This is one of the most overtly authoritarian proposals for internet regulation I've ever heard from a democratic, Western nation. How in the hell are the people of the UK supporting something like this? As an American who cherishes liberty and freedom, I'm shocked that anyone could support these laws in the UK. They are straight up Orwellian...
Whether we are supporting it or not remains to be seen. May has always had this authoritarian streak but rose to the office of Prime Minister without being elected.
Sadly this is unlikely to become a key issue in the forthcoming election, so an attempt at implementation is likely and we'll end up 'supporting' it passively by voting for the proposers.
We've just become very passive. No one makes a noise about being the most CCTV-ed nation in the world. Even when the leaks about the true nature of GCHQ surveillance came out, there wasn't much rage in the streets.
I guess we are all secretly OK with it. "You shouldn't worry, unless you have something to hide."
I was thinking about this in relation to the pirate radio history of the UK. Maybe people are apathetic because everyone knows no matter how "Nanny State" things get, smart people can skirt their draconian tendencies no matter what?
If the more fascist members of society are placated by technical placebos, why not allow them to pretend they are actually in control of the "situation"?
I'm personally keeping a close eye on lifi. In the US the FCC restrictions on the range of wifi networks restricts mesh networking substantially. If it's just invisible gigabit light communication from rooftop to rooftop, it could be a huge gamechanger.
I don't think this is a real solution. I need to talk to my friends and family privately without installing conspicious hardware on their house.
The right to encrypt and the right to privacy too are precedents that need to be defended, otherwise as soon as the law catches up and learns about the loophole, it will be closed quickly.
Sorry if I gave you the impression that it was a solution! What I'm saying is that the technical cat is already out of the bag, we're already moving forward with stronger encryption and a multilayered internet. Adding restrictions on the ISP level just creates a market to get around that restriction, be it mesh networks, li-fi, or low earth orbit satellites.
Do people in the UK see the police as adversarial, like they do in the US? To me (a perception) it seems like US police are expected to act disproportionately and have the system on their side. See for example advice on never talking to them, profiling, civil asset seizures, swat raids, plea bargains etc. It doesn't seem like UK police are seen the same way or even close.
CCTV and internet control are additional tools for them.
As a UK citizen, my impression is that the relationship is more adversarial in the US. But as far as the US side goes, all I have is what I see on the Internet.
Perhaps this has something to do with the fact that the Wikipedia list of people killed by the police in the UK since the year 2000 fits on 1 screen on my (admittedly large) monitor:
UK police are nowhere near close to US police in terms of everyday brutality. Generally people in the UK are comfortable with the police.
There's a few big exceptions: policing in Northern Ireland was so sectarian it had to be rebuilt. The Met (London) police have a bit of a race relations problem, although again nowhere near as bad as most large US cities.
And the police have a record of tracking and interfering with peaceful left-wing political groups to a disproportionate extent. There's cases outstanding relating to undercover officers who had relationships with women they were spying on.
Do people in the UK see the police as adversarial, like they do in the US?
No. Ordinary police officers that you might meet day to day are mostly just decent people who want to be approachable and have good relations with their local communities. The collective organisations that represent those officers within senior management and to the wider government often defend these principles. Policing by consent remains the foundation of our system, at least for now.
I fear this will change over time, though, not because of the generally decent people working on the front lines in policing, but because of the authoritarian measures pushed through by their government masters and the bias in how they are used, the perception that if something does go seriously wrong then the police involved will not be held accountable, and probably also some element of having a lot of US TV shows and films where we see a theatrical portrayal of a very different kind of relationship.
I've found this extremely frustrating because people in hacking culture for the main part are unwilling to invest time to figure out the psychology of the larger population.
Yes, most people are OK with it. Hackers' response to this datum tends to be 'well they shouldn't be because liberty and reasons,' but what hackers are missing is that most people are not logical an also there are far more of them than you so it's important to get to people where they are rather than where you would like them to be.
It's the same thing when people get upset about the NSA or other spy agencies. I have been pointing out for years now that such agencies perform an important task of government (because no government, organization or nation prospers by being less informed or allowing others to gain an information asymmetry over it). Instead of acknowledging this social reality and developing strategies that incorporate, people demand absurd quixotic solutions that ignore everything we know about economics and human behavior.
The sad reality is that most people (~80%) are passive and just go along with whatever they're told to. There's a small sadistic fringe at one end of the political spectrum that responds to all problems by blaming them on the weakest people they can find as scapegoats, and a small idealistic fringe at the other that clings to a nive idealism; both fringes are capable of totalitarianism.
People in hacker culture decry this state of affairs, but most of them don't want to give up their cushy jobs or privileges or take any risks, and so they get co-opted into building the next iteration of oppressive technology by default.
>As an American who cherishes liberty and freedom, I'm shocked that anyone could support these laws in the UK. They are straight up Orwellian...
Well, those (liberty and freedom) are mostly cherished in lip service by most, and only when it comes to government.
Otherwise, few bat an eye that between them Google and Facebook (and perhaps 2-3 other players) control and have access to 90% of what people do on the internet. And that they also sleep with their government for their nation's interests.
>Otherwise, few bat an eye that between them Google and Facebook (and perhaps 2-3 other players)
Big difference there between the one government that can put you in jail and you cannot divorce without leaving the country (sometimes not even then), and some fragmented web services you can point your browser in a different place.
>I can choose not to use/give meaningful data to Google and Facebook
Between Google Ads on tons of site, their Google Analytics in tons of sites, your friends sharing stuff, photos etc with you on Facebook, your friends receiving your messages on their Gmail account, and the several other (differently branded) services they own, not to mention sites hosted by them on GAE and such, sites serving you Google Web Fonts, etc, you don't really have much choice...
Especially with Google being the only game in town for quality search results.
If you are willing to trade some convenience for privacy from private companies, it is doable. You cannot make such a trade with the government. I agree it is hard (and often infringed upon by friends who can trade your privacy without your consent), but it is possible to a degree and that makes the distinction really important.
By all means though, let's regulate the internet giants to make it even easier. But I don't subscribe to the opinion that the battle is already lost, or that these moderately powerful companies have the same potential effect on our lives as our government.
> Well, those (liberty and freedom) are mostly cherished in lip service by most, and only when it comes to government.
The Trump administration has really shown that this cynical view is not true. Whether you like or dislike Trump, you can't deny that the kind of stuff people say about him freely, the level of protesting in major cities (three major ones since the inauguration alone--it's not something you see in a repressive society.
In the US it's saying things against the establishment consensus and large private interests that will get you fired, cut off, your story not published, mocked, character assassinated, (a la Gary Webb), or worse etc, not saying things that everybody and their dog is saying on TV.
And in this case, most major players of the establishment are, if not entirely totally anti-Trump, at least anti-Trump until they whip him into submission (e.g. to conventional Republican agendas and ways to go about them).
Who in the establishment really cares of/is inconvenienced by neo-nazis? As if they even have any following, or they'll do anything to hurt their interests?
Try being an investigative journalist like Webb, an activist (even a tame one like MLK) or a whistleblower for some big corp, or making waves that disrupt the major lobbies, or Washington politics, and see what happens...
What happens? The FBI investigates you, but ultimately does nothing to prevent you from turning into a national hero with a federal holiday in your honor? And what about corporate whistleblowers? Last year the Justice Department recovered $4.7 billion in whistleblower suits, and paid over $500 million to the whistleblowers who helped bring them: https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-recovers-o.... America has the strongest corporate whistleblower protections in the G20: http://www.economist.com/news/business/21679455-life-getting....
Of course, that's true in spite of Trump, not because of him: Trump is reported to have asked Comey to prosecute journalists. Our institutions are holding up, but they're under tremendous strain.
As a person from and living in the UK, I'm equally shocked and appalled as you. Everybody I know is baffled by and vehemently against these ridiculous proposals. Quite frankly I have no idea who is voting for the Conservatives. Anybody with half a brain cell and not pushing an evil agenda seems to despise the Conservative party. (I'm sure there are some reasonable Tory supporters out there, I've never met them though. I also think in this current sociopolitical climate it's plain dangerous to vote for the Conservatives, even if you believe you have good reasons to support them.)
As a country, we've lost faith in politics and I fully expect this to be demonstrated by a very low turnout for the general election in June. The issue with this is we currently have no strong enough opposition to the Tories (thanks to an incredibly effective smear campaign against Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the Labour party, led by the media and perpetuated by the Labour MPs themselves) so will end up with an even greater Conservative majority and another 5 years of this dystopian madness. I very much hope I'm proven wrong.
I'd be happy to elaborate on some of these points if you're interested; I have a few theories about what is currently going on and what has led us here. It is both very interesting and incredibly upsetting to observe and analyse the state of politics in this country at the moment.
Edit: I should state that I am not a Labour party supporter, I was just trying to give a vague overview of the state of our politics at the moment.
This issue is deeper than party politics. You can blame the Tories, but the Labour party gave us RIPA. They're just as bad, if not worse. It does not matter which political party is in power at the moment, they all want to increase surveillance. And if they say they don't want to before they get into power, they seem to change their tune for some reason once they're in.
Im sure Americans just experienced Deja vu. Sure, they are "all the same" in some narrow way. This equivalence should only matter to single-issue voters.
Sorry, but Labour's 'Wacky' Jacqui Smith was just as bad as Theresa May. The main difference here is that May has become prime minister, so is more able to push her vile ideas.
Whether it's Labour or the Conservatives in power, it seems inevitable that they will push these dangerous ideas in the name of 'keeping us safe from terrorists and paedophiles'.
I completely agree and have edited my comment to explicitly state that I do not support the Labour Party. I do however think that a Labour led coalition (the only other possibility?) would be the lesser of the two evils at the moment.
It's a disease apparently particular to Home Secretaries. Something about the Home Office seems to have a way of 'radicalising' politicians into authoritarians (not sure if I've got the cause and effect the right way around there but that's certainly what it looks like).
The trouble is, if there's a toxic authoritarian culture in the higher levels of the civil service, there's really no way of ousting it. "Whoever you elect, the government gets in".
People complain about having no opposition now but Tony Blair and New Labour's agenda was very similar to the Tory one and equally authoritarian. Now we actually have some ideological differences between the parties
I suspect that most people decide who to vote for based on money, trust on things like jobs, and fear of unemployment &c. I don't think internet policy comes into the decision really for people who don't follow these things and who are not technical.
UK: anyone got a good simple page I can point neighbours at about why this should be an election issue?
> > How in the hell are the people of the UK supporting something like this?
> As a person from and living in the UK, I'm equally shocked and appalled as you. Everybody I know is baffled by and vehemently against these ridiculous proposals. Quite frankly I have no idea who is voting for the Conservatives
It is important for anyone who does not wish to be continue to be blindsided by what "appears" to be surprising to be aware of and correct their own biases.
The trends in UK policymaking (namely, the fact that they're continuing rather than having been ousted) suggests a pattern, and while comments like the above feed into the denial I cite in that comment [0], objective observations (one way or another) serve to clear the air - but only when they're objective. Comments like these - that're "I'm just as confused as you are" - just end up setting discussion back, as people end up being misinformed (as I feel I have been from them in the past, and continue to be unless I make a conscious effort to consider what by all accounts seems the more likely alternative). Hard census-like data would be better than anecdota for this reason, for instance.
Perhaps as you say your anecdotal evidence supports "Everybody [you] know" being 'baffled', but as you're chiming in as a UK citizen, please be aware of any other potential selection or location biases. You're in a better position than outsiders to gauge and figure out where your blind spots are, and it's seeming more to me that the news doesn't bear out the easy-to-jump-to-conclusion (especially in the net-biased echo chamber) of your countrymen at large sharing the same view.
I'm not sure why your comment has been downvoted, this is a very reasonable point. I agree with the linked comment in that I know I am in the minority (votes-wise) but the point I was making is exactly that. Many many people have completely lost faith in politics because it seems that no matter what goes wrong or the number of insane policies presented by the Conservative party, the public opinion seems unchanging. I think there is a very complex set of reasons for this, a lot to do with the media here and the internet communities you mention.
For the above reasons I contend that these are biases, merely observations. I observe everybody around me supporting significantly more libertarian ideals and so I wonder who and where are these other people who hold opposing ideals. I'm sure I could find out the answer from census and statistical data but that doesn't bring me any closer to understanding the reasons why these people vote as they do. Part of my theory is that these opposing ideals are not ideals at all and are in fact a reflection of the efficacy of the marketing campaigns of right-wing politics.
Yes thanks. If I'd allocated more time to that comment I'd likely have edited to better get across that I'm also actively trying not to jump to conclusions on the other end of the spectrum, but I don't particularly care about votes either way and was/am just using this and the past comment to note what I might later look back on as the biased POV I was under at the time.
For GB's sake I hope some minority subdicision forms and at least manages to secure some of the crucial points of privacy or otherwise figure out how they can coexist with their system or one more suited to them... shrug The scarier aspect of globalization.
I live in the USA and would feel this way too about Trump if I didn't know people who lived in the interior. I live in the Los Angeles metro, which is one of America's "alpha cities."
London and other major global cities have formed something almost akin to the science fiction concept of a breakaway civilization. They are their own global meta-nation. Meanwhile the interior and rural districts of their own host countries have been in a state of permanent depression for almost two decades now.
Not saying the conservatives or Trump will fix this. They're political opportunists riding a wave of dissent. All Trump had to do to get elected was to style himself the opposite of all the values and ideas popular in global Urbanity. One of the most insightful comments about Trump I've read was that his racism was more intended to offend educated white urban coastal liberals than to offend non-white races.
From what I can see Brexit and this stuff is the same.
It's a "fuck you" vote from the forgotten districts.
The urban/rural split is insane these days. In my home state, Maine, it's getting very close to a situation where Portland can wag the whole rest of the state.
Urban vs rural values and opinions are almost mirror images of each other...
So the interior heartlands needs to be treated like developing nations and oppurtunities should be opened to them and environment created such that industries move in there. If Chinese people are ready to work for pittance and if the heartland is truly in depression for 20 years then industries should be able to take advantage of low labor cost from the heartland just like they could from China and thus accelerate the growth of heartland communities.
But isolationist policies are not the answer otherwise you are going down the wrong path.
I don't. I'm situated in a very stereotypically "rural England" type place — a deeply Conservative area, within the sea of Blue you see on maps of our election results[1].
In regard to Brexit, there's actually a strong libertarian case for leaving the EU. I personally think it was shortsighted of people (and somewhat reckless) to vote with this mindset given our current government, as the exit of the EU that is desired by those libertarians is not that which will occur. However, this is a much more contentious opinion amongst people I know, many of whom would argue that this was a valid and commendable rejection of the status quo. Saying this, I don't know if the libertarian argument for Brexit was strongly enough represented in the referendum to tip the balance. Given the tiny margin by which Leave won[2] (< 1.3 million votes. It's worth noting that this majority corresponds to about 1/3 of the electorate), I think it's possible.
> London and other major global cities have formed something almost akin to the science fiction concept of a breakaway civilization. They are their own global meta-nation. Meanwhile the interior and rural districts…
Almost, except that cities are utterly dependent on "the interior and rural districts" for food.
No they're not. They can grow their own (and have in times of previous crisis) and most large cities are built around ports. Also, when was the last time a rural population laid siege to a city and starved it? Hundreds of years ago.
Honestly, I don't understand the fantasy world people like you live in. You seem to assume that people who live in cities are helpless kittens or something.
What does shitty economics outside the powerhouse of London (a thesis which I agree with but which I would argue has also been common knowledge for decades) have to do with setting up a new and stricter internet? I don't believe that disgruntled pensioners in the Cotswolds want to stick it to the globalists in London by forcing them onto a different version of the internet protocol.
Nothing directly, nor is Brexit necessarily going to help. But they will vote for politicians who set themselves up as anti-urban-values to stick it to the globalists in London.
As an American who cherishes liberty and freedom, your relationships, conversations, location and political opinions are tracked, logged, and available to your government.
We can't forget that the whole purpose of the internet is decentralization. Perhaps if authoritarian regimes are able to regulate it, that is a sign things have become too centralized.
The more chilling question is why is a Western democracy trying to copy the frameworks of China, the UAE, and other crumbling regimes? This feels like a shadow of the Cold War where certain people believed that the US would fail because capitalism was weaker than communism (parallels abound.)
I agree with all your points except to point out that CCCP is not a "crumbling regime" and a little reflection would indicate why we should not even wish it to be one.
How in the hell are the people of the UK supporting something like this?
Firstly, a lot of people know little if anything about what's going on. They're quite understandably more concerned about high profile issues like Brexit and the collapsing NHS and trains that don't run so they can't get to work and the cost of their kid going to university. The mainstream media is also more concerned with those things.
Secondly, even those who do have some idea of what's going on overall support authoritarian measures if those measures are presented as providing necessary tools to the police and security services to combat serious crime and terrorism, and of course they always are presented that way. When normal people are asked about the actual measures in the laws, for example about all the different government organisations that now have powers to access surveillance data and all the different purposes they can use it for, a lot of people do have significant reservations or even object strongly. But we still tend to trust our government organisations to basically do the right thing in this country, for better or worse, and so supporting the police and security services with new powers is a vote-winner.
Normally the conservatives would never be able to push this authoritarian agenda so openly, but a unique set of circumstances has given them the opening to push through some of their most extreme objectives.
The Conservatives are the only mainstream party promising to follow through with Brexit, and Labour have disintegrated under the 'leadership' of Jeremy Corbyn. This means that many traditional Labour voters are willing to vote Conservative to ensure they get their Brexit, regardless of whatever else the Tories are putting forwards in their manifesto. They've can basically put whatever they want in their manifesto and people will still vote for them to ensure Brexit happens - that's how determined the Leave voters are.
Current polls (although we know how reliable those are) suggest the Tories will take over 400 seats at the general election, giving them absolute control of the government with no other party able to oppose them.
As much as things are looking bad, saying Labour has disintegrated under Corbyn is a truth with severe modifications. Labour is currently polling higher than Ed Milliband was, and has been steadily improving.
The biggest problem now is not that Labour has disintegrated, though the infighting certainly have not made things easy, but that UKIP and the Lib Dems have been disintegrating, and UKIP voters in particular appears to be largely going Tory.
Labour might lose a lot of seats based on current polling, but that is more down to a blatantly undemocratic electoral system than to how the party is polling.
The Conservatives have stolen UKIPs voters by swinging them to the right. They've been able to do this with impunity, in part because of the Labour Leadership, whilst supported on a level I've never seen before in terms of passion, it is frankly not universally popular enough. The only metric you can measure against is how many seats a party wins by. Will Corbyn build on Milliband, or fair worse?
I speak to some hardcore Corbyn supports and their passion is incredible, but alas, only one person get a vote and for all someone passion a pensioner will vote Conservative out of habit and inertia.
While I can understand some of the arguments in favour of regulating internet content, it amazes me people are still talking about pornography like some ancient demon from which our children must be protected at all costs. Does anybody still buy that rhetoric in this day and age?
I don't know if it was explicitly part of the campaign, but UK's government was one of the biggest blockers on European Union's net neutrality laws.
Also, the conservatives mentioned the interference of the European Court of Human Rights and its ability to override sentences inside of the UK as one of the reasons they wanted to leave the EU.
You mean like both are imaginary entities which have real-life consequences only if you believe highly questionable accounts of people who stand to profit a lot if you do believe them, but still offer no objective proof?
I've never heard that claim before. Have there been any reputable studies to back that up? To my knowledge, "psychological damage" isn't a commonly used term in the medical profession. Surely pornography can't be worse than being raised by an alcoholic, abusive parent, which is a relatively common occurence around the world.
It makes you go blind and your teeth fall out, don't you know. Onanism is a sin. rolls eyes
There's an increasingly strong puritanical streak in conservative political circles. May earlier this week said that she was chosen by god to govern, and is a vicar's daughter, so go figure.
Check out the nofap community. Not because they are right, I think they are all about pseudoscience, but to get out of your bubble. They should be easy to find, they are on most online discussion sites.
>Does anybody still buy that rhetoric in this day and age?
Any parent that doesn't allow their children watching porn?
Any company deeming it NSFW?
Any public establishment (library, cafe, etc) where they will throw you out if you watch such a thing (but not if you watch, say, SNL skits or cat videos)?
This is the same government that blacklisted the types of porn Britons shouldn't watch: 'vanila' missionary porn is fine (for now), but squirting[1] or spanking are "unwanted in civilized society", in your words.
The U.K. has been regulating pornography more and more in recent years, first a 2008 law[1] and then a 2014 law[2] restricted what may be depicted. Someone must be voting for it...
Do not forget that even certain drawings (which appear to show fictional children) have been illegal since CAJA 2009 in England and Wales. There's a similar law in NI.
They say that people should be protected from "harmful content", which somehow includes pornography? Is it the 80s again?
The rhetoric here sounds like it's coming from the distant past, when government officials were completely out of touch with the way ordinary people use new technology. Now it just looks like a blatant attempt to score "anti-terrorism" points and regulate the shit out of an industry in draconian ways, just for the sake of regulating it (what are the possible motives, besides the laughable "we don't want to provide safe space for terrorists to communicate" claim?)
Are people actually supporting this kind of thinking?
Ironically her father's former home church is now signed up to the Inclusive Church movement, a progressive, tolerant movement which is the opposite of her xenophobic conservatism.
Maybe you meant the 70's?
The '80's were pretty much liberal AFAICR (in the rest of Europe), the UK has always had some "special rules", guess which country is yellow among all the green in this map?
>The UK has a markedly different tradition of pornography regulation from that found in most other Western countries, which legalised hardcore pornography during the 1960s and 1970s. By contrast the UK was almost the only liberal democracy not to do so.
This will neither work nor result in the expected results. The lines stating that online would be governed the same way as offline life, and access to 'bad' materials would be 'just as hard' shows how disconnected from reality that idea is. Access to violence, hate, porn etc. isn't "harder" offline, and bullying on playgrounds isn't actually getting "fixed" at the moment, just it it won't be online.
The whole irony is that if the online rules would be implemented and resulting in the same things as offline life, the internet would pretty much remain as-is. Of course, the law and the rules would be allowing for more legal spying and detaining, as well as controlling official narrative, which would have nothing to do with online or offline life and is a whole new thing added on top of the current policy.
I hope that if we can just hold off on the crazy orwellian plans and ideas long enough for the old cluster of people in high places to die (of old age), we might actually be able to get the good stuff we created online to actually start fixing the offline problems in governing. That will never happen with the old style people in place, and only time will fix that, since they won't go freely as power is addictive and corrupting (as always).
I find the need to add this qualifier sad. Normally, any rational adult (children even) would be able to correctly infer your intent from the context, but given how things are these days and the crazy laws being passed, I certainly don't blame you for feeling the need to be specific.
>I hope that if we can just hold off on the crazy orwellian plans and ideas long enough for the old cluster of people in high places to die (of old age)
The phenomenon has nothing much to do with "age". The old people running stuff today said the same thing for the "old timers" (Nixon etc) when they were young, and lots of them were themselves were 60s hippies, rebels, revolutionaries, etc when they were young.
See how they turned out?
It's not that new generations bring more liberal people, and not even that age changes you. It's power and interests that come into play. Which young persons don't have much, in the same way they don't have a seat in the senate. And when (a few) do, they can be as conservative/exploitive/etc as any 80 year old politician or CEO, etc.
Makes me giggle when people think "the Internet" can do a damn thing about people with direct physical access to the submarine cables who buy servers and storage by the acre...
As much as I'd like to say "hey Brits, come on and move to Germany as long as you still can", our own government is going way down the authoritarian route, too.
Not that extreme as in the UK, yes, but still - our secret services and the police got awarded the right to automatically access our ID card photography. What this means is that e.g. at demonstrations they can pull up a camera van and have everyone identified in real time - as any form of masking is forbidden by law since the RAF days.
When you're on social support, government may access your entire bank account data including transactions, at will and use everything they find to make your life even more miserable than it already is.
When you're a refugee, immigration offices are now allowed and equipped to forensically examine your cell phone to determine "if you tell the truth", plus you have your fingerprints and biometric photos taken.
First they came for the jobless, then the refugees, ... the path which many countries these days are going is a very dark one and I am not sure if democratic processes will allow a push back or if it will need massive civil unrest.
>When you're a refugee, immigration offices are now allowed and equipped to forensically examine your cell phone to determine "if you tell the truth", plus you have your fingerprints and biometric photos taken.
... What's wrong with inspecting their stories and taking biometrics? Just believing people that are obviously in their 20s claiming to be teens is one reason people are becoming anti immigration. Just cause someone shows up in the EU cause their country sucks doesn't mean they should just be let in without any scrutiny. ProTip: Most people in such countries would prefer to live in the EU/Canada/US.
Blindly believing and letting in anyone damages efforts to admit people who actually are at risk.
Coming in as a refugee is declaring your country of origin has totally failed and you're availing of the mercy of others, of which you might never be able to repay. Getting scanned to make sure you're not gaming the system seems like a trivial price to pay.
> ... What's wrong with inspecting their stories and taking biometrics?
"inspecting their stories" in this case is violating their human right to privacy. Taking biometric photos is fine if used only (!) for checking of multiple applications, but not to submit them to the police databases - as this puts refugees under a general suspicion of being future criminals.
> Getting scanned to make sure you're not gaming the system seems like a trivial price to pay.
The issue is: it's easy to break the dam in regard to human rights for refugees following your line of thought. When measures like this are enacted for refugees, usually no one cares until politicians say "we already have this for refugees/homeless/jobless/other bottom group, so why not extend it to soccer fans/left wing people/the general population". And by the time the "expansion racket" has arrived at "the general population" there is no more real resistance.
This is why weakening of human rights is something that should result in jailtime for the politicians involved.
So what's your proposal to deal with people arriving under false pretences? Also you say refugee but let's admit a lot is simply economic migrants. Reminds me of the woman in Guatemala that tried to get refugees status due to being a woman in Guatemala. Ya, it sucks, but you're no more at risk than the other 100M people in the area.
> So what's your proposal to deal with people arriving under false pretences?
No one except the far right cares for the maybe couple thousands of "fake refugees" that are bound to be in the millions of people fleeing war and poverty (which is often enough caused by Europe in the first place!). We don't ban driving or drinking because a few drunk people cause chaos. We can afford to house a couple thousand of "economic migrants" as long as we can clear up billions of euros in a week to rescue banks, imo.
> Also you say refugee but let's admit a lot is simply economic migrants.
And who causes said economic migrants? Mostly the European policy of dumping excess milk, food and clothing to Africa which destroys local industry there as well as European countries robbing the African coasts of fishes (esp. Somalia has been hit hard by this). To turn them away is pure double morality. We Europeans are the cause of the misery, so why should we ignore the consequences?
It's funny when people that do not have any idea about technology wants to regulate Internet. Someone can just use application developed in other country, what they will do ? block the site on ISP level? People will link to thousands other sites that will have binaries of this application on facebook/twitter/any other site.
They can't even handle piracy and they think that they can control whole Internet? When I hear that kind of proposals I always have this picture in my mind:
The technology exists to firewall entire countries, afterall the ISP's connect to the larger "pipes", this has already happened in several countries. Sure you could probably tunnel a connection but the average person certainly can't, this fractures the internet.
I know this is the independent, but is this for real? It sounds like a prank, straight out of the movie Brazil especially with the whole terrorist motivation. And in the U.K.?!
The headline claims that Theresa May "wants to create a new internet" but there's nothing in the story to actually back up that claim. A "new internet" would involve new infrastructure, ISPs, DNS servers, hosting companies etc. which seems pretty far fetched.
Of course, that doesn't detract from the (potentially very scary) reality of the situation.
This is the problem with letting Labour be held hostage by one out-of-touch lunatic. You get an election where the Conservatives hold all of the cards, and can do basically anything they please as long as Jeremy Corbyn is the opposition.
Labour is so out of touch that even this draconian, insane law will probably not stop people from voting Conservative this time around. Labour has allowed itself to be infiltrated by antisemites and radical socialists, and nobody in Britain is voting for that.
It's like our own version of the "nobody likes Hillary so I guess we'll vote Trump" situation. Difference here being that most of the media is anti-Corbyn which will tip the balance even further.
Can't see the scandal, we are being eaten alive daily by big corps for profit and surrendering them our entire national and supranational infrstructures, so govs should really try and get control back. Do you really think Zuckerberg, Brin, Bezos, Microsoft and Cook are better than May & co.? That said, the other extreme is North Korea, so we know what to expect, eventually.
I'd be curious to see what would happen if Mindgeek (owners of pornhub, etc) put a banner at the top of their websites for British visitors saying "your access to pornography is under threat" or similar. I wonder what effect they would/could have on British voters, based on the sheer amount of traffic they get (and the fact that a considerable amount of people enjoy how easy it is to look at porn, whether they admit it or not).
The UK leadership seems determined to follow the path laid out by Orwell in "1984". They already have the camera system. Now comes the Ministry of Truth.
The US has its own problems, but they're different ones.
I live in London and am looking for anyone in the UK willing to take part in demonstrations (real and virtual) against these plans (and the UK gov's hostility towards the internet in general).
I've set up a quick a Facebook page[1] to organize things. Send me a message through there and I'll respond soon.
Bear in mind the concerns pointed out in this [0] subthread, namely that parents/citizens might not know (or want to bother learning) enough about "how the internet works" (or even thinking "having the government handle protecting our children" is their preference) - my suggestion would be to come up with analogous restrictions of the freedoms they DO hold dear, and possible alternatives (e.g. content stratification) that allows them that complacent hands-off worry-free approach without having to compromise net freedoms. Best of luck.
Stop explaining things and go straight for the emotional language. It's good to have explanations available but if you lead off with them people stop listening because it's boring. This is something right-wingers understand very well and left-wingers need to learn.
I'm too far from London to take part in a physical demonstration, but I'd suggest having a secondary resource to point people to which doesn't use Facebook (or Twitter, G+, etc.). Your target demographic are more likely to avoid/block those services (like I do).
Unless you're in the most remote part of Scotland London is only a train ride away from anywhere in the UK. If your freedom isn't worth the price of a train ticket...
Your argument's only valid up to a point. UK rail fares are ridiculous, even with a rail card, so the money I'd spend on a train ride from Scotland (not the most remote part, but pretty north) would probably be better spent helping in other ways. Plus, as a student, that money would directly impact my necessities like food. The bang for buck is simply too low.
It's crazy how much this country has changed since I moved in the UK in 2010. I originally moved here because London was a city encouraging tolerance, freedom and respect for each other. Technology wise, this city was also the heart of Europe with a great pool of companies and engineers to achieve big things and counterbalance the hegemony of the Silicon Valley and the US.
Every new proposal these days from the UK government is pushing an authoritarian government, and the Brexit has given them an excuse for more populism and isolationism.
As a French man, I moved here because of all these reasons. I had a job in France, a good situation, but I wanted to discover, meet new people, enlarge my horizon. Today, I am not sure that London and the UK are the right places for that.
Yes, looks like terrorists are winning... They made everyone's life to be worse, that was basically their goal.
In the name of fight against terrorism power-hungry politicians propose mind-boggling useless and awful measures, and people don't stop them, because "how can you be against fight on terrorism?"
So sad.
Terrorism is probably the best ally western governments have found to advance their authoritarian agenda. The sad thing is people are actually falling for it. You just have to look at the way the UK Government complained that they didn't have a backdoor to whatsapp's infrastructure because the "terrorist" was able to plan his attack using their service. What is it going to be next ? "London Horrified after Uber Driver blows up his car in Leicester Square. Theresa May to force Uber to share user's personal data with the government". I hate to sound Alex Jones-y but you've got to admit that there's a pattern here.
In an interview during the Nuremberg war crimes trials, Hermann Goering, the founder of the Nazi Gestapo, was discussing whether normal people ever want to go to war. He answered that obviously they do not, but that the leaders make the decisions and can drag the people along with them. When the interviewer suggested that in democracies the people have a say through their elected representatives, Goering countered that "The people can always be brought to the bidding of their leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them that they are in danger of being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country." Sadly, it appears that little has changed in the intervening 70 or so years.
Exactly for a lot of wealthy people they live in terror of the regular people they are gradually starving to death. As we enter a post human economy we will see more and more mass internment more and more concentration camps. As machines eliminate more and more work the totalitarian state will simply eliminate the surplus humans.
“Only a crisis - actual or perceived - produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable.”
Well, terrorists are winning. But the goal of terrorists is not to make "everyone's life to be worse", it is to force political changes.
In the case of the Islamic terrorism, their goal is to spread the authority of Islam.
So, for example, since the Charlie Hebdo attack, nobody will publish any image of Mohammed. We are now all following that part of Islamic blasphemy law, because we're afraid of their enforcement squads. So in that spot they succeeded.
No, there are actual terrorists and have been for ages, though they used to be called anarchists. Attacks on targets by Northern Irish terrorists were a Real Thing. It's the scale and scope of the response that are disproportionate, not to mention the moral vacuity of same.
Calling them anarchists makes them less invented? Calling them Northern Irish terrorists makes them less invented? No.
It works like this. You are a rich fucker who wants to mug a country. To do that you need an army. So first you locate some traumatized people. Feed them money and motivational ideology. Point them at your target. Profit.
To be fair, I don't think this is a partisan thing. The Labour government were getting pretty authoritarian towards the end of their tenure too. Remember the ID cards debacle?
I'm also French, and moved to the US with similar aspirations right when Obama got elected. These days, I am starting to have the same disillusions as you; I feel like these tendencies have been present throughout the western world at large over the past few years.
I am wondering where in the world I could move to and have good public services (healthcare, education, transportation, etc), a government that seems to be truly serving the interests of the people at large, and a rich culture open to differences & innovation. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
From my side, you are very welcome to move to Spain, e.g. pick Barcelona for nice weather, good services, and many tech companies. You can work with just English in most mid/large companies. Salaries are lower than the US and the UK, but que quality of life is quite nice :-)
As a spaniard, I agree that it is an overall nice place to be IF you have a decent job (hundreds of thousands of youngsters had to migrate for lack of it) and IF you are not bothered by politics and "mild" corruption. The grandparent stated:
> a government that seems to be truly serving the interests of the people at large
And I don't think Spain is good in that regard.
English in large companies is not common, though, in my experience.
But my wife is french and I have a lot of french friends on Madrid, and they are very happy to be there and with no plans of coming back! So, gp, definitely consider Spain!
Sure, Madrid is a lovely place, too. Regarding working in English in Madrid and Barcelona, definitely it is possible, specially in companies oriented to the international market. Also, people will do their best to make people comfortable, from my experience :-)
Hahaha I wasn't rooting specifically for Madrid over Barcelona - it's just my experience is from there. I actually believe the english aspect might be a little bit better over there...
Americans and the French have been brothers in liberty since the very beginning of this country, long before the idea of a large centralized federal government providing all the services you mentioned. My maternal side hails from the Guyenne province of France.
The role of government in society will always evolve and be debated, but it is important not to forget our shared heritage and centuries of friendship, and never to let temporary trends or problems ruin that. Don't leave the country, stay and help to improve it for the next generations. Glad you are here!
Regardless of who ultimately financed it, it was the common French soldier fighting under de Lafayette and others who helped the American cause. There were also many French immigrants to America during the time of the revolution (I am aware of the Alien and Sedition Acts; I never claimed there haven't been regrettable mistakes along the way).
My point was that there is a brotherhood among Americans and Frenchmen which transcends temporary political turbulence, that is all.
I don't think there's much better out there, these days. Seems like Canada, continental Western Europe and Scandinavia are the best modern countries. Maybe I'll also return to France these days, or try Quebec.
I've had the impression that the UK has always been more pubically survelience happy than the Usa. I remember over 10 years ago everyone talking about CCTVs were everywhere and the law let the police use them way more than the usa ever could.
I left the UK nearly 25 years ago because (among many other reasons) I was starting to find the omnipresent security culture oppressive. Sadly the US has gone down the same road and it's no longer the country it used to be. Some things have changed for the better but the fact that both countries currently have such authoritarian leaders is a Dangerously Bad Thing.
The UK is a setting of quite a few prominent dystopias (e.g. 1984, Brave New World) and that imprinted in my susceptible young mind that while the UK seems to have always been on the "free" side of the societal spectrum, it's not guaranteed to continue in the future.
I hear you. I moved to the UK ten years ago, because I fell in love with this beautiful, mature, tolerant country. It hurts to see what the populists are trying to do. It's neither good for the people of Britain, the economy, nor the rest of Europe. Shame on you, Theresa May. Shame on you. I say it while I still can.
I hear you. I moved to the UK ten years ago, because I fell in love with this beautiful, mature, tolerant country. It hurts to see what the populists are trying to do. It's neither good for the people of Britain, the economy, nor the rest of Europe. Shame on you, Theresa May. Shame on you. I say it while I still can.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 240 ms ] threadNobody wants this, except the gov't.
Sadly this is unlikely to become a key issue in the forthcoming election, so an attempt at implementation is likely and we'll end up 'supporting' it passively by voting for the proposers.
After living quietly with 24/7 cctv monitoring, all kinds of anti-privacy laws, etc, it's not like it's a real nail-biting mystery this one...
I guess we are all secretly OK with it. "You shouldn't worry, unless you have something to hide."
If the more fascist members of society are placated by technical placebos, why not allow them to pretend they are actually in control of the "situation"?
I'm personally keeping a close eye on lifi. In the US the FCC restrictions on the range of wifi networks restricts mesh networking substantially. If it's just invisible gigabit light communication from rooftop to rooftop, it could be a huge gamechanger.
The right to encrypt and the right to privacy too are precedents that need to be defended, otherwise as soon as the law catches up and learns about the loophole, it will be closed quickly.
CCTV and internet control are additional tools for them.
Perhaps this has something to do with the fact that the Wikipedia list of people killed by the police in the UK since the year 2000 fits on 1 screen on my (admittedly large) monitor:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_killings_by_law_enforc...
There's a few big exceptions: policing in Northern Ireland was so sectarian it had to be rebuilt. The Met (London) police have a bit of a race relations problem, although again nowhere near as bad as most large US cities.
And the police have a record of tracking and interfering with peaceful left-wing political groups to a disproportionate extent. There's cases outstanding relating to undercover officers who had relationships with women they were spying on.
No. Ordinary police officers that you might meet day to day are mostly just decent people who want to be approachable and have good relations with their local communities. The collective organisations that represent those officers within senior management and to the wider government often defend these principles. Policing by consent remains the foundation of our system, at least for now.
I fear this will change over time, though, not because of the generally decent people working on the front lines in policing, but because of the authoritarian measures pushed through by their government masters and the bias in how they are used, the perception that if something does go seriously wrong then the police involved will not be held accountable, and probably also some element of having a lot of US TV shows and films where we see a theatrical portrayal of a very different kind of relationship.
Yes, most people are OK with it. Hackers' response to this datum tends to be 'well they shouldn't be because liberty and reasons,' but what hackers are missing is that most people are not logical an also there are far more of them than you so it's important to get to people where they are rather than where you would like them to be.
It's the same thing when people get upset about the NSA or other spy agencies. I have been pointing out for years now that such agencies perform an important task of government (because no government, organization or nation prospers by being less informed or allowing others to gain an information asymmetry over it). Instead of acknowledging this social reality and developing strategies that incorporate, people demand absurd quixotic solutions that ignore everything we know about economics and human behavior.
The sad reality is that most people (~80%) are passive and just go along with whatever they're told to. There's a small sadistic fringe at one end of the political spectrum that responds to all problems by blaming them on the weakest people they can find as scapegoats, and a small idealistic fringe at the other that clings to a nive idealism; both fringes are capable of totalitarianism.
People in hacker culture decry this state of affairs, but most of them don't want to give up their cushy jobs or privileges or take any risks, and so they get co-opted into building the next iteration of oppressive technology by default.
Well, those (liberty and freedom) are mostly cherished in lip service by most, and only when it comes to government.
Otherwise, few bat an eye that between them Google and Facebook (and perhaps 2-3 other players) control and have access to 90% of what people do on the internet. And that they also sleep with their government for their nation's interests.
Big difference there between the one government that can put you in jail and you cannot divorce without leaving the country (sometimes not even then), and some fragmented web services you can point your browser in a different place.
Enormous, meaningful difference worth fighting over.
I agree with GPP that the 2 aren't really comparable.
Between Google Ads on tons of site, their Google Analytics in tons of sites, your friends sharing stuff, photos etc with you on Facebook, your friends receiving your messages on their Gmail account, and the several other (differently branded) services they own, not to mention sites hosted by them on GAE and such, sites serving you Google Web Fonts, etc, you don't really have much choice...
Especially with Google being the only game in town for quality search results.
By all means though, let's regulate the internet giants to make it even easier. But I don't subscribe to the opinion that the battle is already lost, or that these moderately powerful companies have the same potential effect on our lives as our government.
The Trump administration has really shown that this cynical view is not true. Whether you like or dislike Trump, you can't deny that the kind of stuff people say about him freely, the level of protesting in major cities (three major ones since the inauguration alone--it's not something you see in a repressive society.
And in this case, most major players of the establishment are, if not entirely totally anti-Trump, at least anti-Trump until they whip him into submission (e.g. to conventional Republican agendas and ways to go about them).
Try being an investigative journalist like Webb, an activist (even a tame one like MLK) or a whistleblower for some big corp, or making waves that disrupt the major lobbies, or Washington politics, and see what happens...
As a country, we've lost faith in politics and I fully expect this to be demonstrated by a very low turnout for the general election in June. The issue with this is we currently have no strong enough opposition to the Tories (thanks to an incredibly effective smear campaign against Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the Labour party, led by the media and perpetuated by the Labour MPs themselves) so will end up with an even greater Conservative majority and another 5 years of this dystopian madness. I very much hope I'm proven wrong.
I'd be happy to elaborate on some of these points if you're interested; I have a few theories about what is currently going on and what has led us here. It is both very interesting and incredibly upsetting to observe and analyse the state of politics in this country at the moment.
Edit: I should state that I am not a Labour party supporter, I was just trying to give a vague overview of the state of our politics at the moment.
Im sure Americans just experienced Deja vu. Sure, they are "all the same" in some narrow way. This equivalence should only matter to single-issue voters.
Whether it's Labour or the Conservatives in power, it seems inevitable that they will push these dangerous ideas in the name of 'keeping us safe from terrorists and paedophiles'.
The trouble is, if there's a toxic authoritarian culture in the higher levels of the civil service, there's really no way of ousting it. "Whoever you elect, the government gets in".
Perhaps the very name of the office. "Home" is a word with a lot of powerful emotional resonance.
UK: anyone got a good simple page I can point neighbours at about why this should be an election issue?
> As a person from and living in the UK, I'm equally shocked and appalled as you. Everybody I know is baffled by and vehemently against these ridiculous proposals. Quite frankly I have no idea who is voting for the Conservatives
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14374899
It is important for anyone who does not wish to be continue to be blindsided by what "appears" to be surprising to be aware of and correct their own biases.
The trends in UK policymaking (namely, the fact that they're continuing rather than having been ousted) suggests a pattern, and while comments like the above feed into the denial I cite in that comment [0], objective observations (one way or another) serve to clear the air - but only when they're objective. Comments like these - that're "I'm just as confused as you are" - just end up setting discussion back, as people end up being misinformed (as I feel I have been from them in the past, and continue to be unless I make a conscious effort to consider what by all accounts seems the more likely alternative). Hard census-like data would be better than anecdota for this reason, for instance.
Perhaps as you say your anecdotal evidence supports "Everybody [you] know" being 'baffled', but as you're chiming in as a UK citizen, please be aware of any other potential selection or location biases. You're in a better position than outsiders to gauge and figure out where your blind spots are, and it's seeming more to me that the news doesn't bear out the easy-to-jump-to-conclusion (especially in the net-biased echo chamber) of your countrymen at large sharing the same view.
For the above reasons I contend that these are biases, merely observations. I observe everybody around me supporting significantly more libertarian ideals and so I wonder who and where are these other people who hold opposing ideals. I'm sure I could find out the answer from census and statistical data but that doesn't bring me any closer to understanding the reasons why these people vote as they do. Part of my theory is that these opposing ideals are not ideals at all and are in fact a reflection of the efficacy of the marketing campaigns of right-wing politics.
For GB's sake I hope some minority subdicision forms and at least manages to secure some of the crucial points of privacy or otherwise figure out how they can coexist with their system or one more suited to them... shrug The scarier aspect of globalization.
I live in the USA and would feel this way too about Trump if I didn't know people who lived in the interior. I live in the Los Angeles metro, which is one of America's "alpha cities."
London and other major global cities have formed something almost akin to the science fiction concept of a breakaway civilization. They are their own global meta-nation. Meanwhile the interior and rural districts of their own host countries have been in a state of permanent depression for almost two decades now.
Not saying the conservatives or Trump will fix this. They're political opportunists riding a wave of dissent. All Trump had to do to get elected was to style himself the opposite of all the values and ideas popular in global Urbanity. One of the most insightful comments about Trump I've read was that his racism was more intended to offend educated white urban coastal liberals than to offend non-white races.
From what I can see Brexit and this stuff is the same.
It's a "fuck you" vote from the forgotten districts.
Edit: required reading:
https://morecrows.wordpress.com/2016/05/10/unnecessariat/
Urban vs rural values and opinions are almost mirror images of each other...
But isolationist policies are not the answer otherwise you are going down the wrong path.
In regard to Brexit, there's actually a strong libertarian case for leaving the EU. I personally think it was shortsighted of people (and somewhat reckless) to vote with this mindset given our current government, as the exit of the EU that is desired by those libertarians is not that which will occur. However, this is a much more contentious opinion amongst people I know, many of whom would argue that this was a valid and commendable rejection of the status quo. Saying this, I don't know if the libertarian argument for Brexit was strongly enough represented in the referendum to tip the balance. Given the tiny margin by which Leave won[2] (< 1.3 million votes. It's worth noting that this majority corresponds to about 1/3 of the electorate), I think it's possible.
[1] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election/2015/results
[2] http://www.bbc.com/news/politics/eu_referendum/results
I think you meant 1/30?
Almost, except that cities are utterly dependent on "the interior and rural districts" for food.
Honestly, I don't understand the fantasy world people like you live in. You seem to assume that people who live in cities are helpless kittens or something.
The more chilling question is why is a Western democracy trying to copy the frameworks of China, the UAE, and other crumbling regimes? This feels like a shadow of the Cold War where certain people believed that the US would fail because capitalism was weaker than communism (parallels abound.)
Firstly, a lot of people know little if anything about what's going on. They're quite understandably more concerned about high profile issues like Brexit and the collapsing NHS and trains that don't run so they can't get to work and the cost of their kid going to university. The mainstream media is also more concerned with those things.
Secondly, even those who do have some idea of what's going on overall support authoritarian measures if those measures are presented as providing necessary tools to the police and security services to combat serious crime and terrorism, and of course they always are presented that way. When normal people are asked about the actual measures in the laws, for example about all the different government organisations that now have powers to access surveillance data and all the different purposes they can use it for, a lot of people do have significant reservations or even object strongly. But we still tend to trust our government organisations to basically do the right thing in this country, for better or worse, and so supporting the police and security services with new powers is a vote-winner.
The Conservatives are the only mainstream party promising to follow through with Brexit, and Labour have disintegrated under the 'leadership' of Jeremy Corbyn. This means that many traditional Labour voters are willing to vote Conservative to ensure they get their Brexit, regardless of whatever else the Tories are putting forwards in their manifesto. They've can basically put whatever they want in their manifesto and people will still vote for them to ensure Brexit happens - that's how determined the Leave voters are.
Current polls (although we know how reliable those are) suggest the Tories will take over 400 seats at the general election, giving them absolute control of the government with no other party able to oppose them.
The biggest problem now is not that Labour has disintegrated, though the infighting certainly have not made things easy, but that UKIP and the Lib Dems have been disintegrating, and UKIP voters in particular appears to be largely going Tory.
Labour might lose a lot of seats based on current polling, but that is more down to a blatantly undemocratic electoral system than to how the party is polling.
I speak to some hardcore Corbyn supports and their passion is incredible, but alas, only one person get a vote and for all someone passion a pensioner will vote Conservative out of habit and inertia.
That is how resistance will be framed and it could play just as well here, but I hope I'm wrong.
Also, the conservatives mentioned the interference of the European Court of Human Rights and its ability to override sentences inside of the UK as one of the reasons they wanted to leave the EU.
Given the amount of psychological damage inflicted by pornography that comparison seems pretty accurate.
There's an increasingly strong puritanical streak in conservative political circles. May earlier this week said that she was chosen by god to govern, and is a vicar's daughter, so go figure.
Any parent that doesn't allow their children watching porn?
Any company deeming it NSFW?
Any public establishment (library, cafe, etc) where they will throw you out if you watch such a thing (but not if you watch, say, SNL skits or cat videos)?
In other words, the majority of society.
1. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/a-long-list-of-sex-acts...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_63_of_the_Criminal_Jus... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audiovisual_Media_Services_Reg...
Step 2. Make terrorists use that internet.
Hmm... I'm detecting a problem with this plan...
They say that people should be protected from "harmful content", which somehow includes pornography? Is it the 80s again?
The rhetoric here sounds like it's coming from the distant past, when government officials were completely out of touch with the way ordinary people use new technology. Now it just looks like a blatant attempt to score "anti-terrorism" points and regulate the shit out of an industry in draconian ways, just for the sake of regulating it (what are the possible motives, besides the laughable "we don't want to provide safe space for terrorists to communicate" claim?)
Are people actually supporting this kind of thinking?
May was an authoritarian home secretary who was raised (and is a practising) Christian (iirc her dad was a vicar).
She's a one-woman Morality Police (in her head at least).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inclusive_Church
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pornography_by_region
From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pornography_in_the_United_King...
>The UK has a markedly different tradition of pornography regulation from that found in most other Western countries, which legalised hardcore pornography during the 1960s and 1970s. By contrast the UK was almost the only liberal democracy not to do so.
The whole irony is that if the online rules would be implemented and resulting in the same things as offline life, the internet would pretty much remain as-is. Of course, the law and the rules would be allowing for more legal spying and detaining, as well as controlling official narrative, which would have nothing to do with online or offline life and is a whole new thing added on top of the current policy.
I hope that if we can just hold off on the crazy orwellian plans and ideas long enough for the old cluster of people in high places to die (of old age), we might actually be able to get the good stuff we created online to actually start fixing the offline problems in governing. That will never happen with the old style people in place, and only time will fix that, since they won't go freely as power is addictive and corrupting (as always).
I find the need to add this qualifier sad. Normally, any rational adult (children even) would be able to correctly infer your intent from the context, but given how things are these days and the crazy laws being passed, I certainly don't blame you for feeling the need to be specific.
See the particularly sad "Special note to law-enforcement agents" on https://sphincs.cr.yp.to/ .
I can't help but feel that things are taking a turn for the worse.
The phenomenon has nothing much to do with "age". The old people running stuff today said the same thing for the "old timers" (Nixon etc) when they were young, and lots of them were themselves were 60s hippies, rebels, revolutionaries, etc when they were young.
See how they turned out?
It's not that new generations bring more liberal people, and not even that age changes you. It's power and interests that come into play. Which young persons don't have much, in the same way they don't have a seat in the senate. And when (a few) do, they can be as conservative/exploitive/etc as any 80 year old politician or CEO, etc.
Not that extreme as in the UK, yes, but still - our secret services and the police got awarded the right to automatically access our ID card photography. What this means is that e.g. at demonstrations they can pull up a camera van and have everyone identified in real time - as any form of masking is forbidden by law since the RAF days.
When you're on social support, government may access your entire bank account data including transactions, at will and use everything they find to make your life even more miserable than it already is.
When you're a refugee, immigration offices are now allowed and equipped to forensically examine your cell phone to determine "if you tell the truth", plus you have your fingerprints and biometric photos taken.
First they came for the jobless, then the refugees, ... the path which many countries these days are going is a very dark one and I am not sure if democratic processes will allow a push back or if it will need massive civil unrest.
... What's wrong with inspecting their stories and taking biometrics? Just believing people that are obviously in their 20s claiming to be teens is one reason people are becoming anti immigration. Just cause someone shows up in the EU cause their country sucks doesn't mean they should just be let in without any scrutiny. ProTip: Most people in such countries would prefer to live in the EU/Canada/US.
Blindly believing and letting in anyone damages efforts to admit people who actually are at risk.
Coming in as a refugee is declaring your country of origin has totally failed and you're availing of the mercy of others, of which you might never be able to repay. Getting scanned to make sure you're not gaming the system seems like a trivial price to pay.
"inspecting their stories" in this case is violating their human right to privacy. Taking biometric photos is fine if used only (!) for checking of multiple applications, but not to submit them to the police databases - as this puts refugees under a general suspicion of being future criminals.
> Getting scanned to make sure you're not gaming the system seems like a trivial price to pay.
The issue is: it's easy to break the dam in regard to human rights for refugees following your line of thought. When measures like this are enacted for refugees, usually no one cares until politicians say "we already have this for refugees/homeless/jobless/other bottom group, so why not extend it to soccer fans/left wing people/the general population". And by the time the "expansion racket" has arrived at "the general population" there is no more real resistance.
This is why weakening of human rights is something that should result in jailtime for the politicians involved.
No one except the far right cares for the maybe couple thousands of "fake refugees" that are bound to be in the millions of people fleeing war and poverty (which is often enough caused by Europe in the first place!). We don't ban driving or drinking because a few drunk people cause chaos. We can afford to house a couple thousand of "economic migrants" as long as we can clear up billions of euros in a week to rescue banks, imo.
> Also you say refugee but let's admit a lot is simply economic migrants.
And who causes said economic migrants? Mostly the European policy of dumping excess milk, food and clothing to Africa which destroys local industry there as well as European countries robbing the African coasts of fishes (esp. Somalia has been hit hard by this). To turn them away is pure double morality. We Europeans are the cause of the misery, so why should we ignore the consequences?
They can't even handle piracy and they think that they can control whole Internet? When I hear that kind of proposals I always have this picture in my mind:
https://torrentfreak.com/images/blocktpb1.jpg
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14374533
What a weird world we live in.
Of course, that doesn't detract from the (potentially very scary) reality of the situation.
Labour is so out of touch that even this draconian, insane law will probably not stop people from voting Conservative this time around. Labour has allowed itself to be infiltrated by antisemites and radical socialists, and nobody in Britain is voting for that.
May wants to control the entirety of sites on the internet.
if you can't see the difference, than I don't know what to say to you.
We do like our porn.
The US has its own problems, but they're different ones.
I've set up a quick a Facebook page[1] to organize things. Send me a message through there and I'll respond soon.
Thanks!
[1] https://www.facebook.com/Protest-against-Theresa-Mays-plan-t...
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14374533
Every new proposal these days from the UK government is pushing an authoritarian government, and the Brexit has given them an excuse for more populism and isolationism.
As a French man, I moved here because of all these reasons. I had a job in France, a good situation, but I wanted to discover, meet new people, enlarge my horizon. Today, I am not sure that London and the UK are the right places for that.
I would bet that if they tried, they might be considered terrorists too. It reminds me of this old Thomas Jefferson quote:
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants."
Milton Friedman
In the case of the Islamic terrorism, their goal is to spread the authority of Islam.
So, for example, since the Charlie Hebdo attack, nobody will publish any image of Mohammed. We are now all following that part of Islamic blasphemy law, because we're afraid of their enforcement squads. So in that spot they succeeded.
The name of the game is putting the whole population into a juice-press. Always was, always will be.
It works like this. You are a rich fucker who wants to mug a country. To do that you need an army. So first you locate some traumatized people. Feed them money and motivational ideology. Point them at your target. Profit.
Voila, you have invented a band of terrorists.
I am wondering where in the world I could move to and have good public services (healthcare, education, transportation, etc), a government that seems to be truly serving the interests of the people at large, and a rich culture open to differences & innovation. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
> a government that seems to be truly serving the interests of the people at large And I don't think Spain is good in that regard.
English in large companies is not common, though, in my experience.
But my wife is french and I have a lot of french friends on Madrid, and they are very happy to be there and with no plans of coming back! So, gp, definitely consider Spain!
The role of government in society will always evolve and be debated, but it is important not to forget our shared heritage and centuries of friendship, and never to let temporary trends or problems ruin that. Don't leave the country, stay and help to improve it for the next generations. Glad you are here!
It was the monarchs of France that helped the US during the revolutionary war.
Then France had their own "revolution" and beheaded a lot of people. It was more Pol Pot than Thomas Jefferson.
Then Napoleon took power and made himeself emperor and tried to take over all of Europe.
Then we fought the quasi war.
I suppose after that we had some better times, maybe the last 100 year.
My point was that there is a brotherhood among Americans and Frenchmen which transcends temporary political turbulence, that is all.
> and a rich culture open to differences & innovation.
Maybe Canada is the only one checking all of it?
I lived in the UK for some time, but general atmosphere, even before EU referendum became unbearable for me.
I moved back to continental EU. There are as many opportunities here as in London, even more.
The UK is regressing and it's going to get worse. If you have a chance, don't get stuck there.
This type of casual invasion of privacy at least (nominally) requires a warrant in the US.