Inside the Digital Revolution: Policing and Changing Communication with the Public

This request was also refused and I appealed to the information commissioner and then to the Information Tribunal. The judges ordered full disclosure.

However, on the last day allowable, Parliament appealed the ruling to the High Court. I defended my case and on 16 May the High Court ruled that Parliament had to disclose the information. A deadline was set for October , but the date came and went, as did another deadline of December. The scale of the publication was set out in the following parliamentary answer by Nick Harvey to a question about the digitization process:.

It is therefore planned that the scanning of some 1. That would mean no expenses published—ever. There was public uproar and the proposal quickly capsized under the weight of all the negative publicity. Still there was no indication of when Parliament would publish the information. Eventually the entire unredacted digitized dataset was copied onto a hard drive and leaked. The source was adamant that the key thing was that both the information and the way in which it was handled should be in the public domain and that its release was in the public interest.

How did this advance the digital revolution? Crucial to the leak was the fact that without FOI and the subsequent court battle, the data would not have been digitized. If not digitized there would have been no disk to leak. If not leaked, Parliament would have been able to secretly expand and reinterpret the narrow exemption for sensitive personal information.

Indeed, the official version eventually published in June excised all the worst abuses. As it was, the leak of the unredacted digital dataset prevented Parliament from interpreting and censoring the data and instead reporters and citizens viewed it raw. The scandal has been described in superlative terms both for its journalistic and political impact. According to Worthy and Hazell et al. A new government was elected in May on a mandate of transparency and the UK went from being an open data backwater to ambitious world leader.

The Prime Minister announced that the financial affairs of MPs would be taken over by independent regulators. However, the reforms were not nearly radical enough. Importantly, expense information was still not directly accessible to the public, but rather mediated by a newly created bureaucracy. A YouGov poll found just 26 percent of people thought most MPs were honest, down from 34 percent in Only 13 percent thought most MPs were in touch with the daily lives of their constituents in and the proportion of people believing MPs were principled was down six points to 26 percent.

However, I came to the conclusion that Assange was an inconsistent and unreliable source, and his actions, as I witnessed them, ran counter to his professed ideologies. I focused my reporting elsewhere and it was through another WikiLeaks volunteer that I was leaked a copy of the entire unredacted dataset of the U. Also, the material was of a sensitive nature, and as such I needed legal, editorial, and institutional support. I therefore partnered with the Guardian and we worked on a months-long investigation culminating in a series of articles from 28 November to January The data set was also shared with the New York Times who ran a parallel set of stories.

They can highlight the doublethink of states when rhetoric of openness and access to information is applied directly. On their own, new technologies do not take sides in the struggle for freedom and progress, but the United States does. We stand for a single Internet where all of humanity has equal access to knowledge and ideas. She urged private companies to stand up to foreign governments who sought to control the Internet and promised that the U. However, when it was the U. Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning at the time Pfc. The soldier was convicted by a military judge in July of 17 of 22 charges, including violations of the Espionage Act, for copying and disseminating classified military field reports, State Department cables, and assessments of detainees held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

However, she was acquitted of the most serious charge, aiding the enemy.

In August Manning was sentenced to thirty-five years in prison with the possibility of parole after eight years. In this case the leaker was not protected by public opinion. A Pew Research Center study in December found that 60 percent of those aware of the diplomatic cables story believed leaking State Department cables harmed public interests.

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And 31 percent thought it was in the public interest. Interestingly, the public made a distinction between WikiLeaks itself and the press handling of the data, with 39 percent saying the media had struck the right balance reporting on the leaks and 14 percent saying they held back too much.

The publication of the U. That was the job of the journalists.

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And it was the source who provided the information and who faced the consequences. In time, the hype about this novel leaking site was replaced with a more tempered view: For this reason, an argument can be made that the leaks had an immediate impact on the Arab Spring protests, in Tunisia especially, because it gave people an unvarnished view of their rulers as real, fallible human beings. The year may well be remembered as a watershed year when activists and journalists used new technology to speak truth to power and, in so doing, pushed for greater respect for human rights.

So much of elite political systems depend on an illusion of infallibility and superiority. Among the revelations reported in the Guardian were many instances where elites were shown to be fallible humans acting in ways childish, immoral, or corrupt. The publication also challenged authoritarian views that tend to maximize the risks of disclosure while minimizing those of secrecy.

In these two case studies, we can see that digitization was a means to shake the pillars of elite rule, not just in the UK but the United States, Middle East, and around the world. How successful these attempts have been is very much open to debate. What is certain is that political elites felt increasingly challenged and, where public opinion was on their side, fought back using state institutions. In some instances, such as the Arab Spring, the successful challenge of autocratic regimes did not lead to the promised expanding of the democratic franchise.

Rather it resulted in a shift to a different group of elites operating in a similarly autocratic tradition. Technology has the ability to magnify power, but rates of adoption vary. Small groups and individuals can adapt faster to new technology than large institutions, and so for a time technology empowered small groups and individuals in relation to the state as in the two cases presented above.

Security engineer Bruce Schneier estimates that it took about a decade for traditional powers to adapt to new technologies, but once they did, their powers were magnified exponentially. The fact that everyone carries sensor laden mobile phones makes national security agencies more powerful than they were before. Even where privacy protecting technologies exist, they cannot be said to be equal and opposite in effect to the ubiquitous computing we now live amongst. Mobile computing is a permanently power shifting technology that permanently empowers the security services.

Technology now exists that enables companies and governments to monitor our conversations, commercial transactions, and movements, and to make predictive decisions about us based on this data. Not only are there more technologies to surveil citizens, but also more entities that want to do so. The Internet business model has become one based on surveillance.



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Before Snowden, little attention was given to the rise of state surveillance and official secrecy that followed terrorist attacks on 11 September , particularly related to intelligence agencies. In the UK, intelligence agencies are exempt from FOIA and in the United States several scholars have noted the rise in official secrecy after the 11 September attacks.

The rise in outsourcing and privatization further erodes access. Despite, or perhaps because of, this rise in official secrecy, Snowden went to journalists Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald with information obtained while working as a contractor for the National Security Agency. The revelations began with an article describing how the NSA was accessing phone records of millions of U.

Verizon customers using a secret bulk warrant. The 'user needs' issue continued to drive the development of the programme through workshops and meetings of various kinds with 'Nick', the Local Information Officer librarian of the London Borough of Newham, arguing the case of a system that integrated information provision across the Borough and that gave citizens access not only to local information but, through the Internet, to global sources.

Chapter 8 deals with the 'construction of a digital services narrative at European, National and Regional levels'. The 'narrative' refers to the way in which ideas about the nature of the 'information society', the definition of telematics and the role of telematics in communication between government and the citizen emerged in the publications of the European Commission especially the Bangemann Report , the UK Government especially the Green Paper, ' Government Direct ' - which, typically of the UK government's inept Web policy, seems not to be available online and various other bodies.

The embedding of telematics in the Met's service provision is the subject of Chapter 9, which summarises the nature of policing activities and types of interaction with the public.

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The potential role of telematics was explored through scenario building, which led to ideas on digital communication services and an increased understanding of the inter-relations among telematics technology, communication with the public and the consequences for police information systems generally. In any e-government application, the key problem is that of gaining the participation of the public. In terms of information provision, the problem is compounded by the fact that information-seeking in relation to legal or policing issues tends to be episodic.

No-one, other than, perhaps, the community activist, is engaged in continually seeking such information: As the author notes, dealing with the application of the technology, 'required an understanding of people's perceptions of services as well as of their needs and aspirations'. The London Borough of Newham's 'In-house Research' team had been investigating the needs and aspirations of citizens since and had evolved a three-category classification of residents: The information needs of citizens were explored through focus groups, from which it emerged that, as I have suggested above, and as prior research on information behaviour confirms:.

One is reminded of the Baltimore citizens' information needs study of more than thirty years ago, except that that investigation began with the understanding that information needs were secondary needs and related to issues of housing, education, crime prevention, etc. One is continually surprised or should it be 'depressed'? Please refresh the page and retry.

C rime is changing; the days of walking into a bank with a stocking over your head and a sawn-off shotgun are largely over. At the same time, the number of crimes has been steadily falling since the Eighties. This is good news, but perhaps just as well, since the police have rarely been under as much pressure to cut costs. The changing role of the police has become entwined with the kind of service the public demands; a recent Accenture study noted that most of the public — already familiar with shopping and communicating online — are quite happy to communicate with the police online, too.

Accenture will help to deliver on the plan, and its fees are tied to achieving the targets against which WMP are held to account. It is perhaps one of the best and clearest examples of outcome-based commissioning in the public sector. West Midlands Police is replacing its public-facing website with a new, easier-to-navigate portal with better support for mobility, and a range of interactive services to provide citizens with a new digital channel for their interactions with the police.

These include online crime reporting, online statement generation and crime tracking.