Intriguing new BPI Three Strikes leak
p2pnet view P2P | Politics:- With the confirmation that hacks at Vivendi Universal, EMI, Warner Music and Sony Music’s BPI (British Phonographic Industry) wrote some of the text openly used by the British government in its Digital Ecomy bill comes another leak.
In it BPI director of public affairs Richard Mollet “sets out the BPI’s strategy for ramming through the Digital Economy Bill” says Boing Boing.
Mollet’s Digital Economy Bill weekly update 11 March 2010 memo, addressed to an interesting number of recipients, “appears to be a weekly status report on the DEB’s progress”, says the story.
He identifies Britain’s MI5, the UK’s “top spies”, as being a stumbling block to the bill’s passage — worried, apparently, that creating a Great Firewall of Britain will make it harder for spies to spy on naughty sites”, says Boing Boing.
“Mollet also implies that Britain’s spy agencies might have paid for a Talk Talk survey in which 71% of 18-34 year olds said that they would simply evade the DEB and go on infringing”, it says.
“Mollet claims that Britain’s ISPs have already caved into their duties to spy on and censor network connections, claiming that there is a sense of ’settled will’ in the ‘ISP community’.”
Says the memo >>>
There has been a meeting between No 10 officials and BIS special advisers today to discuss the way forward on Clause 18. I am told that “discussions continue” but that the “security services concerns are not being met”.
Twisting and turning
The interest shown not only MI5 but also MI6 won’t come as a suprise to those who’ve been following events.
The UK government is “twisting and turning in its efforts to please the entertainment industry by finding a way to impose the same Three Strikes anti-P2P plan that’s giving Hollywood and Big music lobbyist Nicolas Sarkozy so much trouble in France”, said p2pnet recently, quoting Times Online as reporting police and intelligence services were, “calling on the Government to drop plans to disconnect persistent internet pirates because they fear that this would make it harder to track criminals online”.
But “The Times understands that both the security services and police are concerned about the plans, believing that threatening to cut off pirates will increase the likelihood that they will escape detection by turning to encryption”, said the story, continuing >>>
Law enforcement groups, which include the Serious and Organised Crime Agency (Soca) and the Metropolitan Police’s e-crime unit, believe that more encryption will increase the costs and workload for those attempting to monitor internet traffic. One official said: ‘It will make prosecution harder because it increases the workload significantly’.
A source involved in drafting the Bill said that the intelligence agencies, MI5 and MI6, had also voiced concerns about disconnection. “The spooks hate it,” the source said. “They think it is only going to make monitoring more difficult.”
Enforcement groups are also unhappy that the Government’s change of plans has left them little time to draw up a response. Lord Mandelson’s intervention came two months after the Government’s Digital Britain report, published in June, failed to back disconnection. Instead, it proposed giving Ofcom, the media watchdog, powers to direct internet service providers to block pirate websites or “throttle” connection speeds.
Observes Mollet’s memo >>>
It is sadly ironic that the campaign for the bill which has drawn support from Steven Garrett, the creative force behind the BBC series “Spooks”, should find itself partially thwarted by a real-life equivalents. Ironic too, that the champions of freedom of information, the Open Rights Group, are lined up alongside those champions of non-free information, the security services.
The document also suggests MPs are “resigned” to not being allowed to “debate the bill or give it “detailed scrutiny”, and has an expert on legislation saying it’ll probably die “if MPs insist on their right and responsibility to examine this legislation in detail before voting on it”, says Boing Boing.
Stay tuned.
..… and identi.ca
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win ~ Mahatma Gandhi
confirmation – Record labels wrote UK 3 Strikes amendment, March 12, 2010
Boing Boing – Leaked UK record industry memo sets out plans for breaking UK copyright, March 12, 2010
p2pnet – UK cops, spy agencies, say No to 3 strikes plan, October 26, 2009
Times Online – MI5 comes out against cutting off internet pirates, October 26, 2009
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March 13th, 2010 at 1:02 pm
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/83174ca2-2d77-11df-a262-00144feabdc0.html
March 13th, 2010 at 7:02 pm
Look at all those luverly email addresses.
March 14th, 2010 at 7:34 pm
Even MI5 hates it. Might as well be called SMERSH – Smashing My Electronic Rights of Sharing Happily.