Interview with Becky Hogge on The Open Rights Group and digital rights in the UK and around the world

Thanks for inviting me to do an online interview. This is the first time I've done an interview online like this, so please bear with me!

The Open Rights Group is a grassroots digital rights organisation. What that means is that we speak out wherever we feel like our consumer rights, our civil liberties or our human rights are being threatened by the poor implementation or the poor regulation of digital technologies. That might be issues to do with privacy and data protection, or electronic voting, or where intellectual property law threatens our rights to freedom of expression online.

We're based in London in the UK, and we've been around since 2005. We act as a media clearinghouse, giving journalists an informed point of view on the tech issues of the day. We also engage with policy-makers - often poor legislation and policy-making comes from a simple lack of knowledge around tech issues!

ORG is funded by around 700 individuals paying £5 each month to support the organisation. It's this pool of money that means someone is always on the end of the phone to answer queries from the media, or to meet with policy-makers. If you're interested in supporting ORG, you should visit: http://www.openrightsgroup.org/support-org/

But we don't just want your money! We have a team of volunteers who help out with lots of things, from keeping our informative wiki on tech issues up to date (Main_Page"http://www.openrightsgroup.org/orgwiki/index.php/Main_Page) to running our office and web systems, to posting news stories on the ORG news blog: http://www.openrightsgroup.org/newsblog/. Volunteers also visit tech conferences to recruit new supporters. We hold regular meetings with our volunteers, and there's always something new to do.

We have a vibrant discussion list, where ORG supporters debate the issues of the day, and we also encourage our supporters and followers to write to their elected representatives or sign petitions on particular issues.

We're working on new ways to get the community involved in what we do all the time, and we're always open to suggestions.

ORG was started in the Summer of 2005, by a group of digital rights campaigners headed by Danny O'Brien. He started a pledge on a e-engagement tool we have over here called Pledgebank. The pledge read: "I will create a standing order of 5 pounds per month to support an organisation that will campaign for digital rights in the UK but only if 1,000 other people will do the same." The deadline for people to sign up was Christmas Day-and we made it - 1,000 people signed!

What happened next was lots of organisation behind the scenes. We had to set up a company to accept the money, a governance structure, including a Board and Advisory Council. The founding Executive Director, Suw Charman, also started campaigning from the get-go, on Data Retention legislation and DRM - both of which were hot topics.

But I don't think we would have got anywhere without the faith of the initial people who signed the pledge, who were prepared to put their hands in their pockets before seeing results. Although not everyone who signed the pledge ended up being an ORG supporter, I think this is pretty normal - signing up to say you're going to do something and actually doing it are different things!

But the hundreds of people who supported ORG from the off, as well as the the small group of determined individuals who set up the organisation once they saw there was demand for it, they are the ones who ORG has to thank for its rapid success.

We are funded by individual donations of £5/month - this pays for our core operations. We also attract small and medium-sized grants from grant giving bodies, usually for campaign-based funding. The Joseph Rowntree Reform Turst Ltd has been particularly supportive, and we've just received a grant from the Open Society Institute.

Fundraising is tough. Because we're new, and because in the short time we have existed we have enjoyed a good track record, we have been quite successful in attracting grant funding. But relying on this to fund our core operations would be a mistake. Funders tend to want something specific for their money, and dislike funding core costs. And once you've been around for a while, funders tend to start questioning why you can't become sustainable, and start looking for the new next big thing to fund. We don't want to be in a situation where we are spending a lot of time looking for funding to continue our operations, instead of fighting for digital rights!

In terms of individual supporters, we've found that once people start supporting ORG, they usually stay supporting ORG. But it's getting people to make that decision that's the tough thing. At the start, with the pledge, we got a big influx of supporters, but increasing that number has proved difficult. We'd like to have 1,000 supporters by the end of this year - that would be enough to cover two staff members and the rest of our costs. We're experimenting with new ways to recruit supporters all the time, but we haven't found the magic formula yet.

I'm afraid it is. The position we're hiring for is a campaigner who can take some of our issues to Europe.

It's weird, when we started the year, we thought that 2008 would be the year of privacy. In November 2007, the government here lost half the nations bank details in the post, and this took data protection issues mainstream in a big way. But then in the first quarter of this year, the European Union, where much of the law that affects the UK is made, started proposing all this crazy stuff around copyright and copyright enforcement. We'd already won the battle against retospective extension of copyright term here in the UK in 2006, but now a Commissioner in Europe is proposing to extend copyright term, we need to fight that battle all over again in Brussels. And then there's pressure from rightsholders to come to agreements - either voluntarily or through legislation - to disconnect people from the internet if they are suspected of illicit filesharing. So it's all go.

I think we're maybe at the top of a bell curve for the digital rights community. There was a time when only a few people understood the technology enough to know what civil liberties concerns were just around the corner, and my experience at least was that we were on the sidelines then. Now, there's increasing awareness in government and among citizens about digital rights concerns, and legislation is coming thick and fast - not all of it good. I would hope that in a few years' time, traditional civil liberties organisations will have wised up to the digital rights debate, and start taking on digital rights issues as a matter of course. But right now, there are only a small group of digital rights organisations out there, and lots of battles to fight, so yes, lots of work to do!

Hi Nyk!

The widespread adoption of digital technologies has massively increased the scope for covert and overt surveillance activities on the part of the state - there's no doubt about that. I don't think that democratic societies have really had the debate yet about how this fits in with their human rights, and how to get the balance right between individual liberty and the security of everyone.

For my part, I think a few concepts will help us understand the debate. For a start, the UK government seem to believe that by gathering huge amounts of data on all of us, then running scripts to interpret that data, they can somehow find people who are likely to be a risk to society or themselves ahead of the fact. Not only is this pure apophenia (a cool word I learnt recently meaning "the experience of seeing patterns or connections in random or meaningless data."), it has the potential to lead us into a society of mechanisaed compassion, where discrimination is the norm.

Strengthening the data protection regime in the UK could help, and I'm really interested in a decision by the constitutional court in Germany recently which basically says that a persons digital activity is part of their "core being" and cannot be intruded upon except under special circumstances. I also think it might help if we drew a line in the sand which meant governments do not act on information gathered through data mining without also involving a human-led investigation team. But I don't think there are easy answers...

ORG takes an evidence-based approach to its advocacy work, mixing inside track lobbying with grassroots engagement and targeted media work. We believe this approach serves to make legislators fully aware of the concerns of citizens and consumers at times when they can practically act upon them, and in a media environment where not acting is not an option. So we do a mix of things - media work, grassroots engagement and lobbying policy makers.

EPIC produce some fantastic work - I particularly like the reports they do with Privacy International each year. EPIC is over ten years older than ORG, and I reckon in ten years we'll have worked out the formula that works for ORG and its supporters. Right now we're trying lots of different ways of working, which is fun, if tiring!

But we do have a few processes in place to guide our work. When we come to any issue, we ask ourselves a set of questions - is it a digital rights issue? Is anyone else working on it? Do we have a good chance of effecting real change here?

And as to how we formulate our position - that's where our Advisory Council of technology and law experts come in - you can read about them here: http://www.openrightsgroup.org/board-and-advisory-council/.

We have quarterly meetings with these guys - I chair them and it's one of the aspects of my job which makes me the most nervous. In those meetings, we'll talk about what our priorities are for quarter - right now it's IP reform, E-voting and Data Protection/Privacy. We decide what ORG wants to achieve on these issues and identify opportunities for influence. In between meetings the AC sit in on an email list to give ad-hoc advice and expertise.

Sure! In 2007, we succeeded in turning around the UK election regulator’s view on the maturity of electronic voting technology in 2007 - they now think we should stop piloting the technologies in the UK. And we're really proud of our contribution to the UK Government’s decision to reject a copyright term extension in sound recordings in 2006.

Thanks for all the great questions, and sorry I didn't get a chance to answer all of them. Being put on the spot for words of wisdom is difficult...

Perhaps I can borrow someone elses instead - those of Ithiel De Sola Pool:

"Repression is in fact most likely not before a technology of liberation comes along, but only afterward, when the powers that be are challenged by the beginnings of change."