digital liberty – Page 2

Policy

I wrote a piece on my essay blog, now here trying to resurrect my thoughts on the #digitalliberty agenda just before the election. The thoughts were formed and committed to writing in 2014 and I said in the article that I thought they’d stood the test of time.

On second thoughts I think it’s weak on

the right to privacy being a right to use encryption
a failure to recognise that access to records created for fighting serious crime may have unacceptably low thresholds of access i.e. no-one is checking that the use is about serious crime
justice must be public and require human judgement; algorithms can’t be judges (although it does cover that!)

Third thoughts would be that the Digital Economy Act 2016 widens the definition of criminal file sharing beyond reasonable and proportionate. …

Digital Rights

I have been asked to write something on Digital Liberty/Rights and so have checked up on the EDRi Charter of 2014. This has been moved around in their site and so I have created a mirror of their white paper, the Charter of Digital Rights. …

Manifesto bingo, digital liberty and the internet

I have had a look at the manifestos and see what they have to say on the internet and Digital Liberty. I have been very influenced by the EDRi voting exchange and summarise the issues of Digital Liberty as e-citizenship, equality before the law, privacy and copyright reform, to which for this election we must add internet governance and industrial & innovation policy. I have created a table summarising the positions of the Tories, Labour, LibDems and Greens. Possibly I should have analysed the SNP manifesto since much of this is Westmister reserved powers. I was hoping to write something easy and quick to read. I don’t think I have succeeded. My super summary is in the figure immediately below, and here is the table I built to help me write this article. (I lost the excel file, so this will have to do!) My main source was the ORG pages but I have been reading the Labour Manifesto also. I feel that the opposition parties have suffered from the surprise; they probably expected more time to develop their promises. All three opposition parties 2015 manifestos covered these issues in more depth. …

Digital Liberty, a baseline

I am preparing to write a blog on Digital Liberty and the Parties’ manifesto positions. I was looking to see how I categorised the issues so I could create a summary view and I found the motion that was the basis for my previous submission on policy. This text has been recovered from a Labour Party motion carried at the Lewisham Deptford GC at their April ’14 meeting. I used it as the basis for a submission to the LP’s New Britain site which they have, of course shit canned; it was their policy development site. I think the motion stands the test of time. …

The Digital Economy Act (again)

The Digital Economy Act 2010 showed the long term goal of the entertainment industry, they want to criminalise file sharing. At the time, individual acts of copyright infringement were civil acts and the copyright owners had to pursue them through the courts, one at a time. This is expensive, slow, uncertain and most importantly expensive, compared with the cover price of a CD or DVD. The DE Act did that, it also sought to automate the justice system and in order to do that it weakened innocent until proven guilty, by prescribing defences and also placed a charge on going to court to argue not guilty. It really was a shit piece of legislation. However, the Law stated that the costs of surveillance and discovery had to be shared by the copyright owners and the internet service providers. The Courts struck down this part of the Law, (see here … for more) …

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. …

Oi!, You! No snooping on my emails and chat!

Earlier this week, the Court of Justice of the European Union delivered its judgement on the legality of the UK & Swedish data retention and surveillance laws. They confirmed their ruling from 2015 that general monitoring is illegal, that retention must be specific and is only allowed to combat serious crimes, that access to surveillance records must be authorised by independent authorities and that EU data subjects must be have access to legal remediation if their rights to privacy are breached. The Guardian report on it here, the Independent here ,the Register here and even the Daily Mash comments here. The UK’s Investigatory Powers Act also gives the government the right to mandate backdoors in UK operated communications products; these powers may also fall foul of the prohibition on general monitoring and the need for independent review. While the ruling is specific to the UK’s DRIPA law, which has now been replaced by the Investigatory Powers Act, it poses a clear challenge to the legality of the new Law. …

Digital inclusions & democracy

25% of the UK population don’t have broadband, this is higher amongst the poor and the old; it generally costs more than the BBC Licence. Also not all internet users are Facebook users. Facebook (& other social media providers) cannot act as a guarantor of identity in government and political business, partly because they’re proprietary, closed source systems and thus users, citizens and judges do not know what the code does. Digital inclusion is still one of the key political issues to be addressed in the internet age, governments and political parties need to step very carefully when they use social media platforms as a means of understanding people’s views; this is before we consider the anti-democratic nature of survey’s and referenda, you can only answer the questions asked, usually in a binary or scalar fashion. It’s not good enough …..oh yeah & open source. …

Here come de Judge

The highest levels of international judiciary have been busy over the last week, I report and comment on the Microsoft vs. FBI on linkedin Pulse, in an article called “Citizens Win”. It was quite simple in the end, the law under which the FBI was seeking search warrant powers was not on of the post 911 laws, but an earlier one and the US District Court says that the law grants no power of inspection abroad. The spooks are going to have to apply for an Irish warrant. In Europe however, Tom Watson’s & David Davies’s judicial review on DRIPA have reached the Advocate General. This reported by Tom Watson here, and by Glyn Moody here. Watson writes about the need for strong judicial review of the search warrants, and Moody brings up that mass surveillance can only be used in the fight against serious crime. …

Labour’s front bench and surveillance.

The Labour Campaign for Human Rights organised an event at which Kier Starmer, Labour’s shadow spokesman on the Investigatory Powers Bill, he introduced himself, and pointed to his record as a Barrister where he has been involved in a number of cases prosecuting the government, the police and the intelligence agencies and his time as DPP. He says his experience shows him the “the reality of the crimes to be fought”. (This is not necessarily a scarce resource if you came to adulthood living in the UK in the eighties, or were working or travelling in London on 7^th July 2005.) The rest of this article looks at the critiques made by the guest speakers and audience; it’s a piece of reporting, not a polemic, there’s plenty of those around. Basically the view in the room was it’s not fit for purpose, the new powers are too extensive, the old powers are too extensive, the proposed oversight remains too weak and the powers are not necessary, effective or proportionate. Those of us in the Labour Party can also add, the question where did this come from as Party policy. …