"Withdrawing ADP in the UK did not affect the 14 iCloud categories that were already end-to-end encrypted by default, including iCloud Keychain and Health. ADP increases the total from 14 to 23 categories. For UK users without ADP, the additional categories (iCloud Backup, Photos, Notes, iCloud Drive and so on) revert to Standard Data Protection. ↩
"
Unfortunately this first phrase is not strictly true in the sense that UK customers have their e2ee secrets exposed under common use cases, without requiring a passcode. My copresenter and I published some research at DEF CON 34 this year showing how the e2ee data is particularly vulnerable when ADP is off. Overall, people that do not work with extraction capabilities are currently over-estimating the strength of apple's e2ee and encryption in general. The platform security whitepaper documentation is insufficient on transparency and there are a number of best practices Apple is not following to better meet the e2ee claims they currently advertise.
I genuinely believe that in 2015 Apple had the balls to resist and today they don't.
I am judging by a simple fact, that "please confirm your age" screen is now mandatory during the iPhone setup in all countries, and in some it's behind a KYC. I have a strong opinion that this is insane. And once they let the foot in the door - there is no closing it.
Even in 2015 Apple put in backdoors. They have been really good at making people believe things that are not true. E.g. from the linked post:
iCloud already protects sensitive categories of data (like Passwords, Health data, Messages in iCloud, etc) with end-to-end encryption by default.
Except that there is a footnote in Apple's security document where they confirm that Messages in iCloud is not end-to-end encrypted if you don't enable ADP and have iCloud Backup enabled (which is probably most users):
Standard data protection: When iCloud Backup is enabled, the keys to your backups are secured in Apple data centers. If you use both iCloud Backup and Messages in iCloud, your backup includes a copy of the Messages in iCloud encryption key to help you recover your data.
So, there is always a backup of Messages in iCloud accessible to Apple and thus (US?) law enforcement, unless you enable ADP and the people you communicate with also use ADP.
WhatsApp is similar by the way. Unless you enable E2E backups, they end up in iCloud/Google Drive backups and are only encrypted at rest. Of the major messengers, I think only Signal completely opts out of iCloud backups and have their own real E2E-encrypted backups.
Even most technical people I talk to do not know this and don't have ADP enabled.
The original implementation of iCloud included Apple's ability to recover the data. You can view this as a backdoor, and that might be fair, but the reality is that it's also a feature in the eyes of many customers - because people will lose devices and passwords, and when Apple doesn't have the keys that means they also lose data. Many customers would rather be able to get their data back.
Apple has moved more things into the bucket of "we do not have the keys for this" over time, but pretending that this isn't a tradeoff for the common customer is disingenuous. That's why ADP exists, so that those who want to make a different tradeoff can do so.
Commenters on HN tend to be technically savvy and tend to want the defaults to be tailored to a technically savvy customer base. That's fine, but that's not a real representation of all of the smartphone users out there, and in this case Apple is directly offering the choice that they usually get knocked for taking away.
They never did. they had the balls to resist against western governments, where it was politically adventagous to do so. They folded to China real quick, because they wanted to make sales. All "icloud storage" in china has been on another storage platform, that follows all the local laws.
We are quickly heading to a world where governments want us to KYC everything, and we saw with the Revolut breach what happens when very, very bad people gain access to our private data.
Whole point is that Apple routinely execute government orders from the most repressive regime on earth after North Korea. And from bloodiest one in last two decades.
> "please confirm your age" screen is now mandatory during the iPhone setup in all countries
Not quite.
The request to confirm age is there, but actually completing it isn't mandatory (though granted, it does leave an 'alert' thingy on your phone settings saying you haven't finished setting it up).
I doubt that with the speed of thought dramatically increasing due to AI, that the door will stay closed just because it's being closed now. That decision will be revisited.
Same with digital IDs (for example the EU one), where you'll have to install it to provide a "zero knowledge" proof today, and since you already have everything in your phone, it'll be easy to implement the "real name" policy when registering/commenting/etc.
I'm not aware of any EU project to make a smartphone literally mandatory (instead of just convenient). If they do, I'll buy a separate smartphone just to hold my ID.
No need to speculate that the UK government "might" one day become the bad guys: they already arrest over 30 people a day for speech that offends the prevailing political orthodoxy.
Stories like this quickly put to rest the idea that everyone who gets arrested must actually deserve it. The bar for posting content that violates the law is very low.
There was also the tragic story of the Cambridge professor who was completely unqualified and had a fake life story. When journalists would get close to the story he would report them to the police for harassment to spike the stories.
Imagine getting six police officers sent to your house and spending 11 hours at a police station for causing "disharmony" by disagreeing with how your daughter's school operates in a WhatsApp group. In a sensible country that might've been a phone call or a single officer stopping to chat and defusing the situation if police decided to get involved at all.
* This bizarre case has nothing to do with "speech that offends the prevailing political orthodoxy" (root comment).
If you look for examples of the police arresting people for stupid and unjustifiable reasons, you can find them in lots of countries, including the US. For example, here is someone being arrested in Kansas for clapping too loudly during a meeting: https://www.kbtx.com/2026/07/27/teacher-arrested-repeatedly-... It's absolutely right that this sort of thing is reported and it's right for people to be outraged about it. However, I'd be cautious about drawing overly sweeping conclusions about the UK from such cases.
In this particular case, the IT consultant was owed money by a failing business, and he put 1) a picture of the business premises, and 2) pictures of him firing guns, on a website where he was sure the business owner would see it.
That's textbook intimidation, which in certain cases is a crime in the UK, and even some US states. You can also do it offline, for example, by sending a letter to the victim containing a photograph of the front of their house, and a photograph of you firing guns. The implication is pretty straightforward and doesn't even need to be stated: "I have guns and I know where you live. Pay me that money you owe me or I might use them." That implication is still there, for the victim, even if you add surface text like "Hey everyone look at these cool things!"
Only _after_ he was arrested, and the police went looking around his house for guns... did he admit that the pictures were taken overseas, he doesn't actually own the guns. And yet that's what the article leads with, like it was a known fact from the get-go and those silly-billy police knew that but went looking for them in the UK anyway.
This article is a great lesson in how to mislead without saying anything untrue.
His own words in a different article make the reason for the arrest clear:
> “The arrest was based on two separate social media posts,” he said. “One was the photo of myself with the shotgun, [...] And the second one was my LinkedIn banner at the top of the page.”
> “I used the photo my business partner took on his premises as a header photo on LinkedIn with the intention he would look at that and go, ‘Why’s this guy posting that? I’d better call him and find out rather than dodging me’ as it had done for months,” he said.
EDIT 2: for avoidance of doubt, he did three days in a row of LinkedIn blog posts, where
1) his PFP at the time (shown in the top-right corner) was a picture of the business premises
2) the text of the post talked about the "delinquent client"
3) the post ended with a no-context-given picture of him posing with guns
EDIT: and your second example is also dangerously misleading. Jason Arday (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jason_Arday) and/or his university reported 2 professors and 1 journalist to the police, pretending their requests for comment on his plagiarism were harrassment. For all three reports, police chose to take no action (nonetheless it still had a chilling effect on speech). What spiked the story is that Jason Arday and/or his university got very expensive reputation lawyers Carter-Fuck to send a C&D to the journalist's newspaper, promising expensive litigation if they published the story. That is what spiked the story, not intimidation via false harassment claims. Expensive lawyers making baseless threats work equally well in the US and UK to chill legal speech, it's not a policy issue.
> In this particular case, the IT consultant was owed money by a failing business, and he put 1) a picture of the business premises, and 2) pictures of him firing guns, on a website where he was sure the business owner would see it.
From your own link, this was from 2 separate posts. I don't know man, this sounds like an excuse from the company to cause trouble and avoid having to pay the owed money.
Also the “website where he was sure the business owner would see it” is a cheap way to hide the fact that he posted on his on LinkedIn, which he used as his social media network. You can just say LinkedIn. We know what LinkedIn is.
Now imagine you owe this guy money, he's admitted in public that he put a picture of your business premises at the top of every blog post he makes on LinkedIn in order to get your attention, and his latest blog posts on the LinkedIn website therefore shows YOUR WORKPLACE and HIM SHOOTING GUNS.
Juxtaposition that he admits he wants you to see.
You can read all three blogposts. Note he has switched out the picture of the workplace (top-right PFP):
> I am disappointed that absolutely nothing has come back from the Secretary of State for Business and Trade (OR his Department) regarding my delinquent Client.. this is concerning as despite continuing to owe me
"delinquent client" who "owes" him and once again, picture of him shooting guns apropos of nothing, nothing explaining where he is, whose guns they are, just him shooting guns. Guess he just likes to shoot guns while talking about his "delinquent client" who "owes" him and he's put a picture of the delinquent client's premises as his PFP.
> Today I'll be following up on my message to the Yorkshire Post by calling the Secretary of State for Business and Trade regarding my delinquent Client.. it's become necessary given what the Owner of said Client is currently doing. I'm also going to escalate my concerns to North Yorkshire Police, then I'll grab the Popcorn and see where this goes.
And again no-context gun photo to add to the blog post about his delinquent client
Hopefully you can understand why the guy who owes him money would feel intimidated and call the police, and you can see why there appears to be enough evidence to charge the guy for harrassing the ower, and to arrest him so you can establish if he possesses the guns he has posted himself shooting.
I read the posts. He's obviously writing daily updates and posts and includes pictures from his travels.
The photos are obviously target shooting. This is a common sport in many countries.
Your argument is that because he wrote long daily updates about what he was doing and included two unrelated things, that he's implying that the guns are for those offhand remarks?
We get getting farther and farther from the real problem, which is that the UK police have been weaponized to respond to people's social media posts about how they make others feel. That's a ridiculously low bar.
> Hopefully you can understand why the guy who owes him money would feel intimidated and call the police, and you can see why there appears to be enough evidence to charge the guy for harrassing the ower, and to arrest him so you can establish if he possesses the guns he has posted himself shooting.
No, I don't understand why he would.
Nothing there was intimidation. Pretending it is intimidation is stretching crudility. The fact that he got arrested over this is straight up nonsense, IMO.
All the posts read like blog-style posts, and there wasn't any aggressive language used there at all. He also mentioned he was meeting with people to resolve the issue through legal means in the posts.
I suspect the owner who owed him money was acting maliciously.
This is one of three days worth of posts where he talks about his "delinquent client" and ends with a picture of him and guns (with no explanation of why, where or how him and the guns are related to the body text). He put an image of the business owner's premises as his PFP in the top-right corner, which is now a picture of some people sitting in chairs. The business premises, "delinquent client" body text and gun photos appear on the same page.
> Today I'll be following up on my message to the Yorkshire Post by calling the Secretary of State for Business and Trade regarding my delinquent Client.. it's become necessary given what the Owner of said Client is currently doing. I'm also going to escalate my concerns to North Yorkshire Police, then I'll grab the Popcorn and see where this goes.
Wait, this is the threat?
I'm bewildered this could be grounds for an arrest. That's pretty scary.
It's the combination of the paragraph about the 'delinquent client' and the picture of him pointing a gun which could be construed as an implied threat. I don't know if that would hold up legally, but in any case, no charges were brought in the end.
As to why the police did anything at all, the most likely explanation is that once the 'delinquent client' reported the LinkedIn posts, the Police saw a photo of someone using a shotgun who didn't have a shotgun license. Unaware that the photo was taken outside the UK, they probably decided that the combination of an unlicensed firearm and a possible implied threat was worth investigating.
Your own quote clearly says it was “two separate social media posts”. The article I linked clearly says he was arrested for one count of stalking and another account of suspicion of possession of a firearm:
> A week later, on August 23, the officers returned and arrested him on suspicion of possessing a firearm with intent to cause fear of violence and another allegation of stalking related to a photograph of a house that appeared on his social media.
You’re trying hard to link the two as “textbook intimidation” but the firearm post that triggered this was just a vacation photo and post about his vacation.
You’re being misleading by saying he “posted them to a website” without explaining that what you mean by “website” is that he posted them on his personal social media.
> For all three reports, police chose to take no action (nonetheless it still had a chilling effect on speech).
Incorrect to say the police “took no action”. They contacted the journalist and instructed him to desist. The police later admitted it was a mistake to pursue the case. It says all of this in the link you used:
> Arday made a complaint about Grove to the Metropolitan Police, alleging harassment that was affecting his mental health; the police asked Grove to desist from further contact with Arday.[80] Mark Rowley, Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, later said that the complaint about Grove should not have been taken forward.[81]
It’s confusing that you’re trying to claim the police “took no action” when they admitted fault for following through with the complaint and they told the reporter to desist.
> Expensive lawyers making baseless threats work equally well in the US and UK to chill legal speech, it's not a policy issue.
If the expensive lawyers are equal in the UK and US, then that’s not the important point of this story. It’s the part about him engaging the police and the police following through with it.
I also strongly disagree that it’s equivalent in the US. That expensive legal firm would be utilizing the maximum extent of the laws available to them in the UK, which includes the very harassment laws we’re talking about!
You can’t say it’s “not a policy issue” by pointing to literal lawyers who are using the law.
> You can’t say it’s “not a policy issue” by pointing to literal lawyers who are using the law.
It's not a UK speech policing policy issue, the topic of your post. The criminal law doesn't support Arday using false claims of harrassment to deter journalists.
You could say it's a worldwide civil law policy issue in terms of barratry / SLAPPs / cost of litigation / etc. No country, certainly not the US, has sufficient protection for whistleblowers against well-resourced litigants, and it is they (not the UK criminal law) who are successfully chilling speech.
Here's the full text of what you said. It's what we're talking about:
> There was also the tragic story of the Cambridge professor who was completely unqualified and had a fake life story. When journalists would get close to the story he would report them to the police for harassment to spike the stories.
You don't mention the threat that civil lawsuits pose to speech at all. And yet it was the threat of a civil lawsuit that actually quelled speech here.
You have no evidence that action A ("he would report them to the police for harassment") led to outcome B ("to spike the stories").
Jason Arday did not spike any journalist's story by reporting them for harrassment. He, or his universty, did spike the story by engaging reputation lawyers. He could do that in almost any country, including the US, despite its stronger free speech laws. Unless a US state has an effective anti-SLAPP law, it is very likely all that is needed to shut people up is to threaten a lawsuit they can't afford.
The thing you want to be mad about -- the police unlawfully instructing a journalist not to contact someone -- is a bad thing, is not even legal (i.e. the UK state doesn't actually allow it, let alone condone it), and it had no effect on the journalist. They still wanted their story published. It was the private threat of a lawsuit that spiked it.
“Getting the police involved” is a lot less exciting in the UK compared to the US. Our police don’t have a nasty habit of getting scared in the dark and shooting anything that moves. Mostly because most officers in the UK don’t carry firearms, and the UK often struggles to recruit officers into firearms units because officers just don’t want to mess with guns.
As a result getting the police involved is often little more than a slightly awkward chat at the front door where the officers politely ask you to stop being arsehole, but everyone knows the police are a bit limited in what they can actual do. Either because no crime has actually been committed, or because they don’t really have the time to properly investigate even if a crime had been committed.
Actually getting arrested takes some effort. The police really don’t want to deal with all the paperwork and mess that comes afterwards if they can avoid it.
> arrested on... another [count] of suspicion of possession of a firearm:
That's not how it works. You get arrested on suspicion, the cops figure out if you actually did it or not, once they know you did it they charge you with counts of actual offences (not suspicions).
> > arrested on... another [count] of suspicion of possession of a firearm:
> That's not how it works. You get arrested on suspicion, the cops figure out if you actually did it or not, once they know you did it they charge you with counts of actual offences (not suspicions).
Isn’t that literally what the quote, which was from the article, says? It didn’t contain the word “count”. You added that. The quote says he was arrested on suspicion.
Argh yes, context. I was wondering why the police were doing what they were doing. Police don't randomly do that to someone, there had to be a reason. Context is king.
Read the actual articles the person linked. The comment you’re replying to uses weasel words like saying “put them on a website” to conceal the fact that the “website” was the guy posting different unrelated things on his social media feed.
In the second case, the person involved was weaponizing the police against a journalist who had uncovered something about a completely unqualified university professor who had a fraudulent background story. The police didn’t do it “randomly”. The professor knew how to use the laws to intimidate and silence his critics (when even the GP comment admits).
Even the police later admitted they should not have gone as far as they did.
I did read the article, and my only takeaway was that it was missing context.
But I agree that the law is being weaponised by bad actors, but irrespective of that the police are duty bound to investigate. They take the blame too. It's one of the few jobs everyone else knows how to do better than the people doing it.
The website, which is also his social media feed, is LinkedIn. Both the header image (of the ower's premises) and pictures of the owee shooting guns are on the same site. Hence the complaint of intimidation from the ower.
In the second case, once again you repeat your nonsense. The chilling effect the police had, a wrong in and of itself, did not put the journalist off publishing.
> Despite the thoroughness of my investigation, THE did not run the story. While I was personally disappointed, I understood; by this point, Arday’s solicitors had been in touch with THE and it was clear that the story could tie the publication up in months of expensive litigation. Even if we were right – and I stand by my reporting – it would have been ruinously expensive.
You want to say POLICE POLICE POLICE were chilling speech here. Bullshit. It was LAWYERS LAWYERS LAWYERS suppressing the story.
> You want to say POLICE POLICE POLICE were chilling speech here. Bullshit.
You're the only person in this thread using the phrase "chilling speech" and you keep admitting that they did.
Let me quote you on this topic:
> The chilling effect the police had, a wrong in and of itself,
> In the case of the journalist Arday reported in 2025, police again did not arrest or charge him, but they (wrongly, in my opinion) phoned him and asked him not to contact Arday. This had a chilling effect
> For all three reports, police chose to take no action (nonetheless it still had a chilling effect on speech).
These are all three your own quotes from this thread. The last quote isn't even accurate because the police DID take action in the form of contacting the journalist and telling him to desist.
I am in generally in favour of some sentiments you're expressing, but you're also wrong on the facts. If your facts are wrong, it harms everyone who shares your sentiments because you're arguing with verifiable bullshit.
You're trying to argue that Jason Arday held journalists at bay by reporting them for harrassment, therefore the UK speech laws are bad because they let wrongdoers avoid scrutiny by making harrassment claims against their scrutinisers. That is incorrect. There was only one journalist, and Arday held him off by engaging private lawyers. The harrassment reporting did not stop the journalist.
Arday falsely reported two people for harrassment to the Metropolitan Police, one professor in 2023 and one journalist in 2025. The (Devon and Cornwall) police declined to pursue the 2023 case. The (Metropolitan) police investigated the 2025 case for four months, then decided to take no action (no charge, arrest or caution). The investigating officer phoned the journalist to tell him the case was closed (they can do that). The fact that there had even been an investigation caused a chilling effect:
> But were my enquiries grounds for a criminal complaint? That was hugely troubling to me as a reporter who specialises in examining issues of research integrity and ethics.
I'd say that even in the professor's case, it could've had a chilling effect. If the police had interviewed anyone related to the professor, there could've been leaks and/or career-stunting rumours.
The officer requested the journalist not contact Arday. That's overreach, and shouldn't have happened.
The head of the Metropolitan police admitted the investigation should not have even been started. That's not the law at fault, that's shoddy policing: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c0rd9y99grzo
But ultimately, it did not "spike the story". That was 100% on the lawsuit. Both things are bad
Are you really defending Arday harassing journalists through the police and being overjoyed because just this time the police was not overzealous enough to arrest them (very likely they were fine only thanks to the huge media attention)? Unbelievable.
I'm not defending Arday at all. I'm pointing out OP's claims are bullshit. At no point did anyone "spike" stories because Arday called the police on them.
OP appears to claim that involving the police is the way to get journalists off your tail. It isn't, and it didn't deter either the professors or the journalist. The much more effective way to get journalists off your tail, which OP didn't even mention, is lawyers. But that doesn't let OP rage against UK laws so he went with the bullshit claim instead.
There was absolutely zero media attention at the time police processed Arday's complaint against professor David Harris, in 2023. They closed the complaint without taking action. The professor didn't even know he was being investigated. His colleague Martyn Hammersley then went over Arday's head straight to the faculty. So much for the police getting people off your case!
In the case of the journalist Arday reported in 2025, police again did not arrest or charge him, but they (wrongly, in my opinion) phoned him and asked him not to contact Arday. This had a chilling effect and the police had no legal basis to direct him so. Again, this was long before any 2026 media attention.
It wasn't media attention that saved these people, it was that what they did wasn't illegal. The police shouldn't have given Arday's claims as much merit as they did, but no matter what Arday said, there was no evidence of crime there, it was never going any further than that.
Only once the deets about Arday were leaked by Cambridge faculty to Cofnas and he published them, and the media firestorm begain, did the details of the police phoning the journalist become known, and in reaction to that, the head of the police said that was clearly wrong and should not have happened: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c0rd9y99grzo
Well he's dead now in no small part because he was 100% correct that partisan activists amplified by friendly "journalists' would follow the usual playbook of creating a reality distortion field by repeatedly lying and republishing each others half truths and outright lies into a massive gish gallop.
- We just changed our PM, despite his party having a historic majority.
- Parliament routinely rebels against the government, and backbenchers have a lot of say about the business of government.
- We have a number of upstart parties; they might be populist, but at least it's not a two-party-forever system.
- We had a coalition government just a few years ago.
- We changed our constitution a few months ago (abolishing hereditary peers) and it was just another news among many.
- We ejected one of the previous PMs for having a party during a lockdown, with a massive scandal before that when the PM accepted a gift of some wallpaper.
Compare and contrast to the ossified and corrupt American system, where the president is openly enriching himself and his family and friends, and there's nothing threatening the presidency. The last amendment was passed half a century ago, and there's zero hope for reform.
Democracy is a living, breathing system of government, not a number of checkboxes like "can I shoot a gun for fun" or "can I call someone N-word online". It's important to see the forest for the trees.
> We ejected one of the previous PMs for having a party during a lockdown
Weirdly that never happened, but that's how many people remember it.
He was ejected because he lost the support of his ministers (most of who resigned over a period of a few weeks) after he had made them to go out and lie to the public on his behalf in the case of Chris Pincher MP.
To be entirely fair, that was a combination of many things (Pincher, wallpaper, partygate, covid deaths, covid deals, brexit, etc). The ministers are also MPs, and they want to be reelected. By that point it was clear that the partygate is not going away, so they needed a scapegoat.
The point still stands though. A populist PM who did a tiny bit of mismanagement and corruption (relative to his current peer in the US) was forced to resign. Trump isn't.
That's not necessarily evidence of undemocratic processes. One of the big downsides of democracy is that it gives the absolute knuckledraggers the same vote as anybody else. It seems to me like the UK has the same problem as the US: they have a revealed preference for autocratic policies, because no one gets excited about the government apparently doing nothing.
>because no one gets excited about the government apparently doing nothing.
Well yes. Precisely because the government was "doing nothing" while issues that plagued the voting population like migration, wealth disparity and affordability crisis were constantly growing for the past ~15 years until it reached breaking point.
Hence why people affected by this are now voting to give the new extremist parties a chance at the helm, because just voting more "doing nothing" by the parties who stood by and enabled this, just guarantees the same issues aggravating. So then what else do you expect to happen at the elections?
I expect a variety of more extremist parties - some offering to kick out the immigrants, others offering to delete all regulations and let the free market prevail, others offering to delete billionaire wealth. Like in the Berlin mayor vote this week, where both the extreme left seize-billionaire-wealth party and the extreme right ban-immigrants party both won sizeable shares (in fact the extreme left party won a plurality)
>Like in the Berlin mayor vote this week, where both the extreme left seize-billionaire-wealth party
And how is Berlin planning to seize the wealth of billionaires?
Because I've seen this play out before, where every supposed promise to tax the billionaires, just ends up as another tax burden on the working class high earners and entrepreneurs who already pay the highest tax rates and are the furthest thing possible from billionaires, but still gets political support from the unwashed masses since it's entirely envy driven.
How is the ban immigrants party going to ban immigrants? How is the delete regulations party going to delete regulations? Last time the extreme left party had any power, it set a city law saying rent couldn't be higher than a certain amount, but the landlords sued the city government in federal court, and won because apparently there is a constitutional right for landlords to collect as much money as possible.
This is not an actionable claim. What are you supposed to do in a multi-party system if nobody wins a majority and voter turnout is 60%? Just have anarchy until someone wins an outright majority?
I don't get why you're making excuses for this stuff. Trump is one kind of bad, but almost all western governments are increasingly unaccountable to their voters. And these are usually the folks that claim to be defenders of democracy. The hypocrisy is breathtaking.
> almost all western governments are increasingly unaccountable to their voters
In this country, the government with a vast majority couldn't even withdraw a small cash payment from better off pensioners without a rebellion from their own MPs.
Those generalising takes are entirely disconnected from the political reality of the UK outside of twitter.
And yet, you were ordered to stay home during coronavirus and threatened with fines if you did not comply. Also, the Internet is censored by your ISPs, you increasingly need to prove your age/identity to do anything online, and it isn't clear for how long you will be able to work around that with VPNs. Apart from that, the UK truly looks like a democratic paradise.
Calling big changes in power, substantive shifts in policy, and constitutional changes "government theatre" to then link to "Flying_Rodent" on twitter as "reality" is just comically unselfaware.
Parliament does have constitutional limits on it (for example, see timetabling powers or Erskine May), even if it can't pass acts that will bind future Parliaments. The constitution being (largely) unwritten and changeable doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
The result is substantially more democratic, as per the list above.
Please explain the constitutional limits to Parliament in more detail.
The result seems substantially more chaotic.
And then there is the fact that the entire legal frame work is based on The Crown. If the king or queen killed someone they would have to prosecute themselves. This is the exact opposite of democracy.
Parliament is not in control of its own timetable, for one. Bit of a restriction on exercising its sovereignty, innit. And yes democracies can be chaotic.
It's entirely mad to me that I can make a list of easily verifiable, massively important examples of democratic processes in this country in the last few years and someone would just come up with a hypothetical like "but what if King kills someone" like it's somehow not just equal but has more weight than the list. Mad
> We just changed our PM, despite his party having a historic majority.
Yeah? The country got to vote for the PM? I don't recall there being a national election. Having a bunch of party insiders replace the leader who won an election with an unelected one is the opposite of democracy.
The leader of the party stepping down (for non-medical reasons) should trigger an election. The fact that it doesn't is scandalous. We have the same problems in Canada where we elected a minority Liberal government that has now magically turned into a majority due to legislators switching parties. How can someone flip from the opposition party to the ruling one and still claim to be representing the will of the people who voted for them?
Funny thing is, your desired system is a constitutional change and it's entirely feasible in the UK if there's enough support for it. Which is exactly my point.
Both the UK and the US fail in rule of law regarding "all citizens and leaders must be equal before the law, supported by strong anti-corruption measures."
UK has stated separation of powers but the crown reportedly nudged Starmer to step down. The king is the one that can formally appoint government following elections.
Prince Andrew had and other royals have control over military forces in the UK, canada, australia, nz, ect. You can hem and haw all you want but the crown has constitutional and ceremonial control over the armed forces.
The King gives 'the kings speech' which is used to set the governments legislative agenda to parliment.
The king also gives royal assent to bills passed by parliment.
Black spider memos
The king also steers diplomatic efforts abroad.
every single aspect of UKs democracy can be cut by the King whenever he wants.
The UK constitutional system is built around mutually assured destruction. If one part doesn't follow convention, the whole system will collapse and everyone loses.
Yes, the monarch can in theory override the government by blocking legislation, but won't because one time a monarch did that, he ended up with his head cut off. If a monarch ever did that in modern times, Britain would quickly be a republic.
Everyone follows convention and stays in their lane and doesn't rock the boat. The last time a bill didn't get royal assent was in 1708. It simply hasn't happened since.
'The kings speech' is written by the government usually based on the manifesto they were elected on. The monarch just reads it. The monarch's role in modern times is to advise the prime minister and act as continuity advisor across governments. While the monarch may offer commentary on legislation, they won't block it, and the government is free to ignore it.
Same with the armed forces. It's ministers that control the army not the monarch. In modern Britain, the monarch's role is purely ceremonial. The monarch cannot order the armed forces into conflict.
Usually legislation gets blocked in the House Of Lords (the unelected chamber) which is why a lot constitutional reform is focused on cleaning that up, but it's game of inches because neither party wants to lose influence.
While the constitutional system may make it seem like the monarch has a lot of hard power, in reality they have none, and since the civil war can't do anything without the approval of Parliament.
Last time I'm aware the monarch did something, it was the firing of the entire Australian parliament and calling a snap election. Which is quite a sensible thing to do if parliament is completely jammed, and since it was reasonably sensible and popular in the situation it happened, nothing happened to the monarch. (Imagine if someone had the power to do that to Congress! Maybe they'd actually do stuff again, and we'd have to rename them to Progress)
Yeah, I don’t think you have any understanding of how the crown interacts with the rest of the UK government.
There are some oddities, but the idea that the crown could actually exercise any of their powers, without causing a constitutional crisis, and UK rapidly becoming a republic, is farcical.
> The King gives 'the kings speech' which is used to set the governments legislative agenda to parliment.
You’re aware that the kings speech is written by the government, not the crown. It’s how the government lays out its parliamentary agenda to parliament, the civil service and the country at large. Heck there’s a whole ritual around the crown having to beg permission to enter the commons etc to emphasise the point that crown enters and speaks at the pleasure of the commons.
> The king also steers diplomatic efforts abroad.
No, the king is given instructions by the foreign office on what he’s expected to help with. Every trip and meeting the king does is checked and cleared by the uk government, and they can and have vetoed trips before.
> every single aspect of UKs democracy can be cut by the King whenever he wants.
You should watch the Jonny English movies, they’re a great documentary on how this could happen.
What is the actual purpose of freedom of expression in a democracy? Is it being able to call people N-word online with no repercussions, or is it being able to organise, form political parties, and change the country?
If it's the former, then indeed the US has more of it.
If it's the latter, the UK has three new major parties with very different policies that openly and vocally oppose Labour, Conservatives, and Libdems. Mainstream media regularly broadcasts their views. I might strongly disagree with those views, but these parties are clearly freely operating political organisations. How is the US doing with viable non-Dem and non-Republican parties?
I won't comment on your Crown conspiracy theories.
> What is the actual purpose of freedom of expression in a democracy? Is it being able to call people N-word online with no repercussions, or is it being able to organise, form political parties, and change the country?
What is the difference between the two? Because you're going to make a cultural argument and NOT a legal one. The C-word is one you throw around (and the Aussies to) but would cause an American woman be pretty upset. You seem perfectly fine with its use, but we frown on both terms socially but they are strictly legal.
Defamation VS political speech would be a better comparison, and I could make the argument that Americans being more lenient are better off with our freedoms.
From your list of purposes about freedom of expression, you're missing "the ability to criticize powerful individuals". If you cannot prove, in a court of law, that your statements are 100% true, you can absolutely lose your shirt in a defamation suit in the UK. It's so egregious that the US had to pass a law specifically shielding American free speech from the UK's libel laws. (to their credit, in 2013 they improved their laws substantially, such that you can no longer be found liable for provably true statements)
In the US, in contrast, you can say pretty much anything, as long as it plausibly enough true that the plaintiff can't prove you don't believe it. "Donald Trump is a child rapist" is an example of speech that would not be protected in UK courts. Sure, I can point at all his visits to Epstein's Island, and his running child pageant shows, and complaints made against him to establish that it's not unreasonable to believe it, but I cannot prove in a court of law that he did it. So in the UK, he would win a defamation suit against me. On the flip side, here in the States that is quite safe to say in a public forum. It's quite difficult to prove a negative, and even if they passed that bar, they would then need to prove to a court that I did not believe that statement.
"In democracy, one side always wins and makes its opponents illegal."
“The claim to legality renders every rebellion and counter-measure an injustice and a legal violation or ‘illegality.’ If legality and illegality can be arbitrarily at the disposal of the majority, then the majority can, above all, declare their domestic competitors illegal, that is, hors-la-loi… Whoever controls 51 percent would be able legally to render the remaining 49 percent illegal… and to treat partisan opponents like common criminals, who are then perhaps reduced to kicking their boots against the locked door.”
this is not limited to democracy - every form of government does this to varying degree, and in fact democracy tends to be (perhaps marginally) better than say autocracy.
as is often said with a sigh, "democracy is the worst form of government, except for every other."
to me, democracy is really about giving the masses enough feeling of agency, because the alternatives are either revolution and/or disengagement / low productivity / low creativity, and both are "bad for business" i.e. cannot compete with democracies.
China will be an interesting test of this theory. Notably, in China they have a terrific education system and the government is able to attract/retain smart ambitious people.
Another test will be the power of governments to thwart revolutions using digital and kinetic assymmetry. The masses have individual hackers and pea shooters and the government has digital armies and autonomous drone swarms. In turn, since revolution is off the table, governments don't need the overhead of democracy. In the US, we see this with the rise of Executive Orders for example.
> to me, democracy is really about giving the masses enough feeling of agency, because the alternatives are either revolution and/or disengagement / low productivity / low creativity, and both are "bad for business" i.e. cannot compete with democracies.
I'll pick this one because it is the easiest to refute (but the others are wrong, too). What form of government was predominant during the most creative and productive periods in recent history, namely the industrial revolution and the Italian Rennaissance?
You even mention China yourself, but do not update your priors.
You cannot compare these eras, where one offers a zeitgeist of scientific progress and opportunity and the other of global scale problems met with ignorance and stagnation.
The tides will turn in china, once that positive notion gets suffocated by misaligned elites.
The magic of democracy isn't that it promises good governance, the magic of it is that it provides a clear avenue for a peaceful transfer of power that is exercised every few years.
Most functioning democracies require more than 51% of a senate and six justices and a criminal head of state to completely unravel.
> The magic of democracy isn't that it promises good governance, the magic of it is that it provides a clear avenue for a peaceful transfer of power that is exercised every few years.
We are currently witnessing the dismantling of this illusion. The reason western governments increasingly engage in lawfare against the opposition is that for the first time since the post-WWII order, they are threatened by a real regime change.
> for the first time since the post-WWII order, they are threatened by a real regime change.
It's only new if you are blind to post-WWII history.
In the western world alone, there was no shortage of incredibly vicious fights with communist/socialist groups in in post-war Europe (Most prominently in Italy and Greece), to say nothing of the various domestic decolonisation movements (The British and French governments were scared shitless of them), secessionist movements in Quebec, Spain, that entire thing in North Ireland (the understatement of the century), the Civil Rights and universal suffrage movement in the US, collapse of prominent dictatorships in Portugal and Spain...
State-threatening social upheaval is nothing new, we just have a particularly shitty flavour of it right now, as fascism and fascist-adjacent movements are currently waxing.
The problem is not democracy, it's corruption fueled by sociopaths who insist on controlling everything and buy politicians. The problem with everything in society is that many people are fundamentally broken. Plenty of people aren't broken and can get along without committing crimes or plotting to take over the world.
yes, its not legal to harass women getting an abortion. That includes being in a given range of an abortion clinic and making a political statement. What part of that is hard to understand?
People know the laws and yet they still do it thinking they're some sort of Catholic Batman. You want to change the law, do what we all do; write to your fucking MP, join a political party, campaign, donate. Don't harass someone vulnerable in a difficult state of mind and impose your morality upon them. Respect their choice and their agency.
In the US you can be arrested for the following speech:
* true threats of violence
* incitement to break the law specifically
* crimes of speech: soliciting crime, fraudulent representations, lying under oath
* stalking/cyberstalking
So lets quit this idea that its some abstract of "political orthodoxy". Stop framing crime as "difference of opinion". Hate speech and incitement to racial/religious hatred or violence are crimes here. People publishing hate speech online and then being all Pikachu face when they get arrested for breaking the law are not victims. The highest profile pretend victim was the wife of a Conservative Councillor who posted a message online that hundreds of thousands of people saw that encouraged people to set fire to hotels where asylum seekers were staying. The judges sentencing remarks were particularly eye opening given she demonstrated a relative lack of respect for the court ("If I get in trouble then I'll play the mental health card").
Do you worry that if your worst enemies were in power, something that you or a friend might say would lead to an arrest?
Who decides what is hate speech? Apparently the current UK government has decided these things (among others) are so hateful their perpetrators must be arrested:
- private WhatsApp chats between friends
- standing still in public with hands folded in prayer
Be careful when you give sharp tools to the golem.
> Do you worry that if your worst enemies were in power, something that you or a friend might say would lead to an arrest?
I don't appreciate this thin end of the wedge argument. Policy is more pragmatic. Read up on what most of mainland Europe had to do in order to suppress all the Hitler Youth children after the second world war. They oppressed their free speech and it was the right thing to do.
> Who decides what is hate speech?
The rules are there for everyone to read[0]. If you want a rule of thumb, don't discriminate based on any aspect of the Equalities Act 2010 and you'll be fine.
> standing still in public with hands folded in prayer
Don't whitewash this shit. You know full well what we're talking about is specifically going to a place that you know you're not allowed to be in, doing a protest you're not allowed to do. Playing with the line is still taking the piss and the UK believe in the spirit of the law to avoid all this mucking about with the specification. Otherwise I can block traffic all day and make up some bullshit excuse as to how I'm somehow innocent. These are feeble excuses that Palestine in Action would be proud of.
> private WhatsApp chats between friends
As far as I'm aware the only case of this being the primary cause of a conviction was when police officers were arrested for grossly offensive messages. However they weren't charged with hate speech but rather: improper use of a public electronic communications network. 12 weeks in jail. They were discovered because it was the same group chat that Wayne Couzens (also a police officer at the time) was in, who is currently serving a life sentence for the kidnap, rape and murder of Sarah Everard.
> The rules are there for everyone to read[0]. If you want a rule of thumb, don't discriminate based on any aspect of the Equalities Act 2010 and you'll be fine.
As usual, the written law only gives a vague outline, so people like you can defend it with motte-and-bailey. In practice, stickers with slogans such as "It's OK to be white" and "Natives losing jobs; migrants pouring in" get you sent to jail [1,2]. But I'm sure you're okay with banning "race hate" or "incitement", so here's a question for you - do you think "Black People!" by the poet laureate of New Jersey, Amiri Baraka, should be banned? Maybe even is already banned in the UK, since I'm sure their anti-hate laws are enforced evenly? Here are the lyrics:
You can’t steal nothin’ from a white man. He’s already stole it. He owes you anything you want, even his life. All the stores will open if you will say the magic words. The magic words are: Up against the wall M-Fer, this is a stick up! [..] Run up and down Broad Street, Negroes, take the shit you want. Take their lives if need be, but get what you what, what you need.
> we're talking about is specifically going to a place that you know you're not allowed to be in, doing a protest you're not allowed to do.
"The law is good because you know you're not allowed to break the law." - yes, thank you, we know how laws work. That doesn't mean we agree with all of them. If she's not intimidating or obstructing anyone, she should be allowed.
> However they weren't charged with hate speech but rather: improper use of a public electronic communications network.
"Impropriety" is an even lower and vaguer standard than "hate".
> They were discovered because it was the same group chat that Wayne Couzens (also a police officer at the time) was in, who is currently serving a life sentence for the kidnap, rape and murder of Sarah Everard.
But he did not discuss or organize that murder on the chat, so this is just a sleazy attempt at guilt by association. Want to apply that standard evenly? Do you think everyone that shared group chats (where "improprieties" were spoken) with e.g. Tyler James Robinson, or Bryanna Dutcher, or Shannon Brandt, should go to jail? "Should" here refers to a moral, not legal standard - we're discussing what the law should be, not what it is, so don't bother with "laws in USA are different" counterarguments.
> Don't whitewash this shit. You know full well what we're talking about is specifically going to a place that you know you're not allowed to be in, doing a protest you're not allowed to do. Playing with the line is still taking the piss and the UK believe in the spirit of the law to avoid all this mucking about with the specification. Otherwise I can block traffic all day and make up some bullshit excuse as to how I'm somehow innocent. These are feeble excuses that Palestine in Action would be proud of.
I don't think you know what happened. At least one case was a person standing quietly outside on a public sidewalk while not impeding traffic or people walking.
There is speech and there are consequences for speech.
If I incite or state that I am going to commit violence, stalking, rape or murder, should I face consequences? Yes. That's what is happening.
There are outlying cases which will be used to discredit this perspective but reality is there are a hell of a lot of very not nice people out there making active threats and inciting hatred and violence.
Anyone old enough to remember the London riots should remember the fact that the acting government issued a D notice to all broadcasters, preventing them from reporting the issue.
This is part of what started the death of BBM and proliferation of news via social media. You’d go on Twitter and see all the reports or riots and burning buildings then go to the BBC and… nothing.
All of this is to say that successive British governments, over a span of decades, have been actively destroying freedom of speech and a right to privacy for its citizens.
With AI and the rise of populism combined with the absolute decimation of the average person’s attention span it is going to get a lot worse.
This is wrong. The BBC were reporting on it in detail both online and on TV news. I know this because I was actually working on contract for them at the time.
What we have is a lot of people changing the narrative since to discredit the BBC and divide everyone further.
The BBC started reporting after the riots were in full swing and social media was already awash with information.
The point at which the BBC started reporting was the same as all other major news outlets: after the point that they just looked daft for not reporting it.
I know this as my videos of the riots took my little blog from 50 - 100 views a day to thousands per minute…
Mark Duggan was a gangster, so people trying to frame it as some sort of execution seemed to not understand that the police were seemingly doing their job. Chris Kaba's death also resulted in protests and demonstrations despite the evidence[0].
> they already arrest over 30 people a day for speech that offends the prevailing political orthodoxy.
This is completely false and comes from a commonly misrepresented statistic; '30 arrests a day' is plainly the arrests made under section 127 of the Communications Act 2003 and section 1 of the Malicious Communications Act 1988 which includes things like online stalking and harassment. I hope you're just mistaken and not willfully implying that those issues are merely offensive to the prevailing political orthodoxy.
You can't argue with data that doesn't exist, either. The arrests are not broken down, so nobody really knows. Both sides can argue their opinion
You can argue it's highly improbable that all arrests are over 'hurty words online', definitely – but anyone claiming zero arrests seems improbable too.
I do also feel it's quite convenient that the lack of breakdown allows people to clap back with accusations of encouraging stalking and harassment.
No one is encouraging you to argue with data that doesn't exist and no one is claiming that no arrests are being made over political speech online. I don't disagree with your third paragraph but it seems clear to me that my original statement stands and it's quite suspicious that you responded it to with these strawmen.
If they'd wanted the data, they could have submitted an FOI and asked for it, but the journalists far preferred to just run "30 people a day arrested for hurty words" rather than "this is quite complicated but potentially problematic and we should dig into it"
Yes but anyone who posts something about "loads of innocent people arrested for just voicing their opinion (man)" is implicitly disingenuous. I say that because the first time I heard someone say this (a friend who lives in the UK no less) I thought "that doesn't seem right" and so did a few minutes of Google searching. And of course it isn't right. People have been arrested for being threatening a.holes which seems perfectly fine. For comparison here in the middle of the US we have a lady in town who liked to send death threats (via mail) to the town manager, based on his chosen policies for street crossings, or something. Well she was arrested and put in jail for a while. She said she really didn't mean it, it was all a joke. Still in jail.
Well, the breakdowns are according to the offences the arrests come under. The police can't really release official figures for "arrests that would seen unjustifiable to libertarian-leaning HN readers", or "arrests for things that would not be a crime in the US".
Reddit often contains completely made up but believeable bullshit, so I wouldn't cite anything you see there. Every single post or comment could be a creative writing exercise to gain karma or sow discord.
However, if you want hard evidence what that post was claiming, I can give you a real citation from 2018:
> A house linked to an "offensive" video showing a model of Grenfell Tower being burned on a bonfire has been searched by police. Six men [...] were arrested on suspicion of a public order offence and have been released under investigation. A video shared on social media shows a cardboard model of the tower being set alight by a laughing crowd.
> Basically, yes. [...] if you make offensive comments in your home and they are recorded and posted online, it might be possible that you could be prosecuted.
Police have arrested and questioned 3 of my mates from our private WhatsApp group chat. They're asking to speak to me too, but I'm working abroad.
They've all been arrested and had interviews under s127 of the Communications Act.
There's 4 of us in a group chat on WhatsApp where we chat and also make some edgy jokes and stuff. We're two white, an Indian and a black guy who studied at uni together.
All three of them have been arrested and interviewed today. I don't know anyrhing more than this. This info comes from their gf and fiance.
I'm working abroad but I have received a WhatsApp message and attempted call from a UK officer who identified himself wanting to speak to me about an ongoing enquiry into a reported issue.
My mate's fiance says it was reported by another guy's ex who he dumped 4 weeks ago. I'm inclined to believe that as the officer's message said he was acting on a report.
The thing is, we shared a lot of edgy jokes beteen us - but it was literally just the 4 of us in a private fucking chat. Some of the jokes we made were racisr, but they were all banter directed at each other. Others were just taking the piss out of the major news events like saying "Who needs people flying planes when our own shitty buildings just burn themselves down?" about Grenfell.
It's crass, but it's literally just us talking shit in private. These messages arent public or anything.
I can't get through to any of the guys. Is this something the police are actually going to try and prosecute?!
At this point should I just not come home? I'm dual Austrian-British and Austria doesn't extradite to the UK.
How so? Since Austria doesn't (typically) allow dual citizenship.
> Austria doesn't extradite to the UK.
With what guarantee? In 2013 Austria forced the landing of the plane of the Bolivian president on orders from the US because they had intelligence Snowden might be on board.
So if you think Austria will hesitate to ship your ass to the UK if you piss off the wrong elites, just because there's no official bi-lateral extradition agreement, you're kidding yourself. If needed, they'll just make up a spin story that you're some major child molester or something, to justify their actions in the media and reassure the public on why the violation of your rights was justified and they'll never ever do it again to anyone else as long as they behave, pinky promise wink-wink. In short, the people with guns can break the rules at will with little to no accountability.
I’d say it is a very low quality article. There is very little detail about what the offending speech actually includes. For example:
> The wife of a conservative politician was sentenced to 31 months in prison for what police said was an unacceptable post.
What did she say? The article does not elucidate.
Inciting violence for example is not legal. I believe spaces around abortion clinics are also to be free from demonstrations. US free speech absolutists seem to vehemently disagree until you say something unkind about Charlie Kirk or ICE.
The low point might be quoting Elon Musk. This is true in any context, but in particular here. The scandal is real, but none of it is about people being arrested for non-politically-correct speech.
There’s plenty of otherwise real stuff to poke the UK about.
I don't have time to dig up her post - but she was calling on people to set fire to hotels housing asylum seekers - she had around 10,000 followers, and her post was read 300,000 times: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c5yl7p4l11po
oh and in court she rested her entire defence on the tragic death of one of her children a decade prior. However her device had been confiscated and her WhatsApp messages to a friend included "if I end up in court I'll play the mental health card".
I am disappointed in most reporting on this case. I wish they would include what she actually said. Here is the full tweet:
> Mass deportation now, set fire to all the fucking hotels full of the
bastards for all I care, while you’re at it take the treacherous government
and politicians with them. I feel physically sick knowing what these
families will now have to endure. If that makes me racist so be it
That Hasan guy is American right? Unsurprisingly British laws need not apply.
I don't think that statement would go down too well here, but even then context is very important for incitement to violence. Considering people were and did set fire to hotels I think it was worthwhile investigating.
A guy Hasan didn't like got shot in the neck during a public debate. A pair of Jewish embassy workers were gunned down while walking to a museum. A health insurance company CEO was shot outside of a hotel. I could go on.
In the UK there was an attempted murder when someone attacked a protestor burning a Koran, but luckily the UK authorities convicted the victim of the attack with "asking for it"[1] so justice was served.
UK abortion clinic laws go a lot further than banning demonstrations.
1. Holding up a sign offering help to any women being coerced into an abortion is illegal.
2. Standing silently on the road near one can be illegal.
3. parking a car with a bumper sticker near one can be illegal.
The whole paragraph about Musk and rape gangs is nonsense, of course. The biggest rape gang ever convicted in the UK was entirely white. Musk and his ilk only care about rape when the rapists are not white. On average immigrants are slightly less likely to commit sexual assaults (obviously averaging across many different groups).
> What did she say? The article does not elucidate.
She called for hotels housing asylum seekers to be burned. I think she is a nasty racist but I also think the sentence was excessive and I am not convinced it was a serious incitement to violence (and that was not what she was convicted of).
> US free speech absolutists seem to vehemently disagree until you say something unkind about Charlie Kirk or ICE.
Not American, and I entirely support the right of anyone to make unkind comments about anyone else. You are right that many people apply different standards to their own side, but right wing Americans are are from alone in that.
I also think it was excessive but the judges sentencing remarks[0] add some context. The primary issue is that the categorisation of the offence was high, but she could have done a better job of showing remorse. She didn't clock that they'd be able to read her WhatsApp messages.
>>The whole paragraph about Musk and rape gangs is nonsense, of course. The biggest rape gang ever convicted in the UK was entirely white. Musk and his ilk only care about rape when the rapists are not white.
They only care when the rapists are coming from outside the UK, and being protected by the authorities.
>>On average immigrants are slightly less likely to commit sexual assaults (obviously averaging across many different groups).
I think that is called picking your sample carefully. No-one is worried about EG the Chinese or the French.
Musk and his ilk care about dog whistle topics that can be used to trigger people into supporting them.
The emphasis on 'rape gangs', 'immigrants' and 'asylum seekers' isn't just objectively untrue, it's cynically manipulative. It's fundamentally a toxic and calculated form of marketing and branding.
And also a cynical distraction from - for example - the Epstein story and Musk's appearances in it.
There was a lot of this around Brexit. Many supporters voted to 'stop them coming over here'.
The government then ramped up immigration - a lot. For some reason the press failed to report this.
I would have thought immigration was mainly a factor of the immigrants, not the government. Do people not support free movement? In China you're assigned to a city or rural zone and you can't leave that area.
Sigh, this is an absolute bullshit figure and people need to stop parroting it - it's 30 arrests under the mal comms act which might include for example, phoning your ex girfriend to say you're coming to stab her. Or phoning in a bomb threat via telephone. Or any number of pretty terrible things it's perfectly reasonable to get nicked for. Or posting on Facebook telling everyone we should set the local migrant hotel on fire. These are not political prisoners.
The British Government has be consistently violating people's rights for decades and probably well before that.
Recently I saw a clip on GB News where one of their analyst said that anyone that opposes a war and/or conscription with Russia will need to put in prison. The show host, Jacob Rees Mogg and Lord Redwood saw nothing wrong with the statements.
None of these people have been in the armed forces and are too old to be called up for conscription.
Oh, it doesn't say what any of them were saying, except for the abortion clinic protestor who was violating a separate law against protesting abortion clinics. I wonder why it doesn't want to say any of the others.
This is a deeply deranged opinion piece. The author ties himself into knots to conflate a tiny number of high profile instances involving social media posts with harassment and other negative behavior involving electronic communication.
This comment is remarkable in its lack of nuance. There's a huge spectrum of, let's call it, aggressive speech, ranging from trying to organize against an oppressive figure or class, to just punching down against people and groups who have either done nothing to the author of that speech which warrants an aggressive response, or where the target of that speech is already a victim.
My opinion is that free-speech absolutism is a policy position that causes much more harm than good, and which erodes social cohesion. There should be perpetual debate about where we as a society accept where the line is between speech which is allowed and that which is disallowed.
And to wit, on the tea party analogy: how's that working for the US now?
Diffrence being state did not have control to stop disgruntled people from organizing. And it might be that preventing such formations is actually detrimental long run.
Everything they could was a lot less back before the fruits of industrial productivity allowed people to have their basic needs met while giving a huge fraction of their surplus to the state to do what it pleases with.
Buddy you aren't addressing the comments that are replying to you.
You gotta stay on-topic. You keep coming up with random things to compare to that make no sense to anybody but you. Who said it was legal to say "kill the king"?
I dislike harassing, threats, hate speech and everything wrong that people yell to other people.
But I dislike even more that we decide that the solution to it is to pass laws prohibiting speech, and even more that the ones in charge of passing those laws are very incentivised to prohibiting criticism to themselves or their policies or their ideologies.
Why is speech a specific, precise red line? Yelling "fire" in a crowded theatre (and I'm aware that the case which coined this phrase was completely stupid, but the phrase itself stands) should probably not be legal, even though it is speech.
Why not? If shouting “fire” causes no harm, what’s the issue? And if it causes harm, isn’t that adequately served by civil lawsuits? Not everything on earth needs to be a criminal matter.
Many (perhaps even most) countries ban public acts of support for what they consider to be terrorist organisations.
For example, the USA maintains a list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations, and penalities for providing support to those organisations are rather more severe than the in the UK.
Whether or not Palestine Action should be proscribed is a different matter - their most serious action to date has been simply damaging military aircraft. Personally, I'd tend to say that proscription is too harsh a response for property damage with no violence against a person.
I guess in the US that anyone doing something similar would simply have been killed, rather than their organisation being banned. That's not exactly great either!
> Faced with a legal order that would have required it to change the security architecture on which ADP depended, Apple found a third option: stop offering the feature that made this dilemma exist in the first place. It reverted affected UK iCloud data to Standard Data Protection, where Apple does hold the keys and can respond to lawful legal procress (except the baseline categories that stay end-to-end encrypted either way). This satisfied the underlying legal requirement without ever building a ‘backdoor’.
Maybe Apple should withdraw all encryption support from all UK government accounts? The Prime Minister can use a Huawei or some chunky thing from a military contractor.
Especially since big tech is steaming ahead to mandating passkeys that only they are allowed to control/backup. Not long until all governments could intercept your passwords to all services.
Well in the article they explicitly said they can’t turn off ADP by design, so no luck. But I’m all for making the politicians suffer the consequences of their own decisions.
A non-trivial reason I bought a fairly closed device (macbook) was that Tim Cook, at least publicly, told the FBI to get bent when asked to create a backdoor. Exactly what I want to see, a fight in court.
I would hope to see Apple pull out of the UK market over this, and certainly to stop selling Apple devices to the UK government and to remove the UK government entities from Apple services.
They dont really need to pull out, instead on every single piece of marketing material where they talk about anything remotely close to things affected by this they mention that unfortunately they cant give it to UK users due to the governments desire to erode privacy protection, and really hammer home how bad it is.
oh, I know, but I wish they would. You can see what this looks like when someone like CMMG refuses to sell to specific law enforcement agencies based on local law.
>. It reverted affected UK iCloud data to Standard Data Protection, where Apple does hold the keys and can respond to lawful legal procress (except the baseline categories that stay end-to-end encrypted either way). This satisfied the underlying legal requirement without ever building a ‘backdoor’.
Ah, just like that.
Of course something that is just possible in the public eye, after a lot of public scrutiny and for all accounts at once.
A single account, in secret? IMPOSSIBLE!
They never needed to build a backdoor....
Yeah I read the next few paragraphs and I've seen the turn off button....
What I don't understand is why Apple is even responding to this absurd demand. Completely banning Apple products in the UK isn't a realistic option for the government, so Apple could simply state openly that it does not cooperate with authoritarian regimes and actively prompt British users via a pop-up to enable ADP to protect themselves from the government.
But apple also cannot just stop selling or supporting their product in the UK either. So that card is dropped from both sides. As long as apple is beholden to a few million costumers and subscribers to their services in the UK; UK law is able to pressure them, fine them and restrict them because of those users.
We don't want it the other way around; companies placed outside the borders doing and selling whatever they want without a care. So we end up in a negotiation.
Apple choose to maliciously comply; subtly revealing the TCN, giving all UK users notices about what their government demanded of them to encourage public outrage, and push on the correct parts of the UK government that has their interest in mind.
It seems you are suggesting that if a private corporation (a foreign one at that) is large enough it should ignore the law of the country its operating in. I don't think you will like the consequences of such a situation, and will charitably assume you have just not thought your message through for even a second before posting it.
PS: If you think the British gov is authoritarian.. well, you might not know what the term means and/or anything about the spectrum of governments operating today or in the past.
If laws aren't transparent and reasonable, you shouldn't necessarily follow them. If I were to sell encryption software that's banned in Kazakhstan, you wouldn't expect me to stop selling to customers there, would you? I see no reason why the United Kingdom should be treated any differently than Kazakhstan in this case.
The British government is certainly not as authoritarian as those in China or Russia, but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s still terrible and restricts people’s rights. For example, you can be detained for as long as they want if you refuse to unlock your encrypted device.
If Bill left the UK temporarily would the ability to turn on ADP come back? Or is a device from the UK that’s not able to enroll somehow prevented forever? Not saying that this makes it OK, just curious
You can switch your Apple ID's region to another country, enable ADP then revert your account's region back to the United Kingdom. You've got to leave Family Sharing first and may also need to adjust/cancel subscriptions - I don't think it's totally straightforward.
I changed countries a few months ago. It took me about two months with all the roadblocks, while I already had government issued proofs from both countries about the change and new address.
Region affects pricing, what payments methods are availanle or accepted and also what apps are available. Some banks, government service apps and few commercial companies limit apps to certain regions.
Unlike Android there are way more hassle in installing iOS apps under different accounts with different regions. On Android I just have 5 diffetent accounts with different billing countries and it just work.
Also AFAIK iCloud family features dont work cross-region.
What a crazy answer you've written. In the sense of: it's wild that the procedure is like that.
It's almost as wild as when during the pandemic "lockdown", planes had to take off, burn tonnes of fuel and land empty some minutes later at the same airport, because there's some fucking law about landing spots and how they'd be lost if that bullshit wasn't done.
Off topic - but I am not sure that is true in the UK/EU - did it happen elsewhere in the world?:
Before the COVID restrictions, airlines were required to use their allotted spots at least 80% of the time.[6] During the pandemic, the European Commission temporarily suspended Europe's airport slot rule for a short period.[citation needed] Due to travel restrictions, many flights were cancelled or had limited capacity, which made it difficult for airlines to fulfill all the requirements for possessing an airport slot. The suspension of the slot rule was reinstated in October 2021. After the slot rule was reinstated, the rule only required European airlines to use 75% of their flight slots for the winter season.
I've not looked into it but I suspect this uses eligibilityd, the same thing that does the location based checks to see if EU users can use 3rd party app stores.
From what I remember it uses a combination of things like your current GPS location, your SIM cards reported country and more to determine what country you're really in to restrict certain features.
So it's not as simple as swapping your location in settings, or even traveling to somewhere in the EU, theres a certain sticky-ness to what your device thinks is your current country.
Yeah, good point. I wonder what would happen if someone without ADP in the UK changed over the region settings to the United States, switched ADP on, and then switched the region back to the UK. I wonder if anybody's tried this?
To an extent. My account is on a different country. Even using a VPN, I was still asked to verify my age to access certain websites. The only explanation I could think of is that iOS abused my consent to them using location data for that.
If ensuring digital devices can be accessed by law enforcement (are not "beyond the law") is so important where are the task forces shutting down crypto and networks using unregulated and anonymous currency? Literally follow the money, as they say. The current admin has 'made' millions if not more off his own fraudulent coin. Take down crypto and you stop crime instead of destroying privacy.
crypto has a lot of theoretical value, but in practice people only really think of crypto when they want to tap into shadow economy.
I do not deny that this technology will be instrumental to network communities, provided we are ever allowed to form such. I do not deny that offline POSes and fully offline tap-to-pay may become a possibility if an existing fiat currency adopts crypto as one "interface" among traditional banking, Apple/Google Pay, and cash. (this, by the way, would be incredible in Ukraine - right now it's power off, and you can't use your bank for offline purchases.)
in practice it's only really shadow economy. at this point it's not even a speculative asset of some notable value
This has happened to me several times recently, a reply with a partisan slant that would be normal IF it made any sense at all within the current thread. Either some “influencers” are cutting back on their token budget, or we’re collectively losing our semantic comprehension.
What happens if someone buys their iphone in the UK, sets their region to UK, then sets the region to USA? Can they then enable advanced data protection?
This got me curious as-well. It cannot be bound to phone number or carrier, since that's not a requirement to create an apple account. It could be bound to phones sold in the UK, but that is easily avoided. It could check the GPS, but then you can just take a trip over to France to activate your account.
There are many real concerns for U.K. citizens, from the price of fuel and food, to extreme weather, to constant attacks on infrastructure from undeclared actors.
This is not one. Nobody (within 2%) gives a stuff.
Strange and hypothetical thought: could Bill purchase a US or international model of the iPhone with US or international iCloud account capable of ADP to activate ADP? Would this allow somebody living or working in the UK the ability to use ADP?
given the story there, I'm surprised apple are still allowed to apply end to end encryption the the "baseline categories" such as messages etc in the UK. Anyone understand how that's happened? To be clear I am not saying what I think should happen, just it seems inconsistent with the UK's stance
What I don't understand, or what I can only guess at, is the cabal & likely global network of interests that are behind the push for this kind of legislation to exists in the first place.
Some delusional "save the children" anti-privacy extremist doesn't have the political capital or the technical insight to convince the government to create a law to issue secret gag orders.
People with good civil intention don't just propose the idea, or get the momentum, to institutionalize such mechanisms.
So who are the major influencers, and their thoughts, for pushing this?
There is a 2005 political cartoon by Jonik where an Uncle Sam has a box labelled Control of Internet Speech on the table. Corporate media is asking "How would you like this wrapped," with paper labeled either "Anti-Terrorism" or "Protect Kid."
For the last 25 years certain western governments (especially the US and UK/5 eyes) have focused on control over democracy. They've sold it as protections, defense, safety, etc. It's the opposite. Control, power, abuse, and the votes/$$$ to ignore their constituents. This is usually lead by conservative or far right parties who have zero history with abusing power and control (ex McCarthyism in the US).
We live in a world of surveillance. Even if most of that is to market you ads and extract capital it's still degrading and less safe for anyone but the core in group(s).
I don't think you need a huge, wide-ranging conspiracy to end up with a strong anti-privacy movement, even in a state which otherwise tries to defend consumer rights (in varying degrees of competency) for the most part.
I think you can just start with:
1. Campaigning on behalf of a worthy victim, or against a terrible enemy, is a good way to become more socially powerful. Most people are less willing to disagree with you when you do this because it risks introducing motive uncertainty - are you criticising the means because you truly object to the means, or are you criticising the means because you don't support the worthy victim or oppose the terrible enemy? This is a socially disadvantageous position to argue from.
2. Exploited children are worthy victims, and drug traffickers and terrorists are terrible enemies.
3. Therefore, policies that nominally protect children or oppose drug traffickers and terrorists are socially advantageous, and arguing for them is likely to increase your social power.
The means here are disproportionately likely to be done in a concealed way if the underlying policy is not broadly popular, independently of the effects it has on localised politcal arguments. Many people, myself included, don't support every political cause that helps a worthy victim or opposes a terrible enemy.
Social pressure is harder to apply at a distance, so the reality-warping effects of motive uncertainty are less powerful, so it makes sense that it's kept to private pressure groups and lobbying.
You won't be criticizing your boss/mayor/president/local politician/whoever, if you have to do it from an account tied to your own name. Having everyine install a digital ID on their phones (to prove they're old enough to jerk off to pornhub) is the first step, the "real name" policy is the next. The encryption ... well, one of the separate steps inbetween those two.
>So who are the major influencers, and their thoughts, for pushing this?
the governments themselves. left, right, or center, their number one priority is to maintain their power.
it amuses me immeasurably when the useful idiots in the West cheer on the policies of China and Russia. think of the children, think of the terrorists, think of the racists, think of the disinformation, blah blah blah. there are a myriad excuses but only one true goal -- suppression of dissent.
the UK establishment in particular primarily feels threatened by unredacted coverage of the consequences of its immigration policy, which they know gives voters to Reform. not because Reform would reverse that policy -- every "far-right fascist racist nazi" party in Europe had at best slowed the influx, not halted or reversed it -- but simply because someone else would be receiving lobbyists' money, favors, and sinecures after retirement.
It's crazy SimpleX is fine being based there. I mean, everything is open, the clients have reproducible builds, but it seems like it may end up being a hassle.
Has the UK started attacking any open source E2EE projects yet?
Apple's control over iOS is the main reason I prefer GrapheneOS so much over it. You get amazing privacy and security without sacrificing control. GrapheneOS has said they won't introduce age verification and a backdoor they obviously won't implement.
I'm guessing they could, in theory, attack open source projects, but it would not be very effective as those could be infinitely forked. That's the reason why governments will actually support an encourage an oligopoly of proprietary platforms via regulations (e.g. mandatory automated scanning) which only companies can practically comply with.
There's no way to obtain root access on GrapheneOS without making your own builds (which won't be affected by many of the apps adding support for GrapheneOS, who likely would only whitelist the official signing keys) or keeping the bootloader unlocked in perpetuity (because AFAIK there is currently no way to recalculate verified boot hashes on top of a systemless root like Magisk -- not that I even know if that works on GOS in the first place). Some years back I was actually working on calculating AVB2 hashes from a live system rather than ONLY through the Android build process, until TWRP wiped my phone without consent or confirmation due to an OpenRecoveryScript that I absolutely did not put there and I basically stopped tinkering with Android root due to that. I have an iPhone nowadays.
Border agents in America can search your phone or laptop without a warrant or sufficient suspicion at the border.
Jeff Gray is a man who regularly gets arrested and/or trespassed from public places for holding up a sign saying "God bless the homeless vets". Seems to happen nearly every time he does it at various locations.
Oh, and flock cameras and ICE aren't exactly a sign that America is this beacon of freedom that it likes to portray.
The UK border agents (technically counter terrorism) can also stop you at the border, force you into a room, ask for your passwords to all your devices and you don't have the right to refuse.
You also don't have the right to a lawyer to be in a room with you and you are compelled to answer all their questions and they do not need to tell you why they stopped you.
Then if you are lucky they return your devices 7 days later after they have been through everything.
> Border agents in America can search your phone or laptop without a warrant or sufficient suspicion at the border.
That is something that can happen at nearly every international border crossing. Before posting I tried to find a list of countries that require a warrant to search your stuff and the only place that came up was Hong Kong. New Zealand requires some suspicion, but that's effectively the same as they can simply state "they were acting suspiciously to my eye."
>Oh, and flock cameras and ICE aren't exactly a sign that America is this beacon of freedom that it likes to portray.
The US never said that you won't be observed in public nor that you can enter, remain, and travel freely around the country forever without permission.
Back in the early 00s the UK seemed to go all in on mass surveillance, with massive amount of cameras in public places and all that. I still remember how shocking it all looked even from Canada. So these 1984 parallels are certainly not a new development.
Yes, there are many cameras. But they're not interlinked, most of them record locally or to the chain's HQ, not some mass surveillance panopticon like TV shows portray.
Worth recognising this was (and still is) mostly nonsense. There were loads of figures like "3 CCTV cameras per person" that included your local shop having a camera in the back, which has nothing to do with state surveillance. The police in the UK have significantly less power to surveil people than police in the UK. Council CCTV is shockingly rare now days.
Anyone have any steps on how I can enable this in the UK? I guess I need to update my billing details to a non UK address and hop on a VPN or something?
You can change billing details to US and then activate US gift card that you can buy of Amazon.com.
But keep in mind you have to disable all subscriptions first and also your family group if you have one must also switch their accounts to US.
So yeah pretending you're US customer is no brainer with Apple and unlike Google they dont have automatic detection that will move your account to other region.
Beware you can only change account region once a year or something.
Create a new account and reset. If you aren't willing due to the friction involved then it's time to decentralize anyway. If it's due to previous payments or licenses/subscriptions tied to the account then work with the vendor to transfer or pay the small cost to reset.
After spending 8-12 years in a single gmail account I learned my lesson. Don't get entrenched or you can't be flexible.
I thought they at least used something complex to attempt to prevent non-EU users using third-party app stores. I also recall a legitimate EU user is not allowed to travel abroad too long before losing access to those stores.
Might be in case of moving region to EU there are something like this, but to move it to US all you need is US gift card.
What Google does is completely different - they enforce local regulations on your accounts just if you keep using them within specific region for too long. Though Google dont actually change billing region or Google Play region.
This’ll go down well (/s) but if you accept that the State has the right to be able to surveil public communications infrastructure (which it has been doing since paper mail was invented, through: radio, telegraph, telex, telephone, fax, email, and mobile telephony) then it’s not surprising certain commoditised public data handling services might be required to provide government access on demand or be restricted from implementing features that can effectively deny that access.
That angry’s up the blood of libertarians, but ultimately from the point of view of the State it has to be able to do its job of detecting and prosecuting serious crime, and it will redraw privacy lines whenever that is substantially impeded by new technology.
The quantity and quality of communications that have been externalized and become effectively searchable and retrievable has increased by many orders of magnitude since paper mail was invented. I think even if you agreed that the State might have had that right then (which not everyone would), it would be good to reconsider what that means with the communications and information systems of today.
A term I've seen thrown around is "good old-fashioned police work" and to me the clear distinction is that it can't be done en masse - a real human police officer had to spend time tracking down each known suspect. E.g. clipping a pen register onto someone's telephone wires, tailing someone, asking the hotel clerk if he's been there, unlocking someone's phone to read their messages, and even watching footage on airgapped CCTV systems are all tasks that can be done one-at-a-time and require human power proportional to how much of them you do. This forces the state to only use them on actual suspects instead of using them on everyone, but still doesn't prevent the state from catching criminals.
Even many dictatorship states, like many of the "socialist" countries, had in the past articles in their constitutions that guaranteed the secrecy of the mail and of the telephone communications (other telecommunications did not exist at that time). Thus it is false that there is some kind of established tradition that governments may have access to private communications.
In reality the secret police did not care about laws or constitution, so private mail correspondence was intercepted and opened, read, then closed again with care, trying to make this undetectable, and the telephone lines of persons of interest were tapped.
Nonetheless, it was understood that this surveillance is actually illegal, so it was hidden as much as possible.
Nowadays, the government institutions of most "free" states, like USA and UK have granted themselves far more rights to do surveillance of their citizens than the dictators of the past.
Detecting and prosecuting serious crime does not need any such general surveillance. The general surveillance just makes much cheaper the detecting of serious crimes, but in exchange it gives the means to the government employees to commit more serious crimes themselves.
It relays my main concern which is that while current governments may use this in moderation and under judicial oversight, future ones may not. And we should build tools for the future not just for now.
There’s a general regression towards fascist and right wing ideologies in the last few years and I don’t want to be up against a wall one day because someone did something with ignorant best intent.
> There’s a general regression towards fascist and right wing ideologies in the last few years
The “fascist” part (authoritarian/totalitarian tendencies) came long before the resurgence of the right, but most people seem to approve of those methods as long as they target those they dislike, so I won’t be shedding any tears for them when it’s their turn at last.
It is self-evidently written by AI. You can tell from both tropes such as “To bring this into sharper focus” and the fact that it is entirely without an opinion or argument for most of the piece.
The Apple-vs-FBI narrative is constructed fiction. Sure, they didn't make a custom firmware to dump the phone's contents, but that's irrelevant. Everything relevant to the investigation on that phone was in the non-E2EE iCloud Backup, which the FBI got from Apple long before, via normal search warrant means. Apple likely either got an FAA702 order (aka PRISM, aka the "backdoor" that Tim Apple says doesn't exist - it allows the USG to access anyone's iCloud data immediately, with no warrant (it's not an encryption backdoor, just an access backdoor)) or a standard search warrant and most probably turned over everything they had in iCloud instantly, just as they do constantly when receiving a search warrant or FAA702 order. (As I mentioned, the FAA702 order fulfillment is likely instantaneous/automated, which amounts to direct access to the storage servers.)
The whole "Apple won't do what the USG wants" story is farce, engineered specifically to protect Apple's brand image. Following the Snowden drop when we all learned that the USG has unfettered realtime access to everything in iCloud without a warrant via FAA702, Apple had a major fucking crisis on its hands, along with a lot of other companies. (If you think the CIA can't read any object in S3, you simply don't understand how the world works. Note also that AWS has built a custom, one-off, airgapped AWS region ON PREM for the CIA. https://aws.amazon.com/federal/us-intelligence-community/ )
Those CEOs all went to DC and sat down with Obama and talked it out. The official cover story was something like "Obama wants help with healthcare.gov".
> The top leaders from the world’s biggest technology companies pressed their case for reform of the National Security Agency’s controversial surveillance operations at a meeting with President Obama on Tuesday, resisting attempts by the White House to portray the encounter as a wide-ranging discussion of broader priorities.
It is very likely that this media plan was discussed and agreed upon in those meetings. Otherwise, nobody sane in any government in Europe would ever buy an iPhone (or let their citizens do same), given that the USG can read all their photos and messages and emails and contacts in iCloud instantly and without a warrant.
(China of course requires Apple run the iCloud servers for Chinese users in China via a joint venture with a CCP-operated company, which preserves the same realtime full access to all iCloud/iMessage data in China for the CCP as PRISM does for the USG.)
The Snowden releases support very plainly the direct realtime access of the US intelligence community to tech company servers without search warrants (just FISA orders).
It is the single most used data source by the US intelligence community.
Heres a favourite of mine. Apple & Google were/still are syphoning off all mobile device push messages to US government. They flat out denied it for years until it got leaked from another source, as soon as it was out in the open they admitted and said they were doing it all along but weren't allowed to tell anybody due to government NDAs.
If it was irrelevant then why did the FBI make such a big deal about it? Are you saying the FBI did that just to make Apple look good? Why would they care about Apple's reputation?
Since Epstein is no more, the governments became crazy about going after people's private data, perhaps hoping to find some spice. Like some politicians lost their source.
If you didn't want it before, you probably never will. It comes with a convenience cost and the risk you may permanently lose access to your iCloud stuff if you lose your password. With the normal level of privacy, Apple is there to help you or your loved ones get access to your stuff. Most people need that much more than they need inviolable privacy.
I’m rolling the dice myself. No ADP here. If I were a political activist (US) I’d definitely need it.
I guess if I lose my phone on a trip, I wanna be able to walk into an Apple store and restore it from their cloud copy that the feds have backed up & pored over by LLMs too. (not sure that’s done in realtime for 100% of the population, but tokens will be cheap enough eventually - they have their pre-LLM solution too)
I think I keep Signal data mostly out of the cloud though, declining to use their latest features. Hidden notifications too. Is it only personal family updates, yes, but the principle makes me feel good.
"Withdrawing ADP in the UK did not affect the 14 iCloud categories that were already end-to-end encrypted by default, including iCloud Keychain and Health. ADP increases the total from 14 to 23 categories. For UK users without ADP, the additional categories (iCloud Backup, Photos, Notes, iCloud Drive and so on) revert to Standard Data Protection. ↩
"
Unfortunately this first phrase is not strictly true in the sense that UK customers have their e2ee secrets exposed under common use cases, without requiring a passcode. My copresenter and I published some research at DEF CON 34 this year showing how the e2ee data is particularly vulnerable when ADP is off. Overall, people that do not work with extraction capabilities are currently over-estimating the strength of apple's e2ee and encryption in general. The platform security whitepaper documentation is insufficient on transparency and there are a number of best practices Apple is not following to better meet the e2ee claims they currently advertise.
I genuinely believe that in 2015 Apple had the balls to resist and today they don't.
I am judging by a simple fact, that "please confirm your age" screen is now mandatory during the iPhone setup in all countries, and in some it's behind a KYC. I have a strong opinion that this is insane. And once they let the foot in the door - there is no closing it.
Even in 2015 Apple put in backdoors. They have been really good at making people believe things that are not true. E.g. from the linked post:
iCloud already protects sensitive categories of data (like Passwords, Health data, Messages in iCloud, etc) with end-to-end encryption by default.
Except that there is a footnote in Apple's security document where they confirm that Messages in iCloud is not end-to-end encrypted if you don't enable ADP and have iCloud Backup enabled (which is probably most users):
Standard data protection: When iCloud Backup is enabled, the keys to your backups are secured in Apple data centers. If you use both iCloud Backup and Messages in iCloud, your backup includes a copy of the Messages in iCloud encryption key to help you recover your data.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/102651
So, there is always a backup of Messages in iCloud accessible to Apple and thus (US?) law enforcement, unless you enable ADP and the people you communicate with also use ADP.
WhatsApp is similar by the way. Unless you enable E2E backups, they end up in iCloud/Google Drive backups and are only encrypted at rest. Of the major messengers, I think only Signal completely opts out of iCloud backups and have their own real E2E-encrypted backups.
Even most technical people I talk to do not know this and don't have ADP enabled.
There are a lot of weak defaults like that.
The original implementation of iCloud included Apple's ability to recover the data. You can view this as a backdoor, and that might be fair, but the reality is that it's also a feature in the eyes of many customers - because people will lose devices and passwords, and when Apple doesn't have the keys that means they also lose data. Many customers would rather be able to get their data back.
Apple has moved more things into the bucket of "we do not have the keys for this" over time, but pretending that this isn't a tradeoff for the common customer is disingenuous. That's why ADP exists, so that those who want to make a different tradeoff can do so.
Commenters on HN tend to be technically savvy and tend to want the defaults to be tailored to a technically savvy customer base. That's fine, but that's not a real representation of all of the smartphone users out there, and in this case Apple is directly offering the choice that they usually get knocked for taking away.
They never did. they had the balls to resist against western governments, where it was politically adventagous to do so. They folded to China real quick, because they wanted to make sales. All "icloud storage" in china has been on another storage platform, that follows all the local laws.
Folding before China in China is not the same as folding before totalitarian western demands.
Why? They only disabled ADP in the UK, how is it different?
It isn't.
It is not like their HQ is in China. They chose to enter the Chinese market.
The only thing where they tried to push back very hard was the EU's DMA, beyond that they folded quickly to absolutely everything else.
They pushed back on the DMA because that affects the monetisation opportunities of their walled garden ecosystem.
Any other invasive privacy/encryption interventions from the government only affects their users, not their money, so they cave without issues.
Apple routinely removes VPNs and other apps from App Store in Russia even though they supposedly left the market in 2022.
They obvioualy never ever resisted anything except its a good PR stunt.
Apple doesn't KYC in Russia though
We are quickly heading to a world where governments want us to KYC everything, and we saw with the Revolut breach what happens when very, very bad people gain access to our private data.
Whole point is that Apple routinely execute government orders from the most repressive regime on earth after North Korea. And from bloodiest one in last two decades.
Even though they have zero presence in a country.
> "please confirm your age" screen is now mandatory during the iPhone setup in all countries
Not quite.
The request to confirm age is there, but actually completing it isn't mandatory (though granted, it does leave an 'alert' thingy on your phone settings saying you haven't finished setting it up).
There is no "skip" button available.
I doubt that with the speed of thought dramatically increasing due to AI, that the door will stay closed just because it's being closed now. That decision will be revisited.
Is it required to KYC in those countries?
I'm generally okay with "how old are you?" without KYC and changeable later. It just allows apps and websites to display age-appropriate content.
> I'm generally okay with "how old are you?"
It's a foot in the door. Once this question exists, the next logical one is "prove it".
Ok but my phone already asks me for my name, isn't that bad too?
Does it require you to prove your legal name?
Isn't that the next logical step according to your logic?
It asks for a name.
Yes.
Same with digital IDs (for example the EU one), where you'll have to install it to provide a "zero knowledge" proof today, and since you already have everything in your phone, it'll be easy to implement the "real name" policy when registering/commenting/etc.
I'm not aware of any EU project to make a smartphone literally mandatory (instead of just convenient). If they do, I'll buy a separate smartphone just to hold my ID.
No need to speculate that the UK government "might" one day become the bad guys: they already arrest over 30 people a day for speech that offends the prevailing political orthodoxy.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/steveforbes/2025/09/09/people-a...
Everyone should read the case of the IT consultant getting arrested in the UK because he posted a photo of him doing some target shooting during a trip to the US: https://www.lbc.co.uk/article/consultant-arrested-linkedin-s...
Stories like this quickly put to rest the idea that everyone who gets arrested must actually deserve it. The bar for posting content that violates the law is very low.
There was also the tragic story of the Cambridge professor who was completely unqualified and had a fake life story. When journalists would get close to the story he would report them to the police for harassment to spike the stories.
I don't know about that case, but the bar is as low as it can be anyways. Hapless UK police are willing to play attack dog for nearly anyone.
Someone got arrested and intimidated by police because they criticized someone with even only a modicom of authority: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/mar/29/parents-arre...
Imagine getting six police officers sent to your house and spending 11 hours at a police station for causing "disharmony" by disagreeing with how your daughter's school operates in a WhatsApp group. In a sensible country that might've been a phone call or a single officer stopping to chat and defusing the situation if police decided to get involved at all.
This was, obviously, stupid and wrong, but:
* The Police admitted their obvious error and paid £20k in damages: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c4gz1qy30v5o
* This bizarre case has nothing to do with "speech that offends the prevailing political orthodoxy" (root comment).
If you look for examples of the police arresting people for stupid and unjustifiable reasons, you can find them in lots of countries, including the US. For example, here is someone being arrested in Kansas for clapping too loudly during a meeting: https://www.kbtx.com/2026/07/27/teacher-arrested-repeatedly-... It's absolutely right that this sort of thing is reported and it's right for people to be outraged about it. However, I'd be cautious about drawing overly sweeping conclusions about the UK from such cases.
In this particular case, the IT consultant was owed money by a failing business, and he put 1) a picture of the business premises, and 2) pictures of him firing guns, on a website where he was sure the business owner would see it.
That's textbook intimidation, which in certain cases is a crime in the UK, and even some US states. You can also do it offline, for example, by sending a letter to the victim containing a photograph of the front of their house, and a photograph of you firing guns. The implication is pretty straightforward and doesn't even need to be stated: "I have guns and I know where you live. Pay me that money you owe me or I might use them." That implication is still there, for the victim, even if you add surface text like "Hey everyone look at these cool things!"
Only _after_ he was arrested, and the police went looking around his house for guns... did he admit that the pictures were taken overseas, he doesn't actually own the guns. And yet that's what the article leads with, like it was a known fact from the get-go and those silly-billy police knew that but went looking for them in the UK anyway.
This article is a great lesson in how to mislead without saying anything untrue.
His own words in a different article make the reason for the arrest clear:
https://nypost.com/2025/12/04/us-news/british-man-says-he-wa...
> “The arrest was based on two separate social media posts,” he said. “One was the photo of myself with the shotgun, [...] And the second one was my LinkedIn banner at the top of the page.”
> “I used the photo my business partner took on his premises as a header photo on LinkedIn with the intention he would look at that and go, ‘Why’s this guy posting that? I’d better call him and find out rather than dodging me’ as it had done for months,” he said.
EDIT 2: for avoidance of doubt, he did three days in a row of LinkedIn blog posts, where
1) his PFP at the time (shown in the top-right corner) was a picture of the business premises
2) the text of the post talked about the "delinquent client"
3) the post ended with a no-context-given picture of him posing with guns
Example: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jonrichelieu-booth_jonthehash...
EDIT: and your second example is also dangerously misleading. Jason Arday (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jason_Arday) and/or his university reported 2 professors and 1 journalist to the police, pretending their requests for comment on his plagiarism were harrassment. For all three reports, police chose to take no action (nonetheless it still had a chilling effect on speech). What spiked the story is that Jason Arday and/or his university got very expensive reputation lawyers Carter-Fuck to send a C&D to the journalist's newspaper, promising expensive litigation if they published the story. That is what spiked the story, not intimidation via false harassment claims. Expensive lawyers making baseless threats work equally well in the US and UK to chill legal speech, it's not a policy issue.
> In this particular case, the IT consultant was owed money by a failing business, and he put 1) a picture of the business premises, and 2) pictures of him firing guns, on a website where he was sure the business owner would see it.
From your own link, this was from 2 separate posts. I don't know man, this sounds like an excuse from the company to cause trouble and avoid having to pay the owed money.
Also the “website where he was sure the business owner would see it” is a cheap way to hide the fact that he posted on his on LinkedIn, which he used as his social media network. You can just say LinkedIn. We know what LinkedIn is.
I'm glad you know what LinkedIn is.
Now imagine you owe this guy money, he's admitted in public that he put a picture of your business premises at the top of every blog post he makes on LinkedIn in order to get your attention, and his latest blog posts on the LinkedIn website therefore shows YOUR WORKPLACE and HIM SHOOTING GUNS.
Juxtaposition that he admits he wants you to see.
You can read all three blogposts. Note he has switched out the picture of the workplace (top-right PFP):
1. https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jonrichelieu-booth_jonthehash...
> Top of my agenda Today is getting a follow-up email to the Secretary of State for Business and Trade regarding my delinquent Client
"delinquent client" and no mention of why there's a picture of him with guns or where it was taken
2. https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jonrichelieu-booth_jonthehash...
> I am disappointed that absolutely nothing has come back from the Secretary of State for Business and Trade (OR his Department) regarding my delinquent Client.. this is concerning as despite continuing to owe me
"delinquent client" who "owes" him and once again, picture of him shooting guns apropos of nothing, nothing explaining where he is, whose guns they are, just him shooting guns. Guess he just likes to shoot guns while talking about his "delinquent client" who "owes" him and he's put a picture of the delinquent client's premises as his PFP.
3. https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jonrichelieu-booth_jonthehash...
> Today I'll be following up on my message to the Yorkshire Post by calling the Secretary of State for Business and Trade regarding my delinquent Client.. it's become necessary given what the Owner of said Client is currently doing. I'm also going to escalate my concerns to North Yorkshire Police, then I'll grab the Popcorn and see where this goes.
And again no-context gun photo to add to the blog post about his delinquent client
Hopefully you can understand why the guy who owes him money would feel intimidated and call the police, and you can see why there appears to be enough evidence to charge the guy for harrassing the ower, and to arrest him so you can establish if he possesses the guns he has posted himself shooting.
I read the posts. He's obviously writing daily updates and posts and includes pictures from his travels.
The photos are obviously target shooting. This is a common sport in many countries.
Your argument is that because he wrote long daily updates about what he was doing and included two unrelated things, that he's implying that the guns are for those offhand remarks?
We get getting farther and farther from the real problem, which is that the UK police have been weaponized to respond to people's social media posts about how they make others feel. That's a ridiculously low bar.
From https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/consultant-arrested-posi...
> However, he said that a police officer later visited his home to warn him that concerns had been raised about the post.
> "I was told to be careful what I say online and I need to understand how it makes people feel," he said.
> Hopefully you can understand why the guy who owes him money would feel intimidated and call the police, and you can see why there appears to be enough evidence to charge the guy for harrassing the ower, and to arrest him so you can establish if he possesses the guns he has posted himself shooting.
No, I don't understand why he would.
Nothing there was intimidation. Pretending it is intimidation is stretching crudility. The fact that he got arrested over this is straight up nonsense, IMO.
All the posts read like blog-style posts, and there wasn't any aggressive language used there at all. He also mentioned he was meeting with people to resolve the issue through legal means in the posts.
I suspect the owner who owed him money was acting maliciously.
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jonrichelieu-booth_jonthehash...
This is one of three days worth of posts where he talks about his "delinquent client" and ends with a picture of him and guns (with no explanation of why, where or how him and the guns are related to the body text). He put an image of the business owner's premises as his PFP in the top-right corner, which is now a picture of some people sitting in chairs. The business premises, "delinquent client" body text and gun photos appear on the same page.
Further details: https://www.snopes.com/news/2025/12/01/uk-police-arrest-gun-...
> https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jonrichelieu-booth_jonthehash...
> Today I'll be following up on my message to the Yorkshire Post by calling the Secretary of State for Business and Trade regarding my delinquent Client.. it's become necessary given what the Owner of said Client is currently doing. I'm also going to escalate my concerns to North Yorkshire Police, then I'll grab the Popcorn and see where this goes.
Wait, this is the threat?
I'm bewildered this could be grounds for an arrest. That's pretty scary.
No, the comment by itself wasn't the threat. Explanation here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49831263 Or just look at this post:
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jonrichelieu-booth_jonthehash...
It's the combination of the paragraph about the 'delinquent client' and the picture of him pointing a gun which could be construed as an implied threat. I don't know if that would hold up legally, but in any case, no charges were brought in the end.
As to why the police did anything at all, the most likely explanation is that once the 'delinquent client' reported the LinkedIn posts, the Police saw a photo of someone using a shotgun who didn't have a shotgun license. Unaware that the photo was taken outside the UK, they probably decided that the combination of an unlicensed firearm and a possible implied threat was worth investigating.
Your own quote clearly says it was “two separate social media posts”. The article I linked clearly says he was arrested for one count of stalking and another account of suspicion of possession of a firearm:
> A week later, on August 23, the officers returned and arrested him on suspicion of possessing a firearm with intent to cause fear of violence and another allegation of stalking related to a photograph of a house that appeared on his social media.
You’re trying hard to link the two as “textbook intimidation” but the firearm post that triggered this was just a vacation photo and post about his vacation.
You’re being misleading by saying he “posted them to a website” without explaining that what you mean by “website” is that he posted them on his personal social media.
> For all three reports, police chose to take no action (nonetheless it still had a chilling effect on speech).
Incorrect to say the police “took no action”. They contacted the journalist and instructed him to desist. The police later admitted it was a mistake to pursue the case. It says all of this in the link you used:
> Arday made a complaint about Grove to the Metropolitan Police, alleging harassment that was affecting his mental health; the police asked Grove to desist from further contact with Arday.[80] Mark Rowley, Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, later said that the complaint about Grove should not have been taken forward.[81]
It’s confusing that you’re trying to claim the police “took no action” when they admitted fault for following through with the complaint and they told the reporter to desist.
> Expensive lawyers making baseless threats work equally well in the US and UK to chill legal speech, it's not a policy issue.
If the expensive lawyers are equal in the UK and US, then that’s not the important point of this story. It’s the part about him engaging the police and the police following through with it.
I also strongly disagree that it’s equivalent in the US. That expensive legal firm would be utilizing the maximum extent of the laws available to them in the UK, which includes the very harassment laws we’re talking about!
You can’t say it’s “not a policy issue” by pointing to literal lawyers who are using the law.
> You can’t say it’s “not a policy issue” by pointing to literal lawyers who are using the law.
It's not a UK speech policing policy issue, the topic of your post. The criminal law doesn't support Arday using false claims of harrassment to deter journalists.
You could say it's a worldwide civil law policy issue in terms of barratry / SLAPPs / cost of litigation / etc. No country, certainly not the US, has sufficient protection for whistleblowers against well-resourced litigants, and it is they (not the UK criminal law) who are successfully chilling speech.
> It's not a UK speech policing policy issue
It's the thing we're talking about.
The UK law was used to get police involved and the police told the journalist to desist.
> You could say it's a worldwide civil law policy issue
The fact that lawsuits exist everywhere does not make it equal everywhere.
We're talking about the UK's specific laws.
Here's the full text of what you said. It's what we're talking about:
> There was also the tragic story of the Cambridge professor who was completely unqualified and had a fake life story. When journalists would get close to the story he would report them to the police for harassment to spike the stories.
You don't mention the threat that civil lawsuits pose to speech at all. And yet it was the threat of a civil lawsuit that actually quelled speech here.
You have no evidence that action A ("he would report them to the police for harassment") led to outcome B ("to spike the stories").
Jason Arday did not spike any journalist's story by reporting them for harrassment. He, or his universty, did spike the story by engaging reputation lawyers. He could do that in almost any country, including the US, despite its stronger free speech laws. Unless a US state has an effective anti-SLAPP law, it is very likely all that is needed to shut people up is to threaten a lawsuit they can't afford.
The thing you want to be mad about -- the police unlawfully instructing a journalist not to contact someone -- is a bad thing, is not even legal (i.e. the UK state doesn't actually allow it, let alone condone it), and it had no effect on the journalist. They still wanted their story published. It was the private threat of a lawsuit that spiked it.
“Getting the police involved” is a lot less exciting in the UK compared to the US. Our police don’t have a nasty habit of getting scared in the dark and shooting anything that moves. Mostly because most officers in the UK don’t carry firearms, and the UK often struggles to recruit officers into firearms units because officers just don’t want to mess with guns.
As a result getting the police involved is often little more than a slightly awkward chat at the front door where the officers politely ask you to stop being arsehole, but everyone knows the police are a bit limited in what they can actual do. Either because no crime has actually been committed, or because they don’t really have the time to properly investigate even if a crime had been committed.
Actually getting arrested takes some effort. The police really don’t want to deal with all the paperwork and mess that comes afterwards if they can avoid it.
> arrested on... another [count] of suspicion of possession of a firearm:
That's not how it works. You get arrested on suspicion, the cops figure out if you actually did it or not, once they know you did it they charge you with counts of actual offences (not suspicions).
> > arrested on... another [count] of suspicion of possession of a firearm:
> That's not how it works. You get arrested on suspicion, the cops figure out if you actually did it or not, once they know you did it they charge you with counts of actual offences (not suspicions).
Isn’t that literally what the quote, which was from the article, says? It didn’t contain the word “count”. You added that. The quote says he was arrested on suspicion.
"account" appears to be a simple autocorrect typo of "count" since the other half of the sentence is about "count"
No, I'm saying the word "count" doesn't appear in the quote in the article.
This is the quote from the article:
> > A week later, on August 23, the officers returned and arrested him on suspicion of possessing a firearm
You falsely added "[count]" to the quote and then argued about the count, which isn't in the quote.
Actually, here's what you said and I quoted:
> The article I linked clearly says he was arrested for one count of stalking and another account of suspicion of possession of a firearm:
Argh yes, context. I was wondering why the police were doing what they were doing. Police don't randomly do that to someone, there had to be a reason. Context is king.
Read the actual articles the person linked. The comment you’re replying to uses weasel words like saying “put them on a website” to conceal the fact that the “website” was the guy posting different unrelated things on his social media feed.
In the second case, the person involved was weaponizing the police against a journalist who had uncovered something about a completely unqualified university professor who had a fraudulent background story. The police didn’t do it “randomly”. The professor knew how to use the laws to intimidate and silence his critics (when even the GP comment admits).
Even the police later admitted they should not have gone as far as they did.
I did read the article, and my only takeaway was that it was missing context.
But I agree that the law is being weaponised by bad actors, but irrespective of that the police are duty bound to investigate. They take the blame too. It's one of the few jobs everyone else knows how to do better than the people doing it.
The website, which is also his social media feed, is LinkedIn. Both the header image (of the ower's premises) and pictures of the owee shooting guns are on the same site. Hence the complaint of intimidation from the ower.
In the second case, once again you repeat your nonsense. The chilling effect the police had, a wrong in and of itself, did not put the journalist off publishing.
You can read the journalist's own words right here: https://www.timeshighereducation.com/opinion/i-was-reported-...
> Despite the thoroughness of my investigation, THE did not run the story. While I was personally disappointed, I understood; by this point, Arday’s solicitors had been in touch with THE and it was clear that the story could tie the publication up in months of expensive litigation. Even if we were right – and I stand by my reporting – it would have been ruinously expensive.
You want to say POLICE POLICE POLICE were chilling speech here. Bullshit. It was LAWYERS LAWYERS LAWYERS suppressing the story.
> You want to say POLICE POLICE POLICE were chilling speech here. Bullshit.
You're the only person in this thread using the phrase "chilling speech" and you keep admitting that they did.
Let me quote you on this topic:
> The chilling effect the police had, a wrong in and of itself,
> In the case of the journalist Arday reported in 2025, police again did not arrest or charge him, but they (wrongly, in my opinion) phoned him and asked him not to contact Arday. This had a chilling effect
> For all three reports, police chose to take no action (nonetheless it still had a chilling effect on speech).
These are all three your own quotes from this thread. The last quote isn't even accurate because the police DID take action in the form of contacting the journalist and telling him to desist.
I am in generally in favour of some sentiments you're expressing, but you're also wrong on the facts. If your facts are wrong, it harms everyone who shares your sentiments because you're arguing with verifiable bullshit.
You're trying to argue that Jason Arday held journalists at bay by reporting them for harrassment, therefore the UK speech laws are bad because they let wrongdoers avoid scrutiny by making harrassment claims against their scrutinisers. That is incorrect. There was only one journalist, and Arday held him off by engaging private lawyers. The harrassment reporting did not stop the journalist.
Arday falsely reported two people for harrassment to the Metropolitan Police, one professor in 2023 and one journalist in 2025. The (Devon and Cornwall) police declined to pursue the 2023 case. The (Metropolitan) police investigated the 2025 case for four months, then decided to take no action (no charge, arrest or caution). The investigating officer phoned the journalist to tell him the case was closed (they can do that). The fact that there had even been an investigation caused a chilling effect:
https://www.timeshighereducation.com/opinion/i-was-reported-...
> But were my enquiries grounds for a criminal complaint? That was hugely troubling to me as a reporter who specialises in examining issues of research integrity and ethics.
I'd say that even in the professor's case, it could've had a chilling effect. If the police had interviewed anyone related to the professor, there could've been leaks and/or career-stunting rumours.
The officer requested the journalist not contact Arday. That's overreach, and shouldn't have happened.
The head of the Metropolitan police admitted the investigation should not have even been started. That's not the law at fault, that's shoddy policing: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c0rd9y99grzo
But ultimately, it did not "spike the story". That was 100% on the lawsuit. Both things are bad
Are you really defending Arday harassing journalists through the police and being overjoyed because just this time the police was not overzealous enough to arrest them (very likely they were fine only thanks to the huge media attention)? Unbelievable.
I'm not defending Arday at all. I'm pointing out OP's claims are bullshit. At no point did anyone "spike" stories because Arday called the police on them.
OP appears to claim that involving the police is the way to get journalists off your tail. It isn't, and it didn't deter either the professors or the journalist. The much more effective way to get journalists off your tail, which OP didn't even mention, is lawyers. But that doesn't let OP rage against UK laws so he went with the bullshit claim instead.
There was absolutely zero media attention at the time police processed Arday's complaint against professor David Harris, in 2023. They closed the complaint without taking action. The professor didn't even know he was being investigated. His colleague Martyn Hammersley then went over Arday's head straight to the faculty. So much for the police getting people off your case!
In the case of the journalist Arday reported in 2025, police again did not arrest or charge him, but they (wrongly, in my opinion) phoned him and asked him not to contact Arday. This had a chilling effect and the police had no legal basis to direct him so. Again, this was long before any 2026 media attention.
It wasn't media attention that saved these people, it was that what they did wasn't illegal. The police shouldn't have given Arday's claims as much merit as they did, but no matter what Arday said, there was no evidence of crime there, it was never going any further than that.
Only once the deets about Arday were leaked by Cambridge faculty to Cofnas and he published them, and the media firestorm begain, did the details of the police phoning the journalist become known, and in reaction to that, the head of the police said that was clearly wrong and should not have happened: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c0rd9y99grzo
Well he's dead now in no small part because he was 100% correct that partisan activists amplified by friendly "journalists' would follow the usual playbook of creating a reality distortion field by repeatedly lying and republishing each others half truths and outright lies into a massive gish gallop.
He is dead because he killed himself because his web of lies was unraveling.
It's intimidation in the form of speech. Enforcing it is enforcing speech.
UK isn't a democracy any more than the US. And the rest of us aren't too far behind.
UK is substantially more democratic than the US.
- We just changed our PM, despite his party having a historic majority.
- Parliament routinely rebels against the government, and backbenchers have a lot of say about the business of government.
- We have a number of upstart parties; they might be populist, but at least it's not a two-party-forever system.
- We had a coalition government just a few years ago.
- We changed our constitution a few months ago (abolishing hereditary peers) and it was just another news among many.
- We ejected one of the previous PMs for having a party during a lockdown, with a massive scandal before that when the PM accepted a gift of some wallpaper.
Compare and contrast to the ossified and corrupt American system, where the president is openly enriching himself and his family and friends, and there's nothing threatening the presidency. The last amendment was passed half a century ago, and there's zero hope for reform.
Democracy is a living, breathing system of government, not a number of checkboxes like "can I shoot a gun for fun" or "can I call someone N-word online". It's important to see the forest for the trees.
> We ejected one of the previous PMs for having a party during a lockdown
Weirdly that never happened, but that's how many people remember it.
He was ejected because he lost the support of his ministers (most of who resigned over a period of a few weeks) after he had made them to go out and lie to the public on his behalf in the case of Chris Pincher MP.
To be entirely fair, that was a combination of many things (Pincher, wallpaper, partygate, covid deaths, covid deals, brexit, etc). The ministers are also MPs, and they want to be reelected. By that point it was clear that the partygate is not going away, so they needed a scapegoat.
The point still stands though. A populist PM who did a tiny bit of mismanagement and corruption (relative to his current peer in the US) was forced to resign. Trump isn't.
You left a few items off the list, for instance:
- We can't beat off to porn anymore without a VPN, because our nanny government has blocked it.
- Our government sends hilarious fines to foreign websites when it disapproves of their moderation.
That's not necessarily evidence of undemocratic processes. One of the big downsides of democracy is that it gives the absolute knuckledraggers the same vote as anybody else. It seems to me like the UK has the same problem as the US: they have a revealed preference for autocratic policies, because no one gets excited about the government apparently doing nothing.
>because no one gets excited about the government apparently doing nothing.
Well yes. Precisely because the government was "doing nothing" while issues that plagued the voting population like migration, wealth disparity and affordability crisis were constantly growing for the past ~15 years until it reached breaking point.
Hence why people affected by this are now voting to give the new extremist parties a chance at the helm, because just voting more "doing nothing" by the parties who stood by and enabled this, just guarantees the same issues aggravating. So then what else do you expect to happen at the elections?
I expect a variety of more extremist parties - some offering to kick out the immigrants, others offering to delete all regulations and let the free market prevail, others offering to delete billionaire wealth. Like in the Berlin mayor vote this week, where both the extreme left seize-billionaire-wealth party and the extreme right ban-immigrants party both won sizeable shares (in fact the extreme left party won a plurality)
>Like in the Berlin mayor vote this week, where both the extreme left seize-billionaire-wealth party
And how is Berlin planning to seize the wealth of billionaires?
Because I've seen this play out before, where every supposed promise to tax the billionaires, just ends up as another tax burden on the working class high earners and entrepreneurs who already pay the highest tax rates and are the furthest thing possible from billionaires, but still gets political support from the unwashed masses since it's entirely envy driven.
How is the ban immigrants party going to ban immigrants? How is the delete regulations party going to delete regulations? Last time the extreme left party had any power, it set a city law saying rent couldn't be higher than a certain amount, but the landlords sued the city government in federal court, and won because apparently there is a constitutional right for landlords to collect as much money as possible.
> despite his party having a historic majority.
33% of the vote is a historically low majority, so I guess you're technically correct.
As you're well aware, we have a first-past-the-post system and what matters in this system is the number of MPs.
A system where the government is chosen by 33% of voters has no legitimate claim to be democracy, that is, rule by the people.
This is not an actionable claim. What are you supposed to do in a multi-party system if nobody wins a majority and voter turnout is 60%? Just have anarchy until someone wins an outright majority?
That's a substantially larger vote share than any other party:
https://electionresults.parliament.uk/general-elections/6
The electoral college would throw up equally weird results if the US didn't have a fully two-party system. (How's that working out?)
> - We just changed our PM
non-democratically. there was no election. the ruling party simply made a decision itself. Just like in China.
A representative democracy is still a democracy.
The ruling party has changed just two years ago. Hardly China, is it
I don't get why you're making excuses for this stuff. Trump is one kind of bad, but almost all western governments are increasingly unaccountable to their voters. And these are usually the folks that claim to be defenders of democracy. The hypocrisy is breathtaking.
> almost all western governments are increasingly unaccountable to their voters
In this country, the government with a vast majority couldn't even withdraw a small cash payment from better off pensioners without a rebellion from their own MPs.
Those generalising takes are entirely disconnected from the political reality of the UK outside of twitter.
And yet, you were ordered to stay home during coronavirus and threatened with fines if you did not comply. Also, the Internet is censored by your ISPs, you increasingly need to prove your age/identity to do anything online, and it isn't clear for how long you will be able to work around that with VPNs. Apart from that, the UK truly looks like a democratic paradise.
That's government theatre, not democracy.
Here's the reality: https://x.com/flying_rodent/status/2102527889556291773
And also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Wilson_plot_allegations
Calling big changes in power, substantive shifts in policy, and constitutional changes "government theatre" to then link to "Flying_Rodent" on twitter as "reality" is just comically unselfaware.
On some Twitter ripoff site called "x.com" actually
Parliament has absolutely no constitutional limits on it. It can and has made retroactive laws that are not allowed in the US.
Parliament does have constitutional limits on it (for example, see timetabling powers or Erskine May), even if it can't pass acts that will bind future Parliaments. The constitution being (largely) unwritten and changeable doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
The result is substantially more democratic, as per the list above.
Please explain the constitutional limits to Parliament in more detail.
The result seems substantially more chaotic.
And then there is the fact that the entire legal frame work is based on The Crown. If the king or queen killed someone they would have to prosecute themselves. This is the exact opposite of democracy.
Parliament is not in control of its own timetable, for one. Bit of a restriction on exercising its sovereignty, innit. And yes democracies can be chaotic.
It's entirely mad to me that I can make a list of easily verifiable, massively important examples of democratic processes in this country in the last few years and someone would just come up with a hypothetical like "but what if King kills someone" like it's somehow not just equal but has more weight than the list. Mad
> "but what if King kills someone"
Anne Boleyn, Catherine Howard would like a word.
> We just changed our PM, despite his party having a historic majority.
Yeah? The country got to vote for the PM? I don't recall there being a national election. Having a bunch of party insiders replace the leader who won an election with an unelected one is the opposite of democracy.
We have a representative democracy, not a direct one.
I invite you to consider the rest of the points, too.
The leader of the party stepping down (for non-medical reasons) should trigger an election. The fact that it doesn't is scandalous. We have the same problems in Canada where we elected a minority Liberal government that has now magically turned into a majority due to legislators switching parties. How can someone flip from the opposition party to the ruling one and still claim to be representing the will of the people who voted for them?
Funny thing is, your desired system is a constitutional change and it's entirely feasible in the UK if there's enough support for it. Which is exactly my point.
UK does not have freedom of expression.
Both the UK and the US fail in rule of law regarding "all citizens and leaders must be equal before the law, supported by strong anti-corruption measures."
UK has stated separation of powers but the crown reportedly nudged Starmer to step down. The king is the one that can formally appoint government following elections.
Prince Andrew had and other royals have control over military forces in the UK, canada, australia, nz, ect. You can hem and haw all you want but the crown has constitutional and ceremonial control over the armed forces.
The King gives 'the kings speech' which is used to set the governments legislative agenda to parliment.
The king also gives royal assent to bills passed by parliment.
Black spider memos
The king also steers diplomatic efforts abroad.
every single aspect of UKs democracy can be cut by the King whenever he wants.
The UK constitutional system is built around mutually assured destruction. If one part doesn't follow convention, the whole system will collapse and everyone loses.
Yes, the monarch can in theory override the government by blocking legislation, but won't because one time a monarch did that, he ended up with his head cut off. If a monarch ever did that in modern times, Britain would quickly be a republic.
Everyone follows convention and stays in their lane and doesn't rock the boat. The last time a bill didn't get royal assent was in 1708. It simply hasn't happened since.
'The kings speech' is written by the government usually based on the manifesto they were elected on. The monarch just reads it. The monarch's role in modern times is to advise the prime minister and act as continuity advisor across governments. While the monarch may offer commentary on legislation, they won't block it, and the government is free to ignore it.
Same with the armed forces. It's ministers that control the army not the monarch. In modern Britain, the monarch's role is purely ceremonial. The monarch cannot order the armed forces into conflict.
Usually legislation gets blocked in the House Of Lords (the unelected chamber) which is why a lot constitutional reform is focused on cleaning that up, but it's game of inches because neither party wants to lose influence.
While the constitutional system may make it seem like the monarch has a lot of hard power, in reality they have none, and since the civil war can't do anything without the approval of Parliament.
Last time I'm aware the monarch did something, it was the firing of the entire Australian parliament and calling a snap election. Which is quite a sensible thing to do if parliament is completely jammed, and since it was reasonably sensible and popular in the situation it happened, nothing happened to the monarch. (Imagine if someone had the power to do that to Congress! Maybe they'd actually do stuff again, and we'd have to rename them to Progress)
This is an alright use of a monarch IMO.
Yeah, I don’t think you have any understanding of how the crown interacts with the rest of the UK government.
There are some oddities, but the idea that the crown could actually exercise any of their powers, without causing a constitutional crisis, and UK rapidly becoming a republic, is farcical.
> The King gives 'the kings speech' which is used to set the governments legislative agenda to parliment.
You’re aware that the kings speech is written by the government, not the crown. It’s how the government lays out its parliamentary agenda to parliament, the civil service and the country at large. Heck there’s a whole ritual around the crown having to beg permission to enter the commons etc to emphasise the point that crown enters and speaks at the pleasure of the commons.
> The king also steers diplomatic efforts abroad.
No, the king is given instructions by the foreign office on what he’s expected to help with. Every trip and meeting the king does is checked and cleared by the uk government, and they can and have vetoed trips before.
> every single aspect of UKs democracy can be cut by the King whenever he wants.
You should watch the Jonny English movies, they’re a great documentary on how this could happen.
What is the actual purpose of freedom of expression in a democracy? Is it being able to call people N-word online with no repercussions, or is it being able to organise, form political parties, and change the country?
If it's the former, then indeed the US has more of it.
If it's the latter, the UK has three new major parties with very different policies that openly and vocally oppose Labour, Conservatives, and Libdems. Mainstream media regularly broadcasts their views. I might strongly disagree with those views, but these parties are clearly freely operating political organisations. How is the US doing with viable non-Dem and non-Republican parties?
I won't comment on your Crown conspiracy theories.
> What is the actual purpose of freedom of expression in a democracy? Is it being able to call people N-word online with no repercussions, or is it being able to organise, form political parties, and change the country?
What is the difference between the two? Because you're going to make a cultural argument and NOT a legal one. The C-word is one you throw around (and the Aussies to) but would cause an American woman be pretty upset. You seem perfectly fine with its use, but we frown on both terms socially but they are strictly legal.
Defamation VS political speech would be a better comparison, and I could make the argument that Americans being more lenient are better off with our freedoms.
Being as charitable as possible: there is a lot of difference between
- swear words
- slurs
- speech enabling political organising
…which is not a matter of "upset".
From your list of purposes about freedom of expression, you're missing "the ability to criticize powerful individuals". If you cannot prove, in a court of law, that your statements are 100% true, you can absolutely lose your shirt in a defamation suit in the UK. It's so egregious that the US had to pass a law specifically shielding American free speech from the UK's libel laws. (to their credit, in 2013 they improved their laws substantially, such that you can no longer be found liable for provably true statements)
In the US, in contrast, you can say pretty much anything, as long as it plausibly enough true that the plaintiff can't prove you don't believe it. "Donald Trump is a child rapist" is an example of speech that would not be protected in UK courts. Sure, I can point at all his visits to Epstein's Island, and his running child pageant shows, and complaints made against him to establish that it's not unreasonable to believe it, but I cannot prove in a court of law that he did it. So in the UK, he would win a defamation suit against me. On the flip side, here in the States that is quite safe to say in a public forum. It's quite difficult to prove a negative, and even if they passed that bar, they would then need to prove to a court that I did not believe that statement.
Quite the opposite, the problem is democracy:
"In democracy, one side always wins and makes its opponents illegal."
“The claim to legality renders every rebellion and counter-measure an injustice and a legal violation or ‘illegality.’ If legality and illegality can be arbitrarily at the disposal of the majority, then the majority can, above all, declare their domestic competitors illegal, that is, hors-la-loi… Whoever controls 51 percent would be able legally to render the remaining 49 percent illegal… and to treat partisan opponents like common criminals, who are then perhaps reduced to kicking their boots against the locked door.”
Carl Schmitt, Legality and Legitimacy
https://x.com/Tool_Being/status/2102495046260150596
this is not limited to democracy - every form of government does this to varying degree, and in fact democracy tends to be (perhaps marginally) better than say autocracy.
as is often said with a sigh, "democracy is the worst form of government, except for every other."
to me, democracy is really about giving the masses enough feeling of agency, because the alternatives are either revolution and/or disengagement / low productivity / low creativity, and both are "bad for business" i.e. cannot compete with democracies.
China will be an interesting test of this theory. Notably, in China they have a terrific education system and the government is able to attract/retain smart ambitious people.
Another test will be the power of governments to thwart revolutions using digital and kinetic assymmetry. The masses have individual hackers and pea shooters and the government has digital armies and autonomous drone swarms. In turn, since revolution is off the table, governments don't need the overhead of democracy. In the US, we see this with the rise of Executive Orders for example.
> to me, democracy is really about giving the masses enough feeling of agency, because the alternatives are either revolution and/or disengagement / low productivity / low creativity, and both are "bad for business" i.e. cannot compete with democracies.
I'll pick this one because it is the easiest to refute (but the others are wrong, too). What form of government was predominant during the most creative and productive periods in recent history, namely the industrial revolution and the Italian Rennaissance?
You even mention China yourself, but do not update your priors.
You cannot compare these eras, where one offers a zeitgeist of scientific progress and opportunity and the other of global scale problems met with ignorance and stagnation.
The tides will turn in china, once that positive notion gets suffocated by misaligned elites.
The magic of democracy isn't that it promises good governance, the magic of it is that it provides a clear avenue for a peaceful transfer of power that is exercised every few years.
Most functioning democracies require more than 51% of a senate and six justices and a criminal head of state to completely unravel.
> The magic of democracy isn't that it promises good governance, the magic of it is that it provides a clear avenue for a peaceful transfer of power that is exercised every few years.
We are currently witnessing the dismantling of this illusion. The reason western governments increasingly engage in lawfare against the opposition is that for the first time since the post-WWII order, they are threatened by a real regime change.
> for the first time since the post-WWII order, they are threatened by a real regime change.
It's only new if you are blind to post-WWII history.
In the western world alone, there was no shortage of incredibly vicious fights with communist/socialist groups in in post-war Europe (Most prominently in Italy and Greece), to say nothing of the various domestic decolonisation movements (The British and French governments were scared shitless of them), secessionist movements in Quebec, Spain, that entire thing in North Ireland (the understatement of the century), the Civil Rights and universal suffrage movement in the US, collapse of prominent dictatorships in Portugal and Spain...
State-threatening social upheaval is nothing new, we just have a particularly shitty flavour of it right now, as fascism and fascist-adjacent movements are currently waxing.
The problem is not democracy, it's corruption fueled by sociopaths who insist on controlling everything and buy politicians. The problem with everything in society is that many people are fundamentally broken. Plenty of people aren't broken and can get along without committing crimes or plotting to take over the world.
yes, its not legal to harass women getting an abortion. That includes being in a given range of an abortion clinic and making a political statement. What part of that is hard to understand?
People know the laws and yet they still do it thinking they're some sort of Catholic Batman. You want to change the law, do what we all do; write to your fucking MP, join a political party, campaign, donate. Don't harass someone vulnerable in a difficult state of mind and impose your morality upon them. Respect their choice and their agency.
In the US you can be arrested for the following speech:
* true threats of violence
* incitement to break the law specifically
* crimes of speech: soliciting crime, fraudulent representations, lying under oath
* stalking/cyberstalking
So lets quit this idea that its some abstract of "political orthodoxy". Stop framing crime as "difference of opinion". Hate speech and incitement to racial/religious hatred or violence are crimes here. People publishing hate speech online and then being all Pikachu face when they get arrested for breaking the law are not victims. The highest profile pretend victim was the wife of a Conservative Councillor who posted a message online that hundreds of thousands of people saw that encouraged people to set fire to hotels where asylum seekers were staying. The judges sentencing remarks were particularly eye opening given she demonstrated a relative lack of respect for the court ("If I get in trouble then I'll play the mental health card").
Do you worry that if your worst enemies were in power, something that you or a friend might say would lead to an arrest?
Who decides what is hate speech? Apparently the current UK government has decided these things (among others) are so hateful their perpetrators must be arrested:
- private WhatsApp chats between friends
- standing still in public with hands folded in prayer
Be careful when you give sharp tools to the golem.
> Do you worry that if your worst enemies were in power, something that you or a friend might say would lead to an arrest?
I don't appreciate this thin end of the wedge argument. Policy is more pragmatic. Read up on what most of mainland Europe had to do in order to suppress all the Hitler Youth children after the second world war. They oppressed their free speech and it was the right thing to do.
> Who decides what is hate speech?
The rules are there for everyone to read[0]. If you want a rule of thumb, don't discriminate based on any aspect of the Equalities Act 2010 and you'll be fine.
[0] https://www.cps.gov.uk/prosecution-guidance/racist-and-relig...
> standing still in public with hands folded in prayer
Don't whitewash this shit. You know full well what we're talking about is specifically going to a place that you know you're not allowed to be in, doing a protest you're not allowed to do. Playing with the line is still taking the piss and the UK believe in the spirit of the law to avoid all this mucking about with the specification. Otherwise I can block traffic all day and make up some bullshit excuse as to how I'm somehow innocent. These are feeble excuses that Palestine in Action would be proud of.
> private WhatsApp chats between friends
As far as I'm aware the only case of this being the primary cause of a conviction was when police officers were arrested for grossly offensive messages. However they weren't charged with hate speech but rather: improper use of a public electronic communications network. 12 weeks in jail. They were discovered because it was the same group chat that Wayne Couzens (also a police officer at the time) was in, who is currently serving a life sentence for the kidnap, rape and murder of Sarah Everard.
> The rules are there for everyone to read[0]. If you want a rule of thumb, don't discriminate based on any aspect of the Equalities Act 2010 and you'll be fine.
As usual, the written law only gives a vague outline, so people like you can defend it with motte-and-bailey. In practice, stickers with slogans such as "It's OK to be white" and "Natives losing jobs; migrants pouring in" get you sent to jail [1,2]. But I'm sure you're okay with banning "race hate" or "incitement", so here's a question for you - do you think "Black People!" by the poet laureate of New Jersey, Amiri Baraka, should be banned? Maybe even is already banned in the UK, since I'm sure their anti-hate laws are enforced evenly? Here are the lyrics:
You can’t steal nothin’ from a white man. He’s already stole it. He owes you anything you want, even his life. All the stores will open if you will say the magic words. The magic words are: Up against the wall M-Fer, this is a stick up! [..] Run up and down Broad Street, Negroes, take the shit you want. Take their lives if need be, but get what you what, what you need.
> we're talking about is specifically going to a place that you know you're not allowed to be in, doing a protest you're not allowed to do.
"The law is good because you know you're not allowed to break the law." - yes, thank you, we know how laws work. That doesn't mean we agree with all of them. If she's not intimidating or obstructing anyone, she should be allowed.
> However they weren't charged with hate speech but rather: improper use of a public electronic communications network.
"Impropriety" is an even lower and vaguer standard than "hate".
> They were discovered because it was the same group chat that Wayne Couzens (also a police officer at the time) was in, who is currently serving a life sentence for the kidnap, rape and murder of Sarah Everard.
But he did not discuss or organize that murder on the chat, so this is just a sleazy attempt at guilt by association. Want to apply that standard evenly? Do you think everyone that shared group chats (where "improprieties" were spoken) with e.g. Tyler James Robinson, or Bryanna Dutcher, or Shannon Brandt, should go to jail? "Should" here refers to a moral, not legal standard - we're discussing what the law should be, not what it is, so don't bother with "laws in USA are different" counterarguments.
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c51zn2l33r9o
[2] https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/03/04/the-tyrannical-jail...
> Don't whitewash this shit. You know full well what we're talking about is specifically going to a place that you know you're not allowed to be in, doing a protest you're not allowed to do. Playing with the line is still taking the piss and the UK believe in the spirit of the law to avoid all this mucking about with the specification. Otherwise I can block traffic all day and make up some bullshit excuse as to how I'm somehow innocent. These are feeble excuses that Palestine in Action would be proud of.
I don't think you know what happened. At least one case was a person standing quietly outside on a public sidewalk while not impeding traffic or people walking.
At best you can say it is loitering.
https://www.foxnews.com/world/blogger-arrested-sharing-anti-...
So this is normal in your eyes?
> Hate speech and incitement to racial/religious hatred or violence are crimes here
Unless it's hate speech against "Zionists" and/or Jews , then it's tolerated, often celebrated. Not all hate speech is created equal.
I think this is mostly being misrepresented.
There is speech and there are consequences for speech.
If I incite or state that I am going to commit violence, stalking, rape or murder, should I face consequences? Yes. That's what is happening.
There are outlying cases which will be used to discredit this perspective but reality is there are a hell of a lot of very not nice people out there making active threats and inciting hatred and violence.
And everyone gets their day in court.
Anyone old enough to remember the London riots should remember the fact that the acting government issued a D notice to all broadcasters, preventing them from reporting the issue.
This is part of what started the death of BBM and proliferation of news via social media. You’d go on Twitter and see all the reports or riots and burning buildings then go to the BBC and… nothing.
All of this is to say that successive British governments, over a span of decades, have been actively destroying freedom of speech and a right to privacy for its citizens.
With AI and the rise of populism combined with the absolute decimation of the average person’s attention span it is going to get a lot worse.
This is wrong. The BBC were reporting on it in detail both online and on TV news. I know this because I was actually working on contract for them at the time.
What we have is a lot of people changing the narrative since to discredit the BBC and divide everyone further.
The BBC started reporting after the riots were in full swing and social media was already awash with information.
The point at which the BBC started reporting was the same as all other major news outlets: after the point that they just looked daft for not reporting it.
I know this as my videos of the riots took my little blog from 50 - 100 views a day to thousands per minute…
Mark Duggan was a gangster, so people trying to frame it as some sort of execution seemed to not understand that the police were seemingly doing their job. Chris Kaba's death also resulted in protests and demonstrations despite the evidence[0].
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1ydQg9NbsQ
> they already arrest over 30 people a day for speech that offends the prevailing political orthodoxy.
This is completely false and comes from a commonly misrepresented statistic; '30 arrests a day' is plainly the arrests made under section 127 of the Communications Act 2003 and section 1 of the Malicious Communications Act 1988 which includes things like online stalking and harassment. I hope you're just mistaken and not willfully implying that those issues are merely offensive to the prevailing political orthodoxy.
You can't argue with data that doesn't exist, either. The arrests are not broken down, so nobody really knows. Both sides can argue their opinion
You can argue it's highly improbable that all arrests are over 'hurty words online', definitely – but anyone claiming zero arrests seems improbable too.
I do also feel it's quite convenient that the lack of breakdown allows people to clap back with accusations of encouraging stalking and harassment.
No one is encouraging you to argue with data that doesn't exist and no one is claiming that no arrests are being made over political speech online. I don't disagree with your third paragraph but it seems clear to me that my original statement stands and it's quite suspicious that you responded it to with these strawmen.
If they'd wanted the data, they could have submitted an FOI and asked for it, but the journalists far preferred to just run "30 people a day arrested for hurty words" rather than "this is quite complicated but potentially problematic and we should dig into it"
Yes but anyone who posts something about "loads of innocent people arrested for just voicing their opinion (man)" is implicitly disingenuous. I say that because the first time I heard someone say this (a friend who lives in the UK no less) I thought "that doesn't seem right" and so did a few minutes of Google searching. And of course it isn't right. People have been arrested for being threatening a.holes which seems perfectly fine. For comparison here in the middle of the US we have a lady in town who liked to send death threats (via mail) to the town manager, based on his chosen policies for street crossings, or something. Well she was arrested and put in jail for a while. She said she really didn't mean it, it was all a joke. Still in jail.
Well, the breakdowns are according to the offences the arrests come under. The police can't really release official figures for "arrests that would seen unjustifiable to libertarian-leaning HN readers", or "arrests for things that would not be a crime in the US".
You can get arrested for making a joke that might offend someone in a private whatsapp group. Doesn't even have to be political.
I think this is the link where the chap asks for legal advice: https://www.reddit.com/r/LegalAdviceUK/comments/1vxkcic/poli...
Reddit often contains completely made up but believeable bullshit, so I wouldn't cite anything you see there. Every single post or comment could be a creative writing exercise to gain karma or sow discord.
However, if you want hard evidence what that post was claiming, I can give you a real citation from 2018:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-46106224
> A house linked to an "offensive" video showing a model of Grenfell Tower being burned on a bonfire has been searched by police. Six men [...] were arrested on suspicion of a public order offence and have been released under investigation. A video shared on social media shows a cardboard model of the tower being set alight by a laughing crowd.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-46112026
> Can I be offensive in my own home?
> Basically, yes. [...] if you make offensive comments in your home and they are recorded and posted online, it might be possible that you could be prosecuted.
Since Reddit is now login-walled, can you share what it says?
Does this work?
----
Police have arrested and questioned 3 of my mates from our private WhatsApp group chat. They're asking to speak to me too, but I'm working abroad.
They've all been arrested and had interviews under s127 of the Communications Act.
There's 4 of us in a group chat on WhatsApp where we chat and also make some edgy jokes and stuff. We're two white, an Indian and a black guy who studied at uni together.
All three of them have been arrested and interviewed today. I don't know anyrhing more than this. This info comes from their gf and fiance.
I'm working abroad but I have received a WhatsApp message and attempted call from a UK officer who identified himself wanting to speak to me about an ongoing enquiry into a reported issue.
My mate's fiance says it was reported by another guy's ex who he dumped 4 weeks ago. I'm inclined to believe that as the officer's message said he was acting on a report.
The thing is, we shared a lot of edgy jokes beteen us - but it was literally just the 4 of us in a private fucking chat. Some of the jokes we made were racisr, but they were all banter directed at each other. Others were just taking the piss out of the major news events like saying "Who needs people flying planes when our own shitty buildings just burn themselves down?" about Grenfell.
It's crass, but it's literally just us talking shit in private. These messages arent public or anything.
I can't get through to any of the guys. Is this something the police are actually going to try and prosecute?!
At this point should I just not come home? I'm dual Austrian-British and Austria doesn't extradite to the UK.
> I'm dual Austrian-British
How so? Since Austria doesn't (typically) allow dual citizenship.
> Austria doesn't extradite to the UK.
With what guarantee? In 2013 Austria forced the landing of the plane of the Bolivian president on orders from the US because they had intelligence Snowden might be on board.
So if you think Austria will hesitate to ship your ass to the UK if you piss off the wrong elites, just because there's no official bi-lateral extradition agreement, you're kidding yourself. If needed, they'll just make up a spin story that you're some major child molester or something, to justify their actions in the media and reassure the public on why the violation of your rights was justified and they'll never ever do it again to anyone else as long as they behave, pinky promise wink-wink. In short, the people with guns can break the rules at will with little to no accountability.
I’d say it is a very low quality article. There is very little detail about what the offending speech actually includes. For example:
> The wife of a conservative politician was sentenced to 31 months in prison for what police said was an unacceptable post.
What did she say? The article does not elucidate.
Inciting violence for example is not legal. I believe spaces around abortion clinics are also to be free from demonstrations. US free speech absolutists seem to vehemently disagree until you say something unkind about Charlie Kirk or ICE.
The low point might be quoting Elon Musk. This is true in any context, but in particular here. The scandal is real, but none of it is about people being arrested for non-politically-correct speech.
There’s plenty of otherwise real stuff to poke the UK about.
I don't have time to dig up her post - but she was calling on people to set fire to hotels housing asylum seekers - she had around 10,000 followers, and her post was read 300,000 times: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c5yl7p4l11po
oh and in court she rested her entire defence on the tragic death of one of her children a decade prior. However her device had been confiscated and her WhatsApp messages to a friend included "if I end up in court I'll play the mental health card".
I am disappointed in most reporting on this case. I wish they would include what she actually said. Here is the full tweet:
> Mass deportation now, set fire to all the fucking hotels full of the bastards for all I care, while you’re at it take the treacherous government and politicians with them. I feel physically sick knowing what these families will now have to endure. If that makes me racist so be it
[0] https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Connolly...
31 months for that is ridiculously low, especially with the rising prevalence of stochastic terrorism.
To add to this, she only served 40% of her sentence before being released.
"Stochastic terrorism" accusations and charges only seem to flow in one direction.
> “Kill those motherfuckers. Let the streets soak in their red, capitalist blood, dude.” - Hasan Piker on landlords
That Hasan guy is American right? Unsurprisingly British laws need not apply.
I don't think that statement would go down too well here, but even then context is very important for incitement to violence. Considering people were and did set fire to hotels I think it was worthwhile investigating.
> context
A guy Hasan didn't like got shot in the neck during a public debate. A pair of Jewish embassy workers were gunned down while walking to a museum. A health insurance company CEO was shot outside of a hotel. I could go on.
In the UK there was an attempted murder when someone attacked a protestor burning a Koran, but luckily the UK authorities convicted the victim of the attack with "asking for it"[1] so justice was served.
[1] https://www.gbnews.com/news/london-muslim-man-spared-jail-tu...
> What did she say?
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cx2910vrrygo
UK abortion clinic laws go a lot further than banning demonstrations.
1. Holding up a sign offering help to any women being coerced into an abortion is illegal. 2. Standing silently on the road near one can be illegal. 3. parking a car with a bumper sticker near one can be illegal.
The whole paragraph about Musk and rape gangs is nonsense, of course. The biggest rape gang ever convicted in the UK was entirely white. Musk and his ilk only care about rape when the rapists are not white. On average immigrants are slightly less likely to commit sexual assaults (obviously averaging across many different groups).
> What did she say? The article does not elucidate.
She called for hotels housing asylum seekers to be burned. I think she is a nasty racist but I also think the sentence was excessive and I am not convinced it was a serious incitement to violence (and that was not what she was convicted of).
> US free speech absolutists seem to vehemently disagree until you say something unkind about Charlie Kirk or ICE.
Not American, and I entirely support the right of anyone to make unkind comments about anyone else. You are right that many people apply different standards to their own side, but right wing Americans are are from alone in that.
I also think it was excessive but the judges sentencing remarks[0] add some context. The primary issue is that the categorisation of the offence was high, but she could have done a better job of showing remorse. She didn't clock that they'd be able to read her WhatsApp messages.
[0] https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/R-v-Lucy...
>>The whole paragraph about Musk and rape gangs is nonsense, of course. The biggest rape gang ever convicted in the UK was entirely white. Musk and his ilk only care about rape when the rapists are not white.
They only care when the rapists are coming from outside the UK, and being protected by the authorities.
>>On average immigrants are slightly less likely to commit sexual assaults (obviously averaging across many different groups).
I think that is called picking your sample carefully. No-one is worried about EG the Chinese or the French.
Musk and his ilk care about dog whistle topics that can be used to trigger people into supporting them.
The emphasis on 'rape gangs', 'immigrants' and 'asylum seekers' isn't just objectively untrue, it's cynically manipulative. It's fundamentally a toxic and calculated form of marketing and branding.
And also a cynical distraction from - for example - the Epstein story and Musk's appearances in it.
There was a lot of this around Brexit. Many supporters voted to 'stop them coming over here'.
The government then ramped up immigration - a lot. For some reason the press failed to report this.
I would have thought immigration was mainly a factor of the immigrants, not the government. Do people not support free movement? In China you're assigned to a city or rural zone and you can't leave that area.
She advocated to burn refugees alive.
Subjects, not citizens.
I'm going to assume good intent against every possible signal here. See https://www.gov.uk/types-of-british-nationality/british-subj... for why you're wrong
Sigh, this is an absolute bullshit figure and people need to stop parroting it - it's 30 arrests under the mal comms act which might include for example, phoning your ex girfriend to say you're coming to stab her. Or phoning in a bomb threat via telephone. Or any number of pretty terrible things it's perfectly reasonable to get nicked for. Or posting on Facebook telling everyone we should set the local migrant hotel on fire. These are not political prisoners.
https://lordslibrary.parliament.uk/select-communications-off...
The British Government has be consistently violating people's rights for decades and probably well before that.
Recently I saw a clip on GB News where one of their analyst said that anyone that opposes a war and/or conscription with Russia will need to put in prison. The show host, Jacob Rees Mogg and Lord Redwood saw nothing wrong with the statements.
None of these people have been in the armed forces and are too old to be called up for conscription.
> and probably well before that.
319 years, 4 months, 3 weeks, 2 days to be exact.
Why would I or anyone else care about the exact duration? It doesn't add anything.
Generally this applies to all governments anyway. The British state is just the most blatant at it currently, as they are losing control.
What was the speech? I can't read beyond the paywall.
https://archive.is/TOKiC
Oh, it doesn't say what any of them were saying, except for the abortion clinic protestor who was violating a separate law against protesting abortion clinics. I wonder why it doesn't want to say any of the others.
> The wife of a conservative politician was sentenced to 31 months in prison for what police said was an unacceptable post.
Pretty sure she called for the murder, by arson, of asylum seekers although the article missed that bit out.
Yeah come on, that figure has been widely debunked.
This is a deeply deranged opinion piece. The author ties himself into knots to conflate a tiny number of high profile instances involving social media posts with harassment and other negative behavior involving electronic communication.
How many of those 30 are unarguably "bad" posts though? Threats of violence and so forth.
250 years ago some people made some bad posts about throwing some tea into the harbor. Calling for revolution isn't a bad post.
This comment is remarkable in its lack of nuance. There's a huge spectrum of, let's call it, aggressive speech, ranging from trying to organize against an oppressive figure or class, to just punching down against people and groups who have either done nothing to the author of that speech which warrants an aggressive response, or where the target of that speech is already a victim.
My opinion is that free-speech absolutism is a policy position that causes much more harm than good, and which erodes social cohesion. There should be perpetual debate about where we as a society accept where the line is between speech which is allowed and that which is disallowed.
And to wit, on the tea party analogy: how's that working for the US now?
Big fucking difference between saying you want to throw some tea into a harbor vs inciting that hotels containing asylum seekers should be burnt down.
That's charitable to say that nobody was saying anything except for "let's drown that tea".
Weird that you think it was legal for people to say "kill the king" back then.
Diffrence being state did not have control to stop disgruntled people from organizing. And it might be that preventing such formations is actually detrimental long run.
The state did everything they could to prevent it back then, just as they do right now.
Using this line of argumentation, you might as well start enslaving (sorry, “impressing”) people into your navy again.
Everything they could was a lot less back before the fruits of industrial productivity allowed people to have their basic needs met while giving a huge fraction of their surplus to the state to do what it pleases with.
Buddy you aren't addressing the comments that are replying to you.
You gotta stay on-topic. You keep coming up with random things to compare to that make no sense to anybody but you. Who said it was legal to say "kill the king"?
I mean, in terms of property damage, the Boston Tea Party was a pretty big deal. Probably in arson territory in today's dollars.
I'd argue that nothing is "inarguable"
And I'd argue that human dignity shall be inviolable
Define dignity
If 27/30 meet the bar for "bad" is that an acceptable level of policing speech? 19/30?
I dislike harassing, threats, hate speech and everything wrong that people yell to other people.
But I dislike even more that we decide that the solution to it is to pass laws prohibiting speech, and even more that the ones in charge of passing those laws are very incentivised to prohibiting criticism to themselves or their policies or their ideologies.
Why is speech a specific, precise red line? Yelling "fire" in a crowded theatre (and I'm aware that the case which coined this phrase was completely stupid, but the phrase itself stands) should probably not be legal, even though it is speech.
Why not? If shouting “fire” causes no harm, what’s the issue? And if it causes harm, isn’t that adequately served by civil lawsuits? Not everything on earth needs to be a criminal matter.
The chronically online anti-uk folks like to turn a blind eye to anything that’s justifiable for matter of principal.
It’s why the US has such a problem with gun control and laws.
I could argue everyone should have guns, and it’s just bad people, right?
Right. Switzerland has 100x guns per capita than UK and 2x less intentional homicides than UK.
Why are we comparing Switzerland? Do you want to try again with the United States?
Let me give it a go; Switzerland has higher gun homicides than the UK.
I don't know, but the UK has criminalized expressions of support for Palestine Action.
They're dragging grannies off to prison just for holding up signs, and literally accusing them of supporting terrorism.
Well they proscribed PA, and showing support for a proscribed organisation _is_ a crime.
But should that be possible?
Many (perhaps even most) countries ban public acts of support for what they consider to be terrorist organisations.
For example, the USA maintains a list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations, and penalities for providing support to those organisations are rather more severe than the in the UK.
Whether or not Palestine Action should be proscribed is a different matter - their most serious action to date has been simply damaging military aircraft. Personally, I'd tend to say that proscription is too harsh a response for property damage with no violence against a person.
I guess in the US that anyone doing something similar would simply have been killed, rather than their organisation being banned. That's not exactly great either!
> Faced with a legal order that would have required it to change the security architecture on which ADP depended, Apple found a third option: stop offering the feature that made this dilemma exist in the first place. It reverted affected UK iCloud data to Standard Data Protection, where Apple does hold the keys and can respond to lawful legal procress (except the baseline categories that stay end-to-end encrypted either way). This satisfied the underlying legal requirement without ever building a ‘backdoor’.
Maybe Apple should withdraw all encryption support from all UK government accounts? The Prime Minister can use a Huawei or some chunky thing from a military contractor.
How are they allowed to even offer e2ee Keychain/iCloud Passwords for example? Isnt that subject to lawful access too?
Exactly my question as well.
Especially since big tech is steaming ahead to mandating passkeys that only they are allowed to control/backup. Not long until all governments could intercept your passwords to all services.
Well in the article they explicitly said they can’t turn off ADP by design, so no luck. But I’m all for making the politicians suffer the consequences of their own decisions.
A non-trivial reason I bought a fairly closed device (macbook) was that Tim Cook, at least publicly, told the FBI to get bent when asked to create a backdoor. Exactly what I want to see, a fight in court.
I would hope to see Apple pull out of the UK market over this, and certainly to stop selling Apple devices to the UK government and to remove the UK government entities from Apple services.
They dont really need to pull out, instead on every single piece of marketing material where they talk about anything remotely close to things affected by this they mention that unfortunately they cant give it to UK users due to the governments desire to erode privacy protection, and really hammer home how bad it is.
I love this. Apple aren't going to pull out of a market. They aren't pulling out of China for example.
oh, I know, but I wish they would. You can see what this looks like when someone like CMMG refuses to sell to specific law enforcement agencies based on local law.
Apple of yesteryear is not the Apple of today.
Think different.
Don't be Evil.
Works better. Plays better
Where did that all go? Same place as the Christmas bonus and empathy above middle management.
This happened 18 months ago, you can stop hoping.
Interesting, the government can demand creating a backdoor and doesn't let anyone tell about it. Basically, outlawing E2EE.
I think it's like the EU rules against Monero: the thing itself isn't illegal, but you're not allowed to make a business around it.
The UK's hostility to privacy is legendary.
Used to live there now I don't even want to visit.
>. It reverted affected UK iCloud data to Standard Data Protection, where Apple does hold the keys and can respond to lawful legal procress (except the baseline categories that stay end-to-end encrypted either way). This satisfied the underlying legal requirement without ever building a ‘backdoor’.
Ah, just like that.
Of course something that is just possible in the public eye, after a lot of public scrutiny and for all accounts at once.
A single account, in secret? IMPOSSIBLE!
They never needed to build a backdoor....
Yeah I read the next few paragraphs and I've seen the turn off button....
What I don't understand is why Apple is even responding to this absurd demand. Completely banning Apple products in the UK isn't a realistic option for the government, so Apple could simply state openly that it does not cooperate with authoritarian regimes and actively prompt British users via a pop-up to enable ADP to protect themselves from the government.
But apple also cannot just stop selling or supporting their product in the UK either. So that card is dropped from both sides. As long as apple is beholden to a few million costumers and subscribers to their services in the UK; UK law is able to pressure them, fine them and restrict them because of those users.
We don't want it the other way around; companies placed outside the borders doing and selling whatever they want without a care. So we end up in a negotiation.
Apple choose to maliciously comply; subtly revealing the TCN, giving all UK users notices about what their government demanded of them to encourage public outrage, and push on the correct parts of the UK government that has their interest in mind.
It seems you are suggesting that if a private corporation (a foreign one at that) is large enough it should ignore the law of the country its operating in. I don't think you will like the consequences of such a situation, and will charitably assume you have just not thought your message through for even a second before posting it.
PS: If you think the British gov is authoritarian.. well, you might not know what the term means and/or anything about the spectrum of governments operating today or in the past.
If laws aren't transparent and reasonable, you shouldn't necessarily follow them. If I were to sell encryption software that's banned in Kazakhstan, you wouldn't expect me to stop selling to customers there, would you? I see no reason why the United Kingdom should be treated any differently than Kazakhstan in this case.
The British government is certainly not as authoritarian as those in China or Russia, but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s still terrible and restricts people’s rights. For example, you can be detained for as long as they want if you refuse to unlock your encrypted device.
If Bill left the UK temporarily would the ability to turn on ADP come back? Or is a device from the UK that’s not able to enroll somehow prevented forever? Not saying that this makes it OK, just curious
You can switch your Apple ID's region to another country, enable ADP then revert your account's region back to the United Kingdom. You've got to leave Family Sharing first and may also need to adjust/cancel subscriptions - I don't think it's totally straightforward.
I changed countries a few months ago. It took me about two months with all the roadblocks, while I already had government issued proofs from both countries about the change and new address.
Why did it take 2 months and proofs to change your country on a private platform? Could you have created a new account and avoided that headache?
AFAIK reverting region to UK wont work. First of all you cant change regions more often than a year (or close to it).
Also if you do revert account to UK you will get a warning that you either need to disable ADP or lose access to iCloud features.
What does the region even do? why not just stay in france mode?
Region affects pricing, what payments methods are availanle or accepted and also what apps are available. Some banks, government service apps and few commercial companies limit apps to certain regions.
Unlike Android there are way more hassle in installing iOS apps under different accounts with different regions. On Android I just have 5 diffetent accounts with different billing countries and it just work.
Also AFAIK iCloud family features dont work cross-region.
What a crazy answer you've written. In the sense of: it's wild that the procedure is like that.
It's almost as wild as when during the pandemic "lockdown", planes had to take off, burn tonnes of fuel and land empty some minutes later at the same airport, because there's some fucking law about landing spots and how they'd be lost if that bullshit wasn't done.
Off topic - but I am not sure that is true in the UK/EU - did it happen elsewhere in the world?:
Before the COVID restrictions, airlines were required to use their allotted spots at least 80% of the time.[6] During the pandemic, the European Commission temporarily suspended Europe's airport slot rule for a short period.[citation needed] Due to travel restrictions, many flights were cancelled or had limited capacity, which made it difficult for airlines to fulfill all the requirements for possessing an airport slot. The suspension of the slot rule was reinstated in October 2021. After the slot rule was reinstated, the rule only required European airlines to use 75% of their flight slots for the winter season.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_flight_%28commercial_avi...
I've not looked into it but I suspect this uses eligibilityd, the same thing that does the location based checks to see if EU users can use 3rd party app stores.
From what I remember it uses a combination of things like your current GPS location, your SIM cards reported country and more to determine what country you're really in to restrict certain features.
So it's not as simple as swapping your location in settings, or even traveling to somewhere in the EU, theres a certain sticky-ness to what your device thinks is your current country.
Edit: bit more info on eligibilityd here https://theapplewiki.com/wiki/Eligibility#eligibilityd
Yeah, good point. I wonder what would happen if someone without ADP in the UK changed over the region settings to the United States, switched ADP on, and then switched the region back to the UK. I wonder if anybody's tried this?
I think country is associated with the iCloud/Apple ID account, not the physical device.
To an extent. My account is on a different country. Even using a VPN, I was still asked to verify my age to access certain websites. The only explanation I could think of is that iOS abused my consent to them using location data for that.
If ensuring digital devices can be accessed by law enforcement (are not "beyond the law") is so important where are the task forces shutting down crypto and networks using unregulated and anonymous currency? Literally follow the money, as they say. The current admin has 'made' millions if not more off his own fraudulent coin. Take down crypto and you stop crime instead of destroying privacy.
this.
crypto has a lot of theoretical value, but in practice people only really think of crypto when they want to tap into shadow economy.
I do not deny that this technology will be instrumental to network communities, provided we are ever allowed to form such. I do not deny that offline POSes and fully offline tap-to-pay may become a possibility if an existing fiat currency adopts crypto as one "interface" among traditional banking, Apple/Google Pay, and cash. (this, by the way, would be incredible in Ukraine - right now it's power off, and you can't use your bank for offline purchases.)
in practice it's only really shadow economy. at this point it's not even a speculative asset of some notable value
Did your bot malfunction and post in the wrong thread? "The current admin", this is a thread about the UK lmao.
This has happened to me several times recently, a reply with a partisan slant that would be normal IF it made any sense at all within the current thread. Either some “influencers” are cutting back on their token budget, or we’re collectively losing our semantic comprehension.
What happens if someone buys their iphone in the UK, sets their region to UK, then sets the region to USA? Can they then enable advanced data protection?
This got me curious as-well. It cannot be bound to phone number or carrier, since that's not a requirement to create an apple account. It could be bound to phones sold in the UK, but that is easily avoided. It could check the GPS, but then you can just take a trip over to France to activate your account.
Fantastic article, and a real concern for UK Citizens.
There are many real concerns for U.K. citizens, from the price of fuel and food, to extreme weather, to constant attacks on infrastructure from undeclared actors.
This is not one. Nobody (within 2%) gives a stuff.
Strange and hypothetical thought: could Bill purchase a US or international model of the iPhone with US or international iCloud account capable of ADP to activate ADP? Would this allow somebody living or working in the UK the ability to use ADP?
You can just register US Apple account or switch region to US and not bother with UK regulations.
Only disadvantage that you will need to pay fot services via US gift cards as you need US bank cards otherwise.
given the story there, I'm surprised apple are still allowed to apply end to end encryption the the "baseline categories" such as messages etc in the UK. Anyone understand how that's happened? To be clear I am not saying what I think should happen, just it seems inconsistent with the UK's stance
What I don't understand, or what I can only guess at, is the cabal & likely global network of interests that are behind the push for this kind of legislation to exists in the first place.
Some delusional "save the children" anti-privacy extremist doesn't have the political capital or the technical insight to convince the government to create a law to issue secret gag orders.
People with good civil intention don't just propose the idea, or get the momentum, to institutionalize such mechanisms.
So who are the major influencers, and their thoughts, for pushing this?
There is a 2005 political cartoon by Jonik where an Uncle Sam has a box labelled Control of Internet Speech on the table. Corporate media is asking "How would you like this wrapped," with paper labeled either "Anti-Terrorism" or "Protect Kid."
For the last 25 years certain western governments (especially the US and UK/5 eyes) have focused on control over democracy. They've sold it as protections, defense, safety, etc. It's the opposite. Control, power, abuse, and the votes/$$$ to ignore their constituents. This is usually lead by conservative or far right parties who have zero history with abusing power and control (ex McCarthyism in the US).
We live in a world of surveillance. Even if most of that is to market you ads and extract capital it's still degrading and less safe for anyone but the core in group(s).
I don't think you need a huge, wide-ranging conspiracy to end up with a strong anti-privacy movement, even in a state which otherwise tries to defend consumer rights (in varying degrees of competency) for the most part.
I think you can just start with:
1. Campaigning on behalf of a worthy victim, or against a terrible enemy, is a good way to become more socially powerful. Most people are less willing to disagree with you when you do this because it risks introducing motive uncertainty - are you criticising the means because you truly object to the means, or are you criticising the means because you don't support the worthy victim or oppose the terrible enemy? This is a socially disadvantageous position to argue from.
2. Exploited children are worthy victims, and drug traffickers and terrorists are terrible enemies.
3. Therefore, policies that nominally protect children or oppose drug traffickers and terrorists are socially advantageous, and arguing for them is likely to increase your social power.
The means here are disproportionately likely to be done in a concealed way if the underlying policy is not broadly popular, independently of the effects it has on localised politcal arguments. Many people, myself included, don't support every political cause that helps a worthy victim or opposes a terrible enemy.
Social pressure is harder to apply at a distance, so the reality-warping effects of motive uncertainty are less powerful, so it makes sense that it's kept to private pressure groups and lobbying.
4. Tech activists are rallying against all less-invasive options
Governments want this the most
You won't be criticizing your boss/mayor/president/local politician/whoever, if you have to do it from an account tied to your own name. Having everyine install a digital ID on their phones (to prove they're old enough to jerk off to pornhub) is the first step, the "real name" policy is the next. The encryption ... well, one of the separate steps inbetween those two.
>So who are the major influencers, and their thoughts, for pushing this?
the governments themselves. left, right, or center, their number one priority is to maintain their power.
it amuses me immeasurably when the useful idiots in the West cheer on the policies of China and Russia. think of the children, think of the terrorists, think of the racists, think of the disinformation, blah blah blah. there are a myriad excuses but only one true goal -- suppression of dissent.
the UK establishment in particular primarily feels threatened by unredacted coverage of the consequences of its immigration policy, which they know gives voters to Reform. not because Reform would reverse that policy -- every "far-right fascist racist nazi" party in Europe had at best slowed the influx, not halted or reversed it -- but simply because someone else would be receiving lobbyists' money, favors, and sinecures after retirement.
It's crazy SimpleX is fine being based there. I mean, everything is open, the clients have reproducible builds, but it seems like it may end up being a hassle.
Has the UK started attacking any open source E2EE projects yet?
Apple's control over iOS is the main reason I prefer GrapheneOS so much over it. You get amazing privacy and security without sacrificing control. GrapheneOS has said they won't introduce age verification and a backdoor they obviously won't implement.
I'm guessing they could, in theory, attack open source projects, but it would not be very effective as those could be infinitely forked. That's the reason why governments will actually support an encourage an oligopoly of proprietary platforms via regulations (e.g. mandatory automated scanning) which only companies can practically comply with.
There's no way to obtain root access on GrapheneOS without making your own builds (which won't be affected by many of the apps adding support for GrapheneOS, who likely would only whitelist the official signing keys) or keeping the bootloader unlocked in perpetuity (because AFAIK there is currently no way to recalculate verified boot hashes on top of a systemless root like Magisk -- not that I even know if that works on GOS in the first place). Some years back I was actually working on calculating AVB2 hashes from a live system rather than ONLY through the Android build process, until TWRP wiped my phone without consent or confirmation due to an OpenRecoveryScript that I absolutely did not put there and I basically stopped tinkering with Android root due to that. I have an iPhone nowadays.
The UK is becoming 1984.
Border agents in America can search your phone or laptop without a warrant or sufficient suspicion at the border.
Jeff Gray is a man who regularly gets arrested and/or trespassed from public places for holding up a sign saying "God bless the homeless vets". Seems to happen nearly every time he does it at various locations.
Oh, and flock cameras and ICE aren't exactly a sign that America is this beacon of freedom that it likes to portray.
The UK border agents (technically counter terrorism) can also stop you at the border, force you into a room, ask for your passwords to all your devices and you don't have the right to refuse.
You also don't have the right to a lawyer to be in a room with you and you are compelled to answer all their questions and they do not need to tell you why they stopped you.
Then if you are lucky they return your devices 7 days later after they have been through everything.
This guy went through it last year and talks bout what happens when they stop you: https://youtu.be/991kRp8KUmo?si=-5S1uLE7K9KG_gNj
What does the comment you’re replying to have to do with the US?
This reads like Soviet-era whataboutism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/And_you_are_lynching_Negroes
I think he's just suggesting this isn't isolated to the UK and is a trending global issue.
Well I agree with that, it just sounded like deflection.
> Border agents in America can search your phone or laptop without a warrant or sufficient suspicion at the border.
That is something that can happen at nearly every international border crossing. Before posting I tried to find a list of countries that require a warrant to search your stuff and the only place that came up was Hong Kong. New Zealand requires some suspicion, but that's effectively the same as they can simply state "they were acting suspiciously to my eye."
>Oh, and flock cameras and ICE aren't exactly a sign that America is this beacon of freedom that it likes to portray.
The US never said that you won't be observed in public nor that you can enter, remain, and travel freely around the country forever without permission.
I think the person you're replying to was talking about the UK, not the US.
Back in the early 00s the UK seemed to go all in on mass surveillance, with massive amount of cameras in public places and all that. I still remember how shocking it all looked even from Canada. So these 1984 parallels are certainly not a new development.
Yes, there are many cameras. But they're not interlinked, most of them record locally or to the chain's HQ, not some mass surveillance panopticon like TV shows portray.
US has Flock, ICE, PRISM and many other privacy horrors. I would much rather live in the UK than in the land of orange.
It’s the five eyes (probably more by now), not the one eye.
Worth recognising this was (and still is) mostly nonsense. There were loads of figures like "3 CCTV cameras per person" that included your local shop having a camera in the back, which has nothing to do with state surveillance. The police in the UK have significantly less power to surveil people than police in the UK. Council CCTV is shockingly rare now days.
At least it's not becoming 1933 like some other places.
It was 1984 when I left in 1998. Not missed.
Anyone have any steps on how I can enable this in the UK? I guess I need to update my billing details to a non UK address and hop on a VPN or something?
You can change billing details to US and then activate US gift card that you can buy of Amazon.com.
But keep in mind you have to disable all subscriptions first and also your family group if you have one must also switch their accounts to US.
So yeah pretending you're US customer is no brainer with Apple and unlike Google they dont have automatic detection that will move your account to other region.
Beware you can only change account region once a year or something.
Create a new account and reset. If you aren't willing due to the friction involved then it's time to decentralize anyway. If it's due to previous payments or licenses/subscriptions tied to the account then work with the vendor to transfer or pay the small cost to reset.
After spending 8-12 years in a single gmail account I learned my lesson. Don't get entrenched or you can't be flexible.
> they dont have automatic detection
I thought they at least used something complex to attempt to prevent non-EU users using third-party app stores. I also recall a legitimate EU user is not allowed to travel abroad too long before losing access to those stores.
Might be in case of moving region to EU there are something like this, but to move it to US all you need is US gift card.
What Google does is completely different - they enforce local regulations on your accounts just if you keep using them within specific region for too long. Though Google dont actually change billing region or Google Play region.
Just call them backdoors.
This’ll go down well (/s) but if you accept that the State has the right to be able to surveil public communications infrastructure (which it has been doing since paper mail was invented, through: radio, telegraph, telex, telephone, fax, email, and mobile telephony) then it’s not surprising certain commoditised public data handling services might be required to provide government access on demand or be restricted from implementing features that can effectively deny that access.
That angry’s up the blood of libertarians, but ultimately from the point of view of the State it has to be able to do its job of detecting and prosecuting serious crime, and it will redraw privacy lines whenever that is substantially impeded by new technology.
The quantity and quality of communications that have been externalized and become effectively searchable and retrievable has increased by many orders of magnitude since paper mail was invented. I think even if you agreed that the State might have had that right then (which not everyone would), it would be good to reconsider what that means with the communications and information systems of today.
A term I've seen thrown around is "good old-fashioned police work" and to me the clear distinction is that it can't be done en masse - a real human police officer had to spend time tracking down each known suspect. E.g. clipping a pen register onto someone's telephone wires, tailing someone, asking the hotel clerk if he's been there, unlocking someone's phone to read their messages, and even watching footage on airgapped CCTV systems are all tasks that can be done one-at-a-time and require human power proportional to how much of them you do. This forces the state to only use them on actual suspects instead of using them on everyone, but still doesn't prevent the state from catching criminals.
They can have the right to surveil, but I don't think they should have the right to demand understanding of my messages.
Even many dictatorship states, like many of the "socialist" countries, had in the past articles in their constitutions that guaranteed the secrecy of the mail and of the telephone communications (other telecommunications did not exist at that time). Thus it is false that there is some kind of established tradition that governments may have access to private communications.
In reality the secret police did not care about laws or constitution, so private mail correspondence was intercepted and opened, read, then closed again with care, trying to make this undetectable, and the telephone lines of persons of interest were tapped.
Nonetheless, it was understood that this surveillance is actually illegal, so it was hidden as much as possible.
Nowadays, the government institutions of most "free" states, like USA and UK have granted themselves far more rights to do surveillance of their citizens than the dictators of the past.
Detecting and prosecuting serious crime does not need any such general surveillance. The general surveillance just makes much cheaper the detecting of serious crimes, but in exchange it gives the means to the government employees to commit more serious crimes themselves.
They simply do not want anyone to hear this: Millions must go.
Very well written article.
It relays my main concern which is that while current governments may use this in moderation and under judicial oversight, future ones may not. And we should build tools for the future not just for now.
There’s a general regression towards fascist and right wing ideologies in the last few years and I don’t want to be up against a wall one day because someone did something with ignorant best intent.
> There’s a general regression towards fascist and right wing ideologies in the last few years
The “fascist” part (authoritarian/totalitarian tendencies) came long before the resurgence of the right, but most people seem to approve of those methods as long as they target those they dislike, so I won’t be shedding any tears for them when it’s their turn at last.
> Very well written article
It is self-evidently written by AI. You can tell from both tropes such as “To bring this into sharper focus” and the fact that it is entirely without an opinion or argument for most of the piece.
I don't think it is. It's a presentation of the facts and current state more than anything. I mean I don't expect an opinion piece all the time.
Wow, which model? I really enjoyed this piece and went and read their piece on Siri recap/Siri rewind. Following this blog.
The Apple-vs-FBI narrative is constructed fiction. Sure, they didn't make a custom firmware to dump the phone's contents, but that's irrelevant. Everything relevant to the investigation on that phone was in the non-E2EE iCloud Backup, which the FBI got from Apple long before, via normal search warrant means. Apple likely either got an FAA702 order (aka PRISM, aka the "backdoor" that Tim Apple says doesn't exist - it allows the USG to access anyone's iCloud data immediately, with no warrant (it's not an encryption backdoor, just an access backdoor)) or a standard search warrant and most probably turned over everything they had in iCloud instantly, just as they do constantly when receiving a search warrant or FAA702 order. (As I mentioned, the FAA702 order fulfillment is likely instantaneous/automated, which amounts to direct access to the storage servers.)
The whole "Apple won't do what the USG wants" story is farce, engineered specifically to protect Apple's brand image. Following the Snowden drop when we all learned that the USG has unfettered realtime access to everything in iCloud without a warrant via FAA702, Apple had a major fucking crisis on its hands, along with a lot of other companies. (If you think the CIA can't read any object in S3, you simply don't understand how the world works. Note also that AWS has built a custom, one-off, airgapped AWS region ON PREM for the CIA. https://aws.amazon.com/federal/us-intelligence-community/ )
Those CEOs all went to DC and sat down with Obama and talked it out. The official cover story was something like "Obama wants help with healthcare.gov".
> The top leaders from the world’s biggest technology companies pressed their case for reform of the National Security Agency’s controversial surveillance operations at a meeting with President Obama on Tuesday, resisting attempts by the White House to portray the encounter as a wide-ranging discussion of broader priorities.
https://www.businessinsider.com/tech-ceo-meeting-with-obama-... (includes photo)
It is very likely that this media plan was discussed and agreed upon in those meetings. Otherwise, nobody sane in any government in Europe would ever buy an iPhone (or let their citizens do same), given that the USG can read all their photos and messages and emails and contacts in iCloud instantly and without a warrant.
(China of course requires Apple run the iCloud servers for Chinese users in China via a joint venture with a CCP-operated company, which preserves the same realtime full access to all iCloud/iMessage data in China for the CCP as PRISM does for the USG.)
Don't believe the marketing hype.
Further reading:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM
The Snowden releases support very plainly the direct realtime access of the US intelligence community to tech company servers without search warrants (just FISA orders).
It is the single most used data source by the US intelligence community.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Prism_slide_5.jpg
Apple began providing such data in October 2012.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:PRISM_Collection_Det...
https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/new-slides-reveal-gr...
Heres a favourite of mine. Apple & Google were/still are syphoning off all mobile device push messages to US government. They flat out denied it for years until it got leaked from another source, as soon as it was out in the open they admitted and said they were doing it all along but weren't allowed to tell anybody due to government NDAs.
https://www.reuters.com/technology/cybersecurity/governments...
These aren't conspiracy theories, these types of secret agreements happen all the time.
EDIT: it seems the original poster I was replying to has deleted their post, and so this may not make as much sense in the thread now.
If it was irrelevant then why did the FBI make such a big deal about it? Are you saying the FBI did that just to make Apple look good? Why would they care about Apple's reputation?
Well in theory more people use an insecure software, the more FBI can monitor
Since Epstein is no more, the governments became crazy about going after people's private data, perhaps hoping to find some spice. Like some politicians lost their source.
Just checked - I’m on the lower tier. FFS
Getting really tired of the UK govs incompetence/maliciousness around digital law making
If you didn't want it before, you probably never will. It comes with a convenience cost and the risk you may permanently lose access to your iCloud stuff if you lose your password. With the normal level of privacy, Apple is there to help you or your loved ones get access to your stuff. Most people need that much more than they need inviolable privacy.
I’m rolling the dice myself. No ADP here. If I were a political activist (US) I’d definitely need it.
I guess if I lose my phone on a trip, I wanna be able to walk into an Apple store and restore it from their cloud copy that the feds have backed up & pored over by LLMs too. (not sure that’s done in realtime for 100% of the population, but tokens will be cheap enough eventually - they have their pre-LLM solution too)
I think I keep Signal data mostly out of the cloud though, declining to use their latest features. Hidden notifications too. Is it only personal family updates, yes, but the principle makes me feel good.
Maliciousness.