TOP 100 ENGLAND SITES
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| Child benefit row: David Cameron holds out promise of tax credits for couples Chancellor George Osborne writes to Tory MPs to defend his decision as the Prime Minister offers hope to married couples. telegraph.co.uk |
Could we accept driverless cars? Google engineers have tested a self-driving car. But could motorists ever let go of the wheel and see a machine take over? bbc.co.uk |
Woman fined for cat bin cruelty A woman caught on CCTV putting a cat in a wheelie bin in Coventry is fined £250 after admitting a cruelty charge. bbc.co.uk |
No, we don't 'understand' surveillance reversal | Wendy M Grossman The revival of a surveillance programme by the coalition makes its promises to safeguard personal privacy sound hollow"They were only political promises," says Bernard Woolley, attempting to comfort Jim Hacker in the 1984 Party Games episode of Yes, Minister. "It's like your manifesto promises. People understand."Do we really? Do we really "understand" all that calmly why a £2bn interception modernisation programme is to be revived? This is the plan to store all the nation's telecommunications traffic data in a sort of giant shed where it can be sifted, mined and surveilled by law enforcement.Here's the money quote from the government's strategic defence and security review:"… introduce a programme to preserve the ability of the security, intelligence and law enforcement agencies to obtain communication data and to intercept communications within the appropriate legal framework. This programme is required to keep up with changing technology and to maintain capabilities that are vital to the work these agencies do to protect the public."The next paragraph nods to being "compatible with the government's approach to information storage and civil liberties". To be sure.There are three categories of objection to IMP: technical, civil libertarian and financial. The first is simple: when you create a giant database on a national scale you create a single point of vulnerability. At the same moment that both UK and US top-level security people are warning of the escalation of organised cyberattacks and the need to build more resilient infrastructures, the review proposes the opposite.The technical and civil liberties objections have been carefully and thoroughly laid out by, among others, the distinguished American scientists Whitfield Diffie and Susan Landau in their book Privacy on the Line: The Politics of Wiretapping and Encryption, which documents the concomitant growth of surveillance and telecommunications. What IMP (and the also-proposed installation of deep packet inspection equipment at ISPs) enables is not just wiretapping but very specifically warrantless wiretapping.These points have been made over and over again, not least by the security engineer Ross Anderson, who's had a lot to say about this latest revival.It's the financial arguments that should be really exercising people right now. Spending £2bn over 10 years on IMP (see the LSE's detailed analysis) makes no contribution to social welfare and no investment that might pay off in terms of new jobs and new industries in the future. Is IMP really worth £2bn more than science research, education, public transport, or libraries? Suppose instead the money were spent on researching and building more decentralised structures that would be harder to attack. Wouldn't that be a better idea than enabling surveillance that 99% of the time will be directed at the innocent, creating huge amounts of useless data that will have to be sifted through to get at anything that will be useful in terms of intelligence?I know Nick Clegg knows better; only last March he spoke forcefully at the 20th birthday party for Privacy International about the importance of safeguarding personal privacy. But the Conservatives, too, were elected on the promise of turning back surveillance.Do we "understand" this reversal? Not so much.SurveillancePrivacyWendy M Grossmanguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Tributes paid to Mourne victims Friends and business associates have been paying tribute to the three men who died in the Mourne Mountains helicopter crash at the weekend. bbc.co.uk |