I fought the law and the law lost.

[davywavy]

In a slack period yesterday afternoon, I spent a half hour or so idly surfing the web acquainting myself with some of the more salacious details of the private lives of a bunch of minor celebrities of whom I'd been previously largely unaware. If it weren't for the whole furore over superinjunctions I wouldn't have bothered doing this or even cared who these people were, but the widespread online civil disobedience - tens, if not hundreds of thousands of people have posted names and details which are legally still redacted - means that anyone at all can access this information and this has brought it to a far wider audience than otherwise would ever have been the case.
The nature of modern communications technology, and the limitations of the law to prosecute either people overseas posting information or even vast numbers of people in this country, means that the superinjuctions are effectively worthless. The law can be - and is - flaunted with utter impunity in this case.

The thing is, this is not a good thing. Junior military officers are taught that they should never give an order which they aren't pretty sure will be obeyed, on the basis that as soon as people start ignoring your authority in one area they will start to think you can be safely ignored in others as well. It's a rule that legislators would do well to remember; if you create legislation which you cannot or will not enforce then as soon as people realise that you can be flaunted it'll start giving them all kinds of ideas about all those other laws as well, and that's not a healthy long term result for the general law-abiding nature of society. In short - if you can't or won't enforce some of your rules, you undermine all your rules as people will naturally assume you're just as weak in other areas as well.

I'm sure there were other cases before, but I first really picked up on this with the hunting ban about ten years ago. Before the ban was passed the police made it pretty clear they considered it unenforceable, and after the ban the number of people involved in hunting actually rose. The number of hunting prosecutions is tiny, and the law is regularly flaunted to this day.
Another good example of unenforceable law is taxation legislation. I'm not sure what the situation is now - I don't doubt it's pretty much the same - but back in days when Gordon Brown was as tax-happy as it gets the law should have been generating about 49% of GDP in tax, but in reality it struggled to bring in more than about 40%*. Why? Because above a certain level people start looking for ways to avoid paying tax and once they've found they can then they do it more. The more legislation there is, the more loopholes there are and the easier it becomes to avoid paying tax above a certain level. Moreover, once it becomes clear you can do it with impunity the entire system becomes undermined and people actively look for more ways to bilk it.

Something I've found when dealing with people who are - let's say - more idealistic and less thoughtful in their politics is that their reaction to anything they don't like is to propose to make it illegal. The Big Issue has a regular feature called 'King for a Day' in which people are asked what they would do if they ran the country and this is pretty much uniformly a list of things that people think should be banned. Similarly raggedhalo's assertion that he'd make it illegal for people to educate their own children or hareb_sarap telling me about all the super new laws he'd introduce if he was in power. What none of these proposals ever seem to tackle is what they would do if their laws were ignored or if they didn't have the intended effect, and to me that's the most important part of planning: what do you do in the event of failure? Passing a law isn't a magic wand which makes things you don't like go away, so if the legislation doesn't do what you want for whatever reason what's your plan B? The twitter campaign against superinjunctions is a case in point - the law is powerless and attempts to enforce it just make the process look ridiculous. The only - only - serious proposal for enforcing the superinjunction law is for a few test cases to take place, and this leads to the unedifying prospect of someone who can't be named being arrested for naming someone else who can't be named, tried in secret to prevent details becoming public, and sent to prison for a crime which can't be reported.

That's the sort of law which only David Blunkett could love, and it just isn't going to happen.

The thing is, every time you introduce new levels of complexity into a system you increase the chance of something within the system failing. The amount of tax law trebled between 2000 -2010 but the amount of tax actually raised as a percentage of GDP increased only infinitesimally. In 2009 alone, over 3000 separate new pieces of legislation were introduced to the statute books. I've got ten bob which says 90% of them aren't enforced. Are you going to take a blind bit of notice of them? I'm not.

But hey, at least we all know that the footballer formerly known as JGF can't keep his trousers on.

^{*Insert pithy comments about overspending on unrealistic revenue projections here, blah blah, I've said it before and if you still think Brown had a clue what he was about there's no helping you.}

Comments

[davegodfrey.livejournal.com]

In principle superinjunctiosn aren't a terrible idea. I don't care that footballer X has been shagging minor celebrity Y. Its their private life, and unless it actually has an impact on their professional career, or there is legitemate public interest- (MPs campaigning on "back to basics" fathering illegitemate offspring left, right and centre for example), I don't see any justification in splashing it all over the red-tops.

However that's a reason to introduce privacy laws of some sort. Although quite how you make them work is another matter.

[crocodilewings.livejournal.com]

You know how people who have terrible body odour never get told they have terrible body odour, and so they keep on smelling bad? And then you start wondering whether you have easily preventable odious qualities that people simply haven't told you about, although you'd much rather they did?

Well the word "incremental" doesn't mean "by a tiny amount"; it just means "increased by an amount", and "increased incrementally" is a painfully gaping tautology. You misused it in the same way in a post about AV, and anyone with a maths or computing background is going to think you don't know what the word means.

Feel completely free to screen or delete this comment, and I trust you'll do the same for me in future.

[supermouse.livejournal.com]

It's really weird reading one of your pieces on law and politics and agreeing *all* the way through.

[sherbetsaucers.livejournal.com]

Well said sir.

[belak-krin.livejournal.com]

There is a kind of bizarre social justice/public interest thing going on with the super-injunctions. I'm pretty sure that there wouldn't be this level of flauting the law if it was in place to prevent something like the identity of an abused child.

I've always felt that 'public interest' and 'interesting to the public' were two different things, but how the hell you define that I have no idea.

I don't think I'd introduce any new laws if I was king for the day (unless you count relaxing some drug laws counts). I'd like to make some radical changes to the prison/benefits system though, although that assumes I have a magical amount of money just lying around. Every non-taxpayer is a potential taxpayer: investment is better than storage.

[ddraiggwyrdd.livejournal.com]

I've posted a link to "A man for all seasons" about four times in the past twelve months but I think most people don't watch it or just don't understand it but
"Yes, I would give the Devil himself benefit of law for my own safetys sake".
I am resisting the temptation to reach for my soapbox here.

Once you start blurring the edges to suit yourself it all goes to shit - and the british government, on all sides has been doing this consistently for too many years.

[(Anonymous)]

David,

(Having fought my way past the advertisements for the last time)

A junior officer very sensibly does not issue an order he fears will not be obeyed. However, ultimately, an honourable officer will have to try it: as in "Russians! the Germans are marching on your homes, we must stop them!" and hope he does not step backward into a barrel and give a Bolshevik the opportunity for a comedy kill.

Likewise, if a Judge is satisfied (they are so Judgemental!) that Tart A has connived with (enormously wealthy and powerful) Supervillain RM, to demand money with menaces from Dick B; he may decide that it is unjust for A and RM to make money from the Mob's prurience...until a Jury (look Democracy! Obi Wan) has had the chace to decide.

Should the fact that the Interwebz anonimity will allow arsesholes' C - Z to spread RM's slime stop a principled decision?

Over to you. This is the price of Democracy (as that paedo Socrates learnt).

D