The article is not about being asked who source is, it’s about being told you can’t publish the source’s material.
Information, if it exists, will always be under threat of e discovery. That’s why tech like Tor and Securedrop is important- you can’t out a source if you don’t know who they are
The vast majority of listed constitutional rights are voting rights. Voting implies something like democracy, hey? This ain’t Plato’s fucking Republic, a nightmare. You want a non-democratic Republic? Move to China or North Korea.
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Hear, hear!
I believe one luminary citizen of the Crown foreshadowed this impulse in a book entitled 1984.
“Ignorance is strength” is especially apropos.
Journalists fleeing, getting arrested, harassed, threatened but:
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Yes, but 13,636,684 did vote for his immediate predecessor, and 100% will have the opportunity to sack him at the next election (if he lasts that long). And how many people voted for Gerald Ford?
But how many times by politicians?
No argument here.
I guess that depends on how you define “journalists”:
To my mind it crosses a line when it moves from being about trying to educate a public and instead just becomes about intelligence porn, frankly, just pushing out information about sources and methods without regard to interests
— James Comey, then Director of the FBI, on why WikiLeaks shouldn’t enjoy the same protections as “legitimate” journalism, 3 May 2017
But yes, I wish media in the UK had similar protections to those the 1st Amendment gives them in the US.
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What am I missing? May won her constituency with only 37,718 votes.
And how many people voted for Gerald Ford?
Around 39 million, but he still lost to Carter. Of course, before that he was briefly president having taken over as an interim, and before that he was house minority leader, which I suppose is analogous to Corbyn’s position in the manner of both authority and how one gets the job.
But how many times by politicians?
Hard to know, thanks to weird English law things called anonymised injunctions and superinjunctions which keep some accusers secret. The only one I remember off the top of my head was Neil Kinnock maybe 10-15 years ago.
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As an European I hope for an hard brexit, then putting mines in the Channel. Fuller and Marstons beers are already fifficult to find, I could live without them… (tongue firmly in cheeck)
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If you’re going to get technical, only 306 people actually voted for Trump.
He was president for two years and five months, without anyone voting him into that office. Boris will be PM for at most two years and ten months before facing an election.
Do you mean the honours-for-travel-expenses thing? I though it was Maxwell who did the actual suing? Mind you, that was back in 1986, so maybe you’re talking about something different: if so, my Google-fu has failed me.
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This is not correct. Hard as it is to believe, many millions of Americans checked a box on a ballot next to Trump’s name.
He was president for two years and five months, without anyone voting him into that office.
Hardly representative of that office, and eventually the entire electorate had a chance to vote on his continuation.
Do you mean the honours-for-travel-expenses thing? I though it was Maxwell who did the actual suing? Mind you, that was back in 1986, so maybe you’re talking about something different: if so, my Google-fu has failed me.
No, Kinnock sued and won while he was serving as an EU officer. Would have been after my last extended stay in England, which was 2000.
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But they weren’t voting for Trump. They were voting for people who pledged, if appointed to the Electoral College, to vote for Trump. (And not all of them kept that pledge: one voted for Jon John Kasich, and one for Ron Paul.)
The situation with Boris isn’t really representative of the office of PM, either, though I do admit it happens more frequently over here (most recently with Theresa May herself).
As we did with May, and as we will with Boris.
Found it: Kinnock wins €60,000 in libel battle with magazines
Thank you for that. I honestly didn’t know about it.
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that’s a statement of opinion on future legislation, not a claim that the acts are currently illegal.
for the record: julian is a bad person but twisting the law to “get” him and harming our freedoms in the process is worse
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Agreed.
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I don’t get it. the “leak” was common knowledge, even I know it & I live in a van.
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The laws of the UK do not recognize the right to freedom of speech. They have the Official Secrets Act, which empowers various government agencies to classify literally anything, and it is perfectly legal to prosecute and jail people for violating it.
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A lot of these posts from Americans reveal an astonish level of ignorance about differences between the USA and the UK, and an even worse level of ignorance about what the USA really is.
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That’s not strictly true. The Human Rights Act, 1998, incorporates the European Convention of Human Rights into UK law, including Article 10 (freedom of expression). However, it doesn’t give the courts the power to overturn legislation in the way the US courts can, and the Convention itself allows restrictions for a wide range of reasons, including “the interests of national security, territorial integrity or public safety”, “the prevention of disorder or crime”, “the protection of health or morals”, and “the protection of the reputation or rights of others”, which covers pretty much anything interesting one might want to say.
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D-Notice.
Great band name, but you’ve never heard of them…
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D-Notices are interesting, because (as I understand it) the press are complicit in them: they have no legal force, being in theory no more than official requests not to report something. I guess they work because (a) they are in part implied threats, hinting at injunction or even prosecution if they’re not complied with; and (b) newspaper proprietors whose papers don’t play ball don’t get their knighthoods.
Also, Wikipedia says they’re called DSMA-Notices these days, which is decidedly less snappy.
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