Good gravy – Boriswatch goes on holiday to Spain for a week, and its tin hats all round. It seems that Boris-Johnson.com has been an innocent victim of an intriguing internet web of intrigue. A legal action by Alisher Usmanov (a portly and frankly scary-looking Russian businessman – don’t sue me, Alisher – who has recently bought a large stake in Arsenal Football Club) against another political blogger Craig Murray has meant that Murray’s site had to be pulled down – and with it all sites hosted on the same servers at Fasthosts hosting company, regardless of their connection to the fallout. Boris-Johnson.com, Bloggerheads.com and BobPiper.co.uk have all been affected too, along with a few other blogs.
This, as far as Boriswatch is concerned, is a very dangerous precedent. By going after the hosting company instead of Murray gives the impression that the accusations can’t be proved wrong – so they’re just gagging the only guy brave enough to put them out. Craig has always been controversial on his site – and you’d imagine if he wasn’t certain of his facts he wouldn’t put them out. And is seems that taking out the servers where Boris’s site resides is shooting themselves in the foot – now everyone knows about it!
Boriswatch believes in the freedom of speech. To save spending time with aggressive lawyers, instead of cut-and-pasting the content we’ll just link to the always brave Indymedia:
Craig Murray censored for attacking Alisher Usmanov – full text
Now, if we could find a handy link between Usmanov and Ken Livingstone, that would be *awesome*…
UPDATE: Atlantic Free Press has a great collection of links on this. And here’s a video of Newsnight’s coverage:
The most insidious and sinister aspect of this is, of course, that the charges have not been proven; they have not even been filed. All of the sites were taken down because of the mere allegation that one of them was defamatory. Surely this opens the company up to lawsuits from its clients, as well as criminal charges of interfering with the lawful operation of a business.