Say it’s, sordid, select it, sell it
A secretive surveillance system based on people’s internet activity is already at the test phase in the UK, according to Wired magazine. The new government scheme and participants from the comms industry leave “a lot of questions [that] remain unanswered’, said the report. The contention is the mechanism by which surveillance is carried out and the content it entails and the system itself has its roots in dubious activity that was carried out under the auspices of the Investigatory Powers Act (RIP), which was originally introduced as an anti-terror mechanism.
Privacy and civil advocates were deeply critical of the exploitive violations enacted by the police and even local councils, who used RIP to investigate complaints about bin contents and planning applications. This misuse of technology and the powers of intrusion may cause another backlash against experimenting with internet connection records (ICRs) have reportedly been practiced with since 2021 by the UK’s National Crime Agency (NCA). The ICR tool is targeting millions of citizens’ internet records via their internet histories. Over the past year, it emerged that the surveillance system, supposed to be used by law enforcement nationwide, is designed to log and store these histories.
While opponents complain that historic privacy is now under threat, their fears over badly designed systems, poorly prepared users and woeful security will not be assuaged by the lack of transparency over the system, says ReclaimTheNet. “This new effort is being developed, tested and readied for deployment behind closed doors. Reports say it is very difficult to get any official answers about the programme and the tool it is producing,” said the report. “What has become known from a mandatory Investigatory Powers Act review is that the National Crime Agency seems to love IRCs.” Collecting people’s records, to paraphrase a statement from the National Crime Agency, “brings significant benefit.”
The NCA claimed that in a recent trial it “focused on illegal images of children.” Wired sent a Freedom of Information Act request, to government supplier BAE Systems which clinched a contract for this work in July. The request for transparency was met with a short reply lacking in any technical details, Wired writes. Meanwhile the UK government’s Contracts Finder has put out a call for tender for the Department of Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), for companies of all sizes who would like to identify “harmful disinformation and misinformation narratives, Coordinated Inauthentic Behaviour (CIB) or systematic manipulation of the information environment.”
Applications are open until May 23 and will close a month later. award is open to both SMEs, small and medium sized enterprises, and voluntary, community and social enterprises. The positions don’t involve transparency and anyone picked must to sign a non-disclosure agreement. Successful applications could become future surveillance contractors. The definition of ‘misinformation narratives’ might be quite subjective. Nina Jankowicz, who briefly headed up the US Department of Homeland Security’s Disinformation Governance Board, saw the department de-activated after her Youtube videos emerged. Jankowicz is now vice president at the UK-based Centre for Information Resilience.