Category Archives: Censorship

Official harassment of amateur photographers

Posted on by

Here’s a partial list of relevant links about how officialdom is treating amateur snappers.

From The Register.

  • Yes, you have rights • The Register Yes, you have rights — unless the police say you haven’t.
  • You’re all al-Qaeda suspects now.
  • So, what can you photograph?
  • New terror guidelines on photography.
  • Photocops: Home Office Concedes Concern.

    • Hansard

    Austin Mitchell’s Early Day Motion.

    Text reads:

    “That this house is concerned to encourage the spread and enjoyment of photography as the most genuine and accessible people’s art; deplores the apparent increase in the number of reported incidents in which police, Police Community Support Officers (PCSOs) or wardens attempt to stop street photography, and order the deletion of photographs or the confiscation of cards, cameras or film on various specious grounds such as claims that some public buildings are strategic or sensitive, that children and adults can only be photographed with their written permission, that photographs of police and PCSOs are illegal, or that photographs may be used by terrorists; points out that photography in public places and streets is not only enjoyable but perfectly legal; regrets all such efforts to stop, discourage or inhibit amateur photographers taking pictures in public places, many of which are in any case festooned with closed circuit television cameras; and urges the Home Office and the Association of Chief Police Officers to agree on a photography code for the information of officers on the ground, setting out the public’s right to photograph public places thus allowing photographers to enjoy their hobby without officious interference or unjustified suspicion.”

    Guide to UK Photographers’ Rights (pdf download of a Guide by lawyer Linda Macpherson.)

    New Labour’s dream: the national surveillance state

    Posted on by

    This morning’s Observer column.

    There’s a delicious moment in Alastair Beaton’s satirical film, The Trial of Tony Blair, in which the former prime minister is finally arrested for war crimes on a warrant from the international criminal court. One scene shows the standard police procedure as Blair is inducted by the desk sergeant in a London station. Towards the end of the rigmarole, the policeman moves to take a saliva swab from him.

    Blair is aghast, asks him what he is doing and – after the policeman has explained that he’s taking a DNA sample – asks who brought in such a stupid law. “You did, sir,” is the response…

    Rules of engagement

    Posted on by

    The best way of ensuring reasonable behaviour in online commenting spaces is to make people responsible for their words. Anonymity prevents that. Of course sometimes anonymity has benefits — especially in repressive environments; but overall it seems to enable the pollution of unmoderated discussions. Mark Anderon has been pondering the question in relation to his blog, and has come up with some rules.

    After a year or more of running this blog without rules, we seemed to have recently crossed the Rubicon: in moving from our internal member conversations to a more open, perhaps wild frontier on the Net, the dialogue has gone from that of mutual respect and intellectual exchange to anonymous insult and emotional attack.

    So, as of today I am putting the same rules in place on this blog as we use in our newsletter. They are very simple:

    1. All comments must be signed, hopefully with real names. Since we are not naive, there is also:

    2. Comments should be about issues, and not personal and / or emotional attacks. Fine to say you don’t agree or like something, but say why.

    3. We will allow anonymous (to the public) comments in only one situation: when the poster would suffer career damage from the expression of ideas. In these cases, we will require the poster’s real name be shared with us, and we will post the comments anonymously.

    In other words: vigorous debate is encouraged, hate mail is not allowed.

    The Evening Pravda

    Posted on by

    Aw, isn’t this nice.

    The billionaire and former KGB agent Alexander Lebedev is to buy London’s Evening Standard tomorrow, in a dramatic move that would see him become the first Russian oligarch to own a major British newspaper, MediaGuardian.co.uk can reveal.

    Lebedev is poised to buy a controlling stake in the ailing title, following a year of secret negotiations with Lord Rothermere, its owner and the chairman of the Daily Mail General Trust.

    Under the terms of the deal Lebedev will purchase 76% of the newspaper, with the Associated Newspapers group retaining 24%. His son Evgeny, who lives in London, is due to sign the deal with Daily Mail General Trust tomorrow. The agreement will make Lebedev the paper's controversial new proprietor.

    It’s a logical move, really. After all, the KGB already controls all Russia’s media outlets. It needed to diversify overseas.

    So will Mr Lebedev be interfering in British politics? Perish the thought. “My influence would be next to zero,” he declared. He promised an “absolutely” hands-off approach, and said it would be up to the Standard’s editor-in-chief and journalists to agree the paper’s editorial line. Absolutely. But now at least his friend Vlad will get a fair deal from the Russophobic British press.

    Wonder how long it will be until he has a peeerage.

    The sting in the long tail

    Posted on by

    This morning’s Observer column.

    'Scorpions', says Wikipedia, 'are eight-legged venomous arachnids. They have a long body with an extended tail with a sting.' Staff of the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF), the self-appointed monitor of 'child sexual abuse content hosted worldwide' and of 'criminally obscene and incitement to racial hatred content hosted in the UK', may well find themselves in rueful agreement about the sting. Except that what they've discovered is that Wikipedia also has one.

    Pause for a review of recent events…

    Google’s Gatekeepers

    Posted on by

    Sobering piece by Jay Jeffrey Rosen exploring the critical role that Google’s corporate gatekeepers play in deciding what can and cannot be shown to audiences.

    “Right now, we’re trusting Google because it’s good, but of course, we run the risk that the day will come when Google goes bad,” [Timothy] Wu told me. In his view, that day might come when Google allowed its automated Web crawlers, or search bots, to be used for law-enforcement and national-security purposes. “Under pressure to fight terrorism or to pacify repressive governments, Google could track everything we’ve searched for, everything we’re writing on gmail, everything we’re writing on Google docs, to figure out who we are and what we do,” he said. “It would make the Internet a much scarier place for free expression.” The question of free speech online isn’t just about what a company like Google lets us read or see; it’s also about what it does with what we write, search and view.

    Source: NYTimes.com.

    Ed Felten adds this:

    Rosen worries that too much power to decide what can be seen is being concentrated in the hands of one company. He acknowledges that Google has behaved reasonably so far, but he worries about what might happen in the future.

    I understand his point, but it’s hard to see an alternative that would be better in practice. If Google, as the owner of YouTube, is not going to have this power, then the power will have to be given to somebody else. Any nominations? I don’t have any.

    What we’re left with, then, is Google making the decisions. But this doesn’t mean all of us are out in the cold, without influence. As consumers of Google’s services, we have a certain amount of leverage. And this is not just hypothetical — Google’s “don’t be evil” reputation contributes greatly to the value of its brand. The moment people think Google is misbehaving is the moment they’ll consider taking their business elsewhere.

    More on the Chinese backdoor in Skype

    Posted on by

    From Technology Review…

    Skype has previously acknowledged that its Chinese partner, TOM Online, blocks chat messages containing certain politically sensitive keywords. The new findings, however, reveal a level of surveillance that goes far beyond this.

    Nart Villeneuve, a research fellow at the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto’s Munk Centre for International Studies, uncovered the surveillance scheme by examining the behavior of the TOM-Skype client application. He used an application called Wireshark, which analyzes traffic sent over a computer network, to see what happens when different words are sent via chat using the software. Villeneuve discovered that an encrypted message was automatically sent by the client over the Internet when some words were entered. Following this encrypted packet across the Net, Villeneuve uncovered a directory of files on an open Web server. Not only was the directory publicly accessible, but the data within it could be unlocked using a password found in the same folder. Within these files were more than a million chat messages dating from August and September 2008.

    Villeneuve used machine translation to convert the files he found from Chinese into English, and he analyzed the contents to determine likely trigger words. The list he came up with includes obscenities and politically sensitive words and phrases such as “Falun Gong,” “democracy,” and “Tibet.” But Villeneuve also found evidence that completely innocuous messages–one, for example, contained nothing more than a smiley face–were logged. This suggests that certain users were targeted for monitoring, he says.

    When ignorance is bliss

    Posted on by

    This morning’s Observer column…

    Sometimes, ignorance is bliss. We saw two examples of this last week. The first came when a new search engine – Cuil (www.cuil.com) – was unveiled. The launch was an old-style PR operation. Some influential bloggers and mainstream reporters had been briefed in advance, and whispers were circulating in cyberspace that this would be Something Big. Cuil would be the ‘Google Killer’ everyone had been waiting for.

    Evidence for this hypothesis was freely cited. The venture was the brainchild of ‘former Google employees’: nudge, nudge. At least one of them had been at Stanford, the university that nurtured the founders of both Yahoo and Google: wink, wink. It had indexed no fewer than 121 billion web pages, compared with Google’s measly 40 billion: Wow! Cuil had already received $33m in venture funding! Cue trumpets.

    So many people were taken in by this that when cuil.com finally opened for business the site was swamped…