Microsofters' SLAPP Censorship - Part 8 Out of 200: Gross Misuse of UKGDPR to Protect the Agenda of American Back Doors (Mass Surveillance)
In the previous part we showed how UKGDPR had been weaponised when Brett Wilson LLP and a barrister put forth phony claims that they would no longer even pursue in court (as they knew those were baseless, meritless nonsense). It wasn't the first time. Last summer we published the following about Brett Wilson LLP and the very same barrister: UK High Court Blasts Brett Wilson LLP for Misusing "GDPR" After Failed Efforts to Censor Critics Using 'Libel' Claims.
This means they are serial, chronic abusers of UKGDPR, which was meant to guard privacy, not guard Americans who promote back doors, surveillance, kill switches etc. We'll revisit this irony some other day. A lot more needs to be said about that.
Today, in Part 8, we present more notes about the claims as put forth in 2024 (later in the year they'd reuse the claims for the Serial Strangler from Microsoft, basically another American who jointly worked to hurt us financially and tried to censor articles about his arrest because begging failed).
Responding to bunk claims regarding UKGDPR and claims of 'analytics' in our sites: (based on the lack of technical understanding by both the barrister and the lawyers, who are just very heavy users of Microsoft).
6. The sites use .org domains and do not discern or distinguish based on geography (or demography). While .org is geographically neutral, it is still controlled by the United States for the most part. The sites’ sole intent is to relay information to those who are interested and, since they do not advertise and have no revenue model whatsoever, dissemination as widely as possible does not correlate with any financial incentive (there are none). Put another way, it would be fallacious and harmful to assume that either site strives to publish things for financial gain. This needs to be accounted for as far as legal classification is concerned. If legal processed were to be leveraged to attack non-profits, it would mostly be a disservice to the laws crafted and then utilised at great expense (both for claimants and defendants).
7. The points dealt with in turn:
I. The term “hits” is crucial here; due to Web browser-level caching, one cannot determine how many objects will be retrieved by a user client/agent and for each page fetched from the site there are also cascading style sheets (CSS files), graphics/images (including animations), photographs (typically high quality), small icons (abundant in number), programs (typically JavaScript) etc. So one visit may equal 4 hits, 40 hits, even 400 hits in more extreme cases of the “modern” (i.e. bloated, uncaring for slow-connection users) Web. It depends on how the site is designed and whether objects are sourced from third-party domains, e.g. widely-contentious (in the EU) Google Fonts or various trackers of analytics providers, which manifest themselves as external files or cryptic programs. The Defendants’ sites contain a grand total of zero trackers. That’s done for programmatic (keeping things simple), pragmatic, and purely practical reasons, not just ideological reasons, which were alluded to earlier. The Barrister who prepared the document may or may not be familiar with theses terms; however, the Defendants and the Claimant know what those terms mean. At one point the Claimant asked the First Defendant for back end access to tuxmachines.org (that is to say, full control of everything), seeing that the site had suffered a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. The First Defendant of course declined, as the Claimant’s slanderous claims against him had already been abundantly visible. That went on for years and he was considered a hostile element in the IRC network, acting in bad faith and seeking only to undermine the sites, among other critical and very popular services. Plural terms are used here (“sites“) because his goal was to undermine not only tuxmachines.org but also techrights.org. The motivations shall become apparent, if they have not been made apparent already. There’s ample history to that effect and the Claimant sought other means – before lawyers – to silence both sites. He had attempted to same against other sites that are not tuxmachines.org and techrights.org. He’s a firm believer in Web censorship, not where terrorism of illegal activities are encountered but where views are expressed that he deems “insulting” – to the point of shaming and cursing at people until they obey demands to censor. What’s truly objectionable about these beliefs of his is that they undermine the very core tenets of the Web and seek to emulate Kremlin-like policies. If people generalise and resort to name-calling, there will be almost no site left that’s deemed “safe” and every site would become candidate for abject condemnation and complete, unconditional blocking.
II. The term “visits” is subjective because most traffic on the World Wide Web is bots (computer programs, not living beings, i.e. not real people), many are repeat visits (not unique people arriving), and the definition of visits is further complicated by Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds or Atom feeds, the nature of feed readers, blockers of analytics (trackers), and presumptuous extrapolation which takes no account of the nature of site readers (more technical readers altogether obstruct trackers). Suffice to say, relying on guesswork – attributed to such a young third party (Alexa.com used to be a more authoritative source, but Amazon bought that site and shut it down only months ago) - does not bode well for the tech-savvy observers. For instance, similarweb.com wrongly asserts that techrights.org is based in Germany and employs people. The heuristics are maladjusted, they’re just guesswork. They compensate with gimmicks and UI polish for a lack of accurate information, gathered from very few people who welcome spyware and then extrapolated sparingly, guessed at rather poorly. Put succinctly, similarweb.com is rejected by the Defendant as a yardstick or reliable measure of anything. It may have become fashionable in recent years, but it should not be used as a legal basis for anything, not just because of caching, ad blocking, JavaScript blocking, and numerous demographic properties (technical people tend to block trackers; the attributes thus vary considerably). The sites in question, lean sites which are frequented by people who subscribe to RSS feeds, target a niche of technical people or people associated with particular activities, organisations etc. All in all, the premise of this point merits scrutiny and serves to show lazy interpretation of the sites’ reach, based on fashionable ‘webservices’ run by private companies.
III. The assertion that “Techrights website uses analytics” is manifestly false. Techrights has log files (for Apache server, i.e. the software that processes and also manages a dynamic queue of page requests; it receives queries and then delivers the respective pages as required) and those are rotated daily, then permanently deleted after 2 weeks. The rotation ensures privacy and better compatibility with EU GDPR – something that both sites have long supported, even out in the open. There is no processing of log data except a scan of log files at the end of every day (this has only been done since January or February 2024 because code was implemented to show popular articles). It is patently untrue and overambitious to assert that the site a) knows how many people accessed articles published last year and b) has access to such data. Both sites’ privacy policy was published when EU GDPR laws came into effect, stating that within weeks all data gets deleted, for good, and will never get shared or processed anywhere. This practice of log-shredding goes several decades back. It is not even new. This helps secure and protect the dignity of readers, whose ideology tends to value such a policy. To challenge such a policy would be to undermine not only the site and its authors but also the expectations of its audience. Both sites habitually speak about the importance of privacy in a well-functioning democracy, where wannabe dictators can otherwise profile and impunitively punish people based on what they read, write, or even merely think (the latter can be loosely deduced based on the former). Accessing of logs with impunity would serve no purpose other than to discredit the sites, harming their reputation as the Claimant very much wishes and wished all along. Privacy is on the one hand demanded by the Claimant, but on the other hand the Claimant also demands access to data that isn’t available, due to privacy. The Claimant cannot have it both ways. Such contradictions or contradictory demands aren’t in the interest of the Claimant.
IV. The site does not do - and never bothered with - Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) – a notorious practice strongly condemned by the site for a whole range of reasons. It’s not particularly interested in - and never really targeted - search engines, which are by their very nature (and their inherent business model) censorious and vengeful. So-called ‘search’ providers delist and derank sites/pages based on criteria outside the auditable controls of democracy and established law, usually based on commercial objectives, irrespective of relevance, accuracy, and the well-being of users. So the site barely cares about search engines and it never really did. The lion’s share of its traffic - since its inception in 2006 - comes from RSS feeds, so to obsess over rankings in search engines such as Google would be to intentionally overlook or mis-frame intent, as if the articles were composed or headlines worded to cause harm by search engines rather than to inform their regulars’ pairs of eyes (actual readers, not Web spiders/crawlers), who rely on efficiency-enhancing syndication tools (akin to subscribing to a particular site of interest as if it was a magazine/daily newspaper). Both sites moreover have no presence at all in social media sites, and that’s by intention and by design, which further affirms a commitment to accuracy rather than clickbait. To paint the matter as an intentional campaign of “sabotage” – or inter alia tarnish a name through some foreign, third-party search engine – is to deeply misunderstand the sites and how they work. They do not rely on search engines at all. In fact, perhaps less than 1% of the traffic comes from search engines, pending an actual analysis/scrutiny (which the Defendants certainly refrain from doing as it would impinge upon readers’ dignity). The legal action is sadly trying to rattle long-held principles, impinging on every reader’s rights as an individual. The Defendants would rightly hesitate to let the Claimant alter the longstanding policy, under the false supposition of guilt or a presumption of culpability. Caution needs to be exercised, bearing in mind the true inertia of a 3-year campaign to harm the sites with legal threats (not acted upon at all until this past spring). Spectacularly, the very action taken against the site in the name of “morality” seeks to make them less moral, mostly by imposing unreasonable demands on them. █