UK Prime Minister David Cameron is investigating the merits of stopping social media communication of individuals known to be planning criminal activity. As Cameron told the UK House of Commons earlier this week, “Free flow of information can be used for good. But it can also be used for ill. So we are working with the police, the intelligence services, and industry to look at whether it would be right to stop people communicating via these websites and services when we know they are plotting violence, disorder, and criminality.”
After everything that’s happened in the mideast since spring, Cameron clearly hasn’t a clue, so let’s help him: The free flow of information is not just “good” in and of itself, it’s a necessity. Social media is part of that free flow of information. Get a warrant for messages related to specific investigations, but no monitoring and no censoring. It’s a fool’s bargin to sacrifice liberty for security.
Olivia Solon, writing for Wired, reports when Cameron was challenged to increase police presence, his response was that the question should be whether “to give the police the technology to trace people on Twitter or BBM or close it down.” Solon cites Liberal Democrat Julian Huppert as a sole voice of reason when he said that social media were being used to mobilize voluntary localized help and clean-up efforts.
Eric Pfanner, writing for the New York Times, reports that Theresa May, the Home secretary, would meet with social media and mobile phone vendors “to discuss possible measure that could be put in place.”
For its part, Twitter appears to be holding fast to its policy published by co-founder Biz Stone and Alex McGillivray, the company’s general counsel at the beginning of the Arab Spring uprisings:
“Some Tweets may facilitate positive change in a repressed country, some make us laugh, some make us think, some downright anger a vast majority of users. We don’t always agree with the things people choose to tweet, but we keep the information flowing irrespective of any view we may have about the content.”
As Eva Galperin, writing for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), notes, this view was also held by Cameron until recently. In a February speech in Kuwait, Cameron “asserted that freedom of expression should be respected ‘in Tahrir Square as much as Trafalgar Square.’ The Prime Minister’s 180-degree shift on freedom of expression unfortunately places him one step closer to the growing, worldwide cohort of politicians and despots seeking solace in censorship.”
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