Drones: At war and at home

Continuing my recent theme on the use of drones in journalism, I came across this Guardian article rather strangely entitled: 'Drones in the hands of the paparazzi? It's an ethics and privacy minefield'

There are some interesting observations here and the article lists some of the important questions raised by the increasing use of drones in military contexts:

"Do drones lower the threshold of war, encouraging those who deploy them to be more bellicose? Can they or their operators sufficiently discriminate combatants from civilians in order to comply with international law? Are they proportionate, or so horrifically cruel as to qualify, along with anti-personnel landmines and cluster bombs, for prohibition? Does their cybernetic nature make them a biological weapon? What effect does their deployment have on the "hearts and minds" of civilians, or the morale of soldiers? Should we worry that Iran appears to have assumed control of a US drone, having kidnapped it out of the sky? And who is to blame when drones go wrong?"

But then right at the end, the article notes that drones are making the leap from foreign to domestic policy which left me with the impression that the piece was suggesting that what we should really be worrying about is the paparazzi using drones.

In other words, there are a few complicated questions about killing 'other people' in foreign lands, but when governments and the media start taking photos of 'us' using drones then we should really become concerned.

I am as worried about privacy, ethics, the media and the use of drones for domestic surveillance as the next person.

But as the article rightly points out (if you read past the headline and the inadvertently misleading structure) there are more pressing "ethical and legal concerns" which we must not lose sight of in future domestic debates on drones.  

"Inappropriate" to include bloggers in press regulation

The Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt has said that bloggers should not be part of a new regulatory system of the press. 

Speaking to a joint committee on privacy and injunctions he said blogs "perform a different role" from newspapers and bloggers "were often not paid". 

At the same time, he believed blogs were growing in importance to public and democratic debate. 

Citing Guido Fawkes as an example, he said that blogs with large audiences have "huge influence on political discourse" and could do "huge damage to individual reputations if and when they get things wrong". 

Despite their potential relevance to the future of privacy law and the use of injunctions, Hunt was concerned at "trying to solve too many problems at once".

He noted that bloggers are already "subject to the laws of the land" including libel, defamation and data protection breaches. But he acknowledged that the law was sometimes more difficult to enforce if blogs are based outside the jurisdiction of the United Kingdom.

In 2009, Guido Fawkes told the Guardian that it was "a jurisdictional nightmare" to send him a writ as his blog was published by a Caribbean company, had a URL in Germany and was hosted in the United States. 

The joint committee felt that blogging should warrant more attention as some "big bloggers" were making "a lot of money" and that a new regulatory system should not leave an "open door" for irresponsible publishing.   

In a light-hearted moment, Justice Secretary Ken Clarke made it plain that he was "certainly not a blogger", quipping that a "quite disproportionate of nuts and extremists seem to be represented on every blog I've ever known". 

Jeremy Hunt interjected to say he had written a blog post last Friday.

To much amusement, Clarke quickly added: "...with the honorable exception of my friend, the Culture Secretary".

The Evening Standard's 'Internet threatens justice' headline

I've just been reading the Evening Standard on the tube home. Specifically, the story about Lord Judge sentencing a juror to 8 months in prison for contempt of court after she contacted a defendant via Facebook.

The headline which accompanies the story in the paper edition of The Evening Standard on page 7 reads:

Judge: Internet threatens justice

I was intrigued to read that the very same Lord Judge is later quoted in the article as saying:

"The problem therefore is not the Internet. The potential problems arise from the activities of jurors who disregard the long-established principles which underpin the right of every citizen to a fair trial."

I would suggest that The Evening Standard's headline is somewhat misleading. But such is the nature of headlines, I suppose.

Recommended reading and Audioboo

BBC

• Reflecting on impartiality and coalition government.
• Planning to hang out in Afghanistan for the forseeable future.
• Saying academics are sometimes to blame for misleading media representations of their work.
  

Global Voices

• Wondering which way to go on volunteering, money and the future of journalism.

Law and blogging

• Libel claim against political blogger is struck out of court.

Geeks section

• 300 social media stats.
• Carnegie Mellon study of Twitter sentiments finds the microblogging tool can be used to produce similar results to opinion polls (sparking panic among pollsters) although it seems that it is less straightforward to reproduce political polling.
  

And finally...

• Would it be wrong to say: 'I've booed myself'. Yes, it probably would in more ways than one. But I have, so I suggest we all move on.

Help? The legal questions raised by Guardian gagging

There's a great summary of the Guardian's reporting parliament gag by Carter-Ruck on behalf of Trafigura over at the Online Journalism blog in case you missed today's news.

But I'd be interested in any help answering the following legal questions.

1. Does anyone have any legal insight into Carter-Ruck's case for arguing that the Guardian's reporting of parliament would have been Contempt of Court? Did Internet coverage, and specifically Twitter's hashtagging frenzy, actually make a legal difference to the case or would they have lost the appeal in the High Court anyway?

2. From the BBC website: "No injunction was served on the BBC, but ever since the Spycatcher case in the 1980s news organisations which knowingly breach an injunction served on others are in contempt of court, so the corporation too felt bound by the Guardian injunction."

This implies there is a legal definition of a 'news organisation'. If there is such a thing when was it last tested in court and does it make any sense anymore? Presumably, the Spectator breached the injunction under law. But who else would qualify as having breached it?

Any links, comments etc greatly appreciated.

Updated

• This is useful background on the scope of injunctions but obviously is not specific.
• Roy Greenslade says 'the action of the firm at the heart of the case' was 'entirely undone by the freedom of the internet'. But that's all we get for the time-being.