All the news that's fit to block

Just in passing, I thought that the pride that NYT execs obviously took in their ability to perform this technical feat, and the way it was done, were worth noting:

In adapting technology intended for targeted advertising to keep the article out of Britain, The Times addressed one of the concerns of news organizations publishing online: how to avoid running afoul of local publishing laws.

...

Richard J. Meislin, the paper’s associate managing editor for Internet publishing, said the technological hurdle was surmounted by using some of The Times’s Web advertising technology. The paper could already discern the Internet address of users connecting to the site to deliver targeted marketing, and could therefore deliver targeted editorial content as well. That took several hours of programming.

Several hours. Gosh: the dedication. And two birds with one stone: many publishers must already be taking notes.

But to the article itself. I've read the article; I also regularly read the Guardian and the Independent online, so I have some sense of how much UK readers already know about ongoing investigations into the latest terror plots and suspects. And I must say, I've been hard pressed to winkle out much in that article that I haven't read before.

There may be specific details about the actions and words of individuals that have not been reported in the British media, and perhaps that matters. I can't see anything, for example, on the first page (of four online) that I hadn't read in the Guardian unless it is one or two sentences allegedly spoken by an individual, and even then, the general sense of what he would have been doing has indeed been widely reported. Perhaps some of the details on page 3 of equipment seized, precise sums allegedly paid, numbers of individuals involved are news, although again the general outline of the alleged activities is well known. And perhaps some of the "senior British officials" quoted anonymously are not supposed to be giving press briefings, although the most disturbing (to me) conclusions that can be drawn from their confidences have already been widely drawn in the British press.

It has been reported in the Guardian, for instance, that British police investigators wanted to monitor their suspects longer and felt that their hands had been forced, perhaps by the arrest of one suspect's brother in Pakistan, the explanation favoured by the NYT. (More politically interesting explanations are available, of course, although the NYT seems uninterested in those just now.) British Home Secretary John Reid may not yet have conceded in so many words that the claims he made in his first press conferences were exaggerated and ill advised, but he has certainly stepped back from his most "dire predictions," a retreat that British commentators are perfectly capable of noticing.

I am reluctant to quote from the Times article or to comment much further because I have conflicting feelings about what is going on in cases such as this one. Canadians are familiar with a somewhat similar situation, when Canadian courts lower publication bans on evidence and testimony at preliminary hearings into criminal charges in cases that have sparked interest in the U.S. American publications commonly disrespect those bans (if they're interested enough, as they were, for instance, in the Homolka-Bernardo case) and publish regardless, which means that at least some Canadian citizens will have access (of a kind) to restricted information.

And then there is the 'net. I'm assuming that the Times article is already freely available on any number of other sites to any Brit determined enough to find it. A word to our faithful readers in the UK: it's not all that gripping, y'know? It's sort of standard NYT hamburger, very bitty-piecey, and you probably already know or suspect most of it anyway.

British and Canadian courts are much more inclined to restrict some kinds of information about criminal proceedings than are American ones, although American grand jury investigations are strictly protected. The Canadian media often go to court to protest such restrictions, and rightly so, it seems to me, in many cases. I'd be interested to hear a few legal minds weigh in on these issues, along with the tech minds who can tell us how unrealistic the New York Times must already have been shown to be in this case. Their own legal eagles seem already to be relaxing back on this interesting if amusingly smug British view:

Jonathan Zittrain, a professor of Internet governance and regulation at Oxford University, said restricting information fit with trends across the Internet. “There’s a been a sense that technology can create a form of geographic zoning on the Internet for many years now — that they might not be 100 percent effective, but effective enough,” Mr. Zittrain said. “And there’s even a sense that international courts might be willing to take into account these efforts.