Tech

Is there any area of public policy which Keir Starmer’s government has got right? ‘Where very little is working, AI is a bright spot,’ says a former adviser. ‘They’ve started well but they are now in danger of blowing it.’ When Labour came to power they consigned much of the past 14 years of Tory rule to the dustbin. But Starmer poured resources into Rishi Sunak’s AI Security Institute and published an AI Opportunities action plan in January last year, declaring (very un-Starmerishly) that he wanted to ‘mainline AI into the veins’ of the economy. Last week an audit found that 75 per cent of the proposals had already been delivered – a level of success rare in Whitehall.

In this week’s magazine I look at the threats posed by the so-called Online Safety Bill now making its way through the House of Commons. It gives sweeping censorship powers by creating a new category of speech that must be censored: 'legal but harmful'. The government will ask social media companies to do the censoring – and threaten them if they do not. The idea is for the UK to fine them up to 10 per cent of global revenue (ie: billions) if they publish 'harmful' content – but harmful is not really defined. So censorship potential is wide open. Nadine Dorries, the Culture Secretary, has suggested that the jokes of the comedian Jimmy Carr would be "harmful".

The world’s oldest democratic party has had a few problems with technology in recent years. Famously it was the 2018 Tory conference which saw a security breach where the official party app allowed anyone to access the private phone numbers of members of the Cabinet – or in the case of Boris Johnson change his profile picture to that of a pig. Once again, tech issues are plaguing Tory conference, with three of the world’s most popular apps – Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp – all being offline since 4:30 p.m. today. The last of these is the favoured platform for disloyal backbenchers and scheming hacks to conspire mischievously to make life harder for long-suffering Tory whips.

It is widely acknowledged that Britain has some of the world’s finest cyber capabilities. GCHQ is a global leader in those dark arts, and its offshoot, the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), is making that expertise available to businesses and others in need of help with their digital defences. All the more shocking, then, that our political leaders seem so utterly clueless. They have pledged to make Britain the ‘safest place in the world to be online’, but instead are running around like stars in a digital age ‘Carry On’ movie. Exhibit number one is Matt Hancock.