Citizens not Suspects

I attended the Open Rights Group’s London meetup on Monday night; Rachel Robinson, Liberty’s Policy Officer was speaking at the Angel, a pub near Old St, probably the inspiration for the London monopoly board space. She spoke about planned legistation in the UK known variously as the Communications Capabilities Development Programme or the Communications Data Bill. Interesting how the British Government develop such annodyne names for their oppressive measures, the Digital Economy Act vs the US “Stop Online Piracy Act” or the “Commerce before Leisure on the Internet Act”, I made the last one up, or I think I did. …

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. …

Facebook – Public Identity Assurance

identity by natasha mayers

David Cameron in a speech earlier this year suggested that Government services should be made available via the leading social networks, including Facebook. It’s an interesting and complex problem. The Tories had thought hard about their approach to Government IT and seem to be pursuing the Open Data Platform projects initiated by the previous government and championed by London’s local government. It’s axiomatic that publishing publicly available data in machine readable form is an invitation to innovate, which most of us consider to be a good thing, but handing over identity assurance to the private sector is another thing. …

The GCSE Farce

Over the month it has become clear that a grave injustice has been done to a number of GCSE students. These exams are marked by a number of different examining boards and it would seem that advice issued by OFQUAL has led to harsher marking than those marked in January and a number of students not achieving their predicted grades. …