PassWord – 30th September 2015

Speaker A: This program is brought to you by Resonance 104.4 FM. If you like what you hear and want to support our work, please make a donation at fundraiser.resonance.fm.

Speaker B: Hello and welcome to Password on Resonance FM with me, Peter Warren, and a packed show on the digital world that is dictating what your mind and your fingertips are doing. In today’s programme, David Miranda, the man who was arrested by the UK intelligence agencies at Heathrow Airport in pursuit of the data taken by Edward Snowden, tells us why he and Edward Snowden are calling for a global treaty on countries to adopt protections against mass surveillance. David Evans, the policy and community director of that most august and ancient of UK technology institutions, the British Computer Society, calls for a reforging of the social a contract between the people and the organisations that collect data on us. And in the run-up to the new film about Steve Jobs, which many see as a eulogy, has the shine gone off Apple?

Speaker C: Apple has been accused of being a cult on several occasions with Apple fans, but I actually think that enthusiasm is dimming a little bit.

Speaker B: But tech is not all about money. We look at the Peace Hack. No? Not a bunch of hippies protesting, but people thinking how they can genuinely solve some of the world’s ills with tech. Yes, I was prepared to be cynical too, but I have to admit I was impressed. We are all in a new Corbyn world. Now, getting Apple out of your focus might be a whole lot easier than the travails of one of the other visitors to the show. In a bid to find out what it was like to have his brain online, he hooked his head up to the web. And got hacked. Just to show that humanity can go high and low.

Speaker D: My connection to my head is quite open, so it’s easy to access my head. It might be interesting if someone is able to hack into my body again and send other images.

Speaker B: But first, some have called them the four riders of the digital apocalypse and claimed that they are simply milking the issue of privacy for their own ends. But the ramifications of what Edward Snowden, Laura Poitras, Glenn Greenwald, and David Miranda did in exposing the extent of German surveillance on us all by by the NSA, the UK’s GCHQ, and the way that they forced the cooperation of a whole host of US technology companies and some in the UK to give them data, they’re still rattling around the world. Janet Wyatt spoke to David Miranda at the Washington launch on an oddly erratic Skype link on why Snowden, Poitras, et al. think that there is a need for a global treaty on surveillance and his own personal experience of being watched by governments.

Speaker E: I went to Berlin to meet with Laura so we could talk about the movie that she was doing that was going to come out, This Is Unfortunate, won the Oscar this year. Also, I wanted to get journalistic material with her because Glenn and her were working other stories and I have to go back and forth with them. As I was coming back from Heathrow, I did a connection Heathrow And I was detained there for 9 hours without any connection with like anyone outside the world. When I was in Burley, they are tracking me. They knew what I was going to do. They knew where I was going. They are monitoring my activities. Me, an ordinary citizen at the time, just doing journalist work with my partner and my friend, that is Laura. So in that moment, like, it creates like this anger for me to try to change this system that is so corrupted in any, any, in all those levels. This is the kind of law that is so disgusting, so much power that you give to someone. So at that point, I started doing a campaign back in Brazil to grant asylum for Snowden. I partnership with the VAS and we got close to 1.5 million signatures.

Speaker A: Wow, 1.5 million Brazilians. That’s, that’s an amazing total, isn’t it? And what was the response in Brazil to that?

Speaker E: We took that to the Brazilian government and they say like, oh, Edward Snowden didn’t send us the proper asylum asking. But he did. He sent a fax to Brazilian government at that time, and the response was very passive, and they didn’t want to grant asylum to him at that time. And what we realized with our campaign and then the public motion that we did, it was like people want to perceive Snowden as a hero because he really is. So we thought that, I think it’s the best way is to just like get a group of countries together to grant asylum to him. But the idea started to evolve. So we saw the corporate sphere, like Facebook, like Apple, they start changing their products because the clients are asking for privacy now. So they start to encrypt it. Everything they have. Not only those companies, but IBM, HP, and all the other big corporations are moving towards that. So I saw that there was a big, big problem in all that is happening in the world, that is mass surveillance. When some governments can just go and do and research, like even like in the little of a country, we proved many, many times They are spying on the presidents of France or Mexico and many other countries, even the Pope. So when you see this kind of government, this kind of power, I just get so angry and I wanted to stop that. And I thought, what can we do? So I sat down with a few diplomats from Brazil a few lawyers expert in this kind of thing. We say, let’s format a treaty and deliver in the UN. The UN is the only organization who can bring some kind of power, like, in retaliation to other countries, because we have given the UN that power. So the idea was created around it, so we can give to the UN this treaty that we are formatting.

Speaker A: And what are the main points in the treaty? I know you want some kind of protection for whistleblowers like Edward Snowden.

Speaker E: The treaty, it’s against mass surveillance and also for further protection for whistleblowers. We will determine it by a court inside of the UN who is going to specify if the whistleblowers come forth in goodwill and they’re going to have their trial inside the UN. We’re still talking to tons of groups that are working on this kind of issues for the past 20 years, but also we are talking to governments as well.

Speaker A: Why do you think the issue of privacy is so important for freedom of the press?

Speaker E: Well, as an example that I just gave to you, I was going through Heathrow with the journalistic material. You know, the whistleblowers are the sources for are journalists. They come forth to tell something about the wrongdoing for those in power. So we need to protect those.

Speaker B: David Miranda on why we need curbs on surveillance, a call that comes just as the UK government is about to debate a new bill on an extension to the powers of GCHQ that will allow it to monitor a lot more of our social media. According to David Evans of the British Computer Society, this dawning awareness among us of what it means to have a life online is coming at a cost, and some of Many of us are beginning to opt out of the online world by trying to distort the data picture about us by giving false data or not taking part. Like David Miranda, he’s calling for a new social contract between the public and the organisations that collect data. Ironically, for a society whose name implies it’s a meeting place for computers and not people, Evans says we have to treat people as human beings and not numbers, an echo of the famous refrain from the hit ’60s sci-fi series The Prisoner. Like everything else at the moment, it’s very retro. So what is the problem?

Speaker G: The fundamental issue is that nobody is really happy with the way personal data is working at the moment. And what I mean by that is that when you put together the wants and needs of both the individuals and the organisations, you see that everyone’s kind of fighting when actually we should be doing things that help each other. We’ve lost the connection between the fundamental good of collecting and sharing our data and making use of it for ourselves as individuals and organisations that want to use our data to do a better job for us.

Speaker B: Right, so you’re talking about this thing that occasionally happens where somebody is asked for their information for some service that they want and they’re sitting there thinking, oh, I’m so irritated with the amount of people who are asking me to do this. I’ll give them a wrong date of birth. I’ll say that I live in somewhere different. That sort of thing.

Speaker G: Yes, exactly that kind of thing. Yes, and I mean trust is the vital component. It’s not trust in the sense of making sure that everyone is trustworthy. It’s about making sure that we trust the people who are trustworthy. But at the end of the day, what we’re trying to do is sort of restore the social contracts between us and the people that we’re dealing with. If you think of it in the context of a village, if you go and buy from a butcher’s and they sell you meat that’s rancid and they tell everyone in the village what you’re up to, you won’t trust them, you won’t buy from them. But around data, around personal data, we just don’t have any of the information that allows us to trust or not trust, and we don’t have ways to reward people who are trustworthy. And there’s things like TripAdvisor and other services that rate and review, you know, they’re helping to restore that balance so that you know who’s doing well and you can reward them for that.

Speaker B: OK, so what are you proposing to clear all of this up? I mean, ideally what people would like is to be able to say, right, here’s my data record, I’ll keep it updated, and you can give me some sort of loyalty reward for doing that, and you tell me when you use it. What is it that you’re proposing?

Speaker G: Well, I think the first thing, at a high level, we’re proposing is that this is something that society needs to get a grip with. This is not something that technology companies on their own can answer the problems of. You know, society needs to understand the issues and what it wants. So just as we’ve developed our justice system, we need to develop our thinking around personal data, because ultimately a lot of this is around our digital citizenship. More specifically, what we’re looking to do is say that there are really good ideas out there of how things could operate that would be much more in line with our societal wants and needs, and we need to give them a space to flourish and be active. There is an awful lot that’s going on at the moment around data protection from a legal and regulatory point of view, and we need some vision that starts to be shared between politicians, big business, regulators, and discussed about, you know, discussed more broadly. This is why, for example, we’re taking this topic to the party conferences to to not only engage MPs but also the political parties to say to them, look, you should be thinking about what this means to you, and you should be actively telling the technology companies what you want from them rather than waiting until they’ve done it to you.

Speaker B: David Evans of the British Computer Society on why we need to know more about what the technology companies are doing and why they are going around the party conferences to make sure that the politicians know. Now, one man who drove the rise of the tech world that consumes us was Apple founder and son of a Syrian refugee, Steve Jobs. And with a highly— and a highly anticipated film about the man comes out in the US next week. You’re not an engineer. You’re not a designer. You can’t put a hammer to a nail. I built the circuit board. The graphical interface was stolen. So how come 10 times in a day I read Steve Jobs is a genius?

Speaker E: What do you do?

Speaker B: Musicians play their instruments. I play the orchestra. But how strong is the conductor’s aura today? Have Apple maintained their status as the high church of technological evangelism? Daniel Gleeson of IHS Technology thinks that there has been a more systematic plan to Apple’s control of customer loyalty.

Speaker C: It has always aimed to strongly tie in people into its ecosystem. First with iTunes and then with the App Store and now with things like Apple Pay. So it’s always been about trying to strongly tie people into that Apple ecosystem so that they will constantly be buying Apple, new Apple phones, tablets, computers over a 2, 3-year cycle, which will earn Apple money in the long term. So that’s always been Apple’s modus operandi with the iPhone and with the Apple Watch has been to build this strong interlinked ecosystem which ties people in and makes it difficult for people to move.

Speaker B: And that’s the other— that’s what so many technology companies want to do.

Speaker F: I mean, they almost don’t become companies, they become cults.

Speaker C: Apple has been accused of being a cult on several occasions with Apple fans. But I actually think that enthusiasm is dimming a little bit, particularly with the hype over the Apple Watch, which came in at a very, very high price, which and really kind of disappointed many people with some ways. And of course, there are just so many Apple devices now that you can spend money on that it makes it harder and harder for a lot of people to be able to afford every Apple device and every new Apple device every year. So I think we’re finding that a lot more people are becoming agnostic towards their favorite technology company. Apple, of course, still has an immense loyalty, but if you look elsewhere, you know, nobody really has any strong loyalty to Samsung or to LG or to any other brand. And realistically, it’s only a matter of time before, I feel, before Apple’s strong loyal base becomes a little more flirtatious with other brands.

Speaker B: So the evangelical church really needs a new prophet then?

Speaker C: Well, I think that the aura of Steve Jobs has definitely faded away from Apple. And Tim Cook is a different kind of manager. He’s a different kind of leader. But Apple haven’t— don’t have that same salesperson leading the company. They don’t have that same aura around their new product pitches that Steve Jobs gave them. They could do with that sort of new head— with that sort of new figurehead. Basically, that’s probably not going to happen. You’re not going to get a once-in-a-generation talent or personality like Steve Jobs. You know, very often they’re not going to come around.

Speaker B: That was Daniel Gleeson, the senior mobile phone analyst at IHS Technology there. But have Apple’s products themselves simply lost that X factor, or I factor as they’d have it? Dmitry Bagrov is managing director of DataArt and just one of the people disappointed by the Apple Watch.

Speaker F: What Apple did with iPad is created a niche pretty much. And people started creating use cases for it and then inventing why we should use this just because, I don’t know, combination of factors, maybe the marketing, the Steve Jobs genius, everything else. But now with Apple Watch and actually with the rest of the smartwatches, it almost looks like a solution for a problem that doesn’t exist yet. It’s like we created this fantastic solution, now let’s look for a problem. It just seems strange to me.

Speaker B: Well, that seems—

Speaker F: I read the same. Because basically what we’re doing is we’re allowing ourselves to be drawn into a world which can exclude us very, very simply. And the easiest way to make sure that doesn’t happen is not to actually install the technology in the first place. You know, if you want to create a nightmare scenario where you can be locked out of your own life, then go ahead with this. Oh, I can easily imagine quite a lot of apocalyptic scenarios, if I got the word pronunciation right, when you actually start being nothing else but the carrier for all those wonderful monstrosities like the watch, the eye, the glass. I find the whole concept really scary.

Speaker B: Now, with all this discontent, it was nice to find someone who was wholeheartedly rapidly embrace technology for all of the right reasons. Dan Marsh, the head of technology at the peace campaigning group International Alert. Dan helped arrange a week-long peace hack which ended on Monday. Sounds very worthy, but not so. Dan is in the studio to tell us about it. Hi, Dan.

Speaker A: Hi there.

Speaker B: So, Dan, what is a peace hack?

Speaker A: So it’s like a traditional hackathon, really, but with a focus particularly on peace-building issues. We ran a hack last year in London, and following the relative success of the hack in London, we’re hacking in 5 countries again this year. So it’s really finding solutions to some quite difficult peace problems around the world.

Speaker B: But a hackathon, a hackathon, it’s not somebody breaking into computers, is it? What you’re doing is you’re building things, isn’t it?

Speaker A: Yeah, that’s right. So we bring a bunch of technologists, so that could be developers, designers, as well as peace practitioners together. And we explain the actual peacebuilding issues that we’re trying to tackle. And those people then build solutions around either new technology or existing technology to see, yeah, what we can fix.

Speaker B: So what was the aim of this Peace Hack then? What did you want to make?

Speaker A: Well, so we ran over the last weekend, we ran 4 hacks. So we were actually in London and Washington, D.C. We were dealing with a somewhat thorny issue of countering violent extremism. So we were thinking about different ways that we could use technology to actually probably drive engagement around youth, which is generally some of the most affected groups around CVE, countering violent extremism, should I say. And yeah, so it was really to try to build some community apps or just to give them some space places where they can actually discuss some of these thornier issues. Because we tend to find in the peacebuilding and in the NGO sector generally that the space to actually discuss these issues is actually shrinking. So we think that we can use technology to help that.

Speaker B: So one of these things in London was to help disaffected youth who might be prepared to go to Islamic State, for example.

Speaker A: Well, yeah, certainly, absolutely. We put a number of their sort of problem statements forward, and yes, it was this lack of sort of community cohesiveness, I guess, especially for youth that we built the winning solution, actually built almost like a community platform. Dare we even say it, almost Tinder for communities. So yeah, just to really get some good engagement because obviously, you know, youth engagement is a difficult process anyway. So we thought using some relevant and technology that they would be used to, to actually help fix these problems would be a good way forward.

Speaker B: So what were the other results? It was a competition, wasn’t it? There were quite a few ideas that won, and you’re going to be announcing those. But give us a flavor of that.

Speaker A: Yeah. So as well as the community stuff, we had a We had a number of solutions. Again, around the globe, they were slightly different. For instance, in Beirut, we were looking at issues around refugees and access to resources, as well as access to resources for youth and women. We had a number of tools, again, that were— Some of the losing ones, if you want— I don’t think there are any losers here, but certainly some of the solutions that didn’t win were more around accessing those basic services, like refuse. A classic example in Beirut at the moment, the refuse is piling up on the streets. One of the ideas was almost just to create an app that would come out and say, look, there’s a pile of rubbish here, let’s go fix it, let’s go sort it out. So ideas around that. We use some big data solutions in Washington, D.C., an actual big data solution that’s been developed by Oxfam International Alert. Somebody was using that almost as an early warning system. There’s been some cynicism around early warning, certainly, in the peacebuilding sector. But they were actually using big data as well as traditional media to sort of cross-reference each other, and then just to see if there was any particular decrease in sentiment for particular racial groups or things like that. We could then deal with— we could then engage local NGOs to actually go out and try to help.

Speaker B: So you can actually find tensions within the communities by looking at big data and say, hey, people could be getting quite angry with each other, we can go and defuse that?

Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. We do some basic sentiment analysis on the Twitter data, for instance. And yeah, the sentiment gives us a good understanding. We did some Twitter analysis, Twitter sentiment analysis, for instance, in Nigeria around the elections. We can actually see sentiment for for the incumbent president was actually decreasing and the challenger was going up. So we like to say quite glibly that we predicted what the outcome of the elections were. But it’s just to show that sentiment can be quite a good marker of what’s actually happening, you know, on the ground in country.

Speaker B: So this is presumably what David Evans was saying in the piece where we interviewed him, which is that if you start distorting that data picture, then you might not get such good results.

Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. And I think that’s why it’s really important that we don’t just take the Twitter data as the de facto, you know, the winning solution in DC was but certainly looking at other sources as well, so that we could really cross-reference. And that’s something similarly that we do in one of the projects that we run in the Philippines. We monitor conflict, but again, we monitor it through police reports, through media stories, and through social media too.

Speaker B: Sounds like a much more intelligent way of doing things. Obviously, you rely on volunteers, but do you need more help?

Speaker A: Yeah, certainly. I mean, Peacehack is all about growing a movement of technologists who understand about peacebuilding.. And it’s really important for us to try to get as many people into that movement as possible. So yeah, if there are any developers out there that are interested in perhaps some of the work that we’re doing, yeah, we’d really, we’d like them to go to our website, internationalalert.org/peacehack, and they can sign up for some more info.

Speaker B: It all sounds very rewarding. What are the things that you’ve done in the past then? You’ve done this before, haven’t you?

Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. Well, we did a Peace Hack last year, and as I say, certainly we’ve The difficulty we find out of hackathons is actually driving these results forward. This year, we’re really determined, us as a technology department at International Alert, to help push these ideas forward. Last year’s Peace Hack gave us an understanding of what was possible, I guess. As I mentioned, we’ve done some work in the Philippines around monitoring conflict. We’ve also done some work with technology in Uganda around, again, some community work in Uganda too. It’s an emerging area, certainly, peacebuilding technology, and International Alert been building peace for around about 30 years, and we now want to get really involved in that technology conversation as well.

Speaker B: So presumably it’d be nice too if some companies turned up and said, we’d like to help develop these with you, or even make a market out of them. Making a market out of peace, there’s a thing.

Speaker A: There are some organizations who are doing that currently as well. So yeah, there is certainly a market. And even some of the solutions that we saw at the Peace Hack this weekend, they could be solutions that could then sort of be sold to other NGOs, you know, as certainly community platforms, for instance. So there’s definitely some kind of monetization, to use a horrible word, in that certainly. But yeah, if other organizations are interested, again, especially if they have development resource or time to actually spend helping us develop some of these solutions, yeah, we’d absolutely welcome that.

Speaker B: Good. So peace is the news. All right, guys. Dan, thank you very much for coming in and talking to us about it. Thank you. All right. Someone else who can see the upside of technology is Neil Harbisson. He decided to augment his his own reality with an implant. He tells us about that and an unwelcome visitor who literally got inside his head. Password’s Tim Smith has this report.

Speaker D: I’m Neil Harbisson and I see myself as a cyborg artist because I create artworks through new senses and my new senses are created through the union between cybernetic and my organism, so I see myself as a cyborg and as an artist.

Speaker H: Those beeps you’re hearing aren’t just random noise. They’re the sounds which Neil hears when he looks out at the world. They’re transmitted into his skull through surgically implanted antennae that stick out the back of his head.

Speaker D: I wanted to extend my senses because I wanted to perceive color. I was born completely colorblind, so at the beginning I wanted to sense the visual colors, and the only way of doing it was to create a new sense because I didn’t have the ability of seeing it through my eyes. So I wanted to perceive color through a new sense, and then we created an antenna that picks up light frequencies and allows me to hear colors. So I then extended the sight to ultraviolet and infrared, so then I was able to perceive more colors than the visual ones. And then after a few years, then I added internet connections so that then I can also receive colors from other parts of the world or from satellites. So it’s basically now a sensory extension that allows me to perceive things that I would never be able to perceive through my existing senses.

Speaker H: You’ve been campaigning for cyborg rights. Can you tell me what rights you’re really campaigning for?

Speaker D: We campaign for the rights of having these types of surgery, because my surgery was done illegally because bioethical committees would not allow such surgeries. So we’re trying to push bioethical committees to accept any type of cyborg surgery that is aimed to extend human perception and human senses, because we believe that we are in need of extending our senses if we want to understand better where we are, where we live. So that’s what we’re trying to push mainly, it’s the bioethical committees to start accepting surgery implants related to cybernetics.

Speaker H: And of course what those bioethical committees would say is that people could do this on a whim, they could do it in situations where it wasn’t necessary, and that could actually be quite dangerous for people.

Speaker D: That’s exactly the reason why they did not accept my implant, because they said it was not necessary, because it’s not necessary to perceive color, it’s not necessary to perceive infrared, ultraviolet, So these type of operations are not accepted, and that’s what we don’t like. We think that it is necessary to extend all senses. So it might take a few years, but it’s the same reasons they were giving— biomedical committees were giving to sex gender surgery in the ’50s and ’60s. They wouldn’t allow them because they said it was not necessary as well. Hearing Color has It makes you look at things in a very different way, so now I really enjoy just listening to supermarkets. When I walk around the supermarket, I hear many different notes because there’s lots of different colors. So sometimes I would just go in the supermarket, walk a little bit, listen to the music of the colors of the products, and then walk out. I don’t know, walking just around the street, each person sounds different, so it’s very musical just to walk around the streets.

Speaker H: We live in a world where cybersecurity is a big issue and hacking, and Am I right in saying that your antennae has been hacked before?

Speaker D: I’ve been hacked, yes. So someone sent an image to my head one year ago, but I liked it. I liked being hacked. It was an interesting experience. It wasn’t really harmful. My connection to my head is quite open, so it’s easy to access my head, and I leave it like this because I’m not against it at all. I think it’s It might be interesting if someone is able to hack into my body again and send other images.

Speaker H: And that’s something you’d be happy to do completely unwarned, unprepared? Someone could just invade your personal being in a way?

Speaker D: Yeah, in the same way that someone, a stranger, might call the doorbell and might interrupt my normal day and ring the bell, and then I would open the door and someone would interact with me, or someone could call my phone and and talk to me through my phone, someone can also hack and go into my body and send a color in my head. So it’s not something entirely new to interact with other people in a way that you’re not expecting it. So it’s just that it goes directly into my head. That’s the only difference. But I’m happy to be interrupted.

Speaker B: Well, there you go. Rather him than me. You’re listening to Password on Resonance FM with me, Peter Warren. And I’m afraid if you If you’ve just joined us, you’ve missed it because that’s all for this week. Password is brought to you by Future Intelligence, and you can find out more about the world of technology on our website, www.futureintelligence.co.uk. Password is produced by Angel Media Productions CIC.

Speaker F: Goodbye.

Speaker A: This program has been brought to you by Resonance 104.4 FM. If you liked what you heard and want to support our work, please make a donation at fundraiser.resonance.fm.