What does Heretic TOC have in common with the International Criminal Court (ICC)?

It’s not that I have been indicted for crimes against humanity, although I’m sure there are those who think I should be. Rather, on this occasion I find myself on the victim side of the justice system in common with – amazingly – the court’s judges.

The court’s woes began when the infamously infantile US president threw a tantrum against them for upsetting his little playmate Benjamin Netanyahu. As may be recalled, the ICC indicted Israel’s prime minister in November 2024 for alleged war crimes in Gaza. Trump immediately denounced the court over this, and soon afterwards its justices found they had lost access to all their Microsoft accounts – emails, documents, and probably everything covered by the MS 365 service, which includes access to cloud backup (OneDrive) and key tools such as Word and Excel.

It started when Microsoft disconnected the email account of ICC Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan KC after he was personally sanctioned by the Trump administration for pursuing arrest warrants related to Gaza. Soon after that the court’s judges found they had been “bricked” by Microsoft, according to one report. When people talk about a “brick” mobile phone, I gather they usually mean a dumb one, like the early models that were big as a brick and no smarter than an old-fashioned landline.  As applied to a computer, though, the term can mean a machine rendered even more lifeless, inert as a brick. As I now know from painful personal experience, the corporation can do this by disabling the PIN that would normally be your password to get past the lock-screen to Windows.

Sensibly, the ICC’s answer to their problem late last year was to ditch Microsoft Office in favour of openDesk, a German-developed open-source alternative designed for public sector digital sovereignty. But solving the court’s data security problem will not be that easy. As an expert from the University of Reading has observed:

The court’s evidence management platform, Project Harmony, operates in partnership with Microsoft. Current announcements leave unclear whether this transition will sever that connection. If the ICC’s ties to Microsoft are not completely eliminated, future US sanctions could cripple the court’s investigation processes and savage its ability to pursue international justice.

Very serious stuff, which perfectly illustrates how vulnerable we have all become not just to the whims of the American president but also to the big tech platforms on which so many of us have come to rely – and to trust, despite the fact that those in the know have been warning us about their untrustworthiness for years.

So, what about Heretic TOC? How come your host here was also bricked, late last year? I have so far been unable to get a clear answer out of Microsoft, but my strong suspicion is that several of the big American corporations, perhaps all of them, have been tightening up their “user guidelines” in response to the growing body of regulatory legislation around the globe, especially from the EU and UK.

As a concrete example, a week or so ago I asked Adobe Acrobat’s “AI assistant” to provide a summary of the key arguments in a new academic paper in the Journal of the History of Sexuality. It refused, saying to do so would violate the guidelines. In what way? It is not obvious from the guidelines themselves, which forbid stuff like the promotion of self-harm, hate-speech, glorifying violence, child porn (what a surprise!) and terrorism.

The academic paper it baulked at did not fail any of the tests, as far as I could see, even on the broadest interpretation. Its only “crime” seems to be the subject, as the paper (to which we were alerted recently in a comment here by Prue) is titled “No Seduction, No Harm: Public Acceptance of Pedophilia in Norway in the 1970s”. It looks as though Adobe’s algorithm didn’t like the P word, or detected its excessive use within the document along with other key words putting children and sex in the same context.

Interestingly, only a few days later I tried again and this time it decided the paper was OK after all and duly provided the requested summary. So it could be that the AI is learning to distinguish “respectable” academic discourse from… Well, from what? From heretical advocacy, perhaps, as found at Heretic TOC? Whatever is going on, the reach of corporate censorship is clearly becoming sinister because it goes far beyond matters of taste in public postings on a social media forum like X or Instagram, where other peoples’ rights are genuinely engaged via matters such as libel and the use of personal images.

The ICC case, and my own, are much more serious. They are about a business corporation, whether at the direct command of an authoritarian politician like Trump or pressure from regulatory bodies, seizing and freezing your private data, including all your files relating to your own personal bank account, names and contact details of everyone you have dealings with, from family and friends to your gas and electricity account details, stuff that could quickly see you cold, hungry and even homeless if you have no way of accessing your funds and paying your bills.

All because you are allegedly in breach of some obscure guideline or other, at the arbitrary whim of a massive, remote, corporate bureaucracy that won’t even specify the nature of the supposed offence and – as I soon discovered – who do their damnedest to prevent you discussing the matter with an actual human being on their staff. Perhaps they no longer have any, I don’t know. The entire shebang might now be just a giant AI topped off with its multi-billionaire ownership.

At this point I should warn you that what follows is not the easiest of reads and I doubt you will find it entertaining. It’s about what I have been through at the hands of Microsoft over the last three months, an experience ranging from frustrating, boring and time-wasting to downright alarming and even traumatic in the challenge presented to the very existence of my online identity and ability to be myself and live my life. The reason I am setting it out in some detail is to offer a warning: DON’T LET THIS HAPPEN TO YOU. The more you understand the ID and data loss hell you could face if you do nothing, the more chance you will wake up to the need for action to get out of danger.

OK, here goes. Late last November I had a No Reply email claiming to be from Microsoft Digital Trust and Safety. It had been sent to my Yahoo email, saying my MS account had been suspended for an unspecified breach of the Microsoft Services Agreement (MSA). At first I thought it was a scam, but when I tried to log in at the MS website I did indeed find myself blocked. So it was real.

But not too devastating at first. My Windows PIN was still working at this stage so I was able to use my laptop as normal, with access to at least my more recent files, which were on the computer itself (the C drive). I assumed the PIN would remain OK because it did not appear to depend on compliance with the MSA. After consulting the MSA terms of service, it looked as though the agreement governs only those MS services (notably Microsoft 365) you get along with the creation of your MS account, which you can access online with a password. Your access to Windows desktop, by contrast, is something you become entitled to when you pay for your Windows Licence, which is separate to the MSA. You get the Licence along with the computer when Windows comes pre-installed on it from the shop or online retailer. Maybe I should have known all this stuff, but I suspect most users are foggy about it until trouble strikes.

My older files were blocked, though, many of them important personal and financial ones, because those were stored only online, on the now inaccessible MS OneDrive cloud. They were files that had been created on a less high-powered laptop I’d stopped using a couple of years ago.  Fortunately, I already had full USB backup of all those older files. Also, my MS desktop email, Outlook, was blocked. I had not used this desktop email for a long time, though, so no problem. Thus I was still in business and able to check out Windows Help info online, although this just sent me round and round in circles – an all too familiar hassle not confined to MS.

Next stop a chat with an actual human at Customer Support then? Not a chance! You can only access Support after logging into your account but I couldn’t do that because I was barred!  Catch 22! However, in the email from Digital Trust and Safety, I had been notified of a webpage where I could make an appeal against the suspension. So I keyed in all the required information onto the online form, including the grounds for appeal, and clicked on the Submit button. Nothing happened! I quadruple-checked I had entered everything correctly, trying different browsers to do so, but nothing happened except for the ominous appearance onscreen of a circle symbol with a diagonal bar across it, like a No Entry sign. It just seemed to be a cruel twist to the story, another way of rubbing in the basic fact: you’re barred!

Nor did a phone call to the UK headquarters of Microsoft in Reading do the trick. All you get there is an AI voice directing you back to the hopeless online Help. So, no help at all. This was driving me crazy!

With no help coming, even from ChatGPT (very reassuring tone, with genuinely sensible advice but no immediately successful outcome), a whole month passed in which I was getting constant notifications from MS on my newer laptop, saying I needed to confirm my identity in relation to my account, and telling me I should log in for this purpose. But how, when they had blocked me? Their left hand didn’t seem to know what their right was doing.

That is probably why, on Christmas Eve and after giving me a month’s notice to respond to the notifications, they totally bricked me, escalating from the original “soft brick” to a full-on “hard brick”. That is when they disabled my Windows PIN, so I could no  longer get past the lock-screen.

My old laptop was still OK, though, accessible via its different PIN. And now I eventually found help in a location where I least expected it: the legal small print of the terms of service. There you can find a sort of nuclear option that enables you to demand access to your data via the legally enforceable provisions of the  EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which has also been adopted into UK law via the Data Protection Act. ChatGPT had pointed this out to me and now it seemed time to act on it.

Down in the bowels of the legal stuff there is a Dublin phone number for Microsoft Digital Trust and Safety. From anywhere in Europe, this is the right place to make a Subject Access Request for access to your data. It’s not a human who answers the phone, of course, you just leave a message when the AI tells you to. I left a short message but it did not seem adequate to the gravity of the situation and I had no confidence it would be acted on. So, in addition, I printed off a detailed letter on my old laptop and snail-mailed it to the postal address of the Microsoft Digital Trust and Safety HQ. As a belt-and-braces job, at great expense, I paid for the track and trace service that makes sure your letter is signed for on arrival. A response duly came to my Yahoo email without undue delay, after just over a week. This time I was given a proper reference number for the enquiry and a named agent handing it. A set of procedures was set out through which I could (so they said) log into my MS account and potentially recover my frozen data.

Meanwhile, though, I had taken my own drastic action to reactivate my bricked laptop. I got a techie friend to get past the lock-screen using the Shift+Restart trick, which brings up various options including totally reinstalling Windows. The downside is that you lose all your files because these are on the bricked (or “bitlocked”) drive. After making sure all my files were backed up to USB, and after making a hard-copy note of a ridiculously long, 48-digit, “Recovery Key” unique to each PC that you need when re-installing, we took the plunge and went ahead. It is important to understand, by the way, that the only way to recover the Recovery Key itself, if you have lost it, is to find it by logging into your MS account online – which, like so much else is not an option when your account is suspended. It was merely by lucky chance that I already had a copy of this key.

Happily, the reinstallation went well. This time, I was able to set up a new lock-screen PIN with a “local account” i.e. the account is located on your own machine, under your own control, rather than one that leaves MS able to pull the strings remotely.

So, now that I have managed to restore my files, along with gaining a measure of independence from MS, I find myself at a digital security crossroads. Do I go ahead with the data Subject Access Request, which I do not strictly need to make because I have recovered the data myself? Or do I say to hell with MS, it’s time to cut myself off entirely from their heavy-handed surveillance, content censorship, brutally user-unfriendly Trust and Safety system (it’s not safe and cannot be trusted), and communications hassles?

Put like that, it sounds a no-brainer. I should obviously try an alternative – preferably not another big corporation that ties you to its propriety software, such as Apple, but instead a system using open-source software, as recommended by freedom-conscious techies. Linux is the way to go, apparently. It’s not just for techies these days. Linux Mint, Cinnamon Edition, is said to look and function much like Windows, so there isn’t too much new stuff to learn. I am definitely thinking of giving it a go, maybe hooked up to Proton cloud backup.

There is a downside, though. MS software programs such as Word have been developed over a long time and the alternatives, in my limited experience (notably LibreOffice recently), tend not to work anything like as well. So I might invest in a Linux machine for data security but keep a Windows machine for ease of use, although that might present a problem for synching across all devices, which is a great convenience but also a massive source of vulnerability to corporate control.

Decisions, decisions!  The hassle helps explain why so many of us ordinary laptop users tend to be “winfags”, as the derogatory expression for Windows addicts has it. We know we are on the wrong end of a deeply abusive relationship with MS but we cannot bring ourselves to split from this controlling, manipulative partner! Now, though, I am determined to give it a go.

FROM GROK TO GLORY

So much has been going on in the world lately, with you-know-who making waves from Gaza to Greenland, it’s hard to keep up with even strictly HTOC-relevant developments while confining myself to just one big blog every six weeks or so. Maybe I should publish more often, as I used to, every week, or every fortnight.

I can no longer commit to that, alas, but I will try to get another blog out fairly soon on some of the hottest recent topics. The Groky horror story over alleged AI child “nudification”, or at least G-stringification, is old news now (except that the European Commission announced only yesterday that they have started an inquiry into this), but the related social media theme of an Under-16 ban is gaining traction fast, and needs a further airing here following my focus on the topic in “How to rewild Generation Doomscroll” a couple of years ago.

The G theme continues with two other notable developments: Gjerde, and “glorification”. Åsmund Borgen Gjerde is the guy who wrote the paper referred to in my lead story above, on the public acceptance of paedophilia in Norway in the 1970s. I have now read this paper and discovered it is well worth talking about here, despite its scholarly remoteness from mainstream thinking today.

As for “glorification”, unfortunately MAP activism looks set to be the next big target of this dubious legal concept in the UK unless the Left in particular gets real and rediscovers the importance of freedom of expression.

We have seen legislation in the UK against “glorifying” terrorism, a law that has been woefully cited against peaceful protesters in the Palestine Action case.  And in the Netherlands the law already in place against “glorifying” paedophilia has been used to devastating effect against Dutch MAP activists.

Now, thanks an excellent and justifiably alarming new article by Brian Ribbon, we are being alerted to a debate in the House of Lords last month in which similar legislation was proposed for the UK by Baroness Bertin and supported in other speeches. It was not offered immediate support by the government, but justice minister Baroness Levitt had warm words for those favouring the measure.  The government could well decide to include something like it in a Bill of their own after further consideration.

So it is certainly something we need to keep an eye on, and more: pre-emptive lobbying may be in order. The implications for MAP forums and blogs like this could be existential unless it can be stopped, and even sympathetic academic discussion could be frozen out.