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

Well that's not a surprise...

[Mashiki]

The UK doesn't have a policy on civil rights anymore. Those were eroded away over the last few years.

Re:Well that's not a surprise...

[Andy_R]

The interesting thing is that none of the parties (with the exception of us Pirates, of course) even has a solid position on civil rights. With almost any other issue, Labour will go one way, Conservatives the other, and the Liberals will suggest a compromise. Membership of the European Union and the legal status of fox hunting are the only other issues that the big parties can't seem to make up their minds on, and falling out over both has caused a lot of internal damage to the parties.

On digital (and to a lesser extent civil) rights, all the other parties are flip-flopping or in internal disagreement. The really odd thing about this is (unlike fox hunting or EU membership) it doesn't represent the mood of the general public, who either don't care or are strongly in favour.

I'm shocked that neither of the 2 big parties have jumped on to the digital and civil rights bandwagon, forcing the opposition to take a less popular stance against them. It's a sure-fire vote winner, that doesn't have a economic big cost to implement.

Re:Well that's not a surprise...

[gl4ss]

canadians as long as they were queens canadians. aussies as long as they weren't aboriginals, people of the great isles as long as they weren't scottish or irish and the english as long as they weren't against the state's ever changing policies. fine civil rights right there..

you do understand the difference between a free man and a serf? magna carta isn't as much about civil rights as it's about who has the right to fuck the common men up as much as they want, come industrialization and the mechanics changed just a little bit - for the better a bit as anyone could theoretically climb up, but magna carta is a lot about how all men are not equal.

Re:Well that's not a surprise...

[jez9999]

That assumes the big two parties give a shit about votes, and not their paymasters. The electorate are also highly malleable. Recently, the Tories sold them the idea that the current electoral system is better than AV.

I'm coming round more and more to the idea that we should just scrap the veil of 'democracy' altogether.

This feels a lot like

[Zsub]

V for Vendetta
1984
A Brave New World

We see it coming and just don't give a damn, it seems. Where are the times governments were afraid of their people? Or at least had some respect for their people?

Re:This feels a lot like

[Hal_Porter]

No way dude. If twitter and facebook are inaccessible for even one minute because they are rebooting their servers it is way worse than 1984 or V for Vendetta because access to twitter is a basic human right. Not having access to them would be like if North Korea was run by Hitler disguised as Big Brother. And like you know how everyone is smoking dope and shit. Well that's exactly like soma in Brave New World. We should totally legalize it. And if you like put on a mask and try and blow up Parliament people call you a terrorist.

Re:This feels a lot like

[Anonymous Coward]

Is there some Godwin's Law equivalent for mentioning 1984/Orwell when discussing the UK government? If not, there should be.

More specifically, people saying: "I didn't think 1984 was meant to be an instruction manual!" or similar.

If you have a problem with the policy - explain why you think it's a bad policy.

Re:This feels a lot like

[digitig]

That is why any kind of censorship has to be fought as if it was "North Korea was run by Hitler disguised as Big Brother" because that is what all those things has in common.

They're also run by people who breathe, so by your argument we should put a stop to breathing. Ever heard of affirming the consequent?

It's not a power grab, that's a side effect

[Nursie]

The UK government folks probably genuinely believe that shutting down social media would be usful to stop waves of criminality like the recent rioting. The fact it hands enormous power to the government is a side effect that they either don't see or (more likely) welcome, but it's not the aim.

This ranting and posturing about evil people in charge is misguided. The point is that through good intentions both people and government can slide into sinister and easily abused situations. Not that the politicians at the top are already aiming for them.

This is why the people who notice this stuff must be extra vigilant, because it is all done with semi-good intent, but it takes us to the same bad place.

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...

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.

Re:Struggle with digital rights?

[Rhodri Mawr]

That's not accurate. The licence fee pays for the BBC (advert free), and some subsidy of Channel 4 and S4C (which are also funded by advertisments). You only need a television licence to receive live broadcasts. Non-live services like iPlayer do not require a licence. There is no requirement at all to have a licence to receive radio.

Anyone thinking that the Pirate Party UK are in any way relevant to the debate are entirely mistaken. The leader of the party stood at the last election here in Worcester and lost his deposit. The real debate about digital rights should be about why the Labour Party were allowed to push through the Digital Economy Act 2010 (UK equivalent of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act) right at the end of the final Parliamentary session before the General Election without it receiving anything like the amount of scrutiny it needed or deserved in Parliament. The Liberal Democrats promised to repeal many parts of the act in their manifesto, however the act was not mentioned in the Coalition Agreement. The Conservative Party promised a 'bonfire' of bad legislation passed by the Labour Party; this has not yet materialised and the DEA 2010 appears to be off the political agenda at the moment.

Re:Brave New World?

[SuricouRaven]

The islands were not public knowledge.

Brave New World showed a society controlled by luxury and trivia - the bread and circuses approach. Rather than keep people in their assigned place through the threat of violence, BNWs model kept people in their place by making them so happy there that they would not want to consider rebellion. The system gave them food, comfort, a culture of sexual liberation, and all the shallow and vapid entertainment they could ever want - even the promise of a recreational drug to relieve any feelings of futility coming from living a life pre-scripted by the government. As dystopias go, it's one of the better ones - even those who are most 'oppressed,' the deltas, are manufactured and conditioned in such a manner that they are happy. There are almost no need to stop people from rejecting the society of that world, because very few people had any reason to.

Or just look at the image: http://www.recombinantrecords.net/images/2009-05-Amusing-Ourselves-to-Death.png

Re:You clearly don't understand politics

[AGMW]

The Liberals made plenty of pledges... like education and then whoops ...

... and then whoops, they didn't win, so all bets are off! I'm not a Lib Dem supporter, but really, their election promises were for if they won the election and however you cut it, they didn't win!

I'm more annoyed about both Lib Dem and Con MPs who said they'd repeal the Digital Economy Act if they got into power and they haven't done so. That's a far more heinous crime because there was really nothing to stop them just cutting it dead in the water on day one after the Nu-Liebour unelected mandarin, and multi-expelled from government for sleaze, Lord Mandlemort rail-roaded it through at the last minute.

It will be interesting to see what the parties are willing to promise next time around, but of course we haven't actually held them to their word this time, so I guess we're just back to business as usual!