edri charter

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. …

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. …