Yesterday’s Independent newspaper reports that HMG has let a contract with five companies to monitor social media such as twitter, facebook, and blogs for commentary on Goverment activity. The report says:

“Under the terms of the deal five companies have been approved to keep an eye on Facebook, Twitter and blogs and provide daily reports to Whitehall on what’s being said in “real time”.

Ministers, their advisers and officials will provide the firms with “keywords and topics” to monitor. They will also be able to opt in to an Orwellian-sounding Human-Driven Evaluation and Analysis system that will allow them to see “favourability of coverage” across old and new media.”

This seems to me to be a modern spin on the old press cuttings system which was in widespread use in HMG throughout my career. The article goes on to say:

“The Government has always paid for a clippings service which collated press coverage of departments and campaigns across the national, regional and specialist media. They have also monitored digital news on an ad hoc basis for several years. But this is believed to be the first time that the Government has signed up to a cross-Whitehall contract that includes “social” as a specific media for monitoring.”

Apart from the mainstream social media sites noted above, I’d be intrigued to know what criteria are to be applied for including blogs in the monitoring exercise. Some blogs (the “vox populi” types such as Guido Fawkes at order-order) will be obvious candidates. Others in the traditional media, such as journalistic or political blogs will also be included, but I wonder who chooses others, and by what yardsticks. Would trivia be included? And should I care?

According to the Independent, the Cabinet Office, which negotiated the deal, claims that even with the extended range of monitoring by bringing individual departmental contracts together it will be able to save £2.4m over four years whilst “maximising the quality of innovative work offered by suppliers”.

Now since the Cabinet Office is reportedly itself facing a budget cut of £13 million in this FY alone, it strikes me that it would have been much more cost effective to simply use GCHQ’s pre-existing monitoring system rather than paying a separate bunch of relative amateurs to search the same sources.

Just give GCHQ the “keywords” or “topics of interest”. Go on Dave, you know it makes sense.

Theresa May hasn’t wasted any time. The Independent reports today that Ms May (Home Secretary in the coalition administration) has said that the new Tory administration will bring the Draft Communications Data Bill, previously blocked by the Liberal Democrats, back to the House of Commons with the intention of getting it passed into law. As the Independent also reports, dear Dave, who is let us say, technically challenged, has in the past expressed the view that no form of communication should be unreadable by the Goverment. This implies severe restrictions on all forms of encryption.

Given that the Tories now have the majority they lacked in the last administration, it is clear that they will see themselves free to attack the kind of liberties I, and millions like me enjoy and cherish. The Open Rights Group maintain a wiki devoted to the relevant points of each political party’s manifesto relating to surveillance or other possible attacks on privacy. As they point out, the Tory party is committed to:

• introducing “new communications data legislation”;
• scrapping the Human Rights Act;
• requiring internet service providers to block (certain) sites;
• enabling employers to check whether an individual is an extremist;
• requiring age verification for access to all sites containing pornographic material.

There are, of course, huge practical and technical difficulties in implementing much of what the Tories wish to do (consider for example the idiocy of attempting to outlaw VPN technology) but that won’t stop them trying. Indeed, some of the technical difficulties may cause the new administration to bring in mechanisms to get around those problems. An obvious example would be the requirement for key escrow for anyone wishing to use encryption.

Excuse me if I find that unacceptable. Time to encrypt much, much more of my everyday activity from now on.

There is a nice tweet over at @NSA_PR. It reads:

We take your privacy, seriously.

Beyond parody.

I get my domestic ADSL connectivity from the rather excellent people at Andrews and Arnold.

Here’s why. And this is the original reason I moved to them.

They also happily take (and similarly reply to) GPG encrypted support questions.

Good guys. Thoroughly recommended.

Now can you /really/ see BT doing any of that?

‘thought not.

My newspaper of choice, the Guardian, has for some time produced its own android (and iOS of course) app. I have often used the android app on my tablet to catch up on emerging news items at the end of the day. I also read the BBC news app for the same reason. Yesterday I received an update to the Guardian app. That update was a complete rewrite and gives the user a very different experience to the original app. For example, in the old app I could tailor the home screen to show me just the news categories I wanted (i.e. no sport, no fashion, but plenty of politics, business and UK news). In the new app I can only do that if I subscribe to a paid version. Sorrry, but no, I already pay for the newspaper, I just want this to give me updated headlines, I don’t want to have to buy the newspaper all over again.

In today’s paper (and on-line of course) there is an editorial comment on the new app explaining its background. The writer opens:

Today I am proud to announce the launch of our redesigned Guardian app. It’s been a ground-up reworking to bring you a new, advanced and beautiful Guardian app. For the first time you will have a seamless experience across phones and tablets, with a cleaner, responsive design that showcases the Guardian’s award-winning journalism to our readers around the world.

The article goes on to explain the history of the original app and the thinking behind the redesign. It continues:

We’re also thrilled to announce that GuardianWitness – the Guardian’s award-winning platform through which readers can contribute their own pictures, videos and text – is now integrated into the app, meaning readers can now contribute to assignments seamlessly and directly within the main app.

Hmmmm.

It continues:

Other new features include:

• A new flexible layout so we can display different stories in different ways, and show readers which stories are the most important in one glance
• Breaking news and sport alerts and up-to-the-minute live coverage
• Increased personalisation: readers can personalise their home screen depending on what topics they’re most interested in, and create notifications to follow favourite writers, stories, series and football teams
• Improved photo galleries and inclusion of interactives for the first time
• Off-line reading – with intelligent caching readers will now be able to save articles to read later and have more content at their fingertips wherever they are
• Open journalism has been built into the app, with even easier ways for readers to contribute comments, videos, photos via our new GuardianWitness integration, as well as a better commenting experience
• New opportunities for advertisers.

I particularly like that last bit.

And of course the app needs access to my location.

Right.

(P.S. The app called “UK Newspapers” by Markus Reitberger gives access to all the UK news sites you could want – and all it asks for is network access.)

The Guardian and the Washington Post have been jointly awarded the Pulitzer prize for public service for their reporting of Edward Snowden’s whistleblowing on the NSA’s surveillance activities.

The Guardian reports:

The Pulitzer committee praised the Guardian for its “revelation of widespread secret surveillance by the National Security Agency, helping through aggressive reporting to spark a debate about the relationship between the government and the public over issues of security and privacy”.

Unfortunately that debate seems to be taking place in the USA rather than in the UK.

In typical Guardian style, one correspondent to today’s letters page says:

Congratulations to all. Can’t wait for the film. All the President’s Men II? Johnny Depp as Alan Rusbridger?

I’d pay to see that. But I’m not sure how it ends yet.