The Labour Party has released an advert which attacks David Cameron’s policies on crime. No surprise there you might say, we’re in a pre-election period after all, but what’s done in the video below is actually quite sinister. They present their authoritarian project as absolute and unquestionable – our streets are so unsafe that any human rights-breaching use of the National DNA Database or overextension of CCTV (how many actually work, and how effective is it statistically in either reducing crime or prosecuting it?) are prices worth paying. Cameron standing against Labour’s surveillance society’s and database state’s human rights breaches makes him somehow weak and pro-criminal. This video makes me absolutely furious, but it does help in knowing once and for all that their position isn’t accidental; it’s tactical.
Where’s the evidence that retaining DNA profiles of innocent people on the scale (and without any debate) perpetrated by the Home Office has actually led to more matches and more convictions? Oh there isn’t any. But hey vote Labour folks, after all they have policies which may breach human rights, but they make you safer. Except they don’t. Instead we have police forces which fail adequately to protect the public, but admitting to that wouldn’t be a vote winner in marginal seats. This started out as a government committed to human rights; its third attempt at retaining power proves it’s now more interested in power. That’s something we should be afraid of. New Labour, New Danger.
Almost four in five people around the world believe that access to the internet is a fundamental right, a poll for the BBC World Service suggests.
The survey – of more than 27,000 adults across 26 countries – found strong support for net access on both sides of the digital divide.
Countries such as Finland and Estonia have already ruled that access is a human right for their citizens.
International bodies such as the UN are also pushing for universal net access.
“The right to communicate cannot be ignored,” Dr Hamadoun Toure, secretary-general of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), told BBC News.
“The internet is the most powerful potential source of enlightenment ever created.”
He said that governments must “regard the internet as basic infrastructure – just like roads, waste and water”.
“We have entered the knowledge society and everyone must have access to participate.”
Interestingly though in Britain 55% of those surveyed believed there was also a case for some governmental regulation of the Internet. The gap between attitudes is what Mandelson is counting on in order to get the Bill through before the general election. Due process and the rule of law would continue their decline under this draconian piece of legislation, and this and successive governments would not just be allowed to censor the Internet as they saw fit (and in secret), but they would also severely damage the most important new communication resource since the telephone. For what? Appeasement of the Labour Party’s corporate friends? What’s getting lost in this argument are the facts about filesharing:
Watch these two videos of campaigner Charlie Veitch being stopped by the Metropolitan Police under Section 44 of the Terrorism Act 2000, despite having demonstrably not broken a single law. A comedian speaking loudly through a megaphone is now longer a lawful reason under the European Court of Human Rights’ ruling to stop and search people on anti-terrorism grounds, but watch the exchange. It’s quite revealing:
Charlie Veitch of The Love Police shows up a Police Community Support Officer (PCSO) for trying to illegally detain him merely for speaking loudly on a megaphone. The irony couldn’t have been lost on many on Camden High Street that they should have decided to exercise their power (of which arrest isn’t strictly one, and certainly not in this instance) on Veitch, when drugs pushers are walking past them and actively doing business by the dozen. Welcome to Britain 2010.
Two women, one a Muslim, have become the first people to be barred from boarding a flight because they refused to go through a full-body airport scanner.
Manchester airport confirmed today that the women, who were booked to fly to Islamabad with Pakistan International Airlines, were told they could not get on the plane after they refused to be scanned for medical and religious reasons.
The women had been selected at random, said the airport.
The Muslim woman decided to forfeit her ticket and left her luggage at the airport. Her companion also left the airport saying she did not go through the scanner on medical grounds because she had an infection.
The full-body scanners were introduced at Manchester and Heathrow last month after the Christmas Day bombing attempt in Detroit. The £80,000 Rapiscan machines show a clear body outline and have been described by critics as the equivalent of “virtual strip searching”.
While American transport authorities offer passengers a choice between going through the full-body scanner or going through a metal-arch scanner and a physical search, the British government has said that a refusal to go through the body scanner would bar passengers from boarding aircraft.
I’m not sure what to say, other than isn’t this the most blatant violation of Article 2 of Protocol 4 of the European Convention on Human Rights? There has been no debate about the introduction of full body scanners at airports – what advantage do they actually provide, against the level of the real threat we face after using pre-existing technologies, scanners and security procedures? Yet again we’re all presumed to be terrorists unless we prove otherwise. Hopefully a legal challenge will be soon be launched against their introduction, and to indeed to rescue the right of privacy which this government holds in such low regard.
All the fundamental questions remain. Questions about cost. About due process. About data protection. About checks giving a false sense of security. About malicious accusations and people being wrongly identified as paedophiles. And, most profoundly, about the wider implications of living in a society in which casual, freely given offers of help are met not with appreciation but with deep suspicion.
Common sense tells us that the ideal of a zero-risk childhood is untenable, if not impossible. Of course, children have a just claim for a degree of protection from harm. But when it comes to protecting them, our responsibility should surely be to tackle the most serious threats first and foremost.
So as a parent, my response to the question “how would I feel if it were my child?” is as follows. We would all want to feel that our collective efforts to keep children reasonably safe in an uncertain world were well thought through, proportionate to the risk, and effective. On all these counts, the vetting system is still wholly unfit for purpose.
It’s not just unfit for purpose, it’s unsuitable for purpose. The ISA by definition won’t be able to fulfil its remit, all the while distracting its 250 administrators’ attention from the real abuses which are committed behind closed doors, almost always by people who don’t appear on its bureucratised radar. When we rationalise the management of risk we can’t exactly be surprised when, at enormous cost, children and other ‘vulnerable’ groups continue to be abused and killed, and a culture of suspicion continues to grow. When the most likely outcome is a generation of children and young people unable to risk assess the world for themselves, we should really think again. Bureaucracy and databases are pernicious and ineffective tools with which to manage society.
The Lords laid into the government last night, in a very emotive and passionate debate. There was anger, the same anger we are feeling.
Lords doubted that an accused infringer would have sufficient legal rights to appeal. They also made clear that the music industry and other copyright holders unleashed an “extraordinary degree of lobbying” in order to get the bill through as quickly as possible. Finally, Lords complained about the impact on libraries, universities and internet cafes with (open) wifi.
The Government front bench’s reply was disappointing to say the least. They don’t want to see unis in front of a court over infringement but don’t want to exclude them from the proposed law either.
The Government has been down playing the impact on these institutions and businesses in general and keeps saying that if we all behave sensibly it will all be fine. No it won’t.
The main problem remains that the account holder is responsible for infringements, not the infringer. The Government acknowledges that this is true, but doesn’t care.
Another worrying aspect is that the government thinks that it is unnecessary to pass on the bill to the Office of the Information Commissioner for oversight. They don’t even hide their intentions: It would delay the process of passing the bill into law.
There are some very serious concerns regarding the privacy of citizens and Lord Puttnam was right to accuse the Government of attempting to push the legislation through and not allowing proper discussion.
More importantly he said that the bill as it stands is not fit for purpose. Or a total mess you might want to add. Lord Puttnam said:
“I am absolutely convinced that, within the next two or three years, there will be another bill before this house which will be created to deal with the deficiencies of the present bill.”
Lords asked the right questions, but amendments were withdrawn or votes on amendments lost. The government’s idea to rush though with the legislation became apparent once more as they ‘discussed’ a block of 5 or more amendments at a time.
A whole lot of the bill remains unclear or unspecified and opposition peers have tried to get answers from the government. It may look like a naïve question when the Conservative front bench asks what hotels should do if they receive an infringement notice for a guest, but it points to one of the major problems of the bill.
How would internet cafes, libraries, universities deal with infringers? What happens to their connection of they receive the qualified amount of infringement reports from Ofcom? If they get disconnected how would students, for instance, continue their studies?
The government has not offered any satisfactory solutions to this problem.
The debate continues tomorrow with the most crucial pieces of the legislation, i.e. clauses 11 and 17. We will be tweeting from 4pm.
What can you do?
We want to make this bill a public debate across the country as the election approaches. That’s why we are asking you to write to your local paper and let people know that disconnection is wrong. Ask your MP and election candidates what their positions on the Digital Economy Bill is.
Proof yet again that the people tasked with keeping us safe are actually just plain stupid:
There were 3 Mancunians called Shoshin busking in Briggate [Leeds] making a rather pleasant kind of urban sound. I stood and watched for a while, made a donation and took a few pictures. After a while they were approached by an official in a red jacket who told them they had, had complaints about the music being too loud. He also told them that they weren’t allowed to have leaflets available to the public or sell CD’s.
He walked off and stood watching with a PCSO. He returned shortly afterwards. I continued taking pictures. Red decided that I wasn’t allowed to take pictures of him and the PCSO doing their job, I explained that I was and took another picture to prove it. He then instructed the PCSO to get my details and began ranting about terrorists and not wanting his picture in the paper. The PCSO asked me to come on one side and talk to me which I did. He then began babbling about terrorists, asked me for my details and asked me why I had an attitude! I told him I would not give him my details. I told him that as he is a public officer I had every right to take his picture whilst doing his job, because unlike other countries law enforcement officers are accountable here. He told me that he didn’t want his picture in the newspapers because of the terrorist threat. That makes absolutely no sense to me. I told him he should go back to his station and look up the advice given to Chief Constables in relation to the harassment of photographers. He of course had never heard of this.
It’s quite a good demonstration that in many cases there aren’t orders, there isn’t a culture; Britain’s surveillance society is just a bunch of old fashioned, stupid jobsworths abusing their authority with powers they don’t even need.
Henry Porter makes an excellent point – neither of the Big Two major political parties in Britain is talking at all about civil liberties or human rights in the run-up to the general election the month after next. Remember this is the election where we can thoroughly repudiate this authoritarian government’s surveillance agenda, and refuse to vote for anyone who doesn’t guarantee to repeal it:
It is [also] a very dangerous government – it has attacked liberty and rights like no other administration in the past hundred years, and it will continue to do so unless stopped by the electorate in 70 days’ time, for the one area which requires absolutely no skill at all is the creation of new offences, the erosion of ancient liberties and filling our lives with endless checking, vetting and surveillance.
Cameron has spoken about these things in the past but this great issue is not apparently big enough to be one of the main themes of an election campaign in which so much is obviously at stake. The only conclusion to draw is that the Tories believe either this is not important, or that the public don’t think it is important. I am not sure which puts them in a worse light because the first displays shallowness, while the second a lack of leadership.
The Tories have rejected changing the voting system and they’re uninterested in talking seriously about civil liberties – this mustn’t be an election about personalities, nor must it be reduced to who can cut public services and how fast. It must be about repairing the social damage caused by New Labour, and proving to all the major parties that the trade-off between security and liberty is a false one.
I shall be voting Green, because they have a strong chance of removing the government minister who doesn’t represent me in any way, shape or form. You should be voting for parties which are against ID cards, think vetting the population for paedophilia before being allowed to work is unthinkably wrong, which don’t demonise asylum seekers (or lock up their children), and which couldn’t condone throwing people off the internet without a trial, or secretly banning websites they don’t like. If the Tories don’t start talking all of these abuses down (and more), you can’t vote for them merely to get Brown, Straw, Johnson, Balls et al out, because they clearly won’t have any intention to do any better. The database state and state surveillance culture must be stopped – this is your best chance to take a stand and make it happen.
According to his blog, Kevin visited the Bridges Shopping Centre in Sunderland with his son to spend the £10 his father gave the boy on a family visit. While there, he seated his son on a coin-operated train ride and snapped a photo of him with his cameraphone. At this point, a Bridges security guard came by and ordered him to stop taking pictures. He said that it was mall policy, and implied that Kevin was taking pictures because he was a paedophile. Kevin told him that this was ridiculous and took his son to find his wife and get out of the mall. He also took a picture of the security guard “so that if I later wanted to make a complaint to the centre I would be able to identify him.”
Outside of the mall, Kevin was stopped by a police constable who had received a complaint from mall security that a suspicious potential paedophile had been taking pictures on its premises. The PC threatened to arrest Kevin “for creating a public disturbance” and ordered him to delete the photo of his son. The PC also averred that the Bridges Shopping Centre is a hotbed of paedophile assaults.
Has the world gone completely mad? Threatening a man with arrest for taking photographs of his own son? And in what way is the shopping centre a ‘hotbed of paedophile assaults’? Do those (whatever the plod meant) normally occur in the full glare of hundreds of busy shoppers? Where do the police think this wave of alleged paedophilia, which merits such interventions and indeed a whole Independent Safeguarding Authority, is coming from?!
It’s cast iron proof that we need to be extremely careful about what powers we give the police. They keep insisting they need to lock people up without charge for 42 days, that the DNA profiles of people unconvicted of or innocent of a crime should be retained for years, despite it already having been proven that there’s no advantage in doing so, even that photographing police officers should be a crime. And all the while they keep protesting that you have nothing to fear if you have nothing to hide, that these powers won’t be misused or abused, yet Bob Patefield’s video shows the exact opposite – multiple police officers flagrantly abusing their authority because of legislation which allows them to. It couldn’t be simpler.
Of course these police officers could have spent time looking for pickpockets, for muggers, for violent drunks or wife beaters, but why should they when they have the Terrorism Act 2000 and the Police Reform Act covering their backs? Are they reacting to a moral panic which only the police seem bothered about? Did all police at some point decide that photographers were either terrorists or paedophiles, and needed to be stopped? This wasn’t after all one of the high profile stops in London a couple of months ago – it was in the north of England. Perhaps it was just a case of how the police operate when they have laws which allow them to abuse the innocent.
It was heartening to attend the Mass Photo Gathering in January, organised by I’m a Photographer Not a Terrorist, which demonstrated just how angry and fed up people are by this abuse, but it’s certainly not ended. The police’s insistence on extra or additional powers can’t ever be taken at face value; there has to be a proportionate need for them. After all how often do terrorists use DSLRs to scout targets which can be seen clearly on Google Street View? And how many amateur photographers really go around being ‘anti-social’? Good grief.
It’s time to get worried. By way of the digital economy bill, Lord Mandelson means to punish innocent people and limit their right to a fair trial. He means to grant his successors the power to block web content by order, without restriction. His proposals are aimed at restricting copyright infringers, but in reality will damage many people who have never done anything wrong.
The reason for this is as simple as it is unjust. Mandelson and the music companies monitoring copyright infringement can perhaps identify the household, business or cafe where someone is uploading a file, but they cannot identify which person or computer did it. Their answer is to make the internet account holder – the person paying the bill – liable for everyone’s actions. And then, to disconnect the entire household.
Disconnection of whole families is not an acceptable punishment. It is the modern day equivalent of banishment: it will disrupt social lives, education and people’s livelihoods. It is designed to threaten and intimidate, and cow people into behaving, with no regard to the consequences of using the law in such a manner.
Restricting the right to a fair trial, state censorship, disproportionate state punishment against households (and businesses of all kinds) for the actions of individuals – these are the tools used by tin pot dictatorships. The Executive Director of the Open Rights Group is right – this isn’t the way our government should be behaving over anything, and we shouldn’t be fooled – the people most at risk of the bill are younger people, who have amongst the least power in society, and who are currently possibly the most ignored minority group in the run-up to the general election. The bill will affect everyone, because it’ll give the government the right to arbitrarily censor the internet as it sees fit. Abuses by such laws are already kicking off in Australia, and it would be crazy to think the same wouldn’t happen here – when laws exist which can be abused, they are invariably abused; it’s the nature of power. Killock continues:
Hardly anybody thinks this bill is a good idea – outside of the music and film lobbies; not even most musicians I have spoken to. But politicians need to hear us much more loudly if they are going to react. You can help by contacting your MP, and explaining what this bill really means, to you and to others. You can take action with Open Rights Group: do it now!
Outside parliament, hotels and educators have complained that the bill also endangers their businesses and provision of the internet to the public because of its insistence that organisations providing net access should be liable for the actions of their customers.
The bill proposes a “three strikes” rule which would mean that persistent copyright breaches would be lead to disconnection from the internet. The aim is to reduce illlicit filesharing by 70%. But in a letter (PDF) to Lord Puttnam, representatives from institutions such as the University of London, British Library and the Imperial War Museum, said: “Because public institutions often provide internet access to hundreds or thousands of individual users, the complexity of our position in relation to copyright infringements must be taken into consideration.”
It says that the bill is unclear about the role of “intermediaries” such as libraries in the bill.
The letter added: “If this is not done, a public institution such as a library, school or university’s internet connection as a whole could be jeopardised, resulting in loss of internet access to large sections of the public, particularly the 15 million citizens without an internet connection at home.”
Meanwhile, the British Hospitality Association (BHA), which represents thousands of hotel, catering and leisure establishments, worries that the requirement in the bill for hotels to provide guest details to an internet service provider (ISP) where copyright infringement is alleged could be impossible in some cases – and that hotels might be disconnected if guests are persistently infringing copyright.
Disconnection would endanger a hotel’s business which the BHA said would be a “grossly unfair consequence” of a guest’s action.
It strikes me as bizarre the level to which the government is determined to control the population, to punish protest, to clamping down on freedom of speech, to the sharing of ideas, you name it. Throwing people off the internet without a trial? Banning websites because Secretaries of State don’t like them? No accountability for these decisions worth a damn? What would this do to schools’ internet access? Hotels’? Libraries? Is New Labour so inextricably wedded to monolithic corporate interests that it’s prepared to take British culture down in the name of ‘protecting copyright’?
The business case for the Digital Economy Bill hasn’t been proven: music profits are up, as are takings at the cinema. Certainly in the latter case it’s had something to do with better product being released, but a greater lesson was shown this last year as well in the case of copyright infringement and film. X-Men Origins: Wolverine was released early in 2009 to critical derision – it was a lousy film, which deserved to crash and burn at the box office. A near-complete print was even leaked to the Internet and circulated virally worldwide, yet the film did extraordinarily well. And there is no evidence whatsoever that the pre-release leak damaged the film’s takings at all – on the contrary it’s more than likely that it increased the excitement for the final print’s release. As with music, all the evidence shows that people are willing to pay for product they like, and ‘pirated’ material is in fact of benefit to the market, allowing people to decide in advance what it is they like. Why then should the rule of law be suddenly abandoned?
For that matter should schools, universities, hotels, libraries, all sorts of public buildings and organisations, suddenly become in effect state informers? Has the government learned nothing from the ISA debacle? It’s crazy to legislate with a wrecking ball to crack a nut. Noone’s suggested the problem of illegal downloading (or paedophilia in the case of the ISA) isn’t there, but this will hurt far more than the few who really are out to breach copyright on an industrial level. It’s not just stupid, it’s insidious and will damage us all.
The Dark Lord Peter Mandelson’s Digital Economy Bill, through allowing households to be disconnected from the Internet without any judicial say, would severely undermine the rule of law in this country. Other elements of the Bill would allow Mandelson and his successors to give police-level enforcement powers to any individual or organisation they choose, and to block any websites they choose at any time, in secret, and without having to give a reason – censorship the likes of which would make a Chinese Communist Party official squirm with delight. The Don’t Disconnect Us campaign has run a contest to produce a viral protest against this authoritarian nonsense. The winning entry is below:
Recent Comments