Alasdair Watson

Why I’ve been in such an odd mood for the last couple of weeks, that is. I was catching up with Hugh, when I made the blindingly obvious observation that I have nothing on the horizon – no big projects, no social events, nothing. I have no plans, and nothing I have to get done with any urgency (or indeed, at all) between now and ooh, Christmas. And I really don’t know what to do with myself. So I think it’s time to really sit down and force myself to work, for the next wee while…

Post Office To Steam Open Your History File [from stand.org.uk]

One of the more extreme powers the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) handed out two years ago let government agencies obtain “traffic data” without a judicial warrant.

Traffic data is best described as the writing on the envelope of a message, instead of its contents. It can be the list of phone numbers you have called in the last six months. Or a full list of Websites you have visited. Or the times you log on, and from where. Or who you e-mail, or what programs you’ve downloaded, or what newsgroups you read. Or the position of your cellphone last Tuesday at five.

Because the risk of abuse of this power (there’s no judicial oversight – all that’s needed is the permission of a suitably high-powered boss), those who could wield it were strictly limited. Only the police, Customs and Excise and the secret services were allowed access to traffic data in the original act.

Not any more.

On Friday, the Home Office petitioned parliament to add a vast array of organisations to that list. If their passes, everyone from the DTI, any local authority, the Food Standards Agency, the Home Office themselves (of course), and staggeringly enough, Consignia. The final entry in the list says that “A Universal Service Provider within the meaning of the Postal Services Act 2000” has the same power as the secret services to read your traffic data. There’s only one USP in Britain right now, and that’s the provider previously known as the Royal Mail.

If the idea that the fricking Post Office has access to your web logs (access which would cost a competitive company millions, and would probably get them investigated by the Data Protection people), let alone every minor apparatchik on the block, you might want to kick up a fuss about this. It’s due to appear before MPs on June 18th, and the Lords a little after.

How do I find out more?

Read the Order before Parliament. It’s very short (although the list of allowed organisations is very long – two minutes should do it).

Flick through our quick notes on the original RIPA law. (The notes are based on an earlier draft, so the section numbers are a bit off. But you get the idea.)

What can I do?

Fax your MP now. The Order is to be debated next Tuesday, and these things are usually rubber-stamped. Tell your MP which groups you don’t want to be spied on by (list them all), and tell him why. Explain what traffic data means (your MP might not now how wide-ranging it is). Explain it in terms he or she can understand – if they’re a Conservative, explain how it’s government prying into people’s lives. If they’re Labour, talk about civil rights. If they’re Liberal, say what you like – the LibDems are usually down with this sort of nonsense. Ask for a reply.

It’ll take twenty minutes of your time. It’ll make a difference. Members of Parliament hate having this sort of wide-ranging power sneaked past them as much as you do. If you’re feeling a bit lazy today, you could forward this message to one of your more overactive friends. And then write your letter tomorrow.

Experts

If you’re a journalist, or want to write a detailed piece for others, you can contact Ian Brown (+44 7970 164526) at The Foundation for Information Policy Research (FIPR). As ever, they were the ones to spot this piece of nastiness first. And if you’re feeling flush, for £25 you can join the Friends of FIPR which will get you advance alerts and a warm feeling about these issues.

Had a bad day today. The football really fucked me off, and one thing got on top of another to just push my stress levels up and up. So I’m home after a session at the gym, working, with Shane MacGowan on the stereo, and candles lit. Add a good whiskey and a handful of chocolate covered coffee beans, and the world seems a much better place.

Giving me chocolate covered coffee beans is a great way to get me to love you forever, incidentally. I adore them, but for some reason, I almost never think to buy them myself.

I don’t recall if I’ve mentioned this here before, but you need to go here, and read Richard Kadrey’s Viper Wire stories. The ultra-short prose form has always fascinated me (mostly because it’s the only sort of prose I stand any chance of making work), and Kadrey’s a genius at it. These stores are hugely immaginative, massively varied, and very rich indeed. They’re exactly what SF should be – hard and fast and clever. If there was any justice, I’d be buying these in some kind of lavishly illustrated hardback on glossy stock, and Richard Kadrey would be sucking the money from the pockets of the wealthy all over the world.

It’s work like this that makes me want to write. Every time I read one of his shorts, I think “I wish I’d thought of that”. Marvellous stuff. Go.

While I had my Mac, my productivity dropped off, and I lost track of where I was with my writing. I’m not sure why. But I’ve been going through the files I transferred back from the Mac to the PC, and surprising myself at every turn with how much unused work is sitting on my hard drive. I started out intending to dust off STORMBREAK, and tidy it up a bit, for example. It doesn’t need tidying up. Somehow, I have managed to forget that I have a complete, unused pitch sitting on my hard drive. All I need to do with it is sell it. Ditto ANIMA. Complete pitch for a 48 page story, breaking into 6 8 page chapters, and parts one and two are each about two-thirds finished as script as well.

Yeah, “all I need to do is sell it” is awfully glib, I know. But for some reason, I’d forgotten that I had so many projects at the sort of stage where I could show them to people. Fuck, if I’d realised, I’d have had STORMBREAK with me at Bristol…

I also found something I wrote year or two back – a couple of thousand words of ideaspace hallucinations and chaos magic – a prose sigil that has run it’s time. Since I’ve heard nothing to make me think that the people I wrote it for are ever going to use it, I may put it up here. I may not.

Good Christ, what a god-awful piece of shit that was. You think there’d be no surprise there, but every had told me it was better than The Phantom Menace, so I was lulled into a sense of false security.

TPM was a bad film, but it at least understood that its purpose was Spectacle. There were plenty of impressive visuals scattered throughout – even when I was cringing at the dialogue, or getting annoyed with the small child, there was something pretty and new on the screen. Not so in this film – there were a couple, but nothing that really excited me. The actoors were phoning it in, at best, the special effects were frankly, dull, and at no point did the film raise even a small thrill in me. Even the much-vauted lightsabre duel at the end of it was dull. Roll on Spider-man. It has to be better.

Had a very good time indeed, hanging out with the WEF kids, and the Oni crowd. SIX STRINGS seemed to go down well, which was very pleasing. I am now quite tired, and now just chilling out with music and whisky. In a couple of days time, I have to get some plans laid for new pitches, and see about doing something with them. I want to dust off STORMBREAK and ANIMA again, for one thing…

Been a busy night. SIX STRINGS is done, and ready to give out at Bristol. My column for Friday is written. (Re-written from scratch, actually.) I’ve got this computer up to full power, with all my usual software installed and working. I feel I have Achieved Things. Good.

Thanks to the extremely clever Tom Coates, you’ll see that any links in the “New” section on this page, are now followed by a little (more…) link. This is a to Blogdex, for a roundup of what other bloggers are saying about the link in question. It’s powered by Tom’s metalinker code. I’ve kept it to just the links in the “New” section to avoid over-cluttering the page with extraneous links.

Just bought (and am now using) a shiny new desktop PC. It’s the first time in half a decade that I’ve owned one, I suddenly realise. My last one shat itself and died shortly after I moved back from Edinburgh – since then my desktop PC use has been either at the office or other people’s computers, while I’ve had a laptop and a Mac.

I’ve decided to stop using a Mac as my home computer because I bought it with intent to use OS X and learn to do all sorts of sexy unix type things, which I haven’t done. No failing on the part of the Mac, I just find a PC more useful for my daily geekwork. Mind you, I may need to turn in my geek card – I’m using XP on this box. (Mostly because I’ve never used it, and want to learn to, just to keep current on all windows versions.)