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UK Gov't Launches 'Your Freedom' Website To Seek Laws Worth Repealing
Firefalcon writes "The UK Government launched Thursday the 'Your Freedom' website, headed by the Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg, to 'identify laws that should be repealed.' In a recent tweet, Police State UK pointed out an article in the New Statesman which appeals for people to call on the Government to repeal the ill thought-out Digital Economy Act that was rushed through Parliament without sufficient scrutiny. While part of the Act is regarding the digital TV switchover, other sections allow for users to be restricted or disconnected from the Internet at the behest of copyright owners, which goes against the principle of 'innocent until proven guilty' that has been in place since the Magna Carta."
Gun registration, no. Background checks on the buyer, yes. Actually, to apply for most jobs you have to submit the same papers you need to get a gun (clean criminal record, valid ID) and guns are not "designed to kill", they're designed to shoot bullets. Guns are actually a most inefficient way to kill humans, poison is better and you can make very nasty stuff with commercially available chemicals.
And who said "Average Joe" needs to be "protected"? In the UK, what the population needs is less protection, more education, less classism and less alcohol.
Geeks are so full of shit that "beating the crap out of them" takes a whole new meaning.
They are actually moderating now, marking duplicates, removing real nonsense (suggestions to repeal a law that doesn't exist) etc. They didn't on Day 1 because of the volume of traffic.
Unfortunately, that still allows a lot of idiocy to be on display.
But there is also plenty of good highlighting of idiotic laws and regs. Have a read - you might enjoy it.
"Cock Up Your Beaver" does not mean what you think. This sig is intended to clog filters and annoy do-gooders
Since when is gun registration violating innocent until proven guilty?
Is it the same way as driver and vehicle licensing violates it?
That is... not at all?
Just because the courts have ruled that vehicle licensing doesn't violate the principle of "innocent until proven guilty" doesn't necessarily make it so. After all, there was plenty of precedent that slavery didn't violate the principle of "all men are created equal" too.
It may have been reasonable to require license tags on vehicles when the only real application was for identifying drivers who have been involved in an accident. But now that cameras are pervasive and the databases linking license tags to owners/drivers are too, license tags of people who have not committed a crime are routinely abused by both the government and private entities. The scope has creeped far beyond the original justification and thus what once was considered a reasonable trade-off between the public good and individual rights is no longer so.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Although it's possible they may review it, the bill won't be scrapped. Before the election, I emailed my local Conservative MP (Nick Soames) about the Digital Economy Bill. Here's the response:
Thank you for your email of the 8th April about the Digital Economy Act. I share your concern about this piece of legislation and I want to make clear the approach that my Party has taken.
As you will be aware the Bill received Royal Assent yesterday.
Britain has been made to wait too long for legislation updating the regulatory environment for the digital and creative industries. I regret that once the Government got around to considering these issues, it did not allocate sufficient time in the House of Commons for proper legislative scrutiny. It says a great deal about the Government's support for the creative industries that despite considering many of these issues as far back as 2006 they only just brought this piece of legislation forward.
My Party took the decision to seek to remove those clauses of the Digital Economy Bill that we did not support or feel received proper legislative scrutiny, while supporting the Bill as a whole. Rejecting the Bill would have been an unacceptable set-back for the important measures it contains.
We supported the Bill's efforts to tackle online copyright infringement. This is an extremely serious issue that costs the creative industries hundreds of millions of pounds each year. We want to make sure that Britain has the most favourable intellectual property framework in the world for innovators, digital content creators and high tech businesses.
The measures in the Bill aimed at tackling online copyright infringement received robust scrutiny in the House of Lords. My Party was concerned about the lack of Parliamentary oversight of the original clauses and as such the Act now has a super-affirmative resolution in it. This means Parliament will debate any order that the Secretary of State lays that would allow people to be disconnected. These measures can also not be introduced for 12 months [ie 12 months after it became law]. This means that we are by no means rushing in to these decisions and that the next Parliament will be able to consider them beforehand.
The measures in the Act designed to tackle illegal peer to peer file sharing set up a proportionate regime that would, only following public consultation, repeated warnings and due process, lead to people having their internet connection temporarily suspended. It will not, as many have suggested, lead to people being disconnected without an appeal. Even if people are disconnected they will be able to sign up to another ISP immediately without penalty.
While I have no doubt that these measures could have been improved if the Government had allocated time for this Bill to be debated in Committee, blocking these measures in their entirety would have risked hundreds of thousands of jobs in the TV, film, music and sports industries and was therefore not something we were willing to do.
Once again, thank you for taking the time to contact me.
Yours sincerely,
Nicholas Soames
Fun fact: Nick Soames is Winston Churchill's grandson.