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.

Only those with their heads in the sand over the last couple of years can fail to have missed the steady stream of reports of personal data lost by both Government and private companies.

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.

As reported elsewhere (Open Rights Group, Boing Boing), there is a set of back-door amendements to a European Telecoms law that will potentially introduce invasive monitoring of internet usage and the removal of internet access following three unsubstantiated accusations of illegal filesharing. These amendments have not been properly discussed or debated given their wide-ranging impact on civil liberties and net neutrality.

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

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.