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Mark's Daily Weight Update: 93Kg.
It's a quick and early one today, as I'm leaving shortly to return to the Smoke for reasons which will be explained below.
If yesterday was a low point in physical and spiritual wellbeing, today is a high. Another 10 hours of sleep and I woke up feeling like the last week had been a dream. I had no idea exactly how exhausted I really was. Even now I still feel tired, but I feel human again. All my enthusiasm and energy are returning, and all the things which had started to feel a bit grey and sloggish - writing, preparing for the trip, finding Extraordinary things to do - are beginning to seem fresh and exciting again. W00t!
Tonight I'm attending the Open Rights Group "Support ORG and Party" event, in Shoreditch, so it seems a good time to talk a bit about ORG.
For many years, the Electronic Frontier Foundation has been dealing with digital rights abuses around the world, which usually means standing up for consumers and individuals against giant corporations trying to take their rights away. EFF was in fact originally formed during Operation Sundevil, a massive international operation spearheaded by the US police, Secret Service and Treasury to "fight hackers".
What Operation Sundevil mostly consisted of was massively over-the-top claims for damages by corporations against kids who'd innocently peeked into their networks out of curiosity and a desire for a challenge, and who had caused no damage and certainly made no profit from their activities. In many cases the corporations, backed by US law enforcement, would claim damages in the amount of replacing their entire computer systems. The EFF started out by providing legal support for a number of these defendants.
Over the years the organisation has grown, and now acts on all sorts of fronts including copyright legislation, identity theft, and all kinds of digital rights abuses. They also spend a lot of time identifying and counteracting corrupt lobbying from organisations like the Recording Industry Assocation of America, who are currently throwing out lawsuits against individuals left right and centre and lobbying the US Congress to impose ever more draconian copyright laws. You can read more about all this stuff on the EFF Homepage.
EFF are US-based but have always worked on a limited international basis - there is an offshoot in the UK represented publicly by Danny O'Brien. But for a long time it has been clear that their resources were overstretched in dealing with UK issues. In 2005 a pledge drive was put together at Pledge Bank (awesome site), to form a new UK-based group to do the same job, and 1,038 people signed up before the deadline. The new organisation was named the Open Rights Group.
Since then ORG has grown steadily, and now employs paid staff as well as hundreds of volunteers who contribute money as well as campaigning, letter writing, and gathering and disseminating information. The issues ORG deals with may seem distant or "geeky" at first glance, but they have very real effects on the lives of everybody in this country.
For example, right now it is illegal in this country to copy tracks from a CD which you have bought and paid for to your MP3 player for personal listening. Blinding, eh? ORG have successfully brought this issue to parliamentary debate, and "Fair Use" law will almost certainly soon be extended to fix that situation. Meanwhile the entertainment industry are currently lobbying the European Parliament not only to keep ripping illegal, but to make supporting it a criminal offence. That means that if you post a piece of software which allows ripping on your website, you could receive a criminal sentence, even jail time. That law nearly went through last year, and was headed off at the last moment by concentrated action largely through ORG.
Other issues include: The current trials of buggy, poorly tested and insecure electronic voting technology (which could end up handing over our entire voting system to commercial interests), the identity chips in new passports which can be read by anyone with a handheld device from several meters away, laws which allow any government agency (and several commercial ones employed by government) to bug your phone or internet on a whim...the list goes on.
All the information on ORG is available from the Main ORG website, and particularly from the ORG Wiki, where all current information is gathered. It's probably worth a read for most people who use a computer.
I was one of the founding pledgers (about number 400 and something I think :-) ) and last year I helped set up the ORG Merchandise and Promotion Page and create and gather ideas for it - unfortunately since then college and other concerns have pretty much swamped my time and I've had to cut back my involvement substantially. Tonight will be a great opportunity to meet with the group in person before I disappear off this continent for an unspecified time. It's a sound group of people doing amazing work.
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