27 Jul 10 | Uncategorized
There’s a moment in political satire The Thick Of It when beleaguered shadow minister Peter Mannion showcases the stereotypical attitude of politicians towards the general public: “I’ve met them.” he says, “They’re fucking horrible”.
Unfortunately, the Australian government has decided to demonstrate that this attitude isn’t just comedic invention. Displaying similar disdain for the great unwashed, they’ve refused to divulge their proposals for a new law to monitor phone and internet traffic (broadly similar to the UK’s discarded Communications Bill of 2008, which was memorably described by Index on Censorship trustee Ken Macdonald as the precursor to “an unimaginable hell-house of personal private information”).
What’s even odder is that the Australian government’s justification for their decision involves claiming that publication would lead to “premature unnecessary debate”: it’s unthinkable, evidently, that citizens in a parliamentary democracy should be able to monitor or discuss the legislative process.
The document in question has in fact been opened to the public, but has had more than 90 per cent of its text redacted. In its current form [pdf], we get a cover page, some general blurb on the theme of data retention, and then page after page of squiggly black marker pen. In an attempt to remove anything which might offer any kind of insight, the government have excised the contents page, parts of the glossary, and even an innocuous introductory section answering the question “How important is communications data?”. In what may be some kind of bleak bureaucratic joke, they’ve kindly retained the margin numbering for the reams of blank paragraphs and bullet points which follow.
What’s really depressing about this decision is not the inane practice of agreeing to release a document then obscuring all of its content, but that the only justification offered for such action is the avoidance of public debate. One might reasonably expect the deletion of sensitive materials if there are issues of national security at stake, but no one’s suggesting that this is the case here. Deleting material for the sake of saving the government from having to explain it to the electorate is pretty dubious. Indeed, I’m not sure whether any kind of democracy should view public discussion as “unnecessary”; likewise, protestations over privacy seem to ring fairly hollow when the laws being outlined potentially involve the infringement of individual privacy on a huge scale.
If this decision is indeed about convenience rather than necessity, then it displays exactly the kind of arrogant superciliousness lampooned by The Thick Of It. How terribly impolite of us, this judgment seems to say, not to recognise the nuisance we cause for politicians by wanting details of the laws they’re planning to introduce. How needlessly we frustrate them with calls for freedom of information, public discourse or democratic accountability. It’d all be much easier, much simpler, if we just gave up claims to involvement in their work and simply allow them, under cover of darkness and marker pen, to decide what’s best for everyone else.
27 Jul 10 | Uncategorized
Hello there, Indexers. This is my last blog till September. Yes, you read that right. Although I seem all unconventional and bohemian, I am taking August off, like teachers, school-children, and parents of school-children. I’m not going away, though, so don’t worry. If you suddenly need a small rant about something freedom-of-speechy, you can just mail me and I’ll be vexed for a sentence or two, to keep you going. And I don’t like the summer, so I’ll be counting the days till I come back to you. I won’t be off having fun without you, seeing other blogs, wondering if we could just be friends. No way.
Do you read this in an office? I realised the other week than I haven’t worked in an office since computer screens were black with green writing on. So I don’t know how spreadsheets work, or what PowerPoint is. Or why you would wish to merge mail, or what that entails. I don’t like not knowing things, so I feel kinda bad about this. Perhaps I could use my summer productively, finding out.
One of the downsides of not having worked in an office since the internet began is that I find the conventions of office netiquette hard to guess. For example, I cannot swear if I write to my brother, who works in, you guessed it, an office. If I do swear, in an email to him, his company blocks the mail and sends me a shitty note telling me they have (see, I’m swearing already. Fluent in three languages and I still can’t help myself). They also send him a shitty note, telling him to stop getting mail from his sweary, awful sister.
I used to complain to him about this: it seems to me such a massive, stupid waste of time, money and life. Who really has the energy to employ someone whose whole job involves telling people off for their language, like Ronnie Corbett’s dad in the lame 80s sitcom, Sorry! Who applies for that job? How to you prove you have the necessary skills? Do you have references for being an irritating killjoy who sucks freedom of expression from a room?
My brother pointed out that it was simply something that fell foul of the firewall his company has in place. I didn’t really see why they would need a firewall at all — it’s not like they’re the Pentagon. Hackers have better things to do. But he asked how I would feel if I worked in an office and looked over at my colleague’s desk and saw they were looking at porn. Like I say, I haven’t worked in an office for a while, but things have obviously changed a great deal since I did. Was it only lack of availability that was holding office-workers back from at-desk porn-consumption before? This seems to me the most depressing way of treating your staff: you must prevent them from seeing porn at work, or they will all promptly start looking at porn at work. As though that is how people behaved before the internet, when presumably there was nothing preventing anyone from taking porn mags into the office. Nothing apart from the basic realisation that that would be freaky and weird. Let’s be honest, public shame is a great regulator.
But the no-swearing rule deprives office-workers of a valuable stress-busting resource: namely, emailing a pal to complain about a crappy day, and calling the people they work with/for cunts, in the certain knowledge that their friend will agree, and they can then adjourn to the pub and compare notes on whose boss is cuntiest. Plus, they don’t get to coin superlatives like that, which is a crying shame.
And it affects the way the rest of us behave. Today, for example, I went to email someone in a state of considerable ire. Not with my intended recipient, of course. But with someone we both knew who had behaved in a manner which really required the description, “fucker”. I was cross with the third party. I knew my friend would be on my side. She might even have been cheered by my experience, convincing her, as it would, that she is not merely being intolerant of the offending party but that he is, objectively, a fucker. And I stopped, as I was writing, and wondered if the mail would get through if I used the word, or if I should asterisk it. And I know, I know, that she’s at work, and it’s her work address, and blah blah blah, but really. She’s met me, she knows I swear. Knows it, and perhaps even likes it. I’ve even been to her office and sworn in it in life, so it’s not like it would come as a surprise.
I sent the mail anyway, and it did get through in the end, although it was mysteriously delayed (while, I presume, some fella in the IT department checked it for treasonous thoughts). But if her company can cope, can’t they all? Can we do away with the no-swearing rule, and be allowed to be the foul-mouthed adults we already are?
26 Jul 10 | Index Index, minipost, News and features
On 23 July, popular Nicaraguan stand-up Luis Enrique Calderón has revealed that he was offered money by government officials in return for not ridiculing President Daniel Ortega in upcoming performances organised to celebrate the comedian’s 20 year career. The humorist, renowned for satirising famous personalities and politicians, contacted First Lady Rosario Murillo ahead of the event to gain their support for the act. Yet senior political advisor Fidel Moreno responded by offering to pay Calderón’s mortgage and give his children scholarships if he did not criticise the president or government. Calderón turned down the offer. However, since the rejection, he has received anonymous phone calls warning him that the July 29-30 concerts may yet be cancelled.
