In British Riots, Social Media and Face Masks Are the Focus
By J. DAVID GOODMANThe British authorities, reeling from days of violent riots, have social media in the cross hairs.
Prime Minister David Cameron told Parliament on Thursday that if people are using social media to organize violence, as has been reported, than “we need to stop them.” He asked the police to tell him if they need “new powers” to do so.
In his speech before an emergency session of Parliament gathered to debate responses to the riots, Mr. Cameron also set his sights on the use of face masks by rioters, saying he would now give police the authority to remove face coverings “under any circumstances” as long as there was reasonable suspicion of a crime.
Everyone watching these horrific actions will be stuck by how they were organized via social media. Free flow of information can be used for good. But it can also be used for ill.And when people are using social media for violence we need to stop them.So we are working with the Police, the intelligence services and industry to look at whether it would be right to stop people communicating via these websites and services when we know they are plotting violence, disorder and criminality. I have also asked the police if they need any other new powers.Specifically on face masks, currently they can only remove these in a specific geographical location and for a limited time. So I can announce today that we are going to give the police the discretion to remove face coverings under any circumstances where there is reasonable suspicion that they are related to criminal activity.
The suggestions of limitations to dress and free speech online set off a firestorm of angry responses on Twitter, and prompted many observers, including some from the Middle East, to point out Mr. Cameron’s apparent double-standard for social media freedom.
Bloggers and others active on social media in Egypt have closely followed the riots and the British government’s response. Mahmoud Salem, the Egyptian blogger known on Twitter as Sandmonkey, wrote:
Bloggers and others active on social media in Egypt have closely followed the riots and the British government’s response. Mahmoud Salem, the Egyptian blogger known on Twitter as Sandmonkey, wrote:
If the UK limits social media to contain the riots, then we are witnessing a spectacularly revealing moment for First World regimes #ukriots
Mahmoud Salem
Sandmonkey
Mahmoud SalemSandmonkey
Indeed, Mr. Cameron spoke of social media in a very different light earlier this year.
During a speech in Kuwait in February, he described the central role of social media in rallying young people to overthrow autocratic regimes in Tunisia and Egypt.
It belongs to a new generation for whom technology — the Internet and social media — is a powerful tool in the hands of citizens, not a means of repression. It belongs to the people who’ve had enough of corruption, of having to make do with what they’re given, of having to settle for second best.For decades, some have argued that stability required highly controlling regimes, and that reform and openness would put that stability at risk. So, the argument went, countries like Britain faced a choice between our interests and our values. And to be honest, we should acknowledge that sometimes we have made such calculations in the past. But I say that is a false choice.
Mr. Cameron added the freedom of speech and the Internet must be respected “in Tahrir Square as much as Trafalgar Square.”
The contrast with Mr. Cameron’s speech on Thursday was striking. The circumstances were different, but after days of lawless violence in British cities, Mr. Cameron seemed to acknowledge limits to the value of openness given the power of social media to cause instability.
It is still unclear what steps would be taken to stop people from spreading violence via social media networks. Such incitement, regardless of the means, is already illegal in Britain.
The BBC reported that several people in Wales, including a 15-year-old boy and a 21-year-old woman, had been arrested for inciting criminal behavior using social networks. The police cited the use of Facebook and mobile phone messages, which were used both to egg on the rioters and to “encourage public disorder.”
The police, who have already been combing through public social media postings for suspects, are working to locate others who may have posted messages via BBM, Blackberry’s private messaging service. This week, Research in Motion, the company that owns Blackberry, said it was cooperating with police.
But it is not clear what a new blanket legal tool aimed at social networks would do to help police gain access to the already porous BBM network. In fact, despite the private nature of the network, BBM messages can be tracked and decoded by the police relatively easily, according to a recent BBM security analysis by the Canadian government. Even decoding just one group message between rioters could reveal to the police the unique digital identifiers for all the group’s members.
The second part of Mr. Cameron’s statement on “new tools” — allowing police to remove face masks in more circumstances — received less attention in the immediate aftermath of his speech.
That is, except from Jeff Jarvis, a well-known blogger, who engaged in a spirited Twitter back-and-forth on the subject with Ian Katz, the deputy editor of The Guardian newspaper.
Mr. Jarvis followed with a blog post arguing that unmasking people in public would be a bad idea, potentially erasing whatever expectation of anonymity people have as they walk down the street. “The bottom line of these debated tactics would be this: Anonymity would be banned in public,” he wrote.
(Of note: New York and several other states currently have antimask laws on the books. The New York law that makes it illegal for a group to gather in masks — except for a “masquerade party or like entertainment” — survived an appellate challenge by the Ku Klux Klan in 2004.)
But of course what happens in public is public, as Mr. Jarvis acknowledges, and the police are already moving to use images captured by the thousands of CCTV cameras around British cities to catch suspected rioters.
As The Associated Press reported on Thursday, the police have begun using facial recognition software, an early roll-out for a technology that British authorities had planned on using during the 2012 Olympic Games.
The debate over the proper technological response to the British riots is likely to continue, but as Tom Watson, a Labour Party politician, pointed out on Twitter: “Technology is neutral.”
The British proved this point in the immediate aftermath of the riot, as the same social networks that incited some people to loot — and gave them positive feedback — were used by others to clean up the mess.
No comments:
Post a Comment