net.wars: Government Archives

July 4, 2008

The new normal

The (only) good thing about a war is you can tell when it's over.

The problem with the "War on Terror" is that terrorism is always with us, as Liberty's director, Shami Chakrabarti, said yesterday at the Homeland and Border Security 08 conference. "I do think the threat is very serious. But I don't think it can be addressed by a war." Because, "We, the people, will not be able to verify a discernible end."

The idea that "we are at war" has justified so much post 9/11 legislation, from the ID card (in the UK) and Real ID (US) to the continued expansion of police powers.

How long can you live in a state of emergency before emergency becomes the new normal? If there is no end, when do you withdraw the latitude wartime gives a government?

Several of yesterday's speakers talked about preserving "our way of life" while countering the threat with better security. But "our way of life" is a moving target.

For example, Baroness Pauline Neville-Jones, the shadow security minister, talked about the importance of controlling the UK's borders. "Perimeter security is absolutely basic." Her example: you can't go into a building without having your identity checked. But it's not so long ago - within the 18 years I've been living in London - that you could do exactly that, even sometimes in central London. In New York, of course, until 9/11, everything was wide open; these days midtown Manhattan makes you wait in front of barriers while you're photographed, checked, and treated with great suspicion if the person you're visiting doesn't answer the phone.

Only seven years ago, flying did not involve two hours of standing in line. Until January, tourists do not have to register three days before flying to the US for pre-screening.

It's not clear how much would change with a Conservative government. "There is a very great deal by this government we would continue," said Neville-Jones. But, she said, besides trackling threats, whether motivated (terrorists) or not (floods, earthquakes, "we are also at any given moment in the game of deciding what kind of society we want to have and what values we want to preserve." She wants "sustainable security, predicated on protecting people's freedom and ensuring they have more, not less, control over their lives." And, she said, "While we need protective mechanisms, the surveillance society is not the route down which we should go. It is absolutely fundamental that security and freedom lie together as an objective."

To be sure, Neville-Jones took issue with some of the present government's plans - the Conservatives would not, she said, go ahead with the National Identity Register, and they favour "a more coherent and wide-ranging border security force". The latter would mean bringing together many currently disparate agencies to create a single border strategy. The Conservatives also favour establishing a small "homeland command for the armed forces" within the UK because, "The qualities of the military and the resources they can bring to complex situations are important and useful." At the moment, she said, "We have to make do with whoever happens to be in the country."

OK. So take the four core elements of the national security strategy according to Admiral Lord Alan West, a Parliamentary under-secretary of state at the Home Office: pursue, protect, prepare, and prevent. "Prevent" is the one that all this is about. If we are in wartime, and we know that any measure that's brought in is only temporary, our tolerance for measures that violate the normal principles of democracy is higher.

Are the Olympics wartime? Security is already in the planning stages, although, as Tarique Ghaffur pointed out, the Games are one of several big events in 2012. And some events like sailing and Olympic football will be outside London, as will 600 training camps. Add in the torch relay, and it's national security.

And in that case, we should be watching very closely what gets brought in for the Olympics, because alongside the physical infrastructure that the Games always leave behind - the stadia and transport - may be a security infrastructure that we wouldn't necessarily have chosen for daily life.

As if the proposals in front of us aren't bad enough. Take for example, the clause of the counterterrorism bill (due for its second reading in the Lords next week) that would allow the authorities to detain suspects for up to 42 days without charge. Chakrabarti lamented the debate over this, which has turned into big media politics.

"The big frustration," she said, "is that alternatives created by sensible, proportionate means of early intervention are being ignored." Instead, she suggested, make the data legally collected by surveillance and interception admissible in fair criminal trials. Charge people with precursor terror offenses so they are properly remanded in custody and continue the investigation for the more serious plot. "That is a way of complying with ancient principles that you should know what you are accused of before being banged up, but it gives the police the time and powers they need."

Not being at war gives us the time to think. We should take it.

Wendy M. Grossman's Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of all the earlier columns in this series. Readers are welcome to post here, at net.wars home, at her personal blog, or by email to netwars@skeptic.demon.co.uk (but please turn off HTML).

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June 27, 2008

Mistakes were made

This week we got the detail on what went wrong at Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs that led to the loss of those two CDs full of the personal details of 25 million British households last year with the release of the Poynter Review (PDF). We also got a hint of how and whether the future might be different with the publication yesterday of Data Handling: Proecures in Government (PDF), written by Sir Gus O'Donnell and commissioned by the Prime Minister after the HMRC loss. The most obvious message of both reports: government needs to secure data better.

The nicest thing the Poynter review said was that HMRC has already made changes in response to its criticisms. Otherwise, it was pretty much a surgical demonstration of "institutional deficiencies".

The chief points:

- Security was not HMRC's top priority.

- HMRC in fact had the technical ability to send only the selection of data that NAO actually needed, but the staff involved didn't know it.

- There was no designated single point of contact between HMRC and NAO.

- HMRC used insecure methods for data storage and transfer.

- The decision to send the CDs to the NAO was taken by junior staff without consulting senior managers - which under HMRC's own rules they should have done.

- The reason HMRC's junior staff did not consult managers was that they believed (wrongly) that NAO had absolute authority to access any and all information HMRC had.

- The HMRC staffer who dispatched the discs incorrectly believed the TNT Post service was secure and traceable, as required by HMRC policy. A different TNT service that met those requirements was in fact available.

- HMRC policies regarding information security and the release of data were not communicated sufficiently through the organization and were not sufficiently detailed.

- HMRC failed on accountability, governance, information security...you name it.

The real problem, though, isn't any single one of these things. If junior staff had consulted senior staff, it might not have mattered that they didn't know what the policies were. If HMRC used proper information security and secure methods for data storage (that is, encryption rather than simple password protection), they wouldn't have had access to send the discs. If they'd understood TNT's services correctly, the discs wouldn't have gotten lost - or at least been traceable if they had.

The real problem was the interlocking effect of all these factors. That, as Nassim Nicholas Taleb might say, was the black swan.

For those who haven't read Taleb's The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, the black swan stands for the event that is completely unpredictable - because, like black swans until one was spotted in Australia, no such thing has ever been seen - until it happens. Of course, data loss is pretty much a white swan; we've seen lots of data breaches. The black swan, really, is the perfectly secure system that is still sufficiently open for the people who need to use it.

That challenge is what O'Donnell's report on data handling is about and, as he notes, it's going to get harder rather than easier. He recommends a complete rearrangement of how departments manage information as well as improving the systems within individual departments. He also recommends greater openness about how the government secures data.

"No organisation can guarantee it will never lose data," he writes, "and the Government is no exception." O'Donnell goes on to consider how data should be protected and managed, not whether it should be collected or shared in the first place. That job is being left for yet another report in progress, due soon.

It's good to read that some good is coming out of the HMRC data loss: all departments are, according to the O'Donnell report, reviewing their data practices and beginning the process of cultural change. That can only be a good thing.

But the underlying problem is outside the scope of these reports, and it's this government's fondness for creating giant databases: the National Identity Register, ContactPoint, the DNA database, and so on. If the government really accepted the principle that it is impossible to guarantee complete data security, what would they do? Logically, they ought to start by cancelling the data behemoths on the understanding that it's a bad idea to base public policy on the idea that you can will a black swan into existence.

It would make more sense to create a design for government use of data that assumes there will be data breaches and attempts to limit the adverse consequences for the individuals whose data is lost. If my privacy is compromised alongside 50 million other people's and I am the victim of identity theft does it help me that the government department that lost the data knows which staff member to blame?

As Agatha Christie said long ago in one of her 80-plus books, "I know to err is human, but human error is nothing compared to what a computer can do if it tries." The man-machine combination is even worse. We should stop trying to breed black swans and instead devise systems that don't create so many white ones.

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May 30, 2008

Ten

It's easy to found an organization; it's hard to keep one alive even for as long as ten years. This week, the Foundation for Information Policy Research celebrated its tenth birthday. Ten years is a long time in Internet terms, and even longer when you're trying to get government to pay attention to expertise in a subject as difficult as technology policy.

My notes from the launch contain this quote from FIPR's first director, Caspar Bowden, which shows you just how difficult FIPR's role was going to be: "An educational charity has a responsibility to speak the truth, whether it's pleasant or unpleasant." FIPR was intended to avoid the narrow product focus of corporate laboratory research and retain the traditional freedoms of an academic lab.

My notes also show the following list of topics FIPR intended to research: the regulation of electronic commerce; consumer protection; data protection and privacy; copyright; law enforcement; evidence and archiving; electronic interaction between government, businesses, and individuals; the risks of computer and communications systems; and the extent to which information technologies discriminate against the less advantaged in society. Its first concern was intended to be researching the underpinnings of electronic commerce, including the then recent directive launched for public consultation by the European Commission.

In fact, the biggest issue of FIPR's early years was the crypto wars leading up to and culminating in the passage of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (2000). It's safe to say that RIPA would have been a lot worse without the time and energy Bowden spent listening to Parliamentary debates, decoding consultation papers, and explaining what it all meant to journalists, politicians, civil servants, and anyone else who would listen.

Not that RIPA is a fountain of democratic behavior even as things are. In the last couple of weeks we've seen the perfect example of the kind of creeping functionalism that FIPR and Privacy International warned about at the time: the Poole council using the access rules in RIPA to spy on families to determine whether or not they really lived in the right catchment area for the schools their children attend.

That use of the RIPA rules, Bowden said at at FIPR's half-day anniversary conference last Wednesday, sets a precedent for accessing traffic data for much lower level purposes than the government originally claimed it was collecting the data for. He went on to call the recent suggestion that the government may be considering a giant database, updated in real time, of the nation's communications data "a truly Orwellian nightmare of data mining, all in one place."

Ross Anderson, FIPR's founding and current chair and a well-known security engineer at Cambridge, noted that the same risks adhere to the NHS database. A clinic that owns its own data will tell police asking for the names of all its patients under 16 to go away. "If," said Anderson, "it had all been in the NHS database and they'd gone in to see the manager of BT, would he have been told to go and jump in the river? The mistake engineers make too much is to think only technology matters."

That point was part of a larger one that Anderson made: that hopes that the giant databases under construction will collapse under their own weight are forlorn. Think of developing Hulk-Hogan databases and the algorithms for mining them as an arms race, just like spam and anti-spam. The same principle that holds that today's cryptography, no matter how strong, will eventually be routinely crackable means that today's overload of data will eventually, long after we can remember anything we actually said or did ourselves, be manageable.

The most interesting question is: what of the next ten years? Nigel Hickson, now with the Department of Business, Enterprise, and Regulatory Reform, gave some hints. On the European and international agenda, he listed the returning dominance of the large telephone companies on the excuse that they need to invest in fiber. We will be hearing about quality of service and network neutrality. Watch Brussels on spectrum rights. Watch for large debates on the liability of ISPs. Digital signatures, another battle of the late 1990s, are also back on the agenda, with draft EU proposals to mandate them for the public sector and other services. RFID, the "Internet for things" and the ubiquitous Internet will spark a new round of privacy arguments.

Most fundamentally, said Anderson, we need to think about what it means to live in a world that is ever more connected through evolving socio-technological systems. Government can help when markets fail; though governments themselves seem to fail most notoriously with large projects.

FIPR started by getting engineers, later engineers and economists, to talk through problems. "The next growth point may be engineers and psychologists," he said. "We have to progressively involve more and more people from more and more backgrounds and discussions."

Probably few people feel that their single vote in any given election really makes a difference. Groups like FIPR, PI, No2ID, and ARCH remind us that even a small number of people can have a significant effect. Happy birthday.

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May 23, 2008

The haystack conundrum

Early this week the news broke that the Home Office wants to create a giant database in which will be stored details of all communications sent in Britain. In other words, instead of data retention, in which ISPs, telephone companies, and other service providers would hang onto communications data for a year or seven in case the Home Office wanted it, everything would stream to a Home Office data center in real time. We'll call it data swallowing.

Those with long memories - who seem few and far between in the national media covering this sort of subject - will remember that in about 1999 or 2000 there was a similar rumor. In the resulting outraged media coverage it was more or less thoroughly denied and nothing had been heard of it since, though privacy advocates continued to suspect that somewhere in the back of a drawer the scheme lurked, dormant, like one of those just-add-water Martians you find in the old Bugs Bunny cartoons. And now here it is again in another leak that the suspicious veteran watcher of Yes, Minister might think was an attempt to test public opinion. The fact that it's been mooted before makes it seem so much more likely that they're actually serious.

This proposal is not only expensive, complicated, slow, and controversial/courageous (Yes, Minister's Fab Four deterrents), but risk-laden, badly conceived, disproportionate, and foolish. Such a database will not catch terrorists, because given the volume of data involved trying to use it to spot any one would-be evil-doer will be the rough equivalent of searching for an iron filing in a haystack the size of a planet. It will, however, make it possible for anyone trawling the database to make any given individual's life thoroughly miserable. That's so disproportionate it's a divide-by-zero error.

The risks ought to be obvious: this is a government that can't keep track of the personal details of 25 million households, which fit on a couple of CDs. Devise all the rules and processes you want, the bigger the database the harder it will be to secure. Besides personal information, the giant communications database would include businesses' communication information, much of likely to be commercially sensitive. It's pretty good going to come up with a proposal that equally offends civil liberties activists and businesses.

In a short summary of the proposed legislation, we find this justification: "Unless the legislation is updated to reflect these changes, the ability of public authorities to carry out their crime prevention and public safety duties and to counter these threats will be undermined."

Sound familiar? It should. It's the exact same justification we heard in the late 1990s for requiring key escrow as part of the nascent Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act. The idea there was that if the use of strong cryptography to protect communications became widespread law enforcement and security services would be unable to read the content of the messages and phone calls they intercepted. This argument was fiercely rejected at the time, and key escrow was eventually dropped in favor of requiring the subjects of investigation to hand over their keys under specified circumstances.

There is much, much less logic to claiming that police can't do their jobs without real-time copies of all communications. Here we have real analogies: postal mail, which has been with us since 1660. Do we require copies of all letters that pass through the post office to be deposited with the security services? Do we require the Royal Mail's automated sorting equipment to log all address data?

Sanity has never intervened in this government's plans to create more and more tools for surveillance. Take CCTV. Recent studies show that despite the millions of pounds spent on deploying thousands of cameras all over the UK, they don't cut crime, and, more important, the images help solve crime in only 3 percent of cases. But you know the response to this news will not be to remove the cameras or stop adding to their number. No, the thinking will be like the scheme I once heard for selling harmless but ineffective alternative medical treatments, in which the answer to all outcomes is more treatment. (Patient gets better - treatment did it. Patient stays the same - treatment has halted the downward course of the disease. Patient gets worse - treatment came too late.)

This week at Computers, Freedom, and Privacy, I heard about the Electronic Privacy Information Center's work on fusion centers, relatively new US government efforts to mine many commercial and public sources of data. EPIC is trying to establish the role of federal agencies in funding and controlling these centers, but it's hard going.

What do these governments imagine they're going to be able to do with all this data? Is the fantasy that agents will be able to sit in a control room somewhere and survey it all on some kind of giant map on which criminals will pop up in red, ready to be caught? They had data before 9/11 and failed to collate and interpret it.

Iron filing; haystack; lack of a really good magnet.

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May 9, 2008

Swings and roundabouts

There was a wonderful cartoon that cycled frequently around computer science departments in the pre-Internet 1970s - I still have my paper copy - that graphically illustrated the process by which IT systems get specified, designed, and built, and showed precisely why and how far they failed the user's inner image of what it was going to be. There is a scan here. The senior analyst wanted to make sure no one could possibly get hurt; the sponsor wanted a pretty design; the programmers, confused by contradictory input, wrote something that didn't work; and the installation was hideously broken.

Translate this into the UK's national ID card. Consumers, Sir James Crosby wrote in March (PDF)want identity assurance. That is, they - or rather, we - want to know that we're dealing with our real bank rather than a fraud. We want to know that the thief rooting through our garbage can't use any details he finds on discarded utility bills to impersonate us, change our address with our bank, clean out our accounts, and take out 23 new credit cards in our name before embarking on a wild spending spree leaving us to foot the bill. And we want to know that if all that ghastliness happens to us we will have an accessible and manageable way to fix it.

We want to swing lazily on the old tire and enjoy the view.

We are the users with the seemingly simple but in reality unobtainable fantasy.

The government, however - the project sponsor - wants the three-tiered design that barely works because of all the additional elements in the design but looks incredibly impressive. ("Be the envy of other major governments," I feel sure the project brochure says.) In the government's view, they are the users and we are the database objects.

Crosby nails this gap when he draws the distinction between ID assurance and ID management:

The expression 'ID management' suggests data sharing and database consolidation, concepts which principally serve the interests of the owner of the database, for example, the Government or the banks. Whereas we think of "ID assurance" as a consumer-led concept, a process that meets an important consumer need without necessarily providing any spin-off benefits to the owner of any database.
This distinction is fundamental. An ID system built primarily to deliver high levels of assurance for consumers and to command their trust has little in common with one inspired mainly by the ambitions of its owner. In the case of the former, consumers will extend use both across the population and in terms of applications such as travel and banking. While almost inevitably the opposite is true for systems principally designed to save costs and to transfer or share data.

As writer and software engineer Ellen Ullman wrote in her book Close to the Machine, databases infect their owners, who may start with good intentions but are ineluctibly drawn to surveillance.

So far, the government pushing the ID card seems to believe that it can impose anything it likes and if it means the tree collapses with the user on the swing, well, that's something that can be ironed out later. Crosby, however, points out that for the scheme to achieve any of the government's national security goals it must get mass take-up. "Thus," he writes, "even the achievement of security objectives relies on consumers' active participation."

This week, a similarly damning assessment of the scheme was released by the Independent Scheme Assurance Panel (PDF) (you may find it easier to read this clean translation - scroll down to policywatcher's May 8 posting). The gist: the government is completely incompetent at handling data, and creating massive databases will, as a result, destroy public trust in it and all its systems.

Of course, the government is in a position to compel registration, as it's begun doing with groups who can't argue back, like foreigners, and proposes doing for employees in "sensitive roles or locations, such as airports". But one of the key indicators of how little its scheme has to do with the actual needs and desires of the public is the list of questions it's asking in the current consultation on ID cards, which focus almost entirely on how to get people to love, or at least apply for, the card. To be sure, the consultation document pays lip service to accepting comments on any ID card-related topic, but the consultation is specifically about the "delivery scheme".

This is the kind of consultation where we're really damned if we do and damned if we don't. Submit comments on, for example, how best to "encourage" young people to sign up ("Views are invited particularly from young people on the best way of rolling out identity cards to them") without saying how little you like the government asking how best to market its unloved policy to vulnerable groups and when the responses are eventually released the government can say there are now no objectors to the scheme. Submit comments to the effect that the whole National Identity scheme is poorly conceived and inappropriate, and anything else you say is likely to be ignored on the grounds that they've heard all that and it's irrelevant to the present consultation. Comments are due by June 30.

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March 14, 2008

Uninformed consent

Apparently the US Congress is now being scripted by Jon Stewart of the Daily Show. In a twist of perfect irony, the House of Representatives has decided to hold its first closed session in 25 years to debate - surveillance.

But it's obvious why they want closed doors: they want to talk about the AT&T case. To recap: AT&T is being sued for its complicity in the Bush administration's warrantless surveillance of US citizens after its technician Mark Klein blew the whistle by taking documents to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (which a couple of weeks ago gave him a Pioneer Award for his trouble).

Bush has, of course, resisted any effort to peer into the innards of his surveillance program by claiming it's all a state secret, and that's part of the point of this Congressional move: the Democrats have fielded a bill that would give the whole program some more oversight and, significantly, reject the idea of giving telecommunications companies - that is, AT&T - immunity from prosecution for breaking the law by participating in warrantless wiretapping. 'Snot fair that they should deprive us of the fun of watching the horse-trading. It can't, surely, be that they think we'll be upset by watching them slag each other off. In an election year?

But it's been a week for irony, as Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has had his sex life exposed when he dumped his girlfriendand been accused of - let's call it sloppiness - in his expense accounts. Worse, he stands accused of trading favorable page edits for cash. There's always been a strong element of Schadenpedia around, but the edit-for-cash thing really goes to the heart of what Wikipedia is supposed to be about.

I suspect that nonetheless Wikipedia will survive it: if the foundation has the sense it seems to have, it will display zero tolerance. But the incident has raised valid questions about how Wikipedia can possibly sustain itself financially going forward. The site is big and has enviable masses of traffic; but it sells no advertising, choosing instead to live on hand-outs and the work of volunteers. The idea, I suppose, is that accepting advertising might taint the site's neutral viewpoint, but donations can do the same thing if they're not properly walled off: just ask the US Congress. It seems to me that an automated advertising system they did not control would be, if anything, safer. And then maybe they could pay some of those volunteers, even though it would be a pity to lose some of the site's best entertainment.

With respect to advertising, it's worth noting that Phorm, which we is under increasing pressure. Earlier this week, we had an opportunity to talk to Kent Ertegrul, CEO of Phorm, who continues to maintain that Phorm's system, because it does not store data, is more protective of privacy than today's cookie-driven Web. This may in fact be true.

Less certain is Ertegrul's belief that the system does not contravene the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, which lays down rules about interception. Ertegrul has some support from a informal letter from the Home Office whose reasoning seems to be that if users have consented and have been told how they can opt out, it's legal. Well, we'll see; there's a lot of debate going on about this claim and it will be interesting to hear the Information Commissioner's view. If the Home Office's interpretation is correct, it could open a lot of scope for abusive behavior that could be imposed upon users simply by adding it to the terms of service to which they theoretically consent when they sign up, and a UK equivalent of AT&T wanting to assist the government with wholesale warrantless wiretapping would have only to add it to the terms of service.

The real problem is that no one really knows how Phorm's system works. Phorm doesn't retain your IP address, but the ad servers surely have to know it when they're sending you ads. If you opt out but can still opt back in (as Ertegrul said you can), doesn't that mean you still have a cookie on your system and that your data is still passed to Phorm's system, which discards it instead of sending you ads? If that's the case, doesn't that mean you can not opt out of having your data shared? If that isn't how it works, then how does it work? I thought I understood it after talking to Ertegrul, I really did - and then someone asked me to explain how Phorm's cookie's usefulness persisted between sessions, and I wasn't sure any more. I think the Open Rights Group: Phorm should publish details of how its system works for experts to scrutinize. Until Phorm does that the misinformation Ertegrul is so upset about will continue. (More disclosure: I am on ORG's Advisory Council.

But maybe the Home Office is on to something. Bush could solve his whole problem by getting everyone to give consent to being surveilled at the moment they take US citizenship. Surely a newborn baby's footprint is sufficient agreement?

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March 7, 2008

Techitics

This year, 2008, may go down in history as the year geeks got politics. At etech this week I caught a few disparaging references to hippies' efforts to change politics. Which, you know, seemed kind of unfair, for two reasons. First: the 1960s generation did change an awful lot of things, though not nearly as many as they hoped. Second: a lot of those hippies are geeks now.

But still. Give a geek something that's broken and he'll itch to fix it. And one thing leads to another. Which is why on Wednesday night Lawrence Lessig explained in an hour-long keynote that got a standing ovation how he plans to fix what's wrong with Congress.

No, he's not going to run. Some 4,500 people on Facebook were trying to push him into it, and he thought about it, but preliminary research showed that his chances of beating popular Silicon Valley favorite, Jackie Speier, were approximately zero.

"I wasn't afraid of losing," he said, noting ruefully that in ten years of copyfighting he's gotten good at it. Instead, the problem was that Silicon Valley insiders would have known that no one was going to beat Jackie Speier. But outsiders would have pointed, laughed, and said, "See? The idea of Congressional reform has no legs." And on to business as usual. So, he said, counterproductive to run.

Instead, he's launching Change Congress. "Obama has taught us that it's possible to imagine many people contributing to real change."

The point, he said, will be to provide a "signalling function". Like Creative Commongs, Change Congress will give candidates an easy way to show what level of reform they're willing to commit tto. The system will start with three options: 1) refusing money from lobbyists and political action committees (private funding groups); 2) ban earmarks (money allocated to special projects in politicians' home states); 3) commit to public financing for campaigns. Candidates can then display the badge generated from those choices on their campaign materials.

From there, said Lessig, layer something like Emily's List on top, to help people identify candidates they're willing to suppot with monthly donations, thereby subsidizing reform.

Money, he admitted, isn't the entire problem. But, like drinking for an alcoholic, it's the first problem you must solve to be able to tackle any of the others with any hope of success.

In a related but not entirely similar vein, the guys who brought us They Work For You nearly four years ago are back with UN democracy, an attempt to provide a signalling function to the United Nations> by making it easy to find out how your national representatives are voting in UN meetings. The driving force behind UNdemocracy.com is Liverpool's Julian Todd, who took the UN's URL obscurantism as a personal challenge. Since he doesn't fly, presenting the new service were Tom Loosemore, Stefan Mogdalinski, and Danny O'Brien, who pointed out that when you start looking at the decisions and debates you start to see strange patterns: what do the US and Israel have in common with Palau and Micronesia?

The US Congress and the British Parliament are all, they said, now well accustomed to being televised, and their behaviour has adapted to the cameras. At the UN, "They don't think they're being watched at all, so you see horse trading in a fairly raw form."

The meta-version they believe can be usefully and widely applied: 1) identify broken civic institution; 2) liberate data from said institution. There were three more ingredients, but they vanished the slide too quickly. But Mogdalinski noted that where in the past they have said "Ask forgiveness, not permission", alluding to the fact that most institutions if approached will behave as though they own the data. He's less inclined to apologise now. After all, isn't it *our* data that's being released in the public interest?

Data isn't everything. But the Net community has come a long way since the early days, when the prevailing attitude was that technological superiority would wash away politics-as-usual by simply making an end run around any laws governments tried to pass. Yes, technology can change the equation a whole lot. For example, once PGP escaped laws limiting the availability of strong encryption were pretty much doomed to fail (though not without a lot of back-and-forth before it became official). Similarly, in the copyright wars it's clear that copyrighted material will continue to leak out no matter how hard they try to protect it.

But those are pretty limited bits of politics. Technology can't make such an easy end run around laws that keep shrinking the public domain. Nor can it by itself solve policies that deny the reality of global climate change or that, in one of Lessig's examples, back government recommendations off from a daily caloric intake of 10 percent sugar to one of 25 percent. Or that, in another of his examples, kept then Vice-President Al Gore from succeeding with a seventh part to the 1996 Communications Act deregulating ADSL and cable because without anything to regulate what would Congressmen do without the funds those lobbyists were sending their way? Hence, the new approach.

"Technology," Lessig said, "doesn't solve any problems. But it is the only tool we have to leverage power to effect change."

Wendy M. Grossman's Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of all the earlier columns in this series. Readers are welcome to post here, at net.wars home, at her Posted by at 4:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

February 22, 2008

Strikeout

There is a certain kind of mentality that is actually proud of not understanding computers, as if there were something honorable about saying grandly, "Oh, I leave all that to my children."

Outside of computing, only television gets so many people boasting of their ignorance. Do we boast how few books we read? Do we trumpet our ignorance of other practical skills, like balancing a cheque book, cooking, or choosing wine? When someone suggests we get dressed in the morning do we say proudly, "I don't know how"?

There is so much insanity coming out of the British government on the Internet/computing front at the moment that the only possible conclusion is that the government is made up entirely of people who are engaged in a sort of reverse pissing contest with each other: I can compute less than you can, and see? here's a really dumb proposal to prove it.

How else can we explain yesterday's news that the government is determined to proceed with Contactpoint even though the report it commissioned and paid for from Deloitte warns that the risk of storing the personal details of every British child under 16 can only be managed, not eliminated? Lately, it seems that there's news of a major data breach every week. But the present government is like a batch of 20-year-olds who think that mortality can't happen to them.

Or today's news that the Department of Culture, Media, and Sport has launched its proposals for "Creative Britain", and among them is a very clear diktat to ISPs: deal with file-sharing voluntarily or we'll make you do it. By April 2009. This bit of extortion nestles in the middle of a bunch of other stuff about educating schoolchildren about the value of intellectual property. Dare we say: if there were one thing you could possibly do to ensure that kids sneer at IP, it would be to teach them about it in school.

The proposals are vague in the extreme about what kind of regulation the DCMS would accept as sufficient. Despite the leaks of last week, culture secretary Andy Burnham has told the Financial Times that the "three strikes" idea was never in the paper. As outlined by Open Rights Group executive director Becky Hogge in New Statesman, "three strikes" would mean that all Internet users would be tracked by IP address and warned by letter if they are caught uploading copyrighted content. After three letters, they would be disconnected. As Hogge says (disclosure: I am on the ORG advisory board), the punishment will fall equally on innocent bystanders who happen to share the same house. Worse, it turns ISPs into a squad of private police for a historically rapacious industry.

Charles Arthur, writing in yesterday's Guardian, presented the British Phonographic Institute's case about why the three strikes idea isn't necessarily completely awful: it's better than being sued. (These are our choices?) ISPs, of course, hate the idea: this is an industry with nanoscale margins. Who bears the liability if someone is disconnected and starts to complain? What if they sue?

We'll say it again: if the entertainment industries really want to stop file-sharing, they need to negotiate changed business models and create a legitimate market. Many people would be willing to pay a reasonable price to download TV shows and music if they could get in return reliable, fast, advertising-free, DRM-free downloads at or soon after the time of the initial release. The longer the present situation continues the more entrenched the habit of unauthorized file-sharing will become and the harder it will be to divert people to the legitimate market that eventually must be established.

But the key damning bit in Arthur's article (disclosure: he is my editor at the paper) is the BPI's admission that they cannot actually say that ending file-sharing would make sales grow. The best the BPI spokesman could come up with is, "It would send out the message that copyright is to be respected, that creative industries are to be respected and paid for."

Actually, what would really do that is a more balanced copyright law. Right now, the law is so far from what most people expect it to be - or rationally think it should be - that it is breeding contempt for itself. And it is about to get worse: term extension is back on the agenda. The 2006 Gowers Review recommended against it, but on February 14, Irish EU Commissioner Charlie McCreevy (previously: champion of software patents) has announced his intention to propose extending performers' copyright in sound recordings from the current 50-year term to 95 years. The plan seems to go something like this: whisk it past the Commission in the next two months. Then the French presidency starts and whee! new law! The UK can then say its hands are tied.

That change makes no difference to British ISPs, however, who are now under the gun to come up with some scheme to keep the government from clomping all over them. Or to the kids who are going to be tracked from cradle to alcopop by unique identity number. Maybe the first target of the government computing literacy programs should be...the government.

Wendy M. Grossman's Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of all the earlier columns in this series. Readers are welcome to post here, at net.wars home, at her personal blog, or by email to netwars@skeptic.demon.co.uk (but please turn off HTML).

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February 8, 2008

If you have ID cards, drink alcohol

One of the key identifiers of an addiction is that indulgence in it persists long after all the reasons for doing it have turned from good to bad.

A sobered-up Scottish alcoholic once told me the following examplar of alcoholic thinking. A professor is lecturing to a class of alcoholics on the evils of drinking. To make his point, he takes two glasses, one filled with water, the other with alcohol. Into each glass he drops a live worm. The worm in the glass of water lives; the worm in the glass of alcohol dies.

"What," the professor asks, "can we learn from this?"

One of the alcoholics raises his hand. "If you have worms, drink alcohol."

In alcoholic thinking, of course, there is no circumstance in which the answer isn't "Drink alcohol."

So, too, with the ID card. The purpose as mooted between 2001 and 2004 was preventing benefit fraud and making life more convenient for UK citizens and residents. The plan promised perfect identification via the combination of a clean database (the National Identity Register) and biometrics (fingerprints and iris scans). The consultation document made a show of suggesting the cheaper alternative of a paper card with minimal data collection, but it was clear what they really wanted: the big, fancy stuff that would make them the envy of other major governments.

Opponents warned of the UK's poor track record with large IT projects, the privacy-invasiveness, and the huge amount such a system was likely to cost. Government estimates, now at £5.4 billion, have been slowly rising to meet Privacy International's original estimate of £6 billion.

By 2006, when the necessary legislation was passed, the government had abandoned the friendly "entitlement card" language and was calling it a national ID card. By then, also, the case had changed: less entitlement, more crime prevention.

It's 2008, and the wheels seem to be coming off. The government's original contention that the population really wanted ID cards has been shredded by the leaked documents of the last few weeks. In these, it's clear that the government knows the only way it will get people to adopt the ID card is by coercion, starting with the groups who are least able to protest by refusal: young people and foreigners.

Almost every element deemed important in the original proposal is now gone - the clean database populated through interviews and careful documentation (now the repurposed Department of Work and Pensions database); the iris scans (discarded); probably the fingerprints (too expensive except for foreigners). The one element that for sure remains is the one the government denied from the start: compulsion.

The government was always open about its intention for non-registration to become increasingly uncomfortable and eventually to make registration compulsory. But if the card is coming at least two years later than they intended, compulsion is ahead of schedule.

Of course, we've always maintained that the key to the project is the database, not the card. It's an indicator of just how much of a mess the project is that the Register, the heart of the system, was first to be scaled back because of its infeasibility. (I mean, really, guys. Interview and background-check the documentation of every one of 60 million people in any sort of reasonable time scale?)

The project is even fading in popularity with the very vendors who want to make money supplying the IT for it. How can you specify a system whose stated goals keep changing?

The late humorist and playwright Jean Kerr (probably now best known for her collection of pieces about raising five boys with her drama critic husband in a wacky old house in Larchmont, NY, Please Don't Eat the Daisies) once wrote a piece about the trials and tribulations of slogging through the out-of-town openings of one of her plays. In these pre-Broadway trial runs, lines get cut and revised; performances get reshaped and tightened. If the play is in trouble, the playwright gets no sleep for weeks. And then, she wrote, one day you look up at the stage, and, yes, the play is much better, and the performances are much better, and the audience seems to be having a good time. And yet - the play you're seeing on the stage isn't the play you had in mind at all.

It's one thing to reach that point in a project and retain enough perspective to be honest about it. It may be bad - but it isn't insane - to say, "Well, this play isn't what I had in mind, but you know, the audience is having a good time, and it will pay me enough to go away and try again."

But if you reach the point where the project you're pushing ahead clearly isn't any more the project you had in mind and sold hard, and yet you continue to pretend to yourself and everyone else that it is - then you have the kind of insanity problem where you're eating worms in order to prove you're not an alcoholic.

The honorable thing for the British government to do now is say, "Well, folks, we were wrong. Our opponents were right: the system we had in mind is too complicated, too expensive, and too unpopular because of its privacy-invasiveness. We will think again." Apparently they're so far gone that eating worms looks more sensible.

Wendy M. Grossman's Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of all the earlier columns in this series. Readers are welcome to post here, at net.wars home, at her personal blog, or by email to netwars@skeptic.demon.co.uk (but please turn off HTML).

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January 18, 2008

Harmony, where is thy sting?

On the Net, John Perry Barlow observed long ago, everything is local and everything is global, but nothing is national. It's one of those pat summations that sometimes is actually right. The EU, in the interests of competing successfully with the very large market that is the US, wants to harmonize the national laws that apply to content online.

They have a point. Today's market practices were created while the intangible products of human ingenuity still had to be fixed in a physical medium. It was logical for the publishers and distributors of said media to carve up the world into national territories. But today anyone trying to, say, put a song in an online store, or create a legal TV download service has to deal with a thicket of national collection societies and licensing authorities.

Where there's a problem there's a consultation document, and so there is in this case: the EU is giving us until February 29 (leap year!) to tell them what we think (PDF).

The biggest flaw in the consultation document is that the authors (who needed a good copy editor) seem to have bought wholesale the 2005 thinking of rightsholders (whom they call "right holders"). Fully a third of the consultation is on digital rights management: should it be interoperable, should there be a dispute resolution process, should SMEs have non-discriminatory access to these systems, should EULAs be easier to read?

Well, sure. But the consultation seems to assume that DRM is a) desirable and b) an endemic practice. We have long argued that it's not desirable; DRM is profoundly anti-consumer. Meanwhile, the industry is clearly fulfilling Naxos founder Klaus Heymann's April 2007 prophecy that DRM would be gone from online music within two years. DRM is far less of an issue now than it was in 2006, when the original consultation was launched. In fact, though, these questions seem to have been written less to aid consumers than to limit the monopoly power of iTunes.

That said, DRM will continue to be embedded in some hardware devices, most especially in the form of HDCP, a form of copy protection being built, invisibly to consumers until it gets in their way, into TV sets and other home video equipment. Unfortunately, because the consultation is focused on "Creative Content Online", such broader uses of DRM aren't included.

However, because of this and because some live streaming services similarly use DRM to prevent consumers from keeping copies of their broadcasts (and probably more will in future as Internet broadcasting becomes more widespread), public interest limitations on how DRM can be used seem like a wise idea. The problem with both DRM and EULAs is that the user has no ability to negotiate terms. The consultation leaves out an important consumer consideration: what should happen to content a consumer pays for and downloads that's protected with DRM if the service that sold it closes down? So far, subscribers lose it all; this is clea

The questions regarding multi-territory licensing are far more complicated, and I suspect answers to those depend largely on whether you're someone trying to clear rights for reuse, someone trying to protect your control over your latest blockbuster's markets, or someone trying to make a living as a creative person. The first of those clearly wants to buy one license rather than dozens. The second wants to sell dozens of licenses rather than one (unless it's for a really BIG sum of money). The third, who is probably part of the "Long Tail" mentioned in the question, may be very suspicious of any regime that turns everything he created before 2005 into "back catalogue works" that are subject to a single multi-territory license. Science fiction authors, for example, have long made significant parts of their income by selling their out-of-print back titles for reprint. An old shot in a photographer's long tail may be of no value for 30 years – until suddenly the subject emerges as a Presidential candidate. Any regime that is adopted must be flexible enough to recognize that copyrighted works have values that fluctuate unpredictably over time.

The final set of question has to do with the law and piracy. Should we all follow France's lead and require ISPs to throw users offline if they're caught file-sharing more than three times? We have said all along that the best antidote to unauthorized copying is to make it easy for people to engage in authorized copying. If you knew, for example, that you could reliably watch the latest episode of The Big Bang Theory (if there ever is one) 24 hours after the US broadcast, would you bother chasing around torrent sites looking for a download that might or might not be complete? Technically, it's nonsense to think that ISPs can reliably distinguish an unauthorized download of copyrighted material from an authorized one; filtering cannot be the answer, no matter how much AT&T wants to kill itself trying. We would also remind the EU of the famed comment of another Old Netizen, John Gilmore: "The Internet perceives censorship as damage, and routes around it."

But of course no consultation can address the real problem, which isn't how to protect copyright online: it's how to encourage creators.

Wendy M. Grossman’s Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of all the earlier columns in this series. Readers are welcome to post here, at net.wars home, at her personal blog, or by email to netwars@skeptic.demon.co.uk (but please turn off HTML).

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January 4, 2008

If God had meant us to vote...

It seems like a couple of years now that people in the UK have been asking me, "Do you think Hillary or Guliani is going to win?" Sometimes they mention Obama. But it's like the meme of a few years ago about Arnold Schwarzenegger becoming president: the famous name dominates the coverage beyond all reason.

When the Schwarzenegger thing came up, I tried patiently to explain about the Constitution: to be elected president, you must have been born a US citizen. I assume the Founding Fathers, even without the benefit of having seen George Bernard Shaw's The Apple Cart, were worried that some English king would come over to the US, get himself naturalized, win the president's job in one of those democratic elections, and then push the country back to colonialism.

"They'll amend the Constitution," people said.

Well, not quite. It takes an incredible amount of effort to onstitution: the prospective amendment has to pass both legislative houses by a two-thirds majority, and then three-quarters of the states. Often, there's a time limit of seven years, which is what eventually scuppered the Equal Rights Amendment. (Apparently the fastest-ever passage of an amendment, 107 days, was not getting Prohibition repealed but lowering the voting age to 18 during the Vietnam War.) While there was, apparently, an attempt in 2004 to introduce an amendment allowing foreign-born, naturalized citizens to become president, it's hard for me to believe even Schwarzenegger thinks he has a chance in his lifetime; he's 60 this year. Certainly, it's not a possibility people inside the US seem to take seriously.

That so many people outside the US think of the chief presidential candidates as Hillary, Obama, Giuliani, and Schwarzenegger tells you how little of the US's real politics seeps out to other countries. Fantasy politics all you want, sure: as many British friends as American ones bought into The West Wing's fictional White House.

Very fictional: Josiah Bartlett might have managed to get elected president despite being a Catholic (Kennedy) and having multiple sclerosis, but he'd never be able to overcome the twin disadvantages of being a Nobel Laureate in economics and, above all, being SHORT. Martin Sheen is 5 foot 7. You have to go all the way back to 1900 and William McKinley to find a president that small, and even then that was short by historical standards. In 1988, Michael Dukakis lost the election when moving around the debate podiums to shake hands with George H.W. Bush revealed that he "http://www6.miami.edu/debate04/art/pagephotos/sphotohistory.jpg">barely came up to Bush's shoulder. Over and out.

Most reports guesstimate Obama at six feet, but Clinton reportedly clocks in at 5 foot 8 and a half – tallish for a woman, maybe, but not for a presidential candidate. Giuliani claims 5 foot 10 (though some observers claim he's shorter). And John Edwards comes in at 5 foot 10.

John Edwards? Things look very different from inside the US. Here, although Clinton, Obama, and Giuliani are still getting most of the headlines there are plenty of other candidates to pick from even just within the Democratic party, all of whom look more like a US president usually looks: white, male, and middle-aged. Giuliani's best moment may have been when, as New Yorkers gleefully keep saying, his every sentence was summed up by Democratic hopeful Senator Joseph R. Biden as "a noun, a verb, and 9/11",

Yesterday's Iowa caucus – the first primaries of the 2008 presidential election – is the first real data we've had. And reality started to hit: Giuliani polled 4 percent; the Republican front runner is former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, who suddenly came out of nowhere in the last few weeks . Clinton polled 30 percent, which sounds respectable until you find out she came third, narrowly below Edwards. Obama led with 37 percent. Lots more to go there.

Some more notes for the coming weeks:

- Giuliani was more or less hated in New York while he was mayor.

- Clinton, like her husband, was politically hated when she was First Lady, despite her exceptional star-name fundraising ability.

- Huckabee crossed WGA picket lines to appear on Jay Leno's Tonight Show on January 3 (without a deal with striking union writers, Huckabee was the best Leno could do for a guest.) When asked, he said he thought Leno had a deal with the WGA. No. "Oh." Oops.

- Vice-president Dick Cheney has vehemently denied all possibility that he will run. "And if elected I will not serve."

- Lots of press speculation that New York's current mayor, the megawealthy Steve Bloomberg, will enter as an independent.

- No matter who runs, from the primaries onwards the technology of voting is going to be an unholy mess and doubtless, in some districts, a deciding factor.

I can't guess November's nominees, but I don't expect to see Clinton among them unless it's as someone's vice-president (and who's going to want Bill hanging around kibitzing?). Clinton's trailing Edwards, even if it's only the first state, suggests the big show will feature dismal, "safe" choices.

Cue Utah Phillips: "If God had meant us to vote, he'd have given us candidates."

Wendy M. Grossman’s Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of all the earlier columns in this series. Readers are welcome to post here, at net.wars home, at her personal blog, or by email to netwars@skeptic.demon.co.uk (but please turn off HTML).

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November 23, 2007

Road block

There are many ways for a computer system to fail. This week's disclosure that Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs has played lost-in-the-post with two CDs holding the nation's Child Benefit data is one of the stranger ones. The Child Benefit database includes names, addresses, identifying numbers, and often bank details, on all the UK's 25 million families with a child under 16. The National Audit Office requested a subset for its routine audit; the HMRC sent the entire database off by TNT post.

There are so many things wrong with this picture that it would take a village of late-night talk show hosts to make fun of them all. But the bottom line is this: when the system was developed no one included privacy or security in the specification or thought about the fundamental change in the nature of information when paper-based records are transmogrified into electronic data. The access limitations inherent in physical storage media must be painstakingly recreated in computer systems or they do not exist. The problem with security is it tends to be inconvenient.

With paper records, the more data you provide the more expensive and time-consuming it is. With computer records, the more data you provide the cheaper and quicker it is. The NAO's file of email relating to the incident (PDF) makes this clear. What the NAO wanted (so it could check that the right people got the right benefit payments): national insurance numbers, names, and benefit numbers. What it got: everything. If the discs hadn't gotten lost, we would never have known.

Ironically enough, this week in London also saw at least three conferences on various aspects of managing digital identity: Digital Identity Forum, A Fine Balance, and Identity Matters. All these events featured the kinds of experts the UK government has been ignoring in its mad rush to create and collect more and more data. The workshop on road pricing and transport systems at the second of them, however, was particularly instructive. Led by science advisor Brian Collins, the most notable thing about this workshop is that the 15 or 20 participants couldn't agree on a single aspect of such a system.

Would it run on GPS or GSM/GPRS? Who or what is charged, the car or the driver? Do all roads cost the same or do we use differential pricing to push traffic onto less crowded routes? Most important, is the goal to raise revenue, reduce congestion, protect the environment, or rebalance the cost of motoring so the people who drive the most pay the most? The more purposes the system is intended to serve, the more complicated and expensive it will become, and the less likely it is to answer any of those goals successfully. This point has of course also been made about the National ID card by the same sort of people who have warned about the security issues inherent in large databases such as the Child Benefit database. But it's clearer when you start talking about something as limited as road charging.

For example: if you want to tag the car you would probably choose a dashboard-top box that uses GPS data to track the car's location. It will have to store and communicate location data to some kind of central server, which will use it to create a bill. The data will have to be stored for at least a few billing cycles in case of disputes. Security services and insurers alike would love to have copies. On the other hand, if you want to tag the driver it might be simpler just to tie the whole thing to a mobile phone. The phone networks are already set up to do hand-off between nodes, and tracking the driver might also let you charge passengers, or might let you give full cars a discount.

The problem is that the discussion is coming from the wrong angle. We should not be saying, "Here is a clever technological idea. Oh, look, it makes data! What shall we do with it?" We should be defining the problem and considering alternative solutions. The people who drive most already pay most via the fuel pump. If we want people to drive less, maybe we should improve public transport instead. If we're trying to reduce congestion, getting employers to be more flexible about working hours and telecommuting would be cheaper, provide greater returns, and, crucially for this discussion, not create a large database system that can be used to track the population's movements.

(Besides, said one of the workshop's participants: "We live with the congestion and are hugely productive. So why tamper with it?")

It is characteristic of our age that the favored solution is the one that creates the most data and the biggest privacy risk. No one in the cluster of organisations opposing the ID card - No2ID, Privacy International, Foundation for Information Policy Research, or Open Rights Group - wanted an incident like this week's to happen. But it is exactly what they have been warning about: large data stores carry large risks that are poorly understood, and it is not enough for politicians to wave their hands and say we can trust them. Information may want to be free, but data want to leak.

Wendy M. Grossman’s Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of all the earlier columns in this series. Readers are welcome to post here, at net.wars home, at her personal blog, or by email to netwars@skeptic.demon.co.uk (but please turn off HTML).

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August 10, 2007

Wall of sheep

Last week at Defcon my IM ID and just enough of the password to show they knew what it was appeared on the Wall of Sheep. This screen projection of the user IDs, partial passwords, and activities captured by the installed sniffer inevitably runs throughout the conference.

It's not that I forgot the sniffer was there, or that there is a risk in logging onto an IM client unencrypted over a Wi-Fi hot spot (at a hacker conference!) but that I had forgotten that it was set to log in automatically whenever it could. Easily done.

It's strange to remember now that once upon a time this crowd – or at least, type of crowd – was considered the last word in electronic evil. In 1995 the capture of Kevin Mitnick made headlines everywhere because he was supposed to be the baddest hacker ever. Yet other than gaining online access and free phone calls, Mitnick is not known to have ever profited from his crimes – he didn't sell copied source code to its owners' competitors, and he didn't rob bank accounts. We would be grateful – really grateful – if Mitnick were the worst thing we had to deal with online now.

Last night, the House of Lords Science and Technology Committee released its report on Personal Internet Security. It makes grim reading even for someone who's just been to Defcon and Black Hat. The various figures the report quotes, assembled after what seems to have been an excellent information-gathering process (that means, they name-check a lot of people I know and would have picked for them to talk to) are pretty depressing. Phishing has cost US banks around $2 billion, and although the UK lags well behind - £33.5 million in bank fraud in 2006 – here, too, it's on the rise. Team Cymru found (PDF) that on IRC channels dedicated to the underground you could buy credit card account information for between $1 (basic information on a US account) to $50 (full information for a UK account); $1,599,335.80 worth of accounts was for sale on a single IRC channel in one day. Those are among the few things that can be accurately measured: the police don't keep figures breaking out crimes committed electronically; there are no good figures on the scale of identity theft (interesting, since this is one of the things the government has claimed the ID card will guard against); and no one's really sure how many personal computers are infected with some form of botnet software – and available for control at four cents each.

The House of Lords recommendations could be summed up as "the government needs to do more". Most of them are unexceptional: fund more research into IT security, keep better statistics. Some measures will be welcomed by a lot of us: make banks responsible for losses resulting from electronic fraud (instead of allowing them to shift the liability onto consumers and merchants); criminalize the sale or purchase of botnet "services" and require notification of data breaches. (Now I know someone is going to want to say, "If you outlaw botnets, only outlaws will have botnets", but honestly, what legitimate uses are there for botnets? The trick is in defining them to include zombie PCs generating spam and exclude PCs intentionally joined to grids folding proteins.)

Streamlined Web-based reporting for "e-crime" could only be a good thing. Since the National High-Tech Crime Unit was folded into the Serious Organised Crime Agency there is no easy way for a member of the public to report online crime. Bringing in a central police e-crime unit would also help. The various kite mark schemes – for secure Internet services and so on – seem harmless but irrelevant.

The more contentious recommendations revolve around the idea that we the people need to be protected, and that it's no longer realistic to lay the burden of Internet security on individual computer users. I've said for years that ISPs should do more to stop spam (or "bad traffic") from exiting their systems; this report agrees with that idea. There will likely be a lot of industry ink spilled over the idea of making hardware and software vendors liable if "negligence can be demonstrated". What does "vendor" mean in the context of the Internet, where people decide to download software on a whim? What does it mean for open source? If I buy a copy of Red Hat Linux with a year's software updates, that company's position as a vendor is clear enough. But if I download Ubuntu and install it myself?

Finally, you have to twitch a bit when you read, "This may well require reduced adherence to the 'end-to-end' principle." That is the principle that holds that the network should carry only traffic, and that services and applications sit at the end points. The Internet's many experiments and innovations are due to that principle.
The report's basic claim is this: criminals are increasingly rampant and increasingly rapacious on the Internet. If this continues, people will catastrophically lose confidence in the Internet. So we must improve security by making the Internet safer. Couldn't we just make it safer by letting people stop using it? That's what people tell you to do when you're going to Defcon.

Wendy M. Grossman’s Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of all the earlier columns in this series. Readers are welcome to post here, at net.wars home, at her personal blog, or by email to netwars@skeptic.demon.co.uk (but please turn off HTML).

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July 27, 2007

There ain't no such thing as a free Benidorm

This has been the week for reminders that the border between real life and cyberspace is a permeable blood-brain barrier.

On Wednesday, Linden Labs announced that it was banning gambling in Second Life. The resentment expressed by some of SL residents is understandable but naive. We're not at the beginning of the online world any more; Second Life is going through the same reformation to take account of national laws as Usenet and the Web did before it.

Second, this week MySpace deleted the profiles of 29,000 American users identified as sex offenders. That sounds like a lot, but it's a tiny percentage of MySpace's 180 million profiles. None of them, be it noted, are Canadian.

There's no question that gambling in Second Life spills over into the real world. Linden dollars, the currency used in-world, have active exchange rates, like any other currency, currently running about L$270 to the US dollar. (When I was writing about a virtual technology show, one of my interviewees was horrified that my avatar didn't have any distinctive clothing; she was and is dressed in the free outfit you are issued when you join. He insisted on giving me L$1,000 to take her shopping. I solemnly reported the incident to my commissioning editor, who felt this wasn't sufficiently corrupt to worry about: US$3.75! In-world, however, that could buy her several cars.) Therefore: the fact that the wagering takes place online in a simulated casino with pretty animated decorations changes nothing. There is no meaningful difference between craps on an island in Second Life and poker on an official Web-based betting site. If both sites offer betting on real-life sporting events, there's even less difference.

But the Web site will, these days, have gone through considerable time and money to set up its business. Gaming, even outside the US, is quite difficult to get into: licenses are hard to get, and without one banks won't touch you. Compared to that, the $3,800 and 12 to 14 hours a day Brighton's Anthony Smith told Information Week he'd invested in building his SL Casino World is risibly small. You have to conclude that there are only two possibilities. Either Smith knew nothing about the gaming business - if he did, he know that the US has repeatedly cracked down on online gambling over the last ten years and that ultimately US companies will be forced to decide to live within US law. He'd also have known how hard and how expensive it is to set up an online gambling operation even in Europe. Or, he did know all those things and thought he'd found a loophole he could exploit to avoid all the red tape and regulation and build a gaming business on the cheap.

I have no personal interest in gaming; risking real money on the chance draw of a card or throw of dice seems to me a ridiculous waste of the time it took to earn it. But any time you have a service that involves real money, whether that service is selling an experience (gaming), a service, or a retail product, when the money you handle reaches a certain amount governments are going to be interested. Not only that, but people want them involved; people want protection from rip-off artists.

The MySpace decision, however, is completely different. Child abuse is, rightly, illegal everywhere. Child pornography is, more controversially, illegal just about everywhere. But I am not aware of any laws that ban sex offenders from using Web sites, even if those Web sites are social networks. Of course, in the moral panic following the MySpace announcement, someone is proposing such a law. The MySpace announcement sounds more like corporate fear (since the site is now owned by News International) than rational response. There is a legitimate subject for public and legislative debate here: how much do we want to cut convicted sex offenders out of normal social interaction? And a question for scientists: will greater isolation and alienation be effective strategies to keep them from reoffending? And, I suppose, a question for database experts: how likely is it that those 29,000 profiles all belonged to correctly identified, previously convicted sex offenders? But those questions have not been discussed. Still, this problem, at least in regards to MySpace, may solve itself: if parents become better able to track their kids' MySpace activities, all but the youngest kids will surely abandon it in favour of sites that afford them greater latitude and privacy.

A dozen years ago, John Perry Barlow (in)famously argued that national governments had no place in cyberspace. It was the most hyperbolic demonstration of what I call the "Benidorm syndrome": every summer thousands of holidaymakers descend on Benidorm, in Spain, and behave in outrageous and sometimes lawless ways that they would never dare indulge in at home in the belief that since they are far away from their normal lives there are no consequences. (Rinse and repeat for many other tourist locations worldwide, I'm sure.) It seems to me only logical that existing laws apply to behaviour in cyberspace. What we have to guard against is deforming cyberspace to conform to laws that don't exist.

Wendy M. Grossman’s Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of all the earlier columns in this series. Readers are welcome to post here, at net.wars home, at her personal blog, or by email to netwars@skeptic.demon.co.uk (but please turn off HTML).

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July 6, 2007

Born digital

Under one of my bookcases there is a box containing 40 or 50 5.25inch floppy disks next to an old floppy drive of the same size. The disks were created in SuperScripsit in the early 1980s, and require an emulator that pretends my Core2Duo is a TRS-80 Model III.

If, like me, you have had a computer for any length of time you, too, have stowed somewhere a batch of old files that you save because they are or were important to you but that you're not sure you could actually read, though you keep meaning to plug that old drive in and find out. But the Domesday Book, drafted in 1085, is still perfectly readable. In fact, it's more readable than a 1980s digital Domesday Book that was unreadable only 15 years after its creation because the technology it was stored on was outmoded.

The average life of an electronic document before it becomes obsolete is seven years. And that's if it survives that long. Paper can last centuries – and the National Archives, which holds 900 years of Britain's records, has to think in centuries.

This week, the National Archives announced it was teaming up with Microsoft to ensure that the last decade or two of government archives do not become a black hole in history.

The problem of preserving access to today's digital documents is not newly discovered. Digital preservation and archiving were on the list of topics of interest in 1997, when the Foundation for Information Policy Research was founded. Even before that, NASA had discovered the problem, in connection with the vast amounts of data collected at taxpayer expense by the various space missions. Librarians have known all along that the many format changes of the digital age posed far greater problems than deciphering an unfamiliar language chiseled into a chunk of stone.

But it takes a while for non-technical people to understand how complex a problem it really is. Most people, Natalie Ceeney, chief executive of the National Archives, said on Tuesday, think all you have to do is make back-ups. But for an archivist this isn't true, even for the simple case of, say, a departmental letter written in the early 1980s in WordStar. The National Archives wants not only to preserve the actual text of the letter but its look, feel, and functionality. To do that, you need to be able to open the document in the software in which it was originally created – which means having a machine you can run that software on. Lather, rinse, and repeat for any number of formerly common but now obsolete systems. The National Archives estimates it has 580Tb of data in obsolete formats. And more new formats are being invented every day: email, Web, instant messages, telephone text messages, email, databases, ministers' blogs, internal wikis…and as they begin to interact without human intervention that will be a whole new level of complication.

"We knew in the paper world what to keep," Ceeney said. "In the digital world, it's harder to know. But if we tried to keep everything we'd be spending the entire government budget on servers."

So for once Microsoft is looking like a good guy in providing the National Archives with Virtual PC 2007, which (it says here) combines earlier versions of Windows and Office in order to make sure that all government documents that were created using Microsoft products can be opened and read. Naturally, that isn't everything; but it's a good start. Gordon Frazer, Microsoft's UK managing director, promised open formats (or at least, Open XML) for the future. The whole mess is part of a four-year Europe-wide project called Planets.

Digital storage is surprisingly expensive compared to, say, books or film. A study reported by the head of preservation for the Swedish national archives shows that digital can cost up to eight times as much (PDF, see p4) as the same text on paper. But there is a valuable trade-off: the digital version can be easily accessed and searched by far more people. The National Archives' Web site had 66 million downloads in 2006, compared to the 250,000 visitors to its physical premises in Kew.

Listening to this discussion live, you longed to say, "Well, just print it all out, then." But even if you decided to waive the requirements for original look, feel, and functionality, not eveything could be printed out anyway. (Plus, the National Archives casually mentions that its current collection of government papers is 175 kilometres long already.) The most obvious case in point is video evidence, now being kept by police in huge amounts – and, in cases of unsolved crimes or people who have been sentenced for serious crimes, for long periods. Can't be printed. But even text-based government documents: when these were created on paper you saved the paper. The documents of the last 20 years were born digital. Paper is no longer the original but the copy. The National Archives is in the business of preserving originals.

Nor, of course, does it work to say, "Let the Internet archive take care of it: too much of the information is not published on the Web but held in internal government systems, from where it will be due to emerge in a few decades under Britain's 30-year rule. Hopefully we'll know before then that this initiative has been successful.

Wendy M. Grossman’s Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of all the earlier columns in this series. Readers are welcome to post here, at net.wars home, at her personal blog, or by email to netwars@skeptic.demon.co.uk (but please turn off HTML).

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January 26, 2007

Vote early, vote often...

It is a truth that ought to be universally acknowledged that the more you know about computer security the less you are in favor of electronic voting. We thought – optimists that we are – that the UK had abandoned the idea after all the reports of glitches from the US and the rather indeterminate results of a couple of small pilots a few years ago. But no: there are plans for further trials for the local elections in May.

It's good news, therefore, that London is to play host to two upcoming events to point out all the reasons why we should be cautious. The first, February 6, is a screening of the HBO movie Hacking Democracy, a sort of documentary thriller. The second, February 8, is a conference bringing together experts from several countries, most prominently Rebecca Mercuri, who was practically the first person to get seriously interested in the security problems surrounding electronic voting. Both events are being sponsored by the Open Rights Group and the Foundation for Information Policy Research, and will be held at University College London. Here is further information and links to reserve seats. Go, if you can. It's free.

Hacking Democracy (a popular download) tells the story of ,a href="http://www.blackboxvoting.org">Bev Harris and Andy Stephenson. Harris was minding her own business in Seattle in 2000 when the hanging chad hit the Supreme Court. She began to get interested in researching voting troubles, and then one day found online a copy of the software that runs the voting machines provided by Diebold, one of the two leading manufacturers of such things. (And, by the way, the company whose CEO vowed to deliver Ohio to Bush.) The movie follows this story and beyond, as Harris and Stephenson dumpster-dive, query election officials, and document a steady stream of glitches that all add up to the same point: electronic voting is not secure enough to protect democracy against fraud.

Harris and Stephenson are not, of course, the only people working in this area. Among computer experts such as Mercuri, David Chaum, David Dill, Deirdre Mulligan, Avi Rubin, and Peter Neumann, there's never been any question that there is a giant issue here. Much argument has been spilled over the question of how votes are recorded; less so around the technology used by the voter to choose preferences. One faction – primarily but not solely vendors of electronic voting equipment – sees nothing wrong with Direct Recording Electronic, machines that accept voter input all day and then just spit out tallies. The other group argues that you can't trust a computer to keep accurate counts, and that you have to have some way for voters to check that the vote they thought they cast is the vote that was actually recorded. A number of different schemes have been proposed for this, but the idea that's catching on across the US (and was originally promoted by Mercuri) is adding a printer that spits out a printed ballot the voter can see for verification. That way, if an audit is necessary there is a way to actually conduct one. Otherwise all you get is the machine telling you the same number over again, like a kid who has the correct answer to his math