Is the City worth it? Financial regulation by John Kay

Is the City worth it? | Prospect Magazine: "The resentment of earnings in finance is stoked by a well-founded combination of doubts about its utility, and a recognition that the global financial crisis revealed that many people in the finance sector were not, even within their own frame of reference, very good at their jobs.

 All inequality is to some degree socially corrosive, but inequality which seems unconnected to deserts is particularly corrosive. The most disturbing downside of the global success of the City of London is the corrupting effect on society at large of a depreciation of ordinary morality and human values. The ethical standards associated with parts of the finance sector have been deplorable." 'via Blog this'

Internet governance: on the right road or the road to nowhere?

Internet governance: on the right road or the road to nowhere? | LSE Media Policy Project: "The problem with today’s debates on Internet governance, is that they’re still yesterday’s debates. Arguments about ‘enhanced cooperation’ are a cul-de-sac. It’s the changes taking place in the fast lane of the motorway – the transition to cloud computing, the concentration of economic power within the Internet, the step change in the Internet-user interface which the Internet of Things is poised to bring – that will determine the future of the Internet and its growing impact on our societies. It’s in that fast lane that today’s debates about Internet governance need to be taking place." 'via Blog this'

VSPs and the FN - Krugman on LePen

VSPs and the FN - The New York Times:

"Funke, Schularick, and Trebesch recently did some work asking whether the rise of right-wing extremism in the 1930s was paralleled in other times, and found that the answer is yes: “politics takes a hard right turn following financial crises.”

 Interestingly, this isn’t true for all kinds of crises. Financial crises, they suggest, are different, in part because

financial crises may be perceived as endogenous, ‘inexcusable’ problems resulting from policy failures, moral hazard and favouritism.

 I would put it a bit differently: financial crises call into question whether respectable people know what they’re doing, in a way that other kinds of economic shocks often don’t.

 The point for Europe is that the doctrinaire policies followed since 2010, and the unwillingness to rethink dogma in the light of experience, aren’t just economically destructive. They undermine the legitimacy of the whole European system, and may in the end lead to political catastrophe." 'via Blog this'

UK cyber counter attack programme

Chancellor's speech to GCHQ on cyber security - Speeches - GOV.UK:

"And part of establishing deterrence will be making sure that whoever attacks us knows we are able to hit back.
We need to destroy the idea that there is impunity in cyberspace.

We need those who would harm us to know that we will defend ourselves robustly. And that we have the means to do so.

This is the fifth element of the plan.

Thanks to the investment that we have made during the last Parliament, just as our adversaries can use a range of actions against us, from the virtual to the physical, so we are making sure that we can employ a full spectrum of actions in response.

We reserve the right to respond to a cyber attack in any way that we choose.

And we are ensuring that we have at our disposal the tools and capabilities we need to respond as we need to protect this nation, in cyberspace just as in the physical realm.

We are building our own offensive cyber capability – a dedicated ability to counter-attack in cyberspace.
We have built this capability through investing in a National Offensive Cyber Programme.

The Programme is a partnership between the Ministry of Defence and GCHQ, harnessing the skills and talents of both organisations to deliver the tools, techniques and tradecraft required for the UK to establish a world class capability." 'via Blog this'

Privacy, encryption and the draft Investigatory Powers Bill #IGF2015

From the official transcript (corrected into English):
GABRIELLE GUILLEMIN:  I would be curious to hear from Chris Marsden who is Professor at Sussex University of what he thinks of the debate in United Kingdom when the investigative powers bill was published recently. 

CHRIS MARSDEN:  So I promised... by the way I was expecting to have people start throwing things at me.  I am only telling you what is going on in the UK but I am not responsible.  I promised I would divide this talk up in the good, the bad and the ugly.  

Let's start with the good.  This will be the shortest part.  We are actually having a debate in the UK and the current investigative powers bill is going in front of joint Parliamentary Committee scrutiny.  It is the response to a previous attempt to introduce a piece of legislation under the last Government that was actually vetoed by the junior coalition partner. Since this May we have a majority Government for the Conservative Party.  It has now been reintroduced in a different way.  You can see what the junior partner thought of it if you look up ‘Nick+Clegg’ online.  

We are having a debate and that's a very good thing. It is a 300 page Bill and there are lots of explanatory memoranda as well.  It is almost Patriot Act length, someone was commenting to me earlier.  Think of it as the UK Patriot Act, 14 years later.  

I should say the other element which I think is very important is that the Joint Scrutiny Committee (which considers the draft bill before it is actually introduced as a Bill in to Parliament) unfortunately doesn't seem to have taken advantage of the expertise that was available from the Scrutiny Committee that considered the previous failed Bill from three years ago, and there are no members of that previous Committee on the new Committee which is to say the least a shame.  For instance, the Intelligence and Security Committee of Parliament which is now Chaired by the former Attorney General of the country, is actually conducting its own shadow scrutiny investigation.  So we are shining light into dark corners.  

That's the good.  

The bad and I could go through a very long list but we only got five minutes.  So I should make it relatively short.  

There is no effective judicial review in a way that people would think of judicial review in the rest of the world.  So as things stand judges will have the ability to examine warrants for their reasonableness but not factual check on what the warrant contains.  And that's not full judicial review as it were. That's maybe a more of a matter problem of judicial oversight.  But I think that's probably the major bad.  

But there were many others. One of them is that there is as you may well know and the Chair stated in introduction, the Prime Minister has said he doesn't want there to be end to end encryption which doesn't have a back door for the security agencies.  There are problems with that, in that the British economy which if you start interfering as it were in the strong encryption products the UK has a very strong IT industry and there are a lot of companies that upset by what is still a draft scrutiny power that may or may not be introduced.  Tim Cook of Apple has been outraged at the ban on full encryption suggested.  

There will be problems for cloud providers and the financial services industry too.  And it has been suggested that this may be a major issue for as it were UK PLC, the UK economy as well.  I realize this is a rights based discussion we are having but Governments respond very well to that kind of thing.  

I have one minute.  

Let me quickly say, you know the new James Bond film has come out.  On the bad side I should tell you in Britain we think that the security agencies are a combination of Enigma code breakers, Alan Turing and Austin powers and if not James Bond and there has been quite a substantial publicity push, I repeat that, publicity push by the security agencies around the film and the publication of the draft bill.  Do not expect the British as we always call them the Great British Public to push back hard about this bill.  Activists have been outraged and some Members of Parliament outraged.  Sysadmins are outraged even at a local level.  Do not expect the general public to be outraged.  They like James Bond and they think he is a tremendous fellow.  

On the ugly, a year’s data retention costs will be extremely high.  There was a meeting, a Committee of Parliament, on Tuesday.  Government predicted the data retention cost would be somewhere in the order of $300 million, using universal currency (we have a currency but no one talks about it anymore).  The actual cost is basically exponentially higher at least according to the ISP and this will affect the one thing that the British people do care about in their broadband connections, the price.  That is the one possibility of there being a more general outcry of the bill.  

The other thing to say are about the data retention element of the bill: it will only retain metadata and not content. Two issues with that. Metadata is content. If you have access to all of someone's metadata you can make a very, very good approximation of what they want.  Content, of course, is relatively useless in security services unless you are very targeted because it is extremely expensive to analyze.  But the other part is to say that the ISPs think it is extremely difficult on a limited budget to separate metadata on a budget. That will be an interesting challenge if it were to come to law.  

I know this is audience that looking at the primary materials, section are the gagging clauses. One is a kind of Snowdonian engaging clauses and the other two are blanket clauses anything that the intelligence agencies don't do that is absolutely outrageous will be legal.  See sections 65, 66 and 71 of the Bill.

One final thing to say is UK Government will have to declare this Bill is consistent with both the European Convention on Human Rights and obligations as a member of the European Union under that Convention as it is incorporated in European Union law, but in terms of whether we will be members of either or both by the time this bill comes in to effect, watch this space.  
Much greater minds have contributed to my contribution this morning.  I spoke to Jon Crowcroft who is a professor at Cambridge, and many other academics who are deeply involved in trying to explain to Parliamentarians about what is involved.  Two people you should read. First and I almost take this draft bill as kind of the final insult, kind of postmortem insult, to Casper Bowden who has been one of the heroes of this debate.  He died in July of this year.  He wrote about the compatibility of mass surveillance with the European Convention on the Human Rights and he has been advising the European Parliament on this for 15 years. The second is my coauthor on our book where we talk about default encryption. His name is Ian Brown and he is a professor at Oxford.  And if you have read anything by Ian and Casper, you will be much more educated than with what advice I have given today."

Zimmermann Telegram - illegal UK interception of US cable in 1917 to aid war effort

Zimmermann Telegram - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: "Hall passed the telegram to the Foreign Office on 5 February, but still warned against releasing it. Meanwhile, the British discussed possible cover stories: to explain to the Americans how they got the ciphertext of the telegram without admitting to the cable snooping; and to explain how they got the cleartext of the telegram without letting the Germans know their codes were broken. Furthermore, the British needed to find a way to convince the Americans the message was not a forgery.

For the first story, the British obtained the ciphertext of the telegram from the Mexican commercial telegraph office. The British knew that the German Embassy in Washington would relay the message by commercial telegraph, so the Mexican telegraph office would have the ciphertext. "Mr. H", a British agent in Mexico, bribed an employee of the commercial telegraph company for a copy of the message. (Sir Thomas Hohler, then British ambassador in Mexico, claimed to have been "Mr. H", or at least involved with the interception, in his autobiography.) This ciphertext could be shown to the Americans without embarrassment. Moreover, the retransmission was enciphered using cipher 13040, so by mid-February the British not only had the complete text, but also the ability to release the telegram without revealing the extent to which the latest German codes had been broken—at worst, the Germans might have realized that the 13040 code had been compromised, but weighed against the possibility of United States entry into the war that was a risk worth taking.

Finally, since copies of the 13040 ciphertext would also have been deposited in the records of the American commercial telegraph, the British had the ability to prove the authenticity of the message to the United States government.
As a cover story, the British could publicly claim that their agents had stolen the telegram's deciphered text in Mexico. Privately, the British needed to give the Americans the 13040 cipher so that the United States government could verify the authenticity of the message independently with their own commercial telegraphic records, however the Americans agreed to back the official cover story. The German Foreign Office refused to consider a possible code break, and instead sent von Eckardt on a witch-hunt for a traitor in the embassy in Mexico." 'via Blog this'

Obituary: Caspar Bowden, a fearless privacy pioneer

Simon Davies, London School of Economics and Political Science

The world’s privacy advocates are reeling over the loss of one of their most influential and feared campaigners, Caspar Bowden, who has died of cancer. His fierce and combative evangelism for online privacy over two decades and surgical analysis of complex surveillance legislation raised the standard of commentary that influenced advocacy groups at home and abroad.

I had the honour and the pleasure of becoming a close friend and co-conspirator of Caspar. It wasn’t always easy – he held high expectations of his colleagues, who could often experience his wrath whenever they dared to negotiate with “the bastards” (whoever they happened to be at the time). The archaic American expression “ornery” could well have been invented for Caspar Bowden, as his opponents well knew.

In conferences and meetings where officials and ministers appeared there was frequently what became known as the “popcorn moment”, when Caspar would stand up and, from the back of the hall, clear his throat and launch into a devastating critique that would utterly destroy the credibility of his opponents. Within two years, ministerial staffers were routinely calling me to find out whether Caspar would be in the audience. No better tribute could ever be awarded to any campaigner.

Caspar Bowden, mid ‘popcorn moment’. Rama, CC BY-SA

Caspar joined the mainstream privacy world in 1997 during the Scrambling for Safety encryption event that I organised at the London School of Economics, and soon after he co-founded the Foundation for Information Policy Research (FIPR), which became the most astute think-tank in Britain in the field of surveillance.

At the time Caspar chaired Scientists for Labour, an organisation which at the time believed that the Labour Party (which had been elected to government only 18 days earlier) would actually respect scientific advice. The reams of dangerous and intrusive legislation the Labour government subsequently passed caused him to ditch this fantasy. In the years since Caspar appeared to abandon all faith in parties, taking pride in comparisons with TV character Mr MacKay in the comedy series Porridge, who famously said: “I have a job to do and, whatever else I am, I’m firm but fair. I want you to know that I treat you all with equal contempt”.

In 2002 Caspar joined Microsoft’s operation in Europe as chief privacy strategist, but the arrangement was a bad fit. Caspar continued to be outspoken, eventually parting company with Microsoft after he criticised the lack of privacy measures in its software and the firm’s cosiness with US government spooks. Years before Snowden’s revelations about US and UK mass surveillance in 2013, Bowden had already become deeply worried about the relationship between companies and security agencies – with his arguments about the safety of cloud data proven true by the subsequent leaks.

Gus Hosein, executive director of Privacy International and an an old friend and colleague said:

I’m not new to this issue, but whenever I struggle to get my head around the implications of a new policy or technology, I always looked to Caspar. I sought his guidance to navigate it, but I feared what he would say if I came out with something stupid. The future is uncertain enough, but without him it is even more daunting.

Caspar was very accurately described by another close friend and colleague Ian Brown, professor of Information Security and Privacy at Oxford University:

Caspar was a truly unique individual, one of the most passionate, methodical, relentless advocates of any cause I have met. I learnt so much from him as we worked together on and off for nearly 20 years on privacy issues. His forensic analysis of UK surveillance laws, and later European and US legislation, was essential reading for anyone who wanted to understand the implications of some extremely obscure language – including legislators themselves.

Brown believes UK internet users are still benefiting from Caspar’s successful campaign to remove “Big Browser” surveillance powers from the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000, and to ensure the burden of proof was not put onto individuals who might have actually forgotten passwords later demanded by police. His important reports for the European Parliament will also be key in the long-term decisions made by the EU to protect the privacy of its 500m citizens.

Anyone who knew Caspar understood that he was dogged in his later years by a deep cynicism about progress in privacy. Deeply mistrustful of governments, corporations and even the law, he eschewed mobile phones and came to place his faith almost solely on mathematical solutions, for example by heavily promoting the concept of differential privacy, which attempts to prevent a loss of privacy in situations where details can be inferred from other data.

Perhaps Caspar’s greatest legacy is that, in an age of increasing compromise, he showed us the importance of dogged, non-negotiable persistence. As George Bernard Shaw observed, all progress depends on the unreasonable man. In that respect, Caspar was a beacon of progress.

Simon Davies is Associate Director at London School of Economics and Political Science.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.