28/07/2011 Newsnight Scotland

there is plenty of wrath. Tonight on Newsnight Scotland: More

revelations in London about News International, an arrest in

Shetland in connection with so- called cyberhacking and continuing

controversy over WikiLeaks. Is our whole legal and moral system for

dealing with information in crisis? And is technology making new laws

to deal with the issue redundant before they're even written?

Also tonight, is it really a Royal wedding just because a Royal is

getting married? We look at how a damp Edinburgh is limbering up for

another joyous day out. Good evening. Well, while the media

goes into another frenzy about the News International scandal, the

internet never sleeps. There, a campaign is under way to encourage

people to shun PayPal, an online payments system which stopped

processing payments to WikiLeaks. And if you believe messages tonight

on Twitter, then a group of hackers will tomorrow publish a slew of

documents from the American Department of Homeland Security.

News International, WikiLeaks, cyberhacking. Could they by any

chance be related? Well, yes. Tomorrow's front pages will again

be dominated by the News International scandal following the

allegations that Sara Payne's phone was hacked. This morning's front

pages were dominated by another hacking story, the arrest of an 18-

year-old in Shetland as part of an investigation into the cyber

hacking group's Anonymous. He's being held in London as part of an

ongoing investigation into hacking and so-called distributed denial of

service attacks with a websites of international companies and

intelligence agencies are flooded to make them crash. Among the most

recent alleged victims are the Italian Government agency

responsible for protecting vital computers in June the CIA's public

website was taken down for a period. Among other alleged targets have

been the US Senate, bang Senate Bank of America and Sony. They've

also allegedly blocked access to the website of visa and hijacked

sites belonging to Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation. In a statement

yesterday people claiming to be So, the News International scandal

and international investigation into cyber hacking, and don't

forget the WikiLeaks affair, which has been obsessing the chattering

classes for ages, and for that matter the MPs expenses scandal,

what do they all have in common? Well, they all raise the question

of whether the ability of technology to give us access to

secret information has outstripped our laws and moral rules about

privacy. Today, Lord Justice Leveson, asked by the Prime

Minister to look at journeyistic practices, raised the issue.

At some stage, there needs to be a discussion of what amounts to the

public good, to what extent the public interest should be taken

into account, and by whom. So, who defines what is in the

public interest? Who controls information that by definition is

increasingly accessible, even the most sensitive types of

information? And when can using questionable methods to access

information be justified in the public interest?

I'm joined now from Edinburgh by computer security expert Professor

Bill Buchanan of Napier University. Here in Glasgow, Strathclyde

sociologist Professor David Miller, and joining us live from San

Francisco by the magic of the internet is Hanni Fakhoury, who's

staff lawyer with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the EFF. Do

you think that the issues we have seen arising with these hacking

issues recently, the campaigns on Paypal etc, are we just seeing a

bunch of kids being criminals or is this some new form of civil action?

I think we're seeing a new form of civil action to a certain extent.

The ability of the internet to make large amounts of data accessible to

many people all at once provides really an opportunity for people

who do have a particular social agenda or cause that they want to

publicise or promote t make it easier for them to get that

information out there. And often times governments are going to try

and label what they're doing criminal, but there is certainly a

strong argument to be made that what they're doing is really

pursuing the public interest. So we can - it's difficult because often

times we may not agree with their means, but at least for many of

these individuals they see it as their ends are justified. Right,

but where do you draw the line? For example, there's a spectrum, if we

take Paypal, there were attempts to basically by these people to say to

people who have accounts don't have them, because we don't like what

they're doing, that sounds like a perfectly legitimate form of

protest. Then there were attempts to flood the Paypal site to bring

it down, I suppose you could say that's like having a demonstration

in the city centre if it's for a period of time. Should there be an

attempt to publish the details of Paypal account holders because

someone's hacked in? That does seem to be something very different,

doesn't it? It does. And I don't want to say that it's OK to

disclose other people's sensitive private information, I am certainly

not suggesting that. But if the issue is do these individuals see

themselves as some sort of social Crusaders, then I would say yes,

they do see themselves that way. I think a lot of people forget

sometimes that in many of the recent - in recent history civil

rights movements, if you want to call it that, or massive protest

movements, they have been criminal behaviour has been the forefront of

that, so I mean we can sit and label something a crime and not a

crime and it may be crime by the legal definition of what is and is

not a crime, but do these people see themselves as doing something

for the greater good and don't see themselves as just vandals and

criminals? Then yes, I think they do see themselves that way. How we

as a society views them is a more difficult question and there are

people who obviously are going to agree with their methods because

they'll believe that the ends justify the means. What links these

issues together, links it with News International in a way, things like

Milly Dowler, everyone was horrified, but there are situations

where a newspaper might say well, we have done things that actually

are technically illegal but we have a public defence, we have exposed

an arms dealer, for example, breaking UN sanctions and we have a

right and actually it's enshrined in law a lot of issues, we have a

public defence. Do the kind of people that Hanni is talking about

have a moral, never mind a legal right to say, well, we're just - we

are the new version of newspapers? We are the new version of

investigative journalism, yes, they are in some respects, they are

replacing some forms of investigatesive journalism. That's

a good argument but there is also a clearly an argument in relation to

News International, that there are some techniques of journalism which

are unacceptable and which horrify... It's drawing boundaries

now, I mean ethically, never mind legally, they difficult, isn't it?

It is and that's partly to do with the technology which we have been

hearing about and partly to do with the concentrated assault there's

been on the concept of the public interest. Many of the most famous

prize winning economists regard the concept of public interest as a

meaningful concept and think that people who defend the public

interest are maniacs and extremists and and must be kpwalted --

combated. That's a key issue as well, which meshs in with the

question of technology. Is there a danger, it's this balance with

protecting privacy and criminalising people. An example,

it took me about five seconds this evening to find a download page for

something called a low orbit ion collider, which is apparently

software you can use to engineer mass floodings of websites to close

them down. Now I didn't download it but people in the United States

have been visited and indeed arrested by the FBI for having

We are now moving from an industrial age into this new area,

which is an information age and we are learning about how we protect

ourselves and businesses from malicious purposes, because there

are a great deal of motivations out there and political gain, there's

financial gain, so I think businesses need to understand how

to protect themselves, so there has been a little bit of a malaise

inside businesses and organisations to say that it doesn't really

matter if we are being attacked or we lose data or something has been

compromised. There needs to be a greater investment. Is it the case

that, as I understand it, a lot of the attacks that these groups like

Anonymous have done, the techniques they are using are not that

sophisticated. It's just that the people they are attacking are so

laxy they don't have defences against it? That is extremely true.

If you ask a good security professional they'll say the

easiest person to defend against is the standard kidy who is using

standard tools that are widely available on the internet, because

other professionals know how to defend. We have found the biggest

risk is serious and organised crime groups, typically outside the UK,

that have sophisticated methods. They have software programmers and

they can actually pay for things to be developed for them. Once you

change something then it makes it more difficult to protect against.

Hanni Fakhoury, I'm interested to attitudes in the EFF as to whether

you would defend some of the hacking activities. Again, from

having a legitimate campaign, yes, but for example, bill Bucahanan was

mentioning criminals, so if you hack into PayPal and publish lists

of names, those names and passwords can be used by criminals, even if

the people who are hacking are around kisses or just trying to

have a laugh? Well, we at EFF have always tried to approach every

situation in its own unique set of facts, so we take every - if people

approach us about representing them then we take a case-by-case

individual approach, but I would say that we - with respect to

publishing lists and people's person and private information,

obviously we don't support or encourage people to do that. To the

extent that the law criminalises people who engage in that type of

activity, that's not a thing that we really - we don't take too much

issue with that. We do, however, take issue with the way the law at

least in the United States is often times interpreted. It's meant to

cover that criminal behaviour, but often it gets used in a way to

criminalise much broader categories that may not be so criminal. Hanni

Fakhoury, I'm sorry to interrupt, but we are going to have to leave

it. Gentlemen, thank you all very much indeed.

Now, you can imagine Derek Bateman's reaction when we asked

him for a film on this weekend's Royal Wedding in Edinburgh between

Zara Philips and Mike Tindall. He protested that it wasn't a Royal

Wedding and the Palace didn't want people turning up on the Royal Mile,

but we insisted he head off to Edinburgh in the rain and here's

the result. All the world loves a Royal Wedding. Only this won't be

one. It is officially a private family affair. It just happens to

be be closing parts of Edinburgh and requires police and private

security and the monarch will be there. Who else has the timetable

for their horse trials adjusted to allow guests to get into tails on

time? We know this is a very private affair, because the

minister of the Kirk won't do interviews. Actually, neither will

the City Council. They've been doing an all-round tidy up ahead of

the big event, which personal I think is a very good idea, because

the last time I walked around the cemetery here there was clear

evidence that local people had been using it as an overnight stop. The

inside word - OK, the Daily Mail - says Zara was keen to sell the

event to Hello but was scuppered by her mum. Yes, there's a rumour

around and I say they should have gone for it. That �500,000 that is

rumoured to have been paid for the pictures could also have paid

�500,000 for all the police and kuert for the event. -- and

security for the event. Is there a danger that the happy couple will

be playing second fiddle to the monarch and to the heir and his new

wife? Yes, no doubt. Anyone who is making an attempt to get a look

will be looking to see Kate and William rather than Zara and Mike,

but you never know, there might be a few Zara watchers around. Why is

the wedding in Edinburgh at all? When the Princess Anne branch of

the family there is a tradition of getting married if Scotland. When

she wanted to marry her second husband, there was worry about

whether she could do this in the Church of England because she had

been divorced and in typical Princess Anne fashion, she kout out

the nonsense by getting -- cut out the nonsense by getting married

near malmoral. There's the tradition and the famous thing

about Princess Anne supporting Scotland at rugby and all that.

They see themselves as the most Scottish branch of the family.

this a family, private affair? Absolutely not. You may say it's

not a Royal Wedding, but it is a wedding and it's Royal. I know what

they mean, it's not a great state occasion, so it will be a simple

and smaller do, which can only be to the good. Shouldn't Scots

welcome these events? Maybe we would welcome them if we were

invited along and allowed to sort of enjoy them more than it seems we

are being allowed to. We should remember the last time there was a

Royal wedling -- wedding Britain celebrated and Glasgow went on the

rampage. It doesn't help that the Edinburgh police introduced a dose

of pessimism by saying there will be minimal opportunity to see the

couple. So tight is space on the Royal Mile. Sadly, you won't see

them either. There will be no camera inside and only one outside

to see them arrive and depart. What of the dress? We are more used to

seeing Zara in a fleece and there is a manly ring to her sponsors.

Chunky Rolex watches, Land Rover 4x4s and water-proof clothing.

Perhaps she will link all three to deal with the Edinburgh weather.

There is an historical symmetry in the choice of the Kirk. The

construction was started under James VII but finished under