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Open Letter in Defence of WikiLeaks’ Right to Publish |
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Thursday 7 April 2011, Committee for the Right to Publish, WikiLeaksOpenLetter.com
We believe that free societies everywhere are best served by journalism that holds governments and corporations to account. We assert that the right to publish is equal to, and the consequence of, the citizen’s right to know.
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Josie Appleton: Freedom Bill: good news and bad news |
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14 February 2011, Josie Appleton, Spiked
The section on the vetting database in the UK government’s new Freedom Bill may not look very dramatic. It is a tangle of insertions and deletions, and it contains the semantic-sounding line: ‘Substitute “must” for “may”.’ Yet behind it all is a fundamental shift in legal principles, which is this: you will no longer have to register with a state body and submit to monitoring in order to work or volunteer with children.
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Philip Johnston: The Freedom Bill is a step back to sanity |
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February 11th, 2011, By Philip Johnston, Telegraph
Finally, we are seeing Labour’s illiberal snooper state cut down to size. The Freedom Bill will cut back the lunatic requirement on adults taking children to football training or cathedral flower arrangers to obtain a criminal record check. This does not mean, as its detractors are already starting to claim, that our children will now be at any greater risk than they were before. It is a common sense approach that has been all too rare in government in recent years. The last Labour administration appeared to take the view that the entire country was a pool of prospective offenders, a national criminal ID parade that had to be controlled, logged, nannied and tick-boxed to distraction.
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Brendan O'Neill: Andy Gray is the victim of Sky's thought police |
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January 25th 2011, Brendan O'Neill, Telegraph
One key principle of civilised life as we know it has been overlooked in the sacking of the Sky football presenter Andy Gray: namely that we should never be punished for our private thoughts or private speech. It’s legitimate for an organisation to slap an employee’s wrists, possibly even sack him, if he says something in public, on the record, that sullies the reputation of said organisation. But to humiliate a man for saying something to a colleague in what he believed was complete privacy? That way tyranny lies.
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Philip Pullman: This is the Big Society, you see. It must be big, to contain so many volunteers. |
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25 January 2011, Speech by Philip Pullman, co-published by Our Kingdom
And who are these volunteers? Who are these people whose lives are so empty, whose time spreads out in front of them like the limitless steppes of central Asia, who have no families to look after, no jobs to do, no responsibilities of any sort, and yet are so wealthy that they can commit hours of their time every week to working for nothing? ... This is the Big Society, you see. It must be big, to contain so many volunteers. But there’s a prize being dangled in front of these imaginary volunteers. People who want to save their library, we’re told, are going to be “allowed to bid” for some money from a central pot. We must sit up and beg for it, like little dogs, and wag our tails when we get a bit.
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Defending moral autonomy against an army of nudgers |
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20 January 2011, Frank Furedi, Spiked
In recent years, the idea that people are too thick to know what is in their best interests has influenced and shaped policymaking on both sides of the Atlantic. In one sense, this diagnosis of intellectual poverty among the masses is simply a new expression of an old idea. Nineteenth-century social engineers regarded the targets of their work - the masses - as both irrational and easily suggestible. In the twentieth century, psychologists and advertisers argued that the world would be a better place if they could successfully manipulate the public to act in accordance with the latest ‘scientific’ insights.
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Philip Johnston: Rid us of these meddlesome meddlers |
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12 Jan 2011, Philip Johnston, Telegraph
The Government's bonfire of pettifogging laws is in danger of fizzling out, writes Philip Johnston.
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Scotland is introducing a compulsory ID scheme at the school gate |
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12 January 2011, Kenneth Roy, Scottish Review
On the Young Scot website, there is the following exchange: Is this the start of a national ID scheme for Scotland? No. It's completely voluntary. This is no longer true. At Breadalbane Academy in Aberfeldy, and we believe at other schools in Perth and Kinross, pupils now need to carry a National Entitlement Card in order to gain access to their own education. Parents have been told that the system has been put in place 'to maximise security in the school building'.
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The state's pedlars of fear must be brought to account |
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11 January 2011, Simon Jenkins, guardian.co.uk
Why have a private firm run police to spy on a few greens? The Ratcliffe Six case is a warning story of securocrats out of control
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Josie Appleton: Now even clowns are spied on by the state |
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7 January 2011, Josie Appleton, Spiked
In modern-day Britain, a man in a comedy suit can’t even blow up balloons for children without first being okayed by the authorities.
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Nov 2010, Sheila Struthers, Scottish Review
Last month, SR ran a series of reports on the threat to personal freedoms posed by a developing system of child monitoring. Today, a follow-up to that series. Getting It Right For Every Child (Girfec) and its English equivalent Every Child Matters (ECM) are constantly presented as having been developed as a result of the Laming report on the death of Victoria Climbié or, in Scotland, the Herbison report on the death of Danielle Reid. This cannot be: the line we have been spun is a great big whopping lie. Girfec is only a small part of a much wider system of gathering, recording, sharing and evaluating information about citizens and communities.
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UK Information Commissioner reports on the state of surveillance |
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11 November 2010, The Surveillance Studies Network
On Thursday 11th November, Christopher Graham, the UK Information Commissioner, sent his report on the state of surveillance and recommendations for action to the House of Commons Home Affairs Committee. His report includes the SSN-authored ‘An Update to a report on the surveillance society’, on which it is based. The update report, co-authored by Charles Raab, Kirstie Ball, Stephen Graham, David Lyon, David Murakami Wood and Clive Norris, was written in the first half of 2010. It features a review of UK surveillance since they wrote the 2006 ‘Report on the Surveillance Society’ for the Information Commissioner’s Office. The new report focuses on developments in information collection, processing and dissemination, and on the regulatory challenges posed by these surveillance developments. The Commissioner’s overview and recommendations, and the SSN update report, can be viewed here
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A u-turn on reversing the surveillance state |
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20 October 2010, Alex Deane, New Statesman
In resurrecting the Intercept Modernisation Programme, the government breaks a clear, basic and fundamental promise. In all the fuss over the Spending Review, you will almost certainly not have seen that the appalling "Intercept Modernisation Programme" is to continue.
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Police vetting decimates 'Big Society' |
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27 September 2010, Civitas
With the imminent results of the Coalition Government's major review of the Vetting and Barring Scheme (VBS), which regulates contact between adults and any child not their own, independent think tank Civitas releases a new edition of Licensed to Hug, which insists the Government must get rid of the VBS once and for all. The dramatic escalation of child protection measures, such as the VBS, has created an atmosphere of suspicion that actually increases the risks to children and damages relations between the generations.
Read more... | Buy the report
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13 September 2010, Clare Sambrook, Our Kingdom
The Liberal Democrats must fight to salvage their promise to end the detention of children for immigration purposes in the UK. Ask Boy A what he is scared of and he says dogs, strangers and policemen. He is scared to go outside and play with friends. At night he wets his bed. He cannot sleep without his mother. He is nine years old. At their autumn conference this weekend Liberal Democrats wanting to rescue their end child detention pledge from Home Office sabotage will find ammunition in a chilling new report from Medical Justice.
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Manifesto Club response to 'Rebalancing the Licensing Act' |
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Sept 2010, Manifesto Club
The government's proposed reforms to the Licensing Act represent a worrying increase in Licensing Authorities' powers to regulate and shut down licensed premises. Far from ‘empowering communities’ – as claimed - these proposed changes would increase the power of local councils and the police, who will be removed from necessary checks and balances. The Manifesto Club's response to the consultation illustrates the problems with these proposals, for civic life and civil liberties.
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MP Tom Watson's speech on the Murdoch phone hacking scandal |
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September 9 2010, House of Commons - Hansard
Anyone can have their phone tapped by the newspapers, and they do. The
House does not forget them as we debate the narrow issue of the abuse
of MPs’ privilege...
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28 ¾: How Constant Age Checks are Infantilising Adults |
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September 2010, Manifesto Club REPORT
With the coalition government planning tougher penalties for under-age serving, our new report finds that 'Think 25' policies are already penalising thousands of innocent adults. 28 ¾: How Constant Age Checks Are Infantilising Adults, by Dolan Cummings, finds that adults in their late 20s and 30s are being hassled by constant ID checks – and that the new rules will make this problem worse. The report is based on our survey of people's ID check experiences, and argues for the abolition of 'Think 25' policies and other over-cautious age-check rules.
Read more... | Download the full report (pdf)
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Business as usual for 'Big Brother state'? |
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27 August 2010, By Brian Wheeler Political reporter, BBC News
The return of the architect of transformational government, Ian
Watmore, to the heart of government is seen by civil liberties
campaigners as a sign that transformational government could be about
to make a comeback - even though the Cabinet Office insists data
sharing is not part of his remit and there is a government-wide freeze
on new IT spending.
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Mental disability, state power and the capacity to decide |
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20 August 2010, Wayne Martin, Liberty Central, guardian.co.uk
The issue of forced contraception raises difficult questions about autonomous decision making under the Mental Capacity Act
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Don’t tinker with the vetting rules: scrap them |
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8 July 2010, Josie Appleton, Spiked
The Safeguarding Vulnerable Groups Act is based on a poisonous assumption: that every adult is a potential abuser unless state-approved.
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8 July 2010, Abelinda Blackbird, Indymedia
Recently in Camberwell various CCTV smart cars have been patrolling residential areas under the publicly known purpose of traffic enforcement. A group of activists who had recently moved to the area observed the Southwark council spy cars recording number plates of all cars passing through their vicinity as well as recording the movements of the local residents and taking footage of people’s houses. This considerable infringement on civil liberties was quite enough for the activists to stand so they went their merry way out onto the streets with their two banners, one reading ‘CCTV free zone’ and another reading ‘freedom not filming’.
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Coalition should be ashamed of continuing 28-day detention |
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7 July 2010, Tim Kevan, guardian.co.uk
Just when we had a glimmer of hope on civil liberties, the home
secretary, Theresa May, announces that the government will seek to
renew the 28-day detention period without charge pending a review of
counter-terrorism legislation. The coalition has had no difficulty
reversing plenty of the last government's spending pledges and even,
let's face it, details such as the tax on cider. But when it comes to
something as profound as our very liberty then it's more of the same.
May said the measure allowing terror suspects to be held for 28 days
before charge should be temporarily renewed for six months. She could
very easily have let it revert to its previous length of 14 days, which
even then would have left us with the longest period of such detention
in the western world.
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We must show we will not tolerate this arrogant policing |
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3 July 2010, Emily Apple, guardian.co.uk
It has been a week of exposures and embarrassments for the police, revealing the extent of their arrogance towards calls for change. On Friday, the Guardian revealed how the National Public Order Intelligence Unit, one of three domestic extremism units, had logged the Catts – peaceful protesters against the EDO MBM Technology arms factory in Brighton – more than 80 times, including detailing their appearance and slogans on their T-shirts. Further to this, Criminal Intelligence Reports (CRIMINTs) disclosed to Fitwatch, during an appeal against conviction for blocking police cameras, show how the Metropolitan police public order unit, CO11, documented the details of speakers, including MP Jeremy Corbyn, at a legal demonstration against the BBC's refusal to air the Gaza appeal in January 2009. Another speaker noted is the interfaith adviser to Nick Clegg, Fiyaz Mughal, who is also his adviser on extremism – you couldn't make it up.
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World known artists protesting for a free Belarus |
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2 July 2010, Charter97.org
Britain’s theatre community comes out against oppression and censorship in the “last dictatorship of Europe”. Sir Tom Stoppard and actor/director Sam West Has led a protest of high-profile theatre practitioners outside the Belarussian Embassy at 6 Kensington Court, London, W8 5DL on Thursday 1st July at 11.30am. They presentes an open letter to President Alyaksander Lukashenko of Belarus calling for greater democratic freedom and for an end to censorship of the Internet. Other signatories include Mark Ravenhill, Howard Brenton, Alan Rickman, Laura Wade, Caryl Churchill, Henry Goodman, Henry Porter, Simon McBurney, Simon Stephens and Lyndsey Turner.
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Why are we so cruel to those who seek sanctuary? |
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20 June 2010, The Observer
That last week's alleged assault on 42 Iraqi men on a plane from Heathrow to Baghdad went largely unreported is a disgrace
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It's time for legislators to look more closely at familial searches of DNA databases |
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June 14, 2010, By Natalie Ram and Michael Seringhaus, Slate
The U.S. forensic DNA database has expanded rapidly in recent years. While it was originally authorized to store the DNA profiles of only convicted violent felons, the FBI Combined DNA Index System (CODIS) now includes all federal offenders—including arrestees not yet convicted of any crime—as well as convicts from all 50 states and arrestees from many. Such expansions of the database are troubling, but at least they are explicit. More worrisome is the effective inclusion of many innocent individuals in the database, via novel and almost completely unregulated search techniques called "partial matching" and "familial searching." By adopting one or both of these search techniques, some states are quietly expanding database coverage to "virtually" include the innocent relatives of profiled offenders—nearly always without any legislative oversight.
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9 June 2010, Damian Green, guardian.co.uk
When the second reading of the Identity Documents bill takes place in the House of Commons later today, the coalition government will meet its commitment to scrap the ID card scheme.This bill is the first step the government will take to reduce control by the state and hand power pack to the people. It is not the job of government to collect and store vast amounts of biographical and biometric data belonging to innocent people.
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Coalition to leave Summary Care Records little changed? |
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June 4, 2010, Tony Collins's IT Projects blog, Computer Weekly
In a Parliamentary answer yesterday, the new minister for NHS IT, Conservative MP Simon Burns, appears to confirm that there will be little change to the Summary Care Records scheme.
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The Coalition has performed a disgraceful u-turn on the Summary Care Record |
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4 June 2010, Alex Deane, Big Brother Watch
The Government has announced that it will continue building the Summary Care Record database of our medical data. This contradicts the Conservative position outlined last year: 'A Conservative government would "dismantle" central NHS IT infrastructure, halt and renegotiate NPfIT local service provider contracts and introduce interoperable local systems.' It also contradicts the Liberal Democrat position outlined this year, when Norman Lamb, then Liberal Democrat health spokesman, said: "The Government needs to end its obsession with massive central databases. The NHS IT scheme has been a disastrous waste of money and the national programme should be abandoned."
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Got any ID? These checks are out of hand |
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14 May 2010, Josie Appleton, guardian.co.uk
Challenging the culture of routine checks on British citizens' identities is as crucial as taking on the ID card scheme
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Have you been ID checked for buying alcohol? |
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14 May 2010, Manifesto Club SURVEY
The age for ID-checking customers creeps upwards, with people in their late twenties and thirties now frequently checked. Have you been ID checked for buying alcohol, fireworks or bleach? If so, we want to know about it. Fill in this Manifesto Club survey and tell us about your case.
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Tell your GP a secret - and 900 council staff may have access to it |
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May 10, 2010, Tony Collins, IT Projects Blog
In 2008 Elizabeth Dove (a pseudonym) saw her GP to ask what could be done about her depression. Some time later Dove had a dispute with her local council, a matter entirely unrelated to her health. Pursuing her complaint to the Isle of Wight council, she submitted a request under the Data Protection Act to be sent all the information the authority held on her. To her dismay, she received sensitive data from her GP health records. It came from officials at the local council's housing department - with whom she had the dispute. It turns out that her health data was held on a joint council and primary care trust system "Swift". She hadn't consented to her health records being shared with the local council...
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Changing the Rules by Stealth: the UK's Constitution is being written as public follows election |
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28 April 2010, Andrew Blick, Our Kingdom
While we are distracted by the General Election, the people who remain in power regardless of the outcome - the Civil Service - are busy drafting our constitution for us; and we have not been invited to participate.
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Personal privacy: This government is too keen to catch us on camera |
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Sunday 18 April 2010, The Observer
The authors of section 44 of the 2000 Prevention of Terrorism Act did not intend to mandate the systematic harassment of photographers. The law gives police the power to stop and search people, without suspicion of criminal intention, in any area considered a possible target for terrorist attack. Since al-Qaida targets civilians, an area vulnerable to attack can plausibly be defined as a place where people gather. Predictably, that interpretation is the one police seem to prefer when using their power.
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Digital Economy Act: This means war |
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16 April 2010, Cory Doctorow, guardian.co.uk
Baking surveillance, control and censorship into the very fabric of our networks, devices and laws is the absolute road to dictatorial hell
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Hmmm…Software That Predicts If You Will Do Crime & Time |
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April 14 2010, By Stacey Higginbotham, GigaOm.com
The Florida State Department of Juvenile Justice says it will use predictive analytics software from IBM to foretell which of its juvenile offenders are likely to return to crime. The UK Ministry of Justice also uses IBM’s predictive software on its criminal population, to see which ones pose a greater threat to public safety upon release. IBM clearly plans to take SPSS beyond its former domain of market researchers and scientists and apply it to where the big money is — homeland security in these frightening times.
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Hang 'em will defy the political class |
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14 April 2010, Anthony Barnett, guardian.co.uk
Hang 'em is just one campaign seeking to make constitutional change from below. We want our country and democracy back
Read more... | Hang 'em website
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Surveillance + detention = £Billions: How Labour’s friends are ‘securing your world’ |
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13 April 2010, Clare Sambrook, Our Kingdom
At the bustling Counter Terror Expo in London’s Olympia this week they are giving top billing to the security industry’s favourite politician. ‘The most experienced cabinet minister of modern times’, they call him: Dr John Reid. Home office colleagues say Reid — Labour hard man, former secretary of state for health and defence, and home secretary — is the minister who brought business in from the cold. These days relations are warm and cosy. Marketing their wares as vital to the war on terror, while dreaming up everyday applications for intrusive high security kit, Reid’s friends have quietly advanced deep into the public sector — running schools, GP clinics and police investigations. Out of government but still a serving MP, Reid has been taking £50,000 a year from G4S — the Group 4 Securicor giant.
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UK's discriminatory criminalization of dissent |
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13 April 2010, Sarah Irving, The Electronic Intifada
"We are very angry, very afraid, very sad, very upset. My wife, she is depressed. When she sees police in the street she's very frightened. They destroyed our life," says Badi Tebani. In January 2009, Tebani's teenage son Yahia was one of tens of thousands of people who joined demonstrations in London against the Israeli bombing of Gaza. At one of those demonstrations Yahia and many others were "kettled" -- surrounded by a police cordon and slowly let out in return for giving their names and addresses and for being filmed. hat was the last Yahia knew of it until the following April, when the family home was raided by 20 to 30 police at 5am. The front door was forced open and Badi Tebani and his family were ordered to lie on the floor
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Digital Economy Bill: Nine things you can't do any more |
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9 April 2010, By Rich Trenholm, CNET
The Digital Economy Bill has a number of clauses that, if taken to their logical extremes, could see some pretty horrible outcomes. It's completed its whistle-stop tour of the legislative process, sprinting from Commons to Lords with barely a pause for breath before getting the nod from Her Maj. MPs decided to get the bill into law first and worry about the details later. Until Ofcom hammers out the mechanics of the processes outlined in the bill, it's impossible to say how we'll be affected. We take a look at some of the worst-case scenarios.
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Sarah's Law review skewed by handpicked sample |
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26th March 2010, By John Ozimek • The Register
Home Office jubilation over the "success" of its sex offender disclosure scheme may be premature amid yet more evidence of the Home Office twisting research to suit its own agenda. That is the conclusion of sharp-eyed blogger, Hawktalk, who also questioned whether the way the scheme works in practice might create problems for wholly innocent individuals through the creation of misleading audit trails and over-zealous public officials applying the rule that "there’s no smoke without fire".
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Broken Records: The worrying lack of security around your medical history |
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25 March 2010, Big Brother Watch REPORT
New research conducted by Big Brother Watch reveals that there are at least 100,000 non-medical personnel in NHS Trusts across the country with access to confidential medical records. The report - Broken Records - is an analysis of the status of confidential medical records in the UK, the security around access to sensitive personal information and how the Government’s NPfIT and the Conservatives' private sector proposals could change the current situation for the worse.
Read more... | Download the report [pdf]...
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A scandalous way to force through constitutional reform |
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March 25, 2010, David Pannick QC, The Times
Few British politicians are interested in the constitution. They are much more concerned with how to achieve, or retain, power, and what to do with it, than with imposing limits on government. The Constitutional Reform and Governance Bill, which received its second reading in the House of Lords yesterday, confirms that this Government does not understand constitutional norms. Parliament should reject any attempt to force any parts of this Bill through without proper scrutiny.
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Counter-Terrorism Policy and Human Rights: Bringing Human Rights Back In |
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25 March 2010, Joint Committee on Human Rights
The Government states that "the protection of human rights is a key principle underpinning all the Government's counter-terrorism work." However, all too often human rights considerations are squeezed out by the imperatives of national security and public safety. Since September 11th 2001 the Government has continuously justified many of its counterterrorism measures on the basis that there is a public emergency threatening the life of the nation. We question whether the country has been in such a state for more than eight years. This permanent state of emergency inevitably has a deleterious effect on public debate about the justification for counter-terrorism measures.
Download report [pdf]...
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Taser quarterly statistics to September 2009 |
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25 March 2010, Home Office
The report provides the figures on the reported and recorded use of taser by police forces in England and Wales.
Read more... | Download PDF...
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Is there now no area of our lives that the Nanny State won't poke its nose into? |
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25th March 2010, By Stephen Glover, Daily Mail
A group of the country's most eminent doctors is calling for a ban on smoking in cars and in public places where young people congregate, such as parks. They trot out an impressive sounding array of statistics about medical problems in children which they say result from 'passive smoking'.
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Smoking in cars: a ban too far |
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March 24th, 2010, By Philip Johnston, Telegraph
Twenty of Britain’s most senior doctors have called for a ban on smoking in cars as part of a sweeping expansion of laws to protect children against the effects of inhaling smoke. Why stop there? Will there be a ban on smoking in homes next? When one of the doctors was asked this question he said that would be a bit too extreme because it could not be policed. In other words, he had no objection to the state’s invasion of private property, merely that it would be a difficult law to uphold. This has gone too far.
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Westminster Lifestyle Survey |
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23 March 2010, Dylan Sharpe, Big Brother Watch
Whilst my walk home from work takes me past the Home Office and countless CCTV cameras, it is not often that one returns home to find the Big Brother state staring up from the doormat. Yet, that is exactly what happened last night when I stepped inside my front door and found the 'Westminster Lifestyle Survey' waiting patiently for my return. The stated purpose of the document is to 'paint a clearer picture of the daily lives of our local community' which, although intrusive, could be seen as having some utility in terms of local service provision. But it is hard not to be shocked by the intrusiveness of some of the questions.
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March 22 2010, Toby Stevens, Privacy, Identity & Consent Blog, Computer Weekly
A very unpleasant little amendment to the Licensing Act (2003) is in front of Ministers for approval as a Statutory Instrument (SI). This ridiculous SI, which is another back-door attempt to undermine civil liberties and bolster the National ID Service, will pass on 6 April unless it is sent back by Parliament.
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