[governance] England and shutting off Twitter & Blackberry access

[Charity Gamboa]

Fouad, apparently Blackberry has been cooperating with the British
authorities after rioters were using the blackberry messenger. Makers of the
Blackberry ( I think it is RIM or Research in Motion) can cooperate but they
have insisted that those messages sent were going to be encrypted and cannot
be unscrambled. What's really going on is that those messages inciting
rioting were sent to twitter, probably re-posted and amplified in several
networks. But I think Twitter has refused to close the accounts of rioters.
It's like saying "*your right to throw a punch ends where my nose begins.*"
Twitter is a private company, as such, they cannot be required to provide
their service to anybody. It is their right to refuse their service if they
do so choose. If these people are using twitter to organize and  encourage
criminal activity, then twitter can refuse their service and at the same
time they have the right *not *to refuse service *irrespective of content*.
All the government can do is track information and thwart any more looting.
Also, RIM and Twitter may be legally ordered to hand over information if
there are suspicions of unlawful activity. I'm not a lawyer but I doubt very
much that Twitter will close the accounts of rioters. Closing those twitter
accounts is not going to stop the rioting. The police have to stop them. The
police might be outnumbered. If the police open fire, there's going to be
all sort of human right accusations even if these law-breaking hooligans
have been on the wrong in some sense.

If you remember the beating of Rodney King in Los Angeles years back, it
also incited the same rioting in LA. There were looting, too. The police
couldn't stop them. It just wound down. When these hooligans in London don't
have anything else to loot, the rioting will wind down.  The loot money will
eventually run out and I guess it's time to start looking for a real job.
The real root of most of society's problems is allowing its people to be
"addicted" to the entitlement system. When you make it so easy for most
people, they abuse that. Why work when everything is handed down to you? The
moral fiber in our "civilized" society is waning. I have students who
believe that if they want to have new clothes, they have to steal them in
the mall. They don't realize that in order to acquire these material things,
you have to work and save up. The riots are nothing more than an opportunity
to find an excuse to  "go down hard and not get hungry." Sad but true.

Regards,
Charity



On Fri, Aug 12, 2011 at 6:38 AM, Roland Perry <
roland at internetpolicyagency.com> wrote:

> In message <CAHuaJtPiRPSmr-**V2ts8xFNBTG7gto6Kr-gSkE1n=NCtq**
> mXU16A at mail.gmail.com <NCtqmXU16A at mail.gmail.com>>, at 13:43:15 on Fri, 12
> Aug 2011, Fouad Bajwa <fouadbajwa at gmail.com> writes
>
>  Shut this off, and you not only facilitate the danger,
>> you endanger our fundamental right to freedom of speech. Violence
>> should be punished where the law has been broken, but not at the
>> expense of our fundamental rights."
>>
>
> I don't think there's a practical possibility of shutting off people's
> access to social networking sites (which is where the Internet Governance
> aspect is involved), but this episode has been the nearest to "shouting fire
> in a crowded theater" that I can think of for some time (which is relevant
> to the concept of free speech).
>
> The initial riots (which soon became completely non-political looting) may
> well have been triggered by false reports that the police had shot a suspect
> in the head[1]. In the UK, the police shooting anyone is quite a rare thing,
> there's an average of only two fatal incidents a year - which is perhaps why
> such a fuss is made. (And it's about 100x less than the USA, once you factor
> in the different population size)
>
> [1] A man was shot (and died), but not in the head.
> --
> Roland Perry
>
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