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UK Government Wants To Bypass Data Protection Act
rar42 writes "Clause 152 of the Coroners and Justice Bill, currently being debated by the UK Parliament, would allow any Minister by order to take from anywhere any information gathered for one purpose, and use it for any other purpose. Personal information arbitrarily used without consent or even knowledge: the very opposite of 'Data Protection.' An 'Information Sharing Order', as defined in Clause 152, would permit personal information to be trafficked and abused, not only all across government and the public sector — it would also reach into the private sector. And it would even allow transfer of information across international borders. NO2ID has launched a Facebook group to challenge this threat to data protection."
This legislation is truly terrifying. It allows the government to aggregate all data that they keep about you. It would mean that the government was exempt of the key points of the Data Protection Act.
We must do better than this.
This game will waste your life. Don't clicky!
of protesting privacy on a companies site that base their revenue (and databases) on people handing them private data.
facebook isnt worth million$ for their pretty graphics
not to mention that if your level of protest is a few mouse clicks, no one is going to take you seriously.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
...if you didn't see this coming. I don't think anyone believed for a minute that any government worker would idly sit on a data goldmine, and not utilize to its full capability. Which is why the proper response to any request for linking databases or collecting any data outside of that necessary for filing charges is "Are you crazy?"
I'd also like to point out that facebook groups are the new Internet petitions: completely meaningless. Either call or mail your representative, or take it like a good consumer.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
Really people, stop bitching, and start encrypting everything, using bank accounts in countries like Switzerland, and doing everything possible to minimize the data collected on you. Of course, you'll be labeled a terrorist for going "off grid", but if you want privacy anymore these days, you need to control your exposure. You. Personally.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
what credible threats to the life and liberty of the UK citizenry could possibly justify this?
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Its not about privacy at all.
The government has discovered that by enacting legislation like this, they can generate almost limitless energy by sticking magnets on George Orwell's coffin and wrapping the whole thing in a copper coil. (There may be a requirement to immerse the whole apparatus in mineral oil to dissipate the heat generated by the ridiculously high speeds at which Orwell is expected to rotate).
Genius! Pure genius!
A portal to a slippery slope?
Sounds fun!
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The so called "democratic republics" HATE the freedom they profess to love.
Until the digital age, actual freedom was pretty hard. With the internet, the ability to reach the masses with ideas and data is virtually effortless.
In the U.S.A. at least, "We The People" better get off our asses and do something. In the UK, the BBC says the subjects have been careless with their freedoms.
This stuff is bullshit (sorry), march, protest, resist!!!!
True. Protesting on Facebook works on Facebook -- hence the Facebook protests that occur every other week about some trivial change to something on the site.
No2ID have the right idea. But... they really, really need to get their PR machine working. There's next to nothing ever mentioned about them anywhere. They need to be organizing much more high profile stuff. They need to be getting in the press regularly and frequently.
Having a Facebook group is fine, but it will achieve nothing by itself. Get it together people, because you do have a lot of support, you just need to channel it much, much better than you are currently doing.
I believe that the slippery slope argument is a logical fallacy in most cases. (To implement laws that you don't want through what? Political momentum?)
The slippery slope argument is a logical fallacy only when it's used as deductive reasoning. But when you apply inductive reasoning, which is arguably much more applicable to politics, the slippery slope holds up nicely.
Every time A has happened, B has resulted.
If we let A happen again, B will probably happen.
Pretty rock-solid, if you ask me. If you replace A with "The government has reduced the people's right to privacy, in order to increase the government's power" and B with "The people have grown to accept their reduced rights, and the government has still wanted more power", you have the current situation.
If we (or rather, "they," as I'm not British) accept this invasion, then the government will likely be left wanting more, and the people will grow ever more complacent. It's happened every time thus far, why think that it'll be different this time?
If half of the "UK is out to get it's citizens" articles here are to be believed - you might as well give up and get out as it appears that the fascists have taken over the UK government and nothing you can do will make it otherwise short of a revolution.
Or just challenge it in the European Court of Human Rights. They're likely to view such a change as a clear violation of the Data Protection Directive unless they think they can seriously walk such broad lifting of protections under the exemptions.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
it is just one step from here to a fascist regime. every kind of laws that violate magna carta has been implemented. british public did nothing. i cant believe my eyes.
Read radical news here
You forget, we never elected the current administration in the first place. Fortunately, we will certainly get a chance to unelect them in the fairly near future.
Perhaps, in the spirit of the "changing the law to get one person is OK because public opinion that we've stirred up is against him" news articles we've seen this week, the next administration could change the law retrospectively so we could try the current lot for crimes against humanity?
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
No2ID have the right idea. But... they really, really need to get their PR machine working. [...] They need to be organizing much more high profile stuff. They need to be getting in the press regularly and frequently.
I don't know which press you've been reading, but NO2ID have been mentioned in just about every article on anything related to this subject that I've seen for the past several years. I'd guess only Liberty manage to attract more coverage opposing these issues, and even that might not be true any more.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
The govt. will never stop at the originally intended intent of the law, no matter how much they promise to limit the reach of the law for the intended use that 'everyone can agree with'.
The govt. ALWAYS will later, expand upon said law to use it in new and creative ways never intended, or try to stretch it to be used to prosecute someone that might have done something, but, there currently isn't a direct law that applies (like with that lady who harrased a teen online, and said teen killed herself).
Heck...look at the new and creative ways in the past decade that they have been expanding the RICO act which was put in place only to target the mob.
We should insist that most new laws are not only VERY narrowly defined, but that they also have sunset provisions....to give the public at least a fighting chance to not only keep laws from expanding in scope, but, to also have hope that some that are downright bad...have a chance to go away.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Why exactly did Great Britain fight Hitler?
Churchill said some crap about liberties, freedom & stuff like that.
(of course he was a racist pig and a cancer-inducing chronic smoker who slept when London burned).
Seems Hitler's ideas won after all. Lets step back a moment and analyze him:
1) He kept saying that the Soviets are a menace and communism must be wiped out.
Which became the mantra of UK and USA after WW2.
2) He racially profiled people: USA does the same under Truman, FDR and Bush. UK does it explicitly. Hell churchill was an exponent of freedom for all, but vehemently (and violently) denied the same to British Colonies.
3) He believed in Rule of law (the Reich laws of racism were based on US laws). So does UK and USA.
4) He refused to prosecute the Reich Police and Armed Forces who violated the law. Tasering police and fasle-evidence-planting police and murdering soldiers go scot-free in UK and USA.
5) He always thought that the State was bigger than the Individual. Hell yeah!
6) He was a proponent of tracking the smallest activity of the individual. So does UK.
So, it is proven as a theorem that Hitler's ideals are what UK is following.
Looks like he won after all!
Wow! Our brave Hurriance pilots, the brave lonely men in Bombers who did not return home, the men who braved Omaha and Gallipoli, and the countless WACs who wept when their men died will all be happy to learn this.
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
But at least it's a polite police state.
Never shake hands with a man you meet in a fertility clinic.
The most powerful argument I have heard for use of surveillance technology is that people that don't break the law should not fear it. The problem is what if the laws change to suit the people in power. We don't need to give the government power that it does not need, but if we need to give them power to protect us it must come at a great cost to them. Regulate the access of the information. Make the process completely transparent. If abuse occurs make the system stop functioning or let the abused go free. It is safe guards like these that ensure the legal system. Why can't it be applied to all government functions.
As a concrete exampke, I offer the spectacles of Tony Blair putting down three separate back-bencher revolts against him. Labour traditionally had no business supporting the US, particularly over Iraq. Most of the Labour voters were against Iraq. But for some reason Tony thought differently. And was able to impose his will. How would be interesting to know.
Please note, I am not claiming US-style presidential systems are better. They are certainly less democratic in the sense that the people's will is often thwarted.
On this privacy issue, UK citizens may need to fall back to the EU courts and constitution. Rather ironic, the birthplace of freedom (Magna Carta) have to rely on the continent with fewer and a horrible history of citizens serving the state.
Every time the Sun has set, it has risen.
The Sun set a few hours ago for me, yet I'm confident that it will rise again.
I don't need a deductive proof to know it.
Or another example, if I flip a coin and have it land heads 100 times in a row, I can be pretty confident that if I flip it again, it will land on heads again. "Gamblers' Fallacy!" you might mistakenly claim. But it's not... the odds a of a fair coin landing on heads a hundred times in a row are on the order of 1 in 10^30. More likely, I have found a biased coin.
To consider your "gulp of saltwater at the ocean" example, you are thinking only of an isolated incident. That doesn't make a pattern. Now, if you swallowed a mouthful of saltwater every single time you went to the beach, twenty times in a row, then yes, I'd say it's likely that you will swallow yet another on your 21st visit.
Deductive logic is great for mathematicians. For everything else, inductive logic is our best tool.
Posting as AC gives you an extra hour, we'll be round at 5 instead. Yours, the Plod.
Jonathanjk.com
iPlod - the UK internet police.
They do use that argument, but the favourite phrase by far is "without these tools, the police will be hampered in their efforts to protect us from terrorists, criminals and illegal immigrants".
With the implied argument that if you're a 'civil liberties campaigner' who dares argue against the database state, you're in favour of the terrorists, criminals and illegal immigrants getting away scot-free.
Remember kids, it's all fun and games until someone commits wholesale galactic genocide.
Protesting within 1km of Parliament in the UK is illegal, unless you've been given Police permission. Even people with blank white placards, protesting that they're not allowed to protest, have been arrested.
Protester Brian Haw's still in Parliament Square because his protest pre-dated the poorly-drafted Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005.
Having the DNA records of hundreds of thousands of innocent people - including young children - stored on the police database indefinitely was ruled illegal by the Court recently.
So far, the UK government has done jack all about changing the situation, and is muttering about having a consultation about maybe putting in place a machanism by which innoncent people can have their DNA removed from the database, considering the merits, in exceptional circumstances. But the police of course constantly trump how important the database is to
fighting crime and preventing terrorism, and of course they care about civil liberties, but they have to balance those in a fair manner against the need to fight crime effectively.
There are already such rules in place, but the case has to be pretty damn exceptional indeed to get your details off, even if you've never been convicted of anything.
Any such ruling by the court of human rights regarding other illegal data collection and mining would also likely be ignored, as the council of ministers and even the parliament is leaning towards ever greater data retention laws, such as the one passed in 2005.
Remember kids, it's all fun and games until someone commits wholesale galactic genocide.
No2ID has been running for several years now without doing anything to discredit itself and its members, such as aligning itself with the far right, carrying out violent protests, or endorsing a particular party. Those are the sort of wrecking tactics that we might expect the Government to use if it secretly controlled them.
However, its main problem is that it is an unfashionable issue. The main stream media is to blame for this. Instead of warning people about the ID register, they have encouraged complacency and the "doesn't bother me, I have nothing to hide" attitude which is so dangerous in an effective democracy.
No surprise, then, that No2ID rarely gets a mention. To their credit, the BBC do link to the No2ID site when it's relevant, and they do get quotes from the No2ID people, but they tend only to include these as a token "opposing viewpoint" and not a real argument.
The tao of democracy: the government you can vote for is not the real government.
When senior police (aka politicians in uniforms) start claiming that we "need" these things in order to stay safe I have to laugh. Especially when people like Dame Stella Rimington, a lady who knows a darn sight more about any "terrorist threat" (ex-MI5 head), comes out and says what a load of rubbish they're talking. Makes me wonder if there actually *is* hope for us on this little island.
Silly rabbit
such data over a long period of time can pretty much be construed to incriminate anyone. What a waste of government resources.
A waste? Far from it. Having data to incriminate ANYONE is not a problem--it is the goal. Sounds like they got exactly what they wanted, resources be damned.
Cancelling the latest series of Celebrity I've Got A Bargain Ballroom In My Big Jungle Attic.
Or putting the price of beer & cigs up too far.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
No, we elected the current Parliament. The government is elected by a constituency of one, the Prime Minister, who is also elected by a constituency of one, the Queen, who takes into account the party distribution within Parliament.