Tag Archives: freedom-of-speech

UK Culture Secretary Fails Internet

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In a terrible indictment on the UK government, Andy Burnham (Culture Secretary) demonstrates some fundamental gaps in his knowledge of both the mystical internet and what freedom of speech means.

From the BBC:

Film-style age ratings could be applied to websites to protect children from harmful and offensive material, Culture Secretary Andy Burnham has said.
Mr Burnham told the Daily Telegraph the government was looking at a number of possible new internet safeguards.
He said some content, such as clips of beheadings, was unacceptable and new standards of decency were needed.

Briefly defending him, Mr Burnham has only suggested it as an option. But that is as far as my charity will go.

First things first. Film style age ratings do not “protect” anyone from anything. Browser based implementations (such as blocking your browser from viewing certain ratings) would prevent people from seeing “offensive” material but that is a different matter. Film style age ratings are far from 100% successful in stopping people seeing offensive films (have you seen Mama Mia?) and they are only moderately sucessful in stopping people seeing age-inappropriate content. Why would they work on the internet?

Despite being culture secretary, Mr Burnham appears unaware that the internet is global in nature. This website is written by British people, hosted on a German server and has 60% of its traffic from the USA. Who gets to say what is, or isnt, appropriate here? Harmful content is very culture-specific and by its nature, the internet skips over these boundaries. Do we censor information that the Iranians find offensive? Or the North Koreans? Or southern-US Baptists? Who gets to choose what is harmful? What gives that person the right to say to me what is harmful for my children?

There are some common standards that could be applied, but I suspect there are less of these than Mr Burnham thinks there are. Some cultures think it is acceptable for people to watch criminals being executed, others don’t. Supporters of capital punishment talk about the death of the criminal serving as a deterrent to others. This only works if others know of the death, which is why most executions of this nature are public. Is it harmful (in this context) for people to see the punishment carried out? It is “harmful” in the eyes of a culture that does not condone the death penalty, but why should that culture control the internet?

One thing that screamed out at me was the idea that a video clip of a beheading was unacceptable, rather than the beheading itself… But, in my charitable mood that might have just been a turn of phrase.

The madness continues:

[Mr Burnham] also plans to negotiate with the US on drawing up international rules for English language websites.

Wow. So the UK and US will make a pact that dictates the rules for Australian websites? That sounds fair. What about Iranian websites translated into English? This is mind-numbing madness. Hopefully the US government is technologically literate enough to tell Mr Burnham to boil his head for a few hours. Equally, most video clips showing beheadings are on foreign language websites. What control does the US have over them (short of invading, although admittedly the US rarely stops short of that…).

“Leaving your child for two hours completely unregulated on the internet is not something you can do,” he told the Telegraph.

Another bit of madness. The internet is not a parent. It is not even a child minder. Parents need to be able to educate and assist their children, not rely on badly-thought out “ratings schemes.” Parents need to sit with their child as they surf the internet. Its like anything children do – if you abandon your child to do it, you have no control over what they do. You may think you have some say, but you dont. Take the ratings scheme: most children who are able to surf un-assisted will be able to change web-browers to one that ignores the ratings. Or better still, will be able to enter a URL without a .uk or .com ending where the UK/US RULE is ignored. Technologically backward parents will not be able to implement a control to prevent the child switching to [Lynx|Amaya|Chrome|Opera|FireFox|Mozilla|Safari|Etc]. Does Mr Burnham think every browser coder will be willing to implement a strong age-ratings control without new ones spawning up? Is he that foolish?

The final bit of oddness is: [Emphasis mine]

He went on to say it was time to review the accessibility of certain content on the internet and insisted he was not trying to curb free speech.
His plans are likely to anger those who advocate the freedom of the worldwide web.
“You can still view content on the internet which I would say is unacceptable. You can view a beheading,” he said.
“This is not a campaign against free speech, far from it, it is simply there is a wider public interest at stake when it involves harm to other people.”

For a culture secretary, Mr Burnham is woefully ignorant of what “freedom of speech” means. Personally I am opposed to beheading people. I find the death penalty for any crime offensive. Not everyone shares my opinion and, as a result, there are websites where you can read about executions. There are even websites that support the death penalty. I would say they were unacceptable. Does that mean they should be blocked from your browser? No, it means I shouldn’t view them. If I find something offensive, then I shouldn’t look at it. With my children, I sit with them to educate them about what they see. Should I accept your view of what is acceptable for them?

Despite what Mr Burnham says, freedom of speech is not about being free to say things that he (or anyone else) finds acceptable. I find political diatribes offensive and I find religious websites offensive. Will Mr Burnham have them removed? Or would that be a violation of the concept of Freedom of Speech? (I suspect the answer is yes)

The world is full of things which people will find offensive. I find children dying of hunger in Africa unacceptable. Does that mean we ban video clips of it (there go those Oxfam adverts) or does it mean we try to prevent it happening in the first place?

Mr Burnham is right to be offended by the video clips of beheadings. So why dont we prevent the beheadings?

I am sorry, Mr Burnham. As culture secretary you fail.

The BBC Must Not Waive Court Costs!

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Sorry, this is a petition that I had meant to publicise a while ago (hat tip: Nullifidian).

Basically a bible bashing crackpot took out a frivolous court case against the BBC for the “Jerry Springer – The Opera” show and lost. In losing he has been saddled with court costs which are really not cheap. Now, the slimebag has decided that it would be the “decent thing” for the BBC to waive the costs and, in effect, all the British licence payers should fund his pointless posturing. This is the message:

I wanted to draw your attention to this important petition that I recently signed:

“BBC and Avalon must NOT Waive Springer Costs”
http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/bbc_springer_green?e

I really think this is an important cause, and I’d like to encourage you to add your signature, too. It’s free and takes less than a minute of your time.

So, if you are a British licence fee payer, please take a trip and sign the petition.

Shari’a family values

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It’s just over 6 months since Abdul Kareem got sentenced to 4 years in jail for blogging. There’s a website in support of him. You can also read a wikipedia entry although there is a caveat at the head of the page saying

This article has been nominated to be checked for its neutrality.

.. He was arrested by Egyptian authorities for posts on his blog that were considered to be anti-religious and insulting to Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. On February 22nd, 2007 in his native city Alexandria. Kareem Amer was sentenced to three years for insulting Islam and inciting sedition and one year for insulting the Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.

Not neutral? Maybe the very mention of the sentence contravenes “neutrality”. Presumably because no sane person would think this was OK?

(If only he had just been the officer in charge of a military unit charged with war crimes, he’d be free today.)

It’s one thing – and a very pleasurable thing it can be, too – to insult Baptist evangelists from the comfort of the Atheist Blogroll. However, if you live in the Middle East, challenging Islam in your blog posts is definitely hazardous to health .

The campaign website is maintained by Kareem’s friends who disagree with what he said about Islam but still uphold his right to express his views. Unlike his family apparently.

From the Kareem FAQs:

What did his family say about all this?
Days before the jail sentence, his family publicly disowned him, and his father called for applying the Sharia on his son by giving three days to repent, followed by having him killed if he did not announce his repentance.

Give them a bit of leeway for trying to protect themselves, as I imagine they are under a fair bit of pressure to distance themselves from their wayward freethinking offspring. But still. A father who thinks his son deserves a death sentence for publishing a few challenging words is definitely so far off the scale of harsh that you would need to invent a new scale. And he’d still fall of the edge.

Disappointingly, the only UK politician mentioned as having spoken out about Kareem is from the UK Independence Party*. Euro-MP Derek Clark, raised the case in the European Parliament.

If you live in the sort of country where you might get arrested or your dad might call for your execution, Reporters sans frontieres have a page about how to blog anonymously without putting yourself in the firing line of your state’s repression.
(You can’t say this blog doesn’t give out any useful information.)

* If you’re not from the UK, there is/was (?) a joke political party called the Monster Raving Loony Party (It’s alternative comedy- it’s not funny, to steal an old Ben Elton quote.) UK Independence Party are generally considered less serious and even less funny than the MRLP. UKIP tends to substitute comical zenophobia for the MRLP’s standard slapstick approach. Luckily, they are completely unelectable and spend their time in internal squabbles. It is enough of a shock that they must have a Euro-MP, let alone that he seems to have actually spoken sense in the European Union.

Marching to repression

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Anti-terror laws used to stifle legitimate protest? Who’d have thought it? Well, everyone, basically, but let’s not be pedantic.

Today’s Guardian front page leads with the story of the Heathrow climate change protest. The headlines are pretty stark:

Police to use terror laws on Heathrow climate protesters
Government has encouraged use of stop and search and detention without charge

This article refers to the incident of Cristina Fraser – a first-year anthropology student and climate change protestor – stopped when cycling near Heathrow airport and charged under section 58 of the Terrorism Act.

“I was arrested and held in a police cell for 30 hours. I was terrified. No one knew where I was. They knew I was not a terrorist,” she said…..
…The police later recharged her with conspiring to cause a public nuisance.

Isn’t a “public nuisance” something like peeing in the street or ranting loudly in a public place? The sort of offence that gets a conditional discharge or a small fine? Still, at least she was charged with a “crime” of sorts, unlike at least half the people detained under the present laws.

30 hours detention? It might not feel like it but she got off lightly. It could have been 28 days. Under the new proposals, the police wouldn’t even need to hurry themselves that much to establish that she wasn’t cycling along, planning to singlehandedly seize a 747 and fly it into Big Ben. They could have taken a leisurely three months to reach that conclusion.

Recent reports of how the existing anti-terror laws are panning out in practice can be found in the Guardian

Powers to stop and search members of the public under terrorism laws will be used increasingly this summer, police said yesterday…… This comes despite a pledge in February that the use of section 44 searches would be scaled back, after complaints from Muslims that they were feeling victimised.

And also despite an awareness in some of the people who have to enforce the law that this sort of thing can be dangerous

Deborah Walsh, deputy head of the CPS’s counter-terrorism division, also acknowledged that excessive use of stop and search powers could be counterproductive. “Inappropriate use of such powers can alienate the community.”

Yesterday’s war-on-terror news was that MOD issues gag on armed forces. As anyone could have foreseen – without resort to any magical prediction skills – the incident of the UK sailors and marines captured by Iraq a few months ago has become the pretext for stopping members of the armed forces from expressing their views in blogs, emails, letters to the press, interviews and apparently even mobile phone pictures sent home.

So the people who are required to risk their own lives in pursuit of the UK’s foreign policies are unable to make their own judgements about what they say? Incapable of expressing their own views about their lives and their roles. Good job this didn’t apply in the first World War or there’d be a whole poetry genre missing.

What about when the gag conflicts with forces’ obligations under the Geneva Convention? (Regarded as outdated and “quaint” by White House Chief Counsel Gonzales) Or even under UK Whistleblower laws? Would we have any idea about Abu Gharaib if someone hadn’t spoken out? D’oh, silly me. So there is a point to all this.