Patients win choice of sharing medical records
Can you support Sgt Danny Nightingale?
Boom in private investigators risks avoiding surveillance regulation
In a word, yes.
When news broke of the US Government’s wholesale request for data on Associated Press journalists,
The New Yorker quickly highlighted how US law allowed the Department of Justice to go straight to the phone companies, without notifying AP (although it’s own guidelines said this should not normally happen.) Because of this, there was no opportunity to test the justification for such a massive intrusion on the freedom of the press.
The latest twist in the Leveson saga is the Government’s proposed amendments to protect ‘small scale bloggers’.
We previously warned the drafting meant groups like Big Brother Watch could be covered, along with websites like ConHome and Mumsnet.
The amendment makes clear if you’re a multi-author blog with a turnover below £2m, you won’t be considered a ‘relevant publisher’ for the purposes of exemplary damages and cost protections. This is an important clarification. (Although the bill does still appear to lack a definition of ‘blog’, which could prove interesting – and expensive to argue in court.)
However, the drafting only protects either ‘incidental’ publishers of news-related material, or multi-author blogs. So someone who is not a blog, who publishes news-related material on a regular basis, remains in scope even if their turnover is £10,000.
In other words, if you’re a small, local newspaper with 3 staff and a turnover of £100,000 then you’re still a relevant publisher, but if you are a £1.5m turnover blog with 8 full time staff you’re not.
3pm Friday is the deadline for amendments to be submitted to the Crime and Courts Bill, which is in the Lords on Monday. The clauses being considered include those for various parts of the Leveson “deal” (Of course, given this isn’t statutory regulation of the press we may well be imagining it.)
Let us be clear – the manner in which this has been brought to bear, in 2am meetings with lobbyists, no civil society input, rushed drafting and ill-considered consequences should not be the way to make law. Indeed, we cannot think of a worse way to make law.
Today Parliament will vote on the Royal Charter for press regulation. While we have not yet seen the final details, serious concerns remain.The detail has been haggled over in two sets of meetings – one with the three party leaders, and one with Ed Miliband, Nick Clegg and Hacked Off.
MPs should not be afraid to table amendments where the proposals do not work and we have highlighted three critical issues that must be addressed.
The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) has published interim guidelines on when it is appropriate to prosecute people for communications they send on social media. If the objective was a return to common sense policing, issuing twenty-five pages of guidance has risked complicating the situation even more.
The necessity for the communication to be ‘grossly offensive’ or ‘obscene’ for a prosecution to be made is highlighted within the guidelines. However, there remains an urgent need to reform laws that pose a serious risk to freedom of speech after several ludicrous prosecutions in recent months.
Last night the Government suffered heavy defeat on the reform of Section 5, a campaign Big Brother Watch has been proud to support.
As Baroness Smith of Basildon noted: “it is nearly a year since the Government launched their consultation on public order policing and whether the word “insulting” should be removed from Section 5 of the Public Order Act. In the Committee on this Bill-a good five months after the close of the consultation-the Minister said that he hoped that at Report stage, the Government “will be able to put forward the Government’s considered view to the House”. Since then, the Government had a further five months to come to a decision, and yet-unless the Minister is going to make an announcement this evening-even at this stage, we still have not had a public announcement from the Government about their position, or about the findings and evidence from the consultation which your Lordships’ House has asked for.”
In the latest of a series of frankly bizarre and unwarranted arrests, Kent Police yesterday took a 19 year old into custody. His crime?
“This follows a posting on a social network site of a burning poppy,”said the police statement. At the time of writing the person was still being detained and has not yet been interviewed.
He was arrested under the Malicious Communications Act 1988. Section 1, “deals with the sending to another of any article which is indecent or grossly offensive, or which conveys a threat, or which is false, provided there is an intent to cause distress or anxiety to the recipient”.
Kent Police need to urgently release this man and drop an utterly ridiculous investigation into something that has harmed no-one.
It is not illegal – and nor should it ever be – to offend people and, however idiotic or insensitive the picture may have been.
The incident is certainly not worthy of arrest and highlights the urgent need to reform a law that poses a serious risk to freedom of speech after several ludicrous prosecutions in recent months.
The long-awaited inquiry into “the culture, practices and ethics of the British press” being run by Lord Leveson is nearing completion, and rumblings of a proposal to regulate the press are beginning to surface.
Let us be clear – a free press is a fundamental part of a democratic society. From bloggers to broadsheets, the idea that the state should be able to decide who gets to publish is entirely at odds with the essential role the press plays in holding the state and authority to account.
We entirely agree with Eric Pickles MP and Boris Johnson, to name but a few who have spoken out against the idea of Parliament passing a new law to regulate the press.
In our evidence to the Leveson enquiry, we made a simple argument against statutory regulation of the press. Everything that has led to the Leveson enquiry is already punishable under criminal law.
From phone hacking to blagging information from public and private organisations, those people intentionally acquiring information they did not have the right to access are already committing a a criminal offence. The fact that the Information Commissioner is woefully short of powers and that it is still not a criminal offence to breach Section 55 of the Data Protection Act (something we, the Information Commissioner and two Parliamentary committees have called for) are clearly troubling, but it would be far better to fix these shortcomings than to try and capture our entire media in a splurge of regulation. Quite how it would even work in an internet age is far from clear.
For those individuals in a public body selling information, there is the offence of misconduct in public office. Only a few weeks ago did a senior Metropolitan Police figure appear in court charged exactly with this offence after allegedly selling information to the News of The World.
Yes, we need to protect people’s privacy and personal information. To do that, you regulate how and when information is collected, and what happens to it after it is collected. Whether it is an insurance company checking out previous illnesses, a private investigator working on a divorce settlement or a journalist investigating which politicians are abusing their expenses, all of those situations require better protections of the data in the first place. To single out the journalist as a special case undermines the wider ambition to protect privacy and puts our media in a precarious position.
The only benefactors of such a state of affairs would be those who seek to abuse their power and avoid accountability. We must not allow this to happen.
Speaking in Parliament last week Rowan Atkinson lent his support to the Reform Section5 campaign, which continues to gather momentum.
Keir Starmer QC, the Director of Public Prosecutions, has announced that he is to issue guidelines for social media prosecutions. In a statement the DPP said that “the time has come for an informed debate about the boundaries of free speech in an age of social media.”
The remarks follow the decision not to prosecute Daniel Thomas for posting a homophobic message on Twitter relating to Tom Daley and Peter Waterfield.
The Communications Act 2003 makes it an offence to send a communication using a public electronic communications network if that communication is “grossly offensive”. In this case the Chief Crown Prosecutor for Wales, Jim Brisbane, concluded that on full analysis of the context and circumstances the message was not deemed to be so grossly offensive that criminal charges were sought.