Tech and the UK Riots

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works dot com. Hello, everyone, welcome to tex Stuff. My name is Chris Poulette and I am an editor at how stuff works dot com sitting in a a cross from me as always a senior writer, Jonathan Strickland. You just call out my name and you know wherever I am, I'll come running a yes. So that's sort of pertinent. Yeah, it's pertinent to our discussion. But before we get into it,

let's start off with a little listener mail. This listener mail comes from Michael, who says, Hi, Chris and Jonathan, I've been listening to your podcast for about seven months and enjoy them immensely, and I figured I should write in to not only tell you this, but also suggest an idea for a podcast topic. I'm writing this email on the day after more riots in London and as I watched the Rolling News coverage I keep hearing people suggesting that social media was integral to the way the

looting and violence played out. They say Twitter is being used to plan and suggest places to go and loot, and that BlackBerry messengers being used to privately distribute this info to hundreds of people at a time, as is the way with the mainstream media. They're quick to jump to conclusions that only social media could have possibly caused these displays of thuggery and violence, and forget the fact that social media can be used for both harm and

for good. In recent months, the Arab Spring has similar commentary. Twitter has been blocked in certain countries and many rallies have been organized using only Twitter. What do you guys make of this? As social media been as integral as everyone is saying it has been, What about in the days before social media? What tech was used back then to organize protests and uprisings? Is all of this in urban myth? I hope you'll be able to explain this

to all of us peaceful tech stuff listeners. Thanks for all the fun, Michael. Michael, we are going to talk about technology and its role in the recent London and well really riots across the United Kingdom. UM. And by recent, I mean we are recording this in early August of twenty eleven, So as of the recording of this podcast, there are still disturbances in the UK that are related

to these riots and hopefully they will be resolved soon. UM. Yeah. UM. Of course we have brought up similar topics UM in the past. We talked about how Twitter was being used in Iran UM to help people communicate with one another. I think we also mentioned Egypt, Egypt, Yep and UM and some of the other countries to where people were using social media fit specifically Facebook and Twitter UM to

help them organize their efforts. UM. And I would I would say that, I mean it's it's certainly in those cases. I mean even the United States government sort of gotten involved, UM because supporting UM the efforts of people to use these services right right. As a matter of fact, Twitter was planning on going undergoing some maintenance and taking down the service UM following the Iranian elections and their unrest that followed the protests, and the Obama administration requested that

they hold off on that maintenance. Yes, yes, which Twitter agreed to do. UM. I would say that integral might be kind of a strong word. I might say that it that that using these technology ease um may have been integral to the way they were carried out. Yeah, it's the We have to separate the reasons for the unrest and the methodology they used to carry it out. We have to separate those two things, because the technology

did not cause these riots. And in fact, to to try and sum up what these riots were caused by in a sound bite or two is doing it a terrible disservice. The first of all, I cannot even pretend to understand the full social and political culture in the UK that kind of led up to this event. We we know, of course that the precipitating event was the the the death of a man at the hands of the police, the Metropolitan London Police UM, and that that

kind of was the spark that started everything. But the riots of course far out a clip that initial event, and it's clear, or at least it appears to be clear, that the motivations behind the people who are carrying out these riots have little if anything to do with that spark. I get the sense that some of the rioters may have had that event in mind um when they started, but that other people may just be rioting to loot, use it as an excuse to loot. And this happens

in a lot of cases when there is rioting. So I I don't think everyone's motivation for participating is the same. I think what you have is you have a population of people who feel uh, some sort of deep resentment and anger which even they may not even be necessarily

conscious of, or they may be unable to articulate that. Uh. They some of them have been articulating their their feelings towards the media, but in ways that seem maybe disingenuous or at least it's it's hard to connect the feelings with the actions, right because the actions we're talking about in London in the UK in general are more about very destructive behavior about looting, and the targets for this

behavior tend to be small businesses, family owned businesses. We're not talking about institutions, right because you would say that, well, this is a if this is truly a political statement, then you would think you would target institutions that represent whatever the opposing ideology is, right, Like if you were going to attack say Parliament to represent the government, or the police station because you didn't like the police right,

or or large banks because that represents the government as well. Then you you know that then you could argue, well, that's a very or at least a clearer political statement than attacking a family owned, community based business. In that case, what saying is that, well, we have rioters who are attacking businesses within their own community, so they are ultimately hurting their own community. This is not pushing forward any

sort of political ideology. This looks more like an example of someone who desires certain things in their life that they otherwise are unable to to obtain, and they're taking the opportunity of chaos to slip in and grab those things. So we're getting really philosophical here, but it's it's kind of like, um, one of the great discussions I've seen online kind of talked about how we have created this

this UH environment of consumerism. Right, consumerism is considered something that's a good thing, you know, beck when after the the nine eleven UH tragedy here in the United States, we had government officials saying the best thing we can do is go out there and business as usual, go out and buy stuff, I mean by things. Was definitely part of the strategy to continue to combat this terrorism, which is saying that consumerism is like a foundation of

what our society is right now. So we have promoted this idea that to make your life better, you should go out and buy stuff. And I'm not saying whether or not that's good or bad. I'm not passing judgment on that. Because I'm a consumer. I have lots of things that uh that if you were to step outside and be objective, you'd say, all right, that's a luxury, that's not a that's not something you have to have, right. I mean, I've got those things. I've got some of

them sitting in front of me. Um. But the promotion of consumerism to a a population of people who don't have the the income to spend on that consumerism can create a level of frustration and anger and greed. You've got these people who are being told over and over again, buying this will make you happy, you know, owning this

will make you a better person. That kind of mess and she gets put forth, and then they have no avenue where they can actually purchase said product, and then they have this opportunity to just take things and be part of this consumer uh environment. By passing the whole being you know, earning the money and purchasing things on your own, using your own money, that kind of thing. Now, I'm not saying that's the cause of the riots either.

That's just one factor and it's such a complex issue that you can't boil it down to because of this this happened. It's far more complex. But I'm just that was just my way of pointing out that this is a really complicated problem. You can't just say, uh, oh, it's technology's fault, and you can't even say it's just the government's fault. There's so many I mean, there are personal choices that are involved here too. You can't you

cannot absolve the rioters from personal responsibility either. But at the same time, you can't just say, oh, these are these are bad people, because if you just say they're bad people, you're just missing them and you're ultimately saying this is always going to happen because some people are just bad. So you resolved yourself to future riots, you know, there's no solution there because you've just made a label. Well, um, I'm sorry, my soapbox is getting a little unsteady livings

step down here. So, so as far as technologies role. Um. You know that the web services that people are using, you know, Twitter and Facebook and and specifically smartphone BlackBerry. Um in this case, uh have been blamed by some in the media. I think, Um, but again, these technologies, Yeah, but these I mean, I think it's important, as Michael points out, to note that these these services are basically neither good nor evil. They're just tools that can be

used for anything, right. Um. I mean in a lot of cases, they're used to you know, communicate with friends or or you know, used for consumers to find new deals. That happens a lot on Twitter, especially you know, hey, uh mentioned this tweet and get a thing, or to disseminate news or to disseminate news. I mean, they can be used for all kinds of things. Um. They can also be used to communicate hate speech. Um. It's not the again, it's not the tools fault. Yeah, no, it's

it's just it's just a medium of communication, right. So, and and in the uh um Iranian elections and the aftermath that followed, people were using uh these tools to organize themselves and stay a step ahead of the authorities who are trying to shut them down. So it was very much like a flash mob might be again another another something you can use these tools for that can be a lot of fun um. But they were using it basically to arrange to be in a certain place

at a certain time. They would meet, you know, they would all take their own path to get there. They would meet, they would do a demonstration, and then they would leave to organize again in another location. And by the time the authorities were able to catch up with them, or they thought they would catch up with them, they

were gone. The crowd. Crowd had dispersed, and that wasn't you know, I mean, And they were getting their point across by getting a lot of media attention and and showing solidarity that they were also being very careful not to become an easy target, right right, And in the in this case, you know, a lot of people in

the media said, this is a good thing. Look how advanced this is, and how this wouldn't have been when possible without it, And it really you would have had to have met with everyone and agreed to everything upfront. So no, technology is not essential to making this happen, but it does make it a whole lot easier. And that you again also raises the question of for for especially for countries where you have civil disobedience in response

to some sort of oppressive government. However, you wanted to find that the question comes comes up like, well, why why now, right? Why does this happen now as opposed to ten years ago? And part of that is that technology has made it easier for people to organize these kind of protests and to communicate with one another and to get the word out so that the world at large knows what's going on. It's not just a regional thing.

And so in a way you could say that technology has helped uh these sort of things happen, but again it's not it's just because technology is a tool that's been used, and it's not that the desire wasn't there ten years ago. It's just that maybe the opportunity was had a higher barrier to it, and so getting over that barrier was was what was preventing these sort of uh outbreaks of civil disobedience if you prefer, from happening. Yeah, these these tools are far more available to people now

than they were in the pasture. Um So now in the case with the UK riots, that to differentiate them between those and the political uh protests that we've seen other places of the world. The big problem here is that a lot of the people who are who have been using these or at least the publicized uses of social media and blackberries and things like that, have been for people in the riots to coordinate attacks on certain businesses.

So essentially, what happens is you've got a couple of people who are casing a place and they see that there's not a very strong police presence in a particular part of London, so they send out the word and in that word gets sent out wider and wider and wider, and then next thing you know, you've got a full,

full blown riot on your hands. People breaking into those businesses because they know based on those messages that there's not a real police presence, so there's not there's not really much of a chance of getting caught, so they take the advantage of the situation and they break in and they looked essentially and uh, then you've got some people who go even further than that, who are burning buildings, which I can't even get into the psychology of that.

I mean, it's so foreign to me that not only are you like, I don't understand the motivations behind it. I don't know if it's anger. I don't know if it's just something else that is really indefinable and I can't pretend to understand. So I'm not really going to go into it. But at any rate, UM, you've got the the use of this technology to organize these uh and organizes really kind of kind of too strong a word.

It's more like a call to arms saying, hey, guys, if you want free stuff, come here and break in and you can take it from this place. It's not really so much organizing as it is just uh snatching up an opportunity because the police are otherwise occupied and you've got a very mobile group out there. I mean, these are all for the most part, you know, if you see the news, they all talk about being youths. So they're young people, you know, in their teens and

twenties mostly. I've I've heard some as young as ten. So you've got the yeah, young people who are in a city that has a lot of UH ways of getting around, particularly using the underground system that the tube. UM. So there's been talking about possibly shutting down just the

the uh the cell networks around tube stations. So in other words, turning those towers off or shutting it down so that people can't communicate when they're near a tube station, because part of it is that, you know, they want to stay as mobile as possible so they can jump on the next opportunity. And if you you know, so, that means they're normally staying pretty close to the various tube stations in order to be able to get to whatever part of London is going to be the next target.

And if you shut that down then you really kind of uh, the theory is that you would you would silence them. The same sort of thing with some of those social networks and the services. There's been some discussion in British government about what to do about the the text messaging and the BlackBerry messaging and and using social networks like Twitter and Facebook. What do you do about that and how do you stop those from being tools

of destruction? And uh, there's a lot of debate on that. Yeah, I was I was gonna say, let's talk a little bit about the tools specifically, UM, Facebook and Twitter sort of no brainers, um, And they're easy for people to use there, they're available via smartphones and and all sorts of devices of course, UM, but they're not encrypted in any way. UM. So it's it's easy enough to post those messages, but it's also easy enough for people in

law enforcement to keep their eyes on it. UM. In fact, I have seen some reports that went so far as to suggest that they believe that people were posting messages deliberately intended to mislead the authorities to going to another location and then the real target was somewhere else that they wanted to hit. UM, that the writers wanted to attack UM. And I just I don't know whether that's accurate or not. That was that that is a a uh you know, I thought that they had had at

one point. And I just want to point out that Facebook has said that, you know, their policy is that they don't allow uh, hate speech or messages that condone violence or or our call to violence or anything like that on their network, so that if they, if anyone working for Facebook sees that, they will remove that post. So at least Facebook already is saying that, you know, uh, we don't need government intervention necessarily because we already do

that this ourselves. So though one might wonder how effective that can be, I mean, how this that that raises another question that we'll get to in a minute about how viable would a solution be to to limit or shut down these social networking services. But that's we'll have to get into that discussion before, I mean, after we talk about all the different specific services, the most interesting

one to me as the BlackBerry messenger. UM. Apparently, according to Offcom, Blackberries are more common phones among teens in the United Kingdom between the ages of thirteen and eighteen. It's more about thirty seven percent of kids have a BlackBerry. Now. I think it's funny because again, on many occasions, you and I have talked about how uh BlackBerry has been sort of left behind by other handset manufacturers and and

operating system manufacturers, most specifically Android and Apple's iOS. But um, you know, even the Windows phone is more of a consumer device, so I don't think of the BlackBerry as being a consumer device. But apparently it is especially popular among this age group in the United Kingdom. And the reason this is interesting is simply because the BlackBerry, since it is intended originally to be uh an enterprise level

basically a corporate messaging service. Um it's encrypted, so uh, you know, and you may not see that with the text messaging UM on your local phone or smartphone. So those messages are going over an encrypted private network Blackberries network, and therefore the police cannot see what these people who are using those devices are are saying. It could be talking about, you know, anything, but they could also be used for uh coordination of activities by people who are

involved with the riots. So um, the the British government is particularly concerned about that. I have noticed, um, because they cannot see what's going on now. Apparently there are laws that say, um, you know they have said we are in London is a very camera heavy city. Yeah. Um, they're saying that, you know, we we can identify you, and we can see that you are involved with this

and committing these acts. We will bring you to justice. Um. Apparently there are some laws that say that, um, they can't just subpoena all these messaging records without knowing in fact that it is that person up front, and then getting the phone records from that person to confirm whether or not he or she was involved. Seems kind of interesting. I know it's more complicated than that, but then you're

you're you're you're arguing like that. The argument seems to be, you can't get the evidence that they did committed something unless you can prove that they committed something already, which is a catch twenty two, right, Um, unless you're just saying that you wanted more corroborating evidence and you already had plenty of evidence to start with, or the alternative as you can say, Well, how how strict is that if you get an accusation, is that enough for it

to be to to get a request for the information? Because, uh, the way it's word it, it it sounds like you have to have more than just an accusation, because otherwise otherwise there's no there's no teeth to that at all, right right, um.

And and apparently Research in Motion, which is the Canadian company that UH is behind the BlackBerry I said it will cooperate with authorities, which UH caused a group of hackers called Team Poison to UH take over the BlackBerry blog basically break in, and they posted a message saying that um if rim as Research in Motion is known popularly UH cooperates with the police, then they will, you know,

stage an attack against. Team Poison also has a history with other anti sec hacker groups like Anonymous and lull sec Uh. They're in a way, they're almost like rivals to lull sec Um. That's kind of that's probably putting it a little too black and white. It's just like any of these groups. It's kind of hazy because I mean,

the very each of the groups themselves are pretty crazy. Um. And to add on to this, the the idea that the government is looking into the possibility of of limiting or shutting down these services has gathered a lot of criticism early early on, and there are many reasons why the criticisms have been directed at this this potential route of action, which I should add, you know, the government never said that it was going to do this, is that it was looking at it, considering it, which means

that they could have come to the same conclusions that everyone else has, or that a lot of the vocal opponents have come to. One of those is just that, you know, using this as a blanket approach means that you are are eliminating the social rights of innocent people.

You know, if you were to just shut down these services and the all all across the board, then innocent people who have nothing to do with the riots would also have that avenue of communication taken away from them, and so that begins to raise a question of are you violating the civil rights of innocent people? Uh? If you are trying to identify people and block them based upon the identity, that raises the question of how how viable is this operation? Because one, you have to identify everyone,

so that's a huge job. Two you have to block them, and then three you have to deal with the fact that there are ways around bands and being blocked their web proxies. They're changing your your IP address on your device, there using other services that weren't covered under the band in the first place. There's lots of different ways around it,

and it's like playing whack a mole. You know, on the highest setting, you know, you knocked down one avenue of communication, in five more sprung up, So it may not even be viable unless again, unless you did an all or nothing kind of approach. But in that case, you're blanketing everyone. And then how do you respond to

how do you make an emergency phone call? If they've shut down the cell phone system like it means that you've cut down the communication of everybody, so it may just not even be possible much less you can all argue the social reasons, but just the technological UH implementation is so complex that it may be off the board. Yeah, there are just too many people, including the authorities, who are relying on these networks UM for that to be feasible. But I do want to before we get too far

into it. These and this is illustrative of h of Michael's point to UM there are people who are using the exact same services to organize cleanup efforts or even to alert that there's trouble brewing. So in some cases it's it's some cases you have people who are using these same services saying, we need, you know, to bring

attention to this because there's trouble coming this way. And then there's others who are saying, well, the troubles happened, let's organize a clean up effort to deal with the damages. And it's where you're getting that whole spirit of of London and Spirit of UK kind of thing coming out, where it's all these these community members banding together to rebuild the communities after the destructive riots, and and some

of these riots have been yes, unthinkably destructive. I mean I look at the pictures and I'm thinking this looks like if you had shown this picture to me in black and white, I would have said, oh, it's a photo of London after the Blitz. I mean, that's how bad some of these communities have been hit. Yeah, and I've seen it compared UM just on some of the people that I followed on social networks. You know, people have said that it's sort of in cleaning it up.

It's sort of like the spirit of the Blitz, like the you know, pushing back and and and helping clean up UM. One one article that I had read on the BBC news site UM mentioned Dan Thompson, who's an artist and U. He started a Twitter account called at riot clean Up UM, and Riot clean Up had when I first checked it out, more than eighty six thousand followers are down as of this recording to a little under about eighty five UM, which suggests to me that

things may be quieting down a little bit. UM. But yeah, basically, and it had spawned other groups to to start their own riot clean ups and in other cities, not just in London, but people were talking about specific areas where UH people needed help UM cleaning up some of the mess and the rubble from UH you know, buildings that had been broken into and in some cases destroyed. UM. And I think that generally what I had read was that efforts like this had made people feel like, uh,

you know, the people a lot of it. Again, people that I've read um about on social media were very very disturbed and upset. Um, some going so far as to say that they were not very proud of their country because their uh, their countrymen were doing these things, um,

which is a very sad statement. UM. But I think these kinds of things like the riot clean up account are doing a lot to help people feel like they can rally and and feel better about themselves and about the areas they live in and take care of some

of the things that were damaged. Um. And hopefully to to not give the sense to people who don't use Twitter or Facebook or these higher technology uh services that no, they're not all you know, they can be used for good things, you know, because yeah, I mean, something like this gets pressed and people who don't use them don't understand that, you know, the technology is not necessarily to

blame but can be used to enable those people. If we took the technology out of this story entirely, the thing They're probably still would have been riots, they just may not have been as intense and as numerous as they have been over the last few days. Um, it certainly enabled people to be more agile in their mood. Rights, right, yeah, the technology aided, but it did not cause this, and

the and to suggest otherwise as being pretty naive and shortsighted. Um. The the takeaway I get is that what you need to do is look at the underlying problems that allowed this situation to even start, and it may very well be that there is no solution to those underlying problems. It might well be that the problems that exist are so so ingrained in our society that there's no real way to solve them, which is is unfortunate. It's also possibly true, but without actually looking at it, we can't

really come to that conclusion. And to just jump on the technology aspect of this story is to ignore the deeper causes that are fueling the riots in the first place. Right. So, yeah, the technology part is a problem. I mean, you want the government has to do something right, and in fact, by the time when we're recording this podcast, they're already been some pretty significant strides and the riots do seem to be uh to be calming down now, it's seem

to be under control. But the government had was in a tough position because it had to respond. It had all these innocent people who are being targeted and through no fault of their own, and they had very few uh resources at their disposal to be able to respond to the this issue. And one of the you know, they're looking for a quick and and relatively easy solution

to a very complex problem. And I'm not saying that the government was just focusing on technology or just focusing on a quick solution, but that was one of the things they had. The government had to consider. So, you know, when you're looking at something as widespread as that and so apparently out of control, and and it's due to very complex factors that are have been boiling up for generations,

there's no real easy solution in the first place. So I think I think one the government said that they were looking at that, I think if they had thought about it a little bit longer or talked with some experts, they would have realized very quickly that that that shutting this down is not really a viable choice. Um And to the media jumping on the announcement. I think that made it more than what it was as far as that the technology aspect and what to do about it

is concerned. It drew a lot of attention to it and probably made more of a mountain out of it than it should have been. But at the same time, I mean, it was very obvious that the technology was playing a role. I mean, there's no way of getting around it. It's just that again, Uh, if the technology hadn't been there, I think we would have still seen a disturbance, it just wouldn't have been as coordinated. So you can't you shutting down the means of communication wouldn't

necessarily solve any problems. So thank you so much Michael for for sending that question in. And I mean, I think this is a good companion piece to our other one about using technology in various forms of protests UM, because this is kind of like the the opposite right, using them in order to cause uh damage and maybe for personal gain, as opposed to trying to actually make

social and political changes. Because I get the feeling that these riots really didn't have a goal outside of mayhem and looting, UM, at least not one that was clear to the average observer. I know that I'm still struggling to understand it, and I probably will for quite some time. Uh so, great question. If you guys have any suggestions for future tech Stuff topics, we highly recommend you get in touch with us and let us know. You can find us on Twitter and Facebook, assuming you're going but

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