NUJ General Secretary Jeremy Dear wrote to the Home Secretary following complaints from photographers that they were under surveillance by members of the FIT team which was impeding their ability to work. In the letter Jeremy Dear says, “The routine and deliberate targeting of photographers and other journalists by the FIT undermines media freedom and can serve to intimidate photographers trying to carry out their lawful work. The rights of photographers to work free from threat, harassment and intimidation must be upheld.”
The letter also calls on the Home Secretary to:
* provide information on whether the FIT team are issued with instructions to photograph and catalogue journalists
* to provide guidelines issued to FIT Team members about their duties/role
* to explain for what purpose is information gained by the FIT team held on journalists by the police
* to give detail on who has access to information being held on police databases about journalists
Jeremy Dear added: “Whilst the police deny they are targeting legitimate photographers we have plenty of evidence to the contrary. This abuse must stop”.
http://www.nuj.org.uk/innerPagenuj.html?docid=816
“NUJ takes protest to Home Office”
http://www.bjp-online.com/public/showPage.html?page=796182
“Street Journalists Under Surveillance”
http://jasonnparkinson.blogspot.com/2008/05/street-journalists-under-surveillance.html
“police surveillance of journalists – jeremy dear sends jacqui smith a letter.”
http://www.marcvallee.co.uk/blog_280508.html
NUJ
Homepage: http://www.nuj.org.uk
Blue Planet in Green Shackles
May 30, 2008
Get it, if you can that is… Written by Czech Republic’s President, Vaclav Klaus, who actually has some scientific qualification! (Having spent most of his life at the Czech Academy of Sciences). He also worked at Prognostics at the Academy of Science. His professional expertise is in looking at scientific theories, understanding their implication/s, and then evaluating their long-term economic impact.
This means that President Klaus, more than any other world leader today, is eminently qualified to assess the IPCC report, both in what it says and in what the ‘remedial measures’ currently being implemented will have.
Guess what? His book is almost impossible to get hold of! Weird eh!? Give it a shot… send it to your local journos…
http://www.amazon.com/Planet-Green-Shackles-Vaclav-Klaus/dp/B001A3W3BK
* ISBN: 1889865095
* ISBN-13: 9781889865096
* Format: Paperback, 100pp
* Pub. Date: May 2008
ACPO Computer Evidence Guidelines…
May 30, 2008
The New Order: When reading is a crime
May 30, 2008
Download a book – get arrested. Be afraid, be very afraid. Andrew has crafted yet another fine piece which is sufficient without me rehashing everything – and anyway I should be working… so if you are interested look here ;
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/05/30/notts_al_qaeda_manual_case/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/05/30/student_arrested_downloading_book/comments/#c_233869
This type of legislation was introduced to try to deter people from downloading anarchist cookbook type material (still dumb but never mind, that’s another issue) but it is, as with most other seemingly innocuous legislation merely the step off to a steep and slippery slope.
Environmental Audit Committee
May 30, 2008
This bunch of idiotic zealots are pushing for a PCA, or “Personal Carbon Allowance” for the little people. What this means, in a nutshell, is that you will be rationed on how much energy you as an individual can consume.
It has been rebuffed for now, but Tim Yeo expounds the virtues of such an oppressive system, lauding the potential for “engagement”, which will “increase awareness” of energy consumption – what the Tyndall Centre calls “carbon consciousness” – which in turn would “spearhead behavioural change”. According to the MPs, “awareness is crucial if behaviours are to change.”
Be interesting to see how this affects the wealthy, if at all, and how many loopholes and workarounds there will be for them.
Save the planet, fuck the people seems to be the message these days. I’m sure many of these loons considered Hitler to be on the right path with his Eugenics programme. Nazi Germany did wonders for the human races global carbon footprint, I’m sure.
Malthus et al would have been proud.
http://www.parliament.uk/parliamentary_committees/environmental_audit_committee/eac_200508.cfm
Who IS Michael Meiring?
May 29, 2008
Well?
Anyone?
Gordongrad…
May 28, 2008
First they came…
May 28, 2008
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came…
Written by John Ozimek
First they came for the child pornographers… It may not have quite the same resonance as Pastor Niemuller’s oft-quoted aphorism. But the reality behind this particular slippery slope is just as sinister.
The government today announced proposals to make possession of drawings and computer-generated images of child abuse illegal. “Good on them”, is likely to be the most common response. However, it will be an ill thought-out response if it is.
Over the last few years, a great deal of new legislation has been put in place “for the sake of the children”. Sometimes it is completely new: for instance, the new child protection structures put forward by the Bichard Inquiry (pdf). At other times, it is just about “closing loopholes”.
Here the government is at it again. Some years ago the Protection of Children Act 1978 (pdf) made it illegal to possess pictures of children being abused. There are two arguments for this law.
The good and obvious one is that any and every picture of child abuse is a picture of a child being abused. It is evidence of a crime being committed. The more speculative reason is that it MAY influence potential abusers to act out their fantasies.
The reason this is considered speculative is that some experts consider the availability of porn to have an opposite effect, allowing abusers to obtain stimulation without acting on their impulses. The jury remains out on that debate.
The Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 added “pseudo-photographs” of child abuse to those things one may not look at. These are computer-generated images based on actual photos of children.
Similar arguments applied as for the 1978 Act – but the degree of harm involved was clearly less. This issue was addressed in the United States in 2002, when the US Supreme Court rejected a ban on pseudo-photos as over-broad and likely to have a chilling effect on speech.
Section 45 of the Sexual Offences Act 2003 extended the definition of “child”, for porn purposes, to anyone aged 16 or 17. For the first time, it became illegal to possess images of perfectly legal sexual activity.
Finally, the Criminal Justice Act 2008 makes it illegal to look at images of “extreme porn”. The issue of whether adults consent or the action is real is immaterial.
At the consultation stage for this law, some Police Forces cited manga as material they would like outlawed. Manga is an essentially Japanese art form, which can cover some quite adult themes. “Tentacle porn” and abduction by aliens are common. Crucially some of the images include individuals whose age is indeterminate or seriously young. As Home Secretary, John Reid expressed his outrage that manga and similar material was not illegal.
Speaking in support of this new proposal, Maria Eagle, Parliamentary under Secretary of State for Justice, said:
“These new proposals will help close a loophole that we believe paedophiles are using to create images of child sexual abuse.
“This is not about criminalising art or pornographic cartoons more generally, but about targeting obscene, and often very realistic, images of child sexual abuse which have no place in our society.”
Government thinking in this area appears seriously disconnected. Some manga is pornographic and includes childish representations. However, taking the under-18 age limit as the benchmark, the scope of this proposal could be very far-reaching indeed.
Moreover, if the test of banning something is the actual harm caused, then this material fails the test entirely.
On the other hand, if the government truly believes that looking at certain types of material does lead to acting out, then they would not have fudged the issue. The extreme porn law allows images to remain in the public domain if passed by the BBFC – but makes it a potential offence to distribute those same images separately from the film in which they appear.
There are two further concerns. At the consultation for the Extreme Porn law, one Police Force – Kent – argued also for the criminalisation of written material. It is clear that the government has an appetite for this form of censorship. So it is not unthinkable that adult censorship will progress to cartoon material as well. Or even literature.
Professor Julian Petley is an expert on media policy and regulation. He believes this government “won’t rest content until it has terrified people into viewing only material which bears the official seal of moral approval – an ambition which it shares with Iran, Saudi Arabia and China.”
He adds: “For a government which boasts of its commitment to ‘deregulation’ and new technology, this measure, taken in conjunction with the anti-porn proposals in the Criminal Justice Bill, presents an utterly ludicrous spectacle and one which reduces the UK to an international laughing stock.”
The only light at the end of this particular tunnel is that it’s all been done before.
The Children And Young Persons (Harmful Publications) Act 1955 made it an offence to publish cartoons depicting crime, violence or “incidents of a repulsive or horrible nature”. Only one prosecution was ever brought – for a Conan the Barbarian cartoon. And that failed. ®
On Copyright…
May 28, 2008
By Steve Roper
1) Copyright is an artificial concept that has been abused to allow people to make money for no work. To clarify this: Current copyright law protects a work for life of the author + 70 years. Now, if an author creates a work when they are 20, they live until 90, that means this work is in copyright for 140 years after its creation. If the work sells well, that means the author never has to do another day’s work in his life. Nor do his kids, his grandkids, or his great-grandkids – none of them will ever have to do any honest work, simply because their grandaddy wrote a book or a song 50 years ago. That’s parasitic greed and laziness at its finest.
Now if the concept of copyright law was equally applied to all fields of human labour, then if I build you a computer, you have to pay me for it. So does EVERYONE else who ever uses that computer, for the rest of my life, my kids’ lives, their kid’s lives, and their kids’ lives. 70 years hence, if you begin using that computer, you must pay my children for the computer I made 70 years ago. If as the author of that computer, I choose to sell my work on a pay-per-use model, you and everyone else who uses that computer must pay me, my kids and their kids EVERY TIME YOU USE IT. But that wouldn’t be acceptable to you copyright-lovers, is it? No, I didn’t think so. So guess what? The word HYPOCRITE applies here.
2) There is no such thing as original work. Every creator draws upon the work of others to create their own, without paying those others for it. Miami Mike, above, who talks about selling his technical manuals: Assuming these are computer manuals, have you paid Dennis Ritchie for his work on C, which is used in every computer OS? Have you paid Alan Turing for his work on algorithms, Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla for their work on electricity, or Michael Faraday for his discovery of electricity? No. You just used their work in your own, without paying for it. Likewise musicians, who hear other people’s music, use a melody or chord progression from someone else’s work in their own, even subconsciously – with neither acknowlegement or payment.
Now, with these points in mind, I believe a fair recompense for any creator is exactly the same as it is for everyone else; you get paid only for the time and effort you spend in creating it. If it takes you 3 months to write a book, you are entitled to 3 months pay in the writers’/literary wage bracket. No more, no less. After that, the work goes into the public domain. If you want more money, do more bloody work like the rest of us!
Call me a communist freetard if you will, but the capitalist system has clearly shown it results in greed-driven police states exactly as the old communist autocracies did. So what’s the difference? Well, I’d much rather live in a society where everyone gets an honest day’s pay for an honest day’s work, instead of all this artificial bullshit enabling FREETARD “creators” to profit for decades for a few months’ work!
And yes, I AM a creator, yes I have published artistic works in my life, yes they have been “pirated”, yes I still profited from them, and yes I still create artistic works. No, I don’t make a living out of it. But I create art for the love of art as it should be. That’s REAL art, the expression of an emotion or an idea, the creation of beauty. Not profit. That’s not art. That’s just opportunistic exploitation of emotion controlled by an artificial intellectual concept
ACTA…from the minds of vipers and thieves…
May 28, 2008
Welcome to serfdom 21st century style. Here comes a new dark age fuelled and funded by grotesque fatcat businessmen who would willingly starve the meek, trample the downtrodden, fund the whoremongers/warmongers and call them just.
They destroy creativity, stifle innovation, strongarm laws through national courts with lobbyists that detract from the quality of life of the normal person and call it justice. Burn them all.
Conform Obey Consume Die.
Stopping the copying of songs, movies and software action list:
DRM technology – didn’t work
Making special CDs – didn’t work
Suing everyone ever – didn’t work
Arresting people – didn’t work
Making laws – didn’t work
Making extra-territorial laws – didn’t work
Making enormous global laws – hmmm….mmmkay, let’s see…
Seriously, anti-BT tracker? Fuck off…. what fuckwits use P2P these days anyway?!
Oh and LAN parties?! Hello?! People seem to forget that the internet is not THAT unique….it’s just the largest single entity network around…fuck it…USB, Bluetooth, long range wireless, cd burners and snailmail even… So let’s not be down eh, it won’t make the slightest bit of difference to anyone who isn’t completely stupid.
