Tag Archives: Civil Liberties

FBI seizes Indymedia server

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I spotted this story last Thursday on Boing Boing, and meant at the time to blog it here as my small contribution to the hue and cry, but didn’t. What finally made me pull out the old finger was spotting the BBC’s coverage of the story which appeared today.

In case you’re not au fait with the story, the basics. Indymedia, an alternative media collective, had a large number of their sites hosted in the UK by a US owned company called Rackspace. Last thursday, Rackspace responded to a court order issued by the FBI and handed over hardware containing the Indymedia sites – obviously removing them from the internet in the process. The exact reasons for this are still unclear but appear to involve the Swiss and Italian authorities and may have something to do with pictures of policemen filming protesters that were posted on one of the sites; the exact legal procedure which enabled it is also somewhat fuzzy. Analysis and speculation can be found at the Register and at Statewatch.

I’m glad to see the story being run by major news organisations like the BBC and the Guardian, even if it did take them a few days to pick it up. The fact the independent news and comment sites can be removed from the web without warning in a western country which supposedly supports freedom of speech and the press is alarming to say the least, even if you’re not overly sympathetic with the general ideological slant on most Indymedia sites. The Reg says it better than I can:

…the procedure ought to send shivers down the spine of every publishing organisation on the Internet. It is clearly perfectly possible for their operations to be crippled without warning, without their being told what it is they’ve done, and without explanation.

Let’s hope this one gets a good airing. It needs it, becasue it smells pretty bad right now, even four days on.

Update 2004-10-14

Electronic Frontier Foundation press release.

Servers are returned by the FBI: BBC, EFF.

Update 2004-10-15

The Register: “Indymedia seizures: a trawl for Genoa G8 trial cover-up?”

Keep off the grass

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From the BBC:

Political activists opposed to US President George W Bush have been told they will not be allowed to stage a huge rally in New York this weekend.

…

A judge at New York’s state Supreme Court has ruled that the rally, which was expected to attract a quarter of a million demonstrators, cannot be held in Central Park because of the damage which may be caused to the grass.

It appears that a protest march will be allowed past the convention centre on Sunday, so the cries of foul play from the organisers have been somewhat blunted. Still, I thought the reason provided for the ban was in itself a good enough reason for a post – quite surreal.

Update 2004-08-31

It appears that the park ban had little effect on the anti-Bush protests, as evidenced by (among other reports) the BBC’s photographic record of the events.

Elsewhere on the net, the evidence of nerdy influence at the demo is noted, and more evidence of geekish, techie and arty contributions to antiBushistas are logged at Boing Boing.

ID Card, redux (ad nauseum)

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According the Guardian, Blunkett is going to piggy-back trials for his proposed ID card on trials for the new Passports due to the fact that trials for the ID card cannot go ahead without legislation, while trials for the passport can and the tech is largely the same. Home Office denials don’t sound too convincing:

A Home Office spokesman last night denied that the trial was a pilot for identity cards, but acknowledged that “its results will feed into the debate” on the project. The pilot scheme was “a testing process for facial recognition for one-to-one verification using iris and fingerprint biometrics”, he said. That would involve an immigration or police officer using a scanner to check the identity of a cardholder.

(Source: The Guardian)

So despite opposition to the idea, Blunkett wants to press on regardless. It’s also worth remembering that there isn’t a lot of evidence to support claims that the ID card will help prevent terrorism, or benefit fraud, or even help us to curb the rising tide of swarthy foreigners that so threaten to overwhelm our green and pleasant land, which seem to be the three big issues that come up in association with the scheme.

Liberty has highlighted the fact that other Western European countries with ID cards do not seem to have solved any of these complex social and economic problems. Identity cards may be a handy PR gimmick for the Government to try and show it is “doing something”, but it has not been shown to be a useful policy tool on the continent. Indeed, much of the evidence seems to point to national identity card schemes worsening community and race relations, fuelling a criminal industry in the production of forgeries, and causing administrative problems for the authorities.

(Source: Liberty)

Brought to you via An Oasis, which was spotted updating in the wild with the help of the UK Blogs Aggregator.

DNA, data retention and civil liberties

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Widely reported today (here and here, for instance) are the proposals to allow the Police to retain fingerprint and DNA data on anyone arrested for a crime, even if they should later not be charged.

I don’t think that it is unreasonable for suspects in an investigation to provide this sort of identifying data. Anyone innocent of a crime should be confident that this should help exclude him or her from the investigation. It’s the fact that the data will be retained by the Police that causes me some concern (and this is the major change to the law here – which is being introduced as an amendment to the criminal justice bill). Lord Falconer, a Home Office minister, was interviewed on the Today program this morning, and he came out with a figure of 300,000 when asked how many people arrested each year were later released without charge. All these people would have their data held by the police under these proposals.

As I’ve discussed before, I generally feel uncomfortable about the state holding large databases of deeply personal information on the general population. Measures like this may seem fairly small when reported individually, but it’s important to look at the broader picture. Over the last few months alone, there has been discussion of the “Entitlement Card” (read “ID card”) scheme, the communication data monitoring proposals and now this. The sheer quantity of data identifying you, what you do and who you talk to that the state wants to begin collecting is growing fast. Then juxtapose this against other developments such as the reports of suppression of dissent occurring in the States and I for one begin to feel uncomfortable.

Changes to the law which involve increases in the quantities of data being held on people by the government should be debated openly and honestly, and not put through as amendments to broader pieces of legislation. All I’m really doing here is backing calls for such a debate.

MPs come out against net data retention

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The BBC reports that the All Party Internet Group (APIG) have come out against plans to make ISP’s maintain long-term records of users’ email and web habits.

The APIG suggest that the Anti-Terrorism Crime and Security Act (ATCS), which contains these requirements, wasn’t properly thought out and appeared to be a knee-jerk to the 9/11 attacks in the US. Not only this, but the legislation would result in crippling costs on ISP’s and had received a decidedly lukewarm reception from the public when plans to make data available to third parties were revealed.

The full report is available for download from the APIG website here (pdf). I haven’t read it yet, but thought the report deserved a quick blog. However, the devil is in the details, so we’ll have to see what it says. It certainly sounds like good news though.

ID ..err.. Entitlement Cards

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I’d almost forgotten that this was humming away in the background until I read this post on Boing Boing, which points at leafnet.org, a site dedicated to encouraging people to do just a little bit of leafletting over civil liberties issues. The current campaign is against the introduction of ID cards here in the UK.

I have always felt apprehensive about the proposals to introduce ID cards that crop up on the UK’s political landscape from time to time. My reasons for this include:

  • We seem to have done pretty well without them up until now.
  • I can think of lots of far more worthy things upon which to spend upwards of 1.5 billion quid of taxpayers money.
  • I just don’t like the idea. I don’t want to live in a total surveillance society where my every move through life is catalogued in a file somewhere. We’re already moving in this direction faster than is comfortable anyway.
  • I can’t help but feel a little cynical about the whole scheme. It feels to me more like an effort to get this central repository of personal info set up for the benefit of the government rather than the people.
  • I think that there are serious concerns over the security of this information and the potential for it to be abused.

To partially illustrate this last point, I’m going to reproduce part of the answer to the question “You Say It Won’t Leak My Information ? But How Can You Stop It?” from the Stand‘s website:

Well, the record sure ain’t good thus far. There is no shortage of stories about police officers abusing criminal records databases.

But for our money, the Home Office’s very own report (PDF) on Police Integrity makes for the most interesting reading:

THE INTEGRITY OF INFORMATION

6.6 Most police intelligence is now stored on computers and, with many members of staff being able to access it through their own terminal, it is a daunting task to try and protect it. To illustrate the potential problem, the Inspection Team is aware a spot audit in one force revealed that within 24 hours of the arrest of a high profile criminal for alleged murder, 67 officers accessed his intelligence record. When interviewed, most acknowledged they did it purely out of curiosity but it would have been equally possible for an unscrupulous member of staff to leak the information unlawfully to other criminals or the press.

The Stand are a loose organisation of volunteers originally set up to oppose the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, but who have since diversified a bit. You can find out more about them at their about page.

They also provide an automated response form to send off your views to the Entitlement Cards Unit as part of the currently ongoing consultation process. Of course, you might feel that before you took the word of a bunch of net.liberals you should find out what the government has to say on the issue.

The Home Office Entitlement Cards Unit has a website where they cover the consultation process. The actual paper is available for download from this page, but it’s 12.7 megabytes in size. You can download it in smaller chunks too, but there’s 12 of them. They also provide a FAQ (html), and a summary (PDF, 310kb) of the process, but if you’re not going to believe the summaries produced by the anti camp, why believe the government’s? This is an awful lot of material to download over a slow bandwidth connection and to digest. And there’s only a couple of weeks or so left until the consultation process closes, on the 31st January. Of course if you really want to see what the government is saying on this, you’ll just have to download it.

The Stand isn’t the only place that has more condensed information about the scheme. They point to a FAQ at the Privacy International website, which covers many of the issues brought up by the scheme.

One reason I thought it important to post this is that it appears that the government are claiming that there is widespread support for the scheme, despite nobody that I have asked in the last couple of days even being aware that there was a consultation process going on. Whatever your views on this, I hope that you’d agree that it’s too important to allow to slip under the radar, and that it needs to be discussed properly before the government’s spin machine cranks up a gear or two. See what the Stand have to say on their homepage about this support.

I make no pretense that any of the sites referenced above, other than the Home Office, are anything but negative towards the scheme. If you know of any places, independent of vested interests, where I can find positive discussion of the scheme, please let me know and I’ll post the links as updates, as I think that it’s important that people should make up their own minds.