GCHQ at the centre of the controversy

The proposals will allow the intelligence agencies to analyse the details of all the internet activity of the UK citizens, including browsing history, email, internet messaging, social media accounts and voipfone – phone calls made using internet technology – communications.

In the speech the Queen said: “My government intends to bring forward measures to maintain the ability of the law enforcement and intelligence agencies to access vital communications data under strict safeguards to protect the public subject to scrutiny of draft clauses.”

According to intelligence experts, the emergence of the internet as a means of communication and the adoption of new technologies such as the cloud, social media and mobile has presented an opportunity to produce profiles of people and monitor their behaviour in a way that has never been possible before.

Analysis of the data, which it is rumoured the Government will require internet service providers and telecommunications companies to store for a minimum of a year, will enable to security services to identify terrorists and criminals, by searching the data for patterns of abnormal behaviour.

 Opposition

 The move to introduce the system has provoked an outcry among civil liberties groups and could threaten the stability of the Government due to outright opposition to the measures from the Liberal Democrats who claim that they are being locked out of discussion on the matter.

According to Julian Huppert, the Liberal Democrat MP for Cambridge, who has been tasked by Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg with monitoring the issue because of his Cambridge science background, the Liberal Democrats have not been provided with any details on the measures despite request to the Home Office.

“The Home Secretary has refused to tell us what is in the proposal,” said Huppert. “I think the Home Office is very confused about what its doing. What they appear to be talking about we would be extremely opposed to,” he added.

The discord among the coalition is particularly ironic, as according to Michael Drury, the GCHQ lawyer responsible for the drawing up of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, the phone monitoring legislation that the new measures are expected to supersede, Nick Clegg was considered to be the most effective opponent of RIPA.

“When were drafting the first RIPA legislation, the most sensible and informed commentator on the issue was Nick Clegg,” said Drury, who left GCHQ two years ago, and now works in commercial practice for BCL Burton Copeland.

 Sudden move

Concern over the developments has already resulted in a flurry of activity from privacy groups with Privacy International convening an emergency, ‘Scrambling for Safety’ debate, on the issue at the London School of Economics two weeks ago, which included former Conservative Shadow Home Secretary David Davis, Huppert and the director of Liberty Shami Chakrabarti among others.

‘the global landscape has changed in the last 10 years. Known security threats have given way to new ones that have been conceived to avoid detection. The techniques available to law and order have not kept pace with the ever increasing sophistication of modern communications infrastructure’

“Quite why this is needed has not been made clear, or why it needs to be done so quickly with so little consultation,” said Eric King who monitors surveillance technology for Privacy International. If this was so crucial then we would have expected it to have been in place before the Olympics but there is no way it is going to ready in time for that, because this will take at least a year to be set up.”

The motivation for the sudden impetus given to the plans is not clear, according to some observers the Government has been looking to introduce the measures since 2006 with the pressure for the changes coming from the Home Office.

“There is a very real and sustainable fear that the amount of protective intelligence available to those who undertake the analysis of communications data is falling, unless you take some real steps to require the retention of data. I think that is a fair and real fear,” said Drury, adding that the populations blurring or communications, switching from email, to the phone, text and internet messaging in a matter of minutes had made the intelligence agencies task much more difficult.

Drury also stressed the ephemeral nature of data as the reason for the requirement to store a pool of data.

Insiders say that the initiative is being pushed by Charles Farr, the Director General of the newly-formed Office for Security and Counter Terrorism, who recently commented that “Communications data from internet-based services is not always available; for some internet-based services it is not generated, collected and stored by the internet service provider. Many service providers are based overseas,” he said.

“About 25% of requests for communication data by the police and agencies can no longer be met. This has a direct impact on the investigation of crime in this country and our ability to identify and then prosecute criminals and terrorists.”

According to ISPs approached by the Government over the proposed changes, the point has been stressed that changes in communications post the internet have meant that many people are now using overseas based communications companies.

 Profound unease

 Co-incidentally the pressure for the reform of the UK’s laws on surveillance have occurred at exactly the same moment as protests in the US have started against the passing of the Cyber Intelligence Storing and Protection Act by the US Congress which the Obama administration has vowed to veto.

Opposition to the plans is not just coming from politicians and activists, worried about the costs of the technology and the implications for their relationship with their customers, telecommunications companies are privately expressing a profound disquiet about the measure.

“We all want to be good citizens and we understand the need for the intelligence services to be able to monitor the activities criminals and terrorists.

“But we have grave concerns about exactly how that information is obtained, partly on grounds of cost, partly on grounds of practicality, but mostly our concern is about the privacy of the individual and the activities of the intelligence agencies,” said Colin Duffy, chief executive officer of Voipfone and a board member of the IT Service Providers Association, which represents internet phone companies.

The detail of what is being proposed has not yet been made available.

According to information gleaned by Huppert and the privacy activists, the proposals will involve the creation of stores of internet activity data held by the service providers that the Government will be able to access and interrogate remotely and analyse very fast.

Whether this will involve the housing of a ‘black box’ in the communications system of the service provider or a direct cable link into the internet company’s database is not clear but according to observers, the Government has now talked to all of the internet companies about its objectives including social media sites like Facebook, cloud and search companies such as Yahoo and Google and the voipfone and instant message companies.

“We know that they have spoken to everyone apart from Skype,” said PI’s King, adding: “but as Skype is owned by Microsoft I can’t see them not co-operating.”

Powerful technology

Quite what the technology can do is impressive VasTech, a South African company that advertises its business on the web as being network recording and passive surveillance produces a system called Zebra which is simply for call analysis. Zebra’s marketing materials state that the problem is a ‘gap in the intelligence picture that the criminals slip through’.

The solution, according to VasTech, is ‘massive passive surveillance technology for recording communications from satellite and terrestrial networks, unfiltered and uncompressed,’ Zebra VasTech states can provide ‘power without compromise. The Zebra records, stores and analyse billions of calls uncovering crucial intelligence. Zebra takes automated intelligence gathering to a new level.

The VasTech system’s marketing also states that it can also identify ‘key relationships between stakeholders. Valuable insight on the structure and operation of syndicate networks are obtained. Speaker identification reveals unknown numbers and new mobile numbers used by targets.’

Zebra - camouflaged but watching

A number crunching capability that  can reduce even the largest  population to a manageable size and  one that VasTech is not alone in  offering to a market that now includes  every advanced country in the world  alongside many states with poor      human rights records.

Worldwide surveillance web

 “All the advanced countries in the world have now deployed advanced intelligence systems to varying degrees but they all do have these systems,” said Dr Bjoern Rupp, the chief executive officer of GSMK Cryptophone, an  expert on phone interception who has worked as an advisor to the German government.

According to Rupp, the monitoring technology can, just on the basis of the phone information culled under the existing RIPA legislation, give governments a frightening degree of information on the activities of individuals.

“The current data hides a lot of information inside so you can easily determine not just who called who, but who was travelling from where and when and how many people that they were in contact with.”

Adding in additional information from the internet makes the potential profiling ability of the systems even frighteningly powerful according to Rupp.

“From the data you can employ advanced data mining technology and then find out for instance not only who the person is but you can then profile that person to find similar people to them in the database.

“You can effectively say to it I’m trying to find a certain person and the system will generate that person for me even though I don’t know them yet.”

 Social control fears

For Rupp it is a power that is a massive danger for civil liberties as well as privacy.

“The underlying issue is that once you store the data it’s very easy for the data to be misused. The UK is a state where the rule of the law is very well enforced in other states where the rule of law is not so well enforced the data is not only going to be misused it is going to be used at will.

“The trend in intelligence support systems is that these are systems that are installed by governments to monitor the telecommunications behaviour of the population.

“The trend in the systems is to correlate a lot of data from various sources and to allow you one, to profile an individual to great detail and much greater details than was possible 10-20 years ago and two, the system allows you to profile abnormal behaviour.”

An amount of data that is already comprehensive, call analysis patterns already yield information about an individual’s status in a group, mobile phone records are overlaid onto that to provide location and travel pattern data, this data is linked to online commercial databases providing information on spending and personal tastes and family situation.

According to Rupp, so powerful are the computer systems now in use by Government’s around the world that they can assign a value to an individual for a pattern of normal behaviour, gathered from a routine monitoring of that individual, but any deviation from that pattern of normal behaviour will register on the system and can be grouped into numerous different types of patterns.

A method that has already been employed by some companies in office computer systems, where intelligent software looks through an employee’s computer use and will alert the company to any change in the ‘normal pattern of behaviour of an employee,’ changes that will normally indicate changes in an individual’s personal circumstances such as money worries or relationship problems and will lead to the individual being placed on a watch list.

A situation that may perhaps be justifiable in a work environment but one that becomes extremely invasive and questionable when applied to personal communications.

 Costs and legal issues

 But according to Trefor Davies, chief technology officer of the internet service provider Timico, it is a situation that we are ironically happy to accept if it involves organisations other than the Government.

“The odd thing about this is that we actually not really talking about much more data than Google holds, but I think that there are other issues other than that,” said Davies who was also one of the panellists at the recent Scrambling for Safety debate.

“There are lots of issues that need to be thought about here – there is the practicality of what they are doing because this is going to cost a lot of money and then there is the issue of putting in a system that is a serious threat to privacy.”

In a nutshell all of the concerns that will be exercising the Government, which is claiming that the system should only cost £2bn and is evidently optimistic about being able to balance the last two factors.

Others are putting the costs much higher, according to civil servants the costs of £2bn are hard to see and insiders are privately mentioning figures closer to an eventual cost of between £15-£20 bn.

Costs aside others are pointing out that there are actually greater issues for the Government to consider.

Sir David Omand, the former head of GCHQ, in a recent report for the thinktank Demos called for changes to the existing legislation to allow the monitoring of internet communications but insisted that, that monitoring needed to be placed on a clear legal footing and the public needed to be confident it was not being abused.

A point echoed by Voipfone’s Duffy: “the thing that really worries me about this is that if the rumours are true about what the Government wants to do is that it will change the relationship of ordinary people to the Government.

“We are supposed to be policed by consent, If we are simply surveilled without any controls or consent then I am going to change my behaviour and so I am demonstrating that I don’t give my consent.

“At the moment we have a regime where the people wanting to obtain this information have to go through a transparent and accountable process and that needs to stay if we are to have confidence in these changes.”

 Need for transparency 

It is this transparency that lies at the heart of the Government’s problems.

According to Drury, when RIPA was drafted it did not envisage the development of social networks or ‘the cloud’.

“How do you define and safeguard for the future? It is a very difficult thing to do given that no-one knows what developments will occur next and no-one really knows what the future development of social media sites will be to take one example,” said Drury, adding that the Government faced very real issues in the drafting of the legislation.

“I think that there is a case that due to technological change that we may be on the edge of what can legislated for under the law, any statute may be potentially unwieldy and there may be a case to look at a set of principles, defined by a code and regulated by a standing committee.”

Another issue highlighted by Drury was the possible problems of transparency in any court case based on information obtained by using such a system, as it would become necessary to say how the individual had been found and that revealing that information as it would alert those being sought to how they were being found.

Those opposed to the proposed changes have received support from an unexpected quarter. Melissa Hathaway, who had been widely expected to take the post of Barrack Obama’s first Cyber Czar

Hathaway, who has been expounding a policy of information age openness since leaving the Obama administration for personal reasons, said that in the internet age it was essential to encourage transparency from all sections of society to generate trust.

“I believe it is very important to have the law govern the Government so that people can see accountability in action.”

The news from Global Industry Analysts comes in the wake of a couple of turbulent years for the solar market, which has seen it battered by the impact of the economic recession in Europe an area that until now has been a key area for the development of the industry.

Following a period of fairly continual growth, the abrupt collapse of the European economy following the debt crisis has seen demand for solar panels fall off dramatically.

A situation that has been made worse by the decisions by companies like Germany, Italy and the UK to withdraw subsidies intended to encourage the deployment of solar technology. http://www.futureintelligence.co.uk/2011/11/sunny-spells-for-solar-power/

According to the GIA research: “Solar Panels: A Global Strategic Business Report,” policy changes that have for the first time weakened the European market’s dominance of the industry.

“The solar panels market in the immediate future will be challenged by planned subsidy cuts by major European countries such as Germany and Italy and chances of excess supply. While Europe still accounts for a major share of demand for solar panels, other markets such as the US, Asia-Pacific and even Latin America are expected to gather momentum, and even spearhead growth in the global market over the next few years.

“Continued policy adjustments, tightening incentive terms and uncertainty over continuation of Feed-In Tariffs for solar installations in major European markets are fast shifting the market dynamics away from the region and towards other regional markets,” states the report, adding that these changes are now seeing developing countries looking to take leadership positions in the industry.

The interest in solar power as potentially the main source of alternative energy has been welcomed by many scientists who have championed the adoption of the technology rather than other options such as wind.

“As an on-going source of energy solar power has to be the grand-daddy of all power,” said Dr Richard Pearson, a bio-fuel engine designer for Lotus and a noted advocate of solar power. If you think about It, the wind comes from the action of the sunlight and oil is simply stored solar energy. It makes a lot more sense to just collect it from source.”

A conclusion that appears not to have been lost on countries like India and China which have seen the spiralling costs of fuel caused by increased global demand and opted to use renewable sunlight instead.

And in response to those rising energy costs many companies such as BT and Body Shop are now integrating solar cell power systems into their buildings as part of their power plans, a trend that has also been taken up by public utilities, schools, train stations and hospitals.

All developments the report interprets as more than healthy: “Given the fast increasing electricity prices, particularly in Europe, and substantial declines in prices of PV technology over the last few years, the solar PV market is expected to achieve its key competitive measure – the grid parity. Global revenues from sales of solar panels are expected to surge at an impressive CAGR (compound annual growth rate) of 20% over the analysis period.”

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No , not one bit.

At this very moment a US robotic space craft, known simply as X37B, and powered by  a solar array that unfurled from its cargo bay is completing its 270^th day in space and according to Professor Stephen Sweeney it is not only the shape of things to come, it is the way that our future will be powered.

For Professor Sweeney, the Head of Photonics at the UK’s University of Surrey, is an evangelist for a technology that first caught the popular imagination over 30 years ago in the Bond film ‘The man with the Golden Gun,’  the development of an orbiting solar array that can beam the Sun’s power straight down to anywhere it is wanted.

Though as Sweeney is quick to point out the technology he is working on will have one major difference, it will drive the collected solar energy down to its target in a harmless infra-red beam rather than the laser of the Bond film.

“Our power is going to come down in a very narrow beam and we have deliberately picked an infra-red frequency, because we want it to be safe, and to be able to come through the Earth’s atmosphere seamlessly. We want to make sure that it takes advantage of an atmospheric window so we don’t lose power.”

The idea is not new, a point Sweeney quickly concedes, some ten years ago scientists were talking about the possibility of creating space-based solar panels that would be the power stations of the future, but what is new is that much of what was talked about before can now be done.

The reason for some very serious money being pointed in the direction of projects like Sweeney’s and the attraction for that serious investment might seem even more ludicrous to the canny cash strapped, recession hit investor – a space station on the Moon, but for those with their eyes quite literally on the future that is where fortunes will be made.

The logic is simple, though the project is speculative to say the least.  The biggest cost of getting anything into space is the cost of getting it out of the Earth’s gravitational field.

A Moon base, with low gravity would be a perfect place for future space missions it would also present a site for space mining – an operation in which asteroids and other objects could be tethered close to the Moon and exploited for their mineral content the only problem to the plan is a lack of energy.

A prospect that may still be a long way off, but with much of the Moon in shadow and 14,000 km² in permanent darkness a constant source of power will be essential.

Step forward Professor Sweeney, one of the men who might help take the loon out of lunacy, for if the experiments Sweeney is conducting on the theory behind his solar power system work then it will be possible to beam power to the Moon and the Earth.

The idea as always is simple.

Solar energy is much more powerful in space because it is not filtered by the Earth’s atmosphere. A typical Earth-based solar cell is only 10-20% effective in space the yield can be taken up to 50% and converting it into a different more concentrated wave-length will mean that the atmospheric power loss can also be removed.

Even more compelling, is that freed from the Earth’s rotation the satellite can be powering energy down 24 hours a day from a space vacuum that should lower any costs from atmospheric wear and tear.

And as always in space you are never alone, two years ago two Japanese companies announced that they were getting ready to spend £13.4 billion on similar technology that will power 294,000 homes.

Mitsubishi Electric Corporation and IGI Corporation are partnering with the Japanese government on the space initiative, which  aims to generate about a gigawatt of energy from solar panel technology.

“It sounds like a science-fiction cartoon, but solar power generation in space may be a significant alternative energy source in the century ahead as fossil fuel disappears,” said Kensuke Kanekiyo, managing director of the Institute of Energy Economics.

The theory is convincing, but then so was the idea of crashing a rocket into one of the Moon’s poles to release water vapour from ice that scientists said that they had discovered there and kick start an atmosphere on our near neighbour.

But if Sweeney has his head in the stars, his backers are also looking very keenly at the potential spin-offs from such lofty research as the innovations necessary for just the optical tracking and power conversion involved would all be potentially valuable in other more Earth-based technologies.

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The work on the station, part of an ambitious £5.5bn project to bring the Thameslink network into the 21st century, will use 4,400 solar panels to create an array that will produce 900.000 kWh of electricity a year.

The 6000 m2 array will generate enough renewable power to slash the station’s annual power bill by 50% and CO2 emissions by 511 tonnes when it is finished in mid 2012.

This sun-harvesting roof will mean that Blackfriars will become the world’s second solar bridge after the Kurilpa footbridge in Australia.

It will also mean that sun light that used to fall on the River Thames only to be washed down river into the sea can now be turned into electricity because the development will see Blackfriars becoming the first station to completely span the river using the foundations of the existing Victorian train bridge built in 1886.
Earning it the rather unique title of the world’s first solar train station bridge, other environmental measures such as sun pipes for natural lighting and rain harvesting systems which are also being built into the station, will further reduce the development’s carbon footprint.

The station roof concept is the brainchild of the alternative power project design company Solarcentury and the engineering company Jacobs and uses high performance solar panels made by Sanyo.

“Sanyo is very proud to have its HIT solar modules used in the redevelopment of Blackfriars Station,” said Shigeki Komatsu solar division director of Sanyo Component Europe. “The high efficiency of our solar modules makes them ideal for structures where maximum power generation is required from an area where load must be considered,”

“With our solar modules on this well known London landmark, Sanyo hopes to raise awareness and understanding of solar and other renewable energy technologies, demonstrating how they can both help the city environment and minimise the onset of climate change.”

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Speaking on Platt’s Energy Week, a specialist internet broadcast channel for the power industry, Jonathan Plowe, a managing director of Bank America Merrill Lynch underlined the declining price of solar panels as evidence of an industry take-up by consumers.

“We’re rapidly getting to the point where solar energy can survive on its own without government subsidies,”

Plowe told the programme. “One of the areas I think is most interesting in that space is distributed, or rooftop, solar.”

Plowe’s comments will be seen as a boost to an industry currently suffering adverse headlines following the bankruptcy of Solyndra, the Californian manufacturers of a revolutionary solar panel technology system, which received a £341.5m loan guarantee from the US Department of Energy in September 2009.

The collapse of Solyndra and its subsequent investigation by the FBI had led many in Washington to call for an end to central government support for the renewable energy sector including the scrapping of grants and tax incentives.

Plowe’s intervention comes at the same time as the Bank of America is set to launch two massive solar panels schemes which have provided a much needed boost to the industry.

The massive £1.6bn scheme known as Project Amp, part funded by another loan guarantee from the DoE in which the Bank of America is to provide an £0.89bn finance package for the scheme which aims to place 733 megawatts of solar panels on warehouse roofs across the US.

The second project also financed by the Bank of America called SolarStong would see solar panels appearing on military housing across the US.

While in the UK the result of Government initiatives aimed at encouraging solar panel take-up rooftops have also spawned controversy.

Many buildings have started to sprout large solar cell installations in a bid to benefit from the Government’s Feed In Tariff for schemes greater than 250 KwH, which had seen many organisations exploiting Government subsidies to install solar farms to reap the tariff.

The Government dropped the FIT from 29.3p per kWh to 8.5p on the 1st of August to deter the practice.
A move lamented by the International Director of Values for the Body Shop Paul McGreevy whose company has installed a 24 tennis court size solar panel on the roof of its headquarters.

“Whilst we understand the need to prevent commercial exploitation of the Feed In Tariffs, we are disappointed that large, self-funded scale installations like The Body Shop, entirely in keeping with the original intention of the initiative, have now reduced considerably in size, postponed or abandoned due to the increased investment.”

“We hope that the government will review again and extend the current Tariff, or at least consider different methodologies to assess the installations to make it more viable as it will be instrumental in reducing the price of solar panels, making it more affordable to more organisations and further encouraging local electricity generation.”

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Revelations  about the practice of remotely listening to other people’s voice messages – erroneously labelled ‘phone hacking’ by the media – has already accounted for a number of high-profile casualties but has conspicuously failed to include technology companies and the public at large in the list of the culpable.

So far that list includes: News of the World royal correspondent Clive Goodman, former editor Andy Coulson, News International’s former chief executive Rebekah Brook, the 168 year old paper itself while Rupert Murdoch has apologised in a private meeting to the family of murdered school-girl MIlly Dowler .

No mention has been made of the role the technology companies have played in releasing equipment to the public which has been enabled to allow people to access it from the outside, or of the responsibility that the public have to familiarise themselves with the functions of the technology that it buys.

The media, already rightly shouldering the bulk of the responsibility for the practice, is also committing another disservice by describing the practice as ‘phone hacking’, a term which allows the public to think that there has been an element of complexity to the technique.

A misconception that allows the public to remain largely complacent about what has gone on, a complacency in an information age, for which the public , very like James Murdoch, is becoming dangerously close to being complicit  through negligence.

Despite the widespread coverage of the fallout from the ‘phone hacking’ affair, there has been very little mention of what the practice involves, which is essentially using the remote answer phone function provided by all mobile phone companies as part of their service.

The system, which has until recently been provided by the mobile phone companies by default, allows someone to dial a mobile phone number and listen to any messages left on that number from another phone.

To use the service the caller waits until the mobile phone’s answer phone message plays and then pushes a button sequence that each mobile operator provides in its instruction manual.

Once the remote access is started, the person dialling in is asked to enter a four digit code to gain access to the messages held on the mobile company’s server.

Unless this is changed, the code is left at the default settings – often 0000, 1111 or 1234 – these default settings and the key series needed to initiate the process can be obtained on the internet from the mobile service provider’s website.

So unless the phone’s owner has read the manual and listened to the options on their mobile phone before they access their answer phone messages and changed the default settings to a password of their own the remote retrieval system is set at the default.

This means that it can be accessed by anyone who has a vested interest in doing so; a situation that partially places the blame for the situation on the phone’s owner and the mobile phone company.

Because if James Murdoch was negligent and therefore culpable – as is being suggested – for not knowing the full extent of the use of illegally obtained answer phone messages by News International journalists then there is also a degree of negligence on the part of mobile phone companies for enabling remote access to answer phones and not telling the phone’s owners about it.

There is also a degree of negligence on the part of the phone’s owners about not finding out exactly what the technology that they bought does – a failing that is now at the heart of many of the issues that we now face with technology.

Because there is an expectation from us that our technology works like any other electronic consumer device that we buy, whether it is a washing machine or a car, we expect to be able to use it and not to understand it, nor to even bother reading the manual.

The result is now an alarming reliance on technologies that we do not even half understand with the result that we are not aware of the risks that they hold for us.

And while the public at large is relaxed about the fact that as a result of the outrage over the remote accessing of answer phone messages that celebrities and the victims of tragedy will now be safe from eavesdropping by journalists, businesses should be aware that they could quite easily become the victims of eavesdropping by a competitor unless they take the appropriate measures.

Protecting yourself against ‘phone hacking’

There is no particular order in which you should do this as both courses should serve your purpose but it will not do any harm to do both.

• Log onto your mobile answer phone and play the options. If it offers you an option to change the pass code on the mobile answer phone do so. Choose something memorable and also something that is not the pass code to something else like your cash-card as criminals work on the basis that people use the same code for everything. Do not use a date of birth from a family member as social networks mean that these can frequently be obtained.
• Ring your mobile phone company and ask if the mobile answer phone system can be accessed remotely and ask if it is enabled by default, ie turned on whether you asked for it to be or not and whether it is password protected. If it is not password protected, demand that it be turned off.

Using the lure of renovating old First and Second World War tanks, the project engages the offenders and provides them with the spur needed to get the qualifications that can give them a new future.

Set up by the Weald Foundation, the Rugmer Project, has been developed in conjunction with Kent Probation, the Tank Museum in Dorset, and West Kent College and now takes young offenders from the Kent area and educates them to GSCE level in English and Maths while also providing them with an NVQ in Engineering and has achieved an astounding success rate.

“Nearly 60% of the people in the criminal justice system have the literacy and numeracy of an 11 year old. Basic literacy and numeracy remains one of the biggest challenges of working with offenders,” said David Ridd, the project’s co-ordinator and a former TV producer, adding: “Being able to read and write enhances the chances of young offenders being able to find and sustain long-term employment.”

Since the project’s start over 70 offenders have passed through the scheme, generating nearly 90 level 1 literacy and Numeracy awards and 6 NVQ level 1 engineering qualifications.  Re-offending rates are running at 7%.  This compares to a national average of 61%.  Attendance rates are at 85%.  7 offenders have found work whilst working at the project.

Success that has been recognised by the Howard League for Penal Reform, which last year gave its national Unpaid Work Award to the Rugmer Project.

Now the project’s organisers want to move its work onto the internet, but to do that it needs new computers and help to develop an in internet presence and is seeking support from the technology community.

Which is where you come in – the work of the Rugmer Project is already attracting considerable TV and media interest and the organisers want to work with the technology sector to develop even more innovative ways to promote the work it is doing and offer more educational opportunities for the people it is helping.

If you feel you can contribute either computers or internet website help that can take the project onto the web then please contact Pete warren on peter@futureintelligence.co.uk

___________________________________________________________________________

The Weald Foundation,

Established in 2002, The Weald Foundation is home to a unique collection of historic military vehicles, restored to full working condition over the last decade.

Activities

The Foundation’s programme focuses on four key areas:

• To acquire and preserve First and Second World War Military Vehicles for the education of the public.

• To research and interpret original documents, record in film and in photographs the restoration of each vehicle, to produce literature on the history of the vehicles and related equipment for display to the general public.

• To promote and encourage the study of methods of restoration.

• To research the unit and therefore campaign history, where possible, of each vehicle and inform the public. This research will encompass interviews with veterans, archive and data study and step by step analysis of the vehicle itself – workshop archaeology.

As part of its charitable remit the Foundation established, in May 2009, an educational scheme known as the Rugmer Project.  This is an innovative Community Payback partnership with Kent Probation, West Kent College and the Tank Museum in Dorset.  The Project provides offenders with GCSE equivalent qualifications in English, Maths and an NVQ in Engineering.  Each day involves literacy and numeracy instruction and vehicle restoration. The project currently runs one day a week.  It is modelled on a similar award winning scheme which has been running at the Tank Museum since 2003.  In 2010 The Rugmer Project won the national Unpaid Work award from the Howard League for Penal Reform.

Since the project’s inception over 50 offenders have passed through the scheme, generating nearly 80 level 1 literacy and Numeracy awards and 4 NVQ level 1 engineering qualifications.  Re-offending rates are running at 7%.  This compares to a national average of 61%.  Attendance rates are at 85%.  7 offenders have found work whilst working at the project.

The intended outcome is to create restoration projects which offenders can begin and complete within the allotted time-span.  For example the Project has traded a restorable German tank engine for a non-working engine with the Dutch National Military Museum at Overloon.  The offenders have been carrying out a complete external restoration and the engine will be returned to Holland for permanent static display.  Restored vehicles are sent out to other museums or take part in public displays and or educational projects.  Offenders also have the opportunity to be with the vehicles when they go out on show and to video and document the restoration projects,   promoting offender engagement in service delivery.

It is the Foundation’s goal to rebuild and restore each vehicle to full working condition in exactly the same way as the factory original, with the exception of weapons that are de-activated for safety reasons.

Not only are the vehicles themselves important examples of military history, their restoration represents an important landmark in historic military vehicle restoration.

This level of restoration requires painstaking research and an extraordinary attention to detail in all areas of the restoration process to achieve the correct end result. This can involve reproducing the largest or smallest parts, often hidden from sight, using the original methods of production, regardless of more modern and efficient methodologies. Our restoration will allow these extremely important historic fighting vehicles to live again in original form thus preserved for future generations.

The Foundation works closely with the Tank Museum and the Imperial War Museum in the UK.  Its founder, Michael Gibb, is a Trustee of the Tank Museum.  The Foundation is currently restoring a Tiger 1 tank engine for the Tank Museum.  It also undertakes restoration work for a number of other collections and individuals.

The next phase of development calls for greater public access to the existing collection with increased emphasis on public education.  As part of this the Foundation have entered into partnership with the Tank Museum in Dorset, who have agreed to initiate a loan agreement to enable the Kent project to swap vehicles thereby enhancing the educational potential of the project.

In addition to its education work the Foundation is involved in a number of high profile public projects over the next few years.  The most immediate plan is to co-ordinate with both the Imperial War Museum and the Tank Museum to have running vehicles ready for the 100^th anniversary of the First World War in 2014.  The restored vehicles will take centre stage in 2016 for the anniversary of the first use of tanks during the latter stages of the Battle of the Somme.

When Iran announced in November 2010 that a computer virus had damaged its  uranium enrichment plant, the news created a stir around the world.

The damage caused by the Stuxnet virus was tangible proof that viruses could have a major impact on the ‘real world’.

Now a report by the UK-based Cyber Security Research Institute (CSRI) has revealed that the vulnerability of societies around the world to virus attacks is greater than many had supposed.

In particular parts of the UK’s Critical National Infrastructure (CNI) – the backbone of the country through which essential services such as power and water supply are run – could be especially at risk to attacks from either criminal or state-sponsored cyber attacks.

Infrastructure security dangerously poor

In its ‘UK Critical Systems Report’, the CSRI reports claims that the so-called control systems world is ‘ten to fifteen years behind’ the IT industry in terms of security against online and digital attacks.

One reason for the vulnerability of the national infrastructure,  finds the report, is that traditionally the world of control systems has not regarded cyber security as an important issue.

‘One of the biggest issues is that the people who design, implement and build [the control systems] don’t know one end of security from another because it is not part of their culture. It’s not their fault, they just have not been required to do it,’ says one leading UK expert who asked not to be named, told the report’s author.

This is partly because at the time various systems, grids and their equipment were installed, there was no expectation that they would ever be linked up to the outside world via the internet.

But, says the report, the need to drive down costs in many industries and the discovery that some key safety systems in dangerous places could be controlled remotely via the internet have changed that.

‘The move to [new control]  systems boosts efficiency at utilities because it allows workers to operate equipment remotely. But at the same time this access to the internet exposes once-closed systems to cyber attacks,’ Frank Saxton, a computer network security engineer, tells the report.

‘Electric utilities, pipelines, railroads and oil companies use remotely controlled and monitored valves, switches and other mechanisms that are vulnerable to attack.’

Built for a different time

The report points out that neither computers nor phones lines – through which the internet runs – were built with security in mind.

‘This inherently insecure internet was then connected to the systems that run our electricity, gas, fuel, telecoms, water and food to provide greater online control and market access to data. In this way the internet has been connected to systems that were never intended to be connected to the outside world. We are now starting to see the impact of that,’ notes the report.

The report accepts that the UK government is starting to address the problem by announcing in October 2010 that €650 million will be spent on the nation’s cyber defences at a time when other public sectors are seeing their budgets slashed.

But it says that the current state of the infrastructure will hamper progress, as will a chronic skills shortage in cyber security and a continuing reluctance in the world of the CNI to address cyber security issues.

‘The situation is worsening rather than improving. The mix of the people with the industrial systems knowledge and the security skills isn’t there,’ warns one expert who is advising the UK Government on CNI.

‘I have assessed 40-50 jobs in the last three months and not a single one mentions security.’

Government and business must work together

The CSRI report also highlights the need, in an inter-connected world, for private businesses to play their part in helping defend the national infrastructure by ensuring their own data systems and computers are properly protected against attack.

But it is not optimistic that this will happen quickly.

‘Some observers point out that even if large companies had been aware of the Stuxnet vulnerabilities  they would not have taken the necessary steps to protect against it until it became essential to do so – i.e. that they had an example of a real world attack as in the case of the Iranian power plant,’ says the report.

The study also suggests that the computer security industry  faces greater challenges in a post-Stuxnet world
‘More and more it will become necessary for the computer security industry to act as part of the awareness-raising mechanism to prove the threat and the need to protect against it,’ it argues.

‘The challenge for computer security companies will be to evolve into a role that they have until now avoided – that of helping identify what needs to be protected, protecting it, finding out who is attacking it, and then helping prosecute the attackers.’

On a world-wide level the report also warns that with governments now devoting greater funds towards cyber security and with defence companies seeing the commercial opportunity and starting their own cyber security, there is a risk of an escalation in terms of  offensive as well as defensive cyber security techniques.

‘It is definitely the start of something new, and it’s definitely the start of an arms race for the simple reason that you can’t stockpile weaponised software because it has to be constantly updated to make sure that it will still work in an internet and cyber landscape that is constantly being updated,’  one employee of a leading US arms firm tells the author.

Copies of the CSRI Stuxnet Report ‘UK Critical Systems’ which costs £495 are available from peter@csri.info at the Cyber Security Research Institute

An investigation by Future intelligence has been told that  McKinnon, who faces a potential 60 year jail sentence if he is handed over to the US, was not a lone hacker roving through US computer systems but was instead the most junior member of an informal five-strong group that regularly exchanged information on US systems.

The news that McKinnon was not the only one roaming over US systems known about by the authorities does beg the question as to whether the US policy is to make an example of the hacker who suffers from Aspergers Syndrome, a medical condition that makes it difficult for sufferers to understand social situations.

According to Fi’s sources, McKinnon first came to the attention of the authorities during a monitoring exercise carried out by Surrey Police into the activities of a hacking gang whose members were spread Europe-wide and included hackers based in Spain, Bristol and Scotland.

“McKinnon was a long way from being the leader. There was someone much bigger than McKinnon in the group. One of the reasons that we were blind-sided by McKinnon in the original investigation was because this particular Mr Big had been responsible for damaging a lot of things in the UK,” said Fi’s source.

McKinnon,  had an identifiable ‘US history’, though he was not the only one and subsequently suffered because his activities in the US were highlighted in an intelligence package that eventually made its way to the US authorities.

Gary McKinnon (Solo) waiting extradition ruling

Ironically the main gang members, who were subsequently broken up by Surrey Police, had the case against them dropped because credit card companies that had been caught up in the group’s activities had decided to withdraw their charges to avoid any damaging publicity.

That McKinnon was not the only person stalking through the US defence systems was given more support over a year before his arrest, when hackers outside of the UK approached Future Intelligence, and offered the organisation computer files that they claimed contained video footage of US ballistics experiments and other material.

At the time Fi suggested that the hackers should either destroy the material or hand it over to the relevant authorities.

It was only later when details of the charges against McKinnon came to light that it became apparent that similar files were in existence.

Entry to the US systems was easy, according to hackers in the hacking forums McKinnon was monitored attending, often because US security systems had never had passwords installed so the password was set at the system default.

Something McKinnnon admitted in a  BBC Click News programme.

“GM: Unlike the press would have you believe, it wasn’t very clever. I searched for blank passwords, I wrote a tiny Perl script that tied together other people’s programs that search for blank passwords, so you could scan 65,000 machines in just over eight minutes.

Interviewer: So you’re saying that you found computers which had a high-ranking status, administrator status, which hadn’t had their passwords set – they were still set to default?

GM: Yes, precisely.

Interviewer: Were you the only hacker to make it past the slightly lower-than-expected lines of defence?

GM: ….There was a permanent tenancy of foreign hackers.” (http://tinyurl.com/md26v )

Backdoors were set into the US systems in the most embarrassing of ways by installing a remote management tool known as ‘GotomyPC’ which allows home and work computers to be controlled from any distance, effectively creating a network within the US defence network.

An embarrassment that US officials have not forgotten: “there are lot of people in law enforcement in the US who want to get a hold of McKinnon,” said one former US intelligence agent.

According to Fi’s sources, McKinnon was regarded as a maverick and a simpleton with an obsession with extra-terrestrial research and was not taken seriously by the hacking group.

“McKinnon would actually go and ask the others questions, he was if anything being coached. He would turn up at the forum that they used and ask them for exploits and kiddie tricks.”

According to McKinnon, speaking in an interview with Fi immediately after his arrest, he had been tracked down by US officials because he had alerted a woman working on a computer at the Johnson Space Centre by taking over her computer.

“I suppose you could say that I really just wanted to get the whole thing over by then,” said McKinnon. “I was watching what she was doing on her screen on my computer and I just felt I wanted to say something to her, so I typed ‘why are you doing this,’ on her screen.

“I knew she knew right from that moment because her computer was turned off instantly,” said McKinnon, who has also admitted leaving a threat on another computer saying: “I am SOLO. I will continue to disrupt at the highest levels.”

The truth was anything but, rather than being solo and rather than being caught by the US, McKinnon was discovered on a hacking forum being monitored as part of an investigation into another hacker.

Seen as a small fish in the scheme of things McKinnon’s details were then passed onto the then National High Tech Crime Unit who passed them in turn onto the FBI Legal Attache at the London Embassy who alerted the US authorities to McKinnon’s existence.

Now in a final ironic twist the US Embassy Cables have revealed that both Gordon Brown and Prime Minister David Cameron have been fighting for McKinnon’s sentence to be served in the UK, in return for a statement of contrition.

Ironic, because release of the diplomatic communiqués collected by US private Bradley Manning on the Wikileaks website which has caused a massive loss of US worldwide credibility will only lead to a maximum prison sentence for the US citizen of 52 years.

For more on McKinnon
http://www.futureintelligence.co.uk/2005/05/mckinnon-warns-off-fledgling-hackers-as-hearing-looms/

Failings that have allowed the copying of an entire archive in the recent Wikileaks case and forays by groups as sinister and highly motivated as the Chinese and as naïve as Gary McKinnon.

Weaknesses that are potentially disastrous, as recent events have revealed

“One of the things that people really don’t realise about this is the amount of material that whoever was responsible for this was able to gather, is that this a mark of the evolution of the internet,” said Neil Barrett, Visiting Professor, at the Royal Military College of Science’s Centre for Forensic Computing.

Are Assange's actions exposing weaknesses in the US's computer systems rather than the State Department's dirty laundry?

“Such data losses are a phenomenon of the last decade or so and Government’s have to get to grips with that. The data espionage now being suffered by Governments and incidents like this prove that understanding of the issue is poor.

“Not only is data now accumulated in particular places, to be of any use it has to be searchable and that means it has to be accessible, tellingly it is also incredibly portable,” said Professor Barrett, author of ‘the State of the Cybernation’.

Much of the weaknesses of the US Government systems are due to poor planning and control.

Sources with a current working familiarity of the US State Department told us of a culture that bought from the cheapest seller and that ran an outdated system on old software that is “wide open to exploitation. The systems are not the best set-up because there is not a lot of money.”

According to Bob Ayers who, when in charge of the US Defense Intelligence Systems Agency in 1995, conducted an exercise on 18,000 US Government computers and managed to penetrate 88% of them because they were badly configured or had not been patched at the time, the US Government did not then employ professional computer security staff.

Hackers and computer security investigators interviewed by Fi stated that US military systems often had their security settings at default – so in some cases the administrator settings for an entire network would therefore be admin and password.

While according to Ayers, though no amount of security can protect you from an internal attacker like Bradley Manning – the US military private and former intelligence analyst, who is accused of leaking the 250,000 cables to Julian Assange’s Wikileaks website -  the fact that his activities were not picked up, points to the same basic lack of security that has allowed the Chinese to loot US systems for intellectual property.

Ironically, a fact,  confirmed by a Chinese contact in the Wikileaks.

“The intelligence community in the US is vast so it has to have access to databases like this. “Though there is no safeguard to prevent an insider threat, there should have been a system in place to identify someone who was copying large amounts of data and send out an alert,” said Ayers, who dismissed comments from another source who said that such a system had been rejected on the grounds of cost around two and a half years ago.

“To put in place an internal network system would have been a relatively trivial cost in terms of the cost of these databases, there is always money available.”

According to Barrett the warnings have been around for a long time, he pointed to another celebrated scandal involving politics and technology as far back as October 1988, when the then Belgian Prime Minister Wilfried Martens, began legal action against a hacker nick-named Wepuntem who had accessed his computer.

Unlike Manning, the Belgian hacker only managed to obtain a fraction of the information released by the Guardian and other international papers.

Even so, the data was considered explosive enough, including top secret memos on the IRA killing of a British sergeant-major is Ostend in August of that year, the detailed agendas of recent Belgian Cabinet meetings and messages sent to Martens when he was on holiday in the South of France.

In an incident with some parallels with the Wikileaks affair, the Belgian hacker showed how easy it was to penetrate the Belgian Bistel computer system which had cost £15m in 1988 and then turned over the information he had obtained to a Belgian newspaper.

In what is now being simply called, ‘the US Embassy Cables’, the incident is demonstrating just how easy it is in the modern era to leave a building with the equivalent of a library full of paper in your pocket – a gigabyte represents a pile of A4 sized documents that if all placed on top of each other would be roughly as tall as the landmark London Docklands skyscraper Canary Wharf.

Still not as much information as Manning is accused of copying as the Guardian relates:

“An innocuous-looking memory stick, no longer than a couple of fingernails, came into the hands of a Guardian reporter earlier this year. The device is so small it will hang easily on a keyring. But its contents will send shockwaves through the world’s chancelleries and deliver what one official described as “an epic blow” to US diplomacy.

“The 1.6 gigabytes of text files on the memory stick ran to millions of words: the contents of more than 250,000 leaked state department cables, sent from, or to, US embassies around the world.”

Cables that are available to some 3m US personnel via the Siprnet system, which means that state department memos normally written by ambassadors can be read by people as lowly as Manning and as high up as a Secretary of State, such as Hilary Clinton.

According to the published chatlog of a conversation Manning had with a fellow-hacker, copying the data that ended up on the thumb drive was child’s play.

“I would come in with music on a CD-RW labelled with something like ‘Lady Gaga’ … erase the music … then write a compressed split file. No one suspected a thing … [I] listened and lip-synched to Lady Gaga’s Telephone while exfiltrating possibly the largest data spillage in American history,” adding that he “had unprecedented access to classified networks 14 hours a day 7 days a week for 8+ months”.

Security weaknesses that are now commonplace in computer systems, according to Richard Hollis, managing director of the computer security company Orthus, which specialises in investigations in the City of London.

“This is now a significant issue because of the range of devices that are available to people from thumb drives, CDs and mobile phones. The attack now takes seconds though and the storage capability of these sticks has increased significantly. The most common attack is “copy:C/”, it’s that simple.”

Attacks that have been going on for years. The US is not alone in suffering data breaches of the Manning kind.

Well over a decade ago a temporary bank IT employee with intelligence knowledge confided to Future Intelligence how they had copied a list of UK intelligence agents.

Knowing that a particular branch of UK intelligence used the bank he was working in for its financial services the temporary employee searched for a specific term through the bank’s computer system and then cut and pasted the results onto a removable storage device.

An action that captured the names of an entire UK intelligence section, these were then shown to Fi, including as proof where some – of the individuals, who ranged from academics to civil servants – were now working.

Manning’s confidante, was a hacker called Adrian Lamo, who subsequently denounced him to the authorities: “Hillary Clinton and several thousand diplomats around the world are going to have a heart attack when they wake up one morning and find an entire repository of classified foreign policy is available, in searchable format, to the public … Everywhere there’s a US post, there’s a diplomatic scandal that will be revealed. Worldwide anarchy in CSV format … It’s beautiful, and horrifying,” said Manning, who believed: “information should be free. It belongs in the public domain.”

Wepuntem, claimed similar high minded motives for his activities claiming that he hoped his revelations would result in better security from the Belgian Government.

An outcome that will certainly now occur in the US as a result of Manning’s activities.