Tomorrow letters are going to be issued to all ISPs, large and small, demanding that details of emails, internet phone calls and browsing history be retained for 12 months.
I don’t need to say that this is unspeakably diabolical. Truly, this is the most terrifying milestone of them all. Available to the Government, for the first time ever, will be the ability to build up detailed profiles on individuals, their relationships with other people, their personal information, their sexuality, their membership of organisations, their shopping habits and in some cases their political beliefs and affliations.
Once the ISPs begin doing this, we’re all going to have to make sure we don’t look at the wrong sorts of websites – anything that might be compromising, anything, in short, you might need to explain when a Police officer or Government official pulls out a file and asks, “so what were you doing looking at this?”
I’ve looked at Mein Kamph on the internet. I’ve read Das Kapital on the internet. I’ve watched Ken Bigley being decapitated. I read political blogs from across the specrum, and occasionally that’ll include looking at stuff from fascists, Trotskyite revolutionaries, Eco-Warriors.. a full gamut of extremists and freaks in politics, religion and anything else. I like reading and discovering things in all walks of life, but how do you tell the difference between harmless intellectual curiosity and dangerous obsession that might indicate a deviant or seditious mind?
For example, people convicted for looking at Child Porn on the internet have never successfully argued that they were ‘just curious’ about it (to my knowledge). The crime is to look – your motives do not matter. We accept this as a society because Child Porn is one of those unforgivable, unspeakable horrors for which no succour for suspects can be tolerated.
The prescedent is set, however, and the Government is empowering itself with the ability to find all anti-Government related activity on the internet, both producers (like me) and consumers (like you). We have to put it on blind faith that this Government or no Government after it will ever consider pushing this particular Nuclear Button.
Of course, trying to record our browsing history for 12 months was, itself, an unspeakable Nuclear Button – and they’ve pushed that. Labour can’t stand this idea of something so huge and important they’ve got no control over, no access to and no ability to tax or regulate. It makes me feel physically sick such is my impotent rage.
So we face the prospect of having to try to guess what might, or might not, be compromising to look at on the internet, or who might or might not be compromising to email. I say this is a cruel and unusual punishment indeed. It’s diabolical. It’s Machiavellian. It’s cutting the British off from a free, uncensored internet in an even nastier and more monsterous way then the Australian or Chinese scheme. Our version uses uncertainty and fear to police the internet. Thought Police.
What are the wrong sort of websites? Who knows. I certainly don’t. Is it better to be safe than sorry and simply not use the internet at all? Does using ‘the internet’ make us like those ‘outer party’ members who are subjected to extreme scrutiny, while the ‘proles’ who have no access to the internet are allowed to wallow in filth and muck unmonitored because they simply don’t matter enough for anyone to care what they do?
How long it will take ISPs to implement these rules, and whether or not they will fight the Government (presumably a legal battle that lasts until, oh, say, after the next General Election) is as yet unknown.
The cost is mindboggling. An independent review suggested that something in the region of 40,000 terabytes of storage would be required by the largest ISPs. The Government’s promised to use taxpayer’s moneys to reimburse them for the costs, but 40,000 terabytes of enterprise level storage would set you back. according to my rather brief research, approximately £1.5 billion, with astronomical power and running costs requirements. Multiply that by the number of really big ISPs, and consider the effect on small ISPs and, once again, the Government’s created a mammoth barrier to entry for the ISP business and is about to dump billions and billions into storage providers. They’ll soon rethink their promise to fund all this when they discover how much it costs – or the public finds out – at which point the cost of the internet is going to rocket, ISPs are going to go bust and someone will come up with the clever idea of nationalising BT Broadband for the purposes of making it a universal public service.
And so on.
We have to hope that this becomes a protracted legal battle and that the Tories overturn it, assuming they win. The alternative doesn’t even bear thinking about. There’s nothing that Labour do that makes this okay, that makes us happy to live with it because of all the other good things they do.
Ian B said...
5 Apr 09 at 1:32 pm
The kind of questions we need to ask are along the lines of-
Why haven’t the ISPs stood up to the government?
Why haven’t we the users stood up to the government?
Why haven’t we the users demanded that our ISPs stand up to the government?
or perhaps-
Why do the government have the power to do this in the first place?
Various answers involving the rule of the threat of law, corporate statism, and the fact that we consistently elect arseholes all spring to mind, as does the reality that any people who are not eternally vigilant will become oppressed.
Ian B said...
5 Apr 09 at 1:45 pm
Oh, and bear in mind that the government are currently in the process of illegalising pornographic drawings and other art involving children. Children here being anyone under the age of 18[1]. Except it’s a drawing. How do you establish the age of a fictional character?
I’m an artist. I draw an “adult” comic strip. If somebody thinks somebody I’ve drawn looks under 18, how do I prove otherwise? My ex had a slim figure which, from some angles, could have been misinterpreted, especially a drawing. What if I’m trying to draw a 20 year old, but my poor artistic skills render a more youthful looking face? How can any rational government attempt to protect from abuse fictional characters? Will I find myself in a court one day, arguing against a howling righteous mob that “she looked old enough to me guv”.
Does anyone care? No, not really. Just us few civil liberties nutters. The morally hegemonic view is that the suspect in such a situation must have possessed “unforgivable, unspeakable horrors for which no succour for suspects can be tolerated.”
The days of the free internet are over. 10 years ago I was saying, to general derision, that the internet would be censored, and the reply was always, “they can’t, the internet routes around censorship”. Ho hum. I feel no joy at being proven correct.
[1] The “age of porn” was quietly elevated from 16 to 18 by T. Blair- adult magazines until then used to publish photos from age 16 onwards. The government deliberately lowered the gay age of consent (rightly) from 18 to 16. We thus live in a country where a lad of 16 can have gay sex, but if he draws a picture of it he’s legally a despicable pervert who must be imprisoned. We are ruled by nutters.
Bunny Smedley said...
5 Apr 09 at 2:10 pm
In a rare surge of optimism, I wonder whether, as seems to happen rather often in the course of human events, technology won’t find a way of running ahead of regulation? Of creating ISPs so ‘offshore’ that it’s hard to regulate our relationships with them? Of creating some mode of traceless browsing? Of creating disposable internet browsers that can just be chucked in the bin once we’ve had a good old browse round some particularly disreputable site?
None of which, of course, should in any way distract us from fighting what is, at least from a certain sort of Tory point of view, a grotesquely unwarranted innovation, like opening the postal correspondence of the apparently blameless, but in some ways much worse.
And finally, I’m actually desperately curious to know why you ever found yourself watching a jihadiste execution video – not, by the way, because I question your right to do so, which I don’t, but rather, because it seems out of character, and thus interesting. But then the whole question is also woefully off-topic, so perhaps we should save that cheery subject for another day.
Ian B said...
5 Apr 09 at 2:22 pm
I’m actually desperately curious to know why you ever found yourself watching a jihadiste execution video
Butting in here (I’m engaged in an orgy of displacemant activity now, blog commenting to avoid the work I should be doing, heh), I watched that video for four reasons-
1) Morbid curiosity
2) I prefer to see things for myself than to have them described to me by someone. Then I can actually form an opinon.
3) Everyone was talking about it and posting links.
4) Why not?
The internet is an enormous boon precisely because it lets us see things for ourselves instead of having them filtered by others to “protect us” or “for our own good”. Our masters often say we must be protected or we become desensitised or misled or perverted, but the reality is that the internet, by showing us the best and the worst of existence, just lets us form balanced opinions. Rather than be told something is “horrifying” we can actually see for ourselves whether it is. This frightens our masters. They want to tell us what to think and feel, not have us forming our own thoughts and feelings.
This is one of the big problems with the kiddie pr0n/”violent pr0n” etc legislation. It is illegal for anyone but the powers that be to even look at it. We thus have no way of knowing what a convicted person was looking at, or to form our own opinion of it. We must simply trust what we are told; and that will always be told in the most extreme language in order to elicit from us an emotional reaction.
The internet gave us sight we had not had before; degree by degree, we are once more being blinded.
Plato said...
5 Apr 09 at 4:00 pm
Couldn’t do the Ken Bigley video myself as still hiding behind the sofa, however I am very angry at the prospect in just a few hours time of looking over my shoulder at what someone may decide isn’t to their liking.
Obnoxio The Clown has gone down the DOS approach by sticking every terror word he can in his email footer, but what have we come to as a nation when this kind of snooping and control in a democratic and supposedly free nation?
I can’t wait for these venal and corrupt earwigs to be voted out and I for one will be lobbying my safe seat MP for a repeal on this one.
Ben Goldacre has an excellent blog post on the idiocy of using massive data gathering to find ever shrinking needles here
Henry North London said...
5 Apr 09 at 4:36 pm
I remember seeing someone beheaded it was the guy with long hair, It was a terrible sight. Morbid curiosity fulfilled and not to be repeated… After all I often say to my patients and anyone else that I am unshockable but that did make me feel pale (I think it was circa 2004)
And after all someone put it up to be seen Not to be censored…
Tristan said...
5 Apr 09 at 5:34 pm
We should all run Freenet
And if large numbers of people ran Tor exit nodes then it would really make their snooping difficult (unfortunately, a lone person running Tor will inevitably draw attention to themsevles…)
Tristan said...
5 Apr 09 at 5:35 pm
Above: I mean a Tor exit node – running Tor itself should be fine (but it obviously needs exit nodes to access the internet)
Ian B said...
5 Apr 09 at 6:09 pm
Tristan, I’m not at all sure that it would be safe to run Freenet. It dumps files on your hard drive. If those files are anything verboten, I think it’s a safe bet that you’re going to be held legally responsible for them, regardless of the fact that you didn’t know what was in them.
Andrew Hickey said...
5 Apr 09 at 6:50 pm
And TOR’s not much better, since you’re effectively letting the person running the exit node have access to all your communication.
It’s not something that can be stopped by purely technological means, unfortunately…
Oranjepan said...
5 Apr 09 at 10:39 pm
Why haven’t ISPs stood up to the burdensome imposition of this new regulation? Because they can smell huge amounts of new income potentially backed by tax-payer guarantees. It’s all gravy.
Why is having state-held information for online activity particularly diabolical? Because it creates the potential assumptions that people only read something they agree with and that readership confers knowledge.
To do so unnecessarily politicises the law, undermines the reputation of law and thereby that of law-makers – people will be encouraged to seek ways round the law rather than to work within it.
But of course politicians value the spirit of the law higher than the letter of the law, which is why they are scrupulous in making fair expense claims… well, not quite.
Charlotte Gore said...
6 Apr 09 at 12:10 am
Hmm Bunny I don’t remember why I watched that video, But I do remember that I regretted it.
Foxwood said...
6 Apr 09 at 1:20 am
If it comes to the UK, it eventually comes to the US. I remember Pete Townsend being caught with his credit card on a child porn site. I don’t know what his motives where, but he says he was doing research because he was abused as a child. Who’s to say? I wait to hear the truth, but you know the government won’t.
I guess if I were to live in the UK, I’d be a Tory. Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful.
Ian B said...
6 Apr 09 at 7:31 am
One other thing. So far as I can tell, this logging of emails must actually only apply to email servers in the UK run by ISPs (e.g. if you’re with plusnet, and your email is fred.bloggs@plus.net). They’re basically demanding the server logs.
My email both incoming and outgoing are using a server on my domain hosted in the USA. So so far as I can tell, there is nobody to log them. My ISP are just passing the data packets through. I’m not saying they couldn’t be intercepted and logged, of course they could, but I don’t think that’s what this law actually asks them to do. If I’m correct, it would make sense for people to buy domains offshore and relay email through them. It then never touches a UK email server so won’t be logged.
As to web browing, presumably the ISP is required to keep a log of every http:// request. That’s an awful lot of data. Any page with images or other embedded content in it is going to generate a whole slew of http requests. (This fact allowed BT to wildly over-egg the pudding when they set up the initial censorship system which is already in place, Cleanfeed, which ISP’s were “asked” (arms twisted behind backs) to “voluntarily” adopt. They were able to announce that it was blocking, I think the figure was around 30,000 requests per day. They deliberately ignored that most of those were multiple requests for the same page, and that anyone clicking refresh multiple times was generating massive numbers of requests. And of course, the figure was announced to the press as “there are 30,000 active online paedophiles in the UK”.
Bunny Smedley said...
6 Apr 09 at 8:13 am
Thanks Charlotte, Ian, Plato. The reason I asked is less creepy voyeurism than ongoing research for the book about art and conflict I’ll probably never get to write. One of the big topics that always surfaces with visual representations of conflict is that of authenticity – one of the main qualities of execution videos, alas.
Personally, I avoid watching that sort of thing, if only because the people who put those videos online are, roughly speaking, the people who do the beheading and so much else, and I make a point of trying not to do things that terrorists want me to do. But I don’t mean that to sound sanctimonious, and I do appreciate the reasons why decent people might come to different conclusions – Ian’s I prefer to see things for myself than to have them described to me by someone. Then I can actually form an opinon being perhaps the most recognisable of these.
Just to reiterate, though – up to the point where people start putting the lives of others in serious danger, I can’t see why we shouldn’t have an absolute right to look at these things. The alternative is, among other things, an example of letting terrorists win by effecting profound changes in the way our legal system operates.
And finally ….
I guess if I were to live in the UK, I’d be a Tory.
Don’t count on it. As mentioned to another Lib Dem pal yesterday, I sometimes wonder what would have happened if I’d come to political maturity when the choice was Brown-Cameron-Clegg rather than Thatcher-Kinnock-Ashdown, with the elegant spectre of Dr Owen lurking enticingly on the margins ….
Charlotte Gore said...
6 Apr 09 at 9:16 am
I completely agree with this, especially refusing to be afraid – fear and reason rarely go together
You’re right that these videos are put out either by terrorists (trying to make you afraid) or others (trying to you afraid of the terrorists). I’m afraid I am more than capable of falling for, “you don’t want to watch this” as a way of getting me to watch something.
“Conventional wisdom” is that imagination is usually worse than the reality. In this particular instance, the conventional wisdom was wrong.
But I didn’t see the video as a demonstration of their power. I saw it as a sign of their weakness. As repulsive and horrible the act itself was, the whole thing was squalid and cheap. It was obviously a profoundly symbolic moment for them, but the symbolism for me was that of a bunch of young men with weapons killing a helpless old man – a demonstration of power because, in fact, they have none at all.
I regret watching it because I could have done without the mental images, thanks, but I suppose with hindsight it did mark a bit of a turning point in my attitude towards the jihadists, and I’ve not been afraid since.
Charlotte Gore said...
6 Apr 09 at 10:38 am
Ian, sorry your last comment didn’t get past the bouncers. They’re useful but dumb, I’m afraid!
I wonder how this is going to affect people using Gmail? It’s run througth ‘the web’ so they can log the fact that you’ve been using it, but it’s also on SSL so technically the pages are encrypted. Will Google be asked to surrender the email logs of UK based users? Will they simply ban UK users from Gmail? Will they fight it in the courts? Will The Government threaten to block Google in the UK unless they comply?
This could get very ugly.
Ian B said...
6 Apr 09 at 11:03 am
Charlotte, I guess your bouncers spotted a particular word in my comment
Following your comment, I wonder what effect this will have viz foreign nations, since the email logs include inbound emails and emails outbound from the UK, that means the email activities of foreign nationals e.g. Americans are being logged. I wonder if that could be the basis for a challenge my an international, US based corporation such as Google? Doesn’t it mean that Google are being asked to hand over private information of their US and other national customers?
I actually think the best thing that could happen would be an international quarantine of the UK on that basis. How long would the government take to cave in when the entire population of Britain lose the capability to email abroad?
Charlotte Gore said...
6 Apr 09 at 11:19 am
Yep, I think you’re on to something there Ian.
Plato said...
6 Apr 09 at 11:22 am
I’ve come across this and thought it was well worth the 5mins to watch to the end.
http://www.pjtv.com/video/PJTV_Daily/Klavan_on_the_Culture%3A_Shut_Up/1612/
Charlotte Gore said...
6 Apr 09 at 11:36 am
Interesting video from the point of view of seeing another perspective. Thought the bit about Europe’s culture’s being good for nothing except being taken over by the Islamist threat within was a load of crap, but the “shut up” argument is very familiar.
Bunny Smedley said...
9 Apr 09 at 10:43 am
I’ve not been afraid since.
That’s a typically thoughtful, distinctive, actually quite inspiring reply, Charlotte – I only wish I felt more confident that everyone who watched those videos was as morally alert and responsible as you are.