Category Archives: Websites

A right to be forgotten?

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So we’re talking about the “right to be forgotten”. I am profoundly unconvinced about this. For a start, I can’t see how you can have an ethics of responsibility and at the same time a right to be forgotten. I am very interested in the past track record of people who want to exert power over me. That Boris Johnson used to claim that renationalising Railtrack was as bad as Robert Mugabe is, I think, relevant information to anyone who might have to vote for or against him. Similarly, the public memory of archives is enormously important, especially to anyone who intends to commit journalism.

That said, we should take petty tyranny, the abuse of private power, seriously too. We should take it seriously, among other things, because it is so common and it tends to be exercised in the same direction as all the other privileges in society. Having posted an embarrassing photo on Facebook should not actually be a bar to employment. Obviously, we’re living in a transitional era here – in the future, everyone will have an embarrassing Internet past, and therefore it will be unremarkable. The trouble is what happens in the meantime.

These two points are obviously in tension, if not contradiction. What I would like would be not so much a right to be forgotten, as a duty of tolerance, a right to be different or perhaps more importantly, a right to be wrong. Wrongness comes to us all. If you are never wrong, it suggests that you’re in denial, or that your ideas are simply uninteresting. And very often, being wrong is confused with just being unpopular.

But then, Harrowell, you’ve been very harsh on all sorts of people yourself. This is true, but I would claim that I’ve picked issues that are important and targets who can look after themselves.

To sum up, I would say that the notion of a right to be forgotten is worrying because we want it. This implies that we are scared of private bullying, and policed by elite consensus.

Beyond that, I am much more interested in the private use of public information, the deep-web stockpiles of ad-targeting metadata, which are worrying precisely because they are not directly observable. Then again, you have as much right to demand that you disappear from my notebook as from my mind.

épuration, crowdsourced

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I’m not sure what either Ethan Zuckerman or Evgeny Morozov would make of this, but this is quite the revolutionary web crowdsourcing project. Piggipedia is an effort by Egyptian Flickr users to pool their photos from the revolution and identify the plain-clothes cops and private thugs responsible for the worst of the violence, with a view to prosecuting them or failing that, just ostracising the hell out of them. I presume this is also going to be a rare deployment outside China of the human flesh search engine. If sex infects new media like a virus, yadda yadda William Gibson feh, just wait ’til you see how revenge does.

Wait, where did the astroturf go?

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I just noticed that a number of pro-Russian astroturf websites — including some that I used to read regularly — have gone dark.

First off, there are the Transnistria pages. The Tiraspol Times used to provide a weekly dose of happy, upbeat news about the good times in Transnistria. It’s gone now — “account suspended”.

Then there was transnistria.co.uk, a more or less daily blog that did the same thing, interspersed with some whining about how nobody was nice to Transnistria. That’s gone too. I can’t find archives for either of them, which is a shame — there was some wonderfully wacky stuff in there.

Visitpmr,com, the site for Transnistrian tourism (really) is still up, but it hasn’t been updated for a long time now. Pridenestrovie.net, same thing — still exists, nothing new since 2007. EODE.org, purporting to be an NGO, published one “report” about the wonderful state of Transnistrian democracy three years ago and has been “under construction” ever since. And transnistria.info hasn’t updated its news feed since March.

Okay, so someone was funding a disinformation/propaganda campaign for Transnistria, and they stopped. That’s no big deal. But some of the louder voices of the pro-Russian disinformatsiya have also fallen silent. Remember the British Helsinki Human Rights Group? Their website is gone, as is their “partner” OSCE Watch. (BHHRG’s loudest voice, professional nuisance John Laughland, has moved to Paris, where he’s working for a Russian-funded think tank. Can’t find what’s happened to the rest of them.) And ICDISS — the “International Council for Democratic Institutions and State Sovereignty” — hasn’t updated their website in over a year.

It was always obvious that these various outlets were pieces of the same organism. It’s a little weird to see it confirmed this way, though. Wonder if we’ll ever find out how it all fit together behind the scenes. Eh, probably not.

Meanwhile: does anyone know a good English-language source for news about Transnistria? There’s a German-language site that’s still live, but it doesn’t update very often. There’s the Transnistrian Parliament’s website, which is interesting to look at — basically it’s like glimpsing an alternate universe where the USSR survived into the age of the internet — but not very informative. Otherwise, it’s a lot of scavenging among blogs and human rights reports and other such odds and ends.

I never thought I’d miss the Tiraspol Times and its friends, but it’s surprising how little is left now that they’re gone.

So what is it with Tory MEPs and the Internet?

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Those horrible surveillance proposals came up again in the European Parliament, and got shot down again. Even though their co-author Syed Kamall did come out against some forms of mass surveillance, I promised I’d look into the two British Conservative MEPs who keep doing this. Anyway, so we’ve got Syed Kamall and Malcolm Harbour, and we’ve also got the great new Web site for spying on MEPs, Votewatch.eu, as well as a gaggle of other things.

Harbour is easy enough to deal with; as his Wikipedia article explains, he was involved with a highly transparent lobby for software patents which sent unsolicited bulk e-mail from his address, supposedly without his knowledge. More about the “Campaign for Creativity” – in reality, Microsoft – is here. He’s now a “political member” and member of the board of governors of the European Internet Foundation, whose “business members” include several firms involved with the CFC and which was itself party to the software-patent campaign. Conveniently, according to the EIF’s Web site, only the business members have to pay a membership fee.

Kamall, who is leading the Tory list for the London region at next month’s election, is slightly different. His primary outside interest is something called the “Global Business Research Institute”, a supposed think-tank arguing for the benefits of globalisation which has a rather second-rate Web site and not very much else. In fact, it doesn’t seem to do anything much but collect links and accept donations – a figure of $500 is mentioned. At some point it seems to have been associated with Alex Singleton’s Globalisation Institute. What interests me about this is why, if he wants to blog, he doesn’t just get a blog – why does he need an Institute?
Apparently the institute is a British company limited by guarantee, that is to say, a non-profit entity (so donations are tax-deductible) – its entry in the register of companies is here.

However, it can hardly explain his commitment to total surveillance; its total expenditure for 2008 was £15, the fee for filing its accounts.

a lost sheep back in the fold

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Well, will you look at this? Remember Tory MEP Syed Kamall, who was the author of a proposal to implement total Internet surveillance in the EU, in order to make the French record industry happy? (I’m sorry to say I spelt his name wrong.) We beat that one. But now look at him – here’s a letter he sent to today’s Guardian.

Lord Woolf and his colleagues were right to point out that the recent erosions of civil liberties are “one of the most significant changes in the life of the nation since the end of the second world war” (Report, 6 February). We already have the largest DNA database in the world and, under the terms of the Prum treaty, more and more personal data can be shared with other EU member states.

It is vital that we weigh up whether we are sacrificing too many of our hard-won freedoms in our quest to tackle crime.
Dr Syed Kamall MEP
Con, London

Quite astonishing; Dr. Kamall has been saved as a brand from the burning. Did we turn him on to a weirder life? Or just scare him? Or has his local talking points cache been refreshed? Certainly, it’s a pretty impressive statement from someone who was looking for a mandate for compulsory deep-packet inspection throughout Europe only a few months ago.