Last weekend the Don’t Spy On Us coalition (a grouping comprising the Open Rights Group, Big Brother Watch, English PEN, Liberty, Article 19 and Privacy International) held a day of action seeking to lay practical groundwork for a stronger international movement to protect digital civil liberties. Jenny Woods, one of our party’s most active campaigners in this area, and I attended the afternoon, which had some important take-away messages for the Lib Dems.
The event kicked off, appropriately, with a tightly packed crowd of delegates crammed into the hall watching a video message from a figure of authority projected on a large screen. Rather than an Ingsoc broadcast, though, we were treated to a webcam video of Stephen Fry from his hotel room at the Tony Awards. In the video Fry argued emotively that “using the fear of the unknown […] is a duplicitous and deeply wrong means of excusing spying on the citizens of your own country.”
Fry was followed by author and campaigner (and former party member!) Cory Doctorow who made a more technical appeal against the deliberate engineering in of features designed to protect copyright (digital rights management or DRM), which have, in the past, been vulnerable to malicious exploits. As there are strong penalties for everyday users modifying DRM software, it is much harder to stay ahead of motivated criminals seeking to exploit weaknesses in these areas.
Next up, Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger discussed his experiences over the year since the Snowden leaks with Josie Rourke. Rourke is the artistic director at the Donmar Warehouse, and recently directed Privacy – a play inspired by Snowden’s revelations. It was here that things started to get political. Rusbridger lamented the inactivity of the major parties on digital rights, claiming that the Lib Dems had ‘done nothing in this area’. I could sense Jenny bristling at this as she had been instrumental in drafting and passing the amendment to the party’s Civil Liberties policy motion that proposed strong minimum safeguards for surveillance of communications data back in 2012.
Someone wasn’t going to let him get away with it, though: former MEP Sarah Ludford challenged Rusbridger on the Lib Dems’ digital rights record, reeling off the Civil Liberties motion passed in 2012 as well as our motion on a Digital Bill of Rights earlier this year, Clegg’s veto of the Communications Data Bill and his setting up of an inquiry into data gathering by security agencies. Ludford’s strong defence of our record drew a mixed reaction from delegates with a fairly generous round of applause mixed with some disgruntled mumbling from someone directly behind me. Rusbridger backed down and qualified his statement to say that he appreciated the work of the Lib Dem grassroots as well as Clegg and Huppert, but that many of our other MPs had still been too quiet on these issues.
After the Rusbridger segment, the conference broke out into smaller sessions and Jenny, Sarah and I joined the session on ‘Changing the law to uphold our privacy’. Much of this session focused on the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) and the EU Data Retention Directive, ruled invalid by the ECJ just over a month ago. Labour MEP Claude Moraes, who voted in favour of Charles Clarke’s data retention proposals in 2005, acknowledged that it had been a mistake to rush the directive through the European Parliament and paid tribute to Sarah Ludford’s record of opposition to the directive. Moraes is now a leading proponent of privacy and digital rights within the Labour Party and has authored reports calling for stronger privacy safeguards.
The day of action ended with a question and answer session with an all-star line up of Liberty’s Shami Chakrabarti, Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales, author and cryptography specialist Bruce Schneier and Guardian intelligence correspondent Ewan MacAskill. One noteworthy moment was a comment from Caspar Bowden on American exceptionalism and how, although the Obama government seems to be pressing ahead with reforms to improve the online rights of American citizens, it doesn’t seem to be budging an inch on extending those rights to non-Americans. Finally, Jimmy Wales again returned to the theme of party politics, arguing that civil liberties advocates need to find a way to sell a pro-digital rights message to their own party. Though he seemed to think that Labour would take more convincing than others (language warning) …
The sheer volume of snooping scare stories over the day left me more convinced than ever that this is a cause that needs more action. You can start by signing the petition and emailing your MP at the Don’t Spy On Us campaign page. But it also reinforced that this issue needs political organising and that Lib Dems have both a duty and an opportunity to fulfil that role. We may never win over the grumbly sysadmin from the row behind me, but with Labour MEPs praising our European voting record and the founder of Wikipedia dropping f-bombs about Labour’s authoritarian tendencies on one side and, well, Theresa May on the other, I think it’s a good time to make sure that a few more people know about our Digital Bill of Rights policy than those who were in the York Barbican at 11am on the 9th of March. And I’ll buy a pint to whoever manages to sign Cory up again …
* Ed Long is the chair of the Association of Lib Dem Engineers and Scientists and a local member of Tower Hamlets Lib Dems
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8 Comments
Thanks for the detailed feedback to the link to the petition. (I have signed this and sent a copy to my MP).
(On another note entirely, I must agree with previous message posters who have stated how (really) annoying the “Plain packaging” notice on this site is! Can it not be moved to the right side panel or somewhere else not so directly “in your face”?)
Was hoping to attend but couldn’t make it – thanks for the feedback Ed!
A quote from the Don’t Spy on Us website:
‘GCHQ won’t tell us … what it is up to’
I’m sorry but is this for real?! What would be the point of gathering intelligence if we then just told everyone what it was / how we do it? If GCHQ told you ‘what it is up to’ then it wouldn’t be up to that anymore, as it would have to change what it’s doing so that potential terrorists etc. don’t know how they gather intelligence. I support much of the digital rights stuff, but the naivety of what some people say is astounding!
I remember reading this article on the BBC, one of the most ridiculous I’ve ever seen.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-26049448
Including the concerns raised by Dr Steven Murdoch, a security researcher at the University of Cambridge, about the closing down of a website used by hackers:
“It’s also likely that most of the chat that was going on about Anonymous was not to do with hacking”
What’s next? “Okay, so one person on the plane has a bomb, but no-one else does, obviously we should let the plane carry on, otherwise its unfair on all of those legitimate plane users”
Thanks Charles & Chris.
Iain, nobody is asking for GCHQ to publish their day-to-day activities. The distinction is whether Parliament ultimately has oversight over intelligence gathering and whether intelligence is led by suspicion or gathered in blanket form on all citizens.
The campaign is asking for judicial oversight and a warrant-based system to monitor suspected criminals and for intelligence agencies to be transparent (at least to Parliament) over the degree to which the communications data of other citizens are monitored and stored.
Okay, after a closer read I can probably support the campaign, however your statement
‘nobody is asking for GCHQ to publish their day-to-day activities’
is sadly incorrect – too often people fail to realise that there are legitimate reasons that they are not being told things
@Iain
The problem with the “there are legitimate reasons” argument is that it leads to the conclusion that what the intelligence services do, should be concealed from the public.
As a result, we get GCHQ pursuing inappropriate tactics, closer to those that might be used by secret police but which are never disclosed. Put simply, I do not trust GCHQ.
Thanks to Greenwald, we know of GCHQ wanting to lure people to websites to discredit them because of those people believing in change. This strikes me as more as self-preservation by GCHQ than legitimate activity.
Dissent is important in society and it is deeply worrying that no one is keeping GCHQ in line.
I hope that these good people have practical recommendations about how we can gain adequate intelligence about ISIL, before ISIL acts against us directly, particularly those members that will come home to the UK.
“I could sense Jenny bristling at this”
What about some bristling about secret courts and water cannons? It is all very well getting annoyed but the track record of the party on civil liberties is far from good