CyberLaw Blog

Archive for the ‘extreme speech’ Category

Humberside Police: Two men found guilty of inciting racial hatred

10 July, 2009

TWO men have been found guilty of publishing written material to stir up racial hatred at Leeds Crown Court on Monday.

Simon Guy SHEPPARD (19/02/57) of Brook Street, Selby and Stephen WHITTLE (29/07/66) of Avenham Lane, Preston faced a total of 18 charges between them.

The jury considered all the evidence and have found the defendants guilty on 11 charges; however were unable to reach a verdict on seven counts.

The trial began on 03 June 2008 and the case is next due before Leeds Crown Court on Monday 28 July 2008.

Adil KHAN, Head of Diversity at Humberside Police said, ‘I welcome the decision by the jury to find SHEPPARD and WHITTLE guilty of a number of charges.

‘The jury considered some of this material breached the law and found them guilty.

‘Inciting racial hatred is a crime and one which seems to occur too regularly. This kind of material will not be tolerated as this lengthy investigation shows.

‘These men were arrested in April 2006 by Humberside Police with the assistance of North Yorkshire Police and Lancashire Police and were charged with offences dating between 2004 and 2006.

‘I would like to thank all those who gave evidence in the trial and came forward to help police with the investigation.

‘Anyone who has been affected by the trial or the material is urged to contact Humberside Police Diversity Unit on 0845 60 60 222.

‘Anyone who receives copies of such material or who comes across any on the internet they are advised to contact police either by telephone or by visiting a neighbourhood policing team.’”

(Via .)

UK obscenity law: Where to now?: “

Post-Girls (Scream) Aloud, the written word is safe – for now

Analysis As the dust settles on the Girls (Scream) Aloud trial, what are the implications for the future of obscenity law in the UK?…

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(Via The Register – Public Sector.)

Prosecutors drop ‘freedom threatening’ Girls Aloud obscenity blog case: “A blogger has been acquitted of obscenity offences in a court case that could have redefined UK citizens’ right to free speech on the internet. Prosecutors offered no evidence against the 35 year-old.”

(Via OUT-LAW News.)

Landmark case? No, not really. This was a prosecution which should have never taken place in the first place. Text based publications should not be the focus of any obscenity prosecution. [Yaman Akdeniz]

Girls Aloud net obscenity case falls at first hurdle: “

Prosecution offers no evidence

A landmark case, which could have led to draconian new restrictions on what UK authors may publish on the internet – and elsewhere – has been dismissed.…

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Prosecution counsel were due today to open their case against Civil Servant Darryn Walker, aged 35, of South Shields, who was accused of publishing an allegedly obscene story online. Instead, they stood up in Newcastle Crown Court this morning and informed the judge that they would be offering no evidence. A statement may follow.

The story in question was published around two years ago on Alt Sex Stories Text Repository, a US-based archive of erotica which currently hosts around 400,000 stories of every shape, size and interest. Entitled Girls (Scream) Aloud, it focussed on the rape, mutilation and murder of the popular group Girls Aloud for – presumably – purposes of sexual arousal.

The Daily Star reported it to the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) on the grounds that it could be criminally obscene, and the IWF referred the case to the police. Walker was arrested and charged. His trial was originally set for March of this year, but was delayed as both he and the prosecuting authorities decided to escalate the stakes by briefing top-notch barristers – Queen’s Counsel – to put their arguments.

The significance of this result cannot be underestimated. In the UK, the last major prosecution of a purely written work was for Inside Linda Lovelace in 1976. Following the failure of the jury to condemn that work as obscene, the Met Police backed off from prosecutions of wholly written material, expressing the belief that when it came to literature, if that work was not obscene, “nothing was”.

Clearly, a successful prosecution would have overturned a 30-year presumption against prosecuting authors for purely written material, and potentially opened the floodgates to a spate of prosecutions against online authors.

That genie now appears well and truly back in the bottle – although the fallout from this case is likely to be much wider, and to have a number of quite important consequences for the law and how written material is policed in the UK.

In a statement to The Register this morning, a spokesman for the Met said: “It was felt that the content of the material and the fact that it made reference to a band popular with young people who may search on the internet for information about them made this case worthy of consideration for prosecution and officers worked closely with the CPS throughout every stage of the investigations.”
Bootnote

Had the case gone to trial, your correspondent was due to give evidence on precisely the point made by the Met: at the time that the case first broke, one issue that became immediately very clear was just how difficult it was to find the site by chance. “Girls Aloud” by itself returns over two million Google hits – and the term needs refining using a range of very non-innocent words before you stand any chance of finding this story.

In effect, the more famous the target of a story, the more people who may be looking for them – but also, the harder it is to find any given story about them. ®

(Via The Register – Public Sector.)

Tories research increased net censorship: “

Jihad.com 404

The activities, alleged activities, and destiny of the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) are a constant source of controversy in these parts, so our interest was naturally piqued by a Parliamentary question from the shadow security minister Baroness Neville-Jones last week.…

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(Via The Register – Public Sector.)

Call for hate groups to be taken offline – The National Newspaper: “Call for hate groups to be taken offline

Erika Niedowski, Washington Bureau Chief
Last Updated: June 14. 2009 8:59PM UAE / June 14. 2009 4:59PM GMT

An investigator inspects bullet holes in a door at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, on Thursday. Mike Theiler / Reuters

WASHINGTON // Last week’s fatal shooting at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in the US capital by a man authorities say has deep ties to white supremacist and neo-Nazi organisations has renewed calls by some for Holocaust denial groups to be shut down on popular social networking sites.

Brian Cuban, an attorney in Texas who writes a blog called The Cuban Revolution, is seeking to have groups such as Facebook’s ‘Holohoax’ and ‘Holocaust: A Series of Lies’ removed from the site, calling them a ‘hateful form of speech that promotes violence’.

‘It’s not a historical theory, it is a pretext to bring together people who hate Jews,’ Mr Cuban said of Holocaust denial. ‘Holocaust denial is hate. And what more do you need to show that Holocaust denial is hate than somebody who is a denier walking in the museum and killing somebody?’

The suspect in Wednesday’s shooting, James von Brunn, 88, has a ‘long history of associations’ with neo-Nazis and Holocaust deniers, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center in Alabama, one of the country’s foremost authorities on hate groups. Von Brunn had created a website called holywesternempire.com, which the centre designated as a hate site in 2003.

Among the things reportedly found in von Brunn’s vehicle after the museum shooting that left Stephen T Johns, a 39-year-old African-American security guard dead, was a note that said: ‘The Holocaust is a lie. Obama was created by Jews.’
Von Brunn is expected to survive the injuries he sustained when other museum guards returned fire, according to the FBI.

Facebook, for its part, has said the existence of such groups – while ‘repulsive’ and ‘ignorant’ – does not violate the site’s terms of service. Those terms disallow hateful and threatening speech, but officials say the Holocaust groups Mr Cuban is seeking to have removed have not crossed that line. In some countries, Holocaust denial is a crime, though not in the US.

‘Just being offensive or objectionable doesn’t get it taken off Facebook,’ Barry Schnitt, a Facebook spokesman, told CNN last month. ‘We want it to be a place where people can discuss all kinds of ideas, including controversial ones.’
Mr Cuban and others had been attempting to get Facebook to take action even before the shooting.

The Simon Wiesenthal Center, an international Jewish rights organisation, released a report last month titled Facebook, YouTube: How Social Media Outlets Impact Digital Terrorism and Hate, which said that the ‘extremist use’ of such sites has grown. It documented a 25 per cent increase in the past year of ‘problematic’ groups on those sites.

Facebook has taken action in some cases. The site recently disabled the group ‘I Hate Muslims in Oz’ because it contained an ‘explicit statement of hate’. It also removed a Ku Klux Klan group, a blog at CNET.com reported.

The Holocaust denial groups are relatively small. ‘Holocaust is a Myth’ listed 64 members on Friday, while ‘Holohoax’ had 59. An attempt to reach the person listed as the creator of Holohoax, Jimmy Degrace, was unsuccessful.

A counter-group that has sprung up, United Against Holocaust Denial on Facebook, has grown quickly to 49,000 members.

The Jewish internet Defense Force (JIDF), an online organisation that works to remove material from the internet that supports Islamic terrorism and racial hatred, has launched a letter-writing campaign to 20 companies – including Radio Shack, Sprint, AT&T and Microsoft – that it says advertise on Facebook ‘side-by-side with material which denies the Holocaust’. They are asking the companies to pull their ads.

Barack Obama, the US president, recently visited the concentration camp in Buchenwald, Germany, with Elie Wiesel, a Nobel Prize-winning author and Holocaust survivor. Mr Obama said there that denying the Holocaust is ‘baseless’, ‘ignorant’ and ‘hateful’.

Last week, about the museum shooting, Mr Obama said: ‘This reminds us that we must remain vigilant against anti-Semitism and prejudice in all its forms.’

Mr Cuban does not draw a direct connection between the suspect in the shooting and the Facebook sites he opposes. But he did call such sites ‘training grounds’ for those with the same supremacist ideas as the ones allegedly held by von Brunn. He has reported that several European companies did pull their ads from Facebook because they did not want to be associated with Holocaust denial content.

‘It is time for Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to once and for all close down his Facebook recruiting ground for the ‘James Von Brunns In Training’ of the world,’ Mr Cuban wrote in his blog. ‘They are training unchecked in the giant social media universe of Facebook. It is time to send the message that this hatred and violence being spawned on Facebook will no longer be tolerated.’

‘It’s silly games with semantics,’ Mr Cuban said in an interview. ‘Because the site doesn’t say ‘We hate Jews’, and they call it Holocaust denial instead, that does not qualify it as a hate group. It’s semantics. It’s ignorant semantics and it’s naive semantics.’

Secret European project to battle online jihad: “

‘Significant’ international bid to block extremism

The UK is collaborating with the German, Dutch and Czech governments on a secret research project on how to effectively block the distribution of Islamic extremist material online.…

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(Via The Register – Public Sector.)

How the government uses dirty data to legislate morality: “

So what’s a standard deviation?

When it comes to sex and censorship, Government’s insistence that laws are ‘evidence-based’ is little more than hot air.…

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(Via The Register – Public Sector.)

Minister admits thought crime is on the agenda: “

Oh George, you are a one

A short exchange in the Commons yesterday suggests that thought crime is now officially on the government’s agenda.…

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(Via The Register – Public Sector.)

UK’s net radicalization plans are ‘crude, costly, counter-productive’: “

Get with the positive, says report – but will that wash?

Negative government measures to counter online radicalisation are crude, costly and counter-productive, says a report released yesterday – if it’s serious about the issue, it needs to harness the positive.…

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(Via The Register – Public Sector.)