Blogzilla

Local newspapers aren't worth saving

2009-11-10T08:46:00.002Z

"For many years the local press has been one of Britain's most potent threats to democracy, championing the overdog, misrepresenting democratic choices, defending business, the police and local elites from those who seek to challenge them. Media commentators lament the death of what might have been. It bears no relationship to what is…

"It's true that the vacuity and cowardice of the local papers has been exacerbated by consolidation, profit-seeking, the collapse of advertising revenues and a decline in readership. But even if they weren't subject to these pressures, they would still do more harm than good. Local papers defend the powerful because the powerful own and fund them." —George Monbiot

Politicians are intoxicated by cowardice

2009-11-03T22:00:00.002Z

"Drugs policy is desperately important. It has the power to wreck lives, families and communities. It underpins a third of crime and 80% of acquisitive crime. Four decades of illegality have done nothing to curb consumption, merely breeding the most lucrative, untaxed product market in Britain. No country has achieved the remotest success with prohibition, but Britain's archaic laws have been the least successful. Go to any deprived area, any difficult school, any failing social service, and the root cause of trouble is drugs." —Simon Jenkins

"Speakeasies, moonshine and gangsterism live on in folkloric infamy, even though the disastrous American experiment in prohibition only lasted for 13 short years. It has been three times as long since the 1971 Misuse of Drugs Act instigated its own unwinnable war. In the late 1960s there were 2,000 registered drug addicts, together with a perhaps similar number who lived their life below the radar. Four decades on there are 360,000 problem drug users. Addicts scramble to spike their veins with dangerously adulterated substances that sell at inflated prices, while modern-day Al Capones clear up. As well as accompanying an explosion in damaging narcotic use, strict prohibition has gone hand in hand with an equally remarkable increase in recreational dabbling, making criminals of a huge minority of young people along the way. Half the government, as well as the Conservative leader and three US presidents in a row, have used drugs in their own youth, and yet punitive laws continue to threaten others who do the same with prison. The three-year sentence that a teenager can receive for providing friends with a few ecstasy tablets snuffs out his future far more surely than any drug, and does so at great expense to the taxpayer." —The Guardian

My FT lead feature: Can creative industries survive digital onslaught?

2009-11-03T11:14:00.003Z

Always a pleasure to be commissioned by the Financial Times, especially to write a lead feature for today's Digital Business supplement:

Can creative industries survive digital onslaught?

Ian Brown examines the competing rights of content producers and file-sharers and argues that new business models are the future, not blocking users

If you are interested in following up any of the points made, here are some references:

Jack Valenti told Congress that cable TV was “a huge parasite in the marketplace”: Richard Corliss (2007) What Jack Valenti Did for Hollywood, Time, 27 Apr

…and that “the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone.” Hearings before the Subcommittee on Courts, Civil Liberties, and the Administration of Justice of the Committee on the Judiciary, House of Representatives, Ninety-Seventh Congress, Second Session, 12 April 1982

The recording industry claims… online copyright infringement will cost the UK music sector £200m this year: British Phonographic Industry (2009) Reducing online copyright infringement

The US Supreme Court decided in 1984 that video recorders should not be considered as directly contributing to copyright infringement: Sony Corporation of America v. Universal City Studios, Inc., 464 U.S. 417 (1984)

Google stumbled upon the sponsored search model that now earns billions of dollars each quarter: Google Inc. (2009) Google announces third quarter 2009 results, October 15

James Murdoch asks, can online journalism compete with the “dumping [of] free, state-sponsored news on the market”? James Murdoch (2009) The Absence of Trust, Edinburgh International Television Festival MacTaggart Lecture, 28 August

The Guardian’s Emily Bell worries that “the ecology of some parts of the UK media is now so uncertain and fragile that it can be depleted by a single blow from the end of the BBC's tail as it rolls over in its sleep": Emily Bell (2008) We need to start a new conversation about the BBC, The Guardian, 28 April

Established musical acts recently had their most successful year ever on tour, grossing over $4bn worldwide in 2008. Tours by Bon Jovi, Bruce Springsteen, Madonna and the Police all grossed over $150m: Ray Waddell (2008) Bon Jovi Scores 2008's Top-Grossing Tour, Billboard, 11 December

Two-thirds of the Guardian’s 30 million monthly online visitors come from outside the UK: Patrick Smith (2009) Guardian Hiring Bloggers For Local News Network, paidContent:UK, 12 October

Blogzilla is 4! And his big brother is 15!!

2009-10-31T15:04:00.006Z

Amidst this week's rejoicings at the 40th birthday of the Internet, Blogzilla is celebrating his own fourth year on the Web. Doddering along behind is the prehistoric Web presence of the author: so old even the Wayback Machine didn't catch up until 1997. Perhaps fortunately, this avoided the purple flares phase of 1994-1996.

To think, it was only fifteen years ago that a first-year undergraduate friend eagerly introduced HTML 1.0…

Cops go for Regional Internet Registry

2009-10-23T09:44:00.004+01:00

The FBI and UK Serious Organised Crime Agency are getting heavy with RIPE (thanks, Lilian!):

Andy Auld, head of intelligence at SOCA’s e-crime department… used the Russian Business Network (RBN) cybercrime network as an example of the type of criminal enterprise they were targeting. The now disbanded group used an IP network allocated by RIPE, a European body that allocates IP resources, to host scam sites, malware and child porn.

RIPE actions might lend themselves to interpretation, viewed in the harshest terms, as being complicit with cybercriminals and "involved in money laundering offences".

"We are not interpreting it that way. Instead we are working in partnership to make internet governance a less permissive environment," Auld said.

This explains some recent EU discussions about blocking "criminal IP address spaces". RIPE is unimpressed:

Press coverage this week portrayed the RIPE NCC as being involved with the criminal network provider Russian Business Network (RBN). Any connection with criminal activity, or with RBN itself, is completely unfounded.

The press coverage arose from a speech given by the Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA) in the UK. SOCA has since contacted the RIPE NCC with an apology. The RIPE NCC will continue to work with SOCA and other bodies to ensure criminal investigations can be carried out in an efficient manner within established laws and guidelines.

Policy-based evidence making

2009-10-20T10:43:00.002+01:00

Two revealing examples in one day of how this government approaches policymaking:

The UK's biggest ever investigation of sex trafficking failed to find a single person who had forced anybody into prostitution in spite of hundreds of raids on sex workers in a six-month campaign by government departments, specialist agencies and every police force in the country… Current and former ministers have claimed that thousands of women have been imported into the UK and forced to work as sex slaves, but most of these statements were either based on distortions of quoted sources or fabrications without any source at all.

Civil liberty campaigners claimed a victory today after the government announced it is dropping current proposals to retain the DNA profiles of innocent people on the national database… The authors of the research on which Home Office ministers based their plan had disowned the proposals. The Jill Dando Institute for Crime Science said its work should not have been used to decide the six- to 12-year time limits because the work was unfinished.

Sigh. Wouldn't it be nice if government departments thought through the impact of policy options before proposing, let alone enacting, legislation?

Consumer privacy and online marketing

2009-10-19T10:14:00.004+01:00

Next month I will be acting as a rapporteur for the European Consumers' Association (BEUC) at their Brussels conference on privacy and marketing. Alongside the EU Commissioners for the Information Society and Consumer Affairs, there will also be keynote speeches from the European Data Protection Supervisor and a number of other prominent experts. You can see the programme and register here.

The irresistible illusion of Afghanistan

2009-10-18T12:11:00.001+01:00

"Obama has so far committed to building ‘an Afghan army of 134,000 and a police force of 82,000’, and adds that ‘increases in Afghan forces may very well be needed.’ US generals have spoken openly about wanting a combined Afghan army-police-security apparatus of 450,000 soldiers (in a country with a population half the size of Britain’s). Such a force would cost $2 or $3 billion a year to maintain; the annual revenue of the Afghan government is just $600 million. We criticise developing countries for spending 30 per cent of their budget on defence; we are encouraging Afghanistan to spend 500 per cent of its budget.

"Some policymakers have been quick to point out that this cost is unsustainable and will leave Afghanistan dependent for ever on the largesse of the international community. Some have even raised the spectre (suggested by the example of Pakistan) that this will lead to a military coup. But the more basic question is about our political principles. We should not encourage the creation of an authoritarian military state. The security that resulted might suit our short-term security interests, but it will not serve the longer interests of Afghans. What kind of anti-terrorist tactics would we expect from the Afghan military? What kind of surveillance, interference and control from the police? We should not assume that the only way to achieve security in a developing country is through the restriction of civil liberties, or that authoritarianism is a necessary phase in state-formation, or a precondition for rapid economic development, or a lesser evil in the fight against modern terrorism." —Prof. Rory Stewart (via Andrew Sullivan)

The lives of the other

2009-10-17T10:50:00.000+01:00

"In recent years general concerns about privacy in Britain have been greatly inflamed by the disappearance of personal data and great rows over planned mega-databases. The public increasingly perceives information collected for official convenience as a malign intrusion. And fears of recreating The Lives of Others are all the greater when the others in question are also "the other" in cultural terms. Muslims read every day about western fighting in Muslim lands. This week they heard MI5's director trot out a less-than-reassuring reassurance on torture of mostly-Muslim terror suspects, and this morning they read that the foreign secretary has been covering up what the government knew in one such case. Already angered by the sense that the ordinary rules no longer protect them as they do everyone else, many more followers of Islam may be tempted to succumb to militant rage if they feel they have been singled out for special snooping. Surveillance aimed at gauging the extent of a problem could end up making it very much worse." —The Guardian

The UK's unspoken constitution

2009-10-12T14:33:00.002+01:00

"We the elite, do not believe in the kind of constitution most other advanced nations have — those that boast a belief in popular sovereignty; with resounding declarations such as ‘we, the people’, and that tend to contain rules about how governments should act.

"We describe ours as the ‘unwritten constitution’. It is a collection of laws, fictions, powers left over from the old monarchy and powers that we make up as we go along. It allows us to decide what governments can do; and best of all, only we have the power to change it.

"We disguise the fact that it is neither popular, representative nor accountable through a set of myths about the ‘Mother of Parliaments’, Magna Carta and the rule of law… We are also able to treat the people not as citizens but as subjects. We encourage people to believe that they are free, though actually they are in chains, unfelt but real chains nevertheless…"

Enough poison about the Human Rights Act

2009-10-05T09:23:00.001+01:00

"They have fought important battles for personal freedom: opposing 42-day detention of suspects without charge, opposing ID cards, and opposing unjust extradition, and the poorly designed European arrest warrant. And it has taken these positions in a thoughtful and well calibrated way, without naivety as to the gravity of the issues involved.

"It is time, now, for the Conservative party to take the final step: to make the Conservative case for the Human Rights Act. It is our own bill of rights, and it is Churchill's legacy." —Peter Oborne

"The Tories have suggested introducing a Bill of Rights, based on the provisions in the convention, but also drawing on this country's own traditions and sorting out the problems of judicial application. That would be a properly conservative approach, although given the amount of legislative time taken up by constitutional measures, my suspicion is that this will slide quickly down the list of Tory policy priorities." —Philip Johnston

Selling surveillance to authoritarian regimes

2009-09-24T16:35:00.003+01:00

Timothy Garton Ash has a strong comment piece in today's Guardian on the continuing political developments in Iran. He suggests:

A textbook example of what democracies should not do was provided last year by a joint venture between Siemens and Nokia, called Nokia Siemens Networks. It sold the Iranian regime a sophisticated system with which they can monitor the internet, including emails, internet phone calls and social-networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter, much used by Iranian protesters. In today's politics of people power, that is the equivalent of selling a dictator tanks or poison gas.

So, to be clear: a German company, Siemens, which used slave labour during the Third Reich, sold a Holocaust-denying president the instruments with which he can persecute young Iranians risking their lives for freedom. Think of that every time you buy something made by Siemens.

When this first hit the news in June, Nokia Siemens stated that they had sold technology that would allow Iran to monitor phone calls rather than Internet usage. The former is mandated in many countries' telephone networks under "lawful intercept" rules, including the US and UK. The latter is not, although the UK Home Office is doing its best with its proposed Intercept Modernisation Programme.

Democratic governments need to think much more carefully before requiring technology companies to develop products that could have an extremely repressive impact in undemocratic regimes lacking human rights protections. They should also update export controls to prevent the sale of these tools to states such as Iran. In the meantime, individuals can help by diverting their business away from companies that are aiding and abetting authoritarian regimes.

A Liberal-Conservative alliance?

2009-09-20T11:38:00.001+01:00

"It's clear: the real enemy of progressive politics is not the Conservatives and I would not claim it is the Liberal Democrats. In truth, it is the bureaucratic, backward-looking, big state government that Labour epitomises. That is why at our conference, instead of trying to create some artificial dividing lines between Liberal Democrat policy and Conservative policy, my message will be: if you want rid of Gordon Brown and the big brother state, and if you care about our schools, our quality of life and our liberties, then join us in one national movement that can bring real change." —David Cameron MP

Tories to reverse rise of database state

2009-09-16T08:33:00.004+01:00

It's always nice to see your research end up as Opposition policy. Even better, of course, once they are in power to implement it. Shadow Justice Secretary Dominic Grieve comments:

“This Government’s approach to our personal privacy is the worst of all worlds — intrusive, ineffective and enormously expensive.

“We cannot run government robotically. We cannot protect the public through automated systems. And we cannot eliminate the need for human judgment calls on risk, whether to children, or from criminal and terrorist threats.

“As we have seen time and time again, over-reliance on the database state is a poor substitute for the human judgment and care essential to the delivery of frontline public services. Labour’s surveillance state has exposed the public to greater — not less — risk.”

Databases and child protection

2009-09-15T10:16:00.004+01:00

Retired senior detective Chris Stevenson, who ran the investigation into the Soham murders, has an extremely sobering article in today's Times on why he believes new checks on the 11 million adults who have regular contact with children would not have made any difference in that case:

As a result of poor intelligence, [Ian] Huntley was appointed a school caretaker in Soham. Did that give him access to children? Yes, hundreds. Did he abuse them? No. In fact he reported to the headteacher that several teenage girls had made inappropriate comments. What Huntley did to Holly and Jessica was as bad as it gets, but did he come into contact with them through being a caretaker? Not exactly — he was caretaker of Soham Village College, a school for the over-11s. The two girls attended St Andrew’s Junior School. Different building, different caretaker. Huntley had contact with them because [girlfriend Maxine] Carr was employed at St Andrew’s as a classroom assistant. She worked in a class with Holly and Jessica, who both liked her. Holly’s mother sent Carr a box of chocolates on the last day of term to say thank you for helping her daughter.

Before trying to find policy solutions, it always helps to be sure exactly what the problem is. Headmaster Anthony Seldon adds:

Subjecting everyone in sight to checks, placing surveillance cameras everywhere, subjecting every institution to intimidating inspections, hemming in all relationships with contract and law, and driving everyone mad with bureaucracy is categorically not the way forward.

The case for legalising all drugs is unanswerable

2009-09-13T12:23:00.001+01:00

"The war on drugs is a failed policy that has injured far more people than it has protected. Around 14,000 people have died in Mexico's drug wars since the end of 2006, more than 1,000 of them in the first three months of this year. Beyond the overflowing morgues in Mexican border towns, there are uncounted numbers who have been maimed, traumatised or displaced. From Liverpool to Moscow, Tokyo to Detroit, a punitive regime of prohibition has turned streets into battlefields, while drug use has remained embedded in the way we live. The anti-drug crusade will go down as among the greatest follies of modern times." —John Gray

Could Paine inspire Cameron?

2009-09-09T14:42:00.001+01:00

"We live under a government that has almost certainly been complicit in torture; given state officials unprecedented power to snoop; undermined local democracy in England; eroded trial by jury; continued the Thatcherite assault on the public domain; presided over growing inequality; and sustained London's ignoble role as a happy hunting-ground for the world's ultra-rich. The gap between the state's proclaimed civic values and its oligarchic practices is becoming too glaring to miss." —David Marquand

The war on drugs has failed

2009-09-06T10:35:00.001+01:00

"No country has devised a comprehensive solution to the drug abuse challenge. And a solution need not be a stark choice between prohibition and legalisation. Alternative approaches are being tested and must be carefully reviewed. But it is clear that the way forward will involve a strategy of reaching out, patiently and persistently, to the users, and not the continued waging of a misguided and counterproductive war that makes the users, rather than the drug lords, the primary victims." —former Brazilian president Fernando Henrique Cardoso

All in the public interest?

2009-08-31T14:17:00.002+01:00

"The 1998 Data Protection Act would allow access to some confidential databases if the journalist were acting in the public interest. However, the public interest is not obvious in the work summaries that [private investigator Steve] Whittamore listed on his weekly pay claims: 'Bonking headmaster, Lonely heart, Dirty vicar, Street stars split, Miss World bonks sailor, Dodgy landlord, Judge affair, Royal maid, Witchdoctor, Footballer, TV love child, Junkie flunkie, Orgy boss, BBC gardening blunder, Hurley and Grant, EastEnders star…'" —Nick Davies

The Murdochs and the media

2009-08-29T10:54:00.004+01:00

In this long, self-serving rant from Rupert Murdoch's son and anointed heir at News International, there is some sense struggling to get out:

Rather than concentrating on areas where the market is not delivering, the BBC seeks to compete head-on for audiences with commercial providers to dampen opposition to a compulsory licence fee. The corporation is incapable of distinguishing between what is good for it, and what is good for the country.

Yet bizarrely, James Murdoch spends the rest of the article attacking the one part of the BBC's output — its news and current affairs programming — where the strongest case can be made for limited state intervention. A carefully circumscribed and robustly impartial BBC news channel would certainly do more for the UK's democracy and soft power than a toxic Fox News UK.

Perhaps the government can do a deal with the Messrs Murdoch: a BBC without the soap operas, movies and sports that are amply provided by the market, and a less interventionist Ofcom, in exchange for much more robust enforcement of competition law and a limit of one national media outlet per beneficial owner. That would have the side benefit of saving us the nauseating spectacle of the leaders of both main parties flying around the world to pay obeisance to Murdoch Snr.

Facebook to fix application privacy problem

2009-08-27T15:27:00.002+01:00

It's always good to see problems you've highlighted in your research fixed, even if it does take several years:

Facebook has agreed to retrofit its application platform in a way that will prevent any application from accessing information until it obtains express consent for each category of personal information it wishes to access. Under this new permissions model, users adding an application will be advised that the application wants access to specific categories of information. The user will be able to control which categories of information an application is permitted to access. There will also be a link to a statement by the developer to explain how it will use the data.

This change will require significant technological changes. Developers using the platform will also need to adapt their applications and Facebook expects the entire process to take one year to implement.

Now the privacy commissioners are taking action, perhaps their competition law counterparts can take a look at our more recent work!

Summer bliss

2009-08-27T10:29:00.002+01:00

For only the second time in five years…

Take 3 strikes into the shower?

2009-08-26T13:46:00.001+01:00

"The creative industries are noisy and well organised, but they are minnows compared with our networking and computing industries. Government’s role is to strike a balance between the needs of rights holders on the one hand and society’s need for fast, efficient and lightly regulated networking on the other. That’s difficult to do and it will take time to work out, which is why Lord Carter set aside three years for the job. It’s not something that should be rushed on the basis of a dinner conversation in Corfu." —Prof John Naughton

Encryption ain't easy

2009-08-21T11:21:00.006+01:00

Encrypting data is an elementary mechanism to protect it from unauthorised access. It would have trivially prevented the UK's biggest data breach to date, and many others, and is now mandated across UK government systems. But why do some software companies continue to make it so *&^$&^% awkward? Apple, I'm looking at you…

FileVault, which encrypts your home directory under Mac OS, has caused me real difficulties on my MacBook, where it has corrupted my files on several occasions (once even requiring a complete reinstall). Now that I've got Apple's Time Capsule remote backup system, it will only backup FileVault partitions when you logout (usually just as I want to switch off the power). It also breaks Time Machine's selective restore function. Why is it so badly designed? It's hardly surprising that many users just give up and leave data vulnerable to thievery.

PS It also breaks Sophos Anti-Virus, but that is probably more Sophos's fault.

Fixing the DNA database

2009-08-12T15:03:00.006+01:00

The Home Office consultation on the future of the UK's National DNA Database has just closed. You may recall that the indefinite retention of DNA from all those arrested was found last December by the European Court of Human Rights to be a "disproportionate interference" with privacy that "cannot be regarded as necessary in a democratic society." I wrote a consultation response with some FIPR colleagues that suggested that:

On the key issue — retention of profiles from unconvicted individuals — the proposals are an entirely inadequate response to the judgement. By retaining profiles of unconvicted individuals for 6 or 12 years, they would leave England, Wales and Northern Ireland greatly out of step with the vast majority of other Council of Europe members. The Court noted approvingly that Scotland retains profiles only of those suspected of violent or sexual offences, for a period of 3-5 years, and that "the strong consensus existing among the Contracting States in this respect is of considerable importance and narrows the margin of appreciation left to the respondent State." The proposals would continue to treat innocent individuals as suspects by retaining their DNA profile for much longer than those, for example, who voluntarily provide samples to rule themselves out of enquiries.

We have suggested that the Home Office should therefore plan a further consultation around primary legislation that more carefully considers the impact of retaining profiles of innocent individuals on both crime and human rights. It seems there is little alternative given that a legal opinion for the Equality and Human Rights Commission found that the existing plans would still be in breach of the Convention.