It’s not just state gathering of data that worries people, of course. Many people object to the hoovering up and monetisation of data posted on public and private networks by the many private web companies whose services so many of us now use.

The right to privacy and the right to free expression often go hand in hand. Surveillance is bound to curtail what we say, and enable what we say to be used against us.

In Stockholm last week, Google brought together experts from politics, business, policing and civil liberties to discuss the complex intermingling of free speech, security and surveillance online.

Hosted in a former church overlooking Stockholm Harbour, the latest “Big Tent” event was kicked off with a discussion between Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt and Google’s Global Head of Free Expression Ross Lajeunesse.

Bildt raised a laugh while voicing confusion over the safety of “cloud computing”, asking “Where is the bloody cloud?”

But Lajeunesse insisted that cloud computing is the best way to guarantee safety from hacking and theft, adding that Google’s gmail is encrypted in an effort to protect users from surveillance.

Discussing China’s method’s of web censorship and surveillance (Read Index’s China correspondent here), Bildt put forward the interesting proposition that the authorities use of “50 cent party” a network of thousands of civilians paid to post pro government content in web conversations, was perhaps a sign the authorities had admitted that censorship had failed, as the government seemed to have conceded that you know had to argue your case rather than censor others.

Lajeunesse was hopeful for Chinese web users, simply saying that 700 milllion people who want access to information cannot be held back.

The reasoning behind state surveillance was discussed in a later panel. After Francesca Bosco, of the United Nations Interregional Crime and Justice Research Institute gave a frankly terrifying account of cyber crime and web security (in brief, there’s a lot of crime and no real security), Brian Donald of Europol discussed the need for surveillance, citing examples of tracking people engaged in the trade of images of child sexual abuse. He countered fears of dragnet surveillance expressed by Eva Galperin of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Jacob Mchangama of Danish civil liberties group CEPOS, saying that he was in fact limited in his powers to fight crime by European data protection laws.

Galperin and Mchangama both also expressed concern over the policing and surveillance of not just of crime, but of speech online (a subject of considerable debate in the UK).

It seems like the back-and-forth on these issues will not be resolved any time soon. Security, surveillance and free speech have always been intertwined. But mass use of the web, as our lives move online, makes the debate on achieving a balance all the more urgent.

The post Surveillance, security and censorship appeared first on Index on Censorship.

There has been some slightly offputting hyperbole about the software’s potential ability to “predict crime”, with frequent mentions of the Philip K Dick story and later Tom Cruise film Minority Report, in which psychics are used to predict potential crime, allowing police to arrest people before any damage is done.

This is largely down to the Raytheon representative’s boast in the promotional video obtained by the Guardian that RIOT can predict where people will be, based on previous behaviour.

When one looks at what he actually says and demonstrates, it’s seems to me that the programme can not really predict anything. It can identify patterns, from which users can make assumptions.

The example used in the video is that by far the most frequent time and place for the surveillance subject (a Raytheon employee) to “check in” on FourSquare is 6am at the gym. From here, a human user can reasonably assume that the subject will be at his gym at 6am most days. Not quite seeing into the future then.

And not exactly revolutionary, but merely a way of presenting data that users themselves have already volunteered into the public sphere.

Nonetheless, this technology is disquieting. More and more of our lives are recorded, day-to-day, online and publicly. Technology such as RIOT shows how easy it is to build up a very detailed picture of someone’s life, movements, interests etc. All this freely available data could have huge implications for users in the present and the future.

The UK government is currently in the process of redrafting the Communications Data Bill, which faced heavy criticism (not least from Index) for its far-reaching provisions which would force communications companies to retain data, and allow government agencies to track vast amounts of users traffic – not just publicly available social media messages, but emails, text messages phone calls and even letters. Should such a bill eventually go through with similar powers, it’s likely that other countries will follow suit.

Of course, some states are ahead of the game: yesterday it was reported that journalists working in Burma had received warnings from Google of potential email security breaches. Though the Burmese authorities have denied being behind the hacking, suspicions remain.

Surveillance inevitably has an effect on free expression, as people will not speak freely if they fear they are permanently watched and recorded. But we live in an age where tracking has become so easy, and so cheap, that without a principled stand against it, surveillance will become the norm.

Padraig Reidy is senior writer at Index on Censorship. He tweets at @mePadraigReidy

The post “RIOT” and the problems of life online appeared first on Index on Censorship.

This year’s Internet Governance Forum, to be held in Azerbaijan from 6-9 November, comes at a key moment in the battle between those who want to keep the internet free and those who do not.

The United Nations’s flagship forum for discussing internet governance, the IGF will be a primer for the crucial World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT) taking place a month later in Dubai. WCIT could fundamentally alter the structure and global reach of the internet as some countries seek to wrench control of the net away from the United States and centralise it through new UN controls.

Exactly how the internet should be governed as it continues to grow is contentious. The current multi-stakeholder, bottom-up model of internet governance is not without its problems: A large part of the world’s population feels excluded from internet policy making.

The internet is facing multiple threats: Censorship enacted by states and corporations through filters, firewalls and takedown requests. As private companies expand internationally they face the challenge of respecting both fundamental human rights and the law of the land, as demonstrated Twitter’s recent decision to block the account of a German far-right group. Such companies also play a leading role in delineating the boundaries of “acceptable” speech through their own terms of service and policies.

The thorny issues do not stop there: Mass monitoring and surveillance of citizens’ use of digital communications endanger fundamental human rights, and Western companies’ role in exporting surveillance technology to authoritarian states continues apace. And both democratic and authoritarian states are ever more willing to criminalise speech online — be it tweets by activists in Bahrain or offensive jokes posted on Facebook in the UK.

Index sets out these challenges in its policy paper below. We will be in Baku for the IGF; our head of advocacy Mike Harris will be chairing a debate on censorship enacted by private companies, and our CEO Kirsty Hughes will be taking part in a panel on security and privacy. To follow the forum on Twitter, use the hashtag #IGF12.

Policy Note:  The Growing Threats to Digital Freedom 

Marta Cooper is editorial researcher at Index. Follow her on Twitter @martaruco

The post Index tells policy makers to keep the internet free appeared first on Index on Censorship.

BRUSSELS, 01/11/2012 (INDEX). She has been described as Europe’s “most wired politician” and is one of the few MEPs who really understands the internet. As the rapporteur leading on the European Parliament’s report and proposal that there should be an EU strategy on digital freedom in foreign policy, published earlier this year (and currently being amended by MEPs), Marietje Schaake is blazing a trail in pushing for technology and human rights to be mainstreamed in EU external action.

A member of the Dutch social liberal party D66, Schaake has been a member of the European Parliament since 2009, and sits on the European Council on Foreign Relations and the Board of Governors of the European Internet Foundation. She also serves as vice-chair of the Supervisory Board of Free Press Unlimited, and was last month appointed to lead a report on press and media freedom worldwide, due in early 2013.

Index met Schaake in Brussels to discuss what the European Parliament is doing — and should be doing — to defend online freedoms and how the internet can stay open in an age of multiple threats.

INDEX: What would you say are the greatest threats to digital freedom of expression in Europe today?

MARIETJE SCHAAKE: There are a number of threats. Roughly speaking, governments have a hard time acknowledging and reconciling the empowerment of individuals. The monopoly of power and information that is eroding (…) I think that’s exciting and to some extent being redistributed to individuals. Power structures that were once hierarchical are more horizontal.

This offers great opportunities, but there are governments who, especially when they feel like they’re facing a crisis, want to reclaim control; they want to ban certain functions such as instant messaging or the use of technology in certain areas, such as in the UK after the riots. But I think there’s a lack of understanding that what we do here has an impact on our credibility abroad.

For example, the European legal standard is that technologies needs to have lawful interception and capacity for police and law enforcement. In Europe in principle this is bound by strict rules. But if this technology is used in a different context where there is no rule of law, then it means the technological backdoor is permanently open. In a country such as Iran, mobile and internet communications are intercepted systematically and then used to track and trace dissidents and human rights defenders.

Another trend I see is the increased power of corporations, a lack of democratic oversight and checks and balances of the responsibilities that they take and are sometimes pushed to take in regulating the online environment.

INDEX: With this pushback from corporations, what should the role of democratic governments be to ensure that, while the internet can innovate and advance, fundamental freedoms are not encroached upon?

MS: We should make sure technology is included in human rights laws, making sure that these laws apply in different contexts. The same goes for competition laws or net neutrality laws. Technologies are developing so quickly and policy making is lagging behind; this is partially a result of democracy, the belief that there should be many voices giving input, we see consensus and these things take time. But I do think it’s important that we ensure the application of laws considers the changing environment. This is now mainly fought out in courts.

We have to make sure that we make and adapt policies to be relevant to today’s age. I would say people come first, not corporate interests or technology itself. There is a tendency to focus on the specific technology, for example, we’re still talking about whether downloading from a legal source should be legal or illegal, but world is now streaming — it’s moving on. The world has already moved on.

While technologies develop rapidly, policy making is slow. Therefore putting the rights of the people at the heart of the decisions, policy is more relevant. There is a tendency by the movie and music industry to push for outsourcing of monitoring illegal downloading by internet service providers (ISPs). This would be an undesirable move; we have a separation of powers for a reason. Without appropriate understanding of what this proposal implies, it is difficult to ensure people’s fundamental rights are protected.

INDEX: And net neutrality? What are the threats here to the openness of the internet?

MS: I think net neutrality should be guaranteed. The real risk is a race to the bottom where business models push out certain non-commercial actors, where public value of information and public value of access to it is under-estimated. That information becomes merely a commodity for businesses to make money on, and we don’t appreciate the consequences of that.

Have you heard of the filter bubble? Eli Pariser [co-founder of Avaaz] has written about the impact of search engines but also about filtering information, not only by search engines but also by social media, whereby we try the same term but get different results because search engines know your profile and that, for instance, you prefer information about conservative politics and I prefer information about sports. And that way you could say that people who are always reading right-wing news will perpetually be presented with more similar links. People are seeing more and more of what they already believe, so it’s like a self-fulfilling prophecy. The impact of these algorithms and increased use of search engines has not been investigated very thoroughly yet.

We must also keep the public value of information in mind. If information is systematically ranked differently, and if people are drawn into their own perspectives systematically, structurally and perpetually, what does that mean? We must understand much more how business models may alter the public value of information and how technologies are designed often to optimise profits for shareholders, but are not designed to optimise human rights or democracy. I would like to go back to a place where we focused much more on ensuring fundamental democratic principles of people’s universal human rights and that we continue to test whether new environments actually ensure that sufficiently.

INDEX: How feasible is a model where human rights are protected?

MS: Well, there’s a lot of updating of rules that I do think one of the key things I’m working on is to stop digital arms being exported from the EU to countries where there are known or systematic human rights violations. [Update 01/11: it was announced on 23 October that the European Parliament has endorsed stricter European export controls of digital arms]. It is a disgrace that this is still going on, I think it undermines the EU’s credibility. Everyone in the public that I’ve talked to about this believes it’s outrageous. There is a technology gap; a lot of people are not aware that the technology they’re using for recording and making [content], these are companies whose names we don’t know, they have a consumer base, they sell to third country governments, law enforcement agencies, police. They are a different kind of company than Google or Twitter or Facebook that a lot of people feel a personal relationship to because they use their services. So I think updating export regulations is feasible.

The discussion on net neutrality is becoming more eminent. In the Netherlands we have net neutrality laws, I’m very happy about that. I think there will be a push for more protection of human rights because it will also come from the market, so it won’t only be governments that have to take their primary responsibilities vis a vis the public and corporations, but it will also be a choice for people to seek different products where they feel like their rights are better protected. I am sure there will be more of those being developed, I think we’re in a transition period where people are only beginning to understand the deep impact of technology.

Marietje Schaake. Photo by Sebastiaan ter Burg on Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0)

INDEX: So how do we educate people about security and privacy online while ensuring their freedoms are protected? 

MS: Security and freedom are an integral part of each other in the context of the rule of law. Educating people is really important so they can make better choices and are aware of the big picture. A lot of people now think that services are free, but there’s no such thing as a free lunch — there’s always a revenue to be made. So making people understand how it happens I think is important.

And again, look at context within which technology may be used but at earlier stage. I’m in favour of doing human rights impact assessment at a research and development phase so that before something is widespread and everybody is using it we can actually stop and think and see what kind of impact it might have. People have warned us for years but we see it happening now, that over-the counter commercial security IT software is used against human rights defenders in third world countries. Malware, weaknesses in common systems like Microsoft are used to take over people’s computers. It’s becoming cheaper, more readily available and more widespread, and it turns against the interests of countries they were produced from and exported from. I wish there had been more consideration of the potential impact down the line of these sorts of surveillance technologies. We should learn as we go and realise that what we sell can also be used against us. The political urgency can be increased by understanding that it’s not just happening in a foreign land, that it will have an impact closer to home.

INDEX: In the UK, we’re looking at the draft “Comms Data Bill” [which will effectively create a giant database of every UK citizen’s web and text activities]…

MS: Oh my God.

INDEX: … so how can the UK defend digital freedom while bringing into play something as restrictive or undemocratic as this?

MS: Some people also need to remind the politicians responsible that such restrictive proposals immediately hurt their credibility on the global stage. William Hague gave a huge speech about the importance of freedom and security [at the Budapest Conference on Cyberspace earlier this month]. Okay, fine, but practise what you preach! I really don’t understand whether he [Hague] realises how contradictory his own words are. So, defenders of human rights, digital freedom activists, civil rights organisations, consumer rights organisations etc can come together and start and pushing back against these kinds of excessive measures. It shows how eager governments are to retain control.

INDEX: Is this an area where the European Parliament could provide some pushback?

MS: It will certainly have to be tested against European rules to see whether it is allowed. That would be an area for internal European policies, and my focus is mostly on the rest of the world.

I hope that the UK government and those responsible for these sorts of proposals realise their credibility in the world is directly undermined. When proposals were made to ban instant messaging or to even shut down certain functions [after the UK riots], there were responses from Iran and China saying “need help?” That’s not a joke, the world is really focused on what we do, it’s not only about being credible but about impacts that can backfire.

INDEX: There’s a very strong argument that if the EU — or any Western government body — is to defend digital freedom abroad it has to get its house in order first. What would you say are the first things the EU Parliament can do to achieve that?

MS: There’s a real confusion about key elements of democracy, like separation of powers. You can’t just have private companies engaging in law enforcement tasks. There are core values like the presumption of innocence, and then there are core human rights such as freedom of expression, freedom of assembly, freedom of the press. These are all at stake when we look at the way in which, for example, intellectual property rights are being enforced.

I would hope there are lessons that are being drawn in the EU from measures against terrorism which initially were justified on the basis of saying “no one wants the worst of the worst crimes”. The same happens here; no-one wants terrorism or child pornography or cybercrime. The question is does it justify the measures proposed and are these measures proportionate? In law this is a very important concept, proportionality. I think that a lot of the measures proposed are not proportionate. There have to be checks in a court of law instead of at a policy level. What we can do is check against existing EU regulations to see if they are in line or not, but otherwise this should be tested before court.

The internet and technologies have changed a lot, but not people’s universal human rights. We do not need many new laws, nor should we over-regulate the internet. However, human rights and competition laws should apply equally online and offline. Technologies should be integrated and mainstreamed.

But I’d also urge political leaders to be leaders and not take some kind of panicked knee-jerk reactions to things they can’t control. The consequences can be disastrous.

Marta Cooper is an editorial researcher at Index. She tweets at @martaruco

The post INDEX Q&A: Talking to Europe’s most wired politician appeared first on Index on Censorship.

The more we live our lives online, the greater the temptation for governments and private companies to spy on us. Padraig Reidy highlights the dark side of our increasing dependence on digital communications

While the internet offers opportunities for mass communication and social interaction unprecedented in human history, the chances for governments to monitor and control how we communicate are also ample

The simplest way to control usage is to block sites. This is widespread practice, in democracies this technique is often used to block child pornography.  However, more authoritarian regimes will block sites carrying sensitive political content, and increasingly, sites will be blocked to prevent religiously “offensive” material from being viewed. YouTube remains inaccessible in Pakistan, having been blocked in September after it failed to remove the controversial anti-Islam film, The Innocence of Muslims. In Turkey, the site was blocked in its entirety between 2007 and 2010 to prevent the viewing of “sensitive material”. The Russian government recently pushed through a bill that will allow websites classified as “extremist” (often a catch-all term in Russia) to be blacklisted without judicial oversight. The amendments, reportedly in place to “protect minors from all ‘dangerous content’”, will take effect on 1 November.

The Great Firewall of China

Perhaps the most infamous example of web policing is the complex system broadly known as the Great Firewall of China. China will not only block sites, but also search terms (such as “Tiananmen”). But the Chinese model goes far beyond algorithms blocking an established set of forbidden terms. Thousands are employed to monitor social media, immediately pouncing on sensitive terms and stories which could expose the governing class to scorn or ridicule. When a (true) rumour of a party official’s relation crashing a Ferrari sports car spread on the web, the term “Ferrari” was banned from searches on Weibo, China’s internal equivalent of Twitter. Many more are employed to intervene in message boards and discussion groups, monitoring threads and steering any displaying signs of dissent back to a more pro-regime view.

China’s cartoon police officers, Jingjing and Chacha, who appear when users attempt to visit censored sites

China has even gone so far as to introduce cartoon police officers which appear on web portals, reminding users of internet laws.

The national intranet is the ultimate web blocking tool. The Islamic Republic of Iran claims to be building a “halal internet” which would limit content to topics and terms deemed acceptable by the regime in Tehran. Meanwhile, users in cybercafés are obliged to provide ID before logging on to a computer, thereby making it easier for authorities to later track the online activities of individuals. In Belarus, commercial websites are forced to register domestically, with a .by domain name. This not only restricts commerce, but severely impairs the functioning of the “world” wide web.

Data retention & preservation

But it is not only authoritarian regimes that police the web. In the UK, the government is currently attempting to push through the Communications Data Bill, which would oblige internet service providers (ISPs) to hold information on users web and email usage for 12 months. ISPs would then have to hand over information to government agencies on request, highlighting the huge potential for the surveillance that is a by-product of our increasing dependence on digital communications.

This dependence can provide governments with apparently easy solutions to dissent. In Cuba, for example, online connections are deliberately kept slow, making communication with the outside world, even via proxies, frustrating.  At the height of the protests against Hosni Mubarak in Egypt in 2011, authorities even tried turning off the internet entirely, costing the country millions, but only temporarily hindering the progress of the uprising that eventually toppled the president.

Living our lives in public

Our increasing tendency to live our lives online, particularly via social networks, provides easy ways for authorities to pursue people. In the wake of the Iranian “green revolution” in 2009, many who had used Twitter to mobilise and share information were rounded up by the authorities. In the democratic world, the UK has seen prosecutions for public order and “menacing communications” after postings on Facebook and Twitter. Several young people were arrested for incitement after posting about the riots of 2011 on Facebook, and Prime Minister David Cameron even suggested shutting down social networks during the disturbances.

Much of what causes governments to seek to control the web are old, familiar themes: dissent, blasphemy etc. Some, such as the controversies over copyright and online “trolling”, have emerged because of the technology. But whatever the issue — new or traditional — the web is now the battleground in the 21st century fight against censorship.

Padraig Reidy is News Editor at Index on Censorship

The post Policing the internet appeared first on Index on Censorship.

Conservative MP Dominic Raab talks to Mike Harris about civil liberties, free speech and how he “wouldn’t lose any sleep” if the UK’s communications data bill were canned

This is the first of a new Index Interviews series

LONDON, 16/10/2012 (INDEX). Dominic Raab’s father fled Czechoslovakia just before the Second World War. The Conservative politician cites the fall of the Berlin Wall as one of his biggest political influences and Soviet dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn as the writer whose life he most admires. In many ways, his style is from another generation of politicians; he shoots from the hip describing Vladimir Putin as “a very Machiavellian, ruthless politician”, he is unaccompanied by an aide, and, rarer still, he doesn’t check his BlackBerry every five minutes.

Index is meeting Raab in a side room off Portcullis House, Parliament’s new office block for members of Parliament (MPs) and their staff. On the agenda are free speech issues both in the UK and abroad — from the Leveson Inquiry to the Kremlin’s suppression of Russian NGOs.

Offence and self-censorship

Let’s start with an easy question: Does he believe the culture of offence has got worse? He does.

“There is certainly much more legal restriction on what you can say. We’ve seen it with the incitement to religious hatred debate,” he says, “the glorification of terrorism debate and the ASBOs (Antisocial Behaviour Orders) that originated under the last government.” His concern is that these limitations are making society less open: “We’re narrowing the space where free speech and open debate takes place.

Raab defends preacher Philip Howard, who was banned from street preaching by Westminster Council in 2006:

I used to walk past him on Oxford Street with his microphone. The eccentricities of British life thrive on there being an open space where free expression can take place, and I don’t think most people thought he was such a nuisance that he ought to have been banned from preaching. We’re seeing the salami slicing of free speech.

The law I draw is the very clear one that John Stuart Mill drew, that you shouldn’t be saying things which incite violence or disorder, or cause tangible concrete harm to other people. Mere offence or insults don’t satisfy that test.

Raab is clear he thinks the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) has over-prosecuted free speech cases in the past citing the Paul Chambers Twitter joke trial case: “Aside from the free speech issue, what a waste of money!”

Paul Chambers, who was found guilty of sending a menacing tweet, last July won his high court challenge against his conviction. He had tweeted in frustration when he discovered that Robin Hood airport in South Yorkshire was closed because of snow. Eager to see his girlfriend, he sent out a tweet on the publicly accessible site declaring: “Crap! Robin Hood airport is closed. You’ve got a week and a bit to get your shit together otherwise I’m blowing the airport sky high!!”

On Chambers he adds the firm he worked for was “gutless” for firing him during the CPS prosecution.

Thinking about the Innocence of Muslims controversy, I ask Raab if he thinks there’s a propensity to self-censor on controversial topics. He agrees:

I think politicians are very cautious that anything they say can be skewed or taken out of context. With excessive political correctness we’ve become ever more cautious as a class. On the other hand, there are areas where you have to be responsible in addressing them.

Of course it’s easy to see why MPs may wish to keep their heads down. The news cycle is quicker than ever. An off-the-cuff comment by a politician will trend on Twitter and be picked up by rolling 24 hour news channels desperate to fill their schedules within minutes. Is this super-fast news cycle making politicians self-censor?

“Well, it’s obviously not having an impact on the (Mitt) Romney campaign…” During the campaign, US Republican candidate Romney said his job was “not to worry about those people”, referring to the 47 per cent of people who don’t pay income taxes.

He switches to serious: “The point at which we down tools and stop speaking up for what we believe in there’s no point in being a politician.”

He relates back to his election in 2010, in the aftermath of the MPs’ expenses scandal:

If you look back at the 2010 election, and I think this is true of all politicians, the thing many of us realise most of all is how low the political class were and the fog of mistrust that hung in the air in the aftermath of the expenses scandal. There’s a deeper malaise, a feeling that politicians are colluding in the system and they don’t really stand up for what they believe in they just say what they’re supposed to. That is very dangerous. It is not just a question of political correctness … but a question of public trust in their elected representatives to stand up and have a conviction even if it is uncomfortable.

The expenses scandal was triggered by the leak and subsequent publication by the Telegraph Media Group in 2009 of expense claims made by MPs over several years. Public outrage was caused by disclosure of widespread actual and alleged misuse of the permitted allowances claimed, following failed attempts by parliament to prevent disclosure under Freedom of Information legislation.

It’s an interesting proposition: self-censorship is undermining trust in MPs. It’s certainly a cultural commonplace from The Thick of It to Yes Minister that MPs are unthinking automatons who blindly follow the orders of their special advisors, civil servants or media handlers. Raab thinks this self-censorship is ultimately self-defeating: “Whilst there is huge pressure on MPs in a way there wasn’t before because of social media and the 24 hour news cycle, there is also a huge repository of good will for those who are not deterred by the chilling effect of the professional pessimists in the media. The bottom line is that MPs and elected representatives ought to have a little more backbone and not give in to the online lynch mob.”

On Leveson

The Leveson Inquiry hangs over the British media. Raab points out that the IPSOS Mori Trust in Professionals Poll for years put trust in journalists below politicians: “The public know they’re not getting an honest account from the media”.

That was until the MPs’ expenses scandal.

Now, he views Leveson as an opportunity to help clean up the media. “There are two acid tests for Leveson. Will any proposals deal with the trigger for Leveson, which were the phone-hacking (that was already a criminal offence), and the reports of newspapers bribing police officers? These are the two things that concern me and I think the public care about the most.”

But, he adds: “Whether we need new legislation for this is a different question.”

On statutory regulation versus self-regulation, Raab is clear: “I am a free speech guy. I will be very reticent to move to a system that ends up having a chilling effect on free speech or media debate. There’s a real risk that we get proposals that do the latter, but don’t address the former. But let’s see.”

Communications Data Bill: Fight against criminals or a snooper’s charter?

One of the themes of Raab’s book The Assault on Liberty is decent people entering politics with the right intentions and being got at by the machine of government. In the book, Raab names former National Council for Civil Liberties General Secretary Patricia Hewitt and legal advisor Harriet Harman as two advocates of civil liberties that went on to embrace illiberal laws.

The parallel with the current Conservative-Liberal Democrat government is obvious with the coalition’s earlier commitment to “end the storage of internet and email records without good reason”, followed promptly by the government’s publication of the Communications Data Bill that will do exactly the opposite.

Raab adds: “I think there’s a few things at play. First, your view when faced by briefings on national security will change even if it’s only a shift … The second thing is something we’ve got to get much better at: pushing back at some of the lazy assumptions we’re fed by the security establishment. I mean, you think of the arguments made in favour of 90 days and 42 days detention! I haven’t heard anyone since suggest there is a serious national security issue or counter-terrorism issue.”

On 12 October 2008, the Government finally dropped the controversial plans to allow terror suspects to be held for 42 days without charge after they were rejected by the House of Lords.

“You think of the scaremongering over ID cards and the assertions made by people in the police and plenty in the security establishment … on the risks of not going down that line of regulation, and does anyone seriously think at the end of that debate that ID cards would have made us safer?”

“Ministers have got to be a lot more demanding of the official advice they get and much more probing of it,” he adds.

In some rare Tory praise for their Liberal Democrat partners he adds:

I think coalition probably helps that, but I would say that the new surveillance proposals are exactly the sort that need to be looked at, scrutinised and tested both on the privacy side, the technological viability side, but also some of the wild assertions about the law enforcement value that have been made. I’m certainly not convinced that these proposals are worth the sacrifice of privacy in terms of the law enforcement bang for your buck you’re going to get.

In opposition, the Conservatives said the controversial Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 (RIPA) went too far, but the Data Communications Bill will go even further. Raab retorts:

In fairness, there have been new checks placed on town hall snooping. Nonetheless, I think if we allowed the latest set of proposals to come through with plans for mass surveillance of every phone call, internet based message, email that we make, Skype and all the rest along with very sobering proposals for data mining and deep packet inspection … I think that would mark a ‘step change’ in the relationship between the citizen and the state. I would be very nervous about crossing that Rubicon unless I am absolutely convinced that it is imperative on the highest security and public safety grounds, and I don’t think that case has yet been made.

He draws a distinction between the Bill and RIPA, acknowledging that it does go further:

The safeguard in (RIPA) is the human manpower needed to sift through all of our personal data is ludicrously high and therefore, whilst there is a principled objection, the reality is, even with 10,000 requests a week for personal data, the impact on privacy is fairly confined. But if you add on the proposals in part two of the Data Communications Act for filtering arrangements and data mining and attempt to draw inference and patterns and trends from lots of our personal information and make judgements or assumptions or pre-judgements, about every innocent citizen as well as the guilty ones, I think that is a real sobering development well beyond qualitatively anything we’ve seen until this point.

I also think there are ways in which the Bill can be salvaged. [But] I wouldn’t lose any sleep if it was canned. We could do much more with the estimated £2 billion worth of money.

He hedges his bet: “If we are going to stick with it, it needs to be focused on terrorism and serious crime, limit very strictly who can have access to the data and I think we need a judicial warrantry system rather than these implicit plans for data mining and other surreptitious techniques which effectively reverse the normal presumption of innocence that we have in Britain.”

There has been a democratic urge towards measures that promote personal safety above individual liberty. In The Assault On Liberty, Raab points to the proliferation of closed-circuit television (CCTV), but it was often democratically elected councillors who introduced security cameras in response to public fears. As Index has pointed out, as the cost of surveillance equipment is dropping more governments are considering implementing it.

Raab questions the cost estimates provided by governments for such projects: “I remember with ID cards the original estimate of how much they would cost ballooned when it was looked at independently. I think the best thing that can be said about this is that the public have become increasingly sceptical the more they have seen fairly draconian proposals that haven’t on due scrutiny, whether parliamentary scrutiny or public scrutiny or seeing the operational practice, haven’t actually delivered on their law enforcement goals.”

He’s also optimistic that the public is increasingly sceptical over politicians’ claims over national security:

“There has certainly been a huge amount of populist pandering and scaremongering in the wake of 7/7 and 9/11. I think the public have wised up to this and I also think they listen to the point of principle and the arguments against in perhaps a way they didn’t in the early 2000s.”

It’s this public scepticism and the longer parliamentary scrutiny the Bill will receive that he believes will neuter the most illiberal measures in the draft Communications Data Bill, says Raab.

“There’s a long time frame because of the pre-legislative scrutiny,” he adds, “and then we’ll have the Bill scrutiny … and I think that it will be a similar debate to the one we saw over ID cards which is there will be analysis over the point of principle and on privacy, and then there will be all the technical geeks will come out and scrutinise very carefully the viability. Then there will be quite a few independently minded law enforcement people like former ACPO president Sir Chris Fox saying this will not deal with top-end criminals and terrorists because they are smart enough to avoid this very obvious route of surveillance whether it’s with pay as you go phones, proxy servers, and all the rest.”

Open debate is key to scaling back the Bill. “Time allows for scrutiny which tends to puncture the myths and once the public turn against proposals like this there is no getting them back though actually I think in the long run we end up in the right place.”

Russia

In a previous interview, Raab highlighted Soviet dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn as the writer he most admires: “When he died last August, I bought a copy of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, his stark account of the denigration of the Russian people, especially peasants, in labour camps. For me, he stands out despite the fact that — or perhaps because — he wasn’t a liberal campaigner siding with the West in the cold war. He was just a straight talker who loved his country, with the moral clarity and courage to puncture communism’s lingering pretence to legitimacy.”

It therefore came as no surprise that Raab is animated when it comes to contemporary Russian politics, describing newly elected Vladimir Putin as “a Machiavellian, ruthless politician, who will do what it takes to cling on to power and he’s also got a smart sense of propaganda.”

Raab believes in highlighting cases such as that of whistleblowing lawyer Sergei Magnitsky. “It’s an astonishing Kafkaesque situation where a guy that exposes the biggest tax fraud in Russian history then gets persecuted for the same crime. It’s very revealing about the nature of Putin’s regime. We need to keep highlighting this.”

He is proud that the House of Commons unanimously backed his resolution calling for a UK version of the US Sergei Magnitsky Bill imposing targeted economic sanctions of those accused of collaborating in the imprisonment and ultimately, the murder of, Magnitsky. It has been slow progress for Raab but he believes “the government has inched in the right direction. The Foreign Office annual Human Rights report says that it will now be standard practice for anyone against whom there is evidence of torture or other similar crimes to be subject to a Visa ban. That was a shift. And we’ve also seen the Home Office send the Magnitsky files that were presented to the US Congressional Committee to their Russian embassy almost as a watch list to look for the 60 suspects if they try to apply for Visas in the UK.”

He believes that if the Magnitsky Bill passes in the US it will encourage the UK to, and significantly, that Foreign Officers Ministers have indicated a Bill to him. He’s clearly passionate about this case and the precedent this action would set. The Magnitsky Bill “is a neat mechanism that we could apply as a foreign policy tool. It’s about us, it’s not just about interfering or extra-territorial jurisdiction, it’s about us saying do we allow people into this country with blood on their hands, to walk up and down the King’s Road to do their shopping, to buy up property with their blood money. It is not just about their crimes it is about the moral approach we take. At the end of the day, it’s on us as Britain and me as a British lawmaker to take some responsibility for that and I don’t want us to be a safe haven for crooks, cronies and people who have committed the most egregious of crimes as in the case of Sergei Magnitsky.”

But is the process is entirely fair? For as flawed as Russia’s legal system is, none of the accused have been tried in an impartial court of law. Raab insists the punishment fits: “We’re not talking about taking their liberty, we’re talking about not letting them travel to the UK and the privilege of being on British soil or buying up British property. My proposal is that there should be an evidential threshold applied before targeted sanctions, with an appeal mechanism.”

Since Vladimir Putin’s re-election as President of Russia, a number of draconian new laws have been rushed through the Duma including the re-criminalisation of libel, a law to restrict civil society access to foreign funding and new restrictions on freedom of association that have been condemned by the OSCE. So what can the international community do? “Ultimately you’ve got to ask yourself what Vladimir Putin fears. I don’t think he fears an adverse ruling from the Strasbourg Court and I don’t think he fears being ticked off in the Council of Europe. What I think he does care about is diplomatic embarrassment, targeted economic sanctions, which is why I support … the Sergei Magnitsky law. Actions that hit him in the pocket are likely to have far greater influence than trying to think that he’s a good soul and all it will take is some time to smooth out a few of those rough edges.”

There’s almost an element of Marxist determinism in Raab’s analysis. “Russian membership of the WTO is a good thing. With trade and a burgeoning middle class history says you’ll see they’ll demand more representation the more economic influence they have. The economic argument is an important one.” As a vocal critic of the implementation of the European Convention on Human Rights, I ask him whether he thinks the Council of Europe has over-extended itself? He’s positive: “One of the pros of the EU and the Council of Europe … has been to sign governments up from previously unsavoury or despotic parts of the world and try and get them to live by the rules of the club … which are broadly speaking Western democratic norms.”

He concludes that the role of external parties may be unhelpful: “The truth is the Russian people need to work this out for themselves. I don’t believe in megaphone diplomacy. We need to be subtle and patient.”

With that, Index’s time is up. As I leave, in the Atrium of Portcullis House a prominent MP comes over to Raab to ask him for lunch. His staunch defence of civil liberties has certainly made himself one of the more notable members of the 2010 parliamentary intake. As with all politicians who claim to defend freedom of expression, the litmus test is not their rhetoric but how they vote on illiberal legislation — that test, luckily, is yet to come in this parliament.

Mike Harris is Head of Advocacy at Index. He tweets at @mjrharris

The post Index Interview: The salami slicing of free speech appeared first on Index on Censorship.

The boom in surveillance technology sales is chilling free speech. We need to wake up to this reality, says Mike Harris

This piece originally appeared on the Independent Blogs

Wide-eyed internet visionaries told us technology would free its users from the iron grip of states, with the internet blind to borders and not respecting the dictats of bureaucrats. Instead technology is making dystopia not just possible, but cheap. Unthinkingly we’re sending our most private data across the internet thinking it a private space. Exploiting this weakness, Western technology companies have spotted a market for surveillance equipment that allows governments to hoover up data — and use it to spy on their citizens. Much of this technology has been exported to authoritarian states, but as we are discovering, if you allow British firms to flout human rights abroad, the rot begins to set in at home.

Gamma Group is run from a non-descript warehouse unit in a commercial park on the edge of Andover. This blandness is a deceit. Gamma sell a product called FinFisher, a piece of software that infects a computer and takes full control of it, allowing Skype calls to be intercepted and every keystroke the user types to be sent across the internet to another computer. The software is so sophisticated human rights groups initially couldn’t even prove it existed.  Now, the University of Toronto Munk School has published research said to show that Bahraini activists have been targeted using FinFisher.

After opening emails with titles like “Torture reports on Nabeel Rajab” (a leading human rights activist now imprisoned) their computers were reportedly infected and their personal data sent to an undisclosed third party. The government of Bahrain denies it was behind the apparent deliberate sabotage. However, opposition activists are now panicked fearing their security has been breached. In response, Gamma Group reportedly said in a 23 July email that it can’t comment on any individual customers and that Gamma complies with the export regulations of the UK, US and Germany. It added that FinFisher is a tool for monitoring criminals and to reduce the risk of abuse of its products the company only sells the product to governments.

Meanwhile in Sweden telecoms giant Teliasonera has, according to a television documentary, sold surveillance equipment to almost the entire roll call of degenerate post-Soviet regimes: Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan and Belarus. In response to the documentary, a spokeswoman for Teliasonera said that “police tap into information from telecom networks to fight crime” and “the rules for how far their authority goes are different from country to country.” When pressed about complicity in human rights violations, she reportedly declined to comment on why security agencies were being given access to telecom buildings in Azerbaijan and Uzbekistan.

One Teliasonera source told news show Uppdrag Granskning: “The Arab Spring prompted the regimes to tighten their surveillance … There’s no limit to how much wiretapping is done, none at all.” Teliasonera’s equipment gives security services the capacity to monitor everything in real time — from the location of mobile phone users, their calls and SMS messages, to their emails and Facebook messages.

As Irina Bogdanova told Index on Censorship, she believes that surveillance equipment was used to locate her brother, former political prisoner Andrei Sannikov, using the signal from his mobile phone. Sannikov, a presidential candidate in 2010’s rigged elections, was stopped whilst hidden in the back of a vehicle travelling across Minsk. During his trial recordings of his private phone calls were played to the court. In a rigged legal system, the KGB didn’t need to do this, but it was a clear signal to other opposition figures that the state is watching their every move.

I can vouch for the effectiveness of surveillance in distilling fear. I flew into Belarus the day Oleg Bebenin, a human rights activist, was found dead in suspicious circumstances. After making a series of calls to London to tell colleagues I thought Oleg had been murdered, my mobile was cut off whilst I was stood alone in the streets of Minsk. My contacts in Belarus also had their mobile phones disconnected.

The British government has the powers under the Export Control Act 2002 to stop the export of any equipment that can be used to breach human rights, but with many surveillance products it has seemingly chosen not to do so. The situation is so grave that Privacy International is preparing to take the government to court to force it to take action. Yet, it isn’t just the use of this technology abroad which is of concern. The debate is moving much closer to home.

In Britain, the government is proposing legislation (the Communications Data Bill) that will grant the Home Secretary the power to blanket retain data on every citizen for an undefined purpose. It won’t require judicial approval — but potentially every text message, every Facebook message, every phone call, every email from everyone in Britain would be stored on behalf of Her Majesty’s Government. If the Bill passes, companies will have to collect data they don’t currently collect and the Home Secretary will be able to ask manufacturers of communications equipment to install hardware such as ‘black boxes’ on their products to make spying easier. This proposed scale of state surveillance will add the UK to the ranks of countries such as Kazakhstan, China and Iran. This total population monitoring would break the fundamental principle that a judge and court order is required before the state invades the privacy of its citizens by holding their personal data.

Five years ago the mobile phone you carried in your pocket could pin-point you in an urban area with a margin of error of approximately 50 metres; on the latest phones it’s around 2.5 metres. Yet, we still haven’t woken up to the possibility of technology enabling states to monitor individuals on a scale unimaginable to even the wildest of science fiction writers just a generation ago. This surveillance is being used right now in authoritarian regimes to silence opposition, as the market for this technology grows with little interference from Western governments, it will become cheaper. Once it becomes almost priceless for Western governments to monitor all our data, the arguments for allowing private communication could become drowned out by the desire for public order and safety. Then the chill on free speech will be complete.

Mike Harris is head of advocacy at Index. He tweets at @cllr_mikeharris

The post Communications Data Bill: Technology is making dystopia not just possible, but cheap appeared first on Index on Censorship.

With surveillance and security around the Olympics intensifying from country to country, purportedly to prevent terrorism and serious crimes, activists are increasingly concerned about a growing trend: once the Games are finished, authorities rarely cut back on public surveillance. And with the pricey new infrastructure installed for good, individuals’ rights to personal privacy are at risk of being permanently diminished.

London already bears distinction among privacy watchdogs as being one of the most closely surveilled cities in the world, yet routine security practices pale in comparison with the exhaustive measures to be imposed during the 2012 Summer Olympics. Surveillance and security measures were recently described in the UK’s Independent newspaper as the ‘biggest operation since the Second World War’ to be undertaken by UK intelligence agency MI5. Plans call for the installation of a new monitoring and intelligence gathering system, plus the mobilisation of nearly all of MI5’s 3,800 agents. While details of the intelligence-gathering programme remain classified, it appears to be intended for long-term use.

As London beefs up its security infrastructure, meanwhile, Brazil has already begun mapping out a security strategy in anticipation of the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro. The situation there is shaping up to be another cause for concern, particularly because the government seems eager to follow London’s lead – and Rio is also one of the most surveilled cities in democratic countries around the world. According to Agence France Presse (AFP) reporter Javier Tovar, Brazilian security agencies plan to use surveillance drones, tough border controls and IP-based surveillance systems during the 2016 Olympics.

Brazil will also host the World Cup in 2014, run by the international governing body for football, FIFA. For both competitions, most of the events will take place in poor urban suburbs of Brazilian cities, where the homicide rate is among the highest in South America. Because of rising crime rates, the announcement that Brazil will host these high-profile sporting events led to a spike in Brazil’s video surveillance market, according to market analyst firm 6Wresearch. The surveillance measures are largely going unchallenged — there seems to be little public debate or attention focused on these issues or the privacy implications they present.

Brazil’s video surveillance market generated US$124.96 million in 2011 and is expected to reach $362.69 million by 2016, research analysts predicted, with a compounded annual growth rate of nearly 24 per cent from 2011 to 2016. 6Wresearch expects “a shift towards more secured IP-based surveillance systems” since advantages include “low cost, video analytics, remote accessibility and [are] easy to integrate with wireless networks”.

No sooner had Rio been selected for the 2016 Olympic Games than the US government sought to strike a partnership with the Brazilian government on security and information-sharing strategies, according to secret diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks. In December 2009, the US embassy in Brazil sent a cable to the US government entitled, “The future is now”. The message encouraged the US to use the Olympic Games to justify the expansion of its influence over Brazil’s critical infrastructure development and cyber security measures. By highlighting concerns about the possibility of power outages or breakdowns in infrastructure, particularly in the months leading up to the Games, the US government could justify a bid for increased co-operation with Brazil on counterterrorism activities. There were “opportunities for engagement on infrastructure development” and “possibly cyber security”, the cable stated. In a second cable, sent on 24 December 2009, the embassy again emphasised its interest in broadening US objectives in Brazil. “Taking advantage of the Games to work security issues should be a priority, as should co-operation on cybercrime and broader information security,” it read.

In the lengthy diplomatic exchanges between the US embassy in Brazil and the US government, the absence of any reference to the very serious privacy, civil liberties and public accountability implications of widespread surveillance technologies stood out as a glaring omission. The same could be said for current public discourse in Brazil. So far, there has not been any significant criticism of the security and surveillance measures being introduced — in marked contrast to the UK, where privacy campaigners have been active.

Brazil’s safeguards for privacy in the face of such pressure aren’t especially promising. There is a need for an impact assessment to evaluate whether cameras installed to help combat crime in Rio are actually needed and to ensure that these intrusive measures do not become an Olympic Games legacy, especially if there are less intrusive methods of combatting serious crimes. There is no legislation pertaining to the privacy of personal information in Brazil, but a draft bill that, if introduced, would protect the collection, use and disclosure of this information is under consideration. It remains to be seen whether the bill will bypass privacy protections by allowing exemptions — namely, databases created for the sole purposes of public security, national security or law enforcement activities.

It’s too early to say exactly what security and privacy protocols Brazil will keep once the 2016 Summer Olympic Games end, or to what extent the Brazilian government will agree to go along with an agenda carved out by the US. But if history is any guide, there is reason to believe that a surveillance regime ushered in by the Olympics will continue to pose threats to individual privacy well into the future. Privacy advocates, having assessed the range of measures implemented in connection with previous Olympic Games, warn of a “climate of fear and surveillance” that could have a detrimental effect on “democracy, transparency, and international and national human rights law”.

But the proliferation of surveillance technology around the Olympics is hardly new. Greece’s contract with technology company SAIC called for the creation and support of a C4I (command, control, communications, computers and intelligence) system to “allow Greek authorities to collect, analyse, and disseminate information” by leveraging SAIC’s expertise in telecommunications, wireless communications and video surveillance. The technology blends the use of data-mining, data-matching, and profiling capabilities. Those researching this area have referred to the adoption of such security measures as an emergence of a “super-panopticon” and a “marriage of camera, computers and databases”.

One report revealed that Greek law enforcement and intelligence agencies installed more than 1,000 surveillance cameras in Athens in advance of the 2004 Summer Olympics – and then continued to make use of them for policing purposes long after athletes and spectators had packed up and left. While the stated purpose for the continued use of the cameras in Greece was to monitor high-traffic roadways, the report found that they were actually employed to monitor public spaces – including during political demonstrations. This revelation triggered heated exchanges between law enforcement officials and the Greek Data Protection Authority, leading to the resignation of the authority’s head, Dimitris Gourgourakis, and his deputies. At the time, Gourgourakis stated that police use of surveillance cameras ‘directly breached’ privacy regulations. In 2007, the country’s data protection law was amended to exempt surveillance cameras from its privacy provisions.

The use of surveillance cameras in Athens barely registers in comparison with the all-out monitoring campaign Chinese authorities implemented in 2008, when the Olympic Games were held in Beijing. Chinese authorities installed a whopping 200,000 cameras and employed other surveillance measures in an effort to make Beijing secure. And, in a move that drew widespread condemnation, the Chinese government ordered foreign-owned hotels to install internet monitoring equipment to spy on hotel guests.

When it was announced that Vancouver had won the bid for the 2010 Winter Olympic Games, Canadian civil society organisations feared a repeat of the privacy-invading security measures adopted by Greece and China. Privacy advocates called for the government to remain open and transparent about the necessary security and surveillance practices that were planned; they called for a full, independent public assessment of these measures after the Games and sought to prevent “a permanent legacy of increased video surveillance” and other security measures. “It is already clear that the event allowed for new surveillance technologies to gain a foothold in Vancouver that would never otherwise have been accepted,” noted Tamir Israel of the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic.

In the run up to the Games, the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, in conjunction with the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner of British Columbia, issued recommendations to prevent security measures from unduly infringing on individual’s rights. “The duty of governments to provide for the security of citizens must, in democratic societies, be tempered by the values that underpin our way of life,” said Jennifer Stoddart, Privacy Commissioner of Canada. “The right to privacy must be upheld, even during mega-events like the Olympic games, where the threat to security is higher than usual.” At this critical juncture, the agencies seeking to implement security measures in London and Rio would do well to heed her words. Unfortunately, the message did not get through.

Violations of individuals’ privacy can range from the loss of anonymity in public places to the inability to communicate and associate freely with others. The capabilities of Closed Circuit Television (CCTV) have risen dramatically, and due to the technology’s relative affordability, street cameras are now everywhere. Technological advances make it possible for CCTV to perform surveillance tasks similar to electronic wiretapping, intelligence sharing and identification systems that link images not stored on databases with images that have actually been archived. Given the prevalence of this technology and how easy it’s become to identify one unnamed face amidst thousands, individuals who care about anonymity will have a very difficult time protecting their identity in the imminent future.

While it’s important to take security precautions prior to the Olympics, these actions should not result in the implementation of public surveillance without regard for personal privacy. It’s crucial that the public scrutinise the security and privacy measures the Brazilian government is considering. There must be an informed and open debate about privacy and security.

Most importantly, the public has a right to know whether enhanced security measures will be reversed after the games. The true spirit of the Olympics as an opportunity for cultural exchange ought to be preserved. Using the Games as an excuse for trampling civil liberties violates this spirit.

Katitza Rodriguez is international rights director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). She tweets at @txitua. Rebecca Bowe is international privacy coordinator at EFF. She tweets at @ByRebeccaBowe.

More London 2012:

- Locog: The ultimate bad sport

- What?!? Now we’re not even allowed to link to the Olympics website?

- Olympic organisers shut down “Space hijackers” protest Twitter account

- In a league of its own

Plus read more on Sport v human rights in Index on Censorship magazine’s Sports issue

The post London 2012: Spy games appeared first on Index on Censorship.

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Dynamics of digital freedom

On 20 June, we hosted a conference with the Global Network Initiative (GNI), where we explored issues of surveillance, security, and freedom of expression. The two panels were heated, and brought up interesting questions around how our data is used. Check out the conversation below:

Storified by Index on Censorship · Thu, Jun 28 2012 03:55:40

The post Dynamics of digital freedom appeared first on Index on Censorship.

This shift has profound implications for the UK, the US and any country that claims to be committed to rule of law and the protection of fundamental freedoms.

This isn’t the first time that an Executive has seized the general authority to search through the private communications and papers without individualized suspicion. To the contrary, the United States was founded in large part on the rejection of “general warrants” – papers that gave the Executive (then the King) unchecked power to search colonial Americans without cause. The Fourth Amendment was adopted in part to stop these “hated writs” and to make sure that searches of the papers of Americans required a probable cause showing to a court. Indeed, John Adams noted that “the child Independence was born,” when Boston merchants unsuccessfully sued to stop these unchecked powers, then being used by British customs inspectors seeking to stamp out smuggling.

The current warrantless surveillance programs on both sides of the Atlantic return us to the policies of King George III only with a digital boost. In both, our daily digital “papers” — including intimate information such as who we are communicating with, what websites we visit (which of course includes what we’re reading) and our locations as we travel around with our cell phones — are collected and subjected to some sort of datamining. Then we’re apparently supposed to trust that no one in government will ever misuse this information, that the massive amounts of information about us won’t be subject to leak or attack, and that whatever subsequent measures are put into place to government access to it by various government agencies will be sufficient to protect our privacy and ensure due process, fairness and security.

On that score, at least the UK government is willing to discuss the proposal publicly and allow Parliament to vote on it.  But this puts the onus on the British people to tell their representatives to soundly reject it.  The message to the Executive should be clear: general warrants were a bad idea in 1760, and they are still a bad idea today.

Cindy Cohn is the Legal Director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) as well as its General Counsel

The post The return of a bad idea appeared first on Index on Censorship.