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Her own MP website is out of date, saying that she is still a Home Office Minister, despite moving to the Department of Culture, Media and Sport in July last year, and her twitter feed is just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.

Film idea: That that brings them together

I've had a great idea for a low budget Brit-flick film thing:-

A group of strangers find themselves together in some kind of situation, I dunno, shipwrecked on a desert island, or stuck in a lift, or kidnapped by a genius psychopath, and after trying to figure out why they are there, they come to the conclusion that the thing that connects them is some shadowy person from their past, a mutual acquaintance, someone used to live with them, sold them a car, went to school with them, picked them up hitchhiking, whatever, this one person that they all know.

Then it turns out that he's got nothing to do with their predicament, and its just coincidence, like six degrees of separation, and after pinning all their hopes that its cos of this guy, they end up dead. Whatever mechanism or person that brought them together and killed them is just a little puzzled by their unexpected connection, but doesn't let it interfere with the sick but otherwise quite banal plan.

Later the shadowy bloke from their past reads about their deaths in the newspaper, gets a little freaked out that these disparate people who he knew all died together, but then otherwise just carries on with his day.

Life goes on.

CrimeTube.com and that woman being racist on the tram

Earlier today there was a tweet by Old Holborn on that twitter about the latest viral video, a woman having a racist rant on a crowded tram somewhere near Croydon. As is the norm these days the YouTube video became a news story and at around 6pm the BBC were reporting that the woman had been arrested. Some on twitter were calling for her kids to be taken away.

Anyhoo, as I am a completely normal user of the internet, well versed with porn websites, I've had this ace idea, a video website like RedTube, YouPorn, PornHub et al, but with youtube videos of people committing crimes. Viewers can submit ones they've found on YouTube, and people can watch and rate them. Then at around 6pm every day, the police can arrest the subjects of the top five most 'popular'.

It would be the greatest website since Hot Or Not. Everyone loves watching miscreants and rapscallions, remember the spectacle of the London Riots, now imagine a whole website of that sort of compelling footage. We may never again need the BBC or ITN for our crime porn.

Sure there'd be tawdry stuff, like burglary and assault, but cos its all ranked by views and ratings, the important stuff, like cat-trapping and racist rants, would float to the top.
Luckily the url crimetube.com is still available, but I can't do it, I've got no idea about websites, but anyhoo, I claim this website idea first, just like in that xkcd strip.

Dreams: Doom on the ZX Spectrum and Gameboy

I had a dream, well, not so much a dream, just this idea about computers and software and hardware, and how folk of my generation have seen home computer processing power improve and graphics improve, and maybe have a tiny inkling that back in the day, one guy in his bedroom could write the bestest computer game in the world, like Elite, but these days, it take a team of dozens of people.

Code used to be written really tightly to fit into a Vic 20's 20 kilobytes, or an Amstrad CPC's 64k or a Spectrum's 48K. Code had to be tight to fit, these days code sprawls and sprawls, and processing power always increases faster than the need to write tight code.

The limitations used to be things like how many colours you could have on screen at once, a pallet of 15 or 32 colours, resolutions less than 300 by 200. It seems so long ago. Now, the only colour limit it the human eye, and with screen resolutions, even the iPhone has the human eye resolution beaten. The limits for graphics are in terms of polygon count, 10,000 or 100,000 ain't much of a difference.

Anyhoo, what I'm imagining is if somehow could could get twenty-first century games on old 8-bit machines, with the graphical limitations inherent to them.

Doom.

I remember when I first saw Doom, the graphics blew my mind, on my dad's 486 DX2 PC. But compared to state of the art games graphics now, it was a bit pants.
What I wonder is, What would Doom look like on 8-bit machines?

Well, on the ZX Spectrum, 15 colours in two colour 8x8 blocks for a screen resolution of 256x192, it would look like this:-
And on the Nintendo Gameboy, four shades of green/gray at 160x144, it would look like this:-
I reckon the Game Boy version would be bestest.

It would be neat if I could be bothered to do some kind of gif animation of the action, but that's a little too much hassle. For the ZX Spectrum screen shot I used a utility called zxspectrumizer, from this chap and for the Gameboy screenshot I just used good old Photoshop.

UPDATE
Looks like some Hungarian mob put together an Spectrum version after all

Its a bit crap

This version of Wolfenstein 3D looks a bit better