Category Archives: Civil Liberty

The legal scheme under which anyone can ask for convicted criminals to be given tougher sentences is to be extended to cover more terrorist offences.

An order will be laid before MPs next week allowing those found guilty of encouraging terrorism, sharing terrorist propaganda and related offences to be brought back to court to have their punishment reassessed.

The Unduly Lenient Sentence (ULS) procedure – which allows victims and the public to query sentences handed out by judges – will now also include crimes such as membership of banned organisations and taking part in weapons training.

The scheme permits anyone to ask the attorney general to review a sentence. Where the senior law officer deems it appropriate, the case can be referred to the court of appeal for reconsideration.

The entire point of the courts of law is so that we are not ruled by the whims of the mob.

Further, despite the limited abolition of the double jeopardy rules, the State does not, or perhaps given double jeopardy fraying should not, get a second bite at trying, convicting nor punishing you. They get just the one chance to stack up their story against your.

And yes, this includes terrorists as well. Including those who “share terrorist propaganda,” as slippy an offence as to do credit to a Stalinist system of propaganda against state interests.

No, fuck off, and the horse you rode in on.

Senior investigating officer Matt Bonner was met with cries of “arrest someone” as he said the investigation would “not be quick but it would be thorough”.

Grenfell was horrible, but who is it that should be arrested?

The RSPCA wants to be allowed to enter private property to seize pets in England and Wales.

The charity is in talks with the Government and police chiefs to negotiate new powers which will allow it to enter gardens, sheds and outhouses without an officer present.

Under current rules the RSPCA has to contact the local police force and wait for an officer to arrive if they believe an animal is in distress on private property.

But if granted special statutory powers, its 33 officers would be able to remove animals from private land without police permission – though the powers do not extend to entering a private home.

No.

As in, no, fuck off.

Having the powers of the State granted to non-state actors really doesn’t have a good track record now, does it?

In the video, the Arkansas Capitol dome can be seen lit against the night sky as the Dodge Dart accelerates to 10, then 20 mph.

“Oh my goodness,” a man says as he flicks on the car’s lights. “Freedom!”

The vehicle speeds up the hill, and the last thing that comes into view before a crash is a large, newly installed monument.

Authorities say the man in the video is Michael Tate Reed, an alleged serial destroyer of Ten Commandments monuments.

He was arrested by state capitol police officers at the scene early Wednesday, according to Chris Powell, a spokesman for the Arkansas secretary of state. Reed is charged with criminal trespass, first-degree criminal mischief and defacing objects of public interest.

The laddie, as they say, seems to have some issues. Issues amenable perhaps to a judicious does of lithium. And yet, and yet……..

Sure, it’s the destruction of someone elses’ property, that’s bad. But it is property, not people, and he seems to be around for being punished for it. Leave aside that lithium issue and regard it instead as an extreme free speech one. Boy’s got the right to make his view known, as long as he’s willing to take the consequences of doing so. As I’m just fine with Banksy doing so–as long as he is willing to pay the damages.

Where are the free speech defenders?

Taylor is inarguably in more danger than Charles Murray. She is a black person in a country with a long history of white supremacist violence—and in recent years that violence has been especially public. Just last month, a white supremacist stabbed two bystanders to death in Portland when they interfered with his racial abuse. Racism may also have motivated the May slaying of a black college student in Maryland.

Coverage of free speech fights in the U.S. casts the left as illiberal antagonists and lets the right off the hook for its own, much more serious history of censorship. By defending Charles Murray, and not Taylor, the media has shown some revealing inconsistencies in its concerns about free speech.

Murray was howled down, persued and his colleague required medial treatment as a result of the treatment from the mob.

As The Seattle Times reported on Thursday, the threats started after Fox News covered her May 30 commencement speech at Hampshire College. In it, she correctly called Donald Trump “a racist, sexist megalomaniac.”

“Since last Friday, I have received more than 50 hate-filled and threatening emails. Some of these emails have contained specific threats of violence, including murder,” she said in a May 31 statement. “I have been threatened with lynching and having the bullet from a .44 Magnum put in my head.”

She’s received emails. About the number that any working journalist will get if they write on a hot subject. Death threats are a bit much of course but this is very much closer to that mere vulgar abuse which is indeed free speech, isn’t it? Certainly closer than a howling mob chasing you out of the building and following you down the street…..

In the heart of the nation’s capital, at near-maximum terror alert, with the densest national concentration of armed officers, the attackers had 8-10 minutes to rampage unimpeded before the armed police turned up and whacked them in short order.

Contrast this with the May 2015 attack in Garland, TX where the heavily armed gunmen just made it out of their car, managed to slightly wound a security officer, and then promptly expired in a hail of bullets. I can’t help but notice the complete lack of follow-on terror attacks in Texas since then; presumably word has got around the terror community that it’s a poor choice of location.(Glasgow is probably number 2 on the do-not-terrorise list after the terrifyingly vicious response of the residents.).

I can’t help but think that the complete dis-arming of the UK civilian population is not working out quite as well as most of its proponents expected.

I seem to recall something around 1905 or so in London. Lithuanian, Latvian perhaps, anarchists. The police were borrowing revolvers from the crowd to combat them….

As his city mourns two men who were killed after confronting a man screaming anti-Muslim slurs, Mayor Ted Wheeler is calling on federal officials to block what he called “alt-right demonstrations” from happening in downtown Portland, Ore.

His concern is that the two rallies, both scheduled in June, will escalate an already volatile situation in Portland by peddling “a message of hatred and of bigotry.” Although the organizers of the rallies have a constitutional right to speak, “hate speech is not protected by the First Amendment,” Wheeler told reporters.

Yes, yes it is. The Supreme Court has ruled on it a number of times and that’s the end of that.

Stephen Fry has called for Facebook and other “aggregating news agencies” to be reclassified as publishers in order to stop fake news and online abuse spreading by making social media subject to the same legal responsibilities as traditional news websites.

Outlining his “reformation” for the internet, as part of the Hay literary festival’s programme to mark the quincentenary of Martin Luther’s Ninety-five Theses in 1517, Fry accused social media platforms of refusing to “take responsibility for those dangerous, defamatory, inflammatory and fake items whose effects will have legal consequences for traditional printed or broadcast media, but which they can escape”.

“One thesis I could immediately nail up to the tent flag is to call for aggregating news agencies like Facebook to be immediately classified as publishers. At the moment, they are evading responsibility for their content as they can claim to be platforms, rather than publishers. Given that they are now a major source of news for 80% of the population, that is clearly an absurd anomaly,” he said.

“If they, and Twitter and like platforms recognised their responsibilities as publishers, it would certainly help them better police their content for unacceptable libels, defamations, threats and other horrors, that a free belief in the value of the press would, as a matter of course, be expected to control.”

If they do that this means that they have to edit what is said.

And all that will happen is that people who want to say things which are edited out will move to another platform.

It’ll just be an endless game of whack a mole.

This evening it emerged that hate crime in Manchester has doubled since the terror attack which killed 22 people on Monday.
Greater Manchester Police bosses said the number of reports had risen from 28 to 56 since Salman Abedi set off a nail bomb at Manchester Arena.
Chief Inspector Ian Hopkins called for the city to stand up against hate and ensure any incidents are quickly reported to the police.
He said: ‘Manchester has come together this week but it is important we continue to stand together here in Greater Manchester against the hate-filled views we have seen from small minorities of the community.
‘We had 28 reports of hate crime on Monday, which is the average, but it rose to 56 reports on Wednesday, although we cannot directly link that to the attack.

22 dead, plus one suicided bomber, and 120 injured.

Hmm

Majority of Britons think minorities threaten UK culture, report says

Our culture generally thinks that tweens get to go to singalongs without being shredded on the way out. It’s an odd thing to have as a part of a culture for sure but there it is.

So the bomber has been known to them for 5 years. Multiple reports of he’s a dodgy one.

And? What could have been done? He had some dodgy ideas, certainly. But he didn’t actually do anything. Until, of course, he did.

Ecksian fantasies aside we’re not going to have internment for anyone who claims that suicide bombing is acceptable. So, what should have been done?

All a bit security theatre isn’t it?

When do we get the TSA prodding our bollocks as we enter a concert hall?

As I’ve noted before I’m not all that worried about terrorist nutters killing some few of us. Yes, easy to say as it’s not me howling at the skies in rage at the theft of my children.

But what do we want, 65 million subject to pass laws and id cards and communications interception and the state, that Courageous State, still failing to protect us or the sacrifice of handfuls of us over time on that altar of secular freedom?

I’ve always worried much more about what government might do to us to stop the bearded nutters than I have about the nutters themselves.

Not being a brave man I’ll not try asking those whose faces are still shining from the tracks of their tears. But I will ask you.

Twitter has been condemned for knowingly giving a platform to a homophobic church which claims that the Westminster terrorist attack was God’s punishment for Britain’s tolerance of gay people.

This is the moment a brave 16-year-old Girl Scout stood up against a Neo-Nazi demonstrator at a rally in the Czech Republic.
Lucie Myslíková, from the city of Brno, attended a march in the city on May Day along with eight of her fellow Girl Scouts with the aim of walking alongside far-right demonstrators to try and drown out their message.
At one point she was approached by a shaved-headed man before getting into what she called a ‘sharp talk’ about national identity, immigration and refugees.

This is normal on May Day. In Usti nad Labem they always get the remnants of the Sudeten Deutchland Party (or whatever they call themselves) coming down from Dresden. All 15 of them.

The teen and her friends joined several hundred protesters during the counter-demonstration, with local reports suggesting they vastly outnumbered the right-wing marchers.
Activists were told not to block the marches, but to walk alongside them singing, dancing and playing instruments in order to drown them out.

Yep, no one even dreams of trying to stop them marching. Ach, Jo, it’s free speech innit? You have an absolute right to march. As do we and those massive numbers of police over there are to make sure that everyone does get to march.

At which point they’ve got it absolutely right and correct. They don’t have to agree with the speech of others, don’t have to approve of it but they’ve most certainly got to tolerate it. Which they do.

Good.

Their confidence was misplaced. In January 2015, Mr Justice Nicholas Blake, sitting in the Old Bailey, rejected the SFO’s argument. “The case remains a matter of conjecture and suspicion,” he wrote in his judgment. To confiscate assets, prosecutors have to prove that the frozen money related to a specific crime and, he ruled, the SFO had totally failed to do so.

Well, yes, that’s sorta the standard thing isn’t it? We’ve not got a crime called “being a bad ‘un” and we should all be most grateful that we don’t.

Eight executions in 11 days: Arkansas order may endanger staff’s mental health

This was part of the plot of a Lincoln Rhyme novel – executioner becomes so blase about it all that he goes off to become a contract killer.

MPs condemned Google for not taking down a video by a former Ku Klux Klan leader which accused Jews of masterminding the genocide of white people because it did not breach its guidelines.

He’s a ghastly thug to be sure but that free speech stuff does still apply to him.

And she expressed disbelief when Google’s vice-president said the recording posted by David Duke, a notorious Holocaust denier, did not “breach our guidelines”.

The recording, broadcast on YouTube, accuses “Zionists” of having “ethnically cleansed the Palestinians” and planning to do “the same thing to Europeans and Americans”.

Ms Cooper told Google’s Peter Barron: “You allow David Duke to upload an entire video which is all about malicious and hateful comments about Jewish people. How on earth is that not a breach of your own guidelines? I think most people would be appalled by that video and think it goes against all standards of public decency in this country.”

He’s allowed to breach public decency sweetie. What he’s not allowed to do is break the law.

She said: “We understand the challenges you face … but you all have millions of users in the UK and you make billions of pounds from these users.

“You all have a terrible reputation among users for dealing swiftly with problems in content even against your own community standards.

“Surely when you manage to have such a good reputation with advertisers for targeting content and for doing all kinds of sophisticated things with your platforms, surely you should be able to do a better job in order to be able to keep your users safe online and deal with this kind of hate speech.”

Clearly that sort of hate speech isn’t illegal for no one’s prosecuting Duke, are they?

Twitter suspended three accounts that were highlighted to it by MPs but one, which included a tweet with a hashtag “deport all Muslims”, remained.

Nick Pickles, from the microblogging site, said that while it was “highly offensive” the tweet did not breach its rules around hateful conduct.

Quite so….

WikiLeaks has published thousands of documents claiming to reveal top CIA hacking secrets, including the agency’s ability to infiltrate encrypted apps like Whatsapp, break into smart TVs and phones and program self-driving cars.
WikiLeaks said the files released on Tuesday – mysteriously dubbed ‘ Vault 7’ – are the most comprehensive release of U.S. spying files ever made public.
The leak purportedly includes 8,761 documents and files from an isolated, high-security network situated inside the CIA’s Center for Cyber Intelligence in Langley, Virgina.

It details intelligence information on CIA-developed software intended to hack iPhones, Android phones, smart TVs and Microsoft, Mac and Linux operating systems.
WikiLeaks alleges that some of the remote hacking programs can turn these electronic devices into recording and transmitting stations to spy on their targets.
It also claims the CIA can bypass the encryption of Whatsapp, Signal, Telegram, Wiebo, Confide and Cloakman by hacking the smart phones the applications run on.

Who didn’t think they were doing this? And the NSA, the FSB, MI6, GCHQ, whatever the Frog spiers call themselves and so on around the world?

That’s what spies do, spy. That’s actually why we have them. And of course, in order to be able to spy on the bad guys, the reason we pay them in the first place, they need to develop the tools that could be used to spy upon all of us.

Shrug, it has always been possible for a spy agency to devote its utmost resources against any one of us and fit us up whatever the hell it is we do. The electronic world hasn’t changed that in the slightest.

ABritish Islamic State fighter who carried out a suicide bombing in Iraq this week is a former Guantanamo Bay detainee who was paid £1 million compensation by the government.

Jamal al-Harith, a Muslim convert born Ronald Fiddler who detonated a car bomb at an Iraqi army base near Mosul, was released from the US detention camp in 2004 and successfully claimed compensation after saying British agents knew or were complicit in his mistreatment.

He was freed following intense lobbying by Tony Blair’s Labour government.

Still shouldn’t lock people up without convicting them of something…..

Why does the £5 note debate matter? Because it’s state power v minorities
Chas Newkey-Burden
The Bank keeping tallow, or beef fat, in the new fiver sends a message to vegans, as well as Hindus, Sikhs and Jains, that our values don’t matter

It says exactly that, your values do not matter to the rest of us.

Because that’s the way that a liberal polity works. We have to tolerate your nostrums, as you must tolerate ours. But we do not have to respect them, accord with them nor even organise society so as to make it easy for you to keep to them. Sure, on the no skin off my nose principle we’ll not deliberately make it difficult for you to keep to your desires. But equally we’re not going to bend over backwards to accommodate each and every view of the universe.

Tallow is near universally used in plastics. Including those plastic shoes you’re wearing in place of leather ones. Tough titty frankly. You’re right, your values aren’t important enough to us for us to try to find a substitute for half a cow’s worth of tallow in the nation’s banknotes.

Tant pis, eh?