Queen of the hill

21 August 2025
Musings

Around this time last year, I was reading in my garden when I got a ping from Guido Noto la Diega at the University of Strathclyde here in Glasgow. I’d messaged him to ask him what the closing date was for applications for Strath’s newly revived techlaw programme, because I was thinking of applying for it, but I needed to figure out how a skint freelancer was going to come up with a full tuition payment upfront. Guido replied by dangling the prospect of a full scholarship at me.

I somehow managed to not fling myself off my chair.

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Make Your Basket

16 August 2025
Reading lists, books, and imagination

Whenever advancements have been made socially, there is pushback. Freedom, justice, democracy: these things are not definitively achieved – they must be constantly fought for. I have found myself wondering what’s best to do. My mind kept returning to the story of Moses. The religious implications are not important. He was born and placed in a basket, sent down the Nile and was found and raised by Pharaoh’s daughter.

I kept thinking about the person who made the basket.

This was in a tumultuous period of massive social unrest. The Israelites were being persecuted, hunted and killed. The community would have been desperately trying to survive, resist, find freedom and justice. I could imagine members of the community looking at this basket-maker and saying, “Why aren’t you protesting? Why aren’t you tweeting? Why are you just sitting there making baskets?” And yet that basket was made well enough that the child who was placed in it survived and became one of the most influential agents of social change.

We each have the potential to effect real positive social change. If the basketmaker hadn’t made it with absolute focus and commitment, human history would have been very different.

So I say, make your basket, or whatever it may be.-actor Giles Terera, speaking to Index on Censorship

That would be me

31 July 2025
UK policy

I am delighted, so I am, that so many of you are discovering what some of us have been warning for six years. And I’m equally delighted that so many of you are discovering what some of us have been working on – or rather, against – for six years.

(Did you detect my dripping Glaswegian sarcasm there? If not, try again.)

I do have a few things to say about what the OSA will mean for things going forward, as opposed to engaging in constant retrospection, but I’m in thorough dissertation writing mode right now. So I’ll write ’em when I write ’em.

In the meantime, here’s a tale from the journey. Yes, that “expert” would be me.

I’m laughing at it now, in fact, I was laughing at it on the day. But not everyone would.

Bona lavs

2 June 2025
Reading lists, books, and imagination

As someone whose highest spiritual relationships are with books, and for whom libraries are cathedrals, today brought blessings.

In the oh so wonderful Strathclyde campus library, I spotted this board, which accompanied a generous Pride Month book display. It’s a tribute to Polari.

Polari was supposed to be ancient history, but it’s 2025. Hence the board.

Because these are the days when secret languages are needed again.

I hate that they are. But everything old is new again.

When I posted this to the socials, someone responded with a comment asking “Why do you think secret languages are needed again?” The best way for me to answer that question was to delete it.

Now think about that.

For more on Polari, there is an entire book, good fun, summarised here; you can do that or not, but fellow policy professionals really must read that same author’s book on Section 28, which I’ve previously recommended for its uncanny/terrifying parallels to our current raft of online safety legislation “for the children”. Both best purchased in paper at Queer Lit, Great Ancoats Street, Mcr. Someday, when we’re old, we’ll walk in there and buy the book about the new Polari which was born in 2025, because it had to be. Also, here’s a blog post on Polari as the modern data protection concept of data minimisation.

A tale of two TCNs

24 April 2025
Privacy

Internet Exchange

I wrote a briefing for technologists about Ofcom’s new technical notice regime under the Online Safety Act. You’ll find it at Internet Exchange, which happens to be my favourite weekly newsletter. I contrast the new regime with the Investigatory Powers Act’s separate and unrelated technical capability notice regime (of Apple fame), whilst viewing both through an ECHR lens.

Yes, this is the sort of thing I think about in the shower. Doesn’t everybody?

The best blog I’ve seen in ages

22 April 2025
Reading lists, books, and imagination

Otherworld Times

My fellow Glaswegian policy troublemaker Nik Sunil Williams, who plies his trade for Index on Censorship, has started a wonderful hobby blog. His central conceit is simple: if films invent worlds, then what are the investigative journalists in those worlds writing? 

Nik is using fan fiction as a starting point for – you guessed it – policy wonking! He is taking the battles he fights in his day job, such as freedom of expression, FOI requests, press regulation, censorship, and state stonewalling, and applying them creatively to scenarios from the movies. Jurassic Park from the perspective of the corporate cover-up of the deaths of the local workers? Yes please.

In fact, this has inspired me to set myself a summer challenge to bang out a 10k word piece of fiction, which I hope Nik will accept as a guest post, about a film whose relevance to my summer dissertation is almost painful. Yes, that film! The creative challenge will give me a place to house the outcomes that I will be setting the stage for, in my dissertation, which means that I will end up with one very tight dissertation and one very loose creative endeavour.

So that’s me, publicly committed to the challenge. I’m doin’ this. Strap in.