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."

Comments

Re:Collapsed?

[u38cg]

It isn't tax money. The Bank of England is a central bank, a lender of last resort that can lend essentially unlimited sums in situations where it (and government oversight) deems appropriate. Appropriate circumstances are where a bank is in danger of folding despite being essentially sound businesses. This is the case with Northern Rock - they have plenty of assets, in the form of mortgages; the problem is they tried to fund it with a source of lending that was not (despite their protestations) guaranteed to continue. When the credit markets ground to a halt, they were sitting ducks.

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.

Raising a serious issue

[hey!]

The letters raise a serious issue about the climate of censorship in the UK...

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.

MAFIAA?

[ja]

You mean like the RIAA and MPAA?

Re:That may be a good thing

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

And the government has bailed them out with over £1,000 for each man, woman and child in the whole United Kingdom - an utterly colossal sum of money. Is that good value for your taxes? It certainly doesn't look like good value for money for mine.

That depends on whether there's a good chance of getting it back, doesn't it?

Certainly the government takes a lot of my money and does things I don't approve of with it. But in this case, if it really is effectively just a loan and it avoids a financial melt-down, it's probably a loan I'd rather make.

The Rock is bankrupt. It has suffered the consequences of bad lending practices. Admittedly the hype over sub-prime lending didn't help, but sooner or later this sort of thing was going to happen. The government should just have stood back and let it crash.

Perhaps. But then a lot of innocent people who kept their savings with NR would lose money. Confidence in the UK's banking industry would collapse. A large-scale run on every major bank would inevitably follow, and if not rapidly corrected by much more dramatic government action than what we've seen with Rock, that in turn would be followed by the biggest national financial meltdown in history.

At that point, it wouldn't matter whether you were a higher-rate taxpayer with lots of savings or a minimum wage slave living month to month. It wouldn't matter whether you prudently checked out your bank's policies on sub-prime lending before keeping your savings there, or just went with what looked like the best deal when you compared the numbers. If the banks collapse, in a modern economy that depends on them and the trust system underwriting them, everyone is seriously f**ked — I'm not talking a tax hike next year, I'm talking likely total failure of law and order.

This is what a lot of the "shoulda just let 'em crash" brigade don't seem to appreciate. Even if we do all lose £1k each because of the government intervention, it's still a lot less in real terms than we would have lost if they hadn't intervened and things had gone south fast. Of course, no remotely competent government would ever let things get anywhere near that far, but the point is that if you don't act decisively early on, you may be forced to take even more dramatic actions later that are even more dubious if you look at the long-term economic picture alone.

Now, letting the investors in an organisation that fails off the hook is an entirely different question. The government shouldn't underwrite bad investments, because it just encourages more bad investments and rewards those who should pay for their poor choices using taxpayers' money. But remember, a lot of the government money involved in the Rock case isn't underwriting the investors, it's underwriting the everyday people who have savings with Rock. If Rock gets bought out at well below its previous value, that's just market forces in action, but it's only the investors who lose out, not the customers or the taxpayer. There's a world of difference.