Category Archives: Human Rights

Google, Government, Human Rights, Society, Technology

Google’s buyout of drones raises privacy fears…

GOOGLE X

Intro: The addition of drones to Google’s robot army marks the outbreak of aerial combat in its battle for global internet supremacy

The internet giant Google has purchased a company that develops military-style drones in a controversial £36million deal.

Titan Aerospace makes unmanned aircraft that run on solar power and can remain airborne for five years at a time.

Google claims the technology will provide internet access to remote corners of the world. But the move has provoked privacy concerns over the internet company’s ability to snoop on people from great heights. The drones fly at 65,000ft – almost twice as high as passenger planes.

Because the drones are solar powered and always above the clouds they do not need to land to refuel, so the drones are able to cover up to 3million miles before needing to land for maintenance.

However, critics have raised fears over the company’s newly-acquired powers of mass global surveillance. Titan is merely the latest addition to its growing arsenal of robotics firms, and Google is highly secretive about its technological ambitions – all of its projects are run by a closely-guarded division mysteriously known as ‘Google X’.

A spokesperson for Big Brother Watch, a privacy campaign group, said:

… The regulation of drones is something that urgently needs addressing. Given Google’s track record is littered with overstepping the line and infringing people’s privacy, combining their hunger for data with drone technology is a mind boggling proposition.

COMMENT & ANALYSIS

Google’s multi-million dollar bid for a company that makes solar-powered drone aircraft marks the outbreak of aerial combat in its battle with Facebook for global internet supremacy.

The search engine giant has bought Titan Aerospace, a New Mexico start-up that previously caught the eye of Mark Zuckerberg, for an undisclosed price thought to be in the region of £36m ($60m).

Zuckerberg opted instead to snap up Ascenta, a tiny British engineering company based in rural Somerset – which is also working on solar-powered drones – for $20m.

The deals take both companies, which are dabbling in areas such as robots, driverless cars and contact lens cameras, even further into the realms of science fiction.

Despite mounting fears on stock markets over the bursting of a new tech bubble, in similar style to the early 2000s dotcom boom and bust, the Californian colossi remain ready to pay millions of pounds of investors’ money on futuristic technology.

Why, though, some may ask, the sudden interest in aviation? The answer is that Google and Facebook are vying to gain a stranglehold on potentially lucrative new online markets as some of the world’s poorest countries begin to be connected to the internet. Laying cables in the ground, they reckon, will take too long and cost too much, so they are trying to beam out signals from on high instead.

In their eyes, this is an altruistic enterprise, giving poor people cheap access to the internet. The drones, it is claimed, could also provide invaluable data on climate change, environmental damage and natural disasters. Google is excited in welcoming Titan Aerospace to the ‘Google family’.

Behind the gushing, however, critics perceive this new bonding as a highly dysfunctional one. The Titan deal is certain to ignite fresh fears over the internet giants’ power to pry into every aspect of people’s lives once they are equipped with robotic aircraft that can conduct surveillance from a high altitude.

It will also raise further questions among investors who are growing increasingly sceptical of tech stocks. Splashing millions on Titan, even though the company’s drones are still at the prototype stage, will be grist to the mill for the doubters. Eyebrows were previously raised following Google’s takeover of robotics company Boston Dynamics.

Facebook, for its part, has come under fire for its recent acquisition of WhatsApp in a $19bn deal, and its $2bn purchase of Oculus Rift, a virtual reality headset maker.

Google’s takeover of Titan promises to put at its disposal a swarm of dragonfly-shaped planes that can encircle the globe, staying aloft for up to five years, without ever having to refuel, since they are run on power generated by sunlight.

Titan’s Solara 60 drone has a 60 metre wingspan and is covered in around 3,000 solar panels generating electricity to power its flight. Its cruising speed is around 65mph and it has a range of more than 2.8miles.

The Solara 60 and another model, the smaller Solara 50, is a prototype but commercial versions are expected to be delivered next year.

The lightweight aircraft will be deployed as part of Google’s ‘Project Loon’. The name refers to balloons, rather than lunacy, but the idea stemmed from Google’s launching in 2013 of a number of large, high altitude balloons over the Southern Hemisphere to transmit internet signals.

The company’s growing robotic arsenal includes the sinister-looking Atlas, one of the terrifying looking robots acquired in the takeover of Boston Dynamics, a military manufacturer that produces animal-like and humanoid machines for the battlefield.

Google’s founders, Page and Sergey Brin, claim their mission is ‘to organise the world’s information and to make it universally accessible and useful’, which sounds innocuous enough.

Yet the very idea of two young billionaires who invented a clever algorithm and went on to command their own robot army and a fleet of drones would, until recently, have sounded like the tale of a Bond villain.

Still, to many, the prospect will be more than a little disquieting.

 

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Britain, Government, Human Rights, Intelligence, National Security, Politics, Scotland, Society

Protecting privacy requires Government action…

SURVEILLANCE

In the early 1990s a Scottish newspaper exposed the details of a routine police practice known as ‘metering’. This involved a senior detective and police officer requesting from British Telecom (BT) one of their customer’s phone records. Such records detailed the telephone numbers that person was calling, when the call took place, and the call’s duration. British Telecom handed these details over under a ‘private agreement’ it had formulated between itself and the police.

Not only did the newspaper reveal this practice, but divulged how little political or judicial oversight there was of it. Later, the Secretary of State for Scotland at the time, Ian Lang, announced new guidelines on metering for Scotland’s police forces, and a new reporting system was introduced to keep track of the practice. Details came to light following the theft of metering surveillance documents from the Headquarters of Lothian and Borders police in Edinburgh, in a saga that came to be known as Fettesgate.

More than two decades on one could be tempted to change the word ‘metering’ to ‘metadata’. In recent months, Edward Snowden, a former US intelligence officer with the National Security Agency (NSA), revealed the phenomenal scale of surveillance of the public’s phone, text, e-mail and social network communications, carried out by the NSA in joint collaboration with Britain’s GCHQ in Cheltenham. Matters arising now are the same issues that applied in 1992. Unlike the actual listening into telephone conversations, much of this surveillance focusses around metadata in the reading of e-mails and electronic texts but does not require ministerial permission and oversight.

The Scottish Government appears to accept the current democratic oversight may be insufficient. It suggests the scope of the practices used in surveillance may need to be reviewed in the event of Scotland becoming an independent country.

Some may say, however, that this is not good enough – arguing, that if the legislation needs to be reviewed then it should be done now: issues of public accountability, improved oversight and privacy apply regardless of Scotland’s constitutional future.

Privacy, of course, is one of the biggest issues of the day. Electronic and digital communications have opened up channels for people in a way that would have been hard to imagine just a generation ago. Undoubtedly, though, this has been achieved at a price. One of the biggest challenges facing our parliamentarians is to balance the needs of the police and security services with the personal liberties and rights of law-abiding citizens who are entitled to enjoy a private life. Of particular concern is the apparent comfortable relationship that has evolved between the authorities and some of the large telecommunication companies, many of whom are already under intense criticism for being condescending with their customers’ privacy.

Scotland’s Justice Secretary, Kenny MacAskill MSP, must accept that his task is not only facilitating Police Scotland in their fight against crime, but also involves protecting ordinary citizens in Scotland from undue and unwelcome scrutiny of their private lives by the authorities. Mr MacAskill has remained silent on this issue despite surveillance being a major issue in the current era. The Justice Secretary must speak up and demonstrate that he has this balance right.

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Britain, Government, Human Rights, Legal, Military, Society

Iraq war crimes denied by the British Government….

INTERNATIONAL CRIMINAL COURT

Earlier this month, the human rights lawyers PIL (Public Interest Lawyers) lodged an application with the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague, said to represent more than 400 Iraqis who have called for an investigation into alleged war crimes carried out by the British Army. The application lodged with the ICC has been made under Article 15 of the Rome Statute.

The legal dossier poses serious implications well above those allegations embedded within the document. For example, it seeks to know whether leading figures in the army and UK government should be called to account.

The submission to the ICC refers to ‘thousands of allegations of mistreatment amounting to war crimes of torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment’. The dossier also alleges that some ‘at the highest levels’ were mostly responsible, including head of the army General Sir Peter Wall and ex-defence secretary Geoff Hoon.

Following the lodging of the document with the court Foreign Secretary William Hague was quick in responding with a firm statement that the allegations are either already under investigation or have been dealt with in previous government inquiries and rulings. Mr Hague insists that any bid to prosecute British politicians and senior military figures for alleged war crimes in Iraq should be rejected. The speed with which Mr Hague reacted and contested the claims is perhaps reflective over concerns the UK government has over the potential damage to Britain’s reputation.

Some 11 years on, the political sensitivity of the UK’s involvement makes the prospect of an international criminal court inquiry highly explosive. The government’s defence is that intensive inquiries have already been held at UK level. It says that some cases of abuse have been acknowledged with appropriate levels of compensation paid and apologies offered. An interim report on an extensive inquiry by Sir Peter Gibson was published last month. Rejecting the allegations of systematic abuses the Foreign Secretary said that the British armed forces ‘uphold high standards and they are the finest armed forces in the world’.

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Yet, there are two problems here for the government. The first is the increasing importance accorded to human rights in international relations. While such investigations into military operations in theatres of war have been questioned on the premise that they would underestimate the intense dangers and pressures which troops were operating under, concerns over human rights abuses has grown. The UK is a signatory to international human rights conventions.

The second problem is that there is a long history of domestic inquiries into the conduct of military operations that were subsequently found to have been inadequately deficient or incomplete. Any external investigation by an international court would spark concern within the Ministry of Defence, which has presided over numerous errors and shortcomings.

What is more, a failure to enforce compliance with the rules of war would be a grave allegation for the MoD to face. But unless such compliance is enforced from the top down with the level of robustness needed, such charges are only likely to be repeated.

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