UK Consultation on Draft Investigatory Bill Closes Monday: Please Write

The Joint Committee on the Draft Investigatory Powers Bill invites any "interested individuals and organisations" to submit evidence to this inquiry.  Written evidence should arrive no later than 21 December 2015.   Here are the four main questions:

Are the powers sought necessary?

Has the case been made, both for the new powers and for the restated and clarified existing powers?

Are the powers sought legal?

Are the powers compatible with the Human Rights Act and the ECHR? Is the requirement that they be exercised only when necessary and proportionate fully addressed? Are they sufficiently clear and accessible on the face of the draft Bill? Is the legal framework such that CSPs (especially those based abroad) will be persuaded to comply? Are concerns around accessing journalists’, legally privileged and MPs' communications sufficiently addressed?

Are the powers sought workable and carefully defined?

Are the technological definitions accurate and meaningful (e.g. content vs communications data, internet connection records etc.)? Does the draft Bill adequately explain the types of activity that could be undertaken under these powers? Is the wording of the powers sustainable in the light of rapidly evolving technologies and user behaviours? Overall is the Bill future-proofed as it stands?

Are the powers sought sufficiently supervised?

Is the authorisation process appropriate? Will the oversight bodies be able adequately to scrutinise their operation? What ability will Parliament and the public have to check and raise concerns about the use of these powers?

Weirdly, you are not allowed to publish your submission until you are given permission:

Evidence which is accepted by the Committee may be published online at any stage; when it is so published it becomes subject to parliamentary copyright and is protected by parliamentary privilege. Submissions which have been previously published will not be accepted as evidence. Once you have received acknowledgement that the evidence has been accepted you will receive a further email, and at this point you may publicise or publish your evidence yourself. In doing so you must indicate that it was prepared for the Committee, and you should be aware that your publication or re-publication of your evidence may not be protected by parliamentary privilege.

So, let me give a summary of my answers to the questions:

No, the powers are not necessary, because they are based on the idea that mass surveillance works.  It doesn't.

No, the powers are not legal: both the Court of Justice of the European Union and the European Court of Human Rights have said mass surveillance is illegal. 

No, they are not workable, because the idea of an Internet Connection Record makes no sense. UK's biggest telecoms confirmed the plan is unworkable.

No, the powers are not supervised because the "double-lock" authorisation is a sham: the judge does not check whether the authorisation was justified, only whether the procedure was correctly followed.

Also worth noting that the distinction between "content" and "communications data" is meaningless: metadata is actually more revealing than content, because it is already parsed in a computer-readable form that allows it to be combined with billions of other pieces of metadata.

Creating huge databases of metadata will create huge honeypots that will be irresistible to criminals and foreign governments.  Stealing the metadata will give them valuable information that can be used for identity theft or blackmail.

Finally, it is worth pointing out that the whole idea of "equipment interference" is really stupid.  If agencies are given permission to break into people's systems, they can plant anything there, and make changes to things like browser histories.  As a result, any computer evidence in a trial is suspect, since it could easily have been planted using "equipment interference" without anyone noticing.  As computer-based evidence becomes more important, "equipment interference" would seriously undermine the UK's legal system.  It should be the very rare exception, not part of a standard toolset.

This is a really important consultation: please respond by Monday.

UK TTIP Debate Tomorrow: Please Contact MPs Today

It seems that there will be a rare UK debate about TTIP tomorrow.  This is a great opportunity to contact your MPs and let them know what you think.  Here's what I've just sent - you can use WritetoThem to make things easier.

I believe that the House of Commons will be debating TTIP on Thursday. I hope you are planning to be there, and might be able to convey some of my concerns about the proposed agreement.

TTIP is generally presented as being something that will boost the EU and UK economies, and provide benefits for all. In fact, the European Commission's own study shows that even under the most optimistic assumptions, the GDP gain will only be 119 billion euros. That may sound a lot, but in fact is only about 0.5% of EU GDP. Moreover, that would be after ten years of TTIP, so the extra annual GDP in this optimistic scenario is around 0.05%, which is effectively zero given the uncertainties of all econometric modelling.

Even that 0.05% annual GDP boost will probaby be very hard to achieve. According to the European Commission's own study, it is based on the assumption that only 20% of the boost will come from removing tariff barriers, which are already low between the EU and US, while 80% will come from removing non-tariff barriers (NTBs). But NTBs are essentially regulations, and are not "trade irritants" as some like to describe them, but hard-won protections for health, safety, the environment etc. Removing them would cause huge negative effects on society – none of which are included in the econometric model. In fact, *no* costs are included in the CEPR projections, which is extraordinary.

The European Commission says that regulations will be harmonised, not lowered. But that will rarely be possible. For example, for chemicals in cosmetics, the EU bans 1300 of them, while the US only bans 12. If it is infeasible to harmonise regulations, and standards will not be lowered, achieving the 80% of gains will be hard, if not impossible.

Finally, there is the issue of ISDS. No convincing argument has been offered for why this is necessary. Both the EU and US have extremely well-developed legal systems. The European Commission has been unable to cite any example where an EU company has been discriminated against in the US. Moreover, the size of the investments across the Atlantic prove that there is absolutely no problem that needs solving here: the US has invested 1.5 trillion euros in Europe, while the EU has invested 1.6 trillion euros. Businesses would not be making these massive investments if there were a problem. And for those that are chary, there is always investment insurance.

On the other hand, including ISDS in TTIP will give 19,900 US-based corporations that own more than 51,400 subsidiaries in the EU the ability to sue the EU and members states over regulations that they claim will harm their profits. And while it is true that ISDS cases cannot force governments to repeal laws, many do since the cost in terms of ISDS awards are so high: recently, an award of $50 billlion was made against Russia by an ISDS tribunal. It is clear from past experience that ISDS has a chilling effect on bringing in new laws that protect the public.

I hope these quick thoughts make clear why I am concerned about TTIP, and believe that it in its current form it will bring few, if any benefits, to the UK public, while exposing them and the EU to huge risks.  If you have time, which I fear is unlikely, I have written at greater length about TTIP in this extensive feature for Ars Technica UK.

As ever, thank you for your help.

"Open " Consultation: Setting the mandate to NHS England for 2016 to 2017

Although you wouldn't know it, the UK's Department of Health has been running a consultation on NHS England.  It has kept this quiet in the hope that no one would reply, and it could just do what it wanted.  

You can read its consultation document pretty quickly, but it probably won't do much good: it's written in the finest officialese that manages to sound impressive, but say very little.  You can respond online, and here's what I've sent them:

Do you agree with our aims for the mandate to NHS England?

Although the mandate is largely fine, it suffers from an excess of generalities. What it lacks is any concrete statement of about how things should be done. I think it is vital that the NHS should be committed to providing a world-class health service using public resources, not private ones. The reasons are simple.

First, the US health system shows us that private healthcare is incredibly expensive, incredibly inefficient, and fails to deliver good healthcare. Moving in that direction would be foolish at best, and downright negligent at worst, since people will die as a direct consequence of doing so.

Moreover, privatising healthcare is foolish for economic reasons: private providers by definition must make a profit, and so by definition are more expensive than publicly-provided resources. Invoking "competition" as a reason why private health provision is better makes no sense, since that competition leads to cost-cutting, which again leads to patients suffering, as recent experiences have shown here in the UK.

Finally, privatisation makes no sense because there is no ownership of skills and knowledge. This would make the NHS a hollow, precarious structure.

Is there anything else we should be considering in producing the mandate to NHE England?

Yes: it should specify as a matter of principle that services will provided publicly, not through private provision. The use of private contractors by public bodies is fine, but the control of every key aspect must remain in public, not private hands, otherwise the profit principle takes over, and people will suffer.

What views do you have on our overarching objective of improving outcomes and reducing health inequalities, including by using new measures of comparative quality for local CCG populations to complement the national outcomes fin the NHS Outcomes Framework?

Fine words again, but without adequate resources, essentially worthless. Unless the NHS is funded adequately, as a matter of priority, it will be impossible to achieve those fine objectives. This will lead to the NHS being dubbed a "failure", which a cynic might suspect is the intention so that privatisation can be offered as the "solution." It is not.

What views do you have on our priorities for the health and care system?

The key priority should be providing world-class healthcare to everyone in the UK free of charge. That is the sign of a civilised country, and failing to do so is to fail that test too. Of course, that requires more resources, in which case it becomes a matter of priorities. But far more lives will be lost as a result of underfunding the NHS than will be lost through terrorism, however much the government likes to exaggerate the threat of the latter. Indeed, the greatest threat to this country is not ISIS/Daesh but things like the end of antibiotics, which could see all major surgery becoming impossible in just a few years. The government should be spending its billions on researching new ways of killing bacteria, not beefing up its surveillance apparatus.

What views do you have on how we set objectives for NHS England to reflect their contribution to achieving our priorities?

Despite all the claims of openness, this consultation has been conducted in near-secrecy. If the government really cared about what the public thinks on this matter (and I do realise that it does not), it would have made far greater efforts to publicise the existence of this consultation. Given the government is now trying to emasculate FOI requests, this is hardly a surprise, but I find the emphasis on openness here a little galling, to say the least.

Do you have any other comments?

I think I have probably said enough...

Urgent: Net Neutrality in EU under Threat; Please Write to your MEPs Now

The long saga of net neutrality in the EU is approaching its end, and things aren't looking good.  The compromise text contains some huge loopholes, which I've written about elsewhere. The key vote is on Tuesday, so there's still time for EU citizens to write to their MEPs. 

You can find contact details for all MEPs on the SaveTheInternet.eu site; those in the UK can also use WriteToThem.com.  Here's what I've just sent - please feel free to use its idea, but don't just copy and paste: MEPs will rightly disregard it.

The Internet has risen more rapidly and had more influence on society than any preceding technology. At the heart of its success lies an obscure technical feature: net neutrality. Simply put, it means that all traffic is treated equally. That level playing field has allowed innovation to flourish, and startups to create new industries in a way never seen before.

As you know, on Tuesday the European Parliament votes on new rules that supposedly enshrine net neutrality in Europe. In fact, those proposals contain such serious shortcomings that they are likely to have the opposite effect, and will undermine net neutrality.

I would therefore like to urge you to vote in favour of amendments that would return the text to a form nearer the earlier one approved by the European Parliament, which was far superior. In particular I would like to ask you to support the amendments specified here:

https://www.laquadrature.net/files/20151019-Amendments_TSM.pdf

In a surprising turn of events, the US has passed strong net neutrality laws (https://www.whitehouse.gov/net-neutrality). If the EU does not follow suit, it will threaten digital innovation in Europe, and hamstring its entrepreneurs, thus ensuring that the digital gulf between the EU and US widens, rather than narrows. For this and other reasons, it is vital that the amendments indicated above are included in the final text.

Thank you for your help.

Urgent TTIP Vote: Please Write (Again) to Your MEPs before Wednesday

There is (another) very important plenary vote in the European Parliament on TTIP this Wednesday, when the European Parliament will vote on a resolution concerning TTIP. The first time around, the vote was pulled for tactical reasons by the pro-ISDS camp, rightly afraid that the European Parliament would reject the inclusion of this anti-democratic idea in TTIP. Now they have cobbled together a "compromise" on ISDS which simply calls it something else, without solving the fundamental problem, which is that it gives corporations unique rights to sue entire nations, with us, the public, footing the bill.  Here's the proposed amendment:

to ensure that foreign investors are treated in a non-discriminatory fashion while benefitting from no greater rights than domestic investors, and to replace the ISDS-system with a new system for resolving disputes between investors and states which is subject to democratic principles and scrutiny where potential cases are treated in a transparent manner by publicly appointed, independent professional judges in public hearings and which includes an appellate mechanism, where consistency of judicial decisions is ensured, the jurisdiction of courts of the EU and of the Member States is respected and where private interests cannot undermine public policy objectives;

The good news is that MEPs are often responsive to their constituents contacting them, especially if large numbers do so on a particular theme. So I would like to urge you to write to your MEPs, using WriteToThem, or directly, to ask them to reject ISDS in all its forms.

If you want to find out more about TTIP in general, I have written a 6000-word explanation; you can also browse through the 51 columns I have written on the topic over the last two years. Finally, there is a documentary about TTIP, which provides a superb introduction to the issues – I'm in it, but please don't let that put you off.

I've included below the letter that I have sent to my MEPs: please feel free to draw on its arguments, but I urge you to put them in your words: MEPs hate and will dismiss letters that are carbon copies of others. Individually-written communications, by contrast, are very powerful.

I hope you will excuse me writing to you again on the topic of TTIP ahead of Wednesday's plenary vote. I would like to urge you to vote against the proposed "compromise amendment" on the topic of ISDS, which supposedly addresses the problems of this system. It does nothing of the sort: it still provides corporations with unique rights against entire nations; it creates a similarly unfair system where companies can win huge awards, to be paid by the public, but the best the public can achieve is not to lose. This is the very definition of a tilted playing-field.

The avowed intent of this "compromise", and of ISDS itself, is to ensure that foreign investors are treated fairly. That is only right, but ISDS and the compromise are exactly the wrong way to go about this. If either is in place, there is no pressure to address the real problem, which is that local laws may not treat foreign investors in the same way as domestic ones. Far better to change laws to make them truly fair, than to introduce another unfair system that undermines the rule of law by creating special structures outside it.

I would therefore ask you to reject ISDS completely, as well as any attempts to introduce it in other ways, for example through the "compromise amendment".

Help Reform EU Copyright: Please Write to your MEPs Now

Although it's rather dropped off the radar, an extremely important revision of the EU Copyright Directive has been underway for years. The biggest development recently has been the excellent work by the German Pirate Party MEP Julia Reda, who put together a draft report on the existing Copyright Directive and some bold but sensible proposals for what the next iteration should contain. Naturally, that report has come under fierce attack from the copyright maximalists, who believe that copyright should only ever get stronger and longer for their benefit, and that it should never be changed for the benefit of the public, who are regarded simply as consumers that must pay for every use of everything.

Reda's report has received over 500 amendments, many of which not only weaken it, but completely reverse its intent. Next Tuesday, the main European Parliament committee responsible for this dossier, JURI, votes on which amendments to incorporate into the report. It is therefore important for people to contact their MEPs, asking them to pass on messages about which amendments must be rejected. Communia has put together a good guide to both good and bad amendments, which you might want to draw upon.

I have included below what I am sending to my MEPs; please feel free to draw on it, but do not copy it verbatim, since that lessens the impact of sending a personal message. To find out who you MEP is, you can use WriteToThem.

I am writing to you in connection with the JURI vote on Julia Reda's draft report on revising the Copyright Directive. As you know, this is an extemely important opportunity to make copyright fit for the digital age. If it is not taken, it is likely to impact adversely the EU's competitiveness and also lead to an increasing disregard for copyright law, especially among young people. I would therefore like to urge you to pass on to your JURI colleagues the following comments about some of the key proposed amendments, and why they should be rejected.

Reject amendments 252 to 257

These all attack the public domain. Copyright is an exceptional monopoly granted for a limited time; after that time expires, works enter the public domain, which therefore forms the foundation of all copyright laws. The public domain represents the great store of knowledge that all can draw upon to create anew. It must be defended.

Reject amendment 409

This is an extraordinary attack on the hyperlink, which lies at the heart of the Web. It would impose an impossible responsibility on everyone creating Web pages: to know the exact legal status of the Web page to which they link. That is a job for judges, not people sitting at home sharing interesting links with their friends and family.

Reject amendment 279

Copyright has been getting stronger, longer and wider for the last 300 years. It is now so unbalanced that the vast majority of Europeans ignore it every day as they use the Internet. In order to salvage at least some respect for the law, copyright needs to be rowed back, not pushed forward even more.

Reject amendment 421

It is absurd that people cannot take pictures of public scenes without worrying about copyright issues. What is public must remain public, for anyone to use, otherwise we are effectively destroying the public sphere.

Reject amendments 236 to 244

The public pays for public sector information, and has a right to use it. But there is another powerful reason for placing public sector information in the public domain: it allows the creation of huge new markets. Perhaps the best example is the information from the Human Genome Project, which was placed in the public domain, and has added $1 trillion to the US economy as a result (http://www.nature.com/news/economic-return-from-human-genome-project-grows-1.13187).

Reject amendment 446

Text and data mining are hugely important new tools that could lead to major scientific discoveries. Attempts to require researchers to pay for the legal right to carry out these techniques on material they have already paid to access is double-dipping, and completely unreasonable.  It is likely to put European researchers at a serious disadvantage compared with their peers elsewhere.

Reject amendment 531

DRM overrides basic rights; it is another example of where copyright is completely unbalanced. It has the ironic effect of making unauthorised copies of works without DRM more attractive than legal ones hobbled by it, and giving power to US companies like Apple and Amazon that control the DRM used for European works.

It is vitally important to get copyright law right, since it is now completely out of step with how people use the Internet, and how they create and share works. If the copyright directive is not updated appropriately now, there may not be another opportunity because copyright will have become completely irrelevant in the digital world.  Thank you for your help.