Tiscali the pusillanimous

The word pusillanimous comes to us from Greek via Latin or French. It is formed from a Greek word meaning very small or weak, and a Greek word meaning mind. The meaning of pusillanimous is faithful to its etymology: lacking in courage; timid, cowardly; mean-spirited.

When I initally created this website, it used a broadband connection provided by Tiscali under certain conditions. Some of those conditions provide severe limitations on freedom of speech. Freedom of speech is one of the greatest assets of the internet, as it provides not merely permission, but a means of speaking to others.

Presumably threats to freedom of speech are common in the conditions imposed by internet service providers. The ISP you are using at present in its acceptable use policy declares, "We and our employees reserve the right to refuse to post or to remove any information or materials, in whole or in part, that it, in its sole discretion, deems to be offensive, indecent, or otherwise inappropriate regardless of whether such material or its dissemination is unlawful." I think such a sweeping statement of policy is reasonable, to cover a multitude of possibilities. The use that a company could make of such a provision, however, could be unreasonable. It was the unreasonable use of such a policy that caused me to close a broadband account with Tiscali.

After the dishonest PC Francis objected to my publication on a website of two things he had said to me - "Keep quiet and listen to me" and that damage to my side gate was not evidence of forced entry to my property by three people who had assaulted me - and said that he was having my website closed down, I received an email dated 10 September 2004 from the Tiscali Abuse team.

The entire message read as follows:

We have been notified of the following infringement in relation to the site http://myweb.tiscali.co.uk/ggmadden.

As it stands, this puts the site in breach of our Acceptable Use Policy. Please therefore remove the material within seven days.

If this is not done, Tiscali will remove the entire contents of the site and disable the account.

There is however a footnote which could mean that I am not supposed to tell anyone else about the message:

This email and its attachments are confidential and intended for the exclusive use of the addressee(s)....

The "following infringement" was not specified, so I did not know which material I was being asked to remove.

I replied to the email on the same day:

Thank you for the seven days' grace I am allowed before my account is disabled. I will certainly remove all the existing material from my website if necessary before the seven days is up (by or on Thursday 16th September 2004 at the latest), but this does allow me time to ask a few questions about your decision, and give you time to examine the material on my website should you be inclined to do so.

In Terms and Conditions, the area of difficulty seems to be with 4.2.2, "The Internet Access Services must not be used . . . to . . . upload . . . any information or material which is abusive, defamatory."

Q1. Would I be right in supposing that I am not allowed to say that I think of people who have called me a tosser, a wanker and a mother fucker as a poor henpecked zombie and a fat slob? Or do you consider that calling a liar a liar is abusive or defamatory?

And with 9.5 9.5.1, "We may at our sole discretion immediately suspend or terminate this Agreement or suspend the provision of the Internet Access Services in the event that: we are directed by any competent authority to cease the provision of the Internet Access Services or any part of it;"

Q2. After my side gate was smashed in recently and three neighbours, including an ex-policeman assaulted me, a PC Francis was sent to "investigate" the matter. When the ex-policeman had assaulted me on a previous occasion, the police had refused to let me sign a statement because I would not agree to drop the matter. I have good reason to be critical of the local police, and if Tiscali do not allow me to use their services to do so, I shall use another ISP for the purpose. PC Francis had asked me to alter my record of two things he had said, though they were 100% accurate and true. It is PC Francis who has told me on three occasions that he was having my website closed down. Is a not very well educated and not very intelligent police constable in your view a "competent authority", even though he was trying to conceal the truth about his own behaviour?

AUP

2. Unlawful Activities

"not: a. publishing . . . any material which may be deemed illegal, abusive, offensive, anti-social, racist, distressing, harmful or threatening

b. infringing the rights of others including privacy"

4. "Your webspace must not contain: i. content that is illegal, defamatory of, abusive or harmful to others"

If one took some of these terms literally, the Web would be a singular place. Any comment must be inoffensive? No subject (e.g. war) can be raised which might distress someone? No person can be mentioned without their permission, as this invades their privacy?

Your terms and conditions and policy raise some very serious questions about free speech. And there were several serious reasons why I created a website as a public record of harassment to which I have been subjected since early 1999, by people who have the stated aim of making my staying at my present address intolerable:

1.. Last year, on one occasion when I drove down to the main road, the ex-policeman, my next-door neighbour, followed me so closely that I thought he might be going to push me into oncoming traffic. On previous occasions he had threatened to beat me up. I wished to leave a public record of his behaviour.

2.. Part of the harassment I have been subjected to has been causing stuff to be sent to me by courier or through the post for more than five years. Most of the goods have been returned, but there are well over 300 items in my garage, some of which have caused me a great deal of trouble, including letters from debt collection agencies and solicitors threatening legal action. My website seems to have put a stop to this, as well as to the abusive language I have been subjected to for more than five years.

3.. Though I had occasion to summon the police on half a dozen occasions in 1999, the police told me last year that they could find no record of my having done so. So I wished to make my own public record of criminal activities to which the police wish to turn a blind eye.

4.. Since creating the website, I have been spared the distressing need to recount again and again details of hoax orders of goods for which I am not responsible. I have been able to simply send a company, a debt agency, or a solicitor the URLs of relevant pages of the website. I think it is as a consequence of this that I have been spared a threatened case in Hull County Court and visits from debt collectors.

I hope that you have the time to consider at least some of my concerns. I appreciate that it is my own interest to avoid your being subject to legal action, but surely there can be no objection whatever to much if not most of what I have written after careful examination of relevant documentation. And justified criticism of public services is surely conducive to the public good, and not a reason for censorship.

I shall, as I said at the outset, if necessary (barring unforeseen eventualities like serious illness or the impossibility of contacting the server) remove all the files at present on my tiscali website by Thursday 16th at the latest, but hope to hear from you in the meantime that a more moderate course of action would be acceptable.

Tiscali failed to reply to me email, so I 'removed' my files from Tiscali's server. Whether I actually removed them in the sense that I deleted them from Tiscali's server I cannot now remember. What is certain is that I downloaded them.

On 06 February 2005 I emailed abuse@uk.tiscali.com again:

On Friday, September 10, 2004 3:54 PM, the Tiscali AUP Team sent me the message appended to this email.

The email I sent to you in reply (10/09/2004 23:53) remains unanswered. Nevertheless, I removed all the material from my website in the allotted time, despite the unclear nature of your message to me.

I have now - at my request - attended a court hearing where the CPS said that they were offering no evidence, and a charge brought against me by a poorly educated, badly trained, and fairly unintelligent police constable was dismissed by the court.

I have given the local police inspector seven days to rescind any instructions to you to have material removed from my website. I wish to put my website back online very soon, and to add further critical comments about the local police.

If in due time the Tiscali AUP Team does not withdraw its instruction to me, I shall have to find for the website an ISP which does not use its acceptable use policy to stifle freedom of speech.

Some days later, having received no response from Tiscali to this second email, I telephoned Tiscali to give notice that I wanted to terminate my contract with them for the provision of a broadband internet connection.

Tiscali's behaviour and attitude I find contemptible. Their emailed notice to me to remove material from my website was clearly incomplete and to that extent incompetent. Their failure to answer or even acknowledge two emails from me would in itself have been a sufficient reason for closing my account with them. Their willingness to summarily ban my website, which is what in effect they did as they did not specify any particular material which they thought needed removing, I think deplorable. Presumably the only ethic Tiscali recognise is to do with money. I think Tiscali really deserve the epithet pusillanimous.