Fight racists and racism, but taking away their civil and human rights is no solution.
A number of instances have come to light in which people in private online conversations have had their comments used to justify public sanctions against them. The illicit remarks have become public because a bone fide recipient has betrayed the privacy - or in a few cases the user’s device or account has been hacked
The bulk of existing cases involve instances of racism.
I am in two minds about this. On the one hand, I don’t want racists in positions of power in society - and certainly not as members of the Labour Party and other progressive organisations. Yet, I feel that participants in private conversations have the right to privacy, however vile their opinions and comments, and that right is something that the Left would do well to protect, if only in its own interests. In addition, while we rightly struggle to prevent racists wielding social influence, I would not deny them the right to make a living merely on account of their private opinions (or ‘jokes’).
Showing posts with label surveillance. Show all posts
Showing posts with label surveillance. Show all posts
24 November 2016
The Investigatory Powers Act 2016: a threat to privacy and freedom
The Investigatory Powers Act 2016 is a threat to people's privacy and freedom. Yet, it was never effectively opposed and challenged.
The Investigatory Powers Act 2016 passed into law in the UK, “with barely a whimper,” according to The Guardian (19-Nov-2016). In the words of Edward Snowden: “The UK has just legalised the most extreme surveillance in the history of western democracy. It goes further than many autocracies.”
Broadly speaking, the Act enables state snoopers to bulk collect our electronic data, to have ready access to all metadata (who is speaking to whom and when) and to hack into our devices.
Most distressing is the low level of interest among the liberal left, with Labour in Parliament nodding in favour and merely requesting a few minor tweaks here and there. Outside Parliament, campaigning against the Act was lacklustre, with GHCQ itself apparently surprised at the ease with which it managed to enlarge its powers. Equally disappointing has been the low level of interest among left-wing activists in encrypting their communications, by using such services as Signal, Tutanota and Tor.
With the Trump victory in the US and Britain's post-Brexit lurch to the right, we may come to regret our indifference.
The Investigatory Powers Act 2016 passed into law in the UK, “with barely a whimper,” according to The Guardian (19-Nov-2016). In the words of Edward Snowden: “The UK has just legalised the most extreme surveillance in the history of western democracy. It goes further than many autocracies.”
Broadly speaking, the Act enables state snoopers to bulk collect our electronic data, to have ready access to all metadata (who is speaking to whom and when) and to hack into our devices.
Most distressing is the low level of interest among the liberal left, with Labour in Parliament nodding in favour and merely requesting a few minor tweaks here and there. Outside Parliament, campaigning against the Act was lacklustre, with GHCQ itself apparently surprised at the ease with which it managed to enlarge its powers. Equally disappointing has been the low level of interest among left-wing activists in encrypting their communications, by using such services as Signal, Tutanota and Tor.
With the Trump victory in the US and Britain's post-Brexit lurch to the right, we may come to regret our indifference.
28 August 2016
Social Media: Rope for your own neck
Believing that your comments online were just off-the cuff and for a couple of friends is sometimes wrong. You might just be giving your adversaries the rope for your own neck.
In the last couple of decades, the growth of the Internet, both in terms of availability and functionality, has enabled progressive people to communicate and organise on a scale which in an earlier age would have been unimaginable. The victory of Jeremy Corbyn in his campaign for the leadership of the Labour Party in September 2015 could not have occurred without social media platforms. Yet the Internet, as a means of communication and organisation, is at the same time a powerful tool for surveilling progressive people and groups.
It is helpful to distinguish between two types of surveillance. The first is the kind which the former CIA contractor and whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed in 2013. This is an attempt by state agencies to gain access to all electronic communication, using methods, which if attempted by private citizens would constitute serious crimes. We cannot know whether the state agencies who gather information about left-wing people make that information available to our political opponents. But it would be foolish to dismiss the possibility that this happens.
The second form of surveillance is perfectly legal: our political adversaries comb the net for our comments. Richer adversaries may employ professionals to do this: and of course various grey methods are deployed such as joining our “private” discussion groups with pseudonyms to find out what particular people are saying. Fishing the net for dirt and using it against us goes on all the time.
Of course, holding left-wing views and discussing them with others is not illegal in Britain, except in a small number of cases where the affair is covered by a court injunction. And there is a strong current of opinion which argues along the lines:
Dare to be a Daniel,
Dare to stand alone,
Dare to have a purpose,
And dare to make it known.
Whether “to publish and be damned” by broadcasting every opinion and every action to police, other state agencies and our political adversaries is a matter of debate. There is certainly something in the argument for openness, because constant vigilance, excessive secrecy and perennial distrust and paranoia can suffocate the left. So, yes, there is a case for openness, but not one that necessarily trumps everything. Here, though I want to focus on comments on social media can undermine the left in the struggle to support Jeremy Corbyn.
The rise in support for Jeremy Corbyn, and his election as leader of the Labour Party, has provoked a furious response from the Parliamentary Labour Party and the Party bureaucracy. The latter has done everything it can to suspend left-wing members of the party, and to disqualify members and supporters from voting. The most typical line of attack against socialist members is to find some half (or badly) articulated comment on Facebook, which is alleged (nearly always untruthfully) to be antisemitic or otherwise abusive. These out-of-context Facebook comments are then misinterpreted and paraded in the media as evidence of wrongdoing. In a similar vein, voters in the leadership election are subject to disqualification because they have commented favourably on Facebook, often months previously, about the Green Party, Left Unity or similar progressive groups.
The fact is that unguarded discussions on social media among friends, and making comments not designed as polished prose for the whole world, is seriously unwise. The commentator, even if he or she doesn't realise it at the time, is often making the rope for his or her own neck. Again and again, though, this mistake is made. To resolve this problem I will make a couple of suggestions for people who send email or post in social media.
If you are sending a message to particular people, whether it is an opinion or information, you should ensure, as far as possible, that only the intended recipients have access to it, not the Internet searching public, and not the Internet Giants like Google and Facebook. Send your message end-to-end encrypted. Today, that is technically straightforward, if both or all of the parties use, for instance, the email provider Tutanota. Of course Tutanota is not a panacea, but it goes a very long way to solving this problem.
But if you really are intending to post to the big wide world, then think long and hard before you post, and consider using a pseudonym.
In the last couple of decades, the growth of the Internet, both in terms of availability and functionality, has enabled progressive people to communicate and organise on a scale which in an earlier age would have been unimaginable. The victory of Jeremy Corbyn in his campaign for the leadership of the Labour Party in September 2015 could not have occurred without social media platforms. Yet the Internet, as a means of communication and organisation, is at the same time a powerful tool for surveilling progressive people and groups.
It is helpful to distinguish between two types of surveillance. The first is the kind which the former CIA contractor and whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed in 2013. This is an attempt by state agencies to gain access to all electronic communication, using methods, which if attempted by private citizens would constitute serious crimes. We cannot know whether the state agencies who gather information about left-wing people make that information available to our political opponents. But it would be foolish to dismiss the possibility that this happens.
The second form of surveillance is perfectly legal: our political adversaries comb the net for our comments. Richer adversaries may employ professionals to do this: and of course various grey methods are deployed such as joining our “private” discussion groups with pseudonyms to find out what particular people are saying. Fishing the net for dirt and using it against us goes on all the time.
Of course, holding left-wing views and discussing them with others is not illegal in Britain, except in a small number of cases where the affair is covered by a court injunction. And there is a strong current of opinion which argues along the lines:
Dare to be a Daniel,
Dare to stand alone,
Dare to have a purpose,
And dare to make it known.
Whether “to publish and be damned” by broadcasting every opinion and every action to police, other state agencies and our political adversaries is a matter of debate. There is certainly something in the argument for openness, because constant vigilance, excessive secrecy and perennial distrust and paranoia can suffocate the left. So, yes, there is a case for openness, but not one that necessarily trumps everything. Here, though I want to focus on comments on social media can undermine the left in the struggle to support Jeremy Corbyn.
The rise in support for Jeremy Corbyn, and his election as leader of the Labour Party, has provoked a furious response from the Parliamentary Labour Party and the Party bureaucracy. The latter has done everything it can to suspend left-wing members of the party, and to disqualify members and supporters from voting. The most typical line of attack against socialist members is to find some half (or badly) articulated comment on Facebook, which is alleged (nearly always untruthfully) to be antisemitic or otherwise abusive. These out-of-context Facebook comments are then misinterpreted and paraded in the media as evidence of wrongdoing. In a similar vein, voters in the leadership election are subject to disqualification because they have commented favourably on Facebook, often months previously, about the Green Party, Left Unity or similar progressive groups.
The fact is that unguarded discussions on social media among friends, and making comments not designed as polished prose for the whole world, is seriously unwise. The commentator, even if he or she doesn't realise it at the time, is often making the rope for his or her own neck. Again and again, though, this mistake is made. To resolve this problem I will make a couple of suggestions for people who send email or post in social media.
If you are sending a message to particular people, whether it is an opinion or information, you should ensure, as far as possible, that only the intended recipients have access to it, not the Internet searching public, and not the Internet Giants like Google and Facebook. Send your message end-to-end encrypted. Today, that is technically straightforward, if both or all of the parties use, for instance, the email provider Tutanota. Of course Tutanota is not a panacea, but it goes a very long way to solving this problem.
But if you really are intending to post to the big wide world, then think long and hard before you post, and consider using a pseudonym.
3 October 2015
Surviving under ubiquitous surveillance
To protect their psychological health and to be free citizens, people need to encrypt their electronic communication.
“Once we know there’s a reasonable chance that we are being watched in one fashion or another it’s hard for that not to have a ‘panopticon effect' where we think and behave differently based on the assumption that people may be watching and paying attention to what we are doing.”
The mass of electronic surveillance details revealed by the CIA analyst and private contractor Edward Snowden in 2013 establish one indubitable fact: the NSA in the US, and GCHQ in Britain, want access to all diplomatic, commercial and private electronic data from their own countries and from the rest of the world. To that end, they have built facilities that hoover up electronic data in transit; they have hacked into telephone networks and in some cases have planted spyware into computers. If the correspondence of the average citizen - the recipes, shopping lists and notes to granny - are not sorted and stored, it is only because the spooks have decided not to retain it. Yet the mere fact that what one expects to be private is not private at all has deep psychological implications for the average citizen. We browse the net for private information and stimulation, and we communicate electronically for a myriad of purposes: writing love letters, talking honestly with friends about our workplaces, neighbours and teachers. Our surveilled data, even if of no interest to the spooks, lies copied on several servers with the danger of it falling victim to malicious hacking multiplied.
However, for people who are, were, or might wish in the future to be active politically, the damage is more immediately felt. If we take the now established fact that British police have over the last few decades embedded over 1200 long term double-life spies in civic organisations at a cost of millions of pounds each year, it would be absurd to assume that the much cheaper practice of collecting, sorting and storing the electronic communication of those who engage in politics is not endemic.
The law governing surveillance offers little protection. The fact is that by one means or another our data can become available to the institutions of the state. Only when the state needs to make public that it has our data (e.g. for a prosecution) does the issue of the legality of the state possessing it in the first place arise. It is thus reasonable to believe that the annual two and half million requests by police to access our data legally is only the tip of the iceberg - or the icing on the cake - of surveillance.
And who is targeted, legally or otherwise? Today, it is reasonable to think that at the very least the members of the Green Party and now Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters in the Labour Party, as well as host of other campaigning groups, are under active surveillance - along with all those who campaigned for Scottish independence. Indeed, there are documented cases of police surveillance of people in these legal and democratic organisations.
Yet citizens do not stand completely naked before the state. And if one wants privacy, be it a matter of principle, for psychological health, or to campaign for political goals with as little state surveillance and impediment as possible, then people need to encrypt their data and communication. David Cameron has gone on record saying he wants to outlaw encryption for which the state does not have a backdoor, but without the help of the US, that is a non-starter.
When Alice sends an email to Bob the email travels through cables and is then stored in servers at Google, Yahoo or wherever. Scanning it at any point takes a microsecond, so the content is simply there for the taking. And until recently that was all the spooks had to do, but with the rise of https (the green text and the padlock icon), used by Google, Facebook and others, the content is encrypted between the user's browser and the service provider. But we can’t be sure that the spooks don’t have a backdoor to the encryption, that the service provider doesn’t hand over content, maybe unwillingly, or that the storage facilities have not been hacked or corrupted in some way.
But if Alice encrypts her email before it even leaves her computer with open-source algorithms and keys which are under the control of her and the recipient, the spooks are stymied. Hence Cameron’s concern. What is intercepted or stored on the service provider’s server is indecipherable. Alice and Bob can do this by using encryption software on their computers, such as PGP - or they can use web-based end-to-end encryption services, such as ProtonMail or Tutanota - or, of course, both in conjunction.
All that leaves the spooks with only one option: to hack your computer. Unless you take several complicated precautions they can probably do this, but they must want to target you personally as an important person because they will need to devote time an effort to the job. In other words the cost to the spooks of surveillance increases exponentially and the number of people (if they use encryption) that they can monitor falls dramatically. And even then their surveillance is not fully effective because you might be using several devices. So unless the state is really after you, the encryption of your communication and stored data is probably enough to maintain your privacy.
So fight for your privacy and encrypt.
“Once we know there’s a reasonable chance that we are being watched in one fashion or another it’s hard for that not to have a ‘panopticon effect' where we think and behave differently based on the assumption that people may be watching and paying attention to what we are doing.”
The mass of electronic surveillance details revealed by the CIA analyst and private contractor Edward Snowden in 2013 establish one indubitable fact: the NSA in the US, and GCHQ in Britain, want access to all diplomatic, commercial and private electronic data from their own countries and from the rest of the world. To that end, they have built facilities that hoover up electronic data in transit; they have hacked into telephone networks and in some cases have planted spyware into computers. If the correspondence of the average citizen - the recipes, shopping lists and notes to granny - are not sorted and stored, it is only because the spooks have decided not to retain it. Yet the mere fact that what one expects to be private is not private at all has deep psychological implications for the average citizen. We browse the net for private information and stimulation, and we communicate electronically for a myriad of purposes: writing love letters, talking honestly with friends about our workplaces, neighbours and teachers. Our surveilled data, even if of no interest to the spooks, lies copied on several servers with the danger of it falling victim to malicious hacking multiplied.
However, for people who are, were, or might wish in the future to be active politically, the damage is more immediately felt. If we take the now established fact that British police have over the last few decades embedded over 1200 long term double-life spies in civic organisations at a cost of millions of pounds each year, it would be absurd to assume that the much cheaper practice of collecting, sorting and storing the electronic communication of those who engage in politics is not endemic.
The law governing surveillance offers little protection. The fact is that by one means or another our data can become available to the institutions of the state. Only when the state needs to make public that it has our data (e.g. for a prosecution) does the issue of the legality of the state possessing it in the first place arise. It is thus reasonable to believe that the annual two and half million requests by police to access our data legally is only the tip of the iceberg - or the icing on the cake - of surveillance.
And who is targeted, legally or otherwise? Today, it is reasonable to think that at the very least the members of the Green Party and now Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters in the Labour Party, as well as host of other campaigning groups, are under active surveillance - along with all those who campaigned for Scottish independence. Indeed, there are documented cases of police surveillance of people in these legal and democratic organisations.
Yet citizens do not stand completely naked before the state. And if one wants privacy, be it a matter of principle, for psychological health, or to campaign for political goals with as little state surveillance and impediment as possible, then people need to encrypt their data and communication. David Cameron has gone on record saying he wants to outlaw encryption for which the state does not have a backdoor, but without the help of the US, that is a non-starter.
When Alice sends an email to Bob the email travels through cables and is then stored in servers at Google, Yahoo or wherever. Scanning it at any point takes a microsecond, so the content is simply there for the taking. And until recently that was all the spooks had to do, but with the rise of https (the green text and the padlock icon), used by Google, Facebook and others, the content is encrypted between the user's browser and the service provider. But we can’t be sure that the spooks don’t have a backdoor to the encryption, that the service provider doesn’t hand over content, maybe unwillingly, or that the storage facilities have not been hacked or corrupted in some way.
But if Alice encrypts her email before it even leaves her computer with open-source algorithms and keys which are under the control of her and the recipient, the spooks are stymied. Hence Cameron’s concern. What is intercepted or stored on the service provider’s server is indecipherable. Alice and Bob can do this by using encryption software on their computers, such as PGP - or they can use web-based end-to-end encryption services, such as ProtonMail or Tutanota - or, of course, both in conjunction.
All that leaves the spooks with only one option: to hack your computer. Unless you take several complicated precautions they can probably do this, but they must want to target you personally as an important person because they will need to devote time an effort to the job. In other words the cost to the spooks of surveillance increases exponentially and the number of people (if they use encryption) that they can monitor falls dramatically. And even then their surveillance is not fully effective because you might be using several devices. So unless the state is really after you, the encryption of your communication and stored data is probably enough to maintain your privacy.
So fight for your privacy and encrypt.
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