Why did the Today Programme invite Claire Perry MP to debate website blocking this morning? Aside from giving Perry an impression of authority on the internet that she does not command — the peg for the discussion was the high court ruling that ISPs block the music file-sharing site Pirate Bay. Perry is leading a campaign to make internet service providers (ISPs) responsible for access to pornography online. While both issues concern ISPs’ role as gatekeepers, conflating pornography (legal) with copyright infringement (illegal) dangerously muddies the argument – a point that the Internet Service Provider Association’s Nicholas Lansman attempted to make before being defeated by John Humphrys’ bluster.
Despite the government making it clear that it is not interested in introducing default filtering for pornographic websites in a response to Index on Censorship and other civil liberties groups in January, Claire Perry remains insistent that this is what is required. Her scaremongering report (“the whole history of human sexual perversion is only a few clicks away”) calls for network level “opt-in” to force ISPs to provide customers with a “clean internet feed as standard”. In other words, Perry would like the internet to be censored for everyone; in order to access “adult content”, customers would have to choose to receive it.
The first problem with this is – who decides what is adult content? The classification of pornography is a subjective issue: one man’s work of art is another man’s history of sexual perversion. All filtering systems will censor some aspects of culture as pornography. The researcher Seth Finkelstein was the first to decrypt blacklists of pornographic material back in 1995 and found that feminism, gay rights and sex education were all swept up by puritanical filters. It is not possible to filter pornography without interfering with our right to freedom of expression and our access to information.
The second problem is – that Perry and her supporters are calling for the censorship of legal material. This would set a dangerous precedent for censoring any material that we might personally find distasteful or offensive.
And the third problem is an issue that faces the high court as much as any parent who would like the responsibility for monitoring their children’s access to content taken out of their hands. If, as Perry’s report claims, children are now more “tech savvy” than their parents and know how to circumvent device filters, then they will find their way past network filters too.
The blunt tool of high court injunctions and crude filters can only offer limited protection – whether for copyright holders or anxious parents – at the high price of our access to information .
The Director of Public Prosecutions has said there was a “degree of pushback” from former Metropolitan police assistant commissioner John Yates against his suggestion of investigating the infamous “for Neville” News of the World email further.
Appearing for a second time at the Leveson Inquiry, Keir Starmer QC said Yates had told him during a 20 July 2009 meeting that the email, which contained phone hacking transcripts that suggested the practice went beyond one reporter at the News of the World, was not new material, had been seen by counsel and would “go nowhere”.
“I had been told in July 2009 in confident terms by Yates that all of this had been looked at, there was nothing new,” Starmer told the Inquiry, noting that Yates had told him he “needn’t concern” himself with the issue.
“[But] I became increasingly concerned about confidence with which those answers had been given to me,” he added.
Starmer said that out of an “abundance of caution” he sought further advice from David Perry QC, the counsel who had led the 2006 prosecution of private investigator Glenn Mulcaire and former News of the World royal reporter Clive Goodman for intercepting voicemails.
By the time of the February 2009 Commons Culture, Media and Sport Committee report that said the police had been wrong not to investigate the “for Neville” email further, Starmer said he felt he had “exhausted the exercise with Perry” and was unsure what else as DPP he could do.
Goodman and Mulcaire were jailed in 2007 for listening to voicemail messages left on the phones of members of the royal household. Goodman was sentenced to four months and Mulcaire six months.
Earlier today Perry gave evidence via video link from Northern Ireland, taking the Inquiry through the details of the 2006 prosecution. He told the Inquiry he was “concerned to discover” the extent of the activity, raising the issue at an August 2006 conference with police officers and the Crown Prosecution Service following the arrest of Goodman and Mulcaire.
“I have a clear recollection of asking whether there was any evidence implicating any other individual employed by News International in the criminality and being informed by the police (I cannot recall which officer) that there was not,” Perry said in his written evidence.
The Inquiry will resume on 23 April, when evidence will be heard from media proprietors and owners.
Follow Index on Censorship’s coverage of the Leveson Inquiry on Twitter – @IndexLeveson
The former crime editor of the News of the World says she believes a “distorted picture” has been presented of how journalists work.
“We do not live a champagne lifestyle and the reality of the day to day grind of journalism is far from glamorous,” Lucy Panton wrote in her witness statement to the Leveson Inquiry.
Panton, who has been arrested and bailed as part of Operation Elveden, the Metropolitan police’s investigation into payments to police officers, wrote that she found it “bizarre that there seems to be such interest in what champagne I did or did not drink.”
Discussing her contact with police officers, Panton wrote that her objective was to “have a long term relationship with the police, which meant an open and honest relationship with the people I met.”
She added: “I am a journalist and therefore my objective is to seek information but not to the detriment of a police operation. I have never met a senior officer who is so ill-informed and naive that he or she gives out information that they were not authorised to divulge.”
She told the Inquiry that former assistant commissioner John Yates had attended her wedding, “along with many other police officers”, some of whom were “friends”. Panton added that her contact with former Met commissioner Lord Blair was “minimal”, she had not had drinks with fellow ex-commissioner Lord Stevens in a pub or restaurant setting, and had drank champagne with police officers when others were present, namely at the Crime Reporters’ Association (CRA) Christmas parties.
She also described an October 2010 email sent to her by her then news editor James Mellor, in which Panton was asked if she had spoken to Yates about an aviation bomb plot story, as “banter”.
Mellor’s email, read to the Inquiry during Yates’ evidence on 1 March, read: “Think John Yates could be crucial here, have you spoken to him, really need an exclusive splash line, time to call in all those bottles of champagne.”
“It’s the way people spoke to each other in our office,” Panton told the Inquiry. “I would read that at that time as banter mixed with a bit of pressure”, she said, describing the message in her written statement as similar to “many I received at work that contained an element of banter with a serious note of expectation that they were relying on me for a big story”. She later added that she did not feel there was a bullying culture at the now defunct tabloid, and that pressure was “part of the job.”
Panton also said she was “sad” to hear from colleagues that lines of communication between police officers and the press “seem to have stopped”.
“I would hate to see crime reporting over and police feeling they can’t have professional relationships with journalists,” she added.
Also giving evidence today was Chief Superintendent Derek Barnett of the Police Superintendents’ Association, University of Leicester criminology lecturer Dr Rob Mawby and Ed Stearns, head of media at the Met’s renamed Directorate of Media & Communications (formerly known as Directorate of Public Affairs).
A directions hearing for the third module of the Inquiry, which will examine the relationship between the press and politicians, will take place this afternoon.
The Inquiry continues tomorrow.
Follow Index on Censorship’s coverage of the Leveson Inquiry on Twitter – @IndexLeveson
