7 ms·

I'm sure the two of them are enjoying having their faces plastered over the sunday news (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs/the_papers https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/

I'm sure the two of them are enjoying having their faces plastered over the sunday news (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs/the_papers https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs/the_papers) and sorting through all the lovely messages they've received over the last day or so.

huffmsa 8y ago
The retraction never spreads as much as the accusation. Her Majesty's Christmas gift to these two appears to be Scotland Yard routing thousands of bits of hate mail their way.
ajb257 8y ago
Whilst a free press is important, I would argue that 'a man and a woman have been held in connection with the Gatwick Airport drone incident' would suffice. Kudos to the BBC for recognising this. It's not in the public interest for us to know exactly who they are unless they're actually found guilty of a crime. Publishing their names and pictures before _even being charged_ does nothing but open potentially innocent people up to danger. Whoever caused the Gatwick chaos needs to be brought to justice, but this is beyond reckless
- zozbot123 8y ago
  > ... It's not in the public interest for us to know exactly who they are unless they're actually found guilty of a crime. ... On the contrary, the commonly-acknowledged right of habeas corpus essentially requires the government to make the fact that someone is being detained public, at least if the prisoner himself so chooses. Privacy is a red herring here - habeas corpus is about preserving basic freedoms.
  - hugh-avherald 8y ago
    It's risible to claim that the press published the names because they were concerned about habeas corpus.
  - hopler 8y ago
    > at least if the prisoner himself so chooses is the missing part in most cases.
  - dahart 8y ago
    What do you mean when you say habeas corpus essentially requires a detention to be made public? Habeas corpus provides for a review of the legality of a detention for the requester. How & when is any information given publicly under habeas corpus laws? What makes you think habeas corpus and privacy can’t co-exist?
    - hopler 8y ago
      Without public knowledge and pressure, there is no check on authoritarian abuse and the law has no teeth.
      - dahart 8y ago
        Maybe, but that's not what I asked. Don't habeas corpus laws provide public access to a (perhaps private) legal review? When do laws require sharing results with the public, as the GP comment claimed? Can there be checks on authoritarian abuse that don't require public dissemination? Is the threat of publicity exactly the same thing as a requirement for publicity?
        wbl 8y ago
        Imagine a country where the police arrest people and they vanish in the middle of the night, with no way to determine what their status is.
        HarryHirsch 8y ago
        There is no need to imagine a country where mugshots are freely available, even is that person is later released without charge, that already exists, and we know what the practice does.
        1ris 8y ago
        Isn't this standard procedure in most western democracies?
        dahart 8y ago
  - dbdjfjrjvebd 8y ago
    > at least if the prisoner himself so chooses This is the key.
- Carpetsmoker 8y ago
  I would argue that publishing the names at all isn't particularly news-worthy. The right to privacy exists, too. In the justice system it's the judge which rules a sentence. Years – or even decades – of public shaming doesn't seem fair to me. Committing a crime doesn't mean you're no longer dealing with a person with real feelings. Publishing names and photos strikes me as "2 minutes of hate", and not "news". Also note that it doesn't just affect the person(s). Family members or even completely unrelated people with similar names can get threatened.
  - starbeast 8y ago
    Even just being in a crime reconstruction video as an actor is apparently risky. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-nottinghamshire-34218343 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-nottinghamshire-342183...
    - hopler 8y ago
      That's horrid. The BBC producers admitted they knew they were putting him in harm's way by republishit the video, and they intentionally went ahead anyway instead of taking a few minutes to fix the video.
    - Carpetsmoker 8y ago
      > Det Insp Helen Evans, of Lincolnshire Police, said it would be "remiss not to thoroughly investigate every solid piece of information" and he will be given an update "in due course". I will never seize to be amazed at the capacity of some people to not think for themselves.
    - jacquesm 8y ago
      That's one very effective way to get people to no longer want to act in reconstruction videos.
  - closeparen 8y ago
    The facts entering public record are what distinguishes "arrested" from "disappeared." Do you want to live in a world where people are yanked off the street and not heard of for months or years, with no ability for the press/friends/family to find out about the situation, "out of respect for their privacy?" If the police refuse to disclose whether they've grabbed someone, I'm going to assume I'm in Soviet Russia.
- DanBC 8y ago
  > It's not in the public interest for us to know exactly who they are unless they're actually found guilty of a crime. The press always say that naming people who've been arrested is an important measure against authoritarian regimes. It allows the public to know whether police powers of arrest are being misused or not. They appear to have lost this argument, because this is in tension with people's right to privacy and rights to a fair trial by the courts not by the media. There's some interesting info here about different approaches: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/law-and-order/10063422/Police-should-name-arrested-suspects-that-are-already-identified-by-the-press-Theresa-May-says.html https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/law-and-order/100634... https://www.theguardian.com/media/2013/apr/21/press-intrusion-name-suspects https://www.theguardian.com/media/2013/apr/21/press-intrusio...
  - hopler 8y ago
    There is an obvious difference between protecting people by tracking their identities in captivity vs harming people by publicly shaming them by immediately parroting the authority'sallegations.
    - caminante 8y ago
      You're missing his point. Your distinction still places the trust in the discretion of the police/press. If they don't disclose the name, then it's harder for character witnesses to come forward (e.g. the couple's neighbors in this case).
      - TheOtherHobbes 8y ago
        I don't think it works like that. Character witnesses are organised in private by a defence lawyer, who - of course - knows the identities of the accused. Not by a public announcement in the press. Front page headlines along the lines of "The police believe these people are criminals who caused huge inconvenience and suffering to hundreds of thousands of people - would someone like to say a good work about them?" probably aren't the best way to guarantee a fair trial.
- danso 8y ago
  I think the right to privacy vs. printing public info about the actions of our police is always going to be in tension. Of course, there's no argument that innocent people should have their privacy invaded, but ideally, innocent people shouldn't have been arrested at all. The flip side is when famous/powerful people are arrested but not charged, and the public not being able to know whether they got off because strings were pulled. And there's the overarching problem of people being disappeared with the public/press having no idea whether they were arrested, and for what reason. Which has led to some absurd situations in China recently: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/13/world/asia/china-fan-bingbing.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/13/world/asia/china-fan-bing...
  - snuxoll 8y ago
    Public information about ongoing investigations and arrests wouldn't be problematic if our society didn't have such hilariously broken views on criminal investigations and trials. Get arrested in connection with some well talked-about crime, but were released or found innocent at trial? Doesn't matter, you're still guilty in the eyes of the public. Hell, look at jury boxes in the US - you as a defendant are assumed guilty against the spirit of our constitution, because people suck. Either we as a society need to fix our fucked up perceptions, or we need to have a serious discussion about the right to privacy up until the point that a verdict is delivered. Unfortunately, there's no evidence that we are going to fix the former in a timely manner.
- mattmanser 8y ago
  While it's not clear, the NYT seems to be saying that the local MP (politician) accidentally named them thinking the police had made them public, while the police would not confirm them and never named them. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/22/world/europe/gatwick-airport-drones-arrest.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/22/world/europe/gatwick-airp... I think it's a very British whoopsie, they're plastered over the papers and they didn't do anything.
- chatterbeak 8y ago
  Just as in the United States, you're guilty if the Public thinks your guilty.
- cosmojg 8y ago
  >Whoever caused the Gatwick chaos needs to be brought to justice Absolutely, along with all of these clowns who are perpetuating the chaos.
Carpetsmoker 8y ago
Being accused is the same as 100% guilty, and being guilty is always reason for pubic shaming and unlimited amounts of vitriol. Good ol' British press logic. I wonder where they get their journalists from. Is there an education to be a heartless bastard with no sense of ethics? Or do they train them in-house?
- pasabagi 8y ago
  They recruit them from the alumni of the same boarding schools they went to. I wish I was joking.
- huffmsa 8y ago
  It's why there's so much outrage in America when differences between the verdict of public opinion and the verdict of the court happen.
- KineticLensman 8y ago
  Well it depends on which part of the British press you read - it's not a homogeneous entity. The BBC (original article) and the Guardian [0] didn't name them at any point. Some of the tabloid press did, including names and photos of their friends, families and employer. (I won't link to the naming articles because that would of course name them!). At least one of the major online papers that did name them has at least said that they have been released without charge (in the process calling them 'the accused'), but still with a mass of personal details. Really sad - I'm guessing that as drone users they will now receive the inevitable nut-job drone hatred. [0] https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/dec/23/gatwick-drone-chaos-arrested-couple-released-without-charge https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/dec/23/gatwick-dron...
- pjc50 8y ago
  "You cannot hope to bribe or twist, thank God! the British journalist. But, seeing what the man will do unbribed, there's no occasion to." -- https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Humbert_Wolfe https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Humbert_Wolfe , 1930 The lack of ethics is definitely imposed from the top, by people like Rupert Murdoch and Piers Morgan.
qrbLPHiKpiux 8y ago
A lot of them death threats, others suggesting life prison and torture. Side note, this shows, in the lowest common denominator, the true nature of people on the internet.
- setquk 8y ago
  Believe me it’s not just the internet. Those people are just as vocal about it among friends and family. If you think the average British person is nice, you’ve probably just been lucky so far.
  - hopler 8y ago
    Please stop with the chauvinist stereotyping. Brits aren't special in this regard.
  - dang 8y ago
    Please keep nationalistic or ethnic or whatever-this-is slurs off HN. We're trying for better than that here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    - setquk 8y ago
      My apologies to the readers of HN. I will bear this in mind in future.
      - dang 8y ago
        Appreciated!
tolien 8y ago
Difficult to imagine a jury would have been found which hadn't seen their faces in order to give them a fair trial. The press could have been responsible for the two of them walking free even if there were evidence they had done it.
e40 8y ago
What happened to the UK law or practice of not naming suspects? That's the way it was a decade ago (or more?), right?
- tobylane 8y ago
  The police and CPS don't name them, but MPs do for political reasons. Even if everyone couldn't, MPs can say things in Parliament more freely than outside.
incompatible 8y ago
Is there a chance that their suffering will be compensated by big libel wins?

huffmsa 8y ago

The retraction never spreads as much as the accusation. Her Majesty's Christmas gift to these two appears to be Scotland Yard routing thousands of bits of hate mail their way.

ajb257 8y ago

Whilst a free press is important, I would argue that 'a man and a woman have been held in connection with the Gatwick Airport drone incident' would suffice. Kudos to the BBC for recognising this. It's not in the public interest for us to know exactly who they are unless they're actually found guilty of a crime. Publishing their names and pictures before _even being charged_ does nothing but open potentially innocent people up to danger. Whoever caused the Gatwick chaos needs to be brought to justice, but this is beyond reckless

zozbot123 8y ago
> ... It's not in the public interest for us to know exactly who they are unless they're actually found guilty of a crime. ... On the contrary, the commonly-acknowledged right of habeas corpus essentially requires the government to make the fact that someone is being detained public, at least if the prisoner himself so chooses. Privacy is a red herring here - habeas corpus is about preserving basic freedoms.
- hugh-avherald 8y ago
  It's risible to claim that the press published the names because they were concerned about habeas corpus.
- hopler 8y ago
  > at least if the prisoner himself so chooses is the missing part in most cases.
- dahart 8y ago
  What do you mean when you say habeas corpus essentially requires a detention to be made public? Habeas corpus provides for a review of the legality of a detention for the requester. How & when is any information given publicly under habeas corpus laws? What makes you think habeas corpus and privacy can’t co-exist?
  - hopler 8y ago
    Without public knowledge and pressure, there is no check on authoritarian abuse and the law has no teeth.
    - dahart 8y ago
      Maybe, but that's not what I asked. Don't habeas corpus laws provide public access to a (perhaps private) legal review? When do laws require sharing results with the public, as the GP comment claimed? Can there be checks on authoritarian abuse that don't require public dissemination? Is the threat of publicity exactly the same thing as a requirement for publicity?
      - wbl 8y ago
        Imagine a country where the police arrest people and they vanish in the middle of the night, with no way to determine what their status is.
        HarryHirsch 8y ago
        There is no need to imagine a country where mugshots are freely available, even is that person is later released without charge, that already exists, and we know what the practice does.
        1ris 8y ago
        Isn't this standard procedure in most western democracies?
        dahart 8y ago
- dbdjfjrjvebd 8y ago
  > at least if the prisoner himself so chooses This is the key.
Carpetsmoker 8y ago
I would argue that publishing the names at all isn't particularly news-worthy. The right to privacy exists, too. In the justice system it's the judge which rules a sentence. Years – or even decades – of public shaming doesn't seem fair to me. Committing a crime doesn't mean you're no longer dealing with a person with real feelings. Publishing names and photos strikes me as "2 minutes of hate", and not "news". Also note that it doesn't just affect the person(s). Family members or even completely unrelated people with similar names can get threatened.
- starbeast 8y ago
  Even just being in a crime reconstruction video as an actor is apparently risky. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-nottinghamshire-34218343 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-nottinghamshire-342183...
  - hopler 8y ago
    That's horrid. The BBC producers admitted they knew they were putting him in harm's way by republishit the video, and they intentionally went ahead anyway instead of taking a few minutes to fix the video.
  - Carpetsmoker 8y ago
    > Det Insp Helen Evans, of Lincolnshire Police, said it would be "remiss not to thoroughly investigate every solid piece of information" and he will be given an update "in due course". I will never seize to be amazed at the capacity of some people to not think for themselves.
  - jacquesm 8y ago
    That's one very effective way to get people to no longer want to act in reconstruction videos.
- closeparen 8y ago
  The facts entering public record are what distinguishes "arrested" from "disappeared." Do you want to live in a world where people are yanked off the street and not heard of for months or years, with no ability for the press/friends/family to find out about the situation, "out of respect for their privacy?" If the police refuse to disclose whether they've grabbed someone, I'm going to assume I'm in Soviet Russia.
DanBC 8y ago
> It's not in the public interest for us to know exactly who they are unless they're actually found guilty of a crime. The press always say that naming people who've been arrested is an important measure against authoritarian regimes. It allows the public to know whether police powers of arrest are being misused or not. They appear to have lost this argument, because this is in tension with people's right to privacy and rights to a fair trial by the courts not by the media. There's some interesting info here about different approaches: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/law-and-order/10063422/Police-should-name-arrested-suspects-that-are-already-identified-by-the-press-Theresa-May-says.html https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/law-and-order/100634... https://www.theguardian.com/media/2013/apr/21/press-intrusion-name-suspects https://www.theguardian.com/media/2013/apr/21/press-intrusio...
- hopler 8y ago
  There is an obvious difference between protecting people by tracking their identities in captivity vs harming people by publicly shaming them by immediately parroting the authority'sallegations.
  - caminante 8y ago
    You're missing his point. Your distinction still places the trust in the discretion of the police/press. If they don't disclose the name, then it's harder for character witnesses to come forward (e.g. the couple's neighbors in this case).
    - TheOtherHobbes 8y ago
      I don't think it works like that. Character witnesses are organised in private by a defence lawyer, who - of course - knows the identities of the accused. Not by a public announcement in the press. Front page headlines along the lines of "The police believe these people are criminals who caused huge inconvenience and suffering to hundreds of thousands of people - would someone like to say a good work about them?" probably aren't the best way to guarantee a fair trial.
danso 8y ago
I think the right to privacy vs. printing public info about the actions of our police is always going to be in tension. Of course, there's no argument that innocent people should have their privacy invaded, but ideally, innocent people shouldn't have been arrested at all. The flip side is when famous/powerful people are arrested but not charged, and the public not being able to know whether they got off because strings were pulled. And there's the overarching problem of people being disappeared with the public/press having no idea whether they were arrested, and for what reason. Which has led to some absurd situations in China recently: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/13/world/asia/china-fan-bingbing.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/13/world/asia/china-fan-bing...
- snuxoll 8y ago
  Public information about ongoing investigations and arrests wouldn't be problematic if our society didn't have such hilariously broken views on criminal investigations and trials. Get arrested in connection with some well talked-about crime, but were released or found innocent at trial? Doesn't matter, you're still guilty in the eyes of the public. Hell, look at jury boxes in the US - you as a defendant are assumed guilty against the spirit of our constitution, because people suck. Either we as a society need to fix our fucked up perceptions, or we need to have a serious discussion about the right to privacy up until the point that a verdict is delivered. Unfortunately, there's no evidence that we are going to fix the former in a timely manner.
mattmanser 8y ago
While it's not clear, the NYT seems to be saying that the local MP (politician) accidentally named them thinking the police had made them public, while the police would not confirm them and never named them. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/22/world/europe/gatwick-airport-drones-arrest.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/22/world/europe/gatwick-airp... I think it's a very British whoopsie, they're plastered over the papers and they didn't do anything.
chatterbeak 8y ago
Just as in the United States, you're guilty if the Public thinks your guilty.
cosmojg 8y ago
>Whoever caused the Gatwick chaos needs to be brought to justice Absolutely, along with all of these clowns who are perpetuating the chaos.

Carpetsmoker 8y ago

Being accused is the same as 100% guilty, and being guilty is always reason for pubic shaming and unlimited amounts of vitriol. Good ol' British press logic. I wonder where they get their journalists from. Is there an education to be a heartless bastard with no sense of ethics? Or do they train them in-house?

pasabagi 8y ago
They recruit them from the alumni of the same boarding schools they went to. I wish I was joking.
huffmsa 8y ago
It's why there's so much outrage in America when differences between the verdict of public opinion and the verdict of the court happen.
KineticLensman 8y ago
Well it depends on which part of the British press you read - it's not a homogeneous entity. The BBC (original article) and the Guardian [0] didn't name them at any point. Some of the tabloid press did, including names and photos of their friends, families and employer. (I won't link to the naming articles because that would of course name them!). At least one of the major online papers that did name them has at least said that they have been released without charge (in the process calling them 'the accused'), but still with a mass of personal details. Really sad - I'm guessing that as drone users they will now receive the inevitable nut-job drone hatred. [0] https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/dec/23/gatwick-drone-chaos-arrested-couple-released-without-charge https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/dec/23/gatwick-dron...
pjc50 8y ago
"You cannot hope to bribe or twist, thank God! the British journalist. But, seeing what the man will do unbribed, there's no occasion to." -- https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Humbert_Wolfe https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Humbert_Wolfe , 1930 The lack of ethics is definitely imposed from the top, by people like Rupert Murdoch and Piers Morgan.

qrbLPHiKpiux 8y ago

A lot of them death threats, others suggesting life prison and torture. Side note, this shows, in the lowest common denominator, the true nature of people on the internet.

setquk 8y ago
Believe me it’s not just the internet. Those people are just as vocal about it among friends and family. If you think the average British person is nice, you’ve probably just been lucky so far.
- hopler 8y ago
  Please stop with the chauvinist stereotyping. Brits aren't special in this regard.
- dang 8y ago
  Please keep nationalistic or ethnic or whatever-this-is slurs off HN. We're trying for better than that here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - setquk 8y ago
    My apologies to the readers of HN. I will bear this in mind in future.
    - dang 8y ago
      Appreciated!

tolien 8y ago

Difficult to imagine a jury would have been found which hadn't seen their faces in order to give them a fair trial. The press could have been responsible for the two of them walking free even if there were evidence they had done it.

e40 8y ago

What happened to the UK law or practice of not naming suspects? That's the way it was a decade ago (or more?), right?

tobylane 8y ago
The police and CPS don't name them, but MPs do for political reasons. Even if everyone couldn't, MPs can say things in Parliament more freely than outside.

incompatible 8y ago

Is there a chance that their suffering will be compensated by big libel wins?