“Alistair Darling told the House of Commons that the discs containing the highly sensitive information failed to arrive after they were sent in the ordinary internal mail between government departments.”

This is the same Government that assures us nothing could possibly go wrong with a national ID card scheme connected to a biometric database.

Please remember this next time you happen to be voting.

Modern communication technologies such as the internet are providing new tools and channels for citizens to use in their interaction with governments - and vice versa. Is it time for citizens and governments alike to accept the changed landscape of politics, and begin opening up the ’source code’ of democracy to closer inspection?

Continue reading “Democracy 2.0 - Opening the Black Boxes of Government”

Remember my despairing posts about the decline of UK libraries? Thanks to Tim Coates, a man who has campaigned against the decay of the service to the point of losing his livelihood and home due to being blackballed by the industry, here are some figures that illustrate the number of books that UK libraries have loaned out, compared with the amount of money spent on the services, and the percentage of that amount spent on books over the last decade: Continue reading “UK libraries update”

In fifty year’s time, people will look back and laugh at us for a lot of reasons. Apart from the fashions (“d00d, those jeans, like WTF!!!1!1”), what gets the biggest chuckles will surely be the hopelessly outdated concept of representative democracy.

Continue reading “The Demise of the Demagogue”

Second Life is really starting to hit the news properly now - it’s been a 1337-geek blogosphere darling for a little while, but some of the more mainstream outlets are picking it up. And as usual, they’re blowing it out of all proportion as it stands at the moment. But what about in a few decades’ time? Continue reading “A second chance at life”

This topic just won’t go away. It seems that a committee in the House of Commons itself has serious doubts over whether the National ID card scheme can actually be implemented using current technologies. Continue reading “More UK ID card chaos”

Turns out the House of Lords is actually a good thing after all; they’ve just bounced the ID cards bill for a fifth time, to the great annoyance of the government. Continue reading “UK I.D. debate rages on”

Thank the deities, it’s not just me that is worried about the UK Government’s insidious plans to have us all carry ID cards linked to a national database of personal information. Continue reading “ID cards - security measure or creeping totalitarianism?”

The last thing I would ever have accused the UK goverment of doing would have been thinking ahead. Continue reading “UK Government looks to the future”

Looks like something slipped through the net here (literally)…read the whole post on Lenin’s Tomb (this link found on Ken Macleod’s blog. Just doing my little bit to make sure government lies don’t disappear like they want them to. Continue reading “Big fat leak of UK government’s approval of torture techniques”