Slashdot Mirror
Twitter Bomb Joke Case Rolls Back Into UK Courts
judgecorp writes "Paul Chambers, the Briton whose joke on Twitter backfired, will be back in court following a legal stalemate, after more than two years. Chambers joked about blowing up South Yorkshire's Robin Hood airport in January 2010, and was arrested and fined for 'sending a public electronic message that was grossly offensive or of an indecent, obscene or menacing character.' His resultant criminal record lost him his job as an accountant. Now his appeal has been heard, but the two judges disagreed with each other, so Chambers will be back in court again."
Seriously, who the hell uses their real information on a goddamned twitter account?!?!
It's that simple. Comedians know it. Amateurs should as well.
Who made it illegal to be an internet tough guy? I'll kill them and feast on their children.
When someone perfects rStabInEye, then we worry.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Make all your threats on MySpace, kids. It's technically public.
This is so easy... leave some emoticon, shorthand, or just plain the word "Joke" to mark all jokes so they don't get taken the wrong way.
I'm LostCluster but I lost my password to that user. Hey Slashdot, how about helping me get it back!
you could say that this guy was a real TWIT. Or you could categorise him as an idealist attempting to create a legal precedent for twits.
I got to the chocolate box before you, that's why the hard ones have teeth marks.
to quote "As far as I know both professional [chartered etc.]accountants and acuaries are exempted occupations under the Rehabilitation Of Oggemnders Act so employers can if they wish require disclosure of *all* convictions, whether spent or not, just the same as happens when working in health care or in contact with children or vulnerable adults. But it is then up to the employer to decide upon overall suitability for the role." so as I thought its up to the employer
so he did not loose his job because of the conviction...
worst case he lost his job because he threatened to bomb somewhere in a public forum...
frankly I have little sympathy for multiple reasons
regards
John 'real name' Jones
How can a threat to bomb an airport be considered as a joke?
People might be saying that it's "free speech", but even free speech has its limit
While I get to enjoy the freedom of speech of saying anything that I want to say, I must be responsible for any word that comes out of my mouth (and also the words that I typed onto my keyboard)
If I say I want to kill somebody, it's a threat, and should not be considered as "free speech" anymore
And of course, I have to be responsible for what I said
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
This was said in Robin Hood airport, Hood being a mediaeval Guy Fawkes.
Of course, Chambers should have expected, at best, a good barrister - not the Spanish Inquisition.
the conservative party of canada got a severed human foot mailed to them .....
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/story/2012/05/29/ottawa-suspicious-package-cpc-hq.html
yup corporations gone too far i'd say when peace loving canada people start acting like this....
That's what I read.
Joke about bombs -> get in trouble.
It doesn't matter if it's by UUCP, email, twitter, Google plus, in person, on a dial-up BBS, by postal mail, on the bathroom stall, etc.
The only place that it's probably safe is MySpace, since there would be no other users to see it, but even then, Google would probably index it.
If you make a stupid joke in public about killing the president, blowing up an airport, etc., I think you can reasonably expect to have some polite men in black suits show up at your door to ask you some very serious questions. Maybe you might even have to go with them for a while to answer some questions in a secure location.
But I don't think it is reasonable to expect that you will be arrested, charged with a crime, and lose your job over what is clearly and obviously a joke to anyone with more than two brain cells to rub together. It was a stupid joke, and a very badly-thought-out one, and I have no problem with someone facing reasonable consequences for doing something like that. But what happened to this guy has gone way beyond reasonable.
1) Security people don't have a sense of humour
2) Always talk nicely to someone with a gun
3) You can't fight city hall
The ex-accountant forgot #1. He's about to come up to #3.
"The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes" - Winston Churchill
WTF is up with British tourists and their "tweeter" accounts.
this guy was sent home from LAX because he said he was going to "destroy" America (the same way a hungry person would destroy a burger)
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-16810312
and Stephen Fry offered to pay Paul Chambers' fees. /stephenfryisawesome
The ''sending a public electronic message that was grossly offensive or of an indecent, obscene or menacing character" law could have been rolled-up into the pre-existing "issuing a threat that was grossly offensive or of an indecent, obscene or menacing character" law.
No wonder law school is so expensive.
I don't care what the guy says, that was not a joke. He might not have really meant it or ever have gone through with it, but what he posted was a threat made out of anger and frustration, not humor. It's exactly the kind of thing that somebody who's reached his breaking point might actually do.
I have nothing else to say.
Lisias@Earth.SolarSystem.OrionArm.MilkyWay.Local.Virgo.Universe.org
the interesting thing is that it's taking them over two fucking years to decide if the guy should have a criminal record or not.
it would be fairly simpler if criminal record wasn't such a simple binary thing.
because why the fuck shouldn't an accountant get to keep his job if he gets a criminal record for making a tweet? lying on their tax statement yeah, for that it would be appropriate.
and for the record you can in usa apparently advocate people to beat up their children for acting queer without getting slapped with a criminal record too - but no, can't say that you want the fucking airport to open in street slang.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Do you think if the tweet had the tag #joke included at the end it would've given context and been treated differently? I don't want to experiment.
Put yourself in the position of the security forces.
You've shouted about terrorrist threats, and got bills passed that enhance your powers by limiting civil liberties.
You've managed to get millions in funding for extra staff and equipment
The little niggle in the back of your mind is "Hey - What if I have seriously overstated the threat here? - I'll risk losing all that, and look like an idiot because I've wasted all that money and bullied a whole lot of people around"
The next thought that comes along is "I'd better keep this terrorist threat thing fresh in peoples minds just in case they start thinking the same thing".
So you jump on any situation that possibly *could* be perceived as a threat - even if only by a brain dead koala with no bowel control. Hey - you know it's not a terrorist threat, but that's not the point - You just want to keep on saying the word terrorist as often as you can to keep it at the fore of the public perception.
It's a bit like the situation in Arlo Guthries "Alices restaurant" where a musician is arrested on a littering charge in a small town
- And they was using up all kinds of cop equipment that they had hanging around the police officer's station.
- They was taking plaster tire tracks, foot prints, dog smelling prints, andthey took twenty seven eight-by-ten colour glossy photographs with circles
and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one explaining what each one was to be used as evidence against us.
- Took pictures of the approach,the getaway, the northwest corner the southwest corner and that's not to mention the aerial photography.
God forbid the populace should start thinkinking along the lines of "lets allocate some security funding towards healthcare and schools". Keep em frightened boys.
Really? Because nobody else who read it or was involved in the case ever claimed to have taken it seriously. Not the airport 'security' goon who searched for it, not the "special budget" coppers who arrested Chambers. They all said "Well, we know that it was a joke, nobody actually felt threatened, but... er... we saw it, so now we have to set an example." or words to that effect. Sotto voce, they couldn't find any actual terrorists, and they had to do something to justify their budgets. They know it, we know it, Paul Chambers most certainly knows it.
After the conviction, tens (was it hundreds?) of thousands of twitards then posted the exact same words. Surely we all committed the same crime? But none of us was arrested. Why's that?
All the way through the various levels, the Judiciary has struggled to understand twitter, and groped for bad analogies to explain it. The fact that anybody outside of Chamber's set of followers could have seen the tweet and read it out of context was used to convict, despite the patent absurdity of that as a standard. Anybody could walk past a pub window, hear one joking sentence spoken out of context, and soil their pink panties, but we don't generally convict the speaker of terrorism offences because of that.
It's been an utter farce of a case, and at this point, it seems to be entirely about the police, CPS and now the judiciary saving face by digging themselves deeper into the mount of steaming contempt that's been rightfully heaped on to them.
It's one of the few cases that genuinely boils my piss, because it does effect every one of us in the UK every second of every day. We are being monitored, and we can be convicted for just about any chance remark, entirely dependent on the budgetary requirements of various tools of the State.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
I was in the supermarket the other day and my little girl, under 10 years old so still a bit dopey, suddenly spotted a bit aisle of fizzy drinks she shouts, "Wouldn't it be cool to blow up the the shop!!". Jebus the looks I got from other shopper, you'd have thought I'd shit in their ice-cream!! I told her that blowing up stuff was not nice and and not funny to say as everyone else will think your serious about it, she said back to me "Why are people so stupid? I meant I wanted the fizzy drinks to blow up all over the place and get all bubbly, you know I'd never, ever hurt anyone at all!".
If a child under ten can understand a joke is a joke and think adults are stupid for believing it, surely a bunch of trained legal-eagles can understand it?!!?
David Allen Green, Paul Chambers' solicitor, blogs for the New Statesman and under his own name at Jack of Kent and has written about the case a number of times. He has also discussed it on the Without Prejudice podcasts on a number of occasions, e.g. two days ago.
Are you suggesting they set up him?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
They should have gone straight to a 3 judge setup. Still, it's only taxpayer money being wasted.