Church and State blog: Royal Mail: Complaint to the CEO of Royal Mail about 'door-stepping' incidents following the loss of our employment contracts to the United States (WITH UPDATE 23/5/2017)

Friday, May 19, 2017

Royal Mail: Complaint to the CEO of Royal Mail about 'door-stepping' incidents following the loss of our employment contracts to the United States (WITH UPDATE 23/5/2017)

Our employment contracts are currently being held up at Kennedy Airport, New York. The item has been there since last Saturday. The last time Declan mailed the item to the United States on 25 February, not even the first Royal Mail collection office (Romford Mail Centre) was recorded on the track and trace report. We received the princely sum of £9.25 from Royal Mail in this morning's post to refund that postage, but we haven't been receiving letters through our letter box since Declan reported the apparent loss of the item last March. He copied Royal Mail CEO Moya Greene into this complaint to Royal Mail's Customer Service Team about these incidents of door stepping that are becoming increasingly concerning at this point in time:

For the attention of Moya Greene, Chief Executive, Royal Mail

Emma Stanton
Royal Mail Customer Service Centre

Address removed for email

19 May 2017

Dear Ms Stanton,

Complaint: 1-3891637251 - Royal Mail

Since your email of 21 March about the loss of my and my wife's employment contracts to the United States, letters are not being put through our letter box. I understand from speaking with one of your colleagues this afternoon that these incidents have been recorded as "door stepping" under the above case number.

I can confirm that this morning I received a cheque for £9.25 from Royal Mail to refund my postage on the loss of the aforementioned item to the United States. I have not been given the reason why the tracking stopped on this item, with not even the first Royal Mail collection office (Romford Mail Centre) recorded on the track and trace report.

Please could you advise what action I should take the next time my or my wife's mail is left in an insecure place.

Yours sincerely,

Declan Heavey

UPDATE 23 May (2.45pm): Yesterday our employment contracts reached their destination in North Carolina, but we were also door-stepped again despite Declan's complaint to Royal Mail CEO Moya Greene last Friday. Declan complained about yesterday's door-stepping incident and received this response from Moya Greene yesterday morning:

Dear Mr Heavey

Thank you for your e-mail. I am sorry to hear that you have had problems with the handling of your enquiry and have asked my senior team to look into this for you straightaway.

Yours sincerely

Moya Greene
Chief Executive Officer

Hopefully, this means that we will receive all future mail through our letter box and Declan will not have to seek legal advice as to how to proceed in this matter. Yesterday I updated my blog post of 16 January, The blocks on public access to our Church and State website continue unabated (WITH UPDATE 18/5/2017). I updated the blog post with last night's 428th block (the 5th of the day) on public access to our Church and State website since 26 July 2016. The blog post also reveals the daily targeting to fluctuating degrees of category pages throughout the site which continues to this day. For example, the second article below has over 1/2 million Facebook likes/shares (not zero):

Re: Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ)

Paragraph 12 of Declan's updated complaint to the United Nations under Article 19 (freedom of expression) of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

12. It is important to underscore that the discriminatory surveillance suffered by the Applicant and his wife is not an isolated event. Rather, it is emblematic of a larger pattern of surveillance by law enforcement officials in the UK that has been well-documented by international and domestic human rights bodies. For example, GCHQ's Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group (JTRIG) specialises in the "4 D's": deny, disrupt, degrade, deceive. It has been branded by the press as the spy agency's "deception unit". Though its existence was secret until 2014, JTRIG has developed a distinctive profile in the public understanding, after documents from NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed that the unit had engaged in "dirty tricks" like deploying sexual "honey traps" designed to discredit targets, launching denial-of-service attacks to shut down Internet chat rooms, pushing veiled propaganda onto social networks and generally warping discourse online. Previous reporting on GCHQ established its focus on what it regards as political radicalism. Beyond JTRIG's targeting of Anonymous, other parts of GCHQ targeted political activists and groups deemed to be "radical", even monitoring human rights NGOs. The President of the London-based Privacy International, Simon Davies, asks: "If spying on human rights NGOs isn't off limits for GCHQ, then what is?"

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From a fascinating excerpt from Glenn Greenwald's book "No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State":

All of the evidence highlights the implicit bargain that is offered to citizens: pose no challenge and you have nothing to worry about. Mind your own business, and support or at least tolerate what we do, and you'll be fine. Put differently, you must refrain from provoking the authority that wields surveillance powers if you wish to be deemed free of wrongdoing.

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Church and State

MAYOR OF LONDON RSI PROPERTY
DAY 406 IN A WEEKLY PERIODIC TENANCY
SUBJECT TO A SECTION 21 NOTICE

(SEE PARA. 3 BELOW)

1. Our 308 Honorary Associates include 20 Nobel Prize laureates. Declan and I are engaged in a project that deals with the publication of issues significant to social policy in a number of key areas, e.g., climate change, population, futurism, atheism, and free speech. Established as Network for Church Monitoring, a non-profit company limited by guarantee, our main publication, found at the website, Church and State, calls attention to subjects, not the least which have been critical of the interaction between religious and secular institutions. We have been the target of numerous threats and actions, e.g., the former resulting in threats to Declan's life, and the latter, which have led to vandalism. The various incidents are on record with the police and other official agencies.

2. There are no less than 63 Nobel Prize laureates on the Church and State website from 20 Honorary Associates, eight articles, nine book excerpts and 33 petition signatories. (For example, one Nobel laureate signed our Nobel petition in support of human embryonic stem cell research and gave us permission to excerpt from one of his books.) Our list of associates also includes 18 US National Medal laureates, and six Turing Award laureates (the equivalent of the Nobel Prize in computer science). We have published one article and excerpted from the books of seven members of the British House of Lords. And there are 31 knighted professors on the site from 13 Honorary Associates, one book excerpt and 21 petition signatories. These figures are despite the never-ending assault on our email (this link reveals the targeting of our emails to, among others, a close colleague in Washington, DC as well as space advocates and Nobel laureates).

3. This is Day 406 for us living under the threat to life of a 'no fault' eviction by Peabody Trust.[1] We live in a Mayor of London's Rough Sleepers Initiative (RSI) property. Peabody's appalling new terms of tenancy have forced us into an unstable weekly periodic tenancy that poses a threat to Declan's life and inhibits our ability to exercise our rights. Declan accumulated quite a history with the Housing Ombudsman Service before he received the Ombudsman's decision not to investigate a referral from Lyn Brown MP on jurisdictional grounds. The Ombudsman was asked to consider whether or not our tenancy has been renewed like for like; and whether, if not, it should be in light of the landlord having accused us of not signing a like-for-like agreement. The Equality and Human Rights Commission will not accept a referral of discrimination from Ms Brown, the Commission's helpline (EASS) having grossly distorted the complaint against Peabody. We no longer have pro se access to the courts (see next paragraph).

4. This eviction matter came before District Judge Ruth Fine at the Central London County Court on 30 June 2020, when both counsel for St Mungo's (the charity in effective control of our tenancy) and Declan presented their positions. Declan lost the case and was ordered to pay £1,850 in costs. A publishing colleague in America cleared these costs within 24 hours of my blog post about this hearing for strike out on a related issue that was the essence of the claim, i.e., that St Mungo's would take a phone call to confirm that we are clients of the Mayor of London's RSI programme. Within a week of the hearing, St Mungo's had agreed to take this phone call for us both, the Court having ruled that they were not obliged to do so despite our circumstances. This time we escaped bankruptcy (counsel for St Mungo's asked for £3,407.50 in costs), but consider that to seek pro se access to justice in the courts has become far too dangerous for us. Declan currently has before the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman the decision of the Information Commissioner that allows St Mungo's to continue processing coercive support plans without our knowledge or consent and that also poses a threat to his life.

5. When it comes to traffic, we have had 10.7 million hits in the past three years on Facebook; however, I left the platform on 13 March 2021 for one year rather than risk being banned for life. It is indisputable that with any sort of level playing field Church and State would have far exceeded 2.5 million hits last year. In addition to a large variety of blocks without explanation, Facebook had so severely restricted our Page's distribution by October 2020 that it was almost as good as an unpublished page.[2] Currently, we are up to their 85th block since 1 December 2015, and as usual without an explanation. This block records as one half of their 3rd double block in the first five weeks of this year that lasted 60 days. Our traffic has also been curtailed by over 2.5K blocks on access to Church and State since 26 July 2016, including 29 full distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks since 17 May 2019 that have lasted for as long as 54 hours at a time.[3] About 70% of our hits are from Americans.

"This is precisely the hard hitting kind of response needed to clarify the unfair way Facebook is treating your highly reputable site." Don Collins, Founder, International Services Assistance Fund, Washington DC

Last updated: 26/06/21

_________________________

[1] Once a fixed term has elapsed, the landlord has the option to seek eviction even if the tenant has upheld their obligations in full (though of course the landlord must still apply for and obtain a county court order).

[2] 17/10/20: We have permission to publish this ISAF letter of 30 September to Facebook COO Sheryl Samberg. Facebook has so severely restricted our Page's distribution since 4 September that it's almost as good as an unpublished page

[3] Since October 2019, we have been defining a full DDoS attack as having such a high volume of up to 4-minute blocks on access to Church and State that we don't bother recording them all.

Church and State blog

Friday, May 19, 2017

Royal Mail: Complaint to the CEO of Royal Mail about 'door-stepping' incidents following the loss of our employment contracts to the United States (WITH UPDATE 23/5/2017)

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