Saturday, December 13, 2008 

Weekend links.

Before we get started, the Sun's clearly decided not to just leave it to the commenters on the their articles to justify the murder of paedophiles:

THE former wife of a child-sex beast who was hacked to death and his genitals mutilated declared last night: “He’s had what was coming to him.”

The mum poured out her hatred for Andrew Cunningham after a mob left the 52-year-old in a pool of blood.

Branding him “pure, cold evil”, she insisted: “No one should feel sorry for him.

“I know mob justice is wrong but he caused a lot of innocent kids a lot of unimaginable pain.”

I know it's wrong but no one should feel sorry for him. Even when this happens:

His daughter aged 22 — one of five sisters taken into care as youngsters — told how her father physically abused her and said she had wished him dead.

But even she was chilled by his savage murder.

...

She was left terrified yesterday after vigilantes attacked HER home.


The paper corrects their claim yesterday that Cunningham had raped a 13-year-old, without, naturally, admitting they had made a mistake. They also carry Sara Payne's denunciation, predictably, whilst telling everyone not to have any sympathy for him and that even his ex-wife thinks he deserved to die. Notably, the comments are also still open, with the same congratulatory mob in evidence, while strangely on "Dying dad is beaten to death", they're closed.

Elsewhere, the story of the weekend is undoubtedly the Jean Charles de Menezes inquest verdict. The Heresiarch and Lenin provide the blogging responses, while Harriet Wistrich in the Groan and Deborah Orr in the Indie tackle it in the broads. Most virulent response though was undoubtedly from the Indie's leader column, calling it [R]eckless, incompetent and lethal policing. For me, a letter in the Guardian says it all:

Princess Diana, killed in a car crash - unlawful killing. Six passengers and four crew killed when a man drives his Land Rover off the M62 on to the Selby rail line - unlawful killing. Man throws his son from the roof of a Greek hotel - unlawful killing. A UK soldier is killed in Iraq when a US pilot opens fire on him - unlawful killing. BBC journalist Kate Peyton shot - unlawful killing. Two policemen shoot an innocent man seven times in the head on a train in front of witness who say no warning was given - not unlawful killing. Could someone please explain?

Dan Tanzey
Thornton Cleveleys, Lancashire

To which you could add baby dies after social services fails to protect him. Within three weeks a report has apportioned blame, the social workers have been suspended and the woman in charge has been sacked. In the de Menezes case, no one accepts any blame or even that they did anything wrong, the officers are back on duty, and one of those in charge on the day has been promoted. If only Sharon Shoesmith had personally pumped 7 bullets into Baby P's head maybe she'd still be in a job.

Elsewhere, not to blow my own horn or anything, but there's my latest post on the Sun Lies involving the Sun's payments to a man who provided them with the video of Amy Winehouse supposedly smoking crack, who has just been jailed for two years for providing the drugs. Brendan O'Neill asks which part of no doesn't the EU understand, Paul Linford comments on Peter Mandelson and the Euro, Dave Semple examines the Barclay brothers throwing their toys out of the pram, anticant castigates Cardinal Cormac Murphy O'Connor, Tom Griffin reports on the Met's latest tactics involving demonstrations, Matthew Parris rather optimistically suggests the Tories' hands-off message might work given time, while Lynne Featherstone, who lost my respect over her involvement in the Baby P case has rather amusingly been criticised for calling out the fire brigade to deal with her boiler.

Finally, Brenda Almond takes the award for worst tabloid comment piece of the weekend for her why-oh-whying in the Mail over who will defend the family over the "liberal establishment's onslaught".

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12/13/2008 10:22:00 PM | | | links to this post

Friday, December 12, 2008 

Scum-watch: Another victim of crime they don't pretend to feel the pain of.

Here's a conundrum for you: you set yourselves up as a crusading, justice seeking newspaper, demanding that heads roll when social services fail to protect the lives of beautiful blue-eyed baby boys, sharing the pain and agony of families that lose loved ones and providing space for their personal manifestos of what must change to prevent it happening again, no matter how unrealistic, and you call society "broken", mainly as a result of politically correct loons, entrenched socialism and welfare scroungers. How then do you react when an exclusive comes your way that suggests that a marauding mob might have murdered a man in cold blood?

Simple. You splash it on the front page and use the most base, unsympathetic and sensationalist language you can possibly muster:

Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that he was a convicted sex offender, which, of course, makes all the difference. For comparison, the Times headlined their article "Paedophile stabbed to death in 'vigilante attack'", the Mail's story, which has been updated throughout the day, is now headlined "Convicted paedophile 'who struck again' stabbed to death, stripped and mutilated in suspected vigilante attack", while Sky goes with, simply "Paedophile Found Stabbed To Death". At the bottom of Sky's article there's an appeal:

:: Anyone with information is asked to contact the Metropolitan Police Incident Room on 020 8721 4138 or Crimestoppers on 0800 555 111.


The Sun's is vaguely similar:

DID you know him? Call our newsdesk on 020 7782 4104, text 63000 or email exclusive@the-sun.co.uk.


Yes, don't call the police, call us first and possibly earn some money at the same time. Did he feel you up as well? Call now!

If all this is inspiring some deja vu, then the exact same thing which happened when the Sun published the details of the murder of Gordon Boon, another convicted sex offender murdered in mysterious circumstances is naturally now taking place underneath the story. Yes, did the evil dirty paedo deserve to die or should he only have had his bollocks chopped off?

no sympathy from me and lets hope the poice dont waste too much time looking for the people that did the world a favour


The best news I have read all morning. I say "1 down with plenty more to go "

Rot in hell Sicko.


This is what should happen to all sex offenders,paedophiles and child abusers. Anyone who ruins innocent childrens lives should suffer & rot in hell too.


I do not think that anyone deserves to die at the hands of a mob but the flip side of the argument is how many lives had he ruined with his actions and how many more could he have ruined ? Chemical castration is the answer , no one dies and the kids are safer...


Four months for raping a little girl? Yes he did deserve to die.

I will never agree with vigilante groups but when are the police and the courts going to do something about serial offenders?


As a father of 3...i think this is exactly the fate this man deserved you cannot molest children and expect karma to be kind to you..its a shame the government/courts dont take sex crimes against children more seriously then the people who killed the fiend would not now be looking at a murder charge. bring back capital punishment for convicted paedophiles simple.


I beleive this is called 'Justice'. Although I do not condone the overall violence of the incident this man surely deserved these actions. If the thugs and knife carriers on our streets are going to aim their anger at anyone it should be Paedophile's, Rapists and the like.


in reference to General26's comment 'did this man deserve to die?', er yes. did the girl under 13 deserve to be horrifically raped? er, no.

eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth.


Mob Rule is the way forward. Police cannot rid the world of these people. I hope these vigilantes don't get caught, they did the Police and the world a favour.

And so it continues for 268 comments, the vast majority either giving the thumbs up or condoning the murder in the same contradictory way as some of those above. Only problem is, that as so often seems to be the case, the Sun article appears to be inaccurate. Not to give the Daily Mail any great credit, but they correct a couple of mistakes in the Scum's exclusive:

He had served four months in prison for a sex attack on a local schoolgirl aged 15, in 2000, and was on the Sex Offenders' Register until March this year.

The Guardian further explains that his offence seems to have been "unlawful sexual intercourse", also sometimes known as "statutory rape", where consent is usually given but the victim is under the age of consent. His apparent predilection for girls around the age of consent is backed up by a quote from a friend:

Linda Whelan, 43, a friend of Mr Cunningham, said: 'He was a lovely guy. He did used to like younger girls. Andrew was in his 50s and liked girls who were about 19 but that doesn't make him a paedophile. I can only imagine if he slept with someone under 16 that he didn't know she was underage.

Then there's the bit around a mob "burning his house down":

Mr Cunningham moved to the caravan because vigilantes set fire to a bag of rubbish outside his former house in Wandsworth in 2003. It came after he was arrested over allegations he was openly grooming children. He was released without charge.

No evidence then whatsoever that he had re-offended except hearsay, doubtless based understandably on his past.

As for his employer, who also found his body:

He said: 'He had a stab wound in his neck and there was blood everywhere. The bed was soaked with it and his head was lying in it. He was a lovely man, he couldn't do enough for me. The customers loved him, people used to say, "I don't want anyone else, I want Andy".'

A lovely man, but obviously a nonce who was asking for it.

In fairness to the Sun, both the Mail and Times also have their comment sections open, featuring much the same logic and faux-celebratory circle-jerking. The Mail at least though seems to have bothered to investigate slightly further, and not condemned the man in the same disgusting, judgemental terms as the Sun did:

But his warped lust for children had made him enemies for YEARS.

Despite there being little to no substantial evidence that was the case at all.

For a newspaper that so often claims to be on the side of the victims and uses their pain for its own ends, it shows remarkably little concern for their feelings when someone with a blemished record is murdered in such horrific circumstances. Don't they deserve something approaching respect, rather than having little more than open high-fiving facing them on the front page of the country's biggest selling daily newspaper? Or are they, simply by his crimes, branded as also being beyond sympathy and the normal reaction of civilised society?

Even the paper's usual first port of call when it comes to paedophilia, Sara Payne, is unequivocal:

Sara Payne, the campaigner whose daughter Sarah was murdered by a convicted paedophile in 2000, said the attacker or attackers were "no better" than the man they had killed and that his murder would set back her campaign for the names and addresses of sex offenders to be made available to the public.

The exact same campaign which the Sun supports and which would almost certainly lead to paedophiles being forced further underground, with more vigilante attacks taking place. Perhaps some good might come from the Scum's dog-whistling after all.

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12/12/2008 11:42:00 PM | | | links to this post

Thursday, December 11, 2008 

Fudged.

Courtesy Beau Bo D'or.

If the response to the welfare reform white paper could be best described as tepid, the government as usual has no one other than itself to blame. For a party so apparently diametrically opposed to leaks, the real tabloid pleasing meat was released last week; single mums having to begin their back to work preparations as soon as their nippers turn 1, along with a massive increase in the work-shy having their appeals for money subject to voice detectors.

Strangely then, neither of those things are played up in the actual document itself. In fact, the entire thing is, like the response, broadly tepid. It's difficult to know entirely why this is: is it because the government, as it has repeatedly done in the past, has flew the same-old kites in the tabloid press, disgusted their own supporters deliberately, then watered down the proposals when it comes to the actual crunch; or is it because it's accepted that with the recession about to bite, this isn't exactly the most opportune time to suddenly dump many of those previously on incapacity benefit on the bonfire?

As so often, the answer is probably a bit of both. Coupled with that is that the worst excesses of the David Freud review, cobbled together in three weeks by an investment banker who admitted that prior to being asked to ask to write it he knew absolutely nothing about welfare, but who knew within those three weeks that a good proportion of those on incapacity benefit instantly shouldn't be on it, have been shaved off. The green paper, prior to this white paper, titled without a hint of irony "No One Written Off", had all the proposals of this one without the added pilot schemes and readjustments. While the emphasis in the green paper, despite the title, was on punitive reforms where a dirty great stick was being yielded while a carrot similar in size to Richard Littlejohn's cock was the supposed reward, the message here is on tough love.

Along with "fairness", another of those all things to all people terms which governments without any remaining ideology cling to in the hope that it will pass for a defining motif, the proposals, having initially been sold on the prospectus that they were all about at long last telling the scroungers that they would have to sing for their supper, are now instead advertised as being designed to "help" those in need, giving them the push that they've been without, helping them to help themselves. This is "personalised conditionality", with the set groups being designed around those mentioned in that quite wonderfully vivid and explanatory diagram posted last week. The vast majority of those previously on incapacity benefit, either now or shortly to be herded onto the new "Employment and Support Allowance", will be placed in the middle "progression to work" where they will be expected to co-produce a back-to-work plan. It doesn't seem to matter that the government themselves don't expect much to come of this, hence why those on it are not going to be expected to actively look for work, probably because they recognise that most of those on incapacity benefit are either on it because they are genuinely too sick to work or because they were put on it in to massage the unemployment statistics and are now unlikely to return to the workplace however many plans you put in front of them; pointless box-ticking, as Chris suggests, needs to be done to appease the tabloid press and convince them something is going to be done.

Make no mistake however, even with all the concessions made, there are still fundamental problems with much of the white paper. First, and most apparent, is that despite all these reforms about to be made and with the workload at JobCentrePlus increasing as the jobless figures inexorably rise, only a further £1.3 billion has been allocated initially to help. That's before a substantial further amount is creamed off by the private and voluntary sector to help with those still out of work a year after being on JSA, who will be paid for every individual they place in a job. This is meant to save the money that would otherwise be spent in paying them JSA, but it's by no means clear whether there will be any overall saving once the contractors have had their pay and the person in a job has potentially claimed tax credits. Furthermore, what's incredibly likely to happen is that the private sector will find it easy with those who've been tardy in trying to find a job who are now having to get one unless they want to spend four weeks doing unpaid work, while finding it just as difficult with those who have tried but have comprehensively failed to find work. At the same time, those in that group will be having to do the unpaid work because the anti-scrounger lobby demand it, even though it's no fault of their own. Breeding bitterness and resentment against those who are supposed to be helping you and against work itself is not the greatest of ideas, but that seems to have passed those drawing the reforms up by completely.

Most pertinently however is that nowhere in this document is it explained how when we're approaching 2 million unemployed with only 500,000 vacancies that all of those currently on any of the current benefit schemes, whether JSA, income support or incapacity benefit can find work. Nowhere is it also set out exactly what work those who, after a year without finding a job, will be expected to do. Will they be sent out wearing fluorescent jackets with "Community Payback" on as well, or what? Exactly how many will simply take any job, however demeaning or poorly paid, just to avoid such treatment? As Compass argue, the white paper assumes that work is an end in itself, a route out of poverty, when it quite often isn't. The government even further infantalises and keeps the low paid hooked on handouts from the state with the tax credits scheme, rather than raising the tax thresholds and lifting them out of paying income tax altogether, not to mention introducing a living wage or a citizen's basic income.

Overall, as again often occurs, the result is a fudge. The hope is to achieve right-wing support while not riling the backbenchers and the soft left vote too much. In this, the government appears to have achieved its aim: only the socialist left seems really concerned, while the Tories have said they'll support it. The only people left without a say seem to be those on benefits themselves.

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Wednesday, December 10, 2008 

Direct action and the democratic deficit.

Few described the inclination to riot as superbly as H. L. Mencken. He wrote that "[E]very normal man must be tempted at times to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and start slitting throats." Somewhat thankfully, even when riots break out, few often spit on their hands; slitting throats though...

The past few days have shown both the benefits and pitfalls of direct political action. Whatever your views on climate change, I defy anyone not to admire the chutzpah of those that succeeded in breaching Stansted airport security and shutting down the runway for three hours by barricading themselves together, then phoning the media. It's often difficult to know where to draw the line with such disruptive protests, knowing that you're always going to piss some people off regardless. The question is whether you piss off those that would otherwise be receptive to your cause, and while making the odd individual potentially miss a funeral or leaving foreign teenagers stranded without any idea how they're going to get home is not necessarily going to help matters, the occasional action where the only real downside is some having their holidays delayed by a few hours is probably worth it. Again, whatever you think about Fathers 4 Justice and their immature headline-grabbing stunts, there's no doubting that they drastically increased the perception of fathers being failed by a system which was biased in favour of the mother. Blocking a road by lying down in it and chaining yourself to others just annoys; blocking a runway, even while middle class, potentially inspires others.

Likewise in Greece, it's hard not to admire the results which at least the initial rioting, since turned into apparent looting and trashing which is far less appealing, brought from an recalcitrant government. The shooting of a 15-year-old boy by a police officer after rocks were thrown at a patrol quickly resulted after an uprising in the officer in question being charged with murder, his companion as accompany to it and the interior minister resigning, but not before saying that "exemplary punishment" would be sought against those responsible. It's all rather different to our own slow-turning cogs of justice: three years after an innocent man had 7 bullets pumped into his head and 3 into his shoulder after he was sadly mistaken for a suicide bomber, the coroner at the inquest decides that it would inappropriate for the jury to be able to consider a verdict of "unlawful killing", despite the previous conviction of the Metropolitan police for breaching health and safety law, the undisputed confusion and chaos which was going in the control room, the complete failure to accurately identify the Jean Charles de Menezes as Hussain Osman, partially due to the police not even having a complete photograph of him, and finally the apparent lies told by the firearms team themselves that they shouted armed police when they entered the tube carriage. That their version of events is at odds with that of the members of the public that witnessed the shooting, is, according to the corner, not necessarily lying in the strictest sense, as the jury should bear "in mind people tell lies for a variety of reasons, not necessarily to put their own part."

While the Jean Charles de Menezes case is an extreme example, when failed suicide bombers were after all on the loose and police officers potentially found themselves in a situation where they may well have thought that they and the others around them were going to die if they didn't act, perhaps the family of de Menezes shouldn't have expected any better if they had considered the case of Harry Stanley, shot dead, allegedly in the back (although the IPCC report decided it was likely he was facing towards the officers when shot), after someone reported that there was an "Irishman with a gun wrapped in a bag" on the loose. The "gun" was a chair leg. Like with the de Menezes case, at the initial inquest the coroner ruled that the jury could not return a verdict of unlawful killing, only for his widow to gain a judicial review which ordered a second inquest, which did return a verdict of unlawful killing. Rather than the people themselves rising up in outrage over an innocent man being shot dead, the firearms officers did instead in favour of their comrades. Subsequently, the officers' suspension was lifted, the verdict of unlawful killing was overturned, and a subsequent IPCC investigation decided the officers should face no further disciplinary action.

The riots in Greece are as much, it seems, about general discontent with the government and life in general as they are about the death of Alexandros Grigoropoulos, capitalised on additionally by anarchist elements which have long been strong in the country. His death though was the straw that broke the camel's back, just as the 2005 and 2007 riots in France, both after the deaths of individuals attempting to escape from the police were the catalyst for violence which reflected anger over dislocation from society as much as that over police brutality. It's impossible to tell whether the reaction to the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes might have been different if he hadn't been a Brazilian, initially reported, erroneously, to have overstayed his visa, and instead a British citizen, but it seems doubtful. Despite the riots in 2001, there have been few signs that there's a potentially similar conflagration building in this country: whether this is down to docility; a less corrupt police force; higher living standards helped by the unprecedented boom between 1994 and last summer, even though few of the benefits of that have been seen by the poorest; despite the scaremongering, less racism and better integration; or the fact that it seems to really take a lot for us to get into the spirit of Mencken, having not even taken any large role in the protests of 68 which rocked continental Europe, is unclear and absurdly difficult to know for certain.

It is however hard not to be struck by the increasing disconnect between parliament and the more boisterous, radical elements of society. As one of the Plane Stupid protesters said, she was of the Iraq generation, which had learned that a million or two taking to the streets could not stop a war we had absolutely no need whatsoever to take part in. Instead we had a government that with opposition support has still offered no formal inquiry into how we came to be taken to war, other than whitewashes which have either avoided looking at it in full or have obfuscated in their conclusions. Up until this year, and the revolt over 42 days, much the same could be said of the government's approach to civil liberties, and the casual way in which they have been diluted, surveillance has become the norm and we are no longer surprised by local councils that think that spying on newsagents employing paperboys is a good use of their time and resources. Again, perhaps some of this is down to individuals deciding that these things aren't go to apply or affect them; who after all cares if terrorists determined to kill us are locked away indefinitely, or subject to control orders, or held without charge for 90 days? Whatever you think of David Davis, he surely deserves some of the credit for changing perceptions at least over 42 days with his stand, whether the bill was doomed in the Lords or not.

The point is that we shouldn't have to rely on archaic institutions like the Lords to preserve our rights and freedoms. It could not be more ridiculous that such inanities and beyond fuckwitted measures as banning the display of cigarettes in stores, lest anyone be seduced by the shiny packets, messages of doom and now diseased organs which adorn them and decide that taking up smoking is a good idea are proposed and introduced so easily when issues involving censorship, such as the IWF, not to mention the keeping of the fingerprints and DNA profiles of the innocent go undiscussed in the supposed mother of all parliaments. Even when it talks about itself, as it did on Monday over the Damian Green affair, our current government thinks that it's appropriate and necessary to introduce three-line-whips to ensure that it or the police aren't embarrassed by the findings into a raid which was carried out without a warrant. For a government that often preaches the mantra of if you've got nothing to hide you've got nothing to fear, it was a performance of the most shabby variety. They probably thought they could get away it because no one out in the real world apparent from political geeks cares about a Tory MP being arrested, and they're probably right. That Labour backbenchers should agree with that though is just as shocking.

Also on Monday we had the sight of Jack Straw going cap in hand to the Daily Mail, agreeing with the view that the act that he saw the introduction of was right to been seen as a "terrorists' and villains' charter", the same convention which the previous Friday the Mail had been praising after the European Court found that the retention of DNA profiles from the innocent was illegal. We know from Paul Dacre's own speech that the real reason the Mail hates the Human Rights Act is because it potentially threatens the tabloids' business model of exposing sex scandals, not because of how it protects everyone else, but half the reason why we are in the mess we are is because the gutter press has been allowed to get away with the idea that rights are something which only criminals, scroungers and foreigners have and that they're the only ones who benefit. Instead of challenging this, the justice secretary either agrees of partially does. The Conservatives meanwhile, the supposed upholders of our civil rights, disgracefully denigrate the HRA and the ECHR as foreign when we ourselves were the major drafters, instead proposing to introduce a "British" bill of rights, as though the ECHR or HRA are not. Kenneth Clarke denounced this as "xenophobic nonsense", but the same people who spoke up for civil liberties keep this ignorant charade alive. Only Nick Clegg and the Liberal Democrats seem willing to defend the HRA.

The riots in Greece and France occurred not because of police brutality, but because of the desperation of those who saw what had happened and imagined that it could have been them instead. Abandoned by those in power, denied a voice, and only able to articulate themselves through carnage which targeted those in the same boat, our own parliament and politicians are surely in danger of repeating the same mistakes, of not listening and living in their own bubble. Whether it will result in violence in this country is uncertain, but the apathy and cynicism which we already have in spades is only likely to increase until our own sources of injustice and discontent are drained.

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12/10/2008 11:59:00 PM | | | links to this post

 

Edifying.

Considering that due to an unfortunate slip of the tongue we'll now be hearing about how Gordon Brown single-handedly saved capitalism for prosperity for the next decade, it's instructive that the Labour benches, obviously in need of a good laugh, found a single mother with small children visiting Nick "Shagger" Clegg so hilarious (14 minutes 40 in). Even when you consider that describing the prime minister's rapid fall from grace as going from "Stalin to Mr Bean" is about the highest form of wit that's emanated from the House of Commons in years, it's still rather surprising that what would embarrass 10-year-olds as being rather unfunny still succeeds in making them roll in the aisles in parliament. All that need have been added was the Speaker to tell those falling about to get their minds out of the sewer and everyone would have been right back in the playground.

(via Justin)

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Tuesday, December 09, 2008 

Wikipaedia part 2.

Almost as quickly as it was imposed, the blocking of the Wikipedia entry on the Scorpions' Virgin Killer album has been lifted. Don't imagine however that this is because the Internet Watch Foundation has suddenly decided that the image after all isn't indecent, or that regarding the context of it, it's ridiculous to now declare 32 years after its original release that it is. Their statement again says it all:

Following representations from Wikipedia, IWF invoked its Appeals Procedure and has given careful consideration to the issues involved in this case. The procedure is now complete and has confirmed that the image in question is potentially in breach of the Protection of Children Act 1978. However, the IWF Board has today (9 December 2008) considered these findings and the contextual issues involved in this specific case and, in light of the length of time the image has existed and its wide availability, the decision has been taken to remove this webpage from our list.
Any further reported instances of this image which are hosted abroad, will not be added to the list. Any further reported instances of this image which are hosted in the UK will be assessed in line with IWF procedures.
IWF’s overriding objective is to minimise the availability of indecent images of children on the internet, however, on this occasion our efforts have had the opposite effect. We regret the unintended consequences for Wikipedia and its users. Wikipedia have been informed of the outcome of this procedure and IWF Board’s subsequent decision.

In other words, the only mistake the IWF is owning up to is that they overreached themselves in blocking a site that was always likely to stand up to them. While admitting that they flagrantly failed to consider the contextual and extenuating circumstances surrounding the image, they make quite clear that if the image was hosted on a server in the UK that they reserve the right to demand that it either be taken down, and/or blocked. It is, after all, in their view, in breach of the Protection of Children Act 1978. That the "child" didn't object at the time and still doesn't object today is irrelevant, as is the context of the image when it isn't hosted on a encyclopaedic or shopping website.

The entire case highlights the secretive and undemocratic nature of the way the IWF operates. If, rather than Wikipedia, they had simply blocked a page on a Scorpions fan site, no one would probably have been any the wiser, and even if it had been noticed, seems unlikely to have spread beyond the tech based sites. It's only because they overreached themselves and completely failed to think through the consequences of blocking a site of the size of Wikipedia that they have come so unstuck.

It also highlights the disparity between the increasing tenor of our laws and those of our peers abroad. Once the ban on "extreme pornography" comes in, our own smut purveyors which dabble in such material will be essentially out of a job, unable to know what is and isn't illegal without running up obscene legal costs. Similarly, the same reason why there isn't much of a porn industry in this country is because of the draconian and ridiculous laws on, if you'll excuse the expression, "hard" copy distribution of the finished product. The only place you can legally buy a hardcore DVD from is a council sanctioned sex shop, again usually for an obscene price. This doesn't stop mail-order or internet companies from existing, but essentially they are breaking the law by operating in such a way. There is however no such ban on you importing hardcore material from abroad, although customs can still be sniffy about the more extreme material - meaning that our overseas cousins have a monopoly on the market. Some will think there's nothing wrong with that, as after all, pornography is without doubt exploitative, but it still seems ludicrous in this day and age.

The entire episode has also shown the haphazard way in the which the IWF was founded, and its rather curious legal position. As noted by Richard Jones in the comments on the previous post, the IWF or rather its predecessor, SafetyNet, came about primarily as an invention of ISPs to avoid direct government censorship, which our ever prurient media and police were advocating once it became public knowledge the delights that the internet could offer, with the Met threatening to raid an ISP over the contents of 132 newsgroups which it considered the ISP to be personally publishing by carrying. As laudatory as this was, this also means that there is no specific legislation concerning the IWF's legal status. Agreements between the government and the ISPs themselves effectively govern its entire being and what is and isn't censored. Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, has said that his first intention was to send in the lawyers - until they informed him that because the IWF isn't a statutory body it isn't even clear that they can be sued. That is remarkable in itself.

Moreover, the IWF has just more or less admitted that there is very little it can do about large foreign opponents complaining and attempting to get around the bans which it might well impose, come the 26th of January. They'll have no problems banning "extreme pornography" from UK servers, but considering very little of it exists as it is in this country, Longhurst's win might well turn out to be a pyrrhic victory. If the IWF shows the same level of intellect in blocking the likes of "Necrobabes" or other such sites as it has Wikipedia, it might well find itself being shown up as ineffective as well as unaccountable. That the IWF's blocks can easily be circumvented using anonymiser websites or open proxy servers should be irrelevant.

Again, it's worth stating that this is not primarily about child pornography, or "child sexual abuse images", as the IWF term them. No one has any real problem with what are clearly abusive images of children being either censored or removed from the internet, as images or video above the "level 2" scale are, with images at the "level 1" scale being very carefully considered before they are similarly removed. It's with the IWF's extending mandate and their apparent inability to exercise what appears to good common sense. After all, shouldn't a court establish what is and isn't material which incites racial hatred before they block it, especially when the IWF has no solid legal basis? You can argue that this is what it is doing in the Darryn Walker case, but should any fictional textual material now be considered to be potentially obscene in the first place? The IWF's whole existence is based on a compromise, one that we ought to be careful before we challenge, considering the potential to make things a whole lot worse rather than better, but shouldn't there at least be legislation put forward which sets up the organisation as a separate independent legal body, like the BBFC, which can be challenged and held to something approaching account, and so the organisation's current set-up can be discussed in parliament? By bringing itself into disrepute over something so apparently inconsequential, a whole hornet's nest has been opened up.

Related:
Wardman Wire - Privatised censorship
Frank Fisher - A nasty sting in the censors' tail

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12/09/2008 11:59:00 PM | | | links to this post

Monday, December 08, 2008 

Wikipaedia.

Another erotic album cover pose?

It occasionally takes a decision made ultimately by an underling to expose the stupidity that often underlies some of the laws which govern us - and the moronic, for it can only be described as moronic, decision by someone simply doing their job at the Internet Watch Foundation that an album cover by an otherwise almost forgotten metal band from the 70s amounts to child pornography, although of the very lowest level, resulting in the blocking of the editing of Wikipedia for sections of the UK deserves to be one of those.

The Internet Watch Foundation's main work is blocking images of "child sexual abuse images" (according to them, terms such as child pornography "are not acceptable", as apparently the "use of such language acts to legitimise images which are not pornography, rather, they are permanent records of children being sexually abused", which suggests they don't just want to censor images but words also) which for the most part, with the exception more than ably illustrated today, is uncontroversial. Less well-known however is that they also block material which incites "racial hatred", although again how much of it they actually do block is impossible to know, but also material which potentially breaches the Obscene Publications Act. The OPA, notoriously, defines an obscene publication as something which is liable to both "deprave and corrupt", something wholly subjective and which juries, notably during the 1980s, could not decide upon when the "video nasties" were prosecuted. Some found some of the films brought before them to be obscene; others decided that the exact same films were in fact, not obscene. Most recently this remit resulted in the prosecution of Darryn Walker, author of a short story depicting the kidnap, rape and murder of the pop group Girls Aloud, apparently first reported to them and passed by them onto the police. His trial is upcoming.

That decision was one of the first to alert us to the vagaries of an apparently unaccountable organisation which still deigns fiction to be liable to bring out the inner Daily Mail reader in us all, but the blocking of the "Virgin Killer" cover is far more instructive of what might be yet to come. According to the IWF, the Virgin Killer cover amounts to level 1 indecent image of a child, as defined by the Sexual Offences Act 2003. Level 1 images depict "erotic posing with no sexual activity". Whilst all the successive levels involve actual sexual activity of one variety or another, level 1 is, like the OPA definition, utterly subjective. Is the girl in the image posing erotically? Quite possibly. Even if she is however, surely the extenuating circumstances surrounding the image should have been taken into consideration. Not only is the image over 30 years old, been available on the high street without causing any real high profile attention, but a tiny amount of background reading from the controversy that had arisen over it would have shown that the girl depicted was someone related to those behind the cover design, that she had posed willingly at the time and has no objections to it now still being used. That the image is not just available on Wikipedia, but also on Amazon (or at least was) and a dozen other places via a Google search, ought to have suggested that this should be a special case.

Instead what we have is an organisation which thinks that using a sledgehammer to crack a nut is both a good idea, and one which is only concerned by doing things entirely by the rules as set out before them. Image is, according to their thinking, obscene, therefore it must be blocked. As it isn't hosted in this country and therefore the ISP responsible cannot be ordered (surely asked politely? Ed.) to take it down, proxy servers and fake 404 pages are set-up to do the job. No thought is given to how this might affect what is after all a rather larger endeavour than a Scorpions album cover repository. The statement from the organisation doesn't even begin to delve into how the decision was came to be made in detail: instead, all they've done is added the URL to the list "provided to ISPs and other companies in the online sector to protect their customers from inadvertent exposure to a potentially illegal indecent image of a child". Protect is the key word; that's after all what they're doing. It doesn't matter that no one would ever be prosecuted over a single image, especially one in such wide circulation; the general public but most of all their customers needs to be saved from potential "inadvertent exposure".

Where after all does all of this end? As others have already pointed out, children have throughout art history been depicted naked, perhaps, it deserves to be pointed out, in more innocent, less hysterical times. Recently the London Underground briefly banned the image of a nude Venus lest anyone be sexually aroused by the advert for an exhibition. If someone for instance posted images of their children online in a photo album (not advisable by any yardstick), and one of these was reported by the same apparent busybody that reported this one to the IWF, and was decided by one of their employees to involve an "erotic pose", would that find itself being blocked too? If "Klara and Edda Belly Dancing" was reported to the IWF, would they demure from the police decision not to prosecute after it was seized from an exhibition and potentially suggest that it also involved erotic posing?

The real concern here though is not over idiotic individual decisions, but rather that from the end of January next year the IWF will also have the power to block "extreme pornography", the kind recently outlawed after parliament abjectly failed to prevent the campaign by Liz Longhurst reaching its ultimate conclusion. This will potentially lead to the blocking of any pornographic material, which is again subjective, which portrays the threatening of a person's life or which results or is likely to result in serious injury to a person's anus, breasts or genitalia, to say nothing of the ban it also places on apparent necrophilia or bestiality. The Heresiarch noted at the time of the Brand-Ross frenzy that the fragrant Georgina Baillie had appeared in material which could well find itself falling foul of the law and which the Daily Mail had republished. To suggest that the law in this case is nonsensical is perhaps to be too kind; the contradictions and lunacy of banning out and out pornographic material featuring necrophilia, for example, when "art" films such as Visitor Q, which features a man killing and then having sex with the corpse of his victim (although that's not by any means an adequate explanation of what goes on and it is a rather excellent film by the consistently outrageous Takashi Miike), Kissed and Love Me Deadly are considered fine to be seen by those over 18, despite the fact that what one man deems culture another deems beating off material have to literally (or ought to be) be seen to be believed. Who has any confidence whatsoever in the IWF making sensible decisions based on the current performance?

It would be nice to imagine that it ends there. But it doesn't. There are plans to ban drawn material which depicts "abuse" or sex between child and adult, which sounds fair enough, but which is likely to be used not just to ban "lolicon", as such anime-type material is known, but hentai and other anime where the age of those involved is not so obvious. Having therefore made those predisposed to sadomasochistic material potentially breach the law to otherwise further their perfectly legal personal habits, the government seems to wish to criminalise those that enjoy the likes of La Blue Girl (already admittedly banned or heavily cut when submitted to the BBFC) or other fantastical hentai as well. Along with the plans to prosecute those who have sex with prostitutes "controlled by others" with rape, with ignorance not being an excuse, you'd similarly be excused for imagining that the government was determined to diminish sexual freedom as a whole by stealth, all so that one-off campaigners and tabloid newspapers can sleep secure in their beds knowing that perverts aren't masturbating and potentially incubating deviant thoughts which they will subsequently carry out on others. Although whether someone will ever successfully create a tentacle monster remains to be seen.

If this sounds like a slippery slope argument, suggesting that child pornography isn't so bad really honest, then it isn't. It does however come down to whether you think that the likes of the Scorpion album cover is an image of abuse, as the IWF does. If you don't, then you have reason to be concerned not just that an organisation like the IWF which claims to be self-regulating has such a potentially chilling control over the internet in this country, but also that the government seems convinced that far less exploitative imagery must also be banned for all our sakes. Then we won't just that IWF to blame and attack, but ourselves also.

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12/08/2008 09:47:00 PM | | | links to this post

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