Category Archives: Politics

Amazon: power – and responsibility

Posted on by

This morning’s Observer column.

When Jeff Bezos founded Amazon, his single strategic goal was to “get big quick”. His hunch was that, in online retailing, size and scale would be the ultimate determinants of success. And his vision was never limited to books – they were the obvious starting point, because they are goods that people could buy without having to handle them. But Bezos had much more ambitious plans. He wanted to sell everything that could be sold online. He saw Amazon as potentially the Wal-Mart of the web.

Last week we saw two very different illustrations of how close he has come to achieving his goal…

Moderating RIPA (slightly)

Posted on by

When RIPA was being pushed through Parliament in 1999, some of us were very concerned at its apparent extensibility — especially (i) the scope it offered for its powers to be extended virtually without limit to any public authority in the UK, and (ii) its use for purposes other than detecting organised crime and terrorism. And lo! it came about — the Act has been used by Local Authorities to legitimise snooping in all kinds of areas, none of them connected with terrorism or organised crime.

The abuses have become so outrageous that now there’s to be a public consultation on the matter. here’s the text of the official announcement:

Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000: Consolidating orders and codes of practice

Passed in 2000, the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (called RIPA), created a regulatory framework to govern the way public authorities handle and conduct covert investigations.

This consultation takes a look at all the public agencies, offices and councils that can use investigation techniques covered by RIPA, and asks the public to consider whether or not it’s appropriate for those people to be allowed to use those techniques.

In light of recent concerns, the government is particularly interested in how local authorities use RIPA to conduct investigations into local issues. Among other things, in order to ensure that RIPA powers are only used when they absolutely need to be, the government proposes to raise the rank of those in local authorities who are allowed to authorise use of RIPA techniques.

To respond to the consultation, reply by email to ripaconsultation@homeoffice.gsi.gov.uk

You can also reply by post to:

Tony Cooper
Home Office
Peel Building 5th Floor
2 Marsham Street
London SW1P 4DF

A convention of cant?

Posted on by

Conor Gearty was not impressed by the Convention on Modern Liberty.

I first wrote that Britain was in danger of becoming a police state in the New Statesman, in June 1986. The occasion was the Public Order Bill that was then before parliament. Our civil liberties were being “horribly squeezed”, as I saw it, by an increase in police power that was producing a “distressing drift into discretionary law”. I ended by declaring that a “police state, even a benevolent one, is not a free society for long”. I wish now I had not used that phrase: it was too shrill for the circumstances it sought to describe, drawing too quick a conclusion from too flimsy a factual base. Yet if we are to believe many of the enthusiastic champions of freedom at the recent Convention on Modern Liberty we are still – 23 years later – on our way to becoming a police state or a “surveillance society” or whatever the latest colourful label is to describe the decline of freedom in Britain. The point is as overstated today as it was in 1986.

First it reveals a serious lack of historical perspective. When was this golden age from which we measure the decline?

Worth reading in full. Thanks to Charlie Beckett for spotting it.

Footnote: Cant is a great word, but I’m not sure Conor’s use of it is entirely accurate. Its origins are obscure, though some people claim it’s derived from the Irish ‘caint’, which means talk. (A nice touch since Prof Gearty and I are both Irish.) But Wikipedia claims that “the original meaning of ‘cant’ was a secret language supposedly used by rogues and vagabonds in Elizabethan England. This Thieves’ Cant was a feature of popular pamphlets and plays particularly between 1590 and 1615, but continued to feature in literature through the 18th century.” The Shorter Oxford doesn’t mention this at all, but has lots of different definitions (e.g. creek, border, edge, portion, share, division, musical sound, singing, sale by auction, apportion, give an oblique or slanting edge to), only two of which seem appropriate to its use as a term of abuse: ‘a whining manner of speaking’; and ‘jargonistic, ephemerally fashionable, uttered mechanically’.

Amazon, Google and Juvenal: Quis custodiet…

Posted on by

Jeff Bezos’s mantra from the moment he founded Amazon was “get big quick”. We’re beginning to see just how big it’s getting.

Last week an investment analyst estimated that Amazon now ‘facilitates’ (and takes a cut from) a third of all e-commerce transactions in the US.

Then the gay and lesbian community discovered how powerful Amazon’s database can be when what the company later described as an “embarrassing and ham-fisted cataloging error” effectively banned 57,310 listings of so-called ‘adult’ books and DVDs by making them invisible. This saga was well covered on the Web. See, for example, Clay Shirky’s admirable apologia (for being seduced by righteousness), Bill Thompson’s BBC column and Rory Cellan-Jones’s early blog post on the subject.

Looming over all this, of course, is a Really Big Question. Companies like Amazon and Google have acquired enormous power. Both can effectively render significant chunks of our culture invisible at the click of a mouse. But they are public corporations, answerable only to their shareholders — if at all. (Actually, in Google’s case, the two-tier shareholding structure means that the company’s leaders are not accountable even to their shareholders.) So, as the Roman poet Juvenal famously observed: Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? (Who will guard the guards themselves?) To date, we’ve avoided the question, arguing that if companies step out of line then in a competitive market they will pay the penalty for messing us around. So, if Google was deliberately skewing search results (so the argument runs) then the market would detect that and people would go to other search engines. I suspect we’ve moved beyond that comforting point. So the question remains: who will keep these online behemoths honest?

Orwellianism on the instalment plan

Posted on by

Charles Arthur has written a terrific piece in Media Guardian about the implications for journalism of the new data-retention legislation.

Want to be an investigative journalist of the future? You’ll need a pen and paper, pay-as-you-go phone, and a motorbike. We’ll explain the motorbike later. But you may be an endangered species. New regulations that came into force last week – requiring telephone and internet companies to keep logs of what numbers are called, and which websites and email services and internet telephony contacts are made – have left some wondering if investigative journalism, with its need to protect sources (and its sources’ need, often, for protection), has been dealt a killer blow.

Worries focus on the fact that every government department, local council and even quango can access this telephone and internet data, given a judge’s clearance. What will they use it for? To investigate everything from treason to flytipping. Might it also be used to find out who has been tipping off a journalist on a local paper about the misdeeds of local councillors? That’s the concern.

It’s a real worry IMHO. When the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act was being pushed through Parilament in 1999, some of us were concerned — and warned — about its almost infinite extensibility. And in due course we found that it was being used not just to monitor alleged terrorists, but by a local authority to spy on parents suspected of giving a false address in order to get their kids into a particular school.

The new data retention laws will make it impossible to protect journalistic sources — unless totally non-electronic channels are used. And, even then, widespread use of car number-plate recognition software will make it risky to travel to a meeting in a car. So, as Charles says, use only snail mail, unlocked SIM-cards bought with cash and travel to meetings with confidential sources on a bike.

We’re building an Orwellian state on the instalment plan.

Obama’s ethical Houdini

Posted on by

I always thought that Larry Summers was an idiotic choice for President of Harvard — and that Obama was crazy to choose him as a senior economic adviser, but it turns out we didn’t know the half of it. Here’s an excerpt from a wonderful column by Frank Rich which explores the extent to which Summers is ethically challenged:

On the same Friday that the Labor Department reported the latest jobless numbers, the White House released (in the evening, after the network news) some other telling figures on the financial disclosure forms of its top officials. From those we learned more about how much the bubble’s culture permeated this administration.

We discovered, for instance, that Lawrence Summers, the president’s chief economic adviser, made $5.2 million in 2008 from a hedge fund, D. E. Shaw, for a one-day-a-week job. He also earned $2.7 million in speaking fees from the likes of Citigroup and Goldman Sachs. Those institutions are not merely the beneficiaries of taxpayers’ bailouts since the crash. They also benefited during the boom from government favors: the Wall Street deregulation that both Summers and Robert Rubin, his mentor and predecessor as Treasury secretary, championed in the Clinton administration. This dynamic duo’s innovative gift to their country was banks “too big to fail.”

Some spoilsports raise the conflict-of-interest question about Summers: Can he be a fair broker of the bailout when he so recently received lavish compensation from some of its present and, no doubt, future players? This question can be answered only when every transaction in the new “public-private investment plan” to buy the banks’ toxic assets is made transparent. We need verification that this deal is not, as the economist Joseph Stiglitz has warned, a Rube Goldberg contraption contrived to facilitate “huge transfers of wealth to the financial markets” from taxpayers.

But perhaps I’ve become numb to the perennial and bipartisan revolving-door incestuousness of Washington and Wall Street. I was less shocked by the White House’s disclosure of Summers’s recent paydays than by a bit of reporting that appeared deep down in the Times follow-up article on that initial news. The reporter Louise Story wrote that Summers had done consulting work for another hedge fund, Taconic Capital Advisors, from 2004 to 2006, while still president of Harvard. [emphasis added]

That the highly paid leader of arguably America’s most esteemed educational institution (disclosure: I went there) would simultaneously freelance as a hedge-fund guy might stand as a symbol for the values of our time. At the start of his stormy and short-lived presidency, Summers picked a fight with Cornel West for allegedly neglecting his professorial duties by taking on such extracurricular tasks as cutting a spoken-word CD. Yet Summers saw no conflict with moonlighting in the money racket while running the entire university. The students didn’t even get a CD for his efforts — and Harvard’s deflated endowment, now in a daunting liquidity crisis, didn’t exactly benefit either.

Summers’s dual portfolio in Cambridge has already led to one potential intermingling of private business and public policy in his new White House post. He tried — and, mercifully, failed — to install the co-founder of Taconic in the job of running the TARP bailouts. But again, Summers’s potential conflicts of interest seem less telling than the conflict of values that his Harvard double-résumé exemplifies…

Interesting footnote: As I observed a while back, Harvard’s endowment (which pays for a third of the university’s operating costs) is in deep, deep trouble. Partly this is due to the collapse in the stock market. But it is made worse, as the New York Times reported, because — on the advice of its President — “it had invested more than its assets, a leveraging strategy that can magnify results, both good and bad. It also had invested heavily in private equity and related deals, which not only lock up existing cash but require investors to put up more capital over time.”

The truth is that Summers is a creature of the monster he is now charged with nursing back to health. Why should anyone believe that he is capable of acting impartially — or even ethically — given his record?

The Met’s Rodney King moment

Posted on by

This morning’s Observer column.

The police have two choices. Accept that digital technology will make them accountable for their actions or try to control the technology. In any normal society there would be no decision to be made. But since 9/11 the threat of global terrorism has given the state – and its security apparatus – carte blanche to take whatever measures it deems necessary. And it has imbued in every uniformed operative, from ‘Community Support’ officers and the bobby on the beat to the bored guy in the airport checking your toothpaste, the kind of arrogance we once associated only with authoritarian regimes.

You think I jest? Talk to any keen amateur photographer. As a group, photographers have been subjected to increasingly outrageous harassment by police and security operatives. (For a partial list of incidents see bit.ly/22VFRX). Try photographing a bridge, public building or a police car parked on a double-yellow line and you will have a goon demanding your camera, image card or film.

Better still, ask John Randall, a Tory MP who recently told the Commons how one of his Uxbridge constituents, a Mr Wusche, photographed properties he thought were in bad repair to pass on to the council…

Marina Hyde had a great column on the same subject in yesterday’s Guardian:

If there is anything to feel optimistic about today, perhaps it is the hope that we are witnessing the flowering of an effective inverse surveillance society. Inverse surveillance is a branch of sousveillance, the term coined by University of Toronto professor Steve Mann, and it emphasises “watchful vigilance from underneath”, by citizens, of those who survey and control them.

Not that turning our cameras on those who train theirs on us is without risk. Indeed, one might judge it fairly miraculous that the man was not forcibly disarmed of his camera phone, given that it is now illegal to photograph police who may be engaged in activity connected to counterterrorism. And as we know, everything from escorting Beyoncé to parking on a double yellow while you nip in to Greggs for an iced bun can now be justified with that blight of a modern excuse – “security reasons”.

Yet it will by now have dawned on even the most dimwitted Met officer that it is increasingly impossible for them to control the flow of information about their activities – to kettle it, if you will – no matter how big their army of press officers putting out misleading information in the immediate aftermath of any event may be.

Did the Met genuinely think they could prevent the emergence of a far more joined-up picture of Tomlinson’s passage through the City of London that afternoon, much as they thought they could suppress the details about Jean Charles de Menezes’s tragic final journey? If so, their naivety is staggering…

Some people have emailed to say that they find the closing prediction of my column (that police from now on will start confiscating cameras) implausible. Well, they clearly haven’t read Section 76 of the Counter-Terrorism Act, which came into force on 16 February. That makes it an offence to photograph any police officer or member of the armed services in ways that could aid terrorism. As Roger Graef (one of the wisest people I know in this field) pointed out yesterday much — if not most — policing of demonstrations these days is ‘justified’ not just under the Public Order acts, but anti-terror legislation which gives anyone in uniform authority to do or ban almost anything.

In fact, one of the great ironies of the Bob Quick case is that the photographer who took the picture could have been prosecuted under Section 76. And probably would have been if he hadn’t got the picture out quickly.

The bigger picture is that Osama bin Laden has won, hands-down. He provoked Western democracies into an obsession with security that justifies any degree of trampling on liberty. He stimulated the introduction of legislation (like the Patriot Act in the US) and the Counter-Terrorism Act in the UK which enables the State to treat ANY activity, including legitimate democratic activity (like protesting against the looting of the banking system, the launching of a war under false pretences, the banning of fox-hunting or airport expansion) not as a nuisance to the normal business of a city but as a threat to the State itself.

Official harassment of amateur photographers

Posted on by

Here’s a partial list of relevant links about how officialdom is treating amateur snappers.

From The Register.

  • Yes, you have rights • The Register Yes, you have rights — unless the police say you haven’t.
  • You’re all al-Qaeda suspects now.
  • So, what can you photograph?
  • New terror guidelines on photography.
  • Photocops: Home Office Concedes Concern.

    • Hansard

    Austin Mitchell’s Early Day Motion.

    Text reads:

    “That this house is concerned to encourage the spread and enjoyment of photography as the most genuine and accessible people’s art; deplores the apparent increase in the number of reported incidents in which police, Police Community Support Officers (PCSOs) or wardens attempt to stop street photography, and order the deletion of photographs or the confiscation of cards, cameras or film on various specious grounds such as claims that some public buildings are strategic or sensitive, that children and adults can only be photographed with their written permission, that photographs of police and PCSOs are illegal, or that photographs may be used by terrorists; points out that photography in public places and streets is not only enjoyable but perfectly legal; regrets all such efforts to stop, discourage or inhibit amateur photographers taking pictures in public places, many of which are in any case festooned with closed circuit television cameras; and urges the Home Office and the Association of Chief Police Officers to agree on a photography code for the information of officers on the ground, setting out the public’s right to photograph public places thus allowing photographers to enjoy their hobby without officious interference or unjustified suspicion.”

    Guide to UK Photographers’ Rights (pdf download of a Guide by lawyer Linda Macpherson.)

    New Labour’s dream: the national surveillance state

    Posted on by

    This morning’s Observer column.

    There’s a delicious moment in Alastair Beaton’s satirical film, The Trial of Tony Blair, in which the former prime minister is finally arrested for war crimes on a warrant from the international criminal court. One scene shows the standard police procedure as Blair is inducted by the desk sergeant in a London station. Towards the end of the rigmarole, the policeman moves to take a saliva swab from him.

    Blair is aghast, asks him what he is doing and – after the policeman has explained that he’s taking a DNA sample – asks who brought in such a stupid law. “You did, sir,” is the response…