Digital Rights Ireland launched on the 6th December last year. Find out more about the group and its activities.

I was at the launch and have helped out the organisers of the group a bit, so I was delighted when TCAL asked me to write a feature on what it is for and why it might be of interest to their readers.

The strapline on the top of the DRI site describes them as a group dedicated to ‘Civil, Legal and Human Rights in a Digital Age’. This is quite a neat encapsulation of DRI’s main interests.

Firstly, who are DRI? DRI are a group of advocates, activists and well known bloggers in the areas of technology and law and the interaction between the two. At the core are the directors of Digital Rights Ireland Limited, which is a company limited by guarantee. Their about page links to all their own sites.

Secondly, what is it they care about, and why should we all care about it too? Every day you move around in society you’re interacting with an invisible web of rights, built up over decades, which allow you to do the things you take for granted without unwarranted interference. Things like sending a letter knowing that it won’t be opened and read by the state along the way. Things like meeting people or going to public lectures without being followed by the police on the offchance that you, or one of the people in the room with you, might do something illegal now or later.

Those are our familiar Civil, Legal and Human rights. The courts have affirmed them, and the government will, usually, publicly acknowledge that it wouldn’t be behaving itself if it breached them.

DRI was prompted into existence to ensure that these rights we take for granted in our tangible interactions with the rest of society are equally protected in our online transactions. Currently, through a combination of state opportunism and the unfamiliarity of our legislators with technology those rights are being denied and curtailed.

Here are some examples. It would be illegal for the state to open all the post and read whatever they liked as it passed through the system. But DRI has highlighted that no law exists to stop your webmail being handed over to the state on request. No warrant is required and there is no judicial oversight to prevent abuse of this power.

Even if it were feasible, it would not be legal for the Gardai to follow everyone in the country as they went about their business, just in case they did anything wrong. Society, and its institutions the Oireachtas and the Courts, have rejected a police state. However, new laws passed in Ireland and through the EU now mandate that the location tracking information of all the mobile phones in the state be stored, solely for this express purpose, for years after they would otherwise be destroyed.

It is illegal to put a tap on phones without special clearance from the Minister for Justice, who will then be answerable for justifying those taps. In the past (ie 1983) we had something of a phone tapping scandal, where the then Minister for Justice ordered that taps be placed on journalist’s phones to find out if they were getting or making calls to a cabinet level source. That scandal eventually brought down Charles Haughy as Taoiseach. But nowadays the Minister could have simply asked the Gardai to ask the phone companies to tell them who was phoning who and when. This traffic data is retained on the request of the Garda Commissioner and can be called on without a warrant.

DRI’s efforts have centred around raising awareness of these issues and helping inform people that if you have a right in your offline world, then the same rights should apply in your communications, be they by mobile, landline or internet.

They’ve also started to try to use the mechanisms of rights enforcement- a complaint has been lodged with the EU Commission that Ireland’s failure to protect webmail from intrusion is a breach of EU law. Parliamentary questions have been asked of the Minister for Justice in relation to the mass surveillance fostered by his data retention laws.

DRI have also tried to act as a voice for people who can’t even know their rights are being stepped on until after the fact. They have presented counter arguments and facts on the airwaves to the record industry’s representations regarding their actions in chasing file sharers. They have also, with limited success, attempted to bring relevant facts and legal precedent to the attention of the courts when the record companies are seeking to have individual’s information divulged to them without the individuals being given an opportunity to respond to the allegations made about them.

File sharers aren’t the only people who fall foul of copyright law. Whether they know it or not, the thousands of people who listen to iPods and other MP3 players are also breaking the law as the record industry sees it. The industry maintains that it is illegal copying, or piracy as they put it, to copy your own legitimately purchased CDs onto your own legitimately purchased MP3 player. DRI has said that if that interpretation of the law is correct, then the law ought to be changed.

They’re working with other organisations like the ICCL in Ireland and the EFF in the US, the Open Rights Group in the UK and the European Digital Rights umbrella group in Europe to make sure that their message is as effective as possible.

Like all voluntary groups, they will need to draw support from people who share their views. That can take the form of a donation or a pledge of €5/10 a month, certainly. Getting things done sometimes takes a little bit of money. But perhaps more important will be for people to sign up onto the interest list, to attend events, to talk about the issues with their friends and families.

Ask elected representatives and those who want to be elected where they stand on Digital Rights issues. I know I have, and received politely uncomprehending (or dismissive) letters in response. But if the people who make our laws start to hear that they need to know about these issues, and that the overarching issue that our online life- our electronic communications, culture and discussions- is important to us and deserving of the same rights as the rest of our lives, they will make it their business to respond.

And having DRI around means that we will have a voice and a platform to analyse, praise or criticise that response when it does come. To me, that’s worth a lot more than the price of a pint.