It is appalling to me how so often in the last few years individual freedoms have been threatened all in the name of “safety” (both in the US and in cases like this overseas). It is especially worrisome to me that the idea of censoring speech is tolerated by enough of the general public that any politician in a first world nation would feel comfortable proposing such a thing. Without free speech, all other rights are meaningless in my opinion.
Between the omnipresent surveillance cameras and the draconian libel laws, I’m surprised someone still thinks that privacy and freedom of speech exist in the UK.
He has to say something about it. The riots were atrocious and continued way past a point when (at least technically) they could have been attenuated - I’m no big fan of this government, but what’s he *supposed *to do?
Deal with the actual problem, not the symptom. If I told my friends on Facebook to riot, there’s no way it would have happened. There must be some very strong tension building for this sort of thing to explode like it did. If people want to riot for some reason, they will find a way to communicate.
I won’t weigh in on the police’s actions, but surely there are things that could be done there, too. Even if they didn’t act improperly, you can go through the motions of training them in proper conduct.
But don’t start taking more freedom away. Do you really think that is going to make people more content and less likely to riot?
What happened was pretty much a scaled-up version of the kind of teenage/twentysomething vandalism and general criminal behaviour that has always been around, just in small, disorganised clumps - social networking provided the means for it to snowball into larger, more organised group events. The people involved in the rioting were largely doing it because they could and because their peers were doing it - it was mostly a social activity (just a very destructive one).
Omnipresent surveillance cameras? Please tell me more. Do you know what omnipresent means? You are right about the libel laws though, old laws that are really not fit.
[QUOTE=Baron Greenback]
Omnipresent surveillance cameras? Please tell me more. Do you know what omnipresent means? You are right about the libel laws though, old laws that are really not fit.
[/QUOTE]
I think that was a bit of hyperbole on Alessan’s part. I will say, as an American traveling to London…those guys have a hell of a lot of surveillance cameras if you know where to look (hell, lots right out in the open). I tend to notice them more, perhaps, than the average person since I have worked in security in my past and we used to do high end surveillance IP camera systems and NVRs/DVRs.
I would love to have gotten the contract to put that stuff in!
They had a Bill of Rights before we did. And they have a written freedom of speech in the EU conventions, plus an older Common Law principal of Free Speech.
Anyways, while the internet is cool and all, I think people overstate its role in stuff like this. People managed to have riots back before the internet. That they use the internet to cordinate such things today is just because its the currently most prominent tool for communicating to groups of people, if it didn’t exist people would just fall back to older methods.
Or Recreational Rioting as we used to call it in Belfast, where throngs of little scallys would take any opportunity to gather and throw petrol bombs at the police. For many young people in certain areas it was just something to do. Thankfully the increase in fuel prices mean petrol bombs are less viable as tools of destruction these days.
I hate the tendency of politicians to impose rules in the name of “safety” but be careful with this article - the OP is conflating two different proposals. The first one, to block social networking sites, was made in the immediate aftermath of the riots last summer and was promptly stomped on by the press and MPs pointing out it made us no better than Egypt, China, or Iran. The recent fuss has been about a proposal to require service providers to keep records of who is accessing what and allow law enforcement agencies to access this information. The proposal - as far as its been published - does not allow them to access content without direct approval by the Home Secretary in the same way as they can access telephone calls at the moment. Again it is doubtful this will get through Parliament as it stands. Personally I strongly dislike the proposal - apart from anything else it should be an independent judge not a politician granting access - but it is not a proposal to "censoring speech ".
I am generally fed up with the government’s attitude on this whole area as both the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats (the two parties in the coalition) promised to roll back the infringements to civil liberties introduced by the profoundly authoritarian Labour government since 2001.
Yes, but with no entrenched constitution nor any real judicial check on legislative power, there is no way for a citizen to enforce the legislature to adhere to these principles. Well, outside of the European Court, but there has been significant recoil from the Lisbon Treaty which would provide a relevant check on legislative power.
They did, although in most cases, it was a localised phenomenon - this latest lot had people commuting to the riots in order to take part - social media didn’t make it happen - but social media provided the means to let it grow big, fast.
