A plea

Michael Pollak mpollak at panix.com
Fri May 14 01:47:01 PDT 1999


On Fri, 14 May 1999, Jim heartfield wrote:


> The British government has been going into fits over the posting of the
> names of 1000 of their secret agents on the web by one disgruntled
> employee. But nobody here is allowed to report the address (still less
> the list). Can any responsible cyber-netizen out there enlighten us
> blacked-out Brits?

Alas, the British government beat you to it and closed down the site. I attach the story from Wired below. I promise when Tomlinson gets his site up again I'll see if I can copy it for you before it gets shut down.

Britain Shuts Down Spy Sites

by Polly Sprenger

3:00 a.m. 12.May.99.PDT

GeoCities has yanked the Web site of a former spy who has repeatedly

threatened to expose the underbelly of British espionage.

Richard Tomlinson has had a rocky couple of years. He was sacked by a

British intelligence agency in 1995 and jailed in 1997 for breaking

England's Official Secrecy Act. After his release, Tomlinson jetted

around the globe, staying out of reach of the British government until

he landed in Geneva.

There, Tomlinson used the Internet to launch a personal crusade

against what he considers to be the gross inadequacies and illegal

activities of MI6, England's international intelligence arm. Now, the

British government has again silenced the ex-spy with an injunction to

keep him from publishing sensitive information on the Internet.

Tomlinson had maintained a Web site hosted by IP worldcom in Lausanne,

Switzerland. On 30 April, the Treasury Solicitor's office obtained an

order against Tomlinson, who removed the site rather than risk a

violation, according to officials in the Treasury Solicitor's office.

"The injunction was granted following threats from Tomlinson to

publish information on the Internet," said a representative of the

Treasury Solicitor's office. "The injunction prevents Tomlinson from

presenting information on the Internet or any other means."

IP worldcom did not respond to interview requests in time for this

article.

A week later, Tomlinson launched another site, this time at

California-based GeoCities, where he promised to post a map of all the

MI6 offices worldwide.

Again, the British government was hot on his heels.

Last week, attorneys for the Crown showed GeoCities the Swiss

injunction. And GeoCities' legal department brought down the curtain

on Tomlinson's site.

"We had a notification from the [British government] attorney that we

had a Web site that appeared to violate our content guidelines," said

Ed Pierce, vice president of legal affairs at GeoCities.

Pierce and his investigative teams determined that Tomlinson was in

violation of the user agreement, which contains three broad principles

-- no pornography, no hate speech, and no illegal activities -- and

terminated the site.

Pierce was unsure what, if any, notification GeoCities sent to

Tomlinson, but he said that the former spy would be able to defend the

right to publish his site if he chose. Most users found to be in

violation of the user agreement never come forward to defend

themselves, Pierce added.

"What I don't understand is how it was possible for this to take place

in the US without there being a court order," said John Wadham,

director of the London civil rights group Liberty, and Tomlinson's

solicitor. "There is the issue of due process. Without this due

process I can't understand how he can be banned from using that Web

site."

But the British government has long been wary of Tomlinson, who has

tried several times in the past few years to draw attention to himself

and the alleged crimes of MI6.

In November 1997, Tomlinson was charged with violating the Official

Secrecy Act as he shopped his memoirs around in the publishing world.

Tomlinson tried to stay an arrest by allegedly telling officials that

he had placed an encoded manuscript on two computers somewhere in the

world. If Tomlinson didn't signal each machine once a week, the

manuscript would automatically be published online. But the manuscript

never appeared, and Tomlinson was jailed for four months.

He reappeared in the media in 1998. Nearly a year after the crash of

the car carrying Princess Diana and Dodi Fayed, Tomlinson told the

French judge investigating the case that driver Henri Paul had worked

for British intelligence.

The French government later told the media that Tomlinson's claims

were unfounded, and that the ex-spy had approached the judge on his

own.

On 11 September 1998, Tomlinson notified his solicitor that he had

evidence that MI6 had tried to assassinate Slobodan Milosevic. He

claimed that in the summer of 1992, a colleague had showed him an MI6

proposal to kill Milosevic.

"I ask you to investigate this matter fully," Tomlinson wrote. "I

believe that legal action should be taken ... to show other MI6

officers that they should not assume that they can murder and carry

out other illegal acts with impunity."

Tomlinson was reportedly on the passenger list but missed being on

SwissAir flight 111 that plunged into icy waters off Nova Scotia on 2

September 1998, leading him to speculate that the crash was actually a

murder plot.

Copyright © 1994-99 Wired Digital Inc. All rights reserved.



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