This week, I’m a little late as every time I thought I had finished, there was another change to one of the items. Events, dear boy… anyway, on with the programme!
1. UK government demands a backdoor from Apple
Apple’s Advanced Data Protection system is pretty secure. Essentially, everything apart from mail, contacts, and calendars is encrypted end-to-end and at rest, and only you have a key to it. Apple can’t read your iCloud files, messages, phone back-ups, and more – which means that it can’t hand over the key to a search warrant either.
Of course, this isn’t good enough for governments round the world. They would love to have access to that data. They claim this is for legitimate law enforcement purposes, usually something connected with child pornography or terrorism, the two go-to excuses for surveillance.
The UK’s Investigatory Powers Act 2016 gave the government a way around this. It allowed the government to demand, using a “technical capability notice”, that companies which encrypt data in this way create a backdoor allowing the authorities to access this data when it needs to. Merely revealing that a request has been made is a criminal offence.
Apple is the first target for this kind of order, at least that we know of. And, if you’re an Apple user, it should make you stop and think about whether you should be using iCloud services, for two reasons.
First, regardless of where you are in the world, this gives the UK government the ability to access your data for a given set of reasons. And remember that the UK is a member of the Five Eyes intelligence alliance, so — in theory — the CIA could request the UK intelligence to get data on a US citizen, without proper oversight.
But more importantly, backdoors into this kind of system are giant targets for criminals, bad hackers and foreign intelligence services. When you make a backdoor, it’s there for anyone who finds it to use – and often, illegitimate users are good enough at covering their tracks so that they get away with it for years.
If this concerns you, it’s worth looking at alternatives like Proton Drive, which is outside UK and US jurisdiction and which follows stricter privacy laws. The other alternative is to move to keeping files locally, but that — of course — means losing the ability to sync files across different platforms.
Apple will hopefully resist this to the full extent of the law. But if its past public comments are anything to do by, if it loses, it may well remove some services from the UK — most likely turning off the ability for UK citizens to access Advanced Data Protection rather than building in a backdoor.
2. Corporate theft is theft
It’s an easy comparison to make between the “throw the book at him” approach the US government took to Aaron Swartz’s mild case of piracy to the inevitable crickets which will follow the revelation that Meta torrented 81.7 terabytes of pirated books to train its LLMs. I don’t think we will see Mark Zuckerberg threatened with 35 years prison time, mores the pity, despite the fact he personally approved breaking the law.
3. Use Signal, pals
Via Ben Werdmuller – who you should be reading regularly – comes this guide to using Signal for government workers, something that’s very timely in the Trump era. Government workers can, and should, be organising (legal) resistance to Trump, but doing so over less private systems will be dangerous given Trump’s love of (illegal) reprisals. Using Signal can help.
Related: If you want to send me messages via Signal, you can!
4. Monopolists of a feather stick together
Well, of course, Apple doesn’t want to lose $20bn of annual revenue, which delivers about as close to a 100% margin as you can get.
5. Why do we have regulations, Andy?
I'm surprised that the CEO of the Royal Society of Arts, Commerce, and Manufacture has forgotten that much of the historical imperative to regulate came from abuse by manufacturing and commerce.
Haldane's point that "a brick-by-brick dismantling of a high-rise tower cannot shift regulatory cultures and practices" is grim, given we are just about to dismantle a high-rise tower which was a monument to regulatory capture and greed that cost 72 people their lives. As The Observer noted after the Grenfell report, "the government left most of the job of regulation to for-profit organisations funded directly by those they were regulating in a deadly conflict of interest." Haldane's brilliant idea seems to be, "get rid of the regulation."
Haldane is right that regulation, like much British law, has happened by accretion and so is incredibly complex to navigate for businesses and citizens alike. He's also right that regulatory enforcement should start with punitive measures for executives, which would focus the mind of the people at the top.
But the idea that "seek forgiveness not permission" is the best approach — or, to put it another way, regulate when it goes wrong and people die — is mind-melting stupid. We did that in the 19th Century, Andy. Perhaps the ghost of George Brewster could give you some help remembering your history.
6. Why the parking app is the icon of our times
Jamie Bartlett has written about what parking apps tell us about the British and their relationship to technology. It’s all great, but this sums it up:
Progress isn’t about things being turned into an app: it’s also about making tasks easier, safer, simpler. And not everything is made better just because it can be done on a mobile phone. Until we realise this, we will continue to forge ahead with the short-sightedness of teenager, always convinced that this time technology will fix it for us. Only to find ourselves in an administrative cul-de-sac from which there is no escape.
7. WhatThreeFails
And speaking of terrible technology, Terence Eden has written a post about WhatThreeWords, the frankly stupid system for sharing locations which takes a public good — maps — and turns it into a private, proprietary system which doesn’t work that well.
It’s a system beloved of a certain kind of marketer, which is why its business model – selling licences to car companies and other suckers to use commercially – was what it was. But now it appears that some companies aren’t renewing their licences, including Mercedes, which is actually a part owner of the business. That kind of tells you how low the usage is.
WhatThreeWords is a terrible idea, both technically poor and an example of an attempt by a private company to capture a market. Avoid like the plague.
8. What just happened?
For a wide variety of reasons, I don’t consider myself to be a Marxist (a communist, yes, but that’s another thing entirely and a different story). But while I don’t believe in the inevitability of a working-class revolution, I think Marx’s analysis of the relationship between classes and the power structures of capitalism has stood the test of time and, in fact, got more relevant.
That’s why this piece by John Ganz is pretty astounding, the best article on how we have ended up with tech oligarchy that I’ve seen. Well worth a read.
9. Move fast and break the poor
Elon Musk moved fast and broke Twitter. Now he’s moving fast and breaking the government, which in turn means breaking some of the poorest people in America. And all while presenting a huge security risk which other countries will no doubt exploit.
10. And of course, it’s not just America…
If the oligarchs have captured the US, we should remember that it’s not enough for them: they want the world:
Tech billionaires like Thiel simply do not believe that their companies and investments should be beholden to governments. And now that they have control of the US government, they are suggesting that, if any other countries interfere with their business, the US government ought to intervene on their behalf.
Digital colonialism, here we come. Or here we are, depending on how bad you think it all really is.