What happens when someone subpoenas Cloudflare to unmask a blogger? This... A former deputy mayor in the UK has subpoenaed Cloudflare in the US to discover the identity of an anonymous British political blogger. Initially, the network infrastructure giant gave the blog owner, who pays Cloudflare to optimize their WordPress site, until the end of this week to file a legal challenge in the States …
There is no federal anti-SLAPP law, so it would come down to whether the jurisdiction in which blogger resides has one. My wild and unsubstantiated guess is that a blogger writing about Tamworth is unlikely to live somewhere with strong anti-SLAPP protections.
However, the SPEECH act (28 USC 4101) may possibly be relevant, although I doubt it for much the same reasons: the Federal court likely won't be issuing judgments in the case, only supporting discovery. So while SPEECH would protect a US blogger improbably writing about Tamworth from having to pay damages, it won't help a UK one.
In general, courts don't particularly like anonymity, so while Joe-the-blogger may be able to shield his identity, it requires having third-parties willing to fight for that, and that's not Cloudflare (although in many cases Cloudflare may not have the definitive information, just email addresses and possibly just PayPal information.
The strongest defense here is probably substantial truth combined with Mike Masnick's Streisand Effect: ridicule the feck out of the politician for being a feeble dweeb!
In entirely related news, looks like Liz Truss has a big sad that someone has called her not terribly smart.
> Liz Truss has a big sad that someone has called her not terribly smart.
That name rings a bell. Isn't she the woman that crashed the economy?
BTW, how likely is it that she could actually win any legal action against Starmer or anyone else for accusing her of that?
My guess- and it's purely an IANAL's guess- would be that it's unlikely, particularly as someone in the position of PM has a high level of responsibility and this would be expected to come with the territory, particularly as there would be a strong chilling effect on political discussion if this weren't the case and she won.
You crashed the economy, suck it up like everyone else had to suck up the consequences of your overzealous incompetence.
I'm aware of her "cease and desist" warning- that's why I made the comment in the first place.
Of course, that in itself is little more than a formal legal warning- one she's attempting to use as a threat to shut up criticism of her incompetence- and says little about the likelihood of the success of any "real" legal action or an actual court case.
The issue with UK defamation is that legally it's a crapshoot. Lots depends on what evidence is presented, the mood of the judge, the weather forecast, etc. Starmer, as a former DPP, knows this all to well.
The thinking behind the threats is that Truss is gets her name in the papers, and if it goes to trial, the whole thing gets lots more airtime for someone who should be consigned the waste-lettuce-bin of history.
I suspect the strongest defense Starmer has is that he could claim to be acting as the PM and therefore the "shadow" of Parliamentary Privilege (if not the whole enchilada of that protection), and so things he says in the context of his job as PM that are related to his job cannot be defamatory. Yeah, I know: echoes of a recent US Supreme Court opinion. Of course, that's not the only defense: "substantial truth" also applies, as does the "political rhetoric" doctrine meaning that the hypothetical man on the Clapham omnibus could not possibly believe what a politician says anyway, so Starmer couldn't have damaged Truss....
Trump and Del Boy?
". ..pretending to be much more wealthy than he really is, as he tries to associate with the upper classes despite being obviously underclass.
...is a compulsive liar, particularly to women, customers, policemen and even his family and doctors"
Trump or Del Boy?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Del_Boy
At the very least, they share first and last name initials!
Donald Trump
Derek Trotter
"ride into town in a Tamworth Pig "
Two things do I understand from this - Trump riding into town in the company of a pig, and secondly, Trump riding into town in a pig. Both appear equally likely but either way I think the RSPCA would have a good case for gross abuse of a pig and deliberate contamination of a pig with agent orange ...
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
Probably, but it's not known until it's really tested.
Yes, if the speech actually occurs in the country, but the first amendment doesn't allow you to print libelous or defamatory information. It seems to my mind that the plaintiff needs to prove the content was false and defamatory and get a UK judge to approve the subpoena to a foreign country before being able to identify the defendent in a case like this, but most law "logic" makes my head hurt, and I don't know what history there is with this case in UK court. The article doesn't even mention that he's raised it in UK court at all. Comments on a public figure relating to their fitness for office are specifically protected by the FA, after court decisions, but they still have to be factual statements OR clearly opinions.
I'm assuming the reason this subpoena can work here is because Cloudflare is based in the US and has servers in the US which cache the blog's content. I'd assume they have servers in other countries with the same content but where it would be harder to get a court to force the release of the information. The registration of the domain has most of the information redacted but shows it's registered with a Saint Kitts & Nevis address, which doesn't mean a whole lot. The site owner may live there or the UK or somewhere else, with their primary site server who knows where, and Cloudflare is just caching the data in various places, but since they have a contract with the owner and cache it in the US, they can be subpoenaed for that owner's information.
In England (not the same as the UK), the blogger needs to prove that the statements are true, or alternatively convince the jury that the statements are not libelous[1].
[1] As an example of the latter, if I accused the Deputy Mayor of drinking tea, that might not be true, but people wouldn't think any less highly of him for doing that, so it isn't libelous. If I accused him of making his tea in a microwave[2], that would be libelous, and I would need to provide evidence to back up the claim.
[2] Just to be clear, this is a purely hypothetical example. I have absolutely no idea who he is or what his drinking or tea-making habits are.
"Cloudflare is based in the US and has servers in the US"
That's probably what this is about. Find out who the guy is using the US court, then drag him through the hot coals in a UK court over the libel or whatever.
That being said, there is a clear concern here if one must go wading through the mire of a foreign legal system to identify who - in your country - is insulting you.
Yes… with caveats wrt jurisdiction. In this case the defendant is in the US, so even if the plantiff is not there’s an, ahem, ‘jurisdictional nexus’. Note that there is... some argument as to the exact definition of 'jurisdictional nexus', and this case may add to the argument. Unleash the attack attorneys, and stand back out of blood splatter range. And get out the popcorn.
Yes, which is why the blogger is invited to argue why Cloudflare shouldn't hand over the info.
Note the only thing being litigated in the US is "whether Cloudflare should give up the name". That's all. Questions and defences about libel, arguments about free speech - all of that stuff falls firmly under English jurisdiction, assuming the blogger is in England.
Wrong answer.
There are no such things as inalienable rights anywhere and specifically not for freedom of speech. Not even in the US - SoMe myths to the contrary.
By definition rights can only be granted within a legislative framework of a country and by that definition they are always limited in some way, whether absolutists want that accept it or not.
Nope. My original answer applies. The founding philosophy is irrelevant without it being enforced by a legislative framework from some kind of political entity with the power to enforce those rights.
Rights do not exist without the power to enforce respect of them - that's reality.
Anything else is wishful thinking.
Remove a government and its enforcement aparatus (police/military) from the equation, and see how long your right to not have someone kick you in the junk lasts.
Inalienable rights are a wonderful concept, but a concept is all they are without a way to enforce those rights.
My full reply to this keeps getting deleted for no apparent reason since the site doesn't notify anyone about it, but yes, the FA applies to any speech that occurs in US territory, regardless of the citizenship of the speaker/writer. Discussions about a public figure and their fitness for office have been explicitly allowed by courts, but the speech must still be true or clear opinion, so false statements are still not protected.
Likely the only reason this is even coming up is because CloudFlare has servers in the US which cache the site's content, and other countries where such servers exist would tell the plaintiff to get bent if he tried to get the information there, including in the UK. I don't think he should be able to get the information until he's shown that the content was actually false and defamatory, or likely to be, in a UK court where it actually matters, but the Internet provides these opportunities to weasel around such things. The site ownership is registered in Saint Kitts and Nevins, so yet an entirely different country is involved if that's where the owner lives.
No body seems to have provided any evidence that the alleged offence (writing the blog) occured in the UK. If it didn't then what jurisprudence does the UK governent have to hear the case? And since libel has to be published, if the alleged libeler typed a letter in the UK which was published in the US, would the UK have jurisprudence? If it does not then what is the difference between the keystrokes being made in the UK, but the upload to a server occurring outside the UK, such as Russia, Albania, or, maybe the US to name but three honorable and trustworthy states...?
The deeper legal bit though is that London is a favourite place for libel jurisdiction shopping. It's very hard to defend against libel actions in the UK.
A prominent science journalist spent years fighting a libel action from a bunch of homeopathy practitioners because his claims that it was q load of bollocks was libelous.
So if the USA is prepared to hand over internet records to libel cases in London, the whole world is going to start suing TPFKAT/Meta/wibble-pling etc there
Depends on your definition of "won". Simon Singh eventually prevailed in the courts. However he had many months of stress and the huge financial costs of preparing his defence. [It took ~2 years to resolve the lawsuits.] IIUC he's been unable to recover his costs from the quacks who sued him.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Chiropractic_Association_v_Singh
The deeper legal bit though is that London is a favourite place for libel jurisdiction shopping. It's very hard to defend against libel actions in the UK.
No, it isn't.
If I say "Your an uninformed fool" upon this subject and that caused "serious harm" to your reputation and you tried to sue me for defamation in Great Britain then I could defend that on the basis of "truth" by it being factually correct, or upon the basis of it being my "honest opinion", and you'd have to prove that neither is the case, at your expense. You'd struggle on both counts, since that is basically my opinion, and it is demonstrably factually correct.
If I thought that there was any danger of my defences being eliminated then at the point that somebody actually wrote me a letter before action (a legally required step before litigation) then I can simply make an "Offer to make amends" which is to say I could retract the comment and make an apology for making said comment (with similar publicity to the original comment) and it would basically then become legally impossible to succeed in suing me.
The only way that you can end up in trouble is if you have written something defamatory and you can't prove that the defamatory statement is true (the person being presumed innocent of what you are accusing them of until you prove that it is true) and you can't prove the statement is true (because it isn't) and you then decide to refuse to accept that your talking bollocks and apologise and fight it in court, despite this being absurd. At which point most of the penalty will be a financial one; the court will make you pay for the other peoples solicitors/barristers for wasting everybodies time, as well as charging you for the courts time that you wasted.
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I assume you don't have a law degree. In fact, "shouting fire in a crowded theater" is covered by the first amendment - this is probably the most common misconception held in the U.S. about the first amendment, and has been thoroughly debunked by many lawyers in articles available on the internet. There have also been cases where the courts have shielded identity on free speech grounds, including a well publicized case eight years ago where a college professor lost a new job due to an anonymous post on PubPeer (https://retractionwatch.com/2016/12/07/pubpeer-wins-appeal-court-ruling-unmask-commenters/).
I'm going to coin Throatwarbler's Razor:
Anything an Anonymous Coward has to say regarding the law, in particular the US Constitution, can safely be disregarded without serious consideration.
Whether this razor is insufficiently broad is left as a thought exercise for the reader.
In any case, as non-lawyer myself, what I've come to understand from talking to lawyers is that almost any legal matter, especially when it comes to free speech issues, is almost certainly more nuanced and complicated than laymen appreciate. For just a taste of what that looks like, I highly recommend the Popehat Report's breakdown of just a few free speech and First Amendment issues.
...that place I've seen on road signs leading up to the junction from the M42 to the M6.
I once nearly went to Tamworth...I missed the junction. Funny story really, I was meant to head up the regular M6 to Manchester, but I missed the junction and ended up continuing along the M42. Luckily I was able to come off a junction 10, and re-enter the M42 to head back towards the M6.
Just one incorrect lane change at junction 10, and I would have definitely been in Tamworth.
That is the tale of how I narrowly avoided the M6 toll and came quite close to entering Tamworth.
I do often wonder...well not often, just this minute really...how many narrow escapes there are per day at junction 10 on the M42...I say escape, I've never been in Tamworth, it might be lovely...at the very least, based on seeing the Aldi distribution centre there and the large buildings in the industrial park at junction 10, I know that for a large businesses it must be reasonably cost effective to be there.
From the M42 J10 you would have got a second chance to avoid Tamworth by staying on the A5 until you reached the M6 again......if you failed that then you would have really been stuffed
Now J9 of the M42 really does try to funnel you onto the M6 Toll going northbound, one of the few times I had to give very forceable verbal instructions of "left Left LEFT LEFFTT!!!" to the missus when she was driving (I did apologise afterwards and she is still on speaking terms with me)
I once spent 2 hours at Tamworth station on a bank holiday* waiting for a train to take me home. I can't think of many worse places to spend 2 hours on a bank holiday.
*back in the mid-90s, when nothing opened on a bank holiday. Or maybe Tamworth had nothing to open at the time.
I can. Milton Keynes. Getting stuck there any day of the week is pretty naff. It's the only place I've been to (several times unfortunately) that feels dead no matter when you go...it's a town where you get the distinct feeling that everyone is staying inside because there is something awful, evil and downright horrifying on the streets...it's the only town on Earth that has a large population and yet no matter where you go, you feel isolated and "external" to it...kind of like being on a Star Trek away mission.
I think if Milton Keynes needed it's own anthem, it should consider the Star Trek Voyager theme tune...because you always feel lost there and it feels like you passed through a wormhole to get there somewhere around the remote M1 Toddington Space station beyond the Luton badlands.
... and interesting issues about cross-national jurisdiction, the applicability of US civil rights to non citizen/residents, treaties, and various requirements that entities doing business in a country comply with its local laws.
This is why I confine my sh-t posting to citizens within my own country.
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