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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."
Northern Rock has not collapsed. It's share price has, but the bank itself is still trading normally.
What's obvious is that this issue is not about censorship per se -- it's about the move to fascism. Corporations rule. Here in the US, corporations often literally write the bills that the corporate-funded Congress then pass into law. This UK innovation just has the courts directly acting on the corporations' behalf.
"Fascism could better be called 'corporatism', for it is merely the merging of state power with corporate power." -- Benito Mussolini, the Italian dictator who "invented" fascism.
"I hope we shall take warning from the example of England and crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations which dare already to challenge our Government to trial and bid defiance to the laws of our country." -- Thomas Jefferson
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.
While I agree with your sentiments, I have to point out that the quote you ascribe to Mussolini is something of a myth, probably based on a mistranslation. He is not known to have said that and, based on what he wrote, his philiosophy did not include giving power to anything other than the fascist state.
(see http://www.publiceye.org/fascist/corporatism.html)
(actually in most of the EU it's the same - e.g. in Germany, Nazi related things are illegal -- um, ironically...) In the UK this has most often been used in relation to the IRA, e.g. internment in the early 70's, or the forbidding of Sinn Fein to speak publicly in the early eighties -- which resulted in the BBC using actors to relay their words. Actually, it's very, very interesting that the BBC were keen on free speech in the Eighties, but are no longer so bothered about it.
Nor, incidentally, do you truly have the right to remain silent. That was removed a few years ago as well. You silence can be construed as admission of guilt -- no pleading the fifth.
It really is time that the UK people realised that Big Brother is here, today, right now. The UK is not as free as some dictatorships in the World. Democracy is smoke and mirrors here, nothing more. It probably is already too late. Americans, you need to ensure you have a change in your Government. Do not repeat the UK's mistakes.
You mean like the RIAA and MPAA?
send + more == money?
The problem with that video is it confuses fractional reserve with tort money and as a result its conclusions are nonsense.
If the system were as that video states than banks would never go bust - they could make infinite money just by lending it to each other!
The wikipedia article covers what really happens http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractional-reserve_banking
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.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.