Posts Tagged ‘Society’
PM apologises for Alan Turing treatment
Posted by: Caroline Davies in Technology on September 13th, 2009
• Enigma genius chemically castrated for being gay
• Admission comes 55 years after Turing took his life
Gordon Brown issued an unequivocal apology last night on behalf of the government to Alan Turing, the second world war codebreaker who took his own life 55 years ago after being sentenced to chemical castration for being gay.
Describing Turing's treatment as "horrifying" and "utterly unfair", Brown said the country owed the brilliant mathematician a huge debt. He was proud, he said, to offer an official apology. "We're sorry, you deserved so much better," Brown writes in a statement posted on the No 10 website.
Turing is most famous for his work in helping create the "bombe" that cracked messages enciphered with the German Enigma machines. He was convicted of gross indecency in 1952 after admitting a sexual relationship with a man.
He was given experimental chemical castration as a "treatment". His criminal record meant he was unable to continue his work for the UK Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) because his security privileges were withdrawn. Two years later he killed himself, aged 41.
Thousands have signed a Downing Street petition calling for an official apology, among them the novelist Ian McEwan, scientist Richard Dawkins, and gay rights campaigner Peter Tatchell.
Paying tribute to Turing's contribution to "Britain's fight against the darkness of dictatorship", Brown described him as "a quite brilliant mathematician".
"Without his outstanding contribution, the history of world war two could well have been very different," he writes.
"The debt of gratitude he is owed makes it all the more horrifying, therefore, that he was treated so inhumanely. In 1952, he was convicted of gross indecency – in effect, tried for being gay.
"His sentence – and he was faced with the miserable choice of this or prison – was chemical castration by a series of injections of female hormones."
The petition, which yesterday had 30,805 signatures, was the idea of computer scientist John Graham-Cumming, who has also written to the Queen to request Turing be awarded a posthumous knighthood. Although an official apology is unusual, the act is seen as symbolic. Alan Turing is survived by three neices – Inagh, Shuna and Janet, from his brother's first marriage – and a nephew, John Dermot Turing, from his brother's second marriage, along with their associated family members.
Acknowledging the strength of feeling, Brown wrote: "Thousands of people have come together to demand justice for Alan Turing and recognition of the appalling way he was treated. While Turing was dealt with under the law of the time and we can't put the clock back, his treatment was of course utterly unfair and I am pleased to have the chance to say how deeply sorry I and we all are for what happened to him.
"Alan and the many thousands of other gay men who were convicted as he was convicted under homophobic laws were treated terribly. Over the years millions more lived in fear of conviction.
"This recognition of Alan's status as one of Britain's most famous victims of homophobia is another step towards equality and long overdue."
"But even more than that, Alan deserves recognition for his contribution to humankind … It is thanks to men and women who were totally committed to fighting fascism, people like Alan Turing, that the horrors of the Holocaust and of total war are part of Europe's history and not Europe's present.
"So on behalf of the British government, and all those who live freely thanks to Alan's work I am very proud to say: we're sorry, you deserved so much better."
Though most famous for his codebreaking, Turing is often considered to be the father of modern computer science, having made highly significant contributions to the emerging field of artificial intelligence and computing. After the war he worked at many institutions, including the University of Manchester, where he worked on the Manchester mark 1, one of the first recognisable modern computers.
In 1999 Time Magazine named him as one of the 100 Most Important People of the 20th Century.
• This article was amended on 13 September 2009 to name the main surviving blood relations of Alan Turing, omitted from the original version of this article.
Writing with a wave of your hand
Posted by: Gadget Boy in Technology on September 9th, 2009
The PhonePoint Pen, a university project, promises to use a smartphone's accelerometer to turn gestures into text
Ever tried waving your mobile phone around in the air for a better signal? Of course you have. But if you see assistant professor Romit Roy Choudhury of Duke University in North Carolina apparently doing so, he's not worrying about poor reception. He's using his phone as an electronic pen to write reminder notes.
In 2005, Choudhury was a PhD student at the University of Illinois working on computer science. Often forgetting things, he wanted to have a quick and easy way of jotting information down.
"I envisioned having a pen with a wireless interface and an accelerometer. My idea was to be able to write in the air with the pen, and click a button to email the handwriting to my email address. Such pens were unavailable, and I shelved the idea," says Choudhury.
From the pen to the phone
Since moving to Duke University, he's revisited the concept thanks to accelerometers in the latest smartphones. An accelerometer senses positional changes: it's the device that prompts the screen image to flip from portrait to landscape when the phone is turned sideways. It also enables games with repetitive movements.
"At that point, I had the idea of using the phone as a pen, since the phone has both the accelerometer and the wireless capability," says Choudhury. "My students jumped on to the idea, and did a wonderful job of turning it into a good prototype. This first round of prototyping took around six months."
Sensing the phone's orientation or playing a game is trivial compared to recognising air writing. His students started by using the phone to gesture a simple square, soon finding it was tough to achieve the right shape. "Then, one day, after innumerable revisions to the algorithm, we suddenly saw a near-perfect square."
Working through the alphabet (and numbers) has proved challenging for Sandip Agrawal, electrical and computer engineering senior at Duke's Pratt School of Engineering and graduate student Ionut Constandache. The standard Nokia N95 being used for the experiments has a three-axis accelerometer to detect the X, Y and Z directions.
The students wrote a Python script to obtain 30 to 35 instantaneous acceleration readings a second, and taking an average to overcome "noise". Using a wireless link, the readings from the phone were processed on a separate computer with MATLAB, a high-level computing language for mathematical computation.
The prototype software now recognises capital letters, numbers, and simple shapes. It works by interpreting the geometric shapes and the order in which the user gestures them. An A, for example, consists of three distinct strokes. Every stroke, angle, and lift of your pen (the phone) is significant if you're trying to interpret air writing on an imaginary plane (the paper). As the phone doesn't have a gyroscope, there are difficulties in distinguishing rotational motion from linear acceleration if the phone is turned in your grip.
At the moment, the phone wirelessly sends the recorded data to an adjacent computer for processing. It quickly returns the results to the phone as text, image, and an email. You also have to write large, distinct letters – not joined-up – for the recognition to work.
"The computations are simple enough to be done on the phone. It's just a matter of time," says Choudhury. "We simply didn't have time to port the code since we are working on so many interesting projects."
So what are the remaining challenges for the device, now dubbed the PhonePoint Pen by the researchers? Correcting mistakes when writing is an obvious one: the idea is to allow users to choose a movement that means "delete", such as several horizontal shakes. When writing on the move, the phone's accelerometer picks up your movement as well as its own, distorting the output. Better algorithms, more sophisticated built-in accelerometers, and a gyroscope would all help.
Air writing is useful for noting where you left the car at the airport or quickly jotting down an appointment time. Following recent interest from the medical profession, Choudhury also thinks it might help people with poor finger control or speech problems.
So when will the researchers release the prototype software for people to try out? "We believe that will be possible in few months," he says.
"We have the current prototype working on Nokia N95 – but the technology can be used for any programmable smartphones with small tweaks."
All done in two shakes
Robert Hardy, a research associate in the computing department at Lancaster University, sees the advantage of one-handed mobile phone use which doesn't (unlike text messaging) need your close visual attention. Leaving aside the remaining technical work, he also believes social factors might come into play. "Concerning the latter issue, it may be possible that the user feels embarrassed using this prototype in public places," he says.
Another example of mobile phone gesturing was tried by two Lancaster University researchers – it involved shaking two phones together to initiate easy Bluetooth pairing. The emerging technology of near field communication relies on mobile phone touch gestures for payments, ticketing, and door access. However, air writing uses a much larger free space area.
Hardy adds that, "by taking advantage of the user's familiarity of physical interactions in the real world, mobile phone gestures can be very intuitive. Relating back to the prototype, the barriers to entry could be potentially low as users are very familiar with handwriting in daily life."
Many people are already happily using lifelike gesture control for playing golf or tennis on the Nintendo Wii console. But there's a difference between gaming at home and using your mobile phone in public as an electronic aide-memoire. Even if you're not embarrassed doing so, writing words in thin air is definitely going to earn you some strange looks.
Social networks ramp up peer pressure
Posted by: Gadget Boy in Technology on September 9th, 2009
Peer pressure is a subtle thing. You may not know that you're reacting to it, but you are. Entire psychological theories suggest that our actions – including the way people look to celebrities to tell them what to do – are all built around the way our brains have evolved: we are social animals who in general want to stay within the mass, but move up within that mass so more people in the group look up to us than down on us.
This was illustrated most beautifully a few years ago in Celebrity Big Brother, when the participants were ordered on their first evening to rank themselves in order of fame. This was the time when complete non-celebrity Chantelle Houghton let others believe she was more famous than them – partly, perhaps, because she was female, blonde and pretty. The jockeying was quite brutal nearer the top. People want to be at the top of whatever heap they find themselves in.
I was prompted to this thought while watching the comments in my Twitter feed, where people had been updating to Apple's Snow Leopard and proclaiming themselves happy. Apart from Simon Willison, the developer behind our fabulous MPs' expenses crowdsourcing system, who hasn't had much fun with it: "Getting pretty frustrated now. Seriously recommend NOT upgrading to Snow Leopard at least until the first patch release. Pauses/hangs often."
Now, Willison's use of his machine may be closer to mine than most other peoples' – low-level additions, your own install of Python, add-ons etc – but I found myself more disposed towards the reports of the ease of Snow Leopard's installation and behaviour. Why? Peer pressure. Twitter brings that closer; but only because it's the fastest mass individual messaging system (so far).
Before Twitter, you would have consulted the crowd – your peers and those you look up to – on sites like Facebook or MySpace and on blogs and news websites. (And of course people still get their peer values from news sites. Have you read our Snow Leopard review?)
The danger with peer pressure is how easily, and at how primeval a level, it makes you want to conform. On seeing those positive tweets ("regained 50GB of disk space!"), I'll admit to a batsqueak of reaction, a limbic lurch that's beyond conscious control. Everyone's upgrading! it says. I have to upgrade too! I often do the same when I see computer gear – often hard drives – for sale, especially with "reduced" stickers on, in shops.
(The solution is to offer a ridiculously low price – if they're reducing it, they want to get rid of it, right? If they accept, you win; if they don't, you've sated your urges while not actually spending anything.)
What Facebook and Twitter and the increasingly instant nature of the web do though is to heighten our perceived need to have what other people have. It's word of mouth at the speed of light.
That's great when it comes to finding out news (though your life has probably not been materially changed by Michael Jackson's death, unless you had tickets for his O2 concerts), but not necessarily for things needing careful consideration.
"I did X – so should you!" is classic peer pressure. Unfortunately, the same approach is what got banks to invest in collateralised debt obligations, homeowners to take out unsustainable buy-to-let mortgages, and some people to upgrade their systems to software that breaks their old setups which worked perfectly fine before. Sometimes you need a safety valve to stop peer pressure building up too heavily.
Medics suspended over Facebook antics
Posted by: Gadget Boy in Technology on September 9th, 2009
Doctors and nurses at Swindon's Great Western hospital face disciplinary hearings after photographs posted on internet
Staff at a hospital in Swindon, including doctors, have been suspended for allegedly taking part in an internet craze known as the "lying down game" while on duty, an NHS trust said today.
Seven staff remain suspended on full pay after the alleged incident, which is said to have taken place during a night shift on August 14-15.
Doctors and nurses from the Great Western hospital's accident and emergency department and acute assessment unit photographed each other lying face down on resuscitation trolleys, ward floors and on the Wiltshire air ambulance helipad.
The pictures were then posted on social networking site Facebook, where hospital management spotted them. They have now been taken down.
The game involves lying face down with palms flat against the body and toes pointing at the ground.
Alf Troughton, medical director of Great Western Hospital NHS Trust, said disciplinary hearings would be held.
"A number of staff were suspended following allegations of unprofessional conduct while on night shift duty in the hospital during a weekend in August," he said.
"This did not involve patients and we are satisfied that at no time was patient care compromised.
"The Great Western Hospital sets high standards for staff behaviour at all times and therefore takes any such breaches extremely seriously.
"It is important to reassure patients and our workforce that this was an isolated incident and staff cover was maintained at all times."
Council loses £500,000 to virus
Posted by: Gadget Boy in Technology on September 3rd, 2009
It was a bad day for a London council when one of its staff plugged a virus-infected memory stick into a computer, but quite a good day for absent-minded readers harbouring piles of overdue library books, and drivers wanting to park on yellow lines.
The meltdown as the virus spread through Ealing council's computer system, crippling internal communications including the phones, and making it impossible to process fines and payments for almost a week, is estimated to have cost the Tory-run authority more than £500,000 in lost revenue and system repairs. Beyond this, 1,838 parking tickets, unable to be processed, were cancelled at a total cost of £90,000, libraries lost £25,000 in fines and booking fees, council property rent went uncollected, and £14,000 was spent on clearing housing benefit claims.
As the council considered a report on the incident in May, the Liberal Democrat councillor Gary Malcolm called for heads to roll. "If this had happened in a private company, people would be sacked." A council spokesman said: "The council acted immediately to protect all data and ensure that essential frontline services could continue."
Teenage girl jailed for Facebook bullying
Posted by: Gadget Boy in Technology on August 21st, 2009
A teenager who posted death threats on Facebook has become the first person in Britain to be jailed for bullying on a social networking site.
Keeley Houghton, 18, of Malvern, Worcestershire, has been sentenced to three months in a young offenders' institution after she posted a message saying that she would kill Emily Moore. She pleaded guilty to harassment.
On 12 July, Houghton updated her status on Facebook to read: "Keeley is going to murder the bitch. She is an actress. What a fucking liberty. Emily Fuckhead Moore."
Moore, also 18, had been victimised by Houghton for four years, the court heard, and had previously suffered a physical assault as well as damage to her home.
Worcester magistrates court heard how two days before the threat was made, Moore was in The Vaults pub in Malvern when she saw Houghton staring at her. Sara Stock, prosecuting, said: "Later when Emily was sitting on her own the defendant came over and sat next to her and asked her: 'Are you Emily Moore? Can I have a huggle?' Emily told the defendant to leave her alone otherwise she would call the police. Keeley then told her: 'I'll give you something to ring the police about.' "
Houghton wept throughout the 15-minute hearing. The court was told she had two previous convictions in connection with Moore. In 2005 she was convicted of assaulting her as she walked home from school and was subsequently expelled from school. Two years later she was convicted of causing criminal damage after kicking Moore's front door.
District judge Bruce Morgan told her: "Bullies are by their nature cowards, in school and society. The evil, odious effects of being bullied stay with you for life. On this day you did an act of gratuitous nastiness to satisfy your own twisted nature."
Houghton, who is unemployed, was also issued with a restraining order banning her from contacting Moore.
The court heard how she told police that she wrote the death threats while she was drunk late at night and had no memory of it. But when police examined internet records they discovered Houghton wrote the comments at 4pm on 12 July and kept them on her Facebook page for 24 hours.
At an earlier hearing Houghton defended herself and told magistrates: "I'm here for trying to apologise. She threatened to call the police and all I was doing was saying sorry."
Edward Gaynor-Smith, defending, told the court Houghton now "fully admitted her involvement" in the case.
The Metropolitan police has hired a consultancy to help monitor social networking sites for evidence of crime.
Labour appoints ‘Twitter tsar’
Posted by: Gadget Boy in Technology on August 17th, 2009
Kerry McCarthy, MP for Bristol East, has been named as Labour's new media campaigns spokesperson
The Labour party has appointed a "Twitter tsar" with the responsibility of encouraging MPs to use new media.
Kerry McCarthy, MP for Bristol East, has been made the party's new media campaigns spokeswoman ahead of an election next year that she says will be the first "new media election". A recent study for a newspaper voted McCarthy the most "influential MP" on Twitter – with more than 1,600 followers.
Labour's advisers are buoyant this week because the party thinks it stole a march on the Conservative leader, David Cameron, by using Twitter to get out a defence of the NHS in the aftermath of an attack by Conservative MEP Dan Hannan on the health system.
Though all involved insist the "we love the NHS" Twitter topic grew organically and was not composed of purely Labour activists, the prime minister and his wife Sarah Brown used Twitter to get their defences in first. The "we love the NHS" trending topic was so popular that the site crashed on Wednesday night.
Despite this, and well-known blogs by some Labour MPs, not all party members are so comfortable online and McCarthy has to bring them up to speed.
In an interview with LabourList website, McCarthy said: "Voters will increasingly be searching the web to find out what we think about the issues – all our candidates need to start building up that online collateral from now."
Lessons that NHS bosses never learned
Posted by: Gadget Boy in Technology on August 12th, 2009
Engineers are trained to learn from their profession's mistakes – however inconvenient the lessons. NHS IT should, too
As the song goes, a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest. Of all the indictments in the Conservative-sponsored independent review of the NHS's £12bn computerisation programme, the most damning may be its account of the way that the programme's originators wilfully disregarded painfully acquired wisdom.
The new study, led by the healthcare informatics veteran Dr Glyn Hayes, observes that the National Programme for IT followed closely on the heels of two important reports.
The first was on a series of IT pilot projects at 19 NHS demonstrator sites between 2000 and 2003. That programme, called ERDIP, tested the technical and ethical boundaries of creating community-scale electronic health records.
You would have expected the national programme to absorb and build on this work, rather as the Apollo moon programme learned from the Gemini programme about manoeuvring spacecraft in orbit. Instead, ERDIP was airbrushed from history. The independent review finds it "extraordinary that the ERDIP recommendations were largely ignored".
The reason, of course, was that the ERDIP findings were inconvenient. The evaluations stressed the need for closely involving system users – and patients – in the design of electronic records, and for introducing IT as part of improvements to patient care, not as an end in itself. This implied that the national programme's massive scale and gung-ho timetable were unrealistic.
To return to the space example, it's as if the Gemini programme had concluded that many more years of work was needed before spacecraft docking became a realistic proposition. Even in the go-go 1960s, Nasa would have paused for thought.
The NHS could dismiss inconvenient criticisms and, in the national programme's early years, it was doing its best to control the flow of information about its IT projects.
Executives deployed "commercial confidentiality", misleading press releases (including one covertly modified after publication) and even the threat of legal action to deter critics.
Which leads me to the second fount of wisdom ignored by the NHS chiefs. Hayes's review calls attention to a study called The Challenges of Complex IT Projects, published in April 2004 by the Royal Academy of Engineering and the British Computer Society. This identified a series of reasons why large-scale public sector IT projects tend to go wrong, and suggested steps to mitigate the risks. Again, it stressed the need for closely involving users in development, rather than foisting systems upon them. Again, the findings were ignored: the NHS tried to impose remotely procured standard systems.
Hayes's review says that "in an ideal world", the ERDIP and Complex IT Projects reports would already have been heeded. However, "since they have been largely neglected, it is important that they play their part in this review and, where there is still scope for redirection, shape future developments".
I can go one better than that. Almost unnoticed outside the specialist press, the institutions behind the Complex IT Projects report published a follow-up last month, calling for the adoption of engineering values in IT. Predictably, this means putting a professional engineer in charge. But it also means building large systems in incremental steps from firm foundations, without tolerating the level of software error that is the norm in many commercial products.
Most significantly, the report notes a distinguishing characteristic of engineering: that, "when a major failure occurs, the root causes are investigated, and the lessons are learned by the whole profession". However inconvenient those lessons may be.
If we take only one message from the spate of investigations into the NHS's foray into large-scale computerisation, let it be that one.
You don’t know what sexting is?
Posted by: Gadget Boy in Technology on August 7th, 2009
Texting explicit photographs has become a common part of courtship among teenagers. But the consequences can be tragic
I did it because he said he loved me and if I cared about him, I'd do it." Spoken by a 15-year-old girl of her 14-year-old self, this sentence could have been uttered at any point in history; about anything from giving a boy a kiss to performing a sexual act. But she is referring to something fairly new – sending a sexy picture of herself to her boyfriend via their mobile phones – also known as sexting.
This week the charity Beatbullying published research showing just how widespread the phenomenon is. According to its findings, 38% of under-18s had "received an offensive or distressing sexual image via text or email". These explicit texts, it says, are increasingly implicated in bullying – with the photo circulated beyond its intended recipient to classmates, friends and even strangers. As the 15-year-old told me, "After I sent him that picture, he ignored me and put [it] up on Bebo and Facebook saying I was easy." Although the words "offensive" or "distressing" were not defined in the survey, in my interviews with teenagers, their view of explicit pictures varied from "me in low-cut tops" to "as graphic as you can imagine, plus I was in school uniform".
It is partly a sign of how normalised sexualised images have become to children: what once may have been regarded as soft-porn is now commonplace everywhere from the Top 20 video charts to magazines. As 14-year-old Nancy, for instance, told me simply, "I don't think what I'm doing is anything different to what Britney does in her new video. Plus, I love the attention."
It is in Nancy's 13/14-year-old age group that sexting appears most prevalent. We are now seeing a perfect storm: girls reaching puberty at the same time as having their own phones; being able to take a picture of themselves easily; being able to distribute it cheaply. Add together the fact that teenagers today have grown up with picture messaging and that semi-nakedness is celebrated and for teenagers, one plus one equals send.
Although the charity's survey showed that girls received slightly more sexts than boys, anecdotally at least it seems that more girls than boys "pose and send". Boys can be distressed by sexting – one 12-year-old said, "I get sexts from girls asking me to kiss them, it terrifies me." But for girls, coercion can be a factor – a 15-year-old said: "When it's just you, and you're on your own with a boy, it can be hard to resist the pressure."
"I think it's most dominant among girls," explains Dr Arthur Cassidy, a social psychologist who works with women and girls who conduct online relationships."Many more girls buy glossy magazines than boys and there are more female sexually explicit icons. Statistically you also get more attention [on online social networking sites] if you put up a photo of yourself and the more explicit the photo, the more responses you get. People who do this are usually self-compensating, they lack the social skills you get from face-to-face contact. Females have more sexual pressure on them now than ever before, so rather than focus on the inner person, it's about looking at the body as a sexual image." The viewers on those social networking sites can be huge. Facebook has more than 250 million active users, Bebo has nearly nine million in the UK.
Sexting also alters courtship. "It gives them more control over their presentation than a face-to-face meeting would," explains Cassidy. It has also become like another "base" – to describe how far you'd go on a date, but seen safer than other, physical things you could do. "I sent sexts to my boyfriend when I was 15," says Sally, now 17. "He was my first boyfriend and I felt safe doing it. I had no idea that when we broke up he would send them on to everyone else. I regret it, but at least I didn't sleep with him and end up with an STD or an unwanted pregnancy. It's just a photo and now everyone has moved on. I don't even look the same and you can't tell it's me."
Dr Hera Cook, lecturer in the history of sexuality at the University of Birmingham, says new technologies have always altered sexual behaviour. "We've seen people in the past getting confused by technological change. Look at the 60s when the pill was launched. No one imagined that, within five years, it would enable young women to start transforming their sexual behaviour." Yet the speed at which pictures of a teenage girl, sent in seconds, without pausing to reflect, may spread around the world can cause terrible consequences. Last year a teenager in Ohio hanged herself after a nude photo of her that she sexted to her boyfriend was sent around her school after they broke up. Cook says the tragedy shows that children must be taught that it is OK to refuse something they are uncomfortable with at an earlier age. "If we don't give children the right to say no, we cannot expect them to then be able to say no when we want them to. We don't allow them autonomy and when they suddenly find themselves in a situation of conflict, where we want them to have autonomy, they don't know how to do it."
"I would ask any teenage girl thinking of sending anything, via text or photo, to think about how she'd feel if it went halfway around the world," says Cassidy. "I'd ask them to be a bit more introspective. With face-to-face interaction you see the whole picture."
• The women's page now has space for your comments. This week we want to know whether feminism needs rebranding. women@guardian.co.uk
Are sexters breaking the law?
In the majority of cases, there is nothing illegal about consenting adults using mobile phones to take explicit images of themselves or each other. But sexting by young people is likely to involve "taking an indecent photograph of a child", which is a serious criminal offence. Depending on the circumstances, making the image may also amount to inciting a child to perform a sexual act, causing a child to watch a sexual act, and, in some cases, engaging in sexual activity with a child – all of which are separate offences. If there is any duress, and another person – child or adult – directing the image is doing it for their own gratification, there could also be a separate offence of voyeurism.
Inevitably, sexting involves forwarding images, and there have been numerous instances of images of one child being forwarded to thousands of others. Although receiving the messages is not an offence, keeping them counts as "possessing an indecent image". The longer the image remains on a phone, the more serious the offence. Anyone who then forwards a message with an image of a child is likely to be committing a further offence of "distributing indecent images of children". Any suggestion of malice – such as revealing images of a former boyfriend or girlfriend after a break-up – is likely to be seen as an aggravating factor.
Despite having been drafted long before the sexting era, the law is clear on the seriousness of indecent images of children. But the purpose of these offences is to protect young people, so whether the police would initiate a prosecution where young people have acted consensually is another matter.
So far, the criminal justice system has tended to kick in where there is a suggestion of duress, disparity of age, or exploitation, although the rise in numbers of young people sexting could lead to a rise in prosecutions in less extreme cases. There are already concerns that young people are unaware of the serious legal implications that sexting can have.
Afua Hirsch
Safeguarding the public’s privacy
Posted by: Gadget Boy in Technology on September 16th, 2009
The Conservatives will check the rise of the surveillance state. We will scrap invasive databases and protect personal privacy
The government is backtracking furiously after casually announcing a vetting system that would force one in four adults to prove they are not paedophiles before they can carry out voluntary work with children. But this latest encroachment of the surveillance state is symptomatic of a far deeper problem.
We have seen ID cards introduced and a DNA database that holds samples on almost a million innocent people, not to mention the widespread use of surveillance powers for inappropriate purposes – like monitoring the permits of paper boys, or following children home from school to check their catchment area. Bit by bit, the government has ushered in a sea-change in the relationship between the citizen and the state. None of this has made us safer; since 1997, police-recorded violent crime has nearly doubled, the terrorist threat has risen to an all-time high and antisocial behaviour remains a scourge in many towns and cities.
Surveillance legislation passed in good faith has been stretched well beyond its original purpose. Meanwhile, the government has robotically relied on databases to provide an inadequate substitute for human judgment and care in delivering public services and protecting the public. The Baby P case shows how dangerous such a false sense of security can be. Equally, the Soham murders might have been prevented if proper reference checks had been completed.
The government's flawed approach has also led to a series of database fiascos – exposing us to more, not less, risk – culminating in the Treasury losing the entire nation's child benefit records in the post. Little wonder that nine out of 10 people do not trust the government with their personal data.
If the rise of a surveillance state has proved both intrusive and clumsy, it is also hugely expensive – at a time we can least afford it. ID cards have been independently estimated to cost £19bn. Time and time again public sector databases have run over their estimated costs. And, on one estimate, the new vetting scheme could cost £200m.
So today, the Conservatives are launching a report setting out 11 commonsense measures to protect personal privacy and check the rise of the surveillance state. Our approach is based on five principles. First, we want less, not more, mammoth databases – so ID cards and ContactPoint will be scrapped. Second, we want to see less of our personal data hoarded by the state – and when it is stored it must be held accurately and on a need-to-know basis. Third, we need greater limits on the sharing of our data across the sprawling arms of Whitehall – let alone quangos and councils. And, finally, we will introduce stronger duties on government to keep our private information safe.
Of course we should harness IT to strengthen public protection and public service delivery. But we also need proper checks on this increasingly arbitrary and authoritarian government. Our personal data belongs to us. Government holds it on trust. The state is there to serve the citizen, not the reverse.
Child protection, Children, Comment, Conservatives, Data protection, Dominic Grieve, guardian.co.uk, Identity cards, Politics, Privacy, Society, Surveillance
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