Suicide is Painful (If You're an ISP?)

The government has announced it is legislating to clamp down on suicide websites (a good vote getter while the electorate panics alternately about theur savings, their mortgage and when Brown wil resign? says Pangloss, who has her mortgage with IF aka HBOS and is having a stiff drink..)

"The law on "suicide websites" is to be rewritten to ensure people know they are illegal, the government has said.

It follows concerns people searching for information on suicide are more likely to find sites encouraging the act than offering support.

It is illegal under the 1961 Suicide Act to promote suicide, but no website operator has been prosecuted.

The law will be amended to make clear it applies online and to help service providers police the sites they host."

Pretty clearly this is not new law at all, but mainly a sop to worried parents after the blanket publicity around the WElsh village of ABridgend as a suicide hot spot.

"Justice Minister Maria Eagle said "Updating the language of the Suicide Act, however, should help to reassure people that the internet is not a lawless environment and that we can meet the challenges of the digital world."

One wonders what relation this law will have to the familiar ECD Art 14 hosting immunities. Will ISPs be given a specific time limit for notice and take down, as in the E-Commerce Directive terrorism regulations? I'd gamble yes.

Will the IWF add suicide websites to their encrypted cleanfeed blocklist despite the acknowledged difficulties in spotting the difference between a site promoting suicide and one providing support to the suicidal? Yes again, I'd say.

Will the change in law be enforced against sites hosted abroad? Hmm - With great difficulty, and..

Will the legislature remember suicide law is different in Scotland and that there is not only no statute but no clear common law on the illegality of assisting or promoting suicide? I do hope so, otherwise we might see an upsurge in suicide websites hosted on Scottish servers!

We now return you to your regularly scheduled panic-stricken watching of Newsnight...

And Another Depressing Copyright Post..

Bill Thompson has an excellent summing up ofthe state of play as UK ISPs like Virgin move towards helping the music industry "re-educate" its users and resist the move to 21st century business models.

"We need a space for experimentation, where we can test the limits of old laws and explore how they might be altered in future, but once ISPs decide that they are no longer neutral carriers of bits and choose to ally themselves with the content industry then we lose another sliver of freedom.

At the moment it's hard to use BitTorrent anonymously, although since the service itself is entirely legal and legitimate there should be no need to do so.

The moves by Virgin and other ISPs will simply spur the development of new ways of sharing files, just as the clampdown on Napster lead directly to the development of the current generation of peer to peer networks.

Virgin has just given its thousands of users an incentive to explore these new tools in order to confuse their administrators."

MEPs condemn 3 strikes and you're out

Via Ray Corrigan and Cory Doctorow:

" Danny sez, "Last year, Euro Boing Boing readers wrote and called their MEPs to complain about European Union proposals advocating Internet filtering and blocking on behalf of the music industry. Not only were the amendments voted down, but now ninety MEPs from across the political spectrum have tabled a new text which condemns IFPI's plans to exile from the Net anyone they accuse three times of file-sharing:"

Calls on the Commission and the Member States to recognise that the Internet is a vast platform for cultural expression, access to knowledge, and democratic participation in European creativity, bringing generations together through the information society; calls on the Commission and the Member States, therefore, to avoid adopting measures conflicting with civil liberties and human rights and with the principles of proportionality, effectiveness and dissuasiveness, such as the interruption of Internet access.

(Translations into other EU languages here.)

"Among the advocates of the new language is Michel Rochard, the former Prime Minister of France. That's significant because present French PM Sarkozy is the only Euro leader currently seriously considering implementing IFPI's three strikes plan. With this kind of opposition, it looks like France might remain an anomaly, if it doesn't abandon the plans entirely.""

Phorm an orderly queue

It might easily be said that the British just love creating problens with Phorms..

Here is the press release for the FIPR official letter to the ICO on the current Phorm controversy. It has my full support as a lucid and explanatory response to a pressingly potential worrying incursion into consumer privacy (disclaimer: I am member of FIPR advisory board.)

FIPR Press Release

For Immediate Release: Monday 17th March 2008

Open Letter to the IC on the legality of Phorm's advertising system
-------------------------------------------------------------------

The Foundation for Information Policy Research (FIPR) has today released
the text of an open letter to Richard Thomas, the Information
Commissioner (IC) on the legality of Phorm Inc's proposal to provide
targeted advertising by snooping on Internet users' web browsing.

The controversial Phorm system is to be deployed by three of Britain's
largest ISPs, BT, Talk Talk and Virgin Media. However, in FIPR's view
the system will be processing data illegally:

* It will involve the processing of sensitive personal data: political
opinions, sexual proclivities, religious views, and health -- but it
will not be operated by all of the ISPs on an "opt-in" basis, as is
required by European Data Protection Law.

* Despite the attempts at anonymisation within the system, some people
will remain identifiable because of the nature of their searches and
the sites they choose to visit.

* The system will inevitably be looking at the content of some
people's email, into chat rooms and at social networking activity.
Although well-known sites are said to be excluded, there are tens or
hundreds of thousands of other low volume or semi-private systems.

More significantly, the Phorm system will be "intercepting" traffic
within the meaning of s1 of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act
2000 (RIPA). In order for this to be lawful then permission is needed
from not only the person making the web request BUT ALSO from the
operator of the web site involved (and if it is a web-mail system, the
sender of the email as well).

FIPR believes that although in some cases this permission can be
assumed, in many other cases, it is explicitly NOT given -- making the
Phorm system illegal to operate in the UK:

* Many websites require registration, and only make their contents
available to specific people.

* Many websites or particular pages within a website are part of the
"unconnected web" -- their existence is only made known to a small
number of trusted people.

The full text of the open letter can be viewed at:

http://www.fipr.org/080317icoletter.html

QUOTES

Said Nicholas Bohm, General Counsel, FIPR:

"The need for both parties to consent to interception in order for
it to be lawful is an extremely basic principle within the
legislation, and it cannot be lightly ignored or treated as a
technicality. Even when the police are investigating as serious a
crime as kidnapping, for example, and need to listen in to
conversations between a family and the criminals, they must first
obtain an authorisation under the relevant Act of Parliament: the
consent of the family is not by itself sufficient to make their
monitoring lawful."

Said Richard Clayton, Treasurer, FIPR:

"The Phorm system is highly intrusive -- it's like the Post Office
opening all my letters to see what I'm interested in, merely so that
I can be sent a better class of junk mail. Not surprisingly, when
you look closely, this activity turns out to be illegal. We hope
that the Information Commissioner will take careful note of our
analysis when he expresses his opinion upon the scheme."

CONTACTS

Nicholas Bohm
General Counsel, FIPR
01279 870285
nbohm@ernest.net

Richard Clayton
Treasurer, FIPR
01223 763570
07887 794090

NOTES FOR EDITORS

1. The Foundation for Information Policy Research (http://www.fipr.org)
is an independent body that studies the interaction between
information technology and society. Its goal is to identify
technical developments with significant social impact, commission
and undertaken research into public policy alternatives, and promote
public understanding and dialogue between technologists and policy-
makers in the UK and Europe.

2. Phorm (http://www.phorm.com/) claims that their "proprietary,
patent-pending technology revolutionises both audience segmenting
techniques and online user data privacy" and has recently announced
that it has signed agreements with UK Internet service providers BT,
TalkTalk and Virgin Media to offer its new online advertising
platform Open Internet Exchange (OIX) and free consumer Internet
feature Webwise.

3. In a statement released on 3rd March the Information Commissioner's
Office (ICO) said:

"The Information Commissioner's Office has spoken with the
advertising technology company, Phorm, regarding its agreement
with some UK internet service providers. Phorm has informed us
about the product and how it works to provide targeted online
advertising content.

"At our request, Phorm has provided written information to us
about the way in which the company intends to meet privacy
standards. We are currently reviewing this information. We are
also in contact with the ISPs who are working with Phorm and we
are discussing this issue with them.

"We will be in a position to comment further in due course."

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