It's also worth stating that the worst part of that proposed amendment [1] isn't even necessarily the VPN ban, it's the next clause, on page 20:
"The “CSAM requirement” is that any relevant device supplied for use in the UK
must have installed tamper-proof system software which is highly effective at
preventing the recording, transmitting (by any means, including livestreaming)
and viewing of CSAM using that device."
"Regulations under subsection (1) must enable the Secretary of State, by further
regulations, to expand the definition of ‘relevant devices’ to include other
categories of device which may be used to record, transmit or view CSAM"
> any relevant device supplied for use in the UK must have installed tamper-proof system software
It's happening. Computer freedom, everything the word "hacker" ever stood for, will be officially destroyed if this passes. We're about to be robbed of control over our computers by force of law. It's just the UK now but eventually it will be every country.
This is a very dark day. I've been prophesizing its arrival for a while now. I was secretly hoping I was wrong about everything, that we'd turn this around, that we'd enshrine a right to control our computers into law. The opposite is happening instead. It's so sad...
I wouldn't give up. When it gets to the level of mandatory government rootkits there are bound to be underground organisations circumventing this and/or trading old hardware.
I'd even go as far to say that if things become this authoritarian, certain "direct" acts would be justified in preventing or fighting it.
An illegitimate underground scene running on life support, using old unlocked computers which are a finite resource they will eventually run out of. Utterly depressing... We used to be free...
If this passes, the only strategic move available is to somehow develop the ability to make our own computer processors in our garages. Billion dollar fabs are single points of failure and they will be exploited, subverted, regulated and controlled. The only possible solution is to democratize and decentralize semiconductor manufacturing to the point anyone can do it. We must be able to make free computer hardware at home just like we can make free computer software at home.
Seems to me this is a cultural issue that runs deep. You are his majesty’s loyal subject, like it or not, and more importantly, you are a subject of his bureaucracy. The US works in a similar fashion, except the deep state has slightly different excuses to exist.
I work extensively in the UK(past 5 years, I’ve worked there maybe two years in total). Nothing gets done without endless approval from people with cushy office jobs in the bureaucracy.
It’s in the bureaucracy’s interest to extend its power, and who is going to stop them?
CSAM is an excellent excuse to control the digital world. I wonder what took them this long.
I'm not british. "We" refers to computer users worldwide. The UK is just the beginning, this will spread to other countries. My country loves to copy whatever Europe is doing.
The obvious answer (that HN hates) is that the right can stop them. The only party in the UK against the Online Safety Act is Reform. The only party that wants to shrink the state is Reform. Every other party is supportive of this kind of thing. This makes sense because every other party in the UK is left wing.
This isn't a problem of one country's specific culture. Australia and Canada are doing the exact same thing, the Democrats would absolutely do the same thing if the libertarian Constitution weren't in their way. The rest of the EU is doing the same thing. It's a left vs right thing.
In fact everywhere is going the same way except the USA, because the USA has a constitution that encodes libertarian values (a minority position) in such a way that it requires a supermajority to overturn.
> This makes sense because every other party in the UK is left wing.
Definitionally not. Left and right are always relative to the local average, "left wing" and "right wing" are nothing more than a seating arrangement turned into a badge.
The Conservatives are, famously, right wing by British standards. If you think the Tories are lefties, you're so far to the right you can't even see the UK's Overton Window from where you are.
> In fact everywhere is going the same way except the USA, because the USA has a constitution that encodes libertarian values (a minority position) in such a way that it requires a supermajority to overturn.
It’s mostly the Tories that were responsible for the drafting of the Online Safety Bill, and let’s not forget the downright evil Investigatory Powers Act. Another Tory creation.
The OP was correct. The Tories were left wing and authoritarian. They raised taxes, and failed to shrink the UK’s bloated state and civil service.
Only Reform have made a stand against the Online Safety Act and other creeping dystopian measures.
I don’t know if I fully trust Reform to deliver, but by a country mile, they’re a safer choice than Conservatives, Labour or Lib Dems in 2029.
The next General Election cannot come soon enough.
> It’s mostly the Tories that were responsible for the drafting of the Online Safety Bill, and let’s not forget the downright evil Investigatory Powers Act. Another Tory creation.
Read enough of my old comments, and you'll know that the Investigatory Powers Act is a big part of why I left the UK. The other half was how I expected Brexit would be used as an excuse to leave things like the European Court of Human Rights and thereby make it harder to fight such things.
Pleasant surprise that the UK is still bound to the human rights stuff, especially given Theresa May's opinion of such things and prior reputation the Home Office.
> The Tories were left wing and authoritarian.
No, they're right wing and authoritarian. Or at least, there's enough of an authoritarian streak in it to be a problem.
> They raised taxes, and failed to shrink the UK’s bloated state and civil service.
You didn't notice all the austerity policies, I take it? Their approach to the civil service was basically a government self-lobotomy, reducing state capacity to be competent.
Not that size of government is hugely important to the left-right split in the UK; that seems to be a much more American dividing line, from what I see in the American stories that make it across.
> I don’t know if I fully trust Reform to deliver, but by a country mile, they’re a safer choice than Conservatives, Labour or Lib Dems in 2029.
The other things Reform (or, given that it's owned by the leader, he) have called for include, to quote the Wikipedia page:
leaving the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR); repealing the Human Rights Act 1998 and replacing it with a new law; disapplying the 1951 Refugee Convention, the UN Convention Against Torture, and the Council of Europe Anti-Trafficking Convention (ECAT); creating detention powers without Hardial Singh constraints;
To be against these things is not the indication of someone who dislikes authoritarianism.
The only thing I see him calling for that I actually agree with is basically an example of "left wing" by UK standards: the nationalisation of the steel plant in Scunthorpe.
Not that I expect him to succeed. His experience of politics combines is much the same as Jeremy Corbyn: to be the one who opposes everything, not the one who has to take responsibility. Look how bad Corbyn was for Labour, that's my median for how bad Farage would be for the UK.
Your obvious solution is wrong, though. The right wing is just as eager to implement a police state.
The correct answer is decentralisation of power, and put the government back in the hands of the people. That means frequent voting(multiple times a year), by an educated population.
> The correct answer is decentralisation of power, and put the government back in the hands of the people. That means frequent voting(multiple times a year), by an educated population.
Sufficiently well educated and also willing to read carefully and without partisan (or other) fear of favour.
How many of us read the terms and conditions before clicking "I agree"? How many support a side only because it's their own side?
I don't know how to fix this. The "obvious" solutions (seen in various government systems over the world and the centuries) all have demonstrable problems.
Yes. Like I said, this works well in Switzerland, where stupid decisions are at least made jointly, not by some career politicians. Makes it easier to slowly make changes. The key point is to keep things local - what works in Zürich doesn’t necessarily work in Appenzeller.
> If this passes, the only strategic move available is to somehow develop the ability to make our own computer processors in our garages.
How feasible is this really? I'd feel a lot better if it were possible to produce chips free from backdoors even if the resulting CPUs weren't even as fast as an old Pentium III, but my guess is that any effort to do this at scale will be quickly shutdown by the government
Lithographically fabricated integrated circuit in a garage. Whatever this is, we need a lot more of it to stand a chance at resisting governments.
> any effort to do this at scale will be quickly shutdown by the government
The whole idea is to make this so easy and ubiquitous that they can't shut it down completely. They can shut down some but not all. I believe this is the only way a law like this can be resisted. Promote civil disobedience by making it easy.
It's not. And any effort to do this at scale would be quickly shut down by physics and economics, not the government. Modern computing technology is a wildly complex supply chain, with extremely specialized manufacturing equipment and facilities. Billion dollar fabs are worth billions of dollars for a reason, and it's not for the real estate or the views.
Trying to determine the best "diy chip" sounds like a fun project and an admirable goal, but if you actually wanted something useful I'd wager you'd be better off buying esp32's in bulk so you'd have all the spares you might need.
The absurd thing is that the amendment only covers smartphones and tablets - which means those who the bill aims to target can easily break the law by using a laptop, desktop, camera, smart TV etc.
In short, the Pandora's Box of automated surveillance and security risk on any smartphone or tablet is opened, while a gigantic loophole for serious offenders is left open.
Computers are too powerful, too subversive for us citizens to have access to.
Give citizens computers and they can copy at will, making a mockery out of things like copyright, they'd wipe out entire sectors of the economy if left unchecked.
Give citizens computers and they will have cryptography which can defeat police, judges, governments, spies, militaries.
They cannot tolerate it. They will eventually lock everything down. PCs were left out because everyone is on mobile these days, not because they are opposed to locking them down. They will close the loophole if it becomes an issue. Besides, with remote attestation they can just designate those devices as untrustworthy and ban them from everything.
It's a politico-technological arms race. They make some law, we make technology that subverts it. Due to technology, they must continuously increase their own tyranny in order to enjoy the same level of control they had before. The end result is either an uncontrollable population or a totalitarian state. We're heading towards the latter. I was hoping the government's limits would be discovered along the way, some set of basic principles it'd refrain from violating in its quest for control, thereby reaching the fabled "the ideal amount of crime is non-zero" state. Turns out governments know no limits.
The US was tested for tyranny during Covid, election interference, and BLM burning down cities. You sat at home, utterly impotent. You're gonna stop VPN bans? Please.
This post shouldn't have been dead. It's right. There's an American meme that sidearms create freedom. When has that actually been true in practice in the past 100 years?
For HNers who just automatically flag anything right wing and want left wing examples instead, right now leftists are outraged by deportations. And a tiny number have tried to assassinate ICE agents using sniper rifles, indeed. But it's making no difference, not even when they're protected by corrupt local prosecutors and juries. They have even accidentally shot migrants instead of ICE.
Where's the evidence that an armed population can resist tyranny, however you define it? Whether it's COVID or ICE, there's been no meaningful armed resistance.
The reason the US seems to be less totalitarian is purely because the constitution and the culture that supports it stops Congress from passing the same kind of restrictive speech laws the rest of the world has. If it weren't for the Constitution the Democrats would have already passed lots of speech laws under Obama and Biden, then used them to harass and illegalize the Republicans to maintain a majority. For example they'd have banned Trump's campaign on the basis that it encouraged "hate" against immigrants, and then they'd have forced big tech to do what Europe is now trying already, to strip all anonymity from the internet so they can harass random individual voters who disagree with government policy online, Germany style.
What protects America isn't guns, it's respect for the voting thresholds in the constitution and a right-leaning SCOTUS.
In the end, effectiveness is irrelevant. Basic human dignity requires that you always have the option to resist.
> Where's the evidence that an armed population can resist tyranny, however you define it?
Drug gangs in latin america.
In my country, drug traffickers have become so organized they have established control over a quarter of Brazil's continental territory. They have armies, laws, tribunals, even taxes. They have essentially pulled off a stealthy unannounced secession. It's theorized that they control politicians, judges.
All thanks to the fact they were willing to arm themselves and die in order to achieve their own ends. The rest of the brazilians constantly prove unwilling to do either, and as a result they are dominated by the people with guns. Police state, military dictatorship, drug gangs, makes no difference.
The other side of this coin is that, disgusting horrific pedophiles, terrorists and drug smugglers also have access to this stuff too.
I'm not in support of this bill, I'm just saying whenever I read these arguments, it's almost like you're entirely discounting the challenge the very tech your praising incurs for law enforcement and society.
For me the paradox is simple, one the one hand people want everything to be "open and transparent" including their computers, but those same people often want the ability to completely hide everything in cryptography. Which one is it? If you were for openness and transparency in it's entirety, why wouldn't you by default be against cryptography ? This paradox is where the rubber hits the road on legislation like this and likely why the average Joe Smith doesn't really care about the cause. Because realistically, it all sounds suspicious. To a law abiding citizen, if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.
There is no paradox. The optimal amount of crime is non-zero. You must tolerate some crime in order to keep your humanity and dignity. Orwellian dystopias with omniscient surveillance can reduce crime to zero but you wouldn't want to live in one.
This is just something people need to accept no matter how angry they get about it. If they don't, they will be manipulated through their fears into trading away their freedom for a false sense of security.
What about when a group of individuals forms an institution that's self serving and harmful to other citizens, and they're able to do a lot of this under the guise of "privacy"?
All operations as a public institution should be transparent. We fund them through taxes, we have a right to know what is going on.
I don't know what you are getting at with "self serving and harmful to other citizens"? Like a private institution? a company? Of course private companies are self-serving. All of them could be described as perpetrating some subjective and nebulous "harm". There are already transparency requirements for businesses, and they are subject to warrants. To the extent that they are public institutions (monopolies, publicity-traded companies), there are increasing demands for transparency and vice-versa.
Individuals have a right to privacy and protection from undue search, regardless of scare quotes employed, unless they are living on a prison island such britan.
The institutions you're talking about are under attack by online propaganda and smear campaigns by countries that want to see them taken down. Open online speech is important but it's also been hijacked to do a lot of harm.
Personally I think we're cooked but I can understand why some people are trying to take action and destroy online anonymity. Ideally we'd just live in a world where people can run their own mail server and people would leave it a lone, but we don't.
Maintaining the status quo means western democracy is fucked. There is no anti-dote to propaganda and lies being spread through social media. Maybe getting rid of online anonymity would help but I understand why people don't want a digital ID either.
If what they did is never revealed to someone else, what is the problem here? It is not like we have no way to hide stuff without cryptography, and people are not advocating for police to search every apartment once in a while to look for illegal stuff.
Authorities cannot tap into your brain, cannot tap into physical face-to-face conversations, and people can plan out crimes using these means. It is not like there is no way to hide stuff before the born of modern cryptography.
And who want everything to be open and transparent? I am not aware of anyone who wants this.
Give it time. The natural end state is that all computing devices available to the general public are dumb framebuffers that are only capable of displaying a UI running in the cloud. No more privacy for anything; even if the cloud OS lets you run Linux in a VM, everything you do will be visible and constantly monitored for suspicious activity.
They just won't stop. We needed to have laws in place to prevent digital IDs being continuously pushed on people because the powers that be want total control of all information.
It's happening in the US now under the guise of AI data centers for consumers but I suspect it will be instead used to surveillance everyone who doesn't agree with the fascist government. This is Larry Ellison's public vision but Musk and Thiel also play a role.
The modern societies run via those devices and the enforcement will move to the mostly free Internet that was "a long time ago, when it didn't matter as much".
Apple tried to do it in a way where nobody would see your personal data until they had multiple confirmed matches against known CSAM - and even then a human would check the results before involving any law enforcement.
But the internet had one of their Misunderstanding Olympics and now we're here again - with an even shittier solution, being formed into actual law.
It's already the law in Brazil that online services and "terminal operating systems" must perform age verification in a secure, auditable manner. This presumably includes smartphones and computers, meaning you can't just run an arbitrary Linux distro in Brazil anymore. I expect similar laws to pass in at least a few U.S. states by 2030—places like Texas, Mississippi, Louisiana, maybe Florida...
When I say "the future is signed, verified code from bootloader to application level" I mean it will likely be backed up by force of law. No one complains about the mandatory safety features various governments require cars to come equipped with. The voices of a handful of nerds will go unheard when the law starts insisting computers come equipped with safety features also.
While that's really terrifying about Brazil, is it actually enforced? I can't really imagine there being a "Linux Police" kicking down the door of a hooded teenager and prying the Ubuntu DVD from his clammy hands.
I mean this is the country of favelas where even the police don't dare to enter.
No, but Brazil can (and did) exercise strict import controls over what kind of electronics can get into the country. For the longest time the only game consoles you could legitimately get in Brazil came from Sega through special arrangement with Brazilian manufacturer TecToy—in particular, the Master System and Mega Drive. When the market finally did open up, import consoles were subject to stiff tariffs. Piracy was rampant. That's why the Brazilian gaming market is... weird to this day, and until recently was generally avoided by major manufacturers creating openings for also-rans like the Zeebo.
So while police arresting a kid for having an Ubuntu DVD is unlikely, the Brazilian government twisting the arm of PC manufacturers to prevent the installation of any but approved operating systems on hardware sold to the Brazilian market is highly plausible. Since this already aligns with Microsoft's eventual goals, Microsoft and the PC manufacturers will just hasten the rollout of Palladium 2.0 and nothing will stop it.
Wow thanks, I didn't know any of that. It feels alien to me and yeah I'm sure that MS wants this to happen. Now that windows has only become an advertising vehicle for their cloud services, Linux is a way for customers to avoid that tax.
Law never had anything to do with reason, but this is one more law that mandates an unreachable goal. This will trigger an untold amount of brain-rotten despotism.
They're probably thrilled with themselves because everything will have to be closed, locked down platforms and devices.
IMO the solution to child safety is education with strong user controls. Hell, just delete the social media apps from existence if the other option is dystopian control of our communications.
I know what you're thinking: these restrictions are easy to work around. But don't worry, we can just layer more restrictions on top. Eventually the children will be safe! The government just needs to...
- require proof of age (ID) to install apps from unofficial sources on your phone or PC. Probably best to block this at both the OS and also popular VPN downloading sites like github.com and debian.org.
- require proof of age (ID) to unblock DNS provider IP addresses like 8.8.8.8 and 1.1.1.1 at your ISP.
- make sure children aren't using any other "privacy" tools that might be a slippery slope to installing a VPN.
This makes it so much easier for the parents too! The internet will be so safe that they won't even need to talk to their children about internet safety.
You joke, but as I understand it, all internet in the UK has Government mandated 'adult content' filtering by default and you have to go through a process to prove you're over 18 to have it removed...
So they are much more than halfway there already...
It's worse than that sadly, there is no way to have it globally removed. You either have to use a VPN or age check with every website that requires it (or at least whichever service they partner with, I've not even looked).
“ In July 2013, Internet Service Providers (ISPs) agreed to voluntarily offer “default-on” adult content internet filters on all new and existing home network customers” [1]
OK, so the entire industry does opt everyone in to content filtering by default, just every single provider, without exception, does it “voluntarily”.
It's so organic and grass roots and good for democracy™ that every single Western country suddenly decided that eliminating privacy online in lockstep was the top priority despite none of the ruling parties running on it as a platform or with any meaningful referendums from the voting public. But to what end?
Far more people strongly support it than strongly oppose
The idea it's being done in spite of the public doesn't seem to track with reality. You also don't have to look very hard on social media to find lots of British people supporting strong government policing of the internet.
I don't think I really implied the people of the UK didn't want it? The UK and most of Europe seemingly love the government policing their speech even in private communications.
The concept of free expression basically doesn't exist in most of the UK/EU today and that's scary.
The House of Lords is the most democratic hereditary system in the world. The 90 of the 92 heredities are elected from amongst the available candidates.
The house of lords is a stamping system at this point, and maybe a stopgap to authoritarianism. All power resides in the House of Commons which is elected
The true issue lies in the fact that the Westminster style of government is de facto an elective tyranny, with no real checks and balances other than the misused ECHR
If this were true, the papers wouldn't have run an article yesterday bitching about the lords sending back the workers rights bill again.
The commons may _eventually_ overrule them, but it takes time and costs political capital.
The majority of our population want more law, more rules, more restrictions : they don't see the value or enjoyment in doing something, so they don't think anyone should be able to do it.
Ask the average joe whether or not cars should prevent drivers from being able to "chose" to break the speed limit: You'll get a resounding "yes" 8/10 times - the value of freewill seems to be increasing lost on my country men.
I actually dont think your comment invalidates mine. The house of lords cannot really do anything than be a pain in the ass by sending the bill 3 times. The commons will eventually outrule them if they have sufficient political capital.
My comment on elective tyranny comes from the fact that if a trifecta of: leader/party mps/house of lords are aligned there is little to stop them.
This done I think all of the debates around authoritarianism and censorship put too much blame on the government which seems to represent the views of the majority of people rather well. I think it also comes from the fact that the median age is older and older people are more conservative in their choices and thus more willing to put limitations on everything (and also the fucking boomers vote as a 25% bloc which imposes their choices on the remaining poplation i.e the infamous triple lock of retirements)
It is though. This is one of the few surveillance issues actually driven by grassroots organisations like (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_Shout) in particular when it comes to adult content who have been at this globally for well over a decade.
There's no shadowy cabal trying to age-restrict porn or social media, this is more like a modern day Carrie Nation. Puritanism always comes from the bottom up
Collective Shout are a tiny fringe group, they have had a massively outsized impact because of some extremely effective and clever lobbying but few people here in Australia where they are based know about them (they're definitely not a household name by any stretch of the imagination).
Oh hey, that's the group that got payment processors to ban lots of legal content off of many platforms including Steam, all the while denying everything when the public outrage turned against them. Nothing speaks grassroots more than hiding when everyone hates what you're doing.
The "think of the children!" argument has long been used by people in government to give themselves more power. In this case there's been a global effort to shut down unapproved speech. The government gains the power to censor and arrest for "bad speech" but it also gets to decide how the labels for the same are applied. There have been panel discussions and speeches on this at the WEF, and discussions of tactics for selling or pushing through this kind of legislation for at least a decade.
That's how we got that video of John Kerry lamenting the U.S. Constitution's First Amendment.
So under the aegis of "think of the children!" (which may or may not have come from "grass roots" organizations) you get a committee with the power to decide what speech is badthink or wrongthink, label it as such, and hand out arrest warrants for it.
Disagree with policy: that's "hate" or "misinformation" or "inflammatory."
Voice a moral opinion: that's "hate" or "bigotry" or "intolerance."
Express doubt over a leader's actions: that's "misinformation" or "inflammatory."
Fascinating that they're more worried about VPN use than about shutting down rape gangs.
In Britain in particular? The NSPCC, Molly Rose Foundation, IWF among a bunch of others. 70% of Brits are supportive of the online safety act[1], it's been supported by Conservatives, Labour and the SNP.
There's simply no data in favor of the argument that this is a minority position or even some kind of conspiracy. Child safety is (not very surprisingly) usually a voter driven concern. You think banning people from social media is an idea coming from big tech and shadowy three letter agencies? What kind of sense does that make
YouGov panel always returns huge numbers for any 'safety' question that doesn't match data collected from other sources. It's a panel poll, the people being polled are weird and unrepresentative.
Of course a poll that asks a leading question can get 70% in favour. It’s not a conspiracy by TLAs (the people they’re interested in won’t be fazed by these paper-thin measures) or big tech (this hurts their bottom line). It’s legacy media, who have lost a lot of ground to the Internet, and stand to lose nothing by making it worse, and coincidentally also have a captive audience of voters who wouldn’t know one end of a USB cable from another who simply don’t understand any of the downsides.
> The Security Service Act 1989 sets out our functions and gives some examples of the nature and range of threats we work to disrupt.
> In summary, our functions are:
> to protect national security against threats from espionage, terrorism and > sabotage, from the activities of agents of foreign powers, and from actions intended to overthrow or undermine parliamentary democracy by political, industrial or violent means
Imagine you and I pay likely billions a year and these jokers just let asset managers like Larry Fink influence policies affecting fundamental rights of British people like it's nothing.
The country is corrupt beyond belief and soon we will wake up in corporate prison as slaves.
On the other hand, what's your solution for completely anonymous people to be infiltrating western democracies information space and spreading propaganda lies and falsehoods. I'm 100% not in favor of this level of authoritarianism, i'm just honestly curios what your solution is? Just let it continue? Let your children be subjected to misinformation about the holocaust etc? Let children be exploited and images of them being sexually assaulted just run wild online ? Again I'm just curious what the alternatives might?
The alternative is to refuse to delegate the formation and development of the character of our children and culture to automated systems and regulatory policies. Engage with your children on topics that matter. Discuss the pros and cons of various viewpoints and political platforms with your friends and neighbors, colleagues and fellow bus-riders. We, ourselves, are the psychosocial immune system for society, and if we construct an environment in which we can not be exposed harmful concepts, then we will never learn how to respond and combat it when we inevitably are exposed to it.
This is not to say that we should not actively work to prevent criminal acts, but that trying to establish a world in which such acts are impossible will cripple society in ways which will leave us vulnerable to much larger and more systemic abuses. Benjamin Franklin’s statement rings as true as ever, if in a rather updated context: “ They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”
Yes because self-organizing communities have never appeared anywhere in history.
Just because you are afraid you can't win arguments doesn't mean you should get to impose your view by violence. Which is what you advocate for, when you say the government should impose your views on the population.
Quite an abrasive / overly defensive response, sorry you feel that way.
Not trying to win an argument, I just haven't really got a solid answer. People just get passionate about how they should have a right to secret communications online, why all the burden should be on parents to protect kids from harmful substances, yet can't really give a good reason as to why that is. Yet on the other hand, those same people probably want to live in a world that is relatively safe from terrorism, sexual abuse etc.
I just said I can understand why to some people, wanting to stop children having access to a VPN doesn't necessarily have to be this big secret government overreach conspiracy?
Do I think we should have to have government surveillance software running on everyone's computer? No. I just understand more than a single perspective and I think those who seem to shoot these proposals down rarely give good arguments expect, basically, the government is out to get us, or it suits me the way it is now.
On a related note, they built their digital ID so that third parties could verify attributes (it's NOT just a single-service login across government + a linking ID across government services, which is how it was sold by the BBC).
They're pretty close to completely de-anonymising the internet for UK citizens. Say they introduce an Australian-style social media ban for under 16s, then requires all social media to link their accounts to digital IDs for this verification.
Naturally the only remaining loophole is if a UK citizen manages to avoid being flagged as British ever by using a VPN, so I expect they will focus on that going forwards. Keep in mind the UK already arrests and imprisons vast numbers of people for speech offences, there's no slippery-slope argument here because the UK is already at the bottom of the slope as an ultra-authoratitarian anti-speech nation.
> On a related note, they built their digital ID so that third parties could verify attributes
Isn’t that the entire point of government ID of any variety? The only reason anyone ever asks to see ID is so they can use it verify attributes of your identity, such as name and age. Otherwise what’s the point of an Identity Document, if it’s not to document something?
Digital ID has always been sold as something approximating your passport/Driver License (there is no official government ID in the UK), but digital, on your phone, and actually a government identity document. Rather than a government document that has a specific purpose (such as crossing the border or driving a car), which people pretend is government ID. Something that can cause a serious problem for people because passports and driver’s licenses aren’t free to obtain, replace or keep valid. Plus the government departments that issue them refuse to take any responsibility or liability for the accuracy or validity of the documents for any use case outside their very specific role in narrow government functions, like crossing the border, or figuring out if you’re allowed to drive a car.
The UK already has citizen SSO that stretches across all digital government services, and has had that for a decade plus now. Although it’s not really attached your identity, it’s just a unified auth system so government departments don’t end up creating their own broken auth systems instead.
> Isn’t that the entire point of government ID of any variety?
Ideally this could be done without deanonymizing accounts to service providers unless the user wants to for a 'verified' account linked to their identity publically but I don't think any digital ID system has been built that way. Imagine it acting like OAuth but instead of passing back an identity token it's just verification of age, platforms would store that which would show they had performed the age verification and could be used for other age gates if there are any.
That's how EU's digital wallet is supposed to work:
> The selective disclosure of attributes will allow you to only share the specific information requested by a service provider, without revealing extra information.
> For example, with the selective disclosure of attributes you could choose to share your date of birth, but without revealing any other identifying details that could be used for profiling.
You're totally right that it would be easy from a tech perspective to do that. it's a shame that:
(A) most people cannot grasp how it could be that "GovSSO" can attest "This person you just sent our way just logged into GovSSO [with biometric 2FA], and they are at least 16 years old" without the receiving system having any way of knowing who that citizen is or even whether they're 16 or 99.
(B) very real terrible government policies the UK has (like jailing people for speech, and like demanding encryption backdoors that compromise the security, at minimum, of the whole of every British citizen's devices, and at worst every device in the world) incline anyone who's paying attention to assume that the government will somehow use anything related to "ID" and "internet" to do idiotic things like figuring out who owns a Twitter account that committed some wrongspeak so the bobbies can come round them up.
> (A) most people cannot grasp how it could be that "GovSSO" can attest "This person you just sent our way just logged into GovSSO [with biometric 2FA], and they are at least 16 years old" without the receiving system having any way of knowing who that citizen is or even whether they're 16 or 99.
The loophole that every kid everywhere would instantly figure out is that they just need to borrow their mom’s ID, their older brother’s ID, or a pay some Internet service $1 to use their ID.
This is why the services aren’t designed to totally separate the ID from the account. If nothing actually links the ID to the account then there is no disincentive for people to share their IDs or sell their use for a small fee. Stolen IDs would get farmed for logins.
So the systems invariably get some form of connection to the ID itself. The people making these laws aren’t concerned about privacy aspects. They want maximum enforcement of their goals.
A digital ID can be better than a passport / driver license, because it can verify only specific attributes of the bearer to a third party. E.g. only the fact that you're older than 21 in a liquor store or a car rental, but not other details readily visible in a passport.
Any ID has to reveal enough info to reasonably convince the other party that the ID belongs to that person.
These threads always bring up a hypothetical digital ID that simply says “over 21”, but it’s missing the key point that the ID needs to also give enough information to reasonably tie the identity to the user. Otherwise everyone underage would run around with borrowed or stolen IDs because there was no way to prove it did or did not belong to them.
In theory a digital passport could reveal age 21 or older with a photo and name, but it’s only marginally less info for a lot more complexity.
There are solutions to this. Look at how state ID on iOS is handled.
There’s an enrolment process where your identity is bound to your phone, and secured using biometrics.
When you need to prove age, the device can produce a signed token attesting to fact that your older than 21 etc. and your device is trusted to validate your identity using a biometric scan performed by your phone.
All of this is dependent on everyone trusting your phone to both validate your physical identity before signing something, and also not sharing anything it shouldn’t. But given you can already enroll US state ID on iOS, those problems are clearly solvable.
You mentioned "on your phone". Is it only for phone OSes? A depressing "download from the Google Play Store or the Apple App Store only" app? Are UK citizens required to have it?
It's not a "citizen SSO", even non-residents use it when paying taxes, for self-assessment purposes.
It's Government services SSO.
And no, Digital ID wasn't sold as something like this, it has been sold as a way to prevent (?) "illegals" from working, by introducing system entirely similar to the current eVisa.
Unless you slept through all these televised discussions where Keir Starmer with a stern face explained how a wholly-digital system replacing wholly-digital system will stop these pesky immigrants from getting work (it's almost like in the current systems employers didn't have to do these checks already).
There's been SO, SO MANY lies, like that this system wi be similar to the Polish/Estonian, only these two are primarily physical documents, additionally bearing certificates that can be used to authenticate against the participating systems.
Sure, some countries ALSO have a digital form of the ID, but never advertised as a hate-whip against the others.
The primary problem with the only-electronic Certificate you call ID, is that it's supposed to be always online (never cached, like, say...... Um.....actual Digital ids or cards in the normal phones), so it can be cancelled at any point, also due to the errors of the government employees or systems.
The problem is that MANY people had a very serious problems with eVisa already, leading to being bounced off the Border Patrol or failing to prove right to rent.
Even if the idea of the ID was in general good (and I use one I really love, works wonderfully well), this government lied too many times and is forcing us to eat the frog that we've seen many times prior, is half baked and will burst in someone's face.
This idea is tainted because we're lied to and it's half-baked, and hostile in principle, not helpful.
You’re making the assumption that inherently support the creation of Digital ID. I’ve not expressed support for it, I’m just highlighting that if someone is going to criticise it, they should at least understand it well enough to make useful, accurate, criticism.
Criticising ID for making it possible for 3rd parties to verify attributes is a ridiculous thing to do, because that’s the entire point of ID.
If someone wants to criticise the exact mechanism used to allow 3rd parties to verify attributes of someone’s ID, then they should be clear about what that mechanism is, and why it’s problematic. Otherwise it’s impossible to have a sensible discussion, and discuss the various pros and cons of different implementations.
At the end of the day it’s beyond clear we’re moving towards a world where governments and people expect the internet to work closer to how the real world works, with equivalent limitation such as age gating. Putting forward inaccurate, and hyperbolic arguments about arbitrary, indistinct risks associated forms of Digital ID ultimately does us all a huge disservice, because it creates the opportunity to dismiss all criticism as little more than hysterical whining by people uninterested in learning about the societal problems Digital ID is meant to deal with. Which ultimately means we’re removed from the entire discussion about alternative approaches to Digital ID, or implementations of Digital ID that are privacy preserving.
If we’re not involved in those discussions, and seen as creditable contributors to solving the underlying problem, then those pushing for more authoritarian approaches win the argument by default.
That's what would be reasonably expected, but it's not backed up by the information.
> The total arrest figures are likely to be far higher because eight forces failed to respond to freedom of information requests or provided inadequate data, including Police Scotland, the second largest force in the UK. Some forces also included arrests for “threatening” messages, though these do not fall under the specified sections. [emphasis added]
Thanks. That wasn't clear from the Mail article above.
But the Times article also says:
> A spokeswoman for Leicestershire police said crimes under Section 127 and Section 1 include “any form of communication” such as phone calls, letters, emails and hoax calls to emergency services.
So I think the categorisation is a mess, and probably not even consistent across forces
I have to say, it is a bit astonishing how much you are in a kind of bargaining stage of trying to rationalize how what is happening, is not actually happening, all while the trap doors are closing all around you even though very slowly.
Why do you think that is?
It is not just a British thing, because this ruling class tyranny is descending all across the western world, regardless of whether it is particularly egregious in the UK. Or should we maybe just start calling it Airstrip One at this point, the AO?
For me at least (different person), the term "speech offences" has been so captured by the far-right who think publicly advocating for the burning down of buildings populated with minorities is totally fine, but calling someone racist is beyond the pale. Whereas, at least from my own experience, progressives tend to use phrases related to expression, eg, protests.
And so when I hear "speech offences", my immediate thought is to question the premise: Are we talking about people publicly advocating for mass violence? Are we talking about bullying or harassment? Are we talking about a private conversation? Are we talking about a group chat? Are we talking about hate speech? Are we talking about defamation? Are we talking about "fighting words"? Etc. Context matters.
For all the talk I see online advocating for social media to be considered a public space, I've yet to see anyone really grasp the consequences of that: have any of them tried yelling out in a public space that they should burn down a populated building? That won't go down well, and rightly so. It has never been okay to do that.
People facing consequences for broadcasting their depraved bloodlust online doesn't concern me. What concerns me is the extent to which protests against genocide are being suppressed, with police looking for any minor infraction to pounce upon, but we have video of people saying to police "I support the genocide" to make a point, which the police don't bat an eye at. That scares me.
For you the issue is a left right issue and if the opinion matches yours it is acceptable and seen in a positive light but if it's the other side you have no tolerance.
You will never have free speech just controlled speech with alternating people in power. Which I think is a worse outcome because the people in power will never allow controlled speech against them.
> For you the issue is a left right issue and if the opinion matches yours it is acceptable and seen in a positive light but if it's the other side you have no tolerance.
When you remove all content and context from what is actually being said and done, then yes, this is fairly accurate, but it's also an entirely meaningless framing. But you have fallen into the trap of thinking I only support protests that I agree with, which is the usual response for these kinds of discussions, sadly. If you want your climate-contrarian protest, by all means do so. Unironically do Straight Pride if that's what you want. I believe protest, and expression more generally, is a fundamental right. But what you're doing here is (to use a hyperbolic comparison) accusing me of hypocrisy because I'm okay with interpretive dance but not murder, even though they're both just actions. It reminds me of 2016 Reddit where slurs were "just soundwaves, bro".
We don't have American-style freedom of speech, nor should we. We have freedom of expression instead because we have very personal experience within our very recent history what unfettered hatred does to a continent. Attempting to import American-style freedom of speech will genuinely destroy this country, we are already seeing it happen.
Many people share your viewpoint on the left and right. It's natural to support free speech for what you agree and censor what you don't. It's part of living in a left or right ghetto of thought.
Take a step back. The right is in power you are not allowed to speak your ideas. The left is in power you can say anything that supports their agenda.
What you can never do is speak against the government right or left
Why would you want that? Seems like the worst of all worlds.
Isn't the history you are trying to not repeat a history of controlled speech where the wrong party got elected or got in power? Why won't this happen again and again?
> It's natural to support free speech for what you agree and censor what you don't.
Y'all really don't make a convincing case for freedom of speech when you cannot even read. Let me repeat: "You have fallen into the trap of thinking I only support protests that I agree with, which is the usual response for these kinds of discussions, sadly. If you want your climate-contrarian protest, by all means do so. Unironically do Straight Pride if that's what you want. I believe protest, and expression more generally, is a fundamental right."
Someday we need to kill this myth, the wave of fascisms that appeared in Europe (Italy, Germany, Spain, Romania) are more of a cultural and economic reaction to the destruction of the Great War and not due to "unlimited free speech".
Free speech does not amplify or cultivate hate, it lets it fester in dark areas until it explodes when a crisis happens (which is what is happening currently).
Free speech and open discourse serves as a pressure valve release and self-correcting mechanism where by impopular or "untolerable" but common opinions have to be dealt with i.e the migration backlash in Europe
Again, you are stripping all context and content. You are pretending that protest organising and calling for the burning down of a building populated with asylum seekers are the same thing. I vehemently reject this facetious framing.
You're conflating legitimate criticism with incitement. The police record suggest the opposite.
Take the example *Bernadette Spofforth, 55*, she shared false information that the attacker was an asylum seeker, adding "If this is true, all hell will break loose." (not false btw) Deleted it, apologized. She still got arrested, held 36 hours, and then *released without charge because of insufficient evidence*.
No call for violence, "misinformation", which she retracted when corrected. Yet she still was arrested during the crackdown. The state used riot prosecutions to sweep up misinformation, political speech and "hatred" on one swoop not just incitement. Spofforth's arrest (and quiet release) shows they criminalized *any speech near the riots*, then kinda sorted legality later.
You're using the retarded Lucy Connolly to justify arresting people like Spofforth (which has opinion closer to the average). That's the poisoning-the-well: conflate extremists with moderates sharing concerns, arrest both, then claim all arrested speech was violent incitement.
You also seem to not take into account that *the UK has built the legal apparatus to enable this overreach:*
- *Public Order Act 1986*: Criminalizes speech where "hatred" is "likely" to be stirred up. You're criminal based on how others react.
- *Online Safety Act 2023*: Forces platforms to remove "harmful" content or face £18 million fines.
- *Non-Crime Hate Incidents*: Since
2014, police record speech "perceived" as hateful, even when no crime occurred. 133,000+ recorded. No evidence, no appeals, appears on background checks. Court ruled this unlawful for "chilling effect" in 2021 yet police continue anyway.
In total it ends up with 12,000+ annual arrests for speech (30/day), fourfold increase since 2016. 666,000 police hours on non-crimes. Broad laws + complaint-driven policing = arrest first, determine legality never.
Free speech protects conditional statements about policy during crises or when the people has something to say to its elites. The 36-hour detention without charges proves the suppression.
> You're conflating legitimate criticism with incitement.
You should tell the right wingers that. Here's some of the right-wing sources I found when searching Ground News for some articles about Lucy Connolly, the woman who publicly advocating for the burning down of hotels housing asylum seekers:
You may notice a theme amongst these articles about how "it was just a tweet" and "she's a political prisoner" and "calculated move to suppress conservative viewpoints on immigration". This is what the right does. I'm not conflating legitimate criticism with incitement, they are, and they're using their massive media empires to spread this conflation.
This is just going to fix itself with more speech, right?
I actually do too, the issue is that in today’s wacko world the defense of Free Speech which in the early 2000s was a domain of the left/center-left, now has been abandonded due to the notion of “hate-speech” and opportunistically taken by the right (even tho many like MAGA will drop it the moment it stops being politically convenient i.e expulsion of students being critical of Israel actions).
A lot of those are propaganda peddlers who would drop the charade the moment someone on their political opposite side finds themselves in the same position (they keep crying about statements of Palestine and anti-semitism). I agree that they are stupid in their defense of Lucy Connely who literally and unrepentably pushed to “burn the asylum centers”, and that they are willfully conflating the issue to further their agenda.
The issue is both you and the retarded conservatives uses the situation to push their agendas, and as a counterpoint while they have media empires the left-wing political side also has media conglomerates pushing their ideas (BBC having a center-left slant).
No, the issue is going to fix itself with free speech, when no side is persecuted and better quality and rational discourse can arise and not be censored or overtaken by the extremes. Currently the only sane takes on many issues like immigration, economy or free speech exist only in the internet ghettos hidden from the larger public.
> which in the early 2000s was a domain of the left/center-left
Could you elaborate on that? I'm aware of the Lib Dems championing changes to the law to remove restrictions on "insulting" speech, but even so, they're not left/centre left. There's a joke that they're just yellow tories.
> now has been abandonded due to the notion of “hate-speech”
That's untrue. Stirring up or inciting racial hatred was made an offence by the Public Order Act 1986. And while it's true that stirring up religious hatred and homophobic hatred were added to that in 2006 and 2008 respectively, this did not invent the notion of hate speech. Lord Sumption, who was on our Supreme Court, said that the traditional line in English law was between words that merely outrage and words that would cause a breach of the peace amongst reasonable people (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=END98dJwpCg&t=1306s). Stirring up racial, religious, or homophobic hatred would seem to conform to that.
> BBC having a center-left slant
That's also untrue. The BBC participated in the pillorying of Corbyn; the BBC gave JK Rowling a Russel Prize for her anti-trans manifesto (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-55350905); the whole debacle with the "We're being pressured into sex by some trans women" article (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b4buJMMiwcg); the BBC downplaying Gaza (eg: killed vs died, not allowing the term "genocide", demanding anyone critical of Israel to ritualistically condemn Hamas, etc); the BBC preventing pro-Palestinian audience members for Question Time (https://www.thecanary.co/global/world-analysis/2025/10/03/bb...). And speaking of Question Time, how many times has Farage (or other Reformer) been a panellist now? And this is just the stuff I've personally witnessed and noted down. The BBC is establishment media through and through: the BBC is not suddenly centre left because there's gay people in Eastenders.
> the BBC gave JK Rowling a Russel Prize for her anti-trans manifesto
It wasn't an "anti-trans manifesto", but a thoughtful explanation of her reasons for speaking out on the sex and gender issue, where she discusses her concerns for women's rights and safety, the well-being of vulnerable children, and how important it is to be allowed to speak freely on this topic. Plenty of people on the left (and centre-left) agree with her too.
As with all her work, it was very well written, which the article you linked rightly acknowledges.
Oh hello, welcome to this 18-comment deep thread. This is the second time now that I've mentioned JK Rowling's transphobia and had a randomer show up and comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37058027). You, like them, also only speak about JKR on your profile. How curious.
Maybe I am reading these wrong, but it doesn’t appear to me these sources indicate that a significant number of people are being arrested for “speech offenses,” which I’m guessing you are using as shorthand for statements akin to those that would fall under “free speech” in the US. If I’m not seeing it or I am not correctly defining what you mean, feel free to correct me. I’m having to make some assumptions here
It can be hard to wrap your head around it from the US, but many of these are people that are in fact being arrested for writing posts on social media, e.g.,
> It can be hard to wrap your head around it from the US,
Come on. Was that necessary? I understand what we are talking about, I am saying none of those articles indicate that there is some huge thing going on where people in the UK are being arrested by the tens of thousands for irreverent memes or whatever. The issue is not my understanding, it’s the handwaving and vague generalizations that are causing issues. It’s coming across as fear mongering and I am looking for clarity.
I don’t think you understand. Either of those arrests are unconscionable by American standards. Most U.S. folks would be shocked to ever see such a thing, so it’s necessary to first show it to level-set that non-US jurisdictions don’t have any concept like the 1st Amendment. It wasn’t a slight in any way.
It was to say: even a single arrest on those grounds would be national news in the U.S. and quickly over turned by any circuit in the judiciary.
I feel like we are talking at cross purposes here and this all feels very broad, so I’m still not entirely sure what you are driving at other than “in the UK people are being silenced and arrested for what I consider to be acceptable speech” in some general sense. I don’t know what the line is, I don’t know what the numbers are, I really don’t have any sense of the scale or specifics of your claim.
I was responding to the initial comment at first: that upwards of 10,000 people are being arrested annually now in the UK for irreverent posts online and the like. The sources that were shared do not show that. Now you’re saying it’s really about any single incident being unacceptable and how an American can’t fathom it.
Do you see why I’m having trouble following this conversation?
Yes, I think we'll have continued difficulty reconciling this understanding.
It's almost impossible to get arrested for posting something that isn't CSAM or literal state secrets on Twitter in the US. Even so-called "hate speech" is broadly protected in the US by the First Amendment. In fact the American Civil Liberties Union (which is loathed by the American right) has gone to bat and litigated on behalf of the KKK of all organizations, for example, to protect those rights.
If you send "menacing" notes to someone, that can be a part of a larger crime like harassment, assault or stalking, but as noted in the chain, that's not what's being measured here.
So the fact that people are being arrested at all for tweets is not "what I consider to be acceptable speech" but in fact what the US generally considers to be protected speech. Any number above 0 that doesn't reference child porn is infinitely more than you'd expect to see in the US. That's the difficulty we're having.
[Edit: I understand US != UK. The American flag only flies in the embassy here. I just wanted to provide the context of those arrests and these numbers to US readers who will find them surprising.]
My wife in the USA had semi-anonymous texts send to her personal over a course of 2 years. They included her home address, her mother's home address with a picture of the home, and they stated that they would kill her and anyone she loved.
She never saw justice for it. The police said there was nothing they could do, despite having the phone number it came from, because it was across state lines.
The texts stop, and we suspect that it coincided with a specific person who went to jail for a year or so for unrelated offences around the time that the texts stopped.
And in many other countries those would get you prosecuted for hate speech or incitement to violence.
The lie here is you've picked too examples of atrocious behavior, but you're trying to pretend that actually all the rest are just people posting dank memes and so "it could happen to you!!".
Those examples are completely inoccuous to my sensibilities. Of course, there are plenty of countries that lack the broad speech protections Americans enjoy, but one doesn't expect such curtailments of personal liberty in a fellow English-speaking western "liberal" democracy.
The first example was "man arrested for wearing the exact same outfit as a man who intentionally blew himself up, killing 22 people". It's not "he was wearing the same chequered shirt!" either. As a UK citizen... I don't see how that fits under "free speech", lol
Even with "freedom of speech", you do not have "freedom from fascism" built into that, case in point, Wikipedia has multiple pages documenting both the current US administration's attitude towards trans people (that, in Charlie Kirk's words, we are "abominations unto god" that should be "taken care of" "as in the 50s/60s", which can only be taken to mean lynching), as well as the attitude of the US presidency towards democracy
I think the issue here isn't "freedom of speech", its that people who claim to want "freedom for speech" are either using it as a shield to say vile things to other people, or they feel that "freedom of speech" is the only thing one needs to guard against fascism.
The resulting difficulty is that the former is demonstrably true, and the former is demonstrably false.
Okay, so I see we've arrived at fantasyland now. Just because someone probably posted an idiotic idea like that on Twitter one time does not mean it has any path to becoming law. Do you know how difficult it is to get a constitutional amendment passed?
I agree that it's not currently reality and the person you replied to could have made their point by using actual examples of appalling ICE actions rather than a scenario that's currently just fantasy.
That said, it's not just "someone posted an idiotic idea on Twitter". The idea of stripping people of their citizenship has literally been suggested by the current president to a press gaggle, and that's not a one off random statement it follows years of things like prominent political voices suggesting that certain Muslim members of congress should be deported despite their having been born in the US...
As to the technical difficulties of passing a constitutional amendment, I agree it's hard to imagine that happening. Depressingly though it's less hard to imagine the president signing an executive order telling ICE to go against that part of the constitution, followed by one or both of ICE actions outpacing judicial ability to enforce the constitution, and/or judges ruling in favour of ICE being allowed to ignore the constitution.
These are possibilities that, if suggested 30 years ago would sound like crazy conspiracy theory territory, but in 2025 they're actual plausible scenarios looking at the coming months, yet alone years. I wish this was just scare mongering, but the truth is if you don't think this is possible then you haven't been following US politics closely enough - from the words of Trump and his team, such as Stephen Miller, to the actions of agencies such as ICE and the FBI, to rulings of the Supreme Court such as the one giving Trump unqualified immunity that anything he does as a work act rather than a personal one can't be treated as illegal, even if it goes against the constitution.
See, I don't think they'd really bother with an amendment. FWIG there's also something in there about the right to a trial (is it the sixth?) that they've just kinda ignored. Is it that it's the first one that makes it more important? We've also gotten over our (apparently) ludicrous assumption that posse comitatus means anything.
Indeed. The success of even one such prosecution means that the second someone in government wants someone out of the way, they can efficiently be imprisoned for anything rising to the level of... "offensive."
"offensive" actually has a relatively solid definition based on how judges have ruled on it in the past. This includes hate-mongering against protected characteristics, which I see a lot of from the USA right now.
Huge numbers are for political speech. It's not just prosecutions. Child protection is abused to force far left wing beliefs on the population.
A former Marine was charged with inciting racial hatred after describing some migrants as “scumbags” and “psychopaths” in a 12-minute video posted on Facebook following the murders of three children in Southport, which sparked riots around the country. He was then banned from coaching his own daughter's football club. A jury cleared him in 17 minutes, but Wales is run by the left so they kept the coaching ban in place because they believe right wing people are a threat to children.
In another case a teacher was banned from working with children after telling a Muslim child that "Britain is still a Christian state"
There are lots of cases like this. Especially if you expand to Europe. The German Chancellor has personally prosecuted thousands of speech cases against people who insulted him. Merkel established a general rule against insulting politicians so now people get police visits and their devices confiscated for saying things like such and such a politician is a dumbass.
It is by no means a good publication, but at the same time being accepted as a citation on Wikipedia or not is not necessarily a particularly objective measure of quality. I recommend reading https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/reliable-sources-how-wik... for the critical perspective on Wikipedia's integrity in this regard.
They are a trash paper so skepticism is warranted but care should be taken not to dismiss facts just because of who reports them. Thankfully, we don't have to depend on the word of the Daily Mail for evidence that the UK doesn't value the ideal of free speech and are far too comfortable punishing and silencing online speech. It's a problem, and it makes their efforts to tie people's online activity to an individual worrying.
Dunn was jailed eight weeks for posting three memes:
> Prosecutor George Shelley said Dunn had posted three separate images. The first one showed a group of men, Asian in appearance, at Egremont crab fair 2025, with the caption: “Coming to a town near you.”
> The second also showed a group of men, Asian in appearance leaving a boat on to Whitehaven beach. This, said Mr Shelley, had the caption: “When it’s on your turf, then what?”
> A final image showed a group of men, again Asian in appearance, wielding knives in front of the Palace of Westminster. There was also a crying white child in a Union flag T-shirt. This was also captioned, said Mr Shelley, with the wording: “Coming to a town near you.”
Based on those descriptions... it sounds like he was pretty clearly racist? From the article:
> Sentencing Thompson, Judge Temperley had said of the zero tolerance approach being taken by courts:
> “This offence, I’m afraid, has to be viewed in the context of the current civil unrest up and down this country. And I’ve no doubt at all that your post is connected to that wider picture.
> “I don’t accept that your comments and the emojis that you posted were directed at the police. I’ve read in the case summary of the comments you made on arrest which clearly demonstrate to me that there was a racial element to the messaging and the posting of these emojis.
> “That has to be reflected in the sentence...there to be a deterrent element in the sentence that I impose, because this sort of behaviour has to stop.
> “It encourages others to behave in a similar way and ultimately it leads to the sorts of problems on the streets that we’ve been seeing in so many places up and down this country. This offence is serious enough for custody.”
So the actual news here is "man jailed for sharing memes that Asian people are invading the UK and coming to murder you".
Yes. It's a horrible sentiment, and he should be able to air it. Free and open discourse requires me to allow you to say things I dislike in exchange for you tolerating my saying things you dislike. It isn't free speech if you're only allowed to say popular things.
The continual conflation of speech that harms society as "speech I dislike" is absurd. And yes, it's not American-style freedom of speech... we've never had that nor should we. Just look at what American-style freedom of speech has done to America.
As a minority, I do not hold the same view. I understand your position, however, my personhood is often demonstrably conditional on the speech that other people spread about me and people like me. In the last decade I have seen fascist speech go unpunished and, consequently, the increased spread of the idea that I and people like me are not people, that I am simply an evil and horrible person for my genetic identity, forever tainted, an "undesirable", and a very suitable target for being marginalised and erased (often violently) from society. I have already been victim to these effects, as have my friends, and I have seen others, those with a different skin colour on top of the genetic difference, bear the effects tenfold. I have known of people murdered in the streets for simply having my genetic trait, even if it didn't hit the international news, I saw how people spoke about it online even despite the hate speech acts. That another one of us dead was a good thing.
I have also been witness to the power that physical violence inflicted upon these people has had in silencing that rhetoric and the spread of those ideas. I have seen how fascists go into hiding when they feel they will be the victims of violence, and I have seen how easy it is to break apart these networks by simply restricting the speech of a handful of people, or removing them from the platform.
I very much do feel, that either I am in a concentration camp in the next ten years, or these people are imprisoned. Prison is the lighter sentence for fascist rhetoric, and represent sane and sensible consequences for suggesting that an entire group of people who hold no specific ideology are evil. Remember that a war was fought, and the alternative to imprisonment for fascist rhetoric is letting it grow so large that the only inevitable solution is a war where people are murdered for their fascist rhetoric.
Before comparing the third paragraph with the first, please remember, that these people can simply choose to not say vile things about people with my genetics. If they do not wish to go to prison, maybe they should not make wide fascistic statements about people with my genetics being murderers and pedophiles — both claims that are starkly in opposition to the evidence. I am 60% more likely to be sexually assaulted compared to the baseline, cisgender female population. I cannot change my genetics, nor would I want to if I had the option, and my genetics do not represent my ideology or how I behave or act in public or private.
We know this doesn't work, and it's insane Americans still pretend it does. Goebbels himself said it while they were abusing the Weimar German freedoms and protections of democracy to take power with violence. They were very happy to use the tools of democracy to destroy it. We owe it to our societies and democracy not to let this kind of speech in particular to prosper.
And for a more recent example, you have a presidential couple that (among a million other things) lied publicly, and admitted to it. And they're now in power because their hatred-filled lies were not checked. And the country is sliding fast towards fascism, ignoring courts to concentration camps with no records to suing media to bully them into favourable reporting to pick any other example you want. Guess the country!
It's unfortunate that this seems to have been forgotten in only a few decades, but one day you may find yourself as the one who is clearly racist and despite your protests there will be no one left to defend you
> Apart from Israel/Palestine what speech is being silenced?
You say that as if people posting about Israel/Palestine isn't political speech that matters. Free speech matters and you shouldn't have police coming after you for it even you're just a teenager posting lyrics to facebook (Chelsea Russell) drawing a penis on a photo of a cop (Jordan Barrack), sharing a vacation photo of yourself holding a gun (Jon Richelieu-Booth), repeating gossip surrounding recent events (Bonnie Spofforth), talking shit about your boss (Robert Moss), or saying that a politician should resign (Helen Jones).
While that kind of speech can be silly, thoughtless, rude, or annoying it's also normal everyday speech that happens everywhere. Just because technology allows police monitor our speech more closely than they could before that's no reason for using that to go after people for the kinds of expression that have been a normal part of life for ages.
They're not being arrested "for protesting a genocide", they're being arrested for showing support for a group which has been declared to be a terrorist organisation. Regardless of your views on the latter, the former is an important distinction you seem to be unaware of. The fact there are thousands of people regularly protesting against Israeli actions in Palestine and yet not being arrested completely undermines your point.
The Daily Mail is frequently referred to as either 'The Daily Fail' or 'The Daily Heil' (referring to the fact they supported Oswald Mosley and his fascist ideals, and remain very right wing). It is not a quality publication by any means.
Scientific publishing is a decentralized system, there's no specific ban in place, just that publishers will likely not accept to publish your paper.
And the reason for that is accuracy nor bias, just that Wikipedia is not a primary source. You don't generally cite any encyclopedias in scientific papers.
see [0] the original Palestine Action protestors, who were arrested in 2024 and are not likely to see trial until at the best May 2026, and some sources are saying January 2027.
They are being kept in remand, with no possibility of release, for at least two years, without being convicted of a crime.
This is legal because Palestine Action is a terrorist organisation and the UK passed some farcical laws aimed at preventing terrorism, that everyone pointed out at the time would be used against non-terrorists eventually. They are using this same law to arrest hundreds of people for doing nothing more than holding a placard.
In the UK, if the government can make a case that you are a terrorist, then arrest is absolutely the same as imprisons. And similar farcical laws are operating in most Western democracies.
Yes, let me just arrest you over some text and hold you for a couple of days.
Surely no problem! But being serious if anything this is worse than no imprisonment. Why are they arresting so many people they don't have any grounds to jail longer term?
but then once charged you can be held for years on remand [0], there is no limit to how long the court can take to actually getting around to holding your trial. The law says now 8 months, but (as this site says) people are held for years.
That's exactly it. The proscription is ridiculous and delegitimises the whole concept of proscribed organization. It collapses into "mere support for Palestine is an arrestable offense". This didn't work against Sinn Fein and it will not work now.
Also the whole thing moved incredibly quickly; it went from new organization to banned almost immediately. I'm fairly sure that other groups previously like the Greenham Common camp didn't get this treatment.
It was reasonable to arrest people who actually broke into the base and those who organized it. Going after those speaking in support is what's excessive.
> It was reasonable to arrest people who actually broke into the base and those who organized it. Going after those speaking in support is what's excessive
Speaking out, yes. Helping organize? No.
Where the UK took it over the top was in using terrorist statute to shut down the organisation. That was unnecessary. But if the organisation helped organise the action—and this is not yet proven—its assets should have been frozen while the organisation and its leaders are investigated. If the organisation were found to have knowingly aided and abetted the break-in, it should have been shut down.
All of this could have been done using mostly civil and a little criminal law. None of it required terrorism laws.
> Also the whole thing moved incredibly quickly; it went from new organization to banned almost immediately.
Are you sure? They were founded in 2020.
You can argue that destroying property may be legitimate protest, but that is not all they did. In 2024 they used sledgehammers to destroy machinery in an Elbit factory. Again, arguably legitimate protest. But then they attacked police officers and security guards who came to investigate with those same sledgehammers. That is in no way legitimate.
If the government was going to proscribe them for anything it should have been for that. The RAF thing was indeed bullshit.
Anyway, it seems to me that to simultaneously believe that
a) telling a group of people that they can't use a particular name is an unacceptable attack on our freedoms yet
b) physically attacking people with sledgehammers is OK
I think it's general knowledge that the UK military is a paper tiger, I think Charlie Stross said something about it being enough to defend one small village or something like that (he occasionally comments on this site so may correct me).
I think that damaging what little remains of its defences, which may exist mostly to keep the nukes safe so nobody tries anything, is still a really bad idea. Especially given that the US is increasingly unstable and seems like it may stop responding to calls from assistance from anyone else in NATO, and the UK isn't in the EU any more and therefore can't ask the entire EU for help either just the bits that are also in NATO. Theoretically the UK could also ask Canada for help, but right now it seems more likely that Canada will be asking all of NATO except for the USA for military aid to keep the USA out.
(What strange days, to write that without it being fiction…)
So you understand that the proscription is the core problem, but in the same breath, still focus the blame on protestors for fighting this proscription?
By the way, in case you somehow overlooked it, the whole point of people protesting under the banner of Palestine Action is to protest the illegitimate proscription.
then you haven't been paying attention. the UK is in fact arresting people for all sorts of speech online. the vast majority is not a call for violence at all.
> Officers from 37 police forces made 12,183 arrests in 2023, the equivalent of about 33 per day. This marks an almost 58 per cent rise in arrests since before the pandemic. In 2019, forces logged 7,734 detentions.
This article really doesn't go into what the communication was about. They have some anecdata, but once you go into 10k+ of examples, you're almost guaranteed to get mistakes. Maybe the situation is bad overall, but that article really doesn't show it.
Parallel realities. Over here it seems like the US is a dystopia, with how hostile their leadership is to democratic institutions and how greatly it empowers oligarchs.
They think that European countries (or commonly just "Europe") are about to arrest all citizens for criticizing politicians. "Europe" must be saved from their leftist fascist regimes. For now using propaganda. Soon militarily.
It's illegal to insult anyone in Germany, and has been for a long time. Libel, slander, and insults are all criminal (not civil) offences. I know what you're thinking: "That sounds crazy" - Yeah, it kinda is. In practice this is rarely enforced, as the offended party must file a formal complaint and most people have better things to do.
> "That sounds crazy" - Yeah, it kinda is. In practice this is rarely enforced
Generally, selective enforcement is itself a huge problem. That might not actually be an issue in this instance though if the only thing preventing enforcement is the lack of a formal complaint and assuming that the complaint process is easily accessible to everyone (not requiring money to file, and without other barriers that might prevent certain people from filing but not others). It's still a terrible idea to make it illegal to insult others, but "rarely enforced" may not be the red flag it usually is.
Well, time is money, right? If someone files a complaint and goes through with whatever proceedings ensue you can bet that it's not a single mom working a full-time job. For police officers, on the other hand, enforcing this law on behalf of themselves is part of their job. So in practice this law is grossly unfair. It does lead to a greater level of decorum in public debate than in most other countries, which is nice, but it's not a fair law by any means.
I think you're holding the German law to a much higher standard than many hold their legal systems.
On the other side of the pond cases are routinely decided by who can afford the right lawyer or litigation costs.
So yeah, it's very admirable that you want German law to be perfect, but you've gotta admit how it currently ranks up against real-world points of reference other than the ideal.
German prosecutors actually did a bizarre and out-of-touch (for an American audience) interview with 60 Minutes recently where they proudly declare they're going to bring order to the Internet and how things like calling politicians "dicks"[1] is rightfully VERBOTEN.
> But it was a 2021 case involving a local politician named Andy Grote that captured the country's attention. Grote complained about a tweet, that called him a "pimmel," a German word for the male anatomy. That triggered a police raid and accusations of excessive censorship by the government. As prosecutors explained to us, in Germany, it's OK to debate politics online. But it can be a crime to call anyone a "pimmel," even a politician.
Naturally, it's necessary to arrest people for being mean and/or expressing VERBOTEN political beliefs on the Internet so that...uh...everyone will feel free to express their opinions.
> Josephine Ballon: This is not only a fear. It's already taking place, already half of the internet users in Germany are afraid to express their political opinion, and they rarely participate in public debates online anymore. Half of the internet users.
Germany does not protect free speech the way the US does. You're free to voice any opinion, but the exact wordings in which you are allowed to do it are restricted. You are allowed to say "I hate Merz" but not "Merz is a piece of garbage".
I'm not saying this is good, but it's not recent and it does not prevent free communication of ideas.
As we have seen, it is very easy to declare certain beliefs beyond contestation and any disagreement with them as insulting/inciting hate/etc.
That's why freedom of speech must entail the freedom to say things people find offensive, or there's no free communication of ideas at all. The state and ruling elites will determine that there is a set of proscribed ideas and a set of approved ideas and yours fall into the wrong set.
Banning speech and ideas also accelerates extremist - Weimar had very strong hate speech laws and prosecuted and imprisoned Nazis many many times. [1] The Nazis turned around and used the same laws on their enemies. Then the Stasi with similar motives used similar means. Suppressing speech in the name of order seems to be a German cultural value.
This is generally the mainstream take on it. These laws are not generally seen as good. However, if dictatorship comes back, the law is meaningless, so what a dictator would use a law for is a moot point.
As for whether it's ingrained in German culture, quite possibly! These laws originate from the 1500s.
Dictators, despite the name, cannot do whatever they want. That’s even moreso the case with long democratic or republican histories and in large modern states with enormous political machineries. They require backing from large swaths of the population and have to subvert the existing institutions to their will, which requires a delicate hand.
Already having a legal infrastructure and social expectation that offensive speech is criminal is an enormous help to dictators.
“Country X should change it’s laws because Y” is a belief you can have even if Y is not shared by enough people in Germany to make that change.
Claiming that Germany recently introduced a law prohibiting criticism of politicians is an admission of belief in something demonstrably incompatible with reality.
If you want to keep both narrative and truthfulness, you should ask “doesn’t Germany have laws criminalizing insults, and someone had to pay a fine after insulting a politician”.
Still not very authoritarian on a global scale. We have countries where politicians are exempt from criminal prosecution via presidential pardons and countries that kill dissidents. These countries form alliances and align their foreign policy.
It's being enforced more these days, perhaps because social media makes it more tempting and easier to insult politicians in a manner where it can be easily detected. In the old days, you'd have to hand out flyers or get your letter to the editor published in a newspaper, in order to insult politicians where they could notice, and even then there was no way to automatically detect it. But when people insult politicians on social media, it's an extremely low bar for the effort required, both to do it, and to detect it.
If someone were to insult me on social media, I'd never know about it, because I'm not constantly monitoring Twitter. But some politicians pay some agency to constantly monitor Twitter etc, and then they file complaints about everyone they catch in the act, and then the jackbooted police kick down the perpetrators' doors and confiscate their phones and computers.
Are these adults? This level of sensitivity is what I'd expect from a toddler. We tell them to ignore it and usually/hopefully they grow up into healthy adults that don't mind insults from strangers.
Don't forget that Digital ID really has been pushed by Labour after a meeting with Larry Fink and BlackRock. This is how democracy gets bypassed by the wealthy and in functioning country it should result in the entire government going to prison. Unfortunately MI5 that is in charge of that is asleep at the wheel - probably corrupt themselves.
Certainly, calling the UK "ultra-authoritarian" is incorrect. But the point about attempts of completely deanonymizing Internet access is still important.
The inability of the government to know everything about its citizens is an important check that prevents it from slipping towards illiberal, even if prosperous, system, like that in mainland China, or Singapore.
OK, but the order of "importance", as stated by the government, was:
- easier access to the services - remember this is supposed to be STRICTLY digital only, so presumably on par with government gateway ID?
- control of illegal immigration - with scale of the problem wildly blow out of proportion - presumably by helping control the border? how? And ostensibly by making impossible to work without right - which is a check mandatory already based on the existing digital-only online check -- once again fake non-solution
Certainly after experiencing multiple problems with the existing eVisa (Digital only) and reading multiple horror stories of faults and errors it proves to me the government is NOT taking ANY of the best practices into consideration while unfairly using parallel to the (like Estonian ID)
The only thing it would do is to cut the fraud a bit, but the impact would once again be limited because it would be a physical document (which, I must repeat from the abundance of caution, might bear a certificate or a chip that makes it incredibly hard to make a fake version of it).
I'm sorry but the government made it a fight for the souls of the rightwing voters once again, it didn't show the awesome project. It showed the stick it want to introduce to conduct the same checks it runs already :)
Just VERIFY and examine their claims. It's been discussed so many times, not only on HN.
Arresting a person for holding a blank placard would indeed be Russia-level oppression. The person in question was not arrested, but threatened to be arrested if he wrote a particular phrase on it [1]. Not great at all, but still no cigar.
A man wearing the "Plasticine Action" T-shirt was indeed arrested [2]. That was extra absurd because the protest was against AI-generated animation, not about a political cause.
Yeah, that’s dumb. Curious what they were charged with, e.g. if they were told to disperse and didn’t, and if the charges will stick.
As dumb as it may be, you should be free-in a democracy, with limited exceptions—to verbalize support for a foreign or even domestic terrorist organization as long as you aren’t materially aiding it.
Spray painting a panzer tank in 1939 with "free the jews" would have been a pretty much identical form of "terrorism".
Nobody killed, no real damage done.
Obviously the Nazis back then would agree with modern far right that defacing weapons used to commit genocide fits the definition of terrorism and that voicing support for such a crime demands prison time.
And, modern liberals have always had an easier relationship with the far right than they have had with free speech.
It's only scary to Americans (maybe reaching hard because of Trump?) and those who live off Twitter and Daily Mail headlines. For the rest us it's marginally better than when the crazies where screwing us over with Brexit.
>Arrested is not the same thing as being charged. The latter is what would lead to a trial.
Often the entire point of the arrest is to get restrictive and onerous bail conditions imposed on people. Frequently restricting their speech on social media by threat of imprisonment for violating their bail conditions.
That the charges are later dropped isn't the point.
This is one of dozens of amendments proposed by members, so it's more accurate to say "three members of the House of Lords attempting to ban the use of VPNs".
Brit here. The HoL's role is to review and scrutinise legislation as part of the parliamentary process of turning bills into acts (laws). Most legislation originates in the (directly elected) House of Commons. But all parliamentary bills pass through the Lords, and they can propose ammendments, but those ammendments have to be approved by the Commons. Those that aren't are sent back to the Lords for reconsideration. In the event of deadlock, the Commons has primacy and can overrule the Lords.
Good Lord, Jeeves! Do you mean to tell me that a gaggle of elected coves can simply override the peers in the Upper House? It seems a distinct inversion of the natural order, what? Rather like the oyster overruling the walrus! It makes one feel the foundations of the Empire are trembling a bit, like a jelly in a high wind.
Are there any limitations on what can be proposed in one of the houses? For example in Australia our upper house (senate) can't adjust or propose bills to do with money.
There are the parliament acts which restrict the length of the delay the HoL can inflict (including to just 1 month for money bills). They also cannot amend money bills.
There is however the Salisbury convention which is that the HoL shouldn't block legislation that was a manifesto commitment of the governing party. That doesn't meant they can't amend it at all, but they can't substantively change it. It's also just a convention, not a rule.
Legislation often bounces back and forth between the Commons and the Lords a few times. The Lords won't block things which have a strong mandate, e.g. things promised in an election manifesto; but they can at least stall and amend things.
So lemme guess - in order to prove one's age, one needs to obtain a digital ID and use said ID to gain access to the internet thereby creating a perfect system to monitor one's internet activity.
Gotta hand it to them - "protecting the children" is a pretty good pretext.
Interesting to see these kinds of comments more in this thread compared to the one from yesterday.
The one from yesterday was discussing how australia is banning social media for anyone under 16. Most comments were supportive because they hate social media.
A few comments were discussing how it is just a way to propagate more KYC.
It's way easier to justify banning social media entirely than banning it for under-sixteens. Paradoxically it infringes on freedom less, as it bans a type of business model for being too harmful rather than restricting people's rights to view and share information.
The very people with the most to gain from silencing dissidents or suppressing certain viewpoints given the power to restrict access to selected social media platforms while encouraging the use of others.
None of this recent crackdown on social media is really about 'protecting the kids', is it?
I would personally simply heavily tax ad revenue rather than banning social media, as while a blanket ban is ironically less of an infringement on free speech than banning it for children, it’s still something of an infringement.
There’s a bunch of benefits to an ad-tax too, beyond revenue generation: Users won’t be encouraged to use VPNs (and most VPN users probably also use ad blockers anyway). It’s difficult to evade, since an advertising business kind-of has to operate in the open; if nobody knows you’re running an ad business, your ad business has failed at the one thing it’s supposed to do. Advertisers are also purely profit-motivated, and so won’t hesitate to rat out their competitors if they’re using some loophole to gain a competitive advantage. It’s also very difficult for them to hide which country they’re targeting, since that information has to be available to their customers, so the taxmen can get it by subpoenaing customers or posing as them. And there’s not that many big ad-tech companies, so you don’t really mind if a few small-fries slip through the net.
The problem with just taxing them more is that they'll make the algorithms doing all the personal and societal damage even more agressive to compensate.
> It's way easier to justify banning social media entirely
Whenever I read these comments on Hacker News, on user-generated stories which are ranked in my algorithmic front page feed, written by other users posting comments and socializing, I wonder if the comments realizes that HN is also a social media website with millions of global users.
Or if they just get angry and yell “No that’s not what I meant” because they thought the government social media regulations would only target the sites they don’t like, not the sites they do.
The contention is that the thing in question is harmful for minors and adults, albeit perhaps to different degrees. Also, to be clear, any ban should be enforced on the offering side, not the consumption side.
You can easily argue that most of the things that are banned for minors but not for adults are also harmful or at least dangerous for adults as well. Alcohol, pot, tobacco, pornography, stripping or acting in pornography, gun purchases, etc. are all debatable as far as adults, but clearly should be out of the question for developing brains. Perhaps an even better parallel to social media is that minors cannot get credit cards or take out loans without parental approval. A social media profile is a bit like taking out a mortgage on the rest of your life.
There are things that can have lifelong harmful consequences that we as a society recognize adults have rights to, and which they may be capable of moderating their exposure to, but which minors are simply not prepared to fully understand the consequences of.
Banning minors from social media does not ban their speech or access to speech. It bans their access to the gamified drug-like patterns of engagement surrounding the commoditication of speech for the gain of companies which know full well that the services they provide are built on hooking someone's eyeballs at the earliest age possible.
As an Australian it's so irritating how enthusiastic people are to give up their privacy and freedom of speech, and also force everyone to hand over personal information to private companies, on the flimsiest of pretexts from our perpetually technologically incompetent government.
After the number of data breaches we've seen, they want to do this, and in the least privacy-preserving way possible.
Why not set up a government api where a site can get a yes/no answer about age using tokens, so the site itself gets no information but if the age is ok? Nope, we'll just pick a few sites and force everyone to give them their data, what could go wrong?
And if you actually look at the suicide statistics, there's no epidemic of suicides going on...
It's just lazy parents who can't be bothered parenting looking for a quick fix. I want to hand my phone to little tommy and turn my brain off.
What's even more galling is that the quick fix with so many obvious negatives won't even fix anything. As a kid I had unlimited time to get around any blocks. It's so dumb.
4chan is perfectly fine, but reddit must be stopped! Just to be clear I don't think either should be blocked.
Make the entire internet 18+ only and put the parents who let kids on the net in jail, I don't care.
> Why not set up a government api where a site can get a yes/no answer about age using tokens, so the site itself gets no information but if the age is ok?
As I mentioned in yesterday's thread, an online API still allows the government to track and monitor residents, which is arguably worse. You no longer have plausible deniability when the government asks you to hand over your social media credentials because they now know that you have, or at least attempted to open, an account with that provider.
The better solution would be an offline, cryptographic "wallet" (similar to the EU Digital Identity Wallet) that only exposes the age information and nothing else, but I wouldn't get my hopes up.
I think the separation is in how 'algorithmic engagement' in social media is at least as dangerous as stuff that even the US still has banned in other forms of media [0].
Especially because it's gotten so bad. At first it was just 'making things popular in your network more visible'. But now it's to where when I use something like Facebook there is more 'algorithm spam' than anything actually happening with my friends. It's become something where the primary purpose is 'driving views' rather than communicating. [1]
A VPN is a bit different; it's a tool, and I will note one that depending on the specific definition has legitimate (or at least morally/ethically legitimate) uses.
[0] - e.x. unless it has been reversed in the last decade or two, in the US you still can't cut from a kid's cartoon right into a commercial for a toy/game related to said cartoon. I mean FFS that was a rule that got put in before 'attention hacking' was even a term.
[1] - TBH I'd love if we could get back to Myspace or maybe even early Facebook type social media. There's a lot of excitement lost when an algorithm feeds you shit versus a friend sharing it, and it was a lot less noise...
My point is more so that these are both approaches to push more KYC.
And many comments in here understand that this particular ban is using "for the kids" as an excuse, so why didn't the other thread have more comments recognizing this excuse?
There is a difference between a concept (banning social media for kids) and the actual implementation (requiring ID to visit sites or whatever they are going to do).
There is a theoretical difference, but in practice they are the same thing, and we all know it [1]:
> Social media platforms have admitted verifying user ages would likely involve surrendering personal IDs, as the Albanese government forges ahead with its under-16 ban.
Blacklists are an inherently terrible, rights infringing approach to this sort of issue vs whitelists. It would be a lot better if the internet by default was simply considered 18+ (or 16+ or whatever a country wants). Instead, the tld system could be easily used to have age based domains where anyone who wanted one had to meet some set of requirements for content standards, accountability and content vetting, didn't allow user contributed content at all without review or whatever was needed.
At that point all the technical components exist to make this an ultra easy UI for parents. Require ISP WiFi routers at least to support VLANs and PPSKs, which ultra cheap gear can do nowadays no problem, and have an easy to GUI to "generate child password, restrict to [age bracket]", heck to even just put in a birthday and by default have it auto-increment access if a parent wants. Add some easy options for time-of-day restrictions etc, done. Now parents are in charge and no adult needs anything ever.
Now I highly doubt politicians are all being honest about full motivations here, clearly there are plenty of forces trying to use this issue as a wedge to go after rights in general. But at the same time parental concern is real, and non-technical people find it overwhelming. It'd be good if industries and community could proactively offer a working solution, that'd reduce the political salience a great deal. It's unfortunate the entire narrative has been allowed to go 100% backwards in approach.
To be frank, while it may have a level of technical beauty, this kind of "opt-in whitelist" approach is an authoritarian's dream.
Once the baseline is established, the playbook becomes simple: Shift that age bracket up to the very moment when someone can vote. Make sure that every new voter spends all their formative years unable to access even basic resources on the struggles that marginalized groups go through, and the history of their existence; set the bars for the "whitelist" so high that one must toe the party line in every bit of messaging, and thus is effectively a list of propagandists whose businesses can be fined astronomically if they deviate. Take away the parent's choice, and make it mandatory to use routers that block the non-whitelisted TLDs for any device that doesn't cryptographically authenticate as being operated by an adult. Find ways to impose this on groups other than children (for instance, by making it illegal for criminals to access the non-whitelisted web, then greatly expanding that definition). All in the name of peace and tranquility.
If you want V for Vendetta, this is how you get V for Vendetta.
... only to the degree it hasn't been manufactured by tabloid media and Russian propaganda warfare, that is.
With every little news about local shootings, robberies, rapes, beatings, thefts, whatever not just making national, but in the worst case international headlines, one might think that Western countries are unsafe hellholes of the likes of actually legitimately failed states - despite criminality rates often being on record lows. Of course parents are going to be afraid for their children, and it's made worse by many Western countries financially only allowing for one, maximum two children.
On top of that, a lot of the panic is simply moral outrage. Porn and "trans grooming" it seems to be these days, I 'member growing up with the "Killerspiele" bullshit after some nutjob shot up a school in the early '00s. My parents grew up with the manufactured fear of reading too much as it was supposed to make you myopic. Again, all manufactured fear by organized groups aiming to rip our rights to pieces.
Parents should relax and rather teach their children about what can expect them on the Internet, how people might want to take advantage of them, and most importantly, that their children can always come to them when they feel something is going bad, without repercussions. When children think that they cannot show something to their parents, that is where the actual do-bad people have an in.
The problems I mentioned aren't real, that's the point.
It hasn't just never been proven that Counter Strike et al cause amok runs, it's been disproven [1]. Consuming porn doesn't make people rapists (although I do concede: the ethical aspects particularly around studio-produced porn do require discussions), and consuming LGBT content doesn't make children LGBT. People are, to the extent that we reasonably know, born LGBT.
The fact that some organizations (particularly religious) have framed these issues as "political" doesn't make them political either.
Very much this. The research points to hours spent on social media - not 'I saw something adult and now my fragile little mind is le bork'.
If you want kids to be healthier you're gonna have to deal with it on the device level at worst, and the healthcare level at best. Include mental health services and counseling as part of a single-payer preventative care plan if you really, really want to save the kids.
"The problems I mentioned aren't real, that's the point."
Can you possibly think that determining what is and is not a valid problem isn't a subjective evaluation?
Even looking at your examples, which are not chosen well for your argument. In each of these you're just shifting the burden of proof to reflect what your values. "No one has proven counter strike causes violent behavior, consuming porn makes people rapists or people can become gay." All wide-open empirical questions. Maybe none of these gets resolved in the near future; they aren't even well-formed questions. Meanwhile parents, governments, policy-makers need to make decisions. If you are very concerned about your kid being violent, you will avoid videogames even as a precautionary measure.
"The fact that some organizations (particularly religious) "
Ah you found an even easier way to resolve the issue, just ignore religious values.
Maybe go after Discord then for doing nothing meaningful against abusive, should we not?
And if that means that Discord has to shut down... well, okay, if that's the price? An organisation that doesn't care about the impact on its host society is nothing more than a parasite or cancer and should be treated as such.
(Besides: if you're aiming at stuff like groups of kids bullying other kids into suicide or self harm - guess what: that existed in times where there was no Internet. It just wasn't widely reported, other than maybe holding a vigil for a classmate who had "passed away")
I'm not debating whether they should ban VPNs for minors with you. I'm providing a counter statement to your ill-conceived thought that this is "all manufactured fear by organized groups aiming to rip our rights to pieces".
> I'm providing a counter statement to your ill-conceived thought that this is "all manufactured fear by organized groups aiming to rip our rights to pieces".
What is making Discord different from the real world? Do we ban kids from going to school because they could get bullied there?
Yes, sure, some content we decide to age-gate in real life... but hell. Our parents perused the VHS porn stash of their parents. Their parents wanked off to Playboy magazines. It has all been bullshit from the start.
The way this, and various other proposals/actions in other countries, are all popping up at the same time, seemingly independently though obviously not, has to be one of the biggest warning signs of trouble in my lifetime. Not helped by various European states deciding they want national service again all of a sudden.
Our governments have turned into the very thing they claimed to be opposing for decades. It's disgraceful.
> Not helped by various European states deciding they want national service again all of a sudden
Their next-door neighbour is threatening war and their longtime ally has turned into an unreliable kook. It’s not all that surprising that countries are looking to bolster their defences.
I'm relatively confident this was the entire end goal of the Online Safety Act. Get the (relatively) easy law passed, then "oh no platforms are only requiring this for UK-based IPs and there are too many VPNs/proxies, I guess we need to de-anonymize everyone".
Does anybody have a sense of whether this is best seen as "a proposal by the UK House of Lords", or "a proposal by three fringe whackjobs in the UK House of Lords"? I honestly don't have any idea. How influential are the proposers? Who else has made noise about such things?
The amendment from the same three people about requiring all phones to "have installed tamper-proof system software which is highly effective at preventing the recording, transmitting (by any means, including livestreaming) and viewing of CSAM using that device" strikes me as in the fringe whackjob range.
This is a clearly terrible idea. It's clear to us, at least, not to them. As is on the public record, there are three proponents behind this amendment. They and their contact details are:
LORD NASH [Tory, contactholmember@parliament.uk]
BARONESS CASS [Crossbench / 'independent', rivisn@parliament.uk ("staff")]
BARONESS BENJAMIN [Liberal Democrat - which particularly disappoints me – benjaminf@parliament.uk]
If you're reading this website and are either living in the UK or are a British citizen I strongly urge you to write a personalised and above all polite email stating with evidence why they are misguided. The "think of the children" brigade is strong – you may well be able to persuade these individuals why it is a bad idea.
Oh. Cass. She was given the peerage for constructing the Cass Review, an extremely one sided anti trans "review" of the science around puberty blockers. I suspect she's against VPNs and in favor of total information control of children because of trans panic.
I've been waiting for this for some time. It's an obvious loophole in the current rules.
So how long will we have to wait before it dawns on them that VPNs are also used to circumvent IP address blocks in the UK, and other countries of course.
Britain, Australia, and Canada love massive government overreach for some reason. America seems to have escaped it by having a culture of just hating government in general.
I will say the EUs love affair with it is somewhat new (last 10-15 years or so).
Political/issue opportunism. One so-called "democracy" implementing one civilian-harmful garbage policy makes it that much easier for another to emulate it.
To protect children we must install malware on their computers! Let's just hope those authorities don't use malware to peep on them through webcams ... Again
or look at their personal data
or use behavior analytics to target minority groups as
"risks" sending law enforcement to harass or kill them.
or store all their personal data on a 3rd party companies insecure servers
You have to start surveillance young, get them used to it early so they don't realize how bad it is!
Serious question: What's the gold standard in blocking certain content for an age group, without tracking ones identity?
My initial thought would it would be just making it super easy for their guardians to distribute and control device content. But let the control end at that echelon of power; Not even the local councils or schools should be given the power to regulate social media for kids to this extent IMO, let alone the govt
The more "digi-ID so we are sure you are old enough, bitte" keeps been pushed, the clearer it's about tracking and not about children. No matter how much they love to frame it the other way around. Unless they want to admit they are total inepts.
I'd have thought an OAuth flow to a government run ID system, to create an account you first must verify your age by redirecting to the ID provider logging in via FaceID/Fingerprint to verify it's you and then you are redirected back to the original site with a verification code.
Admittedly on paper that means the Gov system would know which sites you were approved for, not logging that would require legislation to not store these logs.
If we as humans take full responsibility for the world we inhabit.
It's really clear that we live inside of systems that we both control and feel that we don't.
Exploitation of children is (as strange as it sounds) a design issue.
We've designed systems that encourage and rationalize the exploitation of children as a feature of fear.
The encouraging part is that we are in control and it's easier to navigate with a system than to resist it,
so the question becomes.
- How do we modify the incentives that are already in place to not result in the exploitation of children?
Because people generally make decisions for their best interest, we're in a dangerous situation where the incentives are for child exploitation.
An example would be:
I need to feed my family
I need to work to live
I need to appease my boss to continue to work
The boss has goals to meet
We need to perform these actions to meet the goals
There isn't time or space to consider the full consequences of this action
When the impact to children is not considered by a change to a system, they inevitably reap the consequences of living in a system that never considered their welfare.
The children that grew up feeling out of control, and in a system not designed for them then seek to control the very system that formed them - not knowing that they're replicating the same harm that got them there.
This is a design cycle as I see it, if we don't look at it and understand it - then we will continue feeling powerless - while holding the reigns of our future in our hands.
I believe so much in the power of humanity - so I share this not with the idea that I have the answers, but that I am part of the collective that does.
Yes: somewhat cynically, they want their democratically elected affiliate party to remain in government (or they just enjoy popular support themselves) and so when the majority of people think protectin the childrun is good, you should demonstrate your purity spiraling by proposing and going along with anything that supports such an aim. You’d want to vote for that, right? I mean, the kids, right?!
If it's anything like Australia, then yes - here the conservative major party hates the interent because it has taken so much away from their massive donor and supporters' businesses (mostly legacy media - Murdoch's News Ltd, Nine Entertainment, etc.), and the more "progressive" major party (left of the Overton window but objectively fairly centre-right) hates it because actual progressives there shoot down all their hypocrisy and they can't control the narrative at all.
They both want to go back to the days of billionare-controlled media setting and driving the narrative, because they know how to influence that (or in Labor's case, think they know but they always fail to, despite sucking up to the media). So they dispose the Internet and social media.
People are saying mean things on Twitter, or even disagreeing with government-approved opinions! They're making 12000 speech arrests per year, but there's still far too many slipping through the cracks.
Remember how the morons, at the early stage, were saying "come on, don't be excessive, it's not China here", and now we are reaching a similar or worse civil rights point in most western countries...
Because the ruling class in most countries envy China's control and the people are too divided, disorganized, and ignorant to understand what they're losing. The ruling class saw an opportunity to gather more power and took it. They cede nothing voluntarily.
The UK has turned into the worst parts of 1984. The politicians are absolutely stark raving mad at this point, what a horrible country to be living in.
10,000+ arrests a year for posting offensive tweets? The fact there is no freedom of speech in UK and the politicians will willfully arrest people for wrongthink is disgusting. It means that any rational person will keep their mouths shut for fear of getting arrested.
We’ve seen how this goes. If it doesn’t pass, they’ll try again and again until some combination of political chicanery lets it slip through. They only have to win once, we have to win every single time.
> It's crazy that there is a house of unelected lords in an allegedly modern country.
I certainly agree. But its worth noting that only 92 of the 825 seats in the Lords are reserved for hereditary peers - the remainder are nominated by the (elected) leaders of the main political parties, or are appointed for non-political achievements (science, society, business, arts, etc.) There are also 26 Church of England bishops. Legislation to remove the hereditary peers is currently going through parliament.
There's plenty wrong with the HoL, but I think there's at least an argument to be made that the UK benefits from a parliamentary revising chamber that is less party-political than the Commons.
Making it life appointments only makes things much worse. It is not possible to be depoliticized in a polarized environment; look at what happened to the US supreme Court, or the Polish one.
For what it’s worth the SC happened in the US because there is too much agreement between parties. The republicans are the bad cop to the democrats more presentable bad cop. They feel they are losing control of things so capitalism is taking a turn towards increased repression. There wasn’t opposition to the packing of the court, both parties have the same masters.
That description sounds like the U.S. senate before there was a constitutional amendment to implement directly elected senators. The indirect election of senators was used to ensure that senators were selected to be favorable to elite interests. Direct election was intended to make it more responsive.
However, I have many criticisms of the continuing undemocratic nature U.S. Senate (I think it should be dissolved entirely), but that reform was a good step.
It's true that the upper house will be less party political, but that is because everyone inside is very comfy with each other and aligned on policy that favors the wealthy.
They have very limited power these days. They advise the House of Commons, as more or less a hereditary think tank. They can delay the passage of bills, though this has been limited to a maximum delay of one year since 1949 (less for some types of bills) and there are some checks on this ability. They have a few other things they can do that are (IMO) too boring to warrant much thought unless you're a member of parliament.
The idea of a House of Lords does strike me as a bit odd, but it's not really the big deal it used to be.
Time to open a business in Roblox selling eSIMs delivered in-game through QR codes? (Assuming Roblox hasn’t been banned before we can get the MVNOs on board.)
“If Parliament enacts that smoking in the streets of Paris is an offence, then it is an offence”
This is not an enforceable law. It seems predicated on the notion that VPNs can only exist as a commercial product, but all you need is two computers connected to the internet.
Not totally enforceable, but there are not a whole lot of people with connections in other countries willing to host VPNs for them. Most people don't even know what a VPN really is.
Worse than China. They are absolutely obsessed, fanatics.
But it's not just bigotry, unfortunately. They are trying to ban free usage of computers for the general public. They want to establish authoritarianism, at least some form of it.
It is worse than you think. The country is on its knees. I go outside and no one looks happy and no one is shopping or eating out unless it is McDonalds or Lidl. No one is working, children are calling sick for school and everyone is wondering how the hell so many random people suddenly got in. The next few decades will be a story of decline.
i've long held a view that what CCP is doing is cancer to all citizens in previously free countries, our democratic leaders are quick to show disgust and disdain, but the actual owners of the country, actual powers that be are enamored and mesmerised by what they're doing to the Chinese populace especially when it comes to messaging/propaganda. block and track everyone then just tiktok your way high heavens. it's not even what aldous huxley meant by the pleasure essay anymore it's deeper and more manipulative
I've had American colleagues ask me about the London crime wave. They seem to have some sort of alternative news source that doesn't tell them murders have halved from the high point around the millennium.
Seems to be a device for American free speech advocates to feel like they’re contributing something while being distracted from Trump chilling free speech by shaking down CBS & ABC, defunding Harvard, bogus investigations into James Comey, Tish James & others, Texas school book bannings, AAUP vs Rubio, etc, etc.
I mean all of those are downright minor compared to what's happening in the UK. Seriously it's creepy how many people try to gaslight Americans that what we are seeing isn't one of the largest trampling on the rights of free speech in the west.
Most Americans generally think European governments are more relaxed and less authoritarian than our own so finding out how much worse than us they are is a complete shock. It doesn't help that Europeans all jump into the comments trying to gaslight everyone that they have something even vaguely close to free speech.
Probably the media that shows the UK locking up old ladies and people in wheelchairs for speaking out publicly against ongoing UK support for genocide (among other "speech offenses").
> “The decision appears disproportionate and unnecessary. It limits the rights of many people involved with and supportive of Palestine Action who have not themselves engaged in any underlying criminal activity but rather exercised their rights to freedom of expression, peaceful assembly and association,” the High Commissioner said. “As such, it appears to constitute an impermissible restriction on those rights that is at odds with the UK’s obligations under international human rights law.”
>
> Since the UK Government’s ban came into effect on 5 July, at least 200 people have been arrested under the UK Terrorism Act 2000, many of them while attending peaceful protests.
So it seems you're also missing important context when you wave the whole thing away because "it's a proscribed organisation" - that proscription is in fact another example of government overreach.
That doesn't change the context. A different justification doesn't change the practical effect. The curtailing of speech is discussed as problematic by many of the residents openly. I certainly have had an earful touring across the entirety of the isles.
I get regularly downvoted for this, but oh well. I don't post for votes:
I think the research consensus is that the internet is a dangerous place for kids. And pragmatic life experience shows that as a parent, you can't control well what your kids have access to. While I think many of these laws are poorly implemented and unnecessarily endanger the free Internet, I think they are coming from a good place.
I think arguing that there should be no restrictions whatsoever is completely ignoring the negative societal impact of modern technology and is actually unpragmatic and counterproductive, because that impact is very real and people want to control it. They won't care about arguments about freedom that seem far fetched to them.
To me a much more fruitful discussion would be on how to control these things and how to ensure it doesn't become a creeping censorship mechanism. Simply saying "no" will mean people who care about free internet will be left on the side.
Because actually there is a lot one could do to reconcile these two standpoints:
- ensure privacy-preserving mechanisms are used for age verification
- ensure laws proactively proscribe freedom of internet outside of selected (age restricted) areas
- provide transparency laws that enable citizens to see all data collected on them, GDPR-style.
- pathways for citizens to appeal or request compensation for violations of privacy
- and crucially, prevent other terrible things in this area, like the demand I saw on a related thread that all mobile devices have an unremovable black-box software that censors all internet access.
Would I mind a provably privacy-preserving age check? Not really. And it's actually achievable, as opposed to simply attempting to veto this whole wave. Hackers like us no longer own the web, it has become a common good.
As a postscriptum, there's a ton of cynicism about "think of the children" and CSAM. I can well believe it's BS when politicians say it. Equally I don't take it as a given. I feel uncomfortable when my freedom to browse innocuous stuff shelters predators and gives 12 year olds access to SM porn. You're free to disagree, but it seems the world is moving on. You can shout at the clouds or try to find a compromise.
As someone fully supportive of the social media ban for Australian kids, I think As someone fully supportive of the social media ban for Australian kids, I think we need to teach UK kids to vibecode their own VPNs with OSS models at this point so they can save what's left of their future civil liberties.
We all know where this is going, they're going to ban the one mathematical tool we have that gives us control over machines, encryption.
UK House of Lords are a buncha of Jimmy Savile pal types, if you get my drift. The same blackmail and bribery networks that exist in the US largely were learned from the Brits, who of course gave Palestine to the zionists on behalf of dragging America into a war they mostly engineered via Edward the 7ths diplomatic intrigues and the pre-war formation of the entangling alliances.
So for a long time, I traced most roads in the US back to London... (for example Star Chamber origins)...
After a while though, as I dug into the real history of banking, I realized when William of Orange was installed it was shortly after that the Bank of England was established to take them over the same way they later influenced us (Jekyll Island) to establish the Fed, the main trojan horse for a country being monetary countrol.
So I now understand just like the masons, or intel dudes, etc, many of them are just so compartmentalized they don't know what they are a part of. I now view the UK the same way.
So lets keep following the strings up the chain...
"You win battles by knowing the enemy's timing, and using a timing which the enemy does not expect." - Miyamoto Musashi
When that's said, there are forces in the EU as well which try stunts like this, kind of, but in the EU there are at least lots of countries and lots of opposing voices. In the UK the situation is different.
So you would categorize these as "incitements to violence"?
The recent arrest at London’s Heathrow airport of a noted Irish comedian, Graham Linehan, for the “crime” of three politically incorrect tweets
A few months ago, police arrested a couple for messages shared in a WhatsApp chat group as six officers searched their home.
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.”
The wife of a conservative politician was sentenced to 31 months in prison for what police said was an unacceptable post. In contrast, a child molester was sentenced to 21 months in the slammer.
And yet, something worse is happening that is being swept under the rug:
A glaring example of this “wokeness” was exposed earlier this year by Elon Musk when he put the spotlight on how British authorities have for years turned a blind eye to notorious rape gangs made up primarily of Pakistani Muslim men who prey on vulnerable young girls. Musk was pilloried by the woke crowd for making this an issue. If not for his prominence, he most certainly would have been prosecuted. Thanks to Musk’s pressure, however, the British prime minister finally reversed course and ordered a probe. An extensive investigation has already found the scandal to be uglier and more widespread than previously supposed.
The 31 months was for literally inciting a mob to burn down a building with asylum seekers inside, in the middle of a riot. Yes, from the Internet rather than in person, and she's now very vigorous in claiming she didn't intend anyone to actually do it. But yeah. Likely criminal even in the US under the "imminent lawless action" exception.
Musk had bugger all to do with the rape gangs scandal, which broke literally years ago, and has been brought up with regularity by the newspapers here since. (For what it's worth there have also been plenty of non-Pakistani groups doing similar things and getting away with it. The main problem seems to be that no one in authority misses, or listens to, dropout teenage girls who have fallen off the radar - which makes them easy pickings for nonces.)
I don't know about the others. The sign holder was likely within the 150m buffer zone put around abortion clinics last year, though. Given the content of the sign (which just steps over the letter of the statutory prohibition not to influence patients' decisions while being entirely morally unobjectionable) I suspect it was a deliberate setup for arrest for outrage, just like the Palestine Action people. But I could be wrong.
It's perhaps also worth noting that Britain's traditions of free speech have never been as absolutist as the US (the last successful prosecution for blasphemous libel was as recent as the 70s and it's still technically a crime to advocate for a republic) but that raucous objections to government have very rarely been the target in recent centuries. The major difference in practice is that being grossly offensive isn't constitutionally protected. You're still not likely to get done for it, though.
No it’s pointing out that your argument sounds like it’s intentionally missing critical information in a way that makes your audience think or feel a certain way.
Very true, just see what happened to the Graphene project recently. They were approached by the French government for a backdoor, threatened when they refused, and left the country in fear.
That is not what happened to the Graphene project recently.
Basically, there have been a string of anonymous secure phones designed and marketed directly to high-ups in organised crime. Encrochat, Sky ECC, Anom, Phantom Secure, probably more. Their plausible deniability is thin - an undercover government agent goes to the creators and basically says "I'd like to buy 30 of these for my drug-dealing empire" and the creator says "Sure, that'll be $2000 each." Later the agent calls them up and goes "Hey this guy cooking meth was busted by the cops, can you erase his phone?" and the creator goes "Sure." and erases the phone. That's not merely selling secure phones - that's joining organised crime (as the guy who makes the phones).
Someone in the French government basically said that if Graphene is another Phantom Secure, they should suffer the same consequences as Phantom Secure. That's what the comment was. It doesn't seem like Graphene is another Phantom Secure, but they're sure acting suspicious by running away from France because of this comment.
"The “CSAM requirement” is that any relevant device supplied for use in the UK must have installed tamper-proof system software which is highly effective at preventing the recording, transmitting (by any means, including livestreaming) and viewing of CSAM using that device."
"Regulations under subsection (1) must enable the Secretary of State, by further regulations, to expand the definition of ‘relevant devices’ to include other categories of device which may be used to record, transmit or view CSAM"
Apple, what did you start?
[1] https://bills.parliament.uk/publications/63901/documents/746...
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