Tim Berners-Lee at the dinner in Balliol on Friday night, where he was the (deserving) recipient of a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Oii. Technically, it’s a terrible picture (very low light in Balliol’s Hall), but it does capture his impish look. And in a nice juxtaposition, behind him is the portrait of Dame Stephanie ‘Steve’ Shirley, the remarkable woman who funded the Oxford Internet Institute.
“The character we exhibit in the latter half of our life need not necessarily be, though it often is, our original character, developed further, dried up, exaggerated, or diminished. It can be its exact opposite, like a suit worn inside out.”
Marcel Proust
This morning’s Observer column:
A headline caught my eye last Tuesday morning. “Privacy not an absolute right, says GCHQ chief”, it read. Given that GCHQ bosses are normally sensibly taciturn types, it looked puzzling. But it turns out that Sir Iain Lobban has retired from GCHQ to spend more time with his pension, to be followed no doubt, after a discreet interval, with some lucrative non-exec directorships. His successor is a Foreign Office smoothie, name of Robert Hannigan, who obviously decided that the best form of defence against the Snowden revelations is attack, which he mounted via an op-ed piece in the Financial Times, in the course of which he wrote some very puzzling things…
LATER The Economist has a curiously wishy-washy piece about this. It recalls the row, many years ago, about the Clipper chip and points out that it isn’t just the GCHQ boss who is critical of the companies. Michael Roberts, the new NSA director, last week said much the same thing to an audience in Silicon Valley. As to what will happen, though, the Economist is uncharacteristially uncertain:
Although the shrill rhetoric on both sides suggests the opposite, it seems mostly a negotiating tactic. Mr Rogers’s speech in Silicon Valley was essentially an offer to talk. “I’m not one who jumps up and down and says either side is fundamentally wrong,” he said. “We have no choice but to come to an agreement,” says the boss of an American technology giant. A deal would be welcome, but only if the rules are transparent, enforceable—and apply not just to American agencies, but to the other members of the “Five Eyes”, the intelligence alliance which also includes Australia, Britain, Canada and New Zealand.
Will it happen? More likely, there will be muddling through—just like after the Clipper chip. Technology companies will negotiate some arrangement to satisfy information requests by governments. And intelligence services will try to exploit vulnerabilities in encryption technologies or create backdoors surreptitiously. Until, perhaps, another Snowden comes along.
“Politics determines who has the power, not who has the truth.”
When RIPA was going through Parliament in 1999, one of the things critics pointed out was the latitude it provided for mission creep. And so it proved — to the point where local authorities were using it to snoop on parents who were suspected of not living in the catchment area of the schools to which they wanted to send their kids.
Now, more evidence of the extent of the mission creep: Documents released by human rights organisation, Reprieve show that GCHQ and MI5 staff were told they could target lawyers’ communications. This undermines legal privilege that ensures communications between lawyers and their clients are confidential.
The news that legal privilege is being violated comes weeks after it was revealed the Met police have used RIPA to circumvent journalistic privilege that protects journalists’ sources.
The only thing that remains is the (Catholic) Confessional.
“Postel’s Law, aka the Robustness Principle is useful here. Be conservative in what you transmit, liberal in what you accept, and reject malicious patterns. Another way to put that could be: speak gently, keep an open mind to what others say, and don’t be a doormat.
From a lovely essay, “How to be Polite … for Geeks”, by Quinn Norton.
Like many people, I’m wondering what one could do to help the people dealing with Ebola on the ground in Africa. So far, the only answer I’ve come up with is to donate money to the Disasters Emergency Committee. But when I see the modelling predictions coming from the CDC in Atlanta — which predict that if things go on as they are, Ebola will be hitting the 1.4 million mark by January in those countries, I wonder whether most people in the UK or the US are aware of how serious this could be for the world.
Dave Winer pointed me to a must-read piece in Wired, which in turn pointed me to an extraordinary blog post by two risk-communication experts, Jody Lanard and Peter Sandman. They write:
The possibility of an Ebola pandemic throughout the developing world is the scenario that keeps us up nights. We think it must keep many infectious disease experts up as well. But few are sounding the alarm. The two of us are far less worried about sparks landing in Chicago or London than in Mumbai or Karachi. We wish Dallas had served as a teachable moment for what may be looming elsewhere in the world, instead of inspiring knee-jerk over-reassurance theater about our domestic ability to extinguish whatever Ebola sparks come our way. We are glad that Dallas at least led to improvements in CDC guidelines for personal protective equipment and contact tracing, and belatedly jump-started front-line medical and community planning and training. But it doesn’t seem to have sparked the broader concern that is so vitally needed.
Americans are having a failure of imagination – failing to imagine that the most serious Ebola threat to our country is not in Dallas, not in our country, not even on our borders. It is on the borders of other countries that lack our ability to extinguish sparks.
That metaphor of jumping sparks seems to me to be prophetic.
Here’s what they think would be necessary to stop Ebola becoming endemic. Call this the Optimistic Scenario:
The people of West Africa and the governments of West Africa rise to the occasion, radically altering deeply embedded cultural practices, from political corruption to the way they bury their dead.
The epidemic stops spreading exponentially, so the gap between needs and resources stops getting wider every day than the day before.
The world’s nations actually fill that gap, providing enough money, supplies, and people to outrace the epidemic.
Treatment, isolation, contact tracing, and contact monitoring reach the percentage of cases needed to “break the epidemic curve.”
Meanwhile the epidemic doesn’t cross into too many more countries. And all the sparks that land in other countries are extinguished with minimal collateral damage, as has been the case so far in Nigeria, Senegal, Spain, and the United States. (As of the evening of October 23, the U.S. now has a second index case to cope with.)
Fears that sparks will travel more widely and launch new epidemics in Asia, Latin America, and elsewhere prove unfounded.
Or, alternatively, a spectacularly successful vaccine is quickly discovered, tested, mass-produced, and mass-distributed.
Having read it, you can see why I call it the optimistic scenario. It looks implausible, I’m afraid. So what’s the outlook if it turns out to be indeed too optimistic?
What would it be like, Lanard and Sandman ask…
if there are dozens of sparks landing in the U.S. and other developed countries, not just from West Africa but from all over the world?
if healthcare workers won’t come to work?
if cancer patients and HIV-infected persons and children with asthma can’t get their medicines because 40 percent of generic drugs in the U.S. come from India, where production and shipping have halted?
if refugees, under pressure from civil unrest, insurrection, famine, and economic collapse, are pouring across every border – some sick, some healthy, some incubating?
if Ebola in the developing world launches the next Global Financial Crisis?
if the Holy Grail, the deus-ex-machina – a successful Ebola vaccine – cannot be developed, produced, and distributed before all this happens?
OK. So what would it be like? And might it be worth taking the threat more seriously than we are doing? You can see why the markets are spooked by Ebola.
And what are the pharmaceutical giants doing? They previously ignored Ebola because it was a disease that only affected poor people and therefore offered little prospect of commercial reward. (Not a criticism, just a fact.) Are the governments of the world now leaning on them?
Yesterday I participated in a panel discussion on surveillance in the Cambridge Festival of Ideas. My fellow-panellists were the anthropologist Caroline Humphrey, the computer scientist Jon Crowcroft and John Rust, the Director of the university’s Psychometrics Centre. The session was ably chaired by Charles Arthur, who until recently was the Technology Editor of the Guardian and still writes regularly for the paper.
We each gave a short talk and then there was a fairly lively Q&A session with a large audience. Here are the notes for my talk.
Although this is ostensibly about technology, in my opinion it is actually about politics, and therefore about democracy. Here’s why.
Whatever one thinks about Edward Snowden, he deserves respect for revealing to the general public the hidden reality of our networked age — which is that “surveillance is the business model of the Internet” as Bruce Schneier puts it. The spooks do intensive surveillance without our consent (and, until recently, without most of us knowing.) The companies (Google, Facebook et al ) claim that they do it with our consent (all those EULAs we clicked ‘Agree’ to in the distant past) in return for the ‘free’ services that they provide and we apparently crave. What Snowden has shown is the extent to which we have been sleepwalking into a nightmare.
Because I think that the problem is, ultimately, political in origin and nature, demonising the agencies doesn’t address the problem. If they are collecting the whole goddam haystack (and they are), then it’s because of the pressure placed on them by their political masters — the ‘war on terror’, the political pressure to ‘join the dots’ and the injunction (e.g. from Vice President Cheney after 9/11) to ensure that “this must never happen again”. In that sense, the NSA, GCHQ etc. are just rational actors trying to meet impossible political demands.
If there is going to be any way out of this nightmare, it is effective, muscular, publicly-credible, and technologically-informed democratic oversight. To date, all we have had since 9/11 is what I call oversight theatre. So the existential question for democracies is whether it is possible to do oversight properly and credibly?
One of the most striking aspects of this new ‘national security’ syndrome is the absence of any rational debate about both its effectiveness (Does all this haystack-collecting actually work in terms of preventing major terrorist outrages?) and its cost-effectiveness (Do we get value for money? And how would we know?). These questions seem to be currently off-limits in our democracies. So we have endless debates about the worth and cost-effectiveness of, say, the proposed High-Speed rail line from London to Birmingham, but no such debate about whether the huge sums spent on the NSA or GCHQ are actually delivering value for money. In that context, there’s an interesting paper from the CATO Institute which makes this point well. “Terrorism”, it says, “is a hazard to human life,
“and it should be dealt with in a manner similar to that applied to other hazards—albeit with an appreciation for the fact that terrorism often evokes extraordinary fear and anxiety. Although allowing emotion to overwhelm sensible analysis is both understandable and common among ordinary people, it is inappropriate for officials charged with keeping them safe. To do so is irresponsible, and it costs lives.
Risk analysis is an aid to responsible decision making that has been developed, codified, and applied over the past few decades—or in some respects centuries. We deal with four issues central to that approach and apply them to the hazard presented by terrorism: the cost per saved life, acceptable risk, cost–benefit analysis, and risk communication. We also assess the (very limited) degree to which risk analysis has been coherently applied to counterterrorism efforts by the U.S. government in making or evaluating decisions that have cost taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars.
At present, the process encourages decision making that is exceptionally risk averse. In addition, decision makers appear to be overly fearful about negative reactions to any relaxations of security measures that fail to be cost-effective and also about the consequences of failing to overreact.
If other uses of the funds available would more effectively save lives, a government obliged to allocate money in a manner that best benefits public safety must explain why spending billions of dollars on security measures with very little proven benefit is something other than a reckless waste of resources.
Our governments have not done this and so far show no inclination to change their ways.
What are the long-term implications of comprehensive surveillance. What happens to human behaviour in a networked goldfish bowl? Psychologists have shown that people’s behaviour changes when they know they are being watched. What happens to entire societies when intensive surveillance becomes absolutely ubiquitous? Here the experience of East Germans or the wretched citizens of North Korea become relevant.
hen there’s the mystery of public acceptance of surveillance — at least in some societies. One of the things that really baffles me is why have the Snowden revelations not caused more disquiet? Which of course then raises the question of whether there is any real hope of ameliorating the situation in the absence of massive public disquiet? Democracies only change course when there’s public sense of a major crisis. My gloomy conclusion is that not much is going to change. Governments and the security services will see little reason for giving ground on this.
I am also puzzled about why there is not more scepticism of the philosophical underpinnings of the “if you have nothing to hide then you have nothing to fear” argument. This seems to me to be pure cant because what it means is that the State is asserting the right to surveill all of your communications. And the contention that bulk ‘collection’ does not infringe your privacy is bogus for the same reason that Google’s claim that it doesn’t read your mail is bogus: it overlooks the capabilities of the digital technology that both Google and the agencies employ. For without automated pattern-matching and machine learning the security agencies would not be be able to ‘select’ targets for what legal pedants regard as true ‘collection’, namely inspection by a human agent. Related to this is the fact that if, for perfectly legitimate reasons, you take positive steps to protect your communications from official (or any other kind of) snooping by encrypting your email or by using Tor for anonymous browsing, then that is seen as grounds for selecting you for further investigation. So protecting yourself from state surveillance for perfectly innocent reasons becomes grounds for suspicion. This not so much Orwellian as Kafkaesque.
Privacy is both an individual and a social good. Yet we treat it as if it were exclusively a private matter. So an individual can ‘trade’ some of her privacy to Google in return for ‘free’ services like Gmail. Gmail then (machine-) reads her mail in order to target ads at her. But if she writes to someone who has not signed up to Gmail and that person writes back, then his/her email is also read by Google, and his/her privacy has been eroded. Jon Crowcroft knows a researcher who will blacklist anybody who writes to him using a webmail address for that reason.
And then there’s the ultimate question: what will be the political response when, despite all the surveillance, the next terrorist outrage occurs? Because we will have other outrages: after all, the NSA and GCHQ did not see ISIS coming. What then? What will our politicians demand? Even more surveillance? It’s hard to see any logical end-point to this. Or at any rate, any end-point that looks good for democracy.
This morning’s Observer column:
If a year is a long time in politics (and it is), then it’s an eternity in communications technology. Fourteen years ago, about 400 million people were using the internet. Today, the number of net users is pushing the 3 billion mark. But that’s not the really big news. What’s truly startling is that 2 billion of these folks are getting their internet connections primarily via smartphones, ie, handheld computers that can access the internet as well as make voice calls, send text messages and do the other things that old-fashioned “feature phones” could do.
This is startling because smartphones are a relatively new development, and when they first appeared less than a decade ago, most of us thought that they would remain an elite consumer product for a long time to come, staples of affluent professionals in the industrialised world, perhaps, but of no relevance to poor people in the developing world who would continue to be delighted with crude feature phones that could just about do SMS.
How wrong can you be? We underestimated both the power of Moore’s law and human nature…
Well, not quite. But I’m re-reading her diaries and am coming towards the end of Volume 1 (1915-19) and in the entry for April 27, 1919 came on this meditation on diary-writing which in some ways might also be written about blogging.
Woolf had just finished writing a long article for some publication or other (one forgets what an assiduous literary hack she was), and then continues thus:
“In the idleness which succeeds any long article… I got out this diary, & read as one always does one’s own writing, with a kind of guilty intensity. I confess that the rough & random style of it, often so ungrammatical, & crying for a word altered, afflicted me somewhat. I am trying to tell whatever self it is that reads this hereafter that I can write very much better; & take no time over this; & forbid her to let the eye of man behold it. And now I may add my little compliment to the effect that it has a slapdash & vigour, & sometimes hits an unexpected bulls eye. But what is more to the point is my belief that the habit of writing thus for my own eye only is good practise [sic]. It loosens the ligaments. Never mind the misses & the stumbles. Going at such a pace as I do I must make the most direct and instant shots at my object, & thus have to lay hands on words, choose them, & shoot them with no more pause than is needed to put my pen in the ink. I believe that during he past year I can trace some increase of ease in my professional writing which I attribute to my casual half hours after tea. Moreover there looms ahead of me the shadow of some kind of form which a diary might attain to. I might in the course of time learn what it is that one can make of this loose, drifting material of life; finding another use for it than the use I put it to, so much more consciously & scrupulously, in fiction. What sort of diary should I like mine to be? Something loose knit, & yet not slovenly, so elastic that it will embrace any thing, solemn, slight or beautiful that comes into my mind. I should like it to resemble some deep old desk, or capacious hold-all, in which one flings a mass of odds & ends without looking them through. I should like to come back, after a year or two, & find that the collection had sorted itself & refined itself & coalesced, as such deposits mysteriously do, into a mould, transparent enough to reflect the light of ourr life, & yet steady, tranquil composed with the aloofness of a work of art.”
As a thought-experiment, I’ve tried to imagine Woolf as a blogger. My conclusion is that she would have made a terrific one. But of course she couldn’t have done it because her diaries are so suffused with critical (and often harsh) assessments of the people she knew, and so filled with gossip, that she would have had to retain a full-time libel lawyer.