Neelie Kroes’ digital identities – where are you?

I have been waiting for Neelie Kroes to announce the EU’s new proposals on digital identities. She was expected to announce them before the end of May; but either she hasn’t – or she has done it so quietly that I didn’t notice. The intent, as far as I understand it, is to rationalise digital identities across Europe. This will be contentious. There are those who will see it as a backdoor electronic ID card. So the UK, which has already fought off one attempt at the imposition of national ID cards will be particularly concerned.

Cameron and Clegg won’t be concerned. They will welcome the opportunity to grab more control over both the internet and the voter. They will claim firstly that it isn’t an ID card (don’t believe them; it will inevitably grow into more of a controlling digital ID card than Brown’s plastic physical card could ever do); and secondly they will claim that they have no choice, it is forced upon them by virtue of EU treaties that tie their hands.

But it will still be contentious, and both the EU and the UK governments would love to avoid that. The best way to slip something in is when people are looking the other way. And the UK is going to be doing a lot of looking the other way over the next couple of months. Right now we’ve got the Queen’s Jubilee, then we’ve got the football, and after that we’ve got the London Olympics. I shall be watching very closely to see exactly when the digital identities proposal is announced.

The best and most cynical time would be on this coming Monday or Tuesday when the entire UK will be involved in self-absorbed naval contemplation during the Jubilee celebrations.

ACTA is NOT dead

The newswires are awash with news: ACTA is dead. Neelie Kroes, the European Commissioner in charge of the Digital Agenda, is quoted as accepting that ACTA is dead in Europe.

We can all breathe a sigh of relief and relax.

No we can’t. That’s exactly what they want us to do – and that’s what we must absolutely not do. The moment we take the pressure off our own MEPs, that moment will the silent and pervasive money-based pro-ACTA lobbying increase. While we’re still celebrating, ACTA will be ratified.

And even if it is rejected, it’s just a battle. The war will continue. If defeated, ACTA will simply return in a different name.

Governments want control of the internet. It suits their purpose to gain that control by ‘supporting’ industry; it disguises their intent. So even if, as they eventually must, rightsholders realise they must adapt to rather than fight against new technology, the provisions of ACTA will return under another guise.

At the moment, Hollywood is merely bribing government to do what government already wants to do. ACTA will never die until governments understand that they are the servants and not the masters of the people. They are there to enact what we want, not what megalomaniac politicians want. It’s called democracy.

My news stories on Infosecurity Magazine for 3-4 May 2012

News stories for Thursday 3 May and Friday 4 May 2012:

OpBayBack announced by Anonymous look-alike: TheWikiBoat
It was only a matter of time before one hacktivist group or another would react to the UK court-ordered ISP block on The Pirate Bay.
04 May 2012

The UK Protection of Freedoms Bill this week; telecommunications surveillance next week?
A major plank of both the Conservative and LibDem election campaigns was to ‘roll back the database state’ and curtail invasive bureaucratic surveillance. But has the Coalition achieved this? And what about the proposed communications monitoring bill?
04 May 2012

Website infection hits Israeli Institute for National Security Studies
Israeli websites frequently come under cyber attack. Now Websense reports that the Israeli Institute for National Security Studies (INSS) has been infected with malicious code ultimately leading to a Poison Ivy variant.
04 May 2012

LOIC DDoS tool – is it ‘safe’ for the user?
The DDoS weapon of choice for Anonymous activists, the Low Orbit Ion Canon (LOIC), was downloaded from the internet 381,961 times during 2011. That number has already been exceeded in 2012, with daily downloads averaging more than 3400.
04 May 2012

SOCA knocked off the web by DDoS – again
The UK’s Serious Organised Crime Agency has today confirmed that a DDoS attack forced it take its website off-line at 22:00 Wednesday. As of writing, 14:30 Thursday, it is still down.
03 May 2012

UK wi-fi connectivity is inadequate
As the UK economy headed into another recession, a UKFast round table of business and technology experts, slated to discuss the digital wallet, inevitably discussed the economy and what government should do about it.
03 May 2012

The evolving role of the CISO – new study by IBM
A study by IBM’s Center for Applied Insights concludes that there are now three ‘types’ of CISO: influencers, protectors and responders. Evolution towards the ‘influencer’ role is necessary, and happening.
03 May 2012

Hackers levy an ‘idiot tax’ on Belgian bank
“While this could be called ‘blackmail,’ we prefer to think of it as an ‘idiot tax’ for leaving confidential data unprotected on a Web server,” announces an unidentified hacker group in a news statement on Pastebin.
03 May 2012