Comment: surveillance under the Tories

“We believe that your personal information belongs to you, not the state. Where private details are collected by government, they are held on trust. The government must be held accountable to its citizens, not the other way round.” Such is the promising introduction to a new Conservative policy document on ‘Reversing the rise of the [...]

Comment: 7 million downloaders – says the music industry

Reports that Peter Mandelson’s proposals to sever the internet connections of illegal downloaders will affect seven million filesharers in the UK have been debunked by the BBC. The figure may in fact be closer to 3.9 million people. The original statistics were said to be from a paper produced by a government advisory body, the [...]

Comment: If Facebook fans were votes…

During his interview with Surveillance News yesterday, UK Pirate Party leader Andrew Robinson was chuffed to have recently pipped Labour’s attempts to, ah, get down with the kids. Earlier this week, the PPUK Facebook group overtook the Labour Party, with 6691 members compared to 6356 for Labour. Admittedly, if you take the number of group [...]

Comment: Intercept Modernisation Programme

Rather sneakily in April, the now firmly backbenched Jacqui Smith issued a consultation paper on the possibility of getting internet service providers to track all communications data, of everyone. You can read the full story on my other blog, or alternately look at the consultation paper directly. It outlines everything everyone feared about a ‘database’ [...]