• Bill Thompson on Lord Stephen Carter’s interim Digital Britain report, and why peer review beats Peer dictatorship every time.
• Peter Wilby’s cover piece for this week’s New Statesman on the financialisation of British society.

Can you “persuade others of the benefits of proposals or the value of a particular interpretation”? Then perhaps the recently advertised position of senior information officer at the Home Office’s new Intercept Modernisation Programme (IMP) is for you.

According to the description of the £45,000-a-year job (removed from the Home Office website, but, at the time of going to press, still available in Google’s cache), the IMP has been set up to “maintain the UK’s capability to obtain and exploit Lawful Intercept (LI) product and Communications Data (CD)”, using “a range of new technologies”. You and I will know IMP better as the nutty plans that have been making headlines all summer, plans to log details about every web page we visit, every SMS message we text and every email we send. And not only that, but to store all this “communications traffic” information in a central database.

Read the rest here.

Last night, I enjoyed watching Mischief: Your Identity for Sale on BBC3. This style of documentary (very Michael Moore) always leaves me wondering how much the film-makers massaged the facts to sensationalise the story. But being somewhat of an expert in these matters, thanks to my work with ORG, I know they’ve got it right on the money here. Michael Wills MP (who is in charge of Data Protection) and David Smith, Deputy Information Commissioner, come off particularly badly. Find out more about the programme here, and watch it for the next 7 days here.

(Snooper’s Paradise is an excellent permanent flea market in the North Laine in Brighton. I love it. The picture above is taken from their store front.)

The reaction of the US is to rewrite the rules: “In May, the United States said it was rewriting its trade rules to remove gambling from the jurisdiction of the W.T.O.” It seems to me a little odd to have a trade organisation where members pick and choose rules, but that never stopped the UK doing so with the EU.

Some people are so quick to judge. At the beginning of August, the national treasure that is Sir Elton John was reported, albeit by that other great national treasure, the Sun newspaper, as calling for a complete closure of the internet. Apparently, Reg was advocating an experimental halt to all internet traffic in order to see whether, as he believed it might, such a return to our creative roots would stem the tide of mediocrity in popular music. As part of his Luddite rant, Elton chastised Sun readers, telling them to “get out there – communicate”, which prompted one of my more sardonic email pals to quip: “You can see he’s really got the whole internet thing, can’t you?”

Read the rest here.

The day after I wrote it, the House of Lords Science and Technology Committee released an altogether more sensible critique of personal security online. It’s well worth a read, just for the amazing expert evidence their Lordships collected.

The law may appear antiquated in the fast-changing world of the internet, but in most cases citizen journalists have the same legal protection as any other journalists.

And on the letters page Jonathan Mitchell QC suggests that the Guardian’s legal team are fostering “deeply undemocratic” ideas, after the publication of Winston Churchill’s famous “We shall fight them on the beaches” speech over the weekend:

When MPs make speeches in parliament, these are recorded in Hansard and the report is subject to parliamentary copyright (formerly crown copyright) under section 165 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. The Houses of Parliament might in theory restrict republication of the debates in Hansard; but for many years they have, in practice, allowed this quite freely… Even that formal permission would not be needed now, as parliamentary copyright lasts only 50 calendar years, so that the last remnants of copyright in this speech ended on December 31 1990.

Read the entire letter here.

After the Sandinista government took power in Nicaragua in 1979, its reform of the education system included expanding the country’s schools for the deaf. The schools’ methods had been harsh and broadly ineffective, consisting of drilling the children in lip-reading and spoken Spanish. But eventually – simply by bringing previously isolated deaf children together – they generated an unexpectedly positive side-effect.

Largely, the children had been living with hearing relatives, and had had no opportunity to communicate with other deaf children. Brought together, however, they pooled the makeshift gestures they had used at home. What resulted was a usable jargon that was all the children’s own. When new groups of deaf pupils arrived at the schools – their minds ripe for natural language-learning – they took the jargon of the older children and turned it into a fully-fledged, expressive language. Now known as Nicaraguan Sign Language, or Idioma de Señas de Nicaragua (ISN), this was the type of language, according to the Harvard psychology professor Steven Pinker, with which “a child can watch a surrealistic cartoon and describe its plot to another child”. It is a language that can be used in poems, jokes and life histories, one that “is coming to serve as the glue that holds the community together”.

Read the rest here.

I’ve been trying without success to get the widget in del.icio.us working so I can post links direct to this blog. In the meantime, here are a couple of titbits:

• Lawrence Lessig on net neutrality and municipal broadband in Wired
• Unsigned punk band make top 40 (health warning: they are represented by the PR company Quite Good, who were responsible for all the noise about Sandi Thom last year)

I’m pleased to announce that as of 15 January next year, I’ll be joining the Open Rights Group as their new Executive Director!

Suw Charman, ORG’s outgoing Exec Director, has just posted the announcement on the ORG website. I’m looking forward to working with her, ORG’s Ops Manager Michael Holloway, and the incredibly diverse and talented group of people who make up ORG’s board, advisory council and army of expert volunteers.

It’s a big year ahead for digital rights. ORG scored a massive success with their Release The Music campaign against the extension of copyright terms in sound recordings, but this recommendation will need pursuing in Europe, where the music industry has vowed to take its rhetoric next. And there’s a lot more going on which requires the scrutiny of the digital rights community – like the e-voting pilots scheduled for this year’s local elections in March.

Of course, joining ORG means I’ll be leaving my post of Technology Director at openDemocracy. I’ve had a great two years there – watching the website go from strength to strength and working to build and launch a sister website, ChinaDialogue. I’ll miss the friends I’ve made there, they’re some of the most dedicated and talented people I’ve ever worked with. I wish them all the best of luck in continuing to develop what I believe is a worthwhile and necessary exercise in political analysis on the web.

I’ll still be writing my columns for openDemocracy and the New Statesman. All in all, it’s going to be a pretty busy year – I’m looking forward to it already.

The Utopian approach may be described as follows. Any rational action must have a certain aim. … To choose this aim is therefore the first thing we have to do if we wish to act rationally … These principles … demand that we must determine our ultimate political aim, or Ideal State, before taking any practical action. Only when this ultimate aim is determined and … when we are in possession of something like a blueprint … only then can we begin to consider the best ways and means for its realization.

This is opposed to the piecemeal engineer, who:

will be aware that perfection, if attainable is far distant, … will adopt the method of searching for, and fighting against, the greatest and most urgent evils of society, rather than searching for, and fighting for, its greatest ultimate good.

Now my claim is that Utopian Engineering is similar to the waterfall model and that piecemeal engineering is similar to an agile approach. I think this is pretty much self evident. Waterfall attempts to capture requirements (i.e. the greatest good) and development the ‘final solution’. Agile developments attempts to satisfy quickly certain user stories (i.e. the greatest need).

Popper goes on to explain why Utopian engineering is doomed to failure. Firstly, Utopian engineering encourages centralized control (totalitarianism) and since the re-engineering will likely be painful and costly, the engineer becomes deaf to complaints. Secondly, since the program will take time to deliver, the requirements are likely to change:

This approach … can be of practical value only if we assume that the original blueprint … remains the basis of the work until it is completed. But that will take some time. It will be a time of revolutions, both political and spiritual, and of new experiments and experience in the political field. It is therefore expected that the ideas and ideals will change.

Change `political’ for `software’ in that and it reads like a criticism of the waterfall method. Perhaps the history of failure in the software field could have been avoided if we’d paid attention to what happened to previous attempts at Utopian engineering. Of course, the price of failure is much less when software projects go bad, but when our health insurance is being robbed to pay for it it starts to hurt.