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Collapsed UK Bank Attempts to Censor Wikileaks
James Hardine writes "Wikileaks has released a couple of hilarious legal demands over a confidential briefing memo entitled Project Wing — Northern Rock Executive Summary. Northern Rock Bank (UK) collapsed spectacularly late last year on the back of the sub-prime lending crisis and was re-floated by the Bank of England at a cost of over £24bn. The memo was used by the Financial Times, the Telegraph and others. It attracted a number of censorship injunctions, as reported by the Guardian, which only Wikileaks continues to withstand. In their legal demand to Wikileaks, Northern Rock's well-known media lawyers, Schillings, invoke the DMCA & WIPO, claim it'll be 10 years in prison for Wikileaks operators for not following the UK injunction, but then, incredibly, refuse to hand over a copy of the order unless Wikileaks' London lawyers promise not to give it to Wikileaks. Finally they claim copyright and more — on their demands! The letters raise a serious issue about the climate of censorship in the UK, where one can apparently easily obtain a censorship order — a judge made law — that everyone is meant to obey, but no one is meant to know."
.. I never realised until recently with the whole NHS thing on the news that we even had laws that tried to silence people.
Well, you have to be careful in distinguishing the kinds of solvency problems. If it was merely a matter of "We can give you your money, but only after our loans are paid back with interest", that's what central banks are for: to lend when the bank has trouble selling its (good quality) loans because of temporary market kinks. (i.e. liquitiy crisis) So it wouldn't be that bad for the government to do it also. It's just making it a loan that will be paid back with the stream of income from the bank's loans come in.
HOWEVER, if it was a case of "We're lending you the money, even though we know your loans are bad and you can't actually pay us back but we're going to prop you up anyway", THEN you have good reason to object to it, and it would be an unfair taxpayer bailout.
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
Taking a page from the business of assassination: censor the censoring documents.
What do you mean they cut the power? How can they cut the power, man? They're animals!
In the era that I grew up, no one would try to use copyright laws to censor wrongdoing. Edward R Murrow would not have even thought that leaked documents could not be used as a news source.
History will show that the DMCA is one of the most evil laws ever past in the country, and is the lynch pin to Fascism.
The whole WIPO organization is simply there to protect the rich, and do no good whatsoever for the common man.
But it is censorship, not music that the DCMA is about.
Just try and see how far anyone gets getting congress to repeal this one.
This is the keystone of total control by the rich.
Have a nice day.
* Carthago Delenda Est *
but Northern Rock shares are up 25%.
Very true. Over the course of the last 24 hours, Northern Rock shares are up 25%.
But 12 months ago, Northern Rock shares were touching 1200p each. Today they're worth 88p each. That's more than a 90% drop. Take a look at the graph for the last years' share prices here:
http://www.citywire.co.uk/Shares/ShareFactsheet.aspx?InstrumentID=2375
Right now Northern Rock shares are only for those with brass balls so big they need a wheelbarrow to carry them around in.
The Bank did the right thing in extending credit (albeit at an uncompetitive rate), but the Government did the wrong thing in guaranteeing saver's deposits. They would probably have survived anyway and given the entire industry a harsh lesson in the realities of financing. As soon as they did that the nationalisation genie was out the bottle, and once it's out it is very difficult to put back.
[FUCK BETA]
US, UK, Australia, etc... -- in other words "English-speaking countries".
With an emphasis on "English".
Billion in a text in English is 1e9, everywhere. In a text in French or Polish that may be 1e12, but there is no ambiguity because the language tells you what that word means. In Polish, "pies" means "dog" while in English that's plural of "pie" -- the same word has different meanings in different languages. Or, "actual" being "real" in English and "current" in Polish and German.
Of course, this confuses poor bastards in outskirts of Quebec, and those who were born in Poland (aaargh...), but it's no different from any other false friend.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
"re-floated by the Bank of England at a cost of over £24bn."
and of course the first thing they do is spent as much of it as possible on lawyers for frivolous suits. You've fucked up once, why not try it a different way this time?
You feel sleepy. Close your eyes. The opinions stated above are yours. You cannot imagine why you ever felt otherwise.
Well, maybe. I can claim anything I want, and unless you can put a dollar figure on the cost of my making that claim, you don't have a legal claim against me. In some ways the more outrageous the claim, the safer I am in making it. I can claim I own everything written on Slashdot because God told me it was mine. If Slashdot shut down, and sued me for damages, I suspect the judge would throw the case out on the basis that we're both as crazy as a bedbug.
The art, I suppose, is to make a threat that is credible enough to make others do your bidding, but not so credible it can't be construed as fraud. Making wild DMCA claims is pretty borderline. What you're really saying is that while I'd almost certainly beat the snot out of you in a court of law, life's short and is it really worth my while just for this? If there were quantifiable money on the table, I'd got to court, but if I could assuage you for nothing, I might well do so, even if I wouldn't bother if you were asking nicely.
With respect to this being censorship -- well whether it is or not depends on whether the content is the deciding issue. If you break into my house and steal my diary, and a judge orders you not to print my diary, it's not censorship, because the issue here is ownership. If you anonymously mail the diary to my local paper, I can get an injunction against their publishing it. It's not the content of the diary that is at issue, it's the fact that I have a common law copyright to my private, unpublished papers.
If you want to publish your diary and I don't like what you have to say about me, my stopping you would be censorship, except if it were defamation.
There are two issues here: freedom of expression and privacy. I don't like the term "balancing", because that gives a false impression of what has to be done. The two issues have to be reconciled. Freedoms to do something do not, in general, mean you are free of obligations that might restrict you. If you have a document I created, the question is what duties do you have to me relating to publishing that document and disclosing its content? Whether you have a right to even posses the document certainly matters. Your duties to others and the public certainly matters. If I carelessly leave a private letter in the coffee shop, and it just has personal (although amusing) information, a reporter who discovered it would, I think, be duty bound to return it to me unpublished. If it details my involvement in embezzling public funds, the reporter's duty to the public is paramount.
It's not cut and dried.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Does it? From the linked newspaper article:
But the judge, Mr Justice Tugendhat, rejected a more stringent prohibition that Northern Rock had sought - to ban news coverage of the memo on FT.com and other websites.
"We were looking at funding a principled legal case about news that was looking increasingly historic by the day," said Paul Murphy, the editor of Alphaville.
Northern Rock failed to win an injunction against the Telegraph after the paper revealed details of the sales document sent out to prospective bidders.
The bank failed to force the Daily Telegraph to reveal its source for the article and failed to get the newspaper to remove its article.
Even as a British taxpayer, I struggle to work up much concern about "censorship" when clearly no-one's freedom of speech is being curtailed. A judge says newspapers can't publish private documents, and the newspaper drops the "public interest" appeal because it's already become old news. In the meantime, newspapers remained free to publish their articles and protect their sources.
It's quite a leap to go from those decisions to taking a mercenary law firm's typically overstated demands as being a "serious issue".
p.s. on the subject of not being serious, I can't be the only one who would struggle to take a judge called "Tugendhat" seriously. Tug who's end into who's hat, I'd like to know...
The letters raise a serious issue about the climate of censorship in the UK, where one can apparently easily obtain a censorship order -- a judge made law -- that everyone is meant to obey, but no one is meant to know.
This is false. There is no legal basis in the UK for what they are doing. They're chancing their arm, and hoping that the threat of big scary lawyers will frighten away the... other big scary lawyers. I can't see that working.
While I am as wary of any kind of censorship as the next guy, we would also do well to remember that the entire Northern Rock episode was basically caused by media over-hyping a short term liquidity problem, which is a relatively benign, if somewhat unusual, banking situation.
The way the credit crunch/government loan issue has been portrayed in the mainstream media, even relatively decent sources like the BBC, has made it sound disastrous, thus prompting a full scale run on a bank. Given that the entire consumer banking industry basically runs on a trust system, everything would probably have worked out fine, but the resulting panic has exacerbated the problem and now we have had the big government bail out.
So, while I'm all for free speech, I'm also all for people using it responsibly. The responsible thing to do before would have been for the media to explain that Northern Rock had a relatively sound loans book in the long term (they actually have far less exposure to sub-prime losses than many of the big banks), and that the central bank (well, "the government" in this case, argue it how you like) stepping in to smooth over a temporary liquidity problem is the correct response to this, economically speaking. Indeed, it seems unlikely that these circumstances are specific to Northern Rock: much the same could have happened (and perhaps more deservedly) to many other banks in the current economic climate. NR were just in the wrong place at the wrong time, metaphorically speaking. So it would be better if the average person had some understanding of the basic economic idea, so we don't see a repeat performance when the next big bad announcement is made by another bank.
The responsible thing to do now would be to allow Northern Rock, the government, Virgin, and whoever else is playing behind the scenes to get on with making a deal. All leaking confidential documents mid-process does is make it harder to find a mutually beneficial way out of the current predicament, which ultimately just shafts everyone, including the taxpayer and potentially those who have money held by NR.
Censorship has a chilling effect, but so does irresponsible spreading of half-truths and misinformation by the tinfoil hat brigade on the pretence of defending free speech. With freedom comes responsibility, always.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
You mean like the RIAA and MPAA?
send + more == money?
If crap really happens some people would rather have lots of supplies of fuel, food and water.
Of course some people would rather have lots of ammo and guns.
You can't eat gold. Maybe it might be used as a currency, but maybe not.
Since the Blair government. The wholesale overturn of the Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights of 1688 with the thought-crime laws and the disarmament of the Englishry-in-Arms, and the establishment of the Panopticon - the once-imaginary ideal prison - over all of England with the cctv Surveillance State has created Orwell's Oceana, where once there was an England.