UK Police Takedown Website Telling Protesters How To Avoid Police... Article Reposted Everywhere
from the dear-barbara-streisand... dept
Robw alerts us to the news of how the UK police were able to get a blog pulled offline for daring to tell student protesters how to avoid being arrested. The police claimed that this blog post was "attempting to pervert the course of justice" and ordered the webhost to shut down the site, which it did. So... in true Streisand Effect fashion, the article started reappearing all over the place. It was posted to dozens of blogs and on Facebook as well. In the act of trying to censor this basic information, police in the UK only served to get much, much more attention to it. Maybe next time the police should spend more time keeping the peace, rather than worrying about random websites.
Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.
While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.
–The Techdirt Team
Filed Under: censorship, free speech, police, takedown, uk
Reader Comments
Subscribe: RSS
View by: Time | Thread
hehe
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Well Duh!
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Police acted without authority
The website campaign against the Metropolitan police (or at least some of their infiltration activities), so it may be there were other reasons that the Met wanted the site gone.
Didn't work.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Police acted without authority
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Police acted without authority
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Knowledge is not meant for the commonman
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Hah
I wonder if they could have avoided the whole thing by writing the blog entry as if it was a news report...
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Why???
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
website's already back up
they went back up and reposted the information as well.
way to go police.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
I read through that list and some of it seems to paint the protesters in a negative light.
Is it possible that authorities have secretly put the list up, pretending to be (a) protester(s), to publicly take it down in order to encourage the list to spread and make the protesters look bad?
I don't think authorities and special interest groups have yet a sophisticated enough grasp of the Internet to intelligibly manipulate it, and the streisand effect, to their advantage in a way that will effectively fool a good percentage of Internet users, but as these people become more used to the Internet their ability to skillfully manipulate it will improve.
There is little doubt that they've gotten sophisticated and coordinated enough to effectively manipulate newspapers and the MSM though, if it weren't for the Internet this would have probably gone unnoticed. That takes a lot of collusion to execute and get away with and these people demonstrate a very high degree of conspiration.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Making up laws again
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
UK is not yet India, or so me thinks...
Should their role model be something like the Indian Police, or worse ? (About Indian police, read here)
"Cyber defamation", "blasphemy" and so on have been used by Indian police to take down blogs and such and harass people seeking justice or information. Instances follow.
1. Some years ago a Singapore company e-Sys pioneered the abuse of Cyber Defamation complaints thru Indian police.
2. Years later, another Singapore company is using a Cyber Defamation / IT Act 2008 complaint through Indian police to take down whistle-blower blogs and order arrests of former employees, all of that just to chill the air. For the background on that, read a Techdirt report and an update on a fresh attempt by the same actors to take down three blogs in three different countries.
3. Mumbai might seem third world, but the police there are more interested in fixing blasphemy on the internet, emanating from the USA than fixing local thugs.
4. Punjab police of India have also proven themselves adept at hounding whistle-blowers and their families.
5. Those poor Indians who seek information which may protect them against injustice, are harassed for seeking information that a citizens charter gives them right to.
Way to go, UK ?
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Learning about the Law Is AGAINST The Law.
Got it?
[ link to this | view in chronology ]