Convergence Conversation

We're looking for needles, so get more hay!

That seems to be the government's "plan", as far as I can tell from the story in the newspapers.

Every call you make, every e-mail you send, every website you visit - I’ll be watching you. That is the hope of Sir David Pepper who, as the director of GCHQ, the government’s secret eavesdropping agency in Cheltenham, is plotting the biggest surveillance system ever created in Britain.
[From There’s no hiding place as spy HQ plans to see all - Times Online]

Remember also that  Andy Burnham has been talking about regulating the Internet, in what seem to informed observers to be bizzare ways.

Culture and Media Secretary, Andy Burnham, was heard to remark: "We have to start talking more seriously about standards and regulation on the internet... I don't think it is impossible that before you download something there is a symbol or wording which tells you what's in that content. If you have a clip that is downloaded a million times then that is akin to broadcasting... It doesn't seem over-burdensome for these to be regulated."

These are either the words of someone who hasn’t the first idea how user-generated content works – or alternatively, a man with a very sinister plan indeed.
[From UK minister looks for delete key on user generated content • The Register]

Well, "plan" and "sinister" are both strong words, and I don't imagine they apply here, but there is certainly an underlaying unease. The political classes seem to want all technology to be like TV (or, at least, like TV was in the old days). They can't regulate newspapers (although they used to), books and magazines, so the regulate TV. Not according to any particular moral principal, but because they can. Anyway, that's a different point. Something is clearly bothering the chattering classes. I mean, they can control who gets on Newsnight. But anyone, literally anyone, can create a blog page on the interweb. I mean, really.

There's a flaw in the British government's eavesdropping plan, though. The bigger haystack makes it more difficult to find signal in the noise, and therefore the system will inevitably reduce to a mechanistic keyword search or destination trawl. And it has real potential for mischief as well, because the noise is going to increase. Suppose I don't like my boss. I wait till he's away from his desk, then I use his PC for a few minutes, Google "child porn" or "Osama bin Laden fan club", click around a bit and then close the window. Now he's in the database and sooner or later there will be some police investigation or other going on, his name will come up and he'll get a knock on the door at 5am. I thought this was such a good idea that I've started making some notes on it to take along to my next Writing Circle to see if anyone else thinks it's a good plot element.

But wait! My dastardly plot will only work against people who can be matched to an IP address (which a German court has just ruled is not personal data and therefore can be stored and processed by any Tom, **** or Harry). What if there are people using the Internet in, say, an Internet cafe so we don't know who to connect to the IP address in the database? This could be a thorn in the side of the surveillance state. Therefore, I think we should write to Andy and tell him about some of the exciting developments in Internet regulation underway in China.

ALL visitors to internet cafés in Beijing will be required to have their photographs taken in a stringent new control on the public use of cyberspace... All photographs and scanned identity cards will be entered into a city-wide database run by the Cultural Law Enforcement Taskforce. The details will be available in any internet café.
[From China photographs all internet cafe customers | The Australian]

Who could argue with this sensible policy, entirely in tune with the British government's direction. But the web is only part of the story, and for most people in most of the world, it's not the Internet they use to execute terror plots, but mobile phones. Personally, I think that terrorists using mobile phones is much more worrying than terrorists using the Internet, so something really should be done about people being able to just buy and use mobile phones without having to prove their identity. If only someone could think of something to do about it. Oh wait...

Everyone who buys a mobile telephone will be forced to register their identity on a national database under government plans to extend massively the powers of state surveillance.
[From Passports will be needed to buy mobile phones - Times Online]

That's not in China, by the way, it's in the U.K. What all of this means, of course, is that anyone who wants to know who your child is and WHERE THEY ARE will be able to do so through a simple web interface. The most rudimentary security analysis will tell you that, just like the Children's Index, the scale of this database and the number of users means that there is no chance of keeping the data private. There's an obvious benchmark question: will Andy Burnham's name and phone number be in that database or not? Feel safer now?

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