Cumbria police prove political targeting claim and endorse "Absolute Zero" doctrine

By refusing my data rights on the basis of an article about lawful resistance, Cumbria Constabulary have openly confirmed political bias, retaliation, and the collapse of due process

I have received an extraordinary and damning letter from Cumbria Constabulary — one that exposes them as engaging in overt political policing and unlawful retribution for public speech. It is a refusal to process my Data Subject Access Request under the Data Protection Act 2018. The stated basis is that I published an article —The Absolute Zero Protocol— which sets out my intent to use every lawful remedy against unlawful state conduct. This is not the policing of crime, but the policing of lawful dissent.

Yet in trying to shut me down, the Constabulary have only condemned themselves: the letter is institutionally revealing, politically biased, and ultimately self-incriminating.

Let me walk you through the situation, and the lessons it teaches us.

What I asked from the police

On 19th July, I filed three Data Subject Access Requests to the Crown Prosecution Service, HM Courts and Tribunals Service, and Cumbria Constabulary. The deadline expired yesterday, one month after the first working day, and only the police have responded beyond an initial acknowledgement.

I specifically requested all records tied to my Single Justice Procedure prosecution, including:

• Prosecution records — offence reports, charging decisions, witness statement timing, and CPS/HMCTS handover communications.

• Internal communications — emails, memos, and metadata covering decisions, evidence handling, service methods, and any correspondence using my name, address, or vehicle details.

• Court paperwork — creation, amendment, or dispatch records for the SJP Notice (18 Nov 2024) and the Summons (10 Dec 2024, under “North and West Cumbria Magistrates’ Court (1752)”).

• System logs — metadata and access records from PNC, Niche RMS, and any digital evidence or service confirmation systems.

In short: I asked for the digital fingerprints of how this case was created, handled, and transmitted. The Data Protection Act requires those records to be disclosed.

What I got in response instead

The preamble — a refusal:

The Data Protection Act places an obligation on Cumbria Constabulary, when holding personal information, to provide a copy of that information to the individual concerned on request unless an exemption applies. Having considered your request I can advise you that there is no information the Chief Constable is required to provide to you.

On what basis?

Section 53 of the Data Protection Act states-

(1) Where a request from a data subject under section 45, 46, 47 or 50 is manifestly unfounded or excessive the controller may-

(b) refuse to act on the request.

Wow! Me asking for my own data in the context of live civil and criminal litigation is “manifestly unfounded”! How so?

By way of an explanation for this decision, I am aware that you have recently been convicted of an offence to which the case reference number referred to in your request refers. As such evidential material relevant to that case would have been made available to you.

Readers will be aware I received a conviction for s.172 of the Road Traffic Act for not filling in paperwork, after I had questioned its veracity and the police did not respond. This is in the context of alleged revenue enforcement, rather than genuine road policing, in the context of Appleby Horse Fair. I am actively challenging the jurisdiction of the court (which uses three names in legal instruments, none of which map to the underling juridical entity).

I am also aware of an article I believe you have written entitled ‘From £100 fine to £250,000 problem: the “Absolute Zero Protocol”. From £100 fine to £250,000 problem: the "Absolute Zero Protocol". Having reviewed this article, I believe your request is intended to cause disruption rather than a genuine attempt to seek access to personal data Cumbria Constabulary may hold about you.

So saying you are seeking lawful remedy for injustice is now a basis for the police to ignore statutory duties. Which fits a pattern — the prosecution don’t present exculpatory evidence, the court ignores motions and statutory appeals, and HMCTS won’t provide any order or respond to complaints. The system has frozen up.

Taking the above into consideration and notwithstanding the rights and freedoms afforded to you by data protection legislation, I am satisfied that your request is manifestly unfounded.

That is a very big claim — that there is no legitimate purpose to my request. Do you get the feeling that the data shows serious illegality and misconduct by the state?

I can confirm, however, that Cumbria Constabulary is processing your personal data and I have enclosed a copy of the Constabulary’s Privacy Notice which provides further details of the processing undertaken by the Constabulary.

This is the window dressing to appear to regularise lawbreaking.

Why this response is unlawful

Under the UK GDPR and Data Protection Act 2018, every citizen has a right of access to their personal data. A Subject Access Request (SAR) can only be refused if it is “manifestly unfounded or excessive,” and even then the controller must demonstrate clear evidence of malice or bad faith.

Cumbria Police refused my SAR not on the basis of a lawful exemption, but because of an article I had published about the Absolute Zero Protocol. In other words, they blocked disclosure because I wrote publicly about using lawful remedies to challenge defective prosecutions. This is retaliation for lawful dissent, not a valid ground for refusal.

Case law (Dawson-Damer v Taylor Wessing LLP [2017] EWCA Civ 74) makes clear that motive is irrelevant: SARs cannot be denied simply because the requester may use the data for litigation or to criticise the state. By citing my article instead of citing the statute, Cumbria Police stepped outside the law and directly into bias.

Their response is therefore unlawful — it weaponises political speech as a reason to deny statutory rights.

That transforms a routine data request into proof of political targeting. Which is exactly what I wrote when I sent a cease and desist notice in February. Now it is demonstrated in their own words!

What the Absolute Zero Protocol says

Here are direct quotes from my own article:

• “The Absolute Zero Protocol is a paradoxical intervention, as it does not oppose the system at all, but instead overdrives it in the very direction it is heading. In doing so you incontrovertibly reveal what that direction is.”
  → Shows I am not disrupting — only demanding they follow their own law to its logical conclusion.

• “Absolute Zero is ‘Gandhi for ghost courts’ — lawful resistance to legal tyranny. You don’t need to overthrow the government — just make it answer the mail, hold the hearing, and prove its authority.”
  → They are literally objecting to me advocating Gandhi-style lawful non-resistance.

• “The Absolute Zero Protocol is restoration, not revolution. It is the civilian path to clean signal governance — one truth, one court, one defendant at a time.”
  → Impossible to frame this as ‘disruptive’ — it’s the opposite.

• “The moral basis for deploying Absolute Zero is that a belligerent state is conducting irregular warfare on the people via counterfeit courts for non-crimes with no loss, injury, or harm. This is not to aid you to ‘get off’ some fine, and use for selfish purposes will only damage society and invite a crackdown.”
  → Proves I am not trying to dodge justice, but confronting counterfeit process.

• “Justicesec is the discipline of analysing the ‘defect surface’ of corrupted state legal practices. The Absolute Zero Protocol is how you operationalise that as a doctrine.”
  → They are objecting to a discipline of auditing compliance, not disruption.

• “Like a hacker exposing software flaws by following code exactly, this strategy collapses the system by insisting on flawless compliance.”
  → Demonstrates precision, not malice.

This is what a dutiful citizen does in the face of a machine not following the law.

Why this response is a scandal

On the surface, Cumbria Police’s refusal of my Subject Access Request is unlawful because it misapplies the Data Protection Act. But the deeper issue is what the refusal letter reveals about the mindset of the state.

They are monitoring my political speech — not to prevent crime, but to decide whether I am entitled to statutory rights. That transforms a simple GDPR request into a case of domestic surveillance and political policing.

They have equated lawful challenge with disruption. By treating my article about pursuing remedies under the law as evidence of bad faith, they have collapsed the distinction between legitimate criticism and abuse of process. This is authoritarian logic: “to question us is itself unlawful.”

That’s why this is a scandal. It shows the police are not neutral administrators of justice but active political actors, punishing dissent by denying rights. If the state can withhold your data because you criticised it, then GDPR is a dead letter, and due process collapses into retaliatory governance.

The irony is that in trying to suppress me, they have validated the very doctrine they fear: the Absolute Zero Protocol. By their own hand, they have demonstrated that the system cannot survive lawful scrutiny without resorting to bias and concealment.

Absolute Zero Protocol — “Now endorsed by Cumbria Constabulary!” — what a gift.

The timing tells its own story

Cumbria Constabulary’s refusal letter was issued on the very last day permitted under the statutory deadline. They had the full month to respond, yet chose to act only at the eleventh hour. That timing is not neutral — it is tactical.

By waiting until the final possible moment, they maximised obstruction and minimised my opportunity to react. It is a familiar pattern: delay, frustrate, and deny, in the hope that exhaustion will achieve what lawful process cannot. But here, the delay combined with the refusal exposes intent. Had this been a straightforward exemption under the Data Protection Act, there would have been no need to run down the clock.

The lateness of the letter therefore adds to its unlawfulness. It was not just a refusal, it was a refusal delivered in bad faith — an effort to control the process and signal power, rather than comply with statutory obligations. In the Absolute Zero lens, every silence is an admission of failure. By dragging the process to the wire, Cumbria Police have admitted that they are not confident in their own legal position, and needed time to conjure a political justification instead of a lawful one.

This is the Absolute Zero Protocol doing exactly what it predicts: evidencing bad faith by state actors via “clean signal” insistence on upholding the law.

Police response breaks their own “4C” values

The police’s email footer has this as their “public ideology”:

Their banner locks them into four positive-sounding Cs:

• Contempt (for criminality)

• Compassion (for victims)

• Community (focus)

• Care (for colleagues)

What I am seeing is the flip-side “shadow Cs”:

• Corruption — shielding misconduct instead of contempt for crime.

• Cruelty — denying rights of victims of state abuse, the opposite of compassion.

• Concealment — hiding documents and truth instead of community focus.

• Collusion — looking after colleagues’ reputations instead of lawful care.

This is the epitome of the “inversion” we see everywhere: true is false, right is wrong, up is down.

The psychology of why they cannot resist

The police were under no obligation to reply in the way they did. They could have let the deadline lapse, or cited a generic exemption. Instead, they reached for my Absolute Zero article — handing me political targeting evidence on a platter. Why? Because psychologically, they cannot resist.

Institutions like Cumbria Police are conditioned to maintain a sense of control at all costs. To admit error, to stay silent, or to let a challenge pass unaddressed feels like humiliation. So even when silence would have been safer, they lash out — and in doing so, they expose themselves.

This is where the Absolute Zero Protocol functions as “reverse reactive abuse.” Normally, when faced with an abuser, the victim eventually snaps back, and the abuser reframes that reaction as the problem. Here the polarity is inverted: I remain calm, lawful, and precise, while the state, unable to tolerate its authority being questioned, becomes reactive. Its overreach then reveals the very lust for power it seeks to disguise.

The result is predictable and inevitable. Absolute Zero creates a mirror in which their own compulsion to dominate is reflected back at them. Every attempt to reassert control is logged, analysed, and turned into evidence of illegality. They cannot help but double down — and that doubling down is exactly what makes their abuse visible to the public.

In short: their loss of control is their downfall. Absolute Zero doesn’t fight them head-on; it forces them to expose themselves by trying, and failing, to maintain dominance through unlawful means.

The bigger picture: a telling triple failure

The refusal by Cumbria Police does not stand in isolation. It joins two other failures: CPS refusing to name a caseworker or apply the Full Code Test transparently, and HMCTS failing to process my s.111 Case Stated appeal. Taken together, this amounts to a triple failure of disclosure.

Each agency is responsible for a different layer of the justice process — police for investigation, CPS for prosecution, HMCTS for adjudication. Yet all three have converged on the same outcome: denial of access to my data and rights. Whether by omission, delay, or outright refusal, they are moving in lockstep to keep critical records from scrutiny.

This coordination reveals the scale of the problem. It is not about a single parking offence or paperwork slip. It is about ghost courts issuing void prosecutions. The state knows that if the data trails are exposed — the summons logs, system metadata, witness statement timing, jurisdiction records — then the façade of legality collapses. Millions of convictions under the Single Justice Procedure may be shown to rest on counterfeit foundations.

That is why the cover-up is now visible. The triple failure to give me my data is not bureaucratic coincidence; it is systemic concealment of a constitutional scandal. In trying to protect themselves, the police, CPS, and HMCTS have tied their reputations together. If one falls, all fall.

This is why the police’s SAR refusal is more than an unlawful letter. It is the weak link that drags the whole justice system into the scandal. They turned what could have been a minor administrative decision into a demonstration that the state itself is in cover-up mode.

Official support for the Absolute Zero Protocol doctrine

While Cumbria Police may have indicted themselves with their refusal, I find myself with at least some respect for them. Unlike CPS and HMCTS, who retreat behind a cowardly wall of silence, the police at least said something — even if it was self-incriminating. They have also honourably acknowledged my other legal filings, though sometimes in ways that reveal more than they intend.

Even the traffic officer who, I argue, fabricated a crime from nothing and gave misleading testimony in court was at least willing to face me. I had to decline cross-examination to maintain my jurisdiction objection, but he still got on his motorbike and confronted me — just as he confronts every grim scene on the highway. It is the behaviour of a bully who swings openly rather than one who poisons from the shadows.

Policing, done right, is innately brave. I have had moments in my life when I needed help, and officers did the right thing by me. That is why my “work to rule” as a member of the public is not spite, but an act of encouragement: to return officials to lawful conduct by reflecting their own actions back to them.

The police are driven by the spirit of the competitor — the need to “win” — but the law is meant to flow from the spirit of the creator. The Absolute Zero Protocol is a spiritual technology, not a weapon of conquest. It mirrors their own conduct back at them, showing where they obstruct the very life they accuse me of impeding.

In practical terms, AZ works because every abuse is documented, every remedy activated, every denial escalated. I walk away the moment they stop playing by their own self-will. The point is not humiliation or domination, but restoration: one truth, one case, one remedy at a time. By naming AZ as a threat in their refusal letter, Cumbria Police have in fact endorsed it as a doctrine of lawful dissent. That is an extraordinary result.

I spent yesterday smiling and laughing — not mocking them for incompetence, but at the tragicomic irony of power unmasked. Absolute Zero was designed to reveal what the state cannot admit.

In objecting to it by name, the police have proven Absolute Zero Protocol works.

Parting thought

The irony is a complete circle to my earlier correspondence with the police. The refusal letter does not even explicitly say “Cumbria Constabulary” in the header or footer — just a logo. Once again, branding is substituted for lawful identification. It is the same problem as the “ghost courts”: authority by symbol, not by statute.

In Absolute Zero terms, even their own stationery betrays them.