Who needs standards in journalism?

In this era of "citizen journalism", insisting on high standards in reporting - demanding pesky things such as accuracy, genuine balance, correct spelling, punctuation and grammar and, God forbid, paying journalists for their work - exposes one to mockery. 

Never mind that accuracy is the foundation on which credible journalism is built, or that balance on issues of climate change will not be achieved by wheeling out Lord Lawson to punch science in the face, or that journalism is more readable when spelling, punctuation and grammar are in order, or that journalists should be paid for their work because, well, it's work...

Instead, as part of the world's inexorable descent into idiocracy, the rise of the "citizen journalist" means that anyone, it seems, can call themselves a journalist. We wouldn't allow "citizen brain surgeons" to open our skulls but, it seems, many of us are happy to let "citizen journalists" tell us what to think, whether its accurate or not.

"Well, you would say that, wouldn't you?" I hear the indignant crowd shriek at me. After all, I've made a pretty good living out of being a journalist for more than 20 years now. Why would I want these untrained upstarts parking their tanks on my lawn? Why don't I just go back to my manual typewriter and report on the intrigues of the church fete and let "citizen journalists" take over?  

OK, I'll tell you why. Because journalism is a profession. Training is required. Journalists do not need to spend years and years at university, as is the case for doctors, and it is a shame that the days of cadetships, where aspiring hacks could leave school at 16 and work their way up the ladder at newspapers, have fallen by the wayside. But there are skills that need to be taught, an understanding of media law is essential, and ethics are as important as ever. These can be taught at college, university or on the job - or a combination of these - and they are essential for professionalism. 

This is not about Old Lady Lewis yelling at technology. It's great that social media can be used to break news, for people who are on the spot as news events unfold to film or write about what they see through platforms such as Twitter and Facebook Live. 

Hell, I'd be a massive hypocrite if I demanded that bloggers get shut down, particularly as bloggers have shown incredible bravery in less liberal parts of the world in their quest to expose true horrors and corruption. Raif Badawi, for example, is still languishing in a Saudi Arabian jail. He has been publicly lashed over charges, including insulting Islam and apostasy, because of his pro-free speech blog.

But plenty of bloggers and assorted social media users seem to be unaware of the responsibilities that come with writing either reportage or opinion pieces. They risk getting sued for libel or prejudicing court cases. Often, they contribute to the growing mountain of bullshit that can be filed under "fake news". 

The tidal wave of ignorance about the British criminal justice system and rules in regard to reporting on court cases has been brought into sharp focus in recent weeks. First, there was the #FreeTommy crowd, foaming and indignant that Stephen Yaxley-Lennon could be guilty of contempt of court when they thought all he was doing was telling the truth about rapists - except that his "reporting" has the potential to cost the taxpayers thousands in aborted trials and could cause rapists to go free. Stephen Yaxley-Lennon is not a journalist.

And ever since the trial of cricketer Ben Stokes commenced earlier this month, the armchair experts have been out in force crapping all over social media with their inane pronouncements of guilt or innocence. These fools do not care that the trial is ongoing and, at the time of writing, not all evidence has come before the jury. 

As well as being told to avoid the traditional forms of news media, jurors are now being advised to steer clear of social media, lest their decision is coloured by online pitchfork-wavers. The journalists reporting on the case have to be very careful with the language they use, to not allow opinion to creep into their stories, but head over to Facebook and everyone seems to know exactly what happened that night and what should happen to those involved. It's pathetic.

Of course, not all journalism is perfect and bad journalism should be called out. This week, for example, there was a mass outrage because apparently an innocent British woman was jailed in Dubai for the heinous crime of having a glass of wine on an Emirates Airline flight. Except that's not quite what happened - and the reporting of this case in the UK media was almost universally terrible.  

The woman in question, Ellie Holman, a Swedish citizen who lives in Kent, arrived in Dubai from London with her daughter. At passport control, she handed over an expired Swedish passport. Understandably, she was not allowed into the country, as would be the case if she tried to enter any country with an expired passport. Ms Holman then produced an Iranian passport - Iranian citizens cannot get a tourist visa on arrival to the UAE, just as they can't if they want to visit the UK. She had the option of paying on the spot for a visa which would allow her, as an Iranian citizen, to spend 96 hours in the UAE. But she refused. 

As the situation escalated, she filmed the border control officials - again, this would land you in trouble at pretty much any international airport. In the UK, for example, while filming in public places is legal, airports are privately owned businesses and, as such, they can set their own rules in regard to filming and photography. 

Ms Holman was asked if she had been drinking and she said she'd consumed a glass of wine on the plane. But her detention was not for drinking a glass of wine - it was for visa irregularities. However, it was decided that charges would not be pursued and Ms Holman and her daughter should be arriving back in the UK today. 

If someone rocked up to Heathrow on an expired Swedish passport and then tried to enter the country by producing an Iranian passport without a valid UK visa - and then filmed border control officials as the situation escalated - they too would be taken aside and public sympathy would be non-existent. 

As someone who has herself fallen foul of the law in the UAE, I am not going to sit here and tell you all that UAE law is perfect. It's not and there are plenty of good reasons to criticise it. But I am also someone who believes in accurate journalism and there is nothing to be gained by reporting on Ms Holman's case in such a shoddy manner. It undermines the good work other journalists have done on reporting on legal matters in the UAE and neighbouring states.

If people who declare themselves "citizen journalists" would like to become professional journalists, there are multiple options available for training. It would be great if such people did take the time to make themselves aware of media law, of rules and conventions particularly in regard to court reporting, and of media ethics. Good things have come out of the rise of blogging and social media - but when you publish something, you have responsibilities. I'm sure plenty of people, if they have made it to the end of this blog post, will still dismiss me as a boring and bitter old hack, trying to take all the fun out of their crusades - but if you cannot be bothered with accuracy, you are not a journalist. 

Photography by rawpixel.com from Pexels

Why I won't join the Fidel Castro grief orgy

Fidel Castro is dead. And I, for one, will not be shedding a single tear for his passing.

As a journalist, I cannot mourn the passing of a man who on the day of his death left behind a country ranked at just 171 on the Reporters Without Borders World Press Freedom Index. Cuba is ranked 171 out of 180 countries. It is dwelling at the bottom with other press freedom dumpster fires such as North Korea, Eritrea and Syria. It rates lower than Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq and Turkey.

Just last month, Cuba arrested journalists who were attempting to cover the Hurricane Matthew disaster. Equipment was confiscated, and in the wake of harassment in recent months, some journalists have fled the country.

Raul Castro's calls for reforms in 2010 have been meaningless. The regime has almost 100 per cent ownership of all media outlets. Access to the internet for citizens is severely limited. Only around 5 per cent of Cubans have internet at home, all internet comes via the government-owned telco Etecsa. Opposition websites are blocked. There is no real editorial independence in Cuba. Censorship and threats to journalists trying to do their job are par for the course.

We will never know for certain how many people have been murdered under Fidel Castro's regime. The Cuba Archive has documented 3,615 firing squad executions since 1959. It's not on the same scale as the deaths under Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot or Mao but the mentality is the same - wipe out opposition and dissent through executions, a legal system without due process and labour camps.

Why would anyone who claims to chreish freedom, who is appalled by capital punishment, who believes in free and open political debate be OK with such repression, regardless of the scale?

"BUT FREE HEALTHCARE AND EDUCATION!" scream Castro's apologists.

Yeah, that's great as long as the educated, healthy people can actually fulfill their potential, travel freely, express their views freely, and enjoy access to a free press and a polling station once in a while. Have the apologists not noticed that plenty of countries have great educational and healthcare options and democracy? It should not be an either/or situation.

"BUT WHAT ABOUT THE US?!" the apologists yell.

It is precisely this non-nuanced, binary thinking that is turning the world into an idiocracy. It is possible to be angry about more than one thing. There is plenty to criticise the US over, especially in terms of foreign policy over multiple decades. But none of this will bring back the people who were on the receiving end of Castro's firing squads, or reunite families who have been separated, or bring peace to those who want to practice their faith without state repression.

People have risked their lives in dangerous sea voyages to escape the Castro regime. Yet it is stunning how many people who, I am certain, are quite rightly sympathetic to refugees escaping brutality, economic hardship and repression by sea in other parts of the world are seemingly unbothered by the plight of those who felt they had no choice but to leave Cuba. The hypocrisy is breathtaking.

Instead, I stand with the people who are dancing on the streets this weekend. The mere fact that I can sit here in London and criticise both the US and Cuba, and indeed Britain, without fearing for my life speaks volumes. Make mine a Cuba libre.



Photography by Kevin Burkett/Flickr

Douchebags dancing on the grave of the Independent

It was announced this week that the Independent will shut down its print edition next month and be the first daily newspaper in the UK to be 100% online.

Inevitably, there were cloth-eared dullards who celebrated this downsizing of the Indy's operations because it was all a bit too lefty for their liking. Yeah, because the newspaper landscape in Britain is currently dominated by extreme left-wing journalism and opinion pieces...

Up to 100 jobs are under threat. Again, assorted buffoons will be delighted at the prospect of journalists being out of work. Amol Rajan has been placed in the unenviable position as editor of the Indy of having to defend the move to 100% online and put a positive spin on it all in TV interviews.

But dancing on the grave of unemployed journalists and a defunct newspaper is a dick move. And I say this in regard to the demise of the printed Independent and the News of the World, even though these newspapers ended in very different circumstances.

Obviously, as a journalist myself I get no joy out of seeing fellow journalists lose their jobs, whether I liked the paper or not. Obviously, anything that makes the market harder for both staff jobs and freelance work potentially has an impact on me and my husband, who is also a journalist. That is my vested interest declared.

But on a wider level, when we end up with a smaller media, with a smaller number of journalists reporting the news, with a tighter circle of opinion columnists, with fewer sources of information, everyone loses. We lose diversity, we lose journalism that tells stories from multiple angles, from angles that might not have occurred to many, we have media outlets running on the smell of an oily rag, we have editors having to determine which story gets the airplay and which one doesn't, because of a lack of staff and resources.

And we are all to blame for this sorry state of affairs. All of us, myself included.

I am not about to declare myself Saint Georgia of the Printed Page. While my day job involves editing a magazine for the African market, where print is still king, as a consumer of media, I get vast swathes of my information online now. Sure, I pick up a copy of Metro to read on my commute to work and pick up a copy of the Evening Standard for the ride home, and both newspapers are important in the media landscape, but it'd be daft to get all my information from just those two sources. I am not Sarah Palin. I can actually name multiple newspapers.

The Metro and the Evening Standard rely on advertising sales rather than copy sales and that presents its own editorial challenges for the editorial teams.

And I have fallen out of the habit of buying newspapers, as I suspect many of us have. I fondly remember a time, more than a decade ago, when I shared a house with my best friend in Sydney. Every Sunday, we'd buy both Sunday papers, divvy them up into the sections and line them up on the living room floor. I liked to start with the hard news, business and sport and then read the lighter sections, and my friend preferred to start with the lighter stuff and finish with the news. It was a magnificent system whereby we'd wile away the afternoon, each of us starting at one end of the line of sections, passing each other somewhere in the middle, and finishing at the other end.

The last time I bought a newspaper, it was the i, the Independent's condensed baby brother newspaper. I had an hour to kill between appointments at my local hospital and I fancied reading something that wouldn't make me want to punch a wall and would fit nicely in my handbag, because I was getting the bus home. That was almost two months ago. The paper cost me all of 20p. Twenty of my British pence has been my sole contribution to this country's newspaper industry this year.

And in the end, it is all about economics.

When print sales started to decline and newspapers wised up to the fact that they needed to go online, the conundrum of how to make money out of the internet affected every outlet. Some newspapers are trying paywalls for all their online content, some are offering a limited number of free articles before you have to put your hand in your pocket, and some are hoping that advertising revenue will be enough to fund the operation while keeping the web content free to access.

It is particularly pathetic when someone uses the comments section of an online article to complain about the advertising. It takes all my self-control not to reply to their comment by saying: "THE ADVERTISEMENTS ARE THERE SO YOU DON'T HAVE TO PAY FOR ONLINE CONTENT AND SO THAT THE JOURNALISTS WHO WRITE THE ARTICLES ACTUALLY GET PAID, YOU INTELLECTUALLY MILD COCKWOMBLE!".

I have no time for fools who refuse to understand that someone has to be paid for writing and researching material for the internet. We journalists generally love our jobs and couldn't imagine doing anything else for a living but, just like everyone else, we have bills to pay. Doing something for the sheer love is only an option for the independently wealthy. And do you want a media where only the fabulously wealthy can afford to work in it?

So, we as media consumers, need to take responsibility. If we want good quality journalism but don't want to pay for it, we have to accept that the media outlets will need to find other ways to pay their staff and keep the office lights on, even if that means you have to sit through a 30-second advertisement or having to close an annoying pop-up. That really is the ultimate first world pain.

If you don't like ads with your news, you'll have to pay for your news.

Few of us are prepared to go back to the pre-internet days. After all, it is now so much easier not only to read an article but to share it as well. A few clicks and you can post a story on your Facebook page, tweet it, or email it to your entire address book. Gone are the days when my mother would cut out a newspaper article and post it to me. These days, she will email me the link. It is so much easier and more efficient to share an article online than it is to call everyone you know and tell them to go out and buy a newspaper and turn to a certain page.

This is how we get our information now. And nobody wants to give that up. But before you get excited about unemployed journalists or whine about advertising or paywalls, at least try to understand the simple economics.

Why the Ashley Madison hacking matters

"These lying cheats look like they'll get some of their own medicine now." (Daily Telegraph reader)

"I didn't used [sic] to believe in karma, but this, honestly is making me question my doubts. This totally made my Monday. I hope they totally out everyone on that site. ;)" (Huffington Post reader)

"I think the hackers should publish the whole damn lot, regardless of whether the site is taken down." (Guardian reader)

And so on... It was inevitable that the hack on Ashley Madison, a website aimed at people who want to discreetly cheat on their partners, was not going to generate much sympathy for the victims. But the pearl-clutching outrage and sanctimonious gloating over the unfaithful masks the bigger problem here.

Melanie McDonagh, Moral Guardian in Chief for the Evening Standard drearily, predictably wrote yesterday that she would be "even more inclined to cackle if the Impact Team was a group of evangelical Christians anxious to put people out of the way of temptation."

Sadly for St Melanie of the Marital Bed, the real story was not a moral crusade with the potential to destroy millions of lives and provide a bonanza for divorce lawyers. Instead, it seems the Impact Team hacked Ashley Madison as disgruntled customers - they were outraged that the company would only permanently delete details of membership from its servers for a £15 fee. Given the nature of the site and the desperation of people not to be found out if they decided Ashley Madison's human smorgasbord was not to their taste, this would be an easy money-spinner. Welcome to free market capitalism, cheaters!

But it is the fact that such a devastating hack can happen on websites that claim to have the very best security that is the real worry for everyone. How many websites have your personal details? How would you feel if someone wasn't happy with waiting all day for an Argos delivery, hacked into their database and threatened to release the information? Obviously, being outed as an Argos customer is marginally less embarrassing than being outed as an Ashley Madison customer, but the breach of privacy is still completely unacceptable.

What if the government decided that a website you'd signed up to was not to their liking and they wanted to find out the details of everyone involved? David Cameron's speech this week about dealing with radical Islam is a case in point. Maybe you signed up to a website for some information about Islam for any number of reasons, none of which involved terrorism. But this is a government that is becoming less and less libertarian about your online privacy - do you trust this government to not obtain personal information from sites they deem to be "of interest"?

How relaxed and comfortable would you feel if you discovered you ended up on a watch list for no good reason? Maybe you'll get stopped from boarding that flight to Turkey, even though you were simply hoping for a Kate Moss-style rampage on a beach in Bodrum and weren't using the trip to enter Syria and join IS.

But, hey, it is far easier to moralise about the lives of people you don't know. Never mind that with 70% of Ashley Madison members being men, the chances of feckless husbands actually getting laid via that site are not brilliant. Never mind that it's the kind of site that plenty of people probably join for a bit of a nosy around before logging off and never logging back on again. Never mind that there might be people on that site desperate for some attention because they are in an abusive relationship or a relationship they don't feel they can leave for any number of reasons.

No, let's just get the pitchforks out instead and affect an attitude that leads to execution in Saudi Arabia! Yeah! Well played, people!

Nobody is denying that infidelity can destroy relationships and that it usually ends up being deeply unpleasant for all concerned. But if all you're getting out of the Ashley Madison story is an excuse to get on your high horse about other people's sex lives, you're not paying attention.





Photography by Circe Denyer. Picture posed by models in no way connected to this blog post.

A draft speech by Jeremy Hunt that *might* have been found on the Cloud...

Good afternoon, everyone. Good to see you all looking so well in spite of it all.

I am here to announce a revamped NHS. In this age of the internet [NOTE TO ASSISTANT: DO WE STILL CALL IT THE INFORMATION SUPERHIGHWAY OR WILL THAT MAKE ME TREND ON TWITTER FOR THE WRONG REASONS???], we need to harness all the technology we can to save money [NOTE TO ASSISTANT: SHOULD I SAY "IMPROVE PATIENT CARE" HERE???].

As such, the NHS now stands for National Health Syberspace. [NOTE TO ASSISTANT: WILL THAT SPELLING CAUSE QUESTIONS TO BE ASKED ABOUT GOVE'S EDUCATION REFORMS???]

I am sure you have all heard about our cutting-edge plans for GPs to do more consultations via email and Skype. This country is the birthplace of the English language, of fine literature that has influenced the world over the centuries, so I know everyone will be able to describe their symptoms to their GPs over email with an almost lyrical level of descriptiveness. Indeed, I fully expect that one day an enterprising GP will compile his or her most eloquent patient emails for a most entertaining book. [NOTE TO ASSISTANT: WOULD THIS REPRESENT AN ENORMOUS BREACH OF PATIENT CONFIDENTIALITY???]

So I am fully confident that the people of this country will be able to describe such complex conditions as motor neurone disease and cardiac dysrhythmia with effortless ease!

And what could be better than only going as far as your webcam for a cheeky Skype consultation. In keeping with our fine tradition of saucy comedy, I am sure everyone is as excited as I am at the hilarious prospect of a friend or family member walking in just as you are bent over the iPad showing your doctor a particularly tricky anal boil or a booming yeast infection. Benny Hill would be so proud.

But, make no mistake, we are not stopping at email and Skype with the National Health Syberspace.

We will save millions of pounds [IMPROVE PATIENT CARE???] by launching a hashtag. Why should you be limited to seeing just one trained medical professional at a time when you can ask the opinion of millions of Twitter users across the world. Yes, tomorrow we will get #WhatIsWrongWithMe trending worldwide. This way, it will be easy to send your symptoms out to the whole world for easy diagnosis. Be sure to attach a photo for maximum retweets.

Send your photos of irritating rashes out to the Twitterverse! You will know in no time if it is a heat rash, measles, acne, chicken pox or shingles.

And who doesn't love a good Facebook video? The ice bucket challenge has been a jolly jape and we can't get enough of videos of someone else's kids dancing on the kitchen table to a middle-of-the-road radio station. So we will also be saving millions of pounds [IMPROVING PATIENT CARE??? HELP!] by simply urging you all to post videos of yourself, your family and your ailments.

We know there are some things that cannot be properly captured in a photograph or email so if you have a wheezy cough, a weeping sore or you are having a suspected heart attack or bipolar episode, just video it, post it on Facebook and tag the friends whose opinions you value the most. I am pleased to report this has already been happening to a certain extent, whether it is a clueless parent updating their status to inform the world their baby is running a temperature of 39º rather than going to straight to one of the A&E departments we have closed down, or an attention-seeking idiot posting something about a terrible headache in the hope of getting a lot of "u ok hun?" comments.

So why not go one step further and share fun videos of your symptoms on your Facebook page? Your friends and family care about you so they are best placed to advise on whether you really need to see a GP or go to hospital.

We want to embrace the internet as the NHS's main diagnostic tool. After all, who hasn't turned to Doctor Google in the middle of the night to self-diagnose a potentially life-threatening condition? And we can save even more money [DO I MEAN TO SAY "IMPROVE PATIENT CARE" AGAIN HERE? THIS IS TRICKY] by hoping and praying that more people's health-related Googling leads them to homeopathy websites where they will simply spend loads of money on insecure websites buying useless potions or discovering the healing power of rainbows.

It is an exciting new future for the new, improved National Health Syberspace. If you have any questions about this state-of-the-art initiative, please tweet me and I will not bother to respond because, frankly, I am too busy tweeting patronising bunkum about how I spent an afternoon with the "hardworking staff" of an A&E department in a safe Tory seat at its least busiest time.

Fannying about in Sydney

Honi Soit is the newspaper produced by University of Sydney students for University of Sydney students. But the latest cover, reproduced here in all its uncensored glory, has been recalled after a farce that proved exactly why such a cover image is important.

While Honi Soit is pretty hard to come by outside of Sydney University, the Student Representative Council feared that such a cover may break Australian media laws. They would be the same media laws that led to the now-defunct Australian edition of FHM requiring a very busy band of re-touch artists to ensure that errant pubes or vulva outlines were eradicated from covers and inside pages back when I worked there. I recall seeing an advance copy of a mag and marvelling at a model's crotch - her white bikini was indecently damp and the result was a smoothed-out PhotoShop vulva. It looked like she was wearing a crash helmet down there.

Fear turned to farce for Honi Soit when black bars were placed over the visible labia and clitoris. Except the bars weren't entirely opaque and the SRC absurdly called for all copies to be removed from the stands, returned to the Honi Soit office and locked up.

Good grief. Student newspapers exist to challenge the status quo, to take risks, to give voice to opinions that will often be sadly silenced when students graduate and find themselves in the self-censoring corporate world. Honi Soit editor, Hannah Ryan, was not afraid of breaking the law but the SRC panicked. Inevitably, the uncensored cover has been shared far and wide thanks to the internet making a joke of Australian media laws. It is probably the most widely viewed Honi Soit cover in the newspaper's long history.

According to the Sydney Morning Herald, the university's vice-chancellor Dr Michael Spence "defended the paper's editorial freedom but criticised the cover."

He said: "Personally my view is the cover is demeaning to women but I do realise I'm not the target audience for Honi Soit. However, the student body at the University of Sydney has a long and proud tradition of independence and it's a tradition we will continue to uphold."

Er, so he didn't really defend any freedoms at all then. The 18 women involved in the cover all posed willingly and it was created with the support of the university's Women's Collective. It was shot in the university's Women's Room. These women are not ashamed and nor should they be. But thank you, Dr Spence, for telling us these women have demeaned themselves and all women. Where would we all be without this man to tell us what to think?

On the upside, thanks to the power of the internet, a selection of real women's vulvas have been shared globally. If this means that even one young man or teenage boy learns that not every woman has a denuded symmetrical crotch that looks like a plastic taco shell, that is a good thing.  No, I am not a mother. Yes, I would happily let any future teenage son of mine see the Honi Soit cover. What are you going to do, Moral Panic Merchants? Call Social Services in advance lest I end up being a bad mother sometime in about 2030?

Fear of pubes is nothing new, despite what anti-porn campaigners might think. We have a worldwide archive of centuries of art where pubic hair has been diligently eliminated and the pudenda is always neat and tucked away.

A sense of shame, fear and revulsion surrounding real female bodies is nothing new. This, in turn, breeds some awful attitudes towards women's bodies by men and distressingly negative attitudes in women about themselves. The ongoing existence of ridiculous media laws and the resulting panic, such as that exhibited by the SRC, demonstrates exactly why we need to see more images that challenge our collective fear and prudery, not less.

 

Click here to read the blog post from Lily Patchett, one of the 18 women who featured on the cover.

Image courtesy of Honi Soit

David Cameron and the big, bad internet

David Cameron looks so earnest, doesn't he, as he furrows his brow, puts on his best "concerned parent" voice and tells us all how censoring the internet will be a marvellous thing for child protection. Except it won't do a damn thing to stop the creation of child pornography.

People who get off on such material do not enter terms such as "child pornography" or "kiddie sex" into Google and instantly access a world of abusive, exploitative horror. The dissemination and consumption of child pornography is insidious, secretive and encrypted. Has anyone ever seen someone in an internet cafe openly viewing images of kids being sexually abused? Of course not. The consumption of child pornography is furtive, dark and shameful.

But Cameron's simplistic attempt to stop the rot won't actually stop such images and videos being produced in the first place. The whole supply chain of child pornography is a hideous world of wrongness but to stop it happening at all, it is important to focus heavily at the production end. By the time it reaches the pitiful viewer, the children have already been abused.

It is already very difficult to just stumble upon child pornography when searching online. And the intellectually bankrupt censorship Cameron has in mind fails to understand the nuances of human sexuality.

Stuart Hazell, the murderer of 12-year-old Tia Sharp, had searched for "little girls in glasses" before sexually abusing and killing Tia, a young girl who wore glasses. If you put that innocuous term into Google, nothing exploitative comes up. The images are of girls, all fully clothed, all wearing glasses. If someone seriously gets off on underage girls in glasses, Cameron's porn ban won't stop such people seeing images of underage girls in glasses. Given the harmless nature of the images this particular search brings up, it is impossible to stop someone privately getting their jollies from pictures that would not be out of place in frames on mantelpieces. And blocking the "little girls in glasses" term would stop such legitimate searches as those regularly done by photo editors of parenting magazines, for example.

People get off on all manner of things. They don't need to add words such as "porn" or "sex" to find images that might float their boat but are still perfectly legal and should not be censored in a free society. There is no limit to the things that turn people on and there is no way every search engine term that might appeal to a paedophile can ever be identified and then banned.

In short, all Cameron's plan does is appease the assorted pearl-clutchers who are scared of the internet, who refuse to learn how the internet works, and who are easily satisfied by simplistic solutions to complex problems.

Is anyone labouring under the misapprehension that this government is at all serious about child protection? This is a government that has no qualms about letting G4S run children's homes. This would be the same G4S that promotes a guard who fatally restrained a 15-year-old boy to the position of Health and Safety Manager.

But in an era where puritanical voices are getting disproportionately loud, where people genuinely believe that violence against women will be reduced if lads' mags are taken off supermarket shelves, it is easy to see why people from the left and right are being fooled by David Cameron's latest ridiculous idea. 

Privacy? Who needs it?

So Edward Snowden is hiding out somewhere in Hong Kong - or maybe by now, he's not. Who knows? Whatever the case, there is no middle ground narrative for him. He is either a noble and faultless hero or he is a reckless, dangerous man who, to top it all off, has pretty much orchestrated the world's most jaw-dropping break-up. Hell, he has made text-dumpers look positively saintly.

But his personal life is not really the point. Well, unless you're writing for New York magazine, in which case it is perfectly appropriate to name and run pictures of a woman believed to be Snowden's abandoned partner. And not just any old pictures either. New York magazine saw fit to publish pictures of her in pole dancing attire along with excerpts from her blog and her YouTube channel. And, quelle surprise, the Daily Mail has also decided pictures of a woman who is most likely feeling vulnerable and confused are newsworthy.  

What's the problem, you might ask. She put those pictures online for all to see so surely she has given up her right to privacy, no? No. As far as we are aware, she did not know what her partner was up to and was as stunned as his employers were to discover he had left the US after leaking his story to the Guardian. She has almost certainly been questioned, or will be questioned, but at the time of writing, she has not been charged with any crime or been found guilty of any crime.

It is likely that she wanted to attract the attention of people looking for pictures, videos and blog posts on pole dancing. Such people could have found her blog and interacted with her without knowing the details of her personal life. That is nobody's business.

She had occasionally alluded to a boyfriend known only as "E" on her blog, and yesterday she wrote a vague blog post about heartbreak and goodbyes - without naming her now world-famous boyfriend - but has since, understandably, deleted the whole website. Except it all lives on in Google cache. 

Ironically, in a lame attempt to smear someone who has potentially exposed a massive threat to privacy in multiple nations, New York magazine has not respected Snowden's partner's right to privacy. And they have demonstrated just how easy it is for your online presence to become everyone's business without the intervention of big government.

She did not ask to be an international public figure. She has a right to privacy and she has a right to make a new life for herself elsewhere, something that will now become more difficult as she is splashed all over the internet and no doubt in tomorrow's newspapers.

Edward Snowden's revelations are not necessarily shocking. Nor is the potential for the British government to be involved, despite the denials of William Hague. We voluntarily hand over information to the government all the time. In the last two weeks, I have handed over information about myself and my husband to the UK Border Agency so that I can have indefinite leave to remain in Britain. Yesterday, I made a complaint about my local bus service and included my Oyster card number to make it easier to track down the offending drivers. I have to trust that they won't use the information about my travels around London against me.

And they probably won't. Who cares where little ol' me goes in my boring daily business? But that's not really the point.

As a white, 37-year-old Australian woman of English and Scottish Christian heritage, I don't fit any of the usual stereotypes and I am probably not on any watchlists. Or am I? I regularly communicate online with Arab friends who I met in my time living in the Middle East. I am currently involved in a campaign to save my local hospital which has an online presence. I have written on this very blog in defence of the mosque in my neighbourhood. I am not a royalist or a fan of the current government. Who knows if some combination of words, phrases or contacts in my online life has alerted GCHQ? I am pretty sure I have the freedom in Britain to say what I say online without fear or maybe I am being naive?

But surely we need all this surveillance to keep us all safe? Here's the thing about terrorism - the reason why  it is so effective at creating mass fear is the element of surprise. Nobody who went to work at the World Trade Center on that awful day expected the day to end quite so badly. Nobody who went about their usual London commute on 7/7 thought their bus or train might end up a burning wreck. Drummer Lee Rigby did not expect to be attacked and killed in broad daylight.

The two suspects in Drummer Rigby's murder trial were known to MI5 but the attack still happened. All that was required to carry out such a vile act was a conversation between a couple of seriously unwell people and the acquisition of a meat cleaver. The conversation might not have even taken place online or by telephone. It was all pretty low-tech.

What we do need is time to properly digest the information already available to us from Edward Snowden's story. There will no doubt be more revelations in the coming months. We need to rationally assess the full extent of our collective privacy invasion and determine if we think such intrusions are worthwhile, necessary or even effective at stopping terrorism.

But even today, #PRISM and #NSA are dropping back in on Twitter because of #PS4 and #iOS7. An entire Twitter account, @_nothingtohide is devoted to the retweeting of lame remarks along the lines of "I don't care if the government spies on me! My life is so boring! LOL!".

Why do we need to give a damn about whether or not Edward Snowden has uncovered a massive infringement on liberty on an international scale? After all, there's a new console we simply must own and there are pictures of his pretty girlfriend in her underwear to leer over.