Who watches the Watchmen?

For some weeks its been rumoured that Google's camera cars are here in Edinburgh for their Streetmap project, where the existing Google Maps will be supplemented by photos taken at street level. This has already caused complaints from civil liberties groups here and in the US as the teams photograph everything - people with their faces visible, cars with registration often visible, homes, schools, businesses. Google has so far pretty much shrugged this off the same way they shrug off allegations of collaborating with dictatorships such as China. Their only meagre response so far to a barrage of criticism is to say they will try and blur the faces of individuals visible on the photos. Given the number being taken I wonder if that will happen.

However it seems their staff are also hypocritical - when the Edinburgh Evening News photographer saw them prepping their camera cars in Edinburgh and snapped them for the paper they approached him and told him to stop or he would be sued. Since he was on public land and there is now law which gives Google staff the right to come to another country, parade around it taking pictures of everyone and everything they want while gagging the press from taking legitimate pictures for a legitimate story with legitimate public interest concerns they were clearly talking cobblers.

"It would be interesting to see just what legal grounds they think they have to stop their picture being used that wouldn't also apply to the pictures they are taking, and I think they would be on pretty treacherous ground." Guy Herbert, No2ID.

yes, it would be...

Google has now said they have no problem with people taking pictures of their camera cars, but this seems to be at odds with their staff's actions. Hypocritical? Surely not. I do hope I see one of these when I am out and about Edinburgh with my camera because I'd delight in taking a photo and sticking it all over Flickr and my blog. As was noted in the article this isn't entirely disimilar to when large protests and demos are held and the police and other security try to video and photograph everyone taking part, even in peaceful, legitimate demonstations, but get rather antsy if those activists then take pictures of them in return.

The sentence for reading is death

Well, it is in bloody Afghanistan at any rate. Journalism student Sayed Pervez Kambaksh has been sentenced to death for reading. His crime? He downloaded a text which - gasp of horror - said that Muslim fundamentalists (those whacky, zany guys, what will they think of next!) who beat people around the head with their own fucked up interpretation of the holy Koran and use it to legitimate their severe repression and control of women were completely wrong and were acting contrary to the teachings of the Prophet. Gee, I can see where they might get a little annoyed at a document saying they might be wrong - after all these are the same shagwits who respond to a simple cartoon by killing people and demanding some beheadings. They aren't just misrepresenting the teachings of their own religion, they are just fucking stupid, violent fools clearly terrified of women and carrying AK47s as a substitute for their very small willies.Take their guns off them and lock them in a room for a week With Anne Widdecombe, that'll teach the buggers.

Oh but it gets better - this death sentence was pronounced by a religious court in Afghanistan (and surely that is contrary to the central Islamic tenant of learning for them to stop people reading??). Now it is bad enough that any country is stupid enough to still consider it civilised to allow religious leaders to hold people to trial (no, don't give me excuses about respecting other cultures, this is just bloody wrong and utterly fucking stupid, its something moronic from the medieval period and they need to learn this. I respect other cultures as long as they aren't bloody stupid). But then the case was referred to the Afghan secular government. The nice ones we put in power and are holding in power with the blood of our troops (the same troops their president recently said were failing, the same troops that are all that is keeping his arse from being filled full of Taliban bullets because his own troops are incompetent twats) - and they upheld the sentence. Yes, that's right, the person we put in power to replace those muderous fundamentalist fuckwits, the Taliban, said yes, kill this student for daring to read something we don't like.

Er, remind me again just why the hell we have our troops being put through the dusty meatgrinder in this godforsaken cesspit of a country? The Independent has an online petition up to give to the Foreign Office to demand they take some action - please consider signing it. (link via Yvonne)

"Look, I'd had a lovely supper and all I said to my wife was that bit of halibut was good enough for Jehovah... I don't think it ought to be blasphemy just saying 'Jehovah'." Monty Python's Life of Brian.

Npower and the freedom of the press

Following up from me on my high horse blogging last week about energy company Npower bulldozing its way through both the environment, local opinion and the freedoms of speech and the press, here's a proper link to the Channel 4 item I mentioned, with a link to the report and a blog entry by Alex Thomson on Npower's (ab)use of the law and their sinister, masked security goons to overturn basic democratic freedoms at Radley Lakes.

"I would unite with anybody to do right and with nobody to do wrong."

Frederick Douglass

Douglass may be known to some of you already; for many years his writings have continued to be published by the likes of Penguin Classics and still read more than a century after he died. Frederick Douglass was a slave, who used the small amount of reading and writing he was taught to educate himself further, then to begin to elucidate upon that most despicable of institutions, slavery. Douglass did not confine himself only to the plight of the African slave in America (and other lands), he spoke eloquently and with passion on the inequalities between poor and rich and men and women (in an era where even a rich, white wife was essentially the property of the husband). He was a confidant of President Abraham Lincoln and was pressed by the mourners at his memorial to speak, which, reluctantly he finally agreed to, speaking unprepared and off the cuff he moved the mourners to tears and gained a standing ovation; it is said Lincoln's wife was so moved she passed to Douglass the president's favourite walking stick as a keepsake.



Today marks the 200th anniversary of the abolition of slavery in Great Britain, one of those sadly rare moments where morality, public will and politics all came together to do something good. Soon the British would go from being some of the most efficient at running this diabolical trade to an almost missionary zeal in preventing it, with the sight of a Royal Navy man'o'war something slave ships feared to see as the fleet enforced this law. It is a good time to consider not only our shared history but how that history still informs today. Centuries before this point a Spanish monk pleaded with the crown that the Conquistadors in the New World not treat the natives as animals and slaves because, regardless of their faith a true Christian would still percieve them as children of God and therefore to be treated as equal with anyone else of any colour or creed. The Spanish crown was more interested in exploiting those natives and their land, but the monk's enlightened words never went away.

Sadly slavery in one form or another has existed for most of human history; even the Cradle of Democracy itself, the Classical Athens of Pericles, the culture most Western nations like to say they draw upon for the basis of their modern, enlightened societies, saw nothing wrong in slavery (and of treating women as second class citizens either). The Spartans who are celebrated in the new film 300 could only run their warrior society by subjugating an entire race, the Helots (which did cause other Greeks to squirm a bit - enslaving barbarians was one thing, but enslaving other Greeks seemed a bit off; the hypocrisy of this notion was lost on the ancients).

Look around your home city today; look at some of the grand buildings in Glasgow and Bristol and London and wonder - how many of these splendid buildings we take as part of our great historical heritage were built with money earned from the slave trade? Or take America, with that remarkable Declaration of Independence and the Constitution - "we hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal." Alas many of the signatories to that document were happy to own slaves; the Land of the Free was born on the back of whips and iron shackles. A century on from the American Abolition and ordinary folks like Rosa Parks still had to fight for the simple right to sit down on a bus.


(image of a French slaver ship taken from the archive run by the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities)

How much did the idea that you could enslave another because they weren't really as human as you poison societies and leave us the evil bequest of racism, discrimination and hatred that plague us to this day? And far from a Western condition how many African tribes made large amounts of money happily capturing and selling their fellow Africans to white slavers? How many Arab merchants carried on the trade? Watching an interview on the news today I found myself in rare agreement with a journalist from the Catholic Herald when he commented that slavery had, sadly, been going on for so much of our history that we were all, every one of us, in all likelihood the descendants at some point of slaves - and slave traders. Push far back enough... Now there's a thought, and not a terribly pleasant one; certainly makes you think about that awfully jingoistic dirge "Rule Britannia" where the line proudly proclaims "Britons, never, ever, ever shall be slaves..."

And today? Yes, we may have this awful trade finally abolished in most of the world - remarkable given how many millennia it has been around, outlasting empires and entire civilisations - but the legacy of it is still there, in the way different people are treated differently even in modern, Western societies. It still poisons us. When you see others as different it it too easy a step to then consider them lesser, inferior. When you start thinking that way you walk into hate and bigotry which shackles all of us as effectively as the iron slave collar. It leads into thinking of others as less than human. It leads to discrimination, hatred, violence, slavery and even to the death camp. That's where that sort of hatred takes us, make no mistake and let no shouting, red-faced BNP bigot telling you "there ain't no black in the Union Jack" and that all our ills are caused by 'immigrants' (including those 'immigrants' born and raised here) tell you otherwise.

No, we are not all the same in a pluralistic society, but the way we treat one another should be the same. And yet skin colour, wealth, nationality, gender, even accent still dictate how we are treated. We still have chains to break; I don't know if we ever can break every last link in those chains, human nature being what it is, but it is still a fine thing to try.

Who was that masked man?

Channel 4 News tonight carried the frankly scary story of masked private security guards garbed in black, black masks raised over their faces to create an anonymous and threatening-looking appearance, going up to British citizens on a public road in a public space along with a pinstripe suited lawyer and violating their freedom of speech, freedom of expression and clearly, to my mind, violating the freedom of the press. Locals in the area of Radley Lakes have objected to shameless energy company Npower chopping down trees and planning to use the nearby lake for a spot to dump waste ash from their power station in. Many locals have objected and been ignored, a study into the impact is under way but Npower are just carrying right on with their task while it goes on so the study will be academic. Worst of all these creep security guards who look like a cross between something from a totalitarian regime and a masked Old West bandits and the corporate lawyer have persuaded a judge to grant an injunction, based largely on some anonymous witness statements with no actual cross examination which has banned even accredited journalists from taking photographs in public spaces to cover issues which are clearly in the public interest based on little to no proper evidence.


Masked, black suited, menacing looking guards who spent most of the C4 report denying citizens and reporters their basic rights while happily filming everyone present themselves; the injunction the foolish judge gave the company on their flimsy 'evidence' (supposedly to protect staff, although so far no-one has proved there was any real threat) is so vague that apparently just watching the report means the viewer is also injuncted! How ridiculous is that? I'm glad C4 News reported on this because I hadn't heard of this until tonight and from what the usually highly dependable C4 team said other large corporations are using similar dirty tricks with corporate lawyers who would be at home working for Monty Burns and their own private rent-a-cops around the UK. I find myself getting irate quite often at some reports on the news, but this made me bloody furious, that some large company would not only ignore their local residents but then use a mixture of lawyer's tricks and sinister, masked security to violate one of our most precious freedoms. Npower, you are utterly despicable and shameless. Editorial Photographers UK has some more on this story.