Here’s a reading (MP3) of a short story I wrote for the July, 2014 issue of Wired UK in the form of a news dispatch from the year 2024 — specifically, a parliamentary sketch from a raucous Prime Minister’s Question Time where a desperate issue of computer security rears its head:

Quick: what do all of these have in common: your gran’s cochlear implant, the Whatsapp stack, the Zipcar by your flat, the Co-Op’s 3D printing kiosk, a Boots dispensary, your Virgin thermostat, a set of Tata artificial legs, and cheap heads-up goggles that come free with a Mister Men game?

If you’re stumped, you’re not alone. But Prime Minister Lane Fox had no trouble drawing a line around them today during PMQs in a moment that blindsided the Lab-Con coalition leader Jon Cruddas, who’d asked about the Princess Sophia hacking affair. Seasoned Whitehall watchers might reasonably have expected the PM to be defensive, after a group of still-anonymous hackers captured video, audio and sensitive personal communications by hijacking the Princess’s home network. The fingerpointing from GCHQ and MI6 has been good for headlines, and no one would have been surprised to hear the PM give the security services a bollocking, in Westminster’s age-old tradition of blame-passing.

Nothing of the sort. Though the PM leaned heavily on her cane as she rose, she seemed to double in stature as she spoke, eyes glinting and her free hand thumping the Dispatch Box: “The Princess Sophia affair is the latest installment in a decades-old policy failure that weakened the security of computer users to the benefit of powerful corporations and our security services. This policy, the so-called ‘anti-circumvention’ rules, have no place in an information society.

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This morning, I gave the keynote speech the 2014 conference of The Literary Consultancy in London, about the future of publishing. They got the audio up with lightning speed (I’m in the auditorium, listening to the follow-on panel).

MP3 Link

Here’s a reading (MP3) of a recent Guardian column, ‘Cybersecurity’ begins with integrity, not surveillance, in which I suggest that the reason to oppose mass surveillance is independent of whether it “works” or not — the reason to oppose mass surveillance is that mass surveillance is an inherently immoral act:

The Washington Post journalist Barton Gellman and I presented an introductory session at SXSW before Edward Snowden’s appearance, and he made a thought-provoking comparison between surveillance and torture. Some of the opponents of torture argue against it on the ground that torture produces low-quality intelligence. If you torture someone long enough, you can probably get him to admit to anything, but that’s exactly why evidence from torture isn’t useful.

But Gellman pointed out that there are circumstances in which torture almost certainly would work. If you have a locked safe – or a locked phone – and you want to get the combination out of someone, all you need is some wire-cutters, a branding iron, some pliers, and a howling void where your conscience should be.

The “instrumental” argument against torture – that it doesn’t work – invites the conclusion that on those occasions where torture would work, there’s nothing wrong with using it. But the primary reason not to torture isn’t its efficacy or lack thereof: it’s that torture is barbaric. It is immoral. It is wrong. It rots societies from the inside out.

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