Category Archives: Government

Britain, Cyber warfare, Government, Society, Technology

We’re losing the fight on cyber terror

CYBER WARFARE

MICROSOFT boss, Brad Smith, has warned that cyberspace has become the new battlefield.

He has said that terrorists and rogue states are using it to mount devastating attacks on civilians.

He admitted tools created by technology firms were being turned into weapons – and called for a “digital Geneva Convention” to prevent a global arms race.

Mr Smith, president of the US tech giant, said cyber attacks had already caused real “human suffering” around the world, pointing to a virus which last year crippled NHS hospitals in Britain and caused thousands of appointments – including operations – to be cancelled.

Days before a peace conference in Paris timed to coincide with the 100th anniversary commemorations of the First World War armistice, Mr Smith, 59, also drew comparisons with the build-up of arms in the early 20th century and said history was at risk of repeating itself.

Tech firms need to do more to prevent the use of their services in hacking attacks and governments must come to a global agreement to halt the escalation of cyber attacks, he told Web Summit in Lisbon.

“We cannot remain silent in this century,” he said. “Like it or not – and I don’t think we should like it – the reality is we have become the battlefield. We will do the future an injustice if we don’t also recognise this new generation of technology has also created a new generation of challenges and threats.

“Tools we have created have been turned by others into weapons. If a hospital loses access to its computers and electricity, people’s lives are put at risk.

“We need a moral revolution with this technological revolution. There are lessons from a century ago.”

Mr Smith said almost one billion people were estimated to have been victims of cyber attacks in 2017 alone. Power stations, hospitals and other vital infrastructure will be at even greater risk as more objects are connected to the internet, he warned. He said last year had been “a wake-up call” for technology companies, following the devastating Wannacry and Notpetya viruses that swept through computer systems across the world.

More than one third of NHS trusts were affected by Wannacry, with almost 7,000 appointments cancelled.

The virus, known as ransomware, locked staff out of computer systems and demanded payments to allow them access. The UK and US governments blamed North Korea for the attack.

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Arts, Britain, First World War, Government, History, Society

The art of remembrance that can never fade

GREAT WAR CENTENARY

Euphemism-free: in John Singer Sargent’s ‘Gassed’, blinded soldiers hold on to the man in front to find their way.

AN exhibition earlier this year at the Imperial War Museum (North) – best described as Lest We Forget – was a memorable and deeply sad tribute to the fallen of the Great War. At the end of the display, visitors were asked whether we’re in danger of forgetting the First World War.

There isn’t much chance of that. Not in this centenary year of the Armistice, following four years of remembrance of the anniversaries of Ypres, Gallipoli and all those blood-soaked, out-of-the-way names we’d never know but for the history of war.

This particular exhibition shows how quickly and how very effectively our ways of remembering the war today were set in stone after 1918. Literally, in the case of the Imperial War Graves Commission. By 1919, they had already come up with prototypes of the curved headstones, which they presented to Parliament that year and which were on display, in pristine condition. The headstone epitaphs, too – ‘A Soldier of the Great War’; ‘Known Unto God’ – were also worked out in 1919, thanks to Rudyard Kipling, who lost his son in the war, and his advice on memorial wording in The Graves of the Fallen (1919).

The commission’s diktats were direct and unremitting. Soldiers’ bodies were not to be repatriated but were to be buried where they died; officers were to be buried alongside their men. It was an early burst of progressive, democratic emotion and feeling.

At the time, these orders caused understandable heartache and pain among the bereaved, who had no consolation of a nearby grave to visit, or a tombstone design to even choose. Lady Florence Cecil, who lost three sons, instigated a petition to the Prince of Wales by seeking the use of crosses instead of headstones. Her attempts failed.

Families were permitted only three lines of their own composition on tombstones; and, even then, the commission had copy approval, to prevent ‘the sentimental versifier, or the crank’ – as Sir Fabian Ware, the commission’s founder, put it. However cold all this may sound, the result today is a funerary triumph. Those serried ranks of identically shaped tombstones across the fields of northern France give a sharper picture of the breathtaking scale of the losses than an asymmetrical free-for-all – Highgate Cemetery writ large – would have done.

This enforced burial of soldiers abroad led to an explosion of memorials over here: from the Cenotaph, caught on film at this exhibition, with George V laying the first wreath in 1919; to the heartbreaking visiting cards, and even fire screens, engraved with the names of the dead. In the 1920s, the flood of relatives aching to see the war graves began. The green cemetery signposts and printed guides to the battlefields have a hauntingly jaunty look to them.

Most moving of all was the idea (first proposed by army chaplain the Rev David Railton) of the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior, one of the few bodies brought back from the Front, in 1920.

For the Warrior to be claimed by all the bereaved as something of their own, he had to belong to no one. As Henry Williams, a British officer charged with selecting the body, said, ‘We examined them very, very carefully to make certain there was no possible identification, even by teeth.’ Brutal, but more affecting for it.

We’re hungry to remember the dead of the Great War today, even though we never met them. The popularity of Michael Morpurgo’s War Horse, for example, is testament to this. The much more intense desperation of loved ones to remember lost soldiers they knew so well was also palpable during this display. They longed for photographs of their sons’ tombs or first-hand reports of how they perished.

By the end of the war, there were a staggering 559,000 unidentified bodies on the Front: that makes for millions of relatives who didn’t know the true fate of their loved ones. Some went years, wrongly believing their sons, husbands and fathers were still alive. Many fewer were in the happier, but still agonising position: like the family of Lt HD Bird, pictured in the exhibition, wrongly reported as killed in 1918, but in fact taken prisoner and repatriated in 1919.

Euphemisms – or gentle lies – were necessary in the telegrams to mothers from officers who did know the truth. After the Third Battle of Ypres, Jessie Nicholson was told by the CO that her husband ‘suffered no pain as he was killed instantaneously by a fragment of shell’. This was a well-worn line, unverifiable in the fog of war.

The Great War poets – original manuscripts by Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen were on show – held concordance with the art on display – admirable, harrowingly euphemism-free. John Singer Sargent’s Gassed. The line of blinded boys walking, hand on the soldier in front, past piles of bodies, so shocked the first viewers in 1919 that many felt physically ill.

Paul Nash’s The Menin Road reveals an utterly smashed, dead moonscape on the Front. CRW Nevinson’s The Harvest of Battle is unrelenting in its depiction of open-mouthed bodies, outstretched arms stiff with rigor mortis.

The impressive thing is that these paintings – the polar opposite of triumphalist art – were government-approved, commissioned in 1918 by the British War Memorials Committee.

The most famous of the war’s memory symbols was the poppy. Before it became an official totem, with the first Poppy Appeal of 1921, the poppy was the soldier’s rare, informal blast of beauty on the Front. The show had four cards sent back to sweethearts, enclosing a fragile poppy. One, describing war as ‘Hell on earth’, sent the flower with the words, ‘This I plucked while I was convalescent, a souvenir from France.’

The show was well-balanced. It was neither jingoistic, nor was it a lions-led-by-donkeys agitprop. But it makes a difference in that Britain won. The British won’t forget. How could we?

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Britain, Culture, Government, Society, Technology

Whose job is it to keep us nice online?

SOCIETAL: SOCIAL MEDIA

Imagine and visualise a debate that you’ve just had on stage at the Cheltenham Literature Festival concerning a neat little modern conundrum: ‘Is social media the curse of our age?’ Imagine, too, that you and your fellow panellists have agreed that it probably is. In this scenario, should you, or should you not, tweet about it?

We would assume that people normally would. But maybe you would be unsure. What would be your motivation? Would you be publishing an event that you’d found fascinating? Quite likely. Or would you just be craving the sort of “like”-induced serotonin surge you and your fellow panellists had just been talking about, given your addiction to social media networking? What demons were ruling you? What damn tech tricks made you feel that you ought?

And so it goes viral after comments from the Festival audience stick with you. The young woman who saw social media as the vector of the eating disorder she suffered from as a teenager, but who now was using social media platforms to rebuild her sense of self-worth. The older man who, after tweeting in support of Boris Johnson’s comments on burkas, had been shocked to find himself subject to an onslaught of fury, including people trying to get him sacked. Or, another man, say, active on platforms but tired of competing with screens for attention and convinced that the world around him was narcissistic and utterly crazy.

There might be a sense of social media acting the heavy beast squatting upon all our shoulders, forever seen in the corner of an eye. It might also be an overdue reminder that your own thoughts about all this can get a little lofty. Yet, we could trot out the gotcha about the billionaire moguls who run these platforms banning their own children from using them, even while marketing them to yours. We could talk for hours about the damage being done to the fabric of our democracy.

For most people, however, concern about social media has nothing to do with any of that. Instead it is about obsession and compulsion. It is about self-worth and self-harm. It is about friends and relatives developing new violent politics that seem to have come from nowhere. It is about teenagers living their lives as a constant performance on apps that their parents barely comprehend, for audiences that they can scarcely imagine. It sits in the lives of many as an ever-grinding mill of misery, even when they cannot imagine life without it, and they feel that something must be done.

 

EARLIER this year the Government let it be known that it was working on a white paper of proposals to tackle the nebulous business of online harm. Matt Hancock, then culture secretary, declared that Britain was to become “the safest place in the world” to be online. You’ll maybe understand the urge of ministers and can probably see where this is going: “something must be done”. But does this rule out making anyone less fearful?

In some areas, certainly, legislation is desirable and overdue. Criminal hate speech, libel, grooming, copyright violation, fraud and violent radicalisation are all areas that technology companies should be taking far more seriously. We really should have no objection to them being forced to do so. Likewise, there is growing evidence that the chemical hits of serotonin, dopamine and adrenaline that drive online behaviour creates a dependency culture, in the manner of nicotine or cocaine. The notion of a cigarette packed-style warning on your Snapchat or WhatsApp might seem ludicrous today but it could become a necessary measure to help improve physical and mental wellbeing.

The pervasive public miseries of social media, though, are more low level. They involve not hate speech but vitriol and nastiness; not extremism but political polarisation; not libel but rudeness and disrespect. Not grooming, even, but sexualisation. They involve, in other words, forms of speech that today are free and uninhibited, and where the government almost certainly plans to make less free.

Who will complain? Feel the way the wind blows. The public sees a harm and worries about it. Paradoxically the users of social media are increasingly censorious, blocking undesirables and avoiding certain platforms. In parliament, the very bedrock of democracy, you have a cohort of MPs radicalised against popular free speech by some 100 tweets a day threatening rape or murder, or by calling them traitors or fascists.

Many will wish that social media giants should be policing themselves more effectively, yet simultaneously doubt they ever will. Tell those same people that the state ought to do it instead and they will balk, hard. You will remember the instinctive illiberalism of so many politicians in the Leveson battles over press regulation. You might be feeling it is coming back.

Next time, when it’s those hated tech behemoths who pilfer the revenues from traditional media organisations, will even the press be prepared to put up a fight? They must. Like it or not, what was true with the press is even more true for social media. Except in areas of outright criminality, liberal democracies do not curb your freedom of expression. They may fret about it, lambast it, implore others to close their ears. Yet the moment they shut it down they are liberal no more.

This fight is coming. It is likely to be ugly and all the nicest people will be on the wrong side. Trolls, those ugly creatures who once lived under bridges, now reside right behind the screen you’re looking at. Prowl they will. But you have a choice.

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