[Infowarrior] - Snooper's Charter: 19, 000 Emails Against, 0 In Favour

[Richard Forno]

Snooper's Charter: 19,000 Emails Against, 0 In Favour

Published 14:15, 11 October 12

http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/open-enterprise/2012/10/uk-snoopers-charter-19000-emails-against-0-in-favour/index.htm

Back in August, I urged people to respond to the consultation on the truly dreadful Draft Communications Bill, aka Snooper's Charter. Obviously, I wasn't alone in doing that: many organisations concerned about the impact on civil liberties in this country have done the same. For example, both 38 Degrees and Open Rights Group (ORG) provided suggested texts and asked people to contact the Joint Parliamentary Committee that has been considering the Bill - and doing rather a good job of it, I must say.

A document from the Committee, pointed out by Simon Phipps, provides some stats for the impact of these campaigns:

At 12.42 on 21 August the Committee’s website received the first of over 18,000 emails generated in response to a call by the website 38 Degrees.

Pretty impressive. Here are the numbers for ORG:

At 12.34 the following day the Committee received the first of some 600 emails generated by the Open Rights Group whose Director, Jim Killock, gave oral evidence to the Committee on 11 July.

An order of magnitude lower, but still useful.

The Joint Parliamentary Committee makes a comparison to an earlier campaign against a proposed bill, the Assisted Dying for the Terminally Ill Bill, and comments:

The distinction is that while in the case of that Bill opinion was fairly evenly divided, we have not seen a single email supporting the draft Communications Data Bill, or even agreeing that there may be a case for the security services and law enforcement agencies having greater access to communications data than they do at present.

Got that? Out of 19,000 emails received by the Committee on the subject of the proposed Draft Communications Bill, not a single one was in favour of it, or even agreed with its premise. Has there ever been a bill so universally rejected by the public in a consultation? Clearly, it must be thrown out completely.

Unfortunately, I can't give a link to the document itself, because the address I used less than an hour ago brings up this:

The link you gave does not work, either because the page it points to has been deleted or moved. If you clicked on a link, please inform the site’s webmaster that the link is faulty.

Probably just a temporary glitch - you know how these things happen...

Update: Luckily, it seems Simon Phipps kept a copy of the document.

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Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it.