BAFFLEMENT at the workings of new technology has led to fresh embarrassment for Derek Simpson, general-secretary of Britain's biggest white-collar union, Amicus.

Eye 1143 revealed how, before Simpson decided Amicus member David Beaumont's interesting website (www.amicus.cc) was scurrilous and defamatory (because it criticised one of his mates), he had sent effusive emails in support of it (when it criticised his rivals).

Now Simpson has ordered Amicus techies to wage cyber war on the whistleblower. Unfortunately for Simpson - who has a degree in computing and whose union has tens of thousands of members who work in IT - his high-tech attempt to spike Beaumont's guns backfired badly.

Simpson is determined to nail three highranking Amicus officials, Des Heemskerk, Cathie Willis and Jimmy Warne, all former supporters, whom he suspects of having leaked to Beaumont embarrassing documents about assistant general secretary Les Bayliss's links to a convicted fraudster (see Eye 1143).

Amicus geeks vainly scoured the union's computers and servers for evidence that the three suspended officials had a hand in leaking the material to Beaumont's website. So then they bombarded Beaumont with spam. For three days the union's email server forwarded four copies of every suspect email it received to Beaumont. The intention had been to filter out any outgoing email addressed to Beaumont so it could be examined. Alas, Simpson's cyber-sleuths were so incompetent that, instead, they automatically forwarded everything sent to the spam box on to Beaumont, who naturally complained.

The union explained: "This was due to a technical error. It was not harassment as it was not an intended act." In other words: "Don't blame us - we haven't a clue what we're doing!"

'Blackleg'

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