(This letter came through Current.com
I have know Idea of its credibility or source other than link at bottom.)

Dear UK government,
We are Anonymous. It has come to our attention that you deemed it necessary
to arrest five of our fellow anons for their participation in the DDoS
attacks against PayPal, Mastercard, and others, that have been carried out
in our name in retaliation for those organisations’ actions against WikiLeaks.
We understand you are planning to charge these fellow anons with offences
under the 1990 Computer Misuse Act, which prohibits impairing the operation
of a computer or the readability of data. Anonymous believes, however, that
pursuing this direction is a sad mistake on your behalf. Not only does it
reveal the fact that you do not seem to understand the present-day political
and technological reality, we also take this as a serious declaration of war
from yourself, the UK government, to us, Anonymous, the people.
First and foremost, it is important to realize what a DDoS attack exactly is
and what it means in the contemporary political context. As traditional means
of protest (peaceful demonstrations, sit-ins, the blocking of a crossroads
or the picketing of a factory fence) have slowly turned into nothing but an
empty, ritualised gesture of discontent over the course of the last century,
people have been anxiously searching for new ways to pressure politicians
and give voice to public demands in a manner that might actually be able
to change things for the better. Anonymous has, for now, found this new
way of voicing civil protest in the form of the DDoS, or Distributed Denial of
Service, attack. Just as is the case with traditional forms of protest, we block
access to our opponents infrastructure to get our message across. Whether
or not this infrastructure is located in the real world or in cyberspace, seems
completely irrelevant to us.

Moreover, we would like to take this opportunity to set the record straight
on the difference between a DDoS attack and hacking, as these concepts
often seem to be confounded when media and policy-makers talk about
Anonymous. Hacking as such is defined by the law as ‘unauthorised access
to a computer or network’, whereas a DDoS attack is simply a case of
thousands of people making legitimate connections to a publicly accessible
webserver at the same time, using up the entire bandwidth or processing
power of the given server at once and thereby causing a huge ‘traffic jam’.

ANONYMOUS PRESS RELEASE
January 27, 2011
It is clear then, that arresting somebody for taking part in a DDoS attack
is exactly like arresting somebody for attending a peaceful demonstration
in their hometown. Anonymous believes this right to peacefully protest
is one of the fundamental pillars of any democracy and should not be
restricted in any way. Moreover, we have noted that similar attacks have
also been carried out against Wikileaks itself, yet so far, nobody has been
arrested in connection with these attacks, nor are there even any signs
of an investigation into this issue at all. Yet, we know exactly who was
responsible for that attack. Anonymous believes it is unfair and hypocritical
to attempt to put these 5 arrested anons to trial without even attempting to
find those who DDoS’ed a website which you oppose. We can therefore
only assume that these arrests are politically motivated, and were being
carried out under pressure from the US government. Anonymous can not,
and will not, stand idle while this injustice is being done.
Furthermore, the maximum sentence these 5 anons could be given under
the Computer Misuse Act is 10 years imprisonment and a fine of up to
£5000. We want you to realize just how ridiculous these sentences are,
especially given the exact nature of a DDoS attack and its lack of permanent
damage to the target website. To hand out these kinds of harsh sentences
(even to minors!) would effectively ruin their life, taking away their chance
at higher education or even any kind of proper future, simply because they
participated in a peaceful cyber-protest and stood up for their rights. A fine
as high as £5000 would also put an incredible strain on the minors’ families.
We hope that you consider changing the legal framework for what is, at
worst, a minor offense.

And last but not least: The fact that thousands of people from all over the
world felt the need to participate in these attacks on organisations targeting
Wikileaks and treating it as a public threat, rather than a common good,
should be something that sets you thinking. You can easily arrest individuals,
but you cannot arrest an ideology. We are united by a common objective
and we can and WILL cross any borders to achieve that. So our advice to
you, the UK government, is to take this statement as a serious warning from
the citizens of the world. We will not rest until our fellow anon protesters
have been released.

Awaiting your action,
Anonymous

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Anony_Ops
Attention all media: OPEN LETTER FROM ANONYMOUS TO THE UK GOVERNMENT 27-01-2011 http://bit.ly/fWfioF #Anonymous

In America Crime Pays!

Ambac Accues JP Morgan of Fraud in Ongoing Mortgage Suit

Posted: 25 Jan 2011 12:24 PM PST

One of the big reasons there have been so few fraud charges leveled against what looks like clear and widespread banking industry is that under the law, “fraud” is pretty difficult to prove. Needless to say, that puts commentators in a bit of a bind, because they can be depicted as being hysterical if they use the “f” words, since behavior that is often fraud by any common sense standard may be hard or impossible to prove in court.
The hurdle in litigation and prosecution is proving intent. Basically, the party who is being accused has to not only have done something bad, he has to have been demonstrably aware that he was up to no good. Thus po-faced claims of “I had no idea this was improper, my accountants/lawyers knew about it and didn’t say anything” or “everyone in the industry was doing it, so I had not reason to think this was irregular” is a “get out of jail free” card. Similarly, even if lower level employees knew that their company was up to stuff that stank, if the decision-makers can plausibly claim ignorance, again they can probably get away with it.
So it is gratifying in a perverse way to see a case in which the perp not only looks to have engaged in chicanery, but the facts make it pretty hard for him to say he didn’t know he was pulling a fast one. And even more fun, it involves JP Morgan, which has somehow managed to create the impression that it was better than all the other TARP banks, when on the mortgage front, there is plenty evidence to suggest that all the major banks have been up to their eyeballs in bad practices.
The case involves the bond insurer Ambac and the mortgage company EMC, which was the Bear Stearns conduit for buying mortgages to securitize and now thus part of JP Morgan. In 2010, reports surfaced that EMC had been falsifying mortgage data to keep its pipeline moving as fast as Bear wanted and contain costs.
But a suit by bond insurer Ambac alleges far more serious misbehavior. The discovery process in outstanding putback litigation has unearthed a scheme to defraud investors and Ambac and led the bond insurer to add fraud charges to its complaint. The Atlantic, which broke the 2010 story, gives a good overview:

According to the lawsuit, the Bear traders would sell toxic mortgage securities to investors and then sell back the bad loans with early payment defaults to the banks that originated them at a discount. The traders would pocket the refund, and would not pass it on to the mortgage trust, which was where it should have gone to be distributed to the investors who owned the bonds. The [Tom] Marano-led traders [Marano was Senior Managing Director and Global Head of Mortgages for Bear and is now CEO of Ally's mortgage operations] also cut the time allowed for early payment defaults, without telling the bond investors. That way, Bear could quickly securitize defective loans, without leaving enough time for investors to do their own due diligence after the bonds were sold and put-back any bad loans to Bear.
The traders were essentially double-dipping — getting paid twice on the deal. How was this possible? Once the security was sold, they didn’t have a legal claim to get cash back from the bad loans — that claim belonged to bond investors — but they did so anyway and kept the money. Thus, Bear was cheating the investors they promised to have sold a safe product out of their cash. According to former Bear Stearns and EMC traders and analysts who spoke with The Atlantic, [Mike] Nierenberg [head of the adjustable-rate mortgage trading desk] and [Jeff] Verschleiser [another senior managing director on the same desk] were the decision-makers for the double dipping scheme, and thus, are named as individual defendants in the suit.

The complaint is duly indignant:

This evidence – obtained for the first time through discovery – demonstrates that at the same time that JP Morgan and EMC were touting to Ambac the quality of the Mortgage Loans and the rigorous procedures for verifying their quality, JP Morgan personnel understood that the loans underlying the transactions were in fact – to use one JP Morgan employee’s unequivocal if impolite words – a “sack of shit.”

And there is another layer of this ugly picture. A much smaller monoline, Sycora, had also insured some Bear mortgages. Bear was pushing the originator to take back some dud mortgages insured by Syncora while simultaneously refusing to let Syncora put them back.
FTAlphaville recounts how JP Morgan continued to rebuff putback claims, even when EMC found them to be legitimate:

Ambac says JPM barred Bear from fulfilling repurchase requests right after it snapped up in 2008. In doing so, a JPM executive director also went against a review by EMC, it is claimed, that said more than half of a set of loans were in breach of reps and warranties. That, Ambac says, enabled the exec to eliminate up to $14m in JPM liabilities and reduce accounting reserves for the loans by almost 50 per cent.

So it will be rather difficult for JP Morgan to claim it has clean hands on this one and merely picked up an outstanding mess when it bought Bear.
This suit is at a minimum a black eye for JP Morgan, which fought tooth and nail to keep it sealed, and may embolden other litigants, like the investors in Bear’s deals. But sadly, it also demonstrates that crime does pay. The executives named in this case as being at the heart of this scheme now run the mortgage businesses at Ally, JP Morgan, and Goldman.

Guest Post: America’s Middle Eastern Puppet Regimes Are Falling Like Dominoes

Posted: 25 Jan 2011 08:15 PM PST

→ Washington’s Blog
The images from the protests in Cairo, Egypt today are stunning. See this, this and this.
President Mubarak’s family has already fled the country.
As Raw Story notes:

Demonstrators calling for economic and political reforms broke through police barriers and began marching in Cairo’s streets.
Protesters gathered outside the Supreme Court in downtown Cairo and held large signs that read “Tunisia is the solution” amid massive police deployment, an AFP correspondent said.
Chanting “Down with Mubarak” — in reference to Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak who has been in power for three decades — they broke through several police cordons and began marching towards Tahrir Square, in scenes seldom witnessed in Egypt.
Others shouted “Tunisia is not better than Egypt” as the crowds began to swell.
A security official told AFP that at least 20,000 to 30,000 police had been mobilized in the center of the capital alone, and that the area housing the interior ministry had been sealed off.
***
The protest, called by the pro-democracy youth group the April 6 Movement, coincided with a national holiday to mark Police Day.

The Christian Science Monitor reports:

The fact that the protests took place across the nation, and were not led by a particular political movement or opposition party, set them apart from demonstrations in the last decade, he says.
“This time it is really a national movement,” he says. “It’s quite remarkable that the slogans raised by the demonstrators were not typical of any political party. They were general slogans about democracy, ending the state of emergency, and lowering prices. This is the beginning of a process.… The government will not respond favorably so I think the continuation of the protests is almost certain.”

While some Americans assume this is a “Arab affair”, the fact is that Egypt’s president Mubarak is a yes-man to the U.S., and the fall of the Tunisian and now Egyptian leaders are really the ouster of U.S. puppet regimes in the Middle East.
As Eric Margolis wrote last week:

Oops! Something has gone terribly wrong with Washington’s plans for regime change in the Mideast. Wasn’t there supposed to be a US and British engineered revolution against Iran’s mullahs, followed by installation of a cooperative pro-western government and a bonanza for western oil companies?
The revolution came, all right, but in the wrong place. The explosion of popular fury in Tunisia that ousted its dictator of 23-years is sending shock waves across the Arab world and has alarm bells ringing in Washington.
Pay no attention to President Barack Obama’s pious bromides welcoming the revolution in Tunisia. The US, France and their Arab satraps are deeply worried that Tunisia’s popular revolution could spark similar uprising against the dictatorships or monarchies in other members of America’s Mideast Raj, notably Egypt.
It has come to light that Tunisia’s ruling elite had dinners and wine flown in from Paris at government expense for lavish parties in their beachside villas. Shades of the Iranian revolution, when women of the ruling elite in Tehran used to send their dirty laundry to Paris for hand washing, or fly to Paris to have their hair done for a soiree.
***The US and France have always hailed Tunisia as a poster-boy for “moderation, stability, and democracy. ”
Translation: 1. moderation: following orders from Washington and making nice to Israel; 2. stability: crushing all opposition, particularly Islamist-oriented parties, muzzling the media, and paving the way for US business; 3. democracy: holding fake elections every few years. The US media soft-soaped Ben Ali and gushed over Tunisia’s “moderate” virtues. They did the same for Egypt’s Anwar Sadat.
America’s other “moderate” Arab clients, Egypt, Morocco, Algeria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Yemen, Oman and some of the Gulf states, followed precisely the same model of ersatz elections, ferocious internal oppression, and absolute obedience to Washington.
Tunisia closely resembled other Arab non-oil states in having very high unemployment, social and intellectual stagnation, lack of free speech or expression, and no hope for the future unless one had links to the rapacious, self-serving, western-backed ruling oligarchy. On top of this, in most Arab states, over 60% of the population is under 25.
***Mainstream Islamist parties in the Mideast have nothing to do with al-Qaida (which barely exists any more) or anti-Western programs. Their primary concern is getting rid of the western-backed oligarchies that keep the Muslim world backwards and in thrall. Their platform is sharing resource wealth, social welfare, education, uprooting thieving oligarchies and fighting endemic corruption.
The big question now is will Tunisia’s dramatic events be a harbinger of other explosions across the volatile Arab world? All eyes are on Egypt, the home of a third of all Arabs. Egypt’s 83-year-old military ruler, Husni Mubarak, is a giant version of Tunisia’s Gen. Ben Ali.

Mubarak was engineered into power by the US after the killing of longtime CIA “asset” Anwar Sadat. Gen. Mubarak has ruled Egypt like a modern-day pharaoh ever since, crushing both violent extremist and legitimate political opposition. Mubarak’s rigged elections, winked at by Washington, are every bit as egregious as Tunisia’s.

So could the flames of Tunisia’s revolution spread to Egypt?

Today, we got the answer.
Hopefully, moderate Arab governments will replace the deposed regimes, and thus bring real stability to the region. Moderate regimes are those that are not fundamentalists of one type or another, not puppets of any superpower (the U.S. or China), and which focus on implementing sustainable economic and human rights policies which benefit the most of their people possible, instead of just the ruling elite.

American Lose Faith in Pretty Much All Big Organizations, Especially Banks and Corporations

Posted: 25 Jan 2011 11:47 PM PST

The Financial Times reports on an international poll by the consulting firm Edelman to be presented at Davos on Wednesday on public trust in various types of institutions. The interesting finding is that Americans are becoming less confident in all types of organizations, which is contrary to the trend in most other nations, where perceptions are rising.
And perhaps most important, the poll was of people most likely to have a favorable view of the current power structure, namely, 5000 well schooled, wealthy and “well informed” participants (does “well informed” mean they read the oracles of orthodox opinion, like the Economist and the New York Times?). If the people who are likely to be beneficiaries of the status quo aren’t too happy with it, imagine what the average Joe thinks.
From the Financial Times (hat tip Joe Costello):

Just 46 per cent of Americans last year said they trusted business, down eight points from 2009, according to research by Edelman, a communications consultancy, which will be presented on Wednesday. Global trust in business was up two points to 56 per cent, by contrast.
The US decline has been driven by a backlash against bankers and their bonuses, with the number of Americans who trust US banks dropping to a low of 25 per cent, down from 33 per cent a year ago and 71 per cent before the financial crisis.

To quote the famous prognosticator Bill Clinton, “It’s the economy, stupid.”
But no one trust banks much, but we Americans have a better view of them than our peers in the UK and Ireland. So I guess all that Team Obama bank PR really has had an impact on poll readings. I’m sure their masters at Davos will be happy to see what a good return they have gotten on their investment.
via: Naked Capitalism

Comcast/NBC Consolidated Control !!!

Published on Friday, January 21, 2011 by The Nation

Comcast/NBC Merger Takes Media Consolidation to the 'Disaster' Level

by John Nichols & Robert McChesney

Senator Al Franken, the former media personality who has emerged as one of the savviest analysts of media policy in Washington, got it exactly right when he termed the anticipated merger of Comcast and NBC Universal a "disaster."

Like many critics of the deal the Federal Communications Commission approved by a 4-to-1 vote on January 17 (and that the Justice Department's anti-trust division OK'd the same day), the Minnesota Democrat focused on immediate concerns about America's largest cable and Internet company merging with one of the country's oldest and largest news and entertainment producers. "When the same company owns the content and the pipes that deliver that content, consumers lose," explained the senator. That complaint parallels objections raised by Stop Big Media, a coalition of consumer, labor and community groups that objected to the deal, which studies suggest will cost cable viewers as much as $2.4 billion over the coming decade.

But a second objection voiced by Franken, echoing other critics of the merger, is even more unsettling: "Allowing this merger to proceed could lead to subsequent deals, leaving Americans at the mercy of a few powerful media conglomerates."

This deal, which confident Comcast executives were moving to implement even before receiving the formal approvals, will usher in an era of media conglomeration unprecedented in the history of a country where media ownership is already far too consolidated. The details of this plan are daunting: Comcast is poised to control one in five hours of all TV viewing in the United States; to own more than 125 major cable channels, television stations, websites, film studios and related production facilities; and to dominate local media controlling cable and Internet service and TV stations in major cities across the country. Senator Bernie Sanders overstates nothing when he argues that "this new media giant will be the largest cable provider, the largest Internet provider and one of the largest producers of content in the United States. At a time when a small number of giant media corporations already control what the American people see, hear and read, we do not need another media conglomerate with control over the production and distribution of media content. What we need is less concentration of ownership, more diversity, more local ownership-and more viewpoints."

Small cable providers joined consumer groups to object to the Comcast-NBCU merger, but most major media and telecom firms were conspicuously silent as Comcast (which ranked fourth among corporate contributors to 2010 election campaigns) spent an estimated $100 million lobbying for approval of the deal. Why? Comcast's competitors know that with the approval of this merger, it is hard to imagine any deal that might be considered too big, too monopolistic or too threatening to democracy. And make no mistake, deals of this sort pose a huge threat to the discourse that is essential to civil society.

Under pressure to meet the requirement that a merger must serve the public interest, Comcast made vague promises to increase news and public affairs programming by 1,000 additional hours a year in media markets where it will dominate communications, and to forge partnerships between NBC stations and local nonprofit news sites. While that may sound like a concession, the 1,000 additional hours amounts to only sixteen minutes per day, per station. In a letter outlining the corporation's "commitment," Comcast tells the FCC that NBC and its stations will not be "obligated to broadcast, publish on an NBCU-controlled website, or otherwise exhibit or endorse any material produced by an Online News Partner." Comcast's well-documented history of opposing and obstructing local journalism efforts at public access and community TV stations leads Josh Stearns, who monitors journalism issues for Free Press and the Stop Big Media coalition, to bluntly declare, "Comcast's sudden commitment to nonprofit news seems suspect." Bernie Sanders is right when he suggests that the FCC will have a hard time keeping Comcast in line. "Once we allow companies to become this powerful, the FCC does not regulate them. They regulate the FCC," says the senator. The FCC will have a hard time saying no to competing companies that demand permission to create equally powerful combines.

The United States desperately needs a coherent media ownership policy for the digital era, and it also has to address the collapse of journalism forcefully, especially at the local level. But approving individual mergers as they occur is the wrong way to generate good policies, unless one is a shareholder in one of the new mega-super-conglomerates.

This disaster points up the need for Congress and the FCC to open legislative and public hearings on the scope and character of media ownership in the digital age. We need hearings in which the communications firms and their battalions of hired guns do not dominate the proceedings and are not assumed to be the rightful rulers of culture and journalism. Let the 99.999 percent of Americans who have to live with the consequences of these mergers-the Americans who have a great if not always respected material stake-join the debate. There is an important precedent: because of pressure from the courts, Congress and citizens generated during and after the 2003 debate over media ownership rule changes, the FCC held a series of open hearings across the country on the future of media. The input was just the opposite of what the corporations and their hirelings were saying. We need another dose of popular common sense, as the rush to merge content providers and distributors goes to the heart of debates about diversity, localism and serving the public interest; if the American people are brought into those debates, they will be the best counter to telecom industry lobbying.

The Comcast-NBCU merger will likely establish dangerous new precedents for media mergers that will make a mockery of anti-trust laws. Unless we have hearings and legislative and regulatory action now, we fear that Sanders will be proved right when he suggests that we are standing at the precipice of an era of mergers and acquisitions that will "make an already bad situation of media consolidation far worse."

© 2011 The Nation

John Nichols and Robert W. McChesney were the founders, with Josh Silver, of Free Press, which has launched a campaign to save the news. Their latest book is The Death and Life of American Journalism: The Media Revolution that Will Begin the World Again.

John Nichols is Washington correspondent for The Nation and associate editor of The Capital Times in Madison, Wisconsin. Nichols is co-author with McChesney of Tragedy & Farce: How the American Media Sell Wars, Spin Elections, and Destroy Democracy - from The New Press. Nichols' latest book is The Genius of Impeachment: The Founders' Cure for Royalism.

Robert McChesney is research professor in the Institute of Communications Research and the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois. He is the author many books including Rich Media, Poor Democracy, The Political Economy of the Media, and Problem with the Media: US Communication Politics in the 21st Century.

Plutocracy and the Right -Wing Agenda

“There’s been only one issue that really matters in the thirty years since Ronald Reagan came to Washington, and that is the highly successful effort by the plutocracy to enrich themselves further by destroying the standard of living of the middle, working and poorest classes. All the debates concerning taxes and trade and labor rights and spending and regulation policy have been precisely about this single theme. And all the other debates about gay rights and Iraq and immigration and putting Christ back into Christmas have been peripheral matters to this core initiative, if not intentional distractions. Astonishingly, this campaign has produced enormous success. And, since policies have consequences, these policies have had the consequence of directing almost every penny of the considerable growth in GDP sustained over the last thirty years into the hands of the rich, while everyone else slips into economic despair, or uses credit cards with usurious interest rates to barely keep their noses above water. I say “astonishingly”, because you’d think that this development was the product of a non-democracy, because in a real democracy people would never stand for it. But in fact, that’s exactly what’s happened, with the compliance of the victims in this crime. We do get to actually vote for the people who make policy in this country, but we don’t in fact choose candidates with our best interests at heart. In the most recent go-round, we picked a group of feral dog Republicans for our Congress even more obscene than the McCain-Boehner variety who impoverished the country only two years earlier.”

—	David Michael Green (via azspot)

Monsanto wins Corporate Hall of Shame Award 2010

The votes are in! You and tens of thousands have voted. And if one thing from 2010 is clear – it’s that the nominees for the Corporate Hall of Shame have never been more sinister. From the financial crisis and efforts to block healthcare reform, to climate change and oil spills – some of the world's largest and most powerful corporations were all too willing to undermine human rights and the environment if it meant maximizing profits.

This year’s winner is a perfect example.

The Corporate Hall of Shame doesn't just elect a winner - it demands change. We must send a powerful message to abusive corporations that we won't tolerate business as usual.

The votes have been tallied and the winner of the 2010 Corporate Hall of Shame is…
 
Take action now to shine a light on Monsanto’s widespread influence and demand that products containing genetically modified organisms are labeled.

Monsanto’s reckless promotion of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and its aggressive legal tactics to intimidate and bankrupt local farmers have dismantled countless family farms and local economies. With such abuses Monsanto edged out a competitive list of nominees, garnering 38% of the total votes. The title has earned the agribusiness giant renewed public scrutiny, expanding the grassroots call to label all products containing GMOs.

Please join Corporate Accountability International and our ally Organic Consumer’s Association today in calling Monsanto to account.

With your voice, we'll work nonstop to ensure that 2011 is a year beyond corporate greed.

Onward,


Stacey Folsom
Corporate Hall of Shame
Elections Office

P.S. Monsanto isn’t alone. Visit the Corporate Hall of Shame homepage to take action and stand up against Monsanto – and 2010 runner-ups Chevron and BP!

Patriot Act up for Renewal

Did you hear that the PATRIOT Act is up for renewal?  No?  You're not alone:  Apparently US intelligence services can still keep a secret.

Since it was passed almost a decade ago, some of the most noxious portions of the PATRIOT Act have burrowed their way deep into our legal system.  A year ago, President Obama signed a bill extending three provisions of the original PATRIOT Act; last week Congressman Mike Rogers (R-Michigan) introduced legislation to extend them again.

Will you click here, and urge your elected officials to oppose the reauthorization of the PATRIOT Act?

Together, the extended provisions make a mockery of our civil liberties:  They let government officials spy on whomever they want, for any reason, without ever letting them know or giving them a chance to challenge the order in court.

Enough is enough: Will you join us in demanding that Congress finally let these provisions expire?

Just click here and we'll send a message to your senator, representative, and President Obama.

Thanks for joining us in the effort to reclaim Americans' civil liberties.

 -- The Demand Progress team

BP's Gulf Spill update via Telegraph

BP victim fund is 'inaccurate and misleading'

An expert witness for Gulf Coast residents suing BP over its giant oil spill has claimed that the energy major's $20bn (£12bn) compensation fund for victims is "inaccurate and misleading".

A brown pelican covered in oil on the Louisiana coast last year Photo: GETTY

By Rowena Mason 9:00PM GMT 22 Jan 2011

Geoffrey Hazard, a law professor at the University of California hired by the plaintiffs, has questioned whether the process is "more just and fair" than the law – as allegedly portrayed by the fund – especially since claimants are forced to sign away their rights to sue the oil giant at a later date.

He also asks whether the fund, overseen by Kenneth Feinberg, can be properly neutral when all its expenses are paid by BP.

The idea that claimants will have to pay higher lawyer fees if they do not sue BP is not necessarily accurate, Dr Hazard claims, because within the class action suits the court has the power to limit fees going to lawyers.

The 10-page statement was submitted to US judge Carl Barbier, who is hearing all the hundreds of complex oil spill cases.

"Statements portray Gulf Coast Claims Facility procedure as more just and fair than that in the ordinary tort system," Professor Hazard wrote. "But the Oil Pollution Act requires a responsible party, such as BP, directly to receive claims, to make interim payments, and to fully compensate a claimant for loss caused."

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The purpose of the $20bn fund, called the Gulf Coast Claims Facility (GCCF), is to get money faster to people financially affected by the oil spill. It is also likely to reduce BP's liabilities as an independent claims process will probably be cheaper for it than fighting claims in the courts.

"As I understand, the attorneys being hired by the Gulf Claims Compensation Facility to assist claimants are not working pro bono but are being paid by BP. If that is so, those attorneys have a professional duty to inform any claimant they may assist of that compensation arrangement," Professor Hazard added. "The Feinberg firm and Gulf Coast Claims Facility can properly be considered agents for BP, even though they seek to be 'fair and independent'."

Tony Buzbee, a lawyer suing BP on behalf of more than 15,000 clients, has said he is willing to give the compensation fund a chance and submit claims through the system first.

However, he told The Sunday Telegraph that around half of his clients are "very, very unhappy" with the fund administrator's decision that their loss of income does not qualify for emergency compensation.

If they are excluded from final settlements, he will have no option to but to pursue their claims through the legal system.

The fund was set up last summer after weeks of pressure from the Obama administration placed on BP, led at that time by chief executive Tony Hayward. The company agreed to bankroll a fund –held in escrow – over a number of years in order to pay for clean-up and other compensation costs.

At the time, estimates suggested clean-up costs could total as much as $16bn, but more recent estimates have been somewhat lower.

The GCCF has to date received 468,000 claims and paid out around $2.7bn to some 170,000 claimants. Mr Feinberg was put in charge of the fund due to his expertise in managing the post 9/11 terror attacks victims' fund.

via The Telegraph