Coup

Jon Lansman and his allies in Momentum have through extraordinary means overturned the decisions of the last Momentum national committee i.e. to hold a delegate based Conference to set rules and determine policy. They have also determined that expelled Labour Party members cannot be members of Momentum, it’s claimed that this is in order to prepare for affiliation as a Socialist Society. At least some of the Socialist Societies have non members as do the Trade Unions, it’s part of their design goals. As Jill Mountford points out in her blog, in the ’80s, the Left opposed expulsions despite stronger provocation. This is a power play by the same people that have been losing to Labour’s right since 1980, the goal should be to energise new joiners and those that have rebooted themselves; playing the same old games lets them down and will lead to Labour’s destruction.

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Freedom from Robots

Over the last couple of years, a number of economists and politicians have been exploring the threat to professional and middle class jobs posed by algorithms and robots,, for instance, here at the Harvard Business Review and here at the Economist.

Interestingly Article 22.1 of the GDPR offers a freedom from automatic processing, stating that,

The data subject shall have the right not to be subject to a decision based solely on automated processing, including profiling, which produces legal effects concerning him or her or similarly significantly affects him or her.

Obviously this can be finessed via consent as are the working hours restrictions in the UK, but this is a big problem for the robot lawyers (& doctors). When I originally found this clause I thought it might be new but it is in fact part of the previous Directive (Article 15.1) and implemented in UK Law as Para 12 of the Data Protection Act 1998 …

Why you should be bothered about the Snoopers Charter

Why you should be bothered about the Snoopers Charter

Late last year, the UK Parliament passed the Investigatory Powers Act 2016. This law builds on the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Acts and the Data Retention Laws. This law allows the Government to store all our electronic communications traffic, read the content and meta data and co-opt the product and service vendors to help them. I describe this in more detail below.

The Law was written in the aftermath of Court of Justice of the European Union’s (CJEU) ruling in the Schrems vs. Facebook case that the EU’s Data Retention Directive and hence the member state implementations were in contradiction to the EU’s human rights law, the Charter of Fundamental Rights. Parliament had considered aspects of these proposals twice before under the two previous administrations and rejected them.

This article looks at the new Law, criticises it on Human Rights grounds in that it jeopardises the right to privacy, the right to organise, the right to a fair trial and rights to free speech and on IT Security grounds in that the new regulation of encryption products jeopardises access to electronic trust and privacy. It also examines the likely impact of the recent CJEU ruling on the legality of its predecessor law, and in passing, likely conflicts with last year’s passage of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) by the European Union.  …

Fair Trials

It must be clear that I am preparing a blog on the Investigatory Powers Act. The more I look into it, the worse it seems. By not requiring the proof of a probable cause, the law weakens the need for a prosecution to prove a case in court and the right to silence. Another instance of jeopardising the rights to a fair trial …

Evidence

A day or two ago, I read a blog article on where UKIP’s vote comes from and who it threatens published on the LSE blog site by Evans & Mellon. They say, they,

… examine the voting history of UKIP supporters, finding that the party is attracting, primarily, disaffected former Labour voters from the Conservatives and elsewhere, and that the working class basis of UKIP has been markedly over-stated. On the whole, however, it is the Conservatives, not Labour, who have most to fear from UKIP.

This is an important piece of evidence of deep inconvenience to those arguing that we have to do more than listen to UKIPs voters, usually an excuse to explore the cess pitc corners of the immigration control policy cupboard.. I tweeted it as I thought it was interesting and one of the retweets, emphasised the factual nature of the paper.


https://twitter.com/DaveLevy/status/816327113515134976

Thanks for the retweet Red Labour, howver we need to remember that

“you can’t reason people out of positions that they didn’t reason themselves into”.

I made a storify to document my sources,

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Serious Crime

I am preparing a blog article on the Investigatory Powers Act and the CJEU ruling on DRIPA and one issue that comes up is, “What is a serious crime?”. I have looked it up and find the UK’s definition appallingly low. I wonder what others think? …

Encryption

Last month, Bruce Schneier commented on The Encryption Working Group of the House Judiciary Committee and the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s  has 2017 Annual Report. He says they conclude that, strong encryption is in the (US) national interest, the supply of encryption tools is globally liquid (hmm!), there is no one size fits all answer to law enforcement’s need to snoop, or whatever they call it, and that co-operation between law enforcement and the tech. sector should be fostered.

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Roshambo

Mrs. L went off on one this morning. It was brought to her attention that a bijou 2 bed room flat in Bordon, built on public land were deemed affordable at £240,000 and the Labour Party having failed to change the legal regime of housing finance management when in power are now too busy playing Roshambo to do anything about it. It should be noted that the UK is the only OECD country that treats public housing debt as part of the national debt since it is not paid for through taxation. …

GOLD

I had a quick look at the August Economic Journal over the Xmas break, and specifically at the article by Barro & Misra, ” Gold Returns”. They argue that the facts (1836 – 2011) suggest that Gold is not a long term extraordinary good investment, offering a long term rate of return of about 1% which they categorise as the equivalent of the standard risk free ROI although its volatility is much higher since 1971 when the US quit the gold standard. They also argue that it is not a great hedge against macro-economic disasters. It would seem it’s like everything else, you need to get it right when to buy and when to sell. …