Church and State blog: This week we are battling an almost total wipe out. Still nothing from the Mayor of London's St Mungo's Tenancy Sustainment Team (TST) despite Declan's second reminder under data protection law

Tuesday, December 11, 2018

This week we are battling an almost total wipe out. Still nothing from the Mayor of London's St Mungo's Tenancy Sustainment Team (TST) despite Declan's second reminder under data protection law

This is a splendid posting which in its moderate and modest tone should encourage many others to join you!!
http://churchandstate.org.uk/about/
-Don Collins, President of ISAF, an NGO dedicated to helping women

Our Church and State website has no less than 40 Nobel Prize winners on it; for details, see this blog's sidebar under "Church and State" (updated today).

Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms formulates what is the core of free speech. "Everyone has the right to freedom of expression." In an important interpretation of this article, the European Court of Human Rights in Handyside v. UK (1976) indicated that this "freedom of expression" should be construed as follows. It "is applicable not only to 'information' or 'ideas' that are favourably received, or regarded as inoffensive, or as a matter of indifference, but also to those that offend, shock or disturb the State or any sector of the population." Such are the demands of that pluralism, tolerance and broadmindedness without which there is no "democratic society" (see Cliteur, 2010).

What a week! Never before have we had two of our four laptops separately under attack throughout the day, as we have had since Facebook's block against our Church and State website last Saturday. According to my email tracker, not even my emails to Nobel laureates are getting through to them. (Not one of these emails will we allow to go astray, but it means that Declan will have to make more phone calls to the US and Australia just to get them seen.) And there's more besides. This is my update to last month's flagship Facebook post:

Removal of our flat door in 2012

UPDATE 11 December (4.32pm): "... We compare the on-off targeting of our laptops with the removal of our flat door in 2012; see my post of 27 November, The assault on my primary laptop runs into a record-breaking fourth week (WITH UPDATE - DAY 40 11/12/2018). And it's not just Facebook blocks, blocks on access to our Church and State website, the daily targeting to fluctuating degrees of category pages throughout the site, and the now-current assault on two of our four laptops. Since 26 May 2017, I have been recording internet cuts to boot; see my post of 7 July, INTERNET CUTS: Are 45-minute Internet cuts to be the new norm? We pay British Telecom £850 per year for broadband (WITH UPDATE 11/12/2018: re 294th Internet cut since 26 May 2017). Perhaps of particular importance in all this is the fact that Church and State topped more than 3 million hits in 11 months from January to November 2017 (27 Facebook blocks ago), and despite the even then far from level playing field."

2 November: Fighting for survival in London: Facebook's concerted campaign against our Church and State website shows no signs of waning (WITH UPDATE 11/12/2018: re Block 52 DAY 4)

* Yesterday evening we were disconnected from the internet for the 294th time since 26 May 2017, and for the first time the TV players and apps we get with our second British Telecom YouView box were subsequently disabled through no bandwidth at all. Our TV, and our inability to view a various number of TV channels using our BT YouView box due to fluctuating bandwidths, has been and remains a constant reminder that non-stop internet cuts through our BT Hub can kick off at any time with cuts that can last for hours (the longest being 3 1/4 hours on 16 August).

Mayor of London Sadiq Khan

Subject Access Request - action required (Reminder 2)

Maya Kotecha
Information Security Coordinator
St Mungo’s

Address removed for email

4 December 2018

Dear Ms Kotecha,

Further to my previous reminder, St Mungo's has a legal requirement to respond to me within one calendar month, starting from the day after you received my request, so I should receive my data by Wednesday 19 December at the very latest.

Yours sincerely,

Declan Heavey

What are the time limits?

"If you exercise any of your rights under data protection law, the organisation you're dealing with must respond as quickly as possible. This must be no later than one calendar month, starting from the day after they receive the request."
- Information Commissioner's Office

16 November: St Mungo's: Declan reverts to data protection law in his dealings with the Mayor of London's St Mungo's TST for the accurate recording of his complaint of unfair treatment against Newham Council (WITH UPDATE - DAY 23 11/12/2018)

http://churchandstate.org.uk/honorary-associates/

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

Tuesday, December 11, 2018

This week we are battling an almost total wipe out. Still nothing from the Mayor of London's St Mungo's Tenancy Sustainment Team (TST) despite Declan's second reminder under data protection law

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