The Open Rights Group, of which I am a founder member, has announced a call to action to try and prevent the inclusion of Clause 152 in the Coroners and Justice Bill, due to go before Parliament in the near future.

This clause, should it become law, will essentially remove the protections we enjoy under the Data Protection Act and allow Government to mandate the sharing of your personal data with no effective oversight.

This means that data you have provided to the Government for one purpose, with a guarantee under law that it would be used soley for that purpose, would be available for other purposes without the need for further consent.  The other purposes could be pretty much anything – this is not necessarily about security or terrorism or immigration control or any of the other hot-button topics Labour have used over the past few years to justify their more authoritarian and intrusive policies.

I’m not going to go over the details any further in this post, my intentions here are to flag the issue and help in a small way to raise awareness.  There is a lot of information on the Bill and this clause available on the internet, follow the link above to the Open Rights Group site or just trawl through the UK news sites for more.

If this concerns you please consider joining the campaign to get this clause removed from the Bill.  Write to your MP, visit your MP, dicuss with friends, family and colleagues – whatever you have time for.

Update 8th March 2009

Great News – it looks like the proposal has been removed from the Bill (Guardian, Telegraph).  One small victory for common sense and reason.

We are a dozen or so volunteers who think it should be really easy for people to keep tabs on their elected MP, and comment on what goes on in Parliament. We’ve done this sort of thing before, but never on this scale.

For all its faults and foibles, our democracy is a profound gift from previous generations. Yet most people don’t know the name of their MP, nor their constituency, let alone what their MP does or says in their name.

We aim to help bridge this growing democratic disconnect, in the belief that there is little wrong with Parliament that a healthy mixture of transparency and public engagement won’t fix.

Hence this website.

I’ve only just begun to scratch the surface of the site myself, but you can quickly identify your MP and call up information on things like their voting record, their registered interests, the speeches they’ve made – the list just goes on, and since the site is still in beta, we can no doubt expect refinements and improvements over the coming weeks and months.

This is the sort of tool you would expect from a government with accountability and openness high on it’s priority list. Funnily enough, this one was produced by a team of volunteers and some funding from a charity called the UK Citizens Online Democracy.

Total respect to these people – what a brilliant idea.

A Home Office spokesman last night denied that the trial was a pilot for identity cards, but acknowledged that “its results will feed into the debate” on the project. The pilot scheme was “a testing process for facial recognition for one-to-one verification using iris and fingerprint biometrics”, he said. That would involve an immigration or police officer using a scanner to check the identity of a cardholder.

(Source: The Guardian)

So despite opposition to the idea, Blunkett wants to press on regardless. It’s also worth remembering that there isn’t a lot of evidence to support claims that the ID card will help prevent terrorism, or benefit fraud, or even help us to curb the rising tide of swarthy foreigners that so threaten to overwhelm our green and pleasant land, which seem to be the three big issues that come up in association with the scheme.

Liberty has highlighted the fact that other Western European countries with ID cards do not seem to have solved any of these complex social and economic problems. Identity cards may be a handy PR gimmick for the Government to try and show it is “doing something”, but it has not been shown to be a useful policy tool on the continent. Indeed, much of the evidence seems to point to national identity card schemes worsening community and race relations, fuelling a criminal industry in the production of forgeries, and causing administrative problems for the authorities.

(Source: Liberty)

Brought to you via An Oasis, which was spotted updating in the wild with the help of the UK Blogs Aggregator.

I saw no touble, and many high spirits despite the crush and the cold. Although the vast majority of the placards on site were of the mass-produced variety, there were plenty of home made ones too, often with funny and ironic slogans. Respect to the guy on the phone box at the bottom of Shaftsbury Avenue holding aloft his which said “All your bomb are belong to us”, to the utter mystification of many of my fellow marchers.

As is always the case on large demos like this, there were plenty of groups present hoping to get their various messages heard along with the more general anti-war message that the majority had come to support. I was a little troubled by one or two of these, but I don’t think that this is important – the sheer volume of people ensured that no one group could wholly hijack the march for their own agenda. The proliferation of left wing splits reminded me of an incident in Ken Macleod’s The Stone Canal, where the characters are on a similar Peace March (p.82, UK Hardback edition):

My father spotted a young woman carrying a bundle of papers whose headline – no, it wasn’t even that, it was the actual masthead – read “Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism!” and asked her in a tone of polite curiosity: ‘Why don’t you fight capitalism, for a change?’

But none of this really matters. What matters is that somewhere between 750,000 and 2,000,000 people were on the streets yesterday to show their disapproval of the coming war on Iraq. Tony Blair suggested on Friday that we ought to think about those in Iraq who would be supressed if they tried to do such a thing, and yes, we should, but that shouldn’t stop us doing it if we feel that it is the right thing to do, whether or not we believe that it will make a difference.

One of the reasons that I’ve been avoiding the subject is because I hadn’t quite made up my mind on the issue. That’s not to say that I haven’t been entertaining a healthy dose of cynicism about the whole exercise, just that I wasn’t quite sure what the hell I really felt myself.

I regularly read blogs by people on both sides of this debate. That’s one of the things that attracted me to the blogosphere in the first place – it’s a great place to find the views of regular people – not pols, or campaigners, or journos, though some bloggers either are those things or else have pretensions in those directions. I’ve read things on all sides that have made me nod in approval and things that have made me shout in anger. All this has been contributing to my own internal debate on the matter. (I’m not going to bother posting linkage here, this post is about what I think.)

This is going to be a bit of a rant, not a particularly reasoned argument, but this is my blog and I’ll write what I want to. OK?

On balance, I feel that the case for war has not been made. I cannot see that the west is in any clear danger. Saddam is not about to become a hegemonic power in the Middle East, and nor is a country crippled by over ten years of sanctions ever likely to develop a nuclear capability likely to directly threaten us. If our governments truly have evidence that this is the case then they should put it before us whatever the consequences. We are democracies – how can we choose without the facts? Handwaving is not enough, and I don’t buy the “trust me and I’ll fill you in later” approach, not when hundreds or thousands of lives are at stake.

As for the charge that Saddam and bin Laden are in cahoots, we all know what a pile of stinking excrement that is. Do me a favour, I wasn’t born yesterday and nothing that has been put forward as “proof” of this has convinced. Even if Saddam was foolish enough to support people like bin Laden, he’d soon find himself rising up their hit list too – Ba’th “socialists” weren’t flavour of the month with Islamic fundamentalists last time I looked, and bin Laden will use Saddam like the opportunist he is.

So Saddam flaunts UN resolutions. So do other countries, and where’s the invasion force? What about North Korea? They’ve practically been jumping up and down over the last few weeks waving their half-built nukes in our faces and very little seems to be happening there, so the argument about standing up to those who laugh in the face of the UN doesn’t hold much water really.

Nor do I believe that the plight of the Iraqi people figures particularly highly in the minds of Our Glorious Leaders. They’ve been screwed for years – so why the sudden concern now? Puh-lease.

This war is what bin Laden wants. Surely this is enough in itself to make us stop and think for a minute. He doesn’t care about the people of Iraq, he just wants to unite the Islamic world in some sort of jihad against the west and we’re going to help deliver the silver platter to his door.

I stand up and say this not because I want to see Saddam remain in power, or because I’m anti-American (I’m most definitely not), but because I cannot see a clear case for an invasion, and I can see a whole lot of reasons why we should be being a lot more cautious about this. The whole damn thing stinks, and it’s liable to cause far more unrest and chaos than it cures.

I have always felt apprehensive about the proposals to introduce ID cards that crop up on the UK’s political landscape from time to time. My reasons for this include:

• We seem to have done pretty well without them up until now.
• I can think of lots of far more worthy things upon which to spend upwards of 1.5 billion quid of taxpayers money.
• I just don’t like the idea. I don’t want to live in a total surveillance society where my every move through life is catalogued in a file somewhere. We’re already moving in this direction faster than is comfortable anyway.
• I can’t help but feel a little cynical about the whole scheme. It feels to me more like an effort to get this central repository of personal info set up for the benefit of the government rather than the people.
• I think that there are serious concerns over the security of this information and the potential for it to be abused.

To partially illustrate this last point, I’m going to reproduce part of the answer to the question “You Say It Won’t Leak My Information ? But How Can You Stop It?” from the Stand‘s website:

Well, the record sure ain’t good thus far. There is no shortage of stories about police officers abusing criminal records databases.

But for our money, the Home Office’s very own report (PDF) on Police Integrity makes for the most interesting reading:

THE INTEGRITY OF INFORMATION

6.6 Most police intelligence is now stored on computers and, with many members of staff being able to access it through their own terminal, it is a daunting task to try and protect it. To illustrate the potential problem, the Inspection Team is aware a spot audit in one force revealed that within 24 hours of the arrest of a high profile criminal for alleged murder, 67 officers accessed his intelligence record. When interviewed, most acknowledged they did it purely out of curiosity but it would have been equally possible for an unscrupulous member of staff to leak the information unlawfully to other criminals or the press.

The Stand are a loose organisation of volunteers originally set up to oppose the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, but who have since diversified a bit. You can find out more about them at their about page.

They also provide an automated response form to send off your views to the Entitlement Cards Unit as part of the currently ongoing consultation process. Of course, you might feel that before you took the word of a bunch of net.liberals you should find out what the government has to say on the issue.

The Home Office Entitlement Cards Unit has a website where they cover the consultation process. The actual paper is available for download from this page, but it’s 12.7 megabytes in size. You can download it in smaller chunks too, but there’s 12 of them. They also provide a FAQ (html), and a summary (PDF, 310kb) of the process, but if you’re not going to believe the summaries produced by the anti camp, why believe the government’s? This is an awful lot of material to download over a slow bandwidth connection and to digest. And there’s only a couple of weeks or so left until the consultation process closes, on the 31st January. Of course if you really want to see what the government is saying on this, you’ll just have to download it.

The Stand isn’t the only place that has more condensed information about the scheme. They point to a FAQ at the Privacy International website, which covers many of the issues brought up by the scheme.

One reason I thought it important to post this is that it appears that the government are claiming that there is widespread support for the scheme, despite nobody that I have asked in the last couple of days even being aware that there was a consultation process going on. Whatever your views on this, I hope that you’d agree that it’s too important to allow to slip under the radar, and that it needs to be discussed properly before the government’s spin machine cranks up a gear or two. See what the Stand have to say on their homepage about this support.

I make no pretense that any of the sites referenced above, other than the Home Office, are anything but negative towards the scheme. If you know of any places, independent of vested interests, where I can find positive discussion of the scheme, please let me know and I’ll post the links as updates, as I think that it’s important that people should make up their own minds.

The respondents were asked to gauge how much they agree with the statement “I am interested in politics”, and I suspect that this has skewed the results somewhat as interpretations of what falls under the definition of “politics” vary. Certainly the main thrust seems to be that there is widespread disillusionment with Parliamentary Party Politics, and who can be surprised. The major political parties in the UK don’t offer any radical differences in their macro-level policies; the devil is, as they say, always in the detail. The only really major issue where there is some divergence is the Euro, but then whoever is in power when this comes to a head will have to take the question to a referendum anyway. With what appears to be such little real choice, who can blame the young for disregarding the process? This can’t be helped by the constant reports of attempted media manipulation – particularly the more cynical forms – and the fact that debates in the Commons often seem like a game of Who’s Soundbite is it anyway, that is when the speakers are not being drowned out by incoherent heckling.

The study did suggest that the young are more interested in politics of a non-party political nature – social issues, exactly the sort of politics where they feel they can participate and possibly see the effects of their actions. Parliament has to seem less remote for people to want to be involved. Precisely how this can be achieved is, of course, open to debate, but it’s important if we want to reverse the trend away from participation in national politics. A more diverse mixture of views in Parliament itself would probably help, and that’s one of the reasons I see potential value in electoral reform – whatever it’s faults, Proportional Representation has the potential to introduce a wider spread of views into the process, and it would be good to see this back on the agenda.

Unfortunately yesterday the action taken by University staff took a back seat as the news has been completely dominated by the Fire Service strike, and in London by the disruption this has caused to the tube, with deeper stations closed and drivers staying away due to fears over safety.

For anyone interested in more on the University staff dispute, have a look here at the AUT website, or at the Guardian’s report on the subject. Those who would trust neither of these sources are, of course, free to google up their own.

Interest: I am a member of the AUT.