DNA Rention Limits – More of the Same

The Home Office is due to formally  state that their plan is to maintain the DNA data, of innocent people, for 6 years.

This is, of course, a lot longer than the zero time of many other countries and the UK less than a decade ago, but still a lot less than the previous policy of “forever”.

This statement now follows on from the previous statement in May 2009 by the government of the intention to retain the data fro 12 and 6 years, depending on the offense.

For those not acquainted with the reasons behind this change in the law this is due to the S and Marper V United Kingdom test cases in the ECHR, where they challenged, successfully the UK law on detaining, indefinitely the DNA samples of innocent.

 

 

PunterNet, PR, and Bad Driving

Harriet Harman is not having a good time. She is accused of failing to stop at road traffic accident, she was embroiled in the  expenses claims fiasco, and she is the deputy leader of a party that just got dropped by the biggest selling paper in the UK. But, this is not why she is on this site.

She is mentioned here because of her statements about the website Punter Net. As the name of the site implies PunterNet is a website, for “punters”, or more precisely clients of prostitutes. It could be described as being similar to a Which? forum for users of prostitutes (not that Which? would like that analogy). PunterNet provides a surprisingly large amount of information about the prostitutes that are reviewed, for everything from costs and location, right down to wheel chair access.

Harriet Harman called for the website to be banned. And, as the site is hosted in California, she address the comment directly to the Californian governor, Arnold Swartzenager

Ms Harman’s exact statement was:

Surely it can’t be too difficult for the Terminator to terminate PunterNet…..If he doesn’t I’ve got a message for Arnie – I’ll be back!

British politicians don’t really pull off the James Bond style quips very well; Ms even Harman less so. Particularly, because it doesn’t make any sense.

Assuming that the Governor chooses to push forward a law to ban this site, and then California legislates against the site, both of which are a huge assumptions, then the site will simply be moved elsewhere. It could move to a neighboring state, or a different country, there will be no difference whatsoever.

What is frightening is that Harriet Harman doesn’t seem to know this. Presumably she is not aware that there are many sites in the world that contain material that the UK government doesn’t like, but can still be viewed from the UK. Everything from Al Qaeda promotional websites to child abuse images and extreme pornography. If she is not aware of this she is remarkably ill informed.

Even more strange is the fact that UK government effectively  operate a firewall that allows them to block almost anything and everything they want to. This has happened for quite some time, but hit the mainstream press recently when a page from Wikipedia was blocked.

How can the deputy prime minster not know this?

More accurately, either she, her advisors and script writers didn’t know any of this, or they did know this and still decided to push the idea of closing down a website, operating legally in a different country, as it fits in with their personal agenda.

The net effect?

The statements by Harriet Harman were in fact so ridiculous that the owners of PunterNet, stated that the recent press had produced lots of new traffic for the site:

I would like to thank you for the huge influx of traffic to my website which your actions have caused….I am sure that the ladies who are a part of the PunterNet community thank you as well, as they will no doubt benefit financially from the many new clients who might otherwise never have found them.

The Law

Historically, the UK has allowed prostitution. Rather choosing to legislate against those who exploit women, banning (in theory) brothels and pimps, put allowing individual women, working for themselves, to make their own choices; the morals for this are not commented on here. Therefore its strange that the UK Government wants to ban  a site, in a different country, which advertises something which can be legal both in the country it resides and the UK. Has she not seen all the adverts in UK magazines, and phone boxes, advertising “escorts”?

Police experience in the UK has learnt that providing safe environments for women to sell sex is the lesser of the two evils, when compared to the problems of “street walkers”. As a result, in many areas the police have decriminalized prostitution, by allowing the practice to continue unhindered.

The government states that they are concerned that about a spike in the sex industry during the Olympics and want to take action to stop this: This is laudable and may be accurate, with previous major sporting events showing a huge increase in the use of prostitutes. This demand for sex for cash leads to the demand for more prostitutes which, in turn, can lead to sex trafficking; and all of the human horrors that brings with it.

If it’s the governments intent is to stop the eastern European gangs kidnapping and moving young women around Europe, then perhaps the best place to start is not shutting down a website that operates in California, and has been since  1999 (according to the WHOIS database)

Electronic Discovery: MS and Autonomy

If the rummors are true, this would be big news in the ED world,

Full Article

If Microsoft, as rumored, were to buy Autonomy, there would be a seismic ripple felt through eDiscovery-related markets.  First, Microsoft would own two of the leading search products in the market (Autonomy and FAST).  Second, Microsoft would have applications to provide value on top of a SharePoint infrastructure:

- iManage document management – which has a huge law firm and corporate legal installed base
- Meridio records management – which just so happened to be developed to provide RM functionality for SharePoint environment
- Cardiff BPM – which would give Microsoft advanced process management capabilities (all the better to build out more eDiscovery workflow, for say, legal holds?? )
- ZANTAZ archiving – which will enhance the archiving that will be native to Exchange 2010; the on-premise EAS will give Microsoft its own offering for the first time and the hosted Digital Safe will add to the Frontbridge offering Microsoft already has

And – scarily enough – that is just a smattering of the value that Autonomy would bring to Microsoft.  Not hard to see why the rumor mill has Microsoft paying a 75% premium for the Cambridge, UK-based company.

To any eDiscovery vendors out there I say, “be afraid…be very afraid.”  If Microsoft moves into the market, the following players have a lot to lose:

Bloggers, Lawyers, Twitters and Court Orders

Today a right wing blogger (by his own definition), called Donal Blaney, served a court order against an individual, who was using his name. The aim of the court order is to reveal the identify of the person in charge of the twitter account.

So why is this in the news?

Donald Blaney won the order against somebody using a Twitter account, with his name blaneysblarney.

Looking at the twitter account  now (on the evening of 1st October), there are just 10 tweets, not saying much at all. In fact David Blaney only described it as “mildly offensive”, and even stated that he could have the Twitter account shut off by contacting Twitter directly.

So, why is this in the news?

Donald Blaney arranged for the court order to be served via Twitter, a first of its kind apparently (no wonder!); but it’s just a method of serving a court order. Therefore we have a minor  blogger serving a court order against an unknown person, who has written around 1400 characters (not words) that are described as mildly offensive, and could have been stopped via other cheaper, aka free, methods.

In a week where the Sun has pulled its support from Labour, the Prime Minister has had a major speech, BAe is looking at a 1 billion pound fine, a thousand dead due to earth quakes, and most critically Peter Andre is planning a trip to the West Country…. sometime next year, how did David Blaney get prime time news slots?

So, for the third time, why is this in the news?

The law firm which ran the case was, not Herbet Smith, Clifford Chance, or any other law firm giant which naturally attracts and deals with the press. The firm was Griffin Law. Griffin law is owned by …. Mr Blaney.  So on the same day that a minor blogger, won a minor court order, for an even more minor incident, Mr Blaney was all over the news.

Bravo to his PR company, they did their job well. Nearly as well as the Pigeon people

UK Supreme Court to open on Thursday – 1st October 2009

The UK Supreme Court will open on 1st October 2009:

The Outlaw Article on the subject is below:

The UK’s legal landscape will change tomorrow when the Supreme Court takes over from the House of Lords as the country’s highest court.

As part of a Government move to ensure that the highest court in the country is completely independent from those who make the law it created the Supreme Court, which will occupy its own new building and be made up of 12 judges.

Until now the most senior court was made up of the Appellate Committee of the House of Lords and the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council. The House of Lords and the Privy Council are parts of Government, but The Supreme Court will not be connected to Government at all.

The Court said that it would now be “explicitly separate from both Government and Parliament”.

Eleven of the 12 judges that form the Appellate Committee of the House of Lords will become judges at the Supreme Court. One, Lord Neuberger, is moving to the Court of Appeal, where he will be head of its civil division.

Lord Neuberger has expressed reservations about the new structure and has said that the very independence from Government that is its founding principle might lead it to assume too much power.

“The danger is that you muck around with a constitution like the British constitution at your peril because you do not know what the consequences of any change will be,” he told BBC Radio 4 earlier this month. “[There is a risk of] judges arrogating to themselves greater power than they have at the moment.”

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