e-nsecure.net blog - Comments on IT security and Privacy or the lack thereof.
Rat's Blog -The Reverend Rat writes about London street life and technology
Duncan Drury - wired adventures in Tanzania & London
Dr. K's blog - Hacker, Author, Musician, Philosopher
David Mery - falsely arrested on the London Tube - you could be next.
James Hammerton
White Rose - a thorn in the side of Big Brother
Big Blunkett
Into The Machine - formerly "David Blunkett is an Arse" by Charlie Williams and Scribe
infinite ideas machine - Phil Booth
Louise Ferguson - City of Bits
Chris Lightfoot
Oblomovka - Danny O'Brien
Liberty Central
dropsafe - Alec Muffett
The Identity Corner - Stefan Brands
Kim Cameron - Microsoft's Identity Architect
Schneier on Security - Bruce Schneier
Politics of Privacy Blog - Andreas Busch
solarider blog
Richard Allan - former Liberal Democrat MP for Sheffield Hallam
Boris Johnson Conservative MP for Henley
Craig Murray - former UK Ambassador to Uzbekistan, "outsourced torture" whistleblower
Howard Rheingold - SmartMobs
Global Guerrillas - John Robb
Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends
Vmyths - debunking computer security hype
Nick Leaton - Random Ramblings
The Periscope - Companion weblog to Euro-correspondent.com journalist network.
The Practical Nomad Blog Edward Hasbrouck on Privacy and Travel
Policeman's Blog
World Weary Detective
Martin Stabe
Longrider
B2fxxx - Ray Corrigan
Matt Sellers
Grits for Breakfast - Scott Henson in Texas
The Green Ribbon - Tom Griffin
Guido Fawkes blog - Parliamentary plots, rumours and conspiracy.
The Last Ditch - Tom Paine
Murky.org
The (e)State of Tim - Tim Hicks
Ilkley Against CCTV
Tim Worstall
Bill's Comment Page - Bill Cameron
The Society of Qualified Archivists
The Streeb-Greebling Diaries - Bob Mottram
Your Right To Know - Heather Brooke - Freedom off Information campaigning journalist
Ministry of Truth _ Unity's V for Vendetta styled blog.
Bloggerheads - Tim Ireland
W. David Stephenson blogs on homeland security et al.
EUrophobia - Nosemonkey
Blogzilla - Ian Brown
BlairWatch - Chronicling the demise of the New Labour Project
dreamfish - Robert Longstaff
Informaticopia - Rod Ward
War-on-Freedom
The Musings of Harry
Chicken Yoghurt - Justin McKeating
The Red Tape Chronicles - Bob Sullivan MSNBC
Campaign Against the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill
Stop the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill
Rob Wilton's esoterica
panGloss - Innovation, Technology and the Law
Arch Rights - Action on Rights for Children blog
Database Masterclass - frequently asked questions and answers about the several centralised national databases of children in the UK.
Shaphan
Moving On
Steve Moxon blog - former Home Office whistleblower and author.
Al-Muhajabah's Sundries - anglophile blog
Architectures of Control in Design - Dan Lockton
rabenhorst - Kai Billen
(mostly in German)
Nearly Perfect Privacy - Tiffany and Morpheus
Iain Dale's Diary - a popular Conservative political blog
Brit Watch - Public Surveillance in the UK - Web - Email - Databases - CCTV - Telephony - RFID - Banking - DNA
BLOGDIAL
MySecured.com - smart mobile phone forensics, information security, computer security and digital forensics by a couple of Australian researchers
Ralph Bendrath
Financial Cryptography - Ian Grigg et al.
UK Liberty - A blog on issues relating to liberty in the UK
Big Brother State - "a small act of resistance" to the "sustained and systematic attack on our personal freedom, privacy and legal system"
HosReport - "Crisis. Conspiraciones. Enigmas. Conflictos. Espionaje." - Carlos Eduardo Hos (in Spanish)
"Give 'em hell Pike!" - Frank Fisher
Corruption-free Anguilla - Good Governance and Corruption in Public Office Issues in the British Overseas Territory of Anguilla in the West Indies - Don Mitchell CBE QC
geeklawyer - intellectual property, civil liberties and the legal system
PJC Journal - I am not a number, I am a free Man - The Prisoner
Charlie's Diary - Charlie Stross
The Caucus House - blog of the Chicago International Model United Nations
Famous for 15 Megapixels
Postman Patel
The 4th Bomb: Tavistock Sq Daniel's 7:7 Revelations - Daniel Obachike
OurKingdom - part of OpenDemocracy - " will discuss Britain’s nations, institutions, constitution, administration, liberties, justice, peoples and media and their principles, identity and character"
Beau Bo D'Or blog by an increasingly famous digital political cartoonist.
Between Both Worlds - "Thoughts & Ideas that Reflect the Concerns of Our Conscious Evolution" - Kingsley Dennis
Bloggerheads: The Alisher Usmanov Affair - the rich Uzbek businessman and his shyster lawyers Schillings really made a huge counterproductive error in trying to censor the blogs of Tim Ireland, of all people.
Matt Wardman political blog analysis
Henry Porter on Liberty - a leading mainstream media commentator and opinion former who is doing more than most to help preserve our freedom and liberty.
HMRC is shite - "dedicated to the taxpayers of Britain, and the employees of the HMRC, who have to endure the monumental shambles that is Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs (HMRC)."
Head of Legal - Carl Gardner a former legal advisor to the Government
The Landed Underclass - Voice of the Banana Republic of Great Britain
Henrik Alexandersson - Swedish blogger threatened with censorship by the Försvarets Radioanstalt (FRA), the Swedish National Defence Radio Establishement, their equivalent of the UK GCHQ or the US NSA.
World's First Fascist Democracy - blog with link to a Google map - "This map is an attempt to take a UK wide, geographical view, of both the public and the personal effect of State sponsored fear and distrust as seen through the twisted technological lens of petty officials and would be bureaucrats nationwide."
Blogoir - Charles Crawford - former UK Ambassodor to Poland etc.
No CCTV - The Campaign against CCTV
Barcode Nation - keeping two eyes on the database state.
Lords of the Blog - group blog by half a dozen or so Peers sitting in the House of Lords.
notes from the ubiquitous surveillance society - blog by Dr. David Murakami Wood, editor of the online academic journal Surveillance and Society
Justin Wylie's political blog
Panopticon blog - by Timothy Pitt-Payne and Anya Proops. Timothy Pitt-Payne is probably the leading legal expert on the UK's Freedom of Information Act law, often appearing on behlaf of the Information Commissioner's Office at the Information Tribunal.
Armed and Dangerous - Sex, software, politics, and firearms. Life’s simple pleasures… - by Open Source Software advocate Eric S. Raymond.
Georgetown Security Law Brief - group blog by the Georgetown Law Center on National Security and the Law , at Georgtown University, Washington D.C, USA.
Big Brother Watch - well connected with the mainstream media, this is a campaign blog by the TaxPayersAlliance, which thankfully does not seem to have spawned Yet Another Campaign Organisation as many Civil Liberties groups had feared.
Spy on Moseley - "Sparkbrook, Springfield, Washwood Heath and Bordesley Green. An MI5 Intelligence-gathering operation to spy on Muslim communities in Birmingham is taking liberties in every sense" - about 150 ANPR CCTV cameras funded by Home Office via the secretive Terrorism and Allied Matters (TAM) section of ACPO.
FitWatch blog - keeps an eye on the activities of some of the controversial Police Forward Intelligence Teams, who supposedly only target "known troublemakers" for photo and video surveillance, at otherwise legal, peaceful protests and demonstrations.
I wonder if this is covered by Article 3(2) i of the European Union Charter of Fundamental Rights:
2. In the fields of medicine and biology, the following must be respected in particular:
i) the free and informed consent of the person concerned, according to the procedures laid down by law,
Robert.
"DNA analysis" etc. is not just used for "medicine and biology" but also for "law enforcement" and "national security" etc.
If the Human Tissue Bill passes into law in its current form, then "Section 46 Offences relating to non-consensual analysis of DNA" and the exemptions from this section under "Schedule 5 Part 2 Use for an Excepted purpose" will sneak around the European Convention (which is not likely to become law in the UK until after the promised referendum, after the next General Election, assuming that Labour get back into power)
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200304/cmbills/049/04049.50-56.html#j377NS2
The Law Lords recently upheld the right of the Police to store your DNA fingerprints indefinately, even if you have not been convivted of a crime and even if someone else has been convicted of the particular crime which was under investigation. This also applies if you have been foolish enough to surrender a sample to be analysed "voluntarily".
http://www.spy.org.uk/spyblog/archives/000407.html
In that case, maybe Article 3(1) should apply:
"1. Everyone has the right to respect for his or her physical and mental integrity."
If the Charter does become part of the European Constitution then it will effectively be law - and member states domestic law cannot conflict with that, in the sense that it must be 'compatible' with European law. Therefore it could be struck down.
Already, the ECJ takes 'into consideration' the Charter in its deliberations. See http://www.europa.eu.int/comm/justice_home/unit/charte/en/faqs.html#22
Furthermore, could this also be challenged under Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights (which is handled separately from the EU) and therefore under the 1998 Human Rights Act. I wonder if the Government is required to explain *how* this legislation is compatible rather than just declaring it to be so.
The House of Lords decision is crying out for a referral to the ECtHR. Maybe it has already?
Robert.
Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, as incorporated into UK law by the Human Rights Act 1998:
"Article 8 ? Right to respect for private and family life
1 Everyone has the right to respect for his private and family life, his home and his correspondence.
2 There shall be no interference by a public authority with the exercise of this right except such as is in accordance with the law and is necessary in a democratic society in the interests of national security, public safety or the economic well-being of the country, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, or for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others."
However the Charter of Fundamental Rights in Part II of the proposed European Constitution is worded simply as:
"Article II-7:
Respect for private and family life
Everyone has the right to respect for his or her private and family life, home and communications."
i.e. there is no clause 2 allowing exemptions "in accordance with law", but also no prohibition against "no interference by a public authority with the exercise of this right".
However, if DNA data is considered to be "personal data", which it should be obvious that it is, then perhaps
"Article II-8:
Protection of personal data
1. Everyone has the right to the protection of personal data concerning him
or her.
2. Such data must be processed fairly for specified purposes and on the basis of the consent of the person concerned or some other legitimate basis laid down by law. Everyone has the right of access to data which has been collected concerning him or her, and the right to have it rectified.
3. Compliance with these rules shall be subject to control by an independent
authority."
i.e. the right to the privacy of personal data is contrained by the words "or some other legitimate basis laid down by law" e.g. the Human Tissue Bill when it becomes law or the Law Lords judgment on DNA retention.
Presumably, this means that there will be lots of lucrative work for lawyers to argue over in the future.
Liberty took the case of Marper and the unnamed child regarding DNA sample retention through to appeal before the Law Lords, but, having lost this appeal, it is unclear if they will go to Strasbourg on this or not.
http://www.liberty-human-rights.org.uk/resources/interventions/pdfs/marper.pdf
The Government does have a pretty shoddy record in terms of declaring new legislation to be "compatible with the Human Rights Act" c.f. the scandal of the Civil Contingencies Bill part II Emergency Powers, where the Government argues that Ministers are deemed to always act in a "reasonable" and "proportionate" manner, so they would not be likely to abuse the power that they are seeking to suspend or amend the Human Rights Act etc. should they choose to.
They therefore rejected the the criticism of the Joint Committee of the Lords and the Commons which scrutinised the Bill.
http://www.spy.org.uk/spyblog/archives/000344.html
Our current politicians in power and opposition are not quite yet despots, even though they seem to be on the slippery slope, but such laws create a mechanism for future, more extreme Governments to abuse our human rights.
just heard on the 6pm news that the police have been given further power where they can arrest people for minor incidents....surely this must be another way of gathering more dna samples than ever before.
we can expect more powers of arrest being dished out left right and center.