International Law

BNP Membership List - the mainstream media seem to be at least 2 days behind blogs etc.

The BNP Membership List publication affair demonstrates how blogs and internet web sites can be 2 or 3 days ahead of the mainstream media regarding some news stories.

We have been getting tens of thousands of visitors to our 21st December 2006 article:

Encryption and the BNP membership list - does your political party or campaign group protect your personal details with encryption ?

commenting on the laudable use of encryption by the BNP of their membership list details, something which is, obviously in this case, still vulnerable to betrayal by a privileged insider, just like so many UK Government centralised national databases are, despite the weasel words from the Labour party politicians..

We have been getting thousands of search engine queries, and actual , obviously fruitless blog search button searches for terms such as "bnp membership list", "bnp members list", "bnp member list", "bnp list", "bnp membership" etc., which have been growing exponentially for the last 3 days or so.

The alleged list is available online elsewhere, but obviously not here on this data privacy and security campaigning blog e.g. try the WikiLeakS.org controversial whistleblower website in Sweden, which, yet again, seems to have been overloaded by the mainstream media hyped demand for a voyeuristic peek at something illegal or forbidden, or Cryptome.org

• How many of the alleged December 2007 BNP members are actually still in the party, after all the scandals and splits in the last year ?
  
  
• Are there fake entries which have been added maliciously to these internet published versions of the alleged list ?

• Have there been some sneaky deletions of certain members details ? The media reports give widely varying numbers of records on the alleged lists.

• Is the BNP actually benefiting from the "oxygen of publicity" ?

• Will these names and addresses now be added in to Hazel Blears' "community tension monitoring" databases ? see Hazel Blears and Sergeant Flanderka - "tension monitoring" i.e. snooping on local communities

• Will the membership lists of other UK political parties and organisations now be "leaked" onto the internet ?

• Will any such lists be used as target lists for "hate crimes" and discrimination, or even "sectarian violence", "ethnic cleansing" and genocide, as has happened in the past around the world, and in Northern Ireland ?

• Will organisations which run such a list or database of personal details, urgently review the technical security barriers and human personnel aspects of their data security and privacy operations, or will they sit back complacently in the belief that such a data privacy breach "could never happen here" ?

Full post as published by Spy Blog on November 20, 2008 (boomark / email).