Mr. Topp and the Big Bad Blog

As usual, on July 1st, I want to wish everybody out there a Happy Canada Day.

But it doesn’t feel like a very happy Canada Day, at least not for Canada — or for Toronto, in particular. In the aftermath of the G20, reading the reports, it is impossible not to think that Canada is a place that is less free than it was when I left a few years ago.

A lot of people seem to be angry with the protesters — which seems fair enough. Events like the G20 attract protesters, not all of whom are there to try to have their voices heard. People come spoiling for a fight with the police, for whatever reason.

But, to paraphrase David Cameron in his announcement of the findings of the Saville Inquiry into Bloody Sunday, a state must hold its agents to higher standards than it would expect of criminals, thugs, or terrorists. Reports I have read indicate that police at the G20 did not hold themselves to such high standards, and suggest that a significant number failed to hold themselves to any standard whatsoever.

There is no denying that a police officer at an event like this has a difficult job. Police cars are being set on fire, everybody protests their innocence, and the officers themselves are — of course — only human. But there are two frightening elements to the behaviour of the Toronto Police during the G20, that go beyond human errors of individual misjudgment, poor strategy, and overreaction.

Targeting Journalists

First, it seems that accredited media were often treated as though they were there as part of the protests, rather than to report on them. There was the assault and arrest of a reporter from the Guardian who had the temerity to refuse to leave the scene of a protest he was reporting on. There is the Globe and Mail writer who was told that her “goose would be cooked” if she returned to the protest site. And there is freelance journalist Amy Miller who was told (while in a makeshift jail cell) that she would be repeatedly raped in order to maker her “not want to be a journalist again” (video here).

There are more instances — I failed to bookmark the first few I saw as being anomalies, and have not bothered to actually go out looking for examples — but they all add up to one thing: Police were treating reporters and journalists as criminals.

This is completely unacceptable.

A free society depends on the freedom of the press, and the freedom of speech. Reporters must be free to report — particularly on confrontations between authorities and those exercising their right to free speech. When reporters are kept out, arrested, assaulted and threatened, our natural conclusion should be it is because the police do not want their behaviour to be on record — because it is appalling.

The actions of the Toronto police in this regard are more in line with totalitarian states than democracies.

Making it up as they go along

Yet this horrible treatment of the press is not the worst thing that the police did.

The police made up a law that “allowed” them to demand ID from protesters and search them. They “could” arrest anybody who did not comply.

Even though this was not a law — they could only demand ID and search those that entered the secure area beyond the security fence — the police advised individuals otherwise, carried out searches and arrested people on this basis.

Before we go on, I would like everybody reading this to appreciate how stupid this is. By doing this, the police have undermined a huge number of the arrests that they have made over the course of the G20. It doesn’t matter if somebody was planning on bombing the G20, assassinating world leaders, or just there to protest. The cases will be thrown out of court, because many of the searches conducted were illegal.

Every piece of evidence is tainted. And this is before they made the moronic mistake of claiming that props from a roleplaying game are dangerous weapons found on protesters.

The Canadian Civil Liberties Association is demanding an apology from the government for the illegal searches — which seems appropriate. But what of the arrests? Were there any? I have read about at least one person who was arrested on the basis of this law, but they might have been within the secure area — which apparently makes being arrested on the basis of a secretly passed and unannounced change in law OK.

If there were actual arrests made, the situation becomes far more serious. If somebody handcuffs you, takes you off the street and puts you in a cage, there are two options:

1. You are suspected of breaking a law, and arrested on this basis.
2. You have been kidnapped and forcibly confined.

The first is the regular business of the police. The second is a serious crime for which you can serve life in prison.

My thought is that any police officer who knew the law and made such an arrest should be charged. And any of their superiors who encouraged such charges be made (including, apparently, the police chief) should be charged with conspiracy.

Because that is what it is. It does not matter what your job is. It does not matter if you are supposed to be working. If you pull somebody off the street without cause and stick them in a cage, you have kidnapped them.

For the most part, the police should be in the clear on this — they were doing their job, however badly — but if they cannot claim that they suspected an actual law was being broken, and were instead arresting people on the basis of (what they knew to be) a fictitious law.

Well, that’s not even arresting someone on trumped up or fraudulent charges. That’s just plain old kidnapping.

There need to be ramifications

While hoping for kidnapping and forcible confinement charges might be a bit much, there certainly do need to be consequences.

The police are charged with protecting the public, and instead they victimized them. Not on an individual basis, or as part of a misplaced strategy with the best of intentions, but through a concerted effort from the top of the organization to the bottom.

“To Serve and Protect” is their motto, and they have a mission statement and values.

Their mission is to keep Toronto the best and safest place to be.

Their values are:
Honesty — to be truthful and open in their interactions;
Integrity — to be honourable, trustworthy, and strive to do what is right;
Fairness — to treat everybody equally and impartially;
Respect — to show understanding and appreciation of the differences between people;
Reliability — to be conscientious, professional, responsible and dependable;
Teamwork — to work with communities to achieve goals.

With the possible exception of fairness — I suppose you can argue that they treated everybody “equally and impartially” — it is fair to say that they failed on every point.

The people of Toronto should not put up with this. They need a police force that can hold true to its core values, rather than one that perpetuates lies and tries to quiet free speech.

(Postscript: I was going to add photos throughout, but didn’t. Go to the Big Picture for some, instead.)

Here in the UK, the Guardian newspaper has been banned from reporting on parliament.

Today’s published Commons order papers contain a question to be answered by a minister later this week. The Guardian is prevented from identifying the MP who has asked the question, what the question is, which minister might answer it, or where the question is to be found.

The Guardian is also forbidden from telling its readers why the paper is prevented – for the first time in memory – from reporting parliament. Legal obstacles, which cannot be identified, involve proceedings, which cannot be mentioned, on behalf of a client who must remain secret.

This is completely unbelievable. I don’t know what else to write about it, other than that a democracy in which it is forbidden to report upon the workings of parliament is hardly a democracy at all.

Research Digest (which, I assume, is quite different from Reader’s Digest) has asked the world’s leading psychologists to tell them about the “one nagging thing they still don’t understand about themselves.” Some of the answers are fantastic.

All you need to know about Search Engine Optimization. My theory about SEO is this: The better search engines get, the more they reveal actual relevant content. Hence, any work done to optimize your web page for current search engines is doomed to become irrelevant in the near future. I just write, and let the bots in. Or, to quote the linked article:

Make something great. Tell people about it. Do it again.

Yesterday I found an article by Connie Schultz, via the Jeff Jarvis blog Buzz Machine. In the article, Schultz argues that newspapers should be granted special 24-hour exclusivity on their stories.

Essentially, she is arguing that news aggregation, blogs, and other news reporting agencies steal real newspapers’ stories by too-accurately summarizing or rewording those same stories. The newspaper that breaks the story should be allowed to capitalize on it with an exclusive window.

An amusing game to play is “how would this impact the news as we know it”. Imagine on September 11th, 2001, if only one newspaper or TV station was showing news about the terrorist attacks.

Imagine if you did not know where you were when Kennedy was shot, because your local radio station was too late to break the news and were not allowed to report it for 24 hours — you learned the next day.

A plane crashes in the Hudson river – a Twitter exclusive
In January 2009, an airplane crashed in the Hudson river. Immediately, there was coverage on every news station. The next morning — less than 24 hours later — every newspaper in the UK (and possibly worldwide) had pictures and a story on the front page.

The news broke first … on Twitter.

Make no mistake, as a micro-blogging service, Twitter is a publisher. Presumably this means that nobody else would be allowed to mention that a plane had crashed in the Hudson for 24 hours. Exclusivity is exclusivity, after all.

In fact, a vast majority of news probably breaks on Twitter before anywhere else. Twitter has been searching for a way to monetize — perhaps this is it. They can run newspapers out of business, by laying claim to each and every news story which appears there first. One can only read about current events on Twitter, for the first 24 hours.

Of course, many Tweeters would then publish to their own blog first. After all, why pass up that exclusive 24-hour window? Could it be sold? For how much?

If two people are at a newsworthy event, and both blog it immediately, who gets the exclusive window?

Competing against such blogs, newspapers would have to throw out fact-checking. It’s too slow, and someone will have the content blogged within minutes.

Perhaps I go to far.

Perhaps Ms. Schultz’s intent is not that there is an exclusive 24-hour reporting window before facts can be repeated. Perhaps she has not overlooked that reporting — at its core — is all about repeating what you have seen, heard, or read, and redistributing that information.

We are all news aggregators, every one of us. Whether we blog a Morning Coffee each morning, or discuss the latest gossip over coffee in the break room. Even those people who go to a press conference and then write a few paragraphs about it afterwards. This is distributing news that — in most instances — we heard elsewhere. As people get increasingly comfortable online, these are more and more often published: On Twitter, in blogs, on Facebook.

Passing on information by word-of-mouth is natural human behaviour, and it is hardly copyright infringement. And any law that makes the repetition of facts illegal — even if only for a limited time — is a frightening one.

One can only hope that lawmakers see this for what it is: a business in so much trouble that it is not merely requesting billions for a bailout, but asking for free speech to be thrown in the dust bin and to make gossip illegal. It is also dangerous for the newspapers themselves. If they inadvertantly report something already published, they would break their own law. And with a world of blogs out there, they can very rarely be the first at the scene.

Moreover, we must not confuse the technology at play with the function it performs.

The Internet, the printing press, the radio, the television. All can be used to convey information about what is going on in our world. So can two people who happen to be in the same room, speaking to each other.

Yes, there is more to reporting than this, but that is the activity at its core. Sharing gathered information with an audience. Any law that restricts only one means of relaying this information — or otherwise fails to treat all of these equally — is a bad law.

And if it seems silly to stop people from talking about the news in public places, then this proposal needs to be seen in that light.

It looks like Germany has plans to begin censoring the Internet. With a rallying cry of “child pornography!”, the Federal Office of Criminal Investigation will keep a list of banned sites, and require Internet Providers to disallow access to these.

This follows in the footsteps of Australia, who happily fine citizens $10,000 per day if they dare to link to a banned website. How do they know that a site is banned? They don’t — listing the sites is illegal. I guess that means you find out by receiving notice of a fine.

Perhaps this is not surprising as Germany raided the office of a German website at Australia’s request. Their offence was listing those sites banned in Australia (which is not limited to child pornography, as we shall see below).

Censoring the Internet is a little bit stupid, for several reasons.

The nature of information
First and foremost, information on the Internet is in digital form and the Internet itself is a distributed distribution network. This — as the Recording Industry Association of America can tell you — is a recipe for content that does not get distributed according to any particular rules. Web distribution is quite good at circumventing barriers, whoever might be setting them.

This is due in part because digital information is easy to copy and move. If you want to ban a page on mrtopp.com, I can very easily have it up minutes later on mrtopp.co.uk. If I needed a brand new domain name, or a new web host, it might take a matter of hours. It’s easy.

The structure of the Internet
Second, it’s easy to bounce things around. If this site is banned in Germany, you can simply view it via a UK proxy. Or view the RSS feed through an appropriate reader. Possibly, you could still view the Google cache that’s been stored.

In short, there are plenty of options to bounce off another location on the Internet, or to view the content as part of some other non-banned page. Censoring them all is impossible, and any system designed to account for current measures will be obsolete in a week.

The size of the Internet
Speaking of “censoring them all is impossible”, how many pages are on the internet? Google just gave me 393,000,000 hits for the word “sexy”. Who is going to go through each of these sites, and determine if it’s the right type of sexy?

Or do we get rid of anything that includes the words “child pornography”? In that case, goodbye Big Bad Blog — this article now has those words.

It is neither practical nor realistic to try to block content in this manner.

The problem has not been stopped
Moreover, what does the censoring of these websites actually do or accomplish?

Does it take it offline so that nobody can find it? No.
Does it punish those who create or look at the material? No.
Does it — in the case of child pornography — do anything to help the victims? No.

All it does is make those who would view it work a little bit harder, and reduces the frequency at which it is viewed accidentally. All while endangering the concept of freedom of speech — as can be seen by the fact that Australia’s list expanded to include anti-abortion groups and dentists.

No matter how you feel about anti-abortionists (or dentists), surely their voices should not be silenced.

An intelligent approach to child pornography should involve the actual removal of content, punishment of offenders, and help for victims. Censorship accomplishes none of this — but it may leave those looking for dentists in the dark.