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item0071A 1010, 1011 1010 14 June 2004
Internet Freedom 15 June 2004: Mike Davis seeks to have the last word... Hi Dad I've just read Mike Davis' response to you, and yours back to him. 
I understand the 'rhetoric' of wanting the Internet to be a new 'free' zone, for freedom of speech, freedom from regulation, freedom from 'The State'. Surrounded as I am, in my friendship group, by a myriad of IT advocates, techies and indeed 'pioneers' in web technology, I know the excitement and passion there is about the Web as a 'new frontier', being created and exploited faster than anyone can attempt to find the means to police it. There is a real sense of rebellion, revolution and escape.
I certainly believe that the Web has
transformed and empowered millions of ordinary people not only to speak to
audiences and individuals they could never have dreamed of, but to have an
unprecedented level of access to information, perspectives and opinions
which they could never have previously experienced without being a dedicated
researcher, or obsessive political doorstep stalker!
This is an unwieldy, and ineffective process - given the scale upon which the
regulation is required to operate. A combination of international treaty on
internet law and imaginative legal conceptual developments will, I believe,
inevitably come. You may have noticed that recently the first British
It is a precedent that will be followed, as the real world grows
15 June 2004: Mike Davis seeks to have the last word...
1011 14 June 2004 I distrust UKIP, the Euro Election and Euro 2004 have besieged us with bogus concepts of "identity" - and more particularly British identity. This language is without meaning. "Identity" is essentially a personal matter, of individuality, of personality. An "identity" card does not designate your collective "allegiance" or adherence to anything or anyone: it merely records the distinctive features of your individuality, so that you as an individual can be identified.  A similar intellectual error was made, by Mr Justice Macpherson, when
he coined the phrase "institutionalised racism", when giving his verdict
on the Stephen Lawrence murder. The fallacy of this concept runs on,
and continues to bedevil our understanding of racism in our Police forces.
New reports clearly indicate - surprise, surprise - that there racists among our policemen:
see
Observer 13 June. It seems that Trevor Phillips, as Chairman
of the Commission for Racial Equality, continues to beat the drum in
opposition to "institutional racism".
as systems: the Indian caste system falls within than category, certainly in its lower reaches. Formal decisions, selections, promotions are made explicitly on the basis of race, or culture, or family lineage. But that is not the problem with the Police , or other traditional UK institutions. Their problem is that formal non-racist systems are nevertheless racist as practised, by a significant proportion of the individuals involved. The racism is that of prejudiced individuals, who bring to their defined jobs or functions racist presumptions which distort their judgments and their actions. That is not "institutionalised racism", in any meaningful sense of the term. It may be that middle-ranking and junior officers sense that their actions, even if racist, are supported and even approved by their superiors - but that is not institutionalised racism either: that is simply a case of high-ranking racism, which permeates its poison down through the lower ranks.I have no doubt whatever that the racism of individual officers is too easily tolerated by their superiors, condoned and accepted, in a value-environment from which racism has not been unequivocally excluded, either by example, precept or priinciple. Prejudiced stop-and-search practices are deeply entrenched, and condoned by superior officers. There is too much evidence of racist conduct at Police socials, too many reports of Bernard Manning and his ilk raising racist guffaws from everyone, including senior officers. This racism is not "institutionalised": it is shared individual racism, it is unchallenged racism, its values are applauded by thousands of morally fragile individuals who are rather glad that they have joined a team with other racists. Racism is deeply embedded, and it will probably take two generations of promotions through the ranks to permit the promotion of those who will not tolerate racism below them.
What do you think? Drop me a line
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But
- this new frontier must be subject to regulation and the rule of law.
Money and other contract transactions are made in it, publications are read
(with all the potential for slander and defamation that you highlight),
and -
most importantly - crimes are committed on it, and aided by the use of it.
Children who have been already violated, abused and even killed in real life, are doubly
violated by the publication and sale of the photographs and footage of their
abuse, and the trade in such products thrives at unprecedented levels in the
lawless creases of this "new frontier".