Archive for April, 2009
10 things to do if your house is being searched by the police
An excellent article on Iain Dale’s Journal by Damien Green’s wife:
10 things to do if your home is being searched by the police
this along side NightJacks “Guide for decent people” really are two articles that should be read carefully and learnt from.
Whilst Mrs Greens article is written for the partners of politicians partners, it does seem excellent advice for everyone, though I suspect the bit about photographers won’t apply so much to most of us, and I’d also query point 8:
“8. Recycle redundant electronic goods: Make sure, when upgrading any mobile phone, to dispose of the old handset rather than leave it in a desk drawer and forget about it. That can save the police wasting a huge amount of time packing it up as ‘evidence’ for detailed technical investigation in a neat cardboard box, held in place with plastic ties, when it hasn’t been used for years. The same goes for old laptop computers and old printers.”
Now to my mind I can’t help but think this is actually a good reason to have as many old phone’s computers and hard drives lying around as there may be space for, and really old hard drives make excellent door stops.
Calling “Jacqui Smith a Cunt”
In the best traditions of rigging google and getting heard, Old holborn suggests that everyone so inclined should observe on thier blog that “Jacqui Smith is a Cunt”
Having done so I’d everyone joining in, just to help google and the like pick up on it.
- Old Holborn
- GRumpy old Twat
- Zoomraker
- Norsefire Nemesis
- The Screech
- Cato
- Ranton Rab
- The man who fell back to bed
- Thick Custard
- deliver nothing labour party
- Steve shark
- Al Jahom
- Man in the street
- Apropos of what?
- Let fly the pigs of war
- Delphius debate
- New port city
- Sue
- And there was me thinking
- Reducing crimea
- Crowborough News
- Lets argue the point
- Constantly Furious
- Counting cats
- Bristol Dave
- Salted Slug
- Gigits
- Furious Student
- Plato
- Tom’s midnight garden
- Contempt is total
- Age of Kali
- Oleuanna
- Lancastrian Oik
- Stitch Master
Guido explained… maybe
A wonderful post by Samiz Data explaining the chaotic force that is Guido Fawkes. If you’ve ever wondered why so many people read him and also don’t care so much about his alleged hypocrisy then this post will explain it.
Update More from Stuart Sharpe on the same theme.
Somewhat puzzled
Hopefully this is my last post on the McBride/Guido business, as the world and their dog have by now analysed and commented on every aspect of it and then some. Derek Draper has now “apologised” and asked that the “whole blogosphere, right and left” start being nicer, a sentiment echoed by Liberal Conspiracy. Which quite frankly is where I start to get puzzled, I mean I didn’t realise that I had to be either right of left wing to be part of the “blogosphere” (I hate that “word“), but from reading many of the responses from writers seemingly sympathetic to the actions of Mr McBride that does appear to be the only options. There is much talk of the “right wing” dominance on-line where that seems to equate to “people not supporting labour”, but as Charles Crawford observes in terms of the internet which is made up predominately of private individuals doing thier own thing that’s a bit of a nonsense. The last time I saw such enforced partisan lines was at a meeting of geeks “discussing” VI vs. Emacs.
Meanwhile Guido is condemned for being “anti politics” as well as “pro-conservative” which is quite a trick to pull off, but then he’s also been attacked for both selling and not selling information to the papers. What seems to be forgotten is that at the end of the day Guido is a private citizen running a blog for his own amusement and so can do whatever he likes with it. People employed by and using the resources of the state or even a political party do not have that luxury. What these commentators seem to have missed is that there are a lot of individuals out there that are unhappy with our current parliament, and the government in particular, who are no longer dependent on a toadying mainstream media. When people write stories about our great and good that are awkward we hear time and again that ordinary people* are not interested in stories about the westminster village, yet day in day out that is just what the mainstream media gives us. The establishment also tells us that “the blogosphere does not do shades of grey” unlike obviously the careful balanced in depth articles we’re all used to seeing from the papers, TV and our various elected and unelected representatives? Obviously sites such as Burning our money and Tax payers alliance never do anything even approaching analysis nor does Ben Goldacre, and there was no aspect of investigative journalism in Guido’s revelations. Many of these commentators, especially within the established media, seem unable to accept that what is written about and becomes important on the internet is down to the individual choices of thousands of people acting separately and making up their own minds and that independence counts for a lot. I’ve linked to a lot of what could be classified as “right wing” journals here, and I suspect many people would class this as one, but seriously with a few exceptions try to find a “left wing” journal which doesn’t force this whole thing into a left Vs right framing and then complain about the messenger or justify that “everyone’s at it”. Little is given to entertain the idea that something wrong was actually done, and that someone not being controlled by the opposition might have wanted to do something about that, no thought is given to the idea that individual people might be concerned about the behaviour of those in state and want to do something about it. Mind if it does turn out that Guido is in fact being paid by David Cameron personally it doesn’t make one iota of difference to what we’ve been presented with and what’s been admitted to, I don’t for a moment care who exposes corruption and shoddy behaviour within the corridors of power so long as it is exposed.
Which is what confuses me, that individuals are seemingly not to be allowed to be interested in anything not released via a spokesman or other “sources” to the mainstream media. That we can’t try to get as much information as possible to then make up our own minds. That everything must be framed in terms of Left vs. Right. It seems that the idea that we might all be capable of individual thought and independence is of such utter anathema to the mainstream media and some aspects of the left, to such an extent that it blinds them to how they could engage and get their point of view across. I read journals I often disagree with and frequently disagree with what’s said in many of the others, but I get value from both and try to acknowledge a good idea when I see it (particularly galling when it comes from a Conservative or even the BNP). What tends to stop me reading any given site is if they’ve a habit of rebutting an argument by attacking what someone said some other time (They can’t be right about Y because they were wrong about X and they don’t like kittens) or some other aspect of the messenger. Can these people not see how counter productive this is, how every time they do it they just strengthen those they consider to be the opposition and drive more people to them?
Talking of blogs I often disagree with this on Harry’s place I agree with for a change and to second what they say in regards to No 10’s response *boggle* WTF! Though the comments still take a few shots at the messenger.
update LPUK also commenting on the enforced Labour/Conservative dichotomy
* I count myself as an ordinary person, having no particular party affiliation and having not being actively involved in politics since I was a student except for having CAMRA and Amnesty memberships. I only really started paying any interest about a year or so back. So maybe I ceased to be a normal person then.
Footnote: That rambled a lot more than I planned, sorry.
As an aside…
Is it just me or does the proposed Labour smear web site The Red Rag seem a name more appropriate for a site talking about menstruation or possibly even menstruation porn rather than politics?
Update Mope seems it’s not just me.
Events elsewhere
Today Guido Fawkes claimed another scalp assisted by the mainstream media, even if Mr McBride did reign in advance last night to try to limit the damage. I’ve not really got anything much to add to the excellent commentary that can be found elsewhere.
Being horribly meta and doing the whole blogger talking about blogger thing which is terribly dull here’s a bit of a round up. It’s great to see Tom Harris talking a lot of sense:
“We screwed up, big time. We have no-one — absolutely no-one at all — to blame for this but ourselves.”
Sadly he seems to be a lone voice from that area of politics, with others such as Tim Cheetham bemoaning the fact that this story of interest (apparently) only to “the political in-crowd” has driven more important news, that wasn’t being reported much anyway, from the headlines. With the added compulsory moan of how easy it is for people not working in politics to just moan and bitch without offering ideas of how to fix things (which oddly I thought was what we paid the politicians to work out, as we can’t actually do anything), but it seems it’s our fault that we don’t have decent politicians as we’re not following the agenda he’d prefer. Hopi Sen at least admits that it “looks bad for Labour” but again we should all be more interested in other stuff – Look there’s a wooki! Hopi then moves on to attacking the messenger failing to see that the standards a private individual such as Guido can be expected to be held to are different to those that a senior Civil Servant such as Mr McBride are held to. If nothing else as has been observed elsewhere we don’t pay for Guido, we did pay for McBride and the systems used to send the emails in question, hence it’s reasonable to have a lot more interest in the latter than the former.
Mr Draper has been alleging that someone’s emails must have been “hacked” for this sorry mess to have been found out, which as Dizzy observes is amusing given this week the Government is requiring all ISPs to record the envelope of every email we send and are on record of wanting to log everything. This of course is unlikely to be the end of it, as if ntohing else Douglas Carswell MP is asking Tom Watson (Labour MP & colleague of Mr McBride) what he knew. Of course as Anna Raccoon reminds us we were told that:
“In future, under a Gordon Brown regime, we need to have no spin, no briefing, no secrets and respect for parliament”
So that went well then.
There’s is a rather good/amusing analysis of Mr McBrides resignation on the Ranting Penguin and a better summary of events than this by Devils kitchen.
To end on a cheerer note for a sunday Iain Dale has the now compulsory downfall video, and as both Samizdata and Gaby Hinsliff observe today may well be the day when UK politics sees blogging make itself really felt and we all have the ability to create a blog and write about what matters to us and potentially to make a difference. Finally LegIron has a somewhat cheering review of the general unravelling of things.
Footnote: Contrary to what several people linked to above the Government still don’t have the right to read our emails (much less the ability if you’re careful), they just get to see the envelopes.
Update Far more thorough list of saturdays coverage of this story over at Iain Dale
Conspiracies and incompetance
Coincidences are wonderful things and I regularly give thanks to the fickle whims of serendipity . So this morning as work required me to be awake at a time I consider far too early for an Easter Saturday, I was presented with three unconnected articles which wonderfully answered a question I’ve often asked myself.
“Why aren’t deniable/false flag activities more common?”
After all for tarnishing reputations or spreading a bit of dirt they should be the easiest things in the world to carry out, a few trouble makers at a demo and the media can dismiss the entire thing. Free throw away websites or journals and anything can be made public. It really shouldn’t tax anyone’s brains too much.
So it seems that according to an updated journal on the New York Times, that “agent provocateurs” were indeed in play at the G20 protests until challenged at which point they appear to have readily revealed themselves. Following on from this there is the developing story concerning Iain Dale and Guido Fawkes regarding a deniable website that the powers that be “considered” setting up to do their dirty work. What both these stories show is that whilst such activities should be simple they remain beyond the competence of at least part of our current regime. The G20 incident due to the official mendicant having more ID on them than even a normally cautious protester, and cutting and running far too quickly and for the website story it’s yet more proof that groups of people (especially in government) can’t keep secrets and that they still haven’t learnt about the dangers of paper trails.
So the answer to my question is that out with specialist groups that make such matters their business, there simply isn’t the competence to carry out such simple tasks (something all the failed IT projects in Government should have tipped me off about really). This lack of competence is also why there probably isn’t a conspiracy. Which is quite cheering really.
Some what unrelated: From comments on Guido’s journal by Joe Gormley’s Grandson I’m now aware of http://www.newssniffer.co.uk/ which lets you track how news stories change on line over time within the same article.
Chicken Little rules the roost
I’ve been reading a lot of posts regarding how ISPs will be logging every web site we visit and all of our e-mail based on an eu directive that came in to force today. I’ve also read the UK legislation and the EU directive and as far as I can make out it’s all bollox! No really it is.
The only source for the belief that ISPs will be logging web pages I can find is an article in the telegraph it isn’t in either bit of legislation. Well not unless it’s been very sneakily snuck in, in something that’s not yet online and that no one has referenced. In fact nothing that isn’t already logged will be logged, what has changed it how long the logs are kept for.
Your ISP already logs when you connect to them and what IP address they give you, if you use their mail servers they log who you send mail to and from. This is routine and is currently thrown away after a month normally never looked at unless there’s a problem. I used to look at it a lot when I worked on the abuse desk of a large well known UK ISP, and the bit they’re logging half of it’s easily forged in an way undetectable from those logs. I am quite prepared to accept this is the thin end of the wedge, but at the moment the blogosphere (gods I hate that phrase) is raging against phantoms of it’s own imagining.
There is a circumstance where ISPs might log the web sites you go to, if they force you through a proxy server, or if you choose to use a proxy server. This is however very easy to detect.
1) Go to http://find-my-ip-address.net/ make a note of what it says your IP address is.
2) Check what your IP address is on your computer if they don’t match you’re going through a proxy server. Or you have an ADSL router which is giving you a private ip address.
(Private IP addresses start 192.168., 172.16 or 10. )
If you’re running windows you can find out your IP address by opening a cmd prompt and typing ipconfig look for the lines saying
IP Address. . . .
So your web browsing habits are safe, and you can make your email safe by using an email provider in a more friendly location. Or run your own get together with some mates, bribe a geek with beer and pay 10 quid a month for a virtual server you have complete control over.
There is a lot you can do easily to reduce what they can see, but at present your web access isn’t an issue. I’d be more worried about the retention of cell phone data including call location especially in light of events at the G20 summit (“We know you called X who was outside the bank of England whilst you were at the climate camp at 11:30, now why was that?”).
For the thicker end of the wedge take a look at:
Obama’s Surveillance State Targets PCs, Laptops and Media Devices and Should Obama Control the Internet?
For the record apart from working for a few years at an ISP, I’ve also worked with most of the large UK celco’s and currently run mail for over 60 domains on my own servers, amongst a few other things.
Update Sorry the independent is also reporting that Personal web data to be stored for a year, but again only in headline and paragraph one not in the details.
Data retention starts today
For those of you that may not have been paying attention the EU directive on data retention comes into force today. This means that from today your ISP will be required by law (The Data Retention (EC Directive) Regulations 2009) to retain data regarding your use of “internet access, internet e-mail or internet telephony” for a year and make it available to the government on request. Technically the regulations use the wonderfully imprecise phrase:
(a) in specific cases, and
(b) in circumstances in which disclosure of the data is permitted or required by law.
so I think on request is probably a fair interpretation.
Ignoring the much simpler aspects regarding telephone calls where all telephone companies must record, who you called, when and for how long as well as in the case of mobile providers your location at the time. From the internet side of things they’ll be recording:
- your IP address
- Access time and duration of access (This to my mind shows up pre-broadband thinking, the longer your connection is online the less useful this data).
- Who you’ve sent email to and when
- Who you called via internet telephony (skype etc.) and how (Unless they snoop all your traffic which isn’t required I suspect this one applies to the internet telephony provider rather than your ISP
Of course this only applies to “public communications provider” run your own servers in conjunction with some friends and then you won’t be logged, use email providers outside of the EU and you won’t be logged (well not under this law at least). If you have a broadband connection log of as little as possible to reduce the utility of the logs and don’t use your ISP for email, as at the very least you can make it harder for them to join the dots. Also of course it’s worth noting that the original directive states
“This Directive relates only to data generated or processed as a consequence of a communication or a communication service”
so if you use services configured not to generate logs then nothing has to be kept.
Before we blame the EU however it’s worth remembering that it was our Government that asked them to create this rule see this Telegraph article for more background. Though the directive doesn’t contrary to that article seem to actually require that they record the websites you visit. The good news is that the ISPs and Telco’s shouldn’t put up their prices because of this, the bad news is that’s because the government our using our taxes to pay them to spy on us.
Further note despite what Anna Raccoon says and the Various comments (Same article posted to two locations), there doesn’t seem to be any requirement for usage of websites to be logged, it does seem to be “only” VOIP, email and connection to the internet that is to be logged. However if you fancy some spook baiting even though it’s probably not needed or useful then the Landed underclass has some good tips. Some Tory Lords at least are concerned about how this came into effect and where it’s going.
Will update this with further commentary as I stumble upon it, and will correct my interpretation of what is to be logged if I find an explanation of why my interpretation is wrong.
Update Further commentary:
A rather poor interpretation and udnerstanding of the directive from Himmelgarten cafe (hat tip: Charlotte Gore
Update 2
In response to the article from Himmelgarten cafe linked to above it occurred to me that it might be of interest to show people what the logs being retained typically show:
2009-04-06 17:46:02 Message-id <= sendinguser@address H=sending-hostname P=esmtp S=3115
2009-04-06 17:46:02 Message-id => <receiving-user@address> R=userforward T=address_file
2009-04-06 17:46:02 Message-id Completed
The interesting bits are the time stamps and the bits in blue, the bit in red is very trivial to forge. Also when he states that “No help is being offered on paying for the additional storage space.” that would appear to be at odds with what is stated in the directive, but for small email providers it isn’t a huge burden if you only consider the disk space and not back up facilities as each message only takes in the region of 0.5 kb to log.
Trouble delivered as ordered
So just as predicted if not required there was it seems a certain amount of trouble at todays G20 protests. Having been sat at home working I can only go by the reports sent in by the BBC, blogs and other media outlets. Which probably gives me as much authority to comment as most people we’ll see on TV or read in the papers.
Apart from the numpties that tried to bring an armoured car into the city, which I’d expect to encounter no small degree of interest even on the best of days. Especially when it does look so very confusingly like a real police vehicle:
The rest of the reported violence seems to have been to at least some extent remarkably staged managed, here we have a spontaneous bit of violence surrounded by a veritable wall of photographers.
So it would seem that someone at least was making sure that the reporters got good images of things kicking off. There are also reports of “masked black clad” demonstrators running to the more peaceful bits of the demo (the climate camp) to make the atmosphere there more aggressive.
Given the banks that were attacked are already being bailed out by the Government, one way or another this was effectively state sponsored violence against state property. Even if the state didn’t directly provide a detailed script. With Barricades and fires being set up in the city there should be plenty more action for the mornings papers, certainly enough to drive any talk of expenses or problems at the G20 summit from the front pages. What remains to be seen is if how much more nonsense tomorrow will bring and if we’ll discover whose agenda this is all serving.
I do find myself left with one question still, what are these protesters actually protesting about? Given the mixture of interest groups and banners on display it seems that either:
a) G20 is just a convenient event for people with little to no commno ground to protest at
or
b) The protest is in favour of “Something being done” and “down with that sort of thing”
UK terror threat status
- Severe 2010/01/25