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.

The Open Rights Group, of which I am a member, maintain a page on UK Privacy Debacles listing all the incidences they are aware of.  In December last year they also published a simple on-line survey for people to use to determine how likely it is that their data has been involved in any of these losses.

I’d recommend running through the survey.  If nothing else it gives you a sense of the amount of personal data lost and the huge range of organisations involved.  Food for thought given the current popularity of big, intrusive database projects with politicians.

I wrote to my MEP via the excellent WriteToThem.com. The vote is tomorrow, so there’s not much time. That’s the problem with back-door deals like this, they tend to avoid democratic scrutiny.

Dear Neil Parish, Glyn Ford, Graham Booth, Graham Watson, Roger Knapman
and Caroline Jackson,

I understand that this coming week (7th July) the European Parliament
will be debating changes to the law governing telecommunications in the
EU, the “Telecoms Package”. It has come to my attention that elements
of these reforms include provisions relating to the “protection” of
intellectual property rights which include opening the door to
collaboration between ISPs and third party media content producers in
monitoring internet usage to detect illegal filesharing. This
monitoring would of course include all legal and normal usage of the
internet.

The provisions would also appear to open the door to the kind of
“3-strikes” policy that I understand MEPs have already indicated they
do not favour in that the removal of internet access is felt to be
disproportional (I believe this was indicated in an amendment passed on
the so-called Bono Report on the Cultural Industries, not legally
binding but certainly an indication of feeling and intent.)

These proposals will have an impact on internet access that far exceeds
their supposed aim, and have clear implications for civil liberties and
net neutrality if all usage is to be monitored. For example, the
proposals would also seem to include the legal right for ISPs to
prevent users of their networks from using software and systems that
are perfectly legal, which clearly impacts on free access to online
resources for essentially arbitrary reasons.

There is also the question of how these systems would be policed
themselves and how much democratic oversight there would be of them.
From my (admittedly not too detailed) reading, this is far from
satisfactorily answered. Would users have any recourse against threats
and intimidation from ISPs and/or media producers if they were being
unfairly treated or had internet access curtailed or limited?

Now I understand that some member states are debating similar measures,
but these are being examined in a way that allows more scrutiny and
democratic control. I do not sanction the illegal downloading of
copyright material but I think that if we are to have laws like this
they need to be framed properly following proper debate at the national
level and not brought in by the back door like this, given their wide
ranging potential impact on internet usage.

Please can I ask you to do all you can to prevent Compromise Amendments
2,3,4,5 and 7 from being voted through on the IMCO committee. I do not
believe that the rejection of these amendments will impact the adoption
of the bulk of the “Telecoms Package”.

Thanks for taking the time to read this. I understand that there is
very little time to act but I feel strongly in favour of net neutrality
and civil liberties generally and so had to voice my concern. Perhaps
if these measures were not being introduced in this way there would
have been more time to properly debate this.

Yours sincerely,

Sam Pearson

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.

Dear Jean Corston,

I’m writing in advance of the second reading of the Identity Cards Bill, which I understand will take place on Monday 20th December.

I would just like to express my opposition to this scheme. Whilst ID cards will be expensive and will involve deeply invasive regulation of our private lives, I have seen nothing that has convinced me that Identity Cards will in any way help protect us from terrorism, or assist in controlling immigration, or indeed any other of the areas that they are alleged by the Home Office to be of benefit.

I am also worried by the data protection and civil liberties implications of the scheme. Again, given that there seems to be little hope that the cards will substantially improve our lives, having so much deeply personal information available from a single source (and one which, let’s face it, has a farily abysmal record in implementing large IT projects) seems too much of a risk.

I suppose that my ideological objections can be summed up in that I see myself as a citizen of the United Kingdom, not a subject. The ID card is more suitable to a state where the opposite emphasis is true.

One final consideration is the cost of this project. Surely there are far more worthy targets of our nation’s resources. Poverty, homelessness, education, health… I’m sure you are more aware than I of many of these issues.

I hope that you will bear these concerns when debating this matter in the House.

Yours Sincerely,

Sam Pearson

Admittedly, doing this today might be a bit short notice, but it’ll be interesting to see what kind of response I get, if any.

In my opinion, such a power in any form is not compatible with our constitution. The real threat to the life of the nation, in the sense of a people living in accordance with its traditional laws and political values, comes not from terrorism but from laws such as these. That is the true measure of what terrorism may achieve. It is for Parliament to decide whether to give the terrorists such a victory.

The full text of the ruling is available in PDF format (383kb) from the BBC website.

Update: I’ve just read that the catastrophe happened due to a screw-up during a trial upgrade of some of their computers from Windows 2000 to XP. Oh, the joys of Microsoft.

In the specific circumstances of Indymedia, a process that was started in Texas resulted in the removal of servers in London, knocking out numerous Indymedia web sites. According to the US, Inydmedia has no standing to complain about this or to seek redress, or to find out what it was supposed to have been doing, or who said it was doing it. The UK Government insists the whole matter is nothing to do with it, while the US Government says the matter is closed, flashing the T-word to be on the safe side.

Pretty sick.

However, legal wrangles in the US and their hideous implications aside, what really gets to me is the fact that the equipment was seized in the UK by a foreign power on dubious legal grounds and our government doesn’t seem to want to know. It seems that the rest of the world can’t even voice their views over the US election without being told to shut up and mind their own business, but if the FBI wants to waltz over here and help itself to anything it likes they’re welcome and there’s nothing anyone can do or say about it.

Even if you are not sure about signing this petition, please at least visit the NO2ID website and read through some of the arguments against the scheme to find out a bit more about the proposals. ID cards are more than just a threat to our civil liberties: there are serious questions as to whether the scheme will bring any benefits at all and the sheer cost in terms of both cash and inconvenience is staggering.