Craig Murray seeks UN protection in Switzerland against British persecution | Hacker News Reader

Craig Murray seeks UN protection in Switzerland against British persecution

wsws.org

101 points_trampeltier60 comments

I'm afraid Switzerland isn't a safe haven anymore either. People voted yes on a significant extension of police powers allowing FedPol to enforce "anti-terrorist" measures without judicial oversight. Sure those measures can be fought in a federal court, but I wouldnt be surprised if we do bow to other european powers like we did for the Proton mail affair.

I don’t know where you would go for asylum in his situation? Maybe Hong Kong?

Anyplace that doesnt bow to our American overlords ig.

Russia

That has its own obvious problems.

Snowden went to Hong Kong first rather than Switzerland or Dubai. Of course he ends up in Moscow.

The UK suspended its extradition treaty with Hong Kong in 2020 and I don't think it's been resumed: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-53476811

Northern Cyprus?

No, that one bows down to Turkey and Southern Cyprus.

I seem to remember that it does not have an extradition treaty with the UK. It seems that doesn't matter any more.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-10818347

When I think about the other countrys in Europe or north america, I think Switzerland is still pretty safe. But yes, also in Switzerland the sling is getting smaller around personal freedom.

What is the Proton mail affair? Recently I was thinking about creating an account with them, so I'm interested.

idk but safe to say that if you want private comms, you have to do it yourself and encrypt locally and offline to a point where you don't have to trust any middleman

Encrypted email as a service is probably snake oil.

The ways of failure are so many that you have to be an expert to avoid leaking. However, if you and your receivers have that expertise, you could communicate by using PGP encryption that is encoded to base64 and use any email service.

Is this the affair where their Android app became trully terrible, or something else

prob this

https://www.theverge.com/2021/9/6/22659861/protonmail-swiss-...

https://www.vice.com/en/article/88njdg/protonmail-under-fire...

Thank you!

Our encryption cannot be bypassed, and this case shows exactly that - even when we receive a data request we cannot legally contest, we are not able to share the data encrypted on our servers in an unencrypted format. As any legally operating company, we have to comply with the local legislation, however, the Swiss legislation is one of the strictest in the world when it comes to privacy protection. We are also working on improving it further - we won a major court case in 2021: https://proton.me/blog/court-strengthens-email-privacy.

The government could say, we will send our engineer to push a bad JavaScript code or app update , or implement a backdooor, to a select set of users that we suspect, the encryption can be selectively bypassed or the user’s password be extracted. Also, the incoming non-PM emails can be logged unencrypted. That could be a gag order.

Isn’t that true?

Proton could improve the process. For example, it could provide the option of disabling the web access (using only client applications with signatures both of which publicly available. The user can then check that the code they run is same as everyone else’s).

This is not true. As a Swiss company, it is illegal for us to cooperate with any non-Swiss authorities. The methods you describe are not in the catalog of measures a Swiss court can take. Therefore, Proton could not be compelled to do so.

> As a Swiss company, it is illegal for us to cooperate with any non-Swiss authorities

Taken as written, this is obviously false. If we need to add some unstated qualifiers and specific interpretation for that statement to remotely check out, consider the same for the rest, like:

> Therefore, Proton could not be compelled to do so

protonmail may or may not realize that people will read way more into these statements than they should.

"Under Britain’s draconian anti-terror laws, Murray had no right to a lawyer during his hour-long detention, and no right to remain silent. He was forced to provide passwords for his electronic devices. "

Is that true? How is that even legal? How the courts of a liberal democracy allow that?

It is standard when you are detained at a border crossing.

Edit: I see he is an UK citizen and he was detained at Glasgow airport; I would think he has some rights there - I guess that’s why UK police had to use the terror laws - alternative would be to ask the Swiss (or wherever he was flying) to detain him.

>How the courts of a liberal democracy allow that?

The conclusion is that the United Kingdom is not a liberal democracy.

The term I see thrown around is “electoral authoritarianism,” where elections may be free and fair but institutions don’t reflect liberal values.

Maybe we’re discovering that democracy and liberal values don’t necessarily go hand-in-hand.

Another term would be "Managed Democracy".

Discovering? This was a main argument during the founding the United States and the reason it’s supposed to be a republic not a democracy.

If we’re being fair, it was a Republic where only land-owning, white, and Christian men were allowed to have representation in Congress.

That system was never going to survive alongside immigration (driven by capital demanding cheaper foreign labor in the 1800s), the growth of middle-class and educated women, and the spread into the frontier.

Ugh, this again. They are not exclusive concepts. And the US constitution denotes both.

It's not an accident that contemporary US Republicans have started repeating this talking point. The last Republican challenger to win the presidency (not re-election) by popular vote was George HW Bush 35 years ago. Expect to see less 'will of the people' talk from them in the years ahead.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/10/republican...

I refuse to travel to the UK anymore because of their draconian laws. It’s never been a problem for me, but I don’t want to roll the dice.

Luckily there’s not much worth seeing there anyways.

Most European countries have similar laws … we just don’t use them on white people …

It seems that people who serve the public against the political establishment, like Assange and Murray, are awarded with the title of honorary brown person.

Very wise, I live here and would advise against visiting. It's like China without the interesting cuisine.

> draconian laws

Do we have a word for what used to be called draconian laws? Some countries still practice original-sense draconian laws and I don't want to conflate them with the not nearly as bad anti-due-process laws such as the ones here.

The UK is closer to South Africa than to Europe. It's corruption ridden to the top and 1 in 5 children live in food poverty despite it being the 5th richest country. The mismanagement of law and order is so obvious. Birmingham went bust, privatisation spurred energy bills, etc.

Greetings from Brexit

It is ironic that Mr. Murray is the subject of a counter-terrorism investigation: The treatment of himself, and of Julian Assange, can itself be said to rise to the level of terrorism. The imprisonment, investigations, prison abuse, extradition - these are intended to instill fear, dread, terror, among journalists, potential whistleblowers and free speech advocates in Britain.

I'd be interested in knowing why this comment is being downvoted.

I mean sure, he is a victim of British state terrorism. Arbitrary detention and all that.

His own account of the letter (including photo of its contents), his detainment, and the relevant trip: https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2023/10/incredibly-i...

He seems to say they had a focus on a pro-Palestine rally he attended in Iceland (while on a trip about Assange, but current events led to his impromptu attendance), and a Twitter post of his (that he had already deleted).

I misread, he didn't say he deleted the post already.

> They asked how considered my tweets were. I replied that those which were links to my blog posts were my considered writing. Others were more ephemeral, and like everyone else I sometimes made mistakes and sometimes apologised. They asked if I deleted tweets and I said very seldom.

> I volunteered that I thought I understood the tweet that worried them and agreed it could have been more nuanced. This was the limitation of twitter. It was intended to refer only to the current situation within Gaza and the Palestinian people’s right of self-defence from genocide.

Presumably in reference to: https://twitter.com/CraigMurrayOrg/status/171333500612114051...

To which he clarified:

> In a war (which this now officially is) any act that does not involve targeting civilians (or recklessly endangering them).

> “But in the coming Gaza genocide, every act of armed resistance by Hamas and Hezbollah will have my support. If that is a crime, send me back to jail.”

https://twitter.com/CraigMurrayOrg/status/171333500612114051...

That is clearly illegal to say in the UK. I do not agree with the very selective way that our hate speech laws are enforced (it is not illegal to call for the killing of people in Gaza), but outright support of listed terrorism organizations is not a grey area.

I agree it's probably against UK law, but why use harsh counter-terrorism laws to deal with a speech matter? The Met (not the same police force) was just a few months ago found to have abused the exceptional powers in question.

https://apnews.com/article/uk-police-should-not-have-stopped...

> Jonathan Hall, the independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, said officers should not have used Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act 2000, which gives them exceptional powers to root out terrorists, to determine if Moret had been involved in the turbulent pension reform demonstrations that had roiled France for months.

> “The problem with exercising counterterrorism powers to investigate whether an individual is a peaceful protestor or a violent protestor is that it is using a sledge-hammer to crack a nut,” Hall said.

Using the same powers (admittedly less harshly) regarding a post on twitter.com is similarly "using a sledge-hammer to crack a nut" -- there isn't even the question of violence in this case.

> I agree it's probably against UK law, but why use harsh counter-terrorism laws to deal with a speech matter

When the speech is promoting and supporting a terrorist organization (according to UK law), the police have a reasonable expectation to investigate and see if that individual is providing other material support to the organization.

It is literally peak FAFO.

Free civil society requires that those laws not be used with a broad brush (or ideally exist at all, but let's put a pin in that). It's well within reason to question that extremely invasive law's applicability here, where the connection to Hamas is extremely tenuous (a single post, that he had already clarified a day before his detainment and interrogation where his rights were suspended), and to draw analogy to the very recent finding against a somewhat similar use.

The guy has every reason to believe in conspiracies against himself, given the history. However at the present time there are many people being charged with making similar statements and it has been well publicized by the Government that anybody who makes statements in support of listed terrorist groups will get a knock at the door and the book thrown at them. Every British person knows that such statements are very illegal.

Politically, I personally prefer something more like the US first amendment, however that is not a popular political opinion in the UK where hate speech restrictions enjoy broad political support.

Let them knock on his door then, his address is well-known to police. They do not need to use laws that suspend his right to silence or legal council, and permanently seize his property.

Quite.

A recent letter from the Home Secretary to the Police states the following:

> As you know, Hamas is a proscribed terrorist organisation in the UK in its entirety. It is therefore a criminal offence for a person in the UK to:

> …

> * invite support for Hamas

> * express support for Hamas whilst being reckless as to whether the expression will encourage support of it

> …

Assuming this is an accurate representation of the law, it seems we don’t need to invoke conspiracy and persecution theories to understand why the police want to speak to him.

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/police-chiefs-ask...

He doesn't know why they want to speak with him:

“I still don’t actually know whether the terrorism investigation into me is focused on Palestine or on Wikileaks. It seems to be both and anything else they can get.”

Apparently nobody ever told him when the police officer says "do you know why I pulled you over?" your answer shouldn't be "I didn't know it would be a multiple choice question!"

    > outright support of listed
    > terrorism organizations is
    > not a grey area.

It's not? I think you're right after having read the law [1][2] it outlaws any expression of support.

In the case of a government organization like Hamas that's pretty absurd.

I don't agree with most of what they're doing, but I'd think that e.g. expressing support for their efforts to provide clean drinking water to their constituents wouldn't be illegal, but the text of the law seems to clearly state that it would be.

1. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/proscribed-terror...

2. https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2000/11/section/12

This is why "Nothing to hide, nothing to fear" is such a bad excuse for the invasion of privacy everyone is tolerating. British law enforcement is targeting journalists and whistleblowers, not actual criminals.

How did UK come to be such a police state?

Most countries in the anglosphere are not as liberal as the US when it comes to individual rights. They are socially liberal yes but in terms of rule of law, the US has much stronger protection for individuals, albeit rich individuals benefit far more from it than poor ones.

while i sympathize with him and his stated intentions, i somehow can't shake the feeling that there is something else going on

The article seems to consist of somewhat reasonable paragraphs with this bit in the middle:

> Murray’s targeting under anti-terror laws is a warning to the working class. Under conditions of mass popular opposition to Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, backed by US and British imperialism, a terrified ruling class is moving to criminalize left-wing, anti-war and socialist activity.

That’s not exactly quality unbiased reporting.

I'm not sure why one would expect unbiased reporting from an outlet called World Socialist Web Site.

I was expecting the bias to have some apparent relation to the topic of the article.

(There may well be bias about the actual subject too. I don’t know anything about it.)

I'm sorry, but there are not many sources right now. Even more bad is, when I search for "Craig Murray" on Duckduckgo News, I'm getting 0 links at all.

So true. The guy is a former diplomat - so not exactly your average Joe. Suggesting this as an example of criminalising the working class is absurd. A desperate attempt to draw a connection to the site's purpose.

Murray’s targeting under anti-terror laws is a warning to the working class. Under conditions of mass popular opposition to Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, backed by US and British imperialism, a terrified ruling class is moving to criminalize left-wing, anti-war and socialist activity.

Ok.

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