Peter Sommer

Cybersecurity and digital evidence specialist, expert witness and academic, public policy analyst

[Privacy International @privacyint]

MEPs are urging the European Commission to hold some of Europol's budget after it was revealed they were running a "shadow IT system" for phone records, identity documents, financial and geolocation information - even of people not suspected of a crime.
https://t.co/gB5ElkoV14

[Williamrt @Williamrt]

New - MEPs urge European Commission to take action over Europol’s shadow IT https://t.co/7WIGnDoqhD via @computerweekly #Europol #Frontex @saskiabricmont @estrella_galan

[Peter Sommer @Professor_Peter]

It is so much easier to parade online harms victims and complain that not "enough" is being done than to analyze proposed solutions for feasibility and effectiveness. FIPR provides useful analysis - politicians and popular media should read.

[ComputerWeekly @ComputerWeekly]

Age verification tech could put children at greater risk, says think tank https://t.co/xTTFTKf30U

[ComputerWeekly @ComputerWeekly]

Age verification tech could put children at greater risk, says think tank https://t.co/xTTFTKf30U

[The Receipts UK ♿ @david_hollas]

Why isn't mainstream media reporting the MoD's classified no-tender Palantir contract?
The Telegraph's new owner, Axel Springer, runs Palantir's Foundry software across its entire media operation.
GB News's largest shareholder Paul Marshall co-founded Marshall Wace, which holds Palantir stock.
Faculty AI is a named donor to the Tony Blair Institute. The Scott Trust, which owns the Guardian, holds a stake in Faculty through Mercuri VC. Faculty has £26.6m in government AI contracts.
Last night the BBC put a TBI representative on a panel to discuss AI policy without disclosing any of this.
Every major outlet has a reason to look the other way.
That's why independent journalism matters.

[Peter Sommer @Professor_Peter]

I commend the response of the Foundation for Information Research(FIPR) to the Ofcom consultation Growing up in the Online World for their analysis of suggested potential technical solutions (and to which I am a contributor)/ ends

https://t.co/LcDNXmofvv

[Peter Sommer @Professor_Peter]

Coverage in the media and in Parliament has taken the easy route - parade the victims and their survivors. Theirs is an important story but we now need to move to discussing the practicalities of remedies. We will need a mix of responses not just regulations and laws. /5

[Peter Sommer @Professor_Peter]

Will adults now need to prove they are in fact - adults? To the need to censor how do we avoid over-blocking? Might we be encouraging adventurous children into less well-regulated and less safe spaces?

How far can any of the proposed laws and regulations be enforced? /4

[Peter Sommer @Professor_Peter]

number of desired technologies do not exist, or are difficult to implement, or can be easily evaded, or create damage elsewhere. Ofcom is a regulator and regulators are at their most comfortable when issuing regulations; they are less good at suggesting other routes/3

[Peter Sommer @Professor_Peter]

If you are going to ban under 16-year-olds from some or all social media, how will you do so that identifies children accurately, reliably in ways which are easy to implement, difficult to evade, don't have unwanted side effects and are not too complex and expensive? /2

[Peter Sommer @Professor_Peter]

Too little of the coverage of the online harms legislation and regulation has asked how far there are workable practical solutions to the harms identified. Ofcom has had a pre-occupation with “accredited technologies” at the expense of identifying practical outcomes./1

[Maxi @AllForProgress_]

Here's a good joke for your Bank Holiday.

A British magistrate identified in court papers only as "Taylor" has been deciding convictions and sentences for more than 100 British defendants from his home.

In Portugal.

The arrangement, conducted under the Single Justice Procedure - which is the streamlined process by which a magistrate can deal with minor offences without an open court hearing - was running for years before anyone in the British legal system noticed it was happening, and would still be running today if a fellow magistrate had not, at considerable personal cost, refused to take part and raised the alarm.

The whistleblower in question is a serving magistrate who had concluded, after some study, that what was being done was unlawful. He is now suing the Ministry of Justice. He alleges that, having flagged the practice internally, he was bullied, ostracised and progressively excluded from the work he had volunteered to do.

The only thing about this that's a surprise is that it's been exposed at all.

This sort of baroque, even sublime level of piss-taking is, by now, a recognisable British institutional ritual.

So, I must concede, is the reaction to it. An individual notices something is wrong, says so through the proper channels, is treated by the institution as the problem, gets bullied half to death, and ends up in court.

We saw it with Alan Bates, with the consultants at the Letby ward, with the surveyors at Grenfell, and now with this magistrate, who has the additional indignity of having had to bring his case while his colleague was, presumably, still in the Algarve.

The Ministry of Justice's response is the part of the story that most repays attention. Asked, by Sir Jeremy Hunt MP in Parliament, whether more than 100 convictions secured by a magistrate sitting from a different country might need to be revisited, the Ministry stated that there were "no grounds to suggest that any case where the magistrate conducted remote hearings from abroad was unlawful or needed nullification."

The Senior Presiding Judge then advised, in a separate communication, that magistrates and judges should not, in fact, be conducting court proceedings from outside the United Kingdom, the diplomatic objections of the foreign states involved being one of the more obvious reasons. The two positions are not formally in conflict. They are, however, the same Ministry saying that an arrangement which the senior judiciary has now banned for the future was, until ten minutes ago, completely fine. Totally alright.

One hundred British defendants (at the lower end of the magistrates' jurisdiction, sure, but the lower end is where most people in this country actually encounter the courts) have now been sentenced by a man from his holiday home. When the Ministry of Justice found out, it concluded that the arrangement was fine. When the Senior Presiding Judge found out, he concluded that it was not. The whistleblower who exposed the whole thing has, predictably, been treated by his colleagues as the problem and is now suing his own Ministry. The convictions, meanwhile, stand.

I just hope I get the screenplay rights to this one. It's just too perfect an encapsulation of what the British genius, once responsible for the architecture of the world and man's command over nature, has been reduced to: running obvious abuses of office, rank, and authority for years under the noses of the people paid to notice but too thick or venal to actually notice.

If we weren't being consistently saved by single people, heroic individuals, willing to throw themselves into the meat grinder to expose these charlatan prats by a single individual at his own cost, it's absolutely frightening to imagine where we'd be. In respect of abuses like this, like Chagos, like the rape gangs.

Anyway, the arrangement ends and the convictions stand. The magistrate will fly back from Portugal (he's still sitting!). The Ministry of Justice will issue a procedural note. The whistleblower goes to tribunal.

It's not only time we root-and-branched the criminal justice system in this country - in which 'criminal justice' has come to imply an affinity for the criminal, just as the 'Taylor Swift Holy Dinner Party & Human Affairs Circuit' implies an affinity for Taylor Swift - but our approach to whistleblowing as well.

These are the only people preventing our slide into barbarism, as things stand. And whistleblowers who exposed dysfunctions of this kind will, under a Progress government, be honoured for the public service they have performed, and the institutions that punished them will be held to account for the punishing.

[Sky Oracle @SkyOracle_]

🚨 Official Launch Announcement
We are proud to officially launch Sky Oracle — the first AI chat application built exclusively for cases involving encrypted communications: SkyECC, EncroChat, ANOM, PGP and similar platforms.

[Alex Martin @AlexMartin]

Scoop: We can reveal the details of the UK's planned Computer Misuse Act reform:

▶️Statutory defence will only cover scanning internet-facing systems
▶️Activity must stop once vuln is found
▶️Only available to UK nationals accredited by @UKCyberCouncil... https://t.co/omZRhb2PiK

[Peter Sommer @Professor_Peter]

A further problem is that definitions separating "communications data" (admissible) from "content" (inadmissible intercept under s 56 IPA 2016) are increasingly difficult to interpret.

[The Register @TheRegister]

London's police asked Big Tech for comms data over 700,000 times last year https://t.co/k7yYA3Ggnw

[Peter Sommer @Professor_Peter]

If the police turn out to be unwilling to disclose the workings of the tool they are commissioning the evidential product will fail admissibility tests and can only be used as intelligence. Further admissible evidence will be needed to pursue a trial in court.

[The Register @TheRegister]

London's police asked Big Tech for comms data over 700,000 times last year https://t.co/k7yYA3Ggnw

[Privacy International @privacyint]

When governments buy AI ‘solutions’, they also buy dependency and opacity. Is this modernisation or outsourcing responsibility? https://t.co/uCAJ395aEO

[Alec Muffett @AlecMuffett]

@tomhfh I have been campaigning against mandatory adoption of #AgeVerification due to the potential negative consequences for 10 years, including evidence to Parliament. I must agree with @prestonjbyrne here:

https://t.co/QNKnonaXMD

[Alan Woodward @ProfWoodward]

“Think carefully before adopting agentic AI” - sound advice from @NCSC . If you don’t read the article please heed that single sentence. https://t.co/R6z6g4DeVT