Foreign Perspectives

Archive for April, 2009

Freedom of expression is one of those things that we kind of just assume we have in western societies but in reality there are generally limits to it.

For example, the issue of Madeline McCann is freely spoken about in Portugal yet in the UK a range of comments are censored. Joana on her own blogspot blog clearly is none too impressed about the British media on this one. After all, in Portugal the law states that

1. Everyone shall possess the right to freely express and publicise his thoughts in words, images or by any other means, as well as the right to inform others, inform himself and be informed without hindrance or discrimination.
2. Exercise of the said rights shall not be hindered or limited by any type or form of censorship.

Seems clear, doesn’t it? Well, the problem is that what that particular law doesn’t allow for is how individual publishers operate. After all, it is up to the publisher to decide whether or not to publish stuff on their site. What that law is saying that anyone can publish anything; it doesn’t say that an individual publisher is required to publish everything. After all, Joana moderates comments on her site: is that not the very same censorship that she accuses the British media of?

In America, the first amendment is similarly clear on freedom of expression in that it states

• Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

However, that’s been modified somewhat over the centuries and notably does NOT apply to commercial speech so, for example, it doesn’t allow all and sundry to send out junk mail to everyone. Having said that, the freedom of expression is taken very seriously and other laws and administrative procedures have had to change to allow for us, for example, full details of ongoing trials are published as they happen.

In theory Europe as a whole has a similar freedom of expression courtesy of the Human Rights Convention which states in Article 10:

1. Everyone has the right to freedom of expression. This right shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers. This Article shall not prevent States from requiring the licensing of broadcasting, television or cinema enterprises.
2. The exercise of these freedoms, since it carries with it duties and responsibilities, may be subject to such formalities, conditions, restrictions or penalties as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society, in the interests of national security, territorial integrity or public safety, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, for the protection of the reputation or rights of others, for preventing the disclosure of information received in confidence, or for maintaining the authority and impartiality of the judiciary.

In many respects this is an updating of the American first amendment, or at least the freedom of expression bits are. As always, lawmakers tack on seemingly unrelated clauses thus whilst we would see freedom of religion as being separate from freedom of expression, clearly in the 1700s the Americans didn’t. Likewise, the business about not restricting the licensing of broadcasting enterprises isn’t altogether appropriate these days with the likes of Youtube.

Interestingly though the second paragraph in clarifying this freedom does not list the prohibition of publication of current court proceedings as being one of those things that isn’t allowed as this does not appear to affect the “authority and impartiality” of the judiciary as shown by the American example. However, yet again that doesn’t mean that publishers are required to publish everything that comes their way, merely that they are allowed to do so if they wish to.

So where does that place our freedom of expression in the UK? Well, the Human Rights Convention is enacted in UK law. So, the publisher would be permitted to publish those comments of Joana but would not be required to do so. However, it does suggest that the action in taking down our own sites last week was NOT legal as our right of freedom of expression as per Article 10 of the Human Rights Convention would override the reporting restriction ie the contempt of court action was itself illegal.

Somehow or other I managed to pick up 78% on the latest assignment which is pretty good going as initially I hadn’t a clue as to how to properly approach the semi-essay part of it.

It was quite a strange kind of assignment as it was largely based on the methodology book rather than the main course text. That dictated quite a different structure than the typical essay response ending up in the question being split between five short definitions and a longer piece on experimental ethics.

As always at degree level, the “definitions” required are quite complete ones with a full definition of each term in the question and examples to show that you actually understand it which, of course, wouldn’t be shown were you just to write out a straight dictionary style definition.

The ethics part was based around an experiment first carried out in the 1960s and replicated for the BBC/Open University series Child of Our Time a few years ago. Basically it involved kids looking at a video of an adult attacking a doll with three different endings to the video: the adult getting told off for his actions, getting rewarded for them and finally nothing happening to him. There are loads of ethical problems in reproducing an experiment like this, most obviously being that you already know that the kids will become more violent after watching the video (yes, folks, watching violent programming does affect them) you know ahead of time that you will be harming in this way.

Psychological experiments on children seem to be quite a minefield in terms of ethics. For instance, it would be really handy to be able to experiment on the effect of removing, say, the father from the family unit but clearly that’s not a runner ethically or morally and many other potential experiments are just as problematical. In these cases you can use what are called “natural experiments” where the conditions you’d liked to have had in your experiment have happened naturally. For example, if the father leaves naturally. However, even there you’ve problems as one assumes that how the family functioned prior to the divorce would be different than if the divorce hadn’t happened ie the “experiment” isn’t running entirely as one would ideally need it to run.

Still, a pleasing mark. Let’s hope that I can keep it up for the next assignment which I gotta get going on soon…

Although our sites collect a whole bunch of statistics about the people who drop by, most of the time we pay next to no attention to it other than keeping a vague eye on what’s most popular.

However, in light of our recent contempt of court action we’ve been a little more paranoid about things and were wondering if the hits from Manchester were a prelude to something similar in the same way as all the hits from London turned out to be. So we thought we’d do a little digging…

First off, the Feedjit widget showed up the series of hits from Manchester using a variety of searches but all related to the topic of the above court action. Was that a fan or something else?

Next step was to look at our StatCounter records for one of those searches.We picked a recent one from Feedjit so it was towards the top of the searches recorded. One click on the drill-down icon which brings up the IP address, their ISP, that they’d made 127 visits to our site amounting to over 2 hours of viewing.

Popping the IP address into one of the reverse IP lookup sites which gave us the specific entry for their server. In this case it turned out to be someone’s Sky router so ’tis unlikely to be related to the court action.

Now, whilst we can’t track down the actual physical address of our fan, it is more than enough information to allow that person to be found by the authorities which is probably worth bearing mind….

Many people stay with their original hosting company regardless of the ongoing level of service, facilities on offer or even price simply because it seems like a nightmare to even contemplate moving to another hosting company. However, it’s not nearly so difficult as many people think.

For HTML only sites it’s a doddle and for the majority of people complications only appear when they’re trying to move a blog which means that they need to move a database. Since that’s the most complex situation that most people encounter I’ll go through that here.

First off you need to set up an account with a new hosting provider. There are oodles of these around the world with prices ranging from free to around $10/month and levels of service ranging from dreadful to excellent. Which is best depends a lot on your requirements in terms of physical location of the hosting, amount of storage space, bandwidth and pricing and it’s generally best to spend some time going through reviews of the services before you make your final selection.

If possible, it’s handy to have a similar cpanel setup on both old and new services as this makes the move a whole lot more seamless. In my case the cpanel setup on EUKHost and HostGator are almost identical which made this move considerably easier.

Once you’ve the new account setup the easiest way to move the site is by running the cpanel backup utility which’ll copy your entire site onto your PC (“download home directory”); if no backup utility is available to you, you can use FTP instead though it’ll take longer as it doesn’t compress the information. Next step is to restore this backup on your new host which you can do via the backup utility in cpanel (“restore home directory”) or by FTP.

That’s sufficient for non-database sites although you’ll still need to redirect the domain (see later).

For blogs or other database driven sites you need go back to the backup utility and  “Download a MySQL Database Backup”, selecting the appropriate database then do the reverse on your new host.

That’s pretty much the move completed or at least it’s the part that’ll take the longest amount of time for you. Next up is to point the domain to the new host and then you need to wait a bit because it can take quite a while for the domain change to be reflected right across the Internet (anything up to about 48 hours). Finally, you need to add the domain as an add-on domain on the new host.

If you’ve been clever you’ll have used the same username for the account on the new host as this’ll mean that the site is ready to go. If you haven’t you’ll need (on WordPress) to edit the file wp-config.php to reflect the new usernames and passwords.

Incidently, the site will remain operational during the domain transfer so long as you don’t remove the domain from the original host (it can be listed in both hosts). Since the move should be seamless, you should create a small file called something like where.htm and upload this to both old and new servers with a little text message saying “this is hosted on X” or “this is hosted on Y” so that you’ll know the move has been made.

And that’s it. It’s generally best to leave the old hosting account running for a week or two just in case you’ve missed something although if you’re pretty close to the renewal date you could cut this short (just make sure you checkout the whole website though!).

Whilst we all diplore the blatent censorship of the Internet by the Chinese authorities, it would appear that the UK legal system wishes that it could do exactly the same thing in order to properly implement its practice of “reporting restrictions”.

In fact, it has already had such a system of censorship in effect back in 2006 when the New York Times felt it prudent to follow the reporting restrictions issued for a trial then underway. Thus, everywhere else in the world except in the UK the article in question could be read. Or, at least that was the intention. As always on the Internet there are ways around such things and accessing the site through an online proxy let anyone in the UK read the article.

At any one time there are a number of cases affected by these reporting restrictions which are intended to avoid the publication of information which could prejudice the outcome of the trial in question or to protect the names of the people involved in the trial. In addition to specific reporting restrictions there are more general restrictions regarding, for example, reporting of the names of children. These practices date back centuries and clearly a hundred or more years ago stopping the publication of information in the various newspapers of the time was quite effective in ensuring that the jurors did not have access to information about the case outside the courtroom. However, things have moved on somewhat in the intervening centuries.

Up to 10 or 15 years ago one could easily read information about the higher profile cases in foreign newspapers even when reporting on them had been banned by the UK legal system although notably the New York Times did not distribute the issue of the paper noted above in the UK. However, as Steven Bates pointed out back in 1995 the only truly effective way of implementing them would be to unhook the UK from the Internet. Worryingly, as China has shown this is now a potentially viable option but one hopes that it will never be considered as such by the UK.

Although there are presumably instances of even the smallest trial being reported on over the Internet the effect is most noticeable with high profile cases. The snag with those is that often the opinions expressed are very highly charged and thus potentially very prejudicial to the outcome of a trial were jurors to have come across some of them. At least two trials have already come to grief courtesy of independent Internet research by jurors and no doubt there will be more whilst the current “jurors must be ignorant” approach remains in place.

However, although the Internet has brought to prominance the possibility of jurors researching a case themselves in fact they have been able to do that for a considerable period of time already. Libraries contain exactly the kind of background information in the form of archived newspapers that the courts would wish banned from the Internet once a court issues a reporting restriction order. The snag is that the Internet has a much higher profile than the libraries ever did and is, of course, much more accessible. Combine that with the fact that even deleted articles are available courtesy of googles caching and you have the problem that once anything is published, it stays published.

But, there is no reason why that presumption of the ignorance of jurors should be retained. After all, the American legal system seems to operate quite well without it. Granted it will require changes in the British legal system to allow the dropping of this mechanism of reporting restrictions but surely the increased public visibility of the operation of the courts that would follow can only be a good thing?

One suspects that it will be quite some time before the British courts go so far as those in Arizona and permit the jurors to ask questions but it seems high time that they accepted that jurors are likely to have seen something about the case before the trial and allow for that.