Since becoming a barrister in 1987, Sir Keir Starmer has made headlines for offering free legal counsel during the McLibel trial, won awards as a leading human rights QC, and set precedents as director of public prosecutions (DPP) in England and Wales. During the five-year post as DPP, he took on prosecution guidelines for the abuse of women and sexual abuse of children. He also tackled the as yet largely unchartered territory of cases involving social media and is mooted as a Labour candidate in the UK’s 2015 general election.
In this Index podcast Rachael Jolley, editor of Index on Censorship magazine, speaks to the newly knighted former DPP about his time overseeing the prosecution service, plus the right to offend, whistleblowing and legal challenges for social media.
On online abuse: “We haven’t got a law that has been designed to deal with this. We are falling back on the Communications Act, which was designed for abusive messages on telephones in the 1930s that might have been listened to by exchange staff.”
On the web: “You can’t have a law-free zone. If you simply say it doesn’t matter that the court order is breached because you are using social media, you undermine the entire criminal justice system and you remove all the protection that’s intended for very vulnerable victims.”
On whistleblowing: “It is important that legal protection is there and that everyone appreciates it. A lot of people labour under the misrepresentation that if you whistleblow you are necessarily engaging in wrongdoing and it is something you can’t do. There is still a great fear.”
Read the full interview in the latest issue of Index on Censorship magazine. This issue’s writers include Lyse Doucet, David Aaronovitch and Julian Baggini. You can buy it, or take out a subscription here.
Russian authorities have blocked access to 13 sites connected to “Ukrainian nationalist organisations” on the social media site Vkontakte, Russia’s answer to Facebook.
The Russian General Prosecutor’s Office requested that Roskomnadzor — the Federal Service for Supervision of Communications, Information Technology and Mass Media — block the pages, the body said in a statement Monday. The pages promoted Ukrainian nationalist groups and “contained direct appeals to Russian people to conduct terrorist activities,” the statement read.
There had been reports over the weekend of pages on Vkontaktebeing blocked, but the message from Roskomnadzor confirms this.
While it is unclear which sites the ban covers, it appears a group connected to the Euromaidan protests is one of them. A screen grab, allegedly from a Euromaidan group, first shared by a journalist from Russian news site slon.ru, read: “This material was blocked on the territory of Russian Federation by a decision by the State Communication Committee” and that the decision had been made on 2 March.
A new report by Small Media sheds light on the Arzeshi, a hardline, conservative faction of online activists in Iran.
The idea of blogging and social media in Iran was once likely to invoke images of the 2009 Green Movement, where these platforms played a part in regular people standing up to a repressive, conservative regime, calling for reforms and demanding civil liberties. These days, it may be more linked with the country’s political elites, who really seem to have taken to communicating through Twitter and Facebook — sites now blocked for most of the population.
But while it was perhaps always expected that tech-savvy, reformist activists would find ways around the social media censorship, it may come as a surprise that some of Iran’s most conservative do the same.
A new report by Small Media sheds light on the Arzeshi, a hardline, conservative faction of online activists, devoted to the principles of the 1979 revolution and the supreme leader. The report found that the Arzeshi work around online restrictions, appearing on banned sites. In particular, the report looks at blogs and Google+, and analyses the activity of 75 Arzeshi accounts on Twitter — a site that, bar a technical glitch last September, has been blocked in Iran since 2009.
However, while the government claims to have a huge number of online supporters, the report tells a different story. Far from being an active, viral network, “the vast majority” of Arzeshi sites “were poorly-connected, hardly-read, and contained unoriginal content pasted from other sites.”
James Marchant, Small Media’s Research Manager, said: “This report is the first piece of in-depth research to illustrate the reality of Iran’s secretive community of online conservative activists. It shows that contrary to all government claims, the Arzeshi community is actually very fragmented and inward-looking – it is a long way from the energetic activist army touted by senior Iranian officials.”
It’s easy to be glib about social media. Page upon page of selfies, pleas for attention from celebrities, misogynist trolls and angels-on-pinhead arguments.But as the Telegraph’s recent research shows, the Chinese authorities take the web very seriously indeed.Weibo, China’s equivalent of Twitter, is a huge platform, with over 200 million users. And for a while, it functioned freely, or as freely as anything does in China. It was, of course, monitored, and thousands of people were employed to post pro-government opinions and stories on the network.But the old-style censorship didn’t seem to be working as well as it should. Partly because it was just too obvious. In March 2012, rumours spread that the son of a Communist Party Official had been involved in a fatal crash while driving his Ferrari. As people discussed the story, they suddenly found that the word Ferrari had been blocked. For many, this made it clear that someone powerful had something to hide, and people openly wrote about their frustration with the system.Shortly afterwards, Weibo introduced new contracts concerning conduct. Anonymity went out the window. Spreading ‘umours’ became an offence. High profile users were put on alert – if a story you shared went viral, you were personally responsible. On a platform dependent on sharing, this was bound to cause people to think twice before sending their messages out to the world. And on a reactive, interactive and instantaneous platform like Weibo or Twitter, that slowing of pace is lethal. It would appear that Weibo is in danger of becoming boring. Just how the authorities want.Could this happen elsewhere? Look at the debate in the UK: every week a fresh cry goes up for something to be ‘done’ about Twitter trolls, often beyond the existing laws that govern free speech and communication – with the ending of anonymity being a particularly popular (and ill thought out) demand. While these calls may be well-meaning, they are part of a broader uncertainty about how to deal with the fact people now have an unprecedented ability to publish to the world.
The Chinese government (and others, such as the highly tech-savvy Iranians) will tell you that this comes with an unprecedented ability to monitor and censor. As China becomes more and more powerful, its model of web censorship, both internal and external, could become the norm.
