Art, media, opinion and ideas
It was brought to my attention yesterday that the Sunday Times front page (reproduced as pdf here with permission) ran last week with the story that Gardai have been accessing the information held under Data Retention, without oversight, at a rate of 10,000 queries a year. When the measure was brought in, it was described as being intended to be used for investigating serious crime and terrorist offences.
Like Fingerbobs, but made with facts, instead of digits. Factbob1: Speaking in UCC at the student Law Society Law Conference, Seamus Dooley of the NUJ conceeded that standards in newspapers have fallen in recent years. Factbob 2: At the same conference Gary Davis, the Deputy Data Protection Commissioner said that (a) Gardai were accessing telecommunications data at a rate of 10,000 requests a year.
For those who might be interested in such things McGarr Solicitors, where I earn my daily bread, have posted scans of the pleadings to date in the Digital Rights Ireland data retention case. So far these consist of the Plenary Summons and the Appearance entered by the Defendants.
Digital Rights Ireland have sent letters to the Minister for Justice, the Minister for Communications and the Garda Commissioner looking for undertakings in relation to data retention. McGarr Solicitors represent DRI. I won't be commenting on the case beyond this.
I posted quickly about the phone tapping bill which appeared in the Seanad through the medium of Irish. Mr McDowell may as well have introduced it through the medium of modern dance, given the general populous' (and who knows maybe even Senators) ability to decrypt legislation at the best of times. However the stunt may have backfired a little.
I'm afraid that in the course of installing and tweaking two new spam-combating plugins, I managed to wipe out all of December's comments. This is particularly galling, as it included the sequence of comments which attended the Data Retention votes.
And if you were wondering why I was looking for a Parliamentary Question, see TJ McIntyre on the Digital Rights Ireland website for more details. He's very interested in what the Minister for Justice has to say on the use of new Data Retention laws. He might even be more interested in what he doesn't say.
Between 1996 and 1999 the rate of resignations from the civil service rose by 34%. The civil service had been under resourced and demotivated, while subject to an embargo on hiring staff. Staff careers and earnings had stagnated.
Text of today's message:Dear Principal,Thank you all for your continued participation and engagement in the POD project. Please note that the Department is committed to taking on board feedback from schools and parents about POD. In light of this please be aware of the following changes that will be released on POD on 4th March 2015 at 10.
About two weeks ago, as letters started to arrive home in children's lunchboxes, parents started raising issues with the Department of Education's project to take children's data (racial, psychological assessment, special needs, religion, PPS number and so on) and store it until they were 30. Here's the post setting out the inital issues I had with the plan.
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