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.)

Watching Amy Winehouse lash out at Glastonbury this year (YouTube brings out the worst in me), I was surprised by the number of cameraphones the star had thrust in her face by the front row of the Pyramid Stage crowd. When your fans start treating you as badly as the paparazzi do, is it any wonder you crack?

This column has written a lot about surveillance, but in a world of cheap, portable technology, there is also sousveillance.

Sousveillance, or “watching from underneath”, counters the unblinking eye in the sky with millions of tiny blinking ones belonging to each one of us. In the surveillance society, or so the theory goes, sousveillance is the tool of the surveilled, keeping a watchful eye on the watchers.

Read the rest here.

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.

“Sometimes writing about the internet can seem like a cop-out. Imagining the impact that new technology will have on human life, in all its social, political and linguistic forms, is fun, exciting and much easier than, say, reporting from the Middle East. And yet the futurologist is only a step away from the cocktail-party doom-monger boring on about speed cameras, mobile-phone masts and shopping centres.

“But it is a refreshing experience to view futurologists’ predictions in aggregate. A survey released late last month…”

Read the rest here.

“People who want to hide their activities online already have the tools to do so. We’re just giving those tools to the general public.” These were the words of Rickard Falkvinge, chairman of Sweden’s Piratpartiet (Pirate Party), when he revealed that the political party dedicated to copyright reform would be supporting a controversial new commercial “darknet”, Relakks. “Until we have changed the laws to ensure that citizens’ right to privacy is respected, we have a moral obligation to protect citizens from the effects of current routine surveillance”, says Falkvinge.

“So, for a fee of €5 per month, Relakks offers to provide that protection increasingly being eroded from our civil liberties…”

Read the rest of the piece here.

I contacted Ben Laurie, who among other things is a longtime supporter of TOR, for some last minute advice, which was so last minute, it didn’t make it into the piece. On TOR adoption, he had this to say:

“Tor is an interesting problem – it seems that although many individuals of good standing are prepared to endorse tor or run tor nodes almost no companies are. It seems to me that if a less thorough hatchet job had been done on anonymity (only paedophiles and terrorists have any need for it, after all) then companies would be able to get behind it and it could become a pervasive tool.”