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BAD HACKS: Andrew Neil is a sewage snake | TheCritique Archives

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Andrew Neil: his slant on sewage-related litter on Scottish beaches smacks of deliberate misinformation.

A few weeks ago, my curiosity was piqued by a tweet from right-wing broadcaster Andrew Neil, as follows:

It was an innocent question; I don’t know anything about tidal flows between England and Scotland (why should I?), and there really is an awful lot of ordure being pumped into English waters right now.

The response I received was astonishing – particularly in political terms. Example:

It turns out I was right to question this information; I was just mistaken about the basis for questioning it.

Thankfully we have Martin Odoni of The Critique Archives to put us straight.

Here he is:

Note the pains Neil goes to quite needlessly to stress that the authority responsible for overseeing sewer overflows is a nationalised utility, subtly encouraging readers to imagine that the problem is caused by ‘inefficient public industry.’ But also, look closely at his claim and see if you can spot where he might be fiddling the arithmetic.

The Times offers a similar spin on this in its headline, but look closer at the text, and you soon realise we are being deliberately misled.

Sewage-related debris made up 17.9 per cent of litter on beaches in Scotland, compared with an average of 8.9 per cent on beaches throughout the UK in 2022.

– The Times

What the MCS have actually found is that there is an eight-times-higher proportion of sewage-debris in the litter on Scottish beaches than in the litter on English or Welsh beaches. That would only mean there is eight times as much sewage on Scottish beaches as on English ones if there is exactly the same quantity of litter on Scottish beaches. The ‘eight-times-the-proportion’ figure does not substantiate the claim that there is eight times the total.

It seems the real difficulty that the MCS was trying to draw attention to is there is a lack of monitoring of sewage outlets in Scotland compared with the rest of the UK, so we do not actually know the accurate amount of sewage debris on Scottish beaches, or even of litter in general.

There does appear to be proportionally more litter on Scottish beaches (492 items per 100m) than on English beaches (309 per 100m), but that information only comes from volunteer clean-up operations and so is unscientific.

“Moreover,” Mr Odoni adds,

the English coastline is 2,748 miles long. The Scottish coastline is well over twice as long at 6,160 miles, due to the considerably greater ‘zig-zagging’ of Scottish beaches and the extensive peninsulae, which would substantially mitigate the bare amounts of litter involved.

This is not to say that Scotland doesn’t have a sewage-related litter problem:

On balance from what information there is, there probably is somewhat more sewage-debris on Scottish beaches than on English ones.

But This Writer can wholeheartedly join with Mr Odoni in suggesting:

The snake-ish attempt by Neil to give the impression that it is eight times higher, and that purely to smear nationalised companies, is a vintage example of how misleading his brand of ‘journalism’ is.

Source: Andrew Neil is a sewage snake | TheCritique Archives

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Is this the reason Rishi Sunak u-turned on attending COP 27? [VIDEO – SATIRE]

If you were wondering why Rishi Sunak suddenly decided to attend the COP 27 climate change summit after all – and you’re not convinced that it was because Boris Johnson said he’d be going, then here’s an alternative (but even less convincing) explanation:

… or IS it less convincing?

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Tory government suppressed hacking of Liz Truss’s phone, it’s claimed – to protect Braverman?

Hacked: the photo is a mock-up – but it’s indicative of her communication skills that she was reckoned not to be able even to hold a phone properly.

Information is valuable – depending on the timing of its release.

Take the claim that Liz Truss had such poor security, as Foreign Secretary, that her phone was hacked around April and hundreds of confidential documents were copied from it – including information about the war in Ukraine and political conversations with Kwasi Kwarteng.

It is being said that the facts were known over the summer but were prevented from becoming public knowledge by Boris Johnson and Cabinet Secretary Simon Case. Why?

Was it to protect Truss while she was making her bid to become prime minister?

That would be corruption of a very high order and all those involved should be punished – if the corrupt UK legal system defines a crime that covers it.

Some details are on the BBC website here – and this is how I found out: I discovered them on Twitter (I was at a family function and not at my desk):

But let’s get back to timing. Why are we learning about this now? Could it be because Home Secretary Suella Braverman is in trouble, after being reappointed to her job despite revelations of multiple security breaches from her own phone?

Some certainly think so…

But these are two very similar stories. Why not combine them and reach the obvious conclusion?

And what do you think that conclusion is?

It’s that Conservative ministers leak like sieves and shouldn’t be anywhere near confidential information. Right?

Have YOU donated to my crowdfunding appeal, raising funds to fight false libel claims by TV celebrities who should know better? These court cases cost a lot of money so every penny will help ensure that wealth doesn’t beat justice.

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Labour ‘cyber incident’ exposes the party’s own Data Protection breaches

Data theft: the Labour Party has admitted that details of members – and FORMER members, that it handed to a ‘third party’ without telling us, have been stolen. This includes information the party should not have had. Should we take the party to court over it?

The Labour Party has informed This Writer – and many others, it seems – that my data may have been hijacked after it was given to a “third party”.

This is very concerning for several reasons:

Firstly: I am no longer a member of the Labour Party and it should not be holding any information of mine, for any reason at all.

Secondly: I have not given permission for any data held by me to be passed on to any third party, and it is illegal for the Labour Party to have done so.

Next: The Labour Party has not passed on details of the identity of this mysterious third party. Why not? Is it embarrassing? Is it potentially incriminating? I want to know, and I reckon thousands of others will want to know as well.

Finally: Why am I hearing about this on November 4, possibly an entire week after the incident took place – and a day after many other victims were informed? Why were we not all informed at once?

According to Labour’s letter to affected people (which the party is apparently asking us not to share, although that part seems to have been cut from mine), party officers were informed of the incident on October 29.

This implies that the data was hijacked on a still earlier date, meaning that we went uninformed that our illegally-held data had been held by wrong-doers for a longer time than Labour suggests and that we have been vulnerable to cyber crime for all of that period without even knowing about it.

The crime itself seems to be a ransomware incident in which data is rendered inaccessible to a user unless it pays the hijacker some form of remuneration. If such payment is refused, the hijacker may go on to use the stolen data to harm the people to whom it belongs. Labour doesn’t mention this in its email.

Nor are we informed of the nature of the data that was stolen. It may include personal information that could be used for identity theft or blackmail, and/or financial information that could result in plain theft from our bank accounts. We don’t know because Labour hasn’t told us.

The email goes on to say that Labour has reported the incident to authorities including the National Crime Agency (NCA), National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) and the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO). No doubt those organisations are busy doing very little about it (I have experience of the ICO’s dawdling with regard to Labour Party data breaches; it says it has received so many reports about the party that it is swamped).

And we are told that the Labour Party “takes the security of all personal information for which it is responsible very seriously”, which seems plainly untrue, considering the fact that it should not have had any of my personal information at all.

Members – old and current – are up in arms about this:

We do need to know the identity of the “third party”. For one thing, it might be an organisation we would not want to have any of our information at all.

Skwawkbox has pointed out that

Labour has outsourced projects recently to one company formerly run by Evans and now run by his wife and another run by a ‘friend of a friend’.

I would also be concerned if my information had been handed to the Jewish Labour Movement, the organisation Labour has said it would task with providing training to members on the nature of anti-Semitism and indoctrination against it.

That organisation is highly prejudiced, in the experience and opinion of This Writer, and I would not trust it with my personal details in any event.

One final point: Labour Party members may have no choice on who receives their information because party secretary David Evans and the leadership helmed by Keir Starmer demand that they automatically agree to everything the party does with it, as a condition of membership.

But I am no longer a member.

I think a class action lawsuit on this case may be appropriate, don’t you?

I would certainly be interested in hearing from anybody who feels the same way and is interested in taking the matter forward (although I would not want to be the principal claimant as I am already involved in a highly time-consuming court case, as is well known).

Who’s interested?

Have YOU donated to my crowdfunding appeal, raising funds to fight false libel claims by TV celebrities who should know better? These court cases cost a lot of money so every penny will help ensure that wealth doesn’t beat justice.

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Guessing a password is still hacking and Kemi Badenoch should be prosecuted for it

Kemi Badenoch: Hacking.

Tories would argue for the sake of it until they were blue in the face, rather than just in political persuasion.

If there isn’t any legislation or legal case law to state that guessing a password isn’t hacking, then they’re batting on a very sticky wicket indeed.

Kemi Badenoch has admitted breaking into a website belonging to a political opponent in order to carry out unauthorised alterations.

Come to think of it, that isn’t just hacking – it’s fraud.

Let’s see it argued out in court.

A Conservative rising star has admitted “hacking” into the website of a Labour opponent to alter its content in favour of the Tories.

Newly appointed Tory vice-chair Kemi Badenoch made the startling admission when asked what was the “naughtiest” thing she had ever done.

Hacking into websites is a criminal offence which can carry a prison sentence of up to two years – but the Tories insisted guessing a password did not constitute “real hacking”.

Source: Conservative rising star admits she ‘hacked’ into Labour MP website to spread Tory propaganda | PoliticsHome.com

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Somebody at Loose Women is a genius. Here’s the reason

Think about it:

Pertinent question: Piers Morgan.

For information, from Wikipedia:

During Morgan’s tenure as editor, the Daily Mirror was advised by Steven Nott that voicemail interception was possible by means of a standard PIN code. Despite staff initially expressing enthusiasm for the story it did not appear in the paper, although it did subsequently feature in a South Wales Argus article and on BBC Radio 5 Live in October 1999. On 18 July 2011 Nott was visited by officers of Operation Weeting.[97]

He came under criticism for his “boasting” about phone hacking from Conservative MP Louise Mensch, who has since apologised for these accusations.[98]

In July 2011, in a sequence of articles, the political blogger Paul Staines alleged that while editor of the Daily Mirror in 2002 Morgan published a story concerning the affair of Sven-Goran Eriksson and Ulrika Jonsson while knowing it to have been obtained by phone hacking.[99]

On 20 December 2011, Morgan was a witness by satellite link from the United States at the Leveson Inquiry.[100] While he said he had no reason to believe that phone hacking had occurred at the Mirror while he was in charge there, he admitted to hearing a recording of an answerphone message left by Paul McCartney for Heather Mills, but refused to “discuss where that tape was played or who made [it] – it would compromise a source.”[100] Appearing as a witness at the same Inquiry on 9 February 2012, Mills was asked under oath if she had ever made a recording of Paul McCartney’s phone call or had played it to Piers Morgan; she replied: “Never”.[101][102] She said that she had never authorised Morgan, or anybody, to access or listen to her voicemails.[101] Mills told the inquiry that Morgan, “a man that has written nothing but awful things about me for years”, would have relished telling the inquiry if she had played a personal voicemail message to him.[102]

On 23 May 2012, Newsnight presenter Jeremy Paxman was a witness at the Leveson Inquiry. He recalled a lunch with the Mirror editor in September 2002 at which Morgan outlined the means of hacking into a mobile phone.[103]

On 28 November 2012, the Channel 4 documentary Taking on the Tabloids, fronted by actor and phone hacking victim Hugh Grant, showed footage from a 2003 interview with Morgan by the singer and phone hacking victim Charlotte Church, during which he explained to her how to avoid answerphone messages being listened to by journalists. He said: “You can access … voicemails by typing in a number. Now, are you really telling me that journalists aren’t going to do that?”[104][105]

On 29 November 2012, the official findings of the Leveson Inquiry were released, in which Lord Justice Leveson said that Morgan’s testimony under oath on phone hacking was “utterly unpersuasive”. He stated: “[The] evidence does not establish that [Morgan] authorised the hacking of voicemails or that journalists employed by TMG [Trinity Mirror Group] were indulging in this practice … What it does, however, clearly prove is that he was aware that it was taking place in the press as a whole and that he was sufficiently unembarrassed by what was criminal behaviour that he was prepared to joke about it.”[3][106]

On 6 December 2013, Morgan was interviewed, under caution, by police officers from Operation Weeting investigating phone hacking allegations at Mirror Group Newspapers during his tenure as editor.[107]

On 24 September 2014, the Trinity Mirror publishing group admitted for the first time that some of its journalists had been involved in phone hacking and agreed to pay compensation to four people who sued for the alleged hacking of voicemails.[108][109] Six other phone-hacking claims had already been settled. The BBC reported that it had seen legal papers showing that although the alleged hacking could have taken place as early as 1998, the bulk of the alleged wrongdoing took place in the early 2000s when Morgan was the Daily Mirroreditor.[110] The admissions by Trinity Mirror came whilst the London Metropolitan Police investigation into the phone hacking allegations was ongoing. Morgan has always denied any involvement in the practice.[110]

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Was there a secret Tory conspiracy to get rid of #CameronMustGo?

141208simpsonscameronmustgo

Even Bart Simpson thinks #CameronMustGo, according to this satirical cartoon by the Facebook page ‘David Cameron is killing Britain’.

The Twitter hashtag that caught the imagination of the nation has been unceremoniously retired – despite the fact that it is still being used by thousands of British citizens who have had enough of the man it names, and his government.

That’s right – #CameronMustGo has gone.

It disappeared from Twitter‘s United Kingdom trends an astonishing 16 days after it was launched and – suspiciously – while it was still being tweeted at least once every three seconds [accurate at time of writing].

Users instantly smelled a rat – has Twitter been hacked? Or has it been corrupted by Cameron’s cronies?

“# has disappeared from list. So tonight we test the water to try & bring it back Twitterstorm tonight 7pm plz RT” tweeted Sue Rose.

“Looks suspiciously as though censoring hashtag, doesn’t it?” suggested David White.

In order to test whether the hashtag really is being prevented from appearing on people’s screens, they launched a ‘Tweetstorm’ – a co-ordinated barrage of tweets using the hashtag – at 7pm this evening (Monday).

Result: Nothing.

No reappearance of the hashtag in these circumstances clearly suggests someone has taken action against it.

The hashtag has come under criticism – almost from Day One – from the mainstream media. The BBC, the Mirror and even The Guardian are among those who have said #CameronMustGo must go.

The Guardian’s article, headlined ‘#CameronWontGo: why a Twitter campaign alone can’t bring about change’, attracted a less-than-140-character rebuke from ‘Jen’.

She tweeted: “If it means nothing…why is it no longer showing?! It is not because people have stopped tweeting #”

At 7.48pm (19:48 GMT) #CameronMustGo had still failed to reappear, despite being tweeted more than 20,000 times in the previous 60 minutes, according to one bemused user.

This story is not over, but we’ll leave the last word to that man – David Crossweller. His tweet?

“ has nearly over 20,000 tweets in the past hour and isn’t trending? , you bad birdy.”

Breaking:  Thanks are due to Stephen Dolan for the following information. He writes: “Regarding Twitter trends.
https://support.twitter.com/articles/101125-faqs-about-twitter-s-trends#
“‘The new algorithm identifies topics that are immediately popular, rather than topics that have been popular for a while or on a daily basis, to help people discover the ‘most breaking’ breaking news from across the world. (We had previously built in this ‘emergent’ algorithm for all local trends, described below.) We think that trending topics which capture the hottest emerging trends and topics of discussion on Twitter are the most interesting.'”

“So by definition you can’t trend for a long time.”

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Rogues turn government Twitter feed against Miller

Found on Facebook: Members of the public on all the main social media are queueing up to take a pop at former DWP minister and benefit fraudster Maria Miller. How long will David Cameron delay sacking her, and how weak will he seem by the time he gets round to it?

Found on Facebook: Members of the public on all the main social media are queueing up to take a pop at former DWP minister and benefit fraudster Maria Miller. How long will David Cameron delay sacking her, and how weak will he seem by the time he gets round to it?

In comparison to recent events in this saga, what follows is light relief.

A so-called “rogue” Twitter user commandeered a government feed to post satirical comments about the Maria Miller expenses scandal, yesterday evening. (Saturday)

The three tweets appeared on the Department for Culture, Media and Sport’s feed, where they were picked up and shared widely before government watchdogs had a chance to hush them up. The offending tweets have since been deleted from the DCMS feed.

“Seriously though guys which one of us hasn’t embezzled and cheated the taxpayer? #FreeMariaMiller,” ran the first tweet.

This was swiftly followed by one that claimed Miller, who falsely claimed more than £40,000 in mortgage interest payment for a south London house, saying it was her second home while her parents used it as their first, was “like a modern day Robin Hood, she robs the poor to help the rich”.

Miller, who made more than £1 million in profit when she sold the house in February, was ordered to pay back just £5,800 and apologise to Parliament for failing to co-operate with an investigation. The final rogue tweet asked: “Is @Maria_MillerMP guilty? We will let the public decide.”

Unfortunately it seems that the Conservative Party has rallied around the (confirmed) criminal in its ranks and has no intention of allowing British justice anywhere near Miller. They’re all in it together, you see.

That is why Grant Shapps, who knows a thing or three about false claims himself (ask him about his other persona, ‘Michael Green’) wants to “draw a line” under the affair – and why our pitifully weak comedy Prime Minister David Cameron wants to “leave it there”.

It seems the DCMS is also happy to “leave it there”. A spokeswoman has confirmed it was investigating the hacking but, when asked if Twitter or the police had been contacted, admitted: “All I’ve done is change the password.”

A Parliamentary investigation cleared Miller of using public money to provide for her parents, in spite of all the evidence that this was precisely what she had been doing, including a recent revelation that the size of energy bills for the house indicated that somebody had been using it as their main, rather than second, home.

The affair has set off a public outcry, with calls for Miller to resign or be sacked, and for the former Department for Work and Pensions minister to face the same criminal justice system as anyone else accused of wrongly taking taxpayers’ money – like a benefit cheat.

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