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UK Man Faces Prison For Circumventing UK's Pirate Site Blockade (torrentfreak.com)
An anonymous reader writes with news from TorrenFreak that a Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit in the UK has charged a man for operating proxy sites and services that let fellow Internet users in the UK bypass local pirate site blockades.
In a first of its kind prosecution, the Bakersfield resident is charged with several fraud offenses and one count of converting and/or transferring criminal property. During the summer of 2014, City of London Police arrested the then 20-year-old Callum Haywood of Bakersfield for his involvement with several proxy sites and services. Haywood was interrogated at a police station and later released on bail. He agreed to voluntarily hand over several domain names, but the police meanwhile continued working on the case. I wonder if the same logic applies to customers of the shrinking number of VPNs that can be used to bypass other kinds of country-level controls.
Well, it is worth noting this is the City of London Police, that is the "square mile" police force and so not the regular London Metropolitan police. These chumps have deliberately profiled themselves as lapdogs of big entertainment, not surprising since the City of London itself is entirely corporate with corporations for voters and so on, so it may well not directly be taxpayer money they're burning.
Even so, it's not the taxpayer money that's the problem here. The pernicious venom of censorship is.
Not as much as you might suppose. The "City of London" Police force is not the general police force for the City of London (Odd I know) it is literally only responsible of the area inside the "Square mile" that is a bought-and-paid for feudal fiefdom inside the rest of the UK democracy. The "police" there pretty much serve corporate interests only. Thankfully very few people actually live inside the square mile not their influence is much less than you'd expect. It is a very strange legacy of out past that is now very difficult for us to rid ourselves of, because of corporate backing.
But it doesn't represent London proper nor the rest of the UK
This isn't a government mandated block. A private company took the largest ISPs to court and got an injunction requiring them to block a long list of web sites. Smaller ISPs are unaffected.
The correct course of action would for that company to now ask for an injunction against this guy, asking the court to make him stop providing proxies to bypass the other blocks. Instead, they got their private police force, the City of London Police, to treat him as a criminal. If you were not aware, the City of London is a small area in London that is basically run by corporations. Corporations get to vote on their elected officials, and the City of London Police basically work for them.
This is extreme abuse of power by the City of London Police.
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I'm glad to know that given all the cuts on the police force that Osborne is talking about, the humming a tune in the shower police unit remains well-staffed. Right along the lines of the "Big Society" trumpeted by Cameron.
After all, who cares about assault, burglary, etc ? Good luck having the police respond to a call reporting assault. Good citizens should band together and defend against those, the police is too busy with much more serious crimes. Like not paying for the right to hum a tune in the shower.
Last time I was assaulted in the street, the next police officer I flagged down was more concerned that I happened to be inadvertently spitting blood in his face.
Except circumventing a court order or helping someone else do so is an offence in itself, contempt of court I believe.
Not as much as you might suppose. The "City of London" Police force is not the general police force for the City of London (Odd I know) it is literally only responsible of the area inside the "Square mile"
The square mile is the City of London. Greater London area is an agglomeration of a large number of towns, cities, boroughs and other miscellenia such as City of London, City of Westminster, and bits stolen from the surrounding counties, such as Kingston which is the county town of Surrey despite being in Greater London.
What everyone thinks of as London is Greater London.
But yes, the City of London is weird. From an administrative point of view, it's older than England, never mind the UK. It's current charter dates from 1067 (England dates from 930 or so), but that recognises its previous charter which is sadly lost to history as it woud have happened well inside the Dark Ages. Since it was already there, the laws got crafted around it.
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