A privacy timeline and UK news

Surveillance News has created a rough guide to privacy, legislation and relevant UK news stories using Timetoast. Just click the image and interact with the timeline.

Please do point out any major omissions.

Phorm update: £9m loss

Phorm has reported a loss of $15 million – around £9 million since June this year. Despite the losses, the company remains hopeful that it will make headway with UK service providers with its ad-tracking Webwise technology.

The report acknowledges the loss of its contract with Carphone Warehouse, while BT, Virgin and TalkTalk have stalled on plans to implement the technology. However, it states: “Virgin Media continues to examine behavioural advertising technologies, including Phorm.  We remain in ongoing discussions with a number of UK ISPs and remain optimistic about our longer term potential in this market.”

Phorm claims successful custom with Korean service providers, but is still looking for “commercial deployment in a major market”.

Further analysis available at the Guardian.

Mass surveillance may drive legit consumers to encryption services

Communications providers and campaigners have united to denounce proposed restrictions on file sharing as an impingement on users’ privacy and freedom of speech. So how will the next generation outfox mass internet surveillance?

While around 40,000 users have been sued in the US for file sharing, the number of British cases against individuals is comparatively low, with maximum fines remaining around £10,000.

But the number of cases in UK courts may increase if rightsholders snooping on filesharers are endorsed by stringent measures proposed by Peter Mandelson last month.

While the anonymity of users is by no means guaranteed by file sharing services, US consumers have described their shock when receiving formal notification of their activities online. But a closer look at privacy policies shows how little it might take for file sharing services to hand over users’ details over to record companies:

…your use of the BitTorrent Client to download files will, in turn, enable other BitTorrent users to download pieces of those files from you. Although your IP address is associated with your piece of the file, other users will not have access to any other personal information about you.

BitTorrent goes on to stress “We do not track which files you download“. That may be the case, but if a rightsholder company decides to pose as a file sharer and upload (or more likely, download) Vanilla Sky to other users, then they’ll be doing the tracking. That includes finding out IP addresses, from which it is easy enough to determine the internet service provider who may in turn send a legal notification to the offending customer. Carrying out a legitimate download on the BitTorrent client, Surveillance News was easily able to determine that one file sharer was connected via NTL.

Ian Clarke, founder of anonymous file sharing and browsing service Freenet believes this lack of protection, coupled with the threat of internet cutoff will drive users to newer technologies which protect their privacy in the hunt for copyright infringers.

“I don’t question Mandelson’s motives,” he says. “It is certainly the case that we as a society must find a way to incent creativity. Historically copyright has been one of the ways we do this, however it is increasingly unenforceable given improvements in communication technology.”

Clarke argues that the fundamental idea of copyright depends on preventing people from communicating – but as communication technology improves, it is becoming increasingly difficult to enforce.

“Ultimately the only way to reverse this trend is to impose draconian limitations on people’s freedom to communicate, monitoring all communication, and having the ability to deny people the freedom to communicate as a punishment,” he says.

One legitimate, student downloader says he is considering turning to Freenet to mask his identity.

“No-one likes the idea of Big Brother – no-one wants to be monitored or controlled. I’d go out of my way to stop anyone spying on my downloads, content creators or not – not particularly because of what i’m downloading, but simply the principle of the thing,” he says.

He adds that he refuses to download illegally. “When you can start affording software that you plan on using, then there’s an obligation there to start paying back the authors for the work they’ve put in.”

But he adds that despite renouncing illegal downloads, mass surveillance proposals like the Intercept Modernisation Programme would drive him to use encryption technologies.

“I think the more organisations or governments attempt to tighten the noose the more people will migrate to groups like Freenet and TOR. It’s not really about illegal file sharing; it’s more about protecting your right to anonymity.”

Pundits predict Phorm losses

Adware company Phorm is predicted to announce losses upwards of £9 million when it produces its interim financial report today.

The company behind the controversial Webwise software which tracks web users’ browsing habits last week lost its technology chief, Stratis Scelparis who was involved in BT trials of the product.

The Telegraph predicts losses between £9 million and £12 million for Phorm, which has yet to make money since its launch in 2002.

Meanwhile, the Guardian reveals that Phorm’s anti-smear website, Stop Phoul Play, has been quietly taken down and that the company has also lost its director of communications, David Sawday.

I was caught downloading – and it felt like entrapment

A file sharer, preferring to remain anonymous, speaks to Surveillance News about getting caught by games developer Techland after illegally downloading one of their products two years ago. He suspects the company posed as a file sharer, posting a bogus games file to spy on any downloader’s IP address. A month later, he received a letter and a fine directly from the company.

While I was living with four other students, I downloaded a game – the Call of Juarez, a kind of Western shoot-em-up. I downloaded it using Bit Torrent, but after I’d downloaded it, the file didn’t work on my computer. I don’t know if that’s because it was a planted file, but a month later I got a big letter saying [Techland] had traced it to my IP address. There was this big booklet with all the laws in it. They had recorded how I had ‘infringed’, and they wanted an out of court settlement of £519.11 exactly. £500 was the fine; the rest was a labour charge.

The letter was sent by the games provider [Techland], and had been prepared by a legal company. I paid up. It was a matter of either paying, or having all the computers in the house seized. That was a possibility, because the IP address they detected was for a router, not for my specific computer. I thought about fighting the charge on those grounds, but it would have compromised the other students in the house, and all of our computers would have been seized.

I don’t actually share files, but it’s possible [Techland] deliberately put that file up. It’s a bit like entrapment really, just to catch people. I was even sceptical that it was a real letter – it was just a story that people get done and could have been a scam – but I know a lawyer who checked it out and she advised submitting.

I’ve cut back on my downloading – no films or games or anything big like that. Mostly because I’m scared of getting caught again; I’ve never wanted to download enough. It’s just music, although I don’t block my IP address. I do think it’s fair enough to fine people, I do know it’s illegal to download, and companies have to protect their interests. I suppose I’d be a bit miffed if laws came in to stop downloading, but more because I couldn’t access stuff any more [than privacy issues].

Lily Allen starts blog on filesharing

Lily Allen today launched a blog posting responses to her anti-piracy campaign from artists including James Blunt, Muse’s Matt Bellamy, Take That’s Gary Barlow and Tim Rice Oxley from Keane.

She invites those who are against file sharing to reply to her directly and support her campaign for talks with the government and internet service providers.

Artists can respond to a letter posted on the ‘It’s Not Alright’ blog by Ms Allen to other music artists outlining her response to Peter Mandelson’s clampdown on file sharing.

Ms Allen comments on the ‘damaging’ effect of file sharing, particularly on emerging acts. She is particularly critical of established artists who can afford to speak out in favour of file sharing, though she does not name any.

“And now some artists have got their message out there: that file sharing is fine when you’re a successful artist with sell out tours and a back catalogue ready to be sold to a new audience. That might be fine for them, but it’s not fine for the acts that haven’t made it big yet,” she says.

“We can talk about all the legal means of accessing music out there and even come up with new ways to access music, but ultimately we need to establish that we think file sharing is wrong.”

The majority of artists posting are in favour of ISP’s policing illegal downloads in some form or another, with others proposing new licensing rules or financial share from ISP’s to go to copyright holders.

What the artists say (again)

I want to put my hand up in support of Lily Allen. She’s asking British musicians to galvanise over a serious crime: the death of a Great British Industry – our music business. The world over, people are stealing music in its millions in the form of illegal file-sharing. It’s easy to do, and has become accepted by many, but we need people to know that it is destroying people’s livelihoods and suffocating emerging new British artists.

James Blunt

[There should be] a new law where ISP’s have to pay copyright owners a share of the revenue that is generated from broadband subscriptions in acknowledgement of the value that the sharing of copyrighted content online has to those subscriptions and the profitability of the ISPs.

Matt Bellamy, Muse

I’m worried about making sure new talent can continue to come through. Everyone in this world needs an income and the majority of artists chief income should be through selling music, I don’t know how we make it happen but we need to bang our heads together and find a new way to do that.

Tinchy Stryder, grime artist

Lib Dems: The Tories are ‘fake libertarians’

Labour’s ‘abject’ record on civil liberties has come under attack from the Liberal Democrats during their autumn conference today.

The government has succumbed to a ‘politics of fear and control’ according to justice spokesman, David Howarth.

But the MP reserved most of his criticism for Conservative plans on civil liberties, announced earlier this week.

“It is not enough to campaign about the popular issues: ID cards, the DNA database, the ContactPoint database of all children or even the unfair extradition treaty under which Gary Mackinnon is being extradited to the USA,” he said.

Mr Howarth described the Conservatives as ‘fake libertarians’, and accused them of avoiding the issue of protesting.

“Protesters are unpopular with many people, but their right to protest should be cherished even if it is noisy for Members of Parliament to have protests in Parliament Square or annoying for the police to have climate protestors blocking a street in the City of London.”

“Democracy doesn’t mean just voting once every five years. It means a vigorous public debate about politics that everyone can take part in,” he said.

He also criticised the strict rules forbidding protestors to film police and criminal trespass laws brought in by the Conservaties.

Mr Howarth did not detail Liberal Democrat policies on surveillance, but said he would return to the issue on Wednesday. He also attacked the proposals of increasing detention of terrorist suspects without charge, overruled earlier this year: “The idea of holding people for months without telling them what they are supposed to have done belongs in the novels of Franz Kafka, not in a liberal state.”

Full speech available here.

Comment: surveillance under the Tories

“We believe that your personal information belongs to you, not the state. Where private details are collected by government, they are held on trust. The government must be held accountable to its citizens, not the other way round.”

Such is the promising introduction to a new Conservative policy document on ‘Reversing the rise of the surveillance state’ earlier this week, launched by Shadow Justice Secretary Dominic Grieve and Shadow Justice Minister Eleanor Laing.

“New Labour has excessively relied on mammoth databases and wide powers of data-sharing, on the pretext that it will make government more effective and the citizen more secure.”

This is certainly true; despite being forced to give up a centralised database to store how, when and where we communicated online, the Intercept Modernisation Programme consultation rather sulkily insists this ‘would have several advantages’:

“It would be the most effective at delivering fast and efficient access in support of the law enforcement and intelligence agencies and emergency services; the least challenging technically to implement; and the cheapest to build and run.”

Mr. Grieve promises a Bill of Rights (to replace the Human Rights Act), and to scrap the children’s database and the National Identity Register. He rather noticeably avoids any mention of intercepting communications data, ID cards or indeed a general cessation in the collection of personal data. Some of the proposals echo those put forward in a Scottish consultation on data sharing and public authorities, including a measure to restrict local council access to personal communications data. But unlike the Scottish proposals, there is no hint that councils should make any effort to collect less – merely that access to data held across different accounts should be restrained.

More emphasis is placed in certain checking procedures and safeguards -  such as investing the Information Commissioner with more regulatory powers – than really cutting back on state policing measures.

The private sector

Tacked onto the end of the report is the suggestion for a ‘kite mark’ for companies to adhere to – a kind of best practice for data protection in the private sector. This isn’t so much of a sketchy outline as a concept at best. The efficacity of a kite mark is also doubtful, given that it would be voluntary, and bearing in mind the stark warnings about hacking threats from Russia and China in the ‘Snooping Dragon’ report. Mr. Grieve points to the (double) hacking of Monster as an example. The report concluded chillingly that the response to external hacking would be slow – a conclusion proved correct if this final, vague measure is anything to go by.

Comment: 7 million downloaders – says the music industry

Reports that Peter Mandelson’s proposals to sever the internet connections of illegal downloaders will affect seven million filesharers in the UK have been debunked by the BBC.

The figure may in fact be closer to 3.9 million people. The original statistics were said to be from a paper produced by a government advisory body, the Strategic Advisory Board for Intellectual Property. In fact, the numbers were produced during a report commissioned by the British Phonographic Industry, which has been one of the key lobbyists for harsher measures against filesharers.

During Radio 4′s ‘More or Less’ programme, BBC journalist Oliver Hawkins discovered that the seven million figure varied widely depending on the assumptions made, e.g. the number of internet users in the UK – which was calculated by the BPI report to be higher than the number of users estimated by the Office of National Statistics.

Media roundup

So who used that seven million figure?

The Telegraph

The Daily Mail

The Guardian

The Independent

The Mail on Sunday

…while the BBC went with a diplomatic 6 million figure.

Comment: If Facebook fans were votes…

During his interview with Surveillance News yesterday, UK Pirate Party leader Andrew Robinson was chuffed to have recently pipped Labour’s attempts to, ah, get down with the kids. Earlier this week, the PPUK Facebook group overtook the Labour Party, with 6691 members compared to 6356 for Labour. Admittedly, if you take the number of group members and add that to fanpage members (two slightly different things), Labour’s total is in fact still ahead of PPUK. Still – despite its limited manifesto (“a blessing and a curse”, according to Robinson), PPUK has garnered support and national press coverage on its stance on copyright in a matter of months. Whether its Facebook fans are old enough to vote is another question.

It isn’t entirely surprising that a niche group campaigning for privacy, filesharing and freedom of speech should be popular amongst the younger demographic. But perhaps the mainstream political parties ought to be concerned they cannot connect in the same way. SN has compiled statistics to show what the political landscape might look like if Facebook fans/group members were votes. SN wonders what Labour’s digital wunderkind Tom Watson (443 fans) would have to say?

Clicking the image will take you to Many Eyes where you can view and interact with the treemap. It compares PPUK to all UK parties represented in the House of Commons or at the European level. Adjust ‘size’ to show Facebook fans, current number of MP’s or current number of MEP’s. Many Eyes is in beta and may take a couple of tries to display.

Digital pirates and the big players: who will win?

This month Business Secretary Peter Mandelson announced plans to disconnect filesharers from the internet for downloading illegally. This comes after heavy lobbying from the creative industries who argue that hundreds of jobs will be lost if immediate action against piracy is not taken. But digital rights groups argue that ‘disconnection without trial’ is an infringement of consumer rights, while others are demanding a radically new approach to copyright and ownership.

Who owns a song? The ownership of creative works has never been as simple as defining who owns a chair, or a building but through copyright, it was easy enough to control who distributed songs and films. If you play a song in a restaurant, you need a license from the copyright holder. More often than not, it’s a record label you’re paying, rather than the individual artist. If you record it, that’s copyright infringement. In the days of radio and a really carefully timed cassette tape, this didn’t seem to pose a problem. But copyright infringement is now being committed on a mass scale – from dads burning their Neil Diamond collection onto a CD to under-30′s downloading gigabytes of new music. Creative industry surveys put the number of downloaders at six million, although this has been disputed. Campaigners claim that the government has bowed to industry pressure – with particular focus on Peter Mandelson’s meal with the head of Universal Records, Lucian Grainge. But when consulted on alternative plans to ensure artists get paid for their work, pressure groups still disagree.

Legalise all music to be available online

Jim Killock, Open Rights Group

Criminalising the millions of filesharers who download every day is a “one-sided commercial decision”, according to Jim Killock of digital campaigners the Open Rights Group, who is one of many critics of the lobbying power of British music labels and other rightsholders.

“The rightsholders have the biggest economic stake in this problem; they’re the ones whose businesses are mostly being threatened,” he says. “So they have lobbied very hard to stiffen the measures up.” There is, he says, no room for manoeurvre for smaller new music companies, who, without years of industry legitimacy have little political weight. If they did, they might well be campaigning for a complete overhaul of licensing and the internet. According to Killock, downloading tracks off the internet for low cost “isn’t the problem. Even peer-to-peer filesharing is not the problem. The problem is that it’s happening without a licence.”

The fact that millions of us are downloading and streaming illegally every day is, in fact, something to be embraced. This is not an entirely new idea, but one which industry heavyweights have trouble embracing. Killock cites the fight between PRS and YouTube over music videos and licence fees as a recent example. “How do you get licences to the services that customers want? It’s difficult to negotiate these licenses, and they’re not on terms which are particularly good for new music industry offerings,” he says.

Such as Spotify, perhaps, which took the UK by storm this year with its free streaming music service. Killock believes that the UK economy is missing out on new businesses because of the current heavyhanded approach. ORG’s solution is the compulsory collective licensing – forcing rightsholders to issue a kind of blanket license to all internet users via their ISP’s, at a standard price which compensates rightsholders and artists.

Keep the status quo

For the UK Pirate Party, this approach is too complex. “[UK] laws are very, very messy,” says its leader, Andrew Robinson. “No one really knows where they stand, and we need something much simpler.” He points out one Conservative MP who thought burning a CD of copyrighted music was legal. “No one knows where they stand with our legislation.”

The answer?

“File-sharing should be legalised. It does reward artists, because people get to find out about music they’d never have heard of. People will find ways of supporting the bands they love,” says Robinson. “Our country is in a flap over starting up, and people aren’t sure that they can do without a record company to get them started. We need to get over that, and get to the point where artists think ‘well, maybe I’ll only sell a 20th of what I would but I’ll still making the same amount of money.’” Like Killock, he argues that rightsholders need to relinquish control, but also that artists can embrace filesharing as free marketing without the need of record labels.

“With that kind of free advertising, anyone can make it big,” says Robinson. “If you look at the top 40 hits, are they really from the top 40 artists, or are they just the best marketed? It’s far from a meritocracy.”

Surely it would be better all round to allow services like Spotify to legitimise online content? Robinson is sceptical. “I would be very careful about falling into the new business model and YouTube trap. I’ve spent a good five or six hours trying to find out how much artists are actually paid by services like Spotify, but nobody is saying anything. It’s a tiny amount of money, and some say they are ripped off.”

What next?

The filesharing consultation closes today, but Jim Killock thinks it may be some time before the laws are adjusted to satisfy both rightsholders and the public. “You see the beginnings of this discussion in other countries, from Canada to the EU. But companies are very entrenched, especially in France, the UK and Spain. You’ve got large rightsholder industries in Europe who dominate the debate and slow everything down.”

What the artists say

“My generation grew up with the point of view that you pay for your music. Every generation has a different method. File sharing is like a sampler, like taping your mate’s music. You go, ‘I like that, I’ll go and buy the album’. Or, ‘you know what, I’ll go and see them live’. What’s going on is a huge paradigm shift.”

Ed O’Brien, Radiohead.

“The fact that file sharing goes on, and is as popular as it is, is an incredibly positive thing for the music industry. The fact is that music is so popular that people are willing to break the law to get it. Can you have a big red button that Peter Mandelson can press and the problem goes away? No. You’re on the back foot constantly.”

Dave Rowntree, Blur

“I think if you can afford to buy a record then you should buy it. People who hunt down a record and download it for free will probably talk it up. They are the unsung word-of-mouthers who spread the word and create tipping point situations for a greedy record business that has got so fat it is unable to see its own footsoldiers.”

Fran Healy, Travis

“I think music piracy is having a dangerous effect on British music, but some really rich and successful artists like Nick Mason from Pink Floyd and Ed O’Brien from Radiohead don’t seem to think so.”

Lily Allen

Pictures of you: energy identity

By 2020, energy-reading “smart meters” will be able to tell you exactly how much electricity and gas you are using in your home. But the technology has already developed to identify when you switched your TV on, what time you did it, and what the make is – just through reading your electricity meter. How much information is too much information?

Currently the government is considering plans to allow consumers to monitor their energy usage by the minute. That’s actually knowing how much electricity and gas you use through the year, rather than a bill every quarter from your energy provider giving you a haphazard estimate.

The smart meters will, once installed, allow energy suppliers to keep track of your exact energy usage, and will feed this data back to you. What exactly this is – carbon emissions, or just energy readings – has yet to be decided.  The installation costs will be justified by consumers’ keeping better tabs on their energy usage and adjusting their behaviour to use less. In theory, this should save both money and the environment. Currently, the costs of installing the meters will run up to an estimated £7bn.

But smart meters are only the first on a long list of environmental measures proposed by the government – some of which rely on “smart” technology to reap data on our fuel consumption. In fact, the technology is so smart, it may be able to tell you anything from how much petrol it took to drive to Tesco’s to whether you boiled the kettle at 7.18pm.

It should, in theory, be possible to capture everything you’ve purchased for consumption – your fuel bills, waste, water and create a cohesive picture from it, or your “energy identity”. As information about your lifestyle becomes more specific, it becomes easier to create patterns and trends about energy usage in society, adding another use for smart meters.

“We’re look at enabling the data capture of everything you’ve ever purchased,” says Gavin Starks, head of Amee, which works with the UK government to track energy consumption. “All of your fuel bills, waste, water, all this data collectively we’ve started to phrase as your energy identity. It’s very akin to your digital identity in the online space.”

While it’ll be more than a decade before we start getting accurate meter readings, Starks believes it will be possible not just to measure energy emissions, but all consumption. It seems as though we’re already being tracked, albeit voluntarily. The Act on CO2 emissions calculator asks questions not only about energy use in your home, but when you travel and what appliances you use.

Starks waves a small meter reading device. It clamps onto your meter and takes a reading every minute. But, he says, it isn’t just that it tells you that you opened your fridge. “It’s that your Zanussi’s gone on, and it’s got a faulty motor or that it’s a Sony TV that’s gone on and it went on for 30 minutes between 6 and 9pm.” It is even possible to link up to a GPS system to show what kind of transport you might be taking.

Both Zanussi and Sony might take a keen interest in such readily available, precise user information. If government proposals go ahead, this information will be databased by a third party whose role is currently shadowy at best. The ‘central communications’ model will mean energy providers will be responsible for installing and maintaining the meters, but this third party will control the data between your energy supplier and you, the consumer.

This has already raised privacy concerns among technology experts, who point out this approach has failed elsewhere. After campaigns from consumer groups in the Netherlands, the Dutch government had to scrap its mandatory smart meter scheme earlier this year. Great Britain may follow suit, according to technology consultants Detica, as “public concerns over the ‘surveillance society’ grow”.

Detica and other industry players are keen for better consumer control over the data, and an opt-out ability for those wanting to limit how their information might be used by third parties.

While Amee is one such third party wanting to use (anonymous) consumer data to track carbon footprinting, Starks readily admits that greater clarity is needed over consumer privacy. “I feel very strongly that the control of that information should very much be with [consumers],” he says. “We need to really work out all that data ownership before the fact.”

What does the public think of the IMP? That’s classified info…

Dear Home Office,

So, what was the public reaction to your consultation paper on spying on our data traffic everywhere, all the time?

View this document on Scribd

Pro-privacy measures in Scotland

Scottish citizens will hand over minimal private information to public services if proposals put forward by a new consultation document go ahead.

The Scottish government is hoping to increase public faith in data protection by public services and has ruled out centralised databases in favour of greater privacy.

It will also be harder for public authorities to draw together different types of information by “aggregating” it in a single place. Public authorities will still be able to draw together different types of personal information, but these will be held across different stores.

Anyone needing to use a public service should only need to provide minimal identification. People will also be allowed access to their own data if it is stored by a public authority.

Scottish Finance Secretary John Swinney called for wider public education about “identity management”. He said: “Respect for privacy should be central to public services managing people’s identity information. I want the public to be able to trust and have confidence in Scottish public services that are not only effective and secure but also privacy-friendly.”

No internet for filesharers, says Mandelson

Photo by The ArtifexD

Downloaders will have their internet connections severed after the UK Government takes a tougher line on file-sharing.

Business Secretary Peter Mandelson has proposed the measures halfway through the Digital Britain consultation, which originally ruled out such stringent action.

Initially, downloaders would have received warnings followed by ISP action to slow down their connection if they persisted in file-sharing.

Read this at the Guardian.

The new measures have met with resistance from ISP’s, who say they “breach fundamental rights”. They pointed out such strict measures would be easily avoided by persistent offenders and would punish those who share connections.

Read this at the BBC.

Lord Mandelson faced accusations that this government turnaround was the result of a meal with music mogul Lucian Grainge, the chairman and chief executive of Universal Music Group International.

Read this at the Daily Mail.

Andrew Robinson, UK leader of the Pirate party, defended filesharing as an “altruistic system” flummoxing copyright laws which are now outdated and need further debate before draconian measures can be introduced.

Read this at the Guardian.

Privacy groups have also responded angrily to the new measures, claiming the government has “crumbled under pressure” from the music and film industry. The Open Rights Group has launched a grassroots campaign to stop the sanctions, saying: “Clumsy enforcement techniques will further damage trust in not only copyright but Government as a whole.”

What the Digital Britain report said

There is evidence that most people who receive a notification stop unlawful file-sharing. This is backed up by survey results which found significant numbers of people say they would stop or significantly reduce their file-sharing activity upon receipt of a notification. Separately surveys indicate there is real interest in new business models that offer a similar experience and content to filesharing. The recent “Copycats” report by the independent SABIP body showed there is still real confusion over what is/is not lawful and demonstrates the need for widespread education as part of an overall approach. But there are also those who believe that notification, education and the ultimate sanction of legal action will not be enough to make the impact on unlawful file-sharing that we need to see. The Government believe that the notification process outlined here should have the effect of significantly
reducing file sharing; but if it does not go far enough then further action will need to be taken.

For that reason the Government will also provide for backstop powers for Ofcom to place additional conditions on ISPs aimed at reducing or preventing online copyright infringement by the application of various technical measures. In order to provide greater certainty for the development of commercial agreements, the Government proposes to specify in the legislation what these further measures might be; namely: Blocking (Site, IP, URL), Protocol blocking, Port blocking, Bandwidth capping (capping the speed
of a subscriber’s Internet connection and/or capping the volume of data traffic which a subscriber can access); Bandwidth shaping (limiting the speed of a subscriber’s access to selected protocols/services and/or capping the volume of data to selected protocols/services); Content identification and filtering– or a combination of these measures.

DNA Database visualised

Among the chief offenders on the privacy infringement front is the National DNA database which has come under fire again today after police agreed to delete Tory MP Damien Green’s record. In his statement today, he insisted that all innocent people should be removed from the database. Last week, there was controversy over more than 1 million children being recorded by the database.

Figures breaking down the numbers by gender and region are available from a Hansard document. There are almost three times as many boys on the database than girls, and there are massive regional disparities as shown by my data visualisation of the stats (click image for original):

Media interest in data retention

Although headlines about Big Brother databases and BBC scare programmes have flared up particularly this summer, the media have been panicking about databases for some time, as indicated by Google Insights (click image to see original).

Why the peak at 2005? Add the dates, and things perhaps become a little clearer. It was when the EU data retention laws were actually passed which set the cogs in motion for the UK’s beloved Communications Bill…brought into the limelight with the data retention consultation paper in April 2009.

Eye on the prize

In case you hadn’t worked out quite what the government is after with the Intercept Modernisation Programme, here is a handy visual summary.

Comment: Intercept Modernisation Programme

Rather sneakily in April, the now firmly backbenched Jacqui Smith issued a consultation paper on the possibility of getting internet service providers to track all communications data, of everyone. You can read the full story on my other blog, or alternately look at the consultation paper directly. It outlines everything everyone feared about a ‘database’ state; in that it would centralise communications data on a mass scale. Except actually the government is incapable of handling centralised information, so it’s going to make providers (so that’s the private sector) do most of the hard work instead. Really, the document was a kind of begging letter to various ISPs to store and tidily organise the times of suspect calls/e-mails. Oh, and to seek public opinion, but not till right at the back.

The consultation closing date was 20th July, after which the Information Commissioner made some lukewarm comments about the actual necessity and current technological impossibility of implementing the plans. ISP’s (via LINX have also snubbed the plans in a publicly available document here, and analysed by the Register here. Well, there’s hope yet.