|
home · articles · becky hogge: we had to get out there |
A key change at iCommons
If you're not part of the iCommons mailing list, take a look at the letter that Heather Ford, Executive Director of iCommons, sent to the list yesterday:
Dear friends,
At the 2 August iCommons Board Meeting, the board decided to make some difficult but necessary changes at iCommons. It has become clear over the past months that our vision for iCommons is different from the... more
|
| |
Becky Hogge: We Had to Get Out There
Brendan Ballou (United States) · Jun 17th, 2007 8:35 pm · 10 votes · no comments made
|
| |
| Becky Hogge at London Copyfighters' Drunken Brunch and Talking Shop., by gruntzooki |
 |
Back in 2002 the British government launched what promised to be the most technologically ambitious e-voting program in the world. Subjects would be able to vote, not just with computers at regular polling stations, but with their phones, computers, and even their interactive TV's. Local government minister Nick Raynsford told the press, "the UK [will be] quite rightly regarded as being among the pioneers of electoral modernisation."
It was a good idea - or at least a good intention. But to people familiar with experiments in e-voting, from SDU to Nedap to Diebold, the British government's plan was deeply flawed. These machines can be hacked or can malfunction, and because the code is proprietary, no public interest group can guarantee the devices’ reliability. The biggest problem, said Becky Hogge of the Open Rights Group, was that no one in England was talking about these flaws. "Nobody was doing anything," she told me, "that's why we had to get out there."
And so Open Rights Group got certified to monitor elections, and in May when the new technologies debuted Becky drove across the entire country from voting site to voting site, documenting technical failures and potential hacking vulnerabilities. There were a lot of them. She can't talk about specifics, but Becky and the Open Rights Group will be issuing a report next week documenting just what's wrong with e-voting, and what the British government can do to change. "We hope to get people talking about this."
Open Rights Group specializes in these issues that are deeply important but that don’t get the coverage they deserve. Now, political activists in the states are pretty spoiled - if EFF doesn't take on a particular issue then Creative Commons or the Media Access Project or Free Culture or Public Knowledge probably will. All the issues that concern these organizations exist in the UK as well, but for the most part it’s ORG’s – and its sole employee Becky Hogge’s – responsibility to get the word out.
Unsurprisingly, Becky has been busy. Aside from the e-voting activism, she’s been fighting to stop ISP’s from blocking content and has tried to keep IP infringement a civil, not criminal, offense. She’s tried to stop the government from collecting personal ‘Private Encryption Keys,’ and is working to keep the copyright term on recorded music to (a mere) 50 years. The list goes on.
This is all from someone who’s been a full time activist for only two years. Before that she was a journalist, writing for The New Statesman, The Guardian, The Face, and openDemocracy. She’s started two blogs and wrote the first story in the British press on DRM.
Now before this becomes a CV, I’ll end by saying that if I accomplished as much as Becky has as quickly as she has, I would be a lot more egotistical than she ever is. Becky is surprisingly – shockingly – unpretentious, and that quality may in large part account for her success as an organizer. “You know the best thing you can do as an activist,” she said towards the end of our interview, “is to train the next generation of activists.”
tags: london united kingdom education commoner-profile summit07
|
|
|
| |
add a comment: you must be logged on in order to comment. please log in or register at iCommons.org and and your comments right after.
|
|
| |
|
|
|
|
|
| |
|
|
send
printer-friendly version
invite to vote