Karen Bradley's Internet History

The Department of Culture, Media and Sport do not hold any information regarding browsing data of Karen Bradley, the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport.

You may be asking why this is relevant, please allow an exposition...

A few years back in the wake of the 'Snooper's Charter' I put out a Freedom of Information request to get then Home Secretary's 'internet history' including internet telephony, browsing data and email meta data. This was knocked back as being too all encompassing. So I sent out another FOI for just the browsing data, and this was knocked back as being "a fishing trip" and "vexatious", which could be described as hypocritical, but was kind of accurate, I was trolling.

That Home Secretary then became Prime Minister, and a new Home Secretary, Amber Rudd was promoted, so I sent a new FOI, this time, I was less trollish, and requested the browser history for just one day to "gain a feel for the sort of websites that the Home Secretary visits during their day to day work".

Despite confirming that "the Home Office holds the information that you have requested" this request was knocked back because the browsing history was "personal information". This could be seen as progress from the Home Office, an awareness of people's concerns about privacy.

Still, Internet Service Providers have to keep their customer's "Internet History". You may be wondering in the context of Cabinet ministers, who their ISPs are. I wondered this too, and after the Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt suggested that ISPs could monitor bad language or something on the internet, I put in a FOI to find out who the Health Secretary's ISPs were.

As a private citizen he could have any ISP but for government work, the Department for Health is it's own ISP, and hosts a Departmental secured network.

So, the other month, it was announced that Karen Bradley, Culture Secretary, would be leading the government's Digital Strategy. To what extent does Karen Bradley understand and use the internet?

Her own MP website is out of date, saying that she is still a Home Office Minister, despite moving to the Department of Culture, Media and Sport in July last year, and her twitter feed is just supermarket opening and schoolkids smiling, rather an a genuine attempt to engage with people. I put in a FOI for her browser data for the day before the news about her Digital Strategy role.

The response was:-

I can confirm the Department does not hold any information in scope of your request.

Does that mean the Department doesn't have a Departmental network, or it does and it doesn't keep Internet History Records, or that Karen Bradley didn't use the Departmental History that day?

Trolling Theresa May

The term 'trolling' on the internet was originally derived from the fishing term:-

a method of fishing where one or more fishing lines, baited with lures or bait fish, are drawn through the water. This may be behind a moving boat, or by slowly winding the line in when fishing from a static position, or even sweeping the line from side-to-side, e.g. when fishing from a jetty.

In response to the 'Snooper's Charter' that is currently being steered through the House of Commons at the moment, I thought I'd have a go at trolling the Home Secretary Theresa May using Freedom of Information requests.

My first was this one on 4th November, on the WhatDoTheyKnow.com website, asking for:-

1) The date, time, and recipient of every email sent by the Home Secretary during October 2015.
2) The date, time, and sender of every email received by the Home Secretary during October 2015.
3) The date, time, and recipient of every internet telephony call (e.g. "Skype" call) made by the Home Secretary during October 2015.
4) The date, time, and sender of every internet telephony call (e.g. "Skype" call) received by the Home Secretary during October 2015.
5) The date, time, and domain address of every website visited by the Home Secretary during October 2015.

This was simply a re-write of an earlier request from a Matt Dodd in April 2012 which had asked for 12 months worth of metadata. It had been refused, quite rightly, because it would have cost over £600 to process. I figured asking for one month would have been a little more doable. Although in researching this write-up I note that a request for one day's worth of similar metadata was refused because of the cost back in 2012.

A few days later, on 7th November, a Ryan Elger made a similar request to my own, asking for the same metadata and additionally internet chat metadata.

Time passes, and except for a few boilerplate notifications that the FoI had been recieved, all was quiet. Come 15th December I submitted a new FoI  seeking just the email and web browsing metadata for November.

The very next day, 16th December a response to both of my FoI's was received refusing my requests:-

We have considered your requests and we believe them to be vexatious. Section 14(1) of the Act provides that the Home Office is not obliged to comply with a request for information of this nature. We have decided that your request is vexatious because it places an unreasonable burden on the department, because it has adopted a scattergun approach and seems solely designed for the purpose of ‘fishing’ for information without any idea of what might be revealed.

The requests are similar in nature to a request the Home Office received in 2014 that the Information Commissioners Office (ICO) agreed was vexatious. The decision notice in question can be found at this link:
https://search.ico.org.uk/ico/search/decisionnotice?keywords=FS50544833

So of course, I hooted and hollered, and tweeted a few journos, and received a few retweets.

That was pretty much the end of the matter, until a few days back when I noted an article in Teh Guardian which was essentially all about my FoI requests, without giving me any credit:-

It also follows the rejection of a Freedom of Information Act request to see the date, time and recipient of every email the home secretary sent, every Skype call she made and every website she visited during October and November last year on the grounds that it was “vexatious”. 

The Liberal Democrat leader, Tim Farron, said the rejection showed that the while the government wanted to push through powers in the bill to give the police and security services’ access to everyone’s weblogs, they were not prepared to release the home secretary’s records.

and whilst Alan Travis didn't mention me in his Guardian article, over on Buzzfeed Jamie Ross did a whole article about me back in December, which I've only just found, a month later:-

In response to the bill, Chris Gilmour submitted an FOI request for May’s internet history but, in a letter from the Home Office this week, was told the “vexatious” request has been rejected because it would put an “unreasonable burden” on the department.

Yeah, we get it, I'm being vexatious.

Over on Reddit in the discussion thread about Teh Guardian, my trolling was quickly seen through:-

[–]p7rLabour🌹 2 points 2 days ago
I presume you expected the FoI requests to be knocked back, and that was in fact the outcome you wanted? My understanding was that ministers were protected from this kind of request by the FoIA so even if they had the data they wouldn't provide it, but I like the point it made: one rule for them, another rule for everybody else.

My response was that it was a win:win situation, either the Home Office knock back the request and we get this story about hypocrisy and double standards, or get get to laugh at what sort of websites the Home Secretary looks at, and have a heap of interesting metadata to do fun datamining experiments on.

Anyhoo, in today's news Private Eye went to town on the Snooper's Charter:-



The piece points out that its not just web-browsers that connect to the internet, its everything on your wifi network, your iKettle, Smart TV, even children's dolls. Imagine, hypothetically, a terrorist plot, where the plotters communicated by messages left on children's dolls, how that could work, could you even just use them to arrange to meet friends?

So at the start of January, I soldiered on with another FoI in a similar vein to before, asking for:-

1) How many different devices with web-browsing functionality the
Home Secretary uses, for example desktop PC, laptop PC, tablets,
smartphones, games consoles.

2) Which Internet Service Providers (ISPs) provide the internet
connection to the devices enumerated in answer to 1) above.

3) The date, time, and domain address of every website visited by
the Home Secretary during December 2015.

Asking for December's web browser metadata was just to give the Home Office / Theresa May the chance to stop digging, to stop appearing as hypocrites. But I thought the first two questions were a bit more innocent, more practical. If it was going to be a case of the office intern doing a Ctrl+H on all of Theresa's devices, how long would it take? And if they did just whip round the office, would that only harvest the metadata on the House of Common's IP address, or were there several other ISPs involved?

Presumably the Home Secretary is issued a government smartphone which may or may not have the same ISP to the House of Commons estate. Forgive my ignorance but of the Home Office is a separate institution to the House of Commons do they use the same ISP. Theresa's constituency office, would possibly have again a different ISP, Also her Maidenhead home would have an internet connection, again, a different ISP, and if she has a flat in London, would that have again a different ISP.

I dunno.

But the Home Office has again refused to let me know.

We have considered your request and we believe it to be vexatious. Section 14(1) of the Act provides that the Home Office is not obliged to comply with a request for information of this nature. We have decided that your request is vexatious because on three previous occasions you have requested similar information for which you have received responses.

The emboldened text is a little interesting. my request was vexatious because previous requests were vexatious. I'm minded to seek clarification as to whether its just the web browsing metadata question is vexatious or all the questions. But frankly it chills me a little that GCHQ are going to be looking at my own browsing metadata if I push too much.

Is this too much?

So anyhoo, having a blog called Thick Creamy Discharge should be off-putting enough. But last night I had this great idea, registering urls where the address is just a randomly generated number, for example 530360.com that would be pretty awesome.

Say the snooper's charter becomes law, and it become's standard to have trivial browser plugin that sends out requests to millions of random webpages every time you look at a normal page, thus generating petabytes of incomprehensible metadata.

*******

As an addendum, from this FoI response from the House of Commons in 2013, it seems that the web browsing data is both anonymous and isn't retained by the House of Commons IT department.

4 Please confirm all data collected: for example
- Website URL
- Time/Date accessed
- IP address (sender & recipient)
- individual network user ID & status e.g. staff or MP
- the length of time the above information is retained

The website URL and time/date are held within the system managed by third party on our behalf.

5 Please confirm which individuals and departments were accessing these top 500 websites from within the HOC.

The data held covers both Houses of Parliament. It is not possible to break the data down by House or user type. As the data is anonymous the House of Commons does not hold the information you require.

Other than by having the office intern do Ctrl+H on all of Theresa's computers and tablets and phones and games consoles, they simply don't have the infrastructure to provide the web-browsing data. Maybe one day they will, but I think I'll refrain from making any more FoI requests to find out.

Leading Lib Dem Voice

Did I do this?

For almost a fortnight I've been banging on about the Political Compass and wondering where the UK's political parties are located within it, and now Lib Dem Voice have launched a new site:

How Liberal / Authoritarian is your MP?

Liberal Democrat Voice has identified 10 key votes from the 2005-10 Parliament in order to rank all MPs according to how liberal or authoritarian their record is. All MPs are marked out of 100: the higher their score the more authoritarian they are. The lower their score the more liberal is their voting record.

Interesting stuff, I'm wondering if by going through loads of votes on TheyWorkForYou you could actually plot a fuller compass, rather than just the y-axis as LibDem Voice have done.

Well, LibDem Voice haven't actually plotted the y-axis, so I'll do it:-
Its not the most gracefull of bell curves, well,not a bell curve at all, you can clearly see the jackbooted authoritarian hordes on the right of the graph and the anarchistic free-thinking mob at the bottom.

Contrast this with this plot of the y-axis of 200 random folk off of the internet bragging about their political compass score as I've previous harvested.

Different shape graph completely. Is that the effect of whips, or parliamentary democracy, dividing folk so cleanly.

I'm gonna have a go at building this from scratch myself.

The political space of the compass

I've slung up my spreadsheet onto google docs and hopefully this graph and form combo belowshould automatically update when you fill in new information.

Turning the page on the Political Compass

I'm a big fan of graphs and spreadsheets, this you already knew. I feel that the future can in some ways be saved through the use of these tools, hence my interest in the Political Compass.

I've scoured the internet, seeking out the phrase 'political compass' on Twitter, I've dredged the depths of forums, blogs and blog comments. Over a hundred points in my swarm. The Political Compass has an application on Facebook, its just a repeat of the website quiz, but with the added bonus of showing you where you're friends are on the compass if they too have taken the test.

Here's graph, much like the one I posted on Wednesday, but with more points plotted on it, of the swarm that I've scraped off of the internet. The average point is marked with a star.
It does seem to be a bit biased towards the lower left quadrant, and the spectrum if it was just a line would be one which tilts from lower left to upper right, but about 30 degrees I reckon.

Here's a frequency distribution graph showing the bulges on the Left - Right and Libertarian - Authoritarian spectra:-

I tried to get a bit more balance in my data by going to where I thought I'd find upper left people, the white pride St0rmfr0nt forum, but well, they're a broad church with folk spread out all over the compass. Anyhoo, I've figured out the average point for a couple of the 'constituencies', here you go.

There ain't many authoritarian groups on the compass, the folk on the internet don't really go in for that sort of thing I guess. Then again, I doubt that its even possible to score the same as Hitler or Stalin.

Still, I haven't found any actual politicians or PPCs who've taken the test and published their scores, so why are we stuck with such authoritian parties?

**UPDATE**
I thought I'd given up on this one, but I couldn't stop myself from ploughing through google, and found this comment from WDCRob on a random messageboard:-

The fact that there aren't really any societies in that bottom right corner strongly suggests that it's an unstable place to be in terms of societal evolution.

Its an interesting suggestion for genuinely libertarian political parties. It makes me think of that bit in "A Brief History of Time" where Stephen Hawking claims that life would be impossible in a world whose spatial dimension is other than three. He says that a two dimensional dog would “fall apart along its intestine.”

Maybe WDCRob has a point, the bottom right corner is incompatible with political success.

The political compass swarm

I did the Political Compass test again and scored thusly:-

Your political compass
Economic Left/Right: 1.25
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -2.41

I've drifted towards the centre a bit since last time, but I'm still in the right quadrant, which is reassuring.

Anyhoo, seeing as I love graphs and data and stuff, I thought I'd venture out onto the internet and see how my position compares to other people. I've scraped data from Twitter, the blogsphere and a few forums, to generate this graph of the swarm.

Being the internet, the swarms in the Libertarian side of the authoritarian/libertarian spectrum and it all tilts a bit towards the left wing I'm not sure why that is. The wee blue star represents the average point of the swarm.

Compared to where the main UK political parties stand, the swarm is really under-represented, with only the dreaded Greens within the swarmspace.

The great spectrum

Eeh, its been months since I last did the Political Compass quiz thing, and back then it said I was a Lib Dem. Anyhoo, there's an election coming soon, in the unspecified future, and my poll in the right column here is looking towards none of the big three Westminster parties representing any of the voters.

This leads me to wonder about the smaller parties, the single issue mobs and the nutjobs. Sure I'm signed up to the Libertarians now, with my membership pack and everything, but it doesn't look like there's going to be a LPUK candidate in my constituency, so I'm wondering what the next best thing is.

Elsewhere on the internet there's a big old register of all the political parties in the UK, 357 of them, I'm wondering where each one of them stands on the Political Compass.

Sure, there's the locations of five of them, but that's a tiny fraction of the one's possible to vote for.

Its a gargantuan task, but could I get in touch with all the rest of the 357 and ask them to take the political compass quiz and provide their location? So if you're wanting to vote for a party and they're not standing for election in your constituency, you can look at the party political compass and pick the one that's next nearest in the cloud.

Would it even be a worthwhile endeavour?

Can a party, rather than an individual take the test? Like the writer of the Devil's Kitchen blog, Chris Mounsey is the leader of the Libertarian's, has published his location here, but that's not the same as the party's position.

SalmaYaqoob is the leader of Respect, her blog's here, if she took the political compass, would that respresent Respect's position? Lord Pearson, UKIP leader here, where does his party stand?

Maybe I should just farm this out to Iain Dale's Total Politics to look into, paying for the postage to mail 357 political parties is a little beyond my budget.

UPDATE

Those lovely people at the BBC have a big list of UK political parties and their websites.

Theoretically possible right wing libertarians

Oh god, I just can't let it lie.

Over on Craig Murray's blog, he's posted about the libertarian bloggerything and the Political Compass (as I previous covered the other day). He says:-

... right wing libertarians, though a theoretical possibility, do not actually exist in any significant number.

So off I scamper to my spreadsheet and google, trying to find the right-wing libertarians, as certified by the Political Compass.

I found a few.

So, it all depends on Craig's definition of 'significant number'. Including dead celebs such as Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman, I can find amongst bloggery there's Guido, Charles Crawford, Devil's Kitchen, Radioactive Liberty, A Libertarian's Perspective, Mark's Any Musings and Carl-Mikael Teglund and from comments on Craig's post there's Algernon, Guy Herbert, John, Julian Gall and from the comments on Dev's coverage of the same thing last year there's Mark Wadsworth, Longrider, Cleanthes, Roger Thornhill, 'Patrick', John Trenchard.

That's nineteen, how many does he need in order to prove their theoretical existence?


Its kind of like a black swan thing I reckon.

Maybe Charles Crawford is right that the political compass is stupid. But I like to take things at face value and run with them until the wheels fall off. How come there are so few famous folk in the lower right quadrant? Is there something in the nature of frothing at the mouth 9,-9 libertarian right wingers than makes them hide away from fame, success and notoriety?

My navel, it is here

Someone said I was a LibDem.

I don't recall ever asserting that I was. Its possible I guess, I've just never thought I was.

Being conservative has just always been my natural default position, until libertarianism came along.

I'm not going to rule out my LibDeminess.

This one time, when I had a job, they made everyone take the Myers-Briggs personality type indicator test thing. The tester person first explained what all the types were, then made us guess which we thought we were, then we took the test to find out what that the piece of paper said.

Out of the hundred or so people in the room, three people correctly guess their type on all four indicators, thirty or so guessed three types, forty guess two types and another handful only guessed their own personality type correctly on for one indicator. Out of the whole company, only one person was wrong about their entire personality on all four type indicators, and that was me.

So it is possible that all these years I've been innately a LibDem supporter, but voted for right-wing parties by mistake.

Just to be on the safe side, I took The Political Compass test


It looks to me like I judged my politics accurately. I'm a right-wing libertarian.

And crikey! on another page on the Political Compass website, it has the relative positions of the main UK parties. And bugger me, I'm lined up with the LibDems.