digital liberty – Page 4

I.T. & e-referenda

One of the proposals at the Top of the Manifestos event was loads of e-referenda. (That’s an interesting sentence, the plurals of manifesto and referendum are both unusual.) So apart from the IT security issues, one has to ask, where’s the debate and where’s the evaluation of evidence. Obviously the debate would once have happened in a broadcast world where the cost of a seat at the table was immense and thus the voices of the wealthy are amplified; and this applies to the newspapers as well as the 24 hour news channels such as Sky. The relevance of the print is diminishing, but the TV not so much. Social media platforms are developing new collaboration and voting mechanisms, often specifically to solve issues of governance. But it’s not yet ready. There is little argument that blogging software has empowered many people to express their views which has in some, but not all cases, drawn them into the policy development and analysis. …

Supporting the EDRi Charter

Earlier this month I wrote about the 10 Point Charter for a Digital Society and the voting exchange supporting it. Claude Moraes, Labour’s 1st place candidate on the London List, an incumbent and a leading member of the EU Parliament’s LIBE (Civil Liberties) Committee has already signed it as has Ivanna Bartolleti, who is also on Labour’s London list. Two days ago, I wrote to the remaining London Labour candidates and asked them to also support it. The rest of this article is a synopsis of the argument I used in favour of all 10 points. I said something like this, …

Another brick in the wall of decency

Earlier today, I discovered on Twitter that Claude Moraes, one of London’s two Labour MEPs is backing the wepromise.eu charter which I wrote abut last month here. 10 promises to ensure the internet works for citizens, not corporations, nor the secret police. …

Another voice speaks for an Internet Bill of Rights

Among the voices campaigning for a web/internet fit for people is Sir Tim Berners Lee, the inventor of the world wide web. In this Guardian article here his fears that government’s surveillance and corporations desire to shape traffic for commercial benefit will threaten the interests of the people of this planet. …

Digital Liberty, Labour’s Policy?

I have today, posted a submission to Labour’s YourBritain site, arguing for the Labour Party to support the EDRi’s charter of digital rights. I repeat my categorisation of the charter as supporting citizenship activism, defending privacy from corporate and state surveillance, promoting equality before the law and seeking to ensure a democratically regulated internet. I suggest that this builds on two of the last Labour Government’s greatest democratic reforms, the Freedom of Information (FOI) Act and the Human Rights Act (HRA). I conclude with the proposal that the Labour Party supports the Charter for the European Parliamentary elections and the general election in 2015. …

A digital manifesto for Europe

Perhaps it really is the day we fight back, since the EDRi, the European umbrella digital liberty organisation has over the last couiple of days just launched its manifesto for the European Parliament elections. They have published their manifesto on a pseudo trading site where voters and politicians can pledge their votes and promises in public around the EDRi’s charter which consists of the following 10 points. …

The day we fight back

I have just spent the evening at the London #Cryptoparty, called on #thedaywefightback. The night was originally planned as an ORG planned Cryptoparty, an un-seminar on how to use your computer and the internet safely and minimize your chances of being spied upon, but the campaign, “Don’t Spy On Us” has been launched by English Pen, the Open Rights Group, Liberty, Article 19, Privacy International and Big Brother Watch. The campaign watchword is their 1st principle, “No surveillance without suspicion”. …

Digital Freedom, broad campaigns and the Liberal Democrats

I started to ‘follow’ Julian Huppert MP, the LibDem MP for Cambridge on Twitter. He was introduced to me by Tom Watson MP, at Orgcon 2010 as a new champion of digital freedom and free speech. I have been following him for a couple of days and while I recognise I need help, because the Labour Party is pretty poor on the subject, in the campaign for digital freedom and to fight alienation in 21st century information economy, Julian, unlike Tommy, John Grogan and Dianne Abbot, all Labour MPs who opposed the DE Act, seems to put his party before the cause. …

Let’s take back the Internet

Rebecca Mackinnon previews the arguments for digital liberty, exploring the contention points between people and power. I suspect it needs to be informed by Kondratiev cycles, , she takes her start point as the historical achievement of political liberty but we shouldn’t be looking back 300 years.

The steel, oil, & silicon technology revolutions have spawned social democracy, enviromentalism and the digital liberty movement respectively. Each of these reactions have spawned political movements to achieve their goals. …