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Judge Doesn't Know What a Web Site is
An anonymous reader writes "A British judge admitted on Wednesday he was struggling to cope with basic terms like "Web site" in the trial of three men accused of inciting terrorism via the Internet.
Judge Peter Openshaw broke into the questioning of a witness about a Web forum used by alleged Islamist radicals.
"The trouble is I don't understand the language. I don't really understand what a Web site is". he told a London court during the trial of three men charged under anti-terrorism laws.
Prosecutor Mark Ellison briefly set aside his questioning to explain the terms "Web site" and "forum." An exchange followed in which the 59-year-old judge acknowledged: "I haven't quite grasped the concepts.""
If he's 59 now, that means the microcomputer revolution started when he was 27-29. And the worldwide web started when he was 44. Perhaps sometime in the intervening time he could have troubled himself to learn a little about the *biggest* advance in the storage and dissemination of knowledge since the movable type printing press?
I know, I know, he was busy hearing cases. Judgin' ain't easy.
Several, including one that is 70+ who can tell me in detail why he thinks Intel's current CPU architecture is corner cutting crap and who actually did repair electonic medical equipment while he was hospitalised using only a nurses hairpin. Not bad for an electrical engineer who left university before solid state electronics moved out of the lab. Many of the technical folk use their retirement to get more up to date than they had a chance to do before - for example there are old woodworkers moving into putting together their own numerically controlled tools that had not a great deal of computer experience before.
>Unbelievable...
Until the *one* discovery request that receives *only* the closed file from the boxes at the off-site facility, 25 years from now.
Then it makes sense. Most of the litigation I was involved in (IANALBIHSLAWITF), had documentation spanning a period of about 1912 to about 1985.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
The judge may know perfectly well what a website is.
My father, a now retired British judge, pointed out to me years ago that sometimes a judge asks what appears to be a worryingly ignorant question, not because (s)he doesn't know the answer, but because (s)he suspects that some jury members don't know and will not want to appear stupid by asking. This way the judge can be sure they get an explanation, at the potential cost of a little personal flack.
Dad is a happy net user, by the way, and knows exactly what a web site is.