Boiling Frogs

BoilingfrogsThis Sat­urday, Octo­ber 2, I’ll be speak­ing at the South­wark Play­house in Lon­don, in between the mat­inée and even­ing per­form­ances of an excel­lent new play by Steven Bloom­er called “Boil­ing Frogs”.  The play looks at the erosion of civil liber­ties in the UK, in the name of pro­tect­ing us from the “war on ter­ror”, and is being per­formed by The Fact­ory, an innov­at­ive theatre troupe.

My talk will be called “Are We There Yet?”, and will assess how far down the road the UK has moved towards being a de facto police state: what do we mean by this, and what are the indic­at­ors we should watch out for?

Bits of Freedom — Amsterdam Talk, 16 September 2010

It’s going to be a busy month for talks — I’ll be in Ams­ter­dam with the Dutch (digit­al) civil rights organ­isa­tion, Bits of Free­dom, on 16th Septem­ber.  I use the brack­ets con­sciously, as I don’t per­son­ally see a dis­tinc­tion between rights in the phys­ic­al or digit­al world — the under­ly­ing prin­ciples are the same.

BoF is doing great work, so any­one with­in strik­ing dis­tance of Amstie please come along, not only for the talk, but for what also prom­ises to be a great social evening!

Little_BrotherIf you can­’t make that night, I ser­i­ously recom­mend com­ing along to a BoF din­ner on 24th Septem­ber, where the guest of hon­our is acclaimed journ­al­ist, blog­ger and author, Cory Doc­torow.  I had the pleas­ure of meet­ing up with him a couple of years ago in Lon­don — an extremely switched on man.

I really, really enjoyed his digit­al act­iv­ists’ hand­book — sorry, nov­el — “Little Broth­er”, ostens­ibly aimed at the young adult mar­ket.  But, hey, we’re all young at heart, and this book is spot on!

Watch out, Big Brother.….

Upcoming New York Conference: how the world changed after 9/11

INN

Look­ing for­ward to speak­ing at this con­fer­ence next weekend!

A timely and neces­sary debate about the vital, but increas­ingly fra­gile, state of our demo­cracy and basic civil rights.

And what a great line up — well done to the organisers! 

Some of the oth­er speak­ers are old friends I’ve worked with before, some I look for­ward to meet­ing for the first time.