RunningWithBulls.com - The curse of Sanfermin

I attended the DigitalRights Ireland launch this morning in Conference Room, Pearse St. Library. The turnout was very respectable, with a mixture of interested parties, journalists from print, radio.

Digital Rights is made up of Bernie Goldbach, Antoin O’ Lachtain, Damien Mulley, Colm MacCarthaigh, TJ McIntyre, and many many more.

The reasoning behind the launch of a “new” group was launched due to:

* New technology that has brought about new issues “These areas outstrip traditional laws”.
* Specialist knowledge - technical and legal experience within DRI
* The European Dimension
* Enabling democratic decisions

DigitalRights goals are:

* Public education
* Political education
      It is not an us vs them. The will is there on the part of the politicians, but they need advice.
* Lobbying
      deficient laws in the areas of digital rights
* Enabling Democratic Decisions
      this is one of the most important goals that DRI can have. This is *needed*, as without this public ground swell alot of these “minor” privacy infringements will be passed, and therefore our overall rights will be undermined.
Currently people are not concerned, or do not know what to be concerned about, due to the “technical and legal complexity” involved in these areas.

On the area of “what concerns us”, TJ McIntyre said quiet simply “Alot. Our list is very long.” Details from their slides include:

* Civil Human and Legal Rights in a Digital Age
      right to freedom of expression is being eroded. The rights we have in the “offline” world are not present in the “online” world.

* Data retention
      This is currently the most pressing issue for DigitalRights. This matter is being dealt with in a very secret and disclosed way by the current government. DigitalRights want this matter discussed openly and with public discussion.

Data Retention should be renamed to “mass surveilance” according to DRI. Data Retention removes the “guilty until proven innocent” idea, with “we have your data, we will see if you might think about committing a crime”.

Data Retention brings the idea of “tagging for all citizens, not just criminals” into the real world. Your voice mails, e-mails, web browsing, text messages, mobile calls will give a “pattern of usage”.

DRIs questions include “Will Data Retention be extended and if so, what will it be extened to?”, also “What the current state of play?”. Due to the governments unwillingness to inform the people who this will affect, DRI have to find this information out from alternative sources, and innovative ways.

DRI have asked people to question their service providers if they are retaining information regarding them, and also by writing *individual* letters to their MEPs.
This is taken from their first post to their mailing list.

How you can help us:

http://www.europarl.ie/meps/index.html

These are both fantastic ways to impress on the interested parties, and those who will, utimately, be taking these decisions.

An interesting point on Data Retention TJ McIntyre pointed out during the section on Data Retention included references to the fact that your gmail/hotmail/skype traffic are *NOT* covered under privacy laws.
The current data privacy laws were drafted with voicecalls, and print (letters) in mind. Again, an area in which I have some knowledge regarding interception of messages, the current law states you cannot intercept messages “in the course of transmission” (ie the reasoning behind why radio scanners are illegal), whereas what is the legal stance on stored messages?

Data retention requires judicial oversight. Because some data traffic (skype/gmail, etc) is not covered by data privacy laws, anyone can contact the service provider requesting this information. This should not be possible. Again, innocent until proven guilty.

A member of the Internet Service Providers Association of Ireland was adament that they *did not* want to put data retention policies in place for a number of reasons. Some reasoning behind this came from a number of attendees, and also Colm McCarthaigh (an engineer for HEANet-the Irish Educational system ISP). Reasons were:

1) the increase in cost, from a hardware perspective for this increase
2) that if this does occur, it may drive up the cost of basic Internet connectivity. That the cost for this retention, may simply be passed on to the public/commercial entities.
3) that some ISPs may not have the resources, or budgets to do so.

TJ McIntyre alluded to the suggestion (by the government) that only the larger ISPs may have to do this. An idea that everyone, both technical and untechnical, thought was absurd.

When it came to the “filesharing wars” DRI were of the opinion that while some filesharing may be wrong, the way that the Irish Recorded Music Association are going about finding these filesharers maybe illegal.
Outscourcing the job of searching through alleged filesharers harddisks *without their consent* had been done by a US company, MediaCentric. This company is based ouside of Ireland, therefore this brings up legal questions on IRMAs tactics.

Staying on the area of music, Dick Doyle of IRMA was quoted as saying, copying music onto your iPod is illegal. While, technically, this may be true, it shows once more how behind the law is when it comes to technology.

The idea of “Event driven data mining..not carpet bombing data retention” was discussed. Some were of the opinion that data mining in a “frozen state” is just sometimes, but it has to be carried out in a correct way.

The event wound up with some questions being fielded from the floor, around areas such as: using anonyimity to protect yourself, eroding digital rights little by little, using encryption, creating technology based laws-as opposed to rewriting current laws to take into account for new trends in technology, should the matter be data protection as opposed to data retention.

DigitalRights gave details of their website address: www.digitalrights.ie and also of their mailing list where digital rights questions are being discussed.

Some low quality photos can be seen here.