Surveillance cameras in Pennsylvania town prompt privacy concerns

A security camera is mounted on a utility pole in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Photograph: Carolyn Kaster/AP

Horses drawing buggies regularly clop down the roads approaching Lancaster, Pennsylvania a peaceful city in the heart of Amish country that had only three murders last year and relatively low crime.

But if the community sounds reminiscent of the past, it also has some distinctly modern technology: 165 surveillance cameras that will keep watch over thousands of residents around the clock.

When it is complete, the surveillance system will be bigger than those in large cities such as Philadelphia, San Francisco and Boston. And the fact that it will be monitored by ordinary citizens has raised privacy concerns.

"They are using fear to sell the cameras as much as possible," said Charlie Crystle, a member of a fledgling citizens group that opposes the cameras and is trying to raise public awareness about them. "There's just a huge potential for personal and political abuse."

Officials in the city of 54,000 say the cameras have deterred crimes and helped solve them.

The white, domed cameras sit atop utility poles in public spaces, business districts and some residential areas. They are monitored 18 to 24 hours a day by employees of the Lancaster Community Safety Coalition, a non-profit board with workers who report suspected crimes to police.

Lancaster is the seat of Lancaster county, a popular and peaceful tourist destination known for having one of the nation's largest Amish populations. Horses and buggies are common on surrounding roads.

The safety coalition, directed by city councilman Joseph Morales, screens prospective monitors and provides training about racial profiling and how to spot trouble. The group has seven monitors, all paid. The coalition does not release their names.

Monitors sit in a room with two large plasma screens and six smaller ones, each divided into views of different cameras. A joystick allows them to zoom in or move the cameras if they see something unusual. If they do, they call police.

"What they are typically seeing is people in their everyday life going through their business," Morales said. "They're looking for anything out of the ordinary."

A special commission recommended the $2.7m (£1.6m) camera system in 2001 in response to a spike in some crimes. Police chief Keith Sadler strongly supports having citizens monitor the cameras because he does not have the manpower to do it with a force of 159 officers, about 20 fewer than two years ago.

"In this economy, nobody has the luxury to take cops off the street," Sadler said. "You are probably watched more by non-police agencies than you are by us."

Lancaster has seen some declines in property crimes since the cameras went up, but those numbers have fluctuated — along with the totals for violent crimes.

Despite inconclusive statistical evidence, police and the commission say the cameras are providing officers with a new tool. Last year, commission workers called police 492 times and provided video to police 305 times. That work led to 82 arrests and 86 citations, as well as 18 charges pending.

Police also credit the cameras with helping to solve a murder in which a man was shot outside a restaurant and the shooting was caught on tape.

Other small cities have also invested in surveillance cameras, though not as heavily as Lancaster.

In Wilmington, Delaware, the city of about 73,000 developed a network of 21 publicly owned cameras and networked them with more than 200 private cameras owned by businesses.

That city also has 37 neighbourhood cameras, and the combined system is monitored by a non-profit group, which refers calls to the police.

Wilkes-Barre, a north-eastern Pennsylvania city even smaller than Lancaster, is planning to install 150 cameras this year, also monitored by a non-profit.

Some research has cast doubt on just how much surveillance systems reduce crime.

A January study by the University of California found that cameras did not reduce homicide in San Francisco but did help reduce the number of burglaries and some thefts. A New York University study found that cameras did not do much to deter crime in some public housing projects.

Those findings and others are part of why Crystle and other critics do not think the effort is worth the risk in a small town like Lancaster.

He also points to examples such as Cambridge, Massachusetts, where officials decided in February against adding surveillance cameras because of privacy concerns.

Crystle and others in Lancaster say they have done nothing to warrant being watched. Nick Boots, who owns a barber shop near a camera, said he thinks the city is using fear to gain support for the cameras.

"Through the fear of the perceived threat, people are willing to give up certain rights," Boots said. "You got to think of Lancaster now being like an open-air prison. Who's the warden?"

Others praise the project, including Francisco Cruz, 65, owner of Cruz Barber Shop, who said he's seen less drug dealing and fewer prostitutes outside his shop since cameras went up.

"I don't care if they put one right here in the shop," Cruz said.

The American Civil Liberties Union also objects to the project, especially since it covers the entire city — not just high-crime areas.

"When you have a blanket network of surveillance, you are no longer about solving crime," said ACLU attorney Mary Catherine Roper, citing studies that show cameras mainly help solve just small crimes. "Now you're talking about a surveillance community."

Source: The Guardian

Paranoid, suspicion, obsessive surveillance : ht- and a land of liberty destroyed by stealth

Returning to Britain from a summer holiday abroad, you begin to notice things that perhaps escaped your attention before - the huge number of CCTV cameras that infest our public spaces and, much less obviously, the atmosphere of watchfulness and control that has now become a way of life.

This is the regime that 12 years of New Labour have imposed on Britain, a place of unwavering suspicion, paranoia - and obsessive surveillance.

We have become the sort of society that we would unhesitatingly have railed against a few years ago. But, because the change has been brought about with such stealth, we are the very last to see it.

The latest figures, in a report by the Interception of Communications Commissioner, Sir Paul Kennedy, are truly terrifying. They reveal that a request is made every minute to snoop on someone's phone records or email accounts.

Last year alone, there were 504,073 new cases of state-sanctioned surveillance, the equivalent of one adult in 78 being watched - and a rise of 44 per cent over two years. Whatever happened to our centuries- old traditions of freedom?

Voltaire called England 'the land of liberty'. Until New Labour materialised, with its intrusive and 'character improving' agenda, that description rang true. The English preferred freedom and tolerance to ideological and religious fanaticism. The currency of our society was common sense.

No longer. Common sense has been replaced by officially sanctioned mistrust, mistrust that allows anyone invested with the tiniest bit of authority - often in the form of a high-visibility jacket - to throw their weight around.

Britain is now a place where terror laws have been used by councils to spy on people breaching smoking bans, making a fraudulent application for a

Police routinely stop anyone who photographs a public building, in one instance deleting the pictures taken by a 69-year-old Austrian tourist who admired the architecture of Vauxhall bus station.

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And if the authorities are behaving like this today, what will they subject us to in the run-up to the 2012 London Olympics?

Wardens in Brighton already habitually seize drink from people on the mere suspicion that they plan to consume it in a public place. And in Edinburgh, a swimming pool attendant stopped the 85-year-old mother of TV presenter Nicky Campbell from taking pictures of her grandchildren.

These stories have become part of our national life - and there are thousands of them each year. I know this because my researcher trawls local and national newspapers for examples every morning. What they add up to is a depressing account of a nation infantilised by micro-management and fear.

We are losing something essential to our national identity. Foreigners who know what is going on here cannot believe that the British show such little regard for their freedoms. Even Americans, the most jumpy people in the world, are unsettled by Britain's paranoia.

Government policy is largely to blame. Labour has instilled an endemic culture of suspicion in Britain, which is manifest in the 3,500 new criminal offences brought in over its 12 years in office.

Labour is also behind a flurry of new databases that either leech personal information from each one of us or require innocent members of the public to go through an endless rigmarole of proving themselves to the state.

Surveillance: One in 78 adults is being watched

The scale of this project is vast. 'The state and its agencies are amassing increasing quantities of data about its citizens,' writes Jill Kirby, the director of the Centre for Policy Studies, in a recent pamphlet.

She lists them as including the DNA database, centralised medical records and the children's database Contact-Point. This data, she says, has 'proliferated to levels previously unseen in peacetime Britain'.

An institutionalised pessimism has taken over. The clear message of Government is that we are incapable of managing our lives and must be watched and regulated by ministers and civil servants from dawn to dusk.

More sinister is the assumption that we are all in some way guilty of harbouring the worst intentions. Up to 11 million people who work with children - music tutors, babysitters, football coaches and even parents who have exchange students to stay - will now have to join a new database at the cost of £64 and undergo criminal checks.

Writers such as Philip Pullman and Anthony Horowitz, who regularly visit schools, are among those who have roundly condemned the scheme.

You can see why - the other day I heard of a retired canon who was told that he could only baptise his grandson in his local cathedral if the church authorities first saw proof of his criminal records check. But it is the Government's obsession with surveillance that poses the greatest threat to our liberty.

Earlier this year, I calculated from published figures that Britain's expenditure on databases and surveillance systems would amount to a staggering £32 billion.

Thanks to the economic crisis, some projects have been scaled back. But plans still include a £1 billion system that will give the Government access to data from all emails, text messages, phone calls and internet usage - a proposal that has even been savaged by companies expected to collect the information.

Additionally, the e-Borders scheme, which will take 53 pieces of personal information from anyone travelling abroad - including phone and credit card numbers, details of an onward journey and history of cancelled journeys - will cost over £1.2 billion.

But the absurd amounts spent on these schemes are not the only concern. The threat they pose to our privacy - and the incompetent way in which the Government handles our personal data - are even more worrying.

We know, for example, that more than 30 million separate personal files have been lost by government agencies. Recently, a Freedom of Information request by Computer Weekly magazine revealed that nine local authority staff have been sacked for accessing the personal records of celebrities and acquaintances.

This largely unpublicised breach should warn us that a government obsessed with hoarding our information and watching us cannot be trusted to keep our details safely.

A similar security lapse in ContactPoint could be disastrous. But even this doesn't compare to the real possibility of the systems that watch our movements, monitor our behaviour and tap into the communications data linking up into one great apparatus of surveillance.

This would allow the authorities more or less to monitor our every movement and transaction in real time. Nothing would remain private.

If this happens, we can kiss goodbye to a functioning free society in the United Kingdom. We are not there yet - but we can see the seeds everywhere, from the spread of CCTV, and the flood of government regulations to the expropriation of our personal information.

We have to consider the distinct possibility that the obituary for the 'land of liberty' is being composed at this very moment.

Source: Mail Online

March of the state spies: One in 78 adults came under state-sanctioned surveillance last year

Britain's extraordinary march towards a surveillance state is revealed today by shock new figures.

They show that one request is made every minute for officials to spy on someone's phone records or email accounts.

The number of Big Brother snooping missions by police, town halls and other public bodies has soared by 44 per cent in two years.

Spying on the public: One adult in 78 has come under some type of surveillance - from storing petrol without a licence to not quarantining a dog

Last year there were 504,073 new cases - an average of 1,381 a day. It is the equivalent of one adult in 78 coming under state-sanctioned surveillance.

The snoopers are using a law originally aimed at terror suspects. But their targets include people suspected of storing petrol without a licence and bringing a dog into the country without quarantining it.

Liberal Democrat spokesman Chris Huhne said last night: 'It cannot be a justified response to the problems we face in this country that the state is spying on half a million people a year.

'The Government forgets that George Orwell's 1984 was a warning, not a blueprint. We are still a long way from living under the Stasi - but it beggars belief that it is necessary to spy on one in every 78 adults.'

The requests to intercept email and telephone records were made under the hugely controversial Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000.

A total of 653 state bodies, including 474 local councils, are allowed to use its surveillance powers.

CCTV nation: The laws were originally brought in as an anti-terror measure, but are instead becoming a way of life

The Daily Mail has discovered that Sandwell Borough Council checked phone records to locate a bogus faith healer, while Lewisham Council used the anti-terror power to pursue a rogue removal firm and a rogue pharmacist.

Kent County Council carried out 23 phone checks as part of probes into storing petrol illegally and breaking the law over importing a dog.

Other bodies authorised to carry out surveillance include the Financial Services Authority, the Ambulance Service, fire authorities and prison governors.

Chris Huhne: 'The state is spying on half a million people'

They are not allowed to find out the content of phone calls and emails, but can access details of when and to whom they were made or sent.

People who are found to have done no wrong have no right to know they were snooped on.

The figure for access requests in 2008 emerged in a report by the Interception of Communications Commissioner, Sir Paul Kennedy.

In a previous report, based on nine months in 2006, the Commissioner said there had been 253,557 requests, the equivalent of 338,000 over a full year.

The Lib Dems said this shows a 44 per cent increase between 2006 and 2008. The vast majority are understood to have been approved, though no figures are available.

Mr Huhne said it made a mockery of a supposed crackdown on the use of RIPA by the Home Office.

He added: 'We have sleepwalked into a surveillance state but without adequate safeguards. Having the Home Secretary in charge of authorisation is like asking the fox to guard the henhouse.'

Alarmingly, in 2008 there were 595 'errors' by public authorities and the private firms who supply them with phone and e-mail information.

One of the most common mistakes was typing in the wrong phone number when making a request - leading to details being disclosed about the wrong person.

Sir Paul said: 'Errors may result in catastrophic consequences for members of the public'.

He cited a police investigation into a paedophile ring in which an address for a suspect was obtained from internet records. It led to the arrest of an entirely innocent man.

Despite the huge number of requests, the Home Office says there is a need to go further than giving public bodies access to phone and internet records.

Under plans unveiled earlier this year, the police and security services would gain access to the public's every internet click and phone call.

This would include, for the first time, monitoring the use of social networking sites such as Facebook. Every internet and phone company would have to allocate an ID to each customer.

They would then have to store details of calls, text messages and internet sites for a minimum of 12 months. The actual content of calls and emails would not be kept.

As well as phone and email checks, councils and other public bodies have been using actual covert surveillance, though undecoveragents or hidden cameras.

Last year, councils and government departments such as benefits officials were given 9,894 authorisations for this, up from 9,535 a year earlier.

The police and the security services were given 16,118 direct surveillance authorisations, giving a total of more than 26,000, or 71 every day.

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Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1205419/March-state-spies-One-78-adults-came-state-sanctioned-surveillance-year.html#ixzz0NrZKjTUP

Bumbling Big Brother: What Americans can learn from the British experience with government surveillance

Last October several British newspapers reported that Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s government was working on a plan to monitor every phone call, website visit, text message, and email in the country, entering the information into an enormous database that would be used to catch terrorists, pedophiles, and scam artists. Dominic Grieve, the shadow home secretary, called it “a substantial shift in the powers of the state to obtain information on individuals” and warned that “any suggestion of the government using existing powers to intercept communications data without public discussion is going to sound extremely sinister.”

Home Secretary Jacqui Smith later gave a speech in which she said the electronic dragnet would be limited to data transmitted through websites and information about the identities and locations of senders and recipients. She said investigators would still need ministerial warrants, a kind of administrative subpoena, to listen to or read the contents of communications. The speech apparently did not reassure Ken MacDonald, director of public prosecutions for England and Wales. In late October, shortly before stepping down from his post, MacDonald warned that “decisions taken in the next few months and years about how the state may use these [surveillance] powers, and to what extent, are likely to be irreversible,” adding, “We need to take very great care not to fall into a way of life in which freedom’s back is broken by the relentless pressure of a security state.”

The episode illustrated two points that are reinforced by British journalist Ross Clark’s wry, revealing book The Road to Big Brother: One Man’s Struggle Against the Surveillance State. First, despite the U.K.’s reputation as one of the most watched societies in the world, with more surveillance cameras per capita than any other country, its citizens, notably including law enforcement officials, still care about privacy. Second, their complaints are more easily ignored than similar objections in the United States, where the Fourth Amendment and various statutes prevent the executive branch from unilaterally changing the rules regarding government snooping.

In the U.S., implementing a data collection program like the one contemplated by the British government would require not only the “public discussion” demanded by Dominic Grieve but congressional authorization. The legislation, in turn, would be reviewed by the courts, which are unlikely to allow so much heretofore private information to be gathered on so many innocent people, let alone bless routine wiretapping based on administrative subpoenas. Nor would American courts approve mandatory DNA sampling of every citizen and visitor, as a British appeals court judge has suggested, or let police stop people and search their pockets and bags at will, a policy Clark says is in the offing.

Still, there is much Americans can learn from the British experience with surveillance. Take all those cameras. So far in the United States, they have been limited mainly to detecting traffic violations, generating heated debate about whether they reduce or increase accidents and whether municipalities are sacrificing public safety for the sake of revenue (by reducing the duration of yellow lights, for example). But provided they focus only on public areas, there is no constitutional barrier to erecting surveillance cameras throughout the United States, until our country is as thick with them as the U.K. After all, the government could, in theory, post police officers on every corner, and they would be free to look and listen without violating anyone’s Fourth Amendment rights. Looking and listening from a distance does not change the constitutional question.

Yet there is something to be said, fiscal concerns aside, for not having a cop on every corner. The sense of being constantly watched tends to put a damper on things, potentially affecting the topics people discuss, the way they dress, the businesses they visit, even the books they read while sitting on park benches.

By Clark’s account, this cost is not worth paying. He says the evidence that the government’s surveillance cameras are effective at either deterring or detecting crime is thin. Facial recognition software aimed at catching known suspects has been a bust, easily foiled by poor lighting, hats, sunglasses, even a few months of aging. Clark argues that Britain’s cameras, which he describes as frequently unmonitored or out of order, are appealing as a relatively cheap way of seeming to do something about crime. He finds that “electronic surveillance is not always augmenting traditional policing; it is more often than not replacing it, with poor results.” Likewise, he says, huge collections of information gleaned from private sources such as phone companies, banks, and credit bureaus (along the lines of America’s renamed but not abandoned Total Information Awareness program) are unmanageable and rife with errors. Clark notes that “there is a fundamental rule about databases: the bigger they are, the more useless they become.”

Again and again, Clark finds, high-tech systems that seem at first to be outrageous invasions of privacy turn out to be outrageous boondoggles that not only don’t succeed at their official goals but actually get in the way of catching genuine bad guys and protecting public safety. “The excessive collection of data tends to act as a fog through which authorities struggle to find what they are looking for,” he writes. “The more Big Brother watches, the less he seems to see.”

As Clark emphasizes, an excessively nosy government poses many dangers, including exposure to fraud and blackmail, unjustified interference with freedom of travel, and mistaken incrimination. But it is reassuring to realize that government is not competent enough to be omniscient.

Source: Reason Online

Councils must be transparent and accountable about surveillance

Your report on councils spying on their residents (Councils still breaking surveillance laws, 22 July) shows that local government really is on the frontline of Britain's expanding surveillance state – and that councillors and council leaders need to be held accountable for their decisions. Councillors must decide whether they embrace the surveillance society, or reject it and introduce checks and balances and public democratic oversight of the local use of surveillance powers, as the Liberal Democrats have done in Islington.

Local authorities have the power under theRegulation of Investigatory Powers Act (Ripa) to conduct surveilance of residents. Your report highlights how councils have used these powers for issues as trivial as people putting their rubbish out on the wrong day. But there will be times when councils can and do use Ripa powers proportionately and responsibly to tackle serious environmental health issues, fraud, and crime. We've used covert surveillance to crack down on shops selling knives to children, for example.

Surveillance powers should only be used where appropriate and proportionate, such as when there are serious issues of public protection in which there is no other way of collecting evidence. Every time a council uses its surveillance powers it should be considered carefully, and it should be the last resort. And if someone is found innocent, all data gathered should be destroyed.

Councillors should go further than just acting responsibly by introducing democratic oversight and real accountability.

In Islington, my Liberal Democrat administration has made our use of Ripa transparent and accountable, with regular public oversight by elected councillors. The overview committee, the council's main scrutiny body, receives regular reports of all operations conducted under Ripa. Because we are only using these powers where they really are needed, I am not afraid of justifying each operation publicly.

Voters all over the country should start demanding the same level of oversight from their local councils. Liberal Democrat authorities like Islington and Oldham are leading the way, and I hope we are setting a trend for others to follow.

Parliament needs to change the law to roll back Labour's surveillance state, but local councillors are on the frontline and can decide right now whether they embrace or even abuse their surveillance powers, or whether they will take a stand for openness and accountability.

Cllr Terry Stacy JP

Source: The Guardian

Big Brother in the electronic age

WE’RE a big country so I guess it’s understandable that not only is Big Brother watching — but now it’s Big Sister, Big Uncle, Big Aunt, Big Whoever. It’s becom ing a Big Mother of an operation.

OK, we know about pat-downs at the airport that, for some of us, are the only time we have any physical body contact at all so let’s not knock that. But isn’t this whole invasion-of-privacy thing overdone? No place a private citizen can be private anymore. If a nice lady ends up in bed with a semi-nice guy in the so-called privacy of her own nice bedroom, she still can’t be sure she’s not being filmed. Spooks tell you super-mini-cameras can be tucked not only behind a painting or in a light fixture but in your ear, up your nose, between your toes or, with the greatest respect, God knows.

E-mail. The new generation doesn’t even know how to write longhand. Stationery has gone the way of papyrus. Stamps may be going up but letters are going down. Everyone e-mails. A guy’s breaking up with his longtime live-in? He does it by e-mail. You’re receiving a legal document? Comes by e-mail. A dumb married South Carolina governor getting it on with an overheated unmarried lady in downtown Argentina upchucks about the wonders of scratching her itch — on e-mail! Lawyers warn that you must be careful of e-mail. That there’s no way to ever get rid of it. That it’ll remain there longer than a hair transplant.

ATMs? These machines have big mouths. They know what you took and where you were when you took it. Can’t tell the missus you were in Cleveland on business when your ATM will state that on such-and-such particular Thursday you were in hot Buenos Aires pulling cash for a hot time on a hot bod.

Source: RINF News

The increase of the surveillance society

Following the 9/11 and 7/7 terrorist attacks, there has been an exponential increase in Britain’s surveillance: currently, Britain has a quarter of the world’s security surveillance cameras with around four million cameras in use and we are currently the world’s most watched nation – something which is very unnerving and reflective of the surveillance dystopia envisaged by George Orwell in his fictional work “Nineteen Eighty Four”.

The steady expansion and the overuse of the surveillance in Britain risks undermining the right to privacy; it poses a huge risk to individual liberty; and one more step towards a police state in the United Kingdom. Currently, there are few laws in place to limit the use of CCTV, brought about to “protect national security”: this has lead to a “mission creep” in the use and abuse of surveillance. Local councils have been accused of severely abusing the surveillance in the United Kingdom by using CCTV to prevent fly tipping, dog fouling and, recently, CCTV was used by Poole Borough Council to monitor the actions and whereabouts of a family who were wrongly accused of lying about where they live on a school application form.

Britain’s surveillance society can be closely linked to the works of Jeremy Bentham and Michel Foucault. In 1785, Jeremy Bentham proposed the idea of the Panopticon: the Panopticon is a conceptual prison design that allows the prison guard to watch the prisoners without the prisoners being able to tell when they are being watched, in order to gain significant psychological control. Bentham described the Panopticon as “a new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind, in a quantity hitherto without example”. The French philosopher, Michel Foucault, took up this theme in his 1975 work “Discipline and Punish”, where he pursued the link between surveillance and social control. Thus, comparing the effects of surveillance to the effects of the Panopticon.

Although the use of surveillance clearly has its advantages in terms of fighting crime, its overuse can prove counter-productive and can ultimately be viewed as a challenge to Britain’s liberal democratic status.

Daniel Button

Source: RINF News

Big brother is watching

The furore around the Chinese government’s Green Dam software has raised the issue of the way modern technology is used to monitor our daily lives. Here, we list seven of the technologies that can be used to keep track of your movements.

CCTV

Closed-circuit television cameras were first used in Germany in 1942 to remotely monitor the launch of V2 rockets. Since then, CCTVs have become one of the most contentious pieces of technology in public use. The government and law enforcement agencies claim the use of video monitoring technology can help reduce crime and improve public safety; critics argue that the cameras serve only to displace crime to unmonitored areas, and do not act as a deterrent. With more than four million CCTV units in the UK, the network of cameras captures the average person around 25 times a day.

RFID tags

Radio frequency identification chips are already widely used in supermarkets and shops for the purpose of stock control, but some people fear their use could be widened to monitor the habits and behaviour of ordinary citizens. At the moment, these tags, which are little bigger than a grain of sand, are embedded into pints of milk and library books. When paired with an RFID reader, the tags can help to provide detailed information about items, such as their location, or how many there are. Although most people are happy for RFID tags to be used in stores to monitor stock levels, they’re less happy about the idea of the chips still sending out a signal once they leave the shop. On a benign level, such tracking capabilities would mean a store would know that people in Hertfordshire prefer blue cashmere jumpers, while those in Aberdeen favour the brown versions. But on a more sinister level, it could also enable them to glean an unprecedented insight into our personal lives, and target their brands to us accordingly. To those people who fear a “surveillance culture”, the ability to tag and track everything from our food to our clothes would be the next step on an already slippery slope.

Telecoms technology

The recent election protests in Iran have raised some interesting questions about the technology used by the country’s government to not only censor and control the spread of information, but monitor the ways in which citizens have been communicating and mobilising. It now appears that some of the technology the Iranian authorities have been using to listen in on phone calls made on fixed-line phones and mobile handsets was sold to the government by Nokia Siemens, a joint venture between the Finnish phone maker and the German technology giant. Nokia Siemens said it believed the product was being used by the government to monitor calls, but some experts have speculated that it could also be used for a practice known as “deep packet inspection” – a process that enables agencies to block communications, as well as monitor the nature of conversations and even covertly alter this for the purpose of propaganda and disinformation. Nokia Siemens, rocked by this association with a repressive regime, have pointed out that Iran is not the only country using its monitoring technology – many Western governments, including the UK and US, apparently use it for “lawful intercepts”…

Email monitoring software

Who is reading your emails? Chances are, if you work for a big company, your boss could be keeping an eye on how many messages you send in the course of a day. According to recent research by Forrester, 44 per cent of companies read outgoing mail, using a combination of digital scanning software and real people. The primary concern for businesses appears to be the dissemination of inappropriate or commercially sensitive information rather than time-wasting, but with more and more distractions available at our office computers, from Facebook and Twitter to online shopping, many more businesses may decide to start monitoring just how their employees spend their work time.

Information-gathering technology

Gunwharf Quays shopping centre in Portsmouth shot to fame last year when it was revealed that surveillance software was monitoring the signals given off by shoppers’ mobile phones to track their movements. The technology allowed researchers to tell when someone entered the shopping centre, what stores they visited, how long they spent in each one, and what time they left. It could even tell what route they took, and the country they were visiting from. Although all monitoring is anonymous – it does not identify the owner of the phone, rather than handset’s unique IMEI network number – it raised some concerns from privacy campaigners. While, at its most innocuous, this sort of information could help business and shopping centres pinpoint areas of high footfall or congestion, and redesign the space accordingly, or spot a surge in late shoppers that could prompt them to extend store opening hours, it also implies that this technology could be extended to minutely measure purchasing habits and retail behaviour. Perhaps that scene from Minority Report, in which Tom Cruise is bombarded by tailored, personalised advertising as he passes every hording, is not too far away.

Targeted advertising

One of the most contentious issues facing businesses and consumers at the moment is targeted advertising. With companies struggling to find a profitable business model in the digital age, a greater premium is being placed on targeting products, services and content directly to people on the basis of their specific likes, dislikes and needs. Phorm’s Webwise technology is a good example of this new way of thinking – it works by scanning users’ browsing history, and matching keywords found in these websites to targeted adverts, provided by other companies, which match the interests of web users. Phorm has stressed that the entire process is anonymised, so that interests cannot be directly traced to a named individual, but that has still lead some web users, as well as technology luminaries such as Sir Tim Berners-Lee, to be suspicious of the concept. Sir Tim likened commercial traffic monitoring by internet service providers as akin to “allowing them to put a television camera in your living room”.

GPS-enabled phones

Most modern mobile phones have a small GPS chip inside them, which means your location can be pinpointed to within a few hundred metres by the network of satellites floating in orbit. Of course, most people will use this technology in combination with the mapping software loaded on to their phone to make it easier to find their way around; some phones are now so sophisticated that they can provide real-time turn-by-turn directions, just like a satnav. The inclusion of GPS chips in handsets has also opened up a new world of location-based services – now that your phone “knows” where you are, it can feed that information in to, say, your phone’s search engine to provide data, links and recommendations for local amenities for whichever area you find yourself in. The flip side of that, of course, is that with the right kind of software installed on your phone, it’s possible to remotely monitor your location for less innocuous reasons. Services such as Google Latitude and Sniff are opt-in, consensual examples of this sort of technology, although some worry that in time, these kinds of monitoring software will be commonplace and non-negotiable, rather than a matter of personal choice.

Claudine Beaumont

Source: RINF News

Italian journalists speak out against wiretapping law

On 13 June, a draft law limiting journalists’ ability to provide the public with vital information was passed in the lower house of the Italian parliament and now awaits the senate’s approval. Unions representing lawyers, journalists and editors have all expressed their firm opposition, organising a series of events, including a conference last week and another planned for tomorrow in Rome, and promoting a petition to stop the law, which has 260,000 signatories –– and counting.

In recent years, the Italian press has published transcripts of private conversations obtained through wiretapping. Some of these transcripts were relevant to ongoing trials; others were not. Both exposed left and right-wing politicians alike to public anger and sometimes embarrassment. To gain popular support, the government is arguing that the exceptionally high number of tapped phone lines (estimated to be around 300,000) justifies their plan to fast-track the law through parliament. Two years ago, the Prodi government unsuccessfully tried to pass a similar law.

Among the restrictions outlined in the draft is a provision making it illegal for journalists and editors to publish information about a trial (on wiretaps or anything else) until the preliminary investigations are over, even if these documents are already in the public domain. Punishment can be up to 30 days in jail, plus a €10, 000 fine for journalists and €465,000 fine for editors. “This implies censorship of news that could be very relevant to most citizens. For example, under the new law, the press would not have been able to report on the Parmalat scandal for many years,” said Franco Siddi, general secretary of the Italian Press Federation (FNSI). Similar concerns were expressed by both the European Federation of Journalists (EFJ) and the International Press Institute (IPI).

In addition, the new law will make it illegal to publish extracts from wiretaps not relevant to trials. For journalists, this could lead to the maximum sentence of three years in prison.

Under the new law, prosecutors will only be allowed to wiretap individuals for a maximum of 30 days. They can do so only if they have strong criminal evidence, and only when the maximum punishment for the alleged crime exceeds five years in prison. These evidence requirements are less strict when the alleged crime involves organised crime or terrorism. “Theoretically we can still perform investigations on criminal organisations such as the Mafia, but the five-year limit implies that we will not be allowed to wire-tap for typical Mafia crimes such as extortion,” said Giuseppe Cascini, secretary of the supreme court.

“It is a serious blow to everybody’s security and a great help for a lot of criminals,” said Giancarlo Caselli, head prosecutor in Turin. “If this law was already effective the arrests made [of activists allegedly trying to rebuild the Red Brigades] would not have been carried out,” said Olga D’antona, MP and widow of Massimo d’Antona, killed in the 1990s by the new Red Brigades.

Source: Index On Censorship

David Cameron: Giving power back to the people

I want to thank Imperial College London for inviting me to speak today.

This university has a remarkable history. In just a little over a century, you already have the discovery of penicillin, the development of fibre-optics and the foundations of the internet and fourteen Nobel Laureates to your name.

These innovations have put real power into people's hands and changed the world. That's what I want to talk about today - people power and the change we need.

After the political crisis this year, the consensus for change is overwhelming. But the reality has so far been distinctly underwhelming.

Blacked-out expense claims.

The announcement of a behind-closed-doors Iraq enquiry.

And a Prime Minister who talks about restoring the authority of Parliament but is still going around making policy announcements on the radio.

If you're serious about change, you need consistency of argument and clarity of purpose. That's what the Conservatives are offering.

We have a coherent programme to fix our broken politics and drag our democracy into the post-bureaucratic age. It involves a massive, sweeping, radical redistribution of power - from the political elite to the man and woman in the street. But before we deal with long-term plans, we have to deal with the expenses issue.

I set up a Scrutiny Panel to examine the claims of MPs and to examine whether these were reasonable, and whether, in retrospect, some money ought to be paid back. Conservative MPs have overwhelmingly responded in a positive way and shown a real desire to take the lead on this damaging issue. It is an effort - both collectively as a party and individually as Conservative MPs - to address the public's anger about what has happened.

Today, we are publishing a very full update.

Already Conservative MPs have paid back £125,000 - this adds another £125,000. This is not about MPs that broke the rules - we all know the rules weren't good enough. It's about understanding the level of public anger, about a system that was broken, and the part we played in it. It's not good enough just to sort out the rules for the future, we need to recognise the mistakes of the past. And these payments are an important part of that. This is just one step - of many - that needs to be taken to restore both some trust and some faith in the political system.

A month ago at the Open University I set out our plans to decentralise power. Today I want to take the next step and show how we will control the power of the state and make it more accountable to people.

FREEDOM AND ACCOUNTABILITY

The British state has developed over centuries into a powerful entity charged with delivering important goals.

To protect its citizens from internal and external threat.

To redistribute wealth from the richest to the poorest.

To ensure public services - education, healthcare, welfare - are there for all who need them.

These things have helped make our country a place which is safer, fairer, and where opportunity is more equal. But the more the state does, the greater the risk that it gradually becomes master over the citizens it's meant to serve. That's why we have traditionally created checks to keep the right balance of power.

Checks to stop the state exerting too much power over us, in other words, protecting personal freedom. And checks to help us exert power over the state, in other words, ensuring political accountability. But the last twelve years of Labour Government have diminished personal freedom and diluted political accountability. Today, I want to talk about both.

CONTROL STATE BRITAIN

Today we are in danger of living in a control state.

Almost a million innocent citizens are caught in the web of the biggest DNA database in the world - larger than that of any dictatorship. Hundreds of shadowy powers allow officials to force their way past your front door. And soon we will be forced to surrender our fingerprints, eye scans and personal information to intrusive compulsory ID cards.

Every month over a thousand surveillance operations are carried out, not just by law enforcement agencies but by other public bodies like councils and quangos. And the tentacles of the state can even rifle through your bins for juicy information.

NEW LABOUR PHILOSOPHY

How have we got ourselves into the position where there is such a marked imbalance of power between the citizen and the state?

We have to acknowledge that New Labour began with the right intentions.

In the Freedom of Information Act, data protection laws, Scottish and Welsh devolution, and even the attempt to invest citizens with fundamental human rights we can see concrete evidence of good intent. But this liberal strand in Labour has been crushed by the overwhelming dominance of the political authoritarians.

This authoritarian strand of the party was guided by two things: a political philosophy and a style of government. Their philosophy has at its heart a belief that the state is the answer to most problems. So Labour reached for more control over many areas of our lives - with endless laws, targets, and bureaucracy herding everyone into the net of the control state.

Their governing style, on the other hand, is all about presenting the government in the best possible light. They see it as vital to demonstrate that ministerial action leads directly to some beneficial result. And not just any result - but a fast and visible one.

The authoritarians are not interested in real and sustainable change in our country unless that change could be linked, directly, to their own actions.

So when crime rises, better to create another criminal offence and we've had over 3000 new ones since 1997, than it is to take the long-term action that would strengthen families. It's government of the short-term, by the short-term and for the short-term. A top-down philosophy together with a short-term governing style, this was an ideological and political recipe for creating a disastrous imbalance of power between the citizen and the state.

Labour's belief in the state led them to increase state power and thereby diminish personal freedom. And their reliance on spin made them hostile to scrutiny - which is why Labour ended up diluting political accountability.

CONSERVATIVE PRINCIPLES

It's because people have seen Labour's liberal intentions get crushed, twisted and lost that they legitimately ask of us: how will you be different?

Conservatives start with an instinctive desire to give people more power and control over their lives.
But we're not naïve. We know the state cannot let go completely.

The right power balance is something that must be constantly negotiated and adjusted, through ongoing judgements. But we will always be aware that those judgements - however small or insignificant they may seem in isolation - can together change the character of our country.

So a Conservative government would constantly ask two essential questions:
Does this action enhance personal freedom?
And does it advance political accountability?

And at the heart of our programme for government will be our intention to change fundamentally the balance of power between the citizen and the state so that ultimately it's people in control of their government, not the other way round.

ENHANCING PERSONAL FREEDOM

We'll start by putting back in place the protections of personal freedom that Labour have taken away.

Today in Britain - not in some foreign dictatorship, not in a bygone age, you can wake up in the morning, in your own bed, in your own home to hear a knock on the door from an official with one of over a thousand powers that now allow the state to enter your home.

You don't have to be a terrorist or a criminal fugitive. The authorities have the right to come into your home to inspect potted plants for pests or to check the regulation of hedgerows. More than half of these new powers have been introduced in the past twelve years. But Labour's control state can not only enter your home. They can snoop on you as you walk down the street.

Not just the sort of spies you see in primetime dramas but Labour's new spooks: council officials and quango workers, using the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, or RIPA. This was supposedly introduced to help fight terrorism. But Poole council used it to spy for nearly three weeks on a young family who had applied to a local primary school to see if they lived in the right catchment area. And councils in Derby and Gateshead used RIPA to snoop on dog foulers.

Then there is the misuse of the Terrorist legislation. Section 44 of the Terrorism Act gives the police power to stop and search any person on the street. Last year, it was used over 120,000 times - a three-fold increase on the year before. That's one person stopped every four minutes. Yet only one percent of these searches led to arrest, let alone charges or convictions.

Instead, we see a woman in her thirties held for walking on a cycle path. And parents, and their twelve year old disabled son, detained for two hours and by ten officers on suspicion of people-trafficking.

But let's say you were charged. There are now serious questions about the quality of justice in Britain. Since 2003, Labour has repeatedly tried to remove the role of juries in fraud trials, coroners' inquests and other criminal trials. And they haven't just eroded justice at home - they've surrendered to a further attack from abroad. Britain now allows extradition to a range of countries without that country having to produce proper evidence that the person in question has committed a crime.

In all these ways, our personal freedom has been diminished. The balance of power in our country has shifted away from the individual - just trying to live their life and towards the state and its agencies - constantly probing, prying and picking on people.

So we will make some important changes. The next Conservative government will revoke the unjustified and unreasonable powers that let people enter your home without your permission.

We will change the law that allows councils to snoop on people for trivial matters.

We will review the use of the Terrorism Act's Section 44, and the stop and search powers contained within it.

We will change the Criminal Justice Act 2003 to strengthen the right to trial by jury.

And we will review the operation of the Extradition Act - and the US/UK extradition treaty - to make sure it is even-handed and works both ways.

SURVEILLANCE STATE

But stopping the state from exerting too much power over us demands another big change. This Government is running not just a control state, but a surveillance state. In 2007, Privacy International ranked Britain's privacy protections joint 43rd out of 47 countries surveyed - with the worst record in Europe, and only marginally better than Russia and China.

Faced with any problem, any crisis - given any excuse - Labour grasp for more information, pulling more and more people into the clutches of state data capture.

Contact Point is a vast database that holds the details of everyone under the age of eighteen in England, their name, address, gender, date of birth, school and health provider. And the Government doesn't want to stop with the basic information. They want the most complex, important, personal information there is.

Nearly five million people are on Labour's DNA database. The Government says it's to help fight crime. But almost a million of the people on it are completely innocent. And tens of thousands of those innocent people are children. It's a situation that would cause concern under the most oppressive regimes in the world, but it's happening right here, right now in Britain.

This in itself bad enough - our most personal information stored in labs and state data vaults. But Labour want to go even further. They want every single person in this country to walk around with an ID card. With that card over fifty pieces of personal information will have been transferred from your private control to state control. Not just your name and address and place of birth but your image, signature, fingerprints - maybe even iris scans and a facial measurement template.

For those who don't get a card there is talk of fines, enforced registration and penalties in public service provision. Scare tactics to herd more disempowered citizens into the clutches of officialdom, as people surrender more and more information about their lives, giving the state more and more power over their lives.

If we want to stop the state controlling us, we must confront this surveillance state.

So the next Conservative Government will scrap the Contact Point database of children's details.

We will scrap the ID Card scheme.

And we will remove innocent people's records from the DNA database.

POLITICAL ACCOUNTABILITY

The action we take to rein in Labour's control state and confront Labour's surveillance state will help rebalance power in one direction by enhancing personal freedom and limiting the state's power over us.

But a radical redistribution of power also means increasing our power over the state, which means advancing political accountability. And just as information plays a massive part in the argument about personal freedom, as what I've said about Labour's surveillance state databases demonstrates, so too is information central to the argument about political accountability.

Information is power - because information allows people to hold the powerful to account. This has never been more true than today, in the information age. The internet is an amazing pollinator, spreading ideas and information all over the globe in minutes. It turns lonely fights into mass campaigns; transforms moans into movements; excites the attention of hundreds, thousands, millions of people and stirs them to action. And constantly accelerating technology makes information infinitely more powerful.

We see the power of this information in Iran. Every time the Iranian state has tried to choke the flow of information to dampen down the protests, people have turned to technology to share and access information. When the state cut off text messages to stop people coordinating their protests, the protesters switched to social media like Twitter and Facebook. When foreign journalists had their visas taken off them, people on the streets started uploading video clips onto YouTube. And when the government tried to monitor internet traffic and ban popular websites, people outside Iran set up proxy internet servers so Iranians could continue to access information anonymously.

Information is critical in the balance of power today. That's why the US administration asked Twitter to postpone its website maintenance work so Iranians could continue to use the site. That's foreign policy in the post-bureaucratic age - enabling the free flow of information to give people power so they can use that power to demand change. And we've seen the dramatic power of information to shape events at home, too.

Last month, the Daily Telegraph published receipts and expense claims that had previously been kept secret, information that the authorities, to their shame, have even now only released in a half-hearted way, thick with black ink. But what the Daily Telegraph did - the simple act of providing information to the public - has triggered the biggest shake-up in our political system for years. Information alone has been more powerful than years of traditional politics. Of course it has been a painful time for politics and for individual politicians - but let us be clear, it is without question a positive development for the country.

It is information - not a new law, not some regulation - just the provision of information that has enabled people to take on the political class, question them, demand answers, and get those answers.

That's exactly as it should be. That is real accountability. That is people power, and we need more of it not less.

Whether it's for freedom abroad, or fighting corruption at home, we have seen how information can put power in people's hands and make the political elite answer to them.

INFORMATION FOR ACCOUNTABILITY

We have already announced some of the ways in which we will put information - and thereby power - in people's hands.

We will publish every item of government spending over £25,000.

It will all be there for an army of armchair auditors to go through, line by line, pound by pound, to hold wasteful government to account.

We will require the publication of crime data online in an open way so that communities can build their own crime maps, see what crimes are being committed, where and at what time and hold their local police to account if they're not doing something about it. And we will require all local councils to publish information like meeting minutes and local service data in a standardised format.

This will give people the power to hold local government to account, and to develop new public services like a local version of TheyWorkForYou, or Bebo applications that tell teenagers when the local sports centre is open as well as the power to see which councils are providing the best value for money, so residents can demand the same from their own. But today we're announcing further steps towards true freedom of information.

SETTING DATA FREE

In Britain today, there are over 100,000 public bodies producing a huge amount of information.

This ranges from school league tables to train timetables; from health outcomes to public sector job vacancies. Most of this information is kept locked up by the state. And what is published is mostly released in formats that mean the information can't be searched or used with other applications, like online maps. his stands in the way of accountability.

Let me give you just two examples.

Today, many central government and quango job adverts are placed in a select few newspapers.

Some national, some regional. Some daily, some weekly.

But all of them in a variety of different publications - meaning it's almost impossible to find out how many vacancies there are across the public sector, what kind of salaries are being offered, how these vary from public sector body to public sector body and whether functions are being duplicated.

Remember this is your money being put forward to give someone a job - and you have little way of finding out why, what for and for how much.

Now imagine if they were all published online and in a standardised way. Not only could you find out about vacancies for yourself, you could cross-reference what jobs are on offer and make sure your money is being put to proper use. Or what about patient outcomes in the NHS?

Some of the most important information you'll ever need to know, how long your Dad will survive if he gets cancer, your chances of a good life if you have a stroke, all this is out of your hands.

Now, again, imagine if this information was in your hands. You'd be able to compare your local hospital with others, and do something about it if it wasn't good enough.

Choose another hospital. Voice your complaint to a patient group. Make change happen.

All this data which would help people in this country hold the powerful to account - it's all locked away in some vault. And it's only getting worse.

Next week Ed Balls will publish proposals for a new report card, replacing league tables. That will reduce the amount of information being published, and reduce parent power to hold their school to account.

We're going to set this data free. In the first year of the next Conservative Government, we will find the most useful information in twenty different areas ranging from information about the NHS to information about schools and road traffic and publish it so people can use it.

This information will be published proactively and regularly - and in a standardised format so that it can be 'mashed up' and interacted with.

What's more, because there is no complete list that can tell us exactly what data the government collects, we will create a new 'right to data' so that further datasets can be requested by the public.

By harnessing the wisdom of the crowd, we can find out what information individuals think will be important in holding the state to account.

And to avoid bureaucrats blocking these requests, we will introduce a rule that any request will be successful unless it can be proved that it would lead to overwhelming costs or demonstrable personal privacy or national security concerns.

If we are serious about helping people exert more power over the state, we need to give them the information to do it. And as part of that process, we will review the role of the Information Commissioner to make sure that it is designed to maximise political accountability in our country.

PARLIAMENT, JUDGES AND DECENTRALISATION

But as I said in my speech to the Open University, to get real accountability we need to draw upon traditional means as well as modern.

That means strengthening Parliament so it holds the executive to account. That's why we will give the House of Commons more control over its own timetable limit the use of the Royal Prerogative and reduce the power of the party Whips.

It means reining in and reversing the regulation of our lives by unaccountable judges who are changing Britain's legal landscape with their judgments in the courtroom.

That's why we will introduce a British Bill of Rights - not only to strengthen our liberties, but to ensure greater democratic accountability over the creation of any new rights. And it means strengthening the line of accountability that runs through our local politics.

That's why we will have more directly-elected Mayors, and will legislate to create Citizens' Initiatives giving people a new power to get local referendums on issues they feel strongly about.

CONCLUSION

So here is the next stage in our radical redistribution of power.

Stopping the state from exerting too much power over us by enhancing personal freedom.
So you will not be followed or have you home entered for no good reason.

You will be tried by your peers, protected from unjust prosecution abroad. And your identity will be freed from the chains of state databases.

We will also help people exert more power over the state by advancing political accountability.

So we will open up information that will help people hold the powerful to account. And we will strengthen the chain of accountability throughout our politics.

This is progressive Conservatism in action, a traditional suspicion of state power combined with a clear grasp of the modern world producing the right approach, and the right plan of action to increase personal freedom and political accountability, restore trust, and help bring about the new politics we need so badly.

Source: The Conservative Party News