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Comment by mritun | Hacker News Reader

You're responding with an argument that says "he pissed off the government so he was sent to prison" - but he actually was convicted of violating a court injunction (in India, that would be contempt of the court).

It's hard to connect contempt of the court proceedings with pissing off the government without also alleging that courts are in the pocket of the government... which is a very serious connection to draw here. This happened in UK!

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The alleged means of the so called beach are the nub of the issue here. 'Jigsaw identification' was a contrivance to specifically target Mr Murray, and notably is not a mechanism that has been used against any other entities, though it could have been.

For me, it's far too loosely defined and requires supposition of Intenet (mind reading) , to be used as a means of conviction.

Isn't the "jigsaw identification" essentially similar to the 'personally identifiable information' addressed by GDPR? It seems to me that both constructs stand and fall together.

PII is precisely defined, not pulled out of thin air, and nobody's going to jail because of it. Rich corporations like Amazon are fined for fucking with it though.

All of the data that can be used to identify a person are precisely defined?

Or is it that all of the identity data that someone can be held legally accounted for are precisely defined?

Indeed, it seems like the newspapers were already publishing things at the time with far more detail to point at Alex Salmond, but nothing happened to them.

Jigsaw identification is a real thing, and real journalists are taught about it as part of defamation awareness.

Related story: when I was the deputy editor of a paper in a large UK city I was read in on the approximate locations of people known to be on our patch who were subjects of injunctions protecting their identities, just so that we didn’t accidentally reveal anything that could expose their whereabouts when reporting seemingly unconnected events such as house fires etc.

Well, that's not a hard connection to make, when you know about the role of the First Minister of Scotland in the prosecution of her predecessor, Alex Salmond. If you were also to know the identity of one of the accusers, which cannot be reported, but is well known in Scotland, you would find the connection even easier.

The idea is clearly that he pissed off the government in other matters, and so in this particular case, effort might have been made behind the scenes to throw the book at him.

I believe that he has shown that to be the case in advance.

There are so many serious connections to draw these days that it's no longer such an argument against it.

The courts are the government. A separate branch from the executive and legislative, sure, but it's still a government entity.

In British English this is not the case, "Government" is use more like "Administration" is used in the US.

What do Brits use to refer to British courts, Parliament and executive considered as a whole?

Those are the three branches of the state. We consider government to be the executive only. The judiciary does not govern.

Ah. Americans use "state" to mean one of the 50 provinces of the US, leaving the word unavailable for what Brits use it for.

What about the state department?

That is our term for what the Brits call the Foreign Office.

Yes. I think the GP's point was that this shows how US usage also, still, to some extent reflects that of the rest of the world: Your State Department is called that because it is the organ that deals with other sovereign states.

Pointless word semantics aside, the point here is that they are branches of one thing; if you piss off one branch, strings can be pulled so that another branch treats you severely in court. This is plausible.

Golly. Of course the courts and the state are in collusion.

The interests of the state and those of the courts almost completely align. Class interests in the UK really matter and the rulers (not the members of parliament, the actual rulers) and the judges all went to the same schools, they are all cousins essentially.

There is no need for explicit corruption and collusion but there is plenty of that too.

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