This is the location to create and debate potential policies to improve the current legal system.
1). Reform of legal language and the halting of the roll back of trial by jury for complex financial cases and cases where jury protection is an issue. Public safety is increasingly being used as an excuse to roll back rights our ancestors spilt much blood to win for us. We owe it to them.
3). Longer court working hours to reduce remand prisoners time awaiting trial (judges enjoy short working hours and generous holidays).
4) A full review of the use of CCTV cameras e-mail scanning and similar technology.
5) Review of legislation which encourages the ‘compensation culture’..accidents don’t happen anymore, a crack in the pavement you trip over..claim against the council. a postman sprains his ankle on your drive ..claim against the property owner. This is a tremendously corrosive force in society driven by greed. We used to just dust ourselves off, curse our bad luck and keep our eyes open. Now everything is viewed as an opportinity to sue your fellow man for a buck. the erosion of trust and social engegement this produces is terrible surely? Most people hate the compensation culture but nothing ever seems to get done about it.
5). removal of those silly wigs for goodness sake!
Got your own suggestion?
Post it, debate it, if it is supported it will be added.
Join the debate.
Contact your local elected officials - for free
by Jericoa
25 Jul 2009 at 20:11
In my local leisure centre there is a new sign on the wall it says
” no photography or video allowed without the express permission of the centre manager’
The centre manager had obviously missed the irony of siting the poster underneath a CCTV camera.
We are allowing a creeping surviellence culture to develop where it is continually ‘suggested’ to us that individuals can not be trusted, only the state can be trusted to keep us safe.
I was filmed entering the centre, I was filmed pacing impatiently in the corridor outside a kids party waiting to pick up my daughter.
Noboddy asked my permission because it was the state filming me. If I had got a camera out and started taking pictures of people coming and going i would have been asked to leave but the state can do it as much as it likes to ‘keep us safe’.
Just because this nation was one of the founders of modern democratic and judicial societies does not mean we can be complacent.
True stories like the above and the progressive roll back of trial by jury the use of instant fines by police and others, detention without trial and mass screening of e-mails and police infiltration into ‘demonstration groups’ to pre-empt any potential protest which may break the law should send a chill down all our spines. Such activities are of course done by the state to ‘protect us’.
When will the people wake up?
It must never be allowed to be the case that the state is trusted more than individuals, sure there are risks in that (which the state uses as an excuse) but the CCTV cameras will not help the demise of our fragile society if we start not to trust each other in even the most basic of situations.
CCTV and state surviellance in most forms (some must remain) must surely be part of the manifesto?
Any view out there?
by Nick Taylor
26 Jul 2009 at 12:51
I think CCTV in the UK isn’t so much the state, as the prevailing (ie: corporate) culture. When was the last time you saw a pub that didn’t have one? A corner store?
Last time I looked, the coffee kiosks at Victoria Station in London, have 3 of them… pointed at the person making coffee. The Elevator in Waterstones in Brighton has a crafty trap… a mirror that you make faces in, before realising you’re on camera. They are everywhere… and as far as I can see, most of them aren’t owned by the state.
But they’re not the ones making the waves. The cameras that are really making a difference are cellphones. The top-down surveillance empire is feeling the first blows of the seven-shades-of-shit-being-kicked-out-of-it to come.
We need to be careful about storage of personal and biometric information. Personally I think the CCTV panic is over-rated… but the storage of personal and biometric information together is problematic.
A possible approach to this is outlined here:
http://guptaoption.com/4.SIAB-ISA.php
And as Vinay says at about 14.00… “this approach is horrifically dangerous, and people who back this approach are just not thinking”
“This approach” encompassing the ID-card/Database-state approach the the UK govt is taking. This is the only issue that would ever see me vote Tory… and it does kindof eclipse the others.
by goldtop
26 Jul 2009 at 15:05
“A possible approach to this is outlined here:
http://guptaoption.com/4.SIAB-ISA.php”
Blimey. Summarise that for me would you? My brain boiled over after the sixth or so page…
by Jericoa
26 Jul 2009 at 16:53
Nick,
I take your point about the corporate survielance culture, but corporate is a very short step away from the state, same beast, different clothes.
It never really bothered me before but there has been a creeping realisation on my part that the survielance culture under the guise of protecting the public or corporate assets is eroding trust between individuals and there is a gradual dis-engagement between people in favour of ‘hands off ‘ engagement via technology.
Everything now defaults back to the CCTV images recovered or the DNA fingerprinting compared to the database…that in parallel with an erosion of trial by jury.
How long will it be I wonder before someone proposes that jury trials are phased out for murder cases..who needs the time expense and potential security risk to jurers when we can just compare the DNA to the database and refer to the CCTV images.. job done..no reasonable doubt..no need for a jury…?
In the modern world CCTV and DNA fingerprinting still rely on the integrity of individuals for them to be used for the benefit of all rather than a tool to control potentialy troublesome (or creative) individuals. CCTV images can be manipulated, as can a print out from acomputer in a DNA testing lab if you can hack into it…….
One thing, not entirely unrelated was when I found out that the police now routinely infiltrate campaigne groups in order to pre-empt ‘crimes’ they may be considering which may not be in the public interest.
That combined with the anti terror squad raiding an opposition MP’s office in the houses of parliament makes me think we are much further down the road towards some kind of ‘ big brother’ state than we realise.
It scares the hell out of me!!!
by Berko
29 Jul 2009 at 14:27
I seem to recall growing up in a place where people used to regularly say things like “it’s a free country” and “innocent until proven guilty”.
I look back on those days fondly.
I find it hard to work out if it’s just nostalgia for naivety or if things really have shifted so far, so fast.
With CCTV etc in point 4. The common response that “if you’re not doing anything wrong you’ve nothing to worry about” isn’t good enough in my view. And not good enough to justify the council snooping on your bins and kids to see if they’re in the catchment area you say etc.
Mistakes will always be made and it scares me that one day someone will bash down my door because “the computer says you did it” because someone has mis-input a cell in a database somewhere or there’s someone else with my name etc. A false sense of certainty is a dangerous thing.
I suppose it’s comes down to an extension of the idea that the people are too weak and stupid to be trusted to do anything and so need to be managed, constantly. I don’t much want to live in that society. At the heart of it is the question of what we want our government to be “for” and where the line between protection and freedom lies.
Does it impact on society’s perception of itself? Dunno, but I’ve just read that in 1981 44% of people agreed that “most people could be trusted” and in 2006 it was 31%. Something’s going on.
Maybe a formal constitution could clear some of this up. Is there much support for one among people who know about such things?
Related to the CCTV issue is new technology I’ve heard of being developed along the lines of face-recognition that will be able to scan the net for any pictures with a particular face in it. Fine for finding pictures of yourself in someone else’s holiday snaps on Flikr, but easy to see slightly more sinister uses.
That info came from a conversation at a party with someone working in the field, but similarly I’ve just found this..
http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2007/05/facial-recognition-slipped-into-google-image-search.ars
We seem to be rapidly moving into a world where the idea of privacy is redundant. Is that good?
Public / private space is an interesting topic in itself, our urban spaces are increasingly taken up by areas (shopping malls etc but more recently streets) that we assume to be public spaces but are not and which have private security with the power to police restrictions on acceptable behaviour, and even dress (remember the hoodies in Bluewater)
Also, with the rate of regulation, it’s increasing hard to know what we are and are not allowed to do. Apparently more criminal justice laws have been passed since 1997 that in the previous 100 years. Surely simplicity and dissemination of details of new laws should be key.
Perhaps a “Highway Code” style book of things that are illegal, and why, to be taught in schools?
by Jericoa
29 Jul 2009 at 21:53
You ask some good questions and make some astute observations.
I don’t have much time today to respond in detail but I do have time to say I dont think you are naive.
I suspect if you could get a compelling message out there there probably would be a lot of support for an alternate constitution and a fresh look at society, top to bottom taking cognisance of the changed landscape we live in brought obout by technology.
The technology is too far advanced now for the cultural system it is supposed to serve.
The tricky bit is getting the message out there and raising awareness. media coverage is given based on incumbant popularity, not necesaily the same thing as the best and most in touch arguments!
it is very hard to get a tangible mainstream message out there, competing with the incumbents and also a media machine that has become expert at hooking peoples attension with celebrity and sex and the like and not letting it go.
How to break through that fog?