A few days ago my father – a passionate amateur photographer – fell foul of Canary Wharf’s pretend police. His crime? Taking a photo of a shadow of a tree on a building.

Initially it was two fake police which challenged him, demanding that he show them what photos he took on his camera. This not even the real police are entitled to do, and fake police certainly can not (since they have no more rights than you or I).

He quite rightly refused, at which point the fake coppers prevented him from leaving, and so committed the first actual crime.

More fake police arrived and the situation became increasingly tense, the fake police demanded that he show them the photos citing “terrorism” and “9/11″ and “The current climate” and said that taking a photo of a shadow was “not what normal people did”.

They threatened him by their physical presence, preventing him from leaving, and threatened to call the police. To which my father requested that they do so since it was the private security agents who were breaking the law (they of course didn’t call them).

The intimidation continued for about 40 minutes becoming increasingly farcical until the supervisor turned up, who was much less confrontational and admitted that they had no right to demand to see his photos or to detain him. My father, who was not feeling very well and was getting tired, showed the photo and was finally permitted to leave.

To his credit, my father kept his cool throughout although he now wishes that he hadn’t capitulated. We are now investigating possible legal action against the private security firm responsible and their agents.

This sort of scenario appears to be happening more often, and it is happening thanks to the passive co-operation of the public. It is understandable that people do give in at times – especially in situations like this where 20 odd 6ft something men were sent to intimidate one gentlemen in his 60s carrying a camera, however it is the general climate of passive acceptance that lets governments and corporations think we can get away with it.

Fundamentally, you have the right to film, take photos, say, do or be anything and you don’t need permission to do so. This is the essence of freedom, and to let this right – which (if you excuse the hyperbole) was paid for with the blood of your ancestors – be lost is the only crime that really matters.

“The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.” - John Gilmore, Time Magazine 6th December 1993

This quote – made almost 16 years ago – sums up in a nutshell why I love the internet sometimes.

As is obvious from the ongoing events this morning that the law firm Carter-Ruck didn’t really understand just how badly it was going to shoot itself in the foot when it gagged the Guardian newspaper in an attempt to prevent them reporting on open questions asked in parliament.

These questions referred to the Minton Report regarding illegal toxic waste dumping.

I guess we should really thank them, because had they not done I wouldn’t have this delicious feeling of schadenfreude as thousands of people find out about their client Trafigura illegally dumping toxic waste off the Ivory Coast, in possibly the largest toxic waste scandal of the 21st century.

The story broke this morning, and has been widely circulated around blogs and twitter, passed around like a note in a giant electronic classroom (Interestingly, at time of writing at least, the BBC have not picked up the story. Make of that what you will).

The internet is people (as my esteemed friend says so often), and when people are connected secrets become much harder to keep, and cover-ups much harder to orchestrate.

People power ftw.

Update: The gag order on the Guardian has been lifted shortly before they were due to appear in the high court.

… or maybe not.

One of the potential courses of action I suggested that people could take was to essentially smile,  say “that’s nice dear” and continue innovating. To take the typically open source approach adopted by the guys at Open Streetmap (among others) and recreate proprietary datasets in the public domain.

I was therefore delighted when I came across the guys at Ernest Marples, who were attempting to provide a free version of the Postcode to location database.

As a bit of background; in the UK the state (via Royal mail holdings for which the state is the sole shareholder) has a monopoly on all postcode to location lookups. This monopoly is protected by crown copyright and a royal charter, which basically means that even though the dataset was produced using taxpayer’s money it is owned by the crown (in the case of crown copyright), and the charter means that nobody else is permitted to provide the same service.

This means that in order to do anything with postcodes you need to pay a licence fee to the post office, pricing the small players out of the game or limiting them to use a service provider such as Yahoo (which has it’s own terms of usage). A similar situation exists for geolocation in general, but in this instance you have to pay the Ordnance Survey.

This situation is archaic and was a hot topic at Barcamp Transparency. Data which are produced by taxpayer money should be freely available to all, and I had hoped that the dissolution of crown copyright would have been one of the first thing that the Digital Britain report recommended.

Yesterday, Ernest Marples announced in their blog that they were shutting down their service in the face of a legal challenge from Royal Mail, who pretty much accused them of stealing their database. Although the Ernest Marples guys were a little cagey about where they got their data (with hindsight this was probably a mistake) they did explicitly state that it was not using the Royal Mail database in any way.

Under the terms of the charter however, they are simply not permitted to provide this service and compete with Royal mail, and this is the basis of the legal challenge.

I am saddened to see this promising project go, and especially sorry to see that they don’t have the funds to get their day in court. A court case of this nature could provide a useful forum to hold a long overdue debate as to the relevance of the charter and crown copyright in general in the twenty-first century.

Crown copyright is a problem (as well as being morally dubious), and a monopoly is always bad (especially when state enforced). It is sad to see promising UK innovation stifled by entrenched interests, but it seems to be a reoccuring theme in modern Britain. As we have just seen it puts severe limits on just how far a project can go in opening up and recreating data sets, and this worries me.

I wish the project and it’s organisers all the best for the future.

Top image “postbox_20may2009_0830” by Patrick H. Lauke

Judging by the feedback I’ve been getting throughout the day you guys enjoyed it as well, but please let me know if there’s anything that we could do better next year!

Of course the event wouldn’t have been possible without our sponsors… Google who were kind enough to cover the cost of the venue (and thanks to the Oxford Club for being so good to us on the day!). Thanks to our other sponsors – 1000 heads, Proactive, Outmap, Moo and TerminateTheRate.org as well.

Also, thanks to our media sponsors: Global voices, Mashable and JackFM.

Most of all, thanks to all of you who came!

There were plenty of interesting conversations had, and we’ve already spawned a couple of interesting projects – do write in and tell me about yours, we’d love to do a followup!

Check out our flick group, and if you have any photos feel free to upload them to the group pool.

Anyway, I’ve rambled on…see you next year!

The weekend kicks off tonight at 7pm BST (6 GMT) with our virtual event – find us on Friendfeed!

Tomorrow, those of you who are coming down the night before are welcome to join us in the Gardener’s Arms from about 7pm for food, beers and a bit of socialising… look out for the group with Barcamp Transparency posters (thanks Ben Werdmuller for designing those!).

Don’t forget to @mapkyca on Twitter if you get lost!

Finally, the main Barcamp Transparency event kicks off at 10am on Sunday in the Oxford University Club on Mansfield road. Detailed instructions for getting there can be found on the Barcamp Transparency website!

See you there!

My presentation slides are below, but I thought I’d write a quick blog post to go into a little more detail.

The Digital Britain report, for those who aren’t already aware, is a report produced by the government. It contains a number of recommendations aimed at improving the UK’s digital infrastructure and boosting the social and economic impact of digital technology.

“The report provides actions and recommendations to promote and protect talent and innovation in our creative industries, to modernise TV and radio frameworks and support local news, and introduces policies to maximise the social and economic benefits from digital technologies.”

What I hoped for was that the government would use this report as an opportunity to do something interesting – for example:

• Opening the wealth of government data – statistics, contract details etc – the government holds to the general public
• Scrapping the archaic idea of Crown Copyright, which is both unfair and harms our economy. I would like to see a situation where anything which is produced by the state should be released as public domain.
• Modification of the tax and accountancy laws to make them more startup friendly.
• Focussing attention and even funds towards direct democracy – building tools to interact with the government.
• Overhauling the data protection laws to enshrine in law the idea that data about you belongs to you.

However, what we got was a top down and prescriptive rather than bottom up and inventive. Some vague tax breaks for big companies, ISPs told to police their users, and a tax on all phone lines.

Some things we could do:

• Educate your MP – they aren’t experts at this stuff, and it is up to people in the industry to tell the policy makers where the problems are. Open source laws FTW
• Innovate – continue doing what you were doing already, building out those tools and having those creative ideas.
• Recreate and obsolete – In the short term, things like Crown copyright are not going away. I wonder how much of their data we can recreate in the public domain? OpenStreetmap is doing a good job at recreating google maps…
• Local councils and individual projects can be a lot more receptive than central government.

In short, you are the government. You’ve got to act like it!

Image from the Digital Britain report

This is a free event, but we need to get an idea of how many people are coming, and a rough list of contacts so that we can furnish you with things like Wifi keys etc.

Anyway, tickets are being served by Eventbrite like our virtual event, go get yours!

This was an enjoyable and lively event made up of a panel of interested parties and members of the public.

On the panel were:

• Robert Buckland (Tory candidate, Swindon South)
• Steve Goddard (Lib Dem candidate, Oxford East)
• Peter Hitchens (Columnist, Mail on Sunday)
• Peter Tatchell (Human Rights Campaigner, Green candidate, Oxford East)
• Glyn Wintle (Open Rights Group)

Many points were raised, including the need to not be complacent.

Something of particular interest which was raised by someone in the audience before I had a chance to do so, and that is the issue of data ownership.

I think that it is data ownership that is at the heart of the issue here. As we move into a much more data-centric society with more and more information about us is held by third parties, we need to start looking at our laws – and in particular to enshrine in law the concept that data about a person belongs to that person.

Right now we have a rather backward system where agents – be they the Government or Amazon – who collect information about your view that information as theirs. They mine it, monetise it and share it, all without your permission.

If the organisation is in the UK, there is a certain amount of protection afforded to you by the data protection act (unless it’s the government that holds your data), but this is rarely enforced and has been systematically weakened by the labour government.

What would happen if individual was the arbiter of who has access to what? Since third parties can be rarely trusted to retain important data, what would happen if we made the individual the physical gatekeeper of such information?

Could we have a device that asked you “Agency X is trying to access item Y, allow? (no, once, always)”, and allow you to revoke such permission at any time?

Such data you released could then be licensed, and perhaps we could at last put DRM to some good use?

Its technically possible, but probably impractical. Still, if we could just do the very first part – reversing the basic idea of who owns what – we would have a way forward.

Data about me is mine, the audit trail I leave as I live my life is also mine. Some time after I die, I dare say it would be useful for society to have access to that data since I no longer need it (perhaps for census data or medical research) but certainly while I am alive it is me that should govern who has access and for what purpose.

While I am alive it will be necessary for some third parties to have access to my data, either because it exists in their systems, or because they need it to provide me with a service. I can choose to grant access to them for a limited time and for set purposes.

There is already a system in place to handle this sort of arrangement, its called copyright. Thanks to all the lobbying done by big business the punishment for copyright infringement these days is punitive to say the least (in most cases it is a civil offence not criminal – so theoretically less punitive than a breach of the DPA – but civil actions seem to be pursued more often).

Wouldn’t it be a delightful irony if these restrictive and punitive laws turned out to be one of the great safeguards of individual sovereignty?

Of course, as I mentioned previously – once the data is out it is out – so it is still better not to give out unnecessary information in the first place.

But if the individual was concious that data belonged to them in the same way as their clothes, car or house they might mind a little more if this data was misused. Equally, if agencies feared the punitive action for such misuse available under copyright law, perhaps such instances of misuse would be fewer.

Just a thought, any lawyers want to comment?

To give us some idea of the numbers coming we have tickets available on Eventbrite, so go grab yourself one!

Our main avenue is the event Friendfeed account here: http://friendfeed.com/barcamptransparency

We have prepared three virtual rooms for you to discuss issues related to:

1. Open government – http://friendfeed.com/ff-bct09opengoverment
2. Cyber-activism – http://friendfeed.com/ff-bct09cyberactivism
3. Social media ethics – http://friendfeed.com/ff-bct09socialmediaethics

Later this week we will be releasing the first batch of tickets for the main event using the same system, more to follow so watch this space!

This is a fabulous venue (the same one as Barcamp Apache Oxford), directions and other details can be found on our website.

I am also delighted to announce that Google has agreed to be the main sponsor for the event and will be covering the cost of the venue for us! Big thanks to all at Google and our other sponsors for making this event possible!

See you there on the 26th July!