

Find out more about Web Safe Sign in to My Virgin Media to change your Web Safe settings If you don’t think this page should have been blocked, let us know.”

Additionally when I attempted to post a couple of notes about this on Twitter, Twitter blocked those too with the following message:

"This request looks like it might be automated. To protect our users from spam and other malicious activity, we can't complete this action right now. Please try again later."

I then noted on Twitter what had happened without using your website address and it accepted that.

Virgin Media have informed me via Twitter today that they are not blocking your website. I nipped home from the office at lunchtime to check that and found my home computer still being redirected to their warning about malicious content when I attempted to access the APPG site. Twitter also appears to be continuing to block posts containing the web address of your site http://www.extraordinaryrendition.org/

I suspect the problem is automated filtering software rather than any deliberate attempt by these companies to deny access to the APPG materials. Nevertheless, I would suggest asking your technical experts to look into the problem and perhaps follow up with Virgin Media and Twitter.  The irony of the APPG being censored, accidentally or otherwise, on the day the Senate Intelligence committee released the executive summary of their report into CIA interrogation and detention programmes will not be lost on you. The work you are doing in the APPG is extraordinarily important and it would be unfortunate if public access to it is inappropriately curtailed.

Regards,

Ray Corrigan

Virgin Media blocking website of Parliamentary group on rendition

Virgin Media appear to be blocking the website of the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on Extraordinary Rendition. As Chair of the group, Andrew Tyrie says, the

"APPG is a Parliamentary body with over sixty members, both Members of the House of Commons and the House of Lords.

You can visit the APPG’s website here"

Except you can't as a Virgin Media customer since you get re-directed to a page saying

Sorry, Web Safe has blocked this site

This site has been blocked by Web Safe because it's listed as having malicious content. It could put your personal and financial information at risk or cause damage to your files.
Find out more about Web Safe Sign in to My Virgin Media to change your Web Safe settings If you don’t think this page should have been blocked, let us know.

For information, Virgin Media, your web labyrinth is too tortuous for sentient human beings so I'm letting you know from here.

Interestingly, when I attempted to post two separate messages on Twitter about this, Twitter blocked me too:

"This request looks like it might be automated. To protect our users from spam and other malicious activity, we can't complete this action right now. Please try again later."

 My messages:

"@virginmedia blocking website of All-Party Parliamentary Group on Extraordinary Rendition http://www.extraordinaryrendition.org/ Tell Andrew Tyrie MP?"

and

"Twitter blocked me posting @virginmedia blocking website of All-Party Parliamentary Group on Extraordinary Rendition http://www.extraordinaryrendition.org/"

I've made several later attempts to post the message all resulting in the same blocking message - the Twitter bot accusing me of spamming or engaging in malicious activity.

Is it possible the APPG website has been compromised and Twitter and Virgin Media are right?

Either way Mr Tyrie, who I heard doing a valiant job of trying to educate some BBC broadcast journalists on extraordinary rendition this evening, should be informed.

Cory Doctorow on practical privacy

Privacy as Innovation with Cory Doctorow from Lovisa on Vimeo.

Cory has:

• An encrypted hard drive on his computer
• An encrypted phone
• He installs a jail broken version of Android (CyanogenMod) which has lots of better privacy stuff built in
• He uses Cryptocat to have sensitive real-time communications
• He uses PGP for email (full disclosure - it was Cory that finally prompted me some years ago to dust off my PGP keys)
• He tries to use PGP routinely with everyone he knows who has a PGP key hence routine email traffic is all encrypted and any interceptions can't been instantly filtered as the potentially interesting or sensitive ones because they happen to be the only ones encrypted
• He uses The Pirate Bay's Peter Sunde's IPREDator proxy service to proxy his traffic especially on untrusted networks
• He uses SSL and TLS on his server, craphound.com to allow him to communicate with it securely and the same with boingboing
• All his passwords are very long, randomly generated strings; ideally 128 printable characters, all kept on a file separately encrypted on his computer hard drive but nowhere else (apart from a backup). When he needs to enter a password he goes to that file and copies and pastes the passwords but doesn't remember them. He has only one password he can remember - to access the encrypted file of passwords
• He has an encrypted hard drive he backs up to at the office and another that he backs up to at home

Things need to be a bit simpler for ordinary people... 

He does believe though we have not reached peak surveillance, we may have reached peak indifference to surveillance. So people may now start asking for built in privacy features in technology to a degree that will rein in the dominant surveillance business model of the internet and the surveillance state.

Email to MP re Counter Terrorism and Security Bill

The 2nd reading of Counter Terrorism and Security Bill is due in the House of Commons tomorrow.

Prompted by the Open Rights Group I've written to my MP, Nicola Blackwood, about it. Copy of my email below. Some of ORG's concerns are outlined in their briefing on the Bill.

Dear Nicola,

The latest government proposal, the Counter Terrorism and Security Bill, gives me cause for significant concern.

The ill-judged Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Act was, as you know, rushed through as emergency legislation without proper parliamentary scrutiny in the summer, the week before MPs went on holiday.  The use of the murder of Fusilier Lee Rigby as an excuse for introducing these new measures, expanding DRIPA and the further expansion of additional surveillance powers, is unconscionable.

With an election round the corner, we should hardly be surprised that party managers might be encouraging senior figures to ramp up their “tough on terrorism” rhetoric. However, Lee Rigby, who dedicated his life to defending the freedoms we enjoy in the UK, deserves better from our political leaders.

The UK survived two world wars, the cold war, multiple other military adventures and domestic bombing and violence orchestrated by groups like the IRA. Yet in the face of small numbers of violent religious extremists, successive UK governments, in the past 15 years, have normalised mass surveillance and done more damage to the legal infrastructure protecting our fundamental freedoms than any collection of deranged vicious clowns with access to dangerous weapons could do in a lifetime.

The Counter Terrorism and Security Bill is unfortunately building further on that trend.

1.       It introduces an obligation on public bodies including universities, schools, nurseries and councils to prevent terrorism. I've read this section 21 provision of the Bill repeatedly in the hope of making some sense of it. Yet the truth is, as a university educator with an interest in law and technology, I have genuinely no idea of what it is going to mean in practice.

   

2.       It expands the kind of meta-data that ISPs are being required to hold onto to help identify our IP addresses. This fundamentally misses the subtlety that an IP address denotes a device, not a human being.

3.       Mobile Phone companies do not currently log IP addresses because of differences in the technology to mainline broadband providers. They have been told they have to find a way. This will cost the taxpayer £100m over 10 years.

4.       The problems with the Bill are much wider than digital rights concerns. It also includes temporary exclusion orders, banning suspects from Britain for two years, even if they are British citizens.

5.       We are not currently facing a national emergency, so Parliament should not rush through this kind of legislation. We need proper scrutiny by MPs, Peers and civil society.

6.       The European Court of Justice (in the Digital Rights Ireland case this year) ruled that blanket data retention was incompatible with of articles 7, 8 and 52(1) of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the EU. New laws should comply with that judgment. Neither DRIPA nor this proposed new Bill do so.

7.       The ECJ said that there should be a relationship between the data being retained and a threat to public security. However there are no restrictions to time, place or people in this Bill.

8.       DRIPA is even now the subject of a legal challenge, brought by the Open Rights Group and Liberty challenge. It may well be found illegal, while these new provisions are still being paid for.

Could I recommend for your review, the same Open Rights Group's analysis of the proposals in this Bill, available at https://www.openrightsgroup.org/ourwork/reports/briefing-on-counter-terrorism-and-security-bill  

Again you will not be surprised, given our previous correspondence, that I'm of the view that existing mass surveillance activities and powers need reigning in not expansion. Indeed the coalition government came to power on a promise of cracking down of the worst excesses of the previous government's database state. Rather than fulfilling that promise the current government has normalised and expanded these operations and powers. I hope when history comes to be written it will not judge the coalition's performance favourably on that score. Only then will we be sure that fundamental freedoms, under sustained attack by comparatively tiny numbers of terrorists and the bulk of the current, often well-intentioned but scientifically, mathematically and technically illiterate mainstream political classes, have survived intact.

Regards,

Ray

Unconscionable political exploitation of Lee Rigby murder

Copy of my article in The Conversation about the ISC report into Fusilier Rigby's murder below.

The Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) of Parliament has now released its 191-page report into Lee Rigby’s murder. The report concludes that even though the ISC “discovered a number of errors,” the murder could not have been prevented by the intelligence and security services.

Instead, the blame seems to have been put decisively on Facebook, which one of Rigby’s killers apparently used to discuss “killing a soldier” several months prior to the murder. This despite the fact that the security services were apparently well aware of the killers and their motives, independent of their social media presence.

Michael Adebolajo, the controlling mind in the murderous attack on Fusilier Lee Rigby, was first arrested in 2006 at a protest against Danish cartoons he perceived to be insulting to the prophet Muhammad. By the autumn of 2008, he was on MI5’s radar as having potential connections with al-Qaeda and by 2011 was the object of close surveillance.

Between then and April 2013 – when the intensive surveillance of Adebolajo was cancelled since there was “no indication of a national security concern” – he had multiple encounters with police and security services. A month later, Rigby was brutally murdered.

 

Counter-claims

Adebolajo claims MI5 attempted to recruit him as an informant – claims the UK government refuses to comment on, citing national security – and accuses MI6 of tacit complicity in alleged beatings and torture threats he received when detained by Kenyan police in 2010. He had travelled to Kenya with the apparent intention of joining extremists in Somalia.

Adebolajo’s partner in the murder, Michael Adebowale, came to MI5’s attention in August 2011 as a result of his interest in online extremist material and the intelligence services were aware of the two’s close connections. They nevertheless eventually considered Adebowale a low-level threat unworthy of their continuing attention.

By detailing various communications problems between police and security services and between the various branches of the intelligence services themselves and the inferences drawn from knowledge of the activities of Lee Rigby’s attackers, the report does a decent job of illustrating that security and intelligence systems are imperfect.

We can never be 100% secure, because these systems and agencies can and do fail – they fail naturally through human and technical and communications errors and they can be made to fail by actors with malign and, in this case, murderous intent.

What seems odd about the report and the ensuing media frenzy, however, is how Facebook has been framed as the single entity that could have prevented the murder.

Paragraph 17 of the report notes:

We have found only one issue which could have been decisive. This was the exchange – not seen until after the attack – between Adebowale and an individual overseas (FOXTROT) in December 2012. In this exchange, Adebowale told FOXTROT that he intended to murder a soldier. Had MI5 had access to this exchange, their investigation into Adebowale would have become a top priority. It is difficult to speculate on the outcome but there is a significant possibility that MI5 would then have been able to prevent the attack.

Paragraphs QQ to VV of the recommendations and conclusions go into this claim in a little more detail, saying: “Adebowale expressed his desire to murder a soldier “in the most explicit and emotive manner.” It then criticises US big tech companies for their lack of cooperation with government on fighting terrorism.

Happy though I usually might be to criticise Facebook or big tech – if more for their own anti-privacy practices than their lack of co-operation in counter-terrorism – it’s a bit of a stretch to suggest a giant beam of enlightenment would have engulfed the security services if Facebook had only shouted loudly enough, “look at this!”.

They were already aware of extreme views expressed by Adebowale on the net – and even Adebolajo, considered the more dangerous of the pair, was providing no continuing indication of a national security concern.

Brazen

For David Cameron and Theresa May to turn the deranged murder of a young soldier by damaged extremists into a political device for rehashing discredited surveillance proposals is unconscionable. It’s also not supported by the report: two members of the ISC have already criticised the notion that their work supports the further expansion of surveillance powers the government is now proposing.

Of course, with an election round the corner, we should hardly be surprised that party managers might be encouraging senior figures to ramp up their “tough on terrorism” rhetoric. The sad thing is to see how the media has uncritically swallowed the “blame Facebook” mantra hook, line and sinker.

Lee Rigby, who dedicated his life to defending the freedoms we enjoy in the UK, deserves better from our political leaders, from our media outlets and frankly, from all of us.