LL Part 24: Well... That happened!

Following on from our previous post in the Letby Series here.

It has been an eventful couple of days, to be sure…

Many of you who follow the tweets - yes, I think the name has stuck; X’s (pronounced ‘exes’) are something else you mourn or hate at the end of a relationship - will have seen that a group from a well known tv group are filming a documentary for release in 2-3 weeks that they say will increase public awareness surrounding the questions being asked by many eminently qualified people, and me, about the gaps, miscategorisations and errors in the evidence and testimony presented during both trials. In fact, many of you were kind enough to tweet it to me, not knowing of my own involvement which, at the time, was all hush hush:

Professor Norman Fenton and I had been contacted by the two journalists involved with the documentary for several weeks beforehand. Last Tuesday in East London, we became the first two people they interviewed. On camera. They may not use much, or indeed any of the footage that was shot¹. However, given that they were asking the right questions, we were glad at the time to be involved.

Also, while Rachel Aviv’s New Yorker article was the first to break ground for the mainstream media in asking whether Letby’s prosecution and convictions are safe, we’ve since seen Felicity Lawrence in the Guardian and even a much tamer, if not fence sitting comment in The Telegraph that dared to resort to name calling (conspiracy theorists?) join the fray.

On the other side of the fence we’ve seen Ella Devereux at The Nursing Times, arguably a nursing trade rag that should be coming out in support of any nurse, but the headline and lead in to her article gives the impression that she is not of Letby - even if the content she quotes is. She is quoting a Tory MP calling the publication restrictions on Aviv’s article a defiance of open justice. This shows us that even at least one of our politicians can see that fair and balanced reporting is most definitely not allowed under the current regime, because at the same time it went unchallenged when UK newspapers either misrepresented or outright lied about the testimony that was heard in court, e.g: this Daily Mail article whose headline claims the jury was told Lucy was seen tampering with the breathing tube only to acknowledge in the text that the witness said he didn’t see her touching anything at all.

It seems, at least according to most politicians, that as long as you call Lucy Letby a baby murdering serial killer it was okay during the trial for Baby K to publish your articles. However, and as we suspect David Davies was eluding to, if your article suggested, as even some of the prosecution evidence eventually did, that mistakes were made? No. The majority saw you as being in defiance of open justice and you should be prosecuted.

Tainting any potential jury pool is only okay according to these politicians if it is in favor of the Crown Prosecution Service and police.

Today we awoke to find another article in The Telegraph by Sarah Knapton and Dominic Penna saying that it isn’t only us eclectic experts, Telegraph readers and some members of the wider public who have concerns, but this group now also includes several unnamed former cabinet ministers. Further, that the Royal Statistical Society intends to convene a meeting regarding the evidence. I do hope they reach out to people such as Professor Fenton and myself when they do. If you know anyone at the RSS, point them to this article please.

It seems that those of us who have dared to question the evidence presented (and the way and by whom it was presented) are either about to be gaslit and are in for a few months of hurt or, are about to see our questions legitimately amplified in the main stream. I do hope it is the latter.

Speaking of hurt…

Or not.

About a week ago I received three emails from three different burner email accounts. Each email contained the same text. I was told to stop talking about the baby killer and to pay $1500 in bitcoin or my own computers, email etc. were going to be hacked and my data stolen and made public.

I dismissed the emails as a most incredible (meaning they were not credible) extortion attempt from someone who was little more than a grammatically challenged chimp. Then, four days ago, one of my network routers (I have two connections as a result of working from home and hosting some of my own data services for research) started to report huge amounts of additional network traffic. By the time I had identified what type of traffic and where it was coming from, and that it was what is known as a smurf attack, around 180Gb of additional traffic had come into that router. While all of the traffic was being dropped by the router (meaning none of it entered the network) a further 40Gb of traffic had come in by the time our upstream ISP could put mitigations on the port in their network. They were amazingly responsive and helpful (not helpful enough to wave the bill for all that data, I notice), but alas, it didn’t end there.

That huge influx of data hitting the network processor in the router had caused it to either overheat, overload, or simply just wear out. Having done its job so admirably, not a single illegitimate packet passed into the DMZ of my network, it seems this router even gave its ‘life’ (for want of a better word). You might say it sacrificed itself in keeping my network safe. It will go in the ‘tech’ cabinet in my office as a kind of memorial to its faithful service since it was manufactured (probably in China) by one of those brand name silicon valley tech companies in San Jose and sent to me in August 2019.

Yesterday morning the first of two new an unfortunately very, very expensive routers had arrived (if I am going to replace one, I should replace both… right? If for no other reason than that the other appears to also have been dealing with some increased load, but more about that in a second). While I was completely blasé² about the attempted hack, I was extremely stressed about the cost. It was clear the ongoing work to repair the house was going on hold for an indefinite period… and life in general was going to become far less fun (pot noodle for tea, anyone?). While an extra £3-4,000 outgoing all of a sudden (cost of routers, network interfaces, priority shiping and the data fees from the ISP) wouldn’t impact some, I am a lowly lecturer and it is more than I make in about 6-7 weeks. I have zero pension and anything I had to fall back on went into the initial work to make our house liveable after the tenants of the previous owner chose to damage it on their way out the door. Most amazingly, and to quote Julie Andrews from The Sound of Music, where God closes a door, he opens a window. Three wonderful friends who started out as a small community of health data research colleagues during the lockdowns stepped forward yesterday and insisted on helping me to cover the costs (literally… the last and most insistent messages from one of them after I had thanked them for the offer was ‘but I want to’). When I got up this morning i received an alert from HSBC to find that a huge percentage of the cost I had (and in the case of the ISP bill and one more SFP network interface, still have to) put on my credit card had appeared back in my account, I all but cried. Everyone should have friends like these.

Overnight I have done a whole lot of configuration and testing, and implementation occured at 4am this morning. With the newer processors, larger memory capacity and increased real-time logging I was then able to see that the attack was still ongoing - but now our small-minded friend had moved on to a different type of attack - attempts at DNS and NAT cache poisoning. The last time I checked the logs there were almost 83,000 packets per minute coming in… and thank heavens they were all being dropped.

I can’t believe in this world where so many people are having to work multiple jobs to keep their heads above water, where our current political climate is so heavily captured by interests that are totally against us, where our healthcare system is falling apart from a loss of skills and anti-meritocratic hiring policies that often now mean the least qualified and laziest candidates are the ones that get the jobs, that someone has the time or energy to attack an insignificant and inconsequential person like me because I dare to ask questions. Okay, so you forced me to spend some money on some kit and you got me offline for a few short hours. Congratulations to you. But you didn’t achieve anything like the lofty goals of your email. And you most certainly haven’t stopped me talking about this or any other matter where questions that highlight that narratives are built on a foundation of lies and sand need to be asked.

And now. This

The next part in our Letby series can be found here.

1. I have always considered myself a face for radio

2. Indifferent to or bored with