Video games and shootings
OUT-LAW Radio, 07/09/2006
Veteran anti-video game campaigner Jack Thompson explains why he
thinks that video games were behind a recent US school shooting,
and why violent game sales to young people must be banned. Plus: an
interview with the company behind new mobile phone spying
software.
A text transcription follows.
This transcript is for anyone with a hearing impairment or who
for any other reason cannot listen to the MP3 audio file.
The following is the text spoken by OUT-LAW journalist Matthew
Magee.
Hello, and welcome to OUT-LAW Radio, the weekly podcast that
keeps you up-to-date on all the twists and turns in the world of
technology law. Every week, we bring you the latest news and
in-depth features that help you to make sense of the ever-changing
laws that govern technology today. My name is Matthew Magee, and
coming up on this week's show, we hear from the one-man hurricane
that is Jack Thompson. After decades of protesting about rude songs
and filthy broadcasts, Thompson has set his sights on the video
game market, and is taking iconic developer Take 2 to task over its
latest violent game Bully. But as another high school shooting
rocks America, is Thompson right about game control. We also delve
into the murky world of mobile phone surveillance and talk to the
man behind software that can give you access to every call and text
on someone else's mobile phone. But first, the news.
Computer game ads could by-pass regulators. ITV mobile
television goes ad-less in digital rights confusion, Hewlett
Packard is accused of spying on board members and Google agrees to
hand data to Brazil.
Computer game adverts could be completely unregulated in the UK.
A new class of ads proposed by games giant Electronic Arts, may
evade regulation under current rules if they are deemed to be
product placement by the Advertising Standards Authority. The ASA
told OUT-LAW that the adverts are likely to be considered
product placement and not adverts and therefore not subject to ASA
rules. Offcom, which governs product placement on television,
told OUT-LAW that it does not regulate product placement in
computer games. ITV has launched a mobile television of its
stations but is unable to show advertisements because it does not
have the rights. The service will show ITV trailers instead until
actors, composers and advertisers agree to the mobile
broadcasting.
Hewlett Packard paid security consultants to secretly gather
telephone records data on its board members, according to a
recently resigned board member. Chairwoman Patricia Dunn ordered
the surveillance while attempting to identify the source of press
leaks, said Tom Perkins. US magazine Newsweek said that it had seen
an email from lawyers for HP to Perkins that admitted that the
information was obtained by pre-texting, where someone pretends to
be someone else to get their phone records. The US Financial
Regulator says that pre-texting is illegal.
Google will hand over user data to Brazilian authorities after
originally resisting a Court's demands. The demands relate to
Google's social networking subsidiary Orcut whose user base is
mostly in Brazil. A Brazilian Judge had threatened to levy fines of
up to $23,000 a day on Google if it did not comply with its
requests. Google argued that the data was not subject to Brazilian
law because it was stored on servers in the US. It has now agreed
to hand over identifying information about users accused of
participating and groups promoting racism, homophobia and child
pornography. That was this week's OUT-LAW news.
Last week a school boy in the US named Alvaro Castillo stood in
a school playground and fired eight shots. Swift action prevented
any deaths, but the teenager's father was found shot dead in his
house and Castillo has been charged with his murder. One man
believes he knows why it happened. Jack Thompson is an American
lawyer who has spent decades campaigning against explicit song
lyrics and broadcasts and has recently turned his attention to
video games. He believes that the cause of Castillo's actions were
not the abuse he said he suffered at his dead father's hands, not
the fact that he had access to guns, but his playing of violent
video games.
"This young Castillo, Alvaro Castillo, you
can go on the internet and see his portions of his video which is a
suicide note, he has killed his father, his father is there in the
video draped with a sheet. He has killed his father and then he
goes to a school and shoots up his school and he is talking at
length about the violent entertainment he has been obsessed with
since he was eight years of age. And I now find that some of that
entertainment and speaking with a family friend about the violent
video games is yet another example. You can add this to Columbine,
Paducah, Jonesboro Arkansas, Wellsboro I could go on for half an
hour giving you the names of schools that sound like battlefields
in World War II, so we have reality being infected with virtual
reality."
Thompson is on a mission. He wants to control the sale of
violent video games to young people. It's a controversial stance.
Governors in the US have passed a raft of laws along these lines,
but state after state from Louisiana to California from Michigan to
Illinois have had their laws quashed by Courts, which have found
that the games are protected as free speech. Thompson's case though
is that he just wants the rules that we have in the UK and
Europe.
"In the UK, you all embody in your laws the
notion that there is certain adult entertainment that shouldn't be
sold to kids, and if you do there is a consequence. Here there is
no consequence. No-one is trying to ban it outright, but as it
stands now, regardless of the rating that the game may get, anyone
of any age will be able to buy it and that is just very dangerous.
America has become the land of the free and the home of the utterly
depraved."
Perhaps realising one legal avenue is blocked, Thompson is
trying a new tack, he is targeting one game in particular and one
that has already gathered enough controversy to send sales soaring.
Bully is the latest title from Take 2 games and takes place in a
school setting. Thompson, furious, is trying a new legal
approach.
"In Florida you have what is called a
nuisance statute which says that a private citizen can get an
injunction, a Court Order to shut down any commercial activity that
is dangerous to the public, moreover to the public safety, so I
think that the statute is appropriate to apply to this game. So I
filed the lawsuit to prevent the sale of the game to school age
kids, because this is where the real danger is. The military in the
UK as well as in the US uses interactive media to breakdown the
inhibition to kill, the military has figured out that interactive
media is far more useful in behaviour modification than watching
Terminator movies over and over again."
Are there not other reasons for the violence committed in
schools? Most other countries have teenagers playing the same
games, yet do not have the same problem. What the US does have that
other countries don't, is liberal gun laws that mean that
disaffected youths can get their hands on fire arms. Thompson
though rejects out of hand the idea that he should be campaigning
for gun control instead of game control.
"We've got more guns than people over here
and in a perfect country which America is not, I would prefer
nobody have any guns, but now that the guns are out there, the gene
is sort of out of the bottle, and we have got 3,000 gun laws on the
books in this country nobody has come up with a way to get the guns
from the bad guys as well as the good guys, so that if you pass a
law that said everybody has to turn in their guns and we'll melt
them down and make a statue of Charlton Heston out of it or
something, the bad guys, the criminals would still hold on to their
guns and us good guys who are law abiding would be giving them up.
I live in Miami, I'm not giving up my gun because if somebody comes
in my house I want to be able to kill him. Unfortunately when you
have a country that is awash in guns, you have got to do something
about the stimuli to use those guns."
From today you might want to be careful who you give your mobile
phone to. Today sees the launch of the latest version of Flexispy,
a piece of software that can let you spy on someone else's phone.
Released in March, it lets you text messages and calls as long as
you can get access to the phone to install the software. Today's
version also allows you to switch on the phone's microphone and
listen to whatever is happening at the other end without the user
knowing. We talked to the man behind the technology, but first I
asked Sue Cullen, a Surveillance Law expert at Pinsent Masons, the
firm behind OUT-LAW, if using this kind of technology is legal. She
talked me through the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, or
RIPA.
"The offence that is committed under Section
11 is an offence for any person to intentionally and without lawful
authority to intercept at any place in the UK any communication in
the course of transmission by means of in this case a public
telecommunications system. So Section 3 is it sent by a person who
has consented to the interception and a communication the intended
recipient of which has so consented, so you've got to have consent
by both parties. I mean that torpedo's you doesn't it. You might be
able to argue well the wife knew I was putting something on her
phone, so she consented, that would be a bit feeble, but you could
raise the argument, but it doesn't account for all the people
phoning her up, including her lover or whoever, does it?"
Atir Raihan is the Managing Director of Vervata, the Company
behind Flexispy, he says that any illegal use is not his fault.
AR: The onus on the legality is on the person who installs it
there are many products which are sold and can be used for legal or
illegal purposes and therefore the manufacturer of the product is
not, you know really liable.
MM: The advertising does seem to encourage the use of it in a
way that would be illegal under UK law though, I mean it is called
Spy software, it does make direct reference to spying on for
example spouses, so I mean you do seem to be encouraging the use of
it in an illegal manner.
AR: We are suggesting a number of uses, you can monitor
children, you can monitor your spouse, you know there are many,
many purposes. One way or another our intention is always to comply
with the law, we are not here to break the law, because it doesn't
get anyone anywhere.
This is software so potentially dangerous that it has been
deemed a virus by anti-virus company F Secure. Cullen says that it
is almost impossible to use legally. But is Raihan doing anything
wrong just by selling it?
"They're not doing it, it's whoever buys the
stuff and commits the interception, so they are not doing
interception so they can't be committing Section 1 RIPA offences
can they?"
So there is no legal duty under RIPA, but I asked Raihan if he
felt any other kind of obligation to possible victims of his
technology.
MM: Do you feel any kind of moral to people who will be spied on
without their knowledge or consent by this software?
AR: That is an interesting question, but what I can tell you is
this, we have so many people who call our technical support line
initially with technical queries but they end up being emotional
conversations, and many of our customers have become our friends
and actually come to visit the office, so there are two sides to
that story, you know there is people that we have helped as well,
so our customers have generally been very, very happy."
That's all we have time for this week, thanks for listening.
We want to hear from you – have you heard a technology law
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Make sure you tune in next week.
For now, goodbye.
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Out-law Radio is produced and presented by Matthew
Magee for International Law Firm Pinsent Masons.
