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Independent review of UK national security law warns of overreach

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Re: Independent review of UK national security law warns of overreach

#191

Post by fao_ »

mosura wrote: post #49
miroljub wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand why you got heavily downvoted. Yes, there are governments that are worse than European, but the decline of European government is the fastest. You may be surprised that the UK is the world leader in the number of people arrested because of internet posts. And that Germany, which is still way behind the UK, has more people arrested for the same reason than Russia, China, North Korea, Iran, Belarus,…

Indeed: https://metro.co.uk/2025/12/17/man-jailed-burning-migrant-ho... “An X user who posted two anti-immigration tweets been handed a 18-month jail sentence.” Edit to point out 1. That is a quote and 2. The UK considers this Ok though https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cjeykklwn7vo

> Yarwood replied: ‘Head for the hotels housing them and burn them to the ground.’

That's terrorist speech tho. My problem is that everyone can reasonably get on board with banning speech that indicates violent action, and that the reliance on "muh free speech!!!" has been a net negative for actually defending the right of people to have privacy, because people rely on that sans any other (better) arguments.

Re: Independent review of UK national security law warns of overreach

#192

Post by fao_ »

jandrewrogers wrote: post #160
MangoToupe wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an convictable crime in the US. Inciting violence is emphatically not protected speech.

This is definitely not a crime in the US per the US Supreme Court. Several additional conditions not in evidence are required for speech of this type to fall outside of First Amendment protections.

The Something Awful Forums got investigated by the FBI after one or two people posted threats about the current president.

So, uh, yes. It's definitely something that the federal authorities take a dim view on.

Re: Independent review of UK national security law warns of overreach

#193

Post by fao_ »

miroljub wrote: post #72
Kbelicius wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The UK arrests 12k people per year for social media posts, using vague laws to undermine free speech. This doesn't mean anything in isolation. > Here's the citation from the EU parliament itself [1], since I doubt you'd believe non-government sources. Do we know each other? > The fact that the UK and Germany are in some aspects still better than the ones I mentioned doesn't make them beacons of democracy. No, but t…

>> The UK arrests 12k people per year for social media posts, using vague laws to undermine free speech. > This doesn't mean anything in isolation. It's pretty good proxy for freedom of speech, one of the features without which democracy is not possible. >> Here's the citation from the EU parliament itself [1], since I doubt you'd believe non-government sources. > Do we know each other? Probably not, but I can smell…

The problem here is that contextually you are falling into the trap of "talking about committing a terrorist act" as being relevant to "having private communications", and in the process you are conflating the two. This means you are falling into the trap that the UK government intentionally creates to suppress privacy — within a reader's head, now the two are related. This also means you haven't had to develop any arguments other than "muh free speech!" with respect to why having private communication is important.

The second problem is that American conservatives have framed Nazi speech as a free speech issue, so to an onlooker who is not in the USA, when people talk about "free speech", it comes across as someone defending someone's right to say incredibly harmful, violent things about Jewish people, Transgender people, and so on. I think for most people outside of the USA (and, to be honest, most minority populations within the USA) you should consider "free speech" as being an incredibly tainted phrase for that purpose.

The flipside of all of this is that fascism is very, very possible even with freedom of speech (actually it seems to rely on it, given how virulent the spread of outright Nazi rhetoric has been in the USA so far). Freedom of speech is not the sole thing that holds up a democracy and it weakens your arguments for you to rely upon it like this.

Re: Independent review of UK national security law warns of overreach

#194

Post by coliveira »

9dev wrote: post #162
cjbgkagh wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a few people in charge, they just don’t advertise the fact. Similar how the ‘Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence’. These both appear correct to the vast majority of people because of the Pareto distribution of outcomes, the vast majority of people experience the incompetence / no-one in charge and don’t experience the relatively tiny number of events when the competent…

No, that's what I was getting at. Thinking "they" are in charge is actually very widespread, with varying opinions on who "they" actually are—whether it's billionaires for you, the Rothschild's for others, or Reptilians for some. How great it would be to have a select few evil masterminds, a clear enemy to roil against! That isn't reality, though. Would the super-secret council of puppet masters have allowed Trump to…

You're confusing control with total control. Nobody has total control, even the most powerful and rich entities. This doesn't mean, however, that a lot of the policies we see being enacted by governments have not been discussed and promoted by a small number of people in very high positions of economic and political power. You're trying to disprove this well known and easily attested fact with the straw man of total control.

Re: Independent review of UK national security law warns of overreach

#195

Post by JoshTriplett »

flowerthoughts wrote: post #17

> He warns that developers of apps like Signal and WhatsApp could technically fall within the legal definition of "hostile activity" simply because their technology "make[s] it more difficult for UK security and intelligence agencies to monitor communications. Sounds like Let's Encrypt would also fall under that. This has got to stop. If you want to stop criminals, then focus on their illegal activites, not the stree…

> Today, someone can post a Telegram group message and make thousands of people rally to a town square. I see the dangers, and I see why governments think they are doing this to protect the people.

Don't play into their propaganda. Governments don't like it because they're protecting themselves and their power; making it harder for people to find each other and organize and rally is one of many ways governments do that. (There's a reason authoritarian governments regularly shut down cell networks.)

https://bsky.app/profile/tupped.bsky.social/post/3lwgcmswmy2...

> The U.K. Online Safety Act was (avowedly, as revealed in a recent High Court case) “not primarily aimed at protecting children” but at regulating “services that have a significant influence over public discourse.”

Re: Independent review of UK national security law warns of overreach

#196

Post by JoshTriplett »

sneak wrote: post #163
nirui wrote: post #123

> Developers of apps that use end-to-end encryption to protect private communications could be considered hostile actors in the UK. So say if my UK friend connected directly to my PC with SSH/RDP, both uses end-to-end encrypted link, to chat with me using `wall`, `write` or Windows Task Manager, then all of sudden this is a hostile and Mr Big Ben will just launch laser at me to burn me to death. Wow, this is just mes…

> So say if my UK friend connected directly to my PC with SSH/RDP, both uses end-to-end encrypted link, to chat with me using `wall`, `write` or Windows Task Manager, then all of sudden this is a hostile and Mr Big Ben will just launch laser at me to burn me to death. Wow, this is just messed up. No, because nobody is using those systems to communicate at scale to try to destabilize a government. Quantity has a quali…

> destabilize a government

Governments often equate any opposition to "destabilizing"; don't let them. Yes, there are real information-warfare efforts in the world to destabilize governments and societies. There are also far more people who are trying to organize, and rally, and communicate about issues they care about.

Re: Independent review of UK national security law warns of overreach

#197

Post by bschwarz »

fennecfoxy wrote: post #190

I know this is about UK (where I am a foreigner living for almost a decade). But why are pretty much all governments universally inept? It's not only the UK but US gov has also pushed for this and plenty of other stupendously stupid ideas or decisions - and plenty of other governments (well, all of them) besides. It leads me to believe that our species is incapable of leading itself, that we are incapable of choosing…

The skill set required to reach leadership positions does not necessarily match the skill set of a good leader.

Re: Independent review of UK national security law warns of overreach

#198

Post by JoshTriplett »

CommanderData wrote: post #104
richsouth wrote: post #11

Developers of apps that use end-to-end encryption to protect private communications could be considered hostile actors in the UK. <-- HTTPS does this. What about secure sites like baking sites that encrypt end-to-end? Old farts making laws about things they know nothing about.

Why worry about E2E encryption, in theory just need a cert issued from a vast array of CAs or intermediates. Which I wouldn't be suprised they possess the ability through some type of secret warrant, heck even private keys.

> Why worry about E2E encryption, in theory just need a cert issued from a vast array of CAs or intermediates.

Certificate Transparency thankfully means this is a tool a government could only use once if at all, and then they've burned an entire CA.

Re: Independent review of UK national security law warns of overreach

#199

Post by dbdr »

josteink wrote: post #151
dbdr wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The UK arrests 12k people per year for social media posts, using vague laws to undermine free speech. A spokesperson for Leicestershire police clarified that offences under section 127 and section 1 can include any form of communication and may also be “serious domestic abuse-related crimes”. [1] It seems misleading to count arrests related to domestic abuse as "anti-free speech". [1]: https://lordslibrary.parliame…

It seems very politically convenient to be able to hide that one number behind the other. To obfuscate something highly controversial by making it artificially conflated with something everyone would agree on with. This is what governments do when they want to avoid public scrutiny. This is not the win you are looking for.

It would indeed be better to have the separate counts. It's also wrong to attribute to only one case what is a actually a larger category, unless there is actual evidence that it's the overwhelming majority anyways. Both can be true at the same time.

I'm not trying to win anything, and I do support privacy. I just think any argument, especially those citing specific numbers, should be based on an accurate description of reality.

Re: Independent review of UK national security law warns of overreach

#200

Post by asdfdfd »

pjc50 wrote: post #141
N_Lens wrote: post #9

I wonder how the public in the UK feels about their country quickly devolving into an oversurveilled state.

The public, or at least the section that buys newspapers and gets onto the Question Time audience, seem to be in favor of this. Like a lot of people, they will vote in favor of repression so long as they think it's being done to someone else. Especially immigrants. You can even see it in the comments here. "Tough on crime" and "tough on terrorism" are magic bullets for winning authoritarian support. That's how people…

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