Microsofters' SLAPP Censorship - Part 13 Out of 200: Abuse of Process to Make False Accusations of UKGDPR Violations
From the decision uploaded this past summer to
judiciary.uk (Brett Wilson LLP deemed 'guilty' of
having misused UKGDPR in censorship-by-litigation
attempts):
Last summer (familiar barrister and same lawyers): UK High Court Blasts Brett Wilson LLP for Misusing "GDPR" After Failed Efforts to Censor Critics Using 'Libel' Claims
The past couple of parts [1, 2] reminded readers that UKGDPR had been misused in an effort to affect morale and attack my wife and I. This was done twice in the same year - the second time being for the Serial Strangler from Microsoft. This set of reckless barristers and this law firm are 'repeat offenders' in this regard and in Microsoft's Graveley & Garrett v Schestowitz & Schestowitz (they all along used those two in conjunction and sometimes even lost track of who's who; they admitted under sworn oath that there was coordination and - inter alia - admitted they had lied to several judges in the High Court).
Documented below is my own 2024 response (not the barrister's; he cited laws and gave a technically solid counterargument) to misuse of "UKGDPR" and attempts to induce harm by frivolous claims thrown our way. At a later stage we'll present the text the notes below respond to, as showing in conjunction what the barrister did for Graveley and for Garrett will expose him as a low-grade 'copypasta' artist, who overcharges to re-use templates with neither care nor regard for underlying laws. The only way to stop such abuse it to illuminate it in the public, as that way there will be scrutiny like what happened last summer in the Vince case (the Judge deserves to know they repeatedly engage in such abuses of process, it's not a "one-off"). This series serves the national/public interest by shedding light on obvious abuse which the SRA would not even bother looking into.
15. Regarding “CLAIM IN DATA PROTECTION”, this entire section is exceedingly frivolous because, as noted in the initial (very short) response to the Court, at no point were privacy laws breached. One might get the impression that the Complainant (Claimant) recognises the lack of “teeth” in the libel claim and seeks to compensate for it with an even weaker “safety net” strategy – a fallback cushion of sorts. That the barrister was willing to go ahead of it is rather telling, given his prior experience dealing with cases of this nature. That the law firm chose to throw these allegations in phonebook-sized legal documents at a female of ethnic minority is also revealing. It sometimes feels like the principal intent was to scare her and get an easy, quick, unfavourable settlement (for an arbitrary sum of £9,000 with a deadline/time limit), not a real course of justice. In fact, the law firm sought to “settle” over such utterly weak claims for a fee 10+ times smaller than what was posited in the court. Was this part of the “funny” plan? To induce psychological pressure on a vulnerable woman, hoping it would cause marital conflict and maybe result in an impulsive, undeserved out-of-court settlement? If so, how can that possibly improve the Claimant’s image? It seems revealing to the Claimant’s solicitor has a pattern of seeking online censorship and settlements rather than actual legal battles, which aren’t just expensive but may actually result in losses (cases that are meritless don’t advance much). So reputation seems very remote from the real goal.
16. This is easily falsifiable in the sense that, as noted earlier and as posted publicly in both Techrights and Tux Machines (when GDPR came into effect), no access data is retained by the site for more than a couple of weeks (in case of DDoS attacks, in which case access logs can help analyse and mitigate the spontaneous, sporadic attacks; the first DDoS attack in more than 6 months happened on the 5th of June, i.e. days ago) and every bit of material published by the site is publicly accessible, not purchased. Artistic and creative interpretation, wherein the Defendants are portrayed as “data controlled”, would serve well in stand-up comedy but not in a sensible debate over what constitute privacy. Data brokers violate people’s privacy every minute of the day and here we are delving into questions like, does a screenshot of a public (available to all) “tweet” constitutes a privacy violation? Shall the need arise, the Defendant can find the public URL of each tweet cited, or log files for the respective IRC chats (those chat rooms or channels are publicly logged; this is stated upfront to all who enter). If those tweets got deleted by the Claimant later, that still does not change the fact that, at the time of the Defendants’ publication, those tweets were public (visible to all like a postcard, not a letter inside an envelope), i.e. openly available to all, and constituted the poster revealing information about himself. This risks a “slippery slope” scenario or a dangerous precedent wherein any time a British politician tweets something (sometimes foolishly so) and is then cited by the British press, he or she would be able to sue that press under claims of “GDPR”. Over time such frivolous legal actions would simply discredit the rule of law and delegitimise otherwise-important privacy-centric safeguards. This cannot be stressed strongly enough. Privacy rules are for privacy purposes, not for censorship purposes. As the adage goes, transparency is for the powerful (those in position of great power or public office), privacy is for the vulnerable.
17. This seems like an almost redundant reminder that, to put it succinctly, the Defendants reside in the UK and are thus subjected to British laws. That much is simple for anyone to understand, so it needn’t be repeated ad infinitum.
18. This part serves no purpose other than to interject legalese and thus lure the Defendants into seeking highly expensive legal advice. While it is possible to look up with Article 5(1), Article 9 and Article 10 say, it is rather obvious those are applicable but still not infringed for the reasons set forth herein and earlier as well, namely that no private data was shared or misused or even misinterpreted/doctored. Embarrassing old tweets (or other social media anyone can access, even without creating or logging into an account) cannot be nuked forever using claims of “privacy”, especially if or when there is public interest in preserving them. This was tested in courts worldwide in the past, especially because politicians tried to engage in revisionism and change how the past was perceived. Techrights covered this very topic numerous times in the more distant past. There are close to 45,000 articles in Techrights, spanning or ranging from 2006 to 2024; British ministers and politicians expressed support and gratitude for some of the material published in the site, which was also cited a lot in the investigative press, European Parliament and so on. Techrights wrote a great deal about privacy and its main author, the First Defendant herein, is very familiar with the issues, which he articulated every week for well over a decade. Similarly, regarding SLAPP, Techrights posts links on this subject almost every week. Anti-SLAPP laws are strongly advocated by Techrights and the Claimant is happy to embrace those only when those suit him (or his partner). “He is abusing the system and thus is guilty of SLAPP,” one associate in the site has noted.
19. This alludes (in many words, which could certainly benefit from better concision) to “the Personal Data”. When someone who harasses and defames people in public tweets (or similarly, toots in Mastodon) writes things in poor taste, then showing those things constitutes an essential part of defence or a Right of Reply. In a nutshell, “the Personal Data” becomes data of public interest, serving to elucidate a pattern of tasteless behaviour. The Defendants strongly object, in the most stern form of objection, to this framing as “data processing” something that’s intended to help shield from further online abuse. The term “data controller” is a misfit; perhaps it was grafted from some prior (unrelated) legal case as a sort of template, then interpolated in an ad hoc fashion to make a modest couple living in a small home in Manchester seem like they run a spying-savvy network or Facebook-like enterprise. Twisting or portraying a couple that strongly believes in privacy like fiends who violate other people’s privacy is unfair, even insincere.
20. This one, if it actually had any legal basis, would threaten every single news outlet (paper, site, radio etc.) in the UK. The comical (or potentially enraging, depending on one’s mood) assertion that citing and/or showing public “tweets” (or “toots” in the Twitter clone called Mastodon) “constituted the processing of the Personal Data” serves to imply – as sort of leap of faith – that taking a screenshot of ~100 characters of text is “processing” rather than merely capturing what anyone can see and many people already saw. Put another way, what the Claimant and his Barrister do here is a phenomenal attack on all the British media, both large and small (blogs or microblogs). It would not be hard to summon third parties to deposit amici curiae ( lit. 'friend of the court’) in the Defendants’ support, seeing they have a stake in the outcome. It is beyond astounding that the Claimant, a former employee of Google, would resort to this. He worked for the world’s most notorious privacy infringer.
20.1 This now resorts to another confused framing wherein it’s not an issue of capturing statements (screenshots) but rather “the way the data were [sic] processed”. The Claimant did not bother providing any explanation whatsoever as to how that was done. e.g. a statement taken out of context or intentionally distorted (even deliberately doctored by editing text in the screenshot). Above all, saying that “frequency of Publications was inherently unfair processing of the Claimants’ personal data” implies that publishing “too much” or “too fast” is somehow a privacy issue. In reality, the publications’ frequency (for that particular topic) was typically once per week, if not less often. That’s hardly fast. The Defendants intentionally limited the scope and focus, allotting a weekly slot for this issue in order to keep on focusing on the real issues, not some personal grudges. At the time Techrights did a lot of exclusive reporting on corruption in Europe, mass layoffs, and many other topics, even pension fraud at the Defendants’ past employer. This past week Techrights published 144 articles (in 7 days) and in the month of June even more than 200 in a week. Typically, less than 1% of the publications in Techrights devote time to dealing with the harassment against the Defendants. In the case of Tux Machines, perhaps a dozen pages talk about this issue, out of a grand total of about 200,000 pages. The Defendants believe that the Claimant is reaching deep down for the bottom of the barrel, scraping whatever baseless narrative can made the victims of abuse seem unreasonable, unfair, vindictive, and obsessed. The Defendants assert that it is trivial to show (and not questionable) that the Claimant ‘parked’ in the IRC network and channels of Techrights for nearly half a decade, 24 hours a day, every day of the year. It is not hard to see who has an obsessive-compulsive behaviour, seeking to cling onto whatever can “pluck down” or generally harass the site’s chief editors, whom the Claimant had repeatedly slandered for years already. The Defendants say they have strong reasons to believe that the Claimant, having queried the land registry through his legal representative, misused the information gathered to ‘dox’ personal information about the First Defendant’s family into the Techrights IRC channel (using another alias or suckpuppet, perhaps a proxy). That would constitute yet another example of the ongoing harassment and abuse, which extends to one’s family members (in no way connected to Techrights, none whatsoever).
20.2 This is an example of number/section dropping by the Barrister, bothering not at all to explain what Article 5(A)(b) says. The Defendants believe this is an effort to saddle the Defendants with legal fees, daring them to get an expensive barrister to also – similarly – trawl or scrape through a very lengthy document and pay a hefty fee for that. It is disturbing that a response to an attack, in this particular case an attack by a man on a woman, is being conveniently framed by the man as an infringement of his privacy. By those standards, any inquest or investigation of social issues would be impeded by concerns about privacy, wrongly asserting the supremacy of privacy over the safety of women. Again, in this particular case, all the data provided is public and accessible to everyone (none of this involved any attempts to access private records).
20.3 This one uses some words, not just a reference, and it is untrue that there was “processing [...] of Personal Data” (this data was made public by the very same person it is about) and it was not inadequate to capture it because it served to show characteristic traits and moral deficiencies, bolstering the assertion the Claimant is morbidly envious and engages in excessive, obsessive-compulsive behaviour, cyberstalking people in an effort to catch them making a mistake (or causing them to make a mistake). Either that or, perhaps, ‘doxing’ them to their employer, jeopardising their livelihood to cause further misery. On numerous occasions he, the Claimant, publicly admitted seeking professional help for psychological reasons and some of the deeds suggest sociopathic tendencies, based on documented symptoms. If the Claimant needs professional mental help, perhaps the issue is the Claimant himself, rather than those whom he seeks to interfere with.
20.4 This is mere repetition of the “libel” section, albeit this time “wrapped” around in the veil or the veneer or “privacy” (which is inadequate as the two concepts are separable). From a legal standpoint, this is highly problematic. In fact, some legal professionals would strongly contest this strategy, which simply tries to conflate embarrassing information with “privacy violations”. The Right to Be Forgotten, which many nations reject, has attracted much-deserved criticism and there is resourceful, ample literature on this topic. In short, people saying that something is “illegal” because it is “old” or “irrelevant” goes again the core tenets of Free Speech, i.e. against many Constitutional Laws that have long prevailed in many countries. In some cases, the public flagging of historically (as per their track record) problematic people can be deemed a desirable thing. That can help people know who to avoid and, by avoiding them, they can lessen the change of further (future) conflicts. The Claimant trying to salvage his reputation by going after those who challenge it is a vendetta, not a sincere pursuit of justice.
20.5 This simply states that the Claimant demanded censorship of publications and the Defendants declined, as they saw no basis upon which this was justified or would be justified (unless evidence was supplied to contradict what had been published). Declining to respond or to remove a publication is in no way an indication of culpability. No privacy laws had been breached and all publications remained intact, based on some legal consultation as well (the limits of the law and the limits of speech as well recognised and have long been recognised in this context). The Claimant had already sent similar legal threats from lawyers, going back 3 years to 2021. Questions can - and maybe will - be raised against this frivolous and excessive use of pre-action letters. The Claimant even changed his legal firm, probably not informing the new one of prior pre-action letters that he had sent via another firm. This is problematic for a wide range of reasons. The First Defendant’s sole uncle is a high-profile court judge, so he’s generally aware of his fundamental legal rights and is difficult to ‘trick’ or mislead about such basic legal rights, whereas the Second Defendant is easier to manipulate and scare. Bad faith actors would target the latter person, seeking to bypass a person’s calm or composure. In fact, there was likely no reason whatsoever to add the name (and wrong, old name) of the Second Defendant other than to attempt to cause conflict and strife.
21. This is perhaps one of the most ludicrous parts of the Particulars of Claim because a) the term “data subject” implies that the Defendants living in a small home are some sort of data-collecting agency (quite the contrary; they write a great deal in favour of privacy and promote software to that effect) and b) allusions to “Criminal Data” equate an ordinary function of any media outlet to a “crime”. Up until recently there was a very hearted debate in the UK court about whether exposing evidence of a crime can itself constitute a crime. As of late June, the case dealing with the matter (Julian Assange) was concludes with a flight to Saipan and then to Australia. It would be ludicrous to insinuate that someone exposing bad behaviour (against oneself) is the culpable party or allow the matter to escalate to lawfare, wherein prolonged legal disputes simply exhaust the financial means of one party, no matter who the source of the problem actually was.
22. This asserts that the Claimant “suffered damage and distress”. We regret that foolish public remarks and generally poor conduct resulted in him suffering damage and distress. Maybe an introspection and change of behaviour would have prevented this. But it is perhaps too late now. Many people already suffered. Many an apology to them is overdue. █