Tuesday 17 March 2009

Memo to Barclays Bank

Hope you don't mind me sending this over by carrier pigeon. I suspect you've still got that corporate pigeon loft, haven't you? & do forgive me if any of my writing is smudged - I've tried to use a quill pen out of respect for your general approach to life but one simply can't get the blotting paper these days...

Anyway, let me stop rambling and get right to the point old chaps. I see you've taken an injunction out against the Guardian to get them to take down those internal memos of yours about tax avoidance from their websitethingymajig. (Jolly bad show one of you own folks giving them to Vince Cable, what?).

Well, I'm really sorry to be the one to have to mention this but I'm afraid - and I know this might shock you- the Guardian aren't the only people to have a website. Amazing, I know. There's this really bolshy one called Wikileaks. I'm afraid your documents are there. & I'm afraid in Sweden, US, Latvia, Slovakia, UK, Finland, Netherlands, Poland & Tonga as well.

& that blighter Richard Murphy has downloaded them. He says the fact they're on Wikileaks puts them into the public domain. I imagine you might want to check that point with your lawyer chappies - and perhaps you might want to quibble a bit about their legal bill for getting the injunction in the first place? Just a thought.

Update: Sunny over at Liberal Conspiracy is collecting blogs which link to the wikileaks site, in the hope this might void the legal basis of Barclay's argument about confidentiality. So if you have a blog, do post and do let him know. Remember, linking to a site is not the same as downloading. And newsjiffy says if you link from as blog hosted in Australia you might be liable for a whacking fine.

3 comments:

  1. Hey thanks! Ive just sucessfully accessed Wikileaks Sweden and US and downloaded the memos there. Once on the web....

    I wonder if it is my civic duty to start off a chain e-mail....

    Thanks again :)

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  2. It seems that every single Wikileaks server is down at the moment. I only hope that this is due to them being overloaded with genuine requests to download, and not something more sinister. Are these memos available anywhere else?

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