News

blogg against torture

Yesterday (June, 12) the American Medical Association took an important ethical policy decision against medical participation in interrogations “Physicians must not conduct, directly participate in, or monitor an interrogation with an intent to intervene, because this undermines the physicianâ??s role as healer.â??
The UN has declared that the 26th June is the International Day in Support of Victims of Torture – what are we going to do about it?
There is no single face of torture. Unfortunately there happens to be several examples of the cruelty and heartlessness of men (no gender bias intended). Examples include the statement by Rear-Admiral Harris about the three suicides of prisoners under his responsibility was â??â?¦not an act of desperation, but an act of asymmetrical warfareâ?¦â?? or the comment of Nick Harvey when faced with the news that after WWII British troops had starved prisoners and tortured them with equipment taken from Gestapo prisons, says â??Itâ??s too late for anyone to be held personally responsible, or held politically to accountâ?¦â??

Ok so issues such as time, energy and emotional baggage tend to get in the way of a more active support. There is however a way of supporting without much effort. This is not a trivialisation – on the contrary it is the promotion of information to raise awareness. Not to let uncomfortable information slip into oblivion.

The group known as Torture Awareness Month has a blogrole going. By going to http://blogagainsttorture.blogspot.com/ and do two things:

All you need to do to join is (1) promise to do a blog post about torture in the month of June, (2) link to Torture Awareness Month somewhere your blog. Do both of these things, and we will link to you from our blogrolls.

Donâ??t forget to go to Torture Awareness Month to learn more about what is, and can be done, to raise awareness against torture. But don’t stop there. The information about torture, its causes, effects and how to work against it.

Some background…

The United Nations has declared the 26 June to be International Day in Support of Victims of Torture. The UN position against torture is based primarily on article 5 of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which states, â??no one shall be subjected to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishmentâ??

This is further qualified by the 1984 Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment and the sentiments are echoed in conventions such as the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), which adds that: â??No one shall be subjected without his [or her] free consent to medical or scientific experimentation.â??

Posted on by mklang

Note from my university

As some of you may know â?? I am concerned with plagiarism (some earlier posts on the subject). In one of these earlier posts I wrote about a situation where a supervisor had borrowed/stolen/plagiarised a student work and presented it as his/her own at the EMAC conference in Milan in 2005.

The plagiarist is a PhD â?? not a student. The conference submission was a five-page paper. There is something very wrong with the fact that a person with a PhD cannot write his/her own five-page conference paper (Actually I would call five pages an extended abstract).

What really annoyed me (besides the bad plagiarism and all it stands for) was the fact that:

The majority of the research ethics committee found that while it was wrong that the supervisor did not ask the students, it was too far to say that the supervisor had cheated. This position was motivated that by calling the supervisor actions plagiarism would effectively be damage scientific research. (from earlier post).

Thankfully today the local newspaper writes that the University Dean has sent the errand onwards and upwards to the research ethics group of the National Swedish Research Council. Maybe by going beyond the confines of the own organisation the message can be stated clearly that plagiarism by researchers is as unacceptable as we claim it is when students attempt it.

Posted on by mklang

Will blog for cash (and even for free)

Actually I am sceptical to the idea of making money from blogging. In a previous post on the Blogburst I reported about the downsides of commercial feeds (they eat your broadband, usually you dont get more readers, and payment is virtually nil). Obviously there are the exceptions to the rule. In the same way as Madonna makes money from selling records is an exception from the thousands (hundreds of thousands?) who never will.

Dont get me wrong – I am not against money per se. I just dont believe that I will make money directly from my blog. Despite this, I found this news interesting.

Scoopt, the world’s first commercial citizen journalism photography agency, has just launched ScooptWords to help bloggers sell their content to newspapers and magazines. Within the Scoopt interface, you can easily add a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license to your blog right alongside a Scoopt commercial badge. Use the CC license to tell people how your work can be used non-commercially; use the ScooptWords badge to let editors know that your writing can be purchased for commercial use. There’s so much great blog content being created every day — it’ll be very exciting to see how it helps change the way newspapers and magazines are created.

(via Creative Commons)

The attempts to create commercial forms of citizen journalism are fascinating to watch. Again we see the new social uses of media threatening the established business models. Blogs will not kill print media but they will force print media news to adapt to a new reality.  As usual in situations such as these there will be commercial winners and losers.

Posted on by mklang

DNA Databases

The BBC writes that 519 requests from law enforcement agencies to extract data from the UK DNA database have been granted since 2004. No requests have been denied. The BBC writes about the database:

It emerged in January that 24,000 under-18s never cautioned, charged or convicted are on the database, which was established in 1995.

Sweden has been actively moving towards the implementation of a DNA database with the law professor Madeleine Leijonhufvud and the Minister of Justice Tomas Bodström acting main propaganda exponent with simplistic arguments in the national newspapers. Henrik Sandklef and I wrote a debate article (in Swedish) countering some of these arguments.

The short version of my beef against, is firstly that DNA databases is that they re-inforce the idea of technological infallability while being as error prone as any information system. Secondly they will be abused.

As this BBC article shows they have been done in the UK – there is no reason to expect that the same abuse will not occur in other countries.

A very good book on the role of DNA in the criminal justice system is Lazar’s DNA and the Criminal Justice System: The Technology of Justice.

(via Battleangel)

Posted on by mklang

Online Civil Disobedience

One of my research areas is the odd but interesting area of online civil disobedience. The basic problem her is whether or not the internet can be used in political forms of protest. The trend has been to limit the ability to use denial of service (even manual attacks) and web page defacement as legitimate forms of political protest. My opinion has been that this discriminates against online activities. For my arguments read the chapter Participation in the draft of my thesis Disruptive Technology here.

Five years ago the groups “Libertad” and “Kein Mensch ist illegal” (No Human is Illegal) organised 13000 people in an online blockade (With a script- client- based distributed denial of service attack) of the airline Lufthansa. The protest was against the companies part in the deportation of asylum seekers.

Now the Higher Regional Court in Frankfurt says online demonstration is not force but a legitimate form of political protest.

Decision by the Frankfurt Appellate Court (in German only, 22.05.2006)
http://www.libertad.de/service/downloads/pdf/olg220506.pdf

Statement by Libertad on the ruling (in German only, 1.06.2006)
http://www.libertad.de/inhalt/projekte/depclass/verfahren/libpe010606.shtml

In German (1.06.2006)
http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/73755
In English (2.06.2006)
http://www.heise.de/english/newsticker/news/73827

(via EDRI newsletter)

Posted on by mklang

Breeding Brutality

What happens when you train young people to kill and then pump them full of rhetoric and send them off to occupy a foreign country? The answer is tragedies like Haditha.

The strange thing is that there have not been many more tragedies and that the people who send their armies to war seem to be â??shockedâ?? and â??surprisedâ?? by these events. What were they expecting?

In the wake of the massacre at Haditha where US marines have allegedly killed 24 innocent civilians the discussions about battlefield and occupation conduct has taken off. On the one hand there have been â??damage controlâ?? actions such as the news that following Haditha servicemen are to be given ethics training, or as it was termed in a military statement â??core warrior valuesâ?? (BBC Online 1 June).

On the other hand there is sad news in relation to how abuses by servicemen are being treated. In the UK the Court Marshal cases lead to acquittals: â??The acquittals call into question the future of Britainâ??s court martial system for dealing with serviceman accused of committing abuses while on duty.â?? (The Times June 7)

None of this should be surprising â?? its just tragic. Monbiot writes about the brutalising effect of occupations and closes his article with the words:

Why should we be surprised by these events? This is what happens when one country occupies another. When troops are far from home, exercising power over people they donâ??t understand, knowing that the population harbours those who would kill them if they could, their anger and fear and frustration turns into a hatred of all â??micksâ?? or â??gooksâ?? or â??hajjisâ??. Occupations brutalise both the occupiers and the occupied. It is our refusal to learn that lesson which allows new colonial adventures to take place. (Originally published in The Guardian 6 June 2006).

Why is this interesting for me? Well in part becuase the horrors of war have a tendency to be forgotten since they are uncomfortable and a colleague of mine has asked me to participate in an exciting project on the legal use of lethal force in the military. This will be as part of a larger project on Military Violence and Killing. My part is to look at the Swedish militaries legal framework for use of lethal force and then, if time permits, attempt to ascertain whether this legal framework is reflected in the training and understanding of the men and women who will be forced into situations where lethal violence may occur.

This is particularly interesting since the Swedish military is gradually moving towards a position of more active participation in overseas peacekeeping/peacemaking action.

Posted on by mklang

When librarians snap

Most jobs have built in annoyances – and most often its customers! These are usually tolerated as they are considered part of the territory but sometimes the urge to work these annoyances out becomes too great…

One such occurance concerns the librarian Barbara McCutcheon who will now, with the help of the local police, have people arrested for not returning library books. This article quotes her as saying: “I’m just not going to take it anymore. I want my books back and I want them now,” and “I will track people down. You can run but you can’t hide”.

This may seem a harsh way to go but the police seem to support this action: “If Barbara has books out that are not returned, then we will make reports and begin to seek arrest warrants. We will start arresting people…”

The library is in Texas – why is this not surprising?
(via Biblioteksrelaterat)

Posted on by mklang

Bloggers & Law

While in the USA the Sixth District Court of Appeals on Friday defended (.pdf, via Wired) blogger rights to protect their sources. The case concerned Apple who claimed that the bloggers were not acting as journalists when they posted internal documents on future Apple products online. The court writes that the law is “…intended to protect the gathering and dissemination of news…” and therefore it is not necessary to attempt to define the border between journalists and bloggers.

A Swedish case in 2001 (“Ramsbro” B 293-00) arrived at a similar conclusion (in Swedish). Here (pdf) is an unofficial translation of judgement by Bertil Wennergren, former justice of the Swedish Supreme Administrative Court (via Swedish Helsinki Committee for Human Rights). In this case it was an “ordinary” web page and not a blog but the conclusion was that the activity of informing the public was what defined journalism and not whether or not this activity was conducted by accredited journalists or newspapers.

This is naturally an important step on the way to defining the legal position of bloggers but it remains a small step on a long road…

Posted on by mklang

bye bye blogburst

This news (below) gives me the push I needed to quit blogburst. The idea of syndication in this way interested me in that it might increase my readership but it annoyed me as it made me think about my readers. In other words the question of what my readers would think occurred to me. I did not change the content of my work in any way. But the appearance of the question in my mind was enough to annoy me.

A writer wants to be read. This is the reason I signed up to the blogburst service. This may have been a bad idea. Posts from Living the Scientific Life and Bitch Ph.D. present some valid arguments for not joining such syndication services.

The blogburst license states that bloggers who sign up agree to:

… a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free, perpetual license to reproduce, distribute, make derivative works of, perform, display, disclose, and otherwise dispose of the Work (and derivative works thereof) for the purposes ofâ?¦

When I read this I first thought that this could not be wrong. My thinking was that increasing the reach of my writing would be a good thing. But as Bitch Ph.D. explains this is flawed thinking in a couple of ways.

First: If material is published somewhere through blogburst it is very unlikely that the eventual reader will click through to my blog. Therefore I add to the value of someone elseâ??s work without increasing the popularity of my own.

Second: Since the pictures remain on my local server the popularity of my work somewhere else means that my bandwidth is supporting this popularity. Economically this does not effect me too much as blog on the university resources but the principle is that I pay in work and technology and do not get much (or anything in return).

Posted on by mklang

Rainy Sundays

Its almost a cliché. Its a rainy Sunday afternoon! The good news is that a large second hand bookstore nearby (Röde Orm in Haga) was having a major sale 10 kr per book. Most of the good stuff was gone but I came away with Lars-Ingvar Sörenson licenciate thesis from 1997 entitled Naturrätt, egendomsrätt och praxis (Natural rights, Property rights
and praxis). I am looking forward to reading it.

It begins with a quote from Sitting Bull’s speech 1875 where he speaks about his enemy and says, amongs other things:

They claim this mother of ours, the Earth, for their own use, and fence their neighbors away from her, and deface her with their buildings and their refuse. They compel her to produce out of season, and when sterile she is made to take medicine in order to produce again. All this is sacrilege. This nation is like a spring freshet; it overruns its banks and destroys all who are in its path. We cannot dwell side by side. (online version included here)

What can be better on a rainy sunday?
Posted on by mklang