I cannot express how brilliant it is that anyone who wants can "attend" the Convention On Modern Liberty online, and probably actually get more information than someone going along to the convention would. At the moment I'm watching the live streaming from one of the sessions at the London event; keeping up with the #coml hashtags on Twitter, which include Cory Doctorow tweeting from a different session and Jo Swinson and No2ID Scotland tweeting from the Scottish convention as well as people discussing what they're seeing and hearing; reading liveblogs on the main site and other places including here and at the Guardian.

And I'm doing all this while sitting on the sofa eating pizza. Yay! I approve of low-effort politicking.

I'm shocked (more so that I should be, probably) that the Times printed a piece from Philip Pullman on liberty, and then pulled it within hours. You can read it here. And I'm not impressed that I heard about this partly through Bloggers4UKIP. Strange bedfellows indeed.

Extract:

In a thousand ways they have led you to think that whoever does not want to be watched must have something shameful to hide

We want you to feel that solitude is frightening and unnatural

We want you to feel that being watched is the natural state of things.

His keynote speech at the COML is up next on the live feed, I think. Should be good, judging by that article!