In WTF this week:
A 69-year old Viennese tourist named Matkza was forced by police officers to delete photos he'd taken of the Vauxhall bus station in London, saying it was "strictly forbidden" and recording the passport numbers and hotel addresses of him and his companions, presumably because the Security Services at headquartered nearby.
Matkza, a retired cameraman with a taste for modern architecture, has vowed to never again return to London after his experience with police acting "in the name of preventing terrorism."
It is not clear why the police felt that Matkza was such a threat to public security when a real terrorist would surely either use a concealed camera, or make use of one of the 65,800 photos available of the area on Google Image search.
It's also noteworthy that deleting photographs from somebody else's camera is an offence under Section 3 of the UK's Computer Misuse Act 1990. And while there are circumstances in which the police can seize property, in general they cannot destroy it without a court order. And if the Viennese tourists were committing a crime (as surely could be the only truth when you have police telling you that your behaviour is "strictly forbidden" and forcing you to delete your data under threat of arrest), then isn't deleting the images destruction of evidence?
Matkza has since said: "I understand the need for some sensitivity in an era of terrorism, but isn't it naive to think terrorism can be prevented by terrorising tourists? I've never had these experiences anywhere, never in the world, not even in Communist countries."
The Metropolitan police said it was investigating the allegations, go figure.
Bootnote
Interestingly, over the pond the New York Police Department has reminded its officers that "photography and videotaping in public areas is legal" and that "although the city is a terrorist target, it's also a major tourist destination and that virtually all photography has no link to terrorism." The order also says officers cannot demand to see someone's pictures or order them to erase the photos.
Of course US law isn't UK law, but if the architects of the ridiculous War on Terror can handle a couple of tourists with cameras, why can't we?
Another University term, another accommodation nightmare.
The University of Nottingham operates an antiquated system whereby students living in Halls of Residence on Jubilee Campus — the newest and most modern halls — are required to pack up all of their possessions and vacate their rooms for the duration of University holidays.
This is so that the for-profit Nottingham Hospitality organisation, responsible for catering and accommodation, uses the idea that students do not have lectures during this time to fill the Halls up with corporate conference delegates paying extraordinary amounts of money. Other Universities in the UK have stopped this practice as it is a major inconvenience to students, and in the long-term Nottingham is allegedly planning to abolish it too.
For now, though, student residents on Jubilee Campus have problems. Traditionally, lack of communication has rendered it very difficult to find any information on returning to halls after a holiday. Although I have been at the University for several years and know how it works, first year students don't necessarily know what they need to bring with them and when and it's near impossible to find out. This has always been an issue at Nottingham.
Still, usually the last conference will have left the premises by the weekend, giving the cleaning staff time to prepare the Hall for its actual residents to move back in just in time for term time and the summer examination period to begin.
This time around, however, as students are preparing to return to halls on Sunday, we are moving in on the day that a conference ends. Although in March we were all sternly warned that we would not be able to return before 10am on Sunday 19th April, it has been deduced on the phone today that in fact a conference leaves at 10am, and the cleaning staff won't be done until 2pm.
So not only can students not move into their own halls of residence until mid-afternoon on the day before the examination term, but as far as we can tell the Hall never bothered to actually release this change of timing. For the 40% of the population that makes up the international student population, travelling from the States, India, China or as far away as Australia, these sort of "small" timing details are crucial. The window of opportunity for students to arrive, get themselves set up in their University rooms and prepare for exams is now so pathetically small (five hours of daylight!) that it's just pissing all over the international students who bring in the vast majority of fees for the University.
It's epicly ridiculous that a conference would be staying in halls so late, and it just goes to show that students are really not the priority as long as they are paying slightly less than corporate delegates. Sure, a business has to maximise profits, but since students have no-where else to go this is really taking advantage of a monopoly position.
Until the University of Nottingham decides to terminate this silly policy of throwing its fee-paying students out on the streets for weeks at a time during the year and treating them as lowest-class citizens whilst at it, I wouldn't recommend it as a place to study.
As our beloved Western civilisation finds itself teetering on the brink of a stage in the inevitable social cycle that involves a government committed to maintaining order at all costs, it is more important than ever that we do not let Britain descend into a terrified nation.
Through all the rhetoric about standing proud and fighting terrorism, it's plainly obvious to most people that the events of the past decade or so have given rise to a culture of utter fear.
Boarding a flight has become such a security-conscious activity that it might be seen as akin to registering for access to the Ministry of Defence.
Police violently attack innocent bystanders in proximity to a legal protest against illegal wars and thieving corporate CEOs, and do everything they can to cover up the circumstances surrounding the resultant death of a civilian.
Law after law restricts what one can and cannot do. And taking a photograph of a public place which happens to include a law enforcement officer has become a criminal offence.
In the meantime, that same government who seeks to curtail our basic freedoms all in the name of our protection is quite happy to eat up taxpayer's money on free second homes and porn collections.
Ultimately, what used to be the staple only of uber-liberals and conspiracy theorists has become a genuine matter of concern for everyone in this country (and, indeed, in other cultures like ours). It won't be long before the right to voice criticism or show concern about government or anti-terror restrictions is made unlawful itself.
Already it is becoming difficult to suggest that anti-terror laws are unjustified and draconian, without being accused of being dangerous due to a "different" political view.
Our government is encouraging us to watch out for fellow citizens who may look the wrong way at one of the many CCTV cameras that are watching our every move.
Our electronic communications are required">https://kera.name/articles/2009/04/retentive-european-directive-on-data-retention-comes-into-force-in-uk/">required by law to be monitored and logged.
By the time citizens are held overnight without charge for contesting the very right of the police to do so, it will be too late to stop Britain devolving into a pure fascist state.
A democratic society needs to be able to control the restrictions that it imposes on itself. A safe society needs to be able to ensure that its leaders are accountable for their actions and choices. A free society needs to be able to monitor the behaviour of its police force.
It starts here.
The Pirate Bay — the controversial Swedish torrent tracker that keeps a huge index of movies, music and video game downloads — has been embroiled in a legal battle for several months over what essentially mounts to its own existence. Prosecutors acting on behalf of private media companies (the RIAA, MPAA, etc) accuse the site of soliciting the trade of copyrighted content, whilst Pirate Bay owners Gottfrid Svartholm and Fredrik Neij feel that as actual copyrighted data itself never touches their servers it is not their concern.
And, yes, The Pirate Bay should be done for wilful aiding and abetting of illegal activity.
Stay with me for a minute. I hope they don't, but they probably should be. The defence that goes "we don't host the content, we only tell you where to find it" is as much of a crock as is "I only sold him the gun and told him where his now-dead ex-wife lived." Whilst the practical legality of BitTorrent — a system by which end-users transfer content directly between themselves, with internet rendez-vous managed by a "tracker" like The Pirate Bay — is not yet black and white, the spirit of the law ought to quite clearly show that this website exists to solicit the trading of illegal files.
I want to stress that by saying this I am not making a claim that the trade of those files should be illegal. Whether it's morally right or wrong to download TV shows, movies and MP3s is a discussion that I see little point in getting into, so I'm not going to. But if it's immoral and illegal to send the latest episode of Heroes to your friend, the Pirate Bay ought to be at least partially responsible for facilitating that transaction.
Of course, there is a big difference between aiding illegal activity and criminal activity itself, which is a large part of the reason why a website called "The Pirate Bay" — which openly expresses pride in dodging the authorities and providing a copyrighted file trading platform — got away with it for so long.
I do wish the spirit rather the letter of the law were followed more in this age of teenage girls getting charged with the distribution of kiddie porn for texting nekkid body pics to their male companions. Still, the RIAA/MPAA treat the law literally in their anti-piracy cases, so it isn't an injustice that The Pirate Bay are too. In the most literal interpretation of the situation, TPB never even touches illegal content. It's not their problem, and it's not their crime. But in a perfect, alternate reality where the legal system actually makes sense, the defence shouldn't hold up and the prosecution should go after the blatant intent.
I was observing this same discussion in an IRC channel last week, and the guy with my views — person A — admitted that he himself downloads movies from the net. The person he was talking to — person B — found it hard to reconcile his statement that TPB should be prosecuted with his statement that he uses the service.
It turned out that person A essentially felt that if he were caught downloading and prosecuted for it, at least he wouldn't sit there moaning that it was an unfair law, or that file trading it shouldn't be illegal. He'd accept responsibility for what he knew was a morally grey area.
To those in the channel expressing dumbfoundedness at this apparent hypocrisy, he said that he'd never claimed to be a perfect being with a perfect morality system, and didn't believe that anyone could be. And that to sit on the other side of IRC and to judge that was more than very likely absurdly hypocritical.
In fairness morality can be a little warped on IRC, where online file sharing is practically a norm and it would be difficult to find someone ashamed of it. But the conversation still got me pondering on a real-world parallel.
On the street or in the media, there's this assumption that everyone's views on file sharing can be categorised as the difference between the laws that we believe are justified, and those that we believe are open to bending because they don't seem entirely fair or correct in the first place. But in practice, there's a middle ground where you can believe the law is justified but you break it anyway.
In general, human beings aren't perfect, following the letter of law to the exact extent that they agree with it. Everyone goes a few mph over the speed limit once in a while, or tries a few drugs at University just to see what it's like. Even if they agree with the traffic code or the drug laws, it happens.
I think a lot of commentators forget this and I don't know why. It mars stories like the Pirate Bay case and restricts the image of the human race to that of a collection of morally absolute individuals, utterly uncorruptible even in the face of temptation or an easier, if hooky, way of life.
So, Facebook's front page layout has changed again. Hundreds of thousands of users are up in arms about the alterations to the free service, just like last time and the time before.
"[Facebook founder] Mark Zuckerberg shouldn't have to deal with all this moaning from people who aren't even paying for his product," says someone I know.
Meh.
The way I see it, you can look at the situation in either of two ways. On the one hand, Facebook users are on a free service and shouldn't expect any realistic right to say what should or shouldn't be on it. On the other, Facebook users are responsible for Zuckerberg's entire income and have made him worth a LOT of money. So can you consider the use of a social network an indirect form of payment?
In practice, Zuckerberg should fashion a site that's attractive to users because he cares about money, and he makes money by having users. But as long as his users aren't going to leave — and the hoards of youngsters dependant on Facebook and MySpace for their mere survival are not going anywhere — he can piss them off as much as he wants.
And that's the crux of it, isn't it? Perhaps Facebook users are paying in some indirect way. But not in any sense that they might stop.
It's funny how things have turned out for the guy at only 23. After all, Facebook was once just another little project in another little town. The thing about it is that Facebook's founders just got really lucky. Sure they're half-decent programmers, or their luck would not have led them anywhere.
But you can attribute the success of Facebook to the fact that they both happened to be developing a good project, with some decent local interest, around the times the market was open for it. Zuckerberg and his friend certainly and reportedly had no allusions to this social networking explosion that we're seeing today. And when you think about it, the concept behind Facebook is ridiculously simple; it just caught on socially, is all.
But amusingly, the client-side of the product now sucks donkey balls. And why? Because of its success.
The story
Two or three years ago investors, the industry and the media found out about Facebook and realised its potential to blossom into an advertising conglomerate, saying, "ooh look, shiny! Once we apply our soft, crappy management processes to this it would be awesome". So Facebook thought, "okay everyone's watching, well we'd best go do that then." Then investors, the industry and the media started to realise that really social networking is just a fad and they lost interest… but too late for Facebook, by now already stuck in the muddy mire of business-driven development. Like a hit and run.
And we, the users, are left with something that's been built on broken promises and empty returns. The client-side AJAX interface is bloated and slow, the site itself is infested with "applications" (supposedly designed to "enhance the experience" of the site) and almost every other quarter along comes a seismic shift in the design of the product.
But it's not a product, is it? It's a service, and free at that. So the question remains: is it fair to moan about it when we contribute nothing but our participation?
The European directive that requires Internet Service Providers to log their customers' communications came into force in the UK today, and means that details of user emails and internet phone calls will be stored by ISPs for twelve months.
On paper, Directive 2006/24/EC is not such a bad thing. The actual contents of emails aren't monitored but the internet addresses of recipient and sender. It will make crime-solving easier, it won't hurt you if you have nothing to hide, and of course it'll stop those damned terrorists right in their tracks.
In real life, though, the fact of the matter is that the European Directive on Data Retention is highly controversial. All the usual left-wing groups are shouting out about privacy violations in cute media soundbites, and the citizens of the internet are up in arms that their communication habits will be stored for an entire year by their friendly, local ISP for unverifiable government purposes.
But the real problem with the directive lies in the technicalities of the email monitoring itself. For starters, data on the sender and recipients of an email message is contained in the message itself, and it is trivial to falsify this data as the email passes through various servers on the internet to reach its destination. This huge flaw in the design of what we know today as email is one of the reasons that spam is so ridiculously prevalent, and it means that an ISP taking this data and storing it might be storing falsified data without realising it.
Someone wishing to send an email without it being intercepted and stored might encrypt the message, and hope that the government lacked the means of cracking their encryption. Security software to do this is nowadays increasingly touted as the perfect means to total anonymity, but in this case encrypting the contents of an email into an illegible form does nothing to prevent the source and destination being jotted down… which is all that is going to happen.
And sending email from a so-called "shell server" — an account on a commercial server held for the purpose of keeping data or basing a website, that isn't reliant on the residential connection provided by your ISP — won't help either, since even the shell providers get their connectivity from ISPs. And if you are sending email to a home email address, information on the email will be stored by the recipient's ISP anyway.
But why would we want or need to find a workaround? What do we have to hide?
Page 11 of the directive says, "The West Yorkshire Police provided the following examples where internet related data had assisted their officers," and goes on to describe one such example: "A series of internet e-mails were sent to a confidential help-line run by a charity threatening to 'bomb' their office premises. The investigation determined, through the acquisition and analysis of internet related data, that the bomb threats were a hoax."
At first glance this is perfectly innocuous, and delicately sells the wondrous goodness of the scheme as entirely necessary in the investigation of bomb threats; emphasis mine, but I think not entirely retroactive. Clearly, the "confidential help-line" wasn't so confidential. Favourable outcome notwithstanding, isn't this highly immoral?
The document continues on page 12 to provide an example from the Greater Manchester Police of a situation "where internet related data had assisted their officers to save life, determine whether or not a crime has been committed and seek the whereabouts of a suspect."
Whilst the government responds to outcry with assurances that data on the communication habits of citizens would only be used as part of criminal investigations and where a warrant had been issued, the phrase "whether or not a crime has been committed" seems to imply that such determinations could be feasibily applied retroactively. This gives cause for concern for citizens involved in cases where a crime has not been committed.
And this isn't even simply another case of the European Union imposing its iron fist on the good British public. The Home Office is implementing the policy fully willingly, saying that it was the government's priority to "protect public safety and national security", and that "communications data is the where and when of the communication and plays a vital part in a wide range of criminal investigations and prevention of terrorist attacks, as well as contributing to public safety more generally."
Other countries haven't been quite so happy about it. Whilst Germany is pushing a challenge through their courts at present, Sweden has opted to simply ignore the directive completely. ISPs and telecoms firms have also resisted the concept.
The Home Office said the measure had "effective safeguards" in place, although after a recent spate of literal data loss — government data left on USB sticks in pub car parks, for one — it is difficult to be fully trusting in this assertion.
