2016-03-22

Public Bill Committee Written Evidence #IPBill

I am sorry that it has taken so long to get together a proper report on my findings when considering this Bill. It has been a lot of hard work, and I am very grateful to the assistance of many colleagues on this, including working through much of the Bill with me page by page on a Sunday!

There are, as before, a lot of issues.

My submission (PDF).

If you are thinking of making a submission, please do so ASAP. The first oral hearing is Thursday 24th and they have asked for evidence by Wednesday to allow time to consider it.

Please do feel free to quote me or copy to your MP. Ultimately they are the ones that vote on this.

I am happy to meet with MPs and Lords on this matter.


Oh, damn, once again, under this Bill your computer would now be logged as accessing a porn site, just because you read my blog. It would not log that you only accessed a benign favicon image, as that would be content, just that you accessed something on the site. Oops.

15 comments:

  1. Page 1: typo, "such powers do notes actually require"

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    Replies
    1. We tried, but some typos must have got through. Sorry.

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  2. The best of luck but I doubt that many of the relevant MPs will even bother to properly read your submission, let alone be capable of understanding it. They know full well that this imposes 24 hour surveillance on every citizen because that has been their objective from the beginning, although bare faced lying comes naturally to all MPs.

    The real fight will come after the bill is law when I'll be relying on the people in A&A and elsewhere to devise clever loopholes to at least thwart the data retention aspect and its secrecy clause as much as possible.

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  3. Just a note about the cross-site image. I know why you're doing this but I made the mistake of viewing your blog from work (they allow some limited personal browsing). It looks like I may have some explaining to do ... oh well.

    I think you've done this before and no one questioned me then so hopefully I'll be ok.

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    Replies
    1. It is, of course, done to highlight the stupidity of reading anything in to such logs - whether at work or by the state.

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    2. With the state you're (supposed to) get legal counsel, a fair trial and right of appeal.

      None of that applies to employers...

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    3. Unlike the proposed state powers, your employer is allowed to log every bit, and thus can see that all you did was download the favicon with this blog entry as referrer. Thus your innocence is clear.

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  4. Well done and thank you for putting together your excellent and well-reasoned evidence to the Public Bill Committee.

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    Replies
    1. PS As suggested, I have written to my MP with a follow-up to our previous correspondence on the IPB. I suggest that she look at your evidence, and have offered to meet with her to further explain my severe misgivings with the bill as currently presented.

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  5. I am finishing off my submission to my MP today, and hope to submit something to the Public Bill Committee today as well. I suspect this may take a large chunk of my day off!

    One thing I will do is be bragging to my MP how they should enjoy seeing my VPN node, because they'll see a lot of it.

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    Replies
    1. Just read your submission Adrian, thank you for all the work you and others have put in.

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    2. Submitted to my MP. I've decided not to submit to the committee as I feel the bases have been covered.

      I think I'm more impressed by the fact that I managed to condense the basics of the Internet down to 1.5 pages.

      I don't know if you'd be interested in reading what I sent to my MP Adrian and whether there are any points in there you might find of use if you discuss the matter further with the politicians.

      I know your own submission was useful for clarifying several of my thoughts at least, so thank you again for that.

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    3. I did submit after all, mostly focusing on ICRs.

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  6. Just submitted mine. It's not nearly as eloquent or as long (just 2 pages) as yours and it's probably a little too emotive but I hope it gets the point across.

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  7. I'm writing mine now. I'm making the point that we cant possibly know how big these ICR databases are going to get.

    Only last week Ping21 launched. The first decentralised, autonomous monitoring service. Imagine running that from home, and what ICRs that's going to create.

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