Just received this comment from Jimmy Kaplowitz over in the US: “yuck, your country continues to turn into Big Brother: BBC News: Giant database plan ‘Orwellian’”
Hell, yeah. That’s a reason why my support for the party is so weak at the moment. I’ve been working and writing against this since ST@ND and the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, which we were told was essential for crime-fighting, but actually helps gov.uk spy on parents making school place applications.
Currently, I’m telling people Gov.UK Consults on Forced ISP Snooping: Please Say NO. If anyone has any doubt that the database state will be abused, look at some examples of Labour’s “terrorists” (at least, they had supposedly anti-terror measures used against them) since 2001:-
- Wolfie, an 82-year-old peace-campaigning heckler at a Labour conference
- Indymedia
- a Frenchman in Suffolk who downloaded the Anarchists’ Cookbook
- an Algerian pilot
- the country of Iceland
and that’s ignoring gov.uk’s frequent data leaks.
Noodles replied: “There’s a quote somewhere that goes along the lines of “If the Tory policy is looking sane compared to what you’re doing, you’re doing it wrong” that’s been applied to the Labour fascist state stuff.”
Our terrorism measures are a joke, with loopholes that gov.uk can drive a truck through. They should be repealed and clearly-limited ones enacted, shouldn’t they?
Our terrorism measures are a joke? That reminds me of a favourite theme of the late, great Chris Lightfoot.
For those who don’t know of Lightfootian goodness, check out his Let Freedom Ring post from August 2005. There’s much more good stuff there.
I think that these measures were a slap in the face. In the same breath as announcing that the Gov’t had given up on 42-day detention without trial, BBC News was reporting the plans for a single database.
My response to it is a letter to each MP (all 640+) saying that, as someone who may use a mobile phone in their constituency, they must represent me in Parliament and to ask that they vote against the proposal.
K3n.
I think we need to stop thinking of this as a national problem. Part of the regulation is forced upon us by the EU (well actually, I think it was Sweden and the UK that pushed for this to get into the EU legislation in the first place). Here in Sweden we have had a HUGE debate over the summer about similar laws (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FRA_law). The interesting thing is that EVERYONE here is against it, including ordinary people, the journalists association, the lawyers association, all leading Swedish newspapers, professors in political science etc. Yet it looks like the parliament wont change their mind.
In the debate people have pointed out the fact that we live very close to Russia and have a very good telecommunications infrastructure. I.e. a large portion of the Russian traffic passes through Sweden on it’s way to the rest of Europe. We are trading intelligence information with other nations and I’m sure some very powerful nations puts pressure on us to gather as much information as possible. The conclusion is that this is an international issue.
How do we deal with the fact that foreign embassies, the terrorists, and us civilians all use the same communications medium? How do we guarantee the right to private communication (which is part of the European Convention on Human Rights)?
If we want to fight for our human rights we need to join forces across the borders. How do we do that? I don’t know.
A possible way of joining forces across the borders is to support organisations like http://www.Amnesty.org/ and http://www.PrivacyInternational.org/ Are they effective? I’ve had no involvement with any of them yet, so I simply don’t know. I’d really like one I could join – PI isn’t membership-based and I’m confused about whether Amnesty is or not.
I just saw http://www.idealgovernment.com/index.php/blog/imp_other_databases_and_the_bad_karma_of_spammer_smith/ today about the IMP. I particularly like “Are we so petrified, have we so lost our common sense, courage and phlegmatic British values that we should install a massive snooping engine”?
I’d love to see that in a referendum…