The police are WRONG: Watching YouTube videos is NOT illegal Some of you may already be familiar with our sub-editor Gareth Corfield's work as he is usually the man behind our social-media presence. You. Yes, you. Reading this now. You're reading this on a website where potential TERRORISTS operate. Aren't you scared? Why haven't you clicked away? You support this form of terrorism, don' …
Key thing to remember: The police are not barristers. They have a *working* knowledge of the law, but are not experts and aren't supposed to be.
Yes, I *know* that in an idealised world every PC would be au fait with every piece of legislation, but if they were, they'd be called 'lawyers who also patrol the streets', we'd have to pay them all over £80k a year and not many people would ever qualify for the job (and if they did, they'd take the training, work for 5 years and then go and work in the private sector for more money, just like RAF pilots and GPs). It's just not viable for police to know about what they're enforcing in detail. Instead they only have a working knowledge. That's why the CPS exist, and that's why a lot of arrests go nowhere when the CPS discover that there's no actual case.
The police exist to nick you for likely causing an offence and taking you to a station. It's someone with proper training's job to then figure out if you actually did something wrong.
However, all that doesn't excuse a PR dolt for passing legal advice on to a member of the media. Frankly, it's a stupid, stupid thing to have done, and whoever the muppet is should lose their job.
If things had been the other way around and the press had been advised by a PR officer that something was perfectly ok, and you read and acted on that and were later arrested, you know how much slack you'd be given for having been told what the law was by a PR copper? Zilch.
tl;dr: If you want legal advice, talk to a lawyer, not a copper.
@Psyx: "Key thing to remember: The police are not barristers. They have a *working* knowledge of the law, but are not experts and aren't supposed to be".
And yet it is their duty to arrest anyone whom they see (or hear about) breaking the law. How on earth can they do that if they don't know the law themselves?
Further. It is a well-known legal maxim that "ignorance of the law is no defence". In other words, if you unwittingly break the law you are just as guilty as if you had done it deliberately.
I recall being told by my accountant, a partner in a substantial firm and a specialist in company accounting law, that the relevant laws would fill an entire shelf of books and change so rapidly that even he cannot begin to keep up with them. Now consider how small a fraction of all the laws are concerned with accounting. No one - not the most dedicated, assiduous lawyer - can possibly have even a rough knowledge of them all.
Yet our legal system insists that every citizen must act as if he knew every law in detail.
Obviously, if policemen do not know the law they cannot enforce it. If they fail to enforce laws that are on the statute book, that's bad. But if they try to enforce laws that don't exist, that is catastrophic. In either case, contempt for the law will ensue.
There is one simply, glaringly obvious solution that our politicians will NOT try: drastically cutting down the number and complexity of the laws.
"There is one simply, glaringly obvious solution that our politicians will NOT try: drastically cutting down the number and complexity of the laws."
Don't give them ideas we will end up with a law that says anything that the home secretary says is bad is illegal and therefore punishable by up to life imprisonment. SImple enough?
"And yet it is their duty to arrest anyone whom they see (or hear about) breaking the law. How on earth can they do that if they don't know the law themselves?"
Again - as already stated - they have a WORKING knowledge of the law. They're trained to do the job, not be lawyers.
Again: It's the job of the CPS to figure out precisely what laws were broken after the bill have pried the proverbial two parties off of each other and mopped up the blood.
And you can still sick them for illegal arrest or harassment if they balls it up.
It takes years to qualify to be a solicitor, and then you earn a ton of money. Do you honestly believe it's viable for our policemen to be trained to those standards of familiarity with the law?
What do you want: Policemen who are au fait on a working level with the law, or to triple the salray of every policeman.
Because those are your choices.
"Yet our legal system insists that every citizen must act as if he knew every law in detail."
No, it doesn't. That's not how our legal system works. It expects us to act as a reasonable person would. Ignorance is no excuse when it comes to the morally obvious, but it's a perfectly acceptable defence when it comes to intricacies that a reasonable member of the public would not understand, have exposure to, or be likely to take legal advice over.
This post has been deleted by its author
Psyx,
>They have a *working* knowledge of the law, but are not experts and aren't supposed to be.
Then why is ignorance of the law not a defence when you seem to think it is acceptable for police officers?
"Then why is ignorance of the law not a defence when you seem to think it is acceptable for police officers?"
Ignorance of the law is a viable defence if you otherwise acted as a reasonable person with decent morals and had no real reason to get prior legal advice.
If you genuinely believe the police should all have a degree in law and go on a ten-week refresher course each year, then you can pay for it. I'd rather they just did the police-work, let CPS sort out the complex legal matters and got done for wrongful arrest and harassment if they screw it up. Because that's what you can do if they do: If their partial knowledge of the law screws you over, the law is theoretically on *your* side.
Key thing to remember: The police are not barristers. They have a *working* knowledge of the law, but are not experts and aren't supposed to be.
Then they shouldn't (pay people to) be running their gob in public about things that they know little about and apparently cannot be bothered to look up for themselves or perhaps even seek some advice from actual barristers - before sticking their foot in it!
"......the police would use a picture of you picking your nose against you if they could." Socio-political astynomiapbobia, no doubt driven by insecurity and a desire to be seen and accepted as 'cool'.
It's not actually READING it that's the problem - "(e) transmits the contents of such a publication electronically" - a useful phrase meaning that clicking on the link causes the file to be transmitted electronically to your router, where it is again transmitted to your tablet/phone/laptop etc - they've got you bang to rights, you evil terrorist!
As far as the plods are concerned, using any electronic equipment makes you a terrorist suspect
Good to read that someone is challenging them - can we have the name of the senior officer who authorised the statement? At a minimum they need to be sent off for some lengthy re-training, ideally they should spend a year or two on traffic duty in Port Stanley. They are obviously unfit for their current role.
Dear Sir,
under section e) I would mount the defence that the user is not transmitting it, but rather requesting somebody else to transmit it to his/her computerised-viewing-equipment-of-choice via whichever technologically available means... Therefore it is YouTube (Google) who falls foul of the law, and hence they want to remove / are removing / have removed the referred contents.
I wholeheartedly agree with the sentiment of the <opinion> piece. Well done.
Regards,
Guus
the user is not transmitting it, but rather requesting somebody else to transmit it
Ah. Conspiracy to cause the transmission of material contrary to the Terrorism Act 2006.
I was going to put a "Joke Alert" icon on this, but in hindsight, I'm not sure it's a joke...
Vic.
There's interesting case law about this. For example Knuller v DPP (1973) HL
There exists a common law conspiracy to corrupt public morals and outrage public decency.
D published a magazine containing advertisements for homosexual acts amongst consenting adults.
Held:
Conspiracy to corrupt public morals ... really means to corrupt the morals of such members of the public as may be influenced by the matter published' by D, with 'corrupt' being synonymous with 'deprave' or amounting to 'conduct which a jury might find to be destructive of the very fabric of).
Regarding the offence of outraging public decency: 'the substantive offence ... must be committed in public', i.e. before more than one person. "'Outraging public decency" goes considerably beyond offending the susceptibilities of, or even shocking, reasonable people'.
Obiter... it's based on Shaw v DPP which was quite an interesting and relatively famous case as he had sought clarification from plod as to what would be ok before he published.
On the other hand some argue (pdf) this is contrary to Section 7 ECHR.
"They can always claim that your Graphics Card transmitted it to your Monitor."
No 'they' can't, because the law of the land is supposed to be interpreted and sustained in line with what a reasonably intelligent and just man on the street would do.
Ultimately, our law is not about weaselling, but common sense. Common sense interpretations apply.
"If they have the judge in their pocket, he could rule on this."
Judges tend to take their work fairly seriously, despite what TV teaches us.
"No 'they' can't, because the law of the land is supposed to be interpreted and sustained in line with what a reasonably intelligent and just man on the street would do."
A magistrate is guided by his assisting law officials to apply their interpretation of the letter of the law. They have very little room for manoeuvre. However - electing to have a Crown Court jury trial increases the minimum sentence if found guilty.
I know of a trial where the defendant rightly elected to have a Crown Court trial on on the grounds that the prosecution's scant evidence was very subjective. However his lawyers - who were not specialists in that legal area - then convinced him to change his plea to guilty.
Their reasoning was that it would be seen as a "technical offence" with no intent - and he would get probation. Otherwise a jury could be very unpredictable in this subjective matter - and the minimum sentencing rules would increase a "guilty" sentence to a prison term.
When imposing probation - the judge apologised to the defendant that his hands were tied by the minimum sentencing rules. He also commented that the prosecution's evidence was very slight.
In my opinion an innocent man was railroaded by the system to accept the lesser of two undeserved punishments. It seems that the one legal person who applied intelligence and common sense found himself irrevocably bound by government imposed rules.
I think they might be able to argue that you have caused the video to be transmitted by requesting the video. Perhaps they could get you as an accessory, in the same way that giving a thief a list of things to steal, but not actually stealing them yourself, would?
Sounds to be clutching at straws - and I have no intention of watching the video, but I resent being told legal things are illegal.
They'd just redefine "transmit" to make sure they got you, much as when many people are charged with "making" indecent images of children, what they've actually done is viewed it on their computer, thereby causing it to be downloaded and so a new copy "made."
My cynical mind suspects there are a couple of reasons for this. Firstly, it enables a longer penalty without changing the law (though that shouldn't be hard to do, even without whipping up a moral panic first). Secondly, when you hear about people being arrested for "making" doesn't it sound so much more impressive? It's as if they've actually tracked down and found the people physically abusing.
I'm sure, in a similar vein, they could find a learned friend who would argue that, for instance, the transmission of the video across the internet occurred as a result of you clicking on a link. Having established causality, it's merely a short leap to that that you, therefore, transmitted the video.
Few people with any sense of how technology works would necessarily agree with you, but the PR team would get to trumpet another terrorist suspect banged up, and everyone goes to bed feeling a little bit safer.
"They'd just redefine "transmit" to make sure they got you..."
This is, by the way, a perfect example of one reason (among many) why programmers have to be smarter and more careful than lawyers.
Redefining "transmit" to mean, effectively, "receive" (or, at most, "request") is absolutely typical of what lawyers do. One bunch of highly paid lawyers argue for weeks about the wording of a law, then another bunch of highly-paid lawyers argue (in front of a judge who is a yet more highly paid lawyer) about what that wording "really" means.
Whereas a programmer has to make his code state, at all times, exactly what the machine should do. Not nearly, approximately, figuratively, or somewhat. Exactly. If the code says anything in the slightest bit different, then that is what will happen - and the programmer will be blamed for it.
Whereas lawyers deal in ambiguity and uncertainty, prosper from it, live immersed in it, programmers have avoid it utterly. Which job is harder and deserves to be better-paid?
This post has been deleted by its author
An argument could be made that by clicking on the link, you are also transmitting. Namely, transmitting a request to the server to view objectionable material.
Note that the law makes no mention of the 'quantity' of objectionable material which needs to be transmitted in order to constitute an offence; it could be something as small as a ping packet and you'd still fall foul of PC Ignoramus.
(e) transmits the contents of such a publication electronically;
Now that's getting close to the wire.
You could argue that by clicking the link you are causing the transmission, but causing the transmission is not illegal, just transmission.
But you could also argue that your equipement does transmit the publication:
Your NAS/ADSL modem tranasmits it to your Wifi AP.
The Wifi AP transmits it to your computer's wifi module.
That transmits it to your CPU
Which transmits to your screen.
...
They could clarify this by a slight change to (e):
(e) transmits, or causes transmission of, the contents of such a publication electronically;
In that case, clicking a link would get you on the wrong side of the law.
"Terrorism" is an offence defined to mean "any form of dissent". For example, making a vocal protest inside a party political meeting will result in you being ejected under Terrorism laws.
As for watching a video of a beheading, I expect that's more a matter for Health and Safety regulations.
As far as the plods are concerned, using any electronic equipment makes you a terrorist suspect
Using anything other than Apple or Windoze turns you into an arch-hacking criminal. I had a couple of Scotland Yard's finest Defectives maliciously impound two of my computers - simply because they ran OpenBSD in one instance and Mint Linux in the other.
After a few days, I got a phonecall from their "computer forensics" department demanding user passwords (they couldn't work out how to circumvent them themselves) - I pointed out that if they couldn't achieve something as trivial as recovering a user password, then their "forensic" skills wouldn't be up to analysing the contents of the machines anyway. I got both machines back a few days later with their hard drives wiped with a tape demagnetiser!
I sued. I won. I got very substantial damages out of the Met and the Defectives don't work there any more. The machines were restored from back-ups, of course!
It's scary how incompetent these clowns are!
Yep, loved this bit...
"I favour an alternative explanation: that the British police now truly believe they have the right to state that something's illegal even when that's not the case"
Man, they've been doing that shit for years. It's the easiest thing in the world - spout shit and wait to be called out on it. Their standard behaviour is "a night in the cells" for whatever bullshit reason they can think up just to piss you off. Politicians are little better, the superfluous little parasites.
@AC: 'I've been in the car and have been stopped for "dangerous acceleration".'
That's perfectly reasonable (if not necessarily well-explained to you). ANYTHING you do whilst driving on the road or a public place can be an offence, if you go about it in a way that could cause problems for other people (including pedestrians). Check the legislation and you'll see that our main road offences were quite deliberately framed with broad-brush terms such as "reasonable consideration", "due care and attention" and "dangerous" - with the interpretation of what constitutes such left, in the final analysis, to the courts and case law. It's an approach that removes any wiggle-room for getting away with blatant infringements on technicalities, whilst leaving room for common sense to prevail. It's also one that has, on the whole and in my own personal opinion at least, worked pretty well. (And it's also one that means that the government's high-publicity "attack" last year of "new" offences for middle-lane hogging, etc., was a wholly-unnecessary PR exercise - everything was already perfectly well-covered by the existing legislation - but that's a different discussion).
I don't think I'll go looking for the video.. much more interesting things to do with my time, but glad to hear I am not a terrorist if I did.. quite frankly I am much too busy to get involved with all that terrorism stuff.
(dear GCHQ; the previous statement is an ironic take on cause and effect - it was a joke based on the ridiculous idea that if the MET designated me a (potential?) terrorist then I would then somehow be obligated to start carrying out terrorism. to be clear; I am not a terrorist, nor do I have any terrorist ideas, sympathies or materials, and neither does my wife).
However this does raise the question: are only the _uploaders_ of such materials now designated terrorists by the UK government or are the various sites that such materials are uploaded to also impacted? (e.g. would youtube et al. be considered for 'common carrier status' and not liable for any such content on their networks, (their policies of removal of such content notwithstanding) - or is youtube now listed as a terrorist organisation? If they are not, does that mean that the terrorism act is only applied when the state representatives wish to apply it?)
Facinating stuff / IANAL / I'm sure someone will point out the flaw in my reasoning somewhere.
See...you're protesting too much...that will make you "interesting"...oh and you put ANAL in caps, so you're obviously a child molester too...putting that "I" in front didn't camoflage your true intentions.
So...to clarify, the correct response to anyone in authority should always be "yes sir, no sir, three bags full sir"
Chief Constable Savage
Well, if they, a court, and a jury decide that "transmits the contents of such a publication electronically" inflates to "causes to be transmitted the contents of such a publication electronically" then viewing the video could be twisted into an offence under that section.
Much the same as the Communications Act 2003 allows a catch-all crime of "saying something offensive online" that can be invoked should you do or say something that enough people complain about on Twitter.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
