A few words on the Times paywall

July 28th, 2010

Inevitably since I’ve written for the Times a few readers have questioned why, as the paper’s online content is no longer free. Andrew Denny, for example, wrote: ‘Is there not an irony in the fact that your Times articles are now online behind a paywall and not openly accessible?’

It’s a point I’d like to address.

Firstly this comment is to miss the clear difference between a public body and private industry. The courts are paid for by the public. We have no choice but to pay our taxes – under threat of jail – to support this service which exists for the benefit of the public as a whole. Whether we like what we get is immaterial to the taxes we must pay. Transparency is one of the only ways to ensure this public body is working efficiently for the benefit of all, not just the elite.

The Times is a private company. Its survival depends entirely on whether people feel they get something of value for the money they pay. Newspapers are not free and they never have been. They can appear to be so but someone, somewhere is covering the costs whether that is through advertising, a patron’s largesse or a license fee. Advertising is no longer subsidising the industry and so the cost must fall somewhere – why not on the people who use it?

I actually believe journalism must improve if the Times is asking people to pay for it, as readers are not going to pay for inaccurate rumour or propaganda. They can get that anywhere – for free. What quality journalism can offer is synthesis of a great amount of material which is then verified and put into language everyone can understand.

I believe the experience and skills I’ve gained over 22 years as a journalist and writer have value which is why I don’t give away my work for free. I’ve written for the Times because they have valued what I do enough to pay me. The New Statesman magazine also asked me to write an article but they didn’t want to pay me anything. To me, that shows how much they value quality journalism.

If you don’t think there is any value in the work I, or any other serious journalists do, then don’t spend your money on it. At least you have the choice. You’ll still have to pay your taxes, though.

Posted in Uncategorized | 6 Comments »

Article: Court secrecy

July 28th, 2010

The courts are open but justice is a closed book
The Times, 28 July 2010
By Heather Brooke

We are denied even the barest details of what goes on in supposedly public legal proceedings

Last week I had an encounter with open justice. I was attending the Information Tribunal hearing of a friend who is trying to peel back layers of secrecy surrounding allegations that the Liverpool Women’s NHS Foundation Trust had a history of silencing whistleblowing staff by offering them public money to sign confidentiality or ‘gagging’ contracts.

I’ve been to the Tribunal before when I was fighting for the release of MPs’ expenses and that’s when I discovered the only record of proceedings of this so-called “open” people’s court (the Tribunals are meant to be a less formal, more accessible form of justice) were my scribbled notes. When it came time to write a script for a dramatised version of the hearing my notes and those of other reporters were all we had to go on. I’d asked at the time if I could tape record the hearing and was told “no”.

This time I decided to press harder. The rhetoric of the English legal system is that justice must be seen to be done so why are the public forbidden – under threat of jail – from recording a verbatim account of proceedings? Not only that, rules are so opaque and obscure that court reporters struggle to report cases with any degree of accuracy or depth. And that is when there is a reporter in court, which these days is a rarity – there used to be 25 reporters covering national courts for the Press Association; by 2009 there were only four.

We are paying nearly £1.5 billion for the court service plus £2.1billion for legal aid and the salaries of nearly 1000 senior judicial officers. It’s a high price, but to be honest not enough to adequately fund the system. However, if we’re going to invest in the judiciary it’s vital we understand where our money is going and receive some benefit for our considerable contribution. The least we might have is an account of proceedings held in open court.

Anisa Dhanji, the judge, said she was concerned with the hearing being recorded. ‘Usually such requests are made in advance so the tribunal can maintain the necessary degree of control over the transcript.’

“Control” is exactly what a court shouldn’t be exerting. Once it is decided that it is open, there should be no restriction on how that open hearing is processed. She went on to say that she’d allow me to record now but I’d have to wait for a future ruling before I could “use” the recording.

The next day in court the Judge announced she’d made her ruling.
“Please turn your tape recorder off,” she said, looking sternly at me over her glasses. I did so.
Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Articles, Crime & Justice | 7 Comments »

Article: Royal Secrecy

May 27th, 2010

Royal appetite for secrecy can only invite scandal
By Heather Brooke
Guardian, 25 May 2010

The exemption from scrutiny under Freedom of Information shows the status gap between crown and public interest

Where there’s secrecy, there’s scandal. The two certainly go hand in hand in the picture painted by the weekend’s News of the World video that shows Sarah Ferguson accepting a $40,000 briefcase of cash while promising that, for a £500,000 backhander, she would provide an introduction to trade envoy Prince Andrew.

Any claims by the royal family to distance themselves from these shady dealings are undermined by their aversion to transparency. Among the laws rushed through in the “wash-up” of the last government was a change to the Freedom of Information Act granting an absolute ban on all communications with the royal family and royal household. Prior to this such information was still exempt but if there was a public interest in the material, it had to be disclosed.

That exemption meant, for example, one could argue that, as the billpayer, the public has a right to know the detail of how the £7.9m from the civil list is spent, about the additional £15m spent to maintain the royal palaces, and the estimated £50m spent on royal security.

July will see the announcement of a new civil list settlement. There are rumours the royals are asking to double the amount to more than £15m. In the information blackout, facts are few and far between. We will only know the deal when it is done. As Graham Smith, campaign manager of the pressure group Republic, says: “We have no idea if these rumours are true. We aren’t allowed any information about what the palace is lobbying for, or on what grounds.”
Read the rest of this entry »

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Silent State manifesto goes mainstream

May 19th, 2010

It’s not every day an author gets to hear her manifesto coming from the mouth of the incoming Deputy Prime Minister. That happened today when Nick Clegg virtually read out the conclusion of The Silent State (Manifesto for a New Democracy) as his Big Society speech.

Read the full text of the speech here. If you want to know in detail what’s going to be on the reform agenda clearly you need to read The Silent State!

Of course, what matters is action and we need to see a timetable for specific changes and reform. But if this rhetoric is anything to go by (and believe me I’m ever the sceptic) then action is expected before the summer recess. I am as full of political disillusionment as anyone and I have to say – this speech gave me hope. For the first time in a very long while.

Here are a few of today’s highlights:

Silent State: Trust the people. It is the people who give public servants their power and so it must be the people to whom they are accountable, directly and forthrightly – with no middlemen in between.
Nick Clegg: My starting point is always optimism about people. The view that most people, most of the time, will make the right decisions for themselves and their families. That you know better than I do about how to run your life, your community, the services you use. So this government is going to trust people.

Silent State: We should give no more power to the state without the state giving something to us.
Nick Clegg: We will repeal all of the intrusive and unnecessary laws that inhibit your freedom.

SS: Society has an interest in encouraging the efficient use and enforcement of freedom of information and making official information freely available to the public who paid for its creation and in whose name it is gathered.
NC: We will reform our politics so it is open, transparent, decent.

SS: Surveillance doesn’t make us safer. It turns citizens into suspects.
NC: Taking people’s freedom away didn’t make our streets safe.

SS: Make voting count
NC: New politics needs fairer votes.

Some other notable points taking up the Silent State philosophy:
‘We will radically redistribute power away from the centre, into your communities, your homes, your hands.’
On Lobbying: ‘that activity needs to be regulated properly and made transparent. Which we’ll do, for example, by introducing a a statutory register of lobbyists.’

All good stuff and a promising start to creating a more efficient and egalitarian democracy. I’m out to celebrate!

Posted in Freedom of Information, Politics, Silent State | 3 Comments »

Article: The Truth about CCTV

May 18th, 2010

I wrote an investigative piece about the actual effectiveness of CCTV for the May issue of Wired Magazine (published in April). I have reprinted it below or you can see it in its full glory on the Wired website.

Investigation: A sharp focus on CCTV
By Heather Brooke|01 April 2010

As the major political parties jostle for position in the run-up to the general election, it’s clear that the way the next government monitors and controls information about us will fundamentally shape British society in the next decades.

Both the Blair and Brown administrations have pursued policies of setting up giant, centralised databases, such as the national Automatic Number plate Recognition (ANPR) system, which tracks vehicles through an expanding network of cameras across Britain’s roads, and the massive communications register behind the Interception Modernisation Programme, intended to log all UK telephone and internet traffic.

The Conservatives, meanwhile, have pledged to scrap the National Identity Register — a database that underlies the proposed ID card, which will store 50 items of personal information about every citizen — along with the children’s database, ContactPoint. (This extensive datastore, which was introduced after the Victoria Climbié inquiry in 2005, records every child’s name, gender, date of birth, address and parental contacts, along with educational and health details.) The Tories have also announced a scaling-back of the DNA database, in order to remove individuals who have never been convicted of a crime. Yet for all this maneuvering, the major parties have been uncharacteristically quiet on the most controversial of all the invasions of UK citizens’ privacy — CCTV.

Although it’s widely supposed that over the past decade there has been a significant increase in the number of surveillance cameras in the UK, it wasn’t until last year that hard numbers emerged via a Freedom of Information request. Big Brother Watch (bigbrotherwatch.org.uk), an anti-surveillance campaign group, found that the number of council-owned cameras had risen from 21,000 to 60,000 in less than ten years — equal to one CCTV camera for every 1,000 people in the country. Its report demonstrated a trebling of investment in local CCTV — even though Home Office research published in 2002 suggested that CCTV has a negligible impact on reducing crime.

Nevertheless, as public perception equates CCTV to tackling crime and antisocial behaviour, most MPs are happy to show up to the unveiling of a new surveillance system in their constituencies. The UK has more CCTV cameras per capita than any European country, yet figures released in July 2009 by the European Commission and United Nations showed Britain’s recorded rate of violent crime surpassed any other country in Europe. Does CCTV do anything to make us safer? If so, at what cost?
Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Crime & Justice | 6 Comments »

Speaking at Hay Literary Festival May 29th

May 18th, 2010

For many years I’ve attended the Hay Literary Festival as an audience member. For the first time this year I am a speaker. Wahay!

I’ll be Event Number 67 on Saturday 29th May at 7.00 pm speaking about my latest book, The Silent State, with the writer and lawyer Philippe Sands. The event is being held in the Guardian Stage and I’ll be vying to pack it out despite some heavy competition from such literary luminaries as Alain de Botton, David Mitchell, Grayson Perry and Jerry Hall (eh?).

You can buy tickets in advance here and there will be a book signing event afterward.

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Electoral Secrecy

May 10th, 2010

I wrote a piece in yesterday’s Mail on Sunday about the secrecy and utter lack of accountability surrounding those public officials charged with overseeing UK elections.

Why election officials are a law unto themselves
Mail on Sunday, 9 May 2010

Anyone trying to find out what preparations were made for Thursday’s General Election would have encountered a wall of silence from the public officials in charge.

I know because I made these enquiries last year. I wanted to know how local councils were registering people to vote and whether the number was going up or down and why.
I wanted to know if there was any truth to a Data Sharing Review instigated by the Cabinet Office that stated voter registration was down due to worries that marketing companies would get voters’ names from the electoral role and send junk mail.

The review recommended scrapping the publicly available electoral roll so only state officials and some private companies could access it. The Government took up this recommendation and there is a consultation in place to abolish it.

This is of great concern. In a democracy it is essential that people can see who is registered to vote and where. Why? Well for a start, officials rarely expose voter fraud, it is normally ordinary people or the Press – it was a reporter who found there was only one occupant at a Tower Hamlets address where eight Bengalis were registered to vote.

If the public are going to be denied ready access to the public electoral roll then there ought to be very good reason. Instead I found the ‘evidence’ used in the report was non-existent. From my queries to local councils I discovered the recommendation to abolish the roll was based on fiction. Voter registration was not going down. This was made clear by the turnout at Thursday’s Election, up from 61.4 per cent in 2005 to 65.2 per cent.

But I discovered something more disturbing. The officials charged with compiling electoral registers and running elections were accountable to no one.
Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Freedom of Information, Politics | 3 Comments »

Silent State at number 28

April 26th, 2010

The Silent State made it into the bestseller list last week getting to Number 28 in the official Nielson non-fiction chart. Hooray! It was also in Amazon’s top 100 books for the first two weeks of publication and is still hovering between 100 and 150. The publisher tells me we are now in the third re-print. It’s quite a thrill to be a serious book nudging aside various chefs and celebs, even for a brief time. Still a long way to go before I give Ben Goldacre a run for his money.

Posted in Silent State | 9 Comments »

Privacy guide for parents

April 16th, 2010

Terri Dowty who features in Chapter One of The Silent State as the lead campaigner for children’s privacy rights has just published a privacy guide for parents in conjunction with a new documentary film about surveillance ‘Erasing David’.

You’ll likely be surprised at the amount of data being collected on kids. Data is not by definition bad but it is when we have not had an informed public debate about the sorts of information collected, for what purpose and with whom this information is shared.

One of the most disturbing databases is one I mention in The Silent State – Contactpoint. This is a new, national government database containing the contact details of every child from birth to 18 plus a list of every service that the child is using. It is designed to allow practitioners to contact each other directly to discuss your child, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. However, the database is used to monitor all children for government-defined ‘problems’. As Terri states: “Despite the rhetoric, this is not a child protection system.” Will you know what data is being stored on your child in this database?
No. Children are automatically entered on to the database at birth.

Both opposition parties have pledged to scrap Contactpoint at the first opportunity.

You can download the privacy guide for parents here (pdf).

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Silent State makes most-reviewed list

April 16th, 2010

According to the Bookseller magazine The Silent State was one of the most reviewed books:

1. The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ by Philip Pullman (Canongate 9781847678256, £14.99, 29th March)
2. The Sultan of Zanzibar by Martyn Downer (Black Spring,9780948238437, £16.99, 1st April)
3. Contested Will by James Shapiro (Faber 9780571235766, £20, 1st April)
4. The Silent State by Heather Brooke (William Heinemann 9780434020263, £12.99, 1st April)
5. Burying the Bones by Hilary Spurling (Profile 9781861978288, £15, 25th March)
6. Red Tory by Philip Blond (Faber 9780571251674, £12.99, 2nd April)
7. Back from the Brink by Peter Snowdon (HarperPress 9780007307258, £14.99, 4th March)
8. Dead Republic by Roddy Doyle (Jonathan Cape 9780224090094, £17.99, 25th March)
9. Ill Fares the Land by Tony Judt (Allen Lane 9781846143595, £20, 25th March)
10. So Much for That by Lionel Shriver (HarperCollins 9780007271078, £15, 4th March)

I’ll be posting the reviews shortly.

Posted in Silent State | 4 Comments »

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