Some video and photos of the event are online here: http://bit.ly/shefdebprotest Yes, that is me mumbling incoherently into Mikey’s video camera!

Paul Scriven at the Gagged Geeks protest

There was disappointing news from Parliament today. Despite a massive letter-writing and direct action campaign by geeks across the UK, Leader of the House Harriet Harman has scheduled a second reading of the Bill for 6 April. This is widely expected to be the day Gordon Brown goes to the Queen to ask permission to disolve parliament. If a second reading takes place before Parliament rises for the election, the Bill will be eligible for the so-called “wash-up” process, in which the Government and Opposition front-bench teams will sit behind closed doors to horse-trade our rights away. No transparency. No scrutiny. No debate. No democracy.

If you haven’t done so already, now is the time to write to your MP and protest, which you can do in two minutes at http://www.writetothem.com/. There’s a guide to writing a good letter here

If you have already written, and you haven’t received a reply, then you could write to the local paper and call them out publicly. Here’s my letter in the Sheffield Star.

You could also turn up to one of the many election hustings being held across the country and ask your local Parliamentary candidates for their opinion – both on the Bill and the underhand way it’s being pushed through Parliament.

If you’ve had a reply from your MP, and it’s a form letter or you’re not satisfied with their answers, please write back and tell them. Point out which parts of their response you disagree with or ask them to address any specific points from your first letter that they’ve ignored. You’ll often get back a much more personal and considered response to a second letter.
Please also consider contributing the correspondance to the Open Rights Group wiki

Lastly, you could join the Open Rights Group, who campaign to protect and extend digital rights in the UK.

Disclosure: I am an Open Rights Group paying supporter and volunteer.

My Mum is a librarian. In conversation with her earlier today it occurred to me that this effect might not be limited to wifi. It probably impacts all publicly-accessible web kiosks such as in Internet cafes, university halls of residence, hotels and… libraries. The thing about libraries, though, is that they provide Internet access to those who can’t otherwise get it. This access is relied upon by the elderly, the poor, the young, students, asylum-seekers, visiting foreigners, job seekers and ordinary folk from out-of-town.

I haven’t heard that there will be an exemption for libraries and in any case rights-holders won’t be able to tell that a particular IP address is on a library network.

Libraries see enough people coming through their doors to guarantee that at some point one of them will infringe on someone’s copyright and get spotted doing it.

Libraries are funded by local government and budgets are always tight. Even though they know the service they provide is vital and worth defending they won’t relish the decision between £250,000 fines and expensive litigation to do so.

The irony is that the Government has put libraries at the forefront of its campaign to push services online in order to improve efficiency and reach more people.

My Mum says that libraries are increasingly reliant on their provision of Internet access to attract visitors, and that if they were no longer able to provide such access, it’d be difficult to put together a case for their continued existence.

Dear Sir

James Hall is wrong to claim ID cards will be voluntary (Letters, 10 June).

Sheffield residents won’t be forced onto the National Identity Register directly, unless they’re from outside the European Economic Area, however the Government intends to make it impossible for us to live without an ID card.

Compulsion will start with “critical workers” [PDF] in industries such as transport, energy and the emergency services. Next they plan to make registration a condition of applying for a passport. Students are a third group who will be targeted early.

Before long we’ll be unable to start a new job, open a bank account or make a high-value purchase without a check against the register, which may also tip off the tax man about our spending habits. The same will apply if we have to claim benefits. Nothing Mr. Hall says reassures me that we won’t be asked to surrender to the scheme before voting or seeking NHS treatment. Registration is for life and the penalties for non-compliance include £1000 fines and prison sentences.

The government presents ID cards as a Hobson’s choice: comply or they will withhold our access to public services and deprive us of our livelihoods. That doesn’t sound very voluntary to me.

I’m grateful that Sheffield City Council has stood up for freedom and our right to a private life by speaking out against this scheme. ID cards and the sinister database behind them should be scrapped.

[In our manifesto], we state there that we will invest in crime prevention through improvements to the built environment, supporting better lighting, alley gating and CCTV WHERE APPROPRIATE. It would be impossible to put CCTV on every street for example and we certainly would not want to do that. The wording “where appropriate” is key here. Where it has proven to be a deterrent for crime and most useful is in shopping precincts, car parks and “hotspots” of crime. This does make people feel safer and aids the apprehension of criminals.

While I applaud the idea of investing in environmental and street-lighting improvements, the fact is most CCTV installations are useless at preventing and detecting crime, and ineffective at reducing people’s fear of it.

We should be limiting camera surveillance to the few places – such as car parks – where it has been shown to have an impact. At the same time, the quality of CCTV images needs to be improved, as do the mechanisms for using video evidence in court. Fewer, targeted, high-quality systems complemented by good urban design and frequent visible police patrols would be a wiser way to spend council tax than mass surveillance. I hope this is what the Lib Dems have in mind when they call for more “appropriate” CCTV.

UPDATE 2008/05/14 23:15:

Shortly after this post was published, I received an email from Cardiff Council:

Dear Mr King

I refer to your request submitted on 15th April. I regret that there has been considerable disruption to our FOI service as a result of an accident to our FOI Officer on the weekend of 19 April, as a result of which he is likely to be off work for several months.

(continues)

I assume this message was auto-generated by some kind of script, arriving as it did 37 minutes after the legal deadline for a response, and signed as it was by the “information manager”. I’ve just pinged back a reply to ask when they now expect to be able to send me the information I requested, given the (clearly unfortunate) circumstances.

On a personal note: there have been too many people around here suffering serious injuries lately. Look after yourselves, everyone – I don’t want to hear about any more.