 I'm going to talk about my view of security, which in a nutshell is about public safety. Imagine a big ring, that's public safety, inside it a smaller ring, and that's the national security part of public safety. I won't choose the Arab Spring so-called as my example although I could have done. I will talk instead about the events of August 2011 when we had some quite spectacular riots and looting in the United Kingdom. I'll use that as my illustration of the power of social media. I'll also use the Olympics, the very successful Olympic Games, to illustrate the power of social media used sensibly by the authorities to ensure the safety of the public. And then I'll talk a little bit about some of the ethical issues that arise from the collection and processing of social media. For those who want to explore that aspect with the think tank demos and colleagues there, I wrote a report, hashtag intelligence, which has got a much fuller explanation of the implications of social media than I can advance in 20 minutes. But that's basically what I plan to cover, so I hope that's something along those lines is what you were expecting. First then, some of the characteristics. This is a picture which was put up at a meeting I attended last year at the Royal Society in London, the world's premier scientific institution. The room was filled with eminent scientists, fellows of the Royal Society. Speaker put this picture up and said, how many in this room can explain why on a London bus the Ritz Cracker advertisement says the wheels on the bus go nom, nom, nom. Now looking at the age balance in this audience, I won't embarrass you by a show of hands, but amongst those eminent fellows of the Royal Society I think there are only two out of about 80 who put their hand up and said, I can explain that. And they were the probably the older fellows who had grandchildren who had explained it to them. And nom, nom is an internet phrase, norm is an internet word. A 15 year old would instinctively just know what it meant. And nom, nom is the sound of pleasure you get when you munch into something delicious or nibble the ear of your beloved or whatever people talk about on the internet. So point one is a discriminator between the generations and the younger generation. This is the world they know. We all know about these, these are the well known ones. But actually you can communicate through social media by hundreds of different sites which are not there labelled social media. They're there for other purposes, but you can use them to blog, you can use them to send messages and to interact with your interest groups. So there's a lot of this stuff out there. The basic characteristic, breaking down of time. So everything is immediate. Breaking down of distance so you don't have to be in the same place as someone to have an interaction. Breaking down of space and here a caution from me that not all social media is alike. So telephone was one to one, Facebook, you have a group and you're communicating within that group. It's a continuous presence feeling, you're with your friends, your group. But Twitter is a one to many model, it's more like a broadcast. If you look at the figures and I won't bore you, take up time now, the usage is going up exponentially. And the amount of time that people spend connected to their group is going up and up and up. And the studies of workplace behaviour show that when managers aren't looking, people spend an enormous amount of time just communicating. And you might ask, as a recent article did, all this quantum physics, all this advanced technology, simply to learn that your girlfriend has just bought a doughnut. It is a very strange phenomenon but people do it. The landscape, it's got a very high visual element and that's quite important when it comes to propaganda and the use of the internet for example for radicalisation purposes. It's obviously a very superficial media and it can be and has been used obviously as I describe it there, an antidote to bureaucracy because anyone can get on it, anyone can talk about any experience of any public service and it's quickly around the world and of course not everything said on social media is true. The impact on democracy, I just want to mention because it's part of the overall picture although I'll be coming on to the more security aspects in a moment. Everyone on social media is their own journalist. Members of parliament I've talked to in Westminster and London use it all the time because it's their way now of communicating with their constituents and what happens in the constituency is instantly known to the Member of Parliament at Westminster. It's not about the writing of letters from the constituency and the sending of a reply, it's instant and this is actually affecting the way democracy works. It does enable messages to get out and cascade so if you have a special interest group then you only need to send your message to some of them. They will know the other people who ought to know the message and it will cascade downwards. It's very, very efficient as a communication device. Much better than anything in a centrally planned government messaging system. Slacktivism as it's called, I don't know if any of you use 38 degrees but you can get a petition, you can get 100,000 signatures very quickly against almost anything. Just put up a bit of a case and the example all those people 187,000 were upset by our attempts to modernise the communications legislation and the interception legislation in parliament. So democracy becomes rather liquid and this can be difficult particularly for the police services we see in the riots because you get a surge, a liquid surge of views about in that case the police are not being tough enough and they ought to deal with these rioters. It may not be well thought through but that surge can overwhelm government. On the good side, lots and lots of commercial usage. This is where the leading edge is, meme tracking as they call it. So these ideas, these memes propagate themselves through the interest groups. Lots of information for government so you can make better policy. I'm sure that is true. Public safety messages and I'll give an example to do with the riots in a moment. Obviously you can communicate very much better as government. Get your side of the case out. What I and my colleagues at Damos called sock mint social media intelligence becomes possible. In other words you can gauge the mood of a crowd from what they are saying to each other. On the other hand, as we've seen, the group has never met before. They're in communication. They tweet at each other or send messages on Blackberry Messenger or whatever. A few hours later, they've all assembled in one particular place for a demonstration about which, through traditional methods, the police would have had no warning. So just a word about these rather calling riots. It all started when this young man was shot by the police. There was a demonstration, a march to the police station. The police were very slow in responding. For reasons I didn't go into, they didn't quite take it as seriously, the protest as seriously as they should. And rumour started going around and it started going around on social media that the young man had been deliberately shot and murdered. So protest spring up all over the place. Then it turns into looting. A lot of trouble is caused. Meet at Oxford Circus, the shots are going to get smashed up, get free stuff. With a date time on it. That's the kind of message that was flashing around. And all over the major urban centres, this is what these young people were doing. And the police were run ragged. They couldn't be everywhere. And they didn't have the capacity to monitor all this stuff at the time. Where they did, then it was possible to deploy officers in advance. And there's a good example there in Leicester, which was a Facebook, the use of Facebook to identify a place to meet up, do a bit of looting, police preempted, trouble averted. All depended on there being able to get the message. On the other hand, the public was trying to use social media to provide information to the police or to ask for advice. How can I get home? Where are the riots? And the volume of calls and of internet interactions and so on, it was overwhelming the system. Because the system hadn't really been designed for this kind of interaction. As that quote at the bottom said, tweets were appearing so fast, they fell off the screen before anyone had time to read them and do anything about them. So, nice example in Hackney. Social media were used to mobilise the public to sweep up after the riots. That was very successful. People who didn't know each other, strangers, came together in common or action. Closed-circuit television identified a lot of the people. Social media posted the photographs, again made it very easy for the public to say, we know who was responsible in the end of a 4,000 people got arrested. Almost everyone who was involved, you'll help to track them down. So social media used by the authorities to get information. So lessons from all of that. Preemptive information is the key. Because if you can be fast enough, you can mobilise, you can preempt. Our unfortunate Norwegian friends simply didn't respond fast enough to the very shooting with very tragic consequences. And without giving the authorities the capacity to monitor social media, the rioters, the troublemakers have the upper hand because they can move and communicate faster than the authorities using old-fashioned traditional methods. This lesson was learnt and I was involved to some extent with the Home Office in overseeing the plans for the Olympics. The Scotland Yard built a state of the art capability to monitor social media for the Olympics and bring all the information together. Every time there was a demonstration, there were dozens and dozens of them. Every dispute, Kashmir, Palestine, the Dow Chemical Company, the anti-capitalism protesters, something like an Olympics brings out the demonstrator in people. The police were able to keep, just listen to the people involved, talking to each other and gauge the sentiment, as it's called in the jargon, the sentiment of the crowd. And in most cases, they were able to leave them alone because they could tell in advance it was not going to be violent. Were they suspected that actually there might be trouble, they could then deploy. As a result, the Olympics passed off without any great trouble but also without militarisation, without the appearance of lots and lots of officers in riot gear just in case there was trouble. So very subtle way of doing it. A good example was the anniversary, the one-year anniversary, the shooting of that young man who sparked the riots off as to Duggan. On the anniversary, there was a planned anniversary march to Totland police station and the police this time were monitoring the sentiment of the crowd and at the start of the day it was potentially violent so they were preparing the guys in the vans with the riot shields by lunchtime. It was evident that actually this was going to be a respectful protest. And commemoration of the death of this man, but it was not going to be an excuse for a punch-up. So they didn't deploy the riot police and everything passed off peacefully. If they had deployed the riot police, my suspicion is they'd have had a riot because that's what tends to happen if you go in heavy handed. So that's fine, but public acceptance of using social media monitoring for intelligence purposes is obviously essential and it's a continuum. So at one end a Twitter feed is deliberately a broadcast. The reason you're tweeting is because you want people to read your tweet and you can't really, I think, take too much offence that somebody in government or in the authorities or in the police service also reading the tweet because it's a form of broadcast. At the other extreme during the riots in 2011, some of the more determined criminals were using Blackberry Messenger, their blackberries, where the messenger is protected by a PIN number and to get that PIN number and to get the message is, in law, intercepting a communication and therefore a warrant is needed and indeed the warrants are obtained for that kind of thing. But a sector of state's warrant is required in the United Kingdom if you want to intercept somebody's telephone. In the middle you've got a grey area and the problem is the law here in the United Kingdom is binary. It's either or but in fact the reality is there's a lot of stuff in the middle. So if for example you have a closed Facebook group of friends and they're communicating but only they set the privacy settings, only they can talk to each other then if you want to know what's going on you have to infiltrate yourself into the group or you can get a warrant and you can intercept in the sort of old fashioned way but it's rather like a member of the guard in the old days, no doubt in very plain clothes sitting at the back of a Sinn Fein meeting just to see who turns up. So you infiltrate yourself under a false identity onto somebody's group and you join the group. What authority is needed for that and what audit trail is available if it should all get out of hand. Is the public acceptance of that kind of activity by the police service? Is it overseen by anyone? What happens if you think that your privacy has been intruded upon? So there are a number of issues which at the hard end have all certainly in the United Kingdom been dealt with by interception of communications. But this social media is a slightly different world. So some years ago now I published in an academic article a set of guidelines, ethical guidelines based on and those of you trained by the Jesuits will recognise these based on good just war principles. I read a few months back that Alan Rushbridgeer who's the editor of the Guardian newspaper sort of liberal left newspaper in the United Kingdom, the Guardian newspaper, he blogged, he put on his blog that he'd read my book and he'd adopted these principles as the principles for investigative journalism by his newspaper. But I actually wrote them for the policing and intelligence community because first of all there must be a sufficient cause. So you shouldn't have this capability that Scotland Yard has unless there's a very good reason for having it to do with public safety and national security, for example, protection, the detection and prevention of serious crime. But not for, I would suggest, checking up on people's tax affairs, integrity. So this stuff doesn't get a bit distorted on the way for any politicisation reasons. Proportionality is obvious. Right authority, so if there is a question asked you can find out who did actually authorise this. Again a very good principle and the right authority, it has to be lawful. So somebody's got to make a balancing within the basket of human rights including privacy. Reasonable prospects of success avoiding collateral damage. So you, particularly with family members and so on who could get quite seriously hurt with some kinds of intrusive investigation. And then finally you shouldn't be doing any of this using these methods if you can get the information through straightforward means. So those are my ethical principles. And they're only, as it were, guidelines. But they gave a sort of checklist for whether or not this kind of monitoring and this kind of intelligence activity, you can say to the public, have confidence because this is being done according to principles that I think everyone would agree to. So that's the basic proposition which we put in our demos pamphlet. And as an individual you set your privacy settings. If you really want to be private you set your privacy settings on social media to be private. Therefore if the authorities want to overcome that they must have proper authority to do so. If you're not worried well you can open up to the world but then you must accept the consequences. I can't see any other way of doing it than putting the onus on the user and educating the users to understand where their privacy is going to be intruded on not just by the state but by commercial organisations who can take the information, process it and sell it. So that's my 20 minutes. I'm going to stop at that point.