The callous murder of ten journalists and two policemen yesterday in the centre of Paris is a landmark moment. The French now have their own 9/11 or 7/7. It’s certainly a defining moment in the history of freedom of expression too: on a par with the Rushdie fatwa.
It’s less than 24 hours since the atrocity and the murders are still at large, yet there is already so much to write about. With ‘moments’ such as this we experience cycles of news, comment, counter-comment and meta comment (i.e. comment on the comment). We seem to be experiencing all of these at once. Continue reading
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When we debate surveillance (whether its CCTV or snooping on our e-mails) the debate is usually framed as a trade off between civil liberties and security. Its the right to privacy versus the right to be protected from crime. Often, civil libertarians seek to win the argument by highlighting how the State can be tyrannical, oppressive, corrupt… or unworthy of trust. Our governments are compared literary dystopias like Airstrip One in Nineteen Eighty-Four or to real-life dictatorships like North Korea. These arguments are persuasive to some.
But as I have discussed previously, this approach does not persuade everyone. And by deploying these arguments, civil liberties campaigners actually leave themselves exposed. What if you do not believe that (say) the UK is as bad as North Korea? What if you think that, on balance, Teresa May, Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe and Robert Hannigan are actually on our side and not out to seize tyrannical control of the people? All this chat about nefarious government agents acting like the Stasi will simply not persuade.
When we talk about surveillance, we need to talk about The Observer Effect. In physics, this is the concept that says that by measuring something, you change it. And we’re talking about surveillance, The Observer Effect means that simply by watching someone, you change their behaviour. Continue reading
It seems the House of Lords Communications Select Committee will be conducting an inquiry into the state of press regulation in the UK. Naturally, I’ve sent the clerks the link to my Leveson (As It Should Be) project, an HTML version of the Leveson Inquiry report. Hopefully that will streamline their research and inform the debate.
Continue reading
I wonder what Lord Bell thinks of Sony’s decision to cancel screening of ‘The Interview’?
Earlier this year, the Tory peer said that author Hilary Mantel should be investigated by the police after she wrote a short story called (and about) ‘The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher – August 6th 1983’.
It was a silly thing to say but free speech groups like English PEN (for whom I work) expressed concern at his words. Artists should be free to imagine and to fantasise, and equating a fictional murder of a head of state with actual incitement is not only fallacious, but gives dictators around the world yet another reason to shut down any kind of expression that portrays them in an impregnable light.
Which brings us on to The Interview, a comedy film in which Seth Rogan and James Franco star as two journalists who set out to assassinate Kim Jong Un. The government of North Korea called the film “an act of war” and threatened “bitter reprisals”. This week, Sony pictures announced that it would be withdrawing the release of The Interview after pro-regime activists calling themselves Guardians of the Peace hacked Sony’s computer systems, leaked embarrassing e-mails, and threatened attacks on cinemas showing the film.
Now, Lord Bell’s suggestion that Mantel receive a visit from the police is not equivalent to North Korean activists threatening violence. But Lord Bell’s idea – that fictionalised assassination of an already dead Maggie Thatcher is incitement, is surely equivalent to the idea that ‘The Interview’ is incitement. Of course, I think both ideas are false… but when a member of the House of Lords peddles the first idea, it rather gives credence to the second. Continue reading
The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence has release a shocking report into the CIA use of torture during America’s post-9/11 panic. The New York Times has a handy 7 point summary, pointing out that the torture was more brutal and extensive than previously supposed, that it was ineffective, and that CIA officials lied to Congress and made exaggerated claims to journalists about the effectiveness of the programme.
Its truly sickening and should not have happened. The USA is supposed to be better. It has set a terrible example to brutal human rights abusing regimes like Iran. Ayatollah Khameni has been pointing out America’s hypocrisy.
It looks like the United Kingdom might have been complicit in the torture programme too.
For those of us who want to read the full report, a 525-page PDF version is available on the webspace of Senator Diane Feinstein.
Plenty of journalists have been writing about the report. Andrew Sullivan has ‘live-blogged’ his reading of it. When they do cite a paragraph, they can’t link directly to it. It strikes me that far more people would be able to read an engae with the report if it were in HTML format. This is a ‘live’ example of the principle behind my Leveson Report (As It Should Be) project.
The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report should be converted to HTML as soon as possible, preferably hosted by a civil liberties NGO or a newspaper. It took me a while to convert the Leveson Report into HTML but a crowdsourced effort could convert this torture report in a matter of days, if not hours.