Your text messages: not safe with Vodafone and T-Mobile?

By law Dutch ISPs and phone companies are required to store all phone and internet traffic metadata to hand over to the police or secret service (AIVD) on request. That is, every phonecall you make, SMS you sent or internet connection you established is logged, stored and handed over to the police whenever they ask for it. Which is bad enough, but now it turns out at least two phone companies, Vodafone and T-Mobile went slightly too far in their zeal to assist the police, handing over not just the metadata on certain SMS messages, but the messages themselves. According to them, it was technically impossible to separate the “traffic data” from the message, so they had no choice but to hand over the whole thing. After this came to light Vodafone immediately acknowledged their error while T-Mobile denied it, but the AIVD declared that it could not and would not delete these SMS messages it had recieved.

Now, as The Netherlands’ best known IT lawyer, Arnoud Engelfriet explains (Dutch) what Vodafone and T-Mobile (allegedly) did is actually illegal under Artikel 273d Wetboek van Strafrecht. Which means their customers could file criminal charges against them…

The 60,000 euro question now is how many other phone companies have done this.

The voice of the soft Labour left

Reading David Osler’s blog is always interesting, because he always manages to capture the views of the soft, making excuses for New Labour left, like Polly Toynbee with better writing skills and slightly more self knowledge. A good example is his commentary on l’affaire David Davis. For those who didn’t pay attention last week, shadow home secretary David Davis resigned his seat in parliament to force a by-election after the government won the vote on extending the time terrorism subjects could be held without charge from 28 to 42 days. According to Davis (and I would agree with him) “42 days is just one – perhaps the most salient example – of the insidious, surreptitious and relentless erosion of fundamental British freedoms.”

So how did Osler respond to this? By portraying it as an opportunistic stunt of course, sounding little different from Harriet Harman:

Part of me almost admires the gesture he is making. In so far as it will keep up the pressure on the government to rescind the disgraceful legislation that the Commons carried last night, I’d even go as far as to call it a good thing. But a gesture it remains, and a deeply opportunistic one at that.

Myself, I’m with Blood and Treasure:

It seems to me that the choice available over this is to outsmart yourself by trying to uncover the “real reasons” behind his resignation or take him at his word and push the issue. And whatever else Davis might have in mind, and whatever you think of his framing it as “fundamental British freedom” this is the issue.

That seems to me to be a much more productive attitude to take than jeering about how opportunistic Davis is, or how much of a rightwinger. But that’s the soft left for you. A guy like Osler always ends up making excuses for Labour, letting tribal loyalty overrule his disgust of the party’s policies by arguing that the Tories would be worse, even if it’s getting harder and harder to do so with a straight face. That’s why he has to rubbish Davis.

Little Brother

Remember the scene in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress where Manny sketches a structure for an underground organization? Now imagine that, done properly. With X-boxes.
— Ken MacLeod

You may already have seen the hype for Cory “Boing Boing” Doctorow’s latest novel, Little Brother all over the internet; certainly I’ve seen it mentioned on a fair few of the blogs I frequent. There’s a reason for this, as it’s not just another science fiction novel, or even another young adult science fiction novel, but an attempt to inoculate a new generation against the phony security mindset that swept America in the wake of the September 11 attacks and arguably the UK some years earlier. We’ve all have had to deal with the results, in everything from having to carry an ID with us at all times to stupid rules about how much fluid you can take along on your airplane trip. But for anybody under twentyone it’s worse and it has been worse for much longer. Every inch of their lives is controlled and regulated these days because it has become so much more easier to do so. As Cory puts it in the preface to Little Brother:

The 17 year olds I know understand to a nicety just how dangerous a computer can be. The authoritarian nightmare of the 1960s has come home for them. The seductive little boxes on their desks and in their pockets watch their every move, corral them in, systematically depriving them of those new freedoms I had enjoyed and made such good use of in my young adulthood.

So what Cory does is to give them the tools to take their lives back. Little Brother is basically one long infodump on, well, hacking, in the good old-fashioned sense of the word, packaged in a neat near-future thriller. It’s a novel in the best tradition of didactic science fiction –Ken MacLeod makes the comparison with Heinlein, while the title itself is of course a reference to 1984. But didactic doesn’t mean dull, as the synopsis makes clear:

Marcus, a.k.a “w1n5t0n,” is only seventeen years old, but he figures he already knows how the system works –and how to work the system. Smart, fast, and wise to the ways of the networked world, he has no trouble outwitting his high school’s intrusive but clumsy surveillance systems.

But his whole world changes when he and his friends find themselves caught in the aftermath of a major terrorist attack on San Francisco. In the wrong place at the wrong time, Marcus and his crew are apprehended by the Department of Homeland Security and whisked away to a secret prison where they’re mercilessly interrogated for days.

When the DHS finally releases them, Marcus discovers that his city has become a police state where every citizen is treated like a potential terrorist. He knows that no one will believe his story, which leaves him only one option: to take down the DHS himself.

Best thing about Little Brother? It’s not just a book, it’s a movement. And Cory is putting his money where his mouth is and made the book available as a free, Creative Commons licensed e-book. In all, this is a noble attempt at not just making people aware of the encrouching security society, but help them find the tools to fight against it, circumvent it, pervert it.

Our Orwellian world

Item one: a man is jailed for three-and-a-half years for carrying a blueprint of a rocket through Luton Airport:

British man who was found with blueprints for a rocket in his luggage at Luton Airport has been jailed for three-and-a-half years.

Yassin Nassari, 28, from Ealing, west London, was earlier found guilty at the Old Bailey of possessing documents likely to be useful to a terrorist.

[…]

Sentencing him, Judge Gerald Gordon said: “I have come to the conclusion that, sadly, like a number of young Muslims, you have somehow been indoctrinated into beliefs supporting terrorism by others.

“I have no doubt you wanted to immerse yourself in this fundamentalist trash, but in the material available to me there is nothing to indicate that any actual terrorist use would have been made of it by anyone.”

Nassari’s hard drive contained documents about martyrdom and weapons training, as well as instructions on how to construct the Qassam artillery rocket – a home-made steel rocket used by terrorist groups in the Middle-East.

So even though there was no evidence that this guy was involved with any terrorist organisation or intended to perform any terrorist acts himself, the mere fact of possessing documents that are a bit dodgy landed him in jail. Really, you don’t need to be an evil terrorist to be interested in the sort of material described in the last quoted paragraph; who hasn’t downloaded The Anarchist Cookbook at one point or another out of curiosity? There are plenty of people interested in weapons, guns, warfare etc. who aren’t terrorists or even terrorist sympathisers; remember Gareth the T.A. nerd from the Office?

Item two: The Metropolitian Police is given real-time access to London’s congestion charge cameras:

Police are to be given live access to London’s congestion charge cameras – allowing them to track all vehicles entering and leaving the zone.

Anti-terror officers will be exempted from parts of the Data Protection Act to allow them to see the date, time and location of vehicles in real time.

They previously had to apply for access on a case-by-case basis.

Home Secretary Jacqui Smith blamed the “enduring vehicle-borne terrorist threat to London” for the change.

The thing is, a) the only true “vehicle-borne terrorist threat to London” was organised by the Keystone Cops branch of Al Queda, b) you cannot tell from the outside if a car is a terrorist car c) if you know enough to know which car to track, you also could’ve gotten permission to do so anyway under the old rules. In his science fiction thriller Whole Wide World Paul J. McAuley predicted that ultimately, all of the UK’s CCTV cameras would be linked up into one giant network, controlled by police computers; this seems like a step in that direction. The Met says this capacity will only be used to fight terrorist activity, but once a capability is there, other uses will be found for it, as the internet itself has shown us.

Item three: The association of Chief Police Officers wants unlimited detention without charge, again for the noble cause of fighting terrorism. And again the question crops up, what is the purpose of locking people up if you don’t have the evidence to charge them, let alone convict them?

Item four: the Dutch police can now keep records of anybody who interacts with them — detainees, suspects, victims, witnesses, literally anybody– for up to five years (Dutch). In the first year, any police officer can look into these records, afterwards it’s only accesible to those who have “a good reason” to do so. But that’s not all, as it’s not just the police who can view these records, but also other parties with a vested interest: social workers, housing societies, even shopowners. All in the name of fighting crime.

Asbo nation

The asbo, antisocial behaviour order, is one of the more odious pieces of social control Nu Labour have managed to bring in. As it is a civil procedure, it has none of the safeguards of criminal proceedings, can be brought against people to disallow behaviour that is not criminal in itself, but carries criminal penalties. You could find yourself in jail for something as innocuous as walking down the wrong street or wearing your underwear where people can see it.

The BBC News Magazine has done an occasional series on asbos handed out, some of which are plainly ridicolous, some of which are responses to things that are indeed serious nuisances, but all of which are basically NIMBY responses: Not In My Back Yard. Play loud music, attempting to commit suicide, addicted to petrol sniffing? We don’t care, we just do not want you to do it here. It’s the institutionalisation of Mrs. Grundy, with the government in the role of social arbiter. It is the ultimate in symbol politics, as it only treats the symptoms of “antisocial behaviour” rather than its causes.

It is also dangerous, as at least one attempt (scroll down) has already been made to penalise free speech…