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Bloggers Versus Billionaire
Roger Whittaker writes "An interesting case in England is pitting the combined power of multiple bloggers against an Uzbek billionaire. The bloggers are supporting the former UK ambassador to Uzbekistan, Craig Murray, who has written a book about what happened there after the fall of Communism. The book is apparently unflattering in the extreme to oligarch Alisher Usmanov, who has engaged the law firm Schillings (which seems to specialize in getting unfavorable Web content removed for rich clients). Their threats have led to the removal of Murray's blog site by his hosting company Fasthosts. But a large number of bloggers have taken up Murray's cause, and the content that caused the original complaint, and links to it, have now sprung up in a very large number of places. The Internet still seems to regard censorship as damage and route around it."
Looks like Borat was right about Uzbekistan
If this jerk had simply kept his trap shut and his legal team leashed, I would never have heard of him. But by being an aggressive prick -- he gets worldwide exposure and confirmation that he is an aggressive prick.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
It looks harmless enough, but if you try to take information away from it, it explodes in your face.
We asked Murray if he intends to stay on Usmanov's back. He replied: "There is room on Usmanov's back for an awful lot of people. You could get even more on his stomach, and possibly lose some under the overlap of his chins."
We think that's a "yes".
It's called the Streisand effect, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect Bet he's got a smaller nose though :-)
Is this perhaps the same guy who's famous for boiling people alive: http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article3943.htm
Attempting to suppress a piece of information nowadays practically guarantees that it will be more widely disseminated than ever before, and with enough redundant links to remind you that the Net's underlying protocols were designed to survive WWIII.
We asked Murray if he intends to stay on Usmanov's back. He replied: "There is room on Usmanov's back for an awful lot of people. You could get even more on his stomach, and possibly lose some under the overlap of his chins."
We think that's a "yes".
This will without a doubt be entertaining and possibly educational. There are plenty of people with power/money who would like to censor others' public opinions of them. It is easier in some countries (China) than others (EU, US?, etc.). There may certainly be lessons to learn for both sides. I know who I'm rooting for but of course I'm not an oligarch.
I reserve the right to think for myself. Others' opinions are optional. Puppy on lap = typos...not illiteracy.
September 2, 2007
Alisher Usmanov, potential Arsenal chairman, is a Vicious Thug, Criminal, Racketeer, Heroin Trafficker and Accused Rapist
I thought I should make my views on Alisher Usmanov quite plain to you. You are unlikely to see much plain talking on Usmanov elsewhere in the media becuase he has already used his billions and his lawyers in a pre-emptive strike. They have written to all major UK newspapers, including the latter:
"Mr Usmanov was imprisoned for various offences under the old Soviet regime. We wish to make it clear our client did not commit any of the offences with which he was charged. He was fully pardoned after President Mikhail Gorbachev took office. All references to these matters have now been expunged from police records . . . Mr Usmanov does not have any criminal record."
Let me make it quite clear that Alisher Usmanov is a criminal. He was in no sense a political prisoner, but a gangster and racketeer who rightly did six years in jail. The lawyers cunningly evoke "Gorbachev", a name respected in the West, to make us think that justice prevailed. That is completely untrue.
Usmanov's pardon was nothing to do with Gorbachev. It was achieved through the growing autonomy of another thug, President Karimov, at first President of the Uzbek Soviet Socilist Republic and from 1991 President of Uzbekistan. Karimov ordered the "Pardon" because of his alliance with Usmanov's mentor, Uzbek mafia boss and major international heroin overlord Gafur Rakimov. Far from being on Gorbachev's side, Karimov was one of the Politburo hardliners who had Gorbachev arrested in the attempted coup that was thwarted by Yeltsin standing on the tanks outside the White House.
Usmanov is just a criminal whose gangster connections with one of the World's most corrupt regimes got him out of jail. He then plunged into the "privatisation" process at a time when gangster muscle was used to secure physical control of assets, and the alliance between the Russian Mafia and Russian security services was being formed.
Usmanov has two key alliances. he is very close indeed to President Karimov, and especially to his daughter Gulnara. It was Usmanov who engineered the 2005 diplomatic reversal in which the United States was kicked out of its airbase in Uzbekistan and Gazprom took over the country's natural gas assets. Usmanov, as chairman of Gazprom Investholdings paid a bribe of $88 million to Gulnara Karimova to secure this. This is set out on page 366 of Murder in Samarkand.
Alisher Usmanov had risen to chair of Gazprom Investholdings because of his close personal friendship with Putin, He had accessed Putin through Putin's long time secretary and now chef de cabinet, Piotr Jastrzebski. Usmanov and Jastrzebski were roommates at college. Gazprominvestholdings is the group that handles Gazproms interests outside Russia, Usmanov's role is, in effect, to handle Gazprom's bribery and sleaze on the international arena, and the use of gas supply cuts as a threat to uncooperative satellite states.
Gazprom has also been the tool which Putin has used to attack internal democracy and close down the independent media in Russia. Gazprom has bought out - with the owners having no choice - the only independent national TV station and numerous rgional TV stations, several radio stations and two formerly independent national newspapers. These have been changed into slavish adulation of Putin. Usmanov helped accomplish this through Gazprom. The major financial newspaper, Kommersant, he bought personally. He immediately replaced the editor-in-chief with a pro-Putin hack, and three months later the long-serving campaigning defence correspondent, Ivan Safronov, mysteriously fell to his death from a window.
All this, both on Gazprom and the journalist's death, is set out in great detail here:
http://www.craigmurray.co.uk/archives/2007/06/russian_journal.html
Usmanov is also dogged by the wides
but isn't a Billionaire in Britian someone with 1e12 (a million millions) pounds. That is, over 2 trillion US dollars?
Your ad here. Ask me how!
Not sure if any kind of pornography or other forms of free speech should be censored; once you start the process, there's no stopping.
On the other hand, producing or sponsoring sick materials involving children, rape, etc. might very well deserve an execution, or life imprisonment at least...
Obama likes poor people so much, he wants to make more of them.
This is the kind of thing perpetrate by evil nitwits Uzbekistan, who as everybody know, is very nosey people with a bone in middle of their brain.
Of course all this is all because Usmanov has recently bought up a load of shares and his vast, blubbery shadow is being cast over North London as he circles Arsenal Football Club - even the club chairman has today spoken out today over concerns about how he amassed his fortune. Usmanov has said publicly that he intends to gain a "blocking stake" in the club. Football fans can be ALMOST as devout as Apple fanboys ;)
He'll soon rebound from this scandal with a book deal, music contract, perfume and fashion line, and will drive around with Britney while getting "accidentally" photographed without his panties.
[...] to remind you that the Net's underlying protocols were designed to survive WWIII.
This is an old canard; stop putting the cart before the horse. The internet was designed to enable effective and economical sharing of computational resources. This necessarily included the capability to share ASCII-Art renderings of Playboy pinups. In order to preserve the capabilities against censors, it had to develop the ability to withstand a potential WWIII nuclear exchange as an inevitable byproduct of the initial design requirement of effective and economical resource sharing. (Nixon really didn't get along well with Hef.)
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
While I agree that this guy does seem like an arse, I have a thought experiment: What if someone were to make up a story like "I found out that John Howard was taking bribes from George Bush to influence Australian lawmaking -- but when I blogged about it, the AFP had my webhost pull my blog!"? They could manipulate this phenomenon to spread misinformation and people would end up believing it.
Me lost me cookie at the disco.
...but the people who are on it. But still, I applaud them for standing up to the bully that he is.
US businesses that currently accept chip and PIN/signature
What if in some other case the information were completely false? If somebody posted your name and said that you were involved in perpetrating the abuses at Guantanamo Bay? And they made sure that the information was spread far enough over the Internet that a Google search on your name would bring it up?
Would you still be an "aggressive prick" (your words) for trying to correct the record? It's undoubtedly slander to knowingly falsely accuse somebody of that sort of heinous crime. But it's the sort of thing that a flat "I didn't do it" wouldn't work on. Most people aren't going to read far enough to find your denial, and even if they did why would they believe it?
That's the hard case. Think it over.
But by being an aggressive prick -- he gets worldwide exposure and confirmation that he is an aggressive prick.
The article barely mentions it, and the summary not at all, but the background to this is the battle over the ownership of Arsenal, one of the big four English football (soccer) clubs. The Arsenal fans (and apparently Craig Murray) are generally opposed to Usmanov's takeover of the club and some of them have blogs, hence the attacks on him and the unleashing of lawyers in response.
Some more details here: ahref=http://www.forbes.com/2007/09/18/arsenal-usmanov-kroenke-lifestyle-sport-cx_pm_0918arsenal_print.html/rel=url2html-32009http://www.forbes.com/2007/09/18/arsenal-usmanov-kroenke-lifestyle-sport-cx_pm_0918arsenal_print.html/>
Otherwise why would a bunch of British bloggers care about the business practices of an Uzbekistani businessman, and why would he care what they think.
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
You know a frequently exploited theme in science fiction, which actually comes fromt he real world: all together we're worth more than just the sum of us.
Just like none of the nerve cells in our brain knows exactly what effect it has on the big picture, they all together create complicated intelligence machine.
Then I read this:
"The Internet still seems to regard censorship as damage and route around it."
I know it's not the context they used it in, but ponder this: Internet has enabled million of people worldwide to communicate instantly.
In this case people came together to show some rich loser he can't mess with their blogger buddy. The result is an information network that quickly provides redundant copies of information under attack and makes the information virtually impossible to erase ever.
The resulting intelligence, behavior and outcome probably escapes the mind of each one of the participators that form it.
Does the Internet have a mind on its own already?
That's what a defamation suit is for, but if you look around, they specifically aren't claiming defamation -- they're just dealing out take down notices under the draconian anti-speech rules in Britain. Secondly, given the author's position, he is quite likely a highly knowledgeable source. Last, even if totally false, he has by his own aggressive actions made the problem worse, which was my point.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
In Uzbekistan during communist times, a leader emerged, Sharaf Rashidov, who defrauded the Soviet system by falsifying the production statistics that were used to calculate payments. Communisms central planning would move products directly from producer to user but pay from a central fund so it was ripe for fraud by falsification of statistics. Eventually, the Soviet government found out and many of the government were imprisoned or dismissed.
When communism died, so did all semblance of control over the government there who reverted to a kleptocracy. The power to export (Uzbekistan is a major cotton producer) or to convert currency was given to a select few. When the blackmarket rate was something like four times the official currency rate you can imagine what happened - yes, a massive black-market in currency. Privatisation became a rip-off. Although shares were passed out to all, those in remote places became vulnerable to raiders who swept them up in return for nothing.
Given the nature of the controls on the Uzbek economy, I cannot understand how Usmanov made his money legally. He cannot be permitted to become the beneficial owner of a western company as the anti-money laundering rules would force the company to become increased-risk or worse which would cause problems for western banks to do business with him. Lawyers are now also constrained by anti-money laundering rules, so they too could have problems working with him.
No it wouldn't. Censorship suggests that something in the public interest is being suppressed. It is not in the public interest for people's personal details to be left lying around. However, it is in the public interest to know which companies are lax with personal data, or whether a billionaire's assets are mostly ill-gotten gains.
This is the trouble with many simplistic rants on Slashdot - because $FOO is considered a good thing, then $BAR must be "otherwise your opinion is inconsistent". Whereas anyone with a modicum of intelligence knows that it's not quite as clear cut as that, and someone's personal bank details are not the same thing as whether someone's business dealings are legal or not.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
A very favourable tax regime for those with non-domiciled status. They pay tax only on assets brought in to the country and keep the rest in off-shore tax havens.
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
Using openSUSE instead of Windows since 9th of October, 2007 and liking it.
The onus in the UK in a civil case (as opposed to in a criminal case) is on the person saying something to show it to be true (in a criminal case the onus is on the prosecution), and the standard of proof is generally lower than the "beyond reasonable doubt" needed in a criminal case.
The interesting thing though is that Murray has been in touch with Usmanov's lawyers and asked them to sue him for libel and made sure that they know where to find him, and he has publicised this invitation in comments in the national press. So far they've declined to do so.
There's obviously nothing in law but I wonder if there should be some sort of "piss or get off the pot" law saying that where the root of the libel is clear you can not continue fighting those publicising it if you decline to fit the root.
The other interesting part of this is that his webhost unintentionally took down a whole load of other sites sharing the same server when they took his down (i'm guessing they panicked and killed the server as the fastest way to comply). One of those taken down was prominent right wing Member of Parliament and candidate for the London Mayor Boris Johnson. Needless to say this has further fuelled publicity around it.
To be clear he was removed from post, not fired. He remained an employee of the UK government. The government claimed that it was for operational reasons and nothing to do with him claiming that the British security services had used information obtained by the Uzbek's through torture.
While there was talk of disciplinary action he eventually agreed to resign having negociated a very sizable settlement.
His blog did have a fairly detailed decription of it before it was taken down.
I am in a 12-step recovery program for
Rich And Stupid is not so bad as Working For Rich And Stupid.
Litigious and tortoise. Makes perfect sense.
Singed,
Unanimous Coward
I'd hope that Meg White would try to remove references to her name in association with the sex tape or demand clarifications. But you'd call that "censorship" and call it morally wrong. How can it possibly be morally wrong to remove your name from sex tape that you didn't make?
This really is a knee-jerk response; how can it be morally right? Indeed, morality may not be involved at all. These are both good questions to ask, but there is an obvious essential truth; Meg White is a raging hottie. Nine out of ten guys would bang her, given the opportunity - and we'd all like to think a fair number of left-leaning girls, too. The intertubes have a hard on for her, and she isn't going to be able to deny that by trying to pull any or even all references to a possible sex tape.
Admit it, the whole idea of a sex tape fascinates you. You, and everybody else.
Meg trying to deny that this rumor existed is not only foolhardy, but disingenuous. If there is a sex tape, then you can't morally say there is not. If there is not a sex tape, it says nothing about you that there is a rumor that there is - only muddle headed thinking would suggest so. It only says something about the social zeitgeist. Which, I think we can all agree, really digs Meg White.
"And the message coming from my eyes says, 'Leave it alone.'"
[Ego]out
The case Godfrey v. Demon Internet is itself a case that reeks strongly of stupidity. In that case, an ISP refused to remove usenet postings falsely pretending to be from Mr. Godfrey. The ISP pretended they had no responsibility, because the defamation act does not apply to those who merely relay information like e.g., newspaper vendors. When this was struck down, the ISP found a batch of other messages with forged sender ids, pretending they were from Mr. Godfrey and alleged these messages were provoking. They wanted to have their responsibility reduced because of the alleged provocation. Through this step, they made the process much, much more costly, and in the end they had to pay for it all.
The ISP of course also claimed freedom of speech. They forgot to say who's speech. If the articles i question were actually from Mr. Godfrey, he has the the right to cancel them. The Usenet software has automated mechanisms he could have used. In order to claim freedom of speech for anybody else, they automatically were claiming the right to falsely write under the name of somebody else.
I think the legal systems in nearly all countries could be said to have several layers. In some countries it is pretended that every decision is a carefull but strict application of the statutes. However, any half-witted person can see that there is a great selectivity in how the statutes are applied and how the circumstances of a case are found to fit descriptions, or what labels apply to them. Therefore there is a second layer which could be said to consist of mostly "common sense" and "public interest", although this second layer is also often abused, perhaps out of stupidity, producing decisions that sometimes more than border to the mock trials.
However, a reasonable application of common sense and public interest should make it very clear that in absense of any editor, as the Usenet is designed to run entirely without any top-down control, then the human owners of the participating computers must be required to assist in limiting the damage. Society cannot, or at least should not, allow any important damage to persist just because of a technicality not foreseen by the lawmakers. I think that is why the judge made the ISP a "publisher" in the Godfree v Demon case.
This question should be entirely different in the present case, where there is a clearly identifiable and named responsible person behind the allegedly defamating articles. In the present case the articles are entirely under control of Craig Murray, and Fasthost's decision is interfering with his freedom of speech. I guess that if a storehouse chain decided not to carry The Guardian on a particular day because of potential liability for an alledgedly defamating article, the chain could be sued and would be likely to have to pay damages to The Guardian.
What remains disturbing is, that if Fasthost had decided to ask Usmanov's people to turn to Murray himself with their request, there is no guarantee that all judges would side with Fasthost. While I am damn sure that my analysis is correct (even I don't know the law), I am also damn sure that only a small majority of the judges have the brain to analyse the case correctly. (That is, a large minority does not.) Even the little I have seen quoted from the British defamation law, makes it appear like the law carries a list of circumstances when contributors to the publishing of a defamation are not to be held liable, while it fails to say explicitly why. It seems to happen over and over again, that because judges cannot be relied on to interpret overly general principles, the laws are written with lists of more specific nature, and the principle behind the list is not mentioned at all. I think this way of writing laws could be improved.
I have not read the actual text of the Godfrey v Demon decision, and I do not know if the decision makes it very clear why it found that the ISP is a publisher. In
There is no substitute for common sense. Especially, no body of rules will do.