A TV presenter has been killed by a car bomb in Iraq. Kamiran Salaheddin was killed at around 9pm on Monday (2 April) night, after a bomb placed under his car exploded. Salaheddin presented Al-Iraq w-al Hadath (Iraq and Events), a news and current affairs programme on Salahaddin TV, where he had been employed since 2005. The journalist was also the head of the local journalists’ union in Tikrit. Salaheddin is the first journalist to be killed in Iraq this year.
The internet can be a scary place. In my early days of using the web, I passed my angry pubescent days innocently trolling chat rooms powered by America Online, mostly to harass fans of shopping mall punk Avril Lavigne.
I spent my free time accosting what I assumed were fellow misguided teenagers, even though my own music library was filled with the questionable sounds of Linkin Park, Kittie, and Papa Roach. Whilst undoubtedly irritating, my joy in prank calling restaurants and angering people online was mostly a benign past time. Had I been a teenager in Arizona today, my antics could have landed me with a criminal record before I even reached high school. Arizona recently passed H.B 2549 countering cyber-bullying and stalking, which would make trolling a misdemeanour in the state. According to the bill:
“It is unlawful for any person, with intent to terrify, intimidate, threaten, harass, annoy or offend, to use a ANY ELECTRONIC OR DIGITAL DEVICE and use any obscene, lewd or profane language or suggest any lewd or lascivious act, or threaten to inflict physical harm to the person or property of any person.”
Well there go my teenage years, Arizona. The broad language used in the legislation has raised a few eyebrows, particularly because offensive behaviour is not limited to one-on-one conversations, but also “irritating” communications via public forums, including “websites, blogs, listserves, and other internet communications”. The new legislation, which now must be signed by Governor Janice K Brewer before officially going into effect, leaves the regulation of what can be considered to be irritating or offensive in the hands of the state.
Trolling can take many different forms, and it becomes difficult to determine when irritating behaviour should merely be ignored, or if it poses a threat in real life. The 2010 suicide of Rutgers freshman Tyler Clementi after his roommate secretly filmed him and tweeted about his sexuality, sparked a heated debate about cyber bullying, and whether or not his roommate’s behaviour led to Clementi’s suicide. Elsewhere in the world, trolling is used as a way to harass activists and silence them. Other trolls hide behind the internet and create forums calling for the killing of public figures, and in some instances, internet harassment has been been linked to teen suicides. However, there is a pretty big divide between the kind of bullying that leads to someone’s death, and the irritating antics of a teenager in a chat room. As it is, Arizona’s new law does not really draw the line between the two.
Sara Yasin is an editorial assistant at Index
News that the UK government is planning to grant the state new powers to monitor people’s communications has been met with a mixture of anger and confusion.
The story broke at the end of a bizarre few weeks for the ruling coalition, which managed to score a brace of spectacular own goals in reducing tax rates for the rich while increasing tax on hot food. Meanwhile, one government minister was actually encouraging people to panic buy petrol and store large quantities of it at home ahead of a potential, but by no means certain fuel lorry drivers strike.
The uncertainty over the new surveillance powers can, I think, be seen as part of this pattern. No one is quite sure why the government is doing this — or even what exactly it is they want to do. Roughly speaking, it seems to be about obliging companies to hold information on personal communications and allow government agents (from spies right down to local council workers) access at any time without a warrant.
You would think that such a controversial policy would emerge well thought out and with damned good reason. But Home Secretary Theresa May has absolutely failed to make the case, beyond muttering the usual nothing-to-fear-if-nothing-to-hide line (in itself an odd defence of increased official power from a government which has set out its stall as small-statist, even libertarian), and the utterly confusing position that previous crimes had been solved using these powers, (er, we thought they were new powers).
Writing in today’s Times, Heather Brooke points out the ease with which it is now possible to run a surveillance state through technology. Even if the UK government is sincere in its insistence that these powers will only be used to hunt criminals and terrorists, it severely undermines its power to criticise states that would use the same legislation to watch activists and dissidents. Have no doubt, this is a bad idea and Index will campaign against it should it go any further.
As so often happens with proposed web policy, there’s an element here of the technology leading the argument: it is possible to build surveillance back doors, ergo it is desirable to do so. This is not an attitude that should have any purchase with the supposed civil libertarians and conservatives that make up the government parties (indeed, the coalition agreement included a commitment to the “ending of storage of internet and email records without good reason”). But somehow here we are.
A Moroccan rapper and activist was arrested by security forces last week, following claims that one of his songs is offensive to a public institution. Megaz El Haked was summoned to a court on the charge of offending a public authority. Lyrics in in one of his songs criticising the political situation in Morocco were deemed to be defamatory. The rapper and activist has been refused provisional release whilst he awaits his trial, which is expected to take place on 4 April. El Haked was imprisoned last year for four months on trumped-up charges, before being released in January 2012.