1. Scrap the ID card scheme, the National Identity register, the next generation of biometric passports and the ContactPoint Database.
2. Outlaw the finger-printing of children at school without parental permission.
3. Extend the scope of the Freedom of Information Act to provide greater transparency.
4. Adopt the Scottish approach to stopping retention of innocent people’s DNA on the DNA database.
5. Defend trial by jury.
6. Restore rights to non-violent protest.
7. A review of libel laws to protect freedom of speech.
8. Safeguards against the misuse of anti-terrorism legislation.
9. Further regulation of CCTV.
10. Ending of storage of internet and email records without good reason.
11. A new mechanism to prevent the proliferation of unnecessary new criminal offences.
12. End the detention of children for immigration purposes.

Oh my!

As a digital- and civil-rights campaigner this list fills my heart with joy. The successful passage of this Bill through Parliament would not end the need to champion human rights in the digital era* however it would be a famous victory for that cause: we could say with certainty that this election, that the ousting of Labour from Government, was the point at which the high-water mark of authoritarian social policy in Britain was reached.

Some fellow campaigners have today urged caution and are reserving judgement until the details of the Bill are published. I cannot fault them for their cynicism however I am filled with hope that today we have seen not only the dawn of a new politics in Britain, but a new era of liberty, freedom, privacy and respect for human rights in the UK.

I shall be raising my glass to the death of ID cards and the Database State tonight!

* Three omissions stand out: repeal clauses 11-18 of the Digital Economy Act; make the NHS Summary Care Record opt-in rather than opt-out; end the Vetting and Barring scheme, abolish the Independent Safeguarding Authority and reform CRB checks to make them fair. It’s possible that these will be included in the detail of the Bill.

British civil liberties have been dismantled systematically since 2001. The National Identity Register, biometric passports, the NHS spine, Contactpoint and the Vetting and Barring Scheme are just a few of the most egregious privacy invasions we have suffered.

Our every move is watched with suspicion by the authorities. ANPR systems record every journey we make. Video and audio Surveillance Systems (SS) watch us in every public space and many private ones too. Thousands of public bodies abuse their RIP Act powers to spy on us for trivial reasons. The police can stop us and search us arbitrarily, and they keep “pre-crime” databases on the innocent. Our private communications are monitored, analysed and recorded both by the Government and private companies.

Yet often MPs want one rule for us and another for them. The children of MPs can be “shielded” on ContactPoint to protect their privacy – but ours can’t. Very few MPs have an ID card even though ministers have been doing everything in their power to coerce the public into “volunteering” for them. Many MPs voted to exempt themselves from the Freedom of Information Act, to protect their “privacy”, whilst passing laws that erode ours.

When it comes to liberty in Britain today, all animals are equal, but some are more equal than others. This hypocrisy has to end and the systematic assault on our civil liberties must be reversed.

The Power2010 campaign is conducting a letter writing campaign asking Prospective Parliamentary Candidates to:

…commit that, if you are elected, you will vote to repeal the Identity Cards Act 2006 and will defend our privacy as fiercely as you would defend your own and that of your family.

The above reproduces what I sent to Sheffield Central PPCs. You can take part in the campaign here.

Now Ross Anderson and Steven Murdoch, computer security researchers at the University of Cambridge, have published a paper [PDF] analysing 3D-Secure. Announcing the work on his blog, Prof. Anderson said,

From the engineering point of view, [3D-secure] does just about everything wrong, and it’s becoming a fat target for phishing. So why did it succeed in the marketplace? Quite simply, it has strong incentives for adoption. Merchants who use it push liability for fraud back to banks, who in turn push it on to cardholders. … This is yet another case where security economics trumps security engineering, but in a predatory way that leaves cardholders less secure.

The paper concludes by recommending technical measures that would improve security for card-holders. It also calls for regulation to protect consumers from being forced to accept liability for online fraud.

I hope that the academic rigour of Anderson and Murdoch’s work, backed by the formidable reputation of the University of Cambridge Security Research Laboratory, will help to focus mainstream attention on Visa and Mastercard’s selfish treatment of their customers.

The title of the talk was “The Future of Privacy” and Schneier’s treatment of his topic was comprehensive. He started by listing some technologies and practices that can threaten our privacy: overt surveillance systems; mobile phones, RFID tags and the like that produce personal information as a byproduct; automatic identification technologies such as ANPR; and unique identifiers in gadgets such as digital cameras or colour laser-printers.

Schneier reminded us of his famous saying, that just as greenhouse gasses are the polution of the industrial age, data is the polution of the information age. Data is generated when we transact business, swipe our loyalty cards, use a travel card or drive through an automatic toll-booth. We give it away when we socialise by email, instant messenger and Facebook. Sometimes other people release data about us – possibly without our consent. As the cost of processing and storing all this information falls to zero even data of marginal value becomes worth keeping. In fact it’s often cheaper to keep everything than to decide what should be deleted! Data that was ephemeral 20 years ago is now stored.

In the information society most data about us isn’t controlled by us. In the US, laws protect the data that is under our control, but in the information society it tends not to be. Our Gmail, phone records, medical records, financial transactions and photos of us on Facebook are all controlled by someone else. EU law is substantially better in this area but it could still be improved.

Such a wealth of data enables new forms of surveillance. For example, surveillance can now occur backwards in time. This was done in London after the 7/7 bombings – the people responsible, and the route they took on the day, were identified after the fact from surveillance-system footage. Pervasive data collection also enables wholesale surveillance – not “follow that car” but “follow every car.”

What will be the privacy impact of our society’s continuing technological advancement?

Schneier believes a step change is coming. We live in a unique time: cameras are everywhere AND we can see them; identity checks happen all the time AND we know they’re happening. However technology is a great distrupter of equilibriums and Moore’s law is a friend of intrusive tools. Soon face-recognition software will obviate the need to carry ID – when you walk into your workplace they’ll already know who you are and whether you’re supposed to be there.

New invasive technologies will emerge and become pervasive: digital video surveillance with automatic face recognition; networked cameras that can track people through a city automatically; better tracking of our personal devices through their radio signatures or RFID tags; better quality images from cameras. Our era will herald the death of ephemeral conversation. Soon everything we say and do will be on the record. We could try to reject these technologies, but once general adoption occurs, opting out starts to look suspicious. In some cases the authorities have already argued that, “They left their mobile phone at home, which shows they didn’t want anyone to know where they were going.”

What can we do about these threats to our privacy?

Schneier doesn’t believe we can engineer our way back to a more private world. Privacy-enhancing technologies already exist and they could go a long way towards retoring the balance if they gained widespread adoption. However people are seduced by convenience so they tend to make bad privacy trade-offs. We’re on Facebook because our friends are, and while we’re chatting to them we’re focused on the conversation, not on how much data we’re releasing or to whom.

A lot can be done by paying attention to the default settings of software and systems. Most of us won’t change these so if they are secure from the outset any loss of privacy will be minimised. However companies like Facebook make more money the more public we make our data so there’s no incentive for them to set privacy-enhancing defaults.

We need to press for legislation that protects privacy: comprehensive laws regulating what can be done with personal information about us and more privacy protection from the police. However the law finds it difficult to keep up with the pace of technological change.

We also need to start talking about the value of privacy. We want it as a social good. Individual privacy protects us from those in power and it’s also a fundamental human need. Privacy is a part of dignity.

Schneier rejects the security versus privacy notion as a false dichotomy. Only identity-based security reduces privacy and the effectiveness of this is limited. Physical security measures such as locks and burglar alarms don’t reduce privacy. Nor does knowing that you might have to fight back if terrorists hijack your flight. We don’t need to know who’s sat next to us on an aeroplane – we just need to know know whether they’re planning to blow it up! However checking intent is difficult so we check identity instead and pretend that’s the same thing.

Privacy and openness have different effects on Governments and citizens. Government secrecy increases its power whereas transparency and openness reduces it. Conversely, forced openness in people increases the inbalance in power between them and the state, yet forced openness in Government reduces the gap. The balance we need to strike is between liberty and control not privacy and security. Real security comes from having both liberty and privacy.

The above notwithstanding, sometimes we are forced to trade between security and privacy, for example when we give the police the power to search our homes. In such cases we can maintain the balance of power through audit and oversight. Search warrants are a security measure that restrict police searches to only those cases where a magistrate – an impartial advocate for the suspect – can be convinced there are reasonable grounds for suspicion.

Schneier concluded that the death of privacy is over-stated. Left unregulated and unconstrained, technology tends to tip the balance of our society against individual privacy, however it doesn’t make the balancing act go away. Society can choose to deliberately reset the balance with legislation.

We may ultimately have to wait for a new generation of digitally-savvy lawmakers to take office before the the future of privacy can be guaranteed in the information age.

It turns out I wasn’t the only one to notice this potential. Reports last week indicate that a Verified by Visa phishing scam is now circulating by email:

Webroot’s Andrew Brandt claimed that the scam begins with an email that appears to be targeted at holiday shoppers who buy gifts online. Brandt said: “Once you register with the (real) Verified by Visa service, participating merchants permit you to enter a password in addition to your card information.

“In addition to providing the purchaser with an additional layer of safety, the password also gives the merchant some assurance that larger-than-normal transactions (like the ones you make during holiday shopping season) will be approved quickly, without triggering fraud alerts.”

However Brandt pointed that in the email, the user is sent to a web page that asks you for the information you gave the card-issuing bank at the time you first signed up for the credit card. He also commented that the page is clearly more professional, slick and clean than most phishing pages as the form’s businesslike appearance serves to reassure the victim that the page really belongs to Visa.

You might think that credit-card companies have a vested interest in reducing fraud however the reality is subtly different. Their interests lie in reducing their liability not the overall fraud-loss figures. Like chip-and-pin before it, the main benefit to banks and merchants of the 3D-secure system is that it transfers liability for fraud onto the card-holder, not that it improves the intrinsic security of transactions.

Here’s my understanding of how it works: banks first offer to indemnify merchants from any fraudulent transactions they charge that have been authenticated using the scheme. This is a strong incentive for merchants and has ensured widespread adoption. Next the banks adjust their terms and conditions to make their customers liable for all password-authenticated transactions and impose on them a duty to protect their password. Lastly the bank asserts that any password-authenticated transaction must either have originated with the cardholder or be as a result of their neglect – i.e. they have allowed their password to become known to someone else. The customer is then held liable for the cost of the fraud unless they can somehow prove they are not to blame for their password being used without their consent. Both the bank and merchant are protected from loss at the expense of the card-holder.

Is it reasonable to expect credit-card customers to shoulder the blame for the failure of such a fragile security system given the prevelance and increasing sophistication of phishing attacks such as the one reported by Webroot? Implementations of 3D-Secure vary between banks and card companies, however the technology is inherently susceptible to social-engineering attacks, as I noted in my previous post. In addition, even if your password security is meticulous, in some cases all a fraudster needs to reset it are the details on the card and the holder’s date of birth. Hardly a challenge for criminals with a passing knowledge of social-networking and the darknets.

I think fraud liablility should remain with banks and credit-card companies except in cases where they can prove their customers are trying to rip them off. The card companies are best placed to solve the problem of online fraud but there’s no incentive for them to do so if they don’t stand to lose from it.