Robots, GCHQ and the Intercept Modernisation Programme

Reuters has published a fascinating article/interview with Richard Aldrich, author of a study of the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ).

We have warned about the Intercept Modernisation Programme (IMP) before - the clandestine GCHQ plan to monitor every email, phone call and piece of electronic communication made in the UK - but as ever, details are sketchy and the controversies vigorously denied.

This latest piece of work by Richard Aldrich is fascinating because it shows the pace of change - and the accompanying dangers that are posed by this rapid technological innovation.

As the article explains:

The agency is piloting a program to sift the digital trail left by people's daily lives -- who is phoning whom, who is emailing whom -- by using powerful data mining methods to trace networks of targets like criminals and terrorists, (Aldrich) says.

The danger is, such programs may mistake good guys for bad guys, he argues. "Once you go over to data mining you are essentially handing the process over to robots, who roam through this material looking for patterns of suspicious activity," he says.

"The danger is false positives -- people who have done a series of random things but when a machine looks at it, it says that person has done something bad."

Placed side-by-side with the horrible invasion of privacy, the danger of false positives makes the IMP a doubly scary prospect that should be resisted at all costs.

A Government 'committed to restoring civil liberties' as the Coalition has claimed, must reveal the full details of the IMP before promptly scrapping it.

By Dylan Sharpe

Comments

[Andrew Ampers Taylor]

The verb of assassination is to assassinate - David Cameron is the leader of the Conservative party.

If everyone puts that at the bottom of their emails, perhaps they may think better of it. Guess which three consecutive words will be picked up?

By the way, GCHQ will probably read this now.

Ampers

[Heather]

“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face-for ever.” - George Orwell

[alastair]

"must reveal the full details of the IMP before scrapping it"

OK, so that's the craziest thing you've written in recent weeks.

What if there actually isn't a privacy or civil liberties issue here at all, but you don't know that because it's all classified? Must they still reveal the full details and then scrap it.

We've always allowed the intelligence services to intercept signals traffic in the name of national security, and rightly so. That does, of course, mean trusting our elected representatives to oversee their activities in a reasonable manner. I know BBW isn't really into trusting government (except with other peoples' data that was accidentally captured by Google, obviously), but there does come a point where you accept a certain amount of this kind of activity in order to keep us all safe.