Microsofters' SLAPP Censorship - Part 14 Out of 200: Men Who Strangle Women (and Worse) Trying to Force Us to Write Public Apologies to These Men
Last year: Microsoft's Serial Strangler and Matthew J. Garrett Join Forces in Trying to Gag Techrights (for Exposing Microsoft Corruption and Crimes Against Women) | Confirmed: The Two Microsofters Who Filed Two Cases Against Me Were Collaborating | Admission That a Third Party (or Parties) Funds the SLAPPs Against Techrights
Last week: This Isn't About Justice, It's About Censorship | Gross Misuse of UKGDPR to Protect the Agenda of American Back Doors (Mass Surveillance)
Reposted 4 days ago by Matthew Garrett's spouse, Isis:
"Serious Harm" was the theme of yesterday's part. To repeat: "We previously did a mini series about "Serious Harm" in relation to us, to most computer users, and to the spouse of the Claimant, culminating in this overview in January."
I also said, "tomorrow [that's today] I'd like to revisit some of the things which this abusive firm did to us and tried to compel us to do (under duress, threats, and smugness/arrogance that comes with "but you're not a lawyer!")."
For those who never before saw a SLAPP, they basically make many demands, including stuff like a forced/faked "apology" and removal without due process. Like with patent trolls and copyright trolls, many recipients quietly surrender. We did not.
First of all, consider what they did and who for. It mostly started in 2021 (the SLAPPs); the abuse against me by these people began in 2012 because I had criticised Microsoft-controlled boot. The employer (paymaster) was GAFAM or some American company. It has been 14 years!
They would not leave me alone. They kept coming to my own platform to pick on me. I did not approach them, they approached me.
They could simply accept they had done bad things for their employer.
Instead they would portray the Microsoft critic as the real problem, whereas those paid 6-figure salaries to promote Microsoft are somehow the victims.
One reader from Japan wrote to tell me about what they're doing here. This week he wrote:
Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim And Offender
from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARVO
DARVO (an acronym for "Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender") is a reaction that perpetrators of wrongdoing, such as abusers or sexual offenders, may display in response to being held accountable for their behavior. Research indicates that it is a common manipulation strategy of psychological abusers.
Process
DARVO is a tactic used by a perpetrator to avoid accountability for their actions. As the acronym suggests, DARVO commonly involves these steps:
1. The perpetrator denies the harm or abuse ever took place.
2. When confronted with evidence, the perpetrator then attacks the person that they had harmed, or are still harming. The attacker may also attack the victim's family or friends.
3. Finally, the perpetrator claims that they were or are actually the victim in the situation, thus reversing the positions of victim and offender. It often involves not just playing the victim but also victim blaming.
If you think that's bad, then wait, it gets worse. It's not even about "(in)secure boot" anymore. Aside from vicious attacks on my mother and on my wife there were attacks on other women.
In a nutshell, they threaten to put me and my family in prison because 1) they don't know what IRC is; 2) they don't know what Gemini is; 3) they don't like factual articles I wrote about them; 4) they want to stop me writing any more factual articles about what they did to me. Who's "they"? A) the abusive law firm, which lies to several judges, breaks rules etc.; B) the man who was in prison in America for strangling American women (he worked for Microsoft when he was arrested); C) the man in America whose American spouse says is a "rapist" (as recently as days ago; not the first time).
To make matters worse, they are doxing family members, engaging in social engineering to try to hijack our community sites, they attack my wife whose abuse online was confirmed by a High Court judge, and they strive to delete articles about computer security and national security. At the moment they try to compel British taxpayers to shoulder the costs of Americans who attack women while they're also attacking journalists in Britain!
Incredible, right?
"As you can imagine," I told someone this week, "my hands are full with GAFAM bullies at the moment, so I tend to be behind E-mail etc."
One day we'll go through all the E-mails they sent to us and properly cover how incels from America spent like a million dollars attacking a humble couple in another continent. Why would Americans send over 75 KG of legal papers to a small home in Manchester? They've already admitted that a third party helps fund this.
Here are my replies (not the official ones from our barrister) to some of the most outrageous demands they made 24 months ago:
24. An appeal for injunction leaps past the reasonable test which is, was the material published truthful and fair? Or, was an actual law broken or does the Claimant file a court case in pursuit of censorship, with action taken prior to fact (or actual judgment)? The Defendants both deplore such a censorious effort, as it would set a highly dangerous precedent not just to media in the UK but also every blogger in England and Wales, maybe every social media users (that would be millions of people). Microblogging and blogging are not new concepts. They go over two decades back and the idea that sanctions can be introduced by anyone who feels displeased puts at risk Free Speech at large. Weaponising laws that exist for an entirely different purpose (for example, exposing an identity of a vulnerable victims) would be misuse or misapplication. If the Claimant is certain that something is not correct, he can seek a correction, not a bulk takedown. The latter would be both immoral and a case of misapplying laws.
25. The privacy laws are being inadequately roped in; it is part of an effort to weaponise unrelated laws to impose censorship, based on patently false or highly deficient assumptions, laid out earlier in the Extended Defence. A democratic society with checks and balance relies on robust media that is resistant to censorship by means of mere accusations of “privacy violations” (where none exist). The Defendants would like to caution upfront that this “low-profile” case would have severe ramifications for large publishers if an injunction was permitted to proceed. Wide-ranging accusations of GDPR violations must be assessed by specialised-in-privacy authorities, not presumed true because somebody paid a lawyers’ fee or paid a barrister to put together a bundle with recycled texts (for a shallow impression of magnitude, or of great scale while basics like the client’s name remain uncorrected). About 80% of the text, not counting the recycled texts in the claims, was in fact the Defendants’ own articles. It seems absurd that the Claimant would use the Defendants own words, in bulk, to make the case a lot more expensive. What’s more, as noted before many times, it seems doubtful someone really bothered reading the recycled articles because they are being distorted, misinterpreted, misattributed etc. If shortcuts were taken to add pages to the claims (making it a lot bulkier), that should be considered a factor in ill intent. Concise claims could instead be provided and then responded to in a timely fashion, taking mere days rather than months.
Regarding what the Claimant herein claims:
1. As explained many times in the Extended Defence, the Claimant did his fair share of libeling, but he is certain that being “first to file” (or sending several pre-action letters in a period of 3 years) makes the Defendants a “lesser victim”. The Defendants wanted to file for counter-action, but that would likely result in even higher cost and more time. Short of reform (of libel law for instance), the main benefactors will be the legal (litigation) industry. SLAPP-type laws were proposed by various lawmakers (worldwide) for this reason. The Claimant’s partner was quick to latch on and exploit such laws in California after getting sued for defamation (Todd v. Lovecruft or Luvcruft).
2. No privacy violations were committed, nor were demonstrated to have been committed. The mere claims from the Claimant’s lawyers (to whom he is a client) do not constitute an actual court judgment, and moreover they’re not balanced as the Defendants did not yet have a chance to present their side or even to be heard. This case really oughtn’t have anything to do with privacy; to frame it as a matter of privacy would be almost as absurd as using the copyright or trademark brush, e.g. asserting that quoting the Claimant’s tweets is a copyright infringement or merely mentioning his name is harmful to his “brand”. Different laws exist for different scenarios and if the Claimant feels unhappy about the publications, seeking alternative laws by which to paint them as ‘unlawful’ would serve no purpose other than as a safety net (in case the libel claims are thrown out, as they ought to be).
3. This is basically an attempt to gag and censor the Defendants, hoping to prevent them soliciting testimonies, or the Defendants finding other victims of defamation (as usual, by the Claimant). It is important to have more people testifying that they too have been victimised by the Claimants’ antics. Those antics really need to be brought to an end; if any attempt to subject people to accountability resulted in a frivolous lawsuit, society would be worse off (collectively).
4. This is a demand for censorship of material that isn’t just publicly available but was published by the claimant about himself. The common theme here is censorship or, in other words, the Claimant’s attempt to claw back what he already said in public. In reality, or in practice, removing something that was published in the past is feasible, but removing allusions, repostings (reproductions) or press coverage of those past statements isn’t possible, nor should it be. A removal by oneself of what one said does not result in the right to mandate others doing the same. This was tested in courts in the past the the public’s right to know supersedes attempts at reputation laundering.
5. This presumptuously if not arrogantly assumes that the Claimant can win the case – a court case he said he would pursue for a “nominal fee” (his words) because it would be “funny”. Pursuing such a case to exhaustion would exhaust even the means of a millionaire. The Defendants’ legal representative told frankly that this kind of case, owing to the number of claims contained in the Particulars of Claim, would easily cost over a million pounds, possibly for each side (hence, over a million combined). It does not make any sense to pursue a case at such a considerable cost if the claimed amount is about 10 times smaller than the cost of the case itself.
6. This is another effort to censor articles, including an articles’ set composed by a British woman who had been subjected to overt abuse and was advised by British Police that it is OK to write about her experience, as long as that was based on facts. It would be unreasonable and most certainly a prospect for bad (unfavourable in the public view) press if women who suffered abused were censored, whereas those who abused them remain jubilant and unpunished.
Regarding injunctions, the Judge deemed the abuse as real, but she focused on who this abuse can be attributed to and rejected the finger-pointing at Garrett (for the sockpuppet accounts anyway). █