ralpress.org

If stories like this don’t goad UK citizens into action, future generations will conclude that we simply deserved the state micro-management hell that we are walking into.

“Outgoing Director of Public Prosecutions Sir Ken Macdonald warned that the expansion of technology by the state into everyday life could create a world future generations ‘can’t bear’.

In his wide-ranging speech, Sir Ken appeared to condemn a series of key Government policies, attacking terrorism proposals - including 42 day detention - identity card plans and the ‘paraphernalia of paranoia’.

Instead, he said, the Government should insist that ‘our rights are priceless’ and that: ‘The best way to face down those threats is to strengthen our institutions rather than to degrade them.’”

Full story here: Centuries of British freedoms being ‘broken’ by security state, says Sir Ken Macdonald

Astonishingly, this story isn’t on the current front page of the Telegraph web site (although they’ve found space for Sonic the Hedgehog, UFO photographs and football results), or even among the headlines of the News section of the site. You have to drill down from Home > News > Politics to find it! (I understand however, that it did make the front page of the print edition.)

Everyone who buys a mobile telephone will be forced to register their identity on a national database under government plans to extend massively the powers of state surveillance. Phone buyers would have to present a passport or other official form of identification at the point of purchase.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article4969312.ece

By any metric the surveillance policies being enacted by the current government are strongly characteristic of both authoritarian and totalitarian governments. This has gone way beyond a matter of polite debate. Our basic freedoms are being systematically destroyed by a coterie of ex-academics, ex-broadcasters, ex-journalists and career politicians i.e. the current government (most of whom really should know better…)

Capturing the database state: community photocall

Get snapping! It’s dead easy to make your images available on Flickr to be used by the Open Rights Group for Freedom Not Fear day. Simply:

• Tag it: “FNFBigPicture” (no quotes of course, and tag-case is unimportant)
• Choose the “Attribution Creative Commons” license

Et voila. You’ve hopefully helped strike a small but important blow for an open, accountable society. At the very least, you’ll have registered your concern.

Here are those that have been tagged so far: Freedom not Fear on Flickr

A United Nations agency is quietly drafting technical standards, proposed by the Chinese government, to define methods of tracing the original source of Internet communications and potentially curbing the ability of users to remain anonymous.

The latest move by the technology-drunk New Authoritarians. The latest strap to be tightened on the surveillance, tracking and control straightjacket.

The U.S. National Security Agency is also participating in the “IP Traceback” drafting group, named Q6/17, which is meeting next week in Geneva to work on the traceback proposal. Members of Q6/17 have declined to release key documents, and meetings are closed to the public.

“Declined to release key documents”, and “meetings are closed to the public”? Doesn’t that make it about one step away from a conspiracy?

The potential for eroding Internet users’ right to remain anonymous, which is protected by law in the United States and recognized in international law by groups such as the Council of Europe, has alarmed some technologists and privacy advocates.

I feel alarmed too, that a meeting being conducted behind closed doors has such serious potential ramifications for personal liberty.

Bellovin said in a blog post this week that “institutionalizing a means for governments to quash their opposition is in direct contravention” of the U.N.’s own Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

The UN’s commitment to the “principles of reason” depends upon the views of a variety of people, many of whom actually have little such commitment. If the clauses within the Declaration were in safe hands, we wouldn’t see developments such as these or these.

I think it was Yamamoto Tsunetomo writing in the Hagakure who likened allowing sufficient public license to the presence of flora and rocks in a pond. A pond that has nowhere for fish and other animals to hide contains little life. Stamp down too hard, stamp down everywhere you see the potential for wrongdoing, and the citizens will end up creeping around, fearful of the state, wary of stepping out of line. Society will be populated with cowed, nervous sheep, waiting to be herded, fearful of acting without permission. It’s not only Orwellian, it’s H.G. Wellsian!

Who wants to live in such a society? Have our politicians and bureaucrats forgotten their history? Don’t they have any common sense? As the often repeated joke goes, 1984 was supposed to be a warning, not a blueprint for government!

“I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it.”

—Thomas Jefferson

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Edit: In a world in which “intellectual property” holders are becoming increasingly bullish and are accruing powers to initiate police action, to issue take down notices and even block access to The Network, these developments should also be viewed by alarm by Free software creators and users, because we know that collaborating to create unrestricted software has ruined many a corporate business plan…

Cory Doctorow in the Guardian on the three way deal between the government, the music industry and ISPs:

Under the new scheme, the rule of law is replaced by a cosy inter-industry deal. Whereas before, anyone who wanted your ISP to spy on your internet connection would have had to show evidence to a judge and get a court order, now any joker who claims to be an aggrieved copyright holder can do so.

And whereas actual criminals are punished by judges who make rulings that are proportional to the offence, and which are calculated to minimise external harm, the new scheme allows ISPs and their pals in the record industry to randomly shake up your connection like a snow-globe, dropping some or all of your services – whether you’re using your VoIP phone to speak to your dying granny in Australia or downloading the latest hit single from the guy who did the “Crazy Frog Song”.

Then there’s the question of trust:

They claim that the surveillance data will only be used to police copyright and not to spy on every communication you make. But Transport for London claimed that Oyster cards would only be used to simplify paying for travel, and not to bulk-surveil Londoners, and yet here we are. As novelists say, “A gun on the mantle in act one is bound to go off by act three.”

And when it comes to “trust”, let’s not forget the following:

• Voice and data networks were built to help citizens communicate and share, not to provide our government with unprecedentedly powerful means of spying on our most private activities.
• Filesharing is an inherently legal activity; despite this, there is strong evidence that ISPs are interferring with the right of their customers to engage in this activity.
• The Terrorism Act was supposedly drawn up to combat terrorism, not to enable local councils to spy on parents attempting to obtain a place for their child at a particular school
• Roadside CCTV cameras were originally supposed to be used to penalize dangerous driving, not to create a nationwide, automated system for control, punishment and extortion.
• The data within the police DNA database was supposed to be used to fight crime, not sold to  commercial researchers to help the police cover their operational expenses.
• Electoral roll data is entrusted to our local authorities and is supposed to be used to facilitate the functioning of political democracy, not as yet another means for our local authorities to raise extra-taxation revenue.

But we needn’t worry, the ISPs have given us their word that they won’t spy on us or allow our data to be viewed by third parties. With such reassuring pledges, who needs legal or constitutional protection?

One of the great ironies here, is that the ease of data access, copying and manipulation that the recording industry is demanding be curtailed, is the same ease of access, copying and manipulation that has seduced our authorities into thinking that they can control and punish citizens remotely, and earn a quick buck by selling our most sensitive and constitutionally essential data to the highest bidder. Given that the government is siding with the record industry on this matter, it’s not irony, it’s arch hypocrisy. If hypocrisy were the only misdeed, we could just raise our eyes to the heavens and carry on with life, but this hypocrisy is eroding our civil liberties, and it doesn’t get much more serious than that.

 

 

Council ban on atheist websites

EDIT: This intolerable nonsense has finally persuaded me to join the National Secular Society. I submitted the membership form this evening.

Measures like the infamous music tax will hopefully never gain serious purchase among copyright lobbyists and those within government (even Feargal Sharkey thinks it’s an unworkable idea). But the increasing efforts of the content industry to capture the internet (or at least take greater control of it) with the help of government, should be viewed with alarm and suspicion, in my view.

I’m reminded of the old joke in which a young man is talking to a friend and says:

“When I was fourteen, I thought the old man was so ignorant I could barely stand to have him around; now I’m twenty-one and I’m amazed at how much he’s learned in the last seven years”.

I’m beginning to feel like this with regard to Richard M Stallman’s views on copyright. When I first read some of RMS’s writings, probably around the turn of the century, I thought that they were ahead of their time at best, extreme at worst. Now though, his views on the destiny of human-kind to use computers to their full potential, on the essential incompatibility of traditional copyright notions and digital technology, on why so much “piracy” is not theft, and his views on the attempts by copyright holders to lobby for enforcement measures that erode our civil liberties and even damage our civic society, no longer seem so far fetched at all. In fact, the last time I read “Why software should not have owners“, an essay the thesis of which I once rejected as too extreme, I just found myself nodding at each claim, as if it were a statement of the obvious and largely a matter of common sense.

With each new copyright-related news story, I’m increasingly coming around to the view that we can have an information society, but not an information economy, at least not where the latter implies the primacy of powerful copyright trolls and enforcers, sitting in glass and steel towers, remotely monitoring the digital equipment in, and data flows to and from, citizens’ homes. Combine this with the increasingly pervasive government surveillance and extortion-masquerading-as-punishment of citizens, those tracking devices in our pockets AKA mobile phones, DNA databases and other Orwellian developments besides, and we’re rapidly creating a society that given the choice, few sensible people would aspire to live within.

I’m beginning to think that the day is not far off when admitting selling digital equipment or services to a government department or to major copyright holders will be about as socially acceptable as admitting to being a developing world arms dealer. Extreme? Check back in seven years and let’s see.

UPDATE: Underscoring the timeliness of this post, here are the latest proposed measures by the UK government in its attempt to introduce the same degree of surveillance of the Web as many other of the UK’s public spaces currently enjoy. Next stop: On-the-spot fines for writing “offensive” blog articles? Freedom of expression was overrated anyway, wasn’t it?