Earth: Mostly Harmless

W.T.F.

The UK seems to be becoming allergic to protest. The extent to which freedom of expression is being curtailed is becoming quite scary.

A teenager is facing prosecution for using the word “cult” to describe the Church of Scientology.

The unnamed 15-year-old was served the summons by City of London police when he took part in a peaceful demonstration opposite the London headquarters of the controversial religion.

Officers confiscated a placard with the word “cult” on it from the youth, who is under 18, and a case file has been sent to the Crown Prosecution Service.

A date has not yet been set for him to appear in court.

The decision to issue the summons has angered human rights activists and support groups for the victims of cults.

The incident happened during a protest against the Church of Scientology on May 10. Demonstrators from the anti-Scientology group, Anonymous, who were outside the church’s £23m headquarters near St Paul’s cathedral, were banned by police from describing Scientology as a cult by police because it was “abusive and insulting”.

Full story

Pirate Bay interrogation transcripts

Oh jeez. This is funny.

Some transcripts from the Pirate Bay admins, who are being questioned by the Swedish police. It’s a testament to Sweden’s open society that these transcripts are available at all.

Cleveland Police, being all British about it, haven’t released anything on the OiNK admin’s arrest (probably because they’re having difficulty finding anything to charge him with).

Get the full version here.

I: Interrogator
T: TiAMO (Fredrik Neij)

I: This has been a police investigation for a long time. The prosecutor’s case is one of copyright infringement, assisting in copyright infringement and conspiracy to commit copyright infringement. What is your position on this?

T: That he is wrong. That if we are guilty, then Google is guilty too.

I: You mean you can compare Google to The Pirate Bay?

T: Almost.

I: What the difference between them?

T: Well… One difference is that you can upload torrents on The Pirate Bay, but it’s really the same thing because if you have a site with copyrighted material, you can add the link to be indexed on Google. It’s the same level as both sites are handling user-generated material. We don’t have any views on what the content is, we just provide a search engine.

I: But these torrents.. Uhm.. I don’t know what it is in plural (ED: The word “torrent” sounds weird in plural in Swedish)

T: Files of meta data..

I: Yes, I know but what… torrents. If we talk about torrents as more than one, they actually end up on The Pirate Bay’s servers. That’s different to Google?

T: But in the same way it’s… we have a torrent file that is a reference to the material. Someone who only uses a meta link and doesn’t host the file but the file is still available on the filesharing network. Should that be less illegal or more legal? Just because you store the binary data for the hash file locally on a server?

I: But that’s more than Google provides. They only provide a link in that case. While a user or a specific computer in another network provides with the actual… meta data. That has nothing to do with…

T: But then you had to decide whether meta data in itself is illegal or not.

I: But surely it’s not!

T: No.

I: I don’t believe so either, but the summary I mentioned, assisting to commit a crime, that is supplying or owning certain things that can be used for a crime. In this case, it’s providing a tracker, providing a collection of torrent files, you have… It’s about a search engine and so on. That’s more than Google does?

T: Yes

The price of education?

Laura brought this to my attention: worrying stuff in the current difficult civil rights climate. The video included below appears to show Mostafa Tabatabainejad, a UCLA student, being violently restrained and shocked with a taser gun after refusing to show staff his I.D. card in the UCLA library. Tabatabainejad is arrested, and refuses to stand up. He is tasered again. The cycle is repeated several times until a final confrontation in the library lobby results in cops (now in greater numbers) dragging Tabatabainejad away.

Several students admirably take up Tabatabainejad’s cause, repudiating the officers’ advances, and (as the video proves) recording the events so that ample evidence now exists for a high-profile lawsuit.

Laura writes:

The questions I would ponder are:

1) Would the reaction on the part of the security staff had been as fierce if the student was white and/or female?

2) Were the actions of the student and the police influenced by the large number of students gathering to see what was going on?

I’d be interested to know what you think.

It’s a shocking video, and a brutal indictment of the police involved and the climate of hysteria which exists in some circles in the U.S. regarding Arab-Americans.

More: Detailed coverage from Andy Sternberg; BoingBoing’s first and second post on this; Pictures of Friday’s student protests at UCLA over this incident; UCLA chancellor’s response

I have included Laura’s post below, along with the video of the arrest. Don’t watch if you’re squeamish.

I originally saw this video posted on kensei’s journal. It shows a student being tasered by security staff at a university library. Apparently it is policy for people to be IDed in the library after 11pm for the safety of the students.

Personally I’m wondering if this incident would have happened if the student was white. Or female for that matter.

‘I Spy with Thy Lecturer’s Eye’

This is a story I wrote for publication in my University’s student newspaper. It went out in the 9th November edition of the Strathclyde Telegraph (which went out today, due to late printing). It was edited for publication somewhat but I’ve chosen to publish the version which went to press here in the interests of consistency…

And no, the title/headline is nothing to do with me - so send your groans/complaints elsewhere!

A leaked draft memorandum has revealed the UK government gave serious consideration to asking senior university staff to pass on information regarding Muslim or “Asian-looking” students to the security services. This approach appears to be the latest in a series of faltering efforts aimed at tackling ‘extremism’ in Muslim communities, for which the government believes campuses are “fertile recruiting grounds”.

The memo, which is not publicly available but was obtained by The Guardian, calls for university staff to cede information to Special Branch units of regional police forces regarding the activities of Muslim societies on campus.

It has provoked outrage among students, university staff and among Muslim communities.

Ousman Sadiq, a Masters student on Strathclyde’s Computer and Electronic Systems course described the measures as “a largely unhelpful bit of guidance that will end up only making Muslims feel more oppressed, while still not being a deterrent to those who tend towards an extremist viewpoint”.

NUS National President Gemma Tumelty criticised the plans as likely to introduce a “McCarthy-like atmosphere of suspicion between students and lecturers”, and the Universities and Colleges Union joint secretary Paul Mackney warned that the memo had the implication of “blurring the boundaries of what is illegal and what is possibly undesirable”. “UCU members have a pivotal role in building trust - these proposals, if implemented, would make it all but impossible”. The Australian Vice Chancellors Committee (AVCC) even went so far as to issue a press release to reassure students studying in Australia that such measures would never be implemented there.

While plans to distribute the memo itself among senior university staff appear to have been shelved, its essentially ill-founded premises, unhelpful tone and ham-fisted terminology are further evidence of the Government’s increasingly desperate attempts to foster better community relations from the top down.

The memo is ostensibly aimed at averting acts of terrorism, but confuses terrorism on the one hand, and radicalisation on the other. To say that universities sometimes radicalise people in their religious and political views is hardly controversial, but to consider this radicalisation in the context of Muslim communities a stepping stone to committing acts of violence implies a very dim view of students’ morality. Tumelty suggests that “indiscriminate monitoring of groups on campus assumes collective guilt”.

The accusatory tone of the document also has implications for student recruitment and retention. The numbers of Muslim students on many university courses is already unrepresentative of the wider social mix in many British cities - and Mackney fears that proposals like those in the memo, mixed with unhelpful comments from government ministers in recent weeks regarding issues such as the veil, could undermine the “enormous strides” made in recent years in university diversity and race relations.

The government’s approach of ethnic profiling, as evidenced by the ‘Asian-looking’ reference in the memo, has also come in for sharp criticism. Labony Choudhury, a student at Sheffield University interviewed by The Guardian, pointed out that “being Muslim has nothing to do with the colour of your skin, nor terrorism of any description. It’s like trying to define what a rapist looks like. Far too simplistic.”

By Graeme West

29th October 2006