Let's use Your Freedom to chuck out the Digital Economy Act

Nick Clegg is angling for some much-needed goodwill from the left with his announcement this morning that the public will be able to nominate 'unecessary laws' that they want to see repealed. The Deputy Prime Minister is crowdsourcing people's ideas for the repeal or reform of legislation in three key areas:

* Laws that have eroded civil liberties.

* Regulations that stifle the way charities and businesses work.

* Laws that are not required and which are likely to see law-abiding citizens criminalised.

The Your Freedom website allows the public to suggest changes to invasive laws and 'rate' those which they would like the government to consider for repeal or reform in the upcoming Freedom Bill, which will be unveiled in the autumn.

Depending on which suggestions make it into the Bill, this may well herald a whole new way of forming policy, as well as allowing Clegg to put on a solemn voice and inform us that "Today is the launch of Your Freedom," rather like a civil servant auditioning for the role of deranged desert prophet. The Your Freedom initiative isn't precisely direct digital democracy - the government has no obligation to consider any of the suggestions, which, according to the Telegraph, will be 'sifted' before any assessment is made - but it's a start.

There's really only one way for civil liberties campaigners to respond to such an unprecedented display of faith in digital politics: with a lobby to reform the antediluvian Digital Economy Act, removing the sections of the bill which threaten internet users with summary disconnection for engaging in free filesharing. This morning, a group of Open Rights Group Supporters and opponents of the Digital Economy Bill, led by Katie Sutton, convenor of the Stop Disconnection Demonstration in March, put together the following statement:

The Digital Economy Act (DEA) is an insult to British citizens, and the government should consider its repeal in the upcoming freedom bill as a matter of urgency. The DEA was rushed through at the tail-end of the last Parliament in an undemocratic manner, allowing the owners of copyrighted content such as music and film (rights holders) to demand that an Internet Service Provider (ISP) cut someone's Internet connection if they suspect that they have downloaded copyrighted content.
Rights holders only need to prove that the wrongdoing occurred using the Internet connection they wish to be cut, not that the persons affected are guilty. This leaves account holders responsible for the actions of anyone using their connection, whether legitimately or by piggybacking without permission.
In this digital age, an internet connection is essential for simple tasks like banking, paying bills and jobhunting, and as a result, taking away a connection used by several people as punishment for the actions of an individual who may not even be known to them is fundamentally wrong.
Simply put, the Act imposes disproportionate, collective punishment, does not follow the principle of innocent until proven guilty and contravenes the Magna Carta, which in 1215 stated that, as a basic human right, no person may be punished without a fair trial.
The Digital Economy Act is a massive insult to our civil liberties and should be repealed in its entirety, subjectto the less objectionable clauses being redrafted and discussed democratically in the Houses of Parliament to pave the way for a proper digital economy which does not punish innocent people.

If the Liberal Democrats are looking for 'bad laws', they should look no further than the Digital Economy Act, which was forced through during the wash-up despite huge opposition from a digital grassroots movement of internet users, civil rights protestors and allies within Westminster. The Act could be construed in any of the three available categories, as a threat to civil liberties (in 2009, EU amendment 138/46 declared that access to the internet is a fundamental human right), as a threat to businesses and charities (many sections of the music, film and other UK creative industries depend on filesharing to support their business model and disseminate ideas) and as an unecessary law that threatens to criminalise the seven million law-abiding British internet users who are currently regular filesharers.

It's only a pity that the Liberal Democrats, who voiced their opposition to the Digital Economy Bill in March, couldn't be bothered to turn up to vote against this regressive, draconian law in significant numbers during the parliamentary wash-up. Still, better late than never: for those of us who care about digital rights, the patronisingly-titled Your Freedom site is a brilliant opportunity to make our voices heard.

What you can do: rate and comment on any or all of the following suggestions, uploaded to the Your Freedom website by concerned citizens, to repeal aspects of the Digital Economy Act. It's telling that within hours of the site going live, a number of suggestions to reform the Act have already been put forward, alongside some sillier ideas for what the government should throw out ('The EU In General' is my favourite so far). I've selected what seem to be the most comprehensive and well-supported proposals, referring to specific clauses of the Act that need to be repealed. All of them deserve your rating and comments:

1.[link coming soon] - an official proposal put together by the Open Rights Group in consultation with human rights lawyers and digital freedom activists. If you only vote for one idea, make it this one.

2. Save Britain's Digital Economy By Repealing The Digital Economy Act

3. Repeal the Digital Economy Act 2010

You'll need to login or register at the Your Freedom website, but the process takes a few seconds and does not require you to give out sensitive information. New Statesman is not officially backing this campaign, but I certainly am, and if you believe that access to the internet is a fundamental right, you should be, too.

A sad day for British democracy.

(image via scepticisle)


I'm actually in tears. Boris Johnson, the Tories in Westminster Council and the centre-right coalition have managed to do what nine years of new Labour anti-civil-liberties wrangling didn't have the guts to do. They've sent in the police and they've taken away Brian Haw.

Brian Haw's anti-war protest - a tent, some placards and a whole lot of brazen peacenik courage - has been pitched directly outside the houses of parliament for almost nine years. Embarrassing the executive. Reminding them of their complicity in an illegal war. Reminding the people of the possibility of resistance. Labour tried everything they could think of to get rid of him, dragging him through the courts, even setting up a whole new law to ban protest in parliament square without prior approval specifically designed to oust him. They never could. Under the new centre-right regime, however, there's no such faffing about with legal precedent and squabbling over human rights. Today, the Mayor ordered the stormtroopers in to handcuff Brian Haw and drag him away, and now, after nine years, he's gone.

That's what the right does, in government. No lengthy, drawn-out hypocrytical bollocks about decorum and protest, no legislating you out of existence bit by heartbreaking bit. Just this. You are a nasty protestor. We do not like you, or your messy ideas about justice and freedom. You are spoiling our nice clean lawn. We are sending large men to remove you.

I am twenty-three, and have been politically active for about as long as Brian Haw's protest has been standing. Nearly all of my significant political memories involve Haw, from rainy pickets over the HFE bill in 2008 to cheering as the crowd of nearly two million marched past his tents on the big anti-war demo in 2003, back when I was sixteen and had only just begun to realise how terribly wrong the world was, and the power of personal resistance.

Years later, as a parliamentary intern, I passed Haw's protest every morning and evening as I crossed the street into the Houses of Parliament. And every time, I felt glad to see it, sometimes a lonely one-tent display facing down the glowering edifice of Big Ben and the commons, sometimes a larger gathering, as thousands of well-wishers and supporters travelled from all over the world to meet Brian and join his demonstration. It made me feel proud, every day, to know that whatever faff was going down in parliament, I still lived in a country where citizens had some right to protest, some right to face down the entitlement and warmongering of the state without fear of their lives and livelihoods, even if it was just one little tent and some placards against centuries of privilege and pride. It made me feel proud, every day. Johnson is using the excuse that Haw's protest detracted from the majesty of Parliament Square, but I considered Brian Haw as much a symbol of the political inheritance of my generation as the Commons. And now he's gone.

Some of us on the left were always convinced that the Tories would be worse than Labour on civil liberties. We did say. But today 'I told you so' tastes of nothing but bile. This is a tragedy, a travesty, and nothing more. Mr Haw, we salute you. The state may want to forget your protest and the grassroots resistance it symbolised. We never will.

A state-sponsored book-burning parade.

For months, my head has been jammed with anger and ideas about the Digital Economy Bill that's in the last stages of being rushed through parliament. I keep meaning to discuss it on this blog, and I haven't. Not because I don't care - actually, this piece of legislation offends me personally and politically more than anything Labour have done since they took us into Iraq - but because I care so profoundly that I don't think anything I can say can really do it justice. Pathetically, I'm also a bit intimidated by the volume of clever stuff that's been already been said about corporate copyright protection, and I'm scared that if I try to express how I feel I'll reveal myself as a Stupid Shouty Girl who Doesn't Understand. But I've got to at least acknowledge that this matters to me. It matters because the Digital Economy Bill is one of the most significant assaults on human rights that Labour has managed to execute in its twelve-year trigger-happy showdown with British civil liberties.

Today's open letter from a group of MPs, bloggers, musicians and members of the Featured Artists association [including Anthony Barnett of Open Democracy, Billy Bragg and The Indelicates] is a reserved shot of the sheer indignance that many internet users are feeling this week:

Many of us believe that the Digital Economy Bill threatens to severely infringe fundamental human rights, by allowing the disconnection of internet accounts for alleged copyright infringement, and also by new 'website blocking' laws that could result in new ways to suppress free speech and legitimate activity...Last week, Harriet Harman MP failed to give the commons any reassurances that this important, complex and controversial Bill will be properly scrutinised by our elected MPs. Democracy and accountability will be sidestepped if this bill is rushed through and amended without debate during the so-called 'wash-up' process.

The best blog analysis on the Bill that I've read recently has been helen's post at Police State UK, 'The Chilling Effect', explaining the recent amendments and why the actual sanctions proposed against people sharing files for free online are only part of the problem. Suppression of free speech isn't just about direct censorship - it's about creating a climate of cultural orthodoxy in which certain ways of behaving and sharing information are suspect, and then putting power in the hands of intermediary regulating authorities [ISPs, for example] to enforce that suspicion.

The Digital Economy Bill is altogether a larger and more dangerous assault on liberty than its individual clauses would suggest. What really frightens me about the government's corporate copyright protection movement is the casual, sneering manipulation of neoliberal dialectic: talking about 'safeguarding businesses', when clamping down on personal internet freedoms will endanger small entrepreneurial partnerships and cottage creative industries. Talking about 'protecting creative industries', when it's clear, as Bragg told Panorama last night, that "the music industry is thriving. It's the record industry that's in trouble."

This is a vile, vituperative piece of legislation, driven by corporate lobbyists and blithely ignoring public interest. It's a Faustian pact between a dying government and antique, anti-innovatory music and publishing industries who are as terrified now as manufacturers of illuminated manuscripts were in 1455 when they got their hands on the Gutenberg Bible and saw the page turning on a world of easily-exchanged ideas that they could not monetise or control. And just like today, the backlash was vicious, because of easy deal-brokering between communications merchants keen to control how people spent their money and state authorities keen to control people's access to ideas and information.

It's not just the fact that the Digital Economy Bill will criminalise young people, that this law has been written by people who mistrust and misunderstand the internet in order to punish those whose economic and cultural world has been formed by it. It's not just about the collision between information that wants to be free and information that others want to be expensive. It's about a cold and calculated assault on the forming paradigms of my generation, a final statement by a crippled and expiring Labour government that big business being free to make money at the expense of everyone else is the only thing that matters - more than the lives and livelihoods of individuals, more than artistic expression, more than the long-term socio-economic future of this or any other nation.

Because much as the Digital Economy Bill is Mandelson's terrible lovechild, collusion by frontbench Tories and Lib Dem Peers gives the lie to the idea that this is simply a Wicked Labour Scheme. It's not even a trend that's unique to Britain. Across the West, governments are moving to restrict the access of their citizens to unpaid content on the web, creating blacklists and gifting themselves with the power to cut people off from the syncretic world of high-speed information exchange at the slightest provocation. Future generations will look at campaigns like these in the same way that we think about fascist book-burning parades.

On Wednesday, there's going to be a demo in Westminster. Hope to see some of you London-centric folks there.

No going back.

A better day today. Whatever you think about the New Labour project, there are certain ways in which it has changed the country forever, and for the better. In partnership with gay rights groups, Labour has set the bar for tolerance and diversity. No, things aren't perfect, not by a long chalk. But for a sense of how Britain has changed, you only need to listen to the 1993 version of Tom Robinson's fantastic, angry dialectic, Sing If You're Glad To Be Gay - a cross between a cheesy popsong and the best stone-cold protest rant ever - and count how many of the complaints aren't relevant anymore:

Don't try to kid us that if you're discreet
You're perfectly safe as you walk down the street...
Make sure your boyfriend's at least 21
And if you're a lesbian, don't be a mum.
Gay Lib's ridiculous, join in their laughter
'The buggers are legal now, what more are they after?'

You know someone's rolled up the map when one of the most prominent right-wing voices in the nation is out of the closet, proudly civilly partnered to another man and, today, challenging the Daily Mail over its nasty, patronisingly homophobic comments about his campaign for election in Bracknell in today's edition of the paper. I never thought I'd say this, but Iain Dale's principled stance is actually pretty damn impressive:

"I really thought that we had got away from this sort of thing and it's very sad that we haven't...If by standing up to the Daily Mail, and drawing attention to this issue, it hijacks me in Bracknell, then that will be a bitter blow to have to take, but if I sat back and just accepted this sort of thing, what sort of person would that make me? And worst of all, if I did say nothing, it would just encourage them to do it again to someone else in the future. I simply cannot do that...PCC here I come."

Even more heartening are the hundreds of comments from Tory sympathisers expressing support for Dale's brave stance. There have always been gay Tories, but time was they were expected to shut the hell up about it. They certainly couldn't run for candidacy whilst going to the Press Complaints Commission about homophobic attacks on their lifestyle. The Tories were the party of the closet, the party of don't-ask-don't-tell, the party of Section 28, the party that stood against civil partnership laws and lowering the age of consent, the party of hate and self-hate. That old guard is still bumbling evilly around Whitehall (o hai, Ian Duncan Smith), but for the moment they no longer hold the majority consensus. In fact, at the Tory conference this week, the first ever Conservative Pride rally will take place. Maggie must be spinning in her wheelchair.

I'm not saying that there are no bigots in the Tory party. I'm not saying that they have anything but an appalling record on LGBTQ rights, feminism, anti-racism or any other aspect of equality-driven policymaking. But it might, just might be the case that twelve years of a Labour administration has changed the terms of the debate forever. The world has changed. There can be no going back to the days when queer-bashers escaped prosecution and gay men and women were called perverts on the front pages of every tabloid. And if the mood continues in this way, with millions of LGBTQ people and their allies of every political tribe standing up to defend equal rights, then there will be no going back - not even under a right-wing government.

On Orwellian nightmares.

This week, I have mostly been re-reading George Orwell’s 1984.

Perhaps unsurprisingly to those of you who’ve been following this blog for a while, 1984 was one of the formative books of my childhood and adolescence. I read it on a yearly basis until I was 17. Between the ages of 15 and 17 I edited a clunkily subversive student rag that was called, not entirely without irony, Newspeak. I haven’t revisited the book since 2004. I’d been planning to do so for a while, and this weekend I saw that Penguin have just brought out a super-sexy new red and black edition done up to look like a Stalin-era circus poster, and I was persuaded to part with seven of my hard-earned pounds.

It's been too long. Somehow, sixty years after it was published, this book is once more at the linguistic core of the zeitgeist. Words like doublethink, Big Brother, Thought Police are used by all political factions, indiscriminately and with tongues only half in cheeks. I was struck by the way that terms like ‘Orwellian Nightmare’ were flung around at Saturday’s Internet For Activists conference, at which I was speaking- flung around with a quiet, numinous resentment that I found deeply frightening.

1984 is claimed by both the left and the right, but by far the most urgent message of the book for the modern age is one of paranoia. 1984 is the definitive paranoid novel. Not only is the shadowy state watching our flawed protagonist, all the time, every single second, but nobody really has a clear idea of what the state is watching for, or how far their remit extends – only that the mere act of thinking against the party line, whatever that party line happens to be, is enough to ensure inevitable extermination. The creeping horror of being watched, the loathesomeness of life in a paranoid state, was never more viscerally expressed.

British democracy, as Orwell himself noted in his essay ‘The Lion and The Unicorn’, functions best when it respects the deeply private nature of the British national character.

National Take a Photo of a Police Officer Day 2009: stand up for citizen journalism!

Set to become law on the 16th of February in the UK, the Counter-Terrorism Act 2008 amends the Terrorism Act 2000 regarding offences relating to information about members of armed forces, a member of the intelligence services, or a police officer. Laws are being introduced that allow for the arrest - and fining, and imprisonment for up to ten years - of anyone who takes pictures of officers 'likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism'.

The law is expected to increase the anti-terrorism powers used today by police officers to stop photographers, including press photographers, from taking pictures in public places.

Does anyone else have a problem with this?

Picture, if you will, a protest, demonstration or piece of civil action. These can be inconvenient places for the government. A bunch of riot police wade in with batons, and a shocked bystander takes out her camera to preserve the evidence. The right of citizens to maintain sousveillance over their own police and military systems is vital to any healthy democracy.

So let's take back the gaze, if only for ten more days.

Starting from today, take a picture of a police officer on your phone or your camera and post it to this facebook group or email me at the address on the left. Photos will be collated (with permission) here and at participating blogs - if you don't want your photo to be included there, or if you'd like to remain anonymous, just email me.

To make it even easier for you, photos of police officers still count if the participating copper happens to be your mum, sister, school chum, etc. Standing laws mean that we can't take pictures of these people anywhere where they have 'a reasonable expectation of privacy': we're here to say that we don't think police should be expected to enjoy privacy whilst nominally protecting the peace.

Join in, tell your friends! The revolution will not be televised, but it WILL be on facebook.