Author Archive

Rosemary Bechler

Rosemary Bechler is mainsite Editor of openDemocracy. She chaired the National Peace Council and Peaceworkers UK before joining openDemocracy in 2000. For the British Council, she has edited four volumes of Britain and Ireland: Lives Entwined (2003 – 2012) and written Unbounded Freedom – a guide to Creative Commons thinking for cultural organizations (2006). Her compilation from the Convention on Modern Liberty was published by Imprint Academic in 2010.

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 …