GagWatch

Wikileaks, the whistle-blowing website that was forced offline in the US last week is receiving legal help to fight an attempt to keep it offline.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) are planning to intervene for Wikileaks at a legal hearing today which will decide whether to continue the original court order.

The rights groups will argue that the order that knocked Wikileaks offline in the US raises “serious First Amendment concerns”.

“Blocking access to the entire site in response to a few documents posted there completely disregards the public’s right to know,” said ACLU attorney Ann Brick in a statement.

The ruling followed a case brought by Swiss banking group Julius Baer over several documents posted on the site revealing that the bank was involved with money laundering and tax evasion.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali-born former Dutch MP and target of death threats from Islamic fundamentalists is to receive EU protection.

Ms Hirsi Ali, who has been the subject of numerous death threats, has been under high level security since 2004 when Theo van Gogh was murdered by an Islamist extremist. A letter found on the Dutch film-maker’s body threatened her by name.

She left the Netherlands for the United States in May 2006 following a row over the details of her original asylum request for the Netherlands and, in October 2007, the Dutch government stopped paying for her security detail. The Dutch view was that since she was no longer in the country she was no longer their responsibility and the US position is that its government does not pay for personal protection of citizens.

Consequently, she has returned to Europe and, with the backing of several prominent French intellectuals, is seeking French citizenship. She also petitioned the European Parliament, calling on MEPs to set up an EU fund to pay for security for citizens facing death threats for what they have written or said.

On Thursday, Justice, freedom and security commissioner Franco Frattini said that EU member states are to draft special measures to guarantee freedom of movement across the Union for Ms Hirsi Ali and other individuals similarly targeted.

According to Mr Frattini, a “unanimous” decision on the matter was reached at a lunch of the EU’s 27 justice ministers. Host countries will bear the cost of providing police protection and no new laws will be necessary to realise the move.

Geert Wilders is continuing to make waves with the film that no-one has actually seen yet. It was (probably) the reason behind Pakistan’s recent incompetent blocking of YouTube and now the Taliban is trying to get involved.

Zabihullah Mujahid, a spokesperson for the Taliban, called the film - which he hasn’t seen - an “insult to Islam”, and threatened that the group will up attacks against Dutch soldiers in Afghanistan if the film is released.

Dutch Foreign Minister Maxime Verhagen courageously responded by calling on Wilders to not broadcast his film. He claims that he is trying to meet demands from anti-democratic forces and terrorists but protecting Dutch interests abroad, which is really no more than a difference of semantics.

Wilders does seem to be feeling remarkably thin-skinned about the whole affair, claiming that he was subjected to “an hour of intimidation” by Verhagen and Justice Minister, Ernst Hirsch Ballin after a meeting with the ministers on Wednesday.

The PVV leader expects his film will be finished at the end of this week. He will then look for a television broadcaster to air the film.

The New York state has recently introduced the starkly named Libel Terrorism Prevention Act which, according to Geoffrey Wheatcroft, is intended to protect writers and publishers who neither live, work nor publish in the UK from falling foul of Britain’s ridiculously repressive libel laws.

In recent decades, “libel tourism” has become a lucrative trade for London lawyers. Foreign celebrities turn up to sue British papers or US magazines with insignificant British circulations. The late Telly Savalas was one of the first, winning an action here that he couldn’t even have begun in the US. Roman Polanski was allowed to give evidence from France to London by video link when he sued Vanity Fair, a New York magazine. Since he’s wanted in California, he couldn’t set foot in London for fear of being extradited.

But what has brought this to a head are several even more grotesque cases. The powerful Saudi businessman Sheikh Kalid bin Mahfouz sued over a book by two Americans which alleged he was associated with the funding of Islamic militants: hence the lurid name of the New York law. Only a few copies were sold in the UK, but damages were paid and the remaining copies were pulped.

Our libel law has always been heavily weighted in favour of the plaintiff. Unlike the defendant in a criminal case or other civil suits - or in a US libel action - he is assumed to be in the wrong, and must prove that “the words complained of” are true. Under “no win, no fee”, the plaintiff is gambling someone else’s money, while the defendant is on a hiding to nothing. “True as to fact or fair as to comment” are the classic defences, but fair comment is subjective, and any attempt to justify or prove truth can be held to aggravate the gravity of the libel. And a defendant is at the mercy of the caprice of juries and the malice of judges.

Libel tourism is an embarrassment and one that exerts a chilling effect on freedom of speech in general and investigative journalism in particular. Wheatcroft is calling for a scrapping of the existing law and a completely new libel act.

This would provide a statutory defence of public interest. It would remove the burden of proof from the defendant. It would end the nonsense of a person from one foreign country suing in London a person from another over something published in a third country. And better still, it would assimilate libel to slander, where the plaintiff must show actual material damage suffered.

Such a change is long overdue.

Pakistan has denied being responsible for blocking global access to YouTube.

Analysis by net monitoring firm Renesys shows that the problems getting through to YouTube began as after Pakistan Telecom started to implement a block on the site on the orders of the country’s government. In short, Pakistan Telecom hijacked some of the net addresses assigned to YouTube and redirected them. These redirected addresses propagated beyond Pakistan’s borders and effectively brought down the site for two hours.

A spokesman for Pakistan Telecommunication has now tried to blame some unspecified “malfunction” for the outage, going on to say: “We are not hackers. Why would we do that?”

No-one is seriously suggesting that Pakistan Telecommunication deliberately tried to block the site globally. Just that they incompetently implemented an authoritarian order locally.

The Times of India (via) reports that hardline Egyptian cleric has jumped on the latest Mo-toon bandwagon by demanding a boycott of Danish products.

“Regrettably, Muslims start potently with these issues, then they relax gradually as the strong (supporters) get weaker and the enthusiastic (supporters) get lazy,” said el-Qaradawi during a press conference aired by Al-Jazeera television.

That’s one way of looking at it. Another point of view is that most Muslims are adult enough to realise (eventually, in some cases) that a bunch of cartoons you haven’t seen being published in a country you have no intention of visiting isn’t the most important thing in the world.

After breaking the internet at the weekend, the Pakistan Telecommunications Authority (PTA) has told internet service providers (ISPs) to restore access to YouTube. Google, the owner of the video-sharing website has confirmed that service had been restored in the country.

The BBC’s Rory Cellan-Jones has been keeping score and notes that the PTA is saying that it unblocked YouTube because the offending clip - a trailer for Geert Wilders’ film - has been removed.

Google says it never comments on individual YouTube videos. All a spokesman would tell me is this: “When we receive complaints about videos we review them against our terms of use - which include things like pornography or gratuitous violence or hate speech - and where videos break those rules we remove them.”

He wasn’t happy at my suggestion that YouTube had blinked. But I’m putting that down as another goal for the government - making it Government 2, Internet 2.

The European Parliament’s budgetary control committee has voted not to publish a report detailing abuses in the way some deputies use their monthly staff allowance. In the Tuesday morning session of the committee, the issue of whether to make the 92 page document public was raised, and voted down by 21 votes to 14.

UK Lib Dem MEP, Chris Davis called the decision “ridiculous,” and added that instead of being kept secret the document should be used as “a manifesto for change.”

“There are no names of individuals in this report, no political parties or nationalities mentioned. Therefore, I do not see why EU citizens should not be allowed to see it”, he said.

Danish MEP Jens-Peter Bonde from the Independence and Democracy group also called for the report to be made public, and gave some examples of its content.

“This shows that the budgetary control committee wants to scrutinise us, but doesn’t want to scrutinise its own affairs”, Mr Bonde said after the vote.

The fact that there are “crooks” in the European parliament is not a scandal in itself, as they exist everywhere, Mr Bonde said.

“The scandal is how you handle them. Then, it is bad image [for the European parliament]”, he added.

There are two versions of the report. The “soft” version - without names - is the one which MEPs are calling to be published. The one with names has been sent to the EU’s anti-fraud body, OLAF which will probably ignore it.

Swedish Green MEP Carl Schlyter has used his right as an EU citizen to ask for authorisation to see the parliament’s report and received a letter that his request is under process.

Any EU citizen is entitled to see any of the EU Parliament’s documents on the condition that the document does not contain names or, if it does, that the citizen accepts that the names be taken out. You can contact the Parliament via its snappily named Correspondence with Citizens Unit

On Friday, Pakistan blocked access to YouTube on the grounds of “anti-Islamic” content. The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority, which issued the order, didn’t specify what the authorities had taken offence to although a PTA official mentioned a trailer for Geert Wilders’ unreleased film. The official also mentioned that the PTA blocks any sites that show the Muhammed cartoons.

In order to block the site, PTA engineers “hijacked” YouTube’s server address, repointing it to technical cul-de-sac. The redirect details were then passed on to the country’s 70 Internet service providers so that anyone trying to access the site would be sent up the cul-de-sac.

And then these details were accidentally passed on, to Hong-Kong based PCCW who updated their servers and passed the details on. The upshot of all this was that YouTube was blocked all over the place.

Once the YouTube engineers realised what was going on they contacted PCCW who lifted the block. Google, the owners of YouTube, said that the problem lasted for about two hours.

Maybe the censorious types who called for the block in the first place should move to ban Pakistan’s government for making Islamic leaders look like a bunch of incompetent authoritarians.

The censorious types that decide what adverts can and can’t be shown on the London Underground have banned (via) a poster advertising the play Fat Christ on the grounds that it was “likely to offend ethnic, religious or other major groups”.

The poster depicts a portly man, wearing pink underwear and a crown of thorns, on a cross. It was banned from Angel Tube station, where the Upper Street theatre had booked an advertising spot. A London Underground spokesman said the Fat Christ poster was “declined” because it contravened a commitment not to display adverts likely to offend ethnic, religious or other major groups.

However, the Rev Stephen Coles, of St Thomas’s Church in Finsbury Park has criticised the ban:

The itch to censor is something one should resist. I can’t quite see how this could cause offence. We’re grown-ups and Jesus can defend himself. One has to be a little wary of indulging the super-sensitive.

Mr Coles also pointed out that putting Christ in boxer shorts preserved his dignity more than usual.

Gavin Davis, the author of Fat Christ who also features as the man on the cross, insisted he had not set out to offend and that the poster accurately reflects the content and themes of the poster.

We don’t believe it to be blasphemous and can’t understand London Underground’s censorious position. I am, however, prepared to apologise for my choice of boxer shorts.

The decision follows London Underground’s earlier “nipplegate” veto of a 15th-century nude portrait of Venus by the German painter Lucas Cranach the Elder, with which the Royal Academy had hoped to advertise its latest exhibition.