Government gags its own employees while spying on us

Almost 5,000 civil servants and local council staff have been given lucrative severance packages which contain gagging clauses.

Over the past two years the business and climate change departments between them have signed confidentiality agreements worth over £4 million with 95 departing employees.

What has the climate change department got to hide, apart from the fact that ‘man-made global warming’ is the greatest con-trick the Government has ever pulled?

Between 2005 and 2010, for some unaccountable reason the latest figures available, the number of confidentiality deals agreed by councils soared from 179 to 1,027.

Brighton and Hove, Britain’s first Green-controlled council, topped the list, with 123 gagging agreements.

Aren’t the Greens supposed to be in favour of ‘transparency’? What are they so anxious to cover up?

I refer my honourable friend to the answer I gave earlier in relation to the department for climate change.

 

Commendably, Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt and Communities Secretary Eric Pickles are both trying to combat the use of public money to buy the silence of whistle-blowers in their departments.

But I fear they are swimming against a toxic tide.

Gagging NHS managers and Town Hall dissidents is simply part of a much wider, more sinister conspiracy against free speech and freedom of information in Britain.

As the State pries ever more intrusively into our lives, it is going to unprecedented lengths to shield itself from scrutiny.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2340588/RICHARD-LITTLEJOHN-Enough-make-gag-Spending-OUR-money-stop-US-told-truth-OUR-public-services.html#ixzz2WB1mk1TS

Whistleblowers v Big State and Big Tech: we still need Davids to bring down Goliath

Reblogged from Michael Meacher MP:

There are several huge lessons that flow from this latest explosive story about the comprehensive range of the modern surveillance State.   First, if we are ever going to know what is really going on behind the scenes and what government is getting up to, we are entirely dependent on the morality and courage of a handful of very brave whistleblowers, since government cannot be trusted to be transparent or honest.   Edward Snowden ranks alongside Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon papers about what was really happening in Vietnam, and Bradley Manning, who was responsible for the Wikileaks exposure of what was really going on in Iraq.   Now from Snowden we know that the US National Security Agency (NSA)  – and probably also Britain’s GCHQ at Cheltenham – can, and does, wiretap anyone anywhere.   The US Prism system has been in operation for a full 7 years, but of course not a word was breathed about it by its perpetrators.   First lesson, whistleblowers need to have solidly entrenched in statute a cast-iron guarantee of their protection and safety so long as what they reveal is manifestly in the public interest.

Second, the argument will continue to be used that snooping on everyone everywhere is necessary to stop jihadists’ terrorist outrages.   Of course every reasonable action should be taken to pre-empt terrorism, though ordinary intelligence detection on the ground has been regularly shown to be far more effective than an internet ‘fishing expedition’.   But the real point of these latest revelations is that the motive goes far, far beyond any plausible expectation that it will apprehend terrorists.    It is about achieving the power of full-scale surveillance of a nation, and no doubt eventually the population of the world – a power which Snowden believes, probably rightly, wsill rapidly escalate out of control.

A third disturbing lesson from this episode is how easily the Big State (the Bush and Obama Administrations) pressurised Big Tech (the 9 or more big internet companies) into handing over vast quantities of private internet traffic which went far beyond what were believed to be the legal limits.   Initially they shared data specifically required under the US Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), but then under pressure from government they built in separate, secure portals sometimes on company servers into which, when government requested it, companies would deposit data ready for government to retrieve it, without any of the hassle or limits of FISA procedures.

Fourth, how far did GCHQ use material garnered from the US Prism system about UK individuals and then hand it on to MI5/6?   We know that 197 intelligence reports were generated for GCHQ from Prism last year.   But why did GCHQ use Prism at all rather than the normal legal protocol to get information from an internet company in another country?   Nobody would disagree that GCHQ should access US information to monitor individuals suspected of terrorism, but the question remains unanswered whether the NSA conduit, previously unknown, has been used on a regular basis to collect information about individuals that the UK law prohibits.

Tesco will use loyalty card to snoop on shoppers

Buying pizza? Expect a healthy reminder from Tesco: Supermarket giant will use loyalty card data to see who is eating what

• The system will use Clubcard data to check what shoppers are eating
• Tesco said it wanted to play its part in battling the growing obesity crisis
  
• Might offer vouchers for healthier products and promoting a better diet via suggested recipes

By Rob Davies

Tesco will monitor the shopping habits of customers who want to slim and advise them on how to eat more healthily.

The system will work by using Clubcard data to check whether shoppers are loading up on doughnuts, chocolate and pizzas.

The supermarket giant said it wanted to play its part in battling the growing obesity epidemic.

Data: Tesco are to use their Clubcard technology to evaluate what everyone is eating

Tesco boss Phil Clarke said he would draw on the vast database of customer information held in Tesco’s Clubcard loyalty scheme, which has around 16million members.

Tesco hasn’t decided how it will use the information, but options include offering vouchers for healthier products and promoting a better diet via suggested recipes.

 

‘The information provided by Clubcard is invaluable,’ said Mr Clarke.

‘Our customers have told us they’d like help in choosing healthy options, so on an individual level, we want to see whether customers would welcome tailored suggestions for how they could shop more healthily.’ Mr Clarke promised that customers would need to ‘opt in’, rather than being bombarded by unwanted suggestions from the supermarket.

‘We won’t encourage healthier lifestyles by editing choices, but we can influence choice by making healthier options,’ he said.

Unhealthy: They want to find out how many people are eating bad food such as pizzas, doughnuts and chocolate

Mr Clarke told The Grocer magazine that the scheme ‘could be a really innovative way of highlighting those healthier options’.

The supermarket’s technology experts have built an online tool - dubbed the ‘healthy little differences tracker’ - that will measure how customers’ habits change as a result of the healthy eating drive.

It is also expected to contribute data on customers’ eating habits to government research into obesity.

Only anonymous data will be passed to health research organisations, unless customers volunteer to submit their details and waive their right to anonymity.

Tesco, which has already teamed up with charity Diabetes UK to research diet patterns, said that some 65 per cent of its customers said their lifestyle isn’t as healthy as they would like.

One other major supermarket, which asked not to be named because the plans are at an early stage, said it was conducting trials of new store layouts to encourage healthier eating.

A source at the supermarket said it had drafted in behavioural psychologists to come up with ‘nudge tactics’ to coax shoppers into the fruit and vegetable aisle.

Tesco’s plan to use Clubcard information to target obesity is part of its Tesco and Society campaign, a broader effort to show that the supermarket is contributing to British life.

Britain’s largest supermarket has already met one of its targets by reducing the number of calories sold in its own-brand soft drinks last year by one billion.

And Mr Clarke said that Tesco would also put pressure on food producers to follow suit.

Campaign: Tesco want to encourage shoppers to eat a more healthy and balanced diet.They have suggested that they might offer deals on better food

‘We want to take others with us, including suppliers,’ he said.

Tesco has also thrown its weight behind government plans to introduce a universal label on the front of packaging, informing buyers of how much fat, sugar and salt they contain.

And the supermarket has also stepped up efforts to reduce the amount of food that is wasted every day in Britain.

Mr Clarke said last week that the average British family was wasting £700 of food a year.

He said Tesco would help by cutting down on promotions that encourage customers to buy large amounts of food that has only a very short shelf life.

Tesco’s campaigns on food waste and obesity come with the reputation of supermarkets at a low ebb, after horsemeat was found in food sold by a string of major retailers.

Source

Poor coverage of Google’s Street View scandal settlement [USA - but here too]

By Ryan Chittum | cjr.org

Google paid $7 million to 38 states earlier this week to settle its Street View privacy scandal.

This was a serious privacy violation and despite the fact that this story has been unfolding for three years, much of the coverage of the settlement was surprisingly poor.

So it’s worth backtracking to remember what happened here.

In Europe a few years ago, Google was under scrutiny for its Street View cars, which trawl streets taking pictures for Google’s maps. Protestors didn’t want the Web giant taking pictures of their homes and putting them online. They didn’t realize that Google would also be collecting information from their Internet routers as it passed by.

In April 2010, privacy-sensitive Germany discovered that Google was collecting MAC addresses and wifi network names in order to improve its location services technology. German regulators went bananas.

A few days later, on April 27, 2010, Google responded in a blog post by that said, “Google does not collect or store payload data,” which is data you transmit when using the Internet.

Eight days after that, on May 5, German privacy regulators told Google they wanted to audit one of its Street View cars themselves to prove that it wasn’t collecting sensitive personal information.

By May 14, Google was forced to issue a correctionof its earlier statement, admitting that it had collected and stored payload data:

But it’s now clear that we have been mistakenly collecting samples of payload data from open (i.e. non-password-protected) WiFi networks, even though we never used that data in any Google products.

However, we will typically have collected only fragments of payload data because: our cars are on the move; someone would need to be using the network as a car passed by; and our in-car WiFi equipment automatically changes channels roughly five times a second…

So how did this happen? Quite simply, it was a mistake. In 2006 an engineer working on an experimental WiFi project wrote a piece of code that sampled all categories of publicly broadcast WiFi data. A year later, when our mobile team started a project to collect basic WiFi network data like SSID information and MAC addresses using Google’s Street View cars, they included that code in their software—although the project leaders did not want, and had no intention of using, payload data.

But most everything Google said there was also incorrect.

We now know that a Google engineer, Marius Milner, “made a deliberate software-design decision” to collect the data, that Google collected more than fragments of information, and that Milner told his supervisors and colleagues about the tracking in the design document for the project. The question naturally arises: What else are middle-tier coders collecting at Google that their bosses don’t know about?

What made this worse was Google’s response when the scandal came to light. Milner invoked his Fifth Amendment rights and, in the words of the FCC, “Google deliberately impeded and delayed the Bureau’s investigation” by “willfully and repeatedly violat(ing) Commission orders to produce certain information and documents that the Commission required for its investigation.”

Although a world leader in digital search capability, Google took the position that searching its employees’ e-mail “would be a time-consuming and burdensome task.”

Google’s lawyers disputed the FCC’s assertions about the company’s cooperation, but how often do you see the FCC scream at a giant company like that?

Adding to the screwball comedy element, Google told regulators that it would delete the data. Then it told them two years later that it hadn’t quite done that.

That’s the background. Now on to this week’s coverage of the settlement.

Happily, AllThingsD’s Liz Gannes, who got the settlement scoop last week, got the story right. Many of those who followed her did not.

Time just flat gets the story wrong, buying Google’s assertion that it was an accident (emphasis mine):

But it turned out that Google went much further than that, vacuuming up snippets of browser history and email data. The company explained that when the Street View program launched, the team inadvertently included code in their software that “sampled all categories of publicly broadcast WiFi data,” even though the project leaders did not want the more comprehensive data. As soon as Google discovered the practice, it grounded the Street View cars and separated and secured the data on its network.

Again, Milner designed the software to do what Time says Google did inadvertently.

TechCrunch also misses:

In 2010, Google was accused of collecting some private Wi-Fi payload data while its Street View vehicles were on the road and taking images in the U.S. and Europe. Google first denied that this ever happened, but the company later confirmed that this was indeed the case, though it also argued that this was “a mistake.” In 2006, Google argued, one of its engineers developed some code to collect this data for an experimental project and this code somehow found its way into the Street View code, as well.

Google argued that, but it was later shown to be false by the FCC, something TechCrunch doesn’t note.

Agence France Presse flubs the story too, as does the Washington Post:

Google has long said that Street View’s collection of personal information was inadvertent and has apologized.

Jeff Jarvis, author of glowing book called What Would Google Do and another book that criticizes the “panic over privacy,” Public Parts, didn’t much like the lede story in The New York Times the day after the settlement, firing off a post at his BuzzMachine blog accusing the paper of something called “technobias.”

Now, you can certainly argue about whether this story deserved the placement it got, and Jarvis is right on to criticize the Times for this quote from an anti-Google shill, which lands in the fifth paragraph of the piece:

“Google puts innovation ahead of everything and resists asking permission,” said Scott Cleland, a consultant for Google’s competitors and a consumer watchdog whose blog maintains a close watch on Google’s privacy issues

Look, you’re not really a “consumer watchdog” if you’re on the payroll of Microsoft and the telecom giants. The Times shouldn’t have quoted Cleland so high in the story—and maybe not at all.

But other Jarvis criticisms are way off.

The cars recorded whatever data was passing on these — again — *open* and *public* networks, which can be easily closed.

Just because the networks weren’t password-protected doesn’t mean their owners wanted Google driving by in a car and vacuuming up their URLs, emails, and bank account passwords to see whether they might be of corporate interest.

And here’s how Jarvis explains the backstory:

Stupidly and for no good reason, the cars also recorded other data passing on *open* wifi networks. But that data was incredibly limited: just what was transmitted in the random few seconds in which the Google car happened to pass once by an address. There is no possible commercial use, no rationally imagined nefarious motive, no goldmine of Big Data to be had. Nonetheless, privacy’s industrial-regulator complex jumped into action to try to exploit the incident. But even Germany — the rabid dog of privacy protectors — dropped the case.

But the FCC found that Google “intended to collect, store and review” the data “to be analyzed offline for use in other initiatives.” And Germany dropped the criminal case, while France levied a record fine and Norway and others investigated and fined Google too.

Finally, Jarvis actually questions whether Google is a “serial privacy violator,” as the Times quotes unnamed critics calling it. But that’s hardly unreasonable for the paper to do, particularly since it quotes Consumer Watchdog (not the shill) essentially saying the same thing.

Recall the Google Buzz disaster, which prompted an FTC settlement, and how it hacked iPhones to track users for ads and paid the biggest FTC fine in history. There’s the Google Play question. Then there’s the EU regulators who say they will take “coercive actions” against Google “after it failed to follow their orders to comply with EU privacy laws” after Googlechanged its policy to track users across all its products.

“At the end of a four-month delay accorded to Google to conform and promise to implement recommendations, no response has been forthcoming by the company” said France’s CNIL data protection agency.

That sounds an awful lot like what the FCC said happened in the Street View case. Really, what do you have to do to earn the label serial violator

The point is, Google is an incredibly powerful and important corporation, and its slip-ups require close attention, and a memory of what’s been reported not so long ago.

Source: cjr.org