Author Archive

Jim Killock

Since joining Open Rights Group as its Executive Director in January 2009, Jim Killock has led campaigns against three strikes and the Digital Economy Act, the company Phorm and its plans to snoop on UK users, and against pervasive government Internet surveillance. He is working on data protection and privacy issues. In 2012, ORG won Liberty's Human Rights Campaigner of Year award alongside 38 Degrees, for work on issues from copyright to the Snooper’s Charter.

Do you expect the machine to solve the problems? In this wide-ranging interview with the Director of the Open Rights Group members of Open Democracy discuss bulk collection, state bureaucracies, the pre-crime era and trust. Rosemary Bechler (RB): Few of us understood the full import of what Ken Macdonald QC, former Director of Public Prosecutions, was saying at the Convention of Modern Liberty in 2009 when he referred to the then just published paper by Sir David Omand on the effect of modern data mining and processing techniques on intelligence work. Omand had stated that public trust in the organs of the state was going to be crucial, because from then on, ”Finding out other people’s secrets is going to mean breaking …