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Inquisition 21
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Mechanisms of repression
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Mechanisms of repression
How porn is being used to quash dissent
By The Littleman
Christopher Wilson, 27, runs a website in Florida. The site has two parts to it; the first is a ‘readers wives’ website featuring mostly soft core ‘pornographic’ images of women that have been sent in, usually by them and with their consent, of them striking a number of erotic poses. It’s all very low key and would even pass the anally retentive censors in the UK.
Yet Mr. Wilson is now languishing in Polk County Jail in Florida having been threatened with over 300 charges of distributing obscene material. With ever more hardcore websites being produced in the US it is difficult to understand why he was singled out. That is until you look at the contents of the second area of the site he runs. That one is a lot more contentious as it features images taken by the soldiers serving, or having served, in Iraq. The photos include soldiers standing over charred and mutilated corpses and that has got the administration running scared. Note these are not sexually inclined photos (a la Abu Ghraib) but just your average blood and gore stuff that ordinary soldiers have to live with every day. But, apparently, they can still whip up animosity and give ammunition to the enemy - i.e. the over 50% of the US public that does not support the war.
The site has been investigated by the army, after a complaint was lodged with that paragon of virtue, Donald Rumsfeld, the US Defense Secretary, by the Council for American-Islamic relations, however after seeking legal advise there appeared to be nothing that could be done as it was regarded as protected speech and thus immune under the constitution. So instead they decided to target Mr. Wilson on the basis of the other part of the site he runs.
The problem for Mr. Wilson that he offered free access to the ‘obscene’ part of the site in return for the photographs from the front line. What he wanted to create was an ‘unedited look at the war from their point of view’, but obviously that stuck in the craw of the increasingly beleaguered executive whose foreign adventures are coming dramatically unstuck. Hence their delight in prosecuting the ‘porn’ site which mainly featured the wives and girlfriends of the very soldiers that sent in their war images. And as it features ‘obscene’ images it can be closed down to ‘protect the public’ and have him banged up, and as a side effect they also closed down his ‘war’ site. Of course being in prison (in George’s brother’s state don’t forget) he can’t complain about the gross violation of his constitutional rights. So a good result all round.
And before those of us in Europe start congratulating ourselves over the fact that it can’t happen here, we should ponder what our good friends at Customs and Excise are up to in the guise of seeking out pornography being brought into the country. Customs officers have suddenly started to routinely download and keep information from the laptops of travelers. In particular, journalists appear to be targeted as happened to Kenneth Neil Cukier, the Paris correspondent for Communications Week International who was on a day trip to London. A customs officer took his computer and attempted to remove the contents, using some unspecified software on a dubious looking floppy disc, and it was only because he happened to be using an Apple rather than a PC that he escaped having his contents downloaded and disseminated.
A Customs and Excise spokesman confirmed that such searches were taking place, but he said he could not reveal details of the software being used to check hard drives, what it did precisely or whether there was any indemnity being provided against the introduction of viruses and he steadfastly refused to reveal who got access to the downloaded information afterwards. At the very least this must be breaking the data protection act.
The Home Office has admitted that it had no control over the practice, nor the safety of the information that is removed. Indeed it has refused to even issue guidelines and it is left up to the discretion of the individual customs officer as to what is done with the data. Businessmen are concerned that sensitive commercial information can be obtained in this way and passed on by corrupt customs officers (and surprisingly they do exist) to their business rivals. On a personal level, many people use laptops to store very intimate details of their lives and yet they can be scrutinized at will by strangers with no requirement for just cause (even though this is banned after a high court judgment against Customs in the Hoverspeed case). You would have thought you had rights concerning this under the Human Rights Act, but the government manages to circumvent the provisions by saying that it is in the interest of protecting public morals. In other words the censorship of adult material provides the only justification for this gross invasion of our private lives. Ah-ha! No wonder the government is keen to see it remain in place.
And now the new law on ‘violent’ pornography wants to further extend this invasion by including mobile phones in the remit. In which case customs officers, or the police, will be entitled to make a copy of your SIM card (or even confiscate the phone completely) on the basis of searching for pornography. So a journalist’s or businessman’s contact numbers could end up in some government minister or business rival’s in-tray and the affected party would have no recourse in law to stop it happening. Can’t or won’t happen?
Before you answer that question, ponder this: this clause was slipped into the proposed bill after Andrew Gilligan, the BBC journalist, refused to reveal his source regarding the lack of WMD prior to the Iraq war. Ministers would have given their eye teeth to have the contents of Mr. Gilligan’s phone.
And now they can and all under the guise of protecting the public against obscene images. How convenient!
But why is the UK press not making a fuss about this? Primarily because they’ve swallowed the line regarding the banning of violent porn and have failed to read the small print. And by the time they do, it’ll be too late.
So next time you visit the UK, first of all make sure that your laptop and mobile phone do not contain anything that you wouldn’t want the government to know; especially if you are a journalist whose mobile might contain the contact details of a source that is embarrassing the government (either the US or the UK) because you can bet your bottom dollar that you’ll be singled out at the airport. Better yet skip the UK visit and go straight to continental Europe.
They respect human rights there.
Mechanisms of repression
One click and you’re out - Pervcheck
Free speech in Britain under threat
The US lurches to the right
Sarah’s story
Kafkaesque from the National Crime Squad
More Big Brother building blocks in place
How porn is being used to quash dissent
Book burning in Canada given Royal Assent
And the net draws tighter.
Response to AOL
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