One of the reasons Techdirt rails against exaggerated responses to supposed terrorist threats is that it has caused police forces around the world to lose all sense of proportion -- literally, in the case of this UK story from the Daily Mail.
As you may recall, terrorism was one of the primary justifications for bringing in the disproportionate Draft Communications Data Bill:
Any EU project called "Clean IT", with all that implies for elements that are regarded as "dirty", is worrying enough. But combined with a stated intention of "reducing the impact of the terrorist use of the Internet", the concerns naturally grow. After all, it is precisely by invoking the vague and emotional threat of "terrorism" that the UK government has sought to short-circuit criticism of many of its most illiberal policies, most recently with the ill thought-out Draft Communications Bill.
Back in February we wrote about the ominously-named "Clean IT" project in Europe, designed to combat the use of the Internet by terrorists. At that time, we suspected that this would produce some seriously bad ideas, but a leaked document obtained by EDRI shows that these are actually much worse than feared (pdf), amounting to a system of continuous surveillance, extrajudicial removal of content and some new proposals that can only be described as deranged.
Marielle Gallo is probably best known for the Gallo Report, which Techdirt described back in 2010 as a "similarly draconian intellectual property enforcement" to ACTA, with which it has much in common. So it's no surprise that Gallo has been one of the few vocal supporters of ACTA, and it was widely expected that the EU's Legal Affairs (JURI) committee she chairs would support her draft opinion calling for ACTA to be ratified. As we now know, that didn't happen, and JURI formed one of five committees that all recommended that ACTA should be rejected.
A couple of weeks ago, Techdirt reported on UK politicians calling for ISPs to "take down" terrorist content. Now it seems that the idea has not only spread to other European countries, but even acquired a cheesy name: "the Clean IT Project".
What a sad, sad day for this country:
A trainee accountant who posted a message on Twitter threatening to blow an airport "sky high" has been found guilty of sending a menacing electronic communication.
Now, the judge may not know this, but there's a technical term for this kind of tweet: it's what we Internet johnnies call a "joke"...
The truly sickening part of this judgement is the following:a district judge at Doncaster Magistrates Court ruled that the Tweet was "of a menacing nature in the context of the times in which we live".
In other words, our society has become so corrupted by the cynical abuse of the idea of "terror" that we have lost all sense of proportion, not to mention humour. Tragic - and dangerous, since it is bound to have a chilling effect on Twitter in this country.
Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca.
Britain's only specialist police human trafficking unit is to be shut down after two years because of a lack of funding, the government said today.
A Home Office spokeswoman confirmed that money for the Metropolitan police team, which totalled £1.8m in the first year and £780,000 in the second, would no longer be available after April
Experts and campaigners reacted to the move with dismay. Denise Marshall, chief executive of the Poppy Project, which helps trafficked women after they have been rescued, said she was appalled at the decision, which would have a "hugely detrimental impact".
So, the Government can't quite find the huge sum of £1.8 million to help concretely exploited and vulnerable women, and yet *can* somehow find the odd £19 billion to pay for ID cards that will be used to combat terrorism illegal immigration identity fraud benefit fraud littering....
One of Tony Blair's stupider statements was the following:"The biggest civil liberty of all is not to be killed by a terrorist."
Let's call this the Moron Meme: it assumes that people are stupid enough to confuse basic rights to life with others rights to liberty, when in fact they are two quite distinct dimensions. And having made this false comparison, Blair was then able to use false logic to demand a trade-off: if you don't want to be killed by terrorists, then you must give up some/many of your civil liberties.
What this glosses over is the real possibility that you can have *both* by bringing a mature and calm intelligence to bear on the situation, instead of respondingly disproportionately out of abject, unthinking fear ("Terrorists! Terrorists! Everybody panic!")
It was stupid when Blair said it, and it's just as stupid now Geoff Hoon is parroting it:[Julia Goldsworthy] asked: "How much more control can they have? How far is he prepared to go to undermine civil liberties?"
Mr Hoon interjected: "To stop terrorists killing people in our society, quite a long way actually.
...
He added: "The biggest civil liberty of all is not to be killed by a terrorist."
This exchange contains another extraordinarily stupid statement:"If they are going to use the internet to communicate with each other and we don't have the power to deal with that, then you are giving a licence to terrorists to kill people."
- As if the Internet were some magic pixie dust that, when sprinkled on terrorist activies, makes them murderously efficacious.
And yet today, without those powers, the British secret services seem to be doing a pretty good job at stopping misguided idiots attempting to spread mayhem and murder (not least thanks to the latter's enormous incompetence): seen any good terrorist attacks recently? No, nor me.
The only possible reason for bringing in more snooping powers is because it gives the Government even more control over everything - its current obsession.
Godwin's Law states:"As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one."
I'd like to propose Moody's Law as a variant:"When governments can't come up with a real argument, they invoke terrorism."
And here we have it from the Japanese authorities:Die Auseinandersetzung zwischen japanischen Walfängern und Tierschützern ist erneut eskaliert: Die Organisation Sea Shepherd hat ein Walfangschiff mit Buttersäure beworfen. Die Aktivisten sprechen von harmlosen Stinkbomben, Japans Regierung von einem Terrorangriff.
[The confrontation between the Japanese whalers and animal rights activists has escalated again: the Sea Shepherd Organisation has thrown Butyric Acid at a whaling ship. Activities speak of "harmless stinkbombs", the Japanese government of a "terror attack."]
If this is all true, things are obviously going from bad to worse at Wikipedia:
Controversy has erupted among the encyclopedia's core contributors, after a rogue editor revealed that the site's top administrators are using a secret insider mailing list to crackdown on perceived threats to their power.
Many suspected that such a list was in use, as the Wikipedia "ruling clique" grew increasingly concerned with banning editors for the most petty of reasons. But now that the list's existence is confirmed, the rank and file are on the verge of revolt.
Revealed after an uber-admin called "Durova" used it in an attempt to enforce the quixotic ban of a longtime contributor, this secret mailing list seems to undermine the site's famously egalitarian ethos. At the very least, the list allows the ruling clique to push its agenda without scrutiny from the community at large. But clearly, it has also been used to silence the voice of at least one person who was merely trying to improve the encyclopedia's content.
What struck me particularly was the following passage:
Durova then posted a notice to the site's public forum, insisting the ban was too important for discussion outside the purview of the Arbitration Committee, Wikipedia's Supreme Court. "Due to the nature of this investigation, our normal open discussion isn't really feasible," she said. "Please take to arbitration if you disagree with this decision."
Now, where have I heard that before? "This person is guilty: we can prove it, but doing so would reveal terrible states secrets, so you'll just have to trust us" - oh yes, I remember: it's the standard trope used to justify internment in Guantanamo, "extraordinary rendition" or simple kidnapping; it's the same trick that has been used by totalitarian governments the world over to justify repressive "anti-terror" laws that cannot be questioned, because doing so would aid the "enemy".
Not very good company for Wikipedia, "the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit", to be keeping. The sunlight of openness would do a world of good here - and anywhere else power that claims to be democratic refuses to explain its actions to the people.
Blimey, there's hope yet:London is not a battlefield. Those innocents who were murdered on July 7 2005 were not victims of war. And the men who killed them were not, as in their vanity they claimed on their ludicrous videos, 'soldiers'. They were deluded, narcissistic inadequates. They were criminals. They were fantasists. We need to be very clear about this. On the streets of London, there is no such thing as a 'war on terror', just as there can be no such thing as a 'war on drugs'.
The fight against terrorism on the streets of Britain is not a war. It is the prevention of crime, the enforcement of our laws and the winning of justice for those damaged by their infringement.
How's this for a confluence: Terrorists attacking British bases in Basra are using aerial footage displayed by the Google Earth internet tool to pinpoint their attacks, say Army intelligence sources.
Documents seized during raids on the homes of insurgents last week uncovered print-outs from photographs taken from Google.
The satellite photographs show in detail the buildings inside the bases and vulnerable areas such as tented accommodation, lavatory blocks and where lightly armoured Land Rovers are parked.
Written on the back of one set of photographs taken of the Shatt al Arab Hotel, headquarters for the 1,000 men of the Staffordshire Regiment battle group, officers found the camp's precise longitude and latitude.
So what do they do? They try to censor the images. But guess what? That's not going to work, and it's going to get worse. The two main solutions are (a) change the way you fight wars or - rather better - (b) don't fight wars in the first place.
According to heise online:the [German] Federal Ministry of the Interior declares the ability to search PCs without physical access to them to be a key component in the fight against terror.
Well, it can declare away until its booties fall off, but as the article points out:
How a screening of PCs protected by a firewall or tucked away behind a router with Network Address Translation is to be carried out the proposals of the politicians concerned with internal security remain conspicuously silent, however.
Quite. Throw in a modicum of serious data encryption, and you have a PC that is seriously hard to hack - however much the politicians might declare this approach to be a "key component in the fight against a terror."
All of which provides a further demonstration, if one were needed, of how this idiotic "fight against terror" is merely a pretext for governments around the world (step forward, Mr Blair) to impose pointless and unworkable schemes that serve no other purpose than to trample on the freedom of all of us, while the ne'er-do-wells laugh up their terrorist sleeves.
One of my earliest posts on this blog was about Craig Murray and how he was using his blog to get out into the open ideas and information uncomfortable to the British Government. Well, he's at it again, dealing with issues that the mainstream media once again seems strangely loth to discuss.
This time, he's offering a rather different interpretation of the alleged UK plot to blow up planes. The basic idea is simple: that the revelation of this plot took place when it did because it was politically expedient to do so, not because of any inner necessity based on the state of the preparations. As well as the obviously convenient disappearance of the war in Lebanon from the front pages for a while, it also provided ammunition for Dick Cheney in his attacks on a particular strand of thought in the Democratic Party (read the post for the details).
More generally, the dramatic "thwarting" of the alleged plot provides yet another "justification" for draconian security measures, on the basis that it is better to lose a bit of liberty than all of your life. But of course, this convenient equation only works if the perceived threat is great enough, which requires, in its turn, a steady supply of reminders about the potential horrors of terrorism (which are real enough). The fact that few alleged terrorists have actually been convicted, even among the people that have been arrested, suggests that things are not what they seem.
Similarly, the strange "error" of releasing the names of most of the people held in the current "emergency" - which means that there is no hope whatsoever of convicting them, given UK laws - can be seen as a convenient way to have your terrorist cake and eat it: in a blaze of publicity you get to arrest people that are later quietly released because of some terrible "blunder" by some Bank of England functionary.
The only difference between this situation and the one painted by George Orwell in 1984 is that, today, squaring up to Big Brother we have the Big Blogosphere.
One of the tensions that emerges from time to time in this blog is that between openness and security. In the current climate of the so-called "war on terror", openness is typically characterised as dangerous, irresponsible even, because it gives succour to "them".
Terrorism is not to be trivialised, but it's a question of keeping things in perspective. Magnifying the threat unreasonably and acting disproportionately simply hands victory to those who wish to terrorise. This seems pretty obvious to me, but if you want a rigorously-argued version, you could hardly do better than this one, by John Mueller.
Here's a sample, on the issue of perspective:[I]t would seem to be reasonable for those in charge of our safety to inform the public about how many airliners would have to crash before flying becomes as dangerous as driving the same distance in an automobile. It turns out that someone has made that calculation: University of Michigan transportation researchers Michael Sivak and Michael Flannagan, in an article last year in American Scientist, wrote that they determined there would have to be one set of September 11 crashes a month for the risks to balance out. More generally, they calculate that an American’s chance of being killed in one nonstop airline flight is about one in 13 million (even taking the September 11 crashes into account). To reach that same level of risk when driving on America’s safest roads — rural interstate highways — one would have to travel a mere 11.2 miles.
(Via Boing Boing.)
There's an interesting tension between openness and privacy: openness is good except when it might infringe on justifiable privacy. This makes matters of privacy, and hence encryption, a kind of obverse to openness. So legislation like the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act is something that I've followed even before it was introduced in 2000.
I hadn't realised that part of that Act - that deals with disclosure of encryption keys - was not yet in force. As this news item explains, the UK Government is threatening to make this happen, but, as usual, without really thinking it through.
The justification - of course - is the tired old one of terrorism (anybody notice how this has become a kind of continuous justification for everything these days? - You don't think people have been reading 1984 for ideas or anything?). The "argument" is that the new powers are needed to "force" those evil terrorists to hand over the keys so that PC Plod can read all that incriminating evidence, and they can do their well-deserved porridge.
So, let's consider the various possibilities.
Either these terrorists, who tend to show scant regard for human life, let alone human laws, are suddenly going to become law-abiding, and say: "it's a fair cop, but society is to blame. Here are my encryption keys," and get sent down for the 10, 20, or 30 years they would cop for conspiring to carry out acts of terrorism blah-blah-blah. Or might they possibly just say "I've lost the keys", and get sent down for a couple of years instead?
Which do you think they'll choose?
Now tell me again why we need this legislation, since the only people it can possibly affect are law-abiding citizens like you and me, not law-defying terrorists?
Update 1: Slightly off-topic, but quite.
Update 2: More stupid UK legislation that will weaken, not strengthen people's security.
The facts behind the UK cracker who ill-advisedly decided to break into Pentagon systems just gets more and more bizarre. The main issue is that this poor bloke faces porridge in Guantanamo Bay - with hot and cold running torture (mental and physical), kindly provided by that nice Uncle Sam. But along the way there are issues of jurisdiction, questions about George W. Bush's favourite poodle, UFOs and Microsoft.
Yes, it's actually all Microsoft's fault.
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