As a scientist and computer entrepreneur, I am constantly appalled by the blindness to evidence and logic displayed by right-wing politicians.  So I heartily endorse New Scientist’s editorial lamenting absurdities in the proposed Snooper’s Charter following hard on the heels of the Psychoactive Substances Bill:

This pattern of ill-conceived pledges followed by impractical legislation looks ominously as though it will be repeated in energy and education.  That suggests the government is either scientifically illiterate or can get its way by assuming its citizens are.

What can be done to stop this folly?  I think we need to seize upon specific examples and spell out in simple, human terms what they really mean.  For example, the proposed ban on strong encryption should be described as ‘Government plans to kill off online banking’.  The legal requirement to provide decryption keys equals ‘Go to jail if you lose your password’.  And so on.

Mass collection of data – the Snooper’s Charter – really revolves around numbers.  How do they scale?  If you are looking for a needle in a haystack, does performance improve if you enlarge the haystack?  It may indeed be possible to store all that data if you are prepared to open a new power station to keep the server farms operating.  But what then happens to the numbers of false positives and false negatives?  How do your calculations change once the responses of real live people are factored in?

It is only a matter of time before a headline ‘Paedophile ring smashed’ actually means ‘We grabbed the low-hanging fruit of IP addresses that communicated with known paedophile sites, which includes a lot of poor innocents with infected equipment but not the really tech-savvy bad guys’.  Even if you don’t share my experience of the Metropolitan Police – more Inspector Clouseau than Inspector Morse – you have to admit they have a higher head-count and less rigorous staff selection than MI5.

How good are government agencies at dealing with the needles they do find?  Let me quote one paragraph from a contributor to the online site Slashdot: News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters:

Every time there is a terrorist attack in the West, it turns out that the perpetrator was known to security services. Lee Rigby’s murderers were held by Kenyan security services and MI5 tried to recruit them. The 7/7 and Glasgow airport attackers had all previously been on MI5’s radar. The Charlie Hebdo attackers were known to French security services, as was Canada’s parliament attacker. The US security services had been alerted to the Boston bombers by the Russian security services. It’s the same story time and time again, these attackers don’t turn up out of the blue, consistently they’re people who have long been on the radar and have reached a point of radicalisation where they decide to cross the line. If we can’t even stop people that we know think this sort of terrorist attack is okay, then what will logging everyone’s data achieve?

* Anthony Durham retired after careers as a research scientist and computer software publisher and is a long-serving member of the Lib Dems, living in Greenwich