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London Police Ink Shadowy Deal With Industry On Website Takedowns (eff.org)
AmiMoJo writes: The EFF is warning about unregulated activity against websites by the Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit (PIPCU) of the City of London Police. A program called RogueBlock accepts notifications from IP holders, which the PIPCU then acts on, giving private companies legal jurisdiction over the entire internet, with appeals in the case of malicious reports and mistakes being extremely difficult to make. For example, Spanish sports streaming site Rojadirecta had its domain name seized by the U.S. government for over a year, despite the site being lawful in its native Spain. The EFF terms this kind of activity "Shadow Regulation."
Given that PIPCU is funded by the IPO, and that the City of London police is a defacto private sector police force, I don't think it's really actually much of a jump.
It's not like this is London's Metropolitan Police or anything we're talking about where public control is retained. The City of London police is directed by the City of London Corporation, and the IP Office is the organisation that represents rights holders with government funding which is past on to fund PIPCU.
The reality is if rights holders say jump, PIPCU and the City of London police simply ask how high. If they're providing a place where they can submit take down requests make no mistake, the City of London police and PIPCU have shown themselves more than willing to pursue it unquestioningly. This story is basically just about increased automation of how they control their pet police force to do their bidding.
The problem is that there's really very little residential population in the City of London's square mile, and so the representatives that are elected there are therefore elected on behalf of the corporations rather than average citizens. Hence why it's a different beast to other police forces and is in fact basically a private police force.
Personally I wouldn't mind if they stuck to their square mile, but unfortunately they attempt to apply extra-territorial jurisdiction to other parts of the country, where our local police forces act and where those police forces priorities are supposed to be decided by those of us who live in these areas by our elected police crime commissioners. As we're seeing here, they also try and apply international jurisdiction by trying to apply the standards of their corporate owned square mile to service providers across the world. The square mile is where all the banking crimes happen in the UK (Libor trading scandal for example), but the City of London police turn a blind eye to it - imagine the uproar about jurisdiction if say South Yorkshire police went down to the square mile and started arresting criminal bankers? Shame the same isn't true when the City of London police go and arrest some minimum wage labourer for selling a Kodi box in South Yorkshire.
As such, frankly, I believe the City of London police force should be axed as it's way overstepping it's mark, and policing in the square mile should be handed over to the Met, who are at least accountable to the people to at least some degree still. City of London police are an affront to the concept of policing by consent which is precisely what the UK policing system is meant to be based upon.