Government plans to monitor facebook are fundamentally flawed
The government's latest plans for monitoring social networks show a worrying lack of understanding of these online platforms. Privacy, cost, data security and technology that can easily by-pass the government's 'spies' hardly seem to have been considered at all.
Imagine having a conversation with someone in the privacy of your own home: would you be happy for this to be recorded? Unlikely. So what, therefore, is the difference between such a conversation conducted in a physical space and a conversation conducted in a virtual one?
The government claims not to be interested in the contents of your conversation, only the frequency and with whom, but during one interview* a home office spokesman did concede that with high profile cases the police would want to examine the contents of social network chatter. "The security service would want the ability to capture information that could lead to conviction." This means that, like it or not, everything will need to be stored and could, therefore, be accessed at any time.
Nor is such a plan going to be cheap. The government would have to allocate hundreds of millions of pounds of taxpayers' money at a time when debt and unemployment is rising. Cambridge University security expert Richard Clayton thinks that there are far better ways of spending scare resources of cash. He has been quoted as saying 'if the government wants to make us safer, having a few more police on the electronic beat would be a good idea." This would not only be a lot cheaper but more a more flexible option in terms of where and how they are deployed.
Then there are the technical considerations. What if the data the government wants is held on different servers. For example, I create a webmail account with a foreign webmail provider and all of my data is stored there. The proposed new monitoring would be able to see me connecting to it, but not a lot else. So the UK government is now in a position that it would have to ask a foreign power for this data. They may say no or the data simply may not have been stored as that country's laws do not legislate for it. So with one simple move I have circumvented the whole very expensive system.
The final question has to be around the government's track record when it comes to IT systems and data security. A recent report by the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust* has claimed that a quarter of all the largest public sector database projects are either fundamentally flawed and in some cases are in clear breach of European data protection laws. The report is based on the work done by the foundation for information policy research and makes for terrifying reading. Add to this the number of times over the last few years a government department or agency has lost or misplaced data. Can we really trust the government with this data?
Joe Hughes,
Research & Insight Manager
