ORGcon 2014
Surveillance, whistleblowing and the media
Some notes from the UK’s biggest digital rights conference, this year focussing on government surveillance
Saturday, 15 November, 2014: Several hundred people interested in digital rights congregate at King’s College London’s Waterloo campus, for the Open Rights Group’s 2014 conference. I am proud to have been elected to the board of ORG in 2013, having been a founding member of the Advisory Council, so I figured I should share some of my notes from the conference.
I’ve already written about Cory Doctorow’s opening keynote, but there were many other sessions across the day. To avoid these pieces becoming too long and unwieldy, I’m covering an individual session in each piece.
Edit: Via Ecodissident Hosting, I have discovered that Indymedia UK are hosting an audio recording of this — and other — sessions.
The second session I attended was a panel discussion, chaired by Pam Cowburn, ORG’s communications director; with Jodie Ginsberg, chief exec of Index on Censorship; Rachel Oldroyd, editor of the Bureau of Investigative Journalism; and Duncan Campbell, investigative journalist who exposed the existence of GCHQ and Echelon.
Jodie Ginsberg started by saying how shocked she was at the lack of outrage in the British press when GCHQ literally smashed the computers of Guardian journalists over the Snowden revelations but, seeing the phone records of The Sun’s political editor being seized under anti-terrorism laws as a result of a police leak enquiry, British journalists are finally beginning to wake up to the fundamental threat to free speech.
(And that’s without mentioning GCHQ accessing foreign take without warrants, spooks seeking sources at the Mail on Sunday and even local authorities spying on journalists using RIP Act powers.)
Duncan Campbell described the “go for the data as soon as it is available” approach as an existential threat to freedom.
He also reminded us that human rights are a balancing act, where neither absolute security nor privacy is available.
The panel also expressed frustration that the wider British media seem to be suffering from a not-made-here problem over the Snowden revelations and the public debate seen elsewhere is simply not happening here:
In one of the parallel sessions, similar comments were made:
Some of the problem here will be cultural; we don’t have the same kind of civil society as in Germany or even the USA. Similarly, while Edward Snowden came from within the NSA, there have been no whistleblowers from GCHQ.
State surveillance, however, is out of control; last week it was revealed that even legally privileged communications are intercepted and Green politicians have claimed that the Wilson doctrine is being violated as GCHQ is spying on Green politicians. (An audience member later suggested that part of the problem is that lawyers, journalists and MPs all optimistically considered themselves exceptionally protected from surveillance.)
Edited to add: More on this came out today (14 January 2015), with “MI6 forced to show how it may snoop on privileged lawyer-client exchanges: Documents passed to civil liberties group Reprieve reveal intelligence agency’s attempt to show it stays within the law”
Jodie Ginsberg says that lack of transparency is at the heart of the problem; Duncan Campbell doesn’t feel that the law is likely to be of much help to us:
And, of course, bad behaviour in the Global North isn’t just our problem:
One of the key problems we face is that, while we see protections against general warrants for the search of real property (in particular the US Fourth Amendment), we need analogous protection against digital surveillance.
Knowing that illegal surveillance cannot be adduced as evidence (as “fruit of the poisoned tree” in US jurisprudence), we’re seeing a particular problem of the exploitation of “parallel construction” — which one might term “how can we lie to the courts?”
An audience member asked how people can protect themselves from surveillance, to which Duncan Campbell showed us his home-made Faraday cage for his mobile phones:
Protecting oneself completely from surveillance, however, is really very difficult — even Edward Snowden made mistakes when he was in Hong Kong.
It was pointed out that the Centre for Investigative Journalism will be holding the Logan Symposium in December to “bring together key figures in the fight against invasive surveillance and secrecy”, with a strand called Strategies for Survival, workshops on protection and a marketplace of relevant organisations (including ORG). It is also worth mentioning the Logan Handbook by Silkie Carlo and Arjen Kamphuis that the Centre for Investigative Journalism have available for free download (in six different formats) from their website: Information Security for Journalists.
When asked about DRIP (which I wrote to my MP about), Duncan Campbell described the “emergency” legislation as an effective coup d’état by the intelligence services — legislation enacted without properly consulting Parliament.
While I was disappointed at the over-focus on mainstream journalists, when we are all small players in that market now, Alex Hilton summarised the session relatively well in a single tweet:
Before moving on, it’s worth linking to another of Christian Payne’s recordings, this time an interview with Bill Budington and Micah Lee on Surveillance Self Defence:
ORGcon 2014 was generously sponsored by F-Secure and Andrews & Arnold Ltd. The Open Rights Group exists to preserve and promote your rights in the digital age; we are funded by hundreds of people like you.
