In the UK, a Few Tweets Restore Freedom of Speech

Several readers wrote to us about the situation in the UK that saw the Guardian newspaper forbidden by a judge from reporting a question in UK parliament. The press's freedom to do so has been fought for since at least 1688 and fully acknowledged since the 19th century. At issue was a matter of public record — but the country's libel laws meant that the newspaper could not inform the public of what parliament was up to. The question concerned the oil trading company Trafigura, the toxic waste scandal they are involved in, and their generous use of libel lawyers to silence those who would report on the whole thing. After tweeters and bloggers shouted about Trafigura all over the Internet, the company's lawyers agreed to drop the gag request.

Comments

Re:Stephen Fry

[dword]

Agreed. Please let me rephrase: twitting and blogging are work-arounds, because the problem is still there. It wasn't fixed by the lawyers dropping the gag request; it will only be fixed as soon as the judge admits that the judgement was a mistake and explains why it was a mistake.

Re:Simon Singh

[EasyTarget]

Here's a counterexample.. two in fact.

20 years ago my motobike was not stolen, even after the thieves had laboriously sliced a chain and wired the ignition. Why? Because the engine would cut out within 10 seconds of starting, eventually they gave up and left. The engine cutting out was down to a obscure little security system I designed, built and fitted myself, killed the ignition for 2 seconds out of every 10 unless a magnet was held in the correct place as the ignition was turned on. The thieves probably never even suspected it was deliberate, they probably thought the bike was a lemon.. which is arguably true ;-)

My server, which has no open public SSH port.. Unless you know exactly where to look and when.

Both of these work because they are genuinely obscure single implementations. In order to break them the attacker would need to know that it exists, and then spend time analysing the unit to break it. Even if they know there is a hidden layer of defence, is the payout (a crummy motorcycle, control of my printer and access to my photos and porn collection) worth their time to break it?

The sort of Security through Obscurity you describe fails because it is identically implemented in millions of devices, ie. It is not really Obscure, it's just a secret. And if you break it in one place you break it in all places. The payout for finding and breaking it is much, much, greater.