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  • Locked thread
Zephro
Nov 23, 2000

I suppose I could part with one and still be feared...
If NOTW was ordering people to break in to buildings, then maybe we can for once justify appending the suffix -gate to this particular scandal!

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Zephro
Nov 23, 2000

I suppose I could part with one and still be feared...

Brown Moses posted:

The question you should all be asking is who was actually doing the burglaries?
I'll take "The police" for $500.

Zephro
Nov 23, 2000

I suppose I could part with one and still be feared...
I would bet heavily on an unconsciously self-serving assumption that people are bored of the whole thing and it's not a story.

Zephro
Nov 23, 2000

I suppose I could part with one and still be feared...

Brown Moses posted:

No, but he's not leaving because of the frontbench.
So why is he leaving, do we know?

Zephro
Nov 23, 2000

I suppose I could part with one and still be feared...

Brown Moses posted:

Not yet, I've been told nothing apart from the Guardian article being wrong about the frontbench thing.
I wonder if he wants to really go after NI some more, to an extent that would be difficult for someone sitting on the select committee.

I can't believe he would have been booted off, but maybe I'm missing smoething.

Zephro
Nov 23, 2000

I suppose I could part with one and still be feared...
I can't see how it could work otherwise. It'd be hard to go around retroactively deleting posts and pulping newspapers because someone had been arrested.

Zephro
Nov 23, 2000

I suppose I could part with one and still be feared...
Richard Littlejohn is a paedophile. I don't have proof positive, but I'm going to put it on the front page of my newspaper anyway.

If you guys could spread this round the Internet, that'd be really helpful!

Zephro
Nov 23, 2000

I suppose I could part with one and still be feared...
http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/neil-wallis/jimmy-savile-other-unpubl_b_1942668.html

quote:

Imagine if The Sun had printed an expose "Jimmy Savile is a Paedophile".

Imagine it had taken the sworn word of several young women victims, gone against the legal advice (for it would have been No!) like the Daily Mail did over naming the Stephen Lawrence killers, and printed the sort of allegations that have been aired this week in the wake of ITV's brave documentary.

Imagine then the carnage of the subsequent court case, where £750-a-hour barristers expertly tore to shreds the reputation of the paper's frightened and less-than-sophisticated witnesses, poring over the most minute detail of the sexual history of the disturbed young kids Savile had expertly targeted, while smiling benign old Jimmy sat in the dock in a purple shellsuit and waited to bring on the succession of character witnesses including royalty and former prime ministers to defend his honour.

Finally, imagine the record size of the libel damages - and then what play the whole miserable saga would have got from Lord Justice Leveson and his acolyte Mr Robert Jay QC at his subsequent Inquiry into the press.

Because, if Leveson was willing to give courtroom space to 20-year-old allegations from Anne Diamond, the whinings of the gruesome Max Mosley, and untested unsubstantiated wild claims from a prostitute-using fading actor, just think what airtime he would have given Saint Jimmy.
And that, in a nutshell, is why His Lordship is going to ensure that a whole load more Jimmy Saviles are going to get away with evil in the future.

Because Post-Leveson the British press are simply going to be too frightened to even risk that kind of expose any more.

As I've chronicled before, the chilling effect of Leveson-fear is already evident in our taboid and mid-market papers. In my very first Huffington Post UK blog on 22 August this year I warned:
"Stories about disgraced MPs, high society vice rings, cheating married celebrities, philandering tycoons, have all but disappeared from the papers. Not because they're not there - trust me, they never go away - but because even if you can get them past the lawyer you are still to scared to try and get them past His Lordship."

The Jimmy Savile story - or rather, the lack of it - is the perfect example of that. And I could tell you many more from a 35-year-career in national tabloid newspapers. The top Cabinet Minister and the rentboy? The MP who loved child pornography? The mega-rich tycoon and the (very young) shopgirls? The MP and the 13-year-old girl? The "superstud" telly star who secretly prefers guys? The supermodel super-hooker (only £25,000 a night, folks)? The sex-pest "sex-bomb" actress who no woman who knew her dared get into a lift with?

Untold stories like those around Fleet Street are legion. All the stories above - and many more - were investigated by newspapers. Talented, experienced reporters dug away for weeks or months, Large amounts of money were expended, expert legal advice sought and considered, risks agonised over....and ultimately all the stories above were spiked because the newspapers just didn't believe they could win in a libel court. Creatures like Savile trade off that. Lord Justice Leveson will give them succour.

There's been much chatter on Twitter this week suggesting that somehow the tabloids failed in their inability to bring Savile to book, despite the fact that rumours about him and young girls were very widely known indeed. They failed for the reasons above. But at least journalists did have a go.

Sadly, post the Leveson Inquiry, I really doubt that they'd even risk it now. Could an Editor survive losing such a legal case as I've described with their job intact? The News of the World lost the Max Mosley case because a judge ruled that it wrongly added an untrue twist to what most right-thinking people would still believe was disgusting and perverted behaviour. Yet Mosley has managed to convert himself into some noble folk hero in some quarters, to be listened to respectfully at Leveson while experienced and sensible newspaper executives were barely tolerated. Would newspapers even risk a Mosley-style investigation now, knowing the hunger currently abroad to do down the tabloid newspaper industry?

Who would risk putting their job, their newspaper, on the line now to give a voice to the victims, the down-trodden, the abused - the people that the Jimmy Saviles, the Gary Glitters, of the world prey upon?

Lord Justice Leveson insists he believes in Press Freedom, but... It is now a very big But indeed. Because many Editors and proprietors awaiting Leveson LJ's report next month on their industry with great trepidation are now feeling it is just not worth the risk any more to even publish such stories. In which case, why even bother investigating them?

Which, for the Jimmy Saviles of this world, is very very good news indeed.
:barf:

Hai guys, literally your only two choices are having journalists burgling the offices of Cabinet ministers and hacking dead childrens' mobiles, or total censorship that will let THE PAEDOS take over Are Country :britain:

edit: for context, the author is a one-time tabloid editor who's been arrested under one or other of the phone-hacking inquiries, heh.

Zephro fucked around with this message at 17:47 on Oct 5, 2012

Zephro
Nov 23, 2000

I suppose I could part with one and still be feared...

kingturnip posted:

So, Brooks' compensation for being sacked includes clawback clauses. Who wants to bet that she'll lose a bunch of that money if she mentions anything suggesting Roopy or James knew about the phone hacking?

Not that we'll ever find out. Hopefully she'll go to prison, but I assume she'll be able to get another job with NI when she's released, assuming she keeps her mouth shut.
I ask this a lot but never really get a satisfactory answer: how are gagging clauses in contracts (assuming she has one) actually legal? In the case you postulate they'd basically be saying "here's some money to ensure you don't tell anyone about criminal activity". Is that really enforceable in a court of law? If I burgle someone's house and bribe their neighbour not to tell them about it and the neighbour blabs anyway, can I really sue him for breach of contract?

Zephro fucked around with this message at 14:11 on Oct 19, 2012

Zephro
Nov 23, 2000

I suppose I could part with one and still be feared...

Hong XiuQuan posted:

No, but if you do say anything about something that's not illegal you may have breached a contract and depending on thwarted nature of the breach and the type of lossh you could face significant problems. It's also often much easier to prove a contract breach than, say, a tortious breach of duty. Recompense and liability are often defined.

This can have the effect of broadly silencing someone because you might not know if you have enough evidence to prove an illegal act etc.
OK, thanks. So they're basically an abuse of the legal system?

Zephro
Nov 23, 2000

I suppose I could part with one and still be feared...

Temascos posted:

Yeah, I wasn't exactly the "interested in news" guy at the time, student apathy was my way, guilty as charged there. :)

quote:

The ideas contained in the email include spreading several false rumours: that David Cameron had an embarrassing medical condition; that George Osborne took drugs with a prostitute – an old allegation in the public domain which Osborne has flatly denied; allegations of a sexual nature about the Tory backbencher Nadine Dorries, which she vehemently denies and has consulted her lawyers about; and about a Tory MP allegedly getting publicity for a firm run by his partner. There is no evidence that any of the claims are true.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/apr/12/damian-mcbride-derek-draper-emails

From the "make poo poo up" school of political blogging.

Zephro
Nov 23, 2000

I suppose I could part with one and still be feared...

marktheando posted:

The George Osborne thing is based on this photo right?


I believe so, but AFAIK the other stuff is completely invented.

Zephro
Nov 23, 2000

I suppose I could part with one and still be feared...
What, even for things like Cameron's 'embarrassing medical issue'? Wasn't that an accusation that he had some chronic STD or other sexual issue?

Zephro
Nov 23, 2000

I suppose I could part with one and still be feared...

FightingMongoose posted:

What's the significance of this speech on Osbourne's in December?
To tell us all about how tractor production is up 544% and the economy will reach the sunlit uplands any minute now.

This whole "oh no, not statutory regulation" approach that so much of the press is adopting boggles the mind. If they'd found estate agents routinely breaking the law you can bet the response wouldn't be "welp, better let them self-regulate". The naked, unclothed self-interest is breathtaking.

Zephro
Nov 23, 2000

I suppose I could part with one and still be feared...
Are these actually salacious, or just somewhat embarrassing?

Zephro
Nov 23, 2000

I suppose I could part with one and still be feared...
I mean basically, from "salacious", I would assume they were having an affair. I don't get that vibe from what's been quoted so far.

Zephro
Nov 23, 2000

I suppose I could part with one and still be feared...
Oh OK, I'm getting confused.

Zephro
Nov 23, 2000

I suppose I could part with one and still be feared...

The X-man cometh posted:

With all of this poo poo coming in about the Cameron and the Tories, why haven't the Lib Dems broken the coalition with them? It can't be good for their image, and they already got their referendum.
Because they're currently fourth in some polls, behind UKIP.

Zephro
Nov 23, 2000

I suppose I could part with one and still be feared...

zeroprime posted:

So have some of these people started giving evidence against each other/other papers/people outside the immediate scope of the investigation in hopes of a plea bargain? I'd love to see the snakes turning on each other.
I don't think US-style plea bargains are A Thing in the British justice system. You can negotiate about pleading guilty to some charges in return for having others dropped, but I think that's about it.

Zephro
Nov 23, 2000

I suppose I could part with one and still be feared...

SedanChair posted:

How is that Mail headline not libel?

:psyduck: "Where would you be without sensationalist libel? Also the Guardian."
If you mean the murderers one, it's because those are the suspects in the Stephen Lawrence case. The Mail called them murderers because it was convinced that they were actually guilty, the point being it was challenging them to sue. It's a challenge they've never accepted.

It's one of the very few good things the Mail has done.

Zephro
Nov 23, 2000

I suppose I could part with one and still be feared...

Sex Vicar posted:

That's not going to be fun reading for a lot of people this morning.
Well if by "a lot of people" you mean "a few journalists engaged in hilarious special pleading", then sure.

What's really not going to be fun is the liklihood that Cameron is going to bottle the whole thing.

Zephro
Nov 23, 2000

I suppose I could part with one and still be feared...
If it's not backed by force of law it will be useless, because the papers can just refuse to sign up to it like Richard Desmond.

Zephro
Nov 23, 2000

I suppose I could part with one and still be feared...

Plavski posted:

What'd Clegg say?

quote:

blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah newspapers blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah Leveson blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah statutory blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah Liberal Democrats blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah

Zephro
Nov 23, 2000

I suppose I could part with one and still be feared...

notaspy posted:

If every paper was like The Eye I would oppose this law, but they are not. The Eye wins it's cases because they do proper journalism, backed by sources; so the plaintiff doesn't have a leg to stand on and usually takes The Eye to court either out of vanity or an attempt to bully them.
This is not as true as you're making it out. They get things wrong reasonably often.

Zephro
Nov 23, 2000

I suppose I could part with one and still be feared...
I hope the press start doorstepping RB and AC, whoever they are! After all a free and unfettered press is a valiant bulwark against tyranny blah blah blah

Zephro
Nov 23, 2000

I suppose I could part with one and still be feared...
This seems relevant?

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/u...me-8673726.html

quote:



Scotland Yard is embroiled in a new corruption crisis after it emerged that senior officers knew for years that criminal private investigators had compromised its highly sensitive witness protection programme – and did nothing about it.

Days after the Metropolitan Police was rocked by incendiary claims that officers took part in a smear campaign against the family of the murdered black teenager Stephen Lawrence, The Independent can disclose that private investigators (PIs) were employed by organised crime gangs to try to intimidate witnesses who had agreed to give evidence in high-profile trials.

Scotland Yard uncovered the shocking intelligence up to 15 years ago but, incredibly, did next to nothing to stop the private detectives, who also worked for the News Of The World. A registered police informant codenamed “Michael Green”, who spent years undercover working with a corrupt firm of PIs, warned his handlers at the Met that his colleagues were trying to locate “supergrasses” under police protection and “actively worked on them to withdraw their damaging allegations”.

But, for reasons yet to become clear, the Met failed to charge or even arrest the investigators for intimidating key witnesses. One of the supergrasses who was approached while under police protection later withdrew all of his original testimony, resulting in the collapse of a major criminal trial.
It says later in the piece that these were some of the same PIs used by the News of the World, which I assume means Southern "Axe To The Head" Investigations...

Zephro
Nov 23, 2000

I suppose I could part with one and still be feared...

Stottie Kyek posted:

It's hilariously badly written and the main character really hates women for some reason. He talks about his contempt for rich, successful women
Like his former business partner? That must have made for some awkward meetings.

Zephro
Nov 23, 2000

I suppose I could part with one and still be feared...

willie_dee posted:

That is the error message I get when I try and access it and I'm not technical enough to know how to use a proxy to pretend I'm not in the UK, which is what as I understand it, a Proxy does.
A proxy is basically a third-party website that fetches the website you want and then passes it on to you. The server hosting the web site sees the request as coming from the proxy server and not from you, which means you can use it to get around various kinds of blocking.

http://www.mars99.com/

Is one I just grabbed off Google.

standard disclaimer: Don't assume the people who run proxy servers aren't logging your IP and what you look at, or that they'll resist court orders to hand that information over (http://www.tgdaily.com/security-features/58688-hidemyass-says-it-doesnt-hide-your-rear end) if you're doing something Properly Illegal™ that's likely to get you noticed.

Zephro
Nov 23, 2000

I suppose I could part with one and still be feared...

Munin posted:

Yeah, it's standard journalistic practice to allow the person the article is about to respond. That's why most articles alleging a company or individual did something more or less always have a "X was asked to comment but did not provide a response at the time of going to print." or "X refused to comment on the matter.".

In the US it's an excellent CYA move and generally to be recommended. In the UK some publications have become a bit leery of it due to the number of pre-publication injunctions flying around these days.
It's a good CYA move here too, because a judge in a libel case will take a pretty dim view of you if you don't give the subject of your story the opportunity to comment.

Zephro
Nov 23, 2000

I suppose I could part with one and still be feared...

goddamnedtwisto posted:

The situation with email is even worse - almost all email providers use the email address as a login and have trivial password-recovery techniques, and permit diversion of a copy of all email sent to a mailbox with no further notification required (Hotmail still permit it 8 years after they were heavily criticised for it by the trial judge in R. v Stanford) and once you have access to someone's email account these days it's pretty much all over. Google at least permit 2FA but hide it well away.
Out of interest, which webmail provider would you say was the least bad from this point of view? I don't mean which one supports end-to-end encryption and will self-immolate rather than talk to the spooks, just which one is least likely to cave in under less serious pressure, or is less vulnerable to malicious compromise?

Zephro
Nov 23, 2000

I suppose I could part with one and still be feared...

Zombywuf posted:

Really your only choice for even a modicum of privacy is to not use webmail and to learn to use encryption, i.e. GPG. You still wont be safe if they decide to target you because they'll compromise your machine and install a keylogger or just prosecute you under the RIP act. You will also have to convince your interlocutors to use it which is the hard bit.
No, like I said, I'm not worried about three-letter agencies. I just mean I'd like an email provider that won't do things like:

quote:

almost all email providers use the email address as a login and have trivial password-recovery techniques, and permit diversion of a copy of all email sent to a mailbox with no further notification required (Hotmail still permit it 8 years after they were heavily criticised for it by the trial judge in R. v Stanford)
I'm more worried about my insurance company than the NSA.

Zephro
Nov 23, 2000

I suppose I could part with one and still be feared...
On the other hand, given the terrible money that web advertising pays, it wouldn't surprise me if they were making more money despite the drop in readers.

Zephro
Nov 23, 2000

I suppose I could part with one and still be feared...

Orange Devil posted:

I have a cultural inquiry. What is it with you Brits and having tits in your news (or "news")? No other country I know of has as much tits plastered all over such a socially acceptable and wide spread medium as a daily 'paper'. What's going on here, or am I just horribly sheltered about other countries' papers?
We're sexually repressed and it comes out in all sorts of weird ways, like having softcore pornography become 'a bit of harmless fun' when it's in a national newspaper but an unforgiveable scandal if it were to be broadcast before the 9pm watershed?

Zephro
Nov 23, 2000

I suppose I could part with one and still be feared...

ReV VAdAUL posted:

What does it mean to be 'banged out'?
As you walk out of the building the journalists bang their fists on their desks. It's an old tradition when a respected editor leaves.

Zephro
Nov 23, 2000

I suppose I could part with one and still be feared...

HortonNash posted:

Haha, homeopathic medicine..he has lovely taste in porn, he believes in woo and he married Rebecca Wade...how much more evidence does the court need to find him guilty of being a gullible moron?
On the other hand he earns more money than any ten posters in this thread put together, so clearly The Market Has Spoken. He's one of the ubermenschen and we should be grateful for the chance to lick the ground on which he walks.

Zephro
Nov 23, 2000

I suppose I could part with one and still be feared...

Darth Walrus posted:

Right, but what makes it incriminating with regards to the Hackgate allegations? It just seems like a case of consulting your boss about an important political decision.
It's also interesting more broadly because NI papers have always claimed that the Murdochs have no day-to-day say on the editorial line of the paper. Which we all knew was rubbish, but now we can directly prove it.

Zephro
Nov 23, 2000

I suppose I could part with one and still be feared...
It's interesting to watch this. It's plain to everyone who wasn't born yesterday that NOTW was rife with this stuff, but proving it in a legal sense is another matter.

Zephro
Nov 23, 2000

I suppose I could part with one and still be feared...

Plavski posted:

Goddamn, this QC is brutal. No amount of money would exchange my place with Dan Evans right now. News Int. know how to throw their cash around.
Can you go into detail?

edit: the shittiness of being cross-examined seems like a big problem with a court system like ours that's based on trial by combat*

*not an exaggeration, we've just replaced the swords with words.

Zephro
Nov 23, 2000

I suppose I could part with one and still be feared...
Is expecting people to remember every detail of a conversation that happened half a decade ago (would you say it was a half moon, or a gibbous moon? Were you wearing a tie clip? I have surveillance camera footage proving that you weren't!) actually a valid legal strategy?

I mean I presume the idea is to cast doubt on testimony, but to me all this proves so far is that people don't have eidetic memories :confused:

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Zephro
Nov 23, 2000

I suppose I could part with one and still be feared...
Presumably the problem with that line of argument is that to make it accurate you'd have to modify it slightly to "Dan Evans is a masochistic druggy who made all this stuff up and got himself arrested because, um..."

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