New campaign defends human rights in a digital world

Wired on Friday: Be very careful what you say in a room full of people who know how to use the web. A couple of months ago I was sitting in the usual slightly dull, slightly worthy discussion panel that is generally obligatory at technological conferences. My fellow panellists and I were brought in to talk about whether the UK should have some sort of "digital rights" organisation. We blathered on, as is a panellist's God-given right.

By the end of the day, the audience, by dint of a single ingenious website, had roped us into not only accepting the need, but setting up and running such an organisation - and roped themselves into supporting us to the tune of £60,000 a year.

Digital rights is a term that has long been familiar to the technical culture of Silicon Valley and its many cousins across the world. It's a little nebulous, but the principle is simple. Technology affects civil liberties: sometimes strengthening them, sometimes weakening them.

Digital rights attempt to preserve and reinforce human rights in the crossover into a more digitally-mediated world, while fighting any weakening that ignorant or malicious lawmaking might inadvertently create.

So, battling against the widespread surveillance made possible by the net would be a battle over digital rights.

And fighting to allow everyone the power to encrypt and protect their private communications would be a victory for our digital rights.

So would giving your e-mail the same protection against unwarranted seizure under law as your written letters or preserving your right to talk politically online as freely as you would in a public square.

It's a cause that is close to many geeks' hearts, if only because they stand to bear the brunt of any encroachment on digitally-brokered human rights long before anyone else.

When techies complain about the dangers of overly punitive copyright law, for instance, it's not because they want to pirate everything they see. It's because they see the tools that they use in their daily life - to convert data into new formats, or edit and back up data - being outlawed by the same laws.

They see the ramifications: the disappearance of useful, even vital, technologies like the general purpose computer, in the pursuit of short-term gain by the media industry.

Tragically, while digital rights inspire great passion in the technically adept, it can be hard to mobilise that passion. We're not talking about big joiners here: if you're interested in your right to privacy and autonomy, and you're into technology, the chances are you're going to be a bit of an individualist.

While technology companies often benefit from the stout defence digital rights advocates give their work, the same companies are institutionally loathe to enter the political arena. And while many political organisations get financing from the public sector, government is traditionally the last group to see the personal freedom implications of their IT actions. Or to want to do anything about it once they have trampled on those rights.

All of this, of course, was what we were bemoaning at our panel: the geeks were willing, but the financial wherewithal was nowhere. At which point, a member of the audience stood up and said: "How many people here would pay £5 a month to have such an organisation?"

General mutterings of assent, as also befits an audience at such summits. Perhaps with a little more sense of commitment than was usual, though, because, as a group of first-adopting web techies, they knew what would come next.

Within a the few minutes of the panel finishing, an excited crowd gathered around a laptop, and went to a site, Pledgebank.com, designed by a few of them with money donated by the UK's deputy prime minister to build socially useful websites.

Pledgebank is the sort of quick, free solution to a social problem built by geeks with the freedom presented by those precious digital rights. On Pledgebank, anyone can make a public pledge, with the condition that the pledge only operates if others join them.

In this case, I pledged that I'd pay a fiver a month to start a digital rights society - but only if a thousand other people did, too.

The die was cast: everyone in the audience signed up, as did others as news got around. A few months later and with very little publicity, we have close to 800 signed up. Two hundred more, and our panel will have £60,000 and an obligation to commit to.

It gets better: with tools like this, digital rights groups can spring up anywhere. There's one in Ireland being worked on as we speak, aiming to see the light of day at TechCamp, a web-organised conference in Coolock next month (see http://www.bdmwiki.com/index.php/Tech_Camp_Ireland).

I don't think it will be the last example of such spontaneous organisation.