Revealed: government plans for police privatisation

West Midlands and Surrey police offer £1.5bn contract under which private firms may investigate crime and detain suspects

Alan Travis and Zoe Williams

Private companies could take responsibility for investigating crimes, patrolling neighbourhoods and even detaining suspects under a radical privatisation plan being put forward by two of the largest police forces in the country.

West Midlands and Surrey have invited bids from G4S and other major security companies on behalf of all forces across England and Wales to take over the delivery of a wide range of services previously carried out by the police.

The contract is the largest on police privatisation so far, with a potential value of £1.5bn over seven years, rising to a possible £3.5bn depending on how many other forces get involved.

This scale dwarfs the recent £200m contract between Lincolnshire police and G4S, under which half the force's civilian staff are to join the private security company, which will also build and run a police station for the first time.

The home secretary, Theresa May, who has imposed a 20% cut in Whitehall grants on forces, has said frontline policing can be protected by using the private sector to transform services provided to the public, but this is the first clear indication of what that will mean in practice. May said on Thursday that she hoped the "business partnership" programme would be in place next spring.

A 26-page "commercial in confidence" contract note seen by the Guardian has been sent to potential bidders to run all services that "can be legally delegated to the private sector". They do not include those that involve the power of arrest and the other duties of a sworn constable.

Companies who have applied through the Bluelight emergency services e-tendering website have been invited to a "bidders' conference" on 14 March, with an anticipated contract start date of next February.

The timetable for the programme means it will be subject to final sign-off by the first police and crime commissioner for the West Midlands after their election in November. The existing police authority only gave the go-ahead for the tendering stage last month after a "robust and forthright discussion" which ended with a rare 11-5 split vote.

The joint West Midlands/Surrey "transformation" programme, which has strong backing from the Home Office, looks set to completely redraw the accepted boundaries between public and private and the definition of frontline and back-office policing.

The programme has the potential to become the main vehicle for outsourcing police services in England and Wales. It has been pioneered by the West Midlands chief constable, Chris Sims, and Mark Rowley, who has just moved to the Metropolitan police from the post of Surrey chief constable. The pair lead on these matters for the Association of Chief Police Officers.

The breathtaking list of policing activities up for grabs includes investigating crimes, detaining suspects, developing cases, responding to and investigating incidents, supporting victims and witnesses, managing high-risk individuals, patrolling neighbourhoods, managing intelligence, managing engagement with the public, as well as more traditional back-office functions, such as managing forensics, providing legal services, managing the vehicle fleet, finance and human resources.

A West Midlands police authority spokesman said: "Combining with the business sector is aimed at totally transforming the way the force currently does business – improving the service provided to the public.

"The areas of service listed in this notice are deliberately broad to allow the force to explore the skills, expertise and solutions a partnership could bring." He said not all the activities listed would necessarily be included in the final scope of the contract, but if the force added other activities later a "new and costly procurement exercise" would be needed.

The contract notice does state that "bidders should note that not all these activities will necessarily be included in the final scope, and that each police force will select some activities from these areas where they see the best opportunities for transformation". But the police clearly want to test whether it is possible for new areas of policing to be provided by private companies.

The contract is being offered in two lots, one covering custody services and the second all other services. It envisages that only one company will be awarded the main contract, although a second may run custody services separately.

The West Midlands police are already planning to cut 2,764 police jobs over the next three years and this privatisation programme is not designed to meet the immediate budget gaps. The savings are expected to show after 2014.

Ben Priestley, Unison's national office for police and justice, which covers many police civilian staff, said it was alarmed by the programme: "Bringing the private sector into policing is a dangerous experiment with local safety and taxpayers' money," he said. "We are urging police authorities not to fall into the trap of thinking the private sector is the answer to the coalition's cuts. The fact that the Home Office is refusing to publish its business case – even under FOI [the Freedom of Information Act] – speaks for itself.

"Privatisation means that the police will be less accountable to the public. And people will no longer be able to go to the Independent Police Complaints Commission if they have a problem. When a critical incident happens, a force's ability to respond will be severely compromised. The only winners are private companies and shareholders who make profits at the expense of local services."

A number of other forces, including Cleveland, Avon and Somerset, and Cheshire, have been exploring the services that might be offered to the private sector, albeit on a smaller scale.

Cleveland police have a 10-year contract with IT firm Steria to provide call handling, front desk staffing, and aspects of the criminal justice system on top of computer services, finance and training. Reliance security runs Cleveland's custody suites.

Avon and Somerset had a contract with IBM, called South West One, which suffered problems in its first three years. Some services are to be taken back in-house. Cheshire has a more traditional contract with Capgemini to provide finance, facilities and fleet management.

There is not expected to be any shortage of bidders. When Lincolnshire put its then groundbreaking contract out to tender last March, 12 companies responded with submissions.

All Your Internets Belong to US, Continued: The Bodog.com Case

Imagine a scenario in which a country enacts a law that bans the sale of asbestos and includes the power to seize the assets of any company selling the product anywhere in the world. The country tests the law by obtaining a court order to seize key assets of a Canadian company, whose operations with hundreds of employees takes a major hit. The Canadian government is outraged, promising to support the company in its efforts to restore its operations.

That is the opening of my technology law column this week (Toronto Star version, homepage version) which continues by noting this scenario became reality last week, though the product was not asbestos and the Canadian government has yet to respond. The case involves Bodog.com, a Canadian-owned online sports gaming site and the country doing the seizing was the United States. Supporting online gaming operations will undoubtedly make governments somewhat squeamish, but the broader implications of last week’s seizure touch on millions of websites and Internet companies who now find themselves subject to U.S. jurisdiction.

Bodog.com and its owner, Canadian Calvin Ayre, was one of the world’s largest sports gambling operations, employing hundreds of people in Canada and Costa Rica. Last November, its free gaming site, Bodog.net, signed a three-year sponsorship deal with the Canadian Football League.

The U.S. has been particularly aggressive about trying to shut down online gambling operations (Las Vegas and Atlantic City are apparently less of a problem), though typically those operations have some U.S. connection. In the Bodog.com case, U.S. officials targeted a site with limited connections to the country as the site had licensed out the bodog.com domain name in 2006 and stopped accepting U.S. bettors late last year.

The legal issues surrounding its operations will be played out in court, but the manner in which the bodog.com name was seized could have a lasting impact on Internet governance.

The domain name was registered in Canada with Vancouver-based DomainClip. In past years, registering a domain name with a non-U.S. registrar and avoiding U.S. servers was viewed as sufficient to fall outside U.S. jurisdiction. This is because a court order requiring the domain name registrar to transfer ownership of the domain (or redirect the site) was only enforceable in the jurisdiction in which it was issued.

No longer.

In the Bodog.com case, State of Maryland prosecutors were able to obtain a warrant ordering Verisign, the company that manages the dot-com domain name registry, to redirect the website to a warning page advising that it has been seized by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

The message from the case is clear: all dot-com, dot-net, and dot-org domain names are subject to U.S. jurisdiction regardless of where they operate or where they were registered. This grants the U.S. a form of “super-jurisdiction” over Internet activities since most other countries are limited to jurisdiction with a real and substantial connection. For the U.S., the location of the domain name registry is good enough.

The aggressive assertion of Internet jurisdiction was one of the key concerns with the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), the controversial bill that died following a massive online protest in January. It simply defined any domain name with a registrar or registry in the U.S. as domestic for U.S. law purposes. The bodog.com case suggests that the provision was not changing the law as much as restating it, since U.S. prosecutors and courts follow much the same approach.

In an era when governments are becoming increasingly active in regulating online activities, the Bodog.com case provides a warning that by using popular dot-com domain names, companies and registrants are effectively opting-in to U.S. law and courts as part of the package.

EFF Calls Foul on Robo-Takedowns

Warner Must Take Responsibility for Baseless Copyright Infringement Notices

San Francisco - The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) urged a federal judge Monday to reject arguments from Warner Brothers Entertainment claiming that the company's automated scheme to send copyright infringement notices absolves it of responsibility for the system's major flaws.

In this case, Warner is accused of sending thousands of takedown notices for content it did not own to a cyber-locker site called Hotfile. Hotfile asked for damages under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which holds copyright users accountable if they send takedown notices in bad faith. However, Warner insists that while it knew it was issuing some bad takedown requests with its semi-automated system, the errors should be excused by the court because a computer made the mistake – not a human. In an amicus brief filed Monday, EFF argues that Warner cannot wash its hands of its responsibility for the improper removal of content from Hotfile's servers.

"Hotfile's customers unfairly lost access to content because of Warner's bogus takedowns. But under Warner's theory, any company could sidestep accountability for abusing the DMCA by simply outsourcing the process to a computer," said EFF Intellectual Property Director Corynne McSherry. "In fact, the companies would have a perverse incentive to dumb down the process, removing human review. What Warner is doing here is a ploy to undermine the DMCA provisions that protect Internet users from overbroad and indiscriminate takedowns like the ones it issued."

The publicly available facts in this case indicate that Warner's system only considered the title of the work – not nearly enough information to base a good faith belief of any copyright infringement. Warner's system took down files with words in their titles like "The Box," "The Town," and "Unknown," apparently without checking to see if the file was a Warner movie or a child's book report or something else. EFF told the court Monday that Warner knew this driftnet technique would inevitably cause a substantial amount of lawful content to be removed from Hotfile.

"Cloud storage sites like Hotfile are becoming increasingly important," said EFF Staff Attorney Mitch Stoltz. "But improper takedowns like Warner's undermine their usefulness. Companies must be held responsible when their sloppy processes hurt other businesses and Internet users."

For the full amicus brief:  https://www.eff.org/document/amicus-brief-5

In Massachusetts, tiny Pirate Party champions Internet freedom

By Jon Brodkin

Six years after the Pirate Party first appeared on the US political scene, the Internet freedom fighters haven't gained much of a foothold in American politics. But in Massachusetts, a small group is trying to drum up support for the party's platforms of defending privacy, reforming copyright laws, abolishing patents, and opposing laws that restrict sharing of content on the Internet.

Formed in 2010 and approved as an official political designation by the state in February 2011, the Massachusetts Pirate Party will host its first conference on Saturday, March 10 in Cambridge's Democracy Center. "The primary goal is to bring together different people of Pirate persuasion," Party "Captain" James O'Keefe told Ars.

But it's more than that. One telling session is titled "How to Run for Office"—that's right, the Pirates want candidates and votes. While there are only 20 registered "Pirates" in all of Massachusetts, at least one member is set to run for state representative, and O'Keefe is hoping for several candidates in this year's elections.


The party takes its name from the Pirate Party in Sweden, which surged in popularity after a 2006 raid on facilities owned by the Pirate Bay website. Swedish Pirate Party founder Rick Falkvinge "put it rather well when he said we would be branded [as pirates] anyway so we might as well take the name as our own and use it as we see fit, not as the entertainment giants see fit," O'Keefe said. "It has a playful characteristic to it, which is good in this day and age of major political parties that are not in any way playful and are much more interested in scoring points. We set ourselves apart as folks who want to get things done as well as not taking ourselves incredibly seriously, although the issues we fight for are very serious."

O'Keefe, who tests computer software and is raising a family, is a former member of the Green-Rainbow Party and ran for state treasurer of Massachusetts in 2002 and 2006, receiving 8 percent and 16 percent of the vote in his two runs.

In the November 2012 Massachusetts elections, Pirate Party member JP Hollembaek plans to run for state representative in the 16th Middlesex District. Hollembaek, a US Marine Corps veteran who served in Iraq, told Ars he's filling out the election paperwork and working with a campaign agency. "I joined the Pirate Party when it started here in Massachusetts, and I've been doing some Occupy activities as well," he said. "As such, I support the Pirate Party platform of 'personal privacy and public transparency', and I am very focused on the infrastructure and income inequality issues that Occupy has brought up."
As US Pirates struggle, Massachusetts members wave the flag

The Pirate Party of Massachusetts is affiliated with the US Pirate Party. The national party's website refers to "the closure of the United States Pirate Party" in 2011, but is establishing a temporary Pirate National Committee to get the party back on track and facilitate cooperation between the state parties. In addition to Massachusetts, there are also state-based organizations in Florida, Georgia, Michigan, New York, Oklahoma, Oregon, and Washington state.

The Pirate Party had just 20 registered voters in all of Massachusetts as of February 15, with most in Middlesex County, the state elections division told Ars. Actual interest in the party is a bit higher, with more than 100 people on the e-mail list and "several multiples of that" following the group on Twitter and Facebook, O'Keefe said. He's hoping for at least 100 attendees at the conference Saturday.

The Pirates joined the fight against SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act), PIPA (Protect IP Act), and ACTA (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement), with O'Keefe saying "we're not going to be able to defend our civil liberties if proposals like SOPA, PIPA, and ACTA are implemented."


Massachusetts Pirate Party organizer James O'Keefe

More broadly, O'Keefe says the Party believes "copyright itself is way too long," lasting for the life of the creator plus 70 years. The Pirate Party opposed the Megaupload shutdown, calling it "a violation of national sovereignty" and "a shocking revelation of the collusion between a private industry and our government."

When asked if he's a "pirate" in the sense that copyright industries would use the term, O'Keefe said, "Our belief is that people want to be able to support the artists they like." But copyright owners have often failed to provide legitimate ways of purchasing content that are also convenient, he said. "People are willing to pay and they're even wiling to pay the entertainment companies. To go and brand people pirates for their own failings to us is completely wrong."

The Pirate Party believes "people should be able to share our culture, that our culture shouldn't be locked down, people shouldn't go to jail, people shouldn't be hit with astronomical lawyers bills or fines because they shared something," he said. O'Keefe criticizes the use of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to take down websites, noting that "we've seen entertainment companies try to take down things they don't even have a copyright to."

The Pirate Party conference—advertised with the tagline "Politics: share, remix, reboot"—has an agenda that's more reminiscent of a tech policy conference than a political party gathering. Aside from the "How to run for office" session hosted by O'Keefe, there will be sessions on Internet safety, the fair use of copyrighted material, and a talk about patents. David House, an MIT researcher who helped build support for "WikiLeaker" Bradley Manning, will talk about the challenges of being a digital activist. Other speakers will tackle topics from transparency in government to how artists can make a living in the digital economy.

"We often hear from entertainment companies that when people share copywritten work they are stealing from others," O'Keefe said. "While we don't characterize sharing as stealing, we do think the Internet makes it possible for creators and artists to be able to share their work and still make a living, oftentimes a better living than they would get under the entertainment companies."

Better Living Through Electrochemistry

By Sally Adee

Have you ever wanted to take a vacation from your own head?

You could do it easily enough with liberal applications of alcohol, weed or hallucinogens, but that’s not the kind of vacation I’m talking about. What if you could take a very specific vacation only from the stuff that makes it painful to be you: the sneering inner monologue that insists you’re not capable enough or smart enough or pretty enough or whatever hideous narrative rides you. Now that would be a vacation. You’d still be you, but you’d be able to navigate the world without the emotional baggage that now drags on your every decision. Can you imagine what that would feel like?

Late last year, I got the chance to find out, in the course of investigating a story (in this week’s New Scientist) about how researchers are using neurofeedback and electrical brain stimulation to accelerate learning. What I found was that electricity might be the most powerful drug I’ve ever used in my life.

It used to be just plain old chemistry that had neuroscientists gnawing their fingernails about the ethics of brain enhancement. As Adderall, Ritalin and other cognitive enhancing drugs gain widespread acceptance as tools to improve your everyday focus, even the stigma of obtaining them through less than legal channels appears to be disappearing. People will overlook a lot of moral gray areas in the quest to juice their brain power.

But until recently, you were out of luck if you wanted to do that without taking drugs that might be addictive, habit-forming or associated with unfortunate behavioural side effects. Over the past few years, however, it’s become increasingly clear that applying an electrical current to your head confers similar benefits. US military researchers have had great success using transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS)– in which they hook you up to what’s essentially a 9-volt battery and let the current flow through your brain. After a few years of lab testing, they’ve found that they can more than double the rate at which people learn a wide range of tasks such as object recognition, maths skills, and marksmanship.

We don’t yet have a commercially available “thinking cap” but we will soon. So the research community has begun to ask: What are the ethics of battery-operated cognitive enhancement? Last week a group of Oxford University neuroscientists released a cautionary statement about the ethics of brain boosting, followed quickly by a report from the UK’s Royal Society that questioned the use of tDCS for military applications. Is brain boosting a fair addition to the cognitive enhancement arms race? Will it create a Morlock/Eloi-like social divide where the rich can afford to be smarter and leave everyone else behind? Will Tiger Moms force their lazy kids to strap on a zappity helmet during piano practice?

After trying it myself, I have different questions. To make you understand, I am going to tell you how it felt. The experience wasn’t simply about the easy pleasure of undeserved expertise. When the nice neuroscientists put the electrodes on me, the thing that made the earth drop out from under my feet was that for the first time in my life, everything in my head finally shut the fuck up.

The experiment I underwent was accelerated marksmanship training on a simulation the military uses. I spent a few hours learning how to shoot a modified M4 close-range assault rifle, first without tDCS and then with. Without it I was terrible, and when you’re terrible at something, all you can do is obsess about how terrible you are. And how much you want to stop doing the thing you are terrible at.

Then this happened:


The 20 minutes I spent hitting targets while electricity coursed through my brain were far from transcendent. I only remember feeling like I had just had an excellent cup of coffee, but without the caffeine jitters. I felt clear-headed and like myself, just sharper. Calmer. Without fear and without doubt. From there on, I just spent the time waiting for a problem to appear so that I could solve it.

It was only when they turned off the current that I grasped what had just happened. Relieved of the minefield of self-doubt that constitutes my basic personality, I was a hell of a shot. And I can’t tell you how stunning it was to suddenly understand just how much of a drag that inner cacophony is on my ability to navigate life and basic tasks.

It’s possibly the world’s biggest cliche that we’re our own worst enemies. In yoga, they tell you that you need to “learn to get out of your own way.” Part of getting out of your own way is making those voices go away, exhuming the person you really are under all the geologic layers of narrative and crosstalk that are constantly chattering in your brain. I think eventually these voices just become background noise. We stop hearing them consciously, but believe me, we listen to them just the same.

Sometimes they’re anodyne distractors that tell us to look at the shiny thing or interrupt our focus to bleat that we forgot to buy milk. But most often their influence is destructive. They tell us in countless ways that we’re not good enough.

Me without self-doubt was a revelation. There was suddenly this incredible silence in my head; I’ve experienced something close to it during 2-hour Iyengar yoga classes, but the fragile peace in my head would be shattered almost the second I set foot outside the calm of the studio. I had certainly never experienced instant zen in the frustrating middle of something I was terrible at.

There were no unpleasant side effects. The bewitching silence of the tDCS lasted, gradually diminishing over a period of about three days. The inevitable reintroduction of self-doubt and inattention to my mind bore heartbreaking similarities to the plot of Flowers for Algernon.

I hope you can sympathize with me when I tell you that the thing I wanted most acutely for the weeks following my experience was to go back and strap on those electrodes.* I also started to have a lot of questions. Who was I apart from the angry little bitter gnomes that populate my mind and drive me to failure because I’m too scared to try? And where did those voices come from? Some of them are personal history, like the caustically dismissive 7th grade science teacher who advised me to become a waitress. Some of them are societal, like the hateful ladymag voices that bully me every time I look in a mirror. Invisible narrative informs all my waking decisions in ways I can’t even keep track of.

What would a world look like in which we all wore little tDCS headbands that would keep us in a primed, confident state free of all doubts and fears? Wouldn’t you wear the shit out of that cap? I certainly would. I’d wear one at all times and have two in my backpack ready in case something happened to the first one.

I think the ethical questions we should be asking about tDCS are much more subtle than the ones we’ve been asking about cognitive enhancement. Because how you define “cognitive enhancement” frames the debate about its ethics.

If you told me tDCS will allow to someone to study twice as fast for the bar exam, I might be a little leery because now I have visions of rich daddies paying for Junior’s thinking cap. Neuroscientists like Roy Hamilton have termed this kind of application “cosmetic neuroscience,” which implies a kind of “first world problem” frivolity.

But now think of a different application–could school-age girls use the zappy cap while studying math to drown out the voices that tell them they can’t do math because they’re girls? How many studies have found a link between invasive stereotypes and poor test performance?

And then, finally, the main question: what role does doubt and fear play in our lives if its eradication actually causes so many improvements? Do we make more ethical decisions when we listen to our inner voices of self-doubt or when we’re freed from them? If we all wore these caps, would the world be a better place?

And if tDCS headwear were to become widespread, will the same 20-minutes with a 2 milliamp current always deliver the same effects, or will you need to up your dose like you do with some other drugs?

Because, to steal a great point from a Gizmodo commenter, pretty soon, a 9-volt battery may no longer be enough.

* As you might expect after this kind of evangelizing, the first thing I did when I got back from California was check how I could DIY my own contraption. And as you might expect, after reading the article, the commenters, letter-writers, and denizens of this monster Reddit thread wanted to know the same thing.

I hereby shake off all liability for directing you to this page. If you’re going to turn to unaccountable internet strangers for advice on the best way to send a current through your noodle, caveat lector and godspeed. I’m not involved. (and for fuck’s sake, just go enroll in a study at a nearby university)

Police are linked to blacklist of construction workers

Security services 'gave data to clandestine organisation funded by major names in building industry'

The police or security services supplied information to a blacklist funded by the country's major construction firms that has kept thousands of people out of work over the past three decades.

The Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) has revealed that records that could only have come from the police or MI5 have been discovered in a vast database of files held on 3,200 victims who were deemed leftwing or troublesome.

The files were collected by the Consulting Association, a clandestine organisation funded by major names in the construction industry.

Its database was seized nearly three years ago, but the extraordinary nature of the information held has only now emerged, following an employment tribunal for one of the victims, Dave Smith, a 46-year-old engineer who had a 36-page file against his name and was victimised repeatedly for highlighting safety hazards on sites, including the presence of asbestos.

David Clancy, investigations manager at the ICO, told the central London tribunal adjudicating on Smith's claims against construction giant Carillion that "there is information on the Consulting Association files that I believe could only be supplied by the police or the security services".

Speaking to the Observer, Clancy added: "The information was so specific and it contained in effect operational information that wouldn't have formed anything other than a police record."

The scandal will be thrown open to further public exposure in the coming months as a class action by 100 victims against at least 39 companies is set to be pursued in the high court by Hugh Tomlinson QC, currently counsel for several of the phone-hacking claimants. The revelations will inevitably raise fresh questions about the probity of the police in a week in which its relationship with major news corporations, and News International in particular, has come under sharp focus. Last week the Leveson inquiry heard that the police were investigating a "network of corrupt officials" as part of their inquiries into phone hacking and police corruption.

Clancy said he was unable further to trace the specific sources of the information held in the Consulting Association files because it touched on individuals living across the country and stretched over three decades.

He added that the relationship between the Consulting Association and the police and security services appeared to have been nurtured when the organisation went under an earlier guise as the Economic League, at a time when the state was keen to liaise with major building firms to discover as much as it could about Irish construction workers amid the threat of IRA terrorism.

John McDonnell MP, who first raised the issue of blacklisting a decade ago, said he would demand a debate in parliament on what he described as collusion. "I am outraged at the systematic abuse of people's rights. This has destroyed people's lives, broken up families, ensured that people have not been able to earn a living. It has devastated people year after year, and nobody has listened to us. No one has been willing to believe the extent to which there has been collusion between police, security services and companies. It is all about the ability of companies to exploit workers and destroy anybody who stands up against them."

The existence of the secret blacklist was first exposed in 2009, when ICO investigators from the Information Commissioner's Office raided an unassuming office in Droitwich, Worcestershire.

The investigators uncovered an extensive database that was used by construction firms to vet workers they deemed to be trade unionists and troublesome – usually trade unionists. More than 40 construction firms, including Balfour Beatty and Sir Robert McAlpine, had been funding the confidential database, which recorded workers' trade union activities and conduct at work.

The Consulting Association was closed down and a 66-year-old private investigator, Ian Kerr, was fined £5,000 for administering the database, although the construction firms escaped prosecution. At Smith's tribunal, Carillion admitted that two of its subsidiaries covertly supplied information to the database to "penalise" Smith for being a trade unionist, even though he had "reasonably brought health and safety concerns to their attention". However, Smith lost his claim for £175,000 in lost income because he worked through an agency and was not directly employed by Carillion.

A spokesman for the Independent Police Complaints Commission said it had not yet received a complaint from the victims or the ICO.

A new threat to media freedoms

Writers of the world, beware. A new threat to our freedom of speech is looming and, for once, I am not inveighing against the Official Secrets Act.

Over recent years the UK has rightly earned a pungent reputation as the libel capital of the world. And now it appears that this wonderful practice is going "offshore".

How did this whole mess begin? It turned out that someone in the Middle East could take exception to a book written and published about them in the USA. US law, somewhat surprisingly considering its current parlous state, provided no route to sue. However, some bright legal spark decided that the UK courts could be used for redress, provided the offending book had been sold in the UK - even if only a handful of second-hand books had been sold over Amazon.co.uk - and Mr Justice Eady helped the process along magnificently.

And so was born the concept of "libel tourism". Satirical current affairs magazine Private Eye has long been campaigning against this, other UK news outlets gradually followed suit, and the UK government is finally taking steps to rein in these egregious, if lucrative, legal practices.

But, hey, that's precisely when your offshore crown dependencies, otherwise known as British tax havens, come into their own. The UK has for years turned a blind eye to the dubious financial practices of these islands, the most geographically convenient being the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man, where the attitude to self-regulation makes the dealings of the Square Mile look positively Vestal.

Now it appears that Guernsey is looking to become a hub of another lucrative offshore practice: libel tourism.

Guernsey has its own parliament - the States - and can make its own laws. So as the libel door closes on the UK mainland, a firm of offshore tax lawyers has identified a wonderful business opportunity.

Jason Romer is the managing partner and intellectual property specialist at the large "wealth management" legal firm Collas Crill. According to his firm's website, he also, coincidentally, sits on the island's Commercial IP Steering Group and the Drafting Sub-Committee, and is thus conveniently on hand to ease the new legislation through the States.

Also coincidentally, he appears to be an enthusiastic advocate of Eady's infamous "super-injunction" regime which has had such a chillingly expensive effect on the British media in the last decade.

So, if this law is passed, anyone, anywhere around the world will be able (if they can afford it) to register their "image rights" in Guernsey. These rights can even last indefinitely after the original owner's death.

This means that anyone, anywhere, who feels that their "image" has been inappropriately reproduced/copied/traduced/pirated - the correct legal terminology is hazy - can then sue through the Guernsey courts for redress. This could potentially be a powerful new global tool for the suppression of free speech. As public outcry swells internationally against the US IP laws, SOPA and PIPA, and across Europe against the utterly undemocratic ACTA, this new law is a giant leap precisely in the wrong direction.

Guernsey, my island of birth, has changed out of all recognition over the last thirty years. Ever since the 1980s infestation of offshore bankers and trust fund lawyers, it has been tarmac-ed over by greed and social division. Before then it was proud of its egalitarianism, Norman-French heritage, beautifully anachronistic pace of life, and an economy based on tomatoes and tourism.

Now, if this law is passed, it will be known for its economy based on rotten financial apples and offshore libel tourism.

I just wanted to get that out of my system now - while I can still freely express my thoughts and before the island can sue me for damaging its "image rights"....

TSA: Fail

The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) was formed to ensure America’s freedom to travel. Instead, they have made air travel the most difficult means of mass transit in the United States, at the same time failing to make air travel any more secure.

TSA has never, (and I invite them to prove me wrong), foiled a terrorist plot or stopped an attack on an airliner. Ever. They crow about weapons found and insinuate that this means they stopped terrorism. They claim that they can’t comment due to “national security” implications. In fact, if they had foiled a plot, criminal charges would have to be filed. Ever hear of terrorism charges being filed because of something found during a TSA screening? No, because it’s never happened. Trust me, if TSA had ever foiled a terrorist plot, they would buy full-page ads in every newspaper in the United States to prove their importance and increase their budget.

I have a unique position from which to make these statements. For 25 years, as many of readers know, I was an FBI Special Agent, and for many of those years, I was a counter-terrorism specialist. I ran the Los Angeles Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF) Al Qaeda squad. I ran the JTTF’s Extra-territorial squad, which responded to terrorism against the United States or its interests throughout the world. I have investigated Al Qaeda cell operations in the United States, Pakistan, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Thailand, just to name a few. The FBI and the CIA provides the lion’s share of actionable intelligence on threats to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) (the mother organization of TSA), so that they can tailor security screening to the actual threat.

I am, as I have said before, a political conservative, a law and order kind of guy and I get misty when the national anthem is played at a football game and jets fly over in salute. If anything, I am pre-disposed to support the United States government.

I have been a pilot for more than 35 years. In the early years of my career, I flew aircraft for the FBI and I amassed 6,500 hours of flight time. I worked my way through college with United Airlines and was cockpit qualified to move the airliners around the ramp, fuel them and service them. I know aircraft. My father, a former FBI Agent, worked for United from the time I was 12. We used our flight benefits to travel more than anybody I know, taking round-the-world vacations nearly every year and jumping airliners like hobos jump freight trains. During my FBI counter-terrorism years, I traveled 100,000 to 200,000 miles per year. I am intimately familiar with airline travel.

My father's position at United Airlines was Manager of Security. He had this job in the 70’s when airline security was in its infancy and he helped pioneered security procedures including the first magnetometers. He has written two textbooks on airport, aircraft, and airline security, and sat on FAA sponsored committees on airline security.

As a SWAT Agent, I was fully trained to interdict hijackings. I have trained countless hours on actual airliners, learned to shoot surgically inside the airliner “tube,” silently approach the aircraft and breach exterior doors quickly. I was also trained to shoot from airline seats in case I was aboard a hijacked flight, and for 25 years I traveled armed on airliners, meeting with Air Marshals prior to each flight.

I have dealt with TSA since its inception and FAA security prior to that. I have witnessed TSA operate since they became a separate organization in 2002 and seen their reaction to intelligence provided them. I have now watched them operate for a decade, and I have respect for their hard-working employees who are doing a thankless job. But I have come to the conclusion that TSA is one of the worst-run, ineffective and most unnecessarily intrusive agencies in the United States government.

TILTING AT WINDMILLS

The entire TSA paradigm is flawed. It requires an impossibility for it to succeed. For the TSA model to work, every single possible means of causing danger to an aircraft or its passengers must be eliminated. This is an impossibility. While passengers are being frisked and digitally strip-searched a few dozen yards away, cooks and dish washers at the local concourse “Chili’s” are using and cleaning butcher knives.

While bomb-sniffing dogs are run past luggage, the beach at the departure end of LAX is largely unpatrolled, and anybody with a shoulder launched missile (you know the ones they regularly shoot down U.S. helicopters with in Afghanistan) could take out any plane of their choice. I am reticent to discuss anything further that would give anybody ideas. However, these two have had wide dissemination in the media but are by NO means the biggest threats.

I sometimes ruminate while standing in line waiting to take off my shoes, remove my belt, laptop, iPad, etc., etc., about the improvised weapons I saw in prisons and how hard they were to find. It’s fascinating what weapons prisoners can make out of plastic forks, newspapers and toothbrushes. Ask any prison guard if an inmate can make a weapon out of an everyday item, and how long it would take them. Approximately 99% of what the average traveler carries on a plane would be considered contraband in a maximum security prison, due to the fact that it can easily be converted into a weapon. Toothbrushes, Popsicle sticks, pens, pencils, anything with wire (iPod headset), any metal object which can be sharpened, etc., etc. is a potential weapon. Carried to its logical end, TSA policy would have to require passengers to travel naked or handcuffed. (Handcuffing is the required procedure for U.S. Marshalls transporting prisoners in government aircraft.)

TSA’s de facto policy to this point has been to react to the latest thing tried by a terrorist, which is invariably something that Al Qaeda identified as a technique not addressed by current screening. While this narrows Al Qaeda’s options, their list of attack ideas remains long and they are imaginative. Therefore, if TSA continues to react to each and every new thing tried, three things are certain:

1.    Nothing Al Qaeda tries will be caught the first time because it was designed around gaps in TSA security.

2.       It is impossible to eliminate all gaps in airline security.

3.  Airline security screening based on eliminating every vulnerability will therefore fail because it is impossible. But it will by necessity become increasingly onerous and invasive on the travelers.

SCREENING IS STILL IMPORTANT—DONE RIGHT

TSA’s “major malfunction” as R. Lee Ermey would say, is that they do not understand the threat. At least their reactions to the threat indicates an extreme naiveté regarding terrorists, their tactics and their operational philosophies. One of the major reasons that Al Qaeda has not successfully mounted a major attack in the United States since 9/11 is that Al Qaeda is analogous to a political action committee (PAC) or a political candidate. They live off donations from “legitimate” radical Muslims throughout the world. These donations are crucial, and there are many causes which compete for them. In order to keep getting those donations, Al Qaeda can’t appear to be losing, weak or incapable of an attack. Therefore, they actually put themselves in a little bit of a bind after 9/11: Their success was so spectacular that it has become almost impossible to duplicate it, much less create an even more spectacular act. Any attack that seems smaller in scope than those already achieved would make it appear as though Al Qaeda was “slipping” and terrorism dollars might go elsewhere, say to the Mujahedeen in Afghanistan.

Failure is not an option for Al Qaeda; they are as risk averse as the public relations department at Disneyland. Al Qaeda is a brand to protect, and failure is bad for the brand. If there is a one in ten chance that an attack will fail, the powers-that-be will not likely green-light it.

TSA screening, as it is now, is so predictable and known that Al Qaeda can know with absolute certainty what they can and cannot get through screening. That is valuable intelligence for them. In a word, TSA is predictable. This increases Al Qaeda’s chances of success. It reminds me of counter-espionage surveillances against our cold-war adversaries the Soviets. They were followed nearly all the time and they knew it. A good Soviet intelligence officer would identify the surveillance and the agents and vehicles involved in the surveillance. Then, he would be able to fulfill his “drops” and communications knowing where the surveillance was at any time. When you can see the surveillance, you know exactly what you can and cannot get away with. Only when they could not see the surveillance were they truly intimidated.

TSA would have significantly greater affect with a random-selection type of process. The benefits of random selection are: Approximately 80% fewer screeners needed, complete unpredictability of the likelihood of a search, and extremely effective searches of those, say 10%, selected. It would not reduce by 1% Al Qaeda’s belief that they could get through screening with a weapon. A 1-in-10 chance of a full search is too much of a risk for Al Qaeda. They do not plan their attacks on the “Well, it’s got a decent chance” method. They require a sure thing. Putting explosives in a shoe and depending on a 10% chance of failure are odds they will not accept. So rather than ineffective (yet incredibly intrusive) screening of 100% of the passengers, there should be highly effective screening of an unpredictable 10% with a reduced screening requirement for the other 90%, say a magnetometer and bag X-ray, allowing people to wear their shoes, belts and pacemakers through screening.

THE VIRTUAL STRIP SEARCH

Is this really okay with you?


These are images created by the TSA’s “Backscatter/Body Imaging X-Ray” scanner. The images are not, they say, detailed enough to cause anybody any embarrassment. Frankly, they are intimately detailed. I am stunned, quite frankly, that the same people who fought against the Patriot Act because it was invasive and violated privacy rights have not howled about this invasion of personal privacy rights.

I recently asked a TSA officer whether a man or a woman was conducting the screening at my “device.” I was told that it varied and they didn't know right at that moment. I declined being screened by the machine to see what the procedure was. I was then frisked—and told that by rule, I could be frisked only by a man. Good. I get that, but then, why aren't there male and female devices where like-sex screeners view the virtual strip searches. I have to be blunt here, I have a serious issue with any man I don’t know and who is not our doctor, seeing under my wife’s clothing. Maybe I’m old fashioned.

An immediate demand should be that these devices be operated with male/female devices with same-sex screeners. If that can’t be accomplished, then TSA needs to explain why. By the way, “money” will not be accepted as a justifiable reason. They’re spending enough to cover it on other things. Don’t take my word for it; listen to a report by congressional investigators released just two months ago:

“Today, TSA's screening policies are based in theatrics. They are typical, bureaucratic responses to failed security policies meant to assuage the concerns of the traveling public.” Translation? TSA doesn’t know what it’s doing, but is trying to put on a good show to keep the traveling public from catching on. The report, entitled, “"A Decade Later: A Call for TSA Reform" sharply criticized the agency, accusing it of incompetent management. Former DHS Inspector General Richard Skinner dropped this bomb, “The ability of TSA screeners to stop prohibited items from being carried through the sterile areas of the airports fared no better than the performance of screeners prior to September 11, 2001.”

Frankly, the professional experience I have had with TSA has frightened me. Once, when approaching screening for a flight on official FBI business, I showed my badge as I had done for decades in order to bypass screening. (You can be envious, but remember, I was one less person in line.) I was asked for my form which showed that I was armed. I was unarmed on this flight because my ultimate destination was a foreign country. I was told, "Then you have to be screened." This logic startled me, so I asked, "If I tell you I have a high-powered weapon, you will let me bypass screening, but if I tell you I'm unarmed, then I have to be screened?" The answer? "Yes. Exactly." Another time, I was bypassing screening (again on official FBI business) with my .40 caliber semi-automatic pistol, and a TSA officer noticed the clip of my pocket knife. "You can't bring a knife on board," he said. I looked at him incredulously and asked, "The semi-automatic pistol is okay, but you don't trust me with a knife?" His response was equal parts predictable and frightening, "But knives are not allowed on the planes."

OUT OF CONTROL

Civil libertarians on both sides of the aisle should be appalled at an unauthorized use to which TSA is putting their screening: Identifying petty criminals--using one search method to achieve a secret goal. This is strictly forbidden in other government branches. In the FBI, if I had a warrant to wiretap an individual on a terrorism matter and picked-up evidence of a non-terrorism-related crime, I could not, without FBI Headquarters and a judge’s approval, use that as evidence in a criminal case. But TSA is using its screening devices to carve out a niche business. According to congress, TSA began to seek out petty criminals without congressional approval. TSA have arrested more than 1,000 people on drug charges and other non-airline security-related offenses to date.

The report goes on to state that the virtual strip search screening machines are a failure in that they cannot detect the type of explosives used by the “underwear bomber” or even a pistol used as a TSA’s own real-world test of the machines. Yet TSA has spent approximately $60 billion since 2002 and now has over 65,000 employees, more than the Department of State, more than the Department of Energy, more than the Department of Labor, more than the Department of Education, more than the Department of Housing and Urban Development---combined. TSA has become, according to the report, “an enormous, inflexible and distracted bureaucracy more concerned with……consolidating power.”

Each time the TSA is publically called to account for their actions, they fight back with fear-based press releases which usually begin with “At a time like this….” Or “Al Qaeda is planning—at this moment …..” The tactic, of course, is to throw the spotlight off the fact that their policies are doing nothing to make America safer “at a time like this.” Sometimes doing the wrong thing is just as bad as doing nothing.

The TSA unions are now fighting against any reduction in staff, such as by implementation of more efficient protocols, hiring of contractors, or less draconian screening. It is simply not in their best interest for screening to get quicker or easier because that would require fewer screeners. The chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, John Mica (R-FL) scolded; “It is time for TSA to refocus its mission based on risk and develop common sense security protocols.”

THE QUEEN HAS NO CLOTHES

Just when I was getting to think that the backscatter x-ray images were humiliating, degrading or invasive, Susan Hallowell, Director of the TSA research lab eased my fear by consenting to have her backscatter image made public.




That’s Ms. Hallowell in the upper photo. And the two below--same day, same time. See? What’s invasive or embarrassing about those photos? Obviously, I’m overreacting. Several things about these photos struck me; first, I of course noticed that the backscatter x-ray has cleverly detected the gun on her hip (it’s the black object just above her thong in the far left picture). That the gun would have been found by magnetometers in service since the 1970’s is likely not something they would like us to dwell on. Secondarily, I am struck by the similarity of this demonstration to the fable, “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” In that tale, a king is swindled by tailors who create for him a suit of clothes that are invisible to incompetent people. Of course, nobody would admit that they didn’t see the clothes for fear of being branded unfit for their jobs, and certainly the king wasn’t going to say anything.

Looking at these photos, I wonder if something similar isn’t going on here. It is as if patriotic, loyal citizens who care about security and the United States of America and the lives of their fellow citizens will not see this as an abuse of power. Anybody who views these images as dehumanizing, humiliating, unnecessary or abusive are obviously not against terrorism and care little if airplanes filled with families fall to the ground. But in this situation, it is essential that we shout “the king (or in this case the queen) has no clothes!” Going along with the status quo is the exact opposite of protecting Americans, it is the opposite of saving lives, it is the opposite of preventing terrorism, and it is the opposite of freedom and personal rights.

With the congressional spotlight on the organization, TSA is finally feeling what it's like to be screened. It has walked through the detector of bureaucratic failure and the red light has gone off. It’s time that we ask congress to have TSA “step over to this area” for a more thorough search. For once, "TSA screening" will be productive. I predict that dangerous amounts of inefficiency, derivative thinking, and reactive policy will be located, if not in their shoes, in their DNA.

Pima County Public Library hires public health nurse

Thousands of Pima County residents and visitors flock to the Pima County Public Library and its 27 branches every day to read or check out books and other materials, use public computers, attend meetings or classes, and access information and resources.

Where people gather in large numbers, public health is always a consideration. But an expert health resource and trained responder has been missing from the library – until recently.

In January, Pima County Public Library, in partnership with the Pima County Health Department, became the first library in the nation to employ a public health nurse on site.

Registered nurse Emily Pogue spends most of her work week circulating through the Joel D. Valdez Main Library at 101 N. Stone Ave. and five branches, a stethoscope around her neck.

In the short time that she‟s been on the job, she‟s been able to refer dozens of library visitors with health issues – especially those without health insurance – to resources in the community.

She counseled a branch manager who had determined that a young library user had head lice. She‟s met latchkey kids and answered teens‟ questions about sex – and took advantage of the opportunity to talk to them about diabetes and high blood pressure. She helped a victim of domestic violence find safe shelter and get medical attention. She encourages library visitors to use the hand sanitizer that‟s always available to reduce the spread of germs. “Everything is an educational moment,” Pogue says.

She listens to the worries of the elderly, the unemployed and the homeless who turn to libraries for help and safety, and directs them to social services when appropriate.

“It takes a nurse to put a gentle hand on theirs and say, „I‟m here for you,‟” Pogue says.

Karyn Prechtel, Managing Librarian at the Joel D. Valdez Main Library, began thinking about the possibility of a public health nurse on site more than a year ago and was encouraged when the San Francisco Public Library hired an on-site social worker in

2009. Pogue has already made a difference, Prechtel said.

She has been able to respond in situations that have been challenging for librarians, Prechtel said. For example, since Pogue‟s arrival, the Main Library has had “fewer behavioral health incidents, which can often lead to a call 911 for assistance,” Prechtel said.

Pogue also spends time at:

• Eckstrom-Columbus Branch Library, 4350 E. 22nd St.
• Martha Cooper Branch Library, 1377 N. Catalina Ave.
• Sam Lena-South Tucson Branch Library, 1607 S. Sixth Ave.
• Santa Rose Branch Library, 1075 S. 10th Ave.
• Woods Memorial Branch Library, 3455 N. First Ave.

She will also be training library and health department staff and eventually developing educational materials and programs.

Pogue has a bachelor‟s degree and a master‟s degree in nursing from the University Phoenix and was previously clinical director of nursing at Pima Medical Institute.

“It is an answer to my prayers to be here,” she says of her new position.

For more information about the Pima County Health Department, visit www.pimahealth.org.

For more information about the Pima County Public Library, including branch locations, schedules, news and events, please visit www.library.pima.gov or call 791-4010.

Censorship is inseparable from surveillance

We're bad at calculating the long-term costs of keeping our online privacy

Cory Doctorow

There was a time when you could censor without spying. When Britain banned the publication of James Joyce's Ulysses in the 1920s and 1930s, the ban took the form on a prohibition on the sale of copies of the books. Theoretically, this entailed opening some imported parcels, and it certainly imposed a constraint on publishers and booksellers. It was undoubtedly awful. But we've got it worse today.

Jump forward 80 years. Imagine that you want to ban www.jamesjoycesulysses.com due to a copyright claim from the Joyce estate. Thanks to the Digital Economy Act and the provision it makes for a national British copyright firewall, we're headed for a system where entertainment companies can specify URLs that have "infringing" websites, and a national censorwall will block everyone in the country from visiting those sites.

In order to stop you from visiting www.jamesjoycesulysses.com, the national censorwall must intercept all your outgoing internet requests and examine them to determine whether they are for the banned website. That's the difference between the old days of censorship and our new digital censorship world. Today, censorship is inseparable from surveillance.

Of course, you can surveil without censoring, watching everything and stopping nothing. Ironically, from a human rights perspective, censorship with surveillance is better than censorship on its own. In despotic regimes around the world, censorship is the spur that gets internet users to use TOR, the Onion Router, a technology for bypassing censorwalls that offers some anonymity in the bargain.

When the government in Syria or Iran blocks Facebook or Human Rights Watch, internet users figure out how to install and use TOR, and their browsing habits are kept private from the secret police. When the state drops the censorship, many users drop TOR – which slows down your internet connection – and then everything they do is visible to the agents of the state who might kidnap, torture and kill them for looking at the wrong parts of the internet.

The death of privacy?

We hear a lot about the death of privacy, and the supposed end of our desire to be private. I think it's more correct to say that we're very bad at pricing the long-term option on a present-day privacy disclosure. That's because privacy tradeoffs are one of those areas of public life where actions and consequences are separated by a lot of time and space. That's a recipe for a problem that's nearly impossible to get good at solving.

To understand why, think of the old days of film cameras. In those days, most families shot one or two rolls of film a year – one on the family vacation and one though Christmas and birthdays, more or less. You'd send the film off to the lab for photo processing, sometimes months after the exposures were shot, and you'd get back your pictures. Most would be mediocre, some would be terrible, and a few would be wonderful. But unless you went to extraordinary lengths to record the circumstances of each shot, you would almost certainly have no idea what you did to make the good ones good and the bad ones bad.

Without that vital knowledge about causes and effects, it is impossible to improve at any task. The easiest way to cultivate a knowledge of cause and effect is to move the two closer together. When digital cameras arrived on the scene, they were inferior to film cameras in many ways, but they had an immediacy that film cameras had never managed. Even "instant" Polaroid cameras couldn't compare with the feedback that digital cameras gave.

As soon as you press the shutter button, your image appears on the viewfinder. Even though digital cameras lack the resolution of film cameras, most of us amateurs make better photos with them than we ever did with our film cameras. Merely being able to marry cause and effect does that. As a society, we've gotten so good at taking photos that we now buy products like Hipstamatic that degrade our pictures to make them look more "authentic," in part because our casual snaps are so well-framed and -timed that they have the look of a studio portrait. Adding grain, blur and colour imbalances restores the sense that they are "genuine" spontaneous shots.

Privacy disasters

We lack any effective means of moving cause and effect together for privacy, especially for the worst kinds of privacy disasters.

In the early 1980s, I had a teacher whose wife went into hospital to deliver their first child. Afterwards, they were approached by a nice man from a marketing consortium offering a basket of free nappies, baby-grows, wipes, and other necessities. All he wanted in return was the child's name, date of birth and address (details that privacy detractors trivialise as "tombstone" information). They gave it to him.

A few weeks later, the baby died. It was unforeseen and tragic. More tragic, though, was what happened every year on the child's birthday: the grieving family got a slew of commercial offers in the post, targeted at a dead child's ageing ghost.

Few of us would have the foresight to turn down a basket of freebies on the grounds that our newborn first child might die suddenly. It's not the sort of thing that we are likely to turn our minds to as we recover in a maternity ward. Of course, once the lesson of the downside of this sort of disclosure has been learned, we're not likely to forget it, but how many times in our lives do we get to apply the lesson? Will we be clever and insightful enough to apply the lesson the next time someone offers us an unrelated privacy bargain (say, a Boots reward card)?

Privacy isn't the only problem that is widespread, potentially grave and characterised by the separation of cause and effect. In fact, these are the traits that unite our most pernicious public health problems. No one would smoke if the tumours emerged with your first drag. No one would overeat if every mouthful of cheesecake was instantly transformed into an equal volume of cellulite on your thighs or stomach. No one would drink to excess if the hangover started while you were hoisting your first pint of the evening.

Many people who smoke will never develop cancer. Many people who eat cheesecake have the BMI of a ballerina. Many people who drink never get drunk. But for people who do experience problems, the consequences are grave, even deadly. Likewise, many people who deliberately or inadvertently disclose their private information will never suffer any particularly grave consequences. But the worst failures of privacy disclosure will be just as grave as in other public health problems — bankruptcy, identity theft, even danger of violence (in the case of Iranian dissidents who allow themselves to be snooped upon by the national firewall).


Privacy v profit

There are plenty of services that make healthy profits off of this unfortunate dynamic. The existence of overeating doesn't mean that "people don't care about obesity". The success of the tobacco industry doesn't mean "people don't care about cancer". And the existence of widespread privacy disclosures online doesn't mean "people don't care about privacy".

Governments put a lot of energy into tackling public health problems. They regulate the companies that profit from the problems – by instituting a minimum drinking age, prohibiting public smoking and so on – and conduct public education campaigns to help people appreciate the potential future effects of their present-day causes. Reflecting the difficulty of such problems, governments often turn to the lurid, disturbing imagery, such as graphic photos of diseased lungs or shock adverts depicting the dangers of drunkenness.

Imagine, instead, that the government spent an equivalent amount to make the problem worse. Imagine that the state used its tax coffers to ensure that cigarette vending machines were placed in every school. Imagine if they instituted a nationwide two-drink minimum for people stopping in at petrol stations or riding the buses.

Fundamentally, this is what national censorship regimes accomplish. They require us to disclose our every online click and keystroke to the state and the private companies that operate the censorship mechanisms it employs. They especially require this of our children, particularly in schools and libraries. It's often the case that the companies that supply censorware to schools, libraries and parents are the very same that serve autocrats from Burma to Bahrain, repackaging their code and their blacklists for sale in liberal democracies' educational institutions.

Most of the privacy disclosures made by most of the internet's users will not harm them in any way. But we all make so many disclosures, so often, that it's only a matter of time until each of us comes up against the difficulty of getting better at privacy. We need the state to help us fight the public health problem, to encourage the use of tools that promote privacy online, to deliver the technical skills to help each child operate her computer and browser in a way that puts her in charge of how her information is disclosed as she moves through the web. We need them to remind us all that this stuff matters, and to pause and think through our information habits and consider the ways that they might come back to bite us in the future.

We can't do that at the same time as we are nationally discounting the value of all private internet information to zero. We can't tell people to value their privacy and treat it as valueless. Well, we can, but only if we don't actually care about the harms that can arise from privacy breaches. Only if we want to make "people don't care about privacy" into our national mission-statement.

Chipping Away At The First Amendment: New 'Trespassing' Bill Could Be Used To Criminalize Legitimate Protests

Don't you just love Congress, where almost no bills actually are what they say on the tin? There's some buzz building online about the "Federal Restricted Buildings and Grounds Improvement Act of 2011" (or HR 347), which has been positioned as a simple updating of trespassing laws concerning federal grounds. However, as some are pointing out, hidden in there is quite the Easter egg that effectively outlaws protests near people who are "authorized" to be protected by the Secret Service (mainly the President and Vice President, but it could include a lot more as well). Only three Representatives voted against it, including Rep. Justin Amash who explained his concerns via Facebook:

Current law makes it illegal to enter or remain in an area where certain government officials (more particularly, those with Secret Service protection) will be visiting temporarily if and only if the person knows it's illegal to enter the restricted area but does so anyway. The bill expands current law to make it a crime to enter or remain in an area where an official is visiting even if the person does not know it's illegal to be in that area and has no reason to suspect it's illegal.

Some government officials may need extraordinary protection to ensure their safety. But criminalizing legitimate First Amendment activity -- even if that activity is annoying to those government officials -- violates our rights. I voted "no." It passed 388-3.

The specifics of the law pretty clearly seem to make it a crime to do a standard form of protest, such as anything that "impedes or disrupts the orderly conduct of Government business or official functions" or just if someone "engages in disorderly or disruptive conduct in, or within such proximity to, any restricted building or grounds...." As Amash notes, there can be times when it makes sense to protect certain individuals, but "disorderly or disruptive" conduct is a pretty broad brush... and it's one very frequently abused by law enforcement officials.

You know all those stories we've had about people being arrested for filming police? Quite often those people are charged with disorderly conduct -- which often seems to boil down to "that person did something law enforcement doesn't like." To then take that and say that anything that constitutes disorderly conduct on the grounds of a building where someone who is protected by the Secret Service is a crime, it appears to be wide open to abuse, and a pretty clear restriction on the free speech rights of anyone wishing to engage in normal and healthy protest of our political process.

On top of that, the punishment can be pretty severe. You can get up to a year in jail for being found guilty of these things, and that jumps up to 10 years if you are carrying a "deadly or dangerous weapon."

As Amash notes, there are legitimate safety concerns to be aware of, and there are issues with doing something that significantly impedes government regulations. But it's really not difficult to see how this bill could very, very easily be stretched to be used against those doing standard protesting against significant political figures.

PayPal Strong-Arms Indie Ebook Publishers Over Erotic Content

By Violet Blue

Summary: PayPal has forced its merchants that publish and distribute e-books to censor erotic literature.

PayPal’s new aggressive campaign wants to stop independent e-book publishers that use its service from including certain kinds of erotic content in their catalogs.

On Saturday February 18, PayPal began threatening indie book publishers and distributors with immediate deactivation of the businesses’ accounts if they did not remove books containing certain sexual themes - namely, specific sexual fantasies that PayPal does not approve of.

PayPal told indie e-book publishers and retailers - such as AllRomance, Smashwords, Excessica and Bookstrand - that if they didn’t remove the offending literature from their catalogs within a few days of notification, PayPal would close their accounts.

Of course, the immediate termination of payment processing would devastate these businesses and all of their authors (not just the erotic writers) overnight.

In case you haven’t noticed, PayPal has a monopoly on the market of online payment processing. There are few alternatives, though none that are widely used by online shoppers.
One corporation begins to shape an entire market

Smashwords had little choice. On February 24, Smashwords sent a letter to all of their authors saying that it was being forced to make PayPal’s guidelines about erotic literature the new rules for content Smashwords would publish and distribute from now on.

All of the Smashwords authors were told in an email that if they want to see their work published and distributed through the popular alternative e-book e-tailer, they will need to make sure their works of fiction conform to PayPal’s acceptable use definitions of sexual fantasies.

Bookstrand went nuclear, and completely eliminated most of the indie titles from their catalog.

AllRomance has decided to stop publishing books that focus more on sex than romance - they are effectively purging all titles that are primarily sexually explicit storytelling “where sex [not romance] drives the story” from their catalog.

It’s a curious thing for PayPal to begin policing content in erotic books. Though they have a mighty hammer with which to enforce their morality.

PayPal would ban works by Anaïs Nin, Vladimir Nabokov, Henry Miller, Marquis de Sade and books like Caligula, The Sookie Stackhouse Novels (True Blood), The Story of O, Venus in Furs, Lolita…

So, what kind of fantasy sex in books is PayPal telling indie publishers is not okay?

They include a number of subjects that many would consider offensive or disturbing in real life - but they included one area of sexual fantasy that is fairly popular in real life between consenting adults.

PayPal told the booksellers they may not sell works of fiction that include sexual fantasies containing themes and implied scenarios of: pseudo-incest (including “daddy” fantasies, step-family), incest, fantasies about non-consensual sex or rape, bestiality (widened to include non-human fantasy creatures), and BDSM.

Under the new PayPal policy, Mark Corker of Smashwords told all the Smashwords authors they would also have to remove paranormal romance that included shape-shifters - if the shape-shifters were to have sex in their non-human forms.

When PayPal told Excessica’s Selena Kitt that BDSM fiction was not allowed in her catalog she wrote on her blog (selenakitt.com NSFW),

That’s right - they weren’t just targeting illegal acts between non-consenting adults. Now they were targeting legal sex between consenting adults.

For what it’s worth, BDSM includes a very wide category of sexual practices that are legal in the United States, and its activities and fantasies are not regarded by psychiatrists as an illness or disorder.

Determining what is acceptable to publish

One argument put forth as to why PayPal would not want to be the middleman for porn or “edgy” sexual content is that sexual content carries the constant risk of buyer’s remorse: people buy it, are ashamed or regretful or whatever, and want their money back.

So the thinking is that Paypal doesn’t want to have to be charged by credit card companies for chargebacks on “high risk” accounts that carry adult content.

But PayPal merchants control returns and refunds on each and every sale: when a customer submits a refund request, the merchant is the one that issues the refund - and it’s the merchant that has to PayPal return fees for the refund.

In addition to the fact that mitigating the cost of chargebacks and refund costs are an easily solvable problem: PayPal could easily bleed “high risk” merchants with higher fees.

Anyone that has done any kind of business online related to erotic content knows that PayPal will not do business with porn websites (or merchants that run websites that PayPal deems to be pornographic).

Many early sex bloggers who did not consider their blogs to be porn - merely artistic erotic imagery - found this out that hard way when PayPal changed its policies to exclude doing business with porn sites back in 2003 (when it was bought by eBay).

But the new development in PayPal’s moral standards bears serious examination.

Erotic writing has always been at the forefront of internet reading, and erotica - dark edges and all - was at the forefront of e-book adoption due to the privacy the form factor affords consumers.

And despite how you feel about the topics of sexual fantasies PayPal won’t tolerate, you must admit that the fringes of literature are important.

As Chris Meadows wrote,

Some people will find [the banned sexual themes] icky, but others enjoy them - and who the hell is PayPal to appoint itself the arbiter over what is and is not acceptable to publish?

I think it’s a dark day for independent book publishers, book distributors and authors when a company that has no vested interest in literature determines the content of the books that these small businesses can carry.

Verisign seizes .com domain registered via foreign Registrar on behalf of US Authorities.

Written by Mark Jeftovic

Yesterday Forbes broke the news that Canadian Calvin Ayre and partners who operate the Bodog online gambling empire have been indicted in the U.S., and in a blog post Calvin Ayre confirmed that their bodog.com domain had been seized by homeland security. As reported in Forbes (hat tip to The Domains for the cite),

According to the six-page indictment filed by Rosenstein, Ayre worked with Philip, Ferguson and Maloney to supervise an illegal gambling business from June 2005 to January 2012 in violation of Maryland law. The indictment focuses on the movement of funds from accounts outside the U.S., in Switzerland, England, Malta, and Canada, and the hiring of media resellers and advertisers to promote Internet gambling.
“Sports betting is illegal in Maryland, and federal law prohibits bookmakers from flouting that law simply because they are located outside the country,” Rosenstein said in a statement. “Many of the harms that underlie gambling prohibitions are exacerbated when the enterprises operate over the Internet without regulation.”

That is a truly scary quote but we'll emphasize that: "The indictment focuses on the movement of funds outside the U.S." and that you can't just "flout US law" by not being in the US. What also needs to be understood is that the domain bodog.com was registered to via a non-US Registrar, namely Vancouver's domainclip.

So Here's Where It Get's Scary…

We all know that with some US-based Registrars (*cough* Godaddy *cough*), all it takes is a badge out of a box of crackerjacks and you have the authority to fax in a takedown request which has a good shot at being honoured. We also know that some non-US registrars, it takes a lot more "due process-iness" to get a domain taken down.

But now, none of that matters, because in this case the State of Maryland simply issued a federal warrant was issued in the State of Maryland[1] to .com operator Verisign, (who is headquartered in California) who then duly updated the rootzone for .com with two new NS records for bodog.com which now redirect the domain to the takedown page.

This is exactly the scenario we were worried about when Verisign originally tabled their very troubling takedown proposal. Said proposal was quickly retracted, but here we have the same situation playing out anyway. Granted, this was an actual court order, to Verisign – not a "request" from a governmental or "quasi-governmental" agency as originally proposed.

But at the end of the day what has happened is that US law (in fact, Maryland state law) as been imposed on a .com domain operating outside the USA, which is the subtext we were very worried about when we commented on SOPA. Even though SOPA is currently in limbo, the reality that US law can now be asserted over all domains registered under .com, .net, org, .biz and maybe .info (Afilias is headquartered in Ireland by operates out of the US).

This is no longer a doom-and-gloom theory by some guy in a tin foil hat. It just happened.

The ramifications of this are no less than chilling and every single organization branded or operating under .com, .net, .org, .biz etc needs to ask themselves about their vulnerability to the whims of US federal and state lawmakers (not exactly known their cluefulness nor even-handedness, especially with regard to matters of the internet).

The larger picture: root monopolies and the need to replace ICANN

The .com root will never be opened to a truly competitive bidding process. Verisign has pretty well ensconced themselves into the .com and .net roots indefinitely with built-in price hikes baked into the cake. I recall a conversation I once had with Tucows CEO Elliot Noss, back when they still owned Liberty RMS (which ran the .info registry and later sold to Afilias) – he lamented that if the .com

Where the fsck is ICANN in all of this?

They are nowhere. They are collecting their fees, pushing their agenda of as many possible new-top-level domains and despite the fact that SOPA, ACTA, PIPA et aim directly at the interests of their core stakeholders, for whom they are supposed to be advocates and stewards. ICANN is conspicuous in their absence from the debate, save for a smug and trite abdication of involvement (i.e. "ICANN Doesn't Take Down Websites") – translation: "This isn't our problem".

And therein lies the issue. ICANN needs to make this their problem, because it very much is. If

ICANN isn't going to stand up, and vigorously campaign for global stakeholder representation in these matters, than they are not only abdicating any responsibility in the ongoing and escalating crackdown on internet freedom, they are also abdicating their right to govern and oversee it.

They need to be visible, they need to be loud and they need to come down on the right side of these issues or they need to be replaced.

Of course, the replacement of ICANN will never happen. At least not by a non-US entity, which means we are once again headed to the unthinkable place that only crackpots and conspiracy theorists think possible: a fractured internet with competing roots. On the bright side, life will go on, and companies like mine will probably become exceedingly wealthy charging every internet user in the world fees to gain and project visibility across all the myriad internet roots that will someday exist because governments will refuse to approach it co-operatively. The only thing that will remain to be seen is whether we'll be deemed "criminals" for doing so.

Further Reading:

• First They Came For The Filesharing Domains
• Verisign Takedown Proposal Very Worrisome
• How SOPA Will Destroy The Internet
• The Price of Freedom and The Cost of a Domain Name
• The Official easyDNS Takedown Policy

Journalist recovers video of his arrest after police deleted it

By Timothy B. Lee

A Miami journalist has recovered video of police officers arresting him after it was deleted from his camera. The man was covering a police effort to evict Occupy Miami protestors. He plans to file a complaint with the police department and with the United States Department of Justice.

On January 31, Miami police evicted Occupy Miami protesters from their downtown campsite. On hand to cover the action was photojournalist Carlos Miller. Along with protestors and other journalists, he was pushed down the street by a line of police in riot gear. He tried to circle around the block to return to his car, but he found his path blocked by a second line of police officers.

The police weren't arresting the other journalists around him, so Miller said he assumed he would be allowed to cross this second line of officers to return to his car. But when he approached one of the officers, he was stopped and placed under arrest. Upon his release the following morning, he found that several videos he had taken, including the one documenting his arrest, had disappeared.

Miller has since recovered some of the missing video, and it appears to back up his story. Though some crucial sequences are missing, the video shows Miller approaching a female police officer, who blocks his path and then calls other officers over to help arrest him.

"You were given a dispersal order, sir, and you were told you were gonna be placed under arrest," she told Miller in the video. "We don't want to have to hurt you," she said.

"I'm not doing anything," Miller responded. "I'm not resisting."
Constitutional violation?

Miller is a member of the National Press Photographers Association. The organization's general counsel, Mickey Osterreicher, sent a letter to the Miami-Dade Police Department protesting Miller's arrest.

Miller was charged with a single count of resisting arrest. "Aside from a blatant violation of Mr. Miller’s First Amendment rights to record matters of public interest in a public place," Osterreicher wrote, "we do not understand how, absent some other underlying charge for which there was probable cause, a charge of resisting arrest can stand on its own?"

"We believe that the recovered video of the incident will show that officers acted outside of their authority, in violation of the First, Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments of the United States Constitution as well as the Privacy Protection Act of 1980 and similar protections provided by Florida law," he wrote.

Osterreicher also pointed to a recent case involving the Baltimore Police Department. In that case, the Obama administration weighed in with a brief arguing that police officers violated the Constitution when they seized a man's recording device and deleted its contents. The United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit has also ruled that journalists have a First Amendment right to record the activities of the police in public.
Deletion can make things worse

Miller's recovery of his video is a reminder of an important fact about modern digital systems: files that get "deleted" aren't necessarily gone forever. Often the raw data is still on the device and can be recovered. And that means that police officers who delete videos not only expose their departments to liability, they may not even succeed in suppressing the embarrassing video.

Miller's efforts to recover the video were only partially successful, and he plans to take his camera to a forensic specialist in hopes of recovering the remaining segments. He also hopes to determine the exact time the video was deleted, which could substantiate his charge that it was deleted while under police control.

Once he has gathered all the evidence, Miller plans to file a complaint with both the police department and the Department of Justice, objecting to his arrest and the deletion of his videos. The case may further entrench the growing consensus that the Constitution protects the right to record the actions of police officers in public.