I didn’t get round to watching last night’s Dispatches but even having read Justin’s blistering assault on the alternate reality of Labour’s election campaign over at the excellent The Sharpener - which will be even better when they fix the RSS feed - I still find it difficult to get worked up over the programme’s supposed revelations.

As soon as I started to read Justin’s article synchronicity - and my MP3 player - provided me with the perfect soundtrack to the piece, the unmistakeable sound of David Byrne and the Talking Heads classic ‘Once in a Lifetime’.

Same as it ever was. Same as it ever was.

New Labour’s carefully planned marketing election campaign may have been just that much slicker, that much more better organised, coordinated and managed than ever before. The Emperor may have bought himself a shiny new outfit to dazzle the crowds, he may even have had the crowds hand-picked for him for their slack-jawed adulation and their phocine delight in his every uttered word…

… but none of it could really be considered new or different. A mousetrap is still a mousetrap even if you do manage to build a better one.

Should we really be so surprised to find our political leaders indulging in the art of myth-making and, if so, why?

Why should this come as such a surprise when so much of what the public has come to accept as the ‘truth’ is nothing more propaganda, hypocrisy and carefully contructed works of fiction? When Shakespeare, our greatest playwright, is also our greatest propagandist and and the perpetrator of the single most effective political hatchet job of all time - on Richard III.

Sun Tzu wrote of the use of propaganda to foment division between the leaders and their followers more than 2000 years ago - just as both opposition parties sought to do during the last election campaign, with some success, by targetting Blair’s personal integrity on Iraq.

500 years ago Niccolo Machiavelli wrote of converting the world through propaganda, considered religion to be the ‘most indispensable propaganda device’ and hypocrisy a legitimate tool of statecraft.

A mere 190 years ago, Von Clausewitz identified war as being ‘politics by other means’ - a terms which surely resonates when one considers - again - the question of Iraq which played such a large part in the last election campaign.

And it was around 50 years ago that Phillip K Dick - who gets a name check in Justin’s article - wrote of the subtleties of manipulating public opinion to political ends in a short story called ‘The Mold of Yancy’, a story based on the Eisenhower presidency but which almost perfectly predicts frightening manipulative power of dressing up political agendas in mass-market homespun philosophy and simple truisms to the extent that it could almost be considered a textbook for the current Bush presidency.

Lies, hypocrisy, propaganda and carefully constructed fictions are the stock-in-trade of political culture and hve been for as long as there has been politics itself. The methods may change. They may become more sophisticated and subtle but otherwise its business as usual - the Spectacle goes ever on and on.

I’ve been mulling over writing something on the general subject of my frustrations with bureaucrats in general, and particularly the public sector variety who tend to get right up my nose when I came across this from today’s Guardian.

Am I alone here in thinking that there’s something deeply and desperately wrong with a situation where the Chief Exec of a Local Authority feels able to demand the resignation of a democratically elected Leader of a Council and, not only that, put a deadline on the decision - especially when the whole dispute seems to stem from that same unelected officer having a hissy fit over local politicians refusing to play ball with his request that they fast track an extra £200K into his personal pension fund to avoid changes in tax regulations.

In fact should the people of Liverpool not be demanding the Chief Exec’s resignation for having the cheek to ask for that payment in the first place.

Clearly things have a reached an impasse where one of the two will have to go and with the Council Leader, Mike Storey, looking likely to get the full backing of the ruling Lib Dem group is seems that it will be the Chief Exec, Sir David Henshaw, who’ll be picking up his P45 in fairly short order - which, as far as I’m concerned looks to be the right result.

More important, however, are the issues this current spat raises about the current state of the local democracy and our local councils at the heart of which is the question of accountability.

More and more it seems to me that the gradual erosion of the authority of local councillors is damaging not only local democracy itself but also the relationship that local people have with their elected representatives, a relationship which should underpin our whole social concept of citizenship.

To some extent this problem derives from the transfer of much of what were one local authority responsibilities to either central of regional governmental structures although some of the problem also lies in the bureaucratic culture to be found at officer level in most councils and, indeed, across geovernment as a whole at all levels, a culture which seems to do its best to avoid and even, where possible, deny the simple fact these people - these public servants - are supposed to be working for us. Its sad to reflect that as much as I hear local people complaining about council officers who don’t listen to their concerns, who treat them like idiots and who rarely, if ever, can be bothered to get off their collective arses and do something to help, these days I’m just as likely to hear the same things from councillors when talking to them ‘off the record’ and this must be doubly frustrating for our elected representatives as its generally they, not the civil servants and council officers - the bureaucrats - who carry the can when things go wrong and public feels that its not being well served.

There’s far more to democratic accountability than simply the whole business of elections and elected representatives, Changing the present voting system to one based on proportional representation may give a greater veneer of ‘fairness’ - and then again it may not as I’ve not yet seen a wholly convincing argument - but on its own that won’t address the real issue here which are about not only the accountability of our elected representatives but of the whole machinery of state that goes with them.

To my mind the real threat to democracy lies not in the question of whether the present electoral system gives our elected representatives a real mandate to govern but on the seemingly growing inability of those representatives, especially at local level, to hold non-elected officers to account on our behalf, an issue which requires an altogether more fundamental rethink of the nature of the relationship between the people and the state.

I can well appreciate the problems facing universities when it comes to trying to root out plagiarism. Hardly a day goes by without the site stats here picking up two or three referrals - usually from Google - where the person at the other end has obviously just rammed their essay question into the search engine in its entirety in the hope that it’ll spit out a more or less complete essay in return.

I’d guess everyone who’s been to university will have their own favorite tale of plagiarism uncovered - even the most innattentive lecturer usually manages to catch at least one student trying it on every year - with the best stories invariably being those which relate the most spectacular acts of academic stupidity such as the sociology student on my own degree course who succeeded in plagerising the university’s own Professor of Sociology without realising that he would be the one making their essay.

All of which leads me to yet another apparent academic own goal, as related by Eve Garrard over at the always excellent Normblog who tells of one unnamed institution which has taken to only penalising female students for plagiarism on the pretext that they’re apparently ‘more amenable to being punished’.

More amenable to being punished? WTF has that got to do with it?

Back in my own student days, plagiarism was dealt with in a very simple and straightforward manner - get caught doing it and you got a big fat zero and the invitation to try again or fail the module. There was nothing amenable about it, that was just the way it was.

Of course this was in the pre-Internet days when you really had to work at plagiarizing by finding a suitable source for yourself - no Googling for answers back then - and with a limited range of source material to rip off chances were that if you did try it on then there was every prospect of having picked on something your lecturer was familar with and getting caught but still you’d get one or two people give it a go even then.

Today, is the site stats here are anything to go by, the problem of plagiarism is becoming endemic, not just here but all over the world, to the extent that you start to wonder just what the real value of a university degree is likely to be in future and how quickly we’ll find ourselves in the same situation as exists in the states where your first degree is largely meaningless and its only when you’ve got at least a Masters that you’re taken seriously.

This is question for which there probably are no easy answers, not when the push is on from Government to make having a degree the norm (no pun intended) and not the indicator of academic ability and excellence it used to be, still its sad to note both that plagiarism appears to be on the rise and that, at least, some universities appear to lack either the gumption or resolve to deal with it effectively.

Given his borderline obsession with voting irregularities you might have thought that John Hemming would have had plenty to say on the subject of voting patterns Saturday’s Eurovision song contest but apparently not - as yet - although I suppose we should be grateful that we’re not alone in being loathed by most of the rest of Europe and that they appear to hate the French, Germans and Spanish as much, if not a little bit more than us.

I think it should be obvious by now, even to the BBC, that we don’t have a hope in hells chance of actually winning the damn thing short of hiring next year’s entry from somewhere in Eastern Europe or the Balkans in the vain hope that we can get a jump on the (Eastern) bloc voting game and the only real purpose the ‘contest’ now serves is to provide an evening’s light relief listening to Wogan taking the piss of of Johnny Foreigner on our behalf. Face it, we’re only in it these days because we put so much of the TV’s right’s cash for it that they daren’t get shot of us - unlike the Irish who didn’t even make it through the qualifying round.

So what should we do? Do we take the same view as the Italians and just give it all up as a bad job?

Nope. I’ve got a much better idea.

Its all just a bit of laugh so lets just treat it as one. Do what the Norwegian’s did and simply choose entries to take the piss - at least I assume that’s what they were up as the idea that their 1980’s glam metal throwback act from Saturday is what passes for fashionable over the North Sea is a truly scarey thought.

In fact, for next years contest, lets go the whole hog and hook up in pact with Ireland - you guys over there talk to McGowan about reforming the Pogues and we’ll gladly match you by sending the Happy Mondays over - ther’s no chance that either will win but at least we can be sure they’ll have drunk Athens dry by the time its all over.

Look, I am serious here. Thanks to the fact that we more or less bankroll the whole event - along with the Germans, French and Spanish - they can’t afford to throw us out no matter what we enter so why not make the most of it and start seriously taking the piss. We send ‘em Ryder and Bez next year, follow that up with Motorhead the year after and then after that, who know? Why not a Sex Pistols reunion, Cradle of Filth or the Prodigy? Better still, get Christopher Guest to reform Spinal Tap for the night - lets face it anythings got to better that trotting out yet more sad reality TV losers.

All we do then is sit back, listen to Wogan’s commentary ang yack it up while watch a crowd of Eastern Europeans all loks ta each other and try to work out what the fuck we’re trying to do to them.

You have to admit, it would be the perfect response.

Oh dear, Guido. I did try to be charitable and attribute your obvious lack of understanding of the Data Protection Act to the entire understandable ignorance of a layman faced with arcane and complex legislation and what do I get in return?

‘Deeply Geeky’

Is that really the best you can do, dear boy?

Well at the risk of being accused of further geekyness, lets finish the job of picking apart poor Guido’s allegation that ‘Labour Broke e-Laws During Election Campaign’.

First a quick recap. So far I think that I’ve more than satisfactorily demonstrated that the Data Protection Act more than adequately covers the outsourcing of e-mail campaigns to an external marketing company, that the use of web bugs is far from illegal and certainly not covered by the notion of ‘misrepresentation’ in the current regulations and that Guido’s allegation that Labour Party e-mails failed to include an opt-out link is - how should I put it - a pile of bovine excrement.

That leaves the issue of the party’s apparent tardiness in responding to subject access requests which has some small subtance to it, even if Guido got it wrong (again) in asserting that all such requests were held over until after election day on May 5th and, of course, Guido’s seeringly detailed analysis of the Labour Party’s privacy statement which runs as follows:

Question - did Labour’s privacy Statement explicitly say it would not give out info to an outside organisation?

A. Yes.

In actual fact, as Guido’s original post acknowleges, Labour’s privacy statement actually states that ‘You may be asked for personal information if you complete one of the forms on this site.’

Ah, right. Personal information - so, once again, we’re back to Guido’s ignorance of the law on Data Protecion.

You see, Guido, personal information, under the Data Protection Act is defined in terms of whether a particular piece of information can be used, in isolation, to identify a living individual to the recipient of the information. The upshot of this is that while, say, a name and address would be considered personal information as that would identify a specific individual, an e-mail address on its own wouldn’t, nor indeed with the combination of an e-mail address and a serial number which could later be used to cross-reference information obtained from a web bug within the e-mail with a master database of personal information held exclusively by the Labour Party.

Now, looking back over the e-mails I received from the Labour Party over the course of the election campaign I find that while they were sent to my personal e-mail address they actually contain no personal information at all - they weren’t even addressed to me by name as some other companies are wont to do. So, by a simple logical inference from the content of the e-mail we can show only that the marketing company, Email Reaction were provided with the e-mail adress & serial number combination necessary to send the e-mails and collate the information returned by the web bugs - what cannot in fact be shown is that any personal data, as defined by the Act - was ever shared with the marketing company.

Or to put it another way, Guido is talking utter bollocks - and that is a statement which would stand up in court.

One of the great myths and misunderstandings of the modern era is the idea that the Data Protection Act exists to protect your personal privacy - it doesn’t.

The purpose of the Data Protection Act is to ensure that personal data is processed according to a number of key principles, these being that personal data must be:

1. fairly and lawfully processed
2. processed for limited purposes
3. adequate, relevant and not excessive
4. accurate and up to date
5. not kept longer than necessary
6. processed in accordance with the individual’s rights
7. secure, and
8. not transferred to countries outside European Economic area unless country has adequate protection for the individual.

Note, the 7th Principle states that personal data must be processed securely and in Data Protection Law securely does not automatically mean privately.

How do I know this? Because in my last job I was the registered data controller for employer and therefore the personal most directly responsible for compliance with the Data Protection Act - and this is also why I note, with the usual mixture of amusement and frustration I experience on such occasions, that the erstwhile Guido Fawkes and others, including rather surprisingly Tim Ireland of Bloggerheads etc., are current barking up entirely the wrong tree in trying to chase down Zack Exley over the inclusion of tracking links in a number of Labour Party e-mails during the election campaign.

I must admit to wondering quite where Tim was going with making subject access requests to the Labour Party during the election campaign - now I understand.

Now, ok, I’m not going to lay into Guido quite as heavily as I might on other occasions for getting things so badly wrong. The Data Protection Act is a horridly complex and arcane piece of legislation when you actually understand it, let alone when you don’t - which is why its so often misunderstood, but lets try as best I can - without getting too far into the intricacies of the Act and the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations, also cited by Guido - to explain why he’s wrong in asserting that the Labour Party broke the current ‘e-laws’.

The first thing to understand is the matter of ‘consent’ in Data Protection.

When you consent to your personal data being processed, as everyone receiving these e-mail will have done as they were sent only to party members and others registering through Labour’s website, what you are actually consenting to is the processing of your personal data in accordance with the various purposes registered by the Labour Party in the Data Protection Register - Labour’s main entry is actually here.

Data controllers are not required to seek your express consent in order to process your personal data in a particular manner, if that manner is specified in their register entry and, equally, they are not required to seek your express consent for disclosure of your personal data to a third party if the nature and purpose of that disclosure is specified in the register - the practice adopted by many websites of seeking express consent for third party disclosure is part convention forced upon them by privacy conscious netizens but mainly because such disclosures are generally made to third parties who will use that data for their own purposes and not for a purpose covered by the registration of the company collecting the data in the first place.

So when Guido complains about data being passed to a private company - Email Reaction - he does so incorrectly as the Labour Party’s own registration permits such a disclosure to an employee or agent working for the party for the purposes specified on the register and such a disclosure is not, of itself, a breach of privacy as this would only occur were Email Reaction to sell on or use the data for another third party of whom you were not aware at the time of giving consent. Guido has, therefore, no cause for complaint so long as the data passed to Email Reaction is used only for the purpose of their work on behalf of the Labour Party and is not made available to any other third party.

Why were you not told this? Because the Labour Party is under no legal obligation to tell you. Consent in Data Protection is a simple matter of caveat emptor - if you want to know what your data is go to be used for and how it may legally be processed before giving consent then its up to you to consult the Data Protection Register and find out for yourself.

As regards the spyware and link tracking issue highlighted by Guido, again he is rather mistaken in his interpretation of the regulations, particularly in trying to assert that this somehow contravenes the regulations as they relate to obtaining information via misrepresentation.

This particular offence relates specifically to the practice of phishing in which the recipient of an e-mail believes themselves to be responding to one party only for their personal data to actually be sent to another, unrelated, party - this is commonly used by fraudsters as a means of illegally obtaining bank account details and other information for the purpose of committing a financial fraud.

In the case of the Labour Party e-mails, while you may not be aware that tracking information is being sent back to Email Reaction rather than the Labour Party, or even sent back at all - unless you examine the source code of the e-mail as I invariably do - this does not mean that the information is being obtained by misrepresentation. Email Reaction were clearly acting as an agent of the Labour Party and therefore entitled to collect data on their behalf - the practice of using hidden tracking links may be ethically questionable and therefore certain to cause annoyance, especially to experienced and generally very privacy conscious netizens, but it is not intrinsically unlawful.

Nor, indeed, can anything be read into the removal of tracking links following Guido’s exchange of e-mails with Zack Exley other than the simple fact that Exley has been around long enough to know exactly the kind of reaction that news of these links would provoke amongst seasoned netizens and that this would be far more damaging to the campaign than any possible threat of litigation over their presence - never, ever, underestimate the power of a good old fashioned slashdotting when dealing with someone who makes his living from his knowledge of the Internet and Internet technology, especially when, as in Zack’s case, your reputation already precedes you and you have a knack of making a fair few online enemies.

Once you under stand this you understand, in addition, how thin Guido’s argument is.

From what I can see he has but two arguable points in his piece and one of those, for the moment, only because I’m blogging from the office and therefore unable to double check my own e-mails for the presence of an opt-out link.

The absence of an opt-out link or other cancellation information would breach clause 22(3) of the Privacy and Electronic Communications (EC Directive) Regulations 2003, although it should be noted that the regulations state only that recipients must be given a ’simple means of refusing (free of charge except for the costs of the transmission of the refusal) the use of his contact details for the purposes of such direct marketing’ and that this need not, necessarily be an opt out link but simply instructions on how to opt out - the usual send a blank e-mail to opt-out address used by many listservs is equally valid under the regulations.

That just leaves the ‘charge’ of failing to provide information under a subject access request within the specified time of 40 days.

Well - and on this occasion I’ll not be holding back so much - Guido needs first to check his facts a little more carefully as in claiming that:

Melanie Onn, the Constitutional and Legal Officer for the Legal and Financial Compliance Taskforce for the Labour Party stonewalled on giving answers to all questions and requests prior to May 5.

… he neglects to mention that Tim Ireland’s subject access request was actually fulfilled on April 29th - although admittedly only after a fair bit of badgering and some 10 days late - Sorry Guido, but if you’re going to make allegations then you need to remember the trouble Andrew Gilligan got into over the matter of a simple lack of equivocation.

Even then, whether Guido, Tim or anyone else, for that matter, could make a complaint of non-compliance stick is open to question, particularly if the subject access request made specific reference to data being collected/held by Email Reaction and not, directly by the Labour Party and not, therefore, necessarily in the Party’s possession at the time the subject access request was made.

Any such claim must also take into account the ruling of Appeal Count in Durant vs Financial Service Authority which considerably tightens the legal definition of what constitutes personal data for the purposes of the Act in a manner calculated to prevent it from being used to conduct a ‘fishing expedition’ - much as one might well argue was conducted by Tim if one were a lawyer acting for the Labour Party. Just because information is collected it does not necessarily follow that it is either processed or stored immediately in what would now be considered a relevant filing system or that it is subject to disclosure under a subject access request.

In other words, and with the qualification that I’ve not had chance to check for opt-out links in any of the e-mails I personally received, its looks very much like Guido’s blowing smoke for the time being and needs to come back with something rather more substantial if he’s to make a worthwhile case.

UPDATE - 6:35pm

Just got home from work and checked through every single e-mail I’ve received from the Labour Party since around November of last year - so this includes a number that I get as a member of the Party and I can find only three in total which do not have a unsubscribe link in them - and none of these are the disputed e-mails which have the tracking links in them.

Actually, in the interests of precision, of the three that don’t have an unsubscribe link one is a newsletter for party members and the other two are what I would consider more personal as the come directly from a local constituency office, even if they are advertising a trip to Brussels for a meet and greet with an MEP.

With that in mind I’m now inclined to challenge Guido directly to produce one of the e-mails that he claims did not contain an opt-out link and I will then check it against my own copies to verify this.

The comments section is open Guido…

One of the dinky features of the blogging software I use is that it provides a wide range of stats, including a list of the most recent searches which referred peopel to this site.

So understandably I’m rather curious as to who might have been searching for “members smethwick community forum” one a few hours ago, especially as I’m the current secretary of the organisation.

Whoever you are, hi, please feel free to introduce yourself properly - I don’t bite [unless by special request] honest…

Its obvious that a number of Parliamentary brains have yet to work themselves up into gear since the election - always a bad move for politician as their mouths rarely operate in anything less that fifth.

How else does one explain away James Gray MP setting what must be a new record for the shortest shadow ministerial career in parliamentary history after suggesting that the best way to solve the West Lothian question was to do away with the Scottish Parliament and its MSP’s.

Just so you know next time, James, Scotland’s the bit in the north with all the shooting and salmon fishing - just turn left at Oxford and you’ll find it eventually.

In the mean time, Hazel Blears has wasted no time at all in putting her foot firmly in her mouth by suggesting that one solution to youth crime would be to put all the little buggers in orange jumpsuits while doing community service as a punishment.

Frankly the thought of having people with big arses wandering around the area in jump suits is enough to give the screaming ab-dabs - last one of those we had round here ended up building a bloody skateboard park.

Bob Piper (May 19th) has some good things to say about Warley Woods Community Trust - quite rightly - and some not so good things to say about the state of Lightwoods Park and the failure of Birmingham City Council to maintain it properly.

Like many local parks, Lightwoods was placed into the custodianship of a local council - in this case Birmingham - endowing parks being a bit of a popular route to posterity for our local Victorian industrialists…

… all of which means that it has a non-revealing entry on the Register of Charities which does, however, suggest from the listed area of benefit that although the park may be in the hands of Birmingham City Council, they may in fact hold it in trust for the people of Bearwood/Smethwick - the question being how does one tell for sure?

Well, fortunately, that’s where the Freedom of Information Act 2000 comes in handy, hence the following e-mail that will be waiting for them at Birmingham City Council when they get into work in the morning.

Sir:

Dave Lambert

As I recall, they now have 20 days to reply - I’ll keep you all posted when they do.

We did it.

We fucking well did it!!!! The Albion stay up.

Too emotional to write anything else.