The only UK party working for your rights on election day didn’t have a candidate in London
This is what the the UK's current government is trying to make your web look like, and "the opposition" shadow cabinet is helping. There's but one political party doing anything about it, but it's not running candidates in the vast majority of the country. This is the year that should change.
The Pirate Party UK stood three candidates in Manchester and three in Scotland, but in terms of serving the public with actual democratic choice, the action was happening online.
There should have been at least one down here in the Big Smoke. An assembly member at the very least. Somehting. C’mon!
On the eve of local elections, the high court ruled that ISPs in UK must block access to The Pirate Bay, a technically unfeasible premise that resulted in a jump in traffic for the torrent site of about 12 million hits. So, we have a democratic mandate for unfettered access to the open web.
But while the Coalition government seemed to find itself in sync with its Labour shadow over how to further cull unmonitored access to the internet under the banner of blocking porn for the children™ The Pirate Party promoted its own proxy for quick and easy access to The Pirate Bay. The difference cannot be more stark.
Leading the crusade for the so-called “opt in” wall is Tory MP Claire Perry, who pooh-poohed concerns of the potential for censorhip: “There is a ‘hands off our internet’ movement that sees any change in how access is delivered as censorship.” Claire Perry is correct. There is such a movement. I am a part of it. It is censorship, or at least how the mechanism for it is established. As Guardian data journalist James Ball pointed out the other day, there’s no technological way to implement a firewall that cannot be used to block more than one website, and MP Perry’s “opt in” plan is proof that as soon as you start talking about blocking one website, the tendency is to make a list of others.
In the Pirate Bay test case, Ball explains that “an effective block would require cutting off the channels used by torrents entirely, using a tool that inspects each bit of internet traffic known as deep packet inspection. To make the block certain, this would also have to be used to block services such as Tor. In other words, to cut out even one high-profile files haring website would quickly require apparatus as sophisticated as the great firewall of China.”
To think that it wouldn’t ever be used for other purposes is to ignore the history of the world and assume that governments never lie, become corrupt or change leaders and agendas. Instead of eagerly working to erode, political parties should be serving the needs of people, free expression, the economy and the creative industry as whole though reform and safe guarding an open communication network.
In the mean time, in these dark days of walled-off corners of the web, here are some work-arounds (Sources: TorrrentFreak and The Pirate Bay blog):
- Splosh some cash and pay for A VPN provider that carries no logs. To each their own, but I bristle a little bit that something fundamental like access to privacy and choice needs to be bought when they’re both things that are taken away from you in the first place. Steal them back.
- Use and create proxies for websites your country blocks.
- Use free, limited anonymous services like VPNReactor. With this one you’re confined to half-hour sessions.
- Take Pirate Bay’s advice and use of TOR to access their website, (but don’t use it to actually download the torrents. Since those actually come from diverse sources, you don’t need it anyway, but if you do, it’s going to take weeks).
- Also for Pirate Bay specifically (but could be useful elsewhere as the list of blocked sites grow in UK) change your DNS provider to OpenDNS or Google.
In a year when a small upstart political party like Respect can absolutely seize Bradford, when in Europe we have a Pirate Party in Germany moving up to third place (and still gaining) in the polls and addressing record political assemblies, in which a European Parliament proposal responds to ACTA is to call for wholesale copyright reform and protection of file sharing, which seems more popular than the copyright treaty itself, it’s unfortunate that the Pirate Party UK didn’t field more candidates. It was indicated that running for office in London was “too expensive.” C’mon. If Siobhan can afford to run, you can busk the cash. Anyway, the alternative seems a far more costly route if the goal is to continue as a political party. At some point, running for office seems like a reasonable goal, and the odds are better if you spread your chips around the board.
This is the time for small, responsive political parties. In an election in which the biggest story was record low turnout, this was the time to give people a reason to vote. Fixing access to the internet for people through proxies is a fun and quick win in the direct democracy battle, but we’ve got hackers for that. Political parties are supposed to run candidates and challenge agendas.
The election is over now. I had to vote Green, damn it. Green! My advise to PPUK, start running for the next one today. Rant finished.
It’s absolutely deplorable that this country treats ideology and intellectual debate the way it does. But: we owe to this its ironies. Its tolerance. Its decision not to take too seriously what in other countries have proved fatal challenges. It is my conviction that had the infinite rhetorical genius of Adolf Hitler been tested on Hyde Park Corner, people would have said, ‘Ah, come off it,’ and walked away.
