It also seems to allow them to prosecute you for things you did that weren’t crimes when you did them, or bang people up for protecting other people’s private personal data.

If this gets past the house of lords (can’t see that happening in a million years), it will be challenged by the European Court of Human Rights – specifically as a breach of the Right to Privacy.

Still, they could do an awful lot of damage and destroy a lot of lives (and bang up a lot of political opponents) before they’re forced to stop, assuming they can be stopped at all.

“that the effect of the provision made by the order is proportionate to that policy objective, and”

I also didn’t note that each information-sharing order has to be voted on as a statutory instrument, largely because in practice it will mean very little unless the culture of Westminster is radically overhauled.

“Your piece would be more complete, and less shrill, if you maybe turned your mind to how that would be defined if judicial review of decisions made under this section were applied for.”

How do you define proportionate? I can’t see any other definition here other than that the order has to pertain to that policy objective, which probably also means proportionate in terms of the policies scope.

Just because these sharing orders are unlikely to be blanket national orders doesn’t make them any less dangerous. We’d be screaming louder, of course, if they were able to just make such blanket orders…but they’re smart, because by doing it this way they can make a dozen sharing orders and effectively have created a network of sharing that is the same as that blanket order, but people like you will sit back and go… “hmm, well…but it *is* proportionate so..I guess that’s ok then!”

“Of course, that might drive a coach and horses through much of your argument, especially your chosen example, but the question is whether you ignored that point because you didn’t get it, or because you feared it was fatal to your case and decided to ignore it.”

Given that these information sharing orders are introduced through statutory instrument, which are rarely visited by members of either house, the reliance would be on people constantly using FOI requests or being lucky enough to realise what is happening before they could call any kind of appeal against the ruling. That’s on top of the issue I mention above of the sheer spectrum of people that can push these forward and thus “policies” that can be utilised to facilitate information sharing.

For me I’d rather that law wasn’t passed that in practice will require citizens to constantly be questioning to government what their data is being used for, just so that it can go through a costly appeals process in the hope that their understanding of the word “proportionate” is the same held by the judges and that the instrument will be overturned or annulled.

You seem to feel differently, I’d love to know why you would rather give government these powers and trust them not to abuse them rather than not give them these powers in the first place. Given RIPA is so obviously abused given it’s original purpose I think the “trust” part of this relationship has been worn out, don’t you?

Of course, that might drive a coach and horses through much of your argument, especially your chosen example, but the question is whether you ignored that point because you didn;t get it, or because you feared it was fatal to your case and decided to ignore it.

As I said on Facebook, I can’t understand the mentality of giving a child a firework and hoping it never finds the match.

I think we’re now at a point where all we can do is keep a list of all of these things and hope that the next government repeals them, which is a vanishingly slim chance in itself.

Well, if government passes an information sharing order, yes. Information is any thing that contains or is personal data.

“For example, these powers appear to enable the Leader of the House (or another Minister) to make an order saying that the Clerks of the House may share information on Memebrs expenses with the Whips’ Office; making it an offence for even the MP whose expenses are at issue to share ‘the information’ with anyone else.”

Yep, perfectly possible. In fact, pretty much anything is possible because as long as the instrument is passed, it is able to amend (for the purposes of the sharing order only) any act of parliament, and make any offence. The only limitations seem to be that the sharing order has to be linked to a policy objective (easy enough to create), has to be issued by a minister in control of that policy area (even easier to convince), and has to relate to personal data (irrelevant as the sharing order can alter the terms of what constitutes personal data and rewrite the bits of the DPA that don’t quite fit).

So essentially, as long as it relates to pretty much any information that can loosely be determined to be personal, a sharing order can rewrite pretty much any law in order to facilitate either the sharing, or the gagging, of any information.

It’s a government information management bill and a censorship bill all rolled in to one.

What is included in ‘the information’? Is this the end of personal details given to the Census being kept secret for 100 years? Does it become legal for the Treasury to share with anyone they chose all personal tax details? Etc., etc.

The possible impact on Freedom of Information is extraordinary. For example, these powers appear to enable the Leader of the House (or another Minister) to make an order saying that the Clerks of the House may share information on Memebrs expenses with the Whips’ Office; making it an offence for even the MP whose expenses are at issue to share ‘the information’ with anyone else.

My impression is that these are hastily drafted provisions intended to cover the back of some Minister whose Department has been sharing data in a way which may be legally challengeable. They are so scrambled together that they are not even gramatical. For example, this Bill would enable Ministers to create offences punishable ‘to’ a fine; but not offences punishable by a fine. Then these provisions have been inserted into the least awkward spot in the current legislative programme.

MPs should be alerted. If that fails, we will have to rely on the Lords, once again.

Some are also having a bit of an argument over the idea that this part…

(d) prohibit or restrict further or onward disclosure of the information;

…is a gagging order clause. Given that information is something that “consists of or includes personal data” the scope of what that information could be is quite wide. I don’t want to get all paranoid, but one Statutory Instrument latter and we could happily have a block newspapers from reporting about a certain subject that has information about a certain person. This would go hand in hand with secret inquests and handpicked judges. It also doesn’t need any court involvement.

That’s 19 pages (just over) a day to analyse. I’m no expert on it, but it took me Several hours simply to decipher and analyse two. This is a Bill that Labour want to sneak through with poor information and discussion, Henry Porter is spot on with his assessment of their strategy.

I too fear the worst, I can’t see this being held up to scrutiny, it’s depressing. The only thing we can do realistically is really watch for any SI’s that pop up and do our best to get MPs to protest against them.

Have written to my MP already, but not holding out much hope on this…