[Director of Public Prosecutions boot boy] Smith said the tweet lacked surrounding context and therefore had to be treated as a genuine threat, rather than a joke.
Really? Because nobody else who read it or was involved in the case ever claimed to have taken it seriously. Not the airport 'security' goon who searched for it, not the "special budget" coppers who arrested Chambers. They all said "Well, we know that it was a joke, nobody actually felt threatened, but... er... we saw it, so now we have to set an example." or words to that effect. Sotto voce, they couldn't find any actual terrorists, and they had to do something to justify their budgets. They know it, we know it, Paul Chambers most certainly knows it.
After the conviction, tens (was it hundreds?) of thousands of twitards then posted the exact same words. Surely we all committed the same crime? But none of us was arrested. Why's that?
All the way through the various levels, the Judiciary has struggled to understand twitter, and groped for bad analogies to explain it. The fact that anybody outside of Chamber's set of followers could have seen the tweet and read it out of context was used to convict, despite the patent absurdity of that as a standard. Anybody could walk past a pub window, hear one joking sentence spoken out of context, and soil their pink panties, but we don't generally convict the speaker of terrorism offences because of that.
It's been an utter farce of a case, and at this point, it seems to be entirely about the police, CPS and now the judiciary saving face by digging themselves deeper into the mount of steaming contempt that's been rightfully heaped on to them.
It's one of the few cases that genuinely boils my piss, because it does effect every one of us in the UK every second of every day. We are being monitored, and we can be convicted for just about any chance remark, entirely dependent on the budgetary requirements of various tools of the State.