There are meant real concerns for U.K. citizens, from the price of fuel and food, to extreme weather, to constant attacks on infrastructure from undeclared actors.
This is not one. Nobody (within 2%) gives a stuff.
It's crazy SimpleX is fine being based there. I mean, everything is open, the clients have reproducible builds, but it seems like it may end up being a hassle.
Has the UK started attacking any open source E2EE projects yet?
Apple's control over iOS is the main reason I prefer GrapheneOS so much over it. You get amazing privacy and security without sacrificing control. GrapheneOS has said they won't introduce age verification and a backdoor they obviously won't implement.
I'm guessing they could, in theory, attack open source projects, but it would not be very effective as those could be infinitely forked. That's the reason why governments will actually support an encourage an oligopoly of proprietary platforms via regulations (e.g. mandatory automated scanning) which only companies can practically comply with.
There's no way to obtain root access on GrapheneOS without making your own builds (which won't be affected by many of the apps adding support for GrapheneOS, who likely only whitelist the official signing keys) or keeping the bootloader unlocked in perpetuity (because AFAIK there is currently no way to recalculate verified boot keys on top of a systemless root like Magisk -- not that I even know if that works on GOS in the first place)
Since Epstein is no more, the governments became crazy about going after people's private data, perhaps hoping to find some spice. Like some politicians lost their source.
If Bill left the UK temporarily would the ability to turn on ADP come back? Or is a device from the UK that’s not able to enroll somehow prevented forever? Not saying that this makes it OK, just curious
You can switch your Apple ID's region to another country, enable ADP then revert your account's region back to the United Kingdom. You've got to leave Family Sharing first and may also need to adjust/cancel subscriptions - I don't think it's totally straightforward.
I changed countries a few months ago. It took me about two months with all the roadblocks, while I already had government issued proofs from both countries about the change and new address.
With that, I would have the headache to transfer my files, apps, subscriptions, bought stuff, and other data. It was still way less painful, and less waste of my time, because that 2 months obviously wasn't an active waiting, but for example the mentioned waiting for my subscription to be ended after cancellation, or waiting for my new bank card. It was mainly just annoying that after every step there was more waiting, because they weren't clear upfront what they exactly needed, for example which subscriptions I needed to cancel.
Huh, my experience was that it was really easy, I just needed to add a payment method from the new region, which to be fair may be hard if you’re not a resident of that region.
Region affects pricing, what payments methods are availanle or accepted and also what apps are available. Some banks, government service apps and few commercial companies limit apps to certain regions.
Unlike Android there are way more hassle in installing iOS apps under different accounts with different regions. On Android I just have 5 diffetent accounts with different billing countries and it just work.
Also AFAIK iCloud family features dont work cross-region.
I've not looked into it but I suspect this uses eligibilityd, the same thing that does the location based checks to see if EU users can use 3rd party app stores.
From what I remember it uses a combination of things like your current GPS location, your SIM cards reported country and more to determine what country you're really in to restrict certain features.
So it's not as simple as swapping your location in settings, or even traveling to somewhere in the EU, theres a certain sticky-ness to what your device thinks is your current country.
The Apple-vs-FBI narrative is constructed fiction. Sure, they didn't make a custom firmware to dump the phone's contents, but that's irrelevant. Everything relevant to the investigation on that phone was in the non-E2EE iCloud Backup, which the FBI got from Apple long before, via normal search warrant means. Apple likely either got an FAA702 order (aka PRISM, aka the "backdoor" that Tim Apple says doesn't exist - it allows the USG to access anyone's iCloud data immediately, with no warrant (it's not an encryption backdoor, just an access backdoor)) or a standard search warrant and most probably turned over everything they had in iCloud instantly, just as they do constantly when receiving a search warrant or FAA702 order. (As I mentioned, the FAA702 order fulfillment is likely instantaneous/automated, which amounts to direct access to the storage servers.)
The whole "Apple won't do what the USG wants" story is farce, engineered specifically to protect Apple's brand image. Following the Snowden drop when we all learned that the USG has unfettered realtime access to everything in iCloud without a warrant via FAA702, Apple had a major fucking crisis on its hands, along with a lot of other companies.
Those CEOs all went to DC and sat down with Obama and talked it out. The official cover story was something like "Obama wants help with healthcare.gov".
> The top leaders from the world’s biggest technology companies pressed their case for reform of the National Security Agency’s controversial surveillance operations at a meeting with President Obama on Tuesday, resisting attempts by the White House to portray the encounter as a wide-ranging discussion of broader priorities.
It is very likely that this media plan was discussed and agreed upon in those meetings. Otherwise, nobody sane in any government in Europe would ever buy an iPhone (or let their citizens do same), given that the USG can read all their photos and messages and emails and contacts in iCloud instantly and without a warrant.
(China of course requires Apple run the iCloud servers for Chinese users in China via a joint venture with a CCP-operated company, which preserves the same realtime full access to all iCloud/iMessage data in China for the CCP as PRISM does for the USG.)
Heres a favourite of mine. Apple & Google were/still are syphoning off all mobile device push messages to US government. They flat out denied it for years until it got leaked from another source, as soon as it was out in the open they admitted and said they were doing it all along but weren't allowed to tell anybody due to government NDAs.
If it was irrelevant then why did the FBI make such a big deal about it? Are you saying the FBI did that just to make Apple look good? Why would they care about Apple's reputation?
Yes. Apple is one of the largest companies in the US, and the NSA did them dirty by letting it become public that Apple is cooperating in allowing them to conduct warrantless surveillance. The alternative is Samsung, and the US government would prefer people buy iPhones. We’re also not just talking about the USA, but the 240 million iphones sold each year.
Border agents in America can search your phone or laptop without a warrant or sufficient suspicion at the border.
Jeff Gray is a man who regularly gets arrested and/or trespassed from public places for holding up a sign saying "God bless the homeless vets". Seems to happen nearly every time he does it at various locations.
Oh, and flock cameras and ICE aren't exactly a sign that America is this beacon of freedom that it likes to portray.
The UK border agents (technically counter terrorism) can also stop you at the border, force you into a room, ask for your passwords to all your devices and you don't have the right to refuse.
You also don't have the right to a lawyer to be in a room with you and you are compelled to answer all their questions and they do not need to tell you why they stopped you.
Then if you are lucky they return your devices 7 days later after they have been through everything.
> Border agents in America can search your phone or laptop without a warrant or sufficient suspicion at the border.
That is something that can happen at nearly every international border crossing. Before posting I tried to find a list of countries that require a warrant to search your stuff and the only place that came up was Hong Kong. New Zealand requires some suspicion, but that's effectively the same as they can simply state "they were acting suspiciously to my eye."
>Oh, and flock cameras and ICE aren't exactly a sign that America is this beacon of freedom that it likes to portray.
The US never said that you won't be observed in public nor that you can enter, remain, and travel freely around the country forever without permission.
Back in the early 00s the UK seemed to go all in on mass surveillance, with massive amount of cameras in public places and all that. I still remember how shocking it all looked even from Canada. So these 1984 parallels are certainly not a new development.
Worth recognising this was (and still is) mostly nonsense. There were loads of figures like "3 CCTV cameras per person" that included your local shop having a camera in the back, which has nothing to do with state surveillance. The police in the UK have significantly less power to surveil people than police in the UK. Council CCTV is shockingly rare now days.
Yes, there are many cameras. But they're not interlinked, most of them record locally or to the chain's HQ, not some mass surveillance panopticon like TV shows portray.
It relays my main concern which is that while current governments may use this in moderation and under judicial oversight, future ones may not. And we should build tools for the future not just for now.
There’s a general regression towards fascist and right wing ideologies in the last few years and I don’t want to be up against a wall one day because someone did something with ignorant best intent.
> There’s a general regression towards fascist and right wing ideologies in the last few years
The “fascist” part (authoritarian/totalitarian tendencies) came long before the resurgence of the right, but most people seem to approve of those methods as long as they target those they dislike, so I won’t be shedding any tears for them when it’s their turn at last.
It is self-evidently written by AI. You can tell from both tropes such as “To bring this into sharper focus” and the fact that it is entirely without an opinion or argument for most of the piece.
No need to speculate that the UK government "might" one day become the bad guys: they already arrest over 30 people a day for speech that offends the prevailing political orthodoxy.
I’d say it is a very low quality article. There is very little detail about what the offending speech actually includes. For example:
> The wife of a conservative politician was sentenced to 31 months in prison for what police said was an unacceptable post.
What did she say? The article does not elucidate.
Inciting violence for example is not legal. I believe spaces around abortion clinics are also to be free from demonstrations. US free speech absolutists seem to vehemently disagree until you say something unkind about Charlie Kirk or ICE.
The low point might be quoting Elon Musk. This is true in any context, but in particular here. The scandal is real, but none of it is about people being arrested for non-politically-correct speech.
There’s plenty of otherwise real stuff to poke the UK about.
Interesting isn’t it, because one might say of a convicted murderer “I think they should hang” and while it’s clearly contentious and morally questionable it’s also broadly seen as acceptable speech.
When the context is altered it suddenly becomes worthy of prosecution? I don’t think that’s fair, by holding or stating an opinion you do not induce its outcome.
UK abortion clinic laws go a lot further than banning demonstrations.
1. Holding up a sign offering help to any women being coerced into an abortion is illegal.
2. Standing silently on the road near one can be illegal.
3. parking a car with a bumper sticker near one can be illegal.
The whole paragraph about Musk and rape gangs is nonsense, of course. The biggest rape gang ever convicted in the UK was entirely white. Musk and his ilk only care about rape when the rapists are not white. On average immigrants are slightly less likely to commit sexual assaults (obviously averaging across many different groups).
> What did she say? The article does not elucidate.
She called for hotels housing asylum seekers to be burned. I think she is a nasty racist but I also think the sentence was excessive and I am not convinced it was a serious incitement to violence (and that was not what she was convicted of).
> US free speech absolutists seem to vehemently disagree until you say something unkind about Charlie Kirk or ICE.
Not American, and I entirely support the right of anyone to make unkind comments about anyone else. You are right that many people apply different standards to their own side, but right wing Americans are are from alone in that.
>>The whole paragraph about Musk and rape gangs is nonsense, of course. The biggest rape gang ever convicted in the UK was entirely white. Musk and his ilk only care about rape when the rapists are not white.
They only care when the rapists are coming from outside the UK, and being protected by the authorities.
>>On average immigrants are slightly less likely to commit sexual assaults (obviously averaging across many different groups).
I think that is called picking your sample carefully. No-one is worried about EG the Chinese or the French.
Musk and his ilk care about dog whistle topics that can be used to trigger people into supporting them.
The emphasis on 'rape gangs', 'immigrants' and 'asylum seekers' isn't just objectively untrue, it's cynically manipulative. It's fundamentally a toxic and calculated form of marketing and branding.
And also a cynical distraction from - for example - the Epstein story and Musk's appearances in it.
There was a lot of this around Brexit. Many supporters voted to 'stop them coming over here'.
The government then ramped up immigration - a lot. For some reason the press failed to report this.
I would have thought immigration was mainly a factor of the immigrants, not the government. Do people not support free movement? In China you're assigned to a city or rural zone and you can't leave that area.
> In China you're assigned to a city or rural zone and you can't leave that area.
The last time it worked like that was in the 1970s. You can travel and move anywhere you want but you can't legally work, rent a state owned apartment, get social benefits or send you kids to public school unless you get a stamp from the local authorities. It's the same as migrant workers anywhere else.
Of course it's corrupt and unfair and they should stop doing it but "can't leave your area" is a big exaggeration.
Brexit was about stopping unskilled EU immigration. The leaders of both the official leave campaigns said they wanted more skilled immigration. Farage said Indian doctors in the NHS in the 70s as an example of the sort of immigration he wanted.
I also think it was excessive but the judges sentencing remarks[0] add some context. The primary issue is that the categorisation of the offence was high, but she could have done a better job of showing remorse. She didn't clock that they'd be able to read her WhatsApp messages.
This is a deeply deranged opinion piece. The author ties himself into knots to conflate a tiny number of high profile instances involving social media posts with harassment and other negative behavior involving electronic communication.
Stories like this quickly put to rest the idea that everyone who gets arrested must actually deserve it. The bar for posting content that violates the law is very low.
- We just changed our PM, despite his party having a historic majority.
- Parliament routinely rebels against the government, and backbenchers have a lot of say about the business of government.
- We have a number of upstart parties; they might be populist, but at least it's not a two-party-forever system.
- We had a coalition government just a few years ago.
- We changed our constitution a few months ago (abolishing hereditary peers) and it was just another news among many.
- We ejected one of the previous PMs for having a party during a lockdown, with a massive scandal before that when the PM accepted a gift of some wallpaper.
Compare and contrast to the ossified and corrupt American system, where the president is openly enriching himself and his family and friends, and there's nothing threatening the presidency. The last amendment was passed half a century ago, and there's zero hope for reform.
Democracy is a living, breathing system of government, not a number of checkboxes like "can I shoot a gun for fun" or "can I call someone N-word online". It's important to see the forest for the trees.
Both the UK and the US fail in rule of law regarding "all citizens and leaders must be equal before the law, supported by strong anti-corruption measures."
UK has stated separation of powers but the crown reportedly nudged Starmer to step down. The king is the one that can formally appoint government following elections.
Prince Andrew had and other royals have control over military forces in the UK, canada, australia, nz, ect. You can hem and haw all you want but the crown has constitutional and ceremonial control over the armed forces.
The King gives 'the kings speech' which is used to set the governments legislative agenda to parliment.
The king also gives royal assent to bills passed by parliment.
Black spider memos
The king also steers diplomatic efforts abroad.
every single aspect of UKs democracy can be cut by the King whenever he wants.
The UK constitutional system is built around mutually assured destruction. If one part doesn't follow convention, the whole system will collapse and everyone loses.
Yes, the monarch can in theory override the government by blocking legislation, but won't because one time a monarch did that, he ended up with his head cut off. If a monarch ever did that in modern times, Britain would quickly be a republic.
Everyone follows convention and stays in their lane and doesn't rock the boat. The last time a bill didn't get royal assent was in 1708. It simply hasn't happened since.
'The kings speech' is written by the government usually based on the manifesto they were elected on. The monarch just reads it. The monarch's role in modern times is to advise the prime minister and act as continuity advisor across governments. While the monarch may offer commentary on legislation, they won't block it, and the government is free to ignore it.
Same with the armed forces. It's ministers that control the army not the monarch. In modern Britain, the monarch's role is purely ceremonial. The monarch cannot order the armed forces into conflict.
Usually legislation gets blocked in the House Of Lords (the unelected chamber) which is why a lot constitutional reform is focused on cleaning that up, but it's game of inches because neither party wants to lose influence.
While constitutional it may seem like the monarch has a lot of hard power, in reality they have none, and since the civil war can't do anything without the approval of Parliament.
Last time I'm aware the monarch did something, it was the firing of the entire Australian parliament and calling a snap election. Which is quite a sensible thing to do if parliament is completely jammed, and since it was reasonably sensible and popular in the situation it happened, nothing happened to the monarch. (Imagine if someone had the power to do that to Congress! Maybe they'd actually do stuff again, and we'd have to rename them to Progress)
Yes. This fits with the UK monarch's modern role which is to ensure continuity of government.
The UK example would be if the UK government lost a vote of confidence, the monarch might ask the opposition parties to see if they could form a government that could pass a vote of confidence to avoid a general election. Although parliamentary math makes such a scenario unlikely in practice.
On the UK end I don't think the monarch can sack the Prime Minister. While the UK monarch could strongly suggest to a Prime Minister that it's time to resign. Usually when a Prime Minister gets to that point, it's usually the end of the road and they won't last much longer anyway even if they pushed forward.
The monarch has a lot of soft power which under the modern system is usually deployed to ensure continuity of government rather than in a controlling manner.
(The Australia, Canada, etc constitutions gives the monarch different powers than the UK and it's usually delegated to whoever is the governor for that nation)
Yeah, I don’t think you have any understanding of how the crown interacts with the rest of the UK government.
There are some oddities, but the idea that the crown could actually exercise any of their powers, without causing a constitutional crisis, and UK rapidly becoming a republic, is farcical.
> The King gives 'the kings speech' which is used to set the governments legislative agenda to parliment.
You’re aware that the kings speech is written by the government, not the crown. It’s how the government lays out its parliamentary agenda to parliament, the civil service and the country at large. Heck there’s a whole ritual around the crown having to beg permission to enter the commons etc to emphasise the point that crown enters and speaks at the pleasure of the commons.
> The king also steers diplomatic efforts abroad.
No, the king is given instructions by the foreign office on what he’s expected to help with. Every trip and meeting the king does is checked and cleared by the uk government, and they can and have vetoed trips before.
> every single aspect of UKs democracy can be cut by the King whenever he wants.
You should watch the Jonny English movies, they’re a great documentary on how this could happen.
> We just changed our PM, despite his party having a historic majority.
Yeah? The country got to vote for the PM? I don't recall there being a national election. Having a bunch of party insiders replace the leader who won an election with an unelected one is the opposite of democracy.
Parliament does have constitutional limits on it (for example, see timetabling powers or Erskine May), even if it can't pass acts that will bind future Parliaments. The constitution being (largely) unwritten and changeable doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
The result is substantially more democratic, as per the list above.
Please explain the constitutional limits to Parliament in more detail.
The result seems substantially more chaotic.
And then there is the fact that the entire legal frame work is based on The Crown. If the king or queen killed someone they would have to prosecute themselves. This is the exact opposite of democracy.
Parliament is not in control of its own timetable, for one. Bit of a restriction on exercising its sovereignty, innit. And yes democracies can be chaotic.
It's entirely mad to me that I can make a list of easily verifiable, massively important examples of democratic processes in this country in the last few years and someone would just come up with a hypothetical like "but what if King kills someone" like it's somehow not just equal but has more weight than the list. Mad
But processes that exist to preserve democracy that arent governed by that democracy are problematic. Saying the "king would never do..." when a king has makes the argument silly.
The UK is not alone in this - a great example is the filibuster in the us (a senate rule).
Hmm, so your argument actually is that a politically motivated prosecution in the 16th century that occurred before the UK even existed, before constitutional democracies were much of a thing, and that couldn't occur under present UK constitutional arrangements, is proof that the UK at present is not a democracy. I'm not sure if you're in a position to call other people's argument's "silly".
I'm sorry but someone claiming to have such an amazingly democratic government when they have a monarch who has absolute personal immunity from civil and criminal proceedings under UK law and whose face is on all the bank notes is a bit silly. This is the least democratic thing possible.
Queen Elizabeth used Queen's Consent many many times to prevent or modify laws she didn't like. An investigation by The Guardian revealed that more than 1,000 parliamentary bills were subjected to Queen's Consent or Prince's Consent during Queen Elizabeth II's reign.
The British government feels like a delicate standoff between Parliament and the crown. The monarchy has used its structural privilege to quietly protect its own wealth and status while maintaining the public illusion of having no power.
That's not necessarily evidence of undemocratic processes. One of the big downsides of democracy is that it gives the absolute knuckledraggers the same vote as anybody else. It seems to me like the UK has the same problem as the US: they have a revealed preference for autocratic policies, because no one gets excited about the government apparently doing nothing.
>because no one gets excited about the government apparently doing nothing.
The government was "doing nothing" while wealth disparity and affordability crisis was constantly growing for the past ~15 years until it reached breaking point.
Hence why people affected by this are now voting new extremist parties, because voting more "doing nothing" by the parties who enabled this, just guarantees the same issues aggravating. So what do you expect?
I expect a variety of more extremist parties - some offering to kick out the immigrants, others offering to delete all regulations and let the free market prevail, others offering to delete billionaire wealth.
>Like in the Berlin mayor vote this week, where both the extreme left seize-billionaire-wealth party
And how is Berlin planning to seize the wealth of billionaires?
Because I've seen this play out before, where every supposed promise to tax the billionaires, just ends up as another tax burden on the working class high earners and entrepreneurs who already pay the highest tax rates and are the furthest thing possible from billionaires, but still gets political support from the unwashed masses since it's entirely envy driven.
How is the ban immigrants party going to ban immigrants? How is the delete regulations party going to delete regulations? Last time the extreme left party had any power, it set a city law saying rent couldn't be higher than a certain amount, but the landlords sued the city government in federal court, and won because apparently there is a constitutional right for landlords to collect as much money as possible.
A lot of voters disliked the effects migration had on their country, being also one of the reason why they voted for Brexit, and why the vote far right parties right now.
And yet, you were ordered to stay home during coronavirus and threatened with fines if you did not comply. Also, the Internet is censored by your ISPs, you increasingly need to prove your age/identity to do anything online, and it isn't clear for how long you will be able to work around that with VPNs. Apart from that, the UK truly looks like a democratic paradise.
In this particular case, the IT consultant was owed money by a failing business, and he put 1) a picture of the business premises, and 2) pictures of him firing guns, on a website where he was sure the business owner would see it.
That's textbook intimidation, which is in certain cases a crime in the UK, and even some US states. You can also do it offline by, for example, sending a letter to the victim, containing a photograph of the front of their house, and a photograph of you firing guns. The implication is pretty straightforward and doesn't even need to be stated: "I have guns and I know where you live. Pay me that money you owe me or I might use them." That implication is still there, for the victim, even if you add surface text like "Hey everyone look at these cool things!"
Only _after_ he was arrested, and the police went looking around his house for guns... did he admit that the pictures were taken overseas, he doesn't actually own the guns. And yet that's what the article leads with, like it was a known fact from the get-go and those silly-billy police knew that but went looking for them in the UK anyway.
This article is a great lesson in how to mislead without saying anything untrue.
His own words in a different article make the reason for the arrest clear:
> “The arrest was based on two separate social media posts,” he said. “One was the photo of myself with the shotgun, [...] And the second one was my LinkedIn banner at the top of the page.”
> “I used the photo my business partner took on his premises as a header photo on LinkedIn with the intention he would look at that and go, ‘Why’s this guy posting that? I’d better call him and find out rather than dodging me’ as it had done for months,” he said.
Your own quote clearly says it was “two separate social media posts”. The article I linked clearly says he was arrested for one count of stalking and another account of suspicion of possession of a firearm:
> A week later, on August 23, the officers returned and arrested him on suspicion of possessing a firearm with intent to cause fear of violence and another allegation of stalking related to a photograph of a house that appeared on his social media.
You’re trying hard to link the two as “textbook intimidation” but the firearm post that triggered this was just a vacation photo and post about his vacation.
> For all three reports, police chose to take no action (nonetheless it still had a chilling effect on speech).
Incorrect to say the police “took no action”. They contacted the journalist and instructed him to desist. The police later admitted it was a mistake to pursue the case. It says all of this in the link you used:
> Arday made a complaint about Grove to the Metropolitan Police, alleging harassment that was affecting his mental health; the police asked Grove to desist from further contact with Arday.[80] Mark Rowley, Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, later said that the complaint about Grove should not have been taken forward.[81]
It’s confusing that you’re trying to claim the police “took no action” when they admitted fault for following through with the complaint and they told the reporter to desist.
> arrested on... another [count] of suspicion of possession of a firearm:
That's not how it works. You get arrested on suspicion, the cops figure out if you actually did it or not, once they know you did it they charge you with counts of actual offences (not suspicions).
> You can’t say it’s “not a policy issue” by pointing to literal lawyers who are using the law.
It's not a UK speech policing policy issue, the topic of your post. The criminal law doesn't support Arday using false claims of harrassment to deter journalists.
You could say it's a worldwide civil law policy issue in terms of barratry / SLAPPs / cost of litigation / etc. No country, certainly not the US, has sufficient protection for whistleblowers against well-resourced litigants, and it is they (not the UK criminal law) who are successfully chilling speech.
Here's the full text of what you said. It's what we're talking about:
> There was also the tragic story of the Cambridge professor who was completely unqualified and had a fake life story. When journalists would get close to the story he would report them to the police for harassment to spike the stories.
You don't mention the threat that civil lawsuits pose to speech at all. And yet it was the threat of a civil lawsuit that actually quelled speech here.
You have no evidence that action A ("he would report them to the police for harassment") led to outcome B ("to spike the stories").
Jason Arday did not spike any journalist's story by reporting them for harrassment. He, or his universty, did spike the story by engaging reputation lawyers. He could do that in almost any country, including the US, despite its stronger free speech laws. Unless a US state has an effective anti-SLAPP law, it is very likely all that is needed to shut people up is to threaten a lawsuit they can't afford.
The thing you want to be mad about -- the police unlawfully instructing a journalist not to contact someone -- is a bad thing, is not even legal (i.e. the UK state doesn't actually allow it, let alone condone it), and it had no effect on the journalist. They still wanted their story published. It was the private threat of a lawsuit that spiked it.
“Getting the police involved” is a lot less exciting in the UK compared to the US. Our police don’t have a nasty habit of getting scared in the dark and shooting anything that moves. Mostly because most officers in the UK don’t carry firearms, and the UK often struggles to recruit officers into firearms units because officers just don’t want to mess with guns.
As a result getting the police involved is often little more than a slightly awkward chat at the front door where the officers politely ask you to stop being arsehole, but everyone knows the police are a bit limited in what they can actual do. Either because no crime has actually been committed, or because they don’t really have the time to properly investigate even if a crime had been committed.
Actually getting arrested takes some effort. The police really don’t want to deal with all the paperwork and mess that comes afterwards if they can avoid it.
Are you really defending Arday harassing journalists through the police and being overjoyed because just this time the police was not overzealous (very likely thanks to the huge media attention)? Unbelievable.
Well he's dead now in no small part because he was 100% correct that partisan activists amplified by friendly "journalists' would follow the usual playbook of creating a reality distortion field by repeatedly lying and republishing each others half truths and outright lies into a massive gish gallop.
Same question as always. What were the lies? Because all the ones I've seen were either found to be true or they were exaggerated versions of statements and then attacking that as a lie.
Especially rich to talk about habitual liars when it's a bunch of British press outlets and activists accusing others of being liars.
> 1 The Racism Of It All: It is not news when white men commit academic misconduct. It gets reported in a handful of stories, there’s a bit of media attention, but everyone quickly forgets about the problems.
> 2 Arday Was Definitely Guilty: The second point is somehow even more frustrating. Yes, Jason Arday was hounded by a society that demands different standards for young Black men than white guys. Yes, the amount of scrutiny he received was obviously connected to the colour of his skin. But also, he definitely did plagiarize. And not just a little bit. His work is riddled with clear, obvious, and extensive theft from other published academic papers.
> You do not need to trust race realists or other unpleasant people. Just download the thesis and check for yourself. It is clear that a significant portion of the thesis was copied directly from other people’s work. This is not in doubt, it’s not in question, and the fact that so many people online are arguing that the plagiarism charges are false because a university said so is deeply depressing. It’s arguably the worst case of plagiarism I’ve ever seen.
> Whatever your thoughts on plagiarism, it’s clear that Arday’s work harmed very few people. As he himself said, “I didn't murder somebody”. If he hadn’t been a Black academic and a poster child for diversity at Cambridge university, we’d probably have never known his name.
> For some of Arday’s supporters, acknowledging that any of the media scrutiny was justified has become tantamount to siding with his “killers.” He is instead a martyr—the victim of a “lynching”—and the inconvenient fact of his fabulism must be tidied away from the virtual shrine. This is an emotional position rather than a rational one, and its very indefensibility makes it a greater demonstration of tribal loyalty. Insisting that the academic was completely innocent, in the face of all the evidence, sends a strong social signal that you hate the right-wing media and care about racism.
> The postmortem airbrushing of Arday’s story also ignores how that story twisted and turned while he was alive. When The Guardian confronted him with the implausibility of some of his tall tales, Arday responded by editing them in real time: Yes, he had once claimed to have run 600 miles in six days, an exceptional feat for an endurance athlete, but what he actually meant was that he took daylong rest breaks in between. Yes, he had claimed to have raised more than £5 million for charity, but actually this was with the help of “many fundraising collectives” whose participants he could not name because they had signed nondisclosure agreements.
As they might say on Reddit, "Everybody Sucks Here". Arday the fabulist and plagiarist, the academic institutions who didn't vet him because they were razzle-dazzled by his bullshit lifestory (then drop him like a stone when their attempts to keep his plagiarism hidden don't work any more), the popular press who are happy to amp up a public shaming for clicks and views, the anti-woke and the racists who say this just confirms what they thought about DEI, and the anti-anti-woke and anti-racists who will deny the bleeding obvious if it makes them appear virtuous to their peers.
I'm not defending Arday at all. I'm pointing out OP's claims are bullshit. At no point did anyone "spike" stories because Arday called the police on them.
OP appears to claim that involving the police is the way to get journalists off your tail. It isn't, and it didn't deter either the professors or the journalist. The much more effective way to get journalists off your tail, which OP didn't even mention, is lawyers. But that doesn't let OP rage against UK laws so he went with the bullshit claim instead.
There was absolutely zero media attention at the time police processed Arday's complaint against professor David Harris, in 2023. They closed the complaint without taking action. The professor didn't even know he was being investigated. His colleague Martyn Hammersley then went over Arday's head straight to the faculty. So much for the police getting people off your case!
In the case of the journalist Arday reported in 2025, police again did not arrest or charge him, but they (wrongly, in my opinion) phoned him and asked him not to contact Arday. This had a chilling effect and the police had no legal basis to direct him so. Again, this was long before any 2026 media attention.
It wasn't media attention that saved these people, it was that what they did wasn't illegal. The police shouldn't have given Arday's claims as much merit as they did, but no matter what Arday said, there was no evidence of crime there, it was never going any further than that.
Only once the deets about Arday were leaked by Cambridge faculty to Cofnas and he published them, and the media firestorm begain, did the details of the police phoning the journalist become known, and in reaction to that, the head of the police said that was clearly wrong and should not have happened: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c0rd9y99grzo
Argh yes, context. I was wondering why the police were doing what they were doing. Police don't randomly do that to someone, there had to be a reason. Context is king.
Read the actual articles the person linked. The comment you’re replying to uses weasel words like saying “put them on a website” to conceal the fact that the “website” was the guy posting different unrelated things on his social media feed.
In the second case, the person involved was weaponizing the police against a journalist who had uncovered something about a completely unqualified university professor who had a fraudulent background story. The police didn’t do it “randomly”. The professor knew how to use the laws to intimidate and silence his critics (when even the GP comment admits).
Even the police later admitted they should not have gone as far as they did.
I did read the article, and my only takeaway was that it was missing context.
But I agree that the law is being weaponised by bad actors, but irrespective of that the police are duty bound to investigate. They take the blame too. It's one of the few jobs everyone else knows how to do better than the people doing it.
The website, which is also his social media feed, is LinkedIn. Both the header image (of the ower's premises) and pictures of the owee shooting guns are on the same site. Hence the complaint of intimidation from the ower.
In the second case, once again you repeat your nonsense. The chilling effect the police had, a wrong in and of itself, did not put the journalist off publishing.
> Despite the thoroughness of my investigation, THE did not run the story. While I was personally disappointed, I understood; by this point, Arday’s solicitors had been in touch with THE and it was clear that the story could tie the publication up in months of expensive litigation. Even if we were right – and I stand by my reporting – it would have been ruinously expensive.
You want to say POLICE POLICE POLICE were chilling speech here. Bullshit. It was LAWYERS LAWYERS LAWYERS suppressing the story.
> You want to say POLICE POLICE POLICE were chilling speech here. Bullshit.
You're the only person in this thread using the phrase "chilling speech" and you keep admitting that they did.
Let me quote you on this topic:
> The chilling effect the police had, a wrong in and of itself,
> In the case of the journalist Arday reported in 2025, police again did not arrest or charge him, but they (wrongly, in my opinion) phoned him and asked him not to contact Arday. This had a chilling effect
> For all three reports, police chose to take no action (nonetheless it still had a chilling effect on speech).
These are all three your own quotes from this thread. The last quote isn't even accurate because the police DID take action in the form of contacting the journalist and telling him to desist.
I am in generally in favour of some sentiments you're expressing, but you're also wrong on the facts. If your facts are wrong, it harms everyone who shares your sentiments because you're arguing with verifiable bullshit.
You're trying to argue that Jason Arday held journalists at bay by reporting them for harrassment, therefore the UK speech laws are bad because they let wrongdoers avoid scrutiny by making harrassment claims against their scrutinisers. That is incorrect. There was only one journalist, and Arday held him off by engaging private lawyers. The harrassment reporting did not stop the journalist.
Arday falsely reported two people for harrassment to the Metropolitan Police, one professor in 2023 and one journalist in 2025. The (Devon and Cornwall) police declined to pursue the 2023 case. The (Metropolitan) police investigated the 2025 case for four months, then decided to take no action (no charge, arrest or caution). The investigating officer phoned the journalist to tell him the case was closed (they can do that). The fact that there had even been an investigation caused a chilling effect:
> But were my enquiries grounds for a criminal complaint? That was hugely troubling to me as a reporter who specialises in examining issues of research integrity and ethics.
I'd say that even in the professor's case, it could've had a chilling effect. If the police had interviewed anyone related to the professor, there could've been leaks and/or career-stunting rumours.
The officer requested the journalist not contact Arday. That's overreach, and shouldn't have happened.
The head of the Metropolitan police admitted the investigation should not have even been started. That's not the law at fault, that's shoddy policing: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c0rd9y99grzo
But ultimately, it did not "spike the story". That was 100% on the lawsuit. Both things are bad
Could you elaborate on how he was “completely unqualified”? AIUI his PhD was cleared on any claims of. It being untoward. Maybe something I missed, of course.
> In this particular case, the IT consultant was owed money by a failing business, and he put 1) a picture of the business premises, and 2) pictures of him firing guns, on a website where he was sure the business owner would see it.
From your own link, this was from 2 separate posts. I don't know man, this sounds like an excuse from the company to cause trouble and avoid having to pay the owed money.
Also the “website where he was sure the business owner would see it” is a cheap way to hide the fact that he posted on his on LinkedIn, which he used as his social media network. You can just say LinkedIn. We know what LinkedIn is.
Now imagine you owe this guy money, he's admitted in public that he put a picture of your business premises at the top of every blog post he makes on LinkedIn in order to get your attention, and his latest blog posts on the LinkedIn website therefore shows YOUR WORKPLACE and HIM SHOOTING GUNS.
Juxtaposition that he admits he wants you to see.
You can read all three blogposts. Note he has switched out the picture of the workplace (top-right PFP):
> I am disappointed that absolutely nothing has come back from the Secretary of State for Business and Trade (OR his Department) regarding my delinquent Client.. this is concerning as despite continuing to owe me
"delinquent client" who "owes" him and once again, picture of him shooting guns apropos of nothing, nothing explaining where he is, whose guns they are, just him shooting guns. Guess he just likes to shoot guns while talking about his "delinquent client" who "owes" him and he's put a picture of the delinquent client's premises as his PFP.
> Today I'll be following up on my message to the Yorkshire Post by calling the Secretary of State for Business and Trade regarding my delinquent Client.. it's become necessary given what the Owner of said Client is currently doing. I'm also going to escalate my concerns to North Yorkshire Police, then I'll grab the Popcorn and see where this goes.
And again no-context gun photo to add to the blog post about his delinquent client
Hopefully you can understand why the guy who owes him money would feel intimidated and call the police, and you can see why there appears to be enough evidence to charge the guy for harrassing the ower, and to arrest him so you can establish if he possesses the guns he has posted himself shooting.
I read the posts. He's obviously writing daily updates and posts and includes pictures from his travels.
The photos are obviously target shooting. This is a common sport in many countries.
Your argument is that because he wrote long daily updates about what he was doing and included two unrelated things, that he's implying that the guns are for those offhand remarks?
We get getting farther and farther from the real problem, which is that the UK police have been weaponized to respond to people's social media posts about how they make others feel. That's a ridiculously low bar.
He's made veiled threats with just enough room to say 'What? It's just some holiday photos' I don't think he should be prosecuted, but I'm fully on board with the old bill knocking on his door to say 'you're treading on thin ice, stop acting the cunt'
Nah, they should have looked at the complaint and realized that it wasn't an actual threat and that should have been the end of it. They shouldn't have charged the guy who complained with making a false complaint, but they should have told him there wasn't enough in those posts to do anything about. Police should absolutely not be knocking on people's door to tell them to stop being cunty on the internet. That's not their job (or at least it shouldn't be)
> Hopefully you can understand why the guy who owes him money would feel intimidated and call the police, and you can see why there appears to be enough evidence to charge the guy for harrassing the ower, and to arrest him so you can establish if he possesses the guns he has posted himself shooting.
No, I don't understand why he would.
Nothing there was intimidation. Pretending it is intimidation is stretching crudility. The fact that he got arrested over this is straight up nonsense, IMO.
All the posts read like blog-style posts, and there wasn't any aggressive language used there at all. He also mentioned he was meeting with people to resolve the issue through legal means in the posts.
I suspect the owner who owed him money was acting maliciously.
More like "Here is a picture of an assault rifle that is clearly me on holiday because many of these guns are illegal in the UK."
Both the police and whoever claimed to be intimidated would/should have known better.
The problem whenever discussion of any of these subjects is that there will be people that are determined to pretend there isn't a problem in the UK with these laws when it is quite clear there is.
This is one of three days worth of posts where he talks about his "delinquent client" and ends with a picture of him and guns (with no explanation of why, where or how him and the guns are related to the body text). He put an image of the business owner's premises as his PFP in the top-right corner, which is now a picture of some people sitting in chairs. The business premises, "delinquent client" body text and gun photos appear on the same page.
> Today I'll be following up on my message to the Yorkshire Post by calling the Secretary of State for Business and Trade regarding my delinquent Client.. it's become necessary given what the Owner of said Client is currently doing. I'm also going to escalate my concerns to North Yorkshire Police, then I'll grab the Popcorn and see where this goes.
Wait, this is the threat?
I'm bewildered this could be grounds for an arrest. That's pretty scary.
It's the combination of the paragraph about the 'delinquent client' and the picture of him pointing a gun which could be construed as an implied threat.
Every time I hear a story of "horrible abuses in UK where people get arrested for talking on the internet" it turns our they intimidated or scammed or bullied someone.
I've seen the posts myself now and there wasn't any intimidation.
What seems to happen on these stories that anything that might be construed as a threat will be to pretend there isn't a problem with the speech and online laws in the UK.
99.9% of the time I see this claim, it's right-wing Americans or bots trying to make the UK look like a hell-hole. They completely ignore the context surrounding it, and simply prefer to believe the claim.
No point even arguing with them, it's a lost cause.
Imagine getting six police officers sent to your house and spending 11 hours at a police station for causing "disharmony" by disagreeing with how your daughter's school operates in a WhatsApp group.
* This bizarre case has nothing to do with "speech that offends the prevailing political orthodoxy" (root comment).
If you look for examples of the police arresting people for stupid and unjustifiable reasons, you can find them in lots of countries, including the US. For example, here is someone being arrested in Kansas for clapping too loudly during a meeting: https://www.kbtx.com/2026/07/27/teacher-arrested-repeatedly-... It's absolutely right that this sort of thing is reported and it's right for people to be outraged about it. However, I'd be cautious about drawing overly sweeping conclusions about the UK from such cases.
Yeah, but in the UK it's systemic and on a national scale.It would be less obnoxious if they were really good at fighting regular crime, but they are atrocious at that.
So yes, we might not be so dreadful compared to Hicksville, US or some craphole country like India,but that's a very low bar for the police of a G5 nation.
Absolutely go ahead and make sweeping generalisations about the state of the police in the UK. It's all true (except if anyone claims they are systemically racist, or some other clickbaity nonsense).
What exactly are you saying is systemic and on a national scale? I certainly don't think the specific news story we're talking about is typical. That's why it was widely reported and why the Police had to admit their error.
No one here seriously thinks the UK is faultless or beyond criticism. This isn't about national pride.
But you're just peddling false narratives which are easily disproved, which are rampant especially on right wing news sites. So you might not be right leaning, but people who write and share them generally are.
Entirely aside from the getting arrested in the UK part, what sort of absolute noob posts photos of themselves shooting an AR15 that has no sights whatsoever on it?
> they already arrest over 30 people a day for speech that offends the prevailing political orthodoxy.
This is completely false and comes from a commonly misrepresented statistic; '30 arrests a day' is plainly the arrests made under section 127 of the Communications Act 2003 and section 1 of the Malicious Communications Act 1988 which includes things like online stalking and harassment. I hope you're just mistaken and not willfully implying that those issues are merely offensive to the prevailing political orthodoxy.
You can't argue with data that doesn't exist, either. The arrests are not broken down, so nobody really knows. Both sides can argue their opinion
You can argue it's highly improbable that all arrests are over 'hurty words online', definitely – but anyone claiming zero arrests seems improbable too.
I do also feel it's quite convenient that the lack of breakdown allows people to clap back with accusations of encouraging stalking and harassment.
Well, the breakdowns are according to the offences the arrests come under. The police can't really release official figures for "arrests that would seen unjustifiable to libertarian-leaning HN readers".
If they'd wanted the data, they could have submitted an FOI and asked for it, but the journalists far preferred to just run "30 people a day arrested for hurty words" rather than "this is quite complicated but potentially problematic and we should dig into it"
Yes but anyone who posts something about "loads of innocent people arrested for just voicing their opinion (man)" is implicitly disingenuous. I say that because the first time I heard someone say this (a friend who lives in the UK no less) I thought "that doesn't seem right" and so did a few minutes of Google searching. And of course it isn't right. People have been arrested for being threatening a.holes which seems perfectly fine. For comparison here in the middle of the US we have a lady in town who liked to send death threats (via mail) to the town manager, based on his chosen policies for street crossings, or something. Well she was arrested and put in jail for a while. She said she really didn't mean it, it was all a joke. Still in jail.
No one is encouraging you to argue with data that doesn't exist and no one is claiming that no arrests are being made over political speech online. I don't disagree with your third paragraph but it seems clear to me that my original statement stands and it's quite suspicious that you responded it to with these strawmen.
Nothing I said implied that. I just pointed out that the original claim was false, it's utterly moronic and devoid of nuance for you to think that by doing so I'm implying that the opposite of the claim is true.
Police have arrested and questioned 3 of my mates from our private WhatsApp group chat. They're asking to speak to me too, but I'm working abroad.
They've all been arrested and had interviews under s127 of the Communications Act.
There's 4 of us in a group chat on WhatsApp where we chat and also make some edgy jokes and stuff. We're two white, an Indian and a black guy who studied at uni together.
All three of them have been arrested and interviewed today. I don't know anyrhing more than this. This info comes from their gf and fiance.
I'm working abroad but I have received a WhatsApp message and attempted call from a UK officer who identified himself wanting to speak to me about an ongoing enquiry into a reported issue.
My mate's fiance says it was reported by another guy's ex who he dumped 4 weeks ago. I'm inclined to believe that as the officer's message said he was acting on a report.
The thing is, we shared a lot of edgy jokes beteen us - but it was literally just the 4 of us in a private fucking chat. Some of the jokes we made were racisr, but they were all banter directed at each other. Others were just taking the piss out of the major news events like saying "Who needs people flying planes when our own shitty buildings just burn themselves down?" about Grenfell.
It's crass, but it's literally just us talking shit in private. These messages arent public or anything.
I can't get through to any of the guys. Is this something the police are actually going to try and prosecute?!
At this point should I just not come home? I'm dual Austrian-British and Austria doesn't extradite to the UK.
How so? Since Austria doesn't (typically) allow dual citizenship.
> Austria doesn't extradite to the UK.
With what guarantee? In 2013 Austria forced the landing of the plane of the Bolivian president on orders from the US because they had intelligence Snowden might be on board.
So if you think Austria will hesitate to ship your ass to the UK if you piss off the wrong elites, just because there's no official bi-lateral extradition agreement, you're kidding yourself. If needed, they'll just make up a spin story that you're some major child molester or something, to justify their actions in the media and reassure the public on why the violation of your rights was justified and they'll never ever do it again to anyone else as long as they behave, pinky promise wink-wink. In short, the people with guns can break the rules at will with little to no accountability.
Reddit often contains completely made up but believeable bullshit, so I wouldn't cite anything you see there. Every single post or comment could be a creative writing exercise.
However, if you want hard evidence what that post was claiming, I can give you a real citation from 2018:
> A house linked to an "offensive" video showing a model of Grenfell Tower being burned on a bonfire has been searched by police. Six men [...] were arrested on suspicion of a public order offence and have been released under investigation. A video shared on social media shows a cardboard model of the tower being set alight by a laughing crowd.
> Basically, yes. [...] if you make offensive comments in your home and they are recorded and posted online, it might be possible that you could be prosecuted.
- people who saw the video and were offended by it are happy "something was done"
- the CPS is happy because they gott'im
- the courts are happy because they got paid double
- the guy accused of offending people is happy this multi-year ordeal where the CPS won't stop hounding him until he confesses his guilt is finally over
- MPs are happy they didn't need to change any laws no matter how unreasonable they were
All good, right?
Are we also going to spend years prosecuting someone who mockingly reenacts the sinking of the Titanic? Or is that somehow water under the bridge?
What is this country coming to when you can't post a social media video laughing at families from Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Egypt, Eritrea, Iran, Lebanon, Morocco, and Syria, burning to death while saying "all the little ninjas getting it"?
It's political correctness gone mad.
> "By 2017, Grenfell Tower housed a remarkably diverse community. Up to 600 people lived in the building’s 120 flats, representing a rich tapestry of nationalities, ethnicities, and generations. Residents hailed from countries including the UK, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Egypt, Eritrea, Iran, Lebanon, Morocco, and Syria, among others." - https://grenfell.soton.ac.uk/week-1-who-lived-in-the-tower/
> "The Grenfell Tower fire inquiry "must not ignore" the impact of race and poverty on the disaster, a lawyer representing survivors has said. .. The inquiry returned this week after a four-month break due to coronavirus. "The Grenfell fire did not happen in a vacuum," said Mr Thomas in his opening statement. "A majority of the Grenfell residents who died were people of colour."""" - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-53320082
Yes, the video is offensive, racist drivel. But I respectfully put to you that the crux of the issue is not about what was said, no matter how awful it was; it's whether the state should have a role in controlling what private individuals share amongst one another.
The people in the video didn't upload it to a social media platform like Youtube, they wanted to keep it private to their friends. It would also have been taken down by the likes of Youtube. The only reason this case got to where it did is because the video ultimately reached a wide audience virally by people forwarding it on, and that enough of that audience didn't like it and wanted someone "done" for it, and the state obliged. But nasty, mean, dark, sick, racist, sexist, bigoted, misogynist and all other -ist jokes are told day-in, day-out, between people who like that sort of humour, no matter how much other morally righteous "right side of history" people want that not to happen. You can't stop them. You can only go after scapegoats if such things breach their usual boundaries.
Over 1,500 people died at sea when the Titanic sank, including black, Chinese, Jewish, Turkish, etc. passengers. It was an dreadful fate for each person, and it caused much grief for each passengers' family and friends. I'm still going to joke about it, though. "How do you think the unthinkable? With an itheberg."
The British Government has be consistently violating people's rights for decades and probably well before that.
Recently I saw a clip on GB News where one of their analyst said that anyone that opposes a war and/or conscription with Russia will need to put in prison. The show host, Jacob Rees Mogg and Lord Redwood saw nothing wrong with the statements.
None of these people have been in the armed forces and are too old to be called up for conscription.
Sigh, this is an absolute bullshit figure and people need to stop parroting it - it's 30 arrests under the mal comms act which might include for example, phoning your ex girfriend to say you're coming to stab her. Or phoning in a bomb threat via telephone. Or any number of pretty terrible things it's perfectly reasonable to get nicked for. Or posting on Facebook telling everyone we should set the local migrant hotel on fire. These are not political prisoners.
Oh, it doesn't say what any of them were saying, except for the abortion clinic protestor who was violating a separate law against protesting abortion clinics. I wonder why it doesn't want to say any of the others.
Anyone old enough to remember the London riots should remember the fact that the acting government issued a D notice to all broadcasters, preventing them from reporting the issue.
This is part of what started the death of BBM and proliferation of news via social media. You’d go on Twitter and see all the reports or riots and burning buildings then go to the BBC and… nothing.
All of this is to say that successive British governments, over a span of decades, have been actively destroying freedom of speech and a right to privacy for its citizens.
With AI and the rise of populism combined with the absolute decimation of the average person’s attention span it is going to get a lot worse.
This is wrong. The BBC were reporting on it in detail both online and on TV news. I know this because I was actually working on contract for them at the time.
What we have is a lot of people changing the narrative since to discredit the BBC and divide everyone further.
The BBC started reporting after the riots were in full swing and social media was already awash with information.
The point at which the BBC started reporting was the same as all other major news outlets: after the point that they just looked daft for not reporting it.
I know this as my videos of the riots took my little blog from 50 - 100 views a day to thousands per minute…
Mark Duggan was a gangster, so people trying to frame it as some sort of execution seemed to not understand that the police were seemingly doing their job. Chris Kaba's death also resulted in protests and demonstrations despite the evidence[0].
yes, its not legal to harass women getting an abortion. What part of that is hard to understand? People know the laws and yet they still do it. You want to change the law, do what we all do; write to your fucking MP. Don't harass someone vulnerable in a difficult state of mind and impose your morality upon them. Respect their choice and their agency.
In the US you can be arrested for the following speech:
* true threats of violence
* incitement to break the law specifically
* crimes of speech: soliciting crime, fraudulent representations, lying under oath
* stalking/cyberstalking
So lets quit this idea that its some abstract of "political orthodoxy". If you don't like abortion then campaign but don't go around pretending to be catholic batman and harassing people who are making that choice.
Do you worry that if your worst enemies were in power, something that you or a friend might say would lead to an arrest?
Who decides what is hate speech? Apparently the current UK government has decided these things (among others) are so hateful their perpetrators must be arrested:
- private WhatsApp chats between friends
- standing still in public with hands folded in prayer
Be careful when you give sharp tools to the golem.
> Do you worry that if your worst enemies were in power, something that you or a friend might say would lead to an arrest?
I don't appreciate this thin end of the wedge argument. Policy is more pragmatic. Read up on what most of mainland Europe had to do in order to suppress all the Hitler Youth children after the second world war. They oppressed their free speech and it was the right thing to do.
> Who decides what is hate speech?
The rules are there for everyone to read[0]. If you want a rule of thumb, don't discriminate based on any aspect of the Equalities Act 2010 and you'll be fine.
> standing still in public with hands folded in prayer
Don't whitewash this shit. You know full well what we're talking about is specifically going to a place that you know you're not allowed to be in, doing a protest you're not allowed to do. Playing with the line is still taking the piss and the UK believe in the spirit of the law to avoid all this mucking about with the specification.
> private WhatsApp chats between friends
As far as I'm aware the only case of this is when police officers were arrested for grossly offensive messages. However they weren't charged with hate speech but rather: improper use of a public electronic communications network. 12 weeks in jail. They were discovered because it was the same group chat that Wayne Couzens (also a police officer at the time) was in, who is currently serving a life sentence for the kidnap, rape and murder of Sarah Everard.
> Don't whitewash this shit. You know full well what we're talking about is specifically going to a place that you know you're not allowed to be in, doing a protest you're not allowed to do. Playing with the line is still taking the piss and the UK believe in the spirit of the law to avoid all this mucking about with the specification. Otherwise I can block traffic all day and make up some bullshit excuse as to how I'm somehow innocent. These are feeble excuses that Palestine in Action would be proud of.
I don't think you know what happened. At least one case was a person standing quietly outside on a public sidewalk while not impeding traffic or people walking.
Isabel Vaughan-Spruce is an anti-abortion campaigner who is playing with the line that intends to prohibit what she does. This is theatre, its artificial news. Its someone intentionally going out into the world to play victim. Focusing on people like this is not a healthy way to understand the world.
DON'T PROTEST ABORTION NEAR OR OUTSIDE ABORTION CLINICS. Its that simple. If you're an anti-abortion campaigner, don't do your shit near abortion clinics.
I think the prosecution failed as it transpired the clinic had actually closed. Which demonstrates the issue. She was trying to get arrested so it didn't even matter that the clinic was operational.
You are only focusing on one person not the others because you think it is the strongest case. Second, you support thought crimes and I am opposed to them. She was not yelling or holding a sign. Literally just thinking. That is the very definition of a thought crime.
We have such a fundamental difference of an opinion on the thought crime issue that focusing on this specific case isn't going to go anywhere so continuing this conversation is just going to be a waste.
She was literally campaigning against abortion near an abortion clinic which she knows is against the law. Criminals who have self-respect don't fucking live-stream their crimes and then act like a victim when they get arrested.
I don't care if it is against the law. The conversation was about free speech. I'll even give you that she was protesting. All that does is proves my point. If you are not allowed to protest quietly while not impeding anybody then you do not have free speech.
Second, it clearly wasn't against the law because they dropped the charges and gave her a settlement.
Third, just because something is against the law doesn't mean that you shouldn't have the right to say it. The law does not dictate morality.
If the parliament passed a law saying you cannot criticize them, would you say well it is the law and as such it isn't a violation of free speech? Would you call somebody doing that a criminal?
Fourth, the police literally said "You’ve said you’ve been engaging in prayer, which is the offense.". Meaning the offense was literally her thinking. If you are not allowed to have wrong think then there is clearly thought crimes.
She has free speech. If she wants to write an article, post a comment, write to her mp, she runs a few campaign groups, she can organise a march, she can talk freely about her opinion. Nobody stops her doing those things, she has free speech. What she doesn't have is the right to harass people who are trying to get an abortion. She has an effective restraining order from abortion clinics that she is violating as part of her campaigning.
Why don't you see the difference between free speech and harassment? Your stance undermines free speech by giving it zero responsibility. These are rights hard won by our ancestors and you cheapen them by pretending they're all about some cheap technicality that permits toxic groups to intimidate other people.
I don't think you are listening to yourself. You are literally saying that standing on the side of the road quietly and not impeding anybody is harassment.
If you think that is harassment then this is hopeless. Have a good day.
> The rules are there for everyone to read[0]. If you want a rule of thumb, don't discriminate based on any aspect of the Equalities Act 2010 and you'll be fine.
As usual, the written law only gives a vague outline, so people like you can defend it with motte-and-bailey. In practice, stickers with slogans such as "It's OK to be white" and "Natives losing jobs; migrants pouring in" get you sent to jail [1,2]. But I'm sure you're okay with banning "race hate" or "incitement", so here's a question for you - do you think "Black People!" by the poet laureate of New Jersey, Amiri Baraka, should be banned? Maybe even is already banned in the UK, since I'm sure their anti-hate laws are enforced evenly? Here are the lyrics:
You can’t steal nothin’ from a white man. He’s already stole it. He owes you anything you want, even his life. All the stores will open if you will say the magic words. The magic words are: Up against the wall M-Fer, this is a stick up! [..] Run up and down Broad Street, Negroes, take the shit you want. Take their lives if need be, but get what you what, what you need.
> we're talking about is specifically going to a place that you know you're not allowed to be in, doing a protest you're not allowed to do.
"The law is good because you know you're not allowed to break the law." - yes, thank you, we know how laws work. That doesn't mean we agree with all of them. If she's not intimidating or obstructing anyone, she should be allowed.
> However they weren't charged with hate speech but rather: improper use of a public electronic communications network.
"Impropriety" is an even lower and vaguer standard than "hate".
> They were discovered because it was the same group chat that Wayne Couzens (also a police officer at the time) was in, who is currently serving a life sentence for the kidnap, rape and murder of Sarah Everard.
But he did not discuss or organize that murder on the chat, so this is just a sleazy attempt at guilt by association. Want to apply that standard evenly? Do you think everyone that shared group chats (where "improprieties" were spoken) with e.g. Tyler James Robinson, or Bryanna Dutcher, or Shannon Brandt, should go to jail? "Should" here refers to a moral, not legal standard - we're discussing what the law should be, not what it is, so don't bother with "laws in USA are different" counterarguments.
Sorry, how is [1] problematic exactly? Is this some yank shit where you're still so soft that you've managed to think that Neo-Nazism is ok?
> so here's a question for you - do you think "Black People!" by the poet laureate of New Jersey, Amiri Baraka, should be banned?
Yeah understanding the UK in 2027 based on a poem written in 1967 New Jersey USA is a great idea. Keep them coming squire, what's next: should I write a paper on volcanism based on the lasagne I cooked last night? It was quite hot.
> That doesn't mean we agree with all of them
that's fine. Just don't wutface when you get arrested and roll around on the floor like some kid in social acting all wounded.
> But he did not discuss or organize that murder on the chat, so this is just a sleazy attempt at guilt by association.
Is this really the hill you want to die on? Protecting a bunch of people who were good mates with a rapist murderer cop and participated in his group chat. Lets dig further, I wonder what they talked about:
* sexually assaulting women
* blaming domestic abuse victims for repeated abuse
> you're still so soft that you've managed to think that Neo-Nazism is ok
Just make sure next time you defend censorship, that you open with "It's OK to be white" is Nazism and jailable, instead of hiding behind "don't discriminate and you'll be fine!"
* Second-generation? Third? Fourth? You have to go back
* Stop immigration, start repatriation.
Ofc many of these are in violation of the Equalities Act 2010.
Idk wtf is going on in the US. Maybe you've conveniently forgotten WW2 but this shit is a thousand times more destructive then the thing it fears. If this shit isn't stamped on it gets us all killed. Nazism should always be illegal due to the tolerance paradox. It seeks to strip away people's rights, dehumanise them and murder them by initially claiming there is a specific filter that you're safe from. It then takes that same standard and applies it internally to any opposition without the filter. My grandparents were both part of that war. I haven't forgotten, you clearly have.
Isn't it great how the judge didn't clarify which ones were illegal? Even when they send you to jail, they won't tell you exactly what is and isn't illegal to say!
> We will be a minority in our homeland by 2066
I'm not sure why you included this one. I don't think any of them should be banned, especially in the wake of the estimated 250k predominantly-British victims of predominantly-Muslim rape gangs, but this one is a simple statement of fact, the best estimate given current trends: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/white-briton...
> Maybe you've conveniently forgotten WW2
We fought WW2 so that we could continue to exist as a people. It's the lessons of WW2 (not that they should be needed) that teach us how dangerous such censorship is.
And the men who fought in WW2 for the Allies were pro-segregation and against interracial marriage, maybe you should have talked to your grandparents instead of getting your history from Hollywood:
How do I feel about the country today? My two uncle’s gave their lives for this country, my father’s health was broken from gas in WW1. I did my little bit, my brother did his national service in the Canal Zone in Egypt. What has been our reward? EVERYTHING we fought for has been taken from us and given to foreigners, we are now third rate citizens in our own country. Our enemies rule us from Brussels and we are being colonized by ** and *** in this country. There is not one political party that is prepared to stand up and fight for our country and indigenous population. The holocaust is now being carried out on us. What are my main regrets? That I didn’t fight for Hitler, at least he was for his own people.* - https://archive.org/details/the-unknown-warriors (out of all the testimonies in that book, only about two are positive)
> Isn't it great how the judge didn't clarify which ones were illegal? Even when they send you to jail, they won't tell you exactly what is and isn't illegal to say!
How many times do I have to reference the Equalities Act 2010 before you actually bother to read it?
> Meanwhile newspapers and academics and employers can disparage and discriminate against whites as much as they want, and it's never "hate"
It's not my fault you don't know what the definition of "whiteness" actually is. I appreciate its not a useful choice of word to use in the modern era, but you need to appreciate it was coined in the 1920s. I trust I don't need to explain to you how that world looked. That a segregated underclass might choose language to describe their oppression that doesn't take into account the feelings of their oppression.
However I do believe that children today use these concepts in a more malicious fashion. The most ugly of which is misunderstanding the sociological idea that "racism without power isn't relevant" and failing to understand it ONLY applies to structural racism and not interpersonal racism. But hey, racist ideas are tempting to everyone I guess, which only goes to show how alike we all actually are.
> I'm not sure why you included this one.
Cos its bullshit and shows people can't count I guess. Also I love how "plurality" is an alien concept that is lost on everyone that talks like that.
> I don't think any of them should be banned
Well tough shit, they are banned because this is a European country and we're not as soft as the yanks are on this, we thankfully still have dread for the spectre of Nazism.
> And the men who fought in WW2 for the Allies were pro-segregation and against interracial marriage, maybe you should have talked to your grandparents instead of getting your history from Hollywood:
Hollywood, do you realise I'm British? Here's[0] the relevant part of history that you clearly have no understanding of. Its an informational film shown to American soldiers when they came over to the UK to prepare for Normandy. I've timestamped the relevant section for you.
There's also the "Battle of Bamber Bridge"[1] which shows it play out in real life. There was a stark difference between the US and the UK at that time around the subject of segregation that you are entirely blind to.
What's laughable about Americans is that they're weird about race. Like _really_ weird and they have zero self awareness about it. Nazism is a scourge and if you understood European history and its post war cultural context you'd appreciate that the lessons we took from the war are very different from the ones you've seemed to fixate upon.
Freedom is about not being killed because you're different, not about being free to harass and abuse minority groups.
> Oh you've never seen an American movie, have you?
The idea that I got my account of the war from Hollywood as a Brit is absurd. I grew up with a first-hand account of the war living in the same house as me.
> If you're going to dismiss a population expert without even bothering to give an argument why, then I won't bother with you.
I've run the numbers myself a few times and 2066 is the domain of charlatans, not "population experts". I imagine this is one of those "white british" ones that don't count Irish people and also consider the loss of majority into plurality the same thing as "being a minority". Its all designed to generate fear, its so transparent and you should be embarrassed that you're falling for it. We're on hacker news. Make a github, make a model, run the numbers, ask gipity why your model is wrong, make it better, work out the numbers, learn the range, ask what you do about halfies, how to model birthrates that normalise after just two or even one generation. Its not 2066 unless you _really_ want it to be. That's the thing, its victim thirst. Everyone wants to be a victim in order to make their complaints feel justified. It ain't about what ACTUALLY happens in 2066, its about feeling angry in 2026.
You broke the site guidelines extremely badly in this thread. We ban accounts that do that. I'm not going to ban you right now because (unlike the other account) you don't seem to been doing it in other threads lately. But please make a point of not doing it again, because (if I go back far enough) you do have a history of getting warned and banned (and unbanned) here. At some point enough is enough.
> because (if I go back far enough) you do have a history of getting warned and banned (and unbanned) here.
Unless I'm missing something, that was once, like a decade ago or something, a testy conversation about history. I was shadow banned for ages and then some mod noticed my comments were good quality and restored me. So that seems like a bit of an uncharitable read given the age of my account and my average comment score.
I appreciate I was far off the mark here and I appreciate the warning. This particular subject is very triggering for me given the impact in my nation of American money influencing our politics. I'll try my best to be better but its hard.
I live in a continent that suffered the ravages of Nazism. Its a brutal philosophy that begins with a comforting lie:
* What if; the problems in my society are not caused by people like me, but some external force?
Its extraordinarily tempting to humans, especially those who find self-reflection uncomfortable. So instead of property prices being a consequence of decades of NIMBYism and failure to build social housing for decades (uh-oh that sounds like something I might have voted for), it's reframed as an issue directly linked to immigration (ahhhh, very calming, I never wanted that!).
The problem is that its a mental health issue pretending to be a political movement. When a politician decides to discard all scruples and exploit this comforting lie in politics, they build a self-consuming state. By definition this state cannot be wrong and therefore everyone else is to blame. So when it makes mistakes, as all states do; it finds a scapegoat and once its done with the first scapegoat, it moves onto another, then another, then another, then another. We're all on this list, its just a case of order. If you try to push this then you'll get us all fucking killed you muppet.
Nazis need therapy, not politics. Alternatively go first wave and find yourselves early victims like the brown shirts. There's no loyalty in these movements.
Shallow dredge of people arrested for anti-semitism in the UK:
* 19 May 2026 - John Haynes - Arrested after incidents of threatening behaviour; convicted of racially aggravated harassment involving antisemitic abuse and threats.
* 9 May 2026 - Dylan Ossei - Arrested after shouting threats at Jewish people in Enfield and assaulting a man; pleaded guilty to aggravated assault, fear of violence, and harassment.
* 7 May 2026 - Adam Bedoui - Arrested after filming and verbally abusing a Jewish man in Hackney for social media; pleaded guilty.
* 7 May 2026 - Abdelkader Bousloub - Arrested in the same Hackney incident; pleaded guilty to a religiously aggravated public order offence.
* 6 May 2026 - Wayne Kelly - Arrested after shouting antisemitic abuse and threats at Jewish men walking to a synagogue in Salford; pleaded guilty.
* 1 May 2026 - Unnamed 57-year-old man - Arrested on suspicion of threatening a Jewish man while using racially offensive language in London; police reported he was released on bail.
* 23 April 2026 - Shafiq Rahman - Arrested after shouting antisemitic abuse and threatening a Jewish man in Slough; pleaded guilty to offences involving words, assault, and damage.
* 5 April 2026 - Munir Saleh - Arrested after reports of shouting antisemitic abuse and spitting at people in London; charged with aggravated threatening behaviour and assault offences.
* 24 March 2026 - Jean Charles Tavius - Arrested after reports of shouting antisemitic abuse and throwing a rock at a moving car; charged with threatening behaviour and damage offences.
* By 23 December 2025 - Unnamed 28-year-old woman - Arrested on suspicion of an aggravated public order offence over alleged antisemitic comments in a Manchester protest speech. The police announcement did not report a conviction.
* 3 October 2025 - Aiden Stanley - Arrested over a social media post about Jewish people following the Manchester synagogue attack; pleaded guilty to sending a grossly offensive message.
* September 2025 - Thomas Webster - Arrested over social media posts that included antisemitic messages; pleaded guilty to offences involving material intended to stir up hatred.
* July 2024 - Lee Cole - Arrested after investigators found antisemitic and other hateful social media posts; pleaded guilty to inciting racial hatred offences.
* 3 April 2024 - Damion Bennett - Arrested over antisemitic videos posted on Gab; pleaded guilty to distributing recordings intended to stir up racial hatred.
* March 2024 - Zakir Hussain - Arrested after police linked him to an X account posting antisemitic comments and support for proscribed groups; pleaded guilty to public order and terrorism offences.
* November 2023 - Elliot Jackson - Arrested following reports of antisemitic social media messages; pleaded guilty to malicious communications.
* February 2023 - Robert Taylor - Arrested following an investigation involving verbal abuse of Jewish people, antisemitic material, and other conduct; pleaded guilty to public order and terrorism offences.
* February 2022 - Jaden Milne - Arrested over a conference speech containing antisemitic and other hateful material; pleaded guilty to public order and aggravated behaviour offences.
* 12 October 2021 - Oliver Riley - Arrested after posting extremist material, including antisemitic content, online; later admitted communications and terrorism offences.
> Not all hate speech is created equal.
This victim cosplay is rancid btw. It's painfully transparent. It's ugly to listen to two awful sides claiming the other is the _real_ problem and how their side is so victimised. These are the mannerisms of teenagers in social care. Please develop some level of responsibility and self-respect.
You're too dumb to understand how media works in the year 2026, and I'm the one who needs to seek help. Hilarious. Fox News didn't break this story bud, the entire internet reshared it from UK sources.
Please don't lock me up for saying you're dumb by the way. I know that's probably a serious hate crime in your eyes.
Sorry, but if the information exists elsewhere, why not find a better news source? Fox News, and any company derived from Newscorp/News Limited are bad enough that I would say more than half of their articles are entirely false.
Find the same article on AP news, or Reuters or something.
Yeah I know the source. Its the Torygraph. Once a mighty broadsheet but these days they print any old shit to get those boomer clicks and make them all upset. Tell them the world is falling apart to soften the blow of impending death. You're treating hospice fare as actual news you spanner.
I've been extremely invested in the British press since around 1992, so this experience of having someone not-British with seemingly limited understanding of its press telling me "you're too dumb" when discussing it, is quite amusing.
I have long considered what people think is "intelligence" is simply an appreciation for understanding how wrong they might be about their first impressions and a willingness to check themselves. This conversation is quite the re-enforcement of this idea. The strength of your conviction is inversely proportional to your level of knowledge on this matter.
There is speech and there are consequences for speech.
If I incite or state that I am going to commit violence, stalking, rape or murder, should I face consequences? Yes. That's what is happening.
There are outlying cases which will be used to discredit this perspective but reality is there are a hell of a lot of very not nice people out there making active threats to people.
Unfortunately, linking one bad article does not make something true. The number you quote includes threatening phone calls, abusive text messages, and general harassment including domestic violence. Four in five arrests did not result in a charge. You also don't hear about the ones that are charged, because they're less entertaining to read about in the news.
Also, shit like, "Authorities arrested a grandmother for silently holding a sign outside an abortion clinic that said “Coercion is a crime, here to talk, if you want.”" - Yeah, take your fucking signs away from people trying to get an abortion. It's harassment.
And, to top if off, you're American. I'm not sure how you can call our government the "bad guys".
If you didn't want it before, you probably never will. It comes with a convenience cost and the risk you may permanently lose access to your iCloud stuff if you lose your password. With the normal level of privacy, Apple is there to help you or your loved ones get access to your stuff. Most people need that much more than they need inviolable privacy.
I’m rolling the dice myself. No ADP here. If I were a political activist (US) I’d definitely need it.
I guess if I lose my phone on a trip, I wanna be able to walk into an Apple store and restore it from their cloud copy that the feds have backed up & pored over by LLMs too. (not sure that’s done in realtime for 100% of the population, but tokens will be cheap enough eventually - they have their pre-LLM solution too)
I think I keep Signal data mostly out of the cloud though, declining to use their latest features. Hidden notifications too. Is it only personal family updates, yes, but the principle makes me feel good.
This’ll go down well (/s) but if you accept that the State has the right to be able to surveil public communications infrastructure (which it has been doing since paper mail was invented, through: radio, telegraph, telex, telephone, fax, email, and mobile telephony) then it’s not surprising certain commoditised public data handling services might be required to provide government access on demand or be restricted from implementing features that can effectively deny that access.
That angry’s up the blood of libertarians, but ultimately from the point of view of the State it has to be able to do its job of detecting and prosecuting serious crime, and it will redraw privacy lines whenever that is substantially impeded by new technology.
Even many dictatorship states, like many of the "socialist" countries, had in the past articles in their constitutions that guaranteed the secrecy of the mail and of the telephone communications. Thus it is false that there is some kind of established tradition that governments may have access to private communications.
In reality the secret police did not care about laws or constitution, so private mail correspondence was intercepted and opened, read, then closed again with care, trying to make this undetectable, and the telephone lines of persons of interest were tapped.
Nonetheless, it was understood that this surveillance is actually illegal, so it was hidden as much as possible.
Nowadays, the government institutions of most "free" states, like USA and UK have granted themselves far more rights to do surveillance of their citizens than the dictators of the past.
Detecting and prosecuting serious crime does not need any such general surveillance. The general surveillance just makes much cheaper the detecting of serious crimes, but in exchange it gives the means to the government employees to commit serious crimes themselves.
A term I've seen thrown around is "good old-fashioned police work" and to me the clear distinction is that it can't be done en masse - a real human police officer had to spend time tracking down each known suspect. E.g. clipping a pen register onto someone's telephone wires, tailing someone, asking the hotel clerk if he's been there, unlocking someone's phone to read their messages, and even watching footage on airgapped CCTV systems are all tasks that can be done one-at-a-time and require human power proportional to how much of them you do. This forces the state to only use them on actual suspects instead of using them on everyone, but still doesn't prevent the state from catching criminals.
I genuinely believe that in 2015 Apple had the balls to resist and today they don't.
I am judging by a simple fact, that "please confirm your age" screen is now mandatory during the iPhone setup in all countries, and in some it's behind a KYC. I have a strong opinion that this is insane. And once they let the foot in the door - there is no closing it.
They never did. they had the balls to resist against western governments, where it was politically adventagous to do so. They folded to China real quick, because they wanted to make sales. All "icloud storage" in china has been on another storage platform, that follows all the local laws.
> Western governments pearl clutch about freedom and how free and open they are
That's not how to use "pearl clutch". And the UK doesn't do that, and it isn't very free or open, except in the deranged mind of Kier Starmer[0]. Classic liberalism in the UK has long given way to regulation of speech, proud conformity, state dependency, and all the other things that are hallmarks of people who treat the state as a surrogate parent.
Don't fall into the trap of putting our governments on the same level as China, despite the tremendous flaws and the very dangerous backsliding we still enjoy many freedoms that their citizens do not have.
The CCP would like nothing more than everyone living in a democracy saying they're just as oppressed as those living in China. Then their own citizens might abandon such foolish notions as human rights.
We should point out the hypocrisy of our governments but not by using that hypocrisy to minimize China's human rights abuses.
Multiple things can be true at the same time, there's more repression in China still than in the West at the moment, yes. At the same time it's all rather vague. There's more state control there and more corporate control here. So naturally there's more state repression there. There's also things that China does better than we do. It's not as clear cut as it should be.
If you look at the treatment of pro-Palestine movements in the West, Flock cameras, Palantir contracts, age verification mandates, encryption 'front door' requests, clamping down on whistleblowers etc. then it seems to me that we're heading where China is pretty fast and that the West definitely wants to be where China is, just without the high speed trains.
What I am dismayed by in discussions like this is how simplistic they are i.e. China bad, West good so don't compare.
The collective West just assisted a genocide of an occupied population of people, so when is it going to be 'as bad'? My guess is never because people here want to feel superior over China without actually doing anything for it.
I wouldn't be surprised if you tried to come up with all sorts of excuses why the West is not responsible for Israeli actions in Gaza, it's not a genocide etc. without pausing for a second to realize the Chinese also have plenty to say about what you object to them doing is not authoritarian.
I think state control is felt fundamentally differently in practice if this state control actually serves the people unlike in the west where it serves exclusively capital interests.
> What I am dismayed by in discussions like this is how simplistic they are
Once you really notice the anti-china framing literally everywhere in media, it is really hard for it all not to become meaningless propaganda. It's itself no different from state control just because it's private media because that private controls the state. We aren't allowed a clear eyed view of china, only a carefully curated antagonistic one. But they aren't our enemies at all, it's absurd how obvious that is, the west is the aggressor, not china.
In the west capital in the hands of unaccountable individuals acting in their own interests and the state acting in the interests of those with private capital. Capital in the hands of the chinese state is different because it serves the interests of everyone collectively. Including things the west describes as oppression, but that is a matter of perspective, it's things like this why you are conditioned to hate china:
Additionally, the humans who make all of the iPhones and iPads are Chinese people, subject to Chinese law. Apple has to do exactly what the CCP wants, at least for now. They are desperately trying to ramp up phone production in India, but there is huge expertise at Foxconn that isn’t in India as yet.
If Apple did not sell iPhones to Chinese consumers the Chinese government wouldn't make Apple provide a different icloud. They made that choice, not by manufacturing in China, but by selling there.
> "please confirm your age" screen is now mandatory during the iPhone setup in all countries
Not quite.
The request to confirm age is there, but actually completing it isn't mandatory (though granted, it does leave an 'alert' thingy on your phone settings saying you haven't finished setting it up).
It locks down devices like ransomware, permanently restricting functionality of web browsers, messaging apps, and other apps until the user submits to age verification. Its mandatory if you want your device to function normally without restrictions.
We are quickly heading to a world where governments want us to KYC everything, and we saw with the Revolut breach what happens when very, very bad people gain access to our private data.
Whole point is that Apple routinely execute government orders from the most repressive regime on earth after North Korea. And from bloodiest one in last two decades.
If you leave it blank or otherwise don't answer does it restrict your functionality?
But anyway it's not really the same thing until and unless governments start making motions to collect a legal name. And even then it still provides some general utility to the user which providing an age doesn't (unless you're setting up the device for a child ofc).
Same with digital IDs (for example the EU one), where you'll have to install it to provide a "zero knowledge" proof today, and since you already have everything in your phone, it'll be easy to implement the "real name" policy when registering/commenting/etc.
I'm not aware of any EU project to make a smartphone literally mandatory (instead of just convenient). If they do, I'll buy a separate smartphone just to hold my ID.
How will you insert your physical ID card into your computer to prove pornhub you're old enough to jerk off to porn? Or buy a dildo on amazon? Or order booze online? Or in some countries, even just order a set of kitchen knives from ikea?
I think whether there is closing it depends on what we do with the intelligence explosion. I expect such decisions will be revisited. It will probably not be closed, but it won't be open after that point because it was opened back then, it will be specifically decided to keep it open.
Even in 2015 Apple put in backdoors. They have been really good at making people believe things that are not true. E.g. from the linked post:
iCloud already protects sensitive categories of data (like Passwords, Health data, Messages in iCloud, etc) with end-to-end encryption by default.
Except that there is a footnote in Apple's security document where they confirm that Messages in iCloud is not end-to-end encrypted if you don't enable ADP and have iCloud Backup enabled (which is probably most users):
Standard data protection: When iCloud Backup is enabled, the keys to your backups are secured in Apple data centers. If you use both iCloud Backup and Messages in iCloud, your backup includes a copy of the Messages in iCloud encryption key to help you recover your data.
So, there is always a backup of Messages in iCloud accessible to Apple and thus (US?) law enforcement, unless you enable ADP and the people you communicate with also use ADP.
WhatsApp is similar by the way. Unless you enable E2E backups, they end up in iCloud/Google Drive backups and are only encrypted at rest. Of the major messengers, I think only Signal completely opts out of iCloud backups and have their own real E2E-encrypted backups.
Even most technical people I talk to do not know this and don't have ADP enabled.
The original implementation of iCloud included Apple's ability to recover the data. You can view this as a backdoor, and that might be fair, but the reality is that it's also a feature in the eyes of many customers - because people will lose devices and passwords, and when Apple doesn't have the keys that means they also lose data. Many customers would rather be able to get their data back.
Apple has moved more things into the bucket of "we do not have the keys for this" over time, but pretending that this isn't a tradeoff for the common customer is disingenuous. That's why ADP exists, so that those who want to make a different tradeoff can do so.
Commenters on HN tend to be technically savvy and tend to want the defaults to be tailored to a technically savvy customer base. That's fine, but that's not a real representation of all of the smartphone users out there, and in this case Apple is directly offering the choice that they usually get knocked for taking away.
Except they don't really. If you're in a convo there only needs to be one user who doesn't have ADP turned on and uses iCloud. And all your data is leaked.
It should be possible to force your messages to be excluded from backup even by recipients. Otherwise it's just for show when it comes to real life.
Not all your data, just the data exchanged with that person.
But how could you force this? They could always copy it or whatever. Yes, I know, defaults.
But this would then need to be somehow enforced on the other side, right? Like preventing copying, or screenshotting, etc. And in that case, see the HN thread the other day about applications messing with these functions and how people want their devices to be theirs and not controlled by some third party.
You gave the answer yourself. If the person you are writing with has E2EE enabled for message backups then just exclude that chat from backups on your end or enable E2EE for that chat. That means if you take the restore route without having access to the keys that conversation will not be restored.
You could even let people overwrite that setting. Preventing screenshots or copying has nothing to with this. Apple is claiming that message are end to end encrypted when in reality their defaults are set so that they are not. That is a lie and al they would need to do to change that is to change those defaults.
The week default is having an OS owned/run/managed/backdoored by a publicly traded company. If you are using anything other than open source, anything other than linux, consider all your communications to be availible for subpeona or outright sale to whoever wants them. Signal is great, but only as good as the OS of its host.
> Except that there is a footnote in Apple's security document where they confirm that Messages in iCloud is not end-to-end encrypted if you don't enable ADP and have iCloud Backup enabled (which is probably most users):
If people do a risk analysis, the most likely scenario they worry about is probably losing access to pictures of their (grand)children, not being attacked by a nation state three-letter agency.
> There are a lot of weak defaults like that.
The defaults are set to protect against the scenarios that are most important and/or likely to happen, and for most folks that's a hassle-free way to recover their data in case their phones/computers get lost, destroyed, or stolen.
I'm glad that ADP is there for that that actually need it, but for myself and my family members that I'm often asked to do IT support for, I would not want it all. If I told someone to enable it, and they lost access to the photos and videos of some of the most important moments of their live, it would probably be relationship-ending.
I also recommend people print out their photos and put them in a shoe box in a closet, and set up a account recovery in case something should happen to them:
> WhatsApp is similar by the way. Unless you enable E2E backups, they end up in iCloud/Google Drive backups and are only encrypted at rest
One of the few good things about WhatsApp is that Meta can very credibly claim that they can't access the backups (as they're not stored by Meta). Meta holds the encryption key & Google/Apple hold the backups, so at least you now have deal with two entities to get the data.
I don't think without forcing more customers to loose data (e.g. by requiring them keeping an encryption pin/key) it's possible to perform backups in a (much) better way.
I'd argue that should/could be relevant, but isn't in reality. Do two global data processors more happy to work with governments/law enforcement exist?
> I don't think without forcing more customers to loose data (e.g. by requiring them keeping an encryption pin/key) it's possible to perform backups in a (much) better way.
I have full confidence that the industry would be quick to innovate if they were forced to, but that's not in their interest nor the government's interest.
Here's a simple one: Build an open standards-based system where users choose their backup provider and let them decide whether they prefer to have full control over the encryption keys or whether they want them to be managed by a third party. Educate them so that they can at least try to make an informed decision. Warn them about the risks and jurisdictions of built-in providers.
If someone wants to continue using their device as-is? Cool, 2 taps and they're done.
Do they want to store all of their app backups on their NAS? Make it as easy as switching your default browser.
> Here's a simple one: Build an open standards-based system where users choose their backup provider and let them decide whether they prefer to have full control over the encryption keys or whether they want them to be managed by a third party. Educate them so that they can at least try to make an informed decision. Warn them about the risks and jurisdictions of built-in providers.
WhatsApp performs (on Android) backups inside a normal directory. You can just backup it via e.g. Syncthing, which I've done in the past.
It doesn't get much more standards based. Strongly pushing users to deviate from the standard flow IMHO risks them quickly choosing poorer options (e.g. a free, dubious, online hoster). At least with the current setup, the "easy option" is quite safe in terms of not loosing data and very low risk that anyone apart from you and governments with lawful access ever accesses the data.
There is an iCloud option on Signal. It's on by default - is that Apple or Signal's doing? - but yes, iCloud can be turned off and Signal have their own e2e backup, if you want to back up. Also a paid option.
the default is weak because it's the most user-friendly option. Otherwise, you end up with edge cases where the user lost their only device, or they forgot their password, or ... the list goes on and on, and they lose all their data.
That's a very user-unfriendly place to be.
You can't be security-maxxing and user-experience-maxxing at the same time. I do like Apple's approach which at least gives you the option.
Apple is surely resisting, but there's a limit to how far they're willing to go. They won't risk losing the entire EU market, for example. Or the Chinese market.
The UK is a minor footnote. They can afford to lose it if push came to shove, but for now they're willing to make conciliatory gestures.
Same here. Problem is, I never gave Apple permission to infer about my age. It's none of anyone's business. So when iPhone rebooted after upgrade and told me "you are old enough, I know it" I was simultaneously relieved that I won't be required to pass KYC (never an option) and furious that this shit ever came about.
A non-trivial reason I bought a fairly closed device (macbook) was that Tim Cook, at least publicly, told the FBI to get bent when asked to create a backdoor. Exactly what I want to see, a fight in court.
I would hope to see Apple pull out of the UK market over this, and certainly to stop selling Apple devices to the UK government and to remove the UK government entities from Apple services.
oh, I know, but I wish they would. You can see what this looks like when someone like CMMG refuses to sell to specific law enforcement agencies based on local law.
They dont really need to pull out, instead on every single piece of marketing material where they talk about anything remotely close to things affected by this they mention that unfortunately they cant give it to UK users due to the governments desire to erode privacy protection, and really hammer home how bad it is.
I really don't understand this. That's how you make your security decisions? Based on something you've read about Tim Cook in the news? But no third party audit, no open source code, no decentralization, zero self-hosted infrastructure? You put all your data in a black box that someone else controls fully, but hey, at least they took the FBI to court once? And on top of that considering this is Apple, well known for dazzling people with superficial first-impressions, into making bad long-term choices?
I sent an RFP to all the hardware makers, but no one was willing to cough up a third party audit, let me audit their flashing process, crack open the IME, let me review the chain of custody for every chip, and opensource the bootloader for my n=1 order quantity.
Could I flash coreboot/libreboot, (mostly) disable IME, get opensource firmware for every peripheral, and get a chain of custody for every part from boule to finished part? perhaps, but this is not realistic for most people.
You're making a long list of assumptions that are not true. Incremental, improved privacy offered by apple over something like Windows is a significant improvement for most people.
Going to court is the pretty good "put up or shut up", idk what else you are expecting here.
> Faced with a legal order that would have required it to change the security architecture on which ADP depended, Apple found a third option: stop offering the feature that made this dilemma exist in the first place. It reverted affected UK iCloud data to Standard Data Protection, where Apple does hold the keys and can respond to lawful legal procress (except the baseline categories that stay end-to-end encrypted either way). This satisfied the underlying legal requirement without ever building a ‘backdoor’.
Maybe Apple should withdraw all encryption support from all UK government accounts. The Prime Minister can use a Huawei or some chunky thing from a military contractor.
Especially since big tech is steaming ahead to mandating passkeys that only they are allowed to control/backup. Not long until all governments could intercept your passwords to all services.
That is exactly the question. I took a look and we presented some of our findings at DEF CON 34. There are paths to decrypting e2ee secrets without the passcode, some of these paths are considered vulnerabilities and have received patches (CVE-2026-28864).
Well in the article they explicitly said they can’t turn off ADP by design, so no luck. But I’m all for making the politicians suffer the consequences of their own decisions.
The UK is currently demanding that Apple install mandatory OS level client side real time scanning malware on every device, bypassing all security and encryption to monitor everything. Its an insanely evil and completely unacceptable demand.
Apple should withdraw from the UK until the UK government learns to respect encryption and privacy.
Apple is a private company. They don't have to comply with these demands if they don't agree with them.
I'm a Brit and I've advocated that Apple pull out of the UK over this. It annoys me that these companies seemingly have no principles and will just comply with our government's authoritarian demands. As a citizen there's nothing I can do, so it's really annoying that those who could be doing something choose to do nothing for a little extra profit.
- Which party do I vote for to reduce the attacks on encryption?
- Which party do we vote for if we don't want the government to keep pushing digital id?
- Which party is committing to stopping facial recognition trials at London Underground stations?
Conservatives and Labour both push for the same things. With Reform's anti-immigration stance, I wouldn't bet on them finding some magical solution that doesn't involve even more demands for constant identity verification to prove you're allowed to be here.
Since last year, you now can't register a company in the UK without having your face scanned. Face scans are also now a very common requirement to open a bank account, get a tech job, buy a property, rent a property. I don't recall being asked to vote on that?
If you vote Democrat next election, will the US stop taking the fingerprints of every visitor upon entry?
All the political parties are completely apathetic about these sorts of issues.
The notion of democracy is used to justify and legitimise things that people don't get to vote on.
Strange and hypothetical thought: could a user purchase a US or international model of the iPhone with US or international iCloud account capable of ADP to activate ADP? Would this allow somebody living or working in the UK the ability to use ADP?
Wise cards are issued in your country of residence. It's very tricky to get US card remotely as UK resident. Only way somewhat accessible to normal people is AMEX global transfer, but even then you need to have ITIN and US bank account.
AFAIK you cant just assign non-US bank card to a billing on US Apple account. At least it was the case before and at least for purpose of switching account region.
Thus you use USD gift cards since they easy to buy.
Anyone have any steps on how I can enable this in the UK? I guess I need to update my billing details to a non UK address and hop on a VPN or something?
You can change billing details to US and then activate US gift card that you can buy of Amazon.com.
But keep in mind you have to disable all subscriptions first and also your family group if you have one must also switch their accounts to US.
So yeah pretending you're US customer is no brainer with Apple and unlike Google they dont have automatic detection that will move your account to other region.
Beware you can only change account region once a year or something.
I thought they at least used something complex to attempt to prevent non-EU users using third-party app stores. I also recall a legitimate EU user is not allowed to travel abroad too long before losing access to those stores.
Might be in case of moving region to EU there are something like this, but to move it to US all you need is US gift card.
What Google does is completely different - they enforce local regulations on your accounts just if you keep using them within specific region for too long. Though Google dont actually change billing region or Google Play region.
Create a new account and reset. If you aren't willing due to the friction involved then it's time to decentralize anyway. If it's due to previous payments or licenses/subscriptions tied to the account then work with the vendor to transfer or pay the small cost to reset.
After spending 8-12 years in a single gmail account I learned my lesson. Don't get entrenched or you can't be flexible.
I moved my Apple account region to Spain and used a Banco Santander bank account to fund it. Banco Santander allows UK citizens to open a bank account.
given the story there, I'm surprised apple are still allowed to apply end to end encryption the the "baseline categories" such as messages etc in the UK. Anyone understand how that's happened? To be clear I am not saying what I think should happen, just it seems inconsistent with the UK's stance
What I don't understand, or what I can only guess at, is the cabal & likely global network of interests that are behind the push for this kind of legislation to exists in the first place.
Some delusional "save the children" anti-privacy extremist doesn't have the political capital or the technical insight to convince the government to create a law to issue secret gag orders.
People with good civil intention don't just propose the idea, or get the momentum, to institutionalize such mechanisms.
So who are the major influencers, and their thoughts, for pushing this?
You won't be criticizing your boss/mayor/president/local politician/whoever, if you have to do it from an account tied to your own name. Having everyine install a digital ID on their phones (to prove they're old enough to jerk off to pornhub) is the first step, the "real name" policy is the next. The encryption ... well, one of the separate steps inbetween those two.
There is a 2005 political cartoon by Jonik where an Uncle Sam has a box labelled Control of Internet Speech on the table. Corporate media is asking "How would you like this wrapped," with paper labeled either "Anti-Terrorism" or "Protect Kid."
For the last 25 years certain western governments (especially the US and UK/5 eyes) have focused on control over democracy. They've sold it as protections, defense, safety, etc. It's the opposite. Control, power, abuse, and the votes/$$$ to ignore their constituents. This is usually lead by conservative or far right parties who have zero history with abusing power and control (ex McCarthyism in the US).
We live in a world of surveillance. Even if most of that is to market you ads and extract capital it's still degrading and less safe for anyone but the core in group(s).
>So who are the major influencers, and their thoughts, for pushing this?
the governments themselves. left, right, or center, their number one priority is to maintain their power.
it amuses me immeasurably when the useful idiots in the West cheer on the policies of China and Russia. think of the children, think of the terrorists, think of the racists, think of the disinformation, blah blah blah. there are a myriad excuses but only one true goal -- suppression of dissent.
the UK establishment in particular primarily feels threatened by unredacted coverage of the consequences of its immigration policy. not because Reform would reverse that policy -- every "far-right" party in Europe had at best slowed the influx, not halted or reversed it -- but simply because someone else would be receiving lobbyists' money, favors, and sinecures after retirement.
If ensuring digital devices can be accessed by law enforcement (are not "beyond the law") is so important where are the task forces shutting down crypto and networks using unregulated and anonymous currency? Literally follow the money, as they say. The current admin has 'made' millions if not more off his own fraudulent coin. Take down crypto and you stop crime instead of destroying privacy.
This has happened to me several times recently, a reply with a partisan slant that would be normal IF it made any sense at all within the current thread. Either some “influencers” are cutting back on their token budget, or we’re collectively losing our semantic comprehension.
This news is about the UK. Across the channel, the EU has effectively outlawed anonymous currency. I believe the UK FCA also has such rules in force. So your post is rather moot.
where did they mention Bitcoin? much like everything "first generation", Bitcoin is objectively garbage nowadays, when we have continuously evolving Ethereum for modern all-around-good experience and Monero for actually private payments. oh by the way, cryptographically significant quantum processors are eventually coming, and Bitcoin still didn't make up its mind on PQC, to my knowledge, whereas Ethereum did.
no one writes a fresh C99 project in a 2000s Visual Studio with whatever formatting was the most trendy back then anymore.
What I don't understand is why Apple is even responding to this absurd demand. Completely banning Apple products in the UK isn't a realistic option for the government, so Apple could simply state openly that it does not cooperate with authoritarian regimes and actively prompt British users via a pop-up to enable ADP to protect themselves from the government.
It seems you are suggesting that if a private corporation (a foreign one at that) is large enough it should ignore the law of the country its operating in. I don't think you will like the consequences of such a situation, and will charitably assume you have just not thought your message through for even a second before posting it.
PS: If you think the British gov is authoritarian.. well, you might not know what the term means and/or anything about the spectrum of governments operating today or in the past.
If laws aren't transparent and reasonable, you shouldn't necessarily follow them. If I were to sell encryption software that's banned in Kazakhstan, you wouldn't expect me to stop selling to customers there, would you? I see no reason why the United Kingdom should be treated any differently than Kazakhstan in this case.
The British government is certainly not as authoritarian as those in China or Russia, but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s still terrible and restricts people’s rights. For example, you can be detained for as long as they want if you refuse to unlock your encrypted device.
You may be confused, so I'll try to illustrate the situation.
Supose you live in USA, your chickens have a list of laws, those laws apply to USA. If you try to sell those chickens in UK or Europe you'll find that your company will not be allowed to operate, and if you continue someone will go to jail.
Maybe digital products have an easy way out, but apple is not digital and they may need to find a way to comply.
To be more charitable, I think they're more suggesting that Apple should call the UK's bluff, knowing that democracies have to be accountable to their citizens.
Can Apple afford to lose the UK market? Almost certainly yes -- it's a fairly minor global player. Can the current UK government afford to deal with the massive fallout of banning all Apple products right now? That might be, as Sir Humphrey Appleby would say, a very courageous move.
In other words, Apple could simply state that in order to protect their users they cannot and will not do this, and will withdraw from the market rather than comply. That puts the onus on the UK government to either put up or shut up.
It would be fascinating to see how this would play out. Would "think of the children" and "OMG, terrorists!!" win against, "but I still want my iProducts"?
But apple also cannot just stop selling or supporting their product in the UK either. So that card is dropped from both sides. As long as apple is beholden to a few million costumers and subscribers to their services in the UK; UK law is able to pressure them, fine them and restrict them because of those users.
We don't want it the other way around; companies placed outside the borders doing and selling whatever they want without a care. So we end up in a negotiation.
Apple choose to maliciously comply; subtly revealing the TCN, giving all UK users notices about what their government demanded of them to encourage public outrage, and push on the correct parts of the UK government that has their interest in mind.
It may actually be illegal in US law for Apple to leave the UK market for ideological reasons. Public companies are beholden to shareholders and can be sued for not acting in their interest (fiduciary duty, Delaware General Corporation Law). (I loathe these laws, but that's a separate discussion entirely.)
So sure they _can_, but at a cost that strikes the option from the cards entirely.
If apple didn't comply with the Chinese government they'd probably be asked to pack up their suicide nets and find somewhere else with sophisticated manufacturing facilities filled with slaves to make their products.
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[ 0.28 ms ] story [ 36.1 ms ] threadThis is not one. Nobody (within 2%) gives a stuff.
Most people's concerns are with the cost of living, and housing. Same as most European countries.
Within my friend group, no one cares about Apple because none of us use Apple.
Has the UK started attacking any open source E2EE projects yet?
Apple's control over iOS is the main reason I prefer GrapheneOS so much over it. You get amazing privacy and security without sacrificing control. GrapheneOS has said they won't introduce age verification and a backdoor they obviously won't implement.
Also if you do revert account to UK you will get a warning that you either need to disable ADP or lose access to iCloud features.
Unlike Android there are way more hassle in installing iOS apps under different accounts with different regions. On Android I just have 5 diffetent accounts with different billing countries and it just work.
Also AFAIK iCloud family features dont work cross-region.
From what I remember it uses a combination of things like your current GPS location, your SIM cards reported country and more to determine what country you're really in to restrict certain features.
So it's not as simple as swapping your location in settings, or even traveling to somewhere in the EU, theres a certain sticky-ness to what your device thinks is your current country.
The whole "Apple won't do what the USG wants" story is farce, engineered specifically to protect Apple's brand image. Following the Snowden drop when we all learned that the USG has unfettered realtime access to everything in iCloud without a warrant via FAA702, Apple had a major fucking crisis on its hands, along with a lot of other companies.
Those CEOs all went to DC and sat down with Obama and talked it out. The official cover story was something like "Obama wants help with healthcare.gov".
> The top leaders from the world’s biggest technology companies pressed their case for reform of the National Security Agency’s controversial surveillance operations at a meeting with President Obama on Tuesday, resisting attempts by the White House to portray the encounter as a wide-ranging discussion of broader priorities.
https://www.businessinsider.com/tech-ceo-meeting-with-obama-... (includes photo)
It is very likely that this media plan was discussed and agreed upon in those meetings. Otherwise, nobody sane in any government in Europe would ever buy an iPhone (or let their citizens do same), given that the USG can read all their photos and messages and emails and contacts in iCloud instantly and without a warrant.
(China of course requires Apple run the iCloud servers for Chinese users in China via a joint venture with a CCP-operated company, which preserves the same realtime full access to all iCloud/iMessage data in China for the CCP as PRISM does for the USG.)
Don't believe the hype.
https://www.reuters.com/technology/cybersecurity/governments...
These aren't conspiracy theories, these types of secret agreements happen all the time.
EDIT: it seems the original poster I was replying to has deleted their post, and so this may not make as much sense in the thread now.
Jeff Gray is a man who regularly gets arrested and/or trespassed from public places for holding up a sign saying "God bless the homeless vets". Seems to happen nearly every time he does it at various locations.
Oh, and flock cameras and ICE aren't exactly a sign that America is this beacon of freedom that it likes to portray.
You also don't have the right to a lawyer to be in a room with you and you are compelled to answer all their questions and they do not need to tell you why they stopped you.
Then if you are lucky they return your devices 7 days later after they have been through everything.
This guy went through it last year and talks bout what happens when they stop you: https://youtu.be/991kRp8KUmo?si=-5S1uLE7K9KG_gNj
That is something that can happen at nearly every international border crossing. Before posting I tried to find a list of countries that require a warrant to search your stuff and the only place that came up was Hong Kong. New Zealand requires some suspicion, but that's effectively the same as they can simply state "they were acting suspiciously to my eye."
>Oh, and flock cameras and ICE aren't exactly a sign that America is this beacon of freedom that it likes to portray.
The US never said that you won't be observed in public nor that you can enter, remain, and travel freely around the country forever without permission.
It relays my main concern which is that while current governments may use this in moderation and under judicial oversight, future ones may not. And we should build tools for the future not just for now.
There’s a general regression towards fascist and right wing ideologies in the last few years and I don’t want to be up against a wall one day because someone did something with ignorant best intent.
The “fascist” part (authoritarian/totalitarian tendencies) came long before the resurgence of the right, but most people seem to approve of those methods as long as they target those they dislike, so I won’t be shedding any tears for them when it’s their turn at last.
It is self-evidently written by AI. You can tell from both tropes such as “To bring this into sharper focus” and the fact that it is entirely without an opinion or argument for most of the piece.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/steveforbes/2025/09/09/people-a...
> The wife of a conservative politician was sentenced to 31 months in prison for what police said was an unacceptable post.
What did she say? The article does not elucidate.
Inciting violence for example is not legal. I believe spaces around abortion clinics are also to be free from demonstrations. US free speech absolutists seem to vehemently disagree until you say something unkind about Charlie Kirk or ICE.
The low point might be quoting Elon Musk. This is true in any context, but in particular here. The scandal is real, but none of it is about people being arrested for non-politically-correct speech.
There’s plenty of otherwise real stuff to poke the UK about.
When the context is altered it suddenly becomes worthy of prosecution? I don’t think that’s fair, by holding or stating an opinion you do not induce its outcome.
1. Holding up a sign offering help to any women being coerced into an abortion is illegal. 2. Standing silently on the road near one can be illegal. 3. parking a car with a bumper sticker near one can be illegal.
The whole paragraph about Musk and rape gangs is nonsense, of course. The biggest rape gang ever convicted in the UK was entirely white. Musk and his ilk only care about rape when the rapists are not white. On average immigrants are slightly less likely to commit sexual assaults (obviously averaging across many different groups).
> What did she say? The article does not elucidate.
She called for hotels housing asylum seekers to be burned. I think she is a nasty racist but I also think the sentence was excessive and I am not convinced it was a serious incitement to violence (and that was not what she was convicted of).
> US free speech absolutists seem to vehemently disagree until you say something unkind about Charlie Kirk or ICE.
Not American, and I entirely support the right of anyone to make unkind comments about anyone else. You are right that many people apply different standards to their own side, but right wing Americans are are from alone in that.
They only care when the rapists are coming from outside the UK, and being protected by the authorities.
>>On average immigrants are slightly less likely to commit sexual assaults (obviously averaging across many different groups).
I think that is called picking your sample carefully. No-one is worried about EG the Chinese or the French.
The emphasis on 'rape gangs', 'immigrants' and 'asylum seekers' isn't just objectively untrue, it's cynically manipulative. It's fundamentally a toxic and calculated form of marketing and branding.
And also a cynical distraction from - for example - the Epstein story and Musk's appearances in it.
There was a lot of this around Brexit. Many supporters voted to 'stop them coming over here'.
The government then ramped up immigration - a lot. For some reason the press failed to report this.
The last time it worked like that was in the 1970s. You can travel and move anywhere you want but you can't legally work, rent a state owned apartment, get social benefits or send you kids to public school unless you get a stamp from the local authorities. It's the same as migrant workers anywhere else.
Of course it's corrupt and unfair and they should stop doing it but "can't leave your area" is a big exaggeration.
[0] https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/R-v-Lucy...
Pretty sure she called for the murder, by arson, of asylum seekers although the article missed that bit out.
Stories like this quickly put to rest the idea that everyone who gets arrested must actually deserve it. The bar for posting content that violates the law is very low.
- We just changed our PM, despite his party having a historic majority.
- Parliament routinely rebels against the government, and backbenchers have a lot of say about the business of government.
- We have a number of upstart parties; they might be populist, but at least it's not a two-party-forever system.
- We had a coalition government just a few years ago.
- We changed our constitution a few months ago (abolishing hereditary peers) and it was just another news among many.
- We ejected one of the previous PMs for having a party during a lockdown, with a massive scandal before that when the PM accepted a gift of some wallpaper.
Compare and contrast to the ossified and corrupt American system, where the president is openly enriching himself and his family and friends, and there's nothing threatening the presidency. The last amendment was passed half a century ago, and there's zero hope for reform.
Democracy is a living, breathing system of government, not a number of checkboxes like "can I shoot a gun for fun" or "can I call someone N-word online". It's important to see the forest for the trees.
Here's the reality: https://x.com/flying_rodent/status/2102527889556291773
And also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Wilson_plot_allegations
Both the UK and the US fail in rule of law regarding "all citizens and leaders must be equal before the law, supported by strong anti-corruption measures."
UK has stated separation of powers but the crown reportedly nudged Starmer to step down. The king is the one that can formally appoint government following elections.
Prince Andrew had and other royals have control over military forces in the UK, canada, australia, nz, ect. You can hem and haw all you want but the crown has constitutional and ceremonial control over the armed forces.
The King gives 'the kings speech' which is used to set the governments legislative agenda to parliment.
The king also gives royal assent to bills passed by parliment.
Black spider memos
The king also steers diplomatic efforts abroad.
every single aspect of UKs democracy can be cut by the King whenever he wants.
Yes, the monarch can in theory override the government by blocking legislation, but won't because one time a monarch did that, he ended up with his head cut off. If a monarch ever did that in modern times, Britain would quickly be a republic.
Everyone follows convention and stays in their lane and doesn't rock the boat. The last time a bill didn't get royal assent was in 1708. It simply hasn't happened since.
'The kings speech' is written by the government usually based on the manifesto they were elected on. The monarch just reads it. The monarch's role in modern times is to advise the prime minister and act as continuity advisor across governments. While the monarch may offer commentary on legislation, they won't block it, and the government is free to ignore it.
Same with the armed forces. It's ministers that control the army not the monarch. In modern Britain, the monarch's role is purely ceremonial. The monarch cannot order the armed forces into conflict.
Usually legislation gets blocked in the House Of Lords (the unelected chamber) which is why a lot constitutional reform is focused on cleaning that up, but it's game of inches because neither party wants to lose influence.
While constitutional it may seem like the monarch has a lot of hard power, in reality they have none, and since the civil war can't do anything without the approval of Parliament.
This is an alright use of a monarch IMO.
The UK example would be if the UK government lost a vote of confidence, the monarch might ask the opposition parties to see if they could form a government that could pass a vote of confidence to avoid a general election. Although parliamentary math makes such a scenario unlikely in practice.
On the UK end I don't think the monarch can sack the Prime Minister. While the UK monarch could strongly suggest to a Prime Minister that it's time to resign. Usually when a Prime Minister gets to that point, it's usually the end of the road and they won't last much longer anyway even if they pushed forward.
The monarch has a lot of soft power which under the modern system is usually deployed to ensure continuity of government rather than in a controlling manner.
(The Australia, Canada, etc constitutions gives the monarch different powers than the UK and it's usually delegated to whoever is the governor for that nation)
There are some oddities, but the idea that the crown could actually exercise any of their powers, without causing a constitutional crisis, and UK rapidly becoming a republic, is farcical.
> The King gives 'the kings speech' which is used to set the governments legislative agenda to parliment.
You’re aware that the kings speech is written by the government, not the crown. It’s how the government lays out its parliamentary agenda to parliament, the civil service and the country at large. Heck there’s a whole ritual around the crown having to beg permission to enter the commons etc to emphasise the point that crown enters and speaks at the pleasure of the commons.
> The king also steers diplomatic efforts abroad.
No, the king is given instructions by the foreign office on what he’s expected to help with. Every trip and meeting the king does is checked and cleared by the uk government, and they can and have vetoed trips before.
> every single aspect of UKs democracy can be cut by the King whenever he wants.
You should watch the Jonny English movies, they’re a great documentary on how this could happen.
33% of the vote is a historically low majority, so I guess you're technically correct.
non-democratically. there was no election. the ruling party simply made a decision itself. Just like in China.
Yeah? The country got to vote for the PM? I don't recall there being a national election. Having a bunch of party insiders replace the leader who won an election with an unelected one is the opposite of democracy.
The result is substantially more democratic, as per the list above.
The result seems substantially more chaotic.
And then there is the fact that the entire legal frame work is based on The Crown. If the king or queen killed someone they would have to prosecute themselves. This is the exact opposite of democracy.
It's entirely mad to me that I can make a list of easily verifiable, massively important examples of democratic processes in this country in the last few years and someone would just come up with a hypothetical like "but what if King kills someone" like it's somehow not just equal but has more weight than the list. Mad
Anne Boleyn, Catherine Howard would like a word.
But processes that exist to preserve democracy that arent governed by that democracy are problematic. Saying the "king would never do..." when a king has makes the argument silly.
The UK is not alone in this - a great example is the filibuster in the us (a senate rule).
Queen Elizabeth used Queen's Consent many many times to prevent or modify laws she didn't like. An investigation by The Guardian revealed that more than 1,000 parliamentary bills were subjected to Queen's Consent or Prince's Consent during Queen Elizabeth II's reign.
The British government feels like a delicate standoff between Parliament and the crown. The monarchy has used its structural privilege to quietly protect its own wealth and status while maintaining the public illusion of having no power.
- We can't beat off to porn anymore without a VPN, because our nanny government has blocked it.
- Our government sends hilarious fines to foreign websites when it disapproves of their moderation.
The government was "doing nothing" while wealth disparity and affordability crisis was constantly growing for the past ~15 years until it reached breaking point.
Hence why people affected by this are now voting new extremist parties, because voting more "doing nothing" by the parties who enabled this, just guarantees the same issues aggravating. So what do you expect?
And how is Berlin planning to seize the wealth of billionaires?
Because I've seen this play out before, where every supposed promise to tax the billionaires, just ends up as another tax burden on the working class high earners and entrepreneurs who already pay the highest tax rates and are the furthest thing possible from billionaires, but still gets political support from the unwashed masses since it's entirely envy driven.
A lot of voters disliked the effects migration had on their country, being also one of the reason why they voted for Brexit, and why the vote far right parties right now.
That's textbook intimidation, which is in certain cases a crime in the UK, and even some US states. You can also do it offline by, for example, sending a letter to the victim, containing a photograph of the front of their house, and a photograph of you firing guns. The implication is pretty straightforward and doesn't even need to be stated: "I have guns and I know where you live. Pay me that money you owe me or I might use them." That implication is still there, for the victim, even if you add surface text like "Hey everyone look at these cool things!"
Only _after_ he was arrested, and the police went looking around his house for guns... did he admit that the pictures were taken overseas, he doesn't actually own the guns. And yet that's what the article leads with, like it was a known fact from the get-go and those silly-billy police knew that but went looking for them in the UK anyway.
This article is a great lesson in how to mislead without saying anything untrue.
His own words in a different article make the reason for the arrest clear:
https://nypost.com/2025/12/04/us-news/british-man-says-he-wa...
> “The arrest was based on two separate social media posts,” he said. “One was the photo of myself with the shotgun, [...] And the second one was my LinkedIn banner at the top of the page.”
> “I used the photo my business partner took on his premises as a header photo on LinkedIn with the intention he would look at that and go, ‘Why’s this guy posting that? I’d better call him and find out rather than dodging me’ as it had done for months,” he said.
> A week later, on August 23, the officers returned and arrested him on suspicion of possessing a firearm with intent to cause fear of violence and another allegation of stalking related to a photograph of a house that appeared on his social media.
You’re trying hard to link the two as “textbook intimidation” but the firearm post that triggered this was just a vacation photo and post about his vacation.
> For all three reports, police chose to take no action (nonetheless it still had a chilling effect on speech).
Incorrect to say the police “took no action”. They contacted the journalist and instructed him to desist. The police later admitted it was a mistake to pursue the case. It says all of this in the link you used:
> Arday made a complaint about Grove to the Metropolitan Police, alleging harassment that was affecting his mental health; the police asked Grove to desist from further contact with Arday.[80] Mark Rowley, Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, later said that the complaint about Grove should not have been taken forward.[81]
It’s confusing that you’re trying to claim the police “took no action” when they admitted fault for following through with the complaint and they told the reporter to desist.
That's not how it works. You get arrested on suspicion, the cops figure out if you actually did it or not, once they know you did it they charge you with counts of actual offences (not suspicions).
It's not a UK speech policing policy issue, the topic of your post. The criminal law doesn't support Arday using false claims of harrassment to deter journalists.
You could say it's a worldwide civil law policy issue in terms of barratry / SLAPPs / cost of litigation / etc. No country, certainly not the US, has sufficient protection for whistleblowers against well-resourced litigants, and it is they (not the UK criminal law) who are successfully chilling speech.
It's the thing we're talking about.
The UK law was used to get police involved and the police told the journalist to desist.
> You could say it's a worldwide civil law policy issue
The fact that lawsuits exist everywhere does not make it equal everywhere.
We're talking about the UK's specific laws.
> There was also the tragic story of the Cambridge professor who was completely unqualified and had a fake life story. When journalists would get close to the story he would report them to the police for harassment to spike the stories.
You don't mention the threat that civil lawsuits pose to speech at all. And yet it was the threat of a civil lawsuit that actually quelled speech here.
You have no evidence that action A ("he would report them to the police for harassment") led to outcome B ("to spike the stories").
Jason Arday did not spike any journalist's story by reporting them for harrassment. He, or his universty, did spike the story by engaging reputation lawyers. He could do that in almost any country, including the US, despite its stronger free speech laws. Unless a US state has an effective anti-SLAPP law, it is very likely all that is needed to shut people up is to threaten a lawsuit they can't afford.
The thing you want to be mad about -- the police unlawfully instructing a journalist not to contact someone -- is a bad thing, is not even legal (i.e. the UK state doesn't actually allow it, let alone condone it), and it had no effect on the journalist. They still wanted their story published. It was the private threat of a lawsuit that spiked it.
As a result getting the police involved is often little more than a slightly awkward chat at the front door where the officers politely ask you to stop being arsehole, but everyone knows the police are a bit limited in what they can actual do. Either because no crime has actually been committed, or because they don’t really have the time to properly investigate even if a crime had been committed.
Actually getting arrested takes some effort. The police really don’t want to deal with all the paperwork and mess that comes afterwards if they can avoid it.
Especially rich to talk about habitual liars when it's a bunch of British press outlets and activists accusing others of being liars.
> 1 The Racism Of It All: It is not news when white men commit academic misconduct. It gets reported in a handful of stories, there’s a bit of media attention, but everyone quickly forgets about the problems.
> 2 Arday Was Definitely Guilty: The second point is somehow even more frustrating. Yes, Jason Arday was hounded by a society that demands different standards for young Black men than white guys. Yes, the amount of scrutiny he received was obviously connected to the colour of his skin. But also, he definitely did plagiarize. And not just a little bit. His work is riddled with clear, obvious, and extensive theft from other published academic papers.
> You do not need to trust race realists or other unpleasant people. Just download the thesis and check for yourself. It is clear that a significant portion of the thesis was copied directly from other people’s work. This is not in doubt, it’s not in question, and the fact that so many people online are arguing that the plagiarism charges are false because a university said so is deeply depressing. It’s arguably the worst case of plagiarism I’ve ever seen.
> Whatever your thoughts on plagiarism, it’s clear that Arday’s work harmed very few people. As he himself said, “I didn't murder somebody”. If he hadn’t been a Black academic and a poster child for diversity at Cambridge university, we’d probably have never known his name.
You sound like one of the Arday Truthers:
https://archive.is/KkqkY
> For some of Arday’s supporters, acknowledging that any of the media scrutiny was justified has become tantamount to siding with his “killers.” He is instead a martyr—the victim of a “lynching”—and the inconvenient fact of his fabulism must be tidied away from the virtual shrine. This is an emotional position rather than a rational one, and its very indefensibility makes it a greater demonstration of tribal loyalty. Insisting that the academic was completely innocent, in the face of all the evidence, sends a strong social signal that you hate the right-wing media and care about racism.
> The postmortem airbrushing of Arday’s story also ignores how that story twisted and turned while he was alive. When The Guardian confronted him with the implausibility of some of his tall tales, Arday responded by editing them in real time: Yes, he had once claimed to have run 600 miles in six days, an exceptional feat for an endurance athlete, but what he actually meant was that he took daylong rest breaks in between. Yes, he had claimed to have raised more than £5 million for charity, but actually this was with the help of “many fundraising collectives” whose participants he could not name because they had signed nondisclosure agreements.
As they might say on Reddit, "Everybody Sucks Here". Arday the fabulist and plagiarist, the academic institutions who didn't vet him because they were razzle-dazzled by his bullshit lifestory (then drop him like a stone when their attempts to keep his plagiarism hidden don't work any more), the popular press who are happy to amp up a public shaming for clicks and views, the anti-woke and the racists who say this just confirms what they thought about DEI, and the anti-anti-woke and anti-racists who will deny the bleeding obvious if it makes them appear virtuous to their peers.
OP appears to claim that involving the police is the way to get journalists off your tail. It isn't, and it didn't deter either the professors or the journalist. The much more effective way to get journalists off your tail, which OP didn't even mention, is lawyers. But that doesn't let OP rage against UK laws so he went with the bullshit claim instead.
There was absolutely zero media attention at the time police processed Arday's complaint against professor David Harris, in 2023. They closed the complaint without taking action. The professor didn't even know he was being investigated. His colleague Martyn Hammersley then went over Arday's head straight to the faculty. So much for the police getting people off your case!
In the case of the journalist Arday reported in 2025, police again did not arrest or charge him, but they (wrongly, in my opinion) phoned him and asked him not to contact Arday. This had a chilling effect and the police had no legal basis to direct him so. Again, this was long before any 2026 media attention.
It wasn't media attention that saved these people, it was that what they did wasn't illegal. The police shouldn't have given Arday's claims as much merit as they did, but no matter what Arday said, there was no evidence of crime there, it was never going any further than that.
Only once the deets about Arday were leaked by Cambridge faculty to Cofnas and he published them, and the media firestorm begain, did the details of the police phoning the journalist become known, and in reaction to that, the head of the police said that was clearly wrong and should not have happened: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c0rd9y99grzo
In the second case, the person involved was weaponizing the police against a journalist who had uncovered something about a completely unqualified university professor who had a fraudulent background story. The police didn’t do it “randomly”. The professor knew how to use the laws to intimidate and silence his critics (when even the GP comment admits).
Even the police later admitted they should not have gone as far as they did.
But I agree that the law is being weaponised by bad actors, but irrespective of that the police are duty bound to investigate. They take the blame too. It's one of the few jobs everyone else knows how to do better than the people doing it.
In the second case, once again you repeat your nonsense. The chilling effect the police had, a wrong in and of itself, did not put the journalist off publishing.
You can read the journalist's own words right here: https://www.timeshighereducation.com/opinion/i-was-reported-...
> Despite the thoroughness of my investigation, THE did not run the story. While I was personally disappointed, I understood; by this point, Arday’s solicitors had been in touch with THE and it was clear that the story could tie the publication up in months of expensive litigation. Even if we were right – and I stand by my reporting – it would have been ruinously expensive.
You want to say POLICE POLICE POLICE were chilling speech here. Bullshit. It was LAWYERS LAWYERS LAWYERS suppressing the story.
You're the only person in this thread using the phrase "chilling speech" and you keep admitting that they did.
Let me quote you on this topic:
> The chilling effect the police had, a wrong in and of itself,
> In the case of the journalist Arday reported in 2025, police again did not arrest or charge him, but they (wrongly, in my opinion) phoned him and asked him not to contact Arday. This had a chilling effect
> For all three reports, police chose to take no action (nonetheless it still had a chilling effect on speech).
These are all three your own quotes from this thread. The last quote isn't even accurate because the police DID take action in the form of contacting the journalist and telling him to desist.
You're trying to argue that Jason Arday held journalists at bay by reporting them for harrassment, therefore the UK speech laws are bad because they let wrongdoers avoid scrutiny by making harrassment claims against their scrutinisers. That is incorrect. There was only one journalist, and Arday held him off by engaging private lawyers. The harrassment reporting did not stop the journalist.
Arday falsely reported two people for harrassment to the Metropolitan Police, one professor in 2023 and one journalist in 2025. The (Devon and Cornwall) police declined to pursue the 2023 case. The (Metropolitan) police investigated the 2025 case for four months, then decided to take no action (no charge, arrest or caution). The investigating officer phoned the journalist to tell him the case was closed (they can do that). The fact that there had even been an investigation caused a chilling effect:
https://www.timeshighereducation.com/opinion/i-was-reported-...
> But were my enquiries grounds for a criminal complaint? That was hugely troubling to me as a reporter who specialises in examining issues of research integrity and ethics.
I'd say that even in the professor's case, it could've had a chilling effect. If the police had interviewed anyone related to the professor, there could've been leaks and/or career-stunting rumours.
The officer requested the journalist not contact Arday. That's overreach, and shouldn't have happened.
The head of the Metropolitan police admitted the investigation should not have even been started. That's not the law at fault, that's shoddy policing: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c0rd9y99grzo
But ultimately, it did not "spike the story". That was 100% on the lawsuit. Both things are bad
From your own link, this was from 2 separate posts. I don't know man, this sounds like an excuse from the company to cause trouble and avoid having to pay the owed money.
Now imagine you owe this guy money, he's admitted in public that he put a picture of your business premises at the top of every blog post he makes on LinkedIn in order to get your attention, and his latest blog posts on the LinkedIn website therefore shows YOUR WORKPLACE and HIM SHOOTING GUNS.
Juxtaposition that he admits he wants you to see.
You can read all three blogposts. Note he has switched out the picture of the workplace (top-right PFP):
1. https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jonrichelieu-booth_jonthehash...
> Top of my agenda Today is getting a follow-up email to the Secretary of State for Business and Trade regarding my delinquent Client
"delinquent client" and no mention of why there's a picture of him with guns or where it was taken
2. https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jonrichelieu-booth_jonthehash...
> I am disappointed that absolutely nothing has come back from the Secretary of State for Business and Trade (OR his Department) regarding my delinquent Client.. this is concerning as despite continuing to owe me
"delinquent client" who "owes" him and once again, picture of him shooting guns apropos of nothing, nothing explaining where he is, whose guns they are, just him shooting guns. Guess he just likes to shoot guns while talking about his "delinquent client" who "owes" him and he's put a picture of the delinquent client's premises as his PFP.
3. https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jonrichelieu-booth_jonthehash...
> Today I'll be following up on my message to the Yorkshire Post by calling the Secretary of State for Business and Trade regarding my delinquent Client.. it's become necessary given what the Owner of said Client is currently doing. I'm also going to escalate my concerns to North Yorkshire Police, then I'll grab the Popcorn and see where this goes.
And again no-context gun photo to add to the blog post about his delinquent client
Hopefully you can understand why the guy who owes him money would feel intimidated and call the police, and you can see why there appears to be enough evidence to charge the guy for harrassing the ower, and to arrest him so you can establish if he possesses the guns he has posted himself shooting.
The photos are obviously target shooting. This is a common sport in many countries.
Your argument is that because he wrote long daily updates about what he was doing and included two unrelated things, that he's implying that the guns are for those offhand remarks?
We get getting farther and farther from the real problem, which is that the UK police have been weaponized to respond to people's social media posts about how they make others feel. That's a ridiculously low bar.
From https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/consultant-arrested-posi...
> However, he said that a police officer later visited his home to warn him that concerns had been raised about the post.
> "I was told to be careful what I say online and I need to understand how it makes people feel," he said.
No, I don't understand why he would.
Nothing there was intimidation. Pretending it is intimidation is stretching crudility. The fact that he got arrested over this is straight up nonsense, IMO.
All the posts read like blog-style posts, and there wasn't any aggressive language used there at all. He also mentioned he was meeting with people to resolve the issue through legal means in the posts.
I suspect the owner who owed him money was acting maliciously.
If you're buying that, I've got a bridge to sell you.
Both the police and whoever claimed to be intimidated would/should have known better.
The problem whenever discussion of any of these subjects is that there will be people that are determined to pretend there isn't a problem in the UK with these laws when it is quite clear there is.
This is one of three days worth of posts where he talks about his "delinquent client" and ends with a picture of him and guns (with no explanation of why, where or how him and the guns are related to the body text). He put an image of the business owner's premises as his PFP in the top-right corner, which is now a picture of some people sitting in chairs. The business premises, "delinquent client" body text and gun photos appear on the same page.
Further details: https://www.snopes.com/news/2025/12/01/uk-police-arrest-gun-...
> Today I'll be following up on my message to the Yorkshire Post by calling the Secretary of State for Business and Trade regarding my delinquent Client.. it's become necessary given what the Owner of said Client is currently doing. I'm also going to escalate my concerns to North Yorkshire Police, then I'll grab the Popcorn and see where this goes.
Wait, this is the threat?
I'm bewildered this could be grounds for an arrest. That's pretty scary.
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jonrichelieu-booth_jonthehash...
It's the combination of the paragraph about the 'delinquent client' and the picture of him pointing a gun which could be construed as an implied threat.
Exactly.
Every time I hear a story of "horrible abuses in UK where people get arrested for talking on the internet" it turns our they intimidated or scammed or bullied someone.
I wonder why people keep lying about it.
What seems to happen on these stories that anything that might be construed as a threat will be to pretend there isn't a problem with the speech and online laws in the UK.
No point even arguing with them, it's a lost cause.
Given you got the nationality wrong 2/3 times in this comment section and they weren't bot accounts either, you might want to adjust that number.
You got the political lean wrong at least once as well. This might be the time to adjust your world view. Appears to be wrong most of the time.
Until this exchange, I hadn't realised I would be doing anyone a favour. I'll have a think about it.
Someone got arrested and intimidated by police because they criticized someone with even only a modicom of authority: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/mar/29/parents-arre...
Imagine getting six police officers sent to your house and spending 11 hours at a police station for causing "disharmony" by disagreeing with how your daughter's school operates in a WhatsApp group.
* The Police admitted their obvious error and paid £20k in damages: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c4gz1qy30v5o
* This bizarre case has nothing to do with "speech that offends the prevailing political orthodoxy" (root comment).
If you look for examples of the police arresting people for stupid and unjustifiable reasons, you can find them in lots of countries, including the US. For example, here is someone being arrested in Kansas for clapping too loudly during a meeting: https://www.kbtx.com/2026/07/27/teacher-arrested-repeatedly-... It's absolutely right that this sort of thing is reported and it's right for people to be outraged about it. However, I'd be cautious about drawing overly sweeping conclusions about the UK from such cases.
So yes, we might not be so dreadful compared to Hicksville, US or some craphole country like India,but that's a very low bar for the police of a G5 nation.
Absolutely go ahead and make sweeping generalisations about the state of the police in the UK. It's all true (except if anyone claims they are systemically racist, or some other clickbaity nonsense).
Wasn't there a story about a woman getting put in jail for having spaghetti on a spoon that they thought was drugs? Lost her job?
https://www.syracuse.com/news/2014/09/florida_woman_jailed_s...
Yeah, imagine that. Getting put in jail for a month.
Also I'm not from Florida or the US for that matter.
But you're just peddling false narratives which are easily disproved, which are rampant especially on right wing news sites. So you might not be right leaning, but people who write and share them generally are.
This is completely false and comes from a commonly misrepresented statistic; '30 arrests a day' is plainly the arrests made under section 127 of the Communications Act 2003 and section 1 of the Malicious Communications Act 1988 which includes things like online stalking and harassment. I hope you're just mistaken and not willfully implying that those issues are merely offensive to the prevailing political orthodoxy.
You can argue it's highly improbable that all arrests are over 'hurty words online', definitely – but anyone claiming zero arrests seems improbable too.
I do also feel it's quite convenient that the lack of breakdown allows people to clap back with accusations of encouraging stalking and harassment.
I think this is the link where the chap asks for legal advice: https://www.reddit.com/r/LegalAdviceUK/comments/1vxkcic/poli...
----
Police have arrested and questioned 3 of my mates from our private WhatsApp group chat. They're asking to speak to me too, but I'm working abroad.
They've all been arrested and had interviews under s127 of the Communications Act.
There's 4 of us in a group chat on WhatsApp where we chat and also make some edgy jokes and stuff. We're two white, an Indian and a black guy who studied at uni together.
All three of them have been arrested and interviewed today. I don't know anyrhing more than this. This info comes from their gf and fiance.
I'm working abroad but I have received a WhatsApp message and attempted call from a UK officer who identified himself wanting to speak to me about an ongoing enquiry into a reported issue.
My mate's fiance says it was reported by another guy's ex who he dumped 4 weeks ago. I'm inclined to believe that as the officer's message said he was acting on a report.
The thing is, we shared a lot of edgy jokes beteen us - but it was literally just the 4 of us in a private fucking chat. Some of the jokes we made were racisr, but they were all banter directed at each other. Others were just taking the piss out of the major news events like saying "Who needs people flying planes when our own shitty buildings just burn themselves down?" about Grenfell.
It's crass, but it's literally just us talking shit in private. These messages arent public or anything.
I can't get through to any of the guys. Is this something the police are actually going to try and prosecute?!
At this point should I just not come home? I'm dual Austrian-British and Austria doesn't extradite to the UK.
How so? Since Austria doesn't (typically) allow dual citizenship.
> Austria doesn't extradite to the UK.
With what guarantee? In 2013 Austria forced the landing of the plane of the Bolivian president on orders from the US because they had intelligence Snowden might be on board.
So if you think Austria will hesitate to ship your ass to the UK if you piss off the wrong elites, just because there's no official bi-lateral extradition agreement, you're kidding yourself. If needed, they'll just make up a spin story that you're some major child molester or something, to justify their actions in the media and reassure the public on why the violation of your rights was justified and they'll never ever do it again to anyone else as long as they behave, pinky promise wink-wink. In short, the people with guns can break the rules at will with little to no accountability.
However, if you want hard evidence what that post was claiming, I can give you a real citation from 2018:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-46106224
> A house linked to an "offensive" video showing a model of Grenfell Tower being burned on a bonfire has been searched by police. Six men [...] were arrested on suspicion of a public order offence and have been released under investigation. A video shared on social media shows a cardboard model of the tower being set alight by a laughing crowd.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-46112026
> Can I be offensive in my own home?
> Basically, yes. [...] if you make offensive comments in your home and they are recorded and posted online, it might be possible that you could be prosecuted.
However, the CPS appealed against his acquittal, and it was quashed in 2021: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-58054431
He was retried in 2022, where this time he pled guilty and was given ultimately a minor slap on the wrist: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-61160971
Ultimately, everyone is happy:
- people who saw the video and were offended by it are happy "something was done"
- the CPS is happy because they gott'im
- the courts are happy because they got paid double
- the guy accused of offending people is happy this multi-year ordeal where the CPS won't stop hounding him until he confesses his guilt is finally over
- MPs are happy they didn't need to change any laws no matter how unreasonable they were
All good, right?
Are we also going to spend years prosecuting someone who mockingly reenacts the sinking of the Titanic? Or is that somehow water under the bridge?
It's political correctness gone mad.
> "By 2017, Grenfell Tower housed a remarkably diverse community. Up to 600 people lived in the building’s 120 flats, representing a rich tapestry of nationalities, ethnicities, and generations. Residents hailed from countries including the UK, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Egypt, Eritrea, Iran, Lebanon, Morocco, and Syria, among others." - https://grenfell.soton.ac.uk/week-1-who-lived-in-the-tower/
> "The Grenfell Tower fire inquiry "must not ignore" the impact of race and poverty on the disaster, a lawyer representing survivors has said. .. The inquiry returned this week after a four-month break due to coronavirus. "The Grenfell fire did not happen in a vacuum," said Mr Thomas in his opening statement. "A majority of the Grenfell residents who died were people of colour."""" - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-53320082
The people in the video didn't upload it to a social media platform like Youtube, they wanted to keep it private to their friends. It would also have been taken down by the likes of Youtube. The only reason this case got to where it did is because the video ultimately reached a wide audience virally by people forwarding it on, and that enough of that audience didn't like it and wanted someone "done" for it, and the state obliged. But nasty, mean, dark, sick, racist, sexist, bigoted, misogynist and all other -ist jokes are told day-in, day-out, between people who like that sort of humour, no matter how much other morally righteous "right side of history" people want that not to happen. You can't stop them. You can only go after scapegoats if such things breach their usual boundaries.
Over 1,500 people died at sea when the Titanic sank, including black, Chinese, Jewish, Turkish, etc. passengers. It was an dreadful fate for each person, and it caused much grief for each passengers' family and friends. I'm still going to joke about it, though. "How do you think the unthinkable? With an itheberg."
Recently I saw a clip on GB News where one of their analyst said that anyone that opposes a war and/or conscription with Russia will need to put in prison. The show host, Jacob Rees Mogg and Lord Redwood saw nothing wrong with the statements.
None of these people have been in the armed forces and are too old to be called up for conscription.
319 years, 4 months, 3 weeks, 2 days to be exact.
https://lordslibrary.parliament.uk/select-communications-off...
This is part of what started the death of BBM and proliferation of news via social media. You’d go on Twitter and see all the reports or riots and burning buildings then go to the BBC and… nothing.
All of this is to say that successive British governments, over a span of decades, have been actively destroying freedom of speech and a right to privacy for its citizens.
With AI and the rise of populism combined with the absolute decimation of the average person’s attention span it is going to get a lot worse.
What we have is a lot of people changing the narrative since to discredit the BBC and divide everyone further.
The point at which the BBC started reporting was the same as all other major news outlets: after the point that they just looked daft for not reporting it.
I know this as my videos of the riots took my little blog from 50 - 100 views a day to thousands per minute…
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1ydQg9NbsQ
In the US you can be arrested for the following speech:
* true threats of violence * incitement to break the law specifically * crimes of speech: soliciting crime, fraudulent representations, lying under oath * stalking/cyberstalking
So lets quit this idea that its some abstract of "political orthodoxy". If you don't like abortion then campaign but don't go around pretending to be catholic batman and harassing people who are making that choice.
Who decides what is hate speech? Apparently the current UK government has decided these things (among others) are so hateful their perpetrators must be arrested:
- private WhatsApp chats between friends
- standing still in public with hands folded in prayer
Be careful when you give sharp tools to the golem.
I don't appreciate this thin end of the wedge argument. Policy is more pragmatic. Read up on what most of mainland Europe had to do in order to suppress all the Hitler Youth children after the second world war. They oppressed their free speech and it was the right thing to do.
> Who decides what is hate speech?
The rules are there for everyone to read[0]. If you want a rule of thumb, don't discriminate based on any aspect of the Equalities Act 2010 and you'll be fine.
[0] https://www.cps.gov.uk/prosecution-guidance/racist-and-relig...
> standing still in public with hands folded in prayer
Don't whitewash this shit. You know full well what we're talking about is specifically going to a place that you know you're not allowed to be in, doing a protest you're not allowed to do. Playing with the line is still taking the piss and the UK believe in the spirit of the law to avoid all this mucking about with the specification.
> private WhatsApp chats between friends
As far as I'm aware the only case of this is when police officers were arrested for grossly offensive messages. However they weren't charged with hate speech but rather: improper use of a public electronic communications network. 12 weeks in jail. They were discovered because it was the same group chat that Wayne Couzens (also a police officer at the time) was in, who is currently serving a life sentence for the kidnap, rape and murder of Sarah Everard.
I don't think you know what happened. At least one case was a person standing quietly outside on a public sidewalk while not impeding traffic or people walking.
At best you can say it is loitering.
Second, if it was a legitimate arrest why was she was paid out by the government for a settlement?
Also, this has happened to multiple people who haven't organized prayer vigils in the past, not that it would matter if they had.
DON'T PROTEST ABORTION NEAR OR OUTSIDE ABORTION CLINICS. Its that simple. If you're an anti-abortion campaigner, don't do your shit near abortion clinics.
I think the prosecution failed as it transpired the clinic had actually closed. Which demonstrates the issue. She was trying to get arrested so it didn't even matter that the clinic was operational.
We have such a fundamental difference of an opinion on the thought crime issue that focusing on this specific case isn't going to go anywhere so continuing this conversation is just going to be a waste.
I hope your thoughts don't get you arrested.
Its not a thought crime, its a crime crime.
Second, it clearly wasn't against the law because they dropped the charges and gave her a settlement.
Third, just because something is against the law doesn't mean that you shouldn't have the right to say it. The law does not dictate morality.
If the parliament passed a law saying you cannot criticize them, would you say well it is the law and as such it isn't a violation of free speech? Would you call somebody doing that a criminal?
Fourth, the police literally said "You’ve said you’ve been engaging in prayer, which is the offense.". Meaning the offense was literally her thinking. If you are not allowed to have wrong think then there is clearly thought crimes.
Why don't you see the difference between free speech and harassment? Your stance undermines free speech by giving it zero responsibility. These are rights hard won by our ancestors and you cheapen them by pretending they're all about some cheap technicality that permits toxic groups to intimidate other people.
If you think that is harassment then this is hopeless. Have a good day.
As usual, the written law only gives a vague outline, so people like you can defend it with motte-and-bailey. In practice, stickers with slogans such as "It's OK to be white" and "Natives losing jobs; migrants pouring in" get you sent to jail [1,2]. But I'm sure you're okay with banning "race hate" or "incitement", so here's a question for you - do you think "Black People!" by the poet laureate of New Jersey, Amiri Baraka, should be banned? Maybe even is already banned in the UK, since I'm sure their anti-hate laws are enforced evenly? Here are the lyrics:
You can’t steal nothin’ from a white man. He’s already stole it. He owes you anything you want, even his life. All the stores will open if you will say the magic words. The magic words are: Up against the wall M-Fer, this is a stick up! [..] Run up and down Broad Street, Negroes, take the shit you want. Take their lives if need be, but get what you what, what you need.
> we're talking about is specifically going to a place that you know you're not allowed to be in, doing a protest you're not allowed to do.
"The law is good because you know you're not allowed to break the law." - yes, thank you, we know how laws work. That doesn't mean we agree with all of them. If she's not intimidating or obstructing anyone, she should be allowed.
> However they weren't charged with hate speech but rather: improper use of a public electronic communications network.
"Impropriety" is an even lower and vaguer standard than "hate".
> They were discovered because it was the same group chat that Wayne Couzens (also a police officer at the time) was in, who is currently serving a life sentence for the kidnap, rape and murder of Sarah Everard.
But he did not discuss or organize that murder on the chat, so this is just a sleazy attempt at guilt by association. Want to apply that standard evenly? Do you think everyone that shared group chats (where "improprieties" were spoken) with e.g. Tyler James Robinson, or Bryanna Dutcher, or Shannon Brandt, should go to jail? "Should" here refers to a moral, not legal standard - we're discussing what the law should be, not what it is, so don't bother with "laws in USA are different" counterarguments.
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c51zn2l33r9o
[2] https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/03/04/the-tyrannical-jail...
> so here's a question for you - do you think "Black People!" by the poet laureate of New Jersey, Amiri Baraka, should be banned?
Yeah understanding the UK in 2027 based on a poem written in 1967 New Jersey USA is a great idea. Keep them coming squire, what's next: should I write a paper on volcanism based on the lasagne I cooked last night? It was quite hot.
> That doesn't mean we agree with all of them
that's fine. Just don't wutface when you get arrested and roll around on the floor like some kid in social acting all wounded.
> But he did not discuss or organize that murder on the chat, so this is just a sleazy attempt at guilt by association.
Is this really the hill you want to die on? Protecting a bunch of people who were good mates with a rapist murderer cop and participated in his group chat. Lets dig further, I wonder what they talked about:
* sexually assaulting women
* blaming domestic abuse victims for repeated abuse
oh yeah. Huh.
> you're still so soft that you've managed to think that Neo-Nazism is ok
Just make sure next time you defend censorship, that you open with "It's OK to be white" is Nazism and jailable, instead of hiding behind "don't discriminate and you'll be fine!"
* Britons Build Britain
* Equality or Quality – you can only have one
* Natives losing jobs; migrants pouring in
* We will be a minority in our homeland by 2066
* Diversity – designed to fail, built to replace
* Mass immigration is white genocide
* They seek conquest not asylum
* There is a war on whites
* Second-generation? Third? Fourth? You have to go back
* Stop immigration, start repatriation.
Ofc many of these are in violation of the Equalities Act 2010.
Idk wtf is going on in the US. Maybe you've conveniently forgotten WW2 but this shit is a thousand times more destructive then the thing it fears. If this shit isn't stamped on it gets us all killed. Nazism should always be illegal due to the tolerance paradox. It seeks to strip away people's rights, dehumanise them and murder them by initially claiming there is a specific filter that you're safe from. It then takes that same standard and applies it internally to any opposition without the filter. My grandparents were both part of that war. I haven't forgotten, you clearly have.
Isn't it great how the judge didn't clarify which ones were illegal? Even when they send you to jail, they won't tell you exactly what is and isn't illegal to say!
> We will be a minority in our homeland by 2066
I'm not sure why you included this one. I don't think any of them should be banned, especially in the wake of the estimated 250k predominantly-British victims of predominantly-Muslim rape gangs, but this one is a simple statement of fact, the best estimate given current trends: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/white-briton...
> Maybe you've conveniently forgotten WW2
We fought WW2 so that we could continue to exist as a people. It's the lessons of WW2 (not that they should be needed) that teach us how dangerous such censorship is.
And the men who fought in WW2 for the Allies were pro-segregation and against interracial marriage, maybe you should have talked to your grandparents instead of getting your history from Hollywood:
https://www.afhra.af.mil/Research/Military-Integration/
How do I feel about the country today? My two uncle’s gave their lives for this country, my father’s health was broken from gas in WW1. I did my little bit, my brother did his national service in the Canal Zone in Egypt. What has been our reward? EVERYTHING we fought for has been taken from us and given to foreigners, we are now third rate citizens in our own country. Our enemies rule us from Brussels and we are being colonized by ** and *** in this country. There is not one political party that is prepared to stand up and fight for our country and indigenous population. The holocaust is now being carried out on us. What are my main regrets? That I didn’t fight for Hitler, at least he was for his own people.* - https://archive.org/details/the-unknown-warriors (out of all the testimonies in that book, only about two are positive)
‘Greatest Generation’ runs counter to its wholesome image in survey on race, sex and combat during World War II - https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2021/12/20/greatest-g...
How many times do I have to reference the Equalities Act 2010 before you actually bother to read it?
> Meanwhile newspapers and academics and employers can disparage and discriminate against whites as much as they want, and it's never "hate"
It's not my fault you don't know what the definition of "whiteness" actually is. I appreciate its not a useful choice of word to use in the modern era, but you need to appreciate it was coined in the 1920s. I trust I don't need to explain to you how that world looked. That a segregated underclass might choose language to describe their oppression that doesn't take into account the feelings of their oppression.
However I do believe that children today use these concepts in a more malicious fashion. The most ugly of which is misunderstanding the sociological idea that "racism without power isn't relevant" and failing to understand it ONLY applies to structural racism and not interpersonal racism. But hey, racist ideas are tempting to everyone I guess, which only goes to show how alike we all actually are.
> I'm not sure why you included this one.
Cos its bullshit and shows people can't count I guess. Also I love how "plurality" is an alien concept that is lost on everyone that talks like that.
> I don't think any of them should be banned
Well tough shit, they are banned because this is a European country and we're not as soft as the yanks are on this, we thankfully still have dread for the spectre of Nazism.
> And the men who fought in WW2 for the Allies were pro-segregation and against interracial marriage, maybe you should have talked to your grandparents instead of getting your history from Hollywood:
Hollywood, do you realise I'm British? Here's[0] the relevant part of history that you clearly have no understanding of. Its an informational film shown to American soldiers when they came over to the UK to prepare for Normandy. I've timestamped the relevant section for you. There's also the "Battle of Bamber Bridge"[1] which shows it play out in real life. There was a stark difference between the US and the UK at that time around the subject of segregation that you are entirely blind to.
What's laughable about Americans is that they're weird about race. Like _really_ weird and they have zero self awareness about it. Nazism is a scourge and if you understood European history and its post war cultural context you'd appreciate that the lessons we took from the war are very different from the ones you've seemed to fixate upon.
Freedom is about not being killed because you're different, not about being free to harass and abuse minority groups.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SyYSBBE1DFw&t=1520s
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Bamber_Bridge
Oh you've never seen an American movie, have you? And the Unknown Warriors book I cited was interviews with British veterans.
> Cos its bullshit
If you're going to dismiss a population expert without even bothering to give an argument why, then I won't bother with you.
The idea that I got my account of the war from Hollywood as a Brit is absurd. I grew up with a first-hand account of the war living in the same house as me.
> If you're going to dismiss a population expert without even bothering to give an argument why, then I won't bother with you.
I've run the numbers myself a few times and 2066 is the domain of charlatans, not "population experts". I imagine this is one of those "white british" ones that don't count Irish people and also consider the loss of majority into plurality the same thing as "being a minority". Its all designed to generate fear, its so transparent and you should be embarrassed that you're falling for it. We're on hacker news. Make a github, make a model, run the numbers, ask gipity why your model is wrong, make it better, work out the numbers, learn the range, ask what you do about halfies, how to model birthrates that normalise after just two or even one generation. Its not 2066 unless you _really_ want it to be. That's the thing, its victim thirst. Everyone wants to be a victim in order to make their complaints feel justified. It ain't about what ACTUALLY happens in 2066, its about feeling angry in 2026.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Unless I'm missing something, that was once, like a decade ago or something, a testy conversation about history. I was shadow banned for ages and then some mod noticed my comments were good quality and restored me. So that seems like a bit of an uncharitable read given the age of my account and my average comment score.
I appreciate I was far off the mark here and I appreciate the warning. This particular subject is very triggering for me given the impact in my nation of American money influencing our politics. I'll try my best to be better but its hard.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
* What if; the problems in my society are not caused by people like me, but some external force?
Its extraordinarily tempting to humans, especially those who find self-reflection uncomfortable. So instead of property prices being a consequence of decades of NIMBYism and failure to build social housing for decades (uh-oh that sounds like something I might have voted for), it's reframed as an issue directly linked to immigration (ahhhh, very calming, I never wanted that!).
The problem is that its a mental health issue pretending to be a political movement. When a politician decides to discard all scruples and exploit this comforting lie in politics, they build a self-consuming state. By definition this state cannot be wrong and therefore everyone else is to blame. So when it makes mistakes, as all states do; it finds a scapegoat and once its done with the first scapegoat, it moves onto another, then another, then another, then another. We're all on this list, its just a case of order. If you try to push this then you'll get us all fucking killed you muppet.
Nazis need therapy, not politics. Alternatively go first wave and find yourselves early victims like the brown shirts. There's no loyalty in these movements.
Unless it's hate speech against "Zionists" and/or Jews , then it's tolerated, often celebrated. Not all hate speech is created equal.
* 19 May 2026 - John Haynes - Arrested after incidents of threatening behaviour; convicted of racially aggravated harassment involving antisemitic abuse and threats.
* 9 May 2026 - Dylan Ossei - Arrested after shouting threats at Jewish people in Enfield and assaulting a man; pleaded guilty to aggravated assault, fear of violence, and harassment.
* 7 May 2026 - Adam Bedoui - Arrested after filming and verbally abusing a Jewish man in Hackney for social media; pleaded guilty.
* 7 May 2026 - Abdelkader Bousloub - Arrested in the same Hackney incident; pleaded guilty to a religiously aggravated public order offence.
* 6 May 2026 - Wayne Kelly - Arrested after shouting antisemitic abuse and threats at Jewish men walking to a synagogue in Salford; pleaded guilty.
* 1 May 2026 - Unnamed 57-year-old man - Arrested on suspicion of threatening a Jewish man while using racially offensive language in London; police reported he was released on bail.
* 23 April 2026 - Shafiq Rahman - Arrested after shouting antisemitic abuse and threatening a Jewish man in Slough; pleaded guilty to offences involving words, assault, and damage.
* 5 April 2026 - Munir Saleh - Arrested after reports of shouting antisemitic abuse and spitting at people in London; charged with aggravated threatening behaviour and assault offences.
* 24 March 2026 - Jean Charles Tavius - Arrested after reports of shouting antisemitic abuse and throwing a rock at a moving car; charged with threatening behaviour and damage offences.
* By 23 December 2025 - Unnamed 28-year-old woman - Arrested on suspicion of an aggravated public order offence over alleged antisemitic comments in a Manchester protest speech. The police announcement did not report a conviction.
* 3 October 2025 - Aiden Stanley - Arrested over a social media post about Jewish people following the Manchester synagogue attack; pleaded guilty to sending a grossly offensive message.
* September 2025 - Thomas Webster - Arrested over social media posts that included antisemitic messages; pleaded guilty to offences involving material intended to stir up hatred.
* July 2024 - Lee Cole - Arrested after investigators found antisemitic and other hateful social media posts; pleaded guilty to inciting racial hatred offences.
* 3 April 2024 - Damion Bennett - Arrested over antisemitic videos posted on Gab; pleaded guilty to distributing recordings intended to stir up racial hatred.
* March 2024 - Zakir Hussain - Arrested after police linked him to an X account posting antisemitic comments and support for proscribed groups; pleaded guilty to public order and terrorism offences.
* November 2023 - Elliot Jackson - Arrested following reports of antisemitic social media messages; pleaded guilty to malicious communications.
* February 2023 - Robert Taylor - Arrested following an investigation involving verbal abuse of Jewish people, antisemitic material, and other conduct; pleaded guilty to public order and terrorism offences.
* February 2022 - Jaden Milne - Arrested over a conference speech containing antisemitic and other hateful material; pleaded guilty to public order and aggravated behaviour offences.
* 12 October 2021 - Oliver Riley - Arrested after posting extremist material, including antisemitic content, online; later admitted communications and terrorism offences.
> Not all hate speech is created equal.
This victim cosplay is rancid btw. It's painfully transparent. It's ugly to listen to two awful sides claiming the other is the _real_ problem and how their side is so victimised. These are the mannerisms of teenagers in social care. Please develop some level of responsibility and self-respect.
So this is normal in your eyes?
Please don't lock me up for saying you're dumb by the way. I know that's probably a serious hate crime in your eyes.
Find the same article on AP news, or Reuters or something.
I've been extremely invested in the British press since around 1992, so this experience of having someone not-British with seemingly limited understanding of its press telling me "you're too dumb" when discussing it, is quite amusing.
I have long considered what people think is "intelligence" is simply an appreciation for understanding how wrong they might be about their first impressions and a willingness to check themselves. This conversation is quite the re-enforcement of this idea. The strength of your conviction is inversely proportional to your level of knowledge on this matter.
There is speech and there are consequences for speech.
If I incite or state that I am going to commit violence, stalking, rape or murder, should I face consequences? Yes. That's what is happening.
There are outlying cases which will be used to discredit this perspective but reality is there are a hell of a lot of very not nice people out there making active threats to people.
Each person gets their day in court.
Also, shit like, "Authorities arrested a grandmother for silently holding a sign outside an abortion clinic that said “Coercion is a crime, here to talk, if you want.”" - Yeah, take your fucking signs away from people trying to get an abortion. It's harassment.
And, to top if off, you're American. I'm not sure how you can call our government the "bad guys".
Getting really tired of the UK govs incompetence/maliciousness around digital law making
I guess if I lose my phone on a trip, I wanna be able to walk into an Apple store and restore it from their cloud copy that the feds have backed up & pored over by LLMs too. (not sure that’s done in realtime for 100% of the population, but tokens will be cheap enough eventually - they have their pre-LLM solution too)
I think I keep Signal data mostly out of the cloud though, declining to use their latest features. Hidden notifications too. Is it only personal family updates, yes, but the principle makes me feel good.
That angry’s up the blood of libertarians, but ultimately from the point of view of the State it has to be able to do its job of detecting and prosecuting serious crime, and it will redraw privacy lines whenever that is substantially impeded by new technology.
In reality the secret police did not care about laws or constitution, so private mail correspondence was intercepted and opened, read, then closed again with care, trying to make this undetectable, and the telephone lines of persons of interest were tapped.
Nonetheless, it was understood that this surveillance is actually illegal, so it was hidden as much as possible.
Nowadays, the government institutions of most "free" states, like USA and UK have granted themselves far more rights to do surveillance of their citizens than the dictators of the past.
Detecting and prosecuting serious crime does not need any such general surveillance. The general surveillance just makes much cheaper the detecting of serious crimes, but in exchange it gives the means to the government employees to commit serious crimes themselves.
I am judging by a simple fact, that "please confirm your age" screen is now mandatory during the iPhone setup in all countries, and in some it's behind a KYC. I have a strong opinion that this is insane. And once they let the foot in the door - there is no closing it.
That's not how to use "pearl clutch". And the UK doesn't do that, and it isn't very free or open, except in the deranged mind of Kier Starmer[0]. Classic liberalism in the UK has long given way to regulation of speech, proud conformity, state dependency, and all the other things that are hallmarks of people who treat the state as a surrogate parent.
[0] https://uk.news.yahoo.com/starmer-defends-uk-commitment-free...
The CCP would like nothing more than everyone living in a democracy saying they're just as oppressed as those living in China. Then their own citizens might abandon such foolish notions as human rights.
We should point out the hypocrisy of our governments but not by using that hypocrisy to minimize China's human rights abuses.
If you look at the treatment of pro-Palestine movements in the West, Flock cameras, Palantir contracts, age verification mandates, encryption 'front door' requests, clamping down on whistleblowers etc. then it seems to me that we're heading where China is pretty fast and that the West definitely wants to be where China is, just without the high speed trains.
What I am dismayed by in discussions like this is how simplistic they are i.e. China bad, West good so don't compare.
The collective West just assisted a genocide of an occupied population of people, so when is it going to be 'as bad'? My guess is never because people here want to feel superior over China without actually doing anything for it.
I wouldn't be surprised if you tried to come up with all sorts of excuses why the West is not responsible for Israeli actions in Gaza, it's not a genocide etc. without pausing for a second to realize the Chinese also have plenty to say about what you object to them doing is not authoritarian.
> What I am dismayed by in discussions like this is how simplistic they are
Once you really notice the anti-china framing literally everywhere in media, it is really hard for it all not to become meaningless propaganda. It's itself no different from state control just because it's private media because that private controls the state. We aren't allowed a clear eyed view of china, only a carefully curated antagonistic one. But they aren't our enemies at all, it's absurd how obvious that is, the west is the aggressor, not china.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houses_are_for_living,_not_for...
Even the Uyghurs?
I am not aware of a country where that's not true to some extent. But I can't see i.e. [1] happening in the West.
1 - https://www.reuters.com/legal/transactional/china-tax-crackd...
Apple is, from a purely practical standpoint, more a Chinese operation than an American one.
Additionally, the humans who make all of the iPhones and iPads are Chinese people, subject to Chinese law. Apple has to do exactly what the CCP wants, at least for now. They are desperately trying to ramp up phone production in India, but there is huge expertise at Foxconn that isn’t in India as yet.
Not quite.
The request to confirm age is there, but actually completing it isn't mandatory (though granted, it does leave an 'alert' thingy on your phone settings saying you haven't finished setting it up).
They obvioualy never ever resisted anything except its a good PR stunt.
We are quickly heading to a world where governments want us to KYC everything, and we saw with the Revolut breach what happens when very, very bad people gain access to our private data.
Even though they have zero presence in a country.
I'm generally okay with "how old are you?" without KYC and changeable later. It just allows apps and websites to display age-appropriate content.
It's a foot in the door. Once this question exists, the next logical one is "prove it".
But anyway it's not really the same thing until and unless governments start making motions to collect a legal name. And even then it still provides some general utility to the user which providing an age doesn't (unless you're setting up the device for a child ofc).
iCloud already protects sensitive categories of data (like Passwords, Health data, Messages in iCloud, etc) with end-to-end encryption by default.
Except that there is a footnote in Apple's security document where they confirm that Messages in iCloud is not end-to-end encrypted if you don't enable ADP and have iCloud Backup enabled (which is probably most users):
Standard data protection: When iCloud Backup is enabled, the keys to your backups are secured in Apple data centers. If you use both iCloud Backup and Messages in iCloud, your backup includes a copy of the Messages in iCloud encryption key to help you recover your data.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/102651
So, there is always a backup of Messages in iCloud accessible to Apple and thus (US?) law enforcement, unless you enable ADP and the people you communicate with also use ADP.
WhatsApp is similar by the way. Unless you enable E2E backups, they end up in iCloud/Google Drive backups and are only encrypted at rest. Of the major messengers, I think only Signal completely opts out of iCloud backups and have their own real E2E-encrypted backups.
Even most technical people I talk to do not know this and don't have ADP enabled.
There are a lot of weak defaults like that.
Apple has moved more things into the bucket of "we do not have the keys for this" over time, but pretending that this isn't a tradeoff for the common customer is disingenuous. That's why ADP exists, so that those who want to make a different tradeoff can do so.
Commenters on HN tend to be technically savvy and tend to want the defaults to be tailored to a technically savvy customer base. That's fine, but that's not a real representation of all of the smartphone users out there, and in this case Apple is directly offering the choice that they usually get knocked for taking away.
It should be possible to force your messages to be excluded from backup even by recipients. Otherwise it's just for show when it comes to real life.
Not all your data, just the data exchanged with that person.
But how could you force this? They could always copy it or whatever. Yes, I know, defaults.
But this would then need to be somehow enforced on the other side, right? Like preventing copying, or screenshotting, etc. And in that case, see the HN thread the other day about applications messing with these functions and how people want their devices to be theirs and not controlled by some third party.
You gave the answer yourself. If the person you are writing with has E2EE enabled for message backups then just exclude that chat from backups on your end or enable E2EE for that chat. That means if you take the restore route without having access to the keys that conversation will not be restored.
You could even let people overwrite that setting. Preventing screenshots or copying has nothing to with this. Apple is claiming that message are end to end encrypted when in reality their defaults are set so that they are not. That is a lie and al they would need to do to change that is to change those defaults.
If people do a risk analysis, the most likely scenario they worry about is probably losing access to pictures of their (grand)children, not being attacked by a nation state three-letter agency.
> There are a lot of weak defaults like that.
The defaults are set to protect against the scenarios that are most important and/or likely to happen, and for most folks that's a hassle-free way to recover their data in case their phones/computers get lost, destroyed, or stolen.
I'm glad that ADP is there for that that actually need it, but for myself and my family members that I'm often asked to do IT support for, I would not want it all. If I told someone to enable it, and they lost access to the photos and videos of some of the most important moments of their live, it would probably be relationship-ending.
I also recommend people print out their photos and put them in a shoe box in a closet, and set up a account recovery in case something should happen to them:
* https://support.apple.com/en-ca/102608
One of the few good things about WhatsApp is that Meta can very credibly claim that they can't access the backups (as they're not stored by Meta). Meta holds the encryption key & Google/Apple hold the backups, so at least you now have deal with two entities to get the data.
I don't think without forcing more customers to loose data (e.g. by requiring them keeping an encryption pin/key) it's possible to perform backups in a (much) better way.
I have full confidence that the industry would be quick to innovate if they were forced to, but that's not in their interest nor the government's interest.
Here's a simple one: Build an open standards-based system where users choose their backup provider and let them decide whether they prefer to have full control over the encryption keys or whether they want them to be managed by a third party. Educate them so that they can at least try to make an informed decision. Warn them about the risks and jurisdictions of built-in providers.
If someone wants to continue using their device as-is? Cool, 2 taps and they're done.
Do they want to store all of their app backups on their NAS? Make it as easy as switching your default browser.
WhatsApp performs (on Android) backups inside a normal directory. You can just backup it via e.g. Syncthing, which I've done in the past.
It doesn't get much more standards based. Strongly pushing users to deviate from the standard flow IMHO risks them quickly choosing poorer options (e.g. a free, dubious, online hoster). At least with the current setup, the "easy option" is quite safe in terms of not loosing data and very low risk that anyone apart from you and governments with lawful access ever accesses the data.
There is an iCloud option on Signal. It's on by default - is that Apple or Signal's doing? - but yes, iCloud can be turned off and Signal have their own e2e backup, if you want to back up. Also a paid option.
That's a very user-unfriendly place to be.
You can't be security-maxxing and user-experience-maxxing at the same time. I do like Apple's approach which at least gives you the option.
The UK is a minor footnote. They can afford to lose it if push came to shove, but for now they're willing to make conciliatory gestures.
I would hope to see Apple pull out of the UK market over this, and certainly to stop selling Apple devices to the UK government and to remove the UK government entities from Apple services.
Think different.
Don't be Evil.
Works better. Plays better
Where did that all go? Same place as the Christmas bonus and empathy above middle management.
Tim's public displays for privacy would be a perfect cover story for a gagged backdoored device.
Not likely the case in 2015 Apple nor probably even now, but perhaps a technique for the future or elsewhere to watch out for.
Could I flash coreboot/libreboot, (mostly) disable IME, get opensource firmware for every peripheral, and get a chain of custody for every part from boule to finished part? perhaps, but this is not realistic for most people.
You're making a long list of assumptions that are not true. Incremental, improved privacy offered by apple over something like Windows is a significant improvement for most people.
Going to court is the pretty good "put up or shut up", idk what else you are expecting here.
Maybe Apple should withdraw all encryption support from all UK government accounts. The Prime Minister can use a Huawei or some chunky thing from a military contractor.
Especially since big tech is steaming ahead to mandating passkeys that only they are allowed to control/backup. Not long until all governments could intercept your passwords to all services.
Apple should withdraw from the UK until the UK government learns to respect encryption and privacy.
I'm a Brit and I've advocated that Apple pull out of the UK over this. It annoys me that these companies seemingly have no principles and will just comply with our government's authoritarian demands. As a citizen there's nothing I can do, so it's really annoying that those who could be doing something choose to do nothing for a little extra profit.
- Which party do we vote for if we don't want the government to keep pushing digital id?
- Which party is committing to stopping facial recognition trials at London Underground stations?
Conservatives and Labour both push for the same things. With Reform's anti-immigration stance, I wouldn't bet on them finding some magical solution that doesn't involve even more demands for constant identity verification to prove you're allowed to be here.
Since last year, you now can't register a company in the UK without having your face scanned. Face scans are also now a very common requirement to open a bank account, get a tech job, buy a property, rent a property. I don't recall being asked to vote on that?
If you vote Democrat next election, will the US stop taking the fingerprints of every visitor upon entry?
All the political parties are completely apathetic about these sorts of issues.
The notion of democracy is used to justify and legitimise things that people don't get to vote on.
it is?
Only disadvantage that you will need to pay fot services via US gift cards as you need US bank cards otherwise.
AFAIK you cant just assign non-US bank card to a billing on US Apple account. At least it was the case before and at least for purpose of switching account region.
Thus you use USD gift cards since they easy to buy.
But keep in mind you have to disable all subscriptions first and also your family group if you have one must also switch their accounts to US.
So yeah pretending you're US customer is no brainer with Apple and unlike Google they dont have automatic detection that will move your account to other region.
Beware you can only change account region once a year or something.
I thought they at least used something complex to attempt to prevent non-EU users using third-party app stores. I also recall a legitimate EU user is not allowed to travel abroad too long before losing access to those stores.
What Google does is completely different - they enforce local regulations on your accounts just if you keep using them within specific region for too long. Though Google dont actually change billing region or Google Play region.
After spending 8-12 years in a single gmail account I learned my lesson. Don't get entrenched or you can't be flexible.
Some delusional "save the children" anti-privacy extremist doesn't have the political capital or the technical insight to convince the government to create a law to issue secret gag orders.
People with good civil intention don't just propose the idea, or get the momentum, to institutionalize such mechanisms.
So who are the major influencers, and their thoughts, for pushing this?
You won't be criticizing your boss/mayor/president/local politician/whoever, if you have to do it from an account tied to your own name. Having everyine install a digital ID on their phones (to prove they're old enough to jerk off to pornhub) is the first step, the "real name" policy is the next. The encryption ... well, one of the separate steps inbetween those two.
For the last 25 years certain western governments (especially the US and UK/5 eyes) have focused on control over democracy. They've sold it as protections, defense, safety, etc. It's the opposite. Control, power, abuse, and the votes/$$$ to ignore their constituents. This is usually lead by conservative or far right parties who have zero history with abusing power and control (ex McCarthyism in the US).
We live in a world of surveillance. Even if most of that is to market you ads and extract capital it's still degrading and less safe for anyone but the core in group(s).
the governments themselves. left, right, or center, their number one priority is to maintain their power.
it amuses me immeasurably when the useful idiots in the West cheer on the policies of China and Russia. think of the children, think of the terrorists, think of the racists, think of the disinformation, blah blah blah. there are a myriad excuses but only one true goal -- suppression of dissent.
the UK establishment in particular primarily feels threatened by unredacted coverage of the consequences of its immigration policy. not because Reform would reverse that policy -- every "far-right" party in Europe had at best slowed the influx, not halted or reversed it -- but simply because someone else would be receiving lobbyists' money, favors, and sinecures after retirement.
https://www.nationalcrimeagency.gov.uk/what-we-do/crime-thre... for plebs, FCA for banks.
but bitcoin isn't anonymous, each coin and transaction is traceable, so its a terrible tool for money laundering.
no one writes a fresh C99 project in a 2000s Visual Studio with whatever formatting was the most trendy back then anymore.
PS: If you think the British gov is authoritarian.. well, you might not know what the term means and/or anything about the spectrum of governments operating today or in the past.
The British government is certainly not as authoritarian as those in China or Russia, but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s still terrible and restricts people’s rights. For example, you can be detained for as long as they want if you refuse to unlock your encrypted device.
Supose you live in USA, your chickens have a list of laws, those laws apply to USA. If you try to sell those chickens in UK or Europe you'll find that your company will not be allowed to operate, and if you continue someone will go to jail.
Maybe digital products have an easy way out, but apple is not digital and they may need to find a way to comply.
Can Apple afford to lose the UK market? Almost certainly yes -- it's a fairly minor global player. Can the current UK government afford to deal with the massive fallout of banning all Apple products right now? That might be, as Sir Humphrey Appleby would say, a very courageous move.
In other words, Apple could simply state that in order to protect their users they cannot and will not do this, and will withdraw from the market rather than comply. That puts the onus on the UK government to either put up or shut up.
It would be fascinating to see how this would play out. Would "think of the children" and "OMG, terrorists!!" win against, "but I still want my iProducts"?
We don't want it the other way around; companies placed outside the borders doing and selling whatever they want without a care. So we end up in a negotiation.
Apple choose to maliciously comply; subtly revealing the TCN, giving all UK users notices about what their government demanded of them to encourage public outrage, and push on the correct parts of the UK government that has their interest in mind.
They can do both of things. There's no law against leaving a country for not respecting human rights like privacy and encryption.
No, but there is a cost.
It may actually be illegal in US law for Apple to leave the UK market for ideological reasons. Public companies are beholden to shareholders and can be sued for not acting in their interest (fiduciary duty, Delaware General Corporation Law). (I loathe these laws, but that's a separate discussion entirely.)
So sure they _can_, but at a cost that strikes the option from the cards entirely.