Brits: Tell Parliament to keep its hands off social media


Jim from the UK Open Rights Group sez, "David Cameron is trying to gain new powers to close social media and mobile messaging when there's 'trouble': he's also thinking about new snooping powers. We need to stop these plans before they get going."

The Government is focusing on entirely the wrong problem in trying to increase their powers to ban, block or monitor people's communications. Social networks like Twitter are used for a huge array of positive purposes such as warnings of danger and organising clean up projects. Blanket surveillance measures of private communications or increased powers to mine users data would undermine people's freedom to communicate in very damaging ways, and would in no way address the problems at hand. Making laws in haste, with limited analysis and information, to deal with an exceptional problem is likely to create unbalanced laws and abuses of our rights.

Save our social media! Stop cut offs and close downs

(Thanks, Jim!)

(Image: Riot Police, a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (2.0) image from zoonabar's photostream)