ORG win: First UK surveillance debate
Today the UK
Parliament will be holding its first substantial debate on mass
surveillance since the first leaks back in June. This is a big win for ORG as MPs have heeded our calls for a debate in Parliament.
The MPs Tom Watson and Julian Huppert from ORG's Advisory Council, as well as Dominic Raab MP, have secured a Westminster Hall debate in Parliament today on 'oversight of intelligence and security services.'
Politicians in America and Europe have held debates
on oversight of intelligence agencies, yet so far the UK Government has worried more about whether the
newspapers should have said anything at all. Now
Parliament is fulfilling its job of ensuring that intelligence agencies’
powers are necessary and proportionate.
If you have a chance, call your MP this morning and ask them to take part in the debate. There’s still time for you to call your MP and let them
know that this issue matters to you!
You can watch the debate live from 1.30pm.
Privacy not Prism: £20k in 2 days
Thank you
for your overwhelming support of our Privacy not PRISM campaign! We
crowdfunded £20k to fund a legal challenge at the European Court of
Human Rights against the UK Government’s surveillance of our data – and
hit that goal over one weekend!
Not only did you help us raise the
money in record time, but you also proved that there is real
public urgency towards stopping the mass surveillance situation, and you busted the
myth that the UK just doesn’t care.
The challenge is being
jointly taken by ourselves, Big Brother Watch, English PEN and Internet
campaigner Constanze Kurz. We are demanding that the Government be held accountable to human rights law.
You can read more about it on the Privacy not Prism site, which is still accepting donations to further support the campaign.
Whistleblowers in the digital age
Former GCHQ director, David Omand, investigative journalist Heather Brooke, and Malcolm Rifkind, Chairman of the Intelligence and Security
Committee: just a few of those who give opinions on Edwards Snowden and the morals of whistleblowing in our latest video.
The
magnitude of Snowden's revelations has raised a huge debate around the
world about the balance between privacy and security, but also
about whistleblowers and their rights. The UK law protects the
majority of whistleblowers, but doesn't cover the security agencies'
workers who deal with secret information, as in Edward Snowden's case.
UK Government: Both Open and Shut?
This
Friday is the Open Government Partnership London summit. The OGP is a project to bring people dedicated to transparency from across the world to make governments more
accountable.
ORG will be
leading a panel on transparency and surveillance. We will be calling for Government to back its basic commitment to ‘open society' by
extending that idea to surveillance. We will look at how these issues relate and
how to protect human rights while enhancing openness.
The panel will be led by Mort Halperin (OSF) and includes Ian Brown (Oxford Internet Institute), Jim Killock (ORG), Jacqueline Peschard (Federal Institute for Access to Public Information, Mexico), David Banisar (Article 19) and a representative of Brazilian government.
Join a cryptoparty!
Cryptoparties are a global movement: each one is an open event to help people protect their computer and their private data. They
are aimed at complete beginners so you don’t need any technical
knowledge to come along. We’d like to help more of these events take
place so everyone can understand how to protect themselves from surveillance.
ORG will be speaking, taking part and helping people to run several of these events in coming months:
-The
ORG-Manchester group will be running one of these events joint with
their local Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) branch on Saturday 7th December, Mad Lab.
-At the London Crypto-Festival, Saturday 30th November, Wendy Grossman and Ian Brown, members of our Advisory Council will be speaking.
-Brighton cryptofestival (kid-friendly!) join the ORG-Brighton group and Lighthouse for talks, workshops and kid events at Sunday 1st December, Lighthouse, Brighton.
We’d
like to encourage you to start one going too! We’ll help you promote it
and arrange speakers and provide advice if needed.
Join ORG today!
ORG have had some major victories in the last 2 months: We are small, growing and effective. Join and become part of a movement fighting to protect fundamental rights like privacy and free speech.
NOW is the time to join ORG
YOU are what makes our work possible. Without support from donations we wouldn't be able to do any of the above work.
Help us keep this work going and take on greater capacity to fight on your behalf.
We can't do the necessary work we do without support from digital rights activists like yourself
Please join here now.
Thank you!
This update and previous versions are now available from our website: https://www.openrightsgroup.org/support-org/
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