Students invent system to thwart police kettling

http://www.thestar.com/news/world/article/933428--students-invent-system-to-thwart-police-kettling?bn=1

by DennisP • 15 years ago

64 49 15 years ago

thestar.com

duncanj• 15 years ago

“What we’re doing in a king of reputation management,”

How do these sorts of typos occur in a newspaper? What input device are they using? OCR?

jarek2• 15 years ago

Two keys over on the keyboard, potentially just one if you hit F and the software or the human corrected wrongly. Should have been caught after being made, though.

Qz• 15 years ago

Doesn't explain is->in -- that's 4 keys over, and opposite hand...

Tycho2• 15 years ago

The Star enjoys the lowest reputation among widely distributed UK newspapers.

ojbyrne• 15 years ago

Which might be explained by the fact that this is the Toronto Star.

mwg6610• 15 years ago

This isn't "The Daily Star".

lenni• 15 years ago

Impressive, but they aren't really thwarting kettling, are they? They inform twitter users of where the police is gathering so protesters can leave/avoid that particular spot.

steveklabnik2• 15 years ago

... which thwarts kettling.

mwg6610• 15 years ago

Whilst I commend any attempt to avoid the police kettling we have seen in the UK at recent demonstrations, I have a number of concerns about Sukey which I made to them at launch - and never received a response. I will try and reiterate here:

* I urge nobody to trust a protest tool that is closed. Where is the source? Where is the documentation on its architecture? The official line is:

"It has always been our plan to make the code open source. Security is paramount and we feel it would benefit from being released to the public after each protest."

I'm sorry but retrospective release of source code is simply not good enough. Security software (which this is, essentially) needs to be out in the open from the start. Not after a protest has happened and all data collected. The wider community must be able to audit this software before it can be trusted. No exceptions.

* If the security depends on secrecy before a protest, is it dependant on a random seed? Can this seed be extracted from a binary (IPA, for example)?

* Sukey has one of the worst pages on "security" I have ever read (see http://sukey.org/security). To paraphrase:

"The team members involved on the security side are a mix of commercial information security experts and computer nerd under/post graduates who love nothing better than a complex algorithm."

That scares me. Complex algorithms are not normally conducive to secure applications. I want to hear about cryptographers - not computer nerds. I want to know what crypto implementations you are using.

Continuing:

"One of our key team members has technical commercial data security patents in his name and has provided information security consultancy to IBM, Lockheed Martin, and to the NHS."

Let's have a citation then please. Who is this expert and what (where?) are the granted patents?

"Your data is safe with Sukey."

Okay, prove it.

* How can we prove the application distributed on the App Store matches that which we (hopefully, in future) have the source for? Is there a mechanism for which we could compare checksums - if the provisioning certificates were also published? This needs to be considered. There is more to trust than merely publishing a source tree.

Let me finally restate my original point: I commend the effort (and I was once involved in a similar application). However, these are serious concerns that need to be addressed.

mayank• 15 years ago

Not to mention that their name (at least in the US) is phonetically synonymous with "doesn't work".

JshWright• 15 years ago

I would pronounce it "Sue-key" not "Suck-y"

Joakal• 15 years ago

Seems far better to offer the system to be managed by the protest organisers. This means the organisers can delegate 'scouts' and 'commanders', yet still allow anyone to submit data. The whole thing sounds shady by technical buzzwords and not showing the product.

Even then, I'd prefer to make Kettling illegal over implementing schemes that are reinforcing the unhealthy "Us vs Them" mentality. It seems that Sukey.org have no intent to make Kettling illegal which leads me to believe that they're exploiting the situation (A campaign section would mitigate this, eg ministers against kettling, plans to make it banned, etc).

TimHardy10• 15 years ago

Right now it's a service: there's no product to see, just a live updated map during the demonstration on Saturday.

We are not giving instructions to people as to the route to follow. That is the role of the stewards (what you call organisers, scouts, commanders). We merely provide people with information with which they can make their own decisions.

We aim to reduce tension between police and protesters by increasing transparency: our approach is the diametric opposite of encouraging us and them thinking. I would personally be very happy to see kettling banned and support the legal challenges being made to it at the moment.

However, if the threat of kettling is being used to prevent peaceful protest and to scare people away from exercising their democrat right to do so then I believe that a tool like Sukey is essential rather than waiting years and years for the law to be changed, not knowing if it ever will be.

TimHardy10• 15 years ago

I'll get one of the team who specialises in security to answer your questions. I've emailed everyone but it may not be until tomorrow if they are out or asleep right now.

You're right that it is paramount that we be open about security and I apologise for the rushed nature of our security pages. Rewriting all of the copy on the site is on our road map right now.

geekfactor• 15 years ago

I don't think I got this. Are police in the UK really on twitter and tweeting about their operations??

mwg6610• 15 years ago

Yes and they were monitoring twitter to find out of the direction of protests in order to "kettle".

TimHardy10• 15 years ago

They don't do #ff yet however ;)

s_jambo• 15 years ago

This may thwart kettling but I think it also thwarts protesting.

The whole idea of the kinds of protests which get kettled is to show that a large number of people care about an issue. If the software advises people to disperse if the police show up where is the protesting?

I'd have thought the best response to kettling would be distributed civil disobedience. It could easily be far more economically costly which would hopefully persuade the politicians and police that mass gatherings of people don't require impromptu imprisonment.

steveklabnik2• 15 years ago

The idea is that people temporarily disperse and regroup elsewhere.

Often, things like 'free speech zones' keep the protest away from the actual venue of the thing being protested. In Pittsburgh for the G20, for example, we weren't able to get within two miles of the actual summit happening. Yeah, people saw the news, which was a bunch of images of people breaking stuff, but they didn't see that people started breaking stuff because the police started throwing tear gas. And using the LRAD.

Unfortunately, the geography here really sucks for this kind of thing, but in a more gridlike city, the main body of people could have dispersed and filtered through police lines.

TimHardy10• 15 years ago

Kettling also discourages protest. We have had many emails from elderly individuals, people with disabilities, families with young children who have been scared to march. There is a massive demonstration being planned in the UK by the TUC on 26 March against the savage cuts being imposed in the UK and a whole raft of ideological reforms that are being pushed through by a minority government and which have nothing to do with the state of the nations finances.

We have just had an election in which MPs courted votes with a signed pledge to scrap tuition fees - then slashed funding to the universities by up to 100% in many subjects and tripled the fees. When a mockery is made of the ballot and the voting system by such duplicitous behaviour, then people have a moral and legal right to take to the streets in mass, peaceful demonstrations.

When aggressive police tactics are used to dissuade people from doing so you have a serious failure of the democratic process.

We see our role as one of increasing transparency and accountability and reducing tensions in the street and we hope that we can help people legally and peacefully demonstrate and by doing so put pressure on the government to change their policies.

That is something all people, I hope, would want to see in a healthy, democratic society.

sliverstorm• 15 years ago

It sounds like you're saying you don't believe a protest can be effective without a confrontation with the police.

gruseom• 15 years ago

The name, at least, is brilliant!

An English nursery rhyme inspired the name: "Polly puts the kettle on, Sukey takes it off again."

(As for people debating the pronounciation, there's obviously no debate, because nursery rhymes are oral texts. If it's a nursery rhyme then everyone who knows it knows how to pronounce it. But even apart from that, x-ukey isn't an ambiguous form in English. Say you disliked a movie so much that it made you want to vomit. Would you describe it as "pucky"?)

pavel_lishin• 15 years ago

What do you call a piece of meat with blood coming out of it?

Bloody.

What do you call a piece of fruit with a lot of juice in it?

Juicy.

What do you call a wound that's extruding pus?

Uh-oh.

motters• 15 years ago

You can call me a paranoid, tin foil hat wearing purveyor of bulldada if you like, but unless this is open source it could just be an efficient way for undercover police of the kind recently highlighted amongst environmental campaigners to obtain the IP addresses or mobile phone numbers of anyone involved in public protests.

mwg6610• 15 years ago

The point is, we do not know. See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2183182

TimHardy10• 15 years ago

You're right, there are many dangers here and we are taking them extremely seriously. As I said above, I apologise for any confusion and lack of clarity caused by the rush to have it ready in time. All this will be fixed!

nika• 15 years ago

I apologize for being off topic, but the last national convention I went to (many years ago), the cops rounded up the protestors, blocked off cross streets and then forced them into a line of cops with billy clubs who beat the hell out of them. Fortunately, I was elsewhere so I didn't get my "fair share of abuse" as the stones(?) put it. But a lot of friends did, and I decided that if this is what "democracy" was like in the USA, I was not interested in it. (Attempting to educate people about the political reality of their government is more effective than massing large number of people in one location to protest... just my choice.)

Is this what kettling is? The article was vague.

danohuiginn• 15 years ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kettling

It's become common in the UK over the past decade or so. I believe they borrowed the name, and the tactic, from the German police, who have been doing it much longer: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polizeikessel

The main objection is not so much about police violence (though that certainly happens), but that the kettle is used to discourage legitimate protests. you have a right to protest -- but if you do, the police will probably keep you pressed together on the street for 10 hours or so, in freezing temperatures, without access to food or water or toilets.

anamax• 15 years ago

> but the last national convention I went to (many years ago), the cops rounded up the protestors, blocked off cross streets and then forced them into a line of cops with billy clubs who beat the hell out of them.

FWIW, I try to ignore folks who engage in counter-protests. The reasonable alternative is to assume that their cause is wrong.

Counter-protests are basically an attempt to stop someone from doing something that they have some right to do. If you're trying to persuade me, a third party, that said someone is wrong, counter-protests are, at best, completely useless. In practice, they're often an exercise in thuggery, either to make it more expensive for said folks to do what they have a right to do (have a convention, for example) or to intimidate them from doing so.

I's sure that you felt that your cause was just and that those folks were wrong/evil/etc. The way to persuade me is to do your own events and make your own argument.

No, you don't have a right to address an audience that someone else has attracted. You only have a right to address folks who have decided that they want to be addressed by you.

In other words, pay for your microphone.

dexen• 15 years ago

When processing messages, why would the software put trust in information from data soure(s) that were credible up till now? It seems easy to be fooled by a well-informed source that keeps posting accurate information from beginning right until the `trap' (police kettle) springs -- and kelping the kettle by posting a false piece of information at the right time.

Kettle planers would have both means and incentives in doing just that.

TimHardy10• 15 years ago

Hi, I'm Tim from the Sukey team and editor of beyondclicktivism.com. I'd like to address each of your questions.

Please bear with me a moment - it's nearly 1am here and I've just got in so I'm going to take off my coat and grab a drink first then I'll come right back.

TimHardy10• 15 years ago

First up, yes, we are going to OS all the code and have been talking with Richard Stallman himself about which is the right licence (yes, really - you should have seen the response when he emailed us. I stopped dead in the street and shouted "Oh my god!" to the bemusement of passers by when the email popped up on my phone).

This project has come about at great speed, none of us has slept much in weeks, there are many, many things we need to do - we're not hiding the source because we're evil, we just haven't had a minute to put it up on git or whatever public svn system we decide to go with. Please be patient with us :)

More answers to follow as I read through the comments below.

BCM43• 15 years ago

we are going to OS* all the code*

Don't let RMS hear you say that!

mwg6610• 15 years ago

Do you not have it in source control already?

"git push origin" doesn't seem like it will take too long.

What's the difficulty with license? (other than the App Store's incompatibility with the GPL).

Gausie2• 15 years ago

Boy oh boy - have you guys missed the point!

There's a sensible discussion about how safe Sukey users are over here: http://visionon.tv/forum/-/message_boards/view_message/45043

Students invent system to thwart police kettling

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