Thanks to everyone who came along to Parliament Square this morning and made the ORG/No2ID “Big Picture” event such a success. The sun was shining as we constructed a massive 4m x 5m collage of all the photos you’ve been uploading of UK surveillance state ephemera over the past couple of weeks.

The result was [...]

Read the rest of "Freedom Not Fear: the Big Picture unveiled on Parliament Square"

I’m pleased to announce that I can now reveal the location for our live collage of the hundreds of surveillance state photos you’ve been taking this week for the Freedom Not Fear, Big Picture event.
On 11 October, we’ll gather underneath the statue of Winston Churchill on Parliament Square in London to build an image showing [...]

Read the rest of "Show Parliament the Big Picture"

Happy-snappers unite! We need as many people as possible to take photos of stuff that embodies the database state, and the UK’s world-famous surveillance society (wake up! You’ve just walked into it).
On 11 October, No2ID and the Open Rights Group will make a live collage of the images you’ve taken in a prominent location in [...]

Read the rest of "Capturing the database state: community photocall"

The House of Commons Justice Committee has today released a report into the protection of public data. The report is a good summary of the state of play and, in particular, of developments since the Chancellor announced to Parliament in November last year that HMRC had lost confidential records affecting 25 million UK citizens.
The report [...]

Read the rest of "MPs call for tougher data protection regime"

On Monday next week Kieron Poynter of PricewaterhouseCoopers will publish his report into the failures that led to HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) losing 25 million confidential records about UK citizens claiming child benefit. The HMRC fiasco, and privacy debacles before and since, demonstrate a public sector culture of complete disregard for the privacy and [...]

Read the rest of "Write to your MP today: stop the Government’s privacy timebomb"

Yesterday, Home Office minister Jacqui Smith announced that she had signed a certificate to exempt Transport for London and the Metropolitan Police from certain provisions of the Data Protection Act. The move will facilitate the transfer of bulk data from the TfL’s congestion charging cameras, which the Met will be permitted to use when investigating [...]

Read the rest of "Automatic Numberplate Recognition - function creep begins?"

Trustguide reports on our views, beliefs and needs regarding trust, security and privacy in relation to new technologies. We like it very much - It should be required reading for politicians! Over the last 15 months HP and BT, in conjunction with the DTI, hosted workshops across the UK on a broad range of [...]

Read the rest of "Trustguide and ID Cards"

The talk that I gave at Trinity College, Dublin, kindly hosted by Dr Eoin O’Dell as part of his Dublin Legal Workshop series and organised by Digital Rights Ireland, is now up online. You can watch the video of my talk and TJ McIntyre’s - Director of DRI - response, followed by the question and [...]

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Whilst I was in Dublin last weekend, I did a videocast for Trinity College bloggers Technolotics. Thanks very much to Gareth Stack and Francis McGillicuddy for giving me the chance to talk about digital rights, copyright reform, privacy, data retention, automatic vehicle tracking and a bunch of other stuff. The ‘cast is available in audio [...]

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Wired reports on a Department for Transport pilot scheme to test RFID chipped car numberplates here in the UK, with battery powered chips that can broadcast their identity up to 300ft. Considering that we don’t have that many toll bridges or roads here, and the congestion charge is limited to London, I wonder what the [...]

Read the rest of "Big Brother is tracking you"