The Guardian reports today (UK mobile phone firms to sell data about customer activity) that mobile telecomms firms have been harvesting data about their customers web browsing habits, and that they plan to uses these data to increase advertising revenues.

The GSMA's chief marketing officer, Michael O'Hara, said: "We can see the top sites, see where people are browsing regularly. See the time that sites are being viewed, the number of visits, the duration of visits and we can also get demographic data so you can have age ranges, male/female ranges. 

The former chief of MI5, Dame Stella Rimington, has warned that the UK risks becoming a police state (The Daily Telegraph, "Spy chief: We risk a police state").  In the interview, she accuses ministers of interfering with people's privacy and playing straight into the hands of terrorists.

This is a theme that I've returned to on numerous occasions over the last few months: that the UK Government has used (and, I believe, mainipulated) the terrorist "threat" to force through draconian measures that threaten out civil liberties and right to privacy.  From extended detention periods, to the increased databases held about (and following the Coroners bill, increasingly joined together), the general drift is to a situation where the state has uprecedented access to out communications and other aspects of out private life.Rimmington says

Over at his blog Heresy Corner, the Heresiarch has an excellent overview of the continual erosion of our civil liberties (Remember what he said about "British liberty"?).

The article is framed over a series of points made by Gordon Brown in a speech delivered shortly after he took office as Prime Minister.

Ars Technica reports (Record industry talks Irish ISP into blocking P2P sites) that the largest Irish ISP, Eircom, has agreed to start blocking access to filesharing sites, beginning (of course) with PirateBay.

Ireland's largest ISP, Eircom, has entered into an agreement with IRMA, saying that it will begin blocking access to sites that allow users to swap files and that it will not oppose any court action mandating that such action must be taken.

A coalition of child protection charities have proposed that the implementation of the Internet Watch Foundation's blacklist should be made compulsory (Ars Technica - UK charities: make IWF Web blacklist 100% compulsory for ISPs).  Interestingly, this comes a few days after an objection to the IWF's charitable status has been made.

"Over 700,000 households in the UK can still get uninterrupted and easy access to illegal child abuse image sites," said advisor Zoe Hilton in a statement yesterday. "Allowing this loophole helps to feed the appalling trade in images which feature real children being seriously sexually assaulted. We now need decisive action from the government to ensure the Internet Service Providers that are still refusing to block this foul material are forced to fall into line. Self-regulation on this issue is obviously failing-and in a seriously damaging way for children."  

The UK Government's plans to assemble a joined up database state appear to be drawing closer.  In the rather innocuous sounding Coroners and Justice Bill Part 8 - Data Protection Act 1998 (c. 29) lies an interesting clause, 152, in which the government empowers itself to authorise largely unlimited data sharing.

The bill's summary is as follows (my emphasis - at least it flags up the change that interests me):

Privacy International have issued a report on how the Coroners and Justice Bill Part 8 - Data Protection Act 1998 (c. 29) will impact on data protection in the UK, and it makes for depressing reading.

Clause 152 of the Bill will permit an almost limitless range of data sharing pportunities both within government and between commercial organisations[...]

An interesting report on the BBC website on the use and abuse of RIPA.  It would appear that local councils are always ready to use RIPA to keep an eye on their citizens.

Figures obtained by BBC Radio Lincolnshire show that local councils have used covert surveillance authorisations 217 times in the last three years.

The BBC reports that the upcoming ContactPoint database which is planned (at a cost of £224 million) to contain contact details of all kids under 18 years old in England is expected to be accessible to 390,000 users.  I guess more still when it gets lost in the post or left on a train.  The database will

hold the name, address, parents' contact details, date of birth, school and doctor of every child in England.

So, it seems the old farts at the Met don't want kids to have much fun these days.  Apparently, every live music event needs to be "risk assessed", which involves completing a form 696, while afterwards you need to complete a form 696A. It's claimed that

Sunny Hundal writes in the Guardian's "Comment is free" about his experiences.  Before he and other fun-lovers could get into the venue, a variety information were gathered, with no indication of why the data were collected, nor how long it would be held for.

The Register reports that the UK ISP Demon has removed access to a larcge chunk of internet history.  The error pages that users are presented with apparently imply this is in response to the site being listed on the IWF blacklist.  Amusingly, El Reg reports:

One Demon customer tells us he was unable to visit archived versions of websites run by the BBC, Parliament, the United Nations, the Internet Watch Foundation, Demon Internet, and Thus. In other words, this customer points out, Thus is blocking its own web history. "It is nuts," he says.

This does seem to be using a sledgehammer to crack a nut.  I presume there are dubious sites archived at the wayback machine, but to block the lot seems a bit extreme.  Presumably the internet block derives from the way Demon have sought to implement the IWF blacklist.

According to The Register (IWF confirms Wayback Machine porn blacklisting), explanation of the loss of access to the internet archive to customers of some UK ISPs is due to an IWF blacklist, containing URLs contained within that archive.

The Register asked the IWF what URLs were blacklisted, who at the ISPs were responsible for implementing the blacklist, and why ISPs were blocking the whole archive, but the IWF refuse to comment on the URLs on the blacklist (it's their policy), and refused to (or were unable to) answer the other questions.

The Times reports that the Home Office has adopted a plan to allow British police to hack into people's personal computers without a warrant.

If true, this is a pretty shocking extension to investigative powers.  Apparently it was made possible by an amendment to the Compter Misuse Act 1990 - the proposals included breaking into a suspect's house to install keyloggers and sending emails bearing malware that allows remote access to a PC.

The Guardian yesterday reported that the UK Culture Secretary plans to introduce a cinema-style "age-rating" for websites.  He's apparently going to contact Barack Obama once he's got up and running in the White House to try and set up some form of web site certification.  Not being one to set his sights too high, the "plan" is to involve only English language sites, but to compel ISPs to provide packages to provide the means to block unrated sites.

I presume such packages would be OS-independent, and an optional add-on.  Of course a number of likely problems loom over the horizon, including the scale of the internet.  How many web sites are there out there?  Back in February 2007, this question was asked at Boutell.com, and the answer was " more than 108 million".  Goodness knows how accurate that estimate is, and how the number may have increased since then!   The same site estimates the number of web pages in February 2007 to be in excess of 29.7 billion.

I blogged the other day about Andy Burnam's campaign for cinema-style rating of web content.  Burnham is apparently the UK Government's Culture Secretary, has small children, and does not appear to believe that parental responsibility includes informing children about what they should or should not do.  He has proposed that a system of rating websites analogous to that used for motion pictures  (and we all know how that stops kids from watching DVDs) be used to rate web sites.  The ISPs would then offer the ability to screen out offensive web content.

It's amusing that this story surfaced shortly after the Internet Watch Foundation's action against a 1970s LP sleeve thrust the IWF somewhat unwillingly into the media spotlight.  Most internet users were probably unaware that a blacklist of websites was maintained in this way.

The Guardian has a front page report updating the status of the Government's proposals to monitor all UK communications (the "Interception Modernisation Programme" or IMP).  This the proposal to record the names and addresses of all communications, but not (at this stage) the contents of the communications.  This execrable plan is estimated to run in at about £12 billion, a sum which you would think the Government would quail at, in the present financial circumstances.

Bizarrely, considering the database is supposed to be vital for  national security, one proposal is that it be run by private industry.  Apparently this is under the illusion that privatised work will be more cost-effective than that run by Govenment.  Ho hum.

Just picked this up via the Open Rights Group website.  Tom Watson MP has a blog and has solicited opinions on his colleague Andy Burhnam's Big Idea - that voluntary age rating of internet sites is a practical solution to the perceived problem of nasty websites being inflicted on unsuspecting kiddies.

A quick squizz through his blog suggests this blog posting has generated a larger number of comments than any others - mind you, even his worst-commented articles do better than most of mine in that regard :-( 

The Sunday Times reports that our authoritarian Home Secretary's plans to prevent leaks from the companies working on implemented the expensive and unnecessary ID card scheme has itself been leaked.

What's particularly draconian is that it seems the desire is to implement a system whereby workers at these companies may have their homes searched without needing  a search warrant.

The nannys at the Internet Watch Foundation, the people who generate lists of websites it doesn't think we should see, have decided that customers of Virgin Media, Be/O2/Telefonica, EasyNet/UK Online, PlusNet, Demon and Opal should be unable to view the Wikipedia page about the 1976 album Virgin Killer by German metal band The Scorpions (if you've been blocked, you won't be able to see that link).  OK, it's tasteless (and I never particularly cared for the Scorpions' music), but should it have been blocked?

The blacklisting of this Wikipedia page has had consequences on the ability of those UK webusers to edit Wikipedia articles.

The Open Rights Group has a well written article on the IWF fracas on banning the Scorpions LP sleeve image.  However, despite a report on the ORG site saying that the IWF is reconsidering it's listing of that Wikipedia URL, the Guardian reports that the IWF are thinking of extending its attempt to stop us seeing this ancient LP sleeve image via amazon.com.  Hitherto, some commentators had reckoned the IWF wouldn't go after websites with serious legal muscle, such as Amazon.

Interesting things:

• While we know the IWF membership, it's not any kind of body accountable to us or the Government.
• This issue has highlighted the existence of the IWF, which I guess many internet users didn't know if before.
• The list of banned URLs doesn't seem readily available.
  
• URLs containing dodgy material are submitted by members of the public.
• Apparently the decision to list a URL for banning is made by four indivuduals whose job it is to sift through submitted URLs.
• The criterion is "potentially" illegal, as defined by some training these four received from the police.
  
• ISPs blocking the wikipedia page via the IWF list inapprpriately serve up a 404 notice - from Wikipedia: "The 404 or Not Found error message is an HTTP standard response code indicating that the client was able to communicate with the server but either the server could not find what was requested, or it was configured not to fulfill the request and did not reveal the reason why. 404 errors should not be confused with "server not found" or similar errors, in which a connection to the destination server could not be made at all."