If you go down to the Games today, you’d better not go in disguise

AnonCentral has issued a warning to Anons:

WARNING! All Anons be aware that there is a UK wide Section 60 in place for the duration of the Olympic and Paralympic Games.

Section 60 (of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994), is the police stop-and-search-without-suspicion power. That is, if they don’t like the look of you, that’s all that is needed to stop and search you.

A person in that area can be searched to see if they are in possession of weapons or dangerous instruments (being anything that has a blade or sharp point). Arrests have already been made using these powers in the last 24hrs in London and Glasgow.

So, says AnonCentral,

…be EXTREMELY CAREFUL with what you are carrying on your person. DO NOT wear your Mask, if heading to a protest action Avoid taking Mobile Phones and anything that may Identify you.

This follows the wider, more general, post from Liberty. Liberty is concerned about all of the liberty-invading precautions being put in place for the Games – such as the London Olympic Games and Paralympic Games Act (2006), which

…allows for the banning of advertising of a “non-commercial nature, and […] announcements of notices of any kind”. Section 22 of the Act allows a “constable or enforcement officer” to “enter land or premises” where they believe a prohibited advert is being shown or produced and destroy the materials.

And then there’s the potential use of LRADs (Long Range Acoustic Devices) as offensive weapons against crowds (which, in the context of dispersal powers available to the police, could be considered “children and adults in groups of two or more”).

The big concern is that these Games-specific restrictions and powers do an income tax – a law that was specifically brought in to fight Napoleon and has stayed ever since.

Kudos to the first person managing to film an unmanned spy drone flying over the capital…

The ICO, Google and the need for a new pit bull approach to privacy

Have I mentioned that the ICO is a waste of both space and money? Well, if you ever doubted me, doubt no more. It has been treated with utter contempt by Google, and there’s not a damn thing it can do.

Do you remember Spy-Fi, when Google engaged in its very own version of drive-by downloading? Well the ICO said, “No! Stop it. Don’t do it again. And delete what you’ve got.” And Google said, ever-so politely, yes sir – we will. Only it didn’t. “Google has recently confirmed that it still has in its possession a small portion of payload data collected by our Street View vehicles in the UK.” It says it was an error and will work with the ICO to remedy the situation.

But how does the ICO know? How does the ICO know what Google has done with that payload data, what it may do with that payload data, or how many copies of that payload exist in what parts of Google’s vast and nebulous cloud? It wrote back, even more politely, asking for Google to store the data securely for examination before being told what to do with it.

But how does the ICO know, and what can it do? Nothing, except take the word of big business.

Nick Pickles, director of privacy and civil liberties group Big Brother Watch, has no doubt on what should happen:

The Information Commissioner is hampered by a woeful lack of powers and is forced to trust organisations to tell the truth. Given Google’s behaviour has called into question if that really is a proper way to protect our personal data, it must be right to now demand a proper regulator with the powers and punishments to fully protect British people’s privacy.

It’s time to get rid of the self-congratulatory lap dog and replace it with an angry pit bull.

Simon Cowell: creativity? Roger Daltrey: my generation? I don’t think so

Here’s a puzzle. What do Simon Cowell, Roger Daltrey (CBE), (the Lord) Lloyd Webber, and (Sir) Elton John (CBE) have in common?

Yes, you’re right, they’re all aging fuddy-duddies. But that’s not the answer. You can choose from any of the following correct answers:

• they’re all multi-millionaires
• they’ve all written an open letter to prime minister David Cameron
• they all want to remodel the internet to suit themselves

Their letter includes this:

Illegal activity online must be pushed to the margins…

The simplest way to ensure this would be to implement swiftly the long overdue measures in the Digital Economy Act 2010; and to ensure broadband providers, search engines and online advertisers play their part in protecting consumers and creators from illegal sites.

Let’s look at this.

implement swiftly the long overdue measures in the Digital Economy Act 2010
That is, start the three strikes graduated response to frighten UK citizens into doing what we want: which is to support a broken business model in order to carry on making our fortunes even bigger.

ensure broadband providers, search engines and online advertisers play their part
That is, get ISPs to block sites we don’t like; get search engines to censor links we don’t like; and prevent advertisers advertising things we don’t like.

The problem here is this. Those things they don’t like are mostly (but far from entirely) already illegal. We have laws (even without the Digital Economy Act) that can be used against illegal things. But what these people want is to become the arbiters of the law – they wish to tell the courts what is illegal rather than have the courts decide. And they don’t care how many innocent people are hurt or disrupted in the process.

Yesterday, TorrentFreak published an overview of the rightsholders’ leaked strategy. On cyberlockers, for example, they want sites that do not comply with their own infringing-content removal criteria, to be shut down. Megaupload is a good example. It didn’t remove infringing copyright fast enough for the rightsholders – so in conjunction with the FBI it was taken down. Who cares about the thousands of legal users with thousands of legally stored documents? Certainly not the rightsholders.

Frankly, if it wasn’t so serious it would be hilarious. Daltrey made a fortune by talking about his generation. That generation was young and dynamic and rebellious. Now he has abandoned the young and the rebellious in favour of the rich and staid. Cowell has put his name to the statement, “To continue to create world-beating creative content…” This is Simon Cowell. The same Simon Cowell who has sucked creativity out of the music industry by concentrating on pre-packaged, good-looking pretty boys and girls who can do nothing but recycle cover versions of old music. Creativity? All of these people want to stamp out creativity and concentrate increasing their own – nobody else’s – fortunes.

You and me and the internet generation are the enemy; and you and me must be made to conform to an internet made in their own image.