The importance of privacy is often downplayed. It sometimes seems as though privacy is viewed as something bad, something inherently selfish, something that ‘good’ people don’t need or really want – or at the very least are willing to sacrifice for the greater good. To me, that displays a fundamental misunderstanding of privacy and of the role it plays in society. Continue reading
The International Forum for Responsible Media Blog
Tag: Paul Bernal (Page 3 of 4)
Evidence seems to be mounting that mass surveillance isn’t actually very good at dealing with terrorism. Hot on the heels of the admission by the NSA that their mass surveillance of telephone call data had only been helpful in a single terrorism-related case, a detailed new report by the New America Foundation seems to suggest that their other surveillance programmes, including the PRISM programme, are also conspicuously ineffective. Continue reading
The news that ‘Clare’s Law’, by which according to the BBC ‘enables women to check the police record of a new boyfriend’ will be expanded to cover the whole of England and Wales fills me with unease. On the surface it seems to offer a simple tool in the fight against what is a truly horrendous problem – but I find myself wondering whether the process and the implications of this law have been properly thought through. Continue reading
The latest in a long line of assaults on our right to protest seems to be on its way with the planned replacement of Anti-Social Behaviour Orders (ASBOs) with ‘Ipnas’: Injunctions to Prevent Nuisance and Annoyance. Former DPP Lord Macdonald QC described the new powers as amounting to ‘gross state interference’ with basic freedoms – and it’s hard to argue with him, given the almost breathtaking scope of the powers. Continue reading
As reported in the BBC, “Parliament’s intelligence watchdog is to hear evidence from the public as part of a widening of its inquiry into UK spy agencies’ intercept activities.” Whilst in many ways this is to be welcomed, the piece includes a somewhat alarming but extremely revealing statement from Sir Malcolm Rifkind, the Chairman of the Intelligence and Security Committee:
Back in 1999, Scott McNealy, then CEO of Sun Microsystems, told journalists that privacy was dead. “You have zero privacy anyway,” he said, “Get over it.”
In internet terms, 1999 was a very long time ago. It was before Facebook even existed. Before the iPhone was even a glint in Steve Jobs’ eye. Google was barely a year old. And yet even then, serious people in the computer industry had already given up on privacy. Continue reading
The whole idea of ‘free speech’ has had a few challenges this last week or so. The Paris Brown saga (about which I’ve written here), the decision by the BBC not to play ‘Ding, Dong, the Witch is Dead’ though it reached number two in the charts, the various attempts to block protests at Margaret Thatcher’s funeral, the late amendments to the Defamation Act to remove the proposed controls over companies’ abilities to sue for libel, and the arrival in court of the Sally Bercow/Lord McAlpine twitter defamation trial about which I wrote this in December). Continue reading
Today, Saturday February 23rd 2013, is International Privacy Day. To mark it, I’ve done a re-boot of an old blog post: ‘Privacy is not the enemy’. The original post (which you can find here) came back in December 2011, after I attended an ‘open data’ event organised by the Oxford Internet Institute – but it’s worth repeating, because those of us who advocate for privacy often find themselves having to defend themselves against attack, as though ‘privacy’ was somehow the enemy of so much that is good. Continue reading
One of the many issues to emerge as a result of the McAlpine saga is the question of how vulnerable users of social media like twitter might be under defamation law. Lord McAlpine is reported to be planning to sue up to 10,000 twitter users – and some famous individuals have already been named as among them: George Monbiot, Sally Bercow and Alan Davies. Continue reading
Andy Smith, a senior security official at the Cabinet Office, caused quite a stir at the Parliament and Internet Conference last month, when he suggested that people should use false names and provide false information on the internet – and in particular, when using social networking sites. Reaction was explosive in both directions. Continue reading
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