Evening Standard comment: Privacy and the new risks of the internet

The internet, after all, is a medium available to all sides. If terrorists can use it, so can other users
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Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe’s warning today that parts of the internet risk becoming “anarchic places”, where paedophiles and terrorists operate freely, plays into a vigorous current debate between the internet giants, users and the security services. Earlier this week Robert Hannigan, the head of GCHQ, declared that US technology companies had become “command and control” networks for terrorists.

Sir Bernard has underlined those concerns by pointing out that the internet companies’ policy of encrypting users’ communications on computers and mobile phones is frustrating police investigations: the result is that part of the web is becoming “dark and ungoverned”. Certainly the big internet companies such as Google, Yahoo!, Apple and Microsoft are encrypting more services; Yahoo has promised “end-to-end” encryption of mail by 2015. GCHQ says this will make life far harder for its operatives to read communications between terrorists. Yet this policy is itself a result of users’ concerns about state surveillance of the internet raised by CIA whistleblower Edward Snowden. To which the obvious reply is that of Robert Hannigan, there is no absolute right to privacy.

Sir Bernard is right to raise these concerns but solving them is harder. He is speaking in New York: this is a global problem and will have to be dealt with globally. That will mean striking a balance between the interests of states to protect their citizens and the big companies’ wish to meet users’ desire for greater privacy. Yet the way terrorists in particular use social media also gives intelligence services a useful means to track their activity. If they communicate through Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, it is possible for the police to track those who follow them.

The internet, after all, is a medium available to all sides. If terrorists can use it, so can other users to challenge their arguments and identify their activities. This is a new kind of criminality and needs a new kind of policing.

If the cap fits

One of the most controversial of the Government’s welfare reforms is the household benefit cap, based on the principle that a family on benefits should not receive more than the average family earns. The idea was that capping benefits would give welfare recipients an incentive to find work. It seems to have had an effect. As Iain Duncan Smith, Work and Pensions Secretary, writes in this paper today, 5,000 households in London that were reliant on benefits and have been capped now have someone in them working. That amounts to one in four such households in London; nationally, 12,000 people have moved into work.

In the capital in particular, the policy makes sense: unlike other parts of the country, there are jobs for those who want to work. And in London, the availability of uncapped housing benefit was particularly galling to those in work who could not themselves afford the homes others got on benefits. Plainly, there are major challenges ahead for Mr Duncan Smith, chiefly in the introduction nationwide of the universal credit scheme: IT problems have caused it to be repeatedly delayed. Benefits should go to those genuinely in need.

Fashion frenzy

Fashion followers are flocking to H&M to snap up the latest designer offering, this time from Alexander Wang. The crossover between affordable street fashion and designer clothes is very London: one of the things that makes this city such a fun place for cutting-edge clothes.

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