Church and State blog

Wednesday, April 05, 2017

19 Facebook blocks against our Church and State website; and now, for the first time, I have no access to the FB page with all the groups I belong to (WITH UPDATE 16/5/2017)

From the Update (16 May, 10.15am) below:

"I have just updated my blog post of 16 January with this morning's 421st block on public access to our Church and State website since 26 July 2016. The blog post also not only reveals a record-breaking 52 such blocks in one week at the end of last month (an unprecedented escalation that kicked off with our focus on Denmark's cartoon crisis; 52 blocks so far this month), but it reveals the daily targeting to fluctuating degrees of category pages throughout the site which continues to this day."

An unprecedented ten blocks in one day two weeks ago on 7 May with our publication of Atheist Ireland republishes 25 blasphemous quotes in solidarity with Stephen Fry. Sixteen blocks last week; two so far this week; one today.

The War on Free Expression

Yesterday public access to our Church and State website was denied a record-equalling seven times in one day. I have just updated my blog post of 16 January with this morning's 245th block on access to the site since 26 July 2016. We have also, as revealed below, experienced 19 Facebook blocks against our Church and State website since 1 December 2015. Don Collins, President of the Washington, DC-based International Services Assistance Fund, writes: "Glad you compiled this odious record of mistaken blockage. What possesses the site? Surely after multiple postings they must know your content is neither lewd nor extreme." Now, for the first time, I am unable to access the Facebook page listing all the groups I belong to. This is what I have been getting all day today:

And this is a record I have on disc of the start of the page I should be getting:

UPDATE 16 May (10.15am): It took Facebook three days to fix the page above (no response from them to my report of 5 April), then I couldn't schedule posts (two days), and then my scheduled posts were not posting (two days). This is my Facebook report of 12 April citing all three of these blocks:

12 April 2017

Dear Facebook,

On 5 April I reported that the page listing all the groups I belong to was not working. With this rectified, I reported on 10 April that I couldn't schedule posts. Now, since 10.05pm last night, my scheduled posts have not been posting (please see my screenshot attached). Please could you fix this for me.

Thanking you in advance for your assistance in this matter.

Regards,
Lola Heavey

UPDATE 16 May (continued): We currently have an international list of 117 Honorary Associates, including two Nobel Prize winners. Since Facebook's 16th block against our Church and State website last October, 87 distinguished scholars (22 academics last month) have given us permission to add their names to the list. Nonetheless, the blocks on public access to our Church and State website continue unabated. I have just updated my blog post of 16 January with this morning's 421st block on public access to our Church and State website since 26 July 2016. The blog post also not only reveals a record-breaking 52 such blocks in one week at the end of last month (an unprecedented escalation that kicked off with our focus on Denmark's cartoon crisis; 52 blocks so far this month), but it reveals the daily targeting to fluctuating degrees of category pages throughout the site which continues to this day. For example, as I point out in my previous blog post about the almost certain loss of our employment contracts to the United States by Royal Mail (as opposed to the United States Postal Service), the second article below has 1/2 million Facebook likes/shares (not zero):

Re: Facebook

Draft paragraph 42 of Declan's next updated complaint to the United Nations under Article 19 (freedom of expression) of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

42. On 13 August 2011, then Home Office Minister Lynne Featherstone wrote to Facebook on the Applicant's behalf, asking that they explain why the Applicant's wife had been barred. The bar was subsequently lifted; however, since 1 December 2015, Facebook have blocked the Applicant's wife from posting to pages and/or groups on nineteen separate occasions, and up to six days at a time (each of these blocks is well accounted for in the N4CM blog). On 22 December 2015, Shadow Home Office Minister Lyn Brown made an enquiry on the Applicant's behalf to Steve Hatch, the Managing Director of Facebook UK, asking if he could offer an explanation as to the terms and conditions the Applicant's wife was alleged to have broken twice previously. To the best of the Applicant's knowledge, Mr Hatch did not respond to this letter. The Applicant's wife only ever posts to groups that are specific to an article's subject and that she is well familiar with, and she only ever posts articles that she has already published on the Church and State website. Nonetheless, Facebook have responded to only one of the Applicant's wife's nineteen appeals since 1 December 2015, citing "technical problems" on 14 January 2017 in relation to the eighteenth block listed below.

1st 1-4 December 2015 (4 days)
2nd 5-7 December 2015 (3 days)
3rd 6-9 January 2016 (4 days)
4th 12-15 January 2016 (4 days)
5th 20-22 January 2016 (3 days)
6th 13-16 February 2016 (4 days)
7th 23-26 March 2016 (4 days)
8th 20-23 May 2016 (4 days)
9th 25-30 May 2016 (6 days)
10th 1-3 July 2016 (3 days)
11th 7-8 September 2016 (2 days)
12th 21-22 September 2016 (3 days)
13th 27-28 September 2016 (2 days)
14th 29 September - 3 October 2016 (5 days)
15th 4-5 October 2016 (2 days)
16th 18-23 October 2016 (6 days)
17th 9-14 December 2016 (6 days)
18th 4-6 January 2017 (3 days)
19th 20-23 January 2017 (4 days)

Facebook UK Managing Director Steve Hatch

From My Picks:

20 February: The Central London County Court: District Judge Avent dismisses Declan's claim against the Greater London Authority-commissioned St Mungo's that alleged the falsification and fabrication of data against us (WITH UPDATE 16/3/2017)

'Let me recommend an important web site churchandstate.org.uk. Operating out of London this well-designed and exciting web site covers church-state, population, climate change and other issues. Check it out.' - Edd Doerr, President, Americans for Religious Liberty

Sunday, March 19, 2017

Royal Mail; Payback for 'adjudication' in this blog of District Judge Avent's dismissal of Declan's claim against the Greater London Authority-commissioned St Mungo's that alleged the falsification and fabrication of data against us? (WITH UPDATE - Day 28 5/4/2017)

"How you manage to do what you do is simply amazing!! And with the pressure on to adjudicate what seems more and more like attacks from a personality from 1984!"

Donald A. Collins, President of ISAF, Washington DC

County Court at Central London, Royal Courts of Justice

20 February: The Central London County Court: District Judge Avent dismisses Declan's claim against the Greater London Authority-commissioned St Mungo's that alleged the falsification and fabrication of data against us (WITH UPDATE 16/3/2017)

Our good friend in Washington DC, Don Collins, hit the nail on the head last Thursday when he wrote that Declan and I were under (immense) pressure to "adjudicate" District Judge Avent's dismissal of Declan's claim against the Greater London Authority-commissioned St Mungo's that alleged the falsification and fabrication of data against us. We only received DJ Avent's order on the 2nd day after the expiration of our statutory 21 days to apply for permission to appeal (see my previous blog post). Now it's Royal Mail that we are dealing with. This is what the Royal Mail Track and Trace on our employment contracts to the United States looked like last Friday:

And this is what the same Royal Mail Track and Trace looks like tonight:

DAY 28 UPDATE 5 April (10.41am): Royal Mail have explained the disappearance from their website of the Track and Trace above as a "problem with the system". It's appearing at the moment as the first image above, with not even the first Royal Mail collection office (Romford Mail Centre) registered. Royal Mail aim to deliver to the United States within 5-7 working days. Our employment contracts were posted on 25 February (i.e. 28 working days ago) and the postage cost was £9.25. Yesterday I updated my blog post of 16 January, The blocks on public access to our Church and State website continue unabated (WITH UPDATE 4/4/2017). I updated the blog post with last night's 242nd block (a record-equalling seventh of the day) on 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 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?"

Citizenfour Official Trailer 1 (2014) - Edward Snowden Documentary HD

JOIN THE CONVERSATION #CITIZENFOUR

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.

'Let me recommend an important web site churchandstate.org.uk. Operating out of London this well-designed and exciting web site covers church-state, population, climate change and other issues. Check it out.' - Edd Doerr, President, Americans for Religious Liberty

About Church and State

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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

Wednesday, April 05, 2017

19 Facebook blocks against our Church and State website; and now, for the first time, I have no access to the FB page with all the groups I belong to (WITH UPDATE 16/5/2017)

Sunday, March 19, 2017

Royal Mail; Payback for 'adjudication' in this blog of District Judge Avent's dismissal of Declan's claim against the Greater London Authority-commissioned St Mungo's that alleged the falsification and fabrication of data against us? (WITH UPDATE - Day 28 5/4/2017)

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