Church and State blog

Thursday, March 31, 2016

Our access to our Church and State website is blocked for the third time in three weeks, and the second time in two days

March 30

March 31

Our chairman in North Carolina, Dr Stephen Mumford, pays SiteGround $1,000 a year to ensure that our Church and State website runs smoothly, even with 100,000 daily visitors. We actually have a very good Cloud hosting package (2x3.0 GHz CPU Cores, CentOS, 4GB RAM, and 20GB SSD), which is why we shouldn't be experiencing this sort of non-access to our site. Here is 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 that he dispatched last Friday.

HEAVEY v. THE UNITED KINGDOM

COMMUNICATION SUBMITTED FOR CONSIDERATION UNDER
THE FIRST OPTIONAL PROTOCOL TO THE
INTERNATIONAL COVENANT ON CIVIL AND POLITICAL RIGHTS

Paragraph 12 of Declan's updated complaint to the United Nations on the subject of harassment, surveillance and interception of communications by the UK's Security Service (MI5) and/or Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) over a period dating back to September 2003

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. Simon Davies, president of the London-based Privacy International, asks: "If spying on human rights NGOs isn't off limits for GCHQ, then what is?"

Related blog post 1 (25 March 2016): "Threat to life: Updated complaint to the United Nations"

'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

Letter from our Chairman

An overview of the e-books we have published so far is available at Church and State Press here. All proceeds from these four e-books go to Network for Church Monitoring with the authors' permission.

Purchase straight from Amazon's Kindle Store:

From the Dissident Left: A Collection of Essays 2004-2013 for $4.67

The Life and Death of NSSM 200: How the Destruction of Political Will Doomed a U.S. Population Policy for $6.64

American Democracy and the Vatican: Population Growth and National Security for $4.99

The Pope and the New Apocalypse: The Holy War Against Family Planning for $2.99

Saturday, March 26, 2016

European Small Claims Court: Facebook blocks me for the seventh time since 1 December 2015

We will wait until the next Facebook block to continue working on our case against Facebook Ireland for the European Small Claims Court. This is paragraph 38 of Declan's updated complaint to the United Nations under Article 19 (freedom of expression) of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights that he dispatched yesterday (see previous blog). It cites the seven Facebook blocks we have experienced since 1 December 2015.

HEAVEY v. THE UNITED KINGDOM

COMMUNICATION SUBMITTED FOR CONSIDERATION UNDER
THE FIRST OPTIONAL PROTOCOL TO THE
INTERNATIONAL COVENANT ON CIVIL AND POLITICAL RIGHTS

Paragraph 38 of Declan's updated complaint to the United Nations citing seven Facebook blocks since 1 December 2015

38. At a preliminary hearing on 3 February 2016, District Judge Silverman ruled that the county court does not have the authority to intervene in what is an administrative dispute with a public body. The following incidents since the Applicant's lodgement of his claim in the county court in September 2015 - by no means exhaustive - serve to highlight the Applicant and his wife's high needs as a result of strong opposition and disruption:

(i) On 9 December 2015 the Applicant's wife's laptop was rendered useless for work after it was made technically incapable of publishing material on their Church and State website. She could solely not use her laptop to create a WordPress post, add images, or click on most of the platform's buttons. This could only have been an attack on her laptop because the platform worked perfectly well on the Applicant's laptop and on an old laptop they use as back up. She had posted videos of the attack to the N4CM blog before the device was mysteriously returned to normal functioning the following afternoon.

(ii) On 16 December 2015 the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) upheld the Applicant's complaint against the Ministry of Justice for breach of the Data Protection Act 1998. The ICO found that the Ministry had mishandled the Applicant's subject access request for a copy of the GLA's application to contest the court's jurisdiction, filed at Central London County Court on 14 October 2015 (see annex 19, pp 57-59).

(iii) In a letter to the Applicant dated 22 December 2015, Shadow Home Office Minister Lyn Brown stated that she had written to the managing director of Facebook UK in her capacity as the Applicant's parliamentary representative to seek an explanation for why Facebook had twice blocked his wife from posting to groups and removed all her postings to groups since 2010 (1-4 December and 5-7 December 2015), without any stated reason or cause or responding to either of the Applicant's wife's appeals. The Applicant had already issued a Letter Before Claim to Facebook Ireland, the entity with which users based outside the USA and Canada have a contractual relationship, with a view to filing a legal claim with the European Small Claims Court.

(iv) On 3 February 2016, while the Applicant was at the hearing of his claim against the GLA, his wife received for the first time an alert from their hosting company SiteGround stating that the Church and State website had used 90% of its available storage and warning that the site could experience service problems without an upgrade. It took two days of correspondence between the Applicant's wife and SiteGround before this problem was rectified. According to a technical support supervisor, the reason for the 90% usage was "the cPanel upgrade done by our system administrators recently".

(v) Despite the contents of both letters cited in (iii) above, Facebook has additionally five times blocked the Applicant's wife from posting to groups (6-9 January, 12-15 January, 20-22 January, 13-16 February and 23-26 March 2016) and twice removed all her postings to groups since 2010 (6-9 January, 12-15 January 2016), without any stated reason or cause or responding to any of the Applicant's wife's five additional appeals. Facebook Ireland has not responded to the Applicant's pre-action letter of 15 December 2015, nor, to the best of his knowledge, has the managing director of Facebook UK responded to Shadow Home Office Minister Brown's letter of 22 December 2015.

This is what Shadow Home Office Minister Lyn Brown says she wrote to Facebook UK on our behalf last December:

But in fact it is the secretive censors in Facebook's European HQ in Dublin who decide what is - and what isn't. This is Declan's pre-action letter to Facebook Ireland last December which they have chosen to simply ignore:

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

Thursday, March 31, 2016

Our access to our Church and State website is blocked for the third time in three weeks, and the second time in two days

Saturday, March 26, 2016

European Small Claims Court: Facebook blocks me for the seventh time since 1 December 2015

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