> It would be great to see a free/open web service that let people securely send messages to their MEPs

So WriteToThem (in the UK) from mySociety then?http://www.writetothem.com/ 

> and then also made it easy for the MEPs to reply to them, individually or as a group.

This functionality exists in the mySociety epetitions system. But it’s difficult to write to people as a group if you’re not pre-categorising what people are writing to their MEPs for.Mostly, it just irks me that there’s free, open source software out there to help with these sorts of things; but getting adoption of them inside government is really difficult…

ACTA (the Anti Counterfeiting Trade Agreement) MEPs experienced a prolonged deluge of emails from geeks around the world - but less than forty came from the East Midlands – using identical wording arguing that the ACTA treaty should be destroyed because of dangers to their personal freedom.

Western industries, on the other hand, argued strongly that they need protection from counterfeiting and from free downloading from the internet. But they were too logical and they failed to deluge MEPs in a similar way.

The result was an overwhelming defeat for the treaty.   I was one of the few who defied the torrent and voted in favour because I believe that if you have to pay for something in a shop you should also pay for it on the internet, but geeks say everything should be free on the internet. The Commissioner says the treaty is not dead and will be brought back.

Afterwards, triumphant geeks emailed from around the world. Two geeks unwisely gave their game away, by warning about their next targets, the EU-Canadian free trade agreement and also “INDECT” which is a research project in the area of intelligent security systems performed by several European universities since 2009 and funded by the EU.

Between arbitrarily dividing them up, and sending to all of them, it seemed best to send to all.  Especially since we were condensing individual emails into one letter, signed by many (so we weren’t sending them an absurd number of emails).

For the US Congress, we send each member of Congress an individual email for every user who signs a letter.  They require an email address to count it.  And this way, members of Congress can reply to people who write them–which is exciting for people, and it sometimes yields useful information when people post those replies.

For MEPs, a few insiders we trusted suggested we not send individual emails for every signature, but we obviously needed to include the email addresses of signers somehow.  So for people who signed a prewritten email we sent the email along with their signatures (emails) below the letter.   Enter Paul Nuttall.

He either quoted the original email or copy-pasted the emails into a CC (he didn’t “reply-all” because the signers weren’t recipients of the email).  I totally agree with the comments here that the way we did things made it to easy for him to do this.

So, Paul Nuttall.  Thanks for taking the time to respond to your constituents.  We’ll build a more parliament-proof system the next time around. 

To reply to the first comment re: districts, countries have different ways of electing MEPs, and there’s no good common source of data for the EU.  In most cases you’d be entering your party affiliation and not your address, anyway.  I think the UK is the only or one of just a few countries that does it geographically.  At the same time, I asked somebody knowledgable about this and they said on paper at least, each MEP represents everyone in their country (not just voters in a certain party or region, even if they’re voted in that way).  Based on that information it made sense to send by country.

Works with Exchange only (much like “Urgent” tags do), but in his shoes I would be taking every step possible to minimize the distribution. If that means attempting to retract the message from those few who use Exchange at the cost of others getting a pointless follow-up email, so be it.

But don’t let me keep you two from snarking.

“Paul would like to recall the message”? No shit, so would I in his shoes!

Because we all know emails are physical objects and sending it back to him would solve everything…

It is possible they were doing wide outreach to show how much UKIP cared, he is, as you stated, the Deputy Leader so would be a “good” spokesman to do such.  Capitalizing on the defeat of ACTA seems to be a good way to drum up more supporters… letting everyone know who they were seems like a way to drive more of them away.

Insert ironic comment about privacy in the UK here.

https://twitter.com/fightfortheftr/status/223546720167018496

It wasn’t, though – the email addresses were plain-text in fightforthefuture’s original email. They say this was to reduce server load, but that doesn’t seem like much of a reason to openly list private email addresses like this.

Kind of tragic, really – I expect this sort of mild incompetence from a UKIP MEP, but I’m surprised a net-savvy bunch like Fight For The Future would make this sort of error. Just makes people more leery of signing up for organisations like this…

There is one pretty important correction to the article though.

The email wasn’t BCCd or CCd to the 2021 petitioners, the email that Paul Nuttall forwarded contained the list of emails in it’s body.
Indeed it seems very much like this list of emails was used to create an email group, which Paul Nuttall then used.
He just made the very foolish mistake of forwarding an email containing peoples personal information, whilst saying how UKIP will defend UK citizens rights and privacy.

Amazing.

“Lee sez…”

Someone named Lee got the letter, and forwarded the tip to BB/Cory, and then  Cory wrote the story… and the first post is from someone who didn’t read, but needed to somehow discredit the people who see ACTA for the hugely bad thing it is and try to pretend it was all outsiders who weren’t actually in a position to have a say in it complaining…