Category Archives: Politics

Andy Burnham and the decline of standards

Internet censorship, News coverage, Politics

There’s a short story by (I think) Stephen Leacock, which tells of declining standards. How an undergraduate, newly arrived at university, lived in awe of the sagacity of the professors, of the intelligence of the grad students, and the learning of those about to receive their degrees. By the time he was receiving his first degree, he and his class were merely of average competence. By the time his PhD was awarded there were few of his cohort with any real learning; and standards had slipped so much over time that when they made him a Professor he and his colleagues hardly knew anything at all!

Having now reached the point in my life when I’m older than half the British Cabinet, it’s perhaps no surprise to read that UK cabinet minister Andy Burnham (born when I was in the Lower Sixth), has come up with some ideas about regulating the Internet that I am deeply unimpressed with.

In a Telegraph interview he proposes that ISPs should be forced to provide censored access to the Internet with only child-friendly sites visible; that the industry should have new “take-down” targets for bad material (presumably shorter ones); that it should be easier to sue for defamation online; and that the web should be labelled with age-ratings the way that video games and films are. Of course he realises he can’t do this alone, so he’s going to ask President Obama to help out!

Unfortunately, Mr Burnham doesn’t know anything about the Internet and seems to be arguing by analogy, and with a childlike hope that merely wishing for something will make it come true.
Continue reading Andy Burnham and the decline of standards →

Forensic genomics

Academic papers, Legal issues, Politics, Privacy technology

I recently presented a paper on Forensic genomics: kin privacy, driftnets and other open questions (co-authored with Lucia Bianchi, Pietro Liò and Douwe Korff) at WPES 2008, the Workshop for Privacy in the Electronic Society of ACM CCS, the ACM Computer and Communication Security conference. Pietro and I also gave a related talk here at the Computer Laboratory in Cambridge.

While genetics is concerned with the observation of specific sections of DNA, genomics is about studying the entire genome of an organism, something that has only become practically possible in recent years. In forensic genetics, which is the technology behind the large national DNA databases being built in several countries including notably UK and USA (Wallace’s outstanding article lucidly exposes many significant issues), investigators compare scene-of-crime samples with database samples by checking if they match, but only on a very small number of specific locations in the genome (e.g. 13 locations according to the CODIS rules). In our paper we explore what might change when forensic analysis moves from genetics to genomics over the next few decades. This is a problem that can only be meaningfully approached from a multi-disciplinary viewpoint and indeed our combined backgrounds cover computer security, bioinformatics and law.

CODIS markers
(Image from Wikimedia commons, in turn from NIST.)

Sequencing the first human genome (2003) cost 2.7 billion dollars and took 13 years. The US’s National Human Genome Research Institute has offered over 20 M$ worth of grants towards the goal of driving the cost of whole-genome sequencing down to a thousand dollars. This will enable personalized genomic medicine (e.g. predicting genetic risk of contracting specific diseases) but will also open up a number of ethical and privacy-related problems. Eugenetic abortions, genomic pre-screening as precondition for healthcare (or even just dating…), (mis)use of genomic data for purposes other than that for which it was collected and so forth. In various jurisdictions there exists legislation (such as the recent GINA in the US) that attempts to protect citizens from some of the possible abuses; but how strongly is it enforced? And is it enough? In the forensic context, is the DNA analysis procedure as infallible as we are led to believe? There are many subtleties associated with the interpretation of statistical results; when even professional statisticians disagree, how are the poor jurors expected to reach a fair verdict? Another subtle issue is kin privacy: if the scene-of-crime sample, compared with everyone in the database, partially matches Alice, this may be used as a hint to investigate all her relatives, who aren’t even in the database; indeed, some 1980s murders were recently solved in this way. “This raises compelling policy questions about the balance between collective security and individual privacy” [Bieber, Brenner, Lazer, 2006]. Should a democracy allow such a “driftnet” approach of suspecting and investigating all the innocents in order to catch the guilty?

This is a paper of questions rather than one of solutions. We believe an informed public debate is needed before the expected transition from genetics to genomics takes place. We want to stimulate discussion and therefore we invite you to read the paper, make up your mind and support what you believe are the right answers.

Liberal Democrat leader visits our lab

Banking security, News coverage, Politics, Privacy technology

This week, Nick Clegg, leader of the UK Liberal Democrat Party, and David Howarth, MP for Cambridgeshire, visited our hardware security lab for a demonstration of Chip & PIN fraud techniques.

They used this visit to announce their new party policy on protections against identity fraud. At present, credit rating companies are exempt from aspects of the Data Protection Act and can forward personal information about an individual’s financial history to companies without the subject’s consent. Clegg proposes to give individuals the rights to “freeze” their credit records, making it more difficult for fraudsters to impersonate others.

See also the Cambridge Evening News article and video interview.

Making bank reimbursement statutory

Banking security, Legal issues, Politics, Security economics

Many of the recommendations of the House of Lords Science and Technology Committee report on Personal Internet Security have been recycled into Conservative Party policy [*] — as announced back in March. So, if you believe the polls, we might see some changes after the next election or, if you’re cynical, even before then as the Government implements opposition policy!

However, one of the Committee recommendations that the Conservatives did not take up was that the law should be changed so that banks become liable for all eBanking and ATM losses — just as they have been liable since 1882 if they honour a forged cheque. Of course, if the banks can prove fraud (for cheques or for the e-equivalents) then the end-user is liable (and should be locked up).

At present the banks will cover end-users under the voluntary Banking Code… so they say that there would be no difference with a statutory regime. This is a little weak as an objection, since if you believe their position it would make no difference either way to them. But, in practice it will make a difference because the voluntary code doesn’t work too well for a minority of people.

Anyway, at present the banks don’t have a lot of political capital and so their views are carrying far less weight. This was particularly clear in last week’s House of Lords debate on “Personal Internet Security”, where Viscount Bridgeman speaking for the Conservatives said:

“I entirely agree with the noble Lord, Lord Broers, that statutory control of the banks in this respect is required and that we cannot rely on the voluntary code.”

which either means he forgot his brief! or that this really is a new party policy. If so then, in my view, it’s very welcome.

[*] the policy document has inexplicably disappeared from the Conservative website, but a Word version is available from Microsoft here.

Lords debate "Personal Internet Security"

News coverage, Politics, Security economics

Last Friday the House of Lords debated their Science and Technology Committee’s report on Personal Internet Security (from Summer 2007) and — because the Government’s response was so weak — the additional follow-up report that was published in Spring 2008. Since I had acted as the specialist adviser to the Committee, I went down to Westminster to sit “below the bar“, in one of the best seats in the House, and observe.

Lord Broers, the Committee Chairman during the first inquiry, kicked things off, followed by various Lords who had sat on the Committee (and two others who hadn’t) then the opposition lead, Viscount Bridgeman, who put his party’s point of view (of which more in another article). Lord Brett (recently elevated to a Lord in Waiting — ie a whip), then replied to the debate and finally Lord Broers summarised and formally moved the “take note” motion which, as is custom and practice, the Lords then consented to nem con.

The Government speech in such a debate is partially pre-written, and should then consist of a series of responses to the various issues raised and answers to the questions put in the previous speeches. The Minister himself doesn’t write any of this, that’s done by civil servants from his department, sitting in a special “box” at the end of the chamber behind him.

However, since the previous speeches were so strongly critical of the Government’s position, and so many questions were put as to what was to be done next, I was able to see from my excellent vantage point (as TV viewers would never be able to) the almost constant flow of hastily scribbled notes from the box to the Minister — including one note that went to Lord Broers, due to an addressing error by the scribblers!

The result of this barrage of material was that Lord Brett ended up with so many bits of paper that he completely gave up trying to juggle them, read out just one, and promised to write to everyone concerned with the rest of the ripostes.

Of course it didn’t help that he’d only been in the job for five days and this was his first day at the dispatch box. But the number of issues he had to address would almost certainly have flummoxed a five-year veteran as well.

Amusing though this might be to watch, this does not bode well for the Government getting to grips with the issues raised in the reports. In technical areas such as “Personal Internet Security”, policy is almost entirely driven by the civil servants and not by the politicians.

So it is particularly disappointing that the pre-written parts of the Minister’s speech — the issues that the civil servants expected to come up and which they felt positive about addressing — were only a small proportion of the issues that were actually addressed in the debate.

It still seems as if the penny hasn’t dropped in Whitehall 🙁

ePolicing – Tomorrow the world?

Legal issues, News coverage, Politics, Security economics

This week has finally seen an announcement that the Police Central e-crime Unit (PCeU) is to be funded by the Home Office. However, the largesse amounts to just £3.5 million of new money spread over three years, with the Met putting up a further £3.9 million — but whether the Met’s contribution is “new” or reflects a move of resources from their existing Computer Crime Unit I could not say.

The announcement is of course Good News — because once the PCeU is up and running next Spring, it should plug (to the limited extent that £2 million a year can plug) the “level 2” eCrime gap that I’ve written about before. viz: that SOCA tackles “serious and organised crime” (level 3), your local police force tackles local villains (level 1), but if criminals operate outside their force’s area — and on the Internet this is more likely than not — yet they don’t meet SOCA’s threshold, then who is there to deal with them?

In particular, the PCeU is envisaged to be the unit that deals with the intelligence packages coming from the City of London Fraud Squad’s new online Fraud Reporting website (once intended to launch in November 2008, now scheduled for Summer 2009).

Of course everyone expects the website to generate more reports of eCrime than could ever be dealt with (even with much more money), so the effectiveness of the PCeU in dealing with eCriminality will depend upon their prioritisation criteria, and how carefully they select the cases they tackle.

Nevertheless, although the news this week shows that the Home Office have finally understood the need to fund more ePolicing, I don’t think that they are thinking about the problem in a sufficiently global context.

A little history lesson might be in order to explain why.
Continue reading ePolicing – Tomorrow the world? →

Listening to the evidence

Internet censorship, News coverage, Politics

Last week the House of Commons Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee published a report of their inquiry into “Harmful content on the Internet and in video games“. They make a number of recommendations including a self-regulatory body to set rules for Internet companies to force them to protect users; that sites should provide a “watershed” so that grown-up material cannot be viewed before 9pm; that YouTube should screen material for forbidden content; that “suicide websites” should be blocked; that ISPs should be forced to block child sexual abuse image websites whatever the cost, and that blocking of bad content was generally desirable.

You will discern a certain amount of enthusiasm for blocking, and for a “something must be done” approach. However, in coming to their conclusions, they do not, in my view, seem to have listened too hard to the evidence, or sought out expertise elsewhere in the world…
Continue reading Listening to the evidence →

Finland privacy judgment

Legal issues, News coverage, Politics, Privacy technology, Security engineering

In a case that will have profound implications, the European Court of Human Rights has issued a judgment against Finland in a medical privacy case.

The complainant was a nurse at a Finnish hospital, and also HIV-positive. Word of her condition spread among colleagues, and her contract was not renewed. The hospital’s access controls were not sufficient to prevent colleages accessing her record, and its audit trail was not sufficient to determine who had compromised her privacy. The court’s view was that health care staff who are not involved in the care of a patient must be unable to access that patient’s electronic medical record: “What is required in this connection is practical and effective protection to exclude any possibility of unauthorised access occurring in the first place.” (Press coverage here.)

A “practical and effective” protection test in European law will bind engineering, law and policy much more tightly together. And it will have wide consequences. Privacy compaigners, for example, can now argue strongly that the NHS Care Records service is illegal. And what will be the further consequences for the Transformational Government initiative – the “Database State”?

Personal Internet Security: follow-up report

News coverage, Politics, Security economics

The House of Lords Science and Technology Committee have just completed a follow-up inquiry into “Personal Internet Security”, and their report is published here. Once again I have acted as their specialist adviser, and once again I’m under no obligation to endorse the Committee’s conclusions — but they have once again produced a useful report with sound conclusions, so I’m very happy to promote it!

Their initial report last summer, which I blogged about at the time, was — almost entirely — rejected by the Government last autumn (blog article here).

The Committee decided that in the light of the Government’s antipathy they would hold a rapid follow-up inquiry to establish whether their conclusions were sound or whether the Government was right to turn them down, and indeed, given the speed of change on the Internet, whether their recommendations were still timely.

The written responses broadly endorsed the Committee’s recommendations, with the main areas of controversy being liability for software vendors, making the banks statutorily responsible for phishing/skimming fraud, and how such fraud should be reported.

There was one oral session where, to everyone’s surprise, two Government ministers turned up and were extremely conciliatory. Baroness Vadera (BERR) said that the report “was somewhat more interesting than our response” and Vernon Coaker (Home Office) apologised to the Committee “if they felt that our response was overdefensive” adding “the report that was produced by this Committee a few months ago now has actually helped drive the agenda forward and certainly the resubmission of evidence and the re-thinking that that has caused has also helped with respect to that. So may I apologise to all of you; it is no disrespect to the Committee or to any of the members.”

I got the impression that the ministers were more impressed with the Committee’s report than were the civil servants who had drafted the Government’s previous formal response. Just maybe, some of my comments made a difference?

Given this volte face, the Committee’s follow-up report is also conciliatory, whilst recognising that the new approach is very much in the “jam tomorrow” category — we will all have to wait to see if they deliver.

The report is still in favour of software vendor liability as a long term strategy to improving software security, and on a security breach notification law the report says “we hold to our view that data security breach notification legislation would have the twin impacts of increasing incentives on businesses to avoid data loss, and should a breach occur, giving individuals timely information so that they can reduce the risk to themselves“. The headlines have been about the data lost by the Government, but recent figures from the ICO show that private industry is doing pretty badly as well.

The report also revisits the recommendations relating to banking, reiterating the committee’s view that “the liability of banks for losses incurred by electronic fraud should be underpinned by legislation rather than by the Banking Code“. The reasoning is simple, the banks choose the security mechanisms and how much effort they put into detecting patterns of fraud, so they should stand the losses if these systems fail. Holding individuals liable for succumbing to ever more sophisticated attacks is neither fair, nor economically efficient. The Committee also remained concerned that where fraud does take place, reports are made to the banks, who then choose whether or not to forward them to the police. They describe this approach as “wholly unsatisfactory and that it risks undermining public trust in the police and the Internet“.

This is quite a short report, a mere 36 paragraphs, but comes bundled with the responses received, all of which from Ross Anderson and Nicholas Bohm, through to the Metropolitan Police and Symantec are well worth reading to understand more about a complex problem, yet one where we’re beginning to see the first glimmers of consensus as to how best to move forward.

Security psychology

Politics, Privacy technology, Security economics, Security engineering

I’m currently in the first Workshop on security and human behaviour; at MIT, which brings together security engineers, psychologists and others interested in topics ranging from deception through usability to fearmongering. Here’s the agenda and here are the workshop papers.

The first session, on deception, was fascinating. It emphasised the huge range of problems, from detecting deception in interpersonal contexts such as interrogation through the effects of context and misdirection to how we might provide better trust signals to computer users.

Over the past seven years, security economics has gone from nothing to a thriving research field with over 100 active researchers. Over the next seven I believe that security psychology should do at least as well. I hope I’ll find enough odd minutes to live blog this first workshop as it happens!

[Edited to add:] See comments for live blog posts on the sessions; Bruce Schneier is also blogging this event.