It’s just over 4 weeks until the elections for the European Parliament on 22nd May.
Yesterday Mr Farage’s xenophobes and Little Englanders launched their election poster campaign in Sheffield.
Radio 4’s Today programme was in Sheffield to record some vox pops; one interviewee described the posters as ‘simplistic bile’.
Quite.
The current government’s asset stripping of the British state has now moved onto HMRC, according to an article in yesterday’s Guardian. To quote directly from the Guardian piece:
The personal financial data of millions of taxpayers could be sold to private firms under laws being drawn up by HM Revenue & Customs in a move branded “dangerous” by tax professionals and “borderline insane” by a senior Conservative MP.
The senior Conservative MP in question is David Davis, who has taken a particular interest in civil liberties in recent years. According to The Guardian, Davis has said:
“The officials who drew this up clearly have no idea of the risks to data in an electronic age. Our forefathers put these checks and balances in place when the information was kept in cardboard files, and data was therefore difficult to appropriate and misuse.
“It defies logic that we would remove those restraints at a time when data can be collected by the gigabyte, processed in milliseconds and transported around the world almost instantaneously.”
Outside Parliament, the Open Rights Group is campaigning against the madness that has afflicted the taxman. According to ORG, the use of personal data without consent is meant to be against data protection laws, so what are the Information Commissioner and Data Protection Registrar doing about this proposed flagrant breach of data protection legislation?
In the meantime, the ORG has set up a petition to which you can add your name. The petition reads as follows:
I call on the government to halt plans to sell personal tax data to private companies and researchers. Please don’t sell our private financial information to companies. Anonymisation is not foolproof and it is my right to object to my information being shared in this way.
Any access to my personal information held by the government should only be given after my explicit personal consent.
I have. My financial data submitted to HMRC is meant for them alone, not to be sold to the highest bidder, even in allegedly ‘anonymised’ format.
Crapita’s mismanagement of the courts and tribunals interpreting contract for the Ministry of Justice may not be getting as much publicity now as previously (posts passim), but that doesn’t mean it hasn’t stopped wasting public money, as the tweet below from yesterday reveals.
@TheCriminalBar Husband's trial with t/e 2-3 days has not yet started and day 3 tomorrow.Reason: #crapita not provided interpretor #mojwaste
— Leisha Bond (@Leisha007) April 15, 2014
As Leisha doesn’t mention the type of court involved, there’s no certainty how many thousands of pounds this laxity has cost, but once again justice is being delayed, contrary to one of the few clauses of Magna Carta still in legal effect (posts passim).
One might even think that the one organisation that should be concerned about this – the Ministry of Justice – seems to be less concerned with justice and more with covering up its own and Crapita’s serial incompetence.
The Open Rights Group (ORG), an organisation which exists to preserve and promote your rights in the digital age, is holding a meet-up at 8.00 pm on Thursday 24th April 2014 at St Werburgh’s Community Centre, Horley Road, Bristol, BS2 9TJ (map).
Following the Snowden revelations on GCHQ’s role in Prism, Open Rights Group, Big Brother Watch, English PEN and Chaos Computer Club spokesperson Constanze Kurz are challenging the UK government at the European Court of Human Rights.
The European Court has completed its preliminary examination of the case and has asked the British Government to justify how GCHQ’s practices and the current system of oversight comply with the right to privacy under Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights.
The court has also given the case a rare priority designation. The British government now has until 2nd May to respond, after which the case will move into the final stages before judgement.
Join ORG in Bristol to hear from Dan Carey, the solicitor for the application, as he explains what the challenge hopes to achieve and how it will progress from here.
We’ll also be hearing about the Don’t Spy On Us campaign from ORG’s Policy Director, Javier Ruiz, as ORG asks the public to sign its 6 key principles on mass surveillance.
The event will provide a fun and informal way to meet with other local ORG supporters, as well as an opportunity to learn about mass surveillance.
Please join the meetup group if you’re interested in coming along.
Below is a picture of part of an actual election leaflet delivered recently to somewhere in South Bristol by the local Liberal Democrats.
Note that local party hacks have omitted to change this generic national leaflet’s wording from ‘Anywhere Council’ to the name of the relevant local authority.
I for one would like to wish the candidate involved – [Insert Name Here] – every success.
Hat tip: Bristol Red.
Joinup, the EU’s public sector open source news website, reports that the government of Spain’s autonomous region of Galicia is recommending that the region’s public sector organisations adopt Open Document Format (ODF, ISO 26300) for editable electronic documents and PDF for non-editable electronic documents.
“This will facilitate the re-use of documents and the creation of derivative works”, the government writes in a guide which was published on 26 March, Document Freedom Day (posts passim). Public sector bodies are also being advised to make their documents available using a copyleft licence, such as Creative Commons’ CC-by-SA.
The guide ‘Boas prácticas para a liberación de publicacións da Xunta de Galicia‘ (Good Practice Guide for liberating Galicia government documents) has been written by Galicia’s free software resource centre, the ‘Oficina de Coordinación de Software Libre’ (Ocfloss). The report is available in both ODT and PDF formats is also published under the CC-by-SA licence.
The guide also contains advice for the public sector on how to manage intellectual property rights in respect of its documents, images and multimedia files, as well as guidance on the creation of derivative works.
Today is Document Freedom Day (DFD) 2014. DFD is an annual celebration of and opportunity to promote the use of open formats and standards for digital documents and takes place on the last Wednesday in March each year.
Document freedom means documents that are free can be used in any way that the author intends. They can be read, transmitted, edited, and transformed using a variety of tools.
Open standards are formats which everybody can use free of charge and restriction. They come with compatibility “built-in” – the way they work is shared publicly and any organisation or person can use them in their products and services without asking for permission. Open Standards are the foundation of co-operation and modern society.
However, don’t just take my word for it.
Below are some testimonials for open standards and document freedom from people with a bit more influence than your ‘umble scribe.
Neelie Kroes, Vice-President, European Commission
I know a smart business decision when I see one – choosing open standards is a very smart business decision indeed.
Stephen Fry, actor, screenwriter, author, playwright, journalist, poet, comedian, television presenter and film director
Open standards make sense. What makes no sense is that large companies in the field still do not understand this. It is time once and for all to end the pointless nonsense of one document sent on one platform being incomprehensible to the user of another.
Chris DiBona, Open Source Manager, Google
Over time, files that have been saved in closed formats tend to be less and less accessible to their creators. We prefer people to use modern and truly open formats like ODF whenever possible to ensure that they can continue to access and enjoy their work today and into the far future.
Happy DFD 2014!
The autonomous government of Spain’s Canary Islands has announced in a press release (Spanish) that the Directorate General of Telecommunications and New Technologies has proposed that the free and open source OpenOffice 4.0 office suite be adopted by the government of the islands as its corporate office productivity software.
At the same time it also announced a standard for web site content management systems to be preferred by all Canary Islands government departments. It decided on “Portal web Tipo”, a package built in-house as part of the islands’ Platino e-government services platform. Platino and its components are being made available as open source to other Spanish public sector organisations via the CTT (Centro de Transferencia de Tecnología – Technology Transfer Centre) software repository.
The government of Italy’s Autonomous Province of South Tyrol wants to save &euro 1 mn. per year by using free software, according to a press release issued last week.
Public sector organisations took the first step towards the use of free software nearly one year ago with the change to the LibreOffice productivity suite (news passim). On 11th March 2014 the regional government decided to continue to pursue this route and to resort to the use of open source where possible. “We are expecting savings of one million Euro per year through free software,” declares governor Arno Kompatscher.
“The use of proprietary or free software has in the meantime degenerated into almost a religious war, not only in the public sector, but also in private businesses,” Kompatscher continued, speaking after a regional government meeting.
During the preceding legislature period the region and regional government had already made a decision in principle to opt for the use of free software. In June last year the first major step towards free software was made with the change from MS Office to LibreOffice. The regional government alone migrated 7,000 to the open source office suite.
Governor Kompatscher stressed that it was not a matter of using free software exclusively, but to find the best solution as regards citizens: “We’re standing by using free software. However, it’s not a matter of deciding between free and proprietary software, but between requirements.” Free software, according to Kompatscher, is not always suitable, but: “Citizens must always have access to public sector documents without having to resort to paid-for software as well. That is the key issue”.
The city of Munich is acting as an example for the use of free software in government. “For example, Munich’s city council is using free software; in spite of this ten per cent of its computers are still running proprietary programs. We’re aligning ourselves with this. There will be no either or; the principal objective is friendliness towards citizens,” Kompatscher emphasises.
The governor also refers to the potential savings arising from free software: “A very, very large amount of money is involved. The target is savings of one million euro per year.” Just from its first major step, switching to LibreOffice should save the regional government paying Microsoft some €600,000 in licence fees in the next few years.
On 1st April – April Fool’s Day – Bristol City Council’s Easton & St Philips Residents’ Parking Scheme comes into operation. (Some would consider the choice of date most apposite. Ed.)
Needless to say, the schemes haven’t exactly received universal support from the residents of a city with a high level of car ownership and an abysmal level of public transport provision. Overall, it’s been condemned by residents as a ‘parking tax’ as residents will have to acquire permits, both for their own vehicles, as well as for visitors arriving by motor vehicle.
There has been consultation, of course. However, as is usual with Bristol City Council, consultation is a portmanteau word, a crafty elision of ‘confidence trick’ and ‘insult’. With a city council consultation, the stress is always firmly on the first syllable. When something goes out to consultation, what the council wants to do is usually a fait accompli.
There have been howls of protest about the Residents’ Parking Schemes in the local press, particularly the car-loving Bristol Post, which has even enlisted the odd high-profile petrolhead to trash the Mayor’s plans.
Bristol’s residents’ parking schemes programme is very flawed.
One of the justifications for implementing them is to dissuade the thousands of daily commuters from outside the local authority area clogging up residential roads by parking there all day. As the scheme doesn’t cover the whole city, the thousands of commuting motorists will just park a bit further out in districts not covered by residents’ parking schemes, such as the area where your ‘umble scribe happens to live.
Where I live, it’s the residents that are guilty of problem parking; the streets are Victorian, narrow and were intended for use by horse and cart, not 21st century motor vehicles. Pavement parking is rife in the backstreets, making pavements impassable to wheelchair users and parents with children in prams and pushchairs. There’s minimal enforcement to combat such anti-social parking. Indeed, the police often contribute to the problem themselves (posts passim).
If Mayor Ferguson really wanted to stop Bristol being choked by out of town commuting motorists, his counterpart in London came up with an alternative that was introduced 11 years ago. It’s called the London Congestion Charge Zone.