Demon founder loses RIPA appeal bid
Published: 03 Feb 2006 15:50 GMT
Clifford Stanford, the founder of Demon and Redbus, has been denied the right to appeal against his conviction for illegally intercepting emails, according to Out-Law.com.
On Thursday, the Court of Appeal upheld Judge Geoffrey Rivlin's ruling that Stanford had not been legally authorised to intercept emails destined for John Porter, Dame Shirley Porter's son.
Stanford was sentenced to six month's imprisonment, suspended for two years, for unlawfully intercepting and redirecting the emails of Porter, a former chairman of Redbus, from the Redbus servers.
Stanford had claimed that he was forced to plead guilty at the earlier trial because of a misinterpretation of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 (RIPA) on the part of Judge Rivlin. He had hoped to overturn Judge Rivlin's ruling at the appeal stage.
Stanford attempted to defend his involvement in the interception of the emails under Section 1 subsection 6 of RIPA which states that a person is "excluded from criminal liability" if:
"(a) he is a person with a right to control the operation or the use of the system; or (b) he has the express or implied consent of such a person to make the interception."
Stanford said he had gained access to the emails through the actions of a company employee who had been given administrator access to usernames and passwords on the Redbus email servers. He was therefore authorised to intercept the emails as a "person with a right to control the operation or the use of the system".
Rivlin disagreed, and said that the "right to control" did not mean that someone had a right to access or operate the system, but was more specific and meant the person had to have the right to authorise or forbid access.
The Lord Chief Justice at the Court of Appeal upheld Rivlin's ruling, and denied Stanford's appeal application.
Stanford said on Friday that he was "actually quite angry" with the result.
"I'm not angry about having lost, I'm angry about my ability to pursue the case in the correct avenue of English law being lost," Stanford told ZDNet UK.
"What it comes down to is the definition of a person with a right to control a system. The Lord Chief Justice has chosen to take a particular view about the interpretation of an ambiguous Act, and that has denied me access to the House of Lords. That's why I'm angry," said Stanford. "Unfortunately I have no further recourse to the [British] courts."
Stanford said he and his legal team were "looking at taking it to Strasbourg. We are considering asking Strasbourg whether I've been denied the right to a fair trial. Is denying an appeal a breach of human rights? I'm not sure," he added.
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