Who is this “you” you refer to? You speak to me as if I am Whitehall, which makes me feel weird. I’m the moderator.

I dont like this data retention law any more than anyone else. I just asked the Home Office Mainister to say why they thought it was a good idea.

And I dont like spam, but the spam filters seem to have stayed abreast of matters since we started Ideal Gov in Sept 2004.

So…er, what would you ideally like from e-enabled gov in Russia then?

It is easily and readily proven, because you make no effort to protect this page from being harvested by spambots (again I refer to my previous post showing how technologically ignorant you are in government,- and you have just proved it!), that were I to post with my REAL e-mail, I would by now be faced with an immediate influx of extra unwanted mail onto my E-mail server which as it happens is hosted in the Russian federation.
So far I take great steps only to be harvested by Russian spambots not English language ones (!!!)

This again illustrates how stupid the proposed (and now enacted) new EU legislation is with reference to both privacy and intercepting & retaining communications.
By mere comparison,- no-one in Russia would permit you to intercept my mail, no matter who made the request,- probably in fact because it already is by the FSB,- the successsor to the KGB, and you would be treading on their feet….
In fact:-
I have very good evidence to suggest foreign passport holders in the federation routinely have ALL their SMS comms intercepted, as it is extemely poorly protected and easy to detect when those SMS traverse the international border comms gateways.
SMS,- it’s unencrypted data,- but do you realise what route you are treading?
I mean I EXPECT this sort of behaviour generated by a government as corrupt and paranoiac as that of Putin. He is after all a KGB man, but I don’t expect this from what is supposed to be the great historic democracy of the world, with habeas corpus!
To have my data intercepted at a whim, by some faceless bureacratic organisation in the UK,-who may be given the right to charge up to your home at 2am,- who knows, it’s what they do for no reason at all with police on Traffic duty (!) -
I mean they can’t even enter the right info on a computer in DVLA, or verify the driver of a vehicle is the real owner or not….WHAT hope is there for the presumption of INNOCENCE which is going out of fashion so fast, you could blink and miss it!
A final comment on government competence again.

Surely the head of MI6 should have been fired in July 2005, after confessing to not knowing in advance of the imminence of small time terrorism on the mainland UK.
All the paranoia about legislation that came after. It’s so pathetic,- I can remember the regular IRA bomb scares in London in the 1980s, and did they need to disfigure the palace of westminster with concrete blocks, like anti tank barriers then, monitor mobile phones et al?
Did they need this latest legislation for countering the mafia and detecting the killers of Falcone in Italy?

I mean the IRA even managed to fire a rocket at No10 in the 80s, and tried to blow up M Thatcher in Brighton. Did it give us this media pow-wow we got in July, and more FUD?
Don’t tell me you weren’t warned before 7/7 last year and 9-11 in NY.
I mean there have been programmes on the BBC years before, showing UK home grown loonies were going to sacrifice themselves for “jihad”, (always shown with appropriate masked interviewees) and Bin Laden tried to get WTC blown up 7 years before finally finding the right demolition techniques.

What is profoundly worrying is you ACTUALLY appear to believe what you are doing will work and make our modern world safer, despite proof that amongst others that Iraq is training an entirely new breed of terorist, and both the British and the Americans are paying for it,- just like they did with Bin Laden (who make no mistake was trained and financed by the CIA to fight the Russians in Afghanistan,- no wonder he is so skillful at getting away!)

There is no greater delusion than self-delusion.

Different issue: what about commercial on-line services based on systematic long-term data retention. These are also presumably accessible to state authorities. Should anyone who opposes data retention in conscience refrain from ever using a service such as Google which builds a user profile?

The market can abandon models like DoubleClick but GoTo/Overture and Google have slipped thru the net bigtime. Who holds these search services accountable?

Does our privacy depend on all using a search/email equivalent of steganography, ie constantly email random addresses on random subjects, and constantly search for random items, constantly phone random numbers to mask our real comunity affiliations. Nightmare thought – imagine your phone going off constantly because strangers want to hide their real network intentions in a haze of random connections.

Legislation with such a question hanging over it cant be the prettiest result of the UK presidency, but I can imagine that some people will rather talk about this than the budget deal.

For every example of law enforcement, intelligence or others using traffic data “for good” there are examples of its use going terribly wrong. These simply haven’t been heard in the limited debate.
I like to point to the example (dutch: http://www.netkwesties.nl/editie124/artikel1.html) of a Dutch woman who was arrested early in the morning by six police officers at her home. A threatening E-mail was supposedly send to a celebrity from a phone for which her name was apparently in the billing records. During the interview that follows after many hours in a police cell she keeps her cool. After a long talk the investigating officer finally confronts her with the “evidence”. A piece of paper with her name, a phone number and the address where she lived ten years ago (but wasn’t picked up early in the morning). She quickly points out that she never had a phone with that number or from that provider. She manages to figure out that here personal detail might have been used by someone who stole her car and papers a couple of years back.

The investigating police officer lets her wait while he “checks her story”. Later he lets her go “based on her background, appearance and education”.. which begs the question? what would have happened if she had another skin color, was just laid of and/or went to a different school? It turned out the police had mistaken the pre-paid phone for one for which a contract was signed with a billing address. Even then the bills wouldn’t have been paid at a decade old address, which isn`t where they picked her up…

But that just an unlucky example from which no conclusion can be drawn right? No one in the debate took the time to realise why this is an important example regardless of which side you are on..

What if the sender of the threat had really hurt the target of the threatening e-mail?

Would the perpetrator have framed an innocent person, or would a defence attorney successfully explain the police the difference between a phone number and a social security number thus cutting the legs from underneath any future attempts to use traffic data (collected at billion Euro costs Europe wide) as evidence in a court of law? What about organisations that don’t haul people in for questioning but just start spying on a person?

But you can ask whether one would want legislation passed based on a few examples that supposedly demonstrate usefulness anyway. In my opinion its a shame that legislation that initially demanded colossal changes to the huge multi-billion Euro communication infrastructure was allowed to pass without any research into the usefulness, cost or or impact of the legislation. (Asking the people that came up with this plan to try and prove who send them an offer for products that can “enhance” various body parts should adequately demonstrate that E-mail protocols aren’t designed for this.)

Would the EU ever pass environmental legislation without at least considering a serious impact study?

To use the data retention “victory” as a measure of UK success in its EU presidency could invite scepticism.
The original “plans” were never specific or feasible and have been watered down significantly because of this. But some of the changes to the early legislative proposals are more likely to be the result of opposition than of a late realization of the inherent problems in the actual plans. Or rather any less sci-fi plans that might be drawn up now the legislation is done.
Because of the mysterious deal that killed any debate before the arbitrary years end deadline that the UK (and/or others?) are rumored to have imposed in the parliament few will use this legislation as a shining example of European democracy or an inspiring UK presidency in action.

This post comes through the “tor” onion routing network, don’t bother figuring out who send it.

So we come on to the more important (at least as far as this site is concerned) issue of the government engaging with the blogging world.

First and foremost, is that blogging is a two-way process and I hope there is someone from Hazel Blears’s office at least reading the replies.

Secondly is the timing. I am sure that this would have been better some 6 to 12 months ago, not as an after-the-facts apologia.

Finally the location. Obviously it appeared here because of William’s sterling efforts in pushing the Home Office into communicating with us. In future it might well be better if all such communications (and hopefully they will evolve into dialogue and debate) from Ministerial level were in one easy to find, easy to archive place – sort of like the MySociety HearFromYourMP. In fact I would see it as a good use of public funds to invest in such a site now (after all doesn’t the govt. bemon public lack of involvement). On a more sour note we have also started to see the bad side of online communication – petty abuse unrelated to the subject at hand. It is likely that such abuse would proliferate on such a site so it is likely to need a full time admin.

For future reference
i) airing of wider political grievances is off-topic here, and
ii) courtesy should prevail at all times.
I’ll take down anything non-conformant. I’m leaving #18 up for the time being as an example of what I’m talking about.

Comments and posts always welcome on
- what we actually want from e-enabled government
- “here’s what happened to me” (ethnographer of bureacracy stories)
- “wouldn’t it be better if” type suggestions, and
- any practical stuff on how we can engage better and more effectively.

Apart from the inevitable costs to the consumer, which have not been spelled out, there must surely be changes to the UK Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act schemes that must flow from this Directive.

e.g. “EU data Retention plans implications for UK Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act”

Are their colleagues in, say the Department for Work and Pensions or in Local Authorities aware that, for example, the Directive specifies the European Arrest Warrant definition of a “serious crime” ? This will probably prevent the DWP or Local Authority Trading Standards or Environmental Health investigators from having access to “Communications Data”, for anything but actual serious organised gangs, but not individuals engaged in, benefit fraud, bankrupt or rogue trading, fly tipping etc. even to the realtively low level of access needed for, say, the registered name and address of a mobile phone number placed in an advertisment ?

Will the DWP’s legacy powers of investigation, which are used primarily to avoid having to pay a data access fee to telecomms and ISP companies, be trumped by implementation of the EU Data Retention Directive ?

The European Arrest Warrant mentions “terrorism”, but it does not mention espionage, which is not the same thing. Will our counter-intelligence services be legally hampered by this ?

The other massive change to the way in which RIPA etc. works in the UK would be the welcome introduction of independent judicial authorisation for access to Communications Traffic Data, which would be a big change from the current scheme. At present this involves self-authorisation by relatively junior or middle ranking police and other officials (more junior than those required to authorise electronic intercepts of the contents of phone or email traffic) with the weak rubber stamp audit of procedures and the annual censored report by the Interception Commissioner or the Intelligence Services Commissioner.

How will this all work in practice, how much will it cost, and what are the checks and balances against the abuse of power by corrupt or overzealous or incompetent petty officials ?

Will the Home Office dither over these issues as long as it has over the production of the Code of Practice on Data Retention introduced by the Anti-terrorism, Crime and Security Act of December 2001 ?

Does it really matter if Hazel Blears reads this personally or not ? If we are very lucky, this Ideal Government blog and perhaps a few others will have been added to the Home Officie’s political intelligence gathering / media monitoring operation funded by the taxpayer, which, according to Sir Stephen Lander (ex-DG of MI5 and now Chair of the Serious Organised Crime Agency) apparently monitors “newspaper column inches” on a topics and partially sets policy priorities accordingly, despite their colleagues having fed most of these stories to the media in the first place.

“Sir Stephen Lander, SOCA, setting priorities via tabloid column inches”

Surely this blog has a readership of “opinion formers” at least as influential as that of, say, a local newspaper ?