Olly Zanetti: Internet Policing
The establishment totally fails to understand how to govern the wild web.
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The timing couldn't have been better. Just as the UK was getting its annual winter snow spattering, Paul Chambers was in the court of appeal in London presenting his case for leniency to two senior judges. Whether Chambers appreciated the timing is another matter - it was snow which led to his whole predicament.
In January 2010, Chambers was on his way to Northern Ireland. He'd met a girl online and things were going well. He was looking forward to seeing her. But disaster struck in the form of snowfall. Frustrated, and waiting in Nottingham's Robin Hood airport, he reached for his phone and tweeted. “Crap! Robin Hood airport is closed. You've got a week and a bit to get your shit together otherwise I'm blowing the airport sky high!!” Perhaps he thought the tweet would raise a smirk in a couple of his 690 followers. Perhaps he thought a few friends would sympathise with his frustration that snow was in the way of a meeting he was really looking forward to. Probably, he clicked send and thought nothing more about it.
Nothing, that is, until a week later when he was arrested at his workplace. That's one week later – by which time it was clear the airport had not been blown sky high. His tweet hadn't been picked up by intelligence officers scouring the land for terror threats. Rather, a staff member at Robin Hood airport had stumbled across it online and forwarded it to the police. Though neither the police nor the airport authorities thought the threat was credible, the arrest went ahead anyway. And the farce didn't end there. Chambers was tried. Found guilty. Appealed. Had his appeal quashed. And now, finally, is defending himself in the highest court in the land. His supposed crime, “Sending a public electronic message that was grossly offensive or of an indecent, obscene or menacing character contrary to the Communications Act 2003.”
Back in January, the world was forced to do without Wikipedia for 24 hours. Google, stopping short of shutting down, censored their logo with a thick black bar. These were acts of protest against Sopa, proposed laws being debated in the US congress which could allow the US government to force internet search engines to block content they suspect as being related to piracy. But, as Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales told the BBC, "Proponents of Sopa have characterised the opposition as being people who want to enable piracy or defend piracy. But that's not really the point. The point is the bill is so over broad and so badly written that it's going to impact all kinds of things that, you know, don't have anything to do with stopping piracy."
Put simply, the bill in its form at the time would have fundamentally changed the way the web functions. Rather than the entwined network we currently have, accusations of association with piracy would see links cut left, right and centre as US internet servers would be prohibited to link to your content for fear of being hauled up in front of a US court. The fundamentally democratic principles of the internet as they currently stand would be endangered, replaced with de facto policing by the US government. Following protest, the legislation is on hold until wider agreement can be found.
What links the Paul Chambers and SOPA cases is the way that those in the establishment have totally failed to understand the internet. They're governors and their instinct is to govern. In itself that's okay, but legislators have assumed that there's something fundamentally different about the internet which sets it apart from ordinary life. They're wrong. Sure, the internet is still a fairly novel technology – particularly if you're a bit older. But it is just a communications technology that facilitates the contact that people have anyway, in the same way the telephone does, or even the letter. If Paul Chambers had said what he said in the pub, the consequences would have been zero. Likewise, I've yet to see lending a DVD to a friend being criminalised alongside the infrastructure that helps it take place.
The internet spent its first couple of decades in happy freedom from legislative interference. Now, for various reasons, the rule makers want to make their mark on the online world. And that's fair enough. An online version of the wild west is in no one's interests, and some rules which govern behaviour are okay. But that rule making needs to be done properly.
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Internet Policing (text) by Olly Zanetti is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
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