The Snitch: Federal court slaps email ban on man after abusive messages to airlines

A man acting on behalf of 18 former airline staff who are suing Qantas, Jetstar and Virgin over the requirement that they receive the Covid vaccination has been banned from any further correspondence.

Whoever said the culture of email correspondence has caused us to become glib, faux-polite communicators hasn’t met Glenn Floyd.

Floyd was recently banned by a judge in the Federal Court of Australia from engaging in any further correspondence in a court case because of the offensive nature of the dispatches he sent to the opposing side.

Floyd was a representative (of sorts) for 18 former airline staff who are suing Qantas, Jetstar and Virgin over the requirement that they receive the Covid vaccination as a part of their employment.

But his “escalating use of offensive language and threats” in his emails – which were not just sent to the airlines’ lawyers but also to their CEOs, including Qantas’ Alan Joyce – caused such offence that the airlines applied to have Floyd banned from communicating with them. Justice Stephen Burley granted the application but first had to unpack exactly who Floyd is and what business he had on the case, given he is not a lawyer. Justice Burley told the court Floyd “holds himself out to be a ‘pro bono advocate and UN observer/reporter’ ”.

Alan Joyce cannot be contacted by email by Glenn Floyd. Picture: Renee Nowytarger

Despite not being their official lawyer, the court heard Floyd prepared documents to launch the case. He then put in his mouthguard and ripped in.

It is not clear if he sought instructions from the workers before sending the emails.

In August, after the airlines’ lawyers forwarded documents seeking to end the court case, the court heard Floyd sent three emails to a number of people, including the lawyers and CEOs of Jetstar and Qantas.

“We fully understand the role of lawyers in the main is to drag out proceedings solely for their money-grubbing (sic) conflicts of interests which ignores the course of justice,” Floyd wrote.

“I’ll say it slowly so that even an apprentice, holiday-sandwich-student, first-year, undergraduate, pimply-hyperbolaed (sic), wet behind the ears articled clerk could understand.”

A lawyer for the airlines responded “in moderate terms” and asked Floyd to communicate a bit more politely. He didn’t.

He continued by calling the airlines’ lawyers and executives “drug-pushing cretins” and “legal pimp-protectors” who were taking part in the “greatest attack on decency and morality in human history”.

When the airlines served an affidavit via email the following day, Floyd responded and called them “boneheads”.

His final email was signed off with “F. k with a Floyd? > Watch Your Back!”.

And so ended Floyd’s participation with the Federal Court of Australia.

REFLECTION TIME

The AN0M bust is known as the sting of the century, but it still takes some top-level craftiness from the cops to make the charges stick.

The sting that was cooked up by the AFP and the FBI saw thousands of crime figures (alleged or otherwise) send millions of messages thinking the AN0M encryption meant the cops couldn’t intercept them. Only problem was the cops were reading every single message and arrested thousands of people on one glorious day in July 2021. But it wasn’t as easy as it sounds.

Every AN0M phone was used under a pseudonym. So the cops had to prove the person they charged was the person using the phone. And police documents recently released by the NSW Supreme Court illustrated just how laterally police were thinking to land their targets.

Police used the reflection on pics sent on an AN0M phone to argue that it was used by an accused drug smuggler. Picture: Supplied

The documents are from the case of a Sydney man who has been accused of smuggling about $50m worth of cocaine into Australia.

And police allege he did a lot of the negotiations from the comfort of his home.

Police allege the man took photos of messages relating to the shipment before sending them on the AN0M device to the other alleged syndicate members. In the photos, police noticed reflections on the screen of the phone the man had used to take the photos.

One included the distinct pattern of a “louvre-style ceiling”. Another featured a palm tree next to an angled gutter on a roof. A third was taken with the phone held up against a grained pattern on a timber table. So when police raided the man’s home, guess what they found?

A “louvre-style” ceiling in the living room, a palm tree next to an angled gutter and a timber table with the same texture as the photo.

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