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?!?!
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!
A few months ago I had a domestic flight in Australia, the first time I'd flown in years. Amusingly, I get swabbed for explosives by security. Afterwards, sitting around waiting for my flight I came very, very close to making a Facebook status a long the lines of "Just got swabbed for explosives at the airport, lucky I left my C4 at home". I'm glad I was smart enough not to.
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 !
Don't make stupid jokes.
It's kind of like when I walked into a biker bar and said loudly "Well fuck me raw!", and seconds later some neanderthal in a leather jacket bent me over a pool table and gave me a serious ass pounding like I had never had before.
Something like that.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
A few months ago I had a domestic flight in Australia, the first time I'd flown in years. Amusingly, I get swabbed for explosives by security. Afterwards, sitting around waiting for my flight I came very, very close to making a Facebook status a long the lines of "Just got swabbed for explosives at the airport, lucky I left my C4 at home". I'm glad I was smart enough not to.
It's too bad that the criminals we really have to worry about aren't stupid enough to even joke about such things. They're the ones who would never mention a thing to anyone under any pretext until it's too late.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
That's what I read.
Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!
Why is it that most of the people that I encounter seem to have been shat from the Sphincter of Mediocrity?
Don't make stupid jokes. It's that simple. Comedians know it. Amateurs should as well.
Tell that to Jeff Dunham.
My sister opened a computer store in Hawaii. She sells C shells by the seashore.
But your post, at least, would have been mildly amusing, unlike his.
My sister opened a computer store in Hawaii. She sells C shells by the seashore.
Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!
Nobody expects the repetitive meme!
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
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 have nothing else to say.
Lisias@Earth.SolarSystem.OrionArm.MilkyWay.Local.Virgo.Universe.org
I hope you never ever meet someone like you. I don't think you will survive the encounter.
Lisias@Earth.SolarSystem.OrionArm.MilkyWay.Local.Virgo.Universe.org
A few months ago I had a domestic flight in Australia ... I'm glad I was smart enough not to.
Irony is more acceptable in Australian culture and you are a lot less likely to get in trouble for that sort of thing here. The problem really occurs when we travel overseas.
Recall the Australian violinist who when checking trough Canadian customs responded to the question "what have you got in that violin case" in the only acceptable manner "whatdya reckon, a machine gun ..." (ask a stupid question, get a stupid answer being the accepted norm in Australian English), which caused the shutdown of Toronto (from memory) Airport and earned him a (short) custodial sentence. No bloody sense of humour those Canadians!
OK, the fact that it was the 12th or 13th of Sept 2001 didn't help any, "tragedy plus time" and all that ...
Doing that here would more likely have earn you the reply "don't be a bloody dickhead mate!" Indeed, a few months afterwards I saw signs plastered all over Kingsford Smith Airport (Sydney) to the effect that "Making jokes about bombs is NOT funny." Which clearly evidences a rash of such behaviour, which while obviously not appreciated did not get the Tactical Response Unit called out or cause a major international incident.
OK posting on Facebook is a little more dangerous, since your tone of voice can't be assessed. And imagine what Today Tonight would to if the coppers missed it and someone really did have C4 at home. So maybe instead of putting it on your FB status you should reserve such comments for the person swabbing you, who will give you a dirty look and point at the sign and maybe get even, by making you unpack all your belongings, or conducting a cavity search or something. On second thoughts...
Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security. --Edmund Burke
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.
Don't badmouth the government. It's illegal. Comedians know it. Amateurs should as well.
Being the victims, it's completely their fault that the government is a piece of garbage.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
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.
More accurately you should have said "luckily I didn't touch my C4 before I left"
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.
While I'm sure Australian airport security are a lot more laid back than say, the TSA, I highly doubt they'd take that kind of comment lightly. Sure, they might get that you're joking but they'd still be required to take you in for some serious questioning.
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.
I highly doubt they'd take that kind of comment lightly.
Obviously not. They went to the expense of having signs made telling people to stop doing it.
Sure, they might get that you're joking but they'd still be required to take you in for some serious questioning.
If they get that you're joking why would they waste time questioning you?
Seriously, what happened in Canada wouldn't happen here. I mean people with an IQ as low as the guy who called the alarm just because someone told him they had a machine gun in a violin case (of all things!) ... you know, they're all on welfare here. A custodial sentence?!!! That's just friggin' crazy, what kind of crack-pot police state they got up there anyway?
If you want some serious questioning here you'll have to try a bit harder! Say breaching the most massive security operation the country had ever put on. You know go through two checkpoints with fake IDs, get, dressed up as Osama bin Laden and drive your limo right up to the front door of the hotel where the US President is staying. Don't count on actually getting prosecuted though, that would be un-Australian.
You are underestimating our larrikin ways, overestimating the efficiency of our security services and universalising the oppression you are obviously subject to.
Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security. --Edmund Burke
Ah I see you're the Aussie originally posting ... In which case strike that last paragraph :)
Seriously point me to the legislation which requires them to take you in for some serious questioning for making a stupid joke (maybe it exists now, but I I'd like to see it). Really if they know you are joking it, you'll get into trouble because you've pissed them off (after a dozen of bomb jokes a day, it's gonna wear thin eventually). And as I said, posting something like that online actually is asking for trouble.
Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security. --Edmund Burke
Denigrate not the Python.
When Python said it, it was not a repetitive meme.
Next objection!
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
Are you suggesting they set up him?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I don't know if there is such legislation in existence; maybe there is, maybe there isn't. I guess my point is that they, at first glance, have absolutely no way of knowing you're joking (regardless of whether you have a smile on your face) and I highly doubt they're going to take that chance just because they might have a good sense of humour.
I highly doubt they're going to take that chance just because they might have a good sense of humour.
My point was that the signs are evidence of just how commonplace such jokes were at Australian airports, and they simply don't have the staffing levels required to interview everyone with a poor enough sense of humour to make one. What do you imagine the correlation is between people who make smartarse comments like leaving their C4 at home and those who actually have it? What chance would they be taking? I put it to you that a reaction from the sniffer dogs is a more reliable indicator and one that would actually trigger the expenditure of limited resources. If you really want that interview, my advice would be not to bother with ironic self-incriminating statements, but actually to carry explosives or try taking a handgun through the metal detector.
When you are in Canada on the other hand, where the chances are that the official has never heard an ironic statement in his or her life ...
And that was my main point, our sense of humour can get us into all sorts of trouble OS.
Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security. --Edmund Burke