The Wardman Wire

Further context to Paul Canning’s report yesterday about the FACT (”Federation Against Copyright Theft”) directed Police raiding party launched against the File Soup Bittorrent Tracker this week.

To me this looks like a feeble excuse for generic targetting of Bittorrent sites, where the “investigation” is so disruptive that a prosecution is not necessary.

So, I predict that – just like the TV-Links case – there will probably be no prosecution.

There was a previous Indymedia case where the FBI swooped on servers in London, on what turned out to be unjustified pretences. Ho-hum.

There have been several other Indymedia cases, at least one more coincidentally before a major protest at G8 under a US court order.

There was also another Indymedia server seized in January 2009, over an article posted about the SHAC animal-rights campaign trial. Here, the strange thing is that the site had already complied with the police request to remove details identifying the Judge in the case. I’m on the other side in this case, and I’m glad that the SHAC noodles were locked up – but servers should not be seized spuriously.

Oh, and of course we have the Plymouth Water Pistol Terrorists who were arrested by a raiding party under “anti-terrorism” laws just before the G20 summit where they were planning to protest. This helped create the national narrative, and then turned into a damp squib when they were released after between 3 and 10 days detention because they had done nothing unlawful. There is a more detailed response to this last case on the Bristle Blog.

FACT is Another QUEFA (Quasi Enforcement Agency) for a future govt to bring to heel, and restrict to their proper business. It’s worth remembering that other organisations (such as the RSPCA) seem to operate in this way – in theory going along “with the police” to provide expertise, but in practice “taking the police along” to provide a right of entry while they themselves seem to do the direction.

One final note: in my view there has been, and will continue to be, pressure to create new and more nebulous offences, and use more ill-defined and arguably inappropriate bits of law, in these cases. This will have the Public Relations advantage of making perfectly reasonable sites operating technically “illegal”.

In the TV-Links case the raiding party arrested the owner on the basis of “Trademark Infringement“, which looks extremely “thin” on the part of the police, and exceedingly “creative” on the part of FACT. For example, Struan Robertson, editor of Out-Law.com, said of the TV-Links case: “I’ve never heard of using trademarks law for anything like this,”.

As I have said repeatedly; this is just not good enough for policing in a democracy. There is far too much badly written, unscrutinised, ambiguous law, which leaves room for heavy-handed interference in the normal everyday business of individuals.