You must be rather dense. Flatly disregard a provided source that counters your claim of "conspiracy theories" and then compare something like this to employers responding to employee criticisms. The two things are categorically different. The state spying on and punishing private citizens (even if they're government employees) for their criticisms of its policies is far ahead in danger from corporate employee monitoring bullshit.
I believe the point is that even suggesting that a western government is surveilling its dissenting citizens would get you labeled a conspiracy theorist nutjob. And with this revelation, we are now supposed to believe that this was the only instance of this happening, it's definitely not happening anywhere else, and you're still just a dangerous conspiracy theorist if you have trouble believing these institutions that lie over and over and over again about things like this until they get caught and aren't held accountable. It's tiring.
It's a low effort comment for sure. But it's pretty spot on if you have ever expressed doubt in the mainstream narrative online.
> In response to these revelations, the Department has chosen to remain largely opaque, stating that it would not be appropriate to comment on individual cases.
It would be interesting to do some sort of analysis based on geography and population density. If someone travels 40 kilometers per day as part of their usual routine then more CCTV cameras will be needed to record their activities. Both the US and China are significantly larger than the UK.
And vast majority of CCTV cameras in the UK are privately owned and are not part of the state surveilance aparattus. Try having your car stolen in London, despite there being several cameras visible on every corner police will tell you(truthfully) that they don't have access to any of them.
I'm sure if that car had a sticker on it saying where Charles 3 belongs, the police would have suddenly gained access to those cameras and tracked the car with sub-millimeter precision.
The UK has always had that surveillance state thing wrapped in a friendly "frontend". Cops can visit you in your hometown because they are concerned about your posts or likes on social media, where such content doesn't have to be anything terribly offensive. And everyone ends up processed in their system. Reminds me a bit of Germany, except germans have more checks and balances, and many things like CCTV-everywhere of the UK, just wouldn't be legal there.
In both countries, low-level bureaucrats have extensive access to information about individuals, as well as broad attributions on what they can do with it, unlike the much maligned US, where these powers are much more separated.
Remember this is “keeping files on posts that criticise education policies” — tracking political dissenters who don’t like the government’s policies but have done nothing wrong or illegal.
While we’re off focusing on encryption debates and the online safety bill, the UK government isn’t waiting around.
Just what is “accredited technology”? As defined in that bill, and how much does encryption play a role when monitoring policies in general cause a general chill in what people are willing to talk about online?
I wonder what other aspects of normal behavior are being tracked? It must be extensive.
Meanwhile, when groups of activists surveil dissenters/wrongthinkers on social media, actively make lists of them and try to get them fired or worse for their speech/thoughts, many still defend that as 'perfectly reasonable consequences of unacceptable speech'
Everyone across the spectrum does it. It's a way of reinforcing the power of a particular political camp. There's a way to fix that though, make it very difficult to fire people. Then companies will need to be incredibly clear about what conditions they're choosing to terminate under.
No, that's thanks to unbalanced Devolution which grants Parliaments and self-government to everyone except the English who are still (over-)ruled by the Union Parliament in Westminster.
No, you misunderstand the situation. The electoral system for Westminster makes a handful of constituencies, all in England, the kingmakers, giving the national government a hubris that is not matched by their actual levels of support on the ground. So government is for a subset of the population and the rest can go hang. The deck is stacked.
The regional assemblies are limited in power and subordinate to Westminster. Resenting that fact would remain a fringe position if it weren't obvious to all that the double whammy of safe seats in FPTP and the cahoots of the media will keep the tories in power vastly more than out of it, despite electoral results that can credibly be interpreted as regularly expressing a national and multiple regional preferences for anyone-but-the-tories to govern; and also that the tories don't give even the slightest smear of shit about the other nations in the union.
But you can grift and shaft the populace indefinitely, in the normal run of things, and get nothing but grumbling. What has really lit the fuse is Brexit, which Scotland most assuredly did not want, and which was imposed on them by the English, and which the English then ballsed up like a classroom of problem children left unattended. Many Scots now see the cost/benefit proposition of the union shifting sharply away from remaining in it.
Northern Ireland is probably also feeling aggrieved about Brexit given the fact that Brexit, as implemented by the aforementioned children, trampled all over the Good Friday Agreement, which did more to reduce daily violence than anything since Cromwell; the open border with RoI was a prerequisite for the GFA that we all took for granted; but their will is much harder to read, given the sectarianism still endemic and the challenges of Irish reunification. What certainly doesn't help is the tories getting into bed with the DUP, which I would call a blot on their record if their record were not just blot after blot merging into a uniform superblot, against which unblotted fragments of record are too dim to make out, like stars observed through the smoulder of a recently-burnt-out house.
I am absolutely understood understand the situation as a former vice-chairman of the Campaign for an English Parliament. And describing a national law-making Parliament such as Holyrood as a "regional assembly" shows that your prejudice blinds you to the genuine issues.
I mean technically you're right. England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are each oversea territories of the United States instead of the UK itself being a state.
The problem is hypocrisy - UK government applied pressure to universities and other institutions to stop DE platforming, but itself bans industry experts from conferences when they disagree with government ministers.
Yes, because obviously the only possible options are a state surveillance program to flag up any teaching assistants who criticise any aspect of government policy and teaching bureaucracy, or the sort of "free speech absolutism" that concludes that literally nothing a teacher could say could ever render them unsuitable for a teaching job.
The "actual conversation" being one based entirely on the highlighted bad faith false equivalence between private citizens exercising their right to object to offensive and discriminatory behaviour and government resources being used to compile lists of people who has expressed doubts about its policy...
Yes it’s free speech, I think the issue here is that companies care what their employees say about politics outside of work, enough to fire them if they find out.
It's not so much that the companies care about the individual 'wrongthinkers', they're worried about what the activists could do to the reputation of their company/brand.
The activist behaviour is close to blackmail - 'punish this person for us now, or we'll hurt your company'.
People conspiring to raise up hatred of an individual, and people of the same mind in HR departments green lighting the acquiesence to that hatred, is the problem. Someone shouting a swear word at me while killing me is unpleasant, but I'll allow it. It's the killing that's the problem.
I feel like if you didnt do something shameful then theres nothing to be called out for, and if you did do something shameful then being shamed is a reasonable thing to have happen. If its shameful enough that your employer saw it and would fire you for it, then you 100% deserve to be fired.
no one is getting canceled for saying something that isnt shameful
My first objection is that any intolerant minority then becomes the arbiter of shame. By nature an intolerant minority is the last category of groups that should have that power.
Second is the question of where you draw the line. Mason Greenwood was cancelled after audio recording emerged of him raping his girlfriend. Kurt Zouma was not cancelled after recording emerged of him kicking his cat. Should he have been? Any answer you give is based on your personal values around punishment for crime and behaviour towards the defenceless. I'm anti-punishment but also anti-cruelty, so it's a head-scratcher for me. What about drink-driving? Parking tickets? You see the problem?
I'm fine with deplatforming the genuinely loathsome, given some consensus on what that is...
...but one of the early cancellation twitstorms was over some hapless male nerd making a sexual joke about USB sticks within earshot of (I'm doing my best to phrase this in a value-neutral way, and I mean no imputation beyond this specific individual) a tumblerina.
I stipulate that it's a horrible experience to be female at a very male tech conference, and that may have given her good reason to be sensitive, but AFAICT the joke in itself was merely unfunny and not inherently offensive to anyone who isn't already primed to explode. I presume that tumblerina received some genuinely bad behaviour previously at the conference, from men unnamed, but hapless nerd was the one she could name, so she did.
Aaanyway. Tech nerd got cancelled. Then tumblerina got cancelled; both of them, understandably, for becoming liabilities to their employers. And much heat was generated in twitter datacentres. The whole thing was a storm in a teacup.
So I refute your claim that "no-one is getting cancelled unless they're doing something shameful". I'd argue that neither of those two people should be ashamed - their sins are no more than common human failings that I hope Osiris would gloss over in his reckoning.
Stepping back, I'm concerned with your comment's assonance with "nothing to hide". I find that mentality deeply problematic. I accept authority only grudgingly, as I believe that organised crime is inevitable anyway, but it doesn't sit right to celebrate that some group that holds power over one, in which one has no representation, can use that power to harm one, using dogmatic justification and motivated reasoning. I really hate your position. Please soften it, so that we can have more forgiveness in the world.
These groups can't secretly compel telecom companies to record or give you a copy of all your communications. It's not surveillance if it's public, it's sousveillance.
I'll be more specific about what I suspect the actual intentions are behind the online safety bill.
A few months back the UK charged five retired police officers with hate crimes because they had a private WhatsApp group in which the police found content racist[1] comments about the Duchess of Sussex (Meghan Markle).
In the UK it is illegal to say something online that could be considered hateful. But the issue is that in most cases when people are saying hateful things they do so in private, so most of the time offenders like these retired police offers go unpunished.
People in the UK are very concerned about hate speech, and unlike these surveillance stories, this is something that UK media obsessively report on.
The issue is that although the government can arrest your kids for saying hateful things in public[2][3] they cannot do this when they're being hateful in private. If we genuinely believe we need to stop hate speech, then it follows that we also need to do something about the large amount of hate speech which occurs in private.
I suspect this is the primary reason why the government wants to know what content you have on your device and what you're saying to your friends because it's likely some of it is hateful, and if you have said something hateful in private then they want to know.
[1] 100,000 people were charged with racist hate crimes last year, and around 1 in every 400 people are charge with some form of hate crime each year. I'm providing this context because these are extremely unlikely to be highly racist messages on par with what you might hear from say a neo-Nazi. More often than not it's simply something negative which could be classed as hateful.
Legal note: I do not agree with hate speech in any form. My comment is not intended to downplay the seriousness of hate speech or question our need to enforce hate crimes, but simply to note that a lot of hate speech currently goes unpunished due to E2E encryption and the governments lack of visibility into what we do on our private devices.
Wow, I didn't realize just how messed up the UK is. Whatever happened to the childhood axiom, sticks and stones can break my bones but words will never hurt me?
Good evening, London. Allow me first to apologize for this interruption. I do, like many of you, appreciate the comforts of everyday routine, the security of the familiar, the tranquillity of repetition. I enjoy them as much as any bloke. But in the spirit of commemoration, whereby those important events of the past, usually associated with someone's death or the end of some awful bloody struggle, are celebrated with a nice holiday, I thought we could mark this November the fifth, a day that is sadly no longer remembered, by taking some time out of our daily lives to sit down and have a little chat. There are, of course, those who do not want us to speak. I suspect even now, orders are being shouted into telephones, and men with guns will soon be on their way. Why? Because while the truncheon may be used in lieu of conversation, words will always retain their power. Words offer the means to meaning, and for those who will listen, the enunciation of truth. And the truth is, there is something terribly wrong with this country, isn't there? Cruelty and injustice, intolerance and oppression. And where once you had the freedom to object, to think and speak as you saw fit, you now have censors and systems of surveillance coercing your conformity and soliciting your submission. How did this happen? Who's to blame? Well, certainly, there are those who are more responsible than others, and they will be held accountable. But again, truth be told, if you're looking for the guilty, you need only look into a mirror. I know why you did it. I know you were afraid. Who wouldn't be? War, terror, disease. They were a myriad of problems which conspired to corrupt your reason and rob you of your common sense. Fear got the best of you, and in your panic, you turned to the now high chancellor, Adam Sutler. He promised you order, he promised you peace, and all he demanded in return was your silent, obedient consent. Last night, I sought to end that silence. Last night, I destroyed the Old Bailey to remind this country of what it has forgotten. More than four hundred years ago, a great citizen wished to embed the fifth of November forever in our memory. His hope was to remind the world that fairness, justice, and freedom are more than words; they are perspectives. So if you've seen nothing, if the crimes of this government remain unknown to you, then I would suggest that you allow the fifth of November to pass unmarked. But if you see what I see, if you feel as I feel, and if you would seek as I seek, then I ask you to stand beside me, one year from tonight, outside the gates of Parliament, and together we shall give them a fifth of November that shall never, ever be forgot.
Good evening, London. I though it time we had a little talk.
Are you sitting comfortably?
Then I’ll begin…
I suppose you’re wondering why I’ve called you here this evening.
Well, you see, I’m not entirely satisfied with your performance lately… I’m afraid your work’s been slipping, and…
…and, well, I’m afraid we’ve been thinking about letting you go.
Oh I know, I know. You’ve been with the company a long time now. Almost… let me see. Almost ten thousand years! My word, doesn’t the time fly?
It seems like only yesterday…
I remember the day you commenced your employment, swinging down from the trees, fresh-faced and nervous, a bone clasped in your bristling fist… “Where do I start, sir?” you asked, plaintively.
I recall my exact words: “There’s a pile of dinosaur eggs over there, youngster,” I said, smiling paternally the while.
“Get sucking.”
Well, we’ve come a long way since then, haven’t we? And yes, yes, you’re right, in all that time you haven’t missed a day.
Well done, thou good and faithful servant.
Also, please don’t think I’ve forgotten about your outstanding service record, or about all your of the invaluable contributions that you’ve made to the company…
Fire, the wheel, agriculture… It’s an impressive list, old-timer, a jolly impressive list. Don’t get me wrong.
But… Well, to be frank, we’ve had our problems, too. There’s no getting away from it.
Do you know what I think a lot of it stems from? I’ll tell you…
It’s your basic unwillingness to get on within the company. You don’t seem to want to face up to any real responsibility, or to be your own boss.
Lord knows, you’ve been given plenty of opportunities…
We’ve offered you promotion time and time again, and each time, you’ve turned us down.
“I couldn’t handle the work, guv’nor,” you wheedled. “I know my place.”
To be frank, you’re not trying, are you?
You see, you’ve been standing still for far too long, and it’s starting to show in your work…
And, I might add, in your general standard of behaviour.
The constant bickering on the factory floor has not escaped my attention…
…nor the recent bouts of rowdiness in the staff canteen.
Then of course there’s…
Hmm. Well, I didn’t really want to have to bring this up, but…
Well, you see, I’ve been hearing some disturbing rumours about your personal life.
No, never you mind who told me. No names, no pack drill…
I understand that you are unable to get on with your spouse. I hear that you argue. I am told that you shout. Violence has been mentioned.
I am reliably informed that you always hurt the one you love…
…the one you shouldn’t hurt at all.
And what about the children? It’s always the children who suffer, as you’re well aware.
Poor little mites. What are they to make of it?
What are they to make of your bullying, your despair, your cowardice and all your fondly nurtured bigotries?
Really, it’s not good enough, is it?
And it’s no good blaming the drop in work standards upon bad management, either…
…though, to be sure, the management is very bad.
In fact, let us not mince words… The management is terrible!
We’ve had a string of embezzlers, frauds, liars and lunatics making a string of catastrophic decisions. This is plain fact.
But who elected them?
It was you! You who appointed these people! You who gave them the power to make your decisions for you!
While I’ll admit that anyone can make a mistake once, to go on making the same lethal errors century after century seems to me nothing short of deliberate.
You have encouraged these malicious incompetents, who have made your working life a shambles.
You have accepted without question their senseless orders.
it is critical for national security and public order to monitor the activity of subversive elements. These 'teaching assistants' may well be spies for foreign governments or unwitting pawns manipulated by those governments. As a democracy, UK government represents the will of the people. The government and the people are one
I for one think this does not go far enough. Teachers have access to children, and so we should monitor children as well.
Whike they may not tweet, we should involve investigators to catalog what words and babyspeech the children say, their tastes in toys, how they arrange their blocks and perhaps even their food preferences.
While tracking the food preferences of every toddler across the UK may be involved, we must remember this is for the safety of those children and the country as a whole and there can be no greater use of government employees time.
It's certainly chilling to have confirmed what I've long suspected is being done.
If OpenAI are scraping public tweets for their LLM then it's hard for me to believe this government isn't also scraping for their own power and control.
Perhaps unsurprisingly this seems to be about as high quality as the track & trace system that looted £37 billion from the tax payer [0].
It makes one think about the importance of anonymous donations to NGOs who are trying to hold the government accountable for fear of future targeted surveillance for valuing "freedom".
I frequently tell people we are becoming like Russia, and they get worked up. Then I ask them why the "Russia report' was supressed and they get even more worked up
Yes. The direction and velocity of travel is very worrying. We've already lost a lot of our rights for peaceful protest. Inconveniencing people with your protest? That's the whole point of protesting isn't it? Fuck the Conservative party. I hope they are destroyed at the next election.
> We've already lost a lot of our rights for peaceful protest. Inconveniencing people with your protest? That's the whole point of protesting isn't it?
Meanwhile in Canada: truckers honking is literally terrorism because it hurts my ears :(
The UK Labour Party have a long history of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. And Starmer, while a much better human being than any of the current Tory leadership, appears to be lacking in political instincts.
He has made some worrying decisions. Including much sitting on the fence on important issues, such as Brexit. I'm not wild about him getting in with a massive majority.
Disagree. My criticism of him - my ardour has cooled very much - is that he's as much of a political weasel as all the rest.
I think his calculus was bang-on to avoid taking a Brexit position. He probably captures the anti-Brexit vote by default, whereas Brexit support was strong in the labour heartlands (and he can not afford to antagonise that base - they flipped improbably blue just to support Brexit). By doing nothing, he's made Brexit an albatross that the tories must wear.
Everything I've seen from him suggests that he's a canny operator. He's been very anodyne in his economics, because the only thing he can achieve by setting out his stall is to alienate. The voters he's already got aren't going to vote harder.
His strategy is to be "not tory" and his tactics are to not prevent the tories from making blunder after blunder. I think this is absolutely the right strategy and tactics. By contrast, the Lib Dems have much more work to do.
Ah! I now see why you think he is bad at politics. I'm sorry to shatter your illusions.
In a better system, it would be. But this is UK politics. If you don't win outright, you lose. Therefore, for most of us, we don't vote _for_ our preferred candidate, we vote _against_ our enemy. I haven't had the luxury of voting Lib Dem for years - I'd just be throwing my vote away.
Starmer only needs to present himself as the end of the tories. That's what the country wants more than anything else. They would vote for a sack of potatoes if it looked like the best chance of rooting out the tories.
No matter how credible, sane, fully costed or appealing his policy may be, the Mail and the Sun will use it to sow FUD, and his vote will decrease. Fuck, you think our electorate votes on policy? No, my friend. They vote based on emotive rhetoric.
If he remains anodyne, his enemies can only clutch mist. The plebs can project their desires onto him. He presents very little attack surface to the media.
Contrast with Corbyn. Out of context, when offered his manifesto policies, the plebs liked them far better than tory policy - yet he failed to win. Why? Because he was wide open to attack. The media painted him as a crank. They drowned him in FUD. Swing voters voted against him because they thought he'd crash the economy or disband the army or something. They didn't read his manifesto - they read Littlejohn lying about his manifesto. They read clickbait published by motivated liars in their Facebook feeds.
For clarity, Corbyn would have been a poor PM, but hopefully you now see that leadership quality is immaterial to the electoral process. If not, look outside.
No; Starmer must at all costs avoid throwing away his victory. He must stay mum except for occasionally - not too often - giving a little shove when the Tory self-destruction looks like slowing down. Keep the focus on them and win by default.
Voting for fringe parties has more effect than people give it credit for - they can and do put pressure on the main parties even when they dont get a lot of votes. With UKIP it changed the whole country (not for the better obviously, but they did).
That said, I'd make an exception for Lib Dems purely because the party is full of awful people with no real principles who have and would turn on a dime for political advantage. It has been a vote in the bin for 24 years.
The Lib Dems had their chance though, in the 2010 coalition with the Tories. Lib Dems might indeed be the biggest party promoting proportional representation as a policy, but what is to say that they will be able to implement it even if they did form a government?
> In 2020, the openDemocracy website published a report on the FOI Clearing House. The report described the Clearing House as "Orwellian" and found that it requires government departments to send it requests that are potentially sensitive or too expensive to answer. The report also found that the Clearing House sometimes requires departments to provide it with drafts of responses to FOI requests for vetting. According to the report, government ministers were hindering FOI requests in "disturbing" ways and the number of FOI requests granted by departments had decreased. The Cabinet Office said the Clearing House was designed to "ensur[e] there is a standard approach across government in the way we consider and respond to requests".
A chap I know worked for comms at a government-adjacent state-funded org - he mentioned the same thing there. They just have an internal performance metric of around 80% of FOI requests they should answer, and they use the remaining 20% for awkward or expensive queries.
> Seriously, what kind of dystopia are UK politicians trying to create?
One where they constantly talk about conservative values of freedom while creating the most oppressive anti-protest laws and government surveillance in the western world.
The argument that I often read is that protecting democracy and democratic values often requires methods contrary to those democratic values (or not, as long as a democracy does it).
AFAIK a lot of the depictions of dystopias are based on the UK government as opposed to the other way around. For example Terry Gilliam and George Orwell. The machinations were more overt in those times and a return to these dystopian circumstances is a more of a reversion to the mean than anything new or unique.
Note that people requesting information collected on themselves was enabled by the GDPR's information-related-to-me provisions, as retained after Brexit. I look forward to the Conservatives dismantling it after realizing that it's used against them.
Those provisions were introduced by the Data Protection Act 1984. At the time the legislation was introduced and passed, the Conservatives were in power.
Animal Farm taught us that the educators of the next generation wield some of the greatest power in society; It is possibly a bit naive not to expect some level of automated surveillance directed towards them.
A social media movement sweeping though the education system could potentially be just as destructive to society as an economic cold war or a poor foreign policy.
A lot of people here seem to be missing a critical point: the government are actively using this information to alter the narrative and create a chilled environment.
> Cases have also surfaced of the Department attempting to silence voices critical of government policy. Early years specialists Ruth Swailes and Aaron Bradbury have previously faced attempts from the Department to cancel their conference due to their earlier critiques. Similarly, Dr. Mine Conkbayir, a renowned early childhood author, was allegedly threatened with funding withdrawal for a conference she was scheduled to keynote, due to her criticisms. As she recounts, the Department also attempted to curtail her talk duration and verify her speech contents, pulling the strings of academic dialogue.
... People here seem to think all this creepy data is just getting shipped into a box, rather than being deliberately acted upon.
But it's very clear that is not the case. The reality is far more disturbing. We're looking at primary school teachers suffering in their career (!!!) for the 'crime' of criticising policy. That's insane.
You know, I think this sounds like a horrible overreach by the UK government, but your point is at least worth considering. This isn't reading emails or tapping phone calls, this is public info.
Is there a public list of UK teachers I can use to conduct my own dragnet surveillance of dissidents? If not, surely combining both private and public information on people to track dissent is an overreach.
Right, but it's also creepy and intimidating. Many things are legal but odious. The question isn't whether the government broke the law, it's how heinous their behaviour is.
I think it counts as surveillance when it's published material, but surveillance of public material does not seem so troublesome to me.
For ex. if these teachers had instead published their complaints in old-fashioned letters-to-the-editor in print newspapers, I don't think anyone would be complaining that the government reads the newspapers. You could still complain about the chilling of dissent and the waste of resources.
But, posting publicly to social media is almost exactly like a letter to the editor. You send your message to a company, the company reviews it, and then usually publishes it publicly for all to see.
I would not feel "chilled" if someone (an employer, government, or whoever) trawled through my HN posts and made some kind of judgment or took action over what I post. I would expect it. It's public after all. I certainly moderate what I say here knowing this (maybe that's the chilling effect you mention?)
> I certainly moderate what I say here knowing this (maybe that's the chilling effect you mention?)
Yeah that is the chilling effect.
Yes, it's likely there are some things that are better to be "chilled". For instance if you were advocating for violence against public figures.
But imagine the day your credit rating gets dinged because you post online that you disagree with some new tax reform bill being proposed. This happens because the agency managing your credit score is also lobbying for this tax reform.
Or you criticize a government official online and the police show up at your door, which is something that absolutely has happened throughout history.
The fact they are watching your social media isn't the problem. It's how they can (and eventually probably will) abuse that surveillance. Or whoever replaces them next time there is an election.
Just the watching is indeed a problem. It makes me feel violated. Whether or not I have something to hide, or might get a knock on the door, is a completely separate point.
I don't love the fact that everything is being watched and analyzed, but it's actions taken based on that data gathering that I'm worried about
Of course we understand that the only reason to watch and analyze all of this data is to be able to take actions based on it
I am definitely in favor of preventing the gathering to guarantee preventing the actions. No one should trust that data is being collected without any intention of using it.
I'd definitely feel chilled, because what I post here isn't under my meatspace identity. I don't think they should have a right to pass judgement over something I'm doing under a pseudonym that can't be attached to me easily
Well sure, but what if you throw in the possibility of mistaken identity?
Might not be too chilling.. as long as they get the right person. Best hope other Ryan just parties it up a bit and nothing more sinister if you want to become a teacher.
I think it's more like installing listening posts in every pub than it is like reading letters to the editor. The web is a public space, yes, but unless I'm specifically attaching my identity to my statements then they are casual interactions and not "published" in the way a letter to the editor is.
I think we can and should differentiate between what we say in casual conversation and way we state as a declaration of our public opinion to which we purposefully attach our name.
Collecting and judging everything is. It's legal sure - perhaps because it's new that it can be done at scale (aside from the old East Germany). And it's because it's new that it's a question now worth asking. I mean it was always done for political reasons. See CIA / FBI dossiers (and harassement) of people they didn't like. Again not at scale and not of everyone before even any reason to not like anyone.
Yes. It’s data collected from public sources of information but it is surveillance.
It may be legal, it may be public information, but this is a government collecting information on its citizens: government surveillance.
Consider the effects:
> Government monitoring of social media can work to people’s detriment in at least four ways: (1) wrongly implicating an individual or group in criminal behavior based on their activity on social media; (2) misinterpreting the meaning of social media activity, sometimes with severe consequences; (3) suppressing people’s willingness to talk or connect openly online; and (4) invading individuals’ privacy.
Now if you’re cool with those effects, rock on. I’m not keen.
> The scope and depth of this surveillance has led to growing skepticism about the Department’s priorities and resource allocation.
Lol. That about sums it up.
Whenever a dystopian UK government surveillance thread makes it to the front page of HN I generally try to remind people of two things:
1. This will not make headlines in the UK.
2. People in the UK do not care about privacy.
The fact that the person they spoke to in this article was more concerned about how much the surveillance was costing is exactly the problem. No one will say, "I have a right to free speech", or "I have a right to privacy", because culturally we don't believe in free speech or privacy.
Do no feel sorry for us. This is largely what people here want. And I'm not saying that cynically, people here genuinely believe the government wants to (and should) protect us from our own dangerous opinions.
The thing is, it is much more confortable for government officials to run after low-level citizens than fighting actual crime. If you paint a scary enough picture ("encryption enables exploitation of children!"), the public might even be more afraid of people those "agitators" than gang wars or robbery.
I used to think that the general public is safer when there is a dangerous criminal element around because the state will focus it's policing on the criminal activity and leave most of the public alone. But if the state is just too risk averse to police hardened criminals then the general public is at risk.
It will make headlines, in Private Eye. Which means it'll be forgotten in days because there's no searchable archive of them unless you are or know a hoarder with a spare few feet of shelf space or find and travel to a library with a back archive longer then a few months.
Of all the publications with the power to string together a long-term narrative account of local and national government malfeasance, it's the one the most needs a historical index and least has one.
That probably needs some qualification since it was the Guardian which broke the story (and the prequel story two weeks prior) and that's two headlines right there.
If you check the front page of The Observer for 2023-10-01[1], the prequel ("Education ministry keeps secret files on critics of schools policy") is fully a third of the front page. Which is also a headline.
Yes, thank you. I probably should have been clearer.
Normally these stories get a little attention here and there but there's rarely ever much mainstream interest. If I were to talk to people in the UK about this story I'd be surprised if anyone is aware of it, and if they are they certainly won't think much of it.
Contrast that with this community who really cares about stories like this, and even the average American who probably more concerned about mass surveillance in the UK than Brits.
I remember getting in arguments like a decade ago with British people who insisted that their lack of actual rights didn't matter and it was actually better to have privileges bestowed upon them by decree of their Queen as chosen by God. I wonder if any of them think differently now.
They were obviously joking, it was probably funny to watch an American (?) believe all that.
More seriously, more people should be concerned about the Conservative party's disdain for the Human Rights Act and suggested intention to withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights: https://www.theguardian.com/law/human-rights-act
(So you'll see the UK does have a list of rights, but like everything else it's a normal law that can be changed by Parliament in the usual way -- there's no special constitutional law requiring more effort to change, and/or a special court to uphold it.)
The greatest difference between the US and the UK is just that: the US is a far more chaotic, violent, and generally unpleasant society compared to the UK, but it has an extraordinarily robust legal system and institutions that balance each other's power so that nobody is ever really in full control. The UK is a fairly pleasant place to live--at the moment. But things are starting to go downhill a bit, the government is becoming, ever so slowly, more authoritarian, and there is no legal backstop: in the end, the UK is an absolute monarchy with an embodied sovereign power, everything goes back to the Crown. If a far-right party comes to power and parliament becomes effectively dissolved, there is no telling how far and how rapidly they could change society.
That is simply not the case in the US, where, in fact, a right wing populist did come to power, did try to subvert the election process, did try to (indirectly) eliminate congress, and failed on every front. And he failed so hard that people might re-elect him since they don't think he could succeed the second time around anyway. Yes, people shoot each other all the time, the violent crime rate per capita is incredibly high, and society in general is plagued by inequality and racial tension. But the chaos drives the country forward. The UK is quiet, calm, comfortable (workers schedule their strikes!) There is no room for real organized dissent. It would take the dissolution of the monarchy for real change to come about, but they aren't going to do that here. They aren't going to do anything.
I despise authoritarianism and agree with your concern about our ever-increasing surveillance state.
However, down is not the only direction. The nation has been far more authoritarian in the past; we will be more liberal again in the future. Liberalism is not a spent force, and there is a sizeable constituency which values personal privacy.
At this risk of offending American (?) sensibilities.....
In Blighty, sarcasm and piss taking are part of entry level conversation. I kindly suggest this is something you clearly missed when 'arguing with British people'.
(The American habit of writing "/s" to signal sarcasm looks distinctly odd to a Brit, as of course it is sarcasm, otherwise they would not have written something so obvious.)
None of the articles seem to have proof or clarity of the claims in the form of actual documents and direct quotes from them. Not to say they don't exist, it's clear they do from the witness statements, but there is no detail to support the claim of some policy of active monitoring.
This seems like a serious overreach of government so the lack of meat here is curious.
I'm sure there have been acts, maybe the Covert Human Intelligence Act, or Investigatory Powers Act, which listed departments who were given a free run at some fairly serious levels of surveillance in the UK, departments like the Food Standards Agency of all people.
I can make my bed to some extent with a very few small, human-resource limited departments conducting surveillance. But we seem to be growing an entire public sector willing to recreate the Stasi and its wider influence. I'm not sure what the fix is, it isn't particularly a new phenomenon and it only ever seems to expand.
157 comments
[ 0.29 ms ] story [ 2735 ms ] threadWhat evidence are you using to tar and feather the guardian with your false conspiracy theories?
If any of us openly criticised our employer on social media what would we expect? A round of applause?
Sorry i stopped reading after that because i think you've responded to the wrong person.
We do not expect our employers to start files on us.
We do not expect them to do it when they are desperately short of cash and morale is low
We expect them to acknowledge there are problems (there are) and show some humility
I seem to have discovered the problem. Expect the worst, be surprised when it doesn't happen.
It's a low effort comment for sure. But it's pretty spot on if you have ever expressed doubt in the mainstream narrative online.
Ok, then talk about the program as a whole.
The US and China have over twice as many CCTV cameras per person than the UK does.
https://www.precisesecurity.com/articles/top-10-countries-by...
https://flic.kr/p/4iRTN8
In both countries, low-level bureaucrats have extensive access to information about individuals, as well as broad attributions on what they can do with it, unlike the much maligned US, where these powers are much more separated.
While we’re off focusing on encryption debates and the online safety bill, the UK government isn’t waiting around.
Just what is “accredited technology”? As defined in that bill, and how much does encryption play a role when monitoring policies in general cause a general chill in what people are willing to talk about online?
I wonder what other aspects of normal behavior are being tracked? It must be extensive.
In the US, "right-to-work state" likely refers to the opposite of what you mean. It's "right to not join a union and not pay dues".
The regional assemblies are limited in power and subordinate to Westminster. Resenting that fact would remain a fringe position if it weren't obvious to all that the double whammy of safe seats in FPTP and the cahoots of the media will keep the tories in power vastly more than out of it, despite electoral results that can credibly be interpreted as regularly expressing a national and multiple regional preferences for anyone-but-the-tories to govern; and also that the tories don't give even the slightest smear of shit about the other nations in the union.
But you can grift and shaft the populace indefinitely, in the normal run of things, and get nothing but grumbling. What has really lit the fuse is Brexit, which Scotland most assuredly did not want, and which was imposed on them by the English, and which the English then ballsed up like a classroom of problem children left unattended. Many Scots now see the cost/benefit proposition of the union shifting sharply away from remaining in it.
Northern Ireland is probably also feeling aggrieved about Brexit given the fact that Brexit, as implemented by the aforementioned children, trampled all over the Good Friday Agreement, which did more to reduce daily violence than anything since Cromwell; the open border with RoI was a prerequisite for the GFA that we all took for granted; but their will is much harder to read, given the sectarianism still endemic and the challenges of Irish reunification. What certainly doesn't help is the tories getting into bed with the DUP, which I would call a blot on their record if their record were not just blot after blot merging into a uniform superblot, against which unblotted fragments of record are too dim to make out, like stars observed through the smoulder of a recently-burnt-out house.
Wales voted for Brexit, the mugs.
If someone robs a corner gas station, you think “dang that’s a shame”.
If the military robs a gas station, you think “umm wtf?”
Having your human rights violated is not like stubbing your toe.
No middle ground is possible.
always funny when the free speech absolutist gets mad when people use free speech to cancel someone
Not really in the spirit of free speech.
The activist behaviour is close to blackmail - 'punish this person for us now, or we'll hurt your company'.
no one is getting canceled for saying something that isnt shameful
happy to help
Second is the question of where you draw the line. Mason Greenwood was cancelled after audio recording emerged of him raping his girlfriend. Kurt Zouma was not cancelled after recording emerged of him kicking his cat. Should he have been? Any answer you give is based on your personal values around punishment for crime and behaviour towards the defenceless. I'm anti-punishment but also anti-cruelty, so it's a head-scratcher for me. What about drink-driving? Parking tickets? You see the problem?
I'm fine with deplatforming the genuinely loathsome, given some consensus on what that is...
...but one of the early cancellation twitstorms was over some hapless male nerd making a sexual joke about USB sticks within earshot of (I'm doing my best to phrase this in a value-neutral way, and I mean no imputation beyond this specific individual) a tumblerina.
I stipulate that it's a horrible experience to be female at a very male tech conference, and that may have given her good reason to be sensitive, but AFAICT the joke in itself was merely unfunny and not inherently offensive to anyone who isn't already primed to explode. I presume that tumblerina received some genuinely bad behaviour previously at the conference, from men unnamed, but hapless nerd was the one she could name, so she did.
Aaanyway. Tech nerd got cancelled. Then tumblerina got cancelled; both of them, understandably, for becoming liabilities to their employers. And much heat was generated in twitter datacentres. The whole thing was a storm in a teacup.
So I refute your claim that "no-one is getting cancelled unless they're doing something shameful". I'd argue that neither of those two people should be ashamed - their sins are no more than common human failings that I hope Osiris would gloss over in his reckoning.
Stepping back, I'm concerned with your comment's assonance with "nothing to hide". I find that mentality deeply problematic. I accept authority only grudgingly, as I believe that organised crime is inevitable anyway, but it doesn't sit right to celebrate that some group that holds power over one, in which one has no representation, can use that power to harm one, using dogmatic justification and motivated reasoning. I really hate your position. Please soften it, so that we can have more forgiveness in the world.
"Shameful" is not objective. It's moral fashion, that can change very quickly.
In practice they can. The method they use isn't the force of law, but the result is the same.
How would a group of private citizens get a copy of all communications of an other private citizen?
Are there any documented cases of this ever happening?
A few months back the UK charged five retired police officers with hate crimes because they had a private WhatsApp group in which the police found content racist[1] comments about the Duchess of Sussex (Meghan Markle).
In the UK it is illegal to say something online that could be considered hateful. But the issue is that in most cases when people are saying hateful things they do so in private, so most of the time offenders like these retired police offers go unpunished.
People in the UK are very concerned about hate speech, and unlike these surveillance stories, this is something that UK media obsessively report on.
The issue is that although the government can arrest your kids for saying hateful things in public[2][3] they cannot do this when they're being hateful in private. If we genuinely believe we need to stop hate speech, then it follows that we also need to do something about the large amount of hate speech which occurs in private.
I suspect this is the primary reason why the government wants to know what content you have on your device and what you're saying to your friends because it's likely some of it is hateful, and if you have said something hateful in private then they want to know.
[1] 100,000 people were charged with racist hate crimes last year, and around 1 in every 400 people are charge with some form of hate crime each year. I'm providing this context because these are extremely unlikely to be highly racist messages on par with what you might hear from say a neo-Nazi. More often than not it's simply something negative which could be classed as hateful.
[2] Police arrest autistic child for commenting that an officer looked like her lesbian nana, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-leeds-66462895
[3] 17 year old arrest for tweeting Olympic driver, "You let your dad down i hope you know that". It was deemed "malicious communications" because the divers dad died the year before, https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/336534/Teenager-arrested-o...
----
Legal note: I do not agree with hate speech in any form. My comment is not intended to downplay the seriousness of hate speech or question our need to enforce hate crimes, but simply to note that a lot of hate speech currently goes unpunished due to E2E encryption and the governments lack of visibility into what we do on our private devices.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/oct/21/uk-governme...
I mean, does this actually need to be said? Would anyone think TAs are the only citizens under surveillance?
The actual speech, from the comic:
⁂
Good evening, London. I though it time we had a little talk.
Are you sitting comfortably?
Then I’ll begin…
I suppose you’re wondering why I’ve called you here this evening.
Well, you see, I’m not entirely satisfied with your performance lately… I’m afraid your work’s been slipping, and…
…and, well, I’m afraid we’ve been thinking about letting you go.
Oh I know, I know. You’ve been with the company a long time now. Almost… let me see. Almost ten thousand years! My word, doesn’t the time fly?
It seems like only yesterday…
I remember the day you commenced your employment, swinging down from the trees, fresh-faced and nervous, a bone clasped in your bristling fist… “Where do I start, sir?” you asked, plaintively.
I recall my exact words: “There’s a pile of dinosaur eggs over there, youngster,” I said, smiling paternally the while.
“Get sucking.”
Well, we’ve come a long way since then, haven’t we? And yes, yes, you’re right, in all that time you haven’t missed a day.
Well done, thou good and faithful servant.
Also, please don’t think I’ve forgotten about your outstanding service record, or about all your of the invaluable contributions that you’ve made to the company…
Fire, the wheel, agriculture… It’s an impressive list, old-timer, a jolly impressive list. Don’t get me wrong.
But… Well, to be frank, we’ve had our problems, too. There’s no getting away from it.
Do you know what I think a lot of it stems from? I’ll tell you…
It’s your basic unwillingness to get on within the company. You don’t seem to want to face up to any real responsibility, or to be your own boss.
Lord knows, you’ve been given plenty of opportunities…
We’ve offered you promotion time and time again, and each time, you’ve turned us down.
“I couldn’t handle the work, guv’nor,” you wheedled. “I know my place.”
To be frank, you’re not trying, are you?
You see, you’ve been standing still for far too long, and it’s starting to show in your work…
And, I might add, in your general standard of behaviour.
The constant bickering on the factory floor has not escaped my attention…
…nor the recent bouts of rowdiness in the staff canteen.
Then of course there’s…
Hmm. Well, I didn’t really want to have to bring this up, but…
Well, you see, I’ve been hearing some disturbing rumours about your personal life.
No, never you mind who told me. No names, no pack drill…
I understand that you are unable to get on with your spouse. I hear that you argue. I am told that you shout. Violence has been mentioned.
I am reliably informed that you always hurt the one you love…
…the one you shouldn’t hurt at all.
And what about the children? It’s always the children who suffer, as you’re well aware.
Poor little mites. What are they to make of it?
What are they to make of your bullying, your despair, your cowardice and all your fondly nurtured bigotries?
Really, it’s not good enough, is it?
And it’s no good blaming the drop in work standards upon bad management, either…
…though, to be sure, the management is very bad.
In fact, let us not mince words… The management is terrible!
We’ve had a string of embezzlers, frauds, liars and lunatics making a string of catastrophic decisions. This is plain fact.
But who elected them?
It was you! You who appointed these people! You who gave them the power to make your decisions for you!
While I’ll admit that anyone can make a mistake once, to go on making the same lethal errors century after century seems to me nothing short of deliberate.
You have encouraged these malicious incompetents, who have made your working life a shambles.
You have accepted without question their senseless orders.
You have allowed ...
-- Friedrich Nietzsche
Whike they may not tweet, we should involve investigators to catalog what words and babyspeech the children say, their tastes in toys, how they arrange their blocks and perhaps even their food preferences.
While tracking the food preferences of every toddler across the UK may be involved, we must remember this is for the safety of those children and the country as a whole and there can be no greater use of government employees time.
If OpenAI are scraping public tweets for their LLM then it's hard for me to believe this government isn't also scraping for their own power and control.
Perhaps unsurprisingly this seems to be about as high quality as the track & trace system that looted £37 billion from the tax payer [0].
It makes one think about the importance of anonymous donations to NGOs who are trying to hold the government accountable for fear of future targeted surveillance for valuing "freedom".
[0] https://committees.parliament.uk/committee/127/public-accoun...
Test & Trace.
Track & Trace is for parcels.
https://www.politico.eu/article/france-starts-scrapping-soci...
One NGO that fought this was la quadrature du net, here is there post about it (in french):
https://www.laquadrature.net/2019/11/05/le-parlement-doit-re...
I wish the UK would spend a bit less effort trying to provoke and fight Russia to the death and a bit more effort trying not to become Russia.
I also wish that wasn't a controversial opinion.
I frequently tell people we are becoming like Russia, and they get worked up. Then I ask them why the "Russia report' was supressed and they get even more worked up
Meanwhile in Canada: truckers honking is literally terrorism because it hurts my ears :(
I think his calculus was bang-on to avoid taking a Brexit position. He probably captures the anti-Brexit vote by default, whereas Brexit support was strong in the labour heartlands (and he can not afford to antagonise that base - they flipped improbably blue just to support Brexit). By doing nothing, he's made Brexit an albatross that the tories must wear.
Everything I've seen from him suggests that he's a canny operator. He's been very anodyne in his economics, because the only thing he can achieve by setting out his stall is to alienate. The voters he's already got aren't going to vote harder.
His strategy is to be "not tory" and his tactics are to not prevent the tories from making blunder after blunder. I think this is absolutely the right strategy and tactics. By contrast, the Lib Dems have much more work to do.
In a better system, it would be. But this is UK politics. If you don't win outright, you lose. Therefore, for most of us, we don't vote _for_ our preferred candidate, we vote _against_ our enemy. I haven't had the luxury of voting Lib Dem for years - I'd just be throwing my vote away.
Starmer only needs to present himself as the end of the tories. That's what the country wants more than anything else. They would vote for a sack of potatoes if it looked like the best chance of rooting out the tories.
No matter how credible, sane, fully costed or appealing his policy may be, the Mail and the Sun will use it to sow FUD, and his vote will decrease. Fuck, you think our electorate votes on policy? No, my friend. They vote based on emotive rhetoric.
If he remains anodyne, his enemies can only clutch mist. The plebs can project their desires onto him. He presents very little attack surface to the media.
Contrast with Corbyn. Out of context, when offered his manifesto policies, the plebs liked them far better than tory policy - yet he failed to win. Why? Because he was wide open to attack. The media painted him as a crank. They drowned him in FUD. Swing voters voted against him because they thought he'd crash the economy or disband the army or something. They didn't read his manifesto - they read Littlejohn lying about his manifesto. They read clickbait published by motivated liars in their Facebook feeds.
For clarity, Corbyn would have been a poor PM, but hopefully you now see that leadership quality is immaterial to the electoral process. If not, look outside.
No; Starmer must at all costs avoid throwing away his victory. He must stay mum except for occasionally - not too often - giving a little shove when the Tory self-destruction looks like slowing down. Keep the focus on them and win by default.
That said, I'd make an exception for Lib Dems purely because the party is full of awful people with no real principles who have and would turn on a dime for political advantage. It has been a vote in the bin for 24 years.
Seriously, what kind of dystopia are UK politicians trying to create?
Also, that's a lot of tax money that could, I dunno, be used to improve the schools?
> In 2020, the openDemocracy website published a report on the FOI Clearing House. The report described the Clearing House as "Orwellian" and found that it requires government departments to send it requests that are potentially sensitive or too expensive to answer. The report also found that the Clearing House sometimes requires departments to provide it with drafts of responses to FOI requests for vetting. According to the report, government ministers were hindering FOI requests in "disturbing" ways and the number of FOI requests granted by departments had decreased. The Cabinet Office said the Clearing House was designed to "ensur[e] there is a standard approach across government in the way we consider and respond to requests".
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/nov/24/orwellian-g...
One where they constantly talk about conservative values of freedom while creating the most oppressive anti-protest laws and government surveillance in the western world.
“Who Really Runs Britain?: The Private Companies Taking Control of Benefits, Prisons, Asylum, Deportation, Security, Social Care and the NHS”
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Who-Really-Runs-Britain-Deportation..."
Search for 'Part III' and read the first item here: https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1984/35/enacted
A social media movement sweeping though the education system could potentially be just as destructive to society as an economic cold war or a poor foreign policy.
> Cases have also surfaced of the Department attempting to silence voices critical of government policy. Early years specialists Ruth Swailes and Aaron Bradbury have previously faced attempts from the Department to cancel their conference due to their earlier critiques. Similarly, Dr. Mine Conkbayir, a renowned early childhood author, was allegedly threatened with funding withdrawal for a conference she was scheduled to keynote, due to her criticisms. As she recounts, the Department also attempted to curtail her talk duration and verify her speech contents, pulling the strings of academic dialogue.
... People here seem to think all this creepy data is just getting shipped into a box, rather than being deliberately acted upon.
But it's very clear that is not the case. The reality is far more disturbing. We're looking at primary school teachers suffering in their career (!!!) for the 'crime' of criticising policy. That's insane.
They're using this data to make sure people who criticise them can't acquire influence.
And it's all in secret, short of canny SAR's.
People can question if this is technically surveillance, but in context, that question is basically misdirection.
For ex. if these teachers had instead published their complaints in old-fashioned letters-to-the-editor in print newspapers, I don't think anyone would be complaining that the government reads the newspapers. You could still complain about the chilling of dissent and the waste of resources.
I would not feel "chilled" if someone (an employer, government, or whoever) trawled through my HN posts and made some kind of judgment or took action over what I post. I would expect it. It's public after all. I certainly moderate what I say here knowing this (maybe that's the chilling effect you mention?)
Yeah that is the chilling effect.
Yes, it's likely there are some things that are better to be "chilled". For instance if you were advocating for violence against public figures.
But imagine the day your credit rating gets dinged because you post online that you disagree with some new tax reform bill being proposed. This happens because the agency managing your credit score is also lobbying for this tax reform.
Or you criticize a government official online and the police show up at your door, which is something that absolutely has happened throughout history.
The fact they are watching your social media isn't the problem. It's how they can (and eventually probably will) abuse that surveillance. Or whoever replaces them next time there is an election.
Of course we understand that the only reason to watch and analyze all of this data is to be able to take actions based on it
I am definitely in favor of preventing the gathering to guarantee preventing the actions. No one should trust that data is being collected without any intention of using it.
Might not be too chilling.. as long as they get the right person. Best hope other Ryan just parties it up a bit and nothing more sinister if you want to become a teacher.
I think we can and should differentiate between what we say in casual conversation and way we state as a declaration of our public opinion to which we purposefully attach our name.
Surveillance is orthogonal to whether the subject is in public or in private.
It may be legal, it may be public information, but this is a government collecting information on its citizens: government surveillance.
Consider the effects:
> Government monitoring of social media can work to people’s detriment in at least four ways: (1) wrongly implicating an individual or group in criminal behavior based on their activity on social media; (2) misinterpreting the meaning of social media activity, sometimes with severe consequences; (3) suppressing people’s willingness to talk or connect openly online; and (4) invading individuals’ privacy.
Now if you’re cool with those effects, rock on. I’m not keen.
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/soci...
Lol. That about sums it up.
Whenever a dystopian UK government surveillance thread makes it to the front page of HN I generally try to remind people of two things:
1. This will not make headlines in the UK.
2. People in the UK do not care about privacy.
The fact that the person they spoke to in this article was more concerned about how much the surveillance was costing is exactly the problem. No one will say, "I have a right to free speech", or "I have a right to privacy", because culturally we don't believe in free speech or privacy.
Do no feel sorry for us. This is largely what people here want. And I'm not saying that cynically, people here genuinely believe the government wants to (and should) protect us from our own dangerous opinions.
We once did, but it looks like times have changed for the worse.
Of all the publications with the power to string together a long-term narrative account of local and national government malfeasance, it's the one the most needs a historical index and least has one.
That probably needs some qualification since it was the Guardian which broke the story (and the prequel story two weeks prior) and that's two headlines right there.
If you check the front page of The Observer for 2023-10-01[1], the prequel ("Education ministry keeps secret files on critics of schools policy") is fully a third of the front page. Which is also a headline.
[1] https://www.tomorrowspapers.co.uk/observer-front-page-2023-1...
(Oddly, no-one seems to have The Guardian front page for 2023-09-30 that I can find.)
Normally these stories get a little attention here and there but there's rarely ever much mainstream interest. If I were to talk to people in the UK about this story I'd be surprised if anyone is aware of it, and if they are they certainly won't think much of it.
Contrast that with this community who really cares about stories like this, and even the average American who probably more concerned about mass surveillance in the UK than Brits.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/oct/21/uk-governme...
I have not heard any British person say the Queen was chosen by God.
I THINK people may have been talking about the value (or not) of written constitutional guarantees.
More seriously, more people should be concerned about the Conservative party's disdain for the Human Rights Act and suggested intention to withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights: https://www.theguardian.com/law/human-rights-act
(So you'll see the UK does have a list of rights, but like everything else it's a normal law that can be changed by Parliament in the usual way -- there's no special constitutional law requiring more effort to change, and/or a special court to uphold it.)
That is simply not the case in the US, where, in fact, a right wing populist did come to power, did try to subvert the election process, did try to (indirectly) eliminate congress, and failed on every front. And he failed so hard that people might re-elect him since they don't think he could succeed the second time around anyway. Yes, people shoot each other all the time, the violent crime rate per capita is incredibly high, and society in general is plagued by inequality and racial tension. But the chaos drives the country forward. The UK is quiet, calm, comfortable (workers schedule their strikes!) There is no room for real organized dissent. It would take the dissolution of the monarchy for real change to come about, but they aren't going to do that here. They aren't going to do anything.
However, down is not the only direction. The nation has been far more authoritarian in the past; we will be more liberal again in the future. Liberalism is not a spent force, and there is a sizeable constituency which values personal privacy.
In Blighty, sarcasm and piss taking are part of entry level conversation. I kindly suggest this is something you clearly missed when 'arguing with British people'.
(The American habit of writing "/s" to signal sarcasm looks distinctly odd to a Brit, as of course it is sarcasm, otherwise they would not have written something so obvious.)
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2023/sep/30/revealed-u...
None of the articles seem to have proof or clarity of the claims in the form of actual documents and direct quotes from them. Not to say they don't exist, it's clear they do from the witness statements, but there is no detail to support the claim of some policy of active monitoring.
This seems like a serious overreach of government so the lack of meat here is curious.
I can make my bed to some extent with a very few small, human-resource limited departments conducting surveillance. But we seem to be growing an entire public sector willing to recreate the Stasi and its wider influence. I'm not sure what the fix is, it isn't particularly a new phenomenon and it only ever seems to expand.