Interview/profile: Caroline McAteer, celebrity PR (Evening Standard)

By David Rowan

MOVE over Gareth, Will and Darius - Simon Fuller, the man behind Pop Idol and the Spice Girls, has decided that the future lies in turning footballers into global brands. After signing the Beckhams to his 19 Entertainment company last week, Fuller is quietly creating a new consultancy designed to keep dozens more sports stars on the world's front pages.

In a central London office, not far from the British Museum, the Beckhams' fearsome publicist, Caroline McAteer, is secretly working with entertainment PR Julian Henry to finalise plans for this new spin powerhouse before a formal announcement next week. With Beckham and Arsenal's Freddie Ljungberg already on board, and Michael Owen potentially next, Fuller hopes to corner the market in manufacturing the next generation of footballing celebrities.

He has already announced plans to turn the Beckhams into an "international brand", taking their name "across music, fashion and TV", and will be managing Victoria's music career as well as the couple's image. But the key element in Fuller's strategy - designed to boost a fortune estimated by the Sunday Times Rich List at £90 million - has been to poach McAteer from her former company, the Outside Organisation, to show new clients just how far personal PR could get them.

As the Beckhams' most trusted confidante, and the custodian of their image, McAteer has become a powerful if notorious figure in media circles. Journalists who have to deal with her describe her as hardnosed, bullying, ruthless and manipulative. "You know where you stand with her," says one who had to negotiate with her. "If she tells you one thing, you can believe the opposite." The website Popbitch knows her as "the devil woman publicist", and Bryan Appleyard in The Sunday Times recently accused her of personifying "the virus of aggressive PR", seeing her job as "to abuse, humiliate and threaten us".

When Rob Shepherd of the Daily Express questioned Victoria's singing abilities, McAteer telephoned to berate him before David sought to humiliate him at a press conference. After Dominik Diamond wrote a Daily Star piece suggesting that Brooklyn was looking miserable, she had David call the columnist in person to attack his judgment.

McAteer does not give on the record interviews, seeing her duty as to promote her clients. She did, though, give the Standard a rare "official" quote confirming the new football-based outfit. "Simon, Julian and I are developing a new set-up which will involve David and Freddie Ljungberg and will be built around a sports PR consultancy," she said. "I'm really excited about it. We've spent the past few weeks getting everything set up and hope it will all be organised in the next week or so."

In person, McAteer, 30, is slight, moderately short and attractive with shoulder-length blonde frizzy hair - hardly giving the appearance of the tyrant her reputation would lead you to expect. Yet her inscrutable straight face, and her habit of choosing her words deliberately and repeatedly declaring wide areas of conversation as out of bounds, hint at why she is known as a "control freak". (She won't say if she's single or in a relationship and will concede only that she lives in "north London". She is recently back from holiday. When the Standard asked where she'd been she said: "an island", which, when pressed, she narrowed down only to "a Mediterranean island".)

She sees herself as "straight" rather than as a bully: she receives, she says, 20 calls a day from newspapers with "ridiculous" stories about the Beckhams, and though she puts most of the plausible claims to them directly, she sees her role as being a protector, especially of the children. But others note that if she takes against somebody, their access will be ruthlessly cut off. After Richard Desmond published an allegedly unauthorised book as part of the Beckhams-OK! wedding deal, the magazine-found that interviews with the couple were no longer available.

She grew up near Belfast and left at 18 to study international economics and French in Manchester. After graduating, she moved to London and found work experience at an independent music label, Acid Jazz. "She impressed me so I gave her a job," Eddie Piller, the label's co-founder recalled. "She was very focused and always knew where she wanted to get to."

In 1997, after Alan Edwards took over managing the Spice Girls, he took McAteer on at his firm, The Outside Organisation, where she learned to handle - some say control - the press. Her clients, beyond the Spice Girls, included George Michael and Stephen Gately. After The Sun alerted her that it had been offered a story about Gately being gay and naming his boyfriend, she spent a week discussing his options with him.

Even though no boy-band star had yet come out as gay, Gately decided to tell his fans himself. The Sun journalist concerned, Andy Coulson, remains a McAteer favourite in his new role editing at the News of the World. Other media contacts whom she sees socially include Victoria Newton of The Sun, the Mirror's Jessica Callan and Dylan Jones of GQ.

THE Outside Organisation is known to be furious at the loss, not only of McAteer, but also some of its key clients. This being the PR industry, all Alan Edwards will say on the record is that he "wishes her all the best", and that Outside "continues to grow". The company does, however, still claim to represent David for PR purposes, and its website still lists him alongside Robbie Williams and David Bowie.

McAteer insists that Beckham has no further links with Outside. There is also some confusion over where Beckham's own management, Tony Stephens at SFX Sports, fits in: although McAteer insists that they discuss his media image jointly, journalists who have found themselves briefed simultaneously by both sides suggest that there can be tension between the camps.

Will the new sports consultancy work? Mark Borkowski, whose own celebrity clients include Eddie Izzard and Graham Norton, says McAteer will find it more difficult than she thinks. "Plenty of PRs have spotted the rise and rise of football - Matthew Freud has aspirations in that direction, as do I," he said. "The problem is, footballers tend only to trust people from inside the game. And while most celebs don't expect lots of cash for giving an interview, as they're out to sell something, footballers realise that their appearances on magazine pages are worth money."

Borkowski does not deny that McAteer has "some very good connections" in the media. "But she's had some class-A products to represent, and that demands some very different skills from building up someone out of nowhere."

(Evening Standard, July 30 2003)

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The Times: Tech column - Movie downloads/e-voting

By David Rowan

Hollywood's relationship with the internet is rather like Jeffrey Archer's approach to investigative journalists: you might long affect to ignore an uncomfortable reality, you might even marshal armies of lawyers to deny it, but sooner or later that reality will nip you in the butt. So it is remarkable that, even as the Recording Industry Association of America serves bully-boy writs on the grandparents of small-time file-swappers, Disney, that most litigious of studios, is making its peace with the web and offering its film catalogue for on-demand downloads.

Disney's decision last week to join the Movielink consortium offering new and classic film downloads is a belated admission that technological progress will not go away, no matter how many lawyers you throw at it. Movielink, launched last November, has six of the top seven studios signed up, missing only Twentieth Century Fox (part of News Corporation, parent company of The Times), which has a distribution deal with the rival CinemaNow. Disney films such as Chicago and Monsters, Inc. will now join Movielink's 400 or so titles available for downloading at between £1.85 and £3.10 each. Yet though film fans now have an increasingly useful legal alternative to KaZaA and Morpheus, it will be a while before they can forget that walk to the video shop.

As more Brits move to broadband connections, it will make sense for studios to offer downloads of films for watching on computer screens. Security measures have reassured the studios that their works will be protected: Movielink customers can store a downloaded film on their PC for 30 days and, 24 hours after it is first played, it is deleted automatically. Even on a broadband connection it takes a few hours to download a title, but Movielink believes that customers will tolerate that in the knowledge that they will be getting the genuine item.

Perhaps. There are other drawbacks, too. You need hundreds of megabytes of spare disk space to store your movie, you can't use a Mac and if you try to enlarge the image (using a media player), picture quality suffers. You cannot even load the website if you live outside the US. And the lawyers haven't disappeared: Intertainer, a rival site, has filed an action against the studios alleging restrictive practices, and Movielink is being sued by USA Video over the latter's 1992 patent for online movie delivery. Some day this might all make a racy movie plot-but for now, hold the popcorn.

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MORE EVIDENCE emerges that electronic voting, seen by the Government as the solution to electoral apathy, is as dangerously insecure as this column has long suggested. A research team at Johns Hopkins and Rice universities, in America, has just completed an analysis of e-voting machines from Diebold Election Systems, 33,000 of which have been installed in the US. The team, which found the system's source code on a Diebold website, discovered "significant security flaws" that allow voters to cast multiple ballots with no way of tracing them, make it easy for administrators to alter the election's terms, and rely on smartcards that can be copied by a £65 card-programmer. Adam Stubblefield, of Rice University, comments: "Practically anyone, from a teenager up, could produce these smartcards that could allow someone to vote as many times as they like."

Diebold says that its system is tested thoroughly and that the study focused on outdated software. But the report's conclusion - that "electronic voting places our very democracy at risk" - should make the British Government extremely cautious in its response to the Electoral Commission's report on recent UK pilots, out on Thursday.

(The Times, July 29 2003)

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The Times: Op-ed - Beware, your pullover may be watching you

Comment: The privacy risks of RFID chips. By David Rowan

When British Airways hit a spot of turbulence last week over an unremarkable plan to record staff attendance with swipe cards, it was perhaps inevitable that union activists would denounce the airline for introducing a "Big Brother technology". I have news for them. If BA were really serious about breaching workers' privacy, there are some far more powerful products on the market that it would be using to track staff electronically. For while the rest of us have been busy in recent years learning to text-message and filter out junk e-mails, the IT industry has quietly been developing a fearsome array of technologies designed to learn more about you than you could ever guess.

BA could, for instance, invest in Computer Associates' 20/20 workplace monitoring system, launched last week as a way to give employers, you've guessed it, "20/20 vision" of their workers' behaviour. From their physical movements to their computer use and phone calls, the software maps out "a three-dimensional view" of an individual's entire working day -flagging up "suspicious" activity such as extended toilet breaks, and logging their every keystroke on a database.

Or if that all sounds too complicated for a reluctantly modernising airline to grasp, it could instead track staff simply by scanning their iris patterns or logging the radio signals emanating from smart-cards in their pockets. The beauty of progress is that, as all that data is automatically scooped up, the worker need remain none the wiser.

Information, more than ever before, represents power to those who have access to it. In the 21st century, as ever-larger chunks of our lives are being mapped out on databases about which we may know nothing, the notion of personal privacy is rapidly being diluted by our acquiescence in the pervasiveness of automated data collection. It may suit employers, retailers, governments and marketers to record unlimited amounts of information about us, but there is no way of knowing where that data will finally end up. No matter how ambitious the data protection laws - and Britain's are vastly superior to those in the US -they never quite manage to keep up with the speed of innovation.

Even at the simplest level of employee monitoring, your personal trail may be being analysed in unexpected quarters. The syndicated American newspaper columnist Dear Abby two weeks ago printed an enlightening letter from a member of an unnamed firm's IT department who confessed to accessing workers' online bank details, tracking their eBay auction bids, and studying their personal e-mails. "I will never look at certain employees the same way again," he wrote.

But it is with the larger commercial and governmental databases that the power games really begin: as one database gets "mined" alongside others, detailed patterns emerge about you that analytical software can crunch to predict your behaviour and profile your lifestyle. Your health insurer may wish to know about your sexual proclivities; the security services may want to know about any suspicious book purchases you may have made with your credit card. And when terrorism alerts cause public officials to justify mining your private data, who knows what they will do with it all.

Once information is collected for one purpose, however legitimate, there is no way for you to prevent it from being used for another, even if that secondary usage prejudices you. The practice is known as "data creep". Fine, you may think; you have nothing to fear beyond a bit of junk mail or cold-calling. Britain's extensive CCTV network, after all, is a technology that may breach personal privacy -but if it helps to protect you from crime, that may be a trade-off worth making.

But how would you feel about a rather more pervasive technology that used radio signals to track your movements whether at home or on the streets, and through tiny microchips embedded in everyday products could identify almost everything you were wearing or carrying? Imagine, furthermore, that a huge global network of computers linked to scanners was monitoring these radio signals and recording your progress on databases for corporations or governments to study in real time. Would you see that as a breach too far of your privacy?

The question is not theoretical. Such a technology is already here -and is starting to be used on the British high street by retailers such as Asda, Marks & Spencer and Woolworths. The technology relies on "smart tags" being fitted to individual items, from cereals to CDs, as a cost-effective way of monitoring product lines and automating the reordering process. The tags, based on microchips smaller than a grain of sand, can be read by scanners up to 10 metres (33ft) away, and their presence recorded over an internet-linked computer network. And unlike barcodes, which merely identify a product line, smart tags are specific to an individual item such as a can of Coke, and can convey detailed information about its manufacturing history and sell-by date.

If you buy a DVD from Tesco this week, you may not realise that it may come with one of these smart tags, known as a Radio Frequency Identification, or RFID tag.

The technology is backed by some of the world's most powerful organisations - Gillette has just ordered half a billion of them, and the European Central Bank wants to put them in euros -and it is a safe bet that they will, within a decade, be fitted to almost every branded product. At MIT in Boston, where the Auto-ID Centre is working with global corporations to develop the common standard, executives are so confident that RFID is about to enter widespread use that they talk of "trillions of tagged items" soon being trackable via a computer network they are calling "the internet of things".

Unless they are deliberately "killed", RFID tags are designed to remain active through a product's life. Anyone with a suitable scanner could "read" the tag to identify that item and, if they had access to the underlying computer network, could track its history. There are, as you may imagine, some "Big Brother" privacy concerns about this technology much greater than those voiced by the BA unions.

After news emerged last March that Benetton planned to embed RFID chips in millions of its Sisley pullovers, an international boycott of the chain was organised under the slogan "I'd rather go naked" to highlight the technology's potential use to track individuals. Benetton subsequently emphasised that it had no immediate plans to put tagged sweaters into its stores.

Katherine Albrecht, the organiser of the Boycott Benetton campaign, claims that it has "the potential to track people from the time they get up in the morning to the time they go to bed". If the information collected via signals from your personal items were matched to CCTV images, you would, she says, "be surveilled at every turn". The police, criminals and marketers would all be motivated to scan your property to learn more about you -since everything from your earrings to your glasses would be identifiable.

At MIT, they are advising companies to warn consumers that they are using RFID tags and to give them the option of having them "killed" at the checkout. That is not being done in practice: Tesco, for example, is not warning customers that its DVDs contain the tags, which remain active long after they have left the store.

Certainly the technology has the potential to bring greater efficiencies in stock tracking, and perhaps even to herald the day when your shopping trolley can be automatically scanned, saving you from queueing at the checkout. But before we allow a tiny wireless computer to be fitted into almost every manufactured product, as the MIT visionaries would like, should we not at least debate how all this data will be regulated?

The Office of the Information Commissioner says it would have "serious data protection concerns" if information gathered using RFID tags was used to track individual consumers without their knowledge. It is a reassuring view, tempered only by the reality that in fact there are no adequate regulatory resources to prevent a tidal wave of data falling into the wrong hands.

That is the trouble with new technologies. They will not simply wait until you are ready to deal with them. By the time you realise that, yes, you did once value your privacy, it may be too late to retrieve it.

(The Times, July 29 2003)

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Mail on Sunday: Boycott threat to stores over 'smart tags'

RETAILERS including Tesco, Marks & Spencer and Asda face the threat of organised consumer boycotts over plans to introduce controversial new "smart tags" designed to track individual products. By David Rowan

The tiny tags, embedded inside manufactured goods or built into the packaging, emit radio signals that can be read from up to 20 feet away, and unless disabled they remain active long after they have left the store.

An investigation by Channel 4 News has discovered that a US-based consumer group, which has previously targeted Benetton and Gillette for adopting this technology, is now launching a UK branch to organise boycotts of British firms using the tags. A boycott of Benetton last March - under the slogan "I'd rather go naked" - led the company to suspend plans to embed the tags in its Sisley-branded pullovers.

Katherine Albrecht, organiser of the Boycott Benetton campaign and founder of Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion and Numbering (Caspian), said the technology would be used to spy on shoppers and would let governments or marketers learn more about you simply by scanning you from a distance. Unlike barcodes, the smart tags - known as Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) labels - identify individual items, whose movements can be tracked by a network of internet-linked computers. The microchips involved are the size of a grain of sand, and with the price falling to a few pence they can be fitted to anything from trainers to toothbrushes.

"This technology has the potential to track people from the time they get up in the morning to the time they go to bed at night," Ms Albrecht said. "The reader devices are very easily hidden, and have been fabricated into floor tiles, carpeting and doorways. As you enter the doorway, you will be emanating an electronic cloud - everything from your earrings to what's in your briefcase would be sending out information. My concern is that this will be tied in with Britain's surveillance system so you'll be literally surveilled at every turn."

The technology is being tested by corporations such as WalMart, Procter & Gamble and Unilever as a means of automating supply lines and knowing where goods are in real time. Tesco is currently using the tags on DVDs and Gillette Mach 3 razors, and Marks & Spencer will start fitting them to clothes in the autumn. The Home Office sees the tags as a means of preventing shoplifting and identifying counterfeit goods, and the European Central Bank plans to fit them inside euro banknotes. Privacy activists warn that police will use the tags to track suspects, and that criminals will obtain tag-readers to locate valuables.

Caspian told Financial Mail on Sunday that it planned new campaigns against Gillette and Tesco if they did not resolve its concerns about their use of the tags, and that it would "fight back" against other firms adopting RFID in Britain. In its main Cambridge store, Tesco has been using hidden cameras linked to tag-readers to photograph shoppers who pick up Mach 3 razors, the chain's most shoplifted item.

A Tesco spokesman said: "There are some potential security benefits of RFID tags, but our trials are about availability and making life easier for customers and staff." Marks & Spencer said it may use the tags more extensively if its autumn clothing trials prove successful.

Richard Allan MP, the Liberal Democrats' technology spokesman, said: "I am very worried that with RFID tags in circulation, all kinds of personal information will be collected about you that won't be properly protected. Do we want where we were at any particular point of the day to be known to everyone? The idea that one has not only has CCTV cameras watching over you, but your own clothes watching over you and sending off data that could be spat out to your detriment, is of serious concern to me."

You can see David Rowan's report about smart tags on Channel 4 News tonight at 7pm

(Mail on Sunday, July 27 2003)

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Channel 4 News: Chips with Everything (script)

Presenter: Microchip trackers, no bigger than a grain of sand, are set to become the latest weapon in the battle of the high street. The so-called "smart tags" can be fitted into virtually everything we buy, and send out a radio signal picked up by internet-linked computers. The technology could already be on its way to a supermarket near you. But there are fears that the retailers' dream is a Big Brother nightmare. David Rowan reports for Channel 4 News

At Prada's showcase New York store, you have to steel yourself to look at the prices.

But the price tags here are smarter than you'd think: they send out signals that are picked up all over the store, leaving a snapshot as individual items are detected, and, in the changing rooms, triggering video images of whatever you're trying on.

This is the place to go if you do need that $3,000 dress. But unlike most stores, almost everything in this one has a chip attached. The chips are the size of a grain of sand - but it they're not switched off after you've left the store, you leave a trail wherever you go. This trail can be picked up by anyone with the right scanner, which can identify an item by its unique signal.

Companies from Coca Cola to Marks & Spencer are introducing these tiny chips. Prada removes them at the cash-desk, but firms such as Benetton have discussed embedding them with their antennae inside the clothes themselves. So somewhere, a database could be tracking your progress.

At MIT in Boston, the Auto-ID Centre is building the global information network that will put this technology - known as radio frequency identification, or RFID - into everything. The Centre's sponsors - from Walmart and Unilever to government departments - see huge commercial benefits in tracking products in real time through a vast computer network. The man who speaks for these corporations aims for nothing less than to change the world.

Kevin Ashton told us: "One day, and not this decade, it's not impossible that everything in the global supply chain, almost every manufactured object, could contain a tiny wireless computer. So the computers that we use to manage this supply chain will know where everything is, all the time."

He's calling it the "internet of things" - with scanners everywhere linked to databases following trillions of items.

As these smart tags get cheaper and more universal - and Gillette's just ordered half a billion of them - the MIT visionaries say we'll all benefit if firms know when and where goods are needed. Ashton adds: "We'll see lower prices, fresher food, it will be easier to buy the things we want to buy, and maybe, 15 years hence, we won't need to stand in line at the checkout."

The question is whether consumers are ready for their personal items to be monitored, and that data logged over the internet. When Benetton said in March that it would put the tags in sweaters, a boycott put its plans on hold. Privacy campaigners say RFID lays you open to permanent surveillance.

Katherine Albrecht, a campaigner with an anti-RFID group called Caspian, said: "This technology has the potential to track people from the time they get up in the morning to the time they go to bed. Reader devices have been fabricated into floor tiles, carpeting, doorways. They're very easily hidden. As you enter a doorway, you will be emanating an electronic cloud. Everything from your earrings to what's in your briefcase would be sending out information that would be picked up by the doorway."

The Auto-ID Centre's own confidential research, obtained by Channel 4 News, suggests that 78 per cent of consumers oppose these smart tags. So behind closed doors, it's fighting back. We've learned that its PR agency urged a
"proactive approach on privacy" - "neutralising opposition" by creating a new advisory body of "credible experts and potentially adversarial advocates".

It's a futuristic vision straight out of the film Minority Report. Already your personal information is being stored each time you make a phone-call or credit-card purchase. Computers can then cross-reference hundreds of databases to predict your behaviour. But these chips are a marketing man's dream - one that's fast becoming reality.

Judd Ferrer, of location-based marketing firm, Insitu, said: “What this chip can offer to the marketing world is the ability to track consumer behaviour from the store to the home, and if they've got the ability to put RFID into appliances, the ability to understand what's going on at the home and then taking it back to the store."

Imagine what this could one day mean:

Talking adverts in Times Square:

Budweiser: "Hi David - feeling thirsty today?"
Swatch Wink: "Oh, David..."
Cup Noodle: "Mmm, chicken flavour, David, your favourite..."
Moving Strap: "Don't forget your wife's birthday... "
Samsung: "Catch this special offer, David..."

When all this information the scanners have picked up about you is out there on the internet, who knows how it will be used - not just to sell you things, but to know where you've been, and what you've been doing.

At Tesco, the future has already arrived. It's taking part in government-funded trials that use RFID tags in Gillette razors and DVDs to track them through the store. Readers built into the shelves monitor each item - so if it's sold, the computer automatically orders another. And if one leaves the store unpaid for, the system can trigger security cameras. There are no warnings that these DVDs have tags attached.

Greg Sage, Tesco spokesman, says: "The tag itself is tiny so you wouldn't see it, but when customers come to ask our staff, they can see the benefits immediately, because it's much quicker for them and it means they can get on with their shopping with the minimum of hassle."

From next week, this store will be scanning the tags at the checkout too. If a DVD's unique number could be matched to, say, my loyalty card, who knows what it could reveal about me? And it doesn't end there.

Tesco doesn't disable its tags when you leave the store - so scanners can pick up their electronic trail, as we found out when we visited a firm which programmes this technology.

Forty miles away, our DVD of The Matrix bought in Tesco was still signalling its tag's unique number.

At MIT, they're advising corporations to keep all this data anonymous, and to give you the chance to have tags "killed" at the checkout. Because once the trail's out there, the police, and maybe your boss, could access it to know where you are at any time. And what if hackers accessed your records too? Today, the system's unregulated - but soon it may be too late.

Richard Allan MP (Lib Dem technology spokesman) said: "People being able to track your movements may seem like a theoretical risk, but in reality, do we want where we were at any particular point of the day to be known to everyone?

"The idea that one not only has CCTV cameras watching over you but your own clothes watching over you and sending off data that could be jumbled up and spat out to your detriment is one that's of serious concern to me."

Twenty years after barcodes took over, the smart tag is on the edge of a far more pervasive revolution. The one question that isn't being asked is whether you want it.

(Film for Channel 4 News, written and reported by David Rowan, July 27 2003)

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The Times: Tech column - Friendster/RIAA bullying/Virgin Atlantic

By David Rowan

FORGET friendsreunited and match.com...a new web-based social network called www.friendster.com is spreading rapidly across the UK. Like napster.com, it is designed to link people with a common interest. But rather than schools or musical tastes, this network relies on a chain of social contacts that is continually increasing, so that members can find each other only through friends, friends of friends, and so on, until they have a huge global contacts book.

The idea is not new, owing its intellectual roots to the theory, based on Stanley Milgram's social-psychology research, that we are all connected by "six degrees of separation". What makes Friendster exceptional is that, formally launched last March, it has already signed up a million users and claims a 20 per cent weekly growth rate. If you have not yet received an e-mail from a "friendster" inviting you to join, it can only be a matter of time.

The site, created by Jonathan Abrams, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, is easy to use and lets you choose with whom, among your ever-extending social circle, you communicate. Members post photographs alongside their personal profiles and friends' names, and those who know them are encouraged to provide personal testimonials. No wonder the site is being used not only to develop business contacts, but also as a peer-moderated dating service.

Danah Boyd, who researches online social networks at the University of California, Berkeley, notes that users are identifying potential sexual partners through their friends' networks before asking the friend to make introductions, or simply approaching potential partners directly. "Friendster not only provides useful information about a potential date (status, sexuality, age), it provides an additional context in which to start a conversation," she says. But beware, Casanovas: there is a strong incentive to behave honourably - your history is in the database for others to inspect.

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THE music industry is taking more absurd legal steps to terrify ordinary song-swappers. Lawyers for the Recording Industry Association of America are obtaining about 75 US court subpoenas each day against individuals, while Congressmen John Conyers and Howard Berman are demanding five-year prison sentences and £155,000 fines for anyone offering copyrighted works online.

Until the association stops its bullying and realises that small-scale downloading offers a reasonable opportunity for consumers to sample its members' overpriced CDs before buying them, record labels and retailers risk inciting a damaging boycott.

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IN-FLIGHT entertainment will never be the same again. Flying Virgin Atlantic back from Boston to London on Saturday, I noticed that the phone-shaped handset wired to the armrest contained both a rewind and a pause button. In a standard economy seat, it seemed, I had my own personal video recorder, through which I could choose to watch dozens of films and television programmes on the seat-back screen at a time and pace to suit me. As well as 300 hours of video on demand, the new "v:port" entertainment system being introduced across the fleet also features a jukebox of 50 CDs, more than a dozen computer games, some of which can be played against other passengers, a facility for sending text messages to the ground, and, apparently, the ability to dial up other seat numbers in order to flirt. Later this year, the airline plans to add an e-mail facility. The Linux-based system can be a little unstable and the black boxes bolted to the floor (presumably to house the hard disks) take up legroom. But the v:port has to be the future of in flight entertainment.

(The Times, July 22 2003)

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Interview: Mishal Husain, BBC World (Evening Standard)

By David Rowan

SHE is the global television star from Britain you may not have heard of - the glamorous face of an international network who has been profiled in Vanity Fair, praised as "spellbinding" by the Washington Times, and drooled over by Canada's Globe and Mail for her "enormous, beguiling brown eyes".

Website polls have voted her one of "the world's sexiest anchors", and strangers stop her in American shopping malls. Yet as she strolled down Hampstead High Street on Monday after a prewedding hairdressing appointment, Mishal Husain did not attract a second glance. Mishal who? As the main evening news presenter on BBC World, Husain, 30, can be seen in 200 countries, but not Britain. Based until this week in Washington DC, she is also a BBC news correspondent and from tomorrow will present a documentary series on US public television alongside Jamie Rubin, the former Assistant Secretary of State.

So what is it like, after establishing a career as a BBC business reporter, to find yourself suddenly treated as a hot new celebrity? "It takes some getting used to," Husain admits with a diffident smile, her still unaffected manner suggesting that the buzz has surprised her as much as anyone.

"I was quite bemused to see the gossip columns, and being stopped in the street is a bit strange. I've been in Bloomingdales, on the phone, when a woman passed me a note, asking, 'Are you Mishal Husain?' She was a staunch Republican who had firm views about how we were covering the war, and wanted me to know that we weren't being fair to the President." The BBC mischievously claims that Husain's evening newscasts are "seen by a worldwide audience of over 256 million" - a distortion worthy of Alastair Campbell's attention, considering that Husain herself understands her nightly US audience to be "almost a million".

Still, since last September, when she arrived as the corporation's first Washington-based anchor, her profile has grown along with the network's as viewers have scrabbled to find informed foreign news.

Iraq, she recognises, has been her lucky break. "The BBC has been in the right place at the right time in America," she says. "Everything that's happened to me in the past couple of years I could not have predicted. I have no expectations." Mishal Husain was born in Britain to Pakistani parents, and at two went to live in the Emirates, where her father was a surgeon. While reading law at Cambridge, she found work experience at the BBC, followed by stints at The Times, the Telegraph and Pakistan's daily paper, The News.

After taking a master's in law at the European University Institute in Florence, she found a job at Bloomberg TV, where she wrote, produced and occasionally presented. Then came a producer's job at BBC World, where she was first tested as an anchor three summers ago.

Live television, she says, delivers "the greatest adrenaline rush". She is as comfortable interviewing the US Deputy Defence Secretary as the Rwandan president, but occasionally there are hairy moments. Last March, she was chatting on air to a colleague while awaiting a George W Bush press conference when the BBC broadcast a live feed of the President having his hair brushed as he practised his speech. The White House was not amused. "We apologised. Profusely," she says.

BEING a US anchor carries other demands. "The line between being a journalist and a celebrity is much more blurred than here," she says. "They expect you to behave in a certain way - to appear in glossy magazines and talk about your personal life." The Los Angeles Times has remarked on Husain's "low-key style - not even a necklace in sight", and she certainly favours a casual if smartly spoken image, rejecting the traditional "big hair". "Some American anchors' hair allowance is the equivalent of a fulltime salary," she says. "If I told a US anchor that I do my own makeup, they would be horrified."

Her rising profile has also brought fan mail. "I've had the odd 'Are you single?', but the nicest was from the sheriff in Bexar County in Texas. A package arrived with a note making me an honorary deputy sheriff." Her suitors will be disappointed, though. This Saturday, Husain is getting married at the Foreign Press Association in Carlton House Terrace before honeymooning for a week in Malaysia. She will continue working for the programme from London. Her fiancé, Meekal Hashmi, whom she has known since childhood, is a lawyer with Barings Asset Management.

It will be a Muslim wedding. "Being in the States and having an obviously Muslim name has made me much more conscious of my Muslim identity," she says. " Honestly, it's a terrible time to be a Muslim there. Here, we accept the fact that society is diverse." She now actively publicises her faith, "to change people's perceptions".

Husain has also become something of a spokeswoman for the BBC on US chat shows, particularly over the current political row about weapons of mass destruction. "You normally point out it's not unusual for an organisation like the BBC to have differences with the Government, and that publicly funded isn't the same as government-owned." She has also had to answer accusations of BBC "bias". "We're perceived to part of the 'liberal' media - liberal in a derogatory sense. There's such a lack of awareness there of media consolidation, and it's really hard to offer an opinion that's against the government line without being called unamerican. During the war, someone wrote a piece in the Washington Post calling the BBC 'unpatriotic'. Is patriotism part of our job?"

Is she a liberal? She shrugs. "God knows. I'm reluctant to use any type of tag." The strongest opinion she will offer - during a long conversation peppered with rather gushing remarks about her "hugely interesting job" - is that she detests reality television. "Please let someone say it's had its day." She herself prefers watching The Office, even if she is sure that "loads of Americans think it's a fly-on-the-wall documentary".

It's all very BBC, and her bosses clearly see Husain as an asset to promote. Still, she does have one reservation about BBC World: "I only wish it was seen in this country," she says.

(Evening Standard, July 16 2003)

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The Times: Tech column - Geocaching/honeypots

By David Rowan

IT IS A blazing hot Saturday afternoon on the Thames-side footpath abutting the National Theatre in London, and the global positioning network of satellites is guiding your columnist excitedly towards a bench: the one located by a handheld GPS device at N 51 degrees 30.513 W 000 degrees 06.648. Sure enough, hidden beneath the bench is a 35mm film canister containing two pencils and a sheet of paper. It might not mean much to the bemused passers-by, but in the sport of geocaching this little baby represents treasure.

Ever since President Clinton opened up GPS technology to civilian use three years ago, a new sport has evolved among owners of the handheld locator units. Using the internet, participants advertise the co-ordinates of objects that they have "cached", or hidden, and set others the challenge of finding them, whether on remote mountainsides or high-rise rooftops. The finder is entitled to remove an item from the cache and replace it with another, and is expected to log the encounter on paper and online. And as GPS units have fallen in price to little more than £100, geocaching has become an increasingly mainstream sport.

According to geocaching.com, there are 59,984 active caches in 177 countries. It is, according to the site's Seattle-based founder, Jeremy Irish, "the sport where you are the search engine" - and, as you would expect from such a geek friendly pastime, it has already spawned its own slang. A "geomuggle" is, Harry Potter-style, someone who just doesn't get the magic, the accolade "FTF" reveals that you were first to find a cache and a "hitchhiker" is an item placed in one cache with the instruction that it be taken to another. Irish estimates that 250,000 people are playing, and UK-specific sites such as www.geocacheuk.com suggest that a few thousand, at least, are active in Britain.

What is most exciting about this sport's rapid rise is that it represents a grassroots response to a newly available technology, rather than anything dreamt up by a corporate marketing department. Still, the mainstream is catching up. On Saturday Hampshire County Council is organising what it claims is "the world's first public geocaching event". But don't expect me to tell you where it is, beyond pointing you towards N 51 degrees 03.625 W 001 degrees 22.849 ...

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IF YOU ARE looking for a lucrative career among friendly, helpful colleagues, you could try that of credit-card fraudster. That seems to be the conclusion of a worrying investigation by the Honeynet Project (www.honeynet.org), a non profit research group that monitors the net's darker corners. Its researchers recently examined a dozen internet relay chat channels and related websites where credit-card numbers and other personally identifiable data have been changing hands in large volumes. They found an open and helpful community of card thieves who went out of their way to welcome newcomers - even giving away valid card numbers to get them started.

They also discovered a worrying level of automation, including "bots" programmed to search the net for vulnerable merchant sites and to validate cards, and evidence that corrupt merchants were offering to sell large batches of card numbers in exchange for a percentage of the take. "By presenting their activities as a lifestyle choice rather than criminal fraud, members of the carding community entice others to join them," the report concludes. "They pose a growing threat to the financial community, online merchants and individual cardholders."

With identity theft and card fraud on the rise, it may no longer be enough to rely on the credit-card providers' insistence that their security systems are adequate.

(The Times, July 15 2003)

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The Times: Tech column - Biometrics/body economics

By David Rowan

IT IS NOT just David Blunkett who is getting excited about biometric identification. From next year it looks as though we shall have to start to share our bodies' most intimate secrets if we want to travel abroad. The European Union is pushing through plans to ensure that EU passports will carry DNA, iris scans or fingerprints by October 26, 2004, apparently to meet a deadline set by the United States after September 11.

This comes after US demands that any travellers who do not have biometric data embedded in their travel documents will need an entry visa after that date - and Europe is keen to make member states upgrade their passports.

There has been little public discussion of this, and even less consultation. But increasingly, governments are turning to biometric identification as the high tech means of monitoring people's movements using personally distinguishing data. Even as the Home Secretary has been looking for a way to persuade us to pay £39 for the privilege of carrying an ID card, his department's immigration officials have been celebrating the results of a six-month trial of iris-scanners at Heathrow. By next summer they want regular travellers to blink into scanners at airports throughout Britain.

These techniques can certainly boost security, and frequent travellers may like a faster check-in. But don't be surprised if your eye pattern or DNA sequence finds its way on to databases all over the world. The US can already access details of all flights originating in Europe, and can store for at least seven years details such as whether you booked a halal meal, your earlier travel history, and any "general remarks" made by the airline about you. Combine this with face-recognition scans now being taken in airports, and powerful check-in X ray machines that show what you look like under your clothes, and soon any number of databases will know vast amounts about you. That data will not always be used for the purposes originally intended.

As for Mr Blunkett's plans, all a technology column can do is to point out that "smartcards" have historically proved less smart than the criminals who have managed to beat them. There may be little statistical likelihood that someone shares your iris pattern, but it is a certainty that as soon as such cards are introduced, organised gangs will clone or otherwise fake them. The French discovered this almost a decade ago, when faking the high-tech new national ID card became a highly profitable business.

As Peter Dorrington, head of fraud at SAS, a software firm, put it recently: "If there is a big enough prize, then organised crime will find a way. If you have one of these, and know that banks and governments are going to take them as a trusted form of identification, then the potential to commit fraud is massive."

Don't say you weren't warned.

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YOU'RE LOOKING like a million dollars today. Actually, more like $45 million (£28 million), according to a Wired magazine survey of what your body's various components would fetch on the open market. It's not your vital organs that make your fortune, apparently - at about £60,000, a kidney will barely pay the school fees, and hearts have fallen for knock-down bids of £36,000. No, the real money's in your bone marrow, according to private hospitals and insurance companies, which value it at about £14,000 a gram, of which you might be able to offload 1,000g. Add your DNA, a full set of antibodies and any available eggs, and suddenly you've attained a Rich List lifestyle. Albeit a very dead one.

(The Times, July 8 2003)

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The Times: Tech column - RFID

By David Rowan

THERE is a new buzz among tech investors that the "next big thing" has finally arrived. No, it's not biotechnology, nor even the nanotechnology that keeps the Prince of Wales awake at night. What is sending share prices jumping is a tiny, low-cost chip known as a radio frequency identification (RFID) tag, which emits radio signals to identify anything from a tank to a toothbrush. Although this column cannot guarantee that they will make your fortune, by this time next year there will be billions of them signalling away from the high street to the battlefield.

Retailers in particular have long sought a technology that can manage inventories more efficiently than bar codes, which do little more than identify a product as a 50p can of cola or a £10.99 DVD. The RFID chip carries detailed data specific to each item: where it was made, when it was put on the shelf, when it passes its sell-by date. Better still, scanners located around the store can talk to the tags to find out when to order new supplies, to know what's in your basket (bad news for checkout staff) and to indicate when goods have not been paid for (worse news for shoplifters). As prices fall, the tags - less than 1mm long - will soon cost just a few pence each. The industry's visionaries see a future of vast computerised databases, fed by scanners all over the world to create an "internet" of physical things.

In the past few weeks, the number of companies planning to embed RFID tags into their products has reached a critical mass. Wal-Mart, which owns Asda, has told its top 100 suppliers that it expects all their goods to be chipped by 2005; Tesco has been testing the tags in its Sandhurst store; Marks & Spencer and Sainsbury's intend to hold trials of the technology. But it's not just retailers who are chipping away. The European Central Bank wants to put RFID tags into all new banknotes to deter counterfeiters; the US military is fitting tags to goods shipped to Iraq, and has even used them to track injured soldiers as they move from battlefield to hospital.

But there remains a serious question that the industry has so far failed to confront. The tags remain active after they have left the store, unless they are switched off. What worries consumer groups is the power this revolution will give to people who want to know more about you - marketers, who can learn your purchasing habits simply by scanning your clothes from a few metres away, or muggers, who can use powerful receivers to learn who is carrying large numbers of banknotes. Benetton already faces a consumer boycott over plans to tag its pullovers, and privacy activists are uneasy about banknotes that can identify where they have been. Unless clear guidelines are agreed soon about how RFID data can be used, this clever innovation will face a damaging backlash.

Talking of futuristic scanners, the US Transportation Security Administration last week unveiled a new machine that it hopes will detect air passengers hiding even non-metallic weapons. The scanner, which relies on a technology called "backscatter" X-rays, distributes radiation so that dense objects produce darker shadows than human skin. The only problem: the passenger appears exactly as nature intended. "It does make you look fat and naked," the TSA's Susan Hallowell said as she bravely demonstrated how security staff would see her, with little of her modesty retained. Expect a surge in applications for airport-security jobs.

British Airways is not, by the way, offering free flights to anyone who forwards a current e-mail doing the rounds to ten more people. It's a hoax, and should be deleted - just as similar too-good-to-be-true offers from Microsoft and Disney proved to be in the past.

(The Times, July 1 2003)

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