This is a slightly longer version of an article I wrote for The Times last week about the UK Government’s proposal for industrial internet surveillance: the ‘snooper’s charter’. The following day, the Government announced it would NOT be putting the bill forward in the Queen’s speech but it still remains very much a live issue.

Don’t let the State spy on us by the back door
The Times, April 3, 2012

Proposed new laws would give powerful officials instant access to people’s internet data

It used to be that running a police state required a tremendous outlay of resources, from hiring watchers and informants to the central collection and storage of paper files. As we move our lives on to digital networks, we create a handy one-stop shop for the nosy official.

It is simple for governments to eavesdrop on our digital communications. They don’t have to store the data; they just go to where it’s collected – internet service providers (ISPs), social networks and telecoms companies. One simple step takes the State’s ability to spy on its citizens to a whole new level.

[We may hope our democratic principles would protect us from the sort of industrial internet surveillance practiced in China, Iran and other autocratic states. However, this government’s proposal revealed yesterday reveals a plan to rival China.]

Intelligence agents can already tap into our online communication and data where there are reasonable grounds for doing so. The Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 (RIPA), extended in 2003, allows not only the police, intelligence services and Revenue & Customs officials, but many other organisations, including local councils, to access telephone records, e-mail and internet activity.
That we have no idea how often they do it or for what purpose is an indication of the lack of supervision in this area.

There are three officials in charge: (more…)

As part of my research for ‘The Revolution Will Be Digitised’ I hung out in a lot of hackerspaces and met many hackers. A lot of people think hackers are synonymous with cybercriminals but the real picture is more complex. The full story is in the book but here I pick out a few highlights from my travels.

Inside the secret world of hackers
Guardian, 25 August 2011
By Heather Brooke

Hackerspaces are the digital-age equivalent of English Enlightenment coffee houses. They are places open to all, indifferent to social status, and where ideas and knowledge hold primary value. In 17th-century England, the social equality and merit-ocracy of coffee houses was so deeply troubling to those in power that King Charles II tried to suppress them for being “places where the disaffected met, and spread scandalous reports concerning the conduct of His Majesty and his Ministers”. It was in the coffee houses that information previously held in secret and by elites was shared with an emerging middle class. They were held responsible for many of the social reforms of the 18th century, when English public life was transformed.

Hackerspaces could prove to be as important for reform in the digital age. While collectives of rogue hackers such as Anonymous and Lulzsec have grabbed headlines with their mischievous hacks of personal information from Sony, News International and governments, hackerspaces have quietly focused on creating alternatives to the things they see wrong in society: secretive government, unfettered corporate power, invasion of privacy. Bradley Manning, the US Army intelligence analyst accused of leaking files to WikiLeaks, attended the launch of BUILDS, a hackerspace at Boston University last year. In Sweden the hacker collective Telecomix has been involved in keeping lines of communication open in middle eastern countries when political leaders shut down networks.

As part of the research for my book, The Revolution Will Be Digitised, I travelled to Berlin to meet the group of hackers known as the Chaos Computer Club (CCC). The Club was so named not because it set out to cause chaos but rather because one of the founders, Wau Holland, felt chaos theory offered the best explanation for how the world actually worked. Dutch hacker and entrepreneur Rop Gonggrijp says the club is about “adapting to a world which is (and always has been) much more chaotic and non-deterministic than is often believed”.

In Berlin, just after Christmas last year, more than 2,000 hackers and information activists gathered at the CCC’s annual conference to discuss technology and the future. Gonggrijp gave the keynote speech, which was startlingly prescient in light of subsequent uprisings, revolutions and riots. “Most of today’s politicians realise that nobody in their ministries, or any of their expensive consultants, can tell them what is going on any more. They have a steering wheel in their hands without a clue what – if anything – it is connected to. Our leaders are reassuring us that the ship will certainly survive the growing storm. But on closer inspection they are either quietly pocketing the silverware or discreetly making their way to the lifeboats.”

The hacker community may be small but it possesses the skills that are driving the global economies of the future. So what is a hacker? (more…)