On 5 April 2017, the Norwegian government proposed an amendment to the Norwegian code of criminal proceedings to allow the police to compel the use of biometric authentication. After two quick debates, the Norwegian Parliament passed the proposition into law on 21 June.

Article 199 of the Norwegian code of criminal proceedings reads as follows after the change:

“When searching an electronic system the police can demand from anyone with connection to the system the necessary information to gain access to the system or open it by biometric authentication.If anyone refuses a demand for biometric authentication as proposed in the first sentence, the police may perform the authentication by force.The decision to use force

If anyone refuses a demand for biometric authentication as proposed in the first sentence, the police may perform the authentication by force.

The decision to use force by the second sentence is decided by the prosecutor’s office. If there is a risk that would be brought about by delaying the authentication, the decision can be made by the police on the spot. The decision shall immediately be reported to the prosecutor’s office.[…]”

The lack of specificity of an “electronic system” means this law has an extremely wide scope. We can, for example, envision that access to a personal device such as a mobile phone, which stores the access credentials to several cloud storage services, essentially gives away a more or less complete description of a person’s life. To entrust such decision to a single police officer with no due process means that an act with very far reaching consequences may be performed in a matter of seconds. EDRi member Electronic Frontier Norway (EFN) is exploring the possibility that this may violate the privacy protections afforded by Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) and the right to avoid self-incrimination afforded by Article 6.

There is also no reference to proportionality of the use of force. Although there is no reason to suspect this would be used in a disproportionate way, the lack of such a limitation means that we don’t know how far the use force might be taken. While the use of torture is prohibited by the Norwegian constitution, such lack of specificity in an individual law risks creating a situation where an overzealous officer may deem it necessary to perform acts which are prohibited by other parts of the law. It is not obvious how the law may be applied for example when iris scanning is involved. Logically, force must be applied in close proximity to the eyeball and eye socket, which puts an individual at obvious physical risk.

It is also important to take note that the law is not limited to suspects but “anyone with connection to the system”. This means that someone with no connection to a crime may be subjected to the abovementioned uses of force.

EFN is worried about the development this and other changes to the law in the same direction represents. This law has been rushed through without proper justification, and the wording has been chosen with apparently little or no regard to proper scope.

Norwegian code of criminal proceedings (only in Norwegian)
https://lovdata.no/dokument/NL/lov/1981-05-22-25/KAPITTEL_4-3#%C2%A7199

Forced biometric authentication in Norway (26.07.2017)
https://efn.no/1807/forced-biometric-authentication-in-norway

(Contribution by Tom Fredrik Blenning, EDRi member Electronic Frontier Norway)

The world’s first crewless, automated ship will launch in 2018, reports the Wall Street Journal, and is expected to be fully autonomous by 2020. The Norwegian-built Yara Birkeland will use GPS, radar, cameras, and sensors to navigate itself around other boat traffic and dock on its own. It’s anticipated to cost around $25 million, which is about three times as much as a standard container ship of the same size. But investors say without the need for fuel or crew, annual operating costs would be cut by up to 90 percent. The vessel will become autonomous in stages, Yara said.

“Yara Birkeland will initially operate as a manned vessel, moving to remote operation in 2019 and expected to be capable of performing fully autonomous operations from 2020,” the company said in a post on its website from May.

The 100-container Birkeland is being jointly developed by agriculture firm Yara International and technology company Kongsberg Gruppen. It’s been dubbed the “Tesla of the Seas,” and is scheduled in late 2018 to start delivering fertilizer from a production facility to the port of Larvik about 37 miles away.

Yara’s head of production Petter Ostbo told The Wall Street Journal the company would look to invest in bigger ships and use them for longer routes once international regulations are in place for crewless vessels. “Maybe even move our fertilizer from Holland all the way to Brazil,” he said.

Yara said its new vessel will also cut emissions. The company plans to reduce air pollutants while improving road safety by removing up to 40,000 truck journeys in populated urban areas.

“We want to go zero emission,” Ostbo said. “Even if some say climate change is not reality, it’s a business reality because clean sources of energy are more affordable than fossil fuels.”

(N.Sethu)

To improve offshore oil spill preparedness, Norway’s government and the oil industry are building an offshore broadband wireless network.

When oil spills occur, the ability to exchange information quickly between ships, planes, and other actors can greatly limit the damage caused by the spill, according to the Norwegian Coastal Administration. In order to speed up communications in such a scenario, an offshore broadband network is being rolled out in Norway.

The network is being built onboard the vessels and planes that take part in oil spill recovery operations. Norway’s Coastal Administration will install the Maritime Broadband Radio (MBR) system on all its oil recovery vessels, as well as ten additional vessels that have oil recovery equipment onboard.

The Norwegian Clean Seas Association for Operating Companies (NOFO) – made up of oil industry organizations – will install the MBR system on all their oil recovery vessels. The system has already been rolled-out on a surveillance plane that’s a joint initiative between the Coastal Administration, NOFO, and the Norwegian Coast Guard. Three onshore base stations have also been installed, to aid in communications with ships and planes.

The Coastal Administration says this is the world’s first national implementation of maritime broadband communication on ships and planes in public service.

“This is a significant improvement that allows us to communicate with all units participating in an oil recovery mission, and share the data without an internet connection. MBR allows us to respond faster with the right actions,” says Kjetil Aasebø, senior advisor in the Coastal Administration, in a statement.

The MBR system has been developed in cooperation with the Norwegian companies Kongsberg Seatex and Radionor. The system operates in the 5GHz frequency band, and offers speeds up to 15Mbps. Its operational range is in excess of 50km, depending on antenna placement.

This means the radios will work well beyond line-of-sight, greatly improving the practical applications of the technology compared to traditional high-performance data communication equipment used offshore.

An MRB network has a mesh network topology. This means that senders and receivers that are out of reach of each other can use other MBR stations between them as radio relay stations. Consequently, a circling airplane with an MBR station can greatly extend the coverage of the network.

MRB radio stations are hardened for offshore use, and contain no moving parts. As a result, the omnidirectional models can contain up to 60 phased-array solid state antennas. The enclosed signal processing circuitry performs real-time radio beamforming and adaptive power control, in order to provide an optimal signal to users, both those nearby and behind the horizon.

(zdnet)

Major evaluation of country’s research landscape also found that internationalisation was a key area for improvement.

More than a quarter of humanities researchers in Norway have never published, according to the first evaluation of the discipline in the country for 30 years.

The study, which was commissioned by the Research Council of Norway, found that 26 per cent of researchers in the discipline had no publications and, while there were “pockets of excellence” in most areas of the humanities, no research groups or universities “reached the highest levels of international performance”.

Overall, however, the humanities had higher than average publication per academic staff member than the other disciplines in the country, according to the report.

The humanities accounted for 16.8 per cent of Norway’s national publication output and there was a 7.8 per cent increase in publications between 2011 and 2015, it added.

The Evaluation of the Humanities in Norway, which was undertaken by 54 international humanities scholars, assessed 2,300 researchers and 97 research groups in 36 organisations in 2016 and early 2017.

Shearer West, deputy vice-chancellor at the University of Sheffield and chair of the evaluation’s principal committee, said that the high proportion of researchers without publications was probably because research in the country is concentrated at its four big research universities: the University of Oslo, University of Bergen, Norwegian University of Science and Technology and UiT The Arctic University of Norway.

“There are a whole bunch of university colleges and other organisations that were more like teaching colleges that have recently begun to be merged with larger institutions. They don’t have a research culture yet they are expected to do research,” she said.

“In some universities that we looked at, staff had 10 per cent of their time allocated to do research, whereas in other places it was closer to 40 per cent or even 45 per cent.”

PhD students accounted for just one-third of the non-publishing research staff.

She said that the main conclusion of the evaluation was that the government and the university sector must “think more strategically about their priorities in terms of humanities research”.

“We didn’t see a lot of evidence of this,” she said.

The report also highlighted internationalisation as a key area for improvement and found that in many instances research was focused on “Norwegian issues and contexts”.

“In a number of cases, the focus on Norwegian research did not lead to sufficient emphasis on how topics, questions and problems investigated in Norwegian case studies should be related to larger, comparable international phenomena,” the panel found.

It also recommended that researchers should target more internationally leading journals and peer-reviewed books while universities should increase inward and outward mobility of academics.

While some institutions provided funds for staff to spend time abroad during sabbaticals, there was “little evidence” of institutions providing fellowships or opportunities for researchers from other countries to visit and spend time working with their own staff in Norway, according to the study.

(times higher education)

Turkey has so far built nine hybrid ferries for Norway, which is one of the world’s leading maritime nations, deputy board chairman of Yalova-Altinova Shipbuilders Inc. said Wednesday.

“Norway is looking to replace [a part of] its fleet of ferries with hybrid ones [which combine diesel power with electric battery power] until 2020,” Orhan Gulcek told Anadolu Agency, adding the Nordic country was preparing to get at least 80 new ferries in this regard.

“Some 20-25 ships have already been built of which nine has been built in Turkey,” Gulcek said, adding this number would increase further considering Turkey’s success in this area.

Noting that Turkey also built battery ferries, Gulcek said there had been an increasing demand for environmentally friendly ferries, especially in the Nordic countries, and Norway was the biggest market in this area.

“Hybrid ferry business is not only new for Turkey, but for the world too. Our biggest customer at the moment is Norway,” he said.

Gulcek said some of these ferries were being built in Norway using semi-finished products from Poland.

“However, I believe a majority will be built in Turkey. Because Turkey has started to become big in this business. So far 8-9 ferries have been built and delivered. This number will go up,” he added.