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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.""
The judge wasn't so proud as to pretend understanding and then issue a potentially unjust ruling.
Would that all judges had the same strength of character in this regard.
Give him credit for admitting he didn't understand. Clearly he needs to be able to understand the concept in order to rule on the case. What are the options when a judge just doesn't understand? Do we need a "technical" set of judges to handle these types of cases?
Cheers.
Mark
Just try looking up "person" in Black's Law Dictionary. The wording is important, as specific terms mean specific strings of legal precedents. Judges recuse themselves for good reasons all the time, and this guy did the right thing. Would you rather he'd judged a case with vague user-end impressions?
I wish everyone who wasn't up to an important job would say so.
Looks like everyone took the sensationalist bait on this.
Article is pretty light on details but it seems like the judge is trying to understand what a website actually "is"...it seems like an issue in this case is where the defendants' activities took place.
So perhaps he realized he needed to know more than "a window that comes up on your computer" as far as what a website is. It doesn't seem unreasonable for a 59-year-old in a completely non-technical job to not know how a website is put together; "what is a website?" is a feasible way to ask not only "describe this thing to me", but also "what makes up this thing?". Maybe he was asking the latter.
Look, nobody expects judges to be experts in everything. In particular, nobody expects judges to be knowledgeable about something that was INVENTED when they were in their 40s and was really a fad-for-young-people until a relatively short time ago.
What we expect judges to do is make fair rulings.
How can a judge who doesn't know anything about web sites and online forums make reasonable rulings? Well, he can't. And he knows this. So, the judge -- and MOST JUDGES -- have two choices:
- Learn enough to make a fair ruling
- Fake it and pick the lawyer with the nicest tie
Now, it has been fairly obvious that COMPLETELY CLUESS judges are making case law around the world. That is quite clearly BAD.
A judge willing to admit he lacks the deep understanding required to make a ruling, and taking steps to work around/solve the problem? NO PROBLEM, in my opinion, as long as he comes to the table with an open mind, impartiality, and a good sense of jurisprudence.
That said -- I think the judge should spend a few hours participating in IRC, reading bash.org, taking part in a forum about something he likes (maybe his car), checking out tubgirl, some pr0n, masturbating and so forth. Then maybe he will actually understand the medium. Somebody (prosecutor) should suggest that.
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
No, just the opposite. He's perfect for true justice. The solicitors will have to spend an hour or so having someone explain the basic concepts of the internet. From there the judge can listen to the facts of the case without any clouding of his judgment from any preconceived notions.
... blah blah blah."
"This is a web page. There are about a billion of them in existence, and about a billion people viewing the web pages. Anyone can pay to have access to the internet. Anyone can get free or very cheap space to put up their own web pages. We are accusing these men of doing just that to incite hatred
(Don't bother correcting my estimates of web sites and users. I know it's wrong)
-- Will program for bandwidth
He's ready to retire and take up photography again. And he LOVES the digital options. He's already setup his own website and uses Photoshop. He knows more about digital cameras than I do.
It's not age. It's interest.
He's found that his old interest has taken a new turn with computerization and he has spent his spare time learning all about it.
After talking with lawyers and paralegals that I know personally, I think that most geeks would have a natural talent for law. At the very least, they have a talent for legal research, as witnessed by the stuff that happens on Groklaw
My blog
Hey, at least he admitted that he didn't understand! There is a lot to be said for a judge who is honest.
Ignorance in situations of justice is only useful when you have ignorance of the criminal or case being tried. You don't want a judge or jury to have preconceptions about the innocence or guilt of the parties involved.
That doesn't mean you want legal decision-makers completely ignorant of even the basic working infrastructure of our modern society. Far from your notion that the judge can just "listen to the facts" -- rather than being able to take internet information for granted while his mind moves on to the pertinent facts of the case, he's wasting valuable brain cycles trying to figure out what this whole web site thing is on the fly as he either puzzles over it himself or TAKES SOMEONE ELSE'S WORD that what it is is important or not important to the case. Is it relevant to innocence or guilt? Is it not? He doesn't know because he's too much in the dark to even have figured out what my 90 year old grandmother knows.
Besides the issues of not knowing a basic building block of the case, it's just appalling that a judge in a modern society could have his head so far buried in the sand to not know what a web site is. Does his lack of observational skills extend to facts being dispensed in the case?
Why are you letting these clowns ruin our country?
I agree. I have a handful of friends that graduated with CS degrees in order to enroll in law school.
My opinion is that our minds are already geared for the IF definition THEN result, EXCEPT WHEN whatever kind of language that most laws that I've read are written in.
You are awash in a sea of fiercely stated opinions. Obvious exits are: 'File->Quit', 'Reply', and 'Page Down'.
Here's a good judge. It's very professional to admit that he doesn't understand something.
Perhaps one would think that it would be easy to explain what a web site is. However, the definition of a website might not be so easy as you may think. Judges, like computer scientists, often have to tackle with very fine details and seek answers to subtle questions. For example: Should every website use the HTTP protocol? If yes, what if there is a law saying terrorist websites are illegal but the defendands used a slightly customised HTTP version? Furthermore, should every website include webpages? What if the law prohibits terrorist webpages, but the defendands just placed some gzip or pdf files on a public indexed directory served by Apache httpd? Is a non-indexed directory served by Apache a website? Can a website on the Principality of Sealand be prosecuted under US law? If you tunnel HTTP traffic through another protocol, would this qualify as website data? Is a website a publication? Is it still a publication if you open a website on a non-networked server? If you create a website unreadable by humans but readable by computers, would this qualify as a publication? Is a website that was online only for 3 minutes a kind of publication? Is the printout of a website still a website? Would the browser cache be regarded as copying potentially copyrighted material? If a very sucky webserver can only handle 3 requests per minute and you hit your Refresh/Reload button 4 times within a minute bringing the server down, would this be a DoS attack?
It's like blood stains - we've all seen them but a judge still wants an expert to explain the fine points.
...Not the fact that he doesn't know what a website is, but the fact that he admits to not knowing what a website is. The fact that he doesn't know what it is isn't a problem -- you can teach someone out of their ignorance. But think about how much worse it would be if he did what most judges do, i.e., pretend they know what they're talking about and make poor judgments and court decisions..
so perl then.
I'm all set.
In reality, I was asked if I was pre-law or a paralegal when I asked an attorney to review my response to Farmers C&D letter on my gripe site. I consider that to be high praise.
As to this judge, he should recuse himself from the case, but should also be lauded for admitting his limitations.
-nB
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
Ok, explain what a web site is to me. A complete, accurate, and comprehensive definition.
I bet I can shoot holes in at least your first attempt. If he knew the 'casual use definition' but realized this case depended on an exact technical definition, even a fairly experienced internet user would probably want to turn to experts.
'Sensible' is a curse word.
I imagine that you were played with. This is how lawyers have to talk to expert witnesses in court - they need to start from some baseline, and work there way down to what they want to know. She was doing exactly the same thing to you - and eventually got to the boundary of your knowledge in the area, showing that you might not be the best witness in that respect. She was practicing. I bet shes one hell of a lawyer at trial, as you fell for this hook line and sinker.
(and perhaps I'm being a touch naive, but I think that this is a bit more likely than not knowing that the earth revolved around the sun)
Nearly every reply I see here falls into one of two categories:
- "Wow, what a stupid judge! He doesn't know what a website is, like we teh smaert peoples do!!!"
- "No, the guy is wise to admit his limitation, and ask us, the smaert peoples who know what a website is, to tell him."
The tacit assumption is that it's perfectly clear what a "web site" is.Now, of course, I'm going to call that assumption into question. What is a web site? How do you tell where one web site ends, and where another starts? Is Geocities a web site? Is it rather a collection of web sites? Is it both, simultaneously? How does this decision interact with other legal reasoning that may be relevant to the case? What criteria ought to be applied in the kind of case he's handling?
The judge's supposed "admission" of "ignorance" could, for all that we know from TFA, not be because the judge has no concept of what a website is; it could be because his concept of what a website is is good enough for using, um, web sites, but not good enough for deciding this particular case.
Are you adequate?
I thought about that when I was "picking my profession", and I did talk to some lawyers and others I knew. At first it seemed a natural fit for me, but as I dug in deeper, I discovered that it wasn't as black and white as I'd hoped.
First, as another poster indicated, there's lots of "if then but else if" clauses. As black and white as a case my appear at first glance, the law is very gray. One can have two courts arrive at two entirely different conclusions on the same basic point, and then the appeals court decide to not take it up because the case isn't interesting. At that point, the implication is that both courts are right (or maybe they're both wrong), but it's no longer a simple truth. Don't even get me started on what one lawyer told me about the words "reasonable" and "prudent" in the context of any legal code.
Second, as strange as it may seem, a lot of practicing law is a matter of avoiding the real issue at hand. Take the SCO case - very little time has been spent addressing the case itself. Almost all the time has been spent on discovery motions, procedural arguments, evidence rules, etc. As a geek, I like to see results fairly quickly in a repeatable and consistent manner. If you told me that I had to write a perl program to compute the area of a triangle, I'd say cool. However, if you then told me that first I had to prove the theorem I'll use, but first I have to agree on the method in which my theorem will be proved, but first I have to decide whether the requester even has standing to ask me to write a program...you get the idea.
Third, I don't disagree on your point about geeks making good researchers. Certainly there's no question we're good at digging stuff up. What remains to be seen is whether we're good at digging everything up. This goes back to my other points. In a way, legal research is like the halting problem - you're never 100% confident that you've pulled every relevant law and ruling. Legal researchers also have to be completely free of bias. Most geeks I know (myself included) tend to feel very strongly on certain issues, and it's only natural that we'd favor facts that support our bias and disfavor those that don't. A good researcher can research the hell out of an issue that they vehemently oppose for the side that they despise. That takes something beyond being good at Google and Lexus.
I don't think he should step down. As a judge, he is an expert in the law; that is why he is there. I would expect that he has probably seen hundreds of cases where he doesn't understand the terminology - he cannot be expected to be an expert in every subject.
As a judge, he is there to apply his understanding of the law to the case; if he doesn't understand a term that is important to the case, he should be expected to admit it and to find out about it, but not to hand the case over (and cause it to be restarted) every time he hears something that he doesn't understand.
It's like me, a web developer, being asked to make a website about law. I don't understand law, I don't understand the terms, but I am an expert in making websites. I am there to apply my understanding of how to make a website; if I don't understand a legal term that is important to the website, I should be expected to admit it and find out about it, but not to resign every time I hear something that I don't understand.
Sure, this time it may be that he doesn't understand what a website or a forum is - if that was someone in the computing world then yes, they should step down. But this is the whole point of having professionals - acknowledge that there are people who understand more than you, and that you need to go and ask them for help so that you can do your job properly. A lot of people I know in the computing world could learn a valuable lesson from this judge.
ISPs should be allowed to bill people differently for different qualities of service.
Which is an irrelevant point to make, NO ONE is arguing or even suggesting otherwise. Anyone who makes that point has effectively demonstrated that they do not really grasp the issue under debate.
For example my Cable ISP offers me at least two different levels of service, one faster and more expensive than the other, and that's A-OK!
The issue under debate is a very different thing. The best comparison to illustrate the situation and the problem is to look at telephone service, and to explain what it would be like for the phone company to do exactly the same thing. For the sake of simplicity lets ignore local calls. The service that the phone company is providing is to take absolutely any number I dial and hand me a link to the long distance network and hand that phone number to the long distance network.
If the phone company wants to offer me different qualities of service, that's fine. They can give me a cheapo low quality low volume noisy link to the long distance network at a low price, or a high quality link at a higher price. That's fine. But that's not what we're talking about.
What we are talking about would be if my local phone company were to examine the phone number I dialed so decide whether or not they "approve" of the person or company that I'm calling. If they "like" the person or company I'm calling, then they give me an immediate pristine link to the long distance network. If they do not "like" the person or company I'm calling, then they stick in a 5 second delay before patching me through to the long distance network and deliberately sabotage the volume of the call and deliberately inject noise into the line.
The service I am paying for is a link to the long distance network, period. If they want to offer different levels of service, that's fine. However there is absolutely no valid justification for them to deliberately sabotage my call based on who I'm calling... they do the exact same work supplying me with the exact same link to the exact same long distance network no matter what number I dialed. They just want to examine the number I dialed and jump in to sabotage certain calls.
And there are at least two reasons they are interested in doing that. Number one is that they might open some other business or sign an alliance with some other business (lets say pizza delivery), and they deliberately sabotage any phone call to any competitor pizza delivery service. They want to abuse their monopoly position in phone service in order to attempt to establish a monopoly in a different area - pizza delivery. The other reason they are interested in doing this is to extort money from random deep-pocket targets... targets that are not their customers and who have no business involvement with them at all. Like your local phone company noticing that a lot of people place phone orders with Sears and that Sears makes a lot of money... so your local phone company says to Sears "we want you to pay us 5% of everything you sell to any of our phone customers, or we will sabotage every call one of our customers makes to you ". And the phone company makes the same extortion threat to all of Sears' competitors... makes the same extortion threat to Target and Macy's and K-Mart and Wal-Mart and JC Penny. If one of those companies were to refuse to pay the extortion threat, their customers are going to have phone problems trying to place orders... and those customers quite likely would switch to placing their phone orders with one of the other stores that did pay the extortion threat and which does not suffer disruptive phone problems.
And a critical point here is that Sears is NOT a customer of the local phone company. Sears pays their phone bill to THEIR local phone company for their phone service. This is YOUR phone company trying to extort money out of Sears. This is YOUR phone company making rediculous noises about how Sears is loading their phone lines
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
He is a judge, and does not need to know about IT. He would probably know what a car was, because I imagine that either he drives one, or is driven in one. He has probably heard of a computer, his secretary probably uses one, he has no doubt heard of the internet and websites, and has probably seen the odd URL or two. However, I wouldn't expect him to understand what they were, and would far rather he admit it than stumble on blindly. Being out of touch with IT just means that he has better or more important things to do than use computers; granted, a foreign concept to most of us on Slashdot, but many people in other industries get by just fine without using anything more complicated than a telephone - that's what secretaries are for.
By asking for an exact definition of a website, it does not preclude his ability as a judge to pass judgement on the case; it merely builds a solid base of understanding (for judge and jury alike) for the expert witness to build upon when they call him later in the week, and demonstrates the sensible and professional attitude of the judge. It is far better to be ruled by men who know their limits, than men who declare that the internet is made of tubes.