Financial & Travel Musings

Wendy has been talking quite a lot about the Baby P trial over on Cultured Views during the course of the last lot of months, using as her sources the various newspaper and TV websites reporting on the case.

This afternoon, we received a phone call from the Metropolitan police telling us that we were in contempt of court and that if we did not immediately remove all information about the case from the website they would seek an injunction to have the site taken down. Whilst Wendy was in the course of removing this material they took it upon themselves to have all of our websites on that host taken down. That’s despite the only one that had anything about that case being Cultured Views and that Wendy had already complied with their request.

However, all of the websites which she used as her sources for the posts remain. Much as we might like to imagine that Cultured Views was the leading authority on the case concerned, in reality the authorities lie among the traditional news organisations such as the BBC, the Mirror, the Sun and, of course, the more new-media sources of wikipedia and answers.com. A number of these go so far as to list the real name of the baby concerned along with a heap of other information which, in the interests of a free society, would be best left unknown. And, yes, in a free society we do need to keep the identity of even the most “obviously” guilty party a secret until they are convicted.

The problem, of course, is that the courts continue to work on the basis that the jurors hearing the case are ignorant of the facts of the case except for those which are put across to them during the trial. In the Internet age that seems unlikely to be a realistic stance in the case of high profile cases. After all, even “deleting” the information doesn’t work when google et al cache so many websites and, honestly, could you really select jurors who knew nothing about this particular case? Surely, it’s better to assume that jurors will know at least some details of the case in advance and allow for that in the trial?

It is good though to see that censorship doesn’t work these days and you still can read the articles in the caches despite the site itself being down.

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At the moment I’m technically between jobs but it was only when Wendy pointed out that this means that I’m unemployed that I started thinking that perhaps I should be claiming unemployment benefit.

Of course, it’s not “unemployment benefit” anymore as we have job seekers in the UK rather than unemployed people and that’s an interesting change in categorisation when you think about it. To be labelled a “job seeker” is definitely more positive than to be labelled simply as “unemployed”, isn’t it?

That relabelling brought with it a lot of other changes. For instance, in the “unemployment office” you now find two separate groups of people that deal with you. First, there’s the people who handle the benefit payments who are basically the same group as have always been there and who are interested in seeing that you’ve made the appropriate social security payments to entitle you to the benefit. Separately from them are the employment people who are there to do what they can to help you back into work and who will prod you into getting up and looking for work if needbe. Formerlly the two were quite separate and in buildings separated by several miles so there wasn’t the sense that there is now of the payment being there just to help you along whilst you’re off looking for work.

One side-effect for me is that there’s what’s almost a trick question on the form: are you currently studying? I am in that I’m doing a child development course but seeing as it’s not a full-time one that means that I’m actually available for work which is what the question is really asking.

Full marks though for that relabelling and the reorganisation that happened almost behind the scenes. Although, in theory, I have a job waiting (sort-of), it has prompted me to have a look around anyway.

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Oh, you thought that you had some personal privacy? Sorry, it seems that you’re wrong and that you ARE being watched.

For example, if you’ve found this post by searching with google then they’ll have recorded that search against your name if you were logged in with your google account. If you’ve found it via StumbleUpon then they’ll have recorded that too. Both are “to enhance your browsing experience” or words to that effect but they certainly remove any privacy that you thought you might have in your Internet browsing.

If you’ve you’ve been using the Internet for a while no doubt you’ve commented on some forums or blogs by now. All those comments are available to everyone. Oh, you used a false name, did you? No good because the software will have recorded the IP address from which you made the comment and that can be linked to you. Ah, but your ISP allocates random IP addresses every time you login so you’re OK. Well, no, because the ISP records who gets what IP address so, yes, that comment could be linked to you.

Still, at least your e-mails are private. Not really. The Internet is structured as a network of linked computers so every e-mail you send will have gone through a series of computers to reach its destination and every one of those computers could easily record the contents and who sent it.

It seems like we’ve finally got the surveillance of 1984 and all we’re missing (in most of the world) is the totalitarian regime. Still, perhaps if we wait a few years we’ll have the complete set.

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