The weekend Twitter mocked the English Courts

Sun, 2012-07-22 00:29 — mzaryta (not verified)

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Fri, 2012-07-20 10:53 — Nathiel (not verified)

Dunning, a minister with St. Patrick of the Island church, says he tried to call the STM's complaints department to report the incident and was informed the agents are not required to serve customers in English.

Mon, 2011-05-23 14:52 — Matt Flaherty (not verified)

I would like for someone to explain to me precisely how an injunction such as this guards against attempted blackmail. Blackmail is about coercion in exchange for the promise to keep quiet. If she blabs, then the game is over. The way to deal with blackmail is to go along with it while gathering evidence. Then you sit her in a room with lawyers and tell her you'll have her charged with attempted blackmail. I would have thought that would be sufficient. An injunction to prevent blackmail is ludicrous.

Mon, 2011-05-23 15:15 — Mark Gould (not verified)

Isn't the blackmail issue just a red herring? As I read the judgment, Eady appears to be more keen on the injunction as a means of protecting the quality of the full hearing. I don't think he makes the point especially well, but it is explicit at a couple of points. (I am thinking particularly of paras 4, 30, 34-38.)

In this light, the injunction is simply an instruction to everyone to shut up until all the facts can be gathered and presented as effectively as both sides would wish. What the tabloids and rogue twits have done is to undermine that process. I hope they never find themselves in need of such protection.

Mon, 2011-05-23 15:35 — Molbee (not verified)

Can someone still be blackmailed if the confidential information being used becomes widely known? David Letterman came clean about an affair on his show after a producer tried to extort 2 million dollars from him. The attempted blackmailer was sent to jail. Don't the footballer's continuing attempts to injunct information that everybody already knows just give more life to a turgid story which could have been nipped in the bud weeks ago?

Mon, 2011-05-23 16:17 — Ellie Mae O'Hagan (not verified)

As I understood it, the judge had not yet made his mind up about whether there was blackmail involved or not. Unless someone can correct me on that?

Mon, 2011-05-23 17:33 — Peter Alison (not verified)

Ellie, yes he said he could not decide at that point

Mon, 2011-05-23 17:39 — Lou (not verified)

Now I'm confused. MP John Hemming named the person live in the House today, Laura K on BBC News said although they were protected by parliamentary privilege in naming him, she could not report the name because she would be held in contempt of court. How come Sky then are naming him and freely discussing it?

Mon, 2011-05-23 18:00 — Robert Taggart

It all leaves one giggling, not to mention, giggsying !

Mon, 2011-05-23 18:08 — Lou (not verified)

The fatal flaw in all of this was his retaining of anonymity whilst Imogen was named, that was a huge error on the part of the Judge at the time. If the alleged person had afforded Imogen Thomas the same amount of privacy that he requested for himself, he wouldn't be in this predicament. I've no sympathy for him at all.

The legal ramifications of all this though are a different matter and I daresay we still haven't heard the last of this.

Mon, 2011-05-23 18:25 — Linda Veryard (not verified)

*Richard Littlejohn how right you you are... However of course, the Sword of Truth can only be held effective in the hand of whomever has understood the difference between judgement and discernment...
...

Mon, 2011-05-23 19:04 — Linda Veryard (not verified)

OOps....that is*LITTLE RICHARDJOHN - of course! That was neither a judgement nor a discernment - just a typo error - Sorry your honour!
...

Mon, 2011-05-23 19:20 — Ben Murphy (not verified)

"It was also depressing to see the sheer enthusiasm with which Twitter users served the commercial interests of the tabloid press in further weakening what little privacy law we have in the United Kingdom."

One possible source of comfort is that if gossip is revealed on Twitter long before it appears in the tabloids, they will not profit from peddling it. When people can get the gossip for free, and the tabloids lose their monopoly on it, it will have less commercial value for them.

Mon, 2011-05-23 19:22 — terence patrick hewett1

We the "great unwashed" never waste an opportunity to stick it to those who believe it is their mission to order our lives. And boy-o-boy, we haven't finished with you lot yet.

Mon, 2011-05-23 19:47 — Simon (not verified)

David Allen Green is simply wrong. This is the weekend Twitter users stuck it to the old guards. The courts, the tabloid press and privileged celebrities. Whilst David is getting his knickers in a twist saying we helped Murdoch, this article is simply borne from his loathing of the fact that his precious little club that he spent years trying to become a member of, the legal profession, is outdated in this world of instant social networking. Green is in fact closer to Murdoch than he would have you think. Both people from an anachronistic establishment who can't keep up with technological pace.

True this twitter incident might well have handed a small victory to the Sun and the erosion of privacy laws, but the long term effect on newspapers is more damning. Twitter will be the death of tabloids, and hopefully the current makeup of the UK courts.

This weekend we stood up, and conused lawyers got annoyed. Society won.

Mon, 2011-05-23 20:04 — Lou (not verified)

Simon,

I don't see how Twitter will be the death of tabloids. On the whole,wannabe celebs are always going to want payment for their kiss and tell story. There's always going to be an impoverished Joe or Joanna Bloggs who will be interested in making a few quid for any other sort of salacious detail they can proffer on whomever. The tabloids will die a death when people stop being interested in the sort of story it offers/sells.

If anything, 75000 twitterers, or whatever the social media jargon is, has only proven that salaciousness sells and I don't think for one minute that the majority of the Twitterers were doing so purely to expose the inadequacies of privacy law. It's very much about gossip, tittle tattle and jumping on a bandwagon led by the very red tops who want to sell this kind of crap to their readership.

Mon, 2011-05-23 21:18 — Peter Seaman (not verified)

As I am not allowed to know whether or not a relevant super injunction exists, how can I determine if I am allowed to say anything about anybody?

Mon, 2011-05-23 21:30 — Chris (not verified)

I don't care less about footballers having an affair. That seems par for the course these days.

Once his identity started to be revealed on Twitter, he should have done an Andrew Marr and held his hands up, or let it blow over. Instead, he made the big mistake of going after Twitter.

Once Twitter appeared to be under threat, just like the Twitter Joke Trial previously, thousands of people rightly or wrongly saw it as their duty to tweet the information.

Mon, 2011-05-23 11:40 — @Michael (not verified)

If there's evidence of blackmail that's a criminal matter, and should surely have been dealt with as such. One wonders what test Judge Eady applied to this, and whether it was to the same standard as a criminal case. From what I read of his adjudication, it was hardly a full examination of both parties. In any case, what constitutes a blackmail threat in a case like this is nothing like as clearly defined as threatening to reveal a criminal offence.

I'd also note that this is a judge whose initial rulings on the Simon Singh and BCA case were so much at odds with liberal consensus views. Judgements, such as Eady's, are not some sort of golden truth passed down from those uniquely gifted with the insight of a Solomon; they are reflections of the values of the individuals themselves within the fairly broad constraints of some widely drawn principles. In this case, I believe that Judge Eady did not give the appropriate weight to freedom of expression which parliament indicated in the Human Rights Act.

Personally, I believe that adults should only be legally constrained from revealing the truth where there are explicit rules of confidentiality or where one of the parties involved clearly has some duty of care over the other.

Personally I do not believe that relations between adults in a social context should be constrained by legal standards of confidentiality. If you take somebody into your confidence in such circumstances, you should have no legal right to censor them in future. Social censure should be enough. I'm always suspicious about increasing the intrusion of law into the personal behaviour of adults unless appropriately justified. The prevention of being embarrassed by my own behaviour is, I think, not one of those grounds.

Nb. I would place a general privacy constraint on "intimate" images requiring explicit approval.

Mon, 2011-05-23 11:42 — Steve Jones (not verified)

- apologies, reposted under my real name as for some reason the NS site substitutes it with a wrong name when I use my primary email address -

*********

If there's evidence of blackmail that's a criminal matter, and should surely have been dealt with as such. One wonders what test Judge Eady applied to this, and whether it was to the same standard as a criminal case. From what I read of his adjudication, it was hardly a full examination of both parties. In any case, what constitutes a blackmail threat in a case like this is nothing like as clearly defined as threatening to reveal a criminal offence.

I'd also note that this is a judge whose initial rulings on the Simon Singh and BCA case were so much at odds with liberal consensus views. Judgements, such as Eady's, are not some sort of golden truth passed down from those uniquely gifted with the insight of a Solomon; they are reflections of the values of the individuals themselves within the fairly broad constraints of some widely drawn principles. In this case, I believe that Judge Eady did not give the appropriate weight to freedom of expression which parliament indicated in the Human Rights Act.

Personally, I believe that adults should only be legally constrained from revealing the truth where there are explicit rules of confidentiality or where one of the parties involved clearly has some duty of care over the other.

Personally I do not believe that relations between adults in a social context should be constrained by legal standards of confidentiality. If you take somebody into your confidence in such circumstances, you should have no legal right to censor them in future. Social censure should be enough. I'm always suspicious about increasing the intrusion of law into the personal behaviour of adults unless appropriately justified. The prevention of being embarrassed by my own behaviour is, I think, not one of those grounds.

Nb. I would place a general privacy constraint on "intimate" images requiring explicit approval.

Mon, 2011-05-23 11:55 — Little Richardjohn

The press isn't interested in freedom of speech, only in money. And mainly in the money to be made from perpetuating degrading stereotypes of women, debasing sexuality and emotion, and feeding the manufactured addiction to Celebrity, all of which ultimately combine to cause real assaults and rapes in the real world. To drag the 'Human Rights' of the press into this debate is a rape of Freedom of Speech, not to champion it. Blazing hypocrisy, not the Sword of Truth. If injunctions have the effect of destroying 'Celebrity Culture', or even just making it less profitable, they will have done a great service.
Meanwhile, one wonders what would have happened if Andrew Marr had been the only journalist to know of the Profumo Affair, and Ian Hislop his editor.

Mon, 2011-05-23 11:58 — Mark Brown (not verified)

Irrespective of how strong any evidence against Miss Thomas may or may not be, the legal profession has no right to portray her in the way that it has done in order to justify the imposition of the injunction. If sufficient evidence exists to be able to charge Miss Thomas they should do so, if not the way in which she has been treated supports the perception that many have that the legal system only really works if you are male and have money. As far as twitter goes, well much of what you say is true, but is also true, that it undermines the vested interests (including the tabloid media)of the institutional elites that continue to dominate this country. Twitter isn't perfect but you do yourself an injustice when you patronise its users.

Mon, 2011-05-23 12:00 — Adam Sheppard (not verified)

From the albeit limited sample of what I saw on twitter, much of the outpouring was aimed at the filing of the lawsuit against Twitter - rather than against the injunction itself.

If the injunction was put in place to prevent a blackmail, wouldn't the alleged blackmailer be liable to face prosecution? Wouldn't that have been a clearer, more PR friendly course of action than to try and discover who leaked the name?

As for the tabloid press cheering on the online breaking of the injunction, wouldn't it be against their interest - especially the newspaper involved in the 'scoop' since their news would be nowhere near as exclusive or relevant?

Mon, 2011-05-23 12:02 — Matt Flaherty (not verified)

I have mentioned blackmail, and I don't think blackmail is likely when we have a Z-list celebrity who likes to have her name in the papers. She has a story to tell of her own personal experiences and ought to be able to tell it. The charge of blackmail was made by a judge without Imogen Thomas afforded the opportunity to state a case. How is this right?

Mon, 2011-05-23 12:06 — Rob H (not verified)

Surely making this information completely public domain disarms any power a supposed blackmailer had? I can understand an injunction where the welfare of children or other vulnerable individuals is concerned. I don't see why it should be used by the rich to cover up their infidelity from the public who line their pockets. I also don't understand why an injunction helps in a blackmail case. "Sorry, I was planning to break the law by blackmailing you but now there's an injunction in place, I simply daren't."?

Mon, 2011-05-23 12:11 — Teifion (not verified)

Imogen believed she was being onvestigated by the press, went to the footballer to tell her concerns and what does he do? get an injunction just for himself using rather spurious claims to justify the gagging order dissing the woman concerned.
To top it all forgetting Scotland BUT trying to gag the US where they really do believe in free speech has just compounded this guys stupidity and his vile image when it does come out

Mon, 2011-05-23 12:17 — Matthew Taylor (not verified)

The claims - from two interested groups, the judiciary and those representing claimants - that blackmail is often involved would carry more weight if either group was proactively referring these matters to the police. The apparent failure to do so undermines those claims.

As to the impotence of the court in this matter, the real death blow was not delivered via Twitter (although that lawsuit must represent a nadir for the commercial reputation of the lawyers involved) but by the football fans who spent an afternoon chanting defiance of the court's order.

The law and the judiciary have failed to deal with the way in which the boundary between "speech/discussion" and "publication" has been eroded in the past 20 years, and that failure is now undermining the latter's credibility and authority.

Mon, 2011-05-23 12:19 — Charlie Markwick (not verified)

We can't cherry pick the elements of Twitter we want to keep and not keep. This is the same medium that plays a role (admittedly it may be smaller that what is claimed) in giving people in more repressive societies the means to be heard.

It comes with a cost. We are now grappling with the cost. I think that if it were possible to unpick motives many people applaud this twitter "outing" because they are unhappy with the way "privacy injunctions" appear to be used. I don't doubt that the "tabloid press" are gleeful but that doesn't necessarily mean that other peoples actions that endorse this glee are necessarily wrong.

Mon, 2011-05-23 12:24 — D-Notice (not verified)

Surely there's an issue of *what* should be injuncted?

If - as alleged - CTB is simply trying to cover-up the fact that he cheated on his wife, is that really be a ground for such an injunction to be granted?

Mon, 2011-05-23 12:30 — Peter Seaman (not verified)

In general I am allowed to publish a fact I know such as X has an affair with Y. But not if X or Y has a super-injunction stopping this. However I am not allowed to know if there is s super-injunction or not involving the parties. I just don't get it, can someone explain?

Tue, 2011-05-24 21:00 — hugh markey (not verified)

Let's not get bogged down on the subject of the 'off-side rule'. This is a Law/Technology issue.
The State have always had to step in when the advance of technology outruns the legal system.
Lord Campbell's Act came into effect when the first fatality involving the railway was a member of parliament. The Traffic Act of 1930 came about because of the chaos created by road traffic: not just physical injury and fatalities. The liabilities and debts of the deceased played a part. Channels of communication such as the telegraph, the wireless, the telephone, cinema, recording devices, television and the internet and its offshoots have all had a major impact on society. Sometimes certain elements in that society forced the new technology into the shape
of its choosing. In the thirties, commercial radio enforced a faster tempo on the big bands.
As a result of the manufacturer refusing to play ball with dubious entertainment forces, Sony's more technically advanced television model failed to take off.
Pornography also seems to have been an essential building block in the development of video and DVD systems.
All this distortion of society caused by past advances in technology is very well known.
It's simply a case of 'don't rock the boat.' Same problem with the financial collapse. Eventually. the courts will have to dance to the internet's tune. Hopefully, a quickstep and not a waltz.

Deja Vu

Mon, 2011-05-23 12:35 — Alex Baldwin (not verified)

I don't know what all of the fuss is about. These superinjunctions seem fine to me.

Mon, 2011-05-23 12:36 — Alex Baldwin (not verified)

Damn, turns out I can't post a comment pretending to be CTB.

Mon, 2011-05-23 12:46 — John (not verified)

Legal correspondents and media lawyers would do well not to make untrue claims like this, "the High Court's concerns about blackmail were conveniently not mentioned by anyone".

Mr Eady's public trashing of Imogen Thomas' reputation, without minor things like a trial, was reported in a whole host of newspapers, raging from the Sun to the Guardian.

Activist judges are sometimes a good thing, but not in these cases.

Mon, 2011-05-23 12:52 — Lou (not verified)

Didn't the blackmail allegation only get raised when the injunction was challenged recently and not in the very first instance when the injunction was granted?

Mon, 2011-05-23 13:05 — mark (not verified)

Is this actually an article? - does it have any real point or informative content? - hardly even an opinion, what? - astonishment here that it blabbered on & on and evoked actual responses - over what is forever unclear.

Mon, 2011-05-23 13:07 — latentexistence

My reply ended up being over a thousand words, so I've put it on my blog instead. http://www.latentexistence.me.uk/privacy-injunctions/

Mon, 2011-05-23 13:50 — Howard Fredrics (not verified)

Although British people don't seem to realize this, NO ONE has the right to not be embarrassed by their own behavior.

Mon, 2011-05-23 13:38 — Mr John Giggs (not verified)

Not only must Justice be done; it must also be seen to be done.

We have seen no justice here.

Mon, 2011-05-23 14:21 — Ron (not verified)

How did Twitter users serve the interests of the mainstream press?

The only interest of the mainstream press is to increase circulation. If I can get accurate information quicker and easier via Twitter, this is a disaster for traditional news outlets.

There'll be some milage in the pubication of interviews with a woman called Imogen Thomas if the injunction ever gets lifted, but that would have happened anyway.