The D-Notice: A British Way of Censoring the Press
thedissenter.org
thedissenter.org
1. It says the UK media largely ignored the Snowden leaks due to a D-Notice - the source supplied didn't really back that up and it didn't sound right to me. Maybe someone can share examples of Snowden-leak-related stories which would have been in UK public interest but were only covered abroad?
2. It says the Steele dossier is largely discredited - I wasn't aware of any discrediting, let alone total. I don't know why the author thought this spin was necessary for the article.
Edit to add 3. It says that a D Notice was used to suppress a link between Sergei Skirpal's handler and Orbis Intelligence, while the only sources provided negate that
There are at least two ways to interpret this:
1)If the Steele dossier is legitimate, then the author is propagandizing the issue.
2)If the Steele dossier is discredited (in some circles) propaganda, but you are not aware of the deception, then perhaps it isn't spin. This experience could be a reflection of the information you consume.
In the interest of avoiding inflammatory discussions, I'll leave it to other commentators to discuss the veracity of either side.
You are quite right that I am lacking complete awareness, so I think it would behoove the author to at least link to something to back up their statement, and without sourcing it does feel like spin.
Similarly, there's a section of the article where the author suggests D-notices were used to suppress a link between Sergei Skripal's alleged handler and the Orbis Intelligence company whose founder wrote the dossier. There is again no souring or backing up this allegation. I didn't understand here either, why the author is using these unsourced points to discuss D Notices
The beauty of these kinds of discussions is that one could spend about 5-10 minutes searching and come up with a plethora of sources supporting either claim from whichever side you prefer.
From this premise the sources become almost irrelevant. You could examine the source taking a given position on either issue and declare it false. You need only find a contradictory source suitable to your biases.
You could instead reason about the outcome of the accusations leveled in the Steele dossier. If those accusations were truthful, why was action not taken? Again, the partisan biases take hold:
1) Action was not taken because the dossier was fabricated
2) Action was not taken because the accused held political power
Getting back to the larger topic, I ask you: Does censorship enhance your ability to trust the media and discern information, or does it hinder it?
Another perspective might observe that Pravda was similarly considered "legitimate enough" by the USSR.
Which of these best describes the information bubble you found yourself in at the top of the thread?
This was a political football during the last US election, since then it's been more thoroughly investigated and the majority of the content has either been proven false, or has yet to be verified as true. There was some truthful information within the dossier, but generally speaking it was mostly hearsay and unverified allegations and not completed when it was leaked. The leaking was clearly politically motivated and it was used as the basis of starting Congressional investigations which ultimately resulted in only minimal parts of the content being verified. There are many people who are politically aligned with the leaker of the dossier that believe the dossier is true because the general thrust of the allegations was true, but the actual specifics were mostly false, and the truth of what did occur mostly was found in the later investigation, which did not corroborate the dossier.
As I said, the numbers are made up. But I think the general gist is right - mostly false, a bit true, and some that is unknown.
But this is why people say the dossier was discredited - the majority of it was false.
[1] https://newrepublic.com/article/161913/we-are-bellingcat-spo...
This is false and a right-wing talking point. Papadopoulos's bragging launched the investigation.
After seeing how the US intelligence people acted with the Hunter Biden story I have zero faith they wouldn’t monkey around. To be fair I think a lot of the shade that was thrown on the story was from ex-intelligence people and not current US government employees. However, this whole thing looks like a vast conspiracy. You have ex-intelligence people, some who have plum media jobs signing up to this statement that seems to claim that Hunter Biden laptop is Russian disinformation. But if you carefully review the statement it doesn’t actually make this claim. And if someone produced irrefutable proof that the laptop was genuine then all these people who signed up to this claim could claim they were still right. The actually claim was the laptop had the hallmarks of Russian misinformation. But that is not a very useful claim if you as a voter are trying to assess the probability that the laptop is genuine or not. For example it could have the hallmarks but it could still be like a 95% probability that it is genuine. Of course this claim about hallmarks is not strong enough so when it was reported in the press it was often reported as X ex-intelligence people have confirmed it is Russian disinformation. So what the hell is going on here?
If you aren't aware of it, that's on you. Frankly it amazes me that people still think it's real.
Another user provided an NYT link which suggested it was real, but only indicative and not necessarily factual.
> Mr. Trump and his supporters have long sought to use the flaws of the dossier to discredit the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election — and the nature of numerous links between Russia and the Trump campaign — as a “hoax." But the available evidence indicates that the dossier was largely tangential to the Russia investigation. Here is a look at the facts.
> The F.B.I. launched the investigation in July 2016, and a special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, eventually took over. His March 2019 report detailed “numerous links between the Russian government and the Trump campaign” and established that “the Russian government perceived it would benefit from a Trump presidency and worked to secure that outcome, and that the campaign expected it would benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian efforts.”
> Beyond its narrow role in facilitating the F.B.I.’s wiretap of Mr. Page, the dossier’s publication had the broader consequence of amplifying an atmosphere of suspicion about Mr. Trump.
> Still, the dossier did not create this atmosphere of suspicion. Mr. Trump’s relationship with Russia had been a topic of significant discussion dating back to the campaign, including before the first report that Russia had hacked Democrats and before Mr. Steele drafted his reports and gave some to reporters.
> Among the reasons: Mr. Trump had said flattering things about Russian President Vladimir V. Putin, kept bringing on advisers with ties to Russia, had financial ties to Russia, publicly encouraged Russia to hack Mrs. Clinton, and at his nominating convention, the party dropped a plank that called for arming Ukraine against Russian-backed rebels. In March 2017, the F.B.I. publicly acknowledged that it was investigating links between Russia and Trump campaign associates.
But people who want to ignore it like to pretend it's something that it's not. It's raw intelligence. It's saying "Hey, here are things we heard you should check out."
It's a lot like the VAERS database. It doesn't prove anything on its own, but it can indicate things we should look into more closely.
And that's how a lot of people treated it: These are things we should probably check out.
“Hey, I heard a few things about Biden raping babies, you should check it out.”
See how it might be important to use more than “raw intelligence” about “stuff you should probably check out” as the basis for an investigation and media witch hunt?
It would not take long to see that Biden doesn't rape babies. Hell, a lot of what was in the Dossier was not looked into because they just dismissed it out of hand.
This kind of casual dismissal and reductio ad absurdum you're engaging in is an attempt to distract from the very real crimes very real people were very really arrested for doing regarding things described in the document.
> Was the dossier a reliable source of information?
> No. It has become clear over time that its sourcing was thin and sketchy.
This was on page 1 of google for "steele dossier", and the title is "Why the Discredited Dossier Does Not Undercut the Russia Investigation", so it seems to be pretty widely accepted that it was a bunch of nonsense.
Numerous Steele dossier "sources" have been arrested for lying to the FBI in regards to the dossier, including Igor Danchenko, a primary Steel "source" who is apparently a fall down alcoholic who, among other things, fabricated conversations that never took place.
https://www.axios.com/2021/11/04/steele-dossier-durham-inves...
There is an ongoing trial at the moment where I expect we will see evidence against the Steele dossier.
Here is the Grand Jury charge: https://www.justice.gov/sco/press-release/file/1433511/downl...
I don't have access to Pacer to search for the other filings and the record so far, but the case number can be found at the top of the linked charge if anyone is interested in looking at this trial.
Look at David Shaylers career and how he has subsequently been done over by them, much like Chelsea Manning. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Shayler#MI5_career
Its the military's job to diffuse situations, identify threats on the horizon and use whatever means necessary to deal with them. Once you are dealing with something in a court, the threat has largely gone thanks to corrupt judges.
Spooks are above the law, but just to make sure, its written into law. https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/nov/05/mi5-policy-g... https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-54274605
I really dont know why people come to the UK or most other organised country for that matter because entrapment & blackmail is still order of the day with all the security services, some of which you will read about in the press.
Another name for the BBC is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MI7 those television camera's and journalists get in everywhere, the press is the best form of spying in the world imo!
So when is a D-notice not a D-notice? When its just reverse psychology to weed out some groups of people perhaps?
Their HQ was stormed by police along with forced compliance of the destruction of information:
https://www.techdirt.com/2013/08/19/uk-govt-forces-guardian-...
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/feb/01/edward-snowden...
That said; in theory D-Notice's are voluntary, but non-compliance is vaguely threatened with "increased scrutiny".
D-Notices themselves are not exactly secret; they even get a mention in the movie V For Vendetta.
> It says the UK media largely ignored the Snowden leaks due to a D-Notice
The Guardian might have been "crucified" for their reporting, but they did report on it.
> The Guardian might have been "crucified" for their reporting, but they did report on it.
a few things;
1) "largely ignored" does not mean universally ignored, 1 outlet reporting on it does not mean that the "large majority" of british media didn't ignore the leaks.
2) Guardian didn't ignore the d-notice either, they made a choice to die on that hill, and they were dragged through the coals for it. D-Notices' are supposedly voluntary, otherwise there would be more outrage.
3) this serves as a warning to the other outlets.
4) the guardian was already in reporting and disseminating the contents directly with Snowden before the d-notice was issued.
The Guardian ignored the D-Notices and survives to this day - both facts undermine the point of the article that the system breaks independent British journalism.
This article stinks, is there any way to downvote it any further?
Couldn't help but click on another article from the page "Uncovering CIA-Funded Experiments On Children In Europe During The Cold War - Was the CIA involved in sponsoring West German pedophilic foster homes overseen by the Social Democratic Party?" all with the same problems of missing sources or sources that don't reference the claims.
Even though I was open to it, am gonna call BS.
I don’t know if it’s been discredited, as it was never “credited” in the first place.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/jan/31/footage-rele...
I would guess that the UK Gov knew full well that destroying these documents in the UK would not stop reporting, but doing nothing might set a precedent that they're not keen on.
What D-Notices are is effectively a polite request not to publish certain sensitive information. Editors at newspapers can decide whether or not to comply with the request. Have a look here: https://www.dsma.uk/how-the-system-works/ and notice the explicit "DSMA notices have no legal standing". The very idea that this is a secret censorship conspiracy is laughable.
I think there is an interesting question arising from the Assange case as to who can claim to be a journalist and what protections this provides, but I do not think D-Notices fit anywhere in this. They're not even a law.
To be clear: I'm not offering an opinion either way on the rights and wrongs of that, but the piece itself comes down very much on one side of the fence.
It's called The Dissenter and they explicitly mention that they support whistleblowers in their about page.
I really do think somebody would have to be either hopelessly, desperately naive or deliberately lying to themselves to believe Assange could receive a fair trial in the US, and I don’t think it’s reasonable to assert that the US has any kind of jurisdiction over him.
1. https://www.theverge.com/2021/9/27/22696436/cia-kidnap-julia...
I've read the allegations. If the allegations are true, he's guilty of hacking. It does not seem to be a case of the law being perverted past its intent. I'm sure the extradition and prosecution is politically motivated, but the problem with doing something that's squarely, dead-to-rights illegal that also happens to piss off the government is that they are within their rights to put you away for doing it.
It'd be one thing if his supporters accepted the dead-to-rights-guilty part, and were making the claim that it was something akin to civil disobedience - illegal, but in service to a higher cause. Unfortunately, most of them are instead bending over backwards to argue that he can't actually guilty of anything. It's not very convincing.
Probably because the most noteworthy accomplishment of that higher cause seems to be 'spending the next decade being a shill for the Kremlin' and 'helping Trump win 2016'. Sorry, but not sorry - I can't say I have an iota of sympathy for the architects of either.
Who, precisely, are you referring to here?
This is kind of interesting. To me, it seems convenient to the point of being totally unbelievable that the person who leaked evidence of US war crimes, who the US has been hounding for a decade now, is also dead-to-rights guilty of a charge that justifies the extradition they've been gunning for the whole time.
Not being particularly engaged in the case, or the guy, it seems that this must be obvious to everyone.
What's weird about it is that using a spurious charge as a form of harassment for a political dissident is a really big no-no for a liberal democracy. And that's exactly what this appears to be.
I honestly expected some check or balance to step in at some point and point out that, no matter what you think about this guy, manipulating the legal system in such a blatant manner to produce a predetermined result is corrosive to legitimacy on every scale.
Fortunately, we have a process, called a trial, that can determine whether or not they are.
What's wild to me is that so many people are OK with this. Politically motivated prosecution is not normal in a democracy.
Yeah, but he helped trump get elected so he doesn't deserve human rights.
(/s; but people are genuinely making this argument)
This is exactly what I'm talking about. Everyone else has to deal with the consequences of their actions, but when the same rules are applied to Assange, it is somehow a cruel and unusual outrage, and he is a saint that we've already determined could have done no wrong.
If the same rules were, as you say, being applied to Assange, he would have been freed a long time ago.
Hard to see where you're coming from. Trials aren't the only stage at which accused people can be released.
It's the difference between a journalist spending a week in the jungle with a group of partisans, and a journalist spending a week in the jungle shooting guns at convoys and blowing up rail lines with a group of partisans. The former's a journalist, the latter's a guerrilla.
If the allegations are correct, Assange is closer to the latter. If they aren't, he's closer to the former. Right now, he's doing his best to make sure we'll never know, because the latter carries serious consequences.
There is also 1 count of "Conspiracy to Commit Computer Intrusion" which is minor compared to the 17 other indictments. It related to him trying to crack offline a password hash to let Manning log in as a different user. Which is assisting someone who does the actual collection of information.
The remaining indictments are for "Conspiracy to Receive" NDI or for obtaining it.
In other words he was embedded with the partisans and when asked to pass a box of ammo, did so. The hacking count can lead to 5 years in prison with possible parole. It's a tortured interpretation to suggest he hacked/blew up rail lines.
The rest, the REAL reason to pursue someone internationally for a decade for extraterritorial acts is for his journalistic function. To make an example. Otherwise this case would have been dropped.
https://www.justsecurity.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/Assa...
Have you watched Collateral Murder? To see that and think justice would be served by burying it would be like watching The Running Man and rooting for the game show host. Again, hard to understand where you're coming from.
Oh, certainly not. A fair trial, however, is probably impossible.
However, what I usually comment on is that there is a large enough corpus of evidence to indicate that he's being tortured.
Regardless of everything else I believe about the case: his human rights are certainly being suspended for now; if I ever talk about that then people are quick to point out that he assisted in the rise to power of Trump; as if that invalidates his human rights.
Regardless of what you believe (IE: I'm not happy about Trump either) you shouldn't be so quick to repeal peoples rights, and that's what people are doing, and that's what I'm commenting on.
https://www.scmp.com/comment/opinion/article/3160861/torturi...
I could go on-and-on about how he was hounded and character assassinated, but you wouldn't believe me because thats the very nature of character assassination.
I would like him to stand trial, but I suspect it cannot be a fair trial. Sham trials are very common, I wouldn't consider them to be an indicator that your human rights are not being eroded.
If you're interested in learning more about "unfair"/human rights abusing/unjust trials; Amnesty international has a few: https://www.amnesty.org/en/topic/unfair-trials/
Oh sweet summer child, enjoy the bliss till it lasts. Once you open your eyes it will never come back.
Are you throwing the whole concept of trials out with the bathwater, or is Assange just special, and the rules don't apply to him?
The US legal system has problems, in terms of which cases it chooses not to pursue, and in terms of the deficiencies of public defenders, and long sentences. But these are problems that affect ~everyone else going through it a lot more than they will affect this golden boy.
And then there are exceptions. Yes, Assange is just special, special rules apply.
If you're going to deny that, I guess, as GP says, enjoy the bliss till it lasts.
I think when historians look back at this era, from the second gulf war on, they'll see it as an era where the US essentially squandered an amazing soft-power position by ridiculously clumsy, arrogant, and petty behavior. And it's being enabled by group think. It's obvious from an outside perspective that all this kind of thing does is undermines the US at home and abroad, and gives ammunition to the Chinese or Russian state line that basically the US are a bunch of hypocrites, and the rules based global order is a sham, or gives ammunition to the left and right of american domestic politics to say that DC is a swamp, for literally no strategic gain. I mean, who really cares about Assange? I certainly don't. I do care about the ability of journalists to do their work without fear of persecution, and even if people don't care about that, they should care about the raw strategic incompetence of what the US is trying to do here.
Law described: https://www.christian.org.uk/news/views-expressed-in-private...
Law passed: https://www.gov.scot/news/hate-crime-bill-passed/
https://thedissenter.org/british-officials-launder-us-intel-...
Pity as it might hurt Assange's cause.
It doesn't help that it struck me as drawn-out and disjointed.
Worse - I never got the sense that the public would much care if the facts that the DMSA is keeping secret could be freely published in Britain. Nor (post-Snowden, and having read about some of America's secret gag orders) that the UK is up to anything all that bad (by the modern-day western world's very low standards).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super-injunctions_in_English_l...
The Official Secrets Act is probably bad law, it's one of the many places where the USA has superior laws that are much better at keeping bad government in check. The various attempts to expand censorship in the UK are also very bad, in my view. The D-Notice system is difficult to really get worked up about because, as this exposé makes clear, it's:
a. Voluntary.
b. Sometimes ignored, even by major outlets like the Guardian.
c. Largely made up of journalists themselves.
d. So shadowy that they publish photos of themselves and upload meeting notes to government websites.
e. Apparently very tightly concerned with stuff like publishing the names of spies, soldiers, troop movements, etc. The classical sorts of information that has a very direct and obvious reason for being kept out of the press.
The article tries to build a case that it's being used in over-broad ways like with Assange, but honestly I don't buy it. The media doesn't need some shadowy committee to stop it covering the Assange story properly. At some point it became received wisdom in media circles to hate him and journalists need no incentive to bury stories if they find them inconvenient. The Guardian in particular has a long running and well documented vendetta against Assange. You'd see the same approach if D-Notices existed or not.
I think that puts it very mildly. There was a gigantic public scandal as far back as 1967 about D-notices.
I could offer anecdotes, but my interactions with my social circles more and more indicate 'well, duh' to stories like this and not post-1981 book reading horror of realization that humans can be quite horrible to one another. And, well, since it is clear now that some information is suppressed and some is heavily promoted -- the distrust of general populace appears to be quite high.
And this is yet another reason why I constantly argue against the temptations of censorship. That said, this is the path we are on.
So to answer your question. No, I don't think it is sinister at all. It is just the current state of affairs. Some subjects are more risky than others.