Does the UK Think It Can Police the Internet?

The Scottish measures definitely sound sensible, but this sent me off investigating the usual issue with these stories: crime is a wicked problem, and its hard to discern "this intervention reduced crime" from "we kept trying different interventions until crime rates happened to fall".

From that article's evidence: In 2004/05 there were 137 homicides in Scotland... By 2016/17 the number had more than halved to 62. Last year this had reduced by a further three to 59... This homicide figure was the joint lowest number of recorded homicide cases for a single 12-month period since 1976.

So homicides fell from ~2.5/100k to ~1/100k, which is pretty impressive. But 2004/05 is cited because it was a spike 20% above the 2000-2008 average. London homicides also fell by about 50% over that same period before the recent spiek, without equivalent programs, which raises some questions about whether this was simply demographic. And the population pyramid for Glasgow (where 1/3 of the murders were happening) sort of supports that theory; there's a large population boom-and-hollow, for which the boom was 16-20 during the murder spike and is now into the lower-crime late 20s. London has similar demography, slightly older, with a slightly earlier crime drop. So there's some reason to believe the recent murder spike with no population change is qualitatively different from the mid-2000s peak that Scotland and London both saw.

On the other hand, that "further three" claim in the article is a statistically meaningless bounce in a number that's been basically flat for since 2013/14. Almost all of the real-looking change is a murder rate that plummeted from 2008 to 2012. That's actually sort of promising: it means the falloff was faster than the decline in the 16-26 population. And the gang-alternative program mentioned launched in 2009, based on a Boston system which was also followed by a sharp decline in murder rate. Both systems work on redirecting a small population with an extremely high murder rate, so a fast response and then a plateau is actually a very plausible outcome.

That technique of proactively engaging gang members has been repeated in many cities at different times, and the statistical evidence for it looks surprisingly strong. I initially suspected that the problem was engaging large networks, since Glasgow and Boston had much lower raw murder rates and at-risk populations than London, but Chicago also showed promising results.

Tentatively, it looks like this really was an intervention that caused a major improvement. But I can't find any sign of a comparable program being tried in London - does anyone happen to know one?

edit: Chicago had 200% London's raw homicide count, but only 25% of its population. Operation Ceasefire theoretically targets a percentage of the population, independent of lethality, so it may still have been a much lower number than London. As far as I can see, none of this ever caught on in NYC.

> I've not seen any evidence of MITM attacks by ISPs since snowden.

[1] There is evidence GCHQ are doing attacks on HTTPS via UK ISPs pre-snowden, post-snowden what does it matter? There is no evidence they have stopped. [2] The Investigatory Powers Act legalizes the governments use of this technology. If you are going to argue that they no longer have this capability or Snowden made it all up Im gonna need some sources.

> Unless the UK government has cracked all the ciphers used by HTTPS + VPNs and have backdoored every CA

You don't need to hack all the things you just need to hack like 95% of the things and [1] is evidence GCHQ have that. I mean I guess you can say "yea but im in that 5% the system works!" while GCHQ work to close the gap.

I mean just read some of the stuff GCHQ do:

https://theintercept.com/2015/09/25/gchq-radio-porn-spies-tr...

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/05/nsa-gchq-encry... [2] https://www.libertyhumanrights.org.uk/human-rights/privacy/s...

There isn't a ban on face sitting or on pornography that involves face sitting.

Please link to the actual law you think is banning this content.

Any source you like comparing north/south spending per person on pretty much anything. Not just the relatively recent HS3 vs Crossrail 2, but any and all infrastructure, public transport and services. Which ripples through into health, depression, life expectancy and countless other measures.

First one search turned up:

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/dec/05/north-contin...

But saying "they don't know we exist" suggests a lack of representation, which is very different to spending. I've lived in Wales, Northern England, and Scotland; I'm not at all going to argue with you about spending -- but spending does localise in high population areas, no? I don't really think it's that politicians don't represent their areas, but there is a limited pot of money and it does make business sense to spend where there is a better return. We're not of course running a business: I just don't like representation and spending to be considered coterminous.

FWIW, your north-south divide article talks, amongst other things, about life-expectency (LE). I think the thing you notice most in https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthan... (eg figure 5 of whole UK) is that England has higher LE than the other parts of the UK, and that there are a number of northern areas (Ribble, Harogate, York, etc.) with higher LE than any area of Scotland, say.

Funnily enough Wales/Scotland get the same issues in miniature, where spending is focussed on the larger population centre in the South. But all areas have representation. Still if you're working poor, you can live anywhere, the spending in that area may be higher, but that doesn't mean you have a better life; it might even be harder if you're living amongst richer people (higher prices for accommodation, etc.).

It's one of the things that I've liked about being in the EU, spending is distributed better to poor areas than it would normally be under Tory spending control.