"Wolf! Wolf!" (II)
(This article first appeared on my blog in January 2007)
Readers may remember that in December, the BCSE twice tried to intimidate and/or discredit me by inventing bogus legal threats against me:
- At one time, the BCSE website carried paragraphs including allegations such as: "We also advise readers of this wiki that Anderson is in serious breach of UK and international copyright laws in information he is offering to the public." (one, two, three).
- After the above allegation seriously back-fired (when the BCSE discovered that a) it was false and b) their private e-mails demonstrated that they knew it was false and c) I was documenting their own multiple and actual breaches of copyright law), the BCSE came up with a new one: that I was attempting to break into their website contrary to the "computer misuse act" and that they had received legal advice to report me to the police (one, two).
I called the BCSE a bunch of bluffing bullies, challenging them to take their evidence to the law if it existed. In fact, I promised to do it myself just to prove the point of how empty their threats were.
And lo and behold... few days later, the BCSE silently deleted the second allegation from their website too.
Before (notice that it's a "sticky" topic, meaning that it was permanently locked to the top of the forum so that all visitors would see it):
(http://www.bcseweb.org.uk/forum/viewforum.php?f=1)
And now, it's gone...
How The BCSE Operate
You will be unsurprised to learn that after carrying this post with its allegations of serious criminality, the BCSE have not troubled themselves to:
- Send me any kind of apology for any damage done to my reputation.
- Put up any kind of statement on their website correcting their errors so that anyone who read the original post can now understand that the BCSE are no longer backing their own allegations.
Nope - it's just been silently deleted. Let's just pretend they never said it! Remember that the front page of the BCSE website says:
I have to say that I find BCSE-style righteousness not very palatable.
The Boy Who Cried Wolf...
The trouble with making bogus legal threats which you have no intention of standing behind should it come to the crunch, is that it damages your credibility. Once you've done it a few times, people no longer see any reason to take you seriously. (For a third case in point, see the footnote of this article). All that the BCSE have accomplished through this saga is:
- Far from damaging my integrity, they have established it. My words about the BCSE still stand - theirs about me have had to be deleted.
- They have proved my own thesis that the "research" on their website will have to be deleted once it comes under scrutiny. Or in other words, their own credibility has been damaged.
- They have shown themselves up as bullies - using threats with no substance behind them.
- They have shown themselves as too small-minded to publish any kind of apology once their smears are exposed as false.
Or in other words, the BCSE are showing the world all the features which led me to start this blog in the first place so that others could see what was going on...
David Anderson