The Met uses Official Secrets Acts to force The Guardian to reveal its sources.

The Met uses Official Secrets Acts to force the Guardian to reveal its sources.

www.guardian.co.uk

The Metropolitan police are seeking a court order under the Official Secrets Act to make Guardian reporters disclose their confidential sources about the phone-hacking scandal.

In an unprecedented legal attack on journalists' sources, Scotland Yard officers claim the act, which has special powers usually aimed at espionage, could have been breached in July when reporters Amelia Hill and Nick Davies revealed the hacking of Milly Dowler's phone. They are demanding source information be handed over.

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Now the Met, who should be praising The Guardian for bringing this scandal to light, a scandal which involved its own officers, now want to know how and where they got their info..and if they paid one of the police on the Milly Dowler case for it..

For me, this Murdoch using his influence to turn the situation on its head.
Attack is the best form of defence.
They O.S.A has only been used once before against a journalist 11 years ago, and it was thrown out of court.
I feel Murdoch is putting pressure on names on his "these people owe me favors" list, and from now on will hound and try to destroy anything in connection with his case & he has powerful friends to do it, because not everyone can call on friends to use the O.S.A

www.guardian.co.uk
(visit the link for the full news article)

reply to post by andy1972


Hacking? Did I hear hacking? Maybe MI6 thinks it could be on the trail of Anonymous. Hehe. Three possibilities here;

1) the reporters refuse (as they should) and go to jail (as they shouldn't)

2) the reporters comply and stay out of jail.

3) the court refuses to issue the court order (as they should refuse)

#3 seems like the least likely these days. Not sure what the laws in the UK are. I know most reporters live in fear of the libel laws.

Anyone from the UK who can fill us in on UK laws concerning sources?

S+F OP. This is important to all our futures. Hope this thread takes off.

reply to post by andy1972


Mods please delete this post. Thumb spazzed and double clicked the mouse. Sorry.

Hacking? Did I hear hacking? Maybe MI6 thinks it could be on the trail of Anonymous. Hehe. Three possibilities here;

1) the reporters refuse (as they should) and go to jail (as they shouldn't)

2) the reporters comply and stay out of jail.

3) the court refuses to issue the court order (as they should refuse)

#3 seems like the least likely these days. Not sure what the laws in the UK are. I know most reporters live in fear of the libel laws.

Anyone from the UK who can fill us in on UK laws concerning sources?

S+F OP. This is important to all our futures. Hope this thread takes off.

The Official Secrets Act is meant to protect the nation by getting people to sign what is essentially a confidentiality agreement. There are many segments to the Offical Secrets Act. There is of course the military application of it, then you have the press related aspect which includes the slapping down of a D notice if and when deemed necessary and there is the civilian apsect as many civil servants have to sign it as well. So when journalists sign it not only do they have to comply with certain reporting restrictions ie being embargoed under a D Notice for some stories, but also it is a two way process, journalists agree to protect their sources as well.

For the Met to be demanding information is fundamentally wrong. This is akin to kowtowing to a Police State, we are half way there already with too many cctv cameras etc but thats a debate for another day. If the Met are so concerned with finding their bad apple they should do it themselves without resorting to twisting the arms of reporters in doing so. They can make a start by interrogating their own people. Dear me, even Inspector Lestrade could do a better job of this! (Fans of Sherlock Holmes/Sir Arthur Conan Doyle will know who i mean )

The Met can also make a start by arresting James Murdoch for it is clear he is up to his neck in this and has evidentally lied at the Parliamentary inquiry "I did not know" The hell he did'nt. And i also think the Met can get in touch with the FBI and look into what Rupert Murdoch has been doing in the USA with his paws on the US press/tv as well. Concentrate on that rather than harrasse the Guardian which had the guts to break the stoy in the first place.

What has become clear is that the hacking issue is just one part of a much wider and rather unsettling realisation of the extent of the power weilded by this organisation.
Not content with merely reporting news, the organisation is powerful enough to manufacture events and manipulate the political spectrum in order to pursue it's own, or other party's agendas, to the detriment of the people.

The subversion of politicians and democracy is enforced by it's police lapdogs, all working together in criminal activities that would see any other mere mortal sitting in a jail cell long before now. The scramble seems to be on though for damage control, but it seems a bit late in the day for that to be effective. All it will look like now to many people is the government, though it's police enforcers, trying to cover their own backsides and complicity.

Hopefully, things have gone too far already for recovery and we will see heads roll wherever the tentacles of this corporation have reached. It won't go far enough for many, as is the way with scandals such as this that encompass those at the very top of the political and corporate system, but at least it has let the mask slip enough for people to see that the rot is all around us, how high it goes, and it'll be interesting to see who gets the job of trying to make the problem "go away" in the name of political expediency.

Protecting your sources - Banned in Britain.

*Yet another one for my Banned In Britain collection. (Back when I started it, it was only cool things that were banned. A guy who had Banned in Britain stuff was cool. Now everything is banned and I'm not cool anymore.)

If it wasn't for the Guardian bringing to light the Milly Dowler hacking story, there would now be no investigation for the police as the met closed their enquiries on phone hacking in 2007, as they deemed it had been dealt with effectively. The Met needs to back off and deal with it's own internal problems.

reply to post by woodwardjnr


I agree with your comments. If the Met police had carried out a proper investigations back in 2007, instead of getting into bed with the Murdoch's then the Guardian would not have had to investigate the hacking themselves. The Met Police are trying to get back at those who exposed their officers.

The big difference between English Law, not that the Law varies between England & Wales, Scotland, & Northern Ireland, is that unlike US law which is set down in the Constitution at the top level, then Federal, State, and local variances, English Law is set by precedent. So in effect whatever the previous ruling was on a matter is the law of the land at the time. So at the moment there is no enshrined right to protect a source, because the last time it was tested in a court the Judge decided that was the interpretation of the law as it stood at that time. That is what the Police are seeking to enforce through the use of the Official Secrets Act, BUT, if the Judge decides that the right to anonymity of the source, and the right to protect the source is a valid argument then the law will effectively change the other way.

At the moment English Law is under pressure and years in favour of the person over the State are being eroded. We don't have the right to silence for instance, the presumption of guilt can be inferred from your silence. Freedom of assembly in certain areas has been removed, you can't protest anywhere where the Police say you're a threat, typically anywhere near Parliament, but it can be anywhere a senior Police office decides it is. Freedom of expression has never existed in the country, the libel law is very strong in this country, and the apparatus of State oppression will be brought to bear on anyone who upsets the political establishment. This is usually accomplished through the State controlled media, the BBC, and the State friendly media, everything owned by Murdoch, to criticise, humiliate, denigrate, and destroy the reputation of anyone causing an upset.

Notably MI5 was used to destroy the reputation of the Miner's Leader, Arthur Scargill, during the Miners Strike in the mid 80's. Love him or hate him, his reputation was damaged with stories proved to be untrue later about him having ties to the KGB, and Soviet monies to destabilise the British economy. It was effective at the time and led to the collapse of the Miners strike. The key point being that Scargill said that if the miners caved in there would be no mining industry in the UK inside 20 years, he was wrong, it didn't take 20 years serious mining effectively ended in the UK within 10 years despite virtually the entire country resting on massive seams of coal. There wasn't a sensible mothballing of the mines either, they were abandoned in such a way as to make their reopening impossible.

Freedom has been eroded in the country most recently as a consequence of the War on Terror, despite the actual credible threat to UK security being negligible, we are rapidly descending to a formal Police State that bears a resemblance to the GDR model with a Stasi like apparatus closely monitoring every aspect of social and political life.

This isn't the country for which our forefathers gave their lives to defend democracy in WWII. We are a bastardized nation bereft of freedom, democracy, altruism, and compassion. We live in a tightly controlled state with the majority of the population leading a politically and morally apathetic lifestyle. There is nothing that can be done about it because those who care are too few and too small a voice to make a difference.