Attacking journalists as terrorists | Hacker News Reader

Attacking journalists as terrorists

craigmurray.org.uk

67 pointsjjgreen44 comments

The intersection of the panopticon surveillance state in the Five Eyes countries with their stated ideological foundation of 'human dignity, universal human rights, and ethical responsibility' never fails to be a source of amusement. Such blatant hypocrisy is the real defining feature of this system of governance.

Access to the laptop also violates the privacy of all his friends and contacts. Odd that he doesn’t make any mention of this.

From what I can tell, he claimed earlier this year that he has a bunch of hacked emails from a SNP MP[1]. I guess this is what this blog post has to do with. I get laptops contain a bunch of your personal information and getting it seized is bad for privacy, but the reverse (ie. you opening claiming that you have stolen information and the police can't do anything) isn't exactly great either. If he doesn't want his laptop to be stolen, maybe don't go out and claim that you're holding stolen emails?

This blog post also mentions him being jailed, which probably refers to this incident[2]. According to the article, he got jailed because he violated a gag order.

I think I'm starting to see a pattern here. He thinks he's above the law and openly violates it (either by holding on to hacked emails and refusing to hand it over or violating gag orders). When he gets punished for it, he claims it's part of some conspiracy out to get him, and writes a one sided blog post to that effect. While it's plausible that his actions were The Just Thing to Do™, I'm not sure what he expected would happen. The justice system can't operate where anyone can break laws and be let off the hook as long as they think they're in the right.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-64601774

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craig_Murray#Alex_Salmond_tria...

Thanks, good context. "Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful" posted there in the picture on Wikipedia in support of him. And yet he supports Hamas actions. Fascinating cognitive dissonance.

I think from a data privacy perspective it's totally appropriate content.

Articles like this are always a struggle between my feeling that this kind of abuse is horrible and my belief that HN should not be the place to air these sorts of grievances.

For better of for worse, the title of this site is "Hacker News" - and hackers tend to have strong feelings about privacy issues like this.

I personally appreciate articles like this being posted, as they don't _really_ feel political and both lefties and righties can agree that freedom of speech and journalism is important. Except the extremists of course, as I'm sure I will be made aware of in any replies to this comment.

Hell, because this kind of stuff bleeds over into hackers quite often.

Hacker finds exploit in major software and reports thing.

Company gets really mad at hacker and wants them thrown in jail.

Hacker goes to media to report on this.

Company calls in state to threaten hacker and journalist with jail time for even daring to talk about the faults in their software "To even mention it enables criminals and terrorists"

> agree that freedom of speech and journalism is important. Except the extremists of course

We "extremists" are more likely to value free speech. We're the ones most often targeted to have it removed.

my belief that HN should not be the place to air these sorts of grievances

Any particular reason why?

As you can see it was flagged off the front page (not by me) and it involves people with controversial opinions. So this tends to invite people who participate for the wrong reasons. At the time I wrote that comment, the only other post in the thread was focused on the author's credentials and not the actual subject.

In any case, I did hear about it here first. So there's some value in that.

It's still a bit more interesting to read "I got my devices stolen by the state" than 100th repetition of "Giggle blocked my account and I don't bother having backups" which is allowed here ad nauseam.

There are technical / practical solutions to this sort of thing, that journalists to CEOs should be doing. Specifically you should not have any information stored on any devices when transiting through any airport anywhere in the world.

"Craig Murray is an author, broadcaster and human rights activist. He was British Ambassador to Uzbekistan from August 2002 to October 2004 and Rector of the University of Dundee from 2007 to 2010."

A lot of <activists|tiktok pranksters|politicians|others> pretend to be "journalists" these days, and claim to have special rights above and beyond the general population. I dont claim this to be the case here, but notice it constantly as a feature of the modern attention economy. Their own bio doesnt even back up the contention that they are from said "protected" group.

Attacking Citizens as Terrorists, misappropriating the anti-terrorism laws to infringe upon due process is disgusting - although it is the will of the people who were happy to usher through these powers, out of fear, back in the 911 days.

Murray was a temporary member of the NUJ (the UK's "official" journalists' union), allowed his membership to lapse when working largely on the Assange case, his subsequent request for membership renewal was refused by the NUJ in disputed circumstances. Murray's site has plenty of comment on this.

He's no prankster.

Agreed. I don't think there is much politically that he and I would agree on, but he appears to be fearless. He follows his convictions wherever that may lead - even if it upsets people who you might expect to be his political allies.

It's also worth noting that he a) upset the British government when an Ambassador for publicising GWOT rendition flights, and b) has also upset the SNP/Scottish Government for publicising SNP corruption and their treatment of Alex Salmond.

> He's no prankster.

Though he does seem like a bit of a crank. Apparently Craig Murray thought Russia "lacked a motive" to poison a Russian spy who defected to the West, but he believed the Jews had "a clear motivation." That reeks of a broken reasoning process driven by prejudice.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craig_Murray#Skepticism_about_...

>although it is the will of the people who were happy to usher through these powers, out of fear, back in the 911 days.

was right there with you until the very end. people seem to confuse the fact that members of congress that are elected by the people do things on behalf of those people. this isn't a situation where the transitive property from math can be used. for example, if A elected B and B did C does not mean A wanted C

Almost three-quarters of the public believe that it is right to give up civil liberties to improve our security against terrorist attacks. A Guardian/ICM poll published today shows that 73% of respondents back the trade-off, with only 17% rejecting it outright.

Usual disclaimers, 2005, polls etc - https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2005/aug/22/july7.terrorism - breakdown by party/class/gender/age and the support is the same (+/- tiny margin).

It's not news that people agree with vague statements that sound good on paper. When the specifics are explained to them, they change their minds.

Q.1 Tony Blair has announced a series of anti-terrorism measures following last month's London bombings, which some people say might mean the loss of some civil liberties. Do you think it is right or wrong to lose some civil liberties to improve our security against terrorist attacks?

I dont think you really need further specifics - years later without bombs going off I expect, with no further explanation to those polled needed, that the 70/30 split would probably be the opposite direction.

> "Do you think it is right or wrong to lose some civil liberties to improve our security against terrorist attacks?"

That "some" is the problem. People who say they support the tradeoff often change their minds when the specifics are explained to them. This happens all of the time in polling and even rigorous studies. Subtle changes in phrasing and context completely change results.

We're seeing that right now. There was a survey done on college campuses on the phrase "from the river to the sea". many endorsed it, until they were shown a map of the region such that the specific meaning became clearer, and then a lot of them changed their minds.

This sounds more like manufactured consent than the will of the people. Plus, I don't know if this happened with Blair's measures, but across the pond, the Patriot was initially written to be sunset after 4 years (from 2001), but wasn't fully sunset until 2020! This was long after the majority of Americans in polls said they didn't want to trade civil liberties to fight terror.

https://news.gallup.com/poll/183548/americans-say-liberties-...

Potential abuse of such powers should not be tolerated regardless of whether one is part of a protected group or not.

Bingo. This whole "journalist" as a protected class just gives them cover to treat everyone crappily by distracting from this core issue.

> A lot of <activists|tiktok pranksters|politicians|others> pretend to be "journalists" these days, and claim to have special rights above and beyond the general population.

"Journalism" is an activity, like programming, not a protected class of people. No one who routinely does journalism thinks they have rights above and beyond ordinary people; the very fact that anyone can do journalism is what entails that any rights "journalists" have are rights that everyone should have.

I used to hitch-hike quite a bit, and a few times I got picked up by a journalist just back from covering some God-awful war, I guess they just wanted to talk to someone who didn't want to kill people, just to get it out of their head. I'd get out of their car feeling like a low-rent psychiatrist, thanking my lucky stars that I didn't have their job. Journalists have my deepest respect.

I wonder if these harsh checks, and data theft is just the US/UK border thing, or if it also happens inside Schengen on airports. Will have to search a bit... :)

It’s cute to expect UN staff to be able to do anything about it. The entirety of organization is thoroughly captured by people on the paycheck from Axis powers (like China or ruskieland).

Axis powers?

China, russia and iran + their satellites like North Korea, Belarus, etc.

I think you must be the first person to describe them as an axis.

> I think you must be the first person to describe them as an axis.

Probably not, “axis” for describing an actual or perceived alignment of countries, particularly one which the speaker views as hostile, is quite a common term, and this is a widely (if somewhat incorrectly, IMO, especially as regards China which is more of a third player with interest in conflict between the Russia-led alignment and the West) perceived alignment.

Bush the younger had "Axis of Evil" of course.

Maybe not literally the first, but it's certainly not an established idea that can just be name-dropped and everyone will go "oh, yeah, the axis of Russia, China, and Iran. Obviously".

Say hello to George W Bush and his Axis of Evil[1]:

"The phrase "axis of evil" was first used by U.S. President George W. Bush and originally referred to Iran, Iraq, and North Korea."

"In 2023, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell described Iran, China, and Russia as the new axis of evil."

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axis_of_evil

"The term Axis of Resistance [...] is a label used by pro-Iranian commentators to refer to an informal anti-Israeli and anti-Western political and military coalition led by the Iranian government. It includes the Syrian Arab Republic, Lebanese Shia militant group Hezbollah and various militant groups in Palestine. Pro-Ba'athist Syrian militias, some of the pro-Iran militias that are a part of the Iraqi PMF, the Houthi movement in Yemen, Cuba, Sandinista Nicaragua, Bolivia as well as Maduro's Venezuela are also considered part of the alliance."

"Despite the alliance's differing ideologies, such as secular Ba'athism, Communism, Shia Khomeinism (a type of Islamist Qutbism), Chavismo, Sandinismo, etc., they are unified by their declared objectives of opposing the activities of pro-Western parties, Israel, Arab Gulf states, Sunni Jihadists and the MEK in the region."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axis_of_Resistance

reference annotations elided

A second-world war thing: the Germans and Italians signed a "Rome-Berlin Axis declaration" in 1936, the name came from that. The Russians weren't involved, later joining the allies of course.

I know what the WW2 axis powers were, of course. But we're not in WW2 anymore, hence my question.

Perhaps a more balanced view is worth considering. It's a dirty business on both sides of this fence.

Firstly It's pretty obvious that the UK government has a number of serious national security problems at the moment. I would assume that they are arresting people who might be considered related indirectly or otherwise to the security problems to obtain data, contacts and leads. Our security services have always asked questions later and seen the rule of law as second class to their business. And they're also lazy so go for people who have already done the legwork (journos).

There is also a big problem with press agencies hiring ad-hoc field reporters and photographers that turn out to actually be either terrorists or hanging around with them suspiciously often. A number of agencies have had to quickly disassociate with them loudly in the last few months.

I applaud this position and it needs to be out in the open but there are no absolutes here. And yes, it sucks that it's like this.

> And they're also lazy so go for people who have already done the legwork (journos).

I don't think they should be able to strip-mine journalists for information, but "laziness" that makes things get done faster is usually called "efficiency". You could also say they're being lazy by taking cars/busses/trains instead of walking everywhere, or searching criminal databases instead of manually leafing through mountains of criminal dossiers.

We shouldn't fault police officers for attempting to do their jobs as efficiently as possible. However, there's an unavoidable conflict of interest in asking those officers to also support the weaknesses we've intentionally built into the system. We need a separate group of people within the government constantly putting them in check, but that doesn't make the police officers bad people, even those who are pushing the boundaries we've established.

History has shown that healthy democracy is a fragile metastable state, prone to devolving into autocracy and/or oligarchy. Also, historically, certain weaknesses in the state security apparatus are the only way we know of to create a healthy democracy from an autocracy/oligarchy. As an insurance mechanism against this once-every-few-hundred-years-millenium tail risk, we build these weaknesses into our state security apparatuses in the hopes that the autocracy/oligarchy that captures the state security apparatus won't be able to fix the weaknesses fast enough to prevent a democratic revolution.

I know many people know this, but I wish we were more explicit in explaining that we're sowing the seeds of the democratic revolution that will bring down the government that topples/captures our current democracy. Yes, that does increase the crime rate and we need to be careful about that, but it seems some crime is the unavoidable cost of that long-tail insurance.

It's good that some police officers are pushing to bring down the cost of that insurance, we just need to make sure there are powerful people ensuring the officers don't go too far.

I never liked this special rules for reporters concept. Why should anyone have more rights than another? Rather than your suggestion of assigning blame to the employers, my proposal also makes it obvious that the government should have to prove some level of likelehood before searching anyone. Reporter or not.

Nobody is saying that reporters are more special and, indeed, anyone can go grab a camera or notepad to start documenting something on which they want to report. That is the heart of "freedom of the press".

The context of this happening to journalists is same as the context that this could happen to anyone.

Suspending civil rights because there are bad guys in the world is pretty much the same as saying there aren't real civil rights. They can be stripped if you do something the government doesn't like or associate with people the government doesn't like -- in other words, you lose them in the circumstances where you actually need them.

Buy, hey, the law has the work "terrorism" in it, so it must be worth it.

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