Categories
End User internet online safety

Government surveillance and the issue of personal privacy

The whole issue of government surveillance seems to have reached a crescendo over the last few days. It makes you wonder what the whole Draft Communications Data Bill was all about if “they” can already see everything.

I don’t even know whether encrypted communications are particularly secure anymore. I thought they were but does government secretly have the capability to do really advanced tech that is not in the public domain. Quite probably. We expect it of our own side and hope that we are better than the opposition (whoever they are) – the James Bond movie Skyfall confirmed that it goes on 🙂

I don’t know what to think about the whole privacy thing anymore though. Every online platform seems to know an awful lot about us. Tesco knows the intimate details of my lifestyle from what I buy from it. Google knows absolutely everything about what I’m doing with all my waking hours.

The old joke about a bloke having an affair with his secretary after work and then rubbing snooker chalk on his collar so that his wife would think he’d been playing with his mates doesn’t work any more. She just needs to follow his movements online, or have the difficult conversation about why he switched his phone off for an hour (5mins? 🙂 ) on his way home from work1 .

The Domesday scenario here is that all this information is opened for all to see, accidentally of otherwise. Worst case is that our bank accounts could be emptied.

Aside from ferociously safeguarding your bank password details, though it seems that crooks use back door techniques for breaking into accounts these days rather than brute force password hacks, it seems to me that we need to up the profile of the whole issue of security of our own personal data.

I can’t see how we can stop people/organisations from collecting this data but if they lose it or expose it for others to see then the penalties need to be suitably robust. The world needs to fast track a move to an online security conscious culture.

1 On Sunday I nipped out to the pub for a swift one before dinner and forgot my phone. When I got home there was a text message from my wife asking which pub I was in! Nothing was mentioned though.  I did feel an element of freedom being out without the mobile phone but was also conscious that the clock in the window of acceptability was ticking away.

Categories
Business Regs surveillance & privacy

Legislation encourages tidal wave of new ISPA members – life jackets at the ready

It’s a funny old world. A judge orders ISPs to cut off access to Pirate Bay and visitor numbers to the site increase by 12 million. A government says it wants to increase the amount of regulation on the internet and the membership of the trade association shoots up.

The membership of ISPA normally hovers just under the 200 mark. The nature of our industry is that companies are bought out or merge with others to get scale. So in any given year the we get perhaps 10 or 15 new members but 10 or 15 disappear off the UK internet map and on the whole the number stays the same – ish.

Things are changing. The threat to the  industry stemming from potentially onerous new regulations placed upon service providers, such as the upcoming Communications Bill Green Paper, has prompted six new service providers to join ISPA in the space of one month. This is a veritable tidal wave in the scheme of things.

ISPs are

Categories
Business online safety Regs security

Government surveillance in a free society?

Time was when MI5 (or whatever they are called) wanted to listen in on your conversation they sent someone round to the local telephone exchange with some wires and a couple of bulldog clips.

The breadth of things that could be monitored was actually fairly large. I remember once, many years ago, being shown satellite photographs of the lake at the Chernobyl nuclear plant in the days running up the announcement that there was a problem with the reactor. The thermal imagery of the lake showed it warming up substantially over a few days. The information showing that there was a problem was being collected by our “security forces”.

The fact is whilst the data was there nobody saw it as it was buried in so much other information, photos etc, that you had to specifically been looking for it to see that something was wrong. The amount of personal information that they could gather about you was fairly limited and the number of people they could do this to was not huge. It was not a scalable system.

Nowadays the game has changed.