Author Archives: Peter Bradwell

The Independent View: An invitation to ORGCon 2013: the UK’s leading digital rights conference

By Peter Bradwell | Wed 22nd May 2013 - 10:28 am

It becomes clearer every year how technology affects our rights and civil liberties in all sorts of ways. Businesses or governments try to block access to more information online. States make ever more demands for powers to surveil their citizens. Some of the laws governing what we can say on the Internet are too strict, with people punished severely for saying something online that would not be an offence if it was said in the local pub.

Open Rights Group’s national conference ‘ORGCon’ is the place to learn about, discuss and debate how technology affects our freedoms and democracy in these …

The Independent View: The battle for privacy in the EU and how the Liberal Democrats can help

By Peter Bradwell | Wed 27th March 2013 - 2:37 pm

Last year Liberal Democrats took a principled stand against the “Snoopers’ Charter” – more formally called the draft Communications Data Bill. This added up to a defiant, important defence of citizens’ privacy rights in the face of a concerted (and ongoing) effort by the Home Office to undermine them.

Right now there is another, equally important, battle for our privacy going in the European Parliament. The same principles are at stake. Once again Liberal Democrats have a really important role in determining what sort of law we get.

The “Data Protection Regulation”, proposed by the European Commission and now being considered by …

Posted in Op-eds and The Independent View | Tagged data protection, open rights group and sarah ludford | 5 Comments

The Independent View: Social media – no longer an easy target

By Peter Bradwell | Fri 26th August 2011 - 11:08 am

Open Rights Group, alongside 9 other human right groups including Amnesty UK, Liberty and Index on Censorship, yesterday wrote to the Home Secretary, Rt Hon Theresa May MP. We were responding to the Prime Minister’s comments that the Government will “look at whether it would be right to stop people communicating via these websites and services when we know they are plotting violence, disorder and criminality”.

The letter was written to coincide with a meeting that took place at lunchtime yesterday between the Home Secretary and Twitter, Facebook and Research in Motion, to discuss what that …