BNP Membership List Published: Analysis of Legal Position for Blogs
- BNP Membership List Published: Analysis of Legal Position for Blogs
- BNP Membership Data Loss: Further Implications
- Leaked BNP Membership List: Fishing in Troubled Waters
- I Don’t Care Who Is A BNP Member
I spend an entire day digging around for details of the Martin Bright New Statesman / Carter-Ruck Libel imbroglio about the businessman Nadhmi Auchi and news reports being removed from websites in the UK after lawyers letters are sent, and I surface to find that someone has published what is claimed to be the entire membership list of the BNP, including phone numbers, email addresses and personal notes – the whole lot.
The story was first reported by the anti-fascist activist Lancaster UAF site. The list is not hard to find. Liberal Conspiracy will be having an interesting debate about it.
Despite obvious violent disagreements in policy and politics and that I think the party is contemptible, the BNP members do have a right to privacy and for their data to be properly maintained – just like the rest of us, and whoever posted the list is headed for trouble if they get found out.
Should we Link to the List?
Coming out of the work I’ve been doing today, my recommendation on reporting of the contents or linking to the list is … just don’t.
Links to material that is alleged to be defamatory (e.g., reports about Nadhmi Auchi preserved on Wikileaks) is part of the basis for the objections that the law firm Carter-Ruck have put to the New Statesman that have caused them to take down articles about Nadhmi Auchi by Martin Bright. No determination has yet been made whether that will stick under English Libel Law, but if the New Statesman and their legal advisers are taking it seriously I wouldn’t go the other way at this point. You will be relying on not being sued, which is your call.
I’ve spent most of the day writing a series of articles about the case while making sure I avoid running this risk in case the New Statesman lose in a way that established a precedent.
Exactly this scenario exists in the case of the BNP Membership List if a single person is on there by mistake: links will be to a post alleging that x, y or z is a member of the BNP. Bearing in mind that BNP Activists are posting that the list is out of date, and that the current membership is of the order of 6,000, linking to a posting suggesting that 10,000 people or so are BNP members looks a touch perilous.
An Example of Someone on the List who Renounced the BNP
I can give you an example. A “Minister of Religion” is featured on the list. However, he also featured in a report in his local paper the Northern Echo back in February admitting to his “stupidity” in signing up, and firmly renouncing the BNP at that point:
In yesterday’s Echo, Mr Stanton, 75, who was the BNP organiser for Rochford District, said he joined the party because he agreed with their positions on Europe and immigration.
But he has now said: “I have ended my involvement with the BNP after finding out more about them at the weekend.
“It was very stupid of me, but I only read what they said about themselves, which I agreed with.
“Friends have contacted me to say: Those people are nasty.’ My daughter rang me sobbing and said: What have you done?’”
You have been warned. Link to the list, and if Carter-Ruck beat the New Statesman you could be vulnerable for this single instance alone. I may be skating the edge even posting the details above.
Putting the Genie back in the Bottle
They are going to have a hell of a job getting the thing off the Net, as – like the lists of shareholders posted on the Internet by the anti-Huntingdon Life Science activists – it is outside the jurisdiction of UK bodies. I think that they may be reduced to obtaining “Spartacus” (i.e., “to whom it may concern”) injunctions preventing people in this country from using the information in most circumstances.
I also note that it seems that – as suspected for a long time from anecdotal evidence – the Midlands is a BNP hot-spot.
In the meantime a lot of people are going to have a lot of explaining to do, especially some members and ex-members of other political parties.
I’d also expect a live issue to be a debate what happens to BNP members who are in particular professions. I wonder whether we will actually end up with reaffirmed rights of BNP members not to be discriminated against within some professions where they can currently be expelled? [Update 10:36: Note that that dicsrimination comment applies to circumstances where BNP members have been specifically targeted, rather than professions where no political affiliation is allowed.]
No Details on Here or be Banned
For the record, and I probably don’t need to say it because we don’t have *that* vigorous a debating community, anyone who starts posting details on here for the hell of it will be banned immediately and permanently. The Wardman Wire is not a democracy, and I’m the despot when it is necessary.
[tags]anti-fascist, bnp members, bnp membership list published, leak[/tags]
Categories: All WW, Internet / Technical, Media, Miscellaneous, News - Current Affairs, Political Blogging, Politics
It does raise some interesting issues. One is whether the state should normally be able to act on the basis of illegally obtained material when it had no means of legally accessing those data. In this particular instance, can (for instance) the police fire someone for membership of the BNP when they would not have had access to this list except for an illegal breach of data protection?
On a more practical level, I’m sure that, the genie being out of the bottle, the cat out of the bag and the horse well on its way to Becher’s Brook with the door only just starting to close, that this is going to provide a wealth of information to all manner of people. Depending on how much information is the membership list, it might be possible to work out current geographic spread, outreach areas, socioeconomic background… the list is endless. I have some experience of running membership databases (before anyone tries, they’re encrypted) and their very usefulness in managing an organisation means they can be invaluable to opponents. The Times reports that their are family memberships, so some people could be on that list, potentially without realising they’re on it, and be damned in perpetuity as a result.
Thirdly, I suspect that quite a lot of organisations will be reviewing their database security arrangements.
xD.
Dave Cole´s last blog post..11th November, 1918
Sorry – I forgot to add ‘epic fail’.
xD.
Dave Cole´s last blog post..11th November, 1918
Yep.
Matt Wardman´s last blog post..BNP Membership List Published: Analysis of Legal Position for Blogs
Interesting point on database security – I think they were pretty good on encryption etc, as commented by Spy Blog some time ago.
The failure was human access and trust.
Another reason not to put all that information on national databases. Keep ‘em small and resilient so that they can only steal a few records
.
Do you suppose they will admit it?
If the weak link is people, there are things that can be done. Three immediate questions:
1. Why was it possible to output the entire database?
2. Were there unique IDs and passwords and is there an activity log?
3. Why could one person do this? If, for whatever reason, it were felt necessary to output the entire database, apparently as a plain text file, why weren’t multiple users required to perform the actions?
xD.
Dave Cole´s last blog post..11th November, 1918
A question (and I insert the usual legal caveat before any answer); is it legal for someone in the UK to even look at the list?
xD.
Dave Cole´s last blog post..11th November, 1918
>1. Why was it possible to output the entire database?
>2. Were there unique IDs and passwords and is there an activity log?
>3. Why could one person do this? If, for whatever reason, it were felt necessary to output the entire database, apparently as a plain text file, why weren’t multiple users required to perform the actions?
I think the answer to most of that is that it isn’t really a large database. 10,000 records is not a lot.
>A question (and I insert the usual legal caveat before any answer); is it legal for someone in the UK to even look at the list?
That I don’t know, but it would be a touch difficult to prove.
Possession might be something else.
Matt Wardman´s last blog post..BNP Membership Data Loss: Further Implications
Ok, well, you’ll ban me if I post portions of the list. Fair enough. But exactly what level of censorship are you going to impose? If I linked to Google? If I said that searching for, say, “bnp membership list” txt on Google would turn up numerous links to it? If I pointed out that certain sites like Wikileaks often host these sorts of things? If I outright said Wikileaks is hosting a copy? If I linked to their landing page for the list? The list itself?
How about if I said there was a blog the author of this article posted on, copying a block of text from (or to) this very post, wherein commenter linked to the aforesaid list? If I pointed out that the blog was Liberal Conspiracy? If I linked to the actual article? The comment?
DeltaDesu
Excellent questions that deserve a thoughtful answer. There are a couple of reasons why I would be cautious anyway and a couple more why I need to be even more careful now – and I’ll answer in a full post in he morning.
Rgds
Matt
OK. This is the line.
I won’t allow direct links to the list, or to pages posting the list or portions of it.
Comments become my editorial responsibility as publisher after a “reasonable period”, so they will go or be edited as well if they do the same thing.
On Lib Con, they are not allowing posting of the contents – so that shouldn’t be an issue. If someone did post the contents there I trust that they would remove it before it became a potential problem.
I’m planning some articles about Libel Law and how I think these sort of arguments (e.g., linking to defamatory material is a defamation) are being used to leverage greater restrictions on the media – including the need to refer to examples that are in use – so I may be under close examination (I’ve sent a note to Carter-Ruck asking for some comments on the Auchi case). Therefore I need to be careful at this point not to do any howlers.
>Wikileaks is hosting a copy
A statement such as that in an article (with a link as well) on the New Statesman website has already been used by a lawyer as an argument for demanding that that particular article be taken down, and the article has been taken down. Elsewhere the removal of just a reference by title to an article previously removed elsewhere under legal threat has been demanded, and it has been removed as well.
I wish we were only playing leapfrog, but I think it is more serious than that.
Rgds
thanks for the hint i have been spending ages trying to track it down.
[...] Blogger Matt Waldman suggests the story of the leaked list was broken by the Lancaster Unity blog, while TheRegister.co.uk posted a report on the leak at 2:31pm (GMT) on Tuesday – also citing the Lancaster Unity post. MSM not quite first past the post then. [...]
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