CyberLaw Blog

Archive for the ‘BNP’ Category

BBC News: BNP members ‘targeted by threats’

BNP members have told BBC News they have received threatening and abusive phone calls and e-mails after a leaked document was published online.

The membership list includes police officers, who are banned from BNP membership, teachers and soldiers.

It includes names, addresses, telephone numbers and jobs of 12,000 people.

It has been removed from the blog it was published on after protests by BNP leaders but members say they are still receiving threatening messages.

One woman, who did not want to be named, told BBC Radio 5 Live she received a phone call at 11pm on Tuesday night saying she should be “very careful” as someone could come to her house.

The BNP’s regional organiser in Northern Ireland has advised members to increase their personal security because of the risk of attack from dissident Republicans. The leaked list names 39 people with Northern Ireland addresses and two with addresses in the Republic of Ireland.

‘Strange phone calls’

But BNP members interviewed by Victoria Derbyshire on BBC Radio 5 Live gave a mixed reaction to the leaked list, with some saying they had nothing to hide.

John, from Redcar, told 5 Live he had been inundated with abusive and threatening e-mails since the list was published.

(more…)

News Blog – Times Online – WBLG: To link or not to link?: “To link or not to link?

Zaffar from London left a comment after reading the Times Online report on the leaking of the BNP membership list. He wrote: ‘this is a joke read this article typed in google got the list in seconds’.

You can quibble with his punctuation, but not with his logic. Anyone could Google the phrase ‘BNP members’ and get the list too, although the original weblog on which it was posted has been taken down.

But The Times decided not to link to the list, even though we often do link to material without taking that as some kind of endorsement.

There were various reasons for the decision, most of them expressed in other comments on our various online reports. Firstly, BNP members have as much right to privacy as anyone else. Secondly, last time we checked it was still a free country: there is no law against membership of the BNP.

It is also a particularly emotive subject. One reader bragged of having spent his evening making prank phones calls to those on the list. A couple of others said that they had found friends or neighbours on it – and had already taken the offenders off their own Chrismas card lists.

Both on Times Online and and on various blogs, BNP members expressed their concern at the leaking of the list. They are not necessarily police officers – a job from which BNP members are explicitly banned. One, for example, runs a computer shop and is frightened that he will be put out of business.

The list is out there now, even if a Google search no longer throws it up. The anti-fascist campaigners and phone-prankers are having a field day. We don’t need to help them.

Posted by Times Online Newsdesk on November 19, 2008 at 11:05 AM in From the newsdesk | Permalink”

BNP members list leak gathers pace online – to link or not to link? | Journalism.co.uk Editors’ Blog: “BNP members list leak gathers pace online – to link or not to link?
November 19th, 2008 Posted by Laura Oliver in Legal, Online Journalism, Press freedom and ethics

Removing the original online posting of the leaked list of members of the British National Party (BNP) has failed to contain the spread of the information online.

The list and reactions to it are being avidly Twittered, as a search for BNP on Twitter search engine Summize shows, while the document has made its way onto Wikileaks.

According to the party’s website, the blog that posted the ‘outdated’ list was removed from Blogger ‘after urgent legal action was instituted by the BNP leadership’.

In a Guardian.co.uk article, BNP leader Nick Griffin has admitted that the party is relying on the Human Rights Act, which it opposes, to help protect its members’ privacy.”

BNP races to get membership list off the net: “

Brown shirts trousers

Updated The BNP membership list containing over 10,000 names and addresses, which we revealed yesterday is still plastered over the internet despite the far right party’s desperate efforts to get it yanked from websites.…

“

(Via The Register – Public Sector.)