Sun, 22 Apr 2007
As mentioned
previously,
following the initiative of comedian Mark Thomas to demonstrate the
dangerous absurdity of the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005
(SOCPA), in particular of its
Section
132, many had requested prior authorisation from the Police
to hold lone demonstrations this past Saturday. Section 132 outlaws
protests without police permission in a designated area within a 1 km
straight line from the central part of Parliament Square.
According to the Home Office, ‘during the period 1 August 2005
to December 2006 1,379 demonstrations have taken place [in the SOCPA
zone] with an authorisation’. The aim was to have 2,000 mass lone
demonstrations. The demo-ometer on Mark Thomas'
website
shows that
2,294 applications to demonstrate on Saturday 2007-04-21 were handed in.
My own demonstrations was to ‘call for the police to consider other
options than to arrest innocents (and keep their DNA) or to shoot
them’. This is one of the issues I raised in my
appeal
to the outcome of the IPCC-supervised enquiry (I called the IPCC
earlier in the week and apparently my appeal was to be reviewed the the
IPCC legal team during the week). I demonstrated on the very same
issue, a
month
ago.
Wed, 18 Apr 2007
The UK 2005 version of the
manifesto
for CCTV filmakers is described as:
MANIFESTO FOR CCTV FILMMAKERS declares a set of rules, establishes
effective procedures, and identifies further issues for filmmakers
using pre-existing CCTV (surveillance) systems as a medium in the UK.
The manifesto is constructed with reference to the Data Protection Act
1988 and related privacy legislation that gives the subjects of data
records (including CCTV footage) access to copies of the data. The
filmmaker's standard equipment is thus redundant; indeed, its use is
prohibited. The manifesto can easily be adapted for different
jurisdictions.
Manu Luksch and Mukul Patel created the movie
Faceless
under
the rules of the '
Manifesto
for CCTV Filmmakers'.
(Discovered via the
billblog.
Bill will chair a
session
titled ‘Control Technology: Knowing Me, Knowing You – Ah
ha! –’ at the
Enter_
conference in Cambridge on 2007-04-27 to which Manu Luksch
will participate.)
See also:
2007-04-17 FIRST PUBLISHED
2007-04-18 EDITED TO ADD reference to SpyBlog
Tue, 10 Apr 2007
At the end of March, I wrote, for The Register,
Fighting
torture with copyright - Moral musos work to rule about the
idea first expressed by Clive Stafford Smith for musicians to use
copyright law to possibly achieve more for the human rights of many
than human right laws have so far. The story has been picked up
by others with a couple interesting twists.
Roger Parloff in the
Legal
Pad at CNN Money investigates whether torture is
fair use in the
context of copyright law. He takes at heart whether songwriters and
music publishers can increase their income thanks to the US army as
‘[m]usic-as-torture seems to offer rare growth potential in an industry
otherwise in distress’. Issues being explored include whether use of
music in
torture constitutes a
public
performance. For this entry, Parloff consulted William
Patry, Senior Copyright Counsel at Google and the author of a treatise
on
copyright law (and of the
The
Patry Copyright Blog), professor Jane Ginsburg of
Columbia Law School, and Fred Koenigsberg of White & Case and
ASCAP's general counsel.
Guillaume Champeau on French site
Ratiatum
asks what if the US army was to buy the music labels? It would solve
the copyright infringement issue (and the financial difficulties of
some labels). If
music is a weapon for war, then maybe it should
belong to the army.
So far I haven't heard of any concerned musician starting a legal
action against the US Government, but I did discover that the Society
for Ethnomusicology issued a
Position
Statement on Torture in which it ‘calls for full disclosure
of U.S. government-sanctioned and funded programs that design the means
of delivering music as torture; condemns the use of music as an
instrument of torture; and demands that the United States government
and its agencies cease using music as an instrument of physical and
psychological torture.’
In the same article, I also wrote about Mark Thomas' mass lone
demonstrations (MLD) to undermine
Section
132 of the Serious Organised
Crime and Police Act 2005 (SOCPA) that outlaws protests without police
permission in a designated area within a 1 km straight line from the
central part of Parliament Square. The day it was published happened to
be the third Wednesday of March and that evening I was in
Parliament
Square. ‘We understand from the
Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police that during the period 1 August
2005 to December 2006 1,379 demonstrations have taken place [in the
SOCPA zone] with an
authorisation’ according to the Home Office. On 2007-04-05, Mark Thomas
and a group of
regulars
at the MLD brought
1,184
requests for demonstrations to Charing Cross police station;
the demos will
take place on
Saturday
2007-04-21. The aim is for people to carry out 20 demos each
in the SOCPA zone in one day and to get as many people as possible to
do so. To participate, you have until 2007-04-15 10.30am to get your
forms in. The regular MLD scheduled for the
third
Wednesday of the month, is on 2007-04-18 this month.
As if Section 132 was not enough of a threat to anyone who wants to be
heard by his or her Member of Parliament and Lords, on
2007-05-012007-06-01
the
Palace
of Westminster and Portcullis House Site will be added among
the
new
sites designated under Section 128 (
offence
of trespassing on designated site) of the same SOCPA. Come
MayJune,
attending an event in a
Committee
Room
or meeting your
MP
in Portcullis House can land in you in jail for up to 51
weeks.
2007-04-28 EDITED TO ADD: The Morning Star picks up on the story and
Michal Boncza writes
The
new torture, published in the 2007-04-28 edition.
2007-04-10 EDITED TO CORRECT: different documents have different start
dates for the additions to S.128. It seems that June is the correct
commencement date.
2007-04-08 FIRST PUBLISHED
Sat, 07 Apr 2007
At the House of Lords debate on
Police:
DNA Database on the 2007-03-08, Baroness Scotland of Asthal
(Minister of State, Home Office) stated that “[t]here were nearly 3.8
million persons on the DNA database as at the end of January 2007”,
confirmed that “each sample is kept on the database indefinitely” and
explained “we should be clear that negotiations on the Prum treaty have
not been completed” (the Prum treaty is a European treaty, which gives
European member states direct access to national DNA records).
In other news last month, we
learn
that “five civil servants who help run the national DNA database have
been suspended after being accused of industrial espionage” but don't
worry as “[t]he Home Office insisted there was no question information
held on the database had been 'compromised'”
The Home Office published a consultation on
Modernising
Police Powers: Review of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act (PACE)
1984 (closing date for responses: 2007-05-31) in which it
suggests the creation of short term holding facilities (STHF) in
shopping centres: “The function of the STHF would be to confirm the
identity of the suspect and process the person by reporting for
summons/charging by post, a penalty notice or other disposal. Persons
detained would be subject to detention up to a maximum period of 4
hours to enable fingerprinting, photographing and DNA
sampling. The STHF would not be used in cases where the
arresting officer considers that an investigation was required and
authority to transfer a person from a STHF to a designated police
station would require the authority of an Inspector.” The document goes
as far as suggesting to remove all exisiting limitations on taking DNA
samples: “Is there scope to populate identification databases and
remove unnecessary operational constraints on the extent to which
police are able to use fingerprints etc. to prevent, detect and
investigate crime?”
(Background information on DNA:
Should
the Police keep your DNA forever?)
Sir Swinton Thomas, the
Interception of Communications Commissioner, authored the
Report
of the Interception of Communications Commissioner for 2005-2006
in February 2007:
[...]
vi. The Communications Service Providers (CSPs) are very important in
this
process and their staff do essential work. They are very co-operative
and dedicated. I talk to them regularly and they are totally opposed to
the concept of intercept being admissible in Court. The present regime
provides a high degree of protection to the CSPs and particularly to
those members of their staff who work in this sensitive field, and
their strong co-operation referred to could easily be undermined. Here
again, I think that it is essential for people holding views on this
subject to talk to the CSPs, and to listen to what they say, and
understand the basis of their strong opposition to any change in the
present law.
[...]
From the minutes of evidence taken before the joint committee on human
rights on
2007-03-12
(uncorrected transcript of oral evidence to be published as HC 394-i)
Q21 Nia Griffith: You
mention in your annual report that communication service providers are
strongly opposed to intercept being admissible in court. Can you tell
us why that is and should their agreement be a precondition to relaxing
the ban?
Sir Swinton Thomas: I visited all the major telephone companies and
internet companies at least once a year and more often with some of
them, as was necessary. There are two aspects. The companies themselves
who are extremely co-operative in providing the material which is
needed for the intercept are very concerned about their capacity and
the way in which they go about dealing with these issues being made
public. There is probably a commercial aspect to that which is
difficult for me to deal with in public. I dare say that if you have a
chairman of a company dealing in communications, he would say, "Quite frankly, we would prefer
that our customers did not know that we were passing all your calls
across to a government agency" [my emphasis], which is a
fairly natural response. A more important one is that they think - and
I think they are right - that if there was a change in the law all the
ways in which they go about providing material would be open to
examination and cross-examination, which is something they do not want
to happen. Members of the general public probably know very little
about it. [...]
Is the main issue regarding use of intercepts in court really that it's
not good for business if we, the public, know that our calls are passed
to NTAC, GCHQ or a similar agency?
As mentioned previously,
following the initiative of comedian Mark Thomas to demonstrate the
dangerous absurdity of the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005
(SOCPA), in particular of its Section
132, many had requested prior authorisation from the Police
to hold lone demonstrations this past Saturday. Section 132 outlaws
protests without police permission in a designated area within a 1 km
straight line from the central part of Parliament Square.