Our Case is a Very Easy Win, the SLAPPs From Microsofters Were a Grave Error, and Censoring Information Won't Work (It'll Only Ever Backfire)
Censoring is what people do when they lose the argument and try to bypass an honest debate. Sort of like in People's Republic of China (PRC).
EARLIER today I explained to somebody that "Techrights is always on the side of whistleblowers, it will do its best to protect them and their interest, and the publication style strives to assist them by illuminating facts. It's expected the reaction to this will be bullying; we try to ensure the bullying backfires on the bully. It can take months before the bully realises this."
Can someone out there explain why nobody in Microsoft was arrested for these actual crimes? Are people exempted from the law when they work for Microsoft, a company that exercises control over the government and gets to tell the government who or what company to go after? A company that controls the courts and tells the country which regulators to appoint and remove (by bribing officials)?
Last year we found ourselves in a position to tell our own story as whistleblowers, including those who collectively exposed serious abuses at Microsoft (coinciding with other SLAPPs). Some truly lousy law firm (against which there are already several formal complaints) decided to SLAPP us not once but several times. Well, it is tempting to tell them that their clientele should go back to prison and leave alone people who merely mentioned the arrest and prior activities that are hugely immoral and are in the public interest. Put more crudely, they should stop working and acting for despicable people against those who merely show evidence of the despicable behaviour, which includes bullying women, strangling women, and telling women to kill themselves. There's a motif of violence and narcotics (addiction), aside from business abuses, e.g. [1, 2). In the process we filed lawsuits, belatedly, against those despicable people [1, 2] and we have hundreds upon hundreds of pages of material amassed, as eventually their efforts to suppress (censor) information will simply result in a lot more of that same information being available for everyone to read. This is work in progress:
We've only scratched the surface so far.
Of relevant here: Reporting Facts About Violence Against Women Deserves Awards, Not Frivolous Lawsuits and Threats
So far they're losing at every step. Two judges (Masters) basically ruled against them, with orders clearly favourtable to us. So the lawyers of the above-mentioned despicable people are just trying to sabotage or trip us up on minor or totally fictional points, as they always tried (and always failed). They know that it's a game they cannot win, for it will only result in further public embarrassment. Picking on some minor technical details where no real issue exists is a shallow giveaway; they don't have the truth on their side, so instead they make stuff up and are sending all the data to Microsoft, which is where the money for litigation at least partly came from. They keep sending facetious letters with a strident tone (they sent 3 such letters at the end of last month) and some of them get sent to my wife, too.
Who are these people kidding? Who are you kidding, Mr. "LLP"?
Why do you keep picking on my wife, who is clearly the victim of your client? Why do you keep pretending that my wife and I are some random people or that we're not connected? You keep referring to us like we're separated or divorced or have separate surnames (these militants keep doing so and even commit cybercrimes in the process). This is insulting and part of a repeating pattern that really gives away your thinly-veiled or closeted malice. Just because your client's marriage has collapsed does not mean you can or should project this collapse onto the woman you keep bullying and threatening, including referring to her by names she has not had for well over a decade. If you persist in cherry-picking and nitpicking non-issues (making up with quantities for unimportance, taking nearly a fortnight to do so), then we too can scrutinise the largely irrelevant and probably inadmissible material you sent our way by uploading all this material to Microsoft (a party of interest in this case) while leaking the password to Microsoft as well.
It should be noted that they don't intend to rely on actual defence of their clients' behaviour, which even resulted in actual arrest (Graveley). About 90% of the files (by volume) is just Techrights video files. The remaining 5% is about Techrights and Tux Machines pages. Then there are mailing lists or E-mail messages that have absolutely nothing to do with the Claimants (us), Defendant, or lack relevance to the case (i.e. it's irrelevant chaff; a lot of it is about Stallman, Perens, Theodore Ts'o and other "targets"). Almost everything there is - laughably enough - just some short quips from social control media sites, such as X.com (controlled by a man who does nazi salutes and is funded by Saudis). Informal communications like these don't quite make up for the volume of material amassed and collected like some copyright-infringing expedition - very much like the POCs (Particulars of Claims) that they kept sending, wherein phonebook-sized bundled were sent to us where about 80% of the material was basically our own work. No kidding.
These are charlatans. Maybe they work for a "reduced rate", but they suck... they also suck a lot of their clients' money. With no result to show...
They probably know that this is going in a really bad direction, hence the lawyer who opened both SLAPPs (frivolous cases, clearly abusive litigation) is leaving the firm. The "Junior" (Barrister) seems to be relying on boilerplate text templates to keep throwing totally irrelevant and invalid claims at people, trying to make up with quantity for a total lack of quality, in effect increasing the cost associated with putting together a Defence. This is highly abusive. The goal here is to blackmail people, telling them it'll cost more to respond to (defend) a bunch of ludicrous allegations than to settle on unfavourable terms. The US Prosecutor who did this to Aaron Swartz got blasted for doing this. But it was too late for Mr. Swartz, whose history/legacy is being distorted by self-serving oligarchs even 12 years after his death. He's posthumously abused for marketing.
But anyway, as we put it back in February, this is what happens "When the Business Goal is to Protect the Image of Criminals From the Mainstream Media or Free/Independent Press (at Any Cost)".
"I read a rather disturbing post on Reddit," somebody told me today. "A man hired an immigration lawyer in Florida, and paid over $10,000. The lawyer drew up all the petitions and everything with "AI", which hallucinated tons of shit that could get the lawyer and the client sanctioned. And then when the client started talking about it, the lawyer started threatening to "call the police and have him arrested for defamation" and then emailed him a thing to sign agreeing to apologize to the lawyer and take down all the reviews. The lawyer can't have the guy arrested for talking about this. There's some really bad ones out there." (They try to censor critics using threats)
Yes, indeed. They need to be named, shamed, and reported to the authorities. They cannot abuse any more people once they get disbarred (or struck off, to use the British term).
This particular firm (as mentioned above) did other things which merit being struck off. We'll write about those things in the future.
It's sad that part of the "legal industry" in the UK involves people who went to college for an English Degree and ended up bullying women (their religion probably justifies doing so; but UK law isn't based on this religion). Even some women who a decades ago spent years waiting tables end up bullying women on behalf of men who strangle women and tell them to kill themselves (some women can be as greedy as men, but they're not expected to help men attack their female victims, unless of course the greed bypassed their moral compass). They think it's moral to do this because their employer is dying and is desperate for money (losing staff), even money from several Americans (yes, different continent!) and serve Microsoft, an American company that attacks all computer users, everywhere.
Of course I could file an application to strike off what they sent my way last month, but I have better things to do with my time. Unlike the men below, I'm not some unemployed loser who made it a "life goal" to bully Roy and his wife (while living in the parents' home or some remote forest cabin). █
