The political gagging bill explained

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I’m not actually dead just horribly busy which looks to continue for a while yet – mainly this is due to an excessive amount of social life, but I’m coping. So in the meantime a video made by 38degrees (who I trust about as far as I could throw Eric Pickles – but hell even a stopped clock is right twice a day).

The political lobbying bill is going to impact independent campaigners and all sorts of actually amateur grass roots groups a hell of a lot more than the political lobbyists and even more than the political parties. Watch the video then write to your MP, they’re unpopular enough at the moment that they might just pay attention.

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Everything will be need to know

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Ignorance is bliss (This post was first published at Knee Jerk)

Ignorance it seems is bliss, that is our ignorance would be bliss to those that spy upon us. With so many revelations coming from the Snowden leaks it’s hard to keep up with what those whacky dudes over at the NSA and GCHQ are up to. Yesterday a bunch of e-mail services shut down rather than risk giving customer data to the spooks, the Germans decide it would be super special if they just turned on encryption between mail servers – but the spooks weren’t to be out done. They have decide that they need to tackle the next big security threat – having had it revealed how useful big data is to them, they have realised it might be used against tham! That’s right all that public data out there could be useful to people that object to what they’re doing. So they’re going to spend a bunch of American tax dollars to make sure that public data isn’t useful to the bad guys which from their recent behavior means everyone else. After all it’s not beyond the realms of possibility that someone looking at a public satellite photo on google earth might see a pixilated building in the middle of a clear photo and decide that might be something interesting. Worse we might look at politicians voting records and see which of them have supported mass intrusion into our private data. No siree such misuse of public data can’t be allowed to happen
Their ultimate goal is “to design a real-world tool that can monitor open source data sets in real time, measure vulnerabilities and then provide defensive countermeasures.” – or in possibly more honest terms they want to watch out for useful data and then take steps to make it less so.

Obviously I would never suggest that the spooks have anything other than our very best interests at heart, and will only take the least possible action to protect the national good and won’t ever be influenced by political goals or their own self interest. However it does seem that some data analysis may be more equal than others.

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Meanwhile in Russia

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Hot on the heels of the same sex marriage bill being passed in the UK, Russia’s lower house has passed some sex legislation of it’s own. They’ve unanimously banned the promotion of homosexual propaganda, a bit clause 28 that – except in Russia it seems that “homosexual propaganda” may cover such outrageous behavior as holding hands. This law extends to foreign visitor as well and indeed four dutch citizens have already been arrested oh and 70 Russians as well which isn’t bad going for a law just 9 days old. The four where LGBT activists and attending a human rights seminar and making a documentary but don’t seem to have been promoting anything at least not as we’d understand it. There were worries that this might affect the winter Olympics, though as Baku’s rules didn’t effect the EuroVision song contest there’s probably not much to worry about there. Anyway just to be on the safe side the IoC have reportedly negotiated a deal that exempts Olympics athletes, press and guests so that’s all all right then. In the meantime the photgraphs coming out of Russia seem to suggest that this clamp down on Homosexuals will be enforced in a stereotypically soviet fashion. Meanwhile the entrapment and abuse of homosexuals appears to not be causing the Russian authorities much distress.

Thankfully the recent laws have attracted international condemnation even from the European parliament of all places. The UN so far is keeping quiet, guess that UN charter of Human rights isn’t really that big a deal after all, though oddly just a few weeks earlier the UN did manage to condemn Nigeria’s Parliament for passing anti-gay law. Can’t possibly imagine why they’d condemn one UN member one week and then be silent about another for doing much the same thing a few weeks later, nope – complete mystery that. To be fair the UN did condemn the idea of such laws last year when Russia was just thinking about them. Now amongst all this international political condemnation you’d have thought that a government that had just struck a principled blow for equal rights by passing a same sex marriage bill might speak out? I mean ti was a principled stand and not just a popularity vote grabbing type of move, and the head of that government did speak out about Nigeria. So with such high principles at stake, the leader of a country who’ll arrest someone for calling a horse gay would surely be leading the international pressure on Russia for passing such a law?

Parliament speaks out

Ah apparently not. Well they are on holiday, so he probably doesn’t even know it’s happened. That’ll be it as soon as he gets back he’ll be making a principled statement on the matter demonstrating his firm commitment to human rights, the other party leaders and the rest of Parliament will also no doubt be on it the moment they get back from holiday as well. The rest of our mainstream media will no doubt also shortly join the Gaurdian in actually mentioning it as well.

Meanwhile apart from the usual writing to people, there’s a somewhat misguided boycott of Russian vodka and also a demo outside the Russian Embassy on August 10th at 13:00. Which given it’s Russia probably won’t worry them much but it might help our politicians and press to find their tongues.

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