Costing out a 21st century police state

There's been lots of interesting coverage of the new Snooper's charter, with light blue touchpaper having a good summary of the fundamental civil liberties issues.

But we haven't seen much in the way of "how would an ISP implement this?"

Which means its up to us, implementers of a PCSO-state adjacent to the Bearpit, to look at how to build this. As proof we know what we are talking about, here is our 8TB JBOD storage infrastructure (running xubuntu server 14) with a Top of Rack (ToR) switch consisting of a netgear base station flashed to DD-WRT. Sticker some recruitment from "Google reliability engineering"


The new bill requires ISPs to store  an "Internet Connection Record (ICR)" of every connection, and allow government access to it on demand.

How would an ISP implement such a system?

First: What is an "Internet Connection Record (ICR)"? The bill has made up something which doesn't really exist and then told ISPs to maintain it.

It is probably a record recording: the originating IP address/port of a TCP connection, the destination IP/port, and the duration of the connection. "probably", because it uses the term "event"

7(9) In this Part “relevant communications data” means communications data which may be used to identify, or assist in identifying, any of the following—

(a) the sender or recipient of a communication (whether or not a person),
(b) the time or duration of a communication, 35
(c) the type, method or pattern, or fact, of communication,
(d) the telecommunication system (or any part of it) from, to or through which, or by means of which, a communication is or may be transmitted,
(e) the location of any such system, or 40
(f) the internet protocol address, or other identifier, of any apparatus to which a communication is transmitted for the purpose of obtaining access to, or running, a computer file or computer program.
In this subsection “identifier” means an identifier used to facilitate the transmission of a communication.

The GCHQ/Bristol university "Problem Book (redacted)" appears to cover this very problem in the "five alive" dataset of IP/IP communications (p70), with every communication record being a list of records of (start-time/8, source-IP/4, source port/2, dest-IP/4, dest port/2, protocol/2. [data size]/8). Using the byte size estimated in the /N values, that's 30 bytes per communication; with the move to IPv6 driven by mobile phones, you'd need 16 bytes per source and dest address, or 56 bytes/record. That's for every HTTP request, skype call, bittorrent block share, PS4 game setup. If they include DNS records, it's for every nslookup command issued.

That's a lot of data in a world of phones and home network connections.

How to store all of this?

We see a number of strategies

The "fuck off Theresa" strategy

Here your ISP implements "for security reasons" an isolated system which collects ICRs, but for which the only way to retrieve them is a 1970s-era punched card reader you have to actually walk to. If HMG asks for something, you say "next wednesday? Come on by. Bring your query on a prepared punched card and we'll have the printer ready for the output. Oh, and we'll bill you for the ink"

The problem here is on P135: "The Secretary of State may make regulations imposing specified obligations on 20 relevant operators, or relevant operators of a specified description.', which includes "obligations to provide facilities or services of a specified description;". You could offer "the fuck off then" system, and they'd say "no, we want this". The ISP would not get a choice in the matter.

The TalkTalk fiasco

A Linux server running MySQL with a front end of an unpatched PHP web application accessible on the open internet over an unencrypted HTTP connection.

MySQL does have the lowest cost/TB of storage out there, and while a single mysql server doesn't grow, you can scale via sharding; storing the mass surveillance records of a few tens of of thousands of users.

Limitations

1. Doesn't handle the "list me everyone who used twitter between 9 and 9:30 query" without going through every single database and then aggregating the results, so pushing out a database query (SELECT * FROM icr WHERE icr.endpoint="twitter.com" AND icr.time>21:00 and icr.time < 21:30), somehow merging them all.

2. Being people utterly out of their depth, that same web UI will be accessible from your customer billing form. That'll be a massive security disaster, unless the people breaking are a group like Anonymous, where it's more likely to be a contribution "; DROP * from USERS" or an attack on public targets (SELECT * FROM icr WHERE user="Theresa May")

The outsourced consultancy disaster

The design here is less a design than a process. Go to a global/national software consultancy (e.g. Capita). Give them lots of money. Wait. Eventually get some software that doesn't work very well, designed to run on very expensive hardware.

This is essentially how major government projects like Universal Credit and any NHS-wide computer systems turn out. The problem here is the "ocean boiling grand vision" along with an inability to adjust features to meet unrealistic deadlines, along with consultants who are too excited by the cash to point out the project is doomed. Oh, and politicians who stand up in parliament announce changes in plans and then keep pretending the project is on schedule.

With this strategy we'd have a police state that came in late and didn't work very well. But: we'd pay for it either via taxes or ISPs, and it will be expensive

Bring it to the Borg

The cloud approach.  All ICRs are Netflow records grabbed off the Cisco switches and buffered locally. Regularly they are pushed up to google cloud storage in bulk HTTPS PUT operations, so storing all your data in google's server farms. We'd duplicate it across sites for Disaster Recovery ("DR") , and host it in the zero-CO2 datacentres ("DCs") to help meet the COP21 commitments which Osborne is trying to pretend weren't made.

Those initial datasets could be converted to more compressed format, with some summary data pushed into the google BigTable database. Queries against the dataset "find everyone who used twitter and facebook yesterday" would be Google BigQuery queries.

This architecture would work, provided whoever wrote the capture, upload and query code knew what they were doing. Google would handle datacentre ops, bill your ISP or HMG by the petabyte of data stored and for the CPU load of the import/cleanup phase and the query execution.

This is the one we'd build. No upfront hardware CAPEX; operational costs O(records)+O(queries). As you get 1TB of free processing month, initial dev costs are relatively low too.

Would the government allow it? Unlikely. Google's nearest datacentres are in Ireland and Finland; all the data would be moved out of the UK and under the jurisdiction of others.

It's notable, however, that Amazon have a special datacentre in the US for Amazon GovCloud, which is is where federal agencies can keep data and run code. We aren't aware of a UK equivalent. They could do this, though presumably after discussing tax arrangements.

[BTW, if someone went this way, as costs are directly proportional to the number of records, you could hurt the telcos and government costs by generating as many records as you can. If every UDP packet kept a sender and destination, you could run something on all willing participant's machines to create costs. Even at pennies per gigabyte, you can ramp up the bills if you leave this code running flat out overnight. Just a thought]

Kafkaesque

The fallback design would be to use the open source Big Data stack; "Hadoop and Friends"

The netflow call records would be streamed into Apache Kafka streams, which would then store the data in Hadoop HDFS, or perhaps feed them through some initial streaming system for cleanup (storm, spark).

Summary information would go into a column database. Normally the checklist item would be HBase, but given this is a government project, the NSA implemented Accumulo would win out.

Assuming there's a way to submit remote queries, those queries need to be secured. We'd come to some arrangement with the government to say "here are the kerberos credentials you need" on a USB stick, restrict access to SPNEGO-authenticated callers over HTTPS and rely on the NSA having no back doors in Accumulo that they aren't willing to tell GCHQ about.

Cost: upfront CAPEX of the datacentre, operational costs: site, power, staff, cooling. ideally you'd host it somewhere with cool air and low cost zero-carbon power, which points us up a Scotland and NE england. Land, power and people are affordable, and before long you could have something on a par with Facebook Prineville, though not, notably, NSA Utah.

Being open source software, you don't actually have to pay anyone for it —if you take on the support costs yourselves. It's unlikely telcos will want to do this, so that needs to be covered too. Once you have enough Petabytes of data, the costs of this system is still likely to be less than with google or amazon.

Otherwise: software development costs atop this layer may be steep, especially if you don't have experience in this.

In fact: all of the strategies have software development costs, a cost which is the same for every telco, all implementing roughly the same application.

Which would leave the government to be in a very good position to walk up to all of them and say "we can provide the software for you —just run these servers with our code". That way they get to run precisely the software they want —and hook it up directly to their central systems in a way which they knows will work.

They could even say "we'll host your servers somewhere and provide the software". That would give the government direct access to the nominally independent telco-hosted datasets, when they were all really in the same big room, running the same application.

There you have it then: four real ways. Two disasters, two viable: one where you hand off the operational issues to Google or amazon in exchange for lots of cash, the other home-built on the open source Big Data stack for more upfront capital costs but lower long term storage & compute costs. And relying on GCHQ to provide the software layer.

The only one that would scale, technically and financially, without giving the Google or Amazon the data, would be Hadoop+Accumulo, with code the telcos probably aren't up to writing themselves.

How much would this cost?

Hardware: Facebook-based open compute servers.

These are never publicly quoted, as you have be shopping for $1M+ before the design starts to make sense; at that point you get off the web site and onto the phone.

Looking at the Penguin Computing icebreaker storage servers, holding 30 3.5" HDDs in a 2U system. with ~44 "rack units" of capacity in a normal rack, you get 22/per rack (we're leaving space for Top of Rack switches) == 660 disks.

With 4TB HDDs, you get 2.6 petabytes in a single rack. Heavy bastard with serious power budget, but compact enough that you can fit one in various telco sites, doing the initial storage/preprocess there before uploading to central facilities in off-peak times.

A 4TB HDD costs $115 from Amazon US; let's assume $75 for the OEM. You'd be paying $50K for those 550 disks. That's all. Servers, let's assume $1.5K for each chassis(*), 33K, so $82,500 per rack, excluding networking. Let's round that up to $100K.

We'd end up with a system whose pure hardware costs, the CAPEX, come in at $100K per 2.5 PB of storage. For 1MB USD you've got 25 PB. At, say, 60 bytes per record (==56 + 4), we'd get 426e9 records per rack. That's what's technically known as "a fuck of a lot of data". More subtly, if you look at the cost per record, in cents, its $0.000000234375. That's "a police state too cheap to meter" (**)

Which is what we are getting here. The big change isn't "the terrorists are using phones", or even "surveillance is getting harder than ever". It's "with the right technologies, we can record everything the population does for next to nothing"

Welcome to the future: privacy is over.

(*) Chassis costs depends very much on RAM and CPU; put in intel Xeon parts and lots of RAM and you'd be paying $8K/node, plus more in the leccy bill. That's what you'd expect to pay for the more compute-centric nodes, rather than the cold data storage, which is what we've costed out.

(**) These numbers seem to come in too low. Either there's a major underestimate of something, or the author should have used a spreadsheet rather than the calculator on their phone.

The new Mass Surveillance State bill

Taking a break from traffic issues, we should note that Bristol Traffic team  has long admitted to building a mass surveillance police state in conjunction with google and facebook —our Datacentre State.

In fact the main difference between us and GCHQ is ours is run from an Ubuntu laptop in the comfy sofa bit of the Canteen. That's just down the road from this painting, behind the riot police in the distance

Now that the new Mass Surveillance State bill is up, we should do a post on how we would implement it and cost it out accordingly. Some request logging  -> Apache Kafka -> Hadoop HDFS pipeline with hourly scheduled MapReduce or Spark jobs compressing the time-series logs a compact and fast-to-scan format like Parquet or Orc. This could then be queried direct via Facebook's Hive, or imported into NSA's open sourced Accumulo column table DB for even faster lookup. Each ISP/mobile telco may host their own "facility", but sticking them all in the same datacentre would ease low-latency cross-ISP queries issued from government computers, while still pretending they were "separate"

In the meantime, let's pick on some talking points that are being used on the radio and TV to justify the bill and make it look like the government listened to feedback

The nature of technology has changed and we must adapt.

People have been browsing the web for 20 years, even skype is about twelve years old. What has changed is the cost of storage. Back in 2008 we were quoting a few hundred dollars for aterabyte. seven years later and the cost is $30/TB and density shrunk to the extent you can get a couple of petabytes in two wardrobe-sized server racks. That's the big change: governments can afford to store all your personal data.

The pages you visit won't be recorded, only the sites.

With the migration of the main web sites to HTTPS, the ISPs couldn't log the pages anyway. There's no concession here: if your browser shows a little green lock in the URL line, the government couldn't record the page. What they can do now is go to facebook and say "Someone at 10.0.1.1 went to fb.com at 21:14 on Tuesday: what did they do?" Facebook, will have the rest of the information for them.

This is just like an itemised phone bill.

No. It's like a log of every game you played on your PS3, every program you watched on BBC iPlayer, every photo you took which your smart phone backed up (and where). If you read books on an Amazon kindle —or with the app— its a log of whenever you turned a page or turned back. Spent too much time reading "extremist" bits of the Koran between bouts of Call of Duty and facebook posts? That'll be something they'll be able to work out by looking at the URLs and then asking the service providers for the details. Here Sony may come out the best —unless they start recording chat sessions. Amazon? They'll probably record the ambient light and tablet rotation while you were reading those chapter of the Koran.

We won't ban encryption

They'd only be laughed at if they asked for this. The algorithms (RSA, Elliptic Curve Cryptography) are well known. You can't stop RSA working without banning prime numbers. ECC is potentially even harder. though the fact that NSA are no longer recommending is use implies they don't trust it any more. Either they've found some new math or built some new hardware ... so longer key RSA is back in fashion. All the homeoffice can do is go to FB, google, Whatsapp and say "please store the communications so we can ask for it", then drive round to Apple and say "add a back door to iPhone encryption —we promise we won't abuse it, lose the secret key or otherwise destroy its value.

There is some mention of "informal arrangements" perhaps the government has had meetings with all these people, and said, "give us access and we won't review your tax status". But that isn't going to work with those companies that don't have a UK outpost who can hang up the phone when Theresa rings them. Note especially that some of the best cryptography libraries, Bouncy Castle are explicitly developed in Australia to avoid US regulations on RSA key lengths. And guess what's been ported to Android? Building an Android device-device app with unbreakable encryption is straightforward enough to make it a final year project for a Computer Science course at any of our local universities —how could that be criminalised?

We're only formalising what's been going on.

Ignoring the fact that this implies that previous governments have clearly been granting warrants to log the actions of every citizen, the fact that they've been doing this is a key part of the UK-side of the Snowden leaks. In the US this has led to a rethink of state/citizen rights. Here its leading to the government not only formalising the existing state of affairs, but expanding it.

We won't monitor MPs communications
Bulk data collection renders this impossible. How you know that the person posting to twitter from an internet cafe is an MP or a possible enemy of the state? You can't, you just grab it all.

Summary

The core concessions aren't concessions, they are the result of the engineering teams of the government and the ISPs telling them what doesn't work, and the politicians coming up with ways to frame this in terms of concessions, rather than acceptance of engineering and cross-border realities. They've also hidden the key implication: they can now afford to record every single interaction you make with a remote computer, and, with informal and formal arrangements with the providers of those services, get the details.

Meanwhile, your civil liberties have been suspended for the duration of the emergency.

Prime Numbers are Crime Numbers

Earlier this week, David Cameron said there should be no means of communication which we cannot read

That's pretty significant. Because, as some subversives have pointed out, internet communications is locked down via HTTPS and other protocols that encrypt their data, often using the RSA Public Key algorithm to do it. Which relies on the fact that, given a big non-prime number, it's "computationally very hard", to determine which two prime numbers can be multiplied together to produce this number.

Thus, in order to stop people encrypting their data in a form which the government cannot read, they are going to have to ban prime numbers.

A number which is forbidden to be discussed, shared or published on the web is known as an Illegal Number, the 09F9 key to decrypt blu-ray disks being a notorious example: a number where everyone publishing it initially received an DMCA takedown notice. Certain prime numbers can also be considered illegal, such as one which is actually the x86 linux binary code to decrypt a DVD.

All Cameron is proposing, then, is expand the list of Illegal Numbers, to some other numbers, specifically all prime numbers. That's a big list, so we'll shorten it by providing a set-theoretic definition of primeness:

∀ n in Naturals: ∄ p, q ∊ {2..n-1} : (p ≠ q ∧ p * q = n) 

That is all numbers n in the set of natural numbers Naturals, for which there do not exist two distinct numbers p and q in the set of numbers 2..n such that p times q equals n.

There: simples. And stopping terrorists sending messages the government —ideally a government led by Boris Johnson with Nigel Farrage as his deputy— cannot read is common sense.

Except, well, it's not going to work, not without bringing down The Internet As We Know It. 

Which would be somewhat inconvenient.

We've stated before that we are building a modern police state, a datacentre state, at an undisclosed location in stokes croft. Some of it is being rolled out, such as these undercover CCTV cameras near the Moon Pub. Some crimes don't merit hidden speed cameras enforcing publicly displayed limits, other crimes,  like rolling some locally grown weed —do.

Because we are a small police state of our own, we have agreed to try out the new "no encryption policy" before it is rolled out nationally. 

We do however recognise that encryption is critical to functionality of the internet, so will allow small primes —anything below 2^8. That is, only primes >= 256 are illegal.

We have issued our local PCSO with a list of all of legal primes, and given them a new power. As well as being able to fine cyclists for cycling on the pavement, they are now permitted to inspect phones and other computing devices to see if they contain prime numbers greater than 255. If so, the criminal will be arrested then deported to the Avonmouth detention facility (formerly: Portway Park and Ride) for The Duration of The Emergency.

Our PCSO will also be allowed to stop and search anyone, in case they are "Prime Number Mules", trying to sneak large prime numbers into the area in USB sticks hidden in body parts. We won't go into the specifics. 

Be advised, because connecting to facebook or twitter uses encypted HTTPS connections, even when done from their phone apps, driving while texting is going to have to be made temporarily illegal —banned until our strategic partners release "Stokes Croft editions" of  the applications.

To catch these possible terrorists, we are now recategorising cyclists such as here, RedVee, from "tax dodging scum", to "guardians in the war on terror". They are now permitted to report such incidents as the one above, in case the culprit is not a "hard working motorist", but instead "threat to society". A&S police will look up the vehicle registration, determine whether or not the driver is Muslim, and take action when appropriate.

What are the cyclists building? Surveillance State 2.0

Out in Twitter Land, one of those paranoid characters accused the cyclists of "building a police state". They are, but not the toy one he imagines from helmet cameras and ANPR recognition. No, those are surface dressing, something to get irate about while the real mass surveillance state gets "deployed" -as the developers call it, "for the duration of the emergency"

Because this new police state is special.

1. The cost of storing the data is offloaded to to private companies, its a privatised police state.
2. It's designed to scale: it is now affordable to store a "record" about every SMS message, or HTTP connection opened up. 
3. We, the population, are paying for the privilege of having the companies record everything we do, and the state being able to ask for it when we get it back.
4. We've moved on from Irish nationalists and communists to "paedos" and "jihadists" as the enemies. There's something dubious about the paedo one, what with the BBC of the 1970s being worked out, and the attention moving towards the houses of parliament. As for the Jihadist rising, yes, we do have idiots who are getting politicised by watching online videos. But the number of people killed by these naive fools is still a fraction of those killed in the troubles: a we didn't have a mass surveillance state then.

So what's changed since the 1970s? The back infrastructure for mass surveillance states now has O(1) scalability; the front end consumer electronics

In computational complexity theory, there's a notation, Big O Notation, used to describe the scalability of system. It doesn't describe how hard things are, but how much harder things get as the problem gets bigger.

The Deutschland Demokratic Republik, the DDR, is notorious for having the worlds most comprehensive mass surveillance society. But they did it by hand. 


For every citizen to watch, they needed a watcher, so the scalability of their state was linear, written down as O(n) scalability. Double the population, double the watchers, double the costs. That's if you trust the watchers. If you want to keep an eye on them, well, if we assume one monitor per 8 stasi members -and that those monitors need watching too, the scale becomes O(n)+O(n/8)+O(n/64)+... You get the point: it doesn't scale. The DDR tried, but it placed too much overhead on their economy, and even being the most efficient of the communist states wasn't enough. Eventually the population chose they wanted those consumer toys rather than the police state, the army felt the same way, and because the russians chose not to send their tanks in, down came the wall.

Nowadays though, we can build a police state with O(1) scalability, where the 1 has a name: Google.

  
Yes, everyone views them as a search engine, or an email service, but behind the scenes they've been developing that infrastructure for storing a snapshot of the web, indexing it's cross page links ("metadata", as they call it). The Google File System, GFS, and its computation layers on top: MapReduce, Pregel and Caffeine,as well as most recently, Spanner. As the abstract there says, "it is the first system to distribute data at a global scale".


What else have google done? Android: a smart phone OS, that they give away, indeed, they even sell their nexus phones at a loss. Why? Because it is profitable for them to give away the OS and sell phones at a discount, in exchange for you to carry a little device wherever you go. One that checks in with Google regularly, giving Spanner data to replicate, Google FS something to store, Pregel something to join together.

   
We are all paying every month for the right to carry a bit of electronics that continually reports to your mobile phone company where you are, who you call, who you text, when you connect to facebook, twitter, whatever. Even everything you look up in the map. Google want that data because the more they record about you, the better they can get about predicting you (remember those Markov Chains?), the better they can target advertising at you.

And government? They want that same data. If they said "every adult has to carry a machine that tells us where you go, what you look up in maps and who you talk to", even the Daily Mail commenters would be up in arms, the UKIP protesting about it being european, and not even the Lib Dem apologists could think of any way to pretend it was good.

Yet we are already carrying those machines that tell google all this stuff -all the government want to do is get that same information. Which they do by pretending it's minor, "metadata", "call records", "web connection information", phrases that aren't obvious to people the same way "where you are", "who you speak to" and "what you do on your computer".

That's what they are after though -they are just hiding the fact so you don't wake up screaming, realising that you are already living in a mass surveillance state that even the DDR would be jealous of -jealous because of its scale, the information it collects, and best of all, the subtlety.

That's the police state the cyclists have built -those bay area pedal pushers- and anyone complaining about CCTV surveillance is simply so woefully innocent it's actually quaint.

The cycling police state: first they came for themselves

Cycling is apparently, "the new golf" for the silicon valley people -the cyclists building the new surveillance state.

They can pop out on a weekend and climb the Santa Cruz Mountains

In the distance, the airship hangars of Moffet Field, which we covered earlier.

We pointed out that the NSA could easily run a fibre cable under the cycle path to the Googleplex. We broke that news two weeks before the "legacy" printed press. Nobody can accuse us of being a spoof now.

What do these police-staters talk about? Their plans for watching everybody. But who do they start with? The drivers? The pedestrians? No, they come for themselves, with the Strava application running on their phones, measuring their time up Old La Honda.



With their phones they can measure their speed, compare it with others, and give them their performance on a ride

 
Which is where we have some bad news for this particular tax-dodger. 2400 of 7500 puts them only just inside the top 1/3 of climbers, which isn’t very good, not for someone near the top of ninetree hill. And that heart-rate numbers makes it clear they were suffering all the way up, heart rate jittering between 170 and 184.Which tells us that they are under fit, getting old and losing peak heart rate, and possibly overfond of consuming beer at those establishments at the top of Ninetree Hill, such as the Hillgrove.

No, this person wasn’t up to having business deal conversations with anyone else, not in aerobic deficit for half an hour. If cycling is the new golf, this person isn’t a good golfer.

Which is information that Strava now knows. In fact, it will know

• who they ride with.
• what their fitness levels are.
• whether they are Soft Southern Jessies who don’t cycle in the rain.
• what their commuting schedule and route is
• what their leisure hours are
• what health issues they may have

This is valuable information -and yet they are giving it away for graphs of how fit they think they are.

For everyone worried about the cyclists building a surveillance state, know this: they will practise on themselves first until they have it right

The cyclists are building a surveillance state: a real one

We have just discovered Richard Wellings, a comedian who pretends to be part of a think tank, IEA.

This is funny: he's running a spoof think tank, a bit like The Thick of It without the swearing. More like the coalition side of the series, where they all go on some off-site meeting and compete on daftest ideas: "lets bill poor people for having spare rooms!", or "let's make it legal to run over pensioners", going round this in circles until someone says something like "let's stop building a nuclear submarine fleet for ICBM delivery as the cold war ended in 1989" and then there's one of those silences round the table as the person who said it looks slighly embarrassed and someone else has to step in .

Anyway, This Richard -is he a new Ali G? The Borat of Politics? - is trying to pretend that there is a mass lobby of cyclists secretly trying to build a mass surveillance state?

Look at this tweet:

Massive increase in surveillance and regulation advocated by cycling lobby: http://richardwellings.wordpress.com/2013/05/25/more-regulation-more-surveillance-and-more-enforcement-the-policies-cycling-groups-plan-to-impose-on-other-road-users

See? Imagining the cycling campaigners, who can't even stop their councils painting over bike lanes, building a police state? Clearly a spoof.

Because if he wasn't a spoof character, if he really wanted to show where the cyclists were building mass surveillance infrastructure, he'd look away from London and over to Silicon Valley, to Mountain view -a city that goes so far as to say "bicycle friendly" by the side of its wide and unblocked cycle lanes




Looking on the Stevens Creek cycle path, we can a small child pedalling on their own, helmetless.



That's bad enough, but it's not what we are talking about -we are looking at the buildings either side of it.

What is that set of buildings on the right?

It's The Googleplex, the mountain view site that hosts the core engineering teams.

What does the Googleplex offer its staff to get around? Hoverboards? Autonomous Cars? No: bicycles. Shared bicycles. Sharing capital items is clearly communism, sharing bicycles is an attempt to destroy society.



Now look in the other direction, to the eastern edge of mountain view. Strange looking buildings going off into the distance.



This is Moffett Field -a military, government science and private airfield, hosting, amongst other things

1. NASA Ames research center: the buildings to the right are wind tunnels for testing rockets, be they designed to go into orbit or merely fly over the north pole to deliver their uranium payloads.
2. The 7th Psychological Operations Group: a psychological warfare unit from the Vietnam War era to keep the country compliant.
3. Larry and Sergey's Google jets: accessible via the bike path or a 20 minute drive.
4. Until recently, the Sunnyvale Blue Cube, believed to be downlink and processing point for all the US government spy satellites.
5. The California National Guard keep trucks and fly planes & helicopters in and out
6. Until the mid 1990s: Orion planes used to hunt for nuclear submarines in the Pacific

This is the Military Industrial Complex viewed from a single path. One side: the engineers building the systems to store all our personal emails. The other: the NSA, the US army, NASA and its various "secret" space shuttle projects, plus psychological warfare groups.

A short distance away from each other: close enough that you could hook up direct fibre optical links from the NSA buildings to Google -the kind of thing you'd do if you wanted access to the emails.

And what is not so much dividing the area as uniting it, as joining the two together?

That's right: a bike path.

These are the cyclists building a mass surveillance state, and your spoof think-of-it think-tank minion is claiming that its the UK cycling campaigns, well, you're clearly out of your technical depth.

Come up with some that is vaguely realistic and so can entertain us, like, say, having Badgers move the Goalposts or something

The Arley Hill Contraflow

In our coverage of Cotham Brow yesterday, one Colin Hounslow, ‏@crusherdrive, who appears to be an HGV driver

@bristoltraffic noticed the foul language and the cyclist riding the wrong way up a one way street #urbanterrorists

We did note the foul language, and did complain that it was needless of abuse of a car that left at least ten centimetres of gap between the cyclist and their car as they squeezed through the pinch point.

The thing we do want to pick up on is the claim that the #urbanterrorists were cycling the wrong way up the hill.

Arley Hill is a contraflow to bicycles. And we have a dataset going back years documenting this.

The entrance is behind the AA van blocking the hatched junction

it goes under where the Bristol Council traffic survey car WV09NYO is blocking it
.
 It goes under where Brittania Movers international WA58BVD are parked -,because coning off some of the parking bays with the dustbins that are on the street would have required forward planning


You can actually see the bicycle logo pointing up hill just before the Ford Ka Y873LCY blocks it.

And proceeds up the hill to where the the Peugeot P817OVV is blocking it.

The cyclists aren't, therefore, illegally contraflowing.

Where there is a contraflow opportunity, it is that the Nugent Hill to Arley Hill cut through is bicycles only, yet it provides such an invaluable rat run that it is popular with people who don't want to get stuck in the Arley Hill traffic jam, such as WN08EZX


And R968NKX

Yet again, we see abusive cyclists giving cars a hard time, such as here where one stops in the middle of the road and so block a car from using this secret route.



As proof that Bristol council is anti-car, they eventually added a traffic island to prevent a right turn here by cars

this now forcing drivers to swerve left -uphill, then swing round, such as the one in R214RVN.


this car was following the transit van YR51XJX, which must have an even harder time executing the contraflow.



Colin, we could carry on, but instead would point  you at our complete datasets on Nugent Hill and Arley Hil.

While you do that, consider that Bristol Traffic -while mistaken for some kind of subversive satire, is -as discussed in the context of Arley Hill itself, a collaborative project with our strategic partners google, facebook, and apparently the NSA, to build a crowd-sourced mass surveillance state for the City of Bristol.

Which brings us to the main reply to your tweet.

You can say what you want about #urbanterrorists, but as soon as you make a claim about a cyclist going the wrong way up a one-way street, provide the data to back up your claim -or shut the fuck up.

Bristol Traffic. Datamining you for your own good since 2008.

Persecution on Parry's Lane

Some militant cyclist, bristolcyclista, sticks up a video of a journey so uneventful it doesn't merit a mention:



Except, by putting up the video of the car F54NWG, the driver has found a photograph of themselves swearing at the tax-dodger.

Needless to say, this persecuted driver has reacted in the only way left: to complain that placing the video up is a privacy violation, to which youtube react by blocking the video. There's now an updated one with the face blurred out.

The cyclist claims as now that you can only hear the abusive shouting from the passing vehicle, it is hard to identify the driver. Consider this. How does "bristolcyclista" know that the driver doesn't shout and swear like that to everyone? His family? His friends? Anyone he works with? Now anyone in the area of Parry's Lane -that's Stoke Bishop, an "under-documented" region- who has someone walk up to them and shout abuse will know "hey, that's the man in the F54NWG youtube video".

This is persecution.

We know that he's been persecuted by the way that he found and complained about the first video. Perhaps he's felt it necessary -as we have been- to create a google alert with our registration number in, sending us an email when yet another video of our driving appears on line. Alternatively, someone who knew him saw the car, heard the shouting and thought "I know of only one person who swears at people like that as they drive a silver car" -and broke the news. At which point the driver and his acquaintance now know what his driving standard is.

Of course that's an invasion of privacy!

Google's paper, Building High-level Features Using Large Scale Unsupervised Learning, [Le 2012], showed how they ran an image-feature identification program through still images, each of which was taken from a different youtube video. At the end of the exercise, the computer could take any image and categorise it into "face","body part", "cat" or "other". We suspect that before long, that program would start to recognise from-bicycle driving videos. If that's the case, youtube could just use it as part of its upload process: to identify all cycling-troublemaker videos and then refuse to accept them.

It's only through the application of such technology that our right to drive how we want can be preserved.

Not participating in the daily mail survelliance infrastructure

The Bristol Traffic Project is, as we have repeatedly declared, a community-sourced police state, using the datacentre infrastructure of our strategic partners Google. Google have published some of their datacentre photographs, for people to look at while reading about how google use atomic clocks to implement causal consistency between locations. The reason that Google's "Spanner" system does this is to ensure that all their computers round the world have a consistent view of "when" they are.

The Bristol Evening Post, with whom we no longer have any strategic relationship, hasn't needed atomic clocks to implement a global-scale consistency model; indeed their articles do not usually implement causal consistency; the notion that actions (e.g burning carbon fuels) have side effects that happen afterwards (climate change). Nor are they eventually Consistent: at no point in the future will the various articles and newspapers of the daily mail portfolio ever make coherent sense.

This is not news; it is not important. Except now, anyone logging in to the thisisbristol web site to add a balanced comment about how Cllr Gollop is going back on his word of being an anti-cycling councillor and now pandering to the lycra-criminals is, if they use a gmail.com email address, asked to sign in with their "google ID".

And when you do that, what rights does Google say the thisisbristol web site -hence the Evening Post and the rest of the Daily Mail portfolio say that they want to have to your account:

TINReg is requesting permission to:

•     Manage your tasks
•     View your email address
•     View basic information about your account
•     Manage your contacts
•     Know who you are on Google

What does that mean? It means the Daily Mail/this-is- set of web sites want to:

Manage your tasks
Have the ability to read and update your todo list in google calendar.

View your email address
See your email address

View basic information about your account
See what your claimed gender and age is.

Manage your contacts
see below

Know who you are on Google
See who you say you are

It's that "Manage your contacts" one that worries us. Because Gmail builds up a list of contacts automatically, based who sends you email and who you email yourself, the google contact list is really "a list of who you communicate with".

That's a really interesting piece of information. Know that and they can start comparing your contacts list with the other people who comment on the paper.  And because they have the contacts list of those commenters, the site could even find common contacts between two commenters  -even in the case where the two commenters do not know each other directly. That is, in graph-theory terms, one degree of separation. Before long they'll have built up a graph of the communications between people in the city, which is pretty valuable stuff. Facebook have that to an extent, but only between people who explicitly declare each other as friends. Even so, that subset of links was enough for Facebook to show that there is usually a four-hop connection between any two people in the US: four degrees of separation. 

If the entire portfolio of the Daily Mail web sites start collecting your email address and those of all you talk to, they stand a good chance of building up a map of who talks to who amongst all people who log in and comment in any of their web sites.

We don't trust the organisation. It's not that we don't agree with their political objectives: the imprisonment of subversives, the stance they take against lycra-criminals, 20 mph speed limits and other potential criminals. It's just that we don't see why they need to go behind our backs and build up a graph of everyone who comments on the paper to achieve those goals. It's the people who don't read the Daily Mail, the Mail on Sunday, the Evening Post, and their other regional counterparts that we need to worry about.

This is what Bristol Traffic is: a police state run by volunteers! There is no need for the DM sites to spy on us -not when we report the anti-motoring activities that the city is up to.

suboptimal data collection strategies - or a secret plan to spy on us

A strange sight: four people wearing hi-viz sitting on the St Werbughs crossing of the M32

What are they up to? The "Highways Agency" text on the back gives the game away -they are monitoring traffic flow, with multiple people to independently monitor different lanes,
 
Some questions spring to mind

1. Why hi-viz? Really? It's a pedestrian footpath that some cyclists also use. Unless you have a fear of being run over by one of those two-kid-wide pushchairs, its the safest place in the city to sit. 
2. Counting traffic by hand? Why not just go to the bit of the Highways Agency that collects the ANPR data and use that instead. If you hook the M32 data up with those of the M4W, M4E and M5 feeds, you can even work out where people go to after leaving the M32. As any vehicle not found on those other feeds must have got off at Eastville or the North Fringe, you get those figures for free.

The fact that they aren't using the ANPR data may be sign that the UK Government police-state-on-motorists isn't as all encompassing as the daily mail and daily telegraph warn us of; that there isn't any coverage of the M32 at all. The four people on the footbridge are therefore implicity sharing a secret with us.

That or there is ANPR scanning of every vehicle entering or leaving the city, and those four people are sitting there to pretend that there isn't -they think they are counting traffic but their numbers are being discarded in preference for the machine-collected statistics. Only someone very paranoid would think that. Which is precisely why we suspect it.

The AA street watch

Apparently the AA were doing some study last week, trying get some statistics on what people in cities do that is technically "illegal", despite the war on motorists being over.

We think their crowd-sourced approach, while clearly based on our own world-leading experiment, is valid, we do like asking the machines for the data too. It scales better in space and time, generates more defensible data,  suffers from less self-selection bias, and is easier to go through in bulk.

This is why we think the best way for the AA to gain some statistics of where drivers bend the "so called law" would simply be to collect the satnav statistics of their own vehicles, correlating vehicle speeds and parking events with the "legacy" speed limits, double yellow line map, yellow-boxed junctions, etc. This would provide a year-round source of data, completely independent of any selection bias of the reporters.

We invite the AA to provide the Bristol Traffic team with an anonymised copy of such a dataset. Even if our multi-terabyte distributed filestore lacks the storage and compute capacity, we are sure that our strategic partners like Yahoo!, Google and Facebook,  do, and we will apply our world class datamining and Hidden Markov Modelling techniques to show the AA we are pretty good at guessing where their vans and driving school vehicles will park (hint: double yellow lines and pavements, such as here, the double yellow lines of St Michael's Hill).

A lot of people dismiss the AA for being lost in time, pining for the 1950s when cars only made it ten miles before a breakdown, and you'd send a telegram to let your family know you'd made it all the way from Bristol city centre to Filton without a catastrophe. We criticise them for something else: inability to grasp the opportunities that modern technologies bring. Never ask the people, when you can ask the machines.

Facebook Issues

The Bristol Traffic team met many of our strategic partners in California, too many to mention. One thing we will flag up is our concerns about the Facebook visit. The Non-Disclosure Agreement prevents any discussion about what went on indoors, what their offices look like, or whether or not the team met The Man. It's not important; what matters is that two of the world's best datamining organisations got together to discuss areas of mutual interest. And the Bristol Traffic logo (a stylised version of Southwell Street) is now on graffiti wall on the right past security.

What we will raise is this. The entrance, of 1601 California Avenue. HQ.

This in the head office, the developers all work here, with Mark in the private room in the middle. Someone worth many billions of dollars, hosting Obama shortly after our visit. But where is the fancy parking area? There is more prestigious parking are outside the UWE vice chancellor's office than here, where the vehicles that can get closest to the entrance are a shuttlebus and bicycles.

It is trends like this -giving bicycle parking pride of place in the foyer of the global web companies- that worry us.

At the junction of Google and Ampitheater

Over in Waltham Forest, Freewheeler has been expressing some concerns about google.

We too have issues, which, during the teams visit to our strategic partners in California, also cause us to question our long term relationship with them.

Ampitheater Parkway. Like the Bristol M32 Parkway except less congested, and there's a bike lane in the hard shoulder for pickups to sideswipe. All is well.

Ahead, the centre of Google-land, with a little "google maps" pin to show you where the Google maps team is based. All is well.

But what's this we see from our SUV?

That's right: it's a Google employee, on a Google staff bicycle, cycling between offices, while holding a phone.

This is Google, not just encouraging their employees to ride bicycles, but to check their email as they do it. And they aren't even wearing a helmet!

It is unacceptable, and concerns us deeply. Is Google really on our side. We know Microsoft are, because they gave the internet the Comic Sans font, the official font of the Association of British Drivers, Drivers Protest and the like. But Google? By encouraging such reckless behaviour by their staffers, we now have doubts.

Bristol Traffic and your privacy rights

A while back, we documented how selfish pedestrians trying to squeeze past Hampton House hospital staff cars parked on the pavement forced the BRI hospital van WR58UMS to drive down a bicycle only contraflow and then park half on the pavement, half on the yellow lines, and keep the door open to reduce the risk of any bicycle damaging their paintwork.

Our reporter also says that the driver warned "if a photo of them appeared on the web site, they would be prosecuted".

This raised an interesting question, one we raised with the Information Commissioners Office,  namely what are the data protection rules surrounding photographs of vehicles in public places.

We now have a response

From:  casework at ico.gsi.gov.uk

Date: Thu, Aug 19, 2010 at 11:22 AM
Subject: Data Protection Query[Ref. ENQ0341761]
To: bristol.traffic at gmail.com

19th August 2010

Case Reference Number ENQ0341761

Dear Sir/Madam

Thank you for your email.

In order to fall under the provisions of the Data Protection Act 1998 the data concerned must be personal data; that is data from which a living individual can be identified.  Vehicles and their registration numbers in isolation from any other information are not considered to be personal data.

As such its seems unlikely that the Data Protection Act 1998 will apply to the situation you outline.  You may need to ensure that you do not include images of the drivers when these pictures are taken as this could lead you into the area of data protection.

Obviously there may be other legal issues you will need to consider but these are not matters that this office could give you advice on.

I hope this clarifies the matter for you

Yours sincerely

Louise MacDonald

Lead Case Officer

 ____________________________________________________________________


The ICO’s mission is to uphold information rights in the public interest, promoting openness by public bodies and data privacy for individuals.

If you are not the intended recipient of this email (and any attachment), please inform the sender by return email and destroy all copies. Unauthorised access, use, disclosure, storage or copying is not permitted.
Communication by internet email is not secure as messages can be intercepted and read by someone else. Therefore we strongly advise you not to email any information, which if disclosed to unrelated third parties would be likely to cause you distress. If you have an enquiry of this nature please provide a postal address to allow us to communicate with you in a more secure way. If you want us to respond by email you must realise that there can be no guarantee of privacy.
Any email including its content may be monitored and used by the Information Commissioner's Office for reasons of security and for monitoring internal compliance with the office policy on staff use. Email monitoring or blocking software may also be used. Please be aware that you have a responsibility to ensure that any email you write or forward is within the bounds of the law.
The Information Commissioner's Office cannot guarantee that this message or any attachment is virus free or has not been intercepted and amended. You should perform your own virus checks.
__________________________________________________________________

Information Commissioner's Office, Wycliffe House, Water Lane, Wilmslow, Cheshire, SK9 5AF
Tel: 0303 123 1113 Fax: 01625 524 510 Web: www.ico.gov.uk

So there you have it. Cars with registration numbers yes, people on their own, OK, but photographs of the drivers with the reg nos, maybe. Interesting. We shall have to consider this. Good email signature.

Billboard Campaign

We have teamed up with central government to produce this new advertising campaign for the Bristol Traffic web site, one that makes it clear that anyone walking or cycling is a potential subversive who should be reported to the police.

Expect to see this being rolled out across the city centre soon. First location -the bottom of Arley Hill.

[credit to this application]

Cooperative Vehicle-Infrastructure Systems

This is the A4174 Ring Road heading from Emerson's Green to the M32. It is a weekday evening, so even the high-occupancy traffic lane is full of single occupant vehicles not moving.

Campaigners for the removal of the 2+ lane during the morning rush hour dream of this exact same situation on their morning drive in.

This jam is pretty predicable; morning and evening: traffic jam here. There is no cause other than traffic volumes on the ring road, caused by M32 congestion, caused by an inability of vehicles to get off the M32 at Muller Road, St Pauls and the city centre, which is caused by buses and bicycles taking up space, and the excessive number of pedestrian crossings, according to our strategic partners the Association of British Drivers.

The ABD have recently flagged up a new concern, that the EU is building a new in-car spy network -CVIS . For those of us building city-wide vehicle spy networks, this is news, as EU funding would be very handy. This led us to the CVIS home page, and a recent workshop on intelligent roads. At this point we feel we must disappoint our ABD fellow-travellers with the bad news that this is not an attempt by central government to track everyone's movement. That can already be done by monitoring mobile phone movements across cell quadrants; no need to force upgrade-every car, as it covers old vehicles and pedestrians. No, this is actually an attempt by the car manufacturers to render the entire current fleet of vehicles technically obsolete.

A key problem with today's vehicles is that they last too long -hence the German and UK old car scrappage scheme -people just aren't buying new cars at a rate that sustains the EU car industry any more, and there is a limit to what can be done on the mechanical engineering side of car design and the appearance of cars to make them obsolete faster. By adopting a high-tech interior, from MP3 and SatNav to DVD players to children, you can introduce an obsolescence rate driven by the lifetime of technologies, not engine longevity. The CVSI scheme takes that idea and raises it, by having the in-car computing communicate with peers (warn vehicles nearby of ABS-hard braking, ice conditions, crashes), and with roadside infrastructure.

The best summary of the work is New Transport Paradigms of the 21st century. Ignoring the fact that new Transport Paradigms of the late 21st century are likely to be a horse and cart and a sailing ship, it's an interesting read. On P28, for example, a key feature of the system will be that it will tell you that you can drive down a bus lane. In Bristol, we do not need to wait the rollout of an EU-wide car-to-car communication infrastructure to do that.

From a datacentre-state, the CVIS infrastructure isn't that interesting. We can already track vehicle movements, so the only issue here is that the city is trying to provide data back to the cars, such as where there is a parking space, then reverse parking for you. But how do you prevent non-CVIS vehicle owners from ignoring your rights and stealing that space first?

The other amusing entry is from the French Autoroute Operators, which on page 17discusses their objectives: profit

Factors of success of cooperative traffic management

1. New actors in traffic management (automotive industry, telecom industry, equipment and content providers,…) work with road operators.
2. The business model recognizes the economic value all along the chain of the information production.
3. To give evidence that each driver need on board reliable traffic information and pay for that as he does for tyres, energy or airbag.

This is pretty profound. It implies that the road operators view the road safety data -traffic information- that they collect as their property, and only something that should be shared with the cars if the drivers are prepared to pay for it.

This is not a police state, no, its just another source of revenue for the road operators and the car manufacturers.

Like a police state, only funnier

We have stated before, and we will repeat it: this site is a community effort to build a community version of an oppressive police state, with the goal being friendly and more humourous. Less "Orwell", more "George", and we will do that in partnership with Google and Yahoo!, and use logos like cuddly toys to make everything seem friendlier.



This week's contributions, then, are a New York Times article on how Apache Hadoop is commoditising Petabyte-scale datamining. It is, and you should all give the yellow elephant the respect is deserves. When we start our large-scale datamining experiments this is the tooling we will use, though for some reason the NYT didn't ask us for any quotes, or use our plans as an example use of the technology.

Meanwhile Google, provider of free storage for the blog, has just added Bristol to streetview, with a lovely photograph of a bike-on-bike collision in City Road.



View Larger Map
It appears that someone heading to Stokes Croft has gone straight into someone crossing the road on their own bike. Google have managed to snap the collision mid-wipeout, and you can just see the unhelmeted rider about to hit the ground, while the other rider, the one apparently going across the road, manages to bail out standing, which is a slick little move, though his bike does come out on the bottom of the pile, which is less good.

Given all the cars are waiting at the lights, there is distinct likelihood that the cyclist in the bristol-chic fluorescent top was running the red light. For all ghost-riders out there, remember, we only put up photos of those who get captured on film, so please carry your own helmet cameras when you choose to run-the-reds on or near the A38.

View Larger Map
If you were involved in this collision, we would love to hear the full details. Please email us at bristol.traffic at gmail dot com.

Stokes Croft Roadworks

We are graced with new roadworks on Stokes Croft, removing the right turn from Jamaica Street, and the left turn from Stokes Croft to City Road. It will improve safety -eventually. But what of the process itself?

Here is Jamaica Street at 09:32 this morning. The bike lane is occupied by a car W964XLG with driver -mate in shopping at the corner store- and a organic milk van making deliveries. Nothing unusual there.

Opposite is where it gets interesting. The right turn is closed, the northbound route gone, a place has been retained for pedestrians (see the sign "Pedestrians <-->" in the bottom right of the picture)

That pedestrian space is the ideal size and location for one of the contractor's cars, WR06NAA. We know it is one of theirs as they were fairly unhappy about someone taking photographs of it. Sadly, the right of Bristol Traffic to take photographs of any car in a public place we feel like and then index their registration number is another way that NuLabour is infringing on the that greatest of British freedoms, the right to park where you like. (Having attended the Bristol showing of the Convention of Modern Liberty this weekend, it was disappointing to see that this freedom was not discussed at all. Given the organisers had also turned down our offer to talk on the infrastructure of a modern datacentre state, we had nothing to do but entertain ourselves by helping code the Apache Hadoop datamining infrastructure during the sessions. )

In theory, Jamaica street has a width of 2.5 Motor Vehicle Widths (MVWs). The car in the bike lane drops that to 1.5 MVWs; the contractor's car half-on-the-pavement subtracts another 0.5 MVWs. This leaves 1.0 MVWs, which is not enough for two lanes of traffic.

What does this mean? It means that the van turning right off Stokes Croft is going to get stuck.

Nobody is happy about this. The Mercedes is trying to get out the way to avoid being scraped, the van is sounding its horn, there is a tailback of turning vehicles to the left of the picture, and everyone is getting upset. Except for the gentleman sitting serenly in his ford fiesta. He must be listening to radio 3 or something else serene.

What to do?

1. The bike lane there needs to be marked as no parking at all, perhaps enforcement even of loading/short stay rules, at least for the proposed five weeks of work.
   
2. Contractors need to be told to stop parking here. If they want to park on double lines, they should know about Dove street and Nine Tree Hill, where they won't make the junction any worse. They are only round the corner, it won't add more than 200 metres of walk to the day's schedule. Parking over the dropped kerb of the only open pedestrian crossing in the area is not a good contribution to the area.
   
3. Contractors should be advised that it is legal to take photographs of pretty-much anything in a public street, and that arguing about someone photoing their cars parked over a bike lane sign and double yellow lines is not going to have any effect other than to add copy to our articles.

The assault on liberty continues

Some radical thinkers in the Conservative Party are about to introduce a new book, the assault on liberty, what went wrong with rights. Apparently it blames the labour party for the emergence of the database state. It does look like an interesting read, but from what they've been saying on the radio, it gets a couple of facts wrong.

It's not New Labour. The Infringement of civil liberties goes back many governments. The introduction of Internment, for example, was under Heath's conservative government as was the 1974 Prevention of Terrorism (Emergency Powers) act. Similarly, anyone who recalls the Thatcher era should remember its view of dissent. The enemy within.

What's interesting about Labour is that they started off with a vision: incorporate the European Convention on Human Rights into legislation, so giving UK courts the ability to use it in decisions, rather than waiting for judgements to come out of Strasbourg. And yet as they embraced the emergency, (as in "your civil rights have been suspended for the emergency"), all their ideals went out the window, out from the folder of "things that kept Northern Ireland contained" came a list of ideas -internment, ID cards, surveillance, shooting of bystanders- and some of them were rolled out.

What changed since the 1970s, however, was technology. Then: shillings and sixpences, part time electricity, cameras bulky things with "film" that needed "developing"; phones something that came in one colour from the G.P.O. Now: pay debit card, mobile phones, emails. In cities with half-decent public transport, we wave our Oystercards at the buses and tube stations, stations with digital CCTV cameras. All of these actions leave a trace, packets in the net, which can either be discarded or retained "for our own safety". That's what's changed. Not the government, but how, through increasing integration of the physical and data worlds, the instrumentation of the real world, it's easier to collect truckloads of data than ever before. So of course central government is going to collect it: they can, so they will. And we will be grateful. It's for or own good. Only people that have things to hide need to worry about having every email, the location of their phone and their car, every web page fetched logged for 3 years. For the rest of us, it's something to be grateful for.

Yet these dissidents are complaining about it, and using the phrase "the database state" to describe what is emerging. Which is where they go wrong again. Databases don't scale to truckloads of data. At most you get a few tens of terabytes out of one, but a terabyte, a thousand-ish gigabytes, only costs you a thousand pounds in a shop, let alone if you phone up a server vendor and ask for a serious quantity. A terabyte of data doesn't costs that much at all. So why stop at a few terabytes, not when recording the location of every mobile phone when it made/received a call creates a wonderful Directed Graph that lets you map who called who and where, who is friends with whom, who never speaks to anyone else except two other pay-per-use SIM cards. Same for emails. You can do fun things with that data, but not if your database doesn't have room for it.

For that you need a decent distributed multi-Petabyte filesystem like GoogleFS; a Petabyte being 1024 Terabytes. Without something like that, there's no way to store all the masses of generated data. The liberties issue in the future is not the database state, its the datacentre state, or the Petabyte-filesystem-with-MapReduce-job-scheduler state. Yet the conservative party live in the technology of the nineties, not what is cutting edge today.

Bristol Traffic are using a Petabyte-filesystem-with-MapReduce-job-scheduler; the big distributed GoogleFS filesystem, and today appear infringing on the civil liberties of this car KU51UEV

The driver is trying to hide his face from the camera, because he does not want to participate in our community database state, just for driving down the one way system on Nugent Hill and so endangering anyone trying to cycle up it.

How dare these cyclists infringe this driver's right to drive the wrong way down the one-way stretch at the end of Nugent Hill! Before New Labour came about, you could happily drive down it, if you were stopped by a police man a quick masonic handshake and you'd be on your way. If a cyclist was in your way, you'd sound your horn, they'd shake their fist at you and you would drive past them.

But now, now with these datacentres, with large indexing systems, these innocent car drivers can be photographed and indexed, their pictures on the web, along with their registration numbers. What a terrible thing New Labour has let loose on the world. Somebody should start a campaign against it. Maybe the Evening Post, now it's lost the Residents' Parking battle.

In London, the police are taking a stand; only central government is allowed to take photograph in public. Hence Croydon's Conservative MP got stopped and searched under the current Prevention of Terrorism laws for taking photos of the local bike lane. He is rightfully grateful for this experience, which shows that the police will stop anyone photographing bike lanes, regardless of race or age. [source: Crap Cycle Lanes of Croydon].

Who in Bristol will fight back against these subversives building a community datacentre-hosted surveillance infrastructure?