Mass Action or Court Action

I have today posted a limited review of Orgcon17 which happened last year. One of the most provocative presentations was this one, “Is the law the best way to stop mass surveillance?” While it documents the heroic struggle by a small group of fiercely motivated lawyers, it’s incredibly slow at the time, the court cases considered in 2017 related to 2015 laws and by the time the rulings came through the law in question had been replaced, but while pursuing legal action, mass action is hard, although crowdjustice.com and other petition sites allow the building of an on-line communities.

The presentation made me think about the numerous, trade union legal actions on collective bargaining issues, most notably their pursuit and criminalisation of Uber. In these cases, the use of the law is a sign of weakness, albeit of both sides, but demos and voting aren’t enough to change politicians minds on issues they consider peripheral. …

You can’t keep the Spies out

While continuing to think about the privacy and regulatory issues that Cloud computing raises, I was point at this article in the NY Times, called “Does Cloud Computing Mean More Risks to Privacy?“, which looks at the US legal position and points out that the US police and even civil investigators will find it easier to get data from third parties than from the entities originally authorised to have access to private data. The article seems to have been categorised as news due to the release of the World Privacy Forum’s latest report, “Privacy in the Clouds“, …