On June 18th the UK home secretary David Blunkett abandoned plans to extend the electronic snooping powers given to the police (under the RIP Act) to a huge range of local authorities and public bodies. In what must have been the shortest privacy campaign ever around 1600 people sent faxes to their MPs through the FaxYourMP website. The anti-RIP website stand.org.uk which itself only relaunched a couple of weeks ago, led the fax campaign and now says "there are dozens of other bits of legislation hanging about with vast technological idiocies contained within - the RIP Act draft Code of Practices; the EU's Copyright Directive and Data Retention orders; laws against reverse-engineering; software patents and who knows what else". Read Report.

Background, Call and Schnews feature here.