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Comment by rmk2 | Hacker News Reader

Neither the BBC, Independent, The Sun nor Daily Mail report on it; q.e.d., the "general public" doesn't care.

Edit: The Sun does, however, have boobs on its homepage, the Daily Mail talks about celebrities and the BBC's international site talks about Syria, Gibraltar and Usain Bolt, with its England page concerned with assisted suicide, a rider who died after a horse accident, something about climate activists and this gem: "Leicester Globe pub closes over anti-military rumours"...

Edit 2: Colour me impressed, the Telegraph not only reports on it on its frontpage, it also has an additional quote by an Amnesty International spokesperson. That's at least something, I suppose?

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It's now the second-to-top story on the www.bbc.co.uk website

This is starting to look like a nice example of the Streisand effect. The more work the authorities do to squash the story and intimidate those associated with it the more legs it is getting.

Certain HN contributors seem to subscribe to a very strange idea that if something is news on HN, it surely is not news elsewhere.

You see it all the time. Go back to the very first HN discussions about PRISM and phonetapping and you'll see people swearing on their mothers life that nobody outside HN will ever care because it is just a 'nerd issue' or something.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2396745/Edward-Snowd...

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/senior-mp-to-...

This could be due to them receiving D-Notices.

It's possible, but I don't think it's likely. D-notices are very British things - they're a polite request to the media not to report on specific areas, and carry no legal weight. The assumption is that as long as they are issued in good faith, then the media goes along with them and everyone's happy because the security services don't have to start lobbying for censorship powers.

Now, along comes a situation which looks a lot like an attempt at journalistic suppression by the state. The incentive for the media to go along with any potential D-notice has evaporated because this is just censorship by other means, and if you're going to censor us anyway, why bother with D-notices? Issuing a D-notice over harrassing a journalist (via their family, in this case) would be something of a bodyliner, and I don't think even the British press would have a hard time figuring out what to do about it.

Or a super-injunction

The super-injunctions were ridiculed pretty much out of existence. TV newscasters talked so much about them they started letting names slip or details sufficient that "everyone" knew. Twitter was overflowing of people publishing the names. TV comedians ridiculed anyone involved, and made jokes about how they'd get arrested, faked calls from their lawyers to shows they were on, and in general showed no respect for them.

If anyone issued a super-injunction over this, the British media would see it as a challenge as to who could ensure the details were insinuated in such as way as to ensure the widest distribution.

Front page of the BBC News right now.

Just been a spot on it on Radio 4, too.

I didn't catch it all but it had a significant section on the main BBC Six O'Clock News.

I wrote to my MP, (Michael Gove) about this. While I disagree with him on many (if not most) things as an ex-journalist I hope he is unhappy with this.

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