Chris Lighfoot - the good die young
The news of the sad death of Chris Lightfoot last month, is now in the public domain: posthumously on his own blog Chris Lightfoot 1978-2007, and with fine tributes from MySociety.org and NO2ID.net
Everyone in the United Kingdom who uses the world wide web or email, to campaign for more publicly accountable Parliamentary democracy or to preserve our hard won freedoms and liberties from bureaucratic function creep and the database surveillance society, using the award winning MySociety website tools such as WriteToThem.com to find and contact their elected representatives, or TheyWorkForYou.com to see what speeches and Parliamentary Questions they have made, owes Chris a great deal of thanks.
Neither PledgeBank.com nor the multi-million signature No. 10 Downing Street website e-petitons to the Prime Minister systems would have been possible without Chris .
Chris Lightfoot was also one of the founding members and technical mainstays of the cross party NO2ID Campaign. He was a formidable opponent, both online and offline, of the particular, nasty yet inept, centralised biometric National Identity Register scheme, which the Home Office and the Labour government is trying to inflict upon us, which he argued against with passion and with forensic, numerate, scientific intellectual rigour.
Rest in peace Chris, the democratic fight goes on, and we will prevail.