Typepad on Tomlinson

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Tomlinson. Not a happy puppy right now.Got an answer about Richard Tomlinson’s blog, although it’s not much of an answer. No, he didn’t take it down because his conditions had been met; it was taken down by Typepad itself, for TOS violations. Here’s the email:

Hi,Thank you for contacing us. Mr. Tomlinson’s weblog was suspended due to Terms of Service violations. We’re not at liberty to discuss the matter beyond that.Thanks,
Colleen
TypePad Technical Services
Six Apart, Ltd.

and here is a link to their Terms of Service. Looks like he fell afoul of #7. The “not at liberty” seems to indicate there are lawyers involved, don’t it?

For those of you who don’t know, Tomlinson is the former MI6 member and blogger who has been jousting with law-enforcement types for several years now. Probably most notorious for his claim that MI6 assassinated Princess Diana and he can prove it, he’s probably more dangerous for publicly posting a database containing the names of those he claims to know are/were working for Special Services. I blogged about his blog here. It was abruptly shut down on the 4th, as he was negotiating the return of some of this things (including his PDA and the computer of a friend) with the law.

9 thoughts on “Typepad on Tomlinson”

  2. Playing with “Big People”…
    It is good that they only suspended his blog… In other parts of the world (sounds familiar?), they would have eliminated him!

  6. Thanks for the link to the new blog. I’ve already blogged about it; the link to my post is in the comment above yours.

    Funny, for whatever reason WordPress won’t store your IP. Haven’t seen that before. Never mind, I was looking in the wrong window. This stuff can make you paranoid!

    In response to your comment, I went to check the records…and… 

    Well now, that’s very interesting. I was going to quote from the googlecache of the old blog, which as of last week was still quite heartily there. Now it’s gone. Poof.

    There is now no way to confirm or deny either your position or mine.

    I did read on the last blog that he’d taken “publicly available” lists and edited them and re-posted them, and Cryptome had listed and linked to the database of his own creation.

    Certainly, he’s denied making the first list, but equally certainly he did make and post a database containing names of people he alleged were in either MI6 or (I believe) the Foreign Office. I read that myself on the old blog. But now, of course, there’s no way to prove it.

    And you’re right about the Di thing. I believe he says they were going to get a European leader, and he’s insinuated that this was related to how Diana died.

  7. The Wayback Machine at Archive.org also has no record of the blog. Very slick. Maybe we should start calling him Herostratus.

    From Archive.org:
    Why isn’t the site I’m looking for in the archive?

    Some sites may not be included because the automated crawlers were unaware of their existence at the time of the crawl. It’s also possible that some sites were not archived because they were password protected, blocked by robots.txt, or otherwise inaccessible to our automated systems. Siteowners might have also requested that their sites be excluded from the Wayback Machine. When this has occurred, you will see a “blocked site error” message. When a site is excluded because of robots.txt you will see a “robots.txt query exclusion error” message.

  8. Update.

    When all else fails, give up on Google and try something else.

    This is what Tomlinson had to say about the lists: he stated repeatedly that he had nothing to do with making up the lists at Cryptome. But he did go ahead and “add value” to the lists, as he explains in the following post on his now-defunct blog.

    New letter from Treasury Solicitor
    The Treasury Solicitor has sent me the attached letter. I dispute that the column “known to RT” is in breach of Justice Park’s order. I am not stating that the corresponding names are in MI6 – I am just stating that I remember them. I could also have known people in the FCO, couldn’t I? Or is the Treasury Solicitor confirming again that everybody on that list is MI6? Moreover, if they accuse me of authoring the list, that means they believe that I remember EVERYBODY on the list – so why are they concerned if I admit to actually only remembering a dozen or so?

    I added the “known to RT” column to demonstrate to Andy Pink which people I can genuinely remember after he specifically asked me by email for my analysis of the lists (I would post his email if he had not specifically asked me not to post his correspondence). Surely I am entitled to point out obvious weaknesses and oddities in these absurd and utterly false allegations against myself?

    If the Treasury Solicitor don’t want the column on the spreadsheet, they should not have falsely accused me of these lists, thereby obliging me to analyse them. Before they arrested me, I had never paid the lists the slightest attention!!

  9. And here’s an example of that “Value Added” stuff I was talking about, also from his old Typepad blog:

    This latest raid on my property and invasion of my privacy sets a very worrying precedent for me. It shows that every time any person anonymously publishes an alleged list of MI6 officers (whether accurate or not), then the police can obtain a warrant to raid me. They clearly do not need to show a magistrate that the list is either accurate, or to show evidence that I am the culprit.

    I am therefore very worried. Literally anybody can buy a copy of the diplomatic list, extract a list of names, post them on the internet – and then I get blamed and raided. I have no legal protection whatsoever from these raids – because clearly magistrates do not need to see any evidence that I am the culprit.

    The only defence I can therefore mount is on the internet. I am considering producing a wiki directory of MI6 officers to list all names that I have been officially blamed for by raiding my home. These names can be assumed to be real MI6 officers – because if they were not accurate how could the police obtain a warrant?

    If anybody can suggest how I can import the spreadsheet analysis into an online wiki database please let me know.

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