Richard's Kingdom

The Government may be about to propose some misconceived, illiberal and anti-competitive copyright-enforcement policies in a Communications Bill green paper. The Open Rights Group has a briefing up on the proposals and their concerns about them. In summary the suggestion seems to be that UK web-surfers should be prevented from accessing websites that major corporate [...]

Last week I attended a public meeting about the UK Government’s plans to introduce a statutory register of lobbyists. It seems the proposals are something of a token effort and the meeting highlighted several ways to shine lights into more of this industry’s dark corners. Speaking as one who lobbies in a volunteer capacity I’m [...]

UPDATE 2012-04-05 16:00 BST: I had my legislative proposals confused. Turns out there are two separate sets of measures being proposed at present. This session was on the forthcoming Communications Green Paper not the Communications Capabilities Development Programme. I’ve updated the post title and content accordingly. My thanks to the [org-discuss] mailing-list subscriber who pointed [...]

The war on terror is over. We lost. The tell-tale signs are everywhere. You can see them in our buildings and our transport networks. You can read them in your morning paper. You can hear them echoing down the corridors of Whitehall. Galvanised by fear whipped up by the media, to which our politicians pander [...]

Europe wants to monitor what you search for on the Internet. Under the misleading guise of protecting children against sexual abuse (sigh) Written Declaration 29 calls for the Data Retention Directive to be extended to cover search engines. This would force national Governments to record everything you type into Google, Bing, Yahoo! et al and [...]