I am sorry to have to take issue with David Aaronovitch for a second time. (Revisit Post 11)
In The Times of 29 May 2009 he writes “The Human Rights Act has actually brought an important rebalancing in favour of the citizen as against the State.”
In my last Post I encouraged you to read life backwards, like these Posts, drawing on past experiences. I hope that you do so, to understand it better.
Some however – and David Aaronovitch appears to be one of them – hold set ideas in their lives – almost idées fixes – reached before they could realise the complexity of things and witness for themselves the vagaries of human behaviour.
They are also strapped into the straitjacket of the words that they use without really thinking about them. (Revisit Posts 3,4 and 5.)Thereafter they spend the rest of their lives looking for evidence to support those ideas. In email parlance, they “delete without reading” anything that contradicts them or calls them into question.
Politicians and academics, as you will see, are particularly prone to this. (Revisit Post 1)
Back to David Aaronovitch in the Times. Is he right about the beneficial effects of the Human Rights Act?
Never mind that today everyone seems to be saying on the issue of MPs’ expenses that their powers need to be rebalanced with the Executive. If our MPs individually are pretty powerless these days, and they are, what chance is there for you and me?
And what about the “Power Report” that I referred to in Death of a Nightingale and in my last two Posts? (Revisit Posts 24 and 25 ) Were its authors wrong to call for a rebalancing of the rights of the citizen against the State?
In my last Post I wrote about the “Iron fist disguised in the velvet glove”, and I set out why we are all so vulnerable. Here I am talking about the grubby little hand of the censor and those who aid and abet him.
The Death of a Nightingale suggests that we are all “casualties of a system that has somehow lost its way” and it gives a fictional illustration of what I am writing about. Now I am going to give you two real life ones. The Human Rights Act did not help at all.
Before I do so, just a brief reminder from Death of a Nightingale in case you have still to read it.
Act One Scene 6
Margaret Williamson, the Head teacher and Joan Errington the English teacher are discussing why giving legal backing to “rights” has not always helped children with special education needs.
JOAN ERRINGTON Some people think that rights grow on trees. Just pass a law and you’ve planted another tree.
MARGARET WILLIAMSON Weeping willows, more like.
JOAN ERRINGTON Trees or people?
MARGARET WILLIAMSON Politicians are all for human rights, but when it comes to delivering them, ah that’s another matter. There are too many social engineers in politics. They think that all you have to do to change society is to pass another law. You know, human rights sometimes are just dreams, very beautiful dreams, but dreams..
JOAN ERRINGTON Yes, if only it was easy to turns those dreams into reality.
MARGARET WILLIAMSON And when you wake up from your dream, what do you find? Your social engineer has put square pegs into round holes with epoxy glue.
JOAN ERRINGTON That is the nub of it. Some people just don’t realise that one person’s right can become another person’s restriction.
On the first page of my website I say that I write as a participant and as an observer. Here I write as a participant.
I do not describe here the successful campaign by parents to save their school. As I have said, for me that is ancient history. I will tell you however about one little happening.
In this campaign we were inevitably not popular with the Local Authority.
As Chair of Governors at the time, I invited a couple of Lib Dem Councillors to my home to give them a general briefing. They had no great power locally so it was no more than that. I then sent them an email thanking them for coming and hoping that we might meet again.That is all that it said. The next morning, I looked at my computer screen, and to my amazement, I read the following:“Failed mail: Banned or potentially offensive material.”.
I wrote to the Leader of the Council about this. He sent back his apology saying that it had been a computer “glitch.” I accepted his apology at the time. Whether the Lib Dem Councillors should have done so is another matter.
Much more recently, in relation to Death of a Nightingale, both in the Prologue and the Notes & Quotes, I applauded the “Power Report”. (Revisit Posts 24 and 25). I thought it might be helpful if its Chair, Lady Helena Kennedy QC, lent her name in support. I had a friend from University days, a leading Labour lawyer, and I thought he might open a door to her for me. I sent him an email on his academic email address inviting him to do so.
It never reached him. It was subjected to RBL. Never heard of RBL? It is a registered black list operated by a multinational company called Trend Micro. I am going to copy some of the correspondence here, and leave you to think about it. I set out the key parts in red.
Extracts from Emails and letters with Virgin Media and Trend Micro.
10 June 2007
Chief Executive
Virgin Media,
Dear Sir
Re “Black listing” of my IP – Your references 477594 and 407588
I enclose a letter that I am sending to the Chief Executive of Trend Micro but as you are my Internet Service Provider I must necessarily say to you what I say to him.
I look for a clear and unqualified assurance that I am not on any “black list” and, if you think that I should be in the future, you will give me an opportunity to question it. I look for a response not later than 12 noon on Friday 15 June.
Yours sincerely,
Alan Share
Enc.
___________________________________________________________________
10 June 2007
Chief Executive
Trend Micro (UK) Ltd
Pacific House
Third Avenue
Globe Business Park
Marlow SL7 1YL
Dear Sir
Re. Death of a Nightingale and “Black listing” of my IP (RBL)
…..
I was led to your company by the blocked email …..I discovered that you specifically did not provided a tool to challenge an RBL (you did for others) and that the email address you provided was blocked by the “black listing” within the system.
I then entered into a telephone dialogue with your technical director, Samantha Gurr, and an email dialogue with her and with Mariana Martín Yuste. You will see that this dialogue sets out the various blocks on my email.
The most important communication from your company came to me on 31 May 2007 as follows:
Hello Alan,
I have checked the problem with your IP addresses being blocked by our RBL service.
Please be informed the 3 IPs you have given us
195.188.213.6
195.188.213.7
195.188.213.8
were listed as part of a group of IPs (195.188.213.0/28) on Wednesday 23rd 2007 that were requested to be blocked. They were removed and put on probation on the 29th and now they are under revision but you should not have further problems sending emails.
I hope this information helps and that the problem is sorted on your side.
Regards, Mariana.
_______________________________________
Mariana Martín Yuste
Customer Care Specialist
Trend Micro Customer Care EMEA
Tel: +353 (0) 21 7307356
_______________________________________
This appears to establish that whilst you have not yourself put my IP on a “black list” you know who had. Unfortunately the promise that I would not have further problems was not fulfilled.
Your email of 30 May stated “Trend Micro customers can also block IPs by themselves. In this case the IPs will not be found in our list. Please contact the receiving email administrator.”
I had already contacted Virgin Media (their reference 477594 ) asking for a new IP number but they declined to provide it. I contacted them again (Their reference 407588 ) and this is the reply that I received.
“Please note that Virginmedia will not discuss the outcome of our investigation into this matter, nor divulge details of the account concerned. Unless we require further information from you, you will not receive any further communication from us in regards to the above reference number 407588.We want to make you aware that a few of our customers may have problems with their outgoing emails being bounced back to them. This is because some of our IP addresses are listed in a popular real-time block list called MAPS. We don’t like it when this happens and we’re working hard with MAPS to identify the cause of the original problem. We sincerely hope to have our email services back to normal as soon as possible.”
All of this suggests to me that you have set up a system whereby your customers can contravene Article 10 of the Human Rights Act 2000 and both you and Virgin Media at the very least collude with it when you certainly could do something to prevent it.
Despite my asking to know who had put my IP “on a black list” and why they had done so, and to challenge it – and you will see my emails of 5, 7 and 8 June – you have failed to acknowledge this or respond to it.
I take the most serious view of all this. I have not finally decided how to deal with it. Much will depend upon how you and Virgin Media reply. One option I have is to take this directly to the media. Another is to instruct my lawyers to deal with it and, in particular, to use the Freedom of Information Act to reveal the information I have not so far been able to obtain, as well as the dialogue that Virgin Media refers to in its email to me. It is clear that this “problem” is not mine alone.
I look for a clear and unqualified assurance that I am not on any “black list” in your system and, if you think that I should be in the future, you will give me an opportunity to question it. And I look for this response not later than 12 noon on Friday 15 June.
With that assurance I will myself bring this matter to a close. But I am sending a copy of this letter to Helena Kennedy QC in the hope that she will address the wider issues involved. She may take the view, as I do, that this exemplifies two of the matters that were of concern to her committee, namely the rise of undemocratic political forces and the rise of a ‘quiet authoritarianism’ within government.
Yours sincerely,
Alan Share
Enc.
Cc: Chief Executive, Virgin Media
Helena Kennedy QC
___________________________________________________________
Dear Mr. Share,
Having reviewed your correspondence with Samantha Gurr, our Head of Technical Support EMEA, and your email letter to my Department of last month, I should like to state that Trend Micro have not committed any breach of the laws you quoted with regard to any temporary inability on your part to properly use your email account(s) with your Internet Service Provider, Virgin Media.
While the Human Rights Act and the Freedom of Information Act are meant to create protection for individuals against governmental acts or omissions, Trend Micro as a company does fully subscribe to the principles underlying that legislation. It is our corporate mission to make the internet a safe(r) place for exchanging digital information. That is why we are in business and why we provide products and services helping our customers to communicate safely via the Web – despite all the problems with that widely abused tool that the House of Lords has recently been reported to address (please see at: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/08/10/lords_net_security_report/)
In pursuit of our corporate mission we offer our customers, amongst other services, protection against the huge issue caused by so-called spam mail. Spam is not only just a nuisance but also abused to commit cybercrime by implanting e.g. “Trojan Horses” into innocent private Personal Computers and turning them into “bots” or “zombies” that are commanded by “botmasters”. According to our research, an enormous amount of PC’s, without their owners even noticing this, have been instrumentalised by (criminal) botmasters for i.e. sending spam, spreading malware, blocking corporate or governmental networks or threaten to block them in order to extort “ransom” for releasing them from that blockage or threat. We are committed to fight such criminal abuses of the Internet. It is obvious from that background that private email connections like yours may be affected by anti-spam measurements, where there is no proper protection against malware attacks of that kind in place.
By such measurements as provided by our products and services we do however:
- NOT scan any emails with our Email Reputation Services (ERS),
- NOT block any IP address of any specific user,
- NOT block specifically any individual email accounts.
This is why we cannot provide you with any information of who may have reported your email account as a spamming account. There is no such report. Our anti-spam protection works on the ISP level in the first place.
In addition to the technical explanation you have already been provided, I hope this clarifies the legal concerns you raised.
Please address any further correspondence with Trend Micro on this matter only to me.
Sincerely yours,
Günter Untucht
________________________________________________________________
Dear Herr Untucht
Thank you for your email. I regret that I cannot square the following:
“By such measurements as provided by our products and services we do however:
- NOT scan any emails with our Email Reputation Services (ERS),
- NOT block any IP address of any specific user,
- NOT block specifically any individual email accounts.”
with:
“Hello Alan,
I have checked the problem with your IP addresses being blocked by our RBL service.
Please be informed the 3 IPs you have given us
195.188.213.6
195.188.213.7
195.188.213.8
were listed as part of a group of IPs (195.188.213.0/28) on Wednesday 23rd 2007 that were requested to be blocked. They were removed and put on probation on the 29th and now they are under revision but you should not have further problems sending emails.
I hope this information helps and that the problem is sorted on your side.
Regards, Mariana.
_______________________________________
Mariana Martín Yuste
Customer Care Specialist
Trend Micro Customer Care EMEA
Tel: +353 (0) 21 7307356
_______________________________________
It would appear to me that although you do not yourself scan emails, your subscribers do so. Further they use your system to censor emails, and you collude with them in direct contravention of Article 10 of the Human Rights Act – an Act not just applying to government as you wrongly suggest.
It may be that we are dealing with the “Wild West” in relation to Internet abuse, but that does not entitle you to be a self appointed sheriff.
I formally ask you to remove the block on my IP, and I again formally request you to tell me who requested the block on my IP and the reason for it.
An early reply would be appreciated.
Alan Share
PS (To my last email)
You might also like to consider why my service provider Virgin Media fails even to acknowledge a letter I sent to them in June. I copy it at the end of this email.
By the way I am sending this email as the last to Baroness Helena Kennedy QC for her attention.
Alan Share
________________________________________________________________
Dear Mr. Share,
I am happy to add the following final explanation to our correspondence.
You are a private customer – of Virgin Media. In the beginning, we may have used language that applies to our customers when they contact us for issues as raised by you. Many of them are enterprises that run their own mailservers. If we deal with a private user or not even a customer of ours is something that is not always clear in the first place. Therefore the wording “your IP Address” turned out to be wrong in your case, as it is actually the IP Address of Virgin Media (http://www.ripe.net/whois?form_type=simple&full_query_string=&searchtext=195.188.213.6&dosearch=Search).
Otherwise, our subscribers can create their own blacklists just as they like and can place even the entire Internet community on it should they so wish. This is not under our control and we cannot force anybody to whitelist any mailserver for any reason. Freedom of information also comprises the right to waive or stop any and all communication with anyone.
Yours sincerely,
Günter Untucht
________________________________________________________________
Dear Herr Untucht
I am at a total loss to understand why you appear incapable of answering a simple question with a simple yes or no answer.
Is my ISP on your “black list”? Yes or No.
If it is, can I remove my ISP from that “black list”? Yes or No.
Yours sincerely,
Alan Share
________________________________________________________________
I know that I am not universally approved of in academic circles. (Revisit Post 6)
I cannot object if some in Academia prefers not to communicate with me, and delete my emails without reading them. I do object if someone does this for them.
I never did find out who put me on Trend Micro’s Registered Black List, the reason I was there and how I might remove myself from it. I never found out what Helena Kennedy QC thought about it. My service provider Virgin Media declined to enter into any discussion about it. And so far as I know emails to councillors are still being “steamed open”, sorry “filtered”, to prevent spam.
I can however tell you that someone, I know not who, has now kindly removed my name from the black list.
If Departments of State, Local Government and public and private companies were obliged to log formal complaints against them on the Net it might do something to head off this sort of problem. It would lend substance to the words “transparency” and “accountability” that politicians of all parties so often pay lip service to.
Why have the snap, crackle and pop of MPs’ expenses when you can have a chargrilled steak instead? Over to you David Aaronovitch.
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