Thursday, July 10, 2003

A barrister, Jon Holbrook, is not happy with UK government's proposed law on corporate killing. He explains why in Spiked magazine.
"In summary: the government is proposing to create an offence of homicide where criminal guilt
exists in the absence of personal criminal guilt, where the management's errors may not amount to
gross negligence and where the death may not have been the direct result of those errors...
The offence of corporate killing has been devised as a means of securing a conviction for a
person's death where the moral culpability for manslaughter does not exist. The notion of criminal
responsibility is being degraded to such an extent the offence of corporate killing will be criminal in
name only."
Thoughtful piece. Unlikely to make an impact though because the proposed law has such intuitive political and popular appeal. I hasten to add that just because something is intuitively appealing on the surface does not necessarily mean it is correct.

Check out this from an 'urban infiltration' enthusiast at Declan McCullagh's Politech.
"Over the years, it becomes
glaringly obvious to explorers such as ourselves, that almost all of
the critical infrastructure of large cities is _totally_ vulnerable.
Electricity, water, gas, communications, sewage, drainage, rail - all of
them could be shut down over wide areas for days or weeks by simple acts
of vandalism, at remote and unguarded locations...
... we have two observations:
1. It would be easy for anyone wishing to massively disrupt society,
to successfully attack the crucial infrastructure (and escape free.)
2. Suck attacks do not seem to occur...
...The only possible conclusion, is that there is simply no one seriously
interested in committing major infrastructure attacks. And that implies
there are actually no true (or even wannabe) 'terrorists' among us.
And never have been."
I don't accept the conclusion but if s/he is correct about the vunerability of the infrastructure, it is surprising that we have not yet had such an attack.

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