For the London Free Press – Mar 3, 2010

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General public, especially Muslims, likely unintended target of move by U.K. police to monitor customers’ web travels

Internet cafes in the United Kingdom are the latest victims of privacy invasive counter terrorism measures. Scotland Yard recently asked Internet cafe owners to monitor customers’ use of public computers. The authorities are encouraging owners to check activity on their computers and keep an eye on any suspicious activity.

Yet police say it’s not about asking Internet cafe owners to spy on their customers.

These measures seem unreasonable and privacy invasive, and are likely to be ineffective.

This is similar to monitoring calls on a public phone, it has been pointed out.

Surely a criminal or terrorist using an Internet cafe would be savvy enough to hide their tracks.

Unfortunately, the general public will likely be the unintended victims of this initiative, similar to the suspicions raised against average people taking photographs in public places.

As Simon Davies, director of U.K.-based Privacy International, has said, “What you’re going to end up with is a lot of people reporting Muslims in Internet cafes.”

Police have stated that Internet cafes often have been used by terrorists and other criminals in order to evade police surveillance. The police noted that the men behind the plot to blow up U.S.-bound passenger jets with liquid explosives secreted into soft drink containers used an Internet cafe to plan their attack.

Posters and computer desktop images of Scotland Yard’s logo are being distributed to Internet cafes. They are sternly worded, warning customers against viewing “inappropriate or offensive content,” and stating “breaching the above will result in the user’s Internet access being terminated immediately and, where appropriate, the police being informed.”

This latest initiative can be seen as an extension of the suspicious attitude the UK police have against public photography. There are many reports that average people with cameras often are accused of suspicious activity, just for taking photographs.

In response to public outrage at police searching people’s cameras, Scotland Yard posted the following note on their website under “Photography Advice:”

“Officers have the power to view digital images contained in mobile telephones or cameras carried by a person searched under S43 of the Terrorism Act 2000 to discover whether the images constitute evidence that the person is involved in terrorism. Officers also have the power to seize and retain any article found during the search which the officer reasonably suspects may constitute evidence that the person is a terrorist. This includes any mobile telephone or camera containing such evidence.”

The official suspicion about photographers seems ironic in a nation having a massive number of surveillance cameras to watch the public’s every move.

One has to wonder whether the invasion of privacy, and the air of suspicion and fear such measures foster, is worth it, and whether these measures do anything at all to increase public safety, or are mere security theatre.

That’s the title of my Slaw post for today.  It reads as follows.

There is a lawsuit  and a criminal investigation underway resulting from a school outside of Philadelphia that secretly took pictures of students with webcams on laptops supplied by the school.

The idea was to use the webcams only in cases where a laptop was reported stolen.   It is alleged however that school officials turned on the webcams simply to spy on the students for their own curiosity.  

More details and commentary can be found on Techdirt, Boing Boing, and this AP story.

It’s hard to sort out reality from posturing, but it doesn’t look good for the school.

A couple of lessons can be learned from this.

First, people are a real weak link in the need to preserve privacy where any kind of surveillance or tracking is possible – despite good intentions behind the system.

Second, if you must use any kind of system that enables surveillance, take all possible steps to limit access, and make clear to those that have access that they will be held accountable if they misuse it.

Security expert Bruce Schneier wrote an article for CNN entitled “Spy cameras won’t make us safer” that’s worth reading.

His basic premise is:

Pervasive security cameras don’t substantially reduce crime. This fact has been demonstrated repeatedly: in San Francisco, California, public housing; in a New York apartment complex; in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; in Washington; in study after study in both the U.S. and the U.K. Nor are they instrumental in solving many crimes after the fact.

Yesterday I wrote about privacy consultations regarding the online tracking of consumers.  Privacy advocates want to ensure that consumer choice and privacy are respected.   Similarly, pressure is put on ISP’s and search engines to limit the amount of information they retain about their customers, and the length of time they retain it.  All laudable objectives.

On the other hand, law enforcement wants to require ISP’s to retain certain information about sites their customers visit for long periods of time to facilitate criminal investigations. See this CNet article for example.

Seems inconsistent to me.

England has turned into one of the least privacy friendly governments.   It is a poster child for being overly invasive – with the usual unsupported claims that is is necessary to fight crime – and the position that governments and police forces can be trusted to be discrete and do the right thing.  But of course, when the official culture is one of invasiveness – the ‘right thing’ is a moving target.

Case in point: Boing Boing reports that a UK inquiry claims the police routinely arrest people they haveo intent of charging solely to get their DNA into their database.

Boing Boing posted a remix challenge to mock the new anti-terror posters I mentioned a few days ago.

Some of them are quite good – definitely worth a look.

Thats the title of my Slaw post for today.   It reads:

Cory Doctorow writes on Boing Boing about the latest anti-terrorist campaign in England.

His entire post is a worthwhile read – but to get a flavour of it:

The London police have bested their own impressive record for insane and stupid anti-terrorism posters with a new range of signs advising Londoners to go through each others’ trash-bins looking for “suspicious” chemical bottles, and to report on one another for “studying CCTV cameras.”

Essentially, this redefines “suspicious” as anything outside of the direct experience of the most frightened, ignorant and foolish people in any neighborhood.

So in addition to being suspected of being a terrorist if you take a photograph of a police officer, or of a public facility, or of a surveillance camera, you are a suspect if you even look at a surveillance camera!

For the London Free Press – March 9, 2009

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George Orwell’s depiction of state surveillance in 1984 is beginning to look less like science fiction and more like reality in the United Kingdom, where successive governments have created one of the most extensive and advanced surveillance systems in the world.

The British House of Lords just released a report that expresses concern over the U.K.’s extensive closed-circuit television (CCTV) surveillance network and its growing national DNA database, which contains information even about innocent people.

Its estimated that the U.K. has about 4 million public CCTV cameras. And Britain’s national DNA database contains information on 7% of the population, compared to only 0.5% in the United States.

Many government organizations claim the widespread surveillance and data collection enjoys public support by providing a greater sense of security.

But many others share a concern expressed by John Burrow, former chief constable of Essex, who believes that when the public fully recognizes the capabilities and intrusions of CCTV, it “may well be that there will be a falling off of public confidence in the authorities having control of such system.”

The eye-opening House of Lords report, Surveillance: Citizens and the State, questions the effectiveness of the surveillance and data gathering and stresses the importance of individual privacy.

It examines how surveillance and the collection of personal data are altering the relationship between people and the state and between individuals. It further canvasses whether the right to privacy is too easily overridden by the government’s assertion that these anti-crime measures are necessary.

This is similar to the statement contained in the 2007-08 Canadian Privacy Commissioner’s annual report on the Privacy Act: “The Orwellian dystopia was predicated on a totalitarian society. In our democracy, benevolent intentions appear to be pushing us toward a surveillance society.”

While the report does not go so far as to say that the U.K. has become an Orwellian state, it does say that “the expansion in the use of surveillance represents one of the most significant changes in the life of the nation since the end of the Second World War.”

The House of the Lords covers the claimed advantages of having this information, including the deterrence of crime, assistance to law enforcement, increased public safety, and the efficient provision of public services. Many, however, question how effective surveillance actually is in achieving those goals.

But the report also says that many of Britain’s “surveillance practices are unknown to most people and their potential consequences are not fully appreciated.”

Disadvantages, some of which are more difficult to quantify than the advantages, include the threat to privacy and social relationships, increased mistrust of the State, the risk to personal security and of identity fraud, as well as the selective way in which the technologies might be used to discriminate against certain categories of individuals. It isn’t always about what people are trying to hide, but rather what they are trying to protect.

To safeguard individual privacy from misuse of CCTV surveillance and the National DNA database, the report urges transparency and control over how and by whom the technologies are used.

The debate between state supervision and personal privacy rights will continue.

While it does, be careful — Big Brother just might be watching you, especially if you’re in the U.K.

The British House of Lords just released a report that expressed concern over the UK’s extensive CCTV surveillance network (4 million cameras) and its growing DNA database containing information even on innocent people.

Read a Guardian article about the report.

Slashdot points to a Times article saying that “The Home Office has quietly adopted a new plan to allow police across Britain routinely to hack into people’s personal computers without a warrant. ”

This of course doesn’t sit well with privacy advocates.  It reminds me of the statement in the Canadian Privacy Commissioner’s annual report on the Privacy Act that:  “The Orwellian dystopia was predicated on a totalitarian society. In our democracy, benevolent intentions appear to be pushing us toward a surveillance society.”