It’s less than two weeks until Support ORG! (and Party) - the ORG supporter event on the evening of 11 April at Bar Kick, London. To recap - SO!(aP) is a chance for ORG supporters to meet one another, and we’re asking each ORG supporter to bring at least one friend who they think would like to support ORG if they knew more about our work. The event will feature “public domain” music, remixed visuals and free culture goodie bags - truly an evening not to be missed.

And I’m pleased to announce that our very special guest speaker will be ORG’s pledge founder - Danny O’Brien - who is flying in to the UK from his EFF outpost in San Francisco. What’s more, we’ve got even more treats to add to the ORG raffle - a signed copy of Code 2.0 from Lawrence Lessig, £150 in O’Reilly book vouchers and… wait for it… a signed copy of the Gowers Review of Intellectual Property! But remember, you don’t get a chance to win anything, if you don’t buy a ticket (£2.50 each - available now via Paypal or on the night for cold, hard cash).

We want as many people as possible to come and join us for this event, so please spread the word. See you there!

The Royal Academy of Engineering has just released a report entitled Dilemmas of Privacy and Surveillance Challenges of Technological Change. The report focuses on areas where the developments in IT have had a particularly significant impact on personal privacy. It gives examples of some of the harm that can be done by exposing people to these risks, for example while talking about RFID chips in British passports:

With sensitive personal details readable over a distance, it could even become possible, with appropriate antennas and amplification, to construct a bomb that would only detonate in the presence of a particular nationality or even a particular individual.

The report also covers proposed government databases holding sensitive personal information. It urges the government to prepare for failures in these systems.

There are a number of incidents in which a government or series of governments have suffered loss of trust due to poor role performance, or perceived poor performance. Crucially to the interests of this report, a number of these relate to the introduction of new technologies. For example, the implementation of a new computer system in the Child Support Agency (CSA) was considered a disaster, with many vulnerable people failing to receive child support payments due to its inadequate functioning. The failures associated with the CSA have been brought up in criticisms of plans for the NHS project ‘Connecting for Health’ which involves bringing modern computing systems to the NHS. They have also been raised in connection with the ID cards scheme and the associated National Identity Register (NIR).

Both past problems and recent difficulties mean that government is vulnerable when it comes to trust in their ability to implement a large IT project, or any other complex business change project. Of course, government is not alone in experiencing difficulties in implementing complex projects with a large IT component, but it is particularly vulnerable since its projects use public money and involve critical services such as the NHS.

The Academy calls for the government to take action to prepare for such failures, making full use of engineering expertise in managing the risks posed by surveillance and data management technologies. It also calls for stricter guidelines for companies who hold personal data, requiring companies to store data securely, to notify customers if their data are lost or stolen, and to tell them what the data are being used for. It recommends that engineering solutions should be devised which protect the privacy and security of data.

We’ve finally got video footage from two of our February e-voting events online. Thanks to Tim, Felix, Chad, Laurence, Gavin and Ryan for pulling this together, and to archive.org for the bandwidth.

Our guide to registering to become part of ORG’s volunteer Election Watch 2007 team is now online. If you’ve already pledged to devote your day to democracy on May 3, by becoming an accredited election observer in one of the areas where e-voting and e-counting systems are being piloted, then Jason Kitcat will be contacting you soon. If you haven’t, but you’d like to, please pledge now.

We have already succeeded in fielding 3 election monitoring teams. But we’re still looking for people in to help us in the following areas:

• Sheffield - only one more person needed for Pledge success!
• South Bucks (in Pledgebank use “Denham” - the one near Uxbridge, Harefield, Fulmer)
• Bedford
• Breckland (in Pledgebank use “East Dereham”)
• Dover
• Stratford-upon-Avon
• Warwick (in Pledgebank use the one near Leek Wootton, Old Milverton, Leamington)

Update #3: Raffle is now closed! See you tonight!

Update #2: Less than 24 hours now until we close the raffle (tomorrow, noon), so get buying your tickets!

Update: more prize donations - signed copies of Lawrence Lessig’s Code v2 and Andrew Gowers’ Review of IP, and £150 worth of O’Reilly vouchers!

Oh you lucky, lucky people… here comes the inaugural ORG raffle! Tickets are £2.50 each and make excellent Easter gifts.

Prizes include Neil Gaiman’s (signed) keyboard, a signed copy of Bruce Schneier’s Beyond Fear, a set of a dozen Beatpick compilations and a couple of extra special Doctorow donations: a signed author’s galley of his next novel, Little Brother (forthcoming in 2008), and the opportunity to be written into it!

We’ll make the draw as part of our spectacular ‘Support ORG! (and Party)’ 11 April event. All advance purchases (we’ll close the paypal interface an hour or two before the party) will be assigned a paper ticket, then added together with tickets sold on the night for the grand draw, to be selected by our yet-to-be-disclosed special guest.

And if you haven’t registered to attend Support ORG! (and Party) yet, get to it!

The Patent Office needs to hear from artists and creators. Please let us help you get in touch.

The Patent Office is charged with implementing the exciting recommendations suggested in the recent Gowers Review of IP. But they are yet to be convinced of the crucial need for some of these recommendations, mainly because they’re finding it hard to get in touch with the relevant practioners. They are looking for concrete examples of creative practices inhibited by the law, to back up proposed exceptions for the purposes of “creative, transformative or derivative works” and “caricature, parody or pastiche”.

Would you, your colleagues, students or collaborators benefit from these exceptions? Are you working or have you worked on a project outlawed by the overly-protectionst copyright regime, which would have benefited from these kinds of exceptions? If so, please get in touch - info[at]openrightsgroup.org - and share your experience.

Rights holders were of course quick to lobby against these suggested exceptions. In their opinion the dismal and labour-intensive “must-ask-permission!” culture of copyright-licensing works just fine as it is. They don’t see the creative and social opportunities in remixing and poking fun, only the economic-downsides in losing control of their ‘IP assets’.

But if you are a practicing artist with relevant experiences to share, please get in touch today so we can show the importance of copyright exceptions to Patent Office.

• Patent Office consults on… patents
  Consultation launched on “modernisation and consolidation” of UK patent rules.
  (tags: publicconsultation patents)
• The NHS Database: Lord Warner’s opt out decoy
  A well-referenced review of persisting privacy and confidentiality issues. by Dr Paul Thornton MPH, FRCGP.
  (tags: identity privacy nhs)
• Cut-throat lobbying ahead of MEPs’ online music vote
  Ahead of a vote on cross-border rights management, the International Federation of Music Publishers has been forced to withdraw a petition allegedly signed by 350 songwriters and composers after some signatories denied having signed it. Sound familiar?
  (tags: europe copyright music)
• Off the shelf | Guardian Unlimited Technology
  A look at some of the pros and cons of a Google project that aims to digitise every book ever published.
  (tags: copyright libraries books google)
• TLF: Framework Set for ‘Broadcast Flag’ Copyright Control to Go Global
  Link to Electronic Frontier Foundation paper about the entertainment industry’s move to take copyright controls global, released this week.
  (tags: Europe broadcast regulation broadcastflag intellectualproperty video television)

• House of Lords debate: DNA Database
  A short debate on the DNA Database in the Lords from yesterday. Really quite impressive how many questions you can avoid answering if you really work at it.
  (tags: bigbrother dataprotection identity surveillance dna)
• Conservative Party - Open Source Politics
  In a speech at the Royal Society of Arts Shadow Chancellor George Osborne announces his intention to create a level playing field for open source software in the UK, which is estimated could save taxpayers over £600 million a year.
  (tags: conservatives opensource itprocurement)
• Gowers review implementation timetable
  Patent Office publishes timetable for responding to Gowers
  (tags: copyright gowersreview intellectualproperty patents)

Doing anything exciting on election day? ORG is looking for volunteers to “devote their day to democracy” and become ORG’s Electoral Commission accredited election observers for the e-voting pilots on Thursday 3 May.

We’ll provide you with full instructions on the kind of things that will be expected of you on the day. We’ll also supply a factsheet of what to look out for in each of the different pilots. We’ll expect you to be travelling around the pilot area during the day, and to turnaround a quick report for us afterwards.

If you live in or around the eleven pilot areas (or are willing to travel there) and you’d like to help out, please let us know. Sign up to our pledge on Pledgebank - we’re using a beta feature that lets you input which of the pilot areas you’re volunteering for. The image on the right shows where volunteers have already signed up.

Please take a look down the list of pilot areas to see if there’s one near you, or one you’d be willing to travel to. The information in brackets will help you sign up to the right area using the Pledgebank system.

The five e-voting pilot areas are:

• Rushmoor (use “Aldershot” in Pledgebank)
• Sheffield
• Shrewsbury & Atcham (use “Shrewsbury” in Pledgebank)
• South Bucks (use “Denham” - the one near Uxbridge, Harefield, Fulmer)
• Swindon (the one near Wroughton, Draycot Foliat, Chisledon)

The six e-counting pilot areas are:

• Bedford
• Breckland (use “East Dereham”)
• Dover
• South Bucks (use “Denham” - the one near Uxbridge, Harefield, Fulmer)
• Stratford-upon-Avon
• Warwick (the one near Leek Wootton, Old Milverton, Leamington)

To read more about e-voting in the UK and across the world, download our briefing pack. If you do volunteer, you’ll be playing a vital role. We need bodies on the ground to inform us about irregularities, machine (and human!) error and even fraudulent activities relating to the trialling of electronic voting mechanisms.

The current issue of Private Eye has an eight-page special report into the NHS Programme for IT and Connecting for Health. The report, by Richard Brooks, gives a history of the project since its ill-fated conception in 2002, and highlights the work of Computer Weekly and e-Health Insider in bringing the less functional aspects of the emerging system to the attention of the public.

What struck me most is the ticker tape running along the bottom of the report, which gives examples of what £12.4bn - the amount the National Audit Office estimated the system would cost over ten years last year - could buy for the NHS. According to Private Eye, £12.4bn would pay for:

• 26,000 doctors for ten years, or
• 65,000 nurses for ten years, or
• The NHS’s record 2005/6 deficit - 23 times over, or
• Every hospital built since 1997 - three times over, or
• 200 years of currently “too expensive” Alzheimer’s drugs, or
• 500,000 full courses of herceptin treatment for cancer patients.

Unfortunately, the report is not available online - although it will likely end up in the Private Eye shop at some point. It should be available from UK newsagents until 13 March.