Speak out against the Digital Economy Bill

Now that the third hearing of the Digital Economy Bill has passed through the House of Lords with many of the original problems either ignored or exacerbated, there is very little time for the public to make their impression felt. It is likely that this Bill will be rushed through the House of Commons with little space being given over to a consideration of it's unintended consequences.

The recent episode of Panorama (Are the Net Police Coming for You?) completely ignored the rights of the public. It suggested that it is persistent downloaders who need to be worried, but it goes even further than that and has the potential to impact on educational institutions and businesses. For many people, this would have been the first time they will have heard about the Bill. When the Bill is first debated by MPs in the House of Commons, they will shut democratic discussion down – after about two hours of debate. As Jim Killock of the Open Rights Group puts it:

So our elected MPs will have spent a whole two hours on this Bill – before they disappear back to Constituencies to ask for our vote.

It's time for more direct action - you need to write to your MP today.

Click this link to write your MP with a preprepared letter

I've sent an amended version of the following letter to my MP, David Miliband, the contents of which can be found below:

Dear [Insert MP Name]

I'm writing to you today because I'm very worried that the Government is planning to rush the Digital Economy Bill into law without a full Parliamentary debate.

The law is controversial and contains many measures that concern me. The controversial Bill deserves proper scrutiny so please don't let the government rush it through. Many people think it will damage schools and businesses as well as innocent people who rely on the internet because it will allow the Government to disconnect people it suspects of copyright infringement.

Industry experts, internet service providers (like Talk Talk and BT) and huge internet companies like Google and Yahoo are all opposing the bill - yet the Government seems intent on forcing it through without a real debate.

As a constituent I am writing to you today to ask you to do all you can to ensure the Government doesn't just rush the bill through and deny us our democratic right to scrutiny and debate.

[Insert your Name]

This will take you two minutes of your time

If you want to know/do more...

The internet ISP, TalkTalk, has created a campaign group called 'Don't Disconnect Us' where you can find the concerns of the industry being voiced. There's also an e-petition over on the government's website which currently has around 34,00 signatures. Sign it.

Meanwhile, Dan Bull has been at it again:

Leverage change with social media

There are lots of ways in which the tools of Web 2.0 have enabled the public to get involved in political issues or take part in public pressure groups. The readily available free content hosting offered by YouTube, AudioBoo, Blogger, Flickr, etc, to name a few, has given anyone with an issue they want to talk about the ability and the platform to do that with a geographically dispersed public. This is often talked of as the 'democratisation' of the media - anyone can be a content producer and distributor these days.

I have some reservations about embracing that kind of rhetoric wholeheartedly - not everyone finds themselves with the same power and reach as a well-established transnational media business - but there is no doubt that web has opened up debate to include more vocal players than in previous eras of broadcasting. Not everything published across these kinds of sites is going to be of interest to everyone, but I dare say that much the same could have been said of legacy media and its output.

The easily shareable nature of the new platforms has brought with it significant benefits (a broader public sphere) as well as dangers (the sacrifice of privacy). I presented a short paper (slides below) to a bunch of colleagues recently about the use of social media tools to remediate the #IranElection of 2009 in which I pointed out that the state ran broadcast media was heavily censored and activists took to the web to organise their protests. Twitter was used heavily in this campaign - the Iran Election was the highest trending topic last year. One of the points I made in the presentation was that Iranians using the service, who found their message being retweeted, may have had some unwanted attention directed thier way (security forces were monitering the service, hence the high porfile campaign to change the location of Twitter users to Tehran, to try and fool them).

Remediation And Iran Election

View more presentations from Rob Jewitt.

It's the dangers or problems of mediation that I want to focus on in this post, and I'd like to do that by turning to an example drawn from digital activism ('hacktivism'?).

I was listening to this week's edition of Digital Planet from BBC World Service that featured an interesting segment on informational activism. You can listen to the section by clicking this link here (the BBC is testing the use of chapters in its audio content, which is a great idea). This comes about on the back of a new documentary movie entitled '10 Tactics For Turning Information Into Action' from the international NGO Tactical Technology Collective.



The film advocates a number of ways in which human rights advocates can leverage change via social media tools. The film makers are keen to emphasise that new media opens up new opportunities for spreading messages about rights violation but they also open up new potential dangers:

Just as each new technology has the potential to bring new opportunities and freedoms, they also present new challenges, difficulties and forms of suppression – from new forms of censorship to threats to privacy. This issue is extremely important for advocates who handle sensitive information in hostile environments and for marginalised communities for whom technology can be a 'double-edged sword' as it carries the potential to both liberate and further marginalise.

Once information is disseminated via the web it may be hard to guarantee what will happen to those people involved in the process. It may seem like one of the best ways to combat persecution is by making your voice heard, but video interviews with people who have suffered at the hands of others may draw attention to those people who may then be subject to more abuse by virtue of their newly acquired visibility.

Advocates have a responsibility to protect their sources - the Tactical Technology Collective are keen to stress this issue and have some useful advice to offer. I'm looking forward to seeing the film. In the mean time, if you are interested in using the web to affect change you could do worse than check out the TTC guide here. You can find related resources at the DigiActive and Global Voices sites.

EU Parliment's credibility undermined by 3-strikes U-Turn

Quick post. This week a strange turn of events occurred within the corridors of Europe which casts doubt on the faith we should have in the EU Parliament. Essentially this comes down to the long-standing "3-strikes" which threatens to have internet users disconnected if they are accused of illegal file-sharing (even if the way in which this data is collected is fundamentally flawed). Access to information via the internet is a right - disconnection compromises our civil liberties.

Parliament has voted against this disconnection process on separate occasions with an 88% majority. Just this week the MEP's negotiating team wanted to dilute these judgements (especially Amendment 138) whilst seeking a compromise with the EU Council. Historically, the EU Parliament has been relatively weak in the face of the EU Council and u-turns like this one do not bode well for democracy.

There is a little more detail on the Open Rights Group blog. They also point to an analysis by La Quadrature du Net.

Take action: write to your MEP asking them to put pressure on their team to preserve our rights and the EU Parliament's credibility.

I have written to my MEPs regarding this matter. I urge you to do the same if you care about your digital rights and/or democracy Full text below:

Thursday 15 October 2009

Dear Martin Callanan, Stephen Hughes and Fiona Hall,

I have heard the worrying news that Catherine Trautmann and Alejo Vidal-Quadras (Wed 14th October) have succeeded in leading negotiations to overturn the Telecoms Package, incorporating Amendment 138. As I understand it, Amendment 138 guarantees Internet access and protects fundamental civil liberties and is in danger of being diluted by the aforementioned Parliamentary negotiators seeking a compromise with the EU Council.

It appears that discussions between the Council of the EU, the Commission and the negotiators led to a compromise position regarding Amendment 138 that goes against the intentions of the Parliament that voted for citizens to have guarantees regarding access and other rights. These principles have twice been adopted by an 88% majority of the European Parliament.

This turnaround seems to suggest that Parliament's powers are being undermined. The negotiating team seems to have ignored the mandate they were issued from the Parliament delegation and this sets a dangerous precedent and displays a worrying lack of transparency.

Pressure needs to be placed on the negotiating team in order to preserve our rights and the credibility of the EU Parliament.

Yours sincerely,

Robert Jewitt

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EDIT

It looks like pressure is mounting around this issue: ORG. More effort is required. Get writing to your MEPs if you care bout your digital rights

Virgin says "no" to disconnection

This story is taken from TorrentFreak who are reporting that there is very little chance that they will follow through with the threats to disconnect their customers suspected by the BPI of participating in illegal filesharing. The original source of the admission appears over on the BBC Newsbeat site who claim there is "absolutely no possibility" that Virgin Media will take legal action against their customers.

This comes on the back of stinging criticism against the ISP who have issued 800 letters to customers over the last month warning them not to use "unauthorised peer-to-peer networks" like BitTorrent or Limewire to swap copyright protected files. The BBC have footage of a customer, Will McGree of Cardiff, who has been issued with one of these letters but denies its accuracy (a point I mentioned here yesterday). It seems difficult to reconcile both positions when Virgin Media are clearly bowing to pressure from the BPI, despite a lack of sufficient evidence.

Virgin have claimed they will not hand details of their customers details over to the BPI but it remains to be seen if they can be trusted to keep their word on this matter, especially since their associated business include music interests. Combine this with the fact that many ISPs (Virgin included) have been overselling their subscription capacities (and maximum download speeds) and are desperate to curb excessive bandwidth users and the picture looks less clear.

Disputing claims as to who downloaded what and when will soon become harder to contest if new Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) become the norm in places other than just Sweden. Until recently, the processing power required to inspect data packets has made this prohibitive, especially if they were encrypted (torrent files), as it required computers with massive computational power. Again, TorrentFreak carry the story:

"The other, arguably more sinister usage of DPI, is the growing interest by advertising companies to use deep packet inspection to observe what Internet users are doing. Watching your browsing activity, you can gain all kinds of insights into the user behind the keyboard. Similar to spyware, but on your line not your system, it’s not a good thing, and impossible to remove. Worse, it may be able to tell who is behind the keyboard at the time, by identifying trends in connection behavior."

Irrespective of filesharers, this kind of privacy invasion should have us all worried, especially if it is prone to abuse. It seems like hiding traffic in SSH VPN tunnels is now no longer a feasible alternative. Even our YouTube activity is under threat. The EFF have more info about the move which gives Viacom a lot of data to play around with. If ever the digital rights of the planet were under threat then it's now.