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2020: Jan-March

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Propaganda fines...

High Court confirms Ofcom's fines for RT


Link Here28th March 2020
Full story: Diplomatic Censorship at Ofcom...Ofcom get caught up in international relations
A High Court justice has dismissed a Russian Today complaint that a massive £200,000 fine imposed by Ofcom last year was disproportionate. The court endorsed the TV censor's decision to fine RT for a breach of its impartiality rules.

RT had issued legal complains that Ofcom's decisions were a disproportionate interference with RT's right to freedom of expression and said other stations had received smaller fines for more serious breaches.

Following an investigation in 2018, Ofcom found that RT had broken TV impartiality rules in seven programmes discussing the Salisbury nerve agent attacks. Ofcom said RT had failed to give due weight to a wide range of voices on a matter of major political controversy.

RT has yet to respond to the ruling.

 

 

The outrage mob rants about dated Doctor Who episodes on BritBox...

But are we so sure we're on the moral high ground? The 1970's didn't have an unfair pecking order defining which identitarian groups are allowed and encouraged to attack and bully other groups, resulting in widespread societal aggrievement


Link Here 10th March 2020
An outrage mob has accused he BritBox of racism after it put up an episode of Doctor Who where Chinese people are played by western actors.

The pay streaming service run by the BBC and ITV was accused of failing to put a trigger warning on the 1977 six-part series titled The Talons of Weng-Chiang where white actors are shown wearing make-up and putting on accents as they play Asian characters.

Britbox later added a content warning to the episode since the kerfuffle, and said its compliance team are still working to review all programmes. A warning to the series now says that it contains some offensive language of the time and upsetting scenes.

A spokeswoman for the British East Asians in Theatre & on Screen told The Times the episode is really hard to watch because yellowface is so unacceptable now.

The episode stars Tom Baker playing the Doctor as he battles a Chinese stage magician villain called Li H'sen Chang, played by white British actor John Bennett.

 

 

UK and US play silly games with backdoors for encrypted messaging...

The Chinese will be probing your backdoors as soon as they are introduced


Link Here 8th March 2020
Full story: UK Government vs Encryption...Government seeks to restrict peoples use of encryption
   
 Haha he thought he was protected by a level 5 lock spell,
but every bobby on the street has a level 6 unlock spell,
and the bad guys have level 10.

The Government is playing silly games trying to suggest ways that snooping backdoors on people's encrypted messaging could be unlocked by the authorities whilst being magically safe from bad guys especially those armed with banks of Chinese super computers.

The government wants to make backdoors mandatory for messaging and offers a worthless 'promise' that authority figures would need to agree before the police are allowed to use their key to unlock messages.

Andersen Cheng, chief executive of Post-Quantum, a specialist encryption firm working with Nato and Government agencies, said a virtual key split into five parts - or more - could unlock messages when all five parties agreed and the five key fragments were joined together.

Those five parties could include the tech firm like Facebook, police, security service or GCHQ, an independent privacy advocate or specialist similar to the independent reviewer of terror legislation and the judge authorising the warrant.

Cheng's first company TRL helped set up the secure communications system used by 10 Downing Street to talk with GCHQ, embassies and world leaders, but I bet that system did not include backdoor keys.

The government claims that official access would only be granted where, for example, the police or security service were seeking to investigate communications between suspect parties at a specific time, and where a court ruled it was in the public or nation's interest.

However the government does not address the obvious issue of bad guys getting hold of the keys and letting anyone unlock the messages for a suitable fee. And sometimes those bad guys are armed with the best brute force code cracking powers in the world.

 

 

Commented: Orwellian police ticked off for their harassment of people exercising their right to free speech...

Court finds that the police were acting unlawfully in pursuing Harry Miller for Twitter posts insulting trans people


Link Here17th February 2020
Full story: Free Speech in the UK...Harry Miller unlawfully denied his right to free speech by the police
Background to the case

1. Between November 2018 and January 2019 the Claimant, Harry Miller, posted a number of tweets on Twitter about transgender issues. He holds gender critical views. The Claimant strongly denies being prejudiced against transgender people. He regards himself as taking part in the ongoing debate about reform of the Gender Recognition Act 2004 on which the Government consulted in 2018.

2. The College of Policing is the professional body whose purpose is to provide those working in policing with the skills and knowledge necessary for effective policing. The College publishes operational guidance for police forces in relation to hate incidents. This is called the Hate Crime Operational Guidance (HCOG). It requires police forces to record hate incidents whether or not they are criminal. The recording is done primarily for intelligence purposes. A noncriminal hate incident in relation to transgender is defined as

Any non-crime incident which is perceived, by the victim or any other person, to be motivated by a hostility or prejudice against a person who is transgender or perceived to be transgender.

3. The Claimant's tweets were reported to Humberside Police by a transgender woman called Mrs B. Mrs B read the tweets when a friend told her about them. She regarded them as transphobic. They were recorded by the police as a non-crime hate incident. Of all the people who read the tweets, Mrs B was the only person to complain.

[An example Twitter post was

You're a man.

You're breasts are made of silicone
Your vagina goes nowhere
And we can tell the difference
Even when you are not there

Your hormones are synthetic
And lets just cross this bridge
What you have you stupid man
Is male privilege.]

4. A police officer visited the Claimant's place of work to speak to him about his tweets. They subsequently spoke on the telephone. What was said is disputed, but in his judgment Mr Justice Julian Knowles finds that the officer left the Claimant with the impression that he might be prosecuted if he continued to tweet. A press statement issued by an Assistant Chief Constable and a response to a complaint by the police also referred to the possibility of criminal proceedings if matters escalated, a term which was never further defined.

The judgment

5. In this application for judicial review the Claimant challenged the lawfulness of HCOG. He argued that, as a policy, it violates domestic law and also Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which protects freedom of expression. Alternatively, he argued that even if the policy is lawful, his treatment by the police was disproportionate and unlawfully interfered with his right of free speech under Article 10(1).

6. In his judgment handed down today, Mr Justice Julian Knowles concludes that HCOG is lawful as a policy both under domestic law and under Article 10. The policy draws upon many years of work on hate crime and hate incidents which began with the 1999 Macpherson Report into the murder of Stephen Lawrence in 1993. The Court concludes that HCOG serves legitimate purposes and is not disproportionate.

7. However, Mr Justice Julian Knowles also finds that the police's actions towards the Claimant disproportionately interfered with his right of freedom of expression on the particular facts of this case. The judgment emphasises the vital importance of free speech in a democracy and provides a reminder that free speech includes not only the inoffensive, but the irritating, the contentious, the eccentric, the heretical, the unwelcome and the provocative, and that the freedom only to speak inoffensively is not worth having.

8. Mr Justice Julian Knowles concludes that the Claimant's tweets were lawful and that there was not the slightest risk that he would commit a criminal offence by continuing to tweet. He finds the combination of the police visiting the Claimant's place of work, and their subsequent statements in relation to the possibility of prosecution, were a disproportionate interference with the Claimant's right to freedom of expression because of their potential chilling effect. In response to the Defendants' submissions that any interference with the Claimant's rights was trivial and justifiable, the judge concludes that these arguments impermissibly minimise what occurred and do not properly reflect the value of free speech in a democracy. He writes: The effect of the police turning up at [the Claimant's] place of work because of his political opinions must not be underestimated. To do so would be to undervalue a cardinal democratic freedom. In this country we have never had a Cheka, a Gestapo or a Stasi. We have never lived in an Orwellian society.

9. To that extent, Mr Justice Julian Knowles upholds the Claimant's claim.

The BBC obtained a follow up statement from the police rather showing that the police are wedded to the Orwellian society that they are enforcing.

Deputy Chief Constable Bernie O'Reilly, of the College of Policing, said:

Policing's position is clear - we want everyone to feel able to express opinions as passionately as they wish without breaking the law.

He added:

Hate incidents can be a precursor to these types of crimes and without recording them the police will begin to lose sight of what is happening in their communities - and potentially lose their confidence.

Offsite Comment: We need more Harry Millers

15th February 2020. See article from spiked-online.com by Tom Slater

He fought the thoughtpolice, and he won.

Today is a good day for free speech in Britain. The High Court has ruled that it is unlawful for police officers to harass members of the public for expressing views on the internet that some people find offensive, but are otherwise entirely legal to express. That this even had to be clarified tells us something about how far we've fallen, and how sorely this ruling was needed.

Statement: Index welcomes ruling that police reaction to tweets was disproportionate interference

15th February 2020. See article from indexoncensorship.org by Jodie Ginsberg

Index has long expressed concerns about the way police are handling online speech.

Index on Censorship chief executive Jodie Ginsberg said:

All too often speech that breaks no law is being investigated in a way that stifles people's freedom to express themselves -- while direct and credible threats of violence go unpunished.

Index on Censorship provided a witness statement in the Miller case and in particular noted the importance of being able to debate matters of public interest, such as the questions that arose from the government's consultation on the Gender Recognition Act. Index argued that the growing number of cases in which police were contacting individuals about online speech that was not illegal -- and sometimes asking for posts to be removed -- was creating confusion among the wider population about what is and is not legal speech.

Offsite Comment: Unpopular Thoughts Approved In The UK

17th February 2020. See article from reprobatepress.com by David Flint

 


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