It’s way past time for something like the Open Rights Group in the UK. Nothing for it but to quote their “manifesto” wholesale, as I couldn’t put it better myself:
The Open Rights Group is committed to protecting your digital rights, to fighting bad legislation both in the UK and Europe, and to fostering a grassroots community of volunteers dedicated to campaigning on digital rights issues.
Your civil and human rights are being eroded in the digital realm. Government, big business and industry bodies are taking liberties with your digital liberties, actions they could never get away with in the “real” world.
Our goals are:
- to raise awareness within the media of digital rights abuses
- to provide a media clearinghouse, connecting journalists with experts and activists
- to campaign to preserve and extend traditional civil liberties in the digital world
- to collaborate with other digital rights and related organisations
- to nurture and assist a community of campaigning volunteers, from grassroots activists to technical and legal experts
Your right to privacy is being eroded by the government’s ill-conceived ID card scheme, by biometric passports and the threat of vehicle tracking systems. Your right to free speech and freedom to use digital media is under threat from corporations who believe that ‘fair use’ of copyrighted works should exist only at their sufferance. Your right to private life and correspondence is under threat from a proposed European directive to log traffic and geographical data for every call you make, every SMS you send, every email you write, every website you visit.
It is essential in this time of international tension and uncertainty that we vigourously defend our digital civil liberties, ensuring that the our hard-won freedoms are not taken away simply because they’ve moved to the digital world.
If these issues concern you and you can afford to pay out a fiver a month in support of the Open Rights Group, go and sign this pledge. Now.
Coverage of this is spreading across the more geeky parts of the internet (for example Boing Boing) and now it’s been covered at the BBC, so let’s hope that with continued pressure news of this will penetrate further into the mainstream media and more people will start to pay a bit more attention to what’s going on rather than blindly believing the paranoid, dangerously misguided rubbish coming out of the Home Office.