From an extraordinary account of a walk around central London:

Suspicion is a global variable. Once triggered it bubbles upward through the entire system. Walking down Park Lane, I was accosted by a man in a suit who demanded to know what I was doing. He took out his mobile phone, pointed it at my face, told me he was going to “circulate my description”.
Shortly afterwards, a colleague of his physically restrained me and called the police. Both men worked at the Grosvenor House Hotel, whose cameras were among those which had been trained on me as I walked, and so are included in my documentation.

When they arrived, the police officers explained that carrying a camera in the vicinity of Central London was grounds for suspicion. I might be a terrorist who posed a threat to the good citizens of London – my own city. Equally I might be casing the joint for some future crime, studying its defences in order to circumvent them.

Carrying a camera thus justified the suspicion of the security guards who stopped me and performed a citizen’s arrest, detaining me until the arrival of the police. This suspicion in turn justified the actions of the police, who threatened me with arrest if I did not identify myself and explain my actions. For carrying a camera, I was told, I could be taken to the station and charged with “Going Equipped”, a provision of the 1968 Theft Act which determines the imprisonment for up to three years of anyone carrying equipment which may be used to commit a burglary.

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.

Read on

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?