DISQUS

Eeek ! Apologies for the incomplete "blockquote" markup of the quotation from The Times above.

In terrorism cases, where people are being held for up to 28 days, and if the Labour politicians get their way, for 90 days or longer, without even being charged, i.e. far longer than the normal attention span / "news cycle" of the media, then where is the Contempt of Court Act ?

There is no control over all the media speculation, hype, leaks and unattributed briefings of "background details" from UK police, intelligence and government sources, supplemented by leaks from Foreign intelligence and government sources, which is then further commented on in the blogosphere.

If, as in this case, it is likely that no jury is involved, in a guilty plea before a Magistrate's Court, why should either blogs or newspaper on-line archives be censored ?

Do not forget the Attorney General Lord Goldsmith's ideas (circa 2004) about retrospectively censoring on-line newspaper archive websites and presumably blogs:

According to The Times:

“Publication of previous convictions or other material relating to the accused’s supposed bad character could therefore give rise to a substantial risk of serious prejudice.”

Lord Goldsmith also highlighted the risk posed by online newspaper archives. Jurors were now free to surf the web and could come across articles written months before that could be prejudicial, he said. Articles on a website that were not prejudicial when written could constitute contempt at the time of trial and should be removed.."

How is a blogger actually meant to know whether or not

a) a particular court case is actually in progress and

b) that any reporting restrictions have actually been imposed ?

Surely we should not jump to censor newspaper or blog archives, unless and until reporting restrictions are formally imposed in a particular case by a Judge, and there is a web based system, ideally with an RSS / XML syndication feed, which actually publishes details of which cases are being censored in this way.

See: Attorney General Lord Goldsmith tries to censor the web - another attack on the jury system.

Good luck with the new job ! The Press Gazette are lucky to have first call on your insights and experience.

Just because you have "crossed over to the dark side" will not stop me reading this blog 8-)

Why are there so few student political bloggers in the UK ?

There should be hundreds of College or University students who should be writing their own UK political blogs, or at least commenting on them.

Do none of them study politics or journalism anymore ? Are none of them active in their student political societies, of all persuasions ?

These students all have internet access, so where are they all ?

"But MacPherson's letter says "No minister" was involved, not "No Treasury minister".

There is probably some convention that senior civil servants do not comment in public on, or even acknowledge the existance of, other Departments, apart from their own.

If it does turn out that there was no Minsterial "opinion" authorising the redactions, then who will be going to jail as a result of breaking the Freedom of Information Act ? Nobody.

The Information Commissioner does not have the power to prosecute anybody over this sort of incident, which can easily be brushed off as a mistake, if necessary.

The most that he can rule on, would be to force the Treasury to disclose the full document, which appears to have already been leaked. Even then he is unable to make such a ruling, or to have it enforced by a court, until after an internal Treasury review of the decision is called for by the original FOIA requestor, a process which could easily take another 3 months.

The majority of my FOIA requests have been delayed , and even appeals to the Information Commissioner also seem to be subject to long delays as well.

There simply is no "culture of open Government" as a result of the Freedom of Information Act, certainly not so far as the Home Office and the Treasury are concerned.

Perhaps Lord Falconer's Department for Constitutional Affairs provided the Ministerial rubberstamp, since they run a "clearing house" for any FOIA requests which might trouble senior officials or ministers.

Perhaps the Treasury will try to claim that any such letter authorising the s36 redaction is itself "legal advice" or "advice about policy", or a "communication between Ministers" and is therefore subject to a Section 35 exemption:

Section 35: Formulation Of Government Policy
http://www.dca.gov.uk/foi/guidance/exsumm/sec35...

Forget the rest of the world, these CCTV images are still available on the Terrorism section of the Home Office website:

Police appeal for information: Have you seen these men?

Bias is in the eye of the beholder.

Try following some topics using the

http://www.newsnow.co.uk

news aggregator,which claims to be

"Automatically searching 20188 news sources every 5 minutes"

It is very instructive to watch the same "story" obviously based on a public relations press release or briefing or leak, being repeated, word for word, by many "sources affiliated with old-media companies", often without attribution.

"Non-traditional news sources" like blogs do seem to add more comment or analysis to these same stories if they pick up on them.

Which was worse: being insulted by John Prescott, or being "kissed on both cheeks" by David Blunkett ?

http://politics.guardian.co.uk/election/comment/0,15803,1473738,00.html

"Kissy kissy ...
One of Mr Prescott's previous sins was atoned for by David Blunkett this week. The former home secretary encountered the South Wales Argus reporter Mark Choueke in Tredegar and kissed him on both cheeks. Last week Choueke had the temerity to try to question Mr Prescott about a prominent local Labour figure who was standing against the party. Mr Prescott responded by dismissing the reporter as an amateur and telling him to "bugger off". Mr Blunkett was more conciliatory. "Being from Yorkshire, I wanted to make amends on behalf of a friend of mine," he said."

Are bloggers also at the same risk as the online archived versions of newspaper articles, which they may quote or comment on, from the retrospective censorship and Contempt of Court
liabilities envisaged by the UK Attorney General Lord Goldsmith ?

"Some observers, like Spyblog, have unfortunatly bought this spin at face value."

We rarely take any spin by the media or the Government at face value !

Nobody really knows how well the UK FOIA procedures will work, if at all, but we are willing to give them a try, and to blog the progress of our requests:

http://www.spy.org.uk/foia/

Any suggestions are welcome.