[Itpolicy-np] Twitter and terrifying tale of modern Britain

[Bipin Gautam]

Absolute monitoring brings absolute dictatorship!
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(Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/sep/19/nick-cohen-terrorism-twitter
)

Paul Chambers has felt the full force of state persecution, simply for
sending a tweet

The head of MI5 has warned we must take the threat of new Islamist
atrocities seriously. If the abuse of antiterrorist legislation in the
Paul Chambers case is a guide, the people who most need reminding of
the importance of seriousness, are MI5's colleagues in the criminal
justice system.

The 27-year-old worked for a car parts company in Yorkshire. He and a
woman from Northern Ireland started to follow each other on Twitter.
He liked her tweets and she liked his and boy met girl in a London
pub. They got on as well in person as they did in cyberspace. To the
delight of their followers, Paul announced he would be flying from
Robin Hood airport in Doncaster to Northern Ireland to meet her for a
date.

In January, he saw a newsflash that snow had closed the airport.
"Crap! Robin Hood Airport is closed," he tweeted to his friends.
"You've got a week… otherwise I'm blowing the airport sky high!"

People joke like this all the time. When they say in a bar: "I'll
strangle my boyfriend if he hasn't done the washing up" or post on
Facebook: "I'll murder my boss if he makes me work late", it does not
mean that the bodies of boyfriends and bosses will soon be filling
morgues.

You know the difference between making a joke and announcing a murder,
I'm sure. Apparently the forces of law and order do not.

A plain-clothes detective from South Yorkshire Police arrived at
Chambers's work. Instead of quietly pointing out that it was best not
to joke about blowing up airports, he arrested him under antiterrorist
legislation. A posse of four more antiterrorist officers was waiting
in reception.

"Do you have any weapons in your car?" they asked.

"I said I had some golf clubs in the boot," Chambers told me. "But
they didn't think it was funny. I kept wondering, 'When are they going
to slap my wrists and let me go?' Instead, they hauled me into a
police car while my colleagues watched."

The Crown Prosecution Service wanted to charge him under the law's
provisions against bomb hoaxers, a serious measure aimed at a serious
public nuisance. But there had been no hoax. Paul Chambers had not
caused a panic at the airport or intended to cause a panic. No one in
authority knew about the tweet until some busybody decided to report
Chambers.

Instead of displaying a little common sense and letting the matter
rest, the CPS dug up an obscure section of the 2003 Communications
Act, which makes it an offence to send a "menacing message" over a
public telecommunications network.

Chambers pleaded not guilty after reading an outraged article on his
case by David Allen Green, one of the new generation of free-speech
lawyers. No good did his plea do him. In a Kafkaesque development, the
CPS persuaded judge Jonathan Bennett that in the context of terrorist
violence his tweet should be taken as a genuine threat, whether he was
joking or not and whether the airport knew about the "threat" or not.

The judge gave Chambers a criminal record and ordered him to pay
£1,000 in costs and fines.

In Milan Kundera's great anti-communist novel The Joke, the young hero
tries to impress a beautiful woman with adolescent bravado. Forgetting
what happens to dissenters in Soviet-occupied Czechoslovakia, he
writes on a card to her: "Optimism is the opium of the people. A
healthy atmosphere stinks of stupidity! Long live Trotsky!" It's a
silly joke. But Communist party officials cannot admit it is a joke
once the card is discovered or they will be branded as Trotskyite
traitors too. So they make him to do forced labour in the mines.

The danger of calling the justice system Kafkaesque or comparing
democratic Britain to Stalinist Czechoslovakia is that you risk
repeating the exaggerations of hysterical writers. This is a free
country, after all, and the state does not send the likes of Paul
Chambers to the salt mines.

In this case, the totalitarian comparison is only mildly hyperbolic,
however. After his managers at the car parts business heard the police
call him a "terrorist", they fired him. He moved to Northern Ireland
to be close to his girlfriend and found a job working for a council.

Last week, he told his employers that his appeal would be heard this
Friday and his name would be in the papers. They heard the words
"bomb" and "airport" and fired him too. Because of a joke, he has a
criminal record and lost two jobs. The CPS is ruining his life – for
no reason.

With a bit of luck, the crown court will turn his case into a legal
scandal. The CPS's claim that a person's intent does not matter when
they tweet a joke strikes me as false in law. More pertinently, anyone
who reads the reports of the original trial can guess that the police
eventually dismissed the affair as a nonsense. If so, was the defence
told?

Beyond the law lies the politics. The hounding of Paul Chambers stinks
of Labour authoritarianism. The prosecuting authorities showed no
respect for free speech. They could not take a joke. They carried on
prosecuting Chambers even when they knew he was harmless. They turned
a trifle into a crime because a conviction helped them hit performance
targets. Inside their bureaucratic hierarchies, it was dangerous to
speak out against a superior's stupidity. Better to let an injustice
take place than risk a black mark against your name.

If the court condemns the CPS, I can guarantee that Keir Starmer, the
director of public prosecutions, will not fire or discipline the
prosecutors involved. I doubt if he will even tell them they have
undermined support for the anti-terrorist cause.

I don't care what the polls say or how unpopular the coalition becomes
– Labour must change the settled view of the majority of Britons that
it is the party of politically correct jobsworths or it will never win
another election.