The UK Government's Struggle With Digital Rights

With his first accepted submission, Ajehals sends this excerpt from a post by the UK Pirate Party: "... at every turn, the coalition has been exposed as having no coherent policy on digital rights. Nothing illustrates this better than its zig-zag course on Internet filtering and website blocking. ... As if any further confirmation was needed that the government's policy on digital rights, and freedom of speech is entirely made up on the fly, along came the riots and a classic knee-jerk reaction to the use of social media. ... one of the few concrete parts of David Cameron’s statement to the recalled House of Commons was a full on attack on social media. It was carefully worded, but the thrust was that the Prime Minister thought further action is necessary to combat the 'ill' done by status updates. At this point things took a turn for the authoritarian, with MP Louise Mensch saying it was 'acceptable to shut Twitter and Facebook off for an hour or two.' ... Worse still, it has been recently revealed that the Government actually asked Ofcom to make Digital Economy Act appeals harder. It also wants to rule out a public consultation – once again trying to do deals away from the public eye. I suspect it is actually this fear of the power technology can give us to hold our representatives to account that drives alarm about the Internet in the corridors of power."

Comments

Propaganda?

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously, is /. pushing political parties now?
Yes, the UK government has problems. But that's no reason to blatantly promote another political party. Even if it aligns with the general opinion of the /. community (and mine).

Re:Propaganda?

[Andy_R]

Well, I'm no wiser about the submission system policy than you, but I guess that any other party that submitted something coherent and relevant would probably get it featured too. Any pro-Pirate bias probably comes from the fact that we're submitting stuff and the others are not.

Personally, I'd love to see the other parties engaging with the Slashdot crowd, talking to a well informed non-partisan audience about digital matters could really help them make good decisions on digital (and civil rights) issues.

Every cloud has a silver lining ;-)

[MrNthDegree]

Suggesting shutting down Facebook for an hour or two sounds like the best thing the Conservatives have said/done in a long time... Facebook is as creepy as hell. They keep a lot of data pretty much indefinitely, without a lot of user cooperation and/or DPA requests. Every message ever sent between users, every wall post, every app result/request, GeoIP on logins and EXIF tags from pictures to reveal location at any given point in time, friends "check you in" to places. Even without malicious abuse of Facebook APIs for using all that data to track you (Police app anyone?) the whole thing is as creepy as hell. That and Facebook controls the flow of information quite strictly, there are phrases one can't post on Facebook due to censorship/filtering. It takes a lot of hard work to sanitise a Facebook profile and still have it be usable for all the benefits of social networking. Sure the rest of Conservative policies when it comes to IT and freedom (RIPA, DEA, Terrorism Act) are ghastly but I can't disagree with wanting to shut down Facebook, that is doing the brainwashed masses a favour...

Brave New World?

[betterunixthanunix]

Have you read Brave New World? Control was based on distraction, not policing -- it was basically on the opposite end of the spectrum from 1984. People were allowed to disagree with the government and reject the society of the world; they just had to do so on an island somewhere.