I just don't understand the UK on surveillance and free speech issues. In most ways, the UK seems more sane than the US, but they have these absurd libel laws and take any and every opportunity to cry "regulate the internet" when anything bad happens involving the internet. Notably, there was no call for "we need to increase our regulation of cars or knives" after this incident.
Any UK resident have insight on why the UK is so backwards on these issues? It is pretty obvious to anyone with a cursory knowledge of computers that terrorist "safe spaces" (assuming that big internet companies knowingly provide them, which I find dubious) are kind of impossible to remove or regulate. The ability of the internet to provide encrypted, point-to-point communications is a pretty core feature.
> absurd libel laws and take any and every opportunity to cry "regulate the internet"
You do realise there's a very consistent theme here?
It's not about terrorism. It's not about the media. It's not even about internet. The underlying narrative is a systematic need to be able to control the messengers. Why impose hard propaganda when you can have unlimited pressure points available to influence what is being relayed to the public at large?
For some reason, the UK government (regardless of parties in power) seems to be fundamentally attracted to autocracy.
Yes, I see the connection, but I have difficulty seeing how politicians think that even with such measures, they can actually control discourse (apart from going full China on the matter).
I have always found it interesting that the great dystopian fiction is always set in the UK: 1984, V for Vendetta, etc. And yet, UK politicians regularly make statements about surveillance that would immediately invoke those associations in the US, but UK residents, seen from the outside at least, don't bat an eye. In the US, we have a great deal of surveillance as well, but the government at least feels the need to hide it rather than flaunt it.
In other words, perhaps those authors also recognized this autocratic tendency (assuming it exists).
I don't think there's anything new about it. The concept and legal framework for D-Notice (essentially: "soft" media gag order)[0] is more than 100 years old.
I consider the occasional need of the government to tell the media "you can't publish this for national security reasons" to be in a different category. This has legitimate use-cases, and with proper oversight can be done correctly. Surely we would not have wanted the media to publish about the Manhattan Project or Ultra during WWII. The US has NSLs which seem much the same thing.
Specific, targeted actions like this are a far cry from dragnet responses like the snooper's charter or calls for banning encryption (at least any kind that can't be decrypted by the government). The danger of dragnets is that they pick up incidental thought-crime. It's why warrants exist.
Although certainly a case could be made that the media is in a better position than the government to decide what should be made public.
I think that there is a substantial minority of both politicians and public who would have no problem with that at all. just read the Daily Mail comments on such stories; they are full of 'nothing to hide, nothing to fear'.
For some reason, the UK government (regardless of parties in power) seems to be fundamentally attracted to autocracy.
Theresa May served as Home Secretary for about six years before becoming Prime Minister. Throughout that time, on most days she probably spent several hours just reviewing cases where the police and security services wanted to do something that required explicit authorisation at that level.
It's reasonable to assume that many, even most, of those cases really did relate to the worst in our society. It also seems reasonable to assume that in at least some of those cases someone known to be very bad could not easily be brought to justice through our normal legal processes without undermining some other ongoing investigation. In addition, she was presumably given information and advice primarily by the police and security services, and those same organisations and the officials representing them would be the people either enabled or limited by her decisions.
It isn't hard to see how someone exposed to that pressure for such a sustained period of time would become extremely authoritarian. I don't know how anyone's view of society after such an experience could not be so biased that it would be hard to see what normal life looks like any more. Just about everyone who has become Home Secretary in my adult life has moved in that direction during their time in office.
The only difference here is that by a quirk of political fate Theresa May then became the most senior politician in the UK, with a majority government that gave her the power to drive through almost any legislation if she wanted it strongly enough. She achieved that position without anyone actually voting for that outcome in the first place. Until very recently, she also had little significant opposition to challenge her.
And so here we are, with the Investigatory Powers Act on the books and a government whose most senior representatives don't seem to understand even the basics of modern technologies and their implications yet have little hesitation about proposing regulation or outright bans of some of that same technology if it makes them look strong to enough voters in the week before a general election.
> Just about everyone who has become Home Secretary in my adult life has moved in that direction
The Home Sec position is a revolving seat used as a political parking lot, so the only people who stayed more than a year and had time to move in any direction in this century were T. May and Blunkett. And the latter started in a position where he regarded civil liberties as "airy fair" and expressed the aim to make the previous law&order hard liner "seem liberal".
It seems to me that the causation is the other way around - the only people really really craving that sort of position with immense secret powers but little public spotlight are those who are intrinsically authoritarian and power hungry.
Thanks for this, really puts a relatable human swing on a politician most see as a cold hearted robot. I just hope the tory majority doesn't widen, and enable her to act even more freely.
I can understand this, but there are plenty of police chiefs, district attorneys, federal prosecutors, and intelligence folks who later go into politics and don't become authoritarian. George H.W. Bush was Director of the CIA before becoming President, a job that would make anyone paranoid if anything would (perhaps a close equivalent to Home Secretary?). Yet he did not become excessively authoritarian.
Since most politicians start out as lawyers, many will inevitably have exposure to crime. So I too appreciate the humanization of May but don't see it as an excuse for authoritarianism. In fact, these people more than any should know about the delicate balance between liberty and security.
I suspect the difference between a UK Home Secretary and many of the other roles involved in policing, security and the legal system is that the HS is probably only getting involved in the most serious cases, where there are already sufficient grounds for thinking someone is a very bad person to want to take things to a level that requires such high-level approval. If you're a lawyer who practices in court or a senior police officer overseeing a whole area, you see the bad people but you also see people getting found not guilty or people being arrested on suspicion but then released when the evidence points elsewhere. I claim no special knowledge of whatever sensitive matters the HS sees on a daily basis, but I'm guessing with the filtering that must surely happen before any particular individual comes to the Home Secretary's attention, they see a much higher ratio of actually very bad people to suspected very bad people than most.
Just to be clear, I'm not defending May's policies as either HS or PM here. I think she demonstrates both a lack of technical knowledge and a biased perspective that make her very dangerous to the public good, and as such I believe she is not the right person to serve as PM. I just think that those flaws are somewhat understandable and probably something that would affect any human being who had served in her former post for as long as she did, unless perhaps they came from a background particularly relevant to these kinds of issues. The real problem may be expecting any single individual to do what is currently required of a Home Secretary for an extended period, certainly without some sort of mandatory recovery period after they leave the post before they take any other high-level position within the government.
* Free speech (see prohibitions on "hate speech" and "extremism")
* The right to remain silent (your silence can be used as evidence of guilt in court)
* The right to a jury trial (the UK now allows majority, 10-2, verdicts. The right to a jury trial can also be removed in cases where the government suspects jury tampering.)
* Habeas Corpus (up to 14 days detention without charge of terrorism suspects. it was 28 days until 2011)
* The right to be secure from unreasonable search and seizure (in many situations the standard of evidence has been lowered from "probable cause" to "reasonable suspicion" and is increasingly at the discretion of police/government instead of courts)
* The prohibition on double jeopardy (the government can petition for a new trial after acquittal if substantial new evidence comes to light)
* The exclusion of illegally gathered evidence from court (the UK never had an exclusionary principle)
* The right to self-defense (there is no castle doctrine in the UK. In every US state except Vermont, you can use lethal force with impunity against an intruder to your home. See the UK case of Tony Martin, who was convicted of murder for shooting robbers who were in his home)
* The right to assemble
* The right to keep arms (I realize this crowd may not be a fan of this right, but nevertheless it used to be a right Englishmen and Americans both enjoyed)
Well that's a load of nonsense. How about backing some of it up? We do have a right to a jury trial. Self-defense is an important defence in several laws. There are assemblies/protests in central London every weekend pretty much. Regarding the 'right to remain silent' when arrested in the UK you do not have to say anything. As for the right to keep arms - we don't want it. If our police force believes they can do their job without all carrying firearms (and last night where they tracked down and killed the attackers within 8 mins of the first call to them proves they are right) the general public doesn't need them either.
Actually the right to a jury isn't absolute [0], you can also be compelled to divulge encryption keys using a two year jail sentence [1] (no right to silence there).
Self defence is still as you say, completely legal.
For self defense, see the case of Tony Martin, who was convicted of murder for shooting intruders in his home. Castle doctrine would have protected his actions in all US states except Vermont.
The right to remain silent in the US (and previously in the UK) means that your silence cannot be presented as evidence of guilt in court. In the UK, such evidence may be presented and the the jury is instructed that they may make negative inferences from your refusal to speak with the police.
The right to a jury trial has been limited by changes that allow juries to reach majority (10-2) verdicts and by removing the right to a jury trial in cases where the government suspects jury tampering.
I'm not trying to get into a debate about guns. But any list of rights no longer enjoyed by Englishmen wouldn't be complete without mentioning it. Whether it's for the better or worse is another issue.
He used an illegally held weapon to 'defend his property'. He lay in wait for the burglars and shot at them in the dark and again shot at them (killing one) as they attempted to flee.
How in any world is that self-defence? As they were fleeing he was under no threat and therefore such deadly force is completely unreasonable and no longer being used in defence of anything anyway.
Unless you want to live in a world where people are shot dead for accidentally wandering on to another persons land the concept of necessary and reasonable force is a fair one.
I agree that the right to self-defense is something that must be limited by tests of necessity and reasonableness, in general. But within your home, I think castle doctrine should be the guiding principle. Castle doctrine doesn't apply to people wandering across your land, it applies to people illegally inside your home.
There are a surprising number of officials who might have reasonable grounds and lawful basis for entering your property, possibly without your knowledge or consent. Emergency services responding to something like a fire or a call saying someone was hurt would be an obvious example. A more subtle example might be something in your home generating noise or radio interference that is affecting everyone else in the area and needs to be turned off.
So, maybe a blanket law saying you can cause essentially unlimited harm or death to anyone entering your property without your consent isn't such a good idea? There are at least two main legal foundations in England for what we casually refer to as a right to self defence, but both of them rely on a test of reasonableness if force is used. Also, it's already acknowledged that someone's idea of what seems reasonable won't be perfect if, say, they are half-awake at 3am and find an intruder standing in the dark outside their child's bedroom, and so there is already an element of benefit of the doubt being given in such situations. Going beyond that would have to be based on either an argument that the current law isn't clear enough to make someone confident to act reasonably (which is a legitimate concern) or an argument that we want to legitimise the deliberate use of grossly excessive force (which, IMHO, is not).
In the case of the Tony Martin case, he was determined as not acting in self defense and that his actions were an overreaction as well as premeditated to some extent. He shot the intruders in the back as they were fleeing and illegally owned a shotgun, his license having been previously revoked for violent behaviour.
> I'm not trying to get into a debate about guns. But any list of rights no longer enjoyed by Englishmen wouldn't be complete without mentioning it.
Well, if you're going back that far as to consider carrying guns as a lost right, what about the vote for women? That's been gained. As has welfare. Occupational health and safety. Universal healthcare. The right to be protected by a professional police force (and emergency services in general). The abolition of slavery. Abolition of debtors prisons. Legalisation of homosexuality. Environmental protections. There are a shitload of legal rights gained since the era of English self-arming.
Cherry-picking rights from yesteryear is a crappy way to go about complaining of an issue. Guns aren't a legal mechanism; they don't belong on a list of legal processes.
According to the law, for a serious indictable offence, unfavourable inferences (once not allowed) may be drawn if a defendant didn’t mention something which:
* he or she could reasonably have been expected to mention in the circumstances; and
* is relied on by the defence in the proceeding
So... not exactly great... but not world-ending either. Basically if the police question you about where you were, and you have a lawyer with you, and you say you don't remember - you can't then go to court and say, "Well actually I was at XYZ" because that'll be used against you.
I'm not sure exactly how that pans out in real life though. It is not unexpected that you'd lose your memory when in a high pressure situation like that.
>So... not exactly great... but not world-ending either. Basically if the police question you about where you were, and you have a lawyer with you, and you say you don't remember - you can't then go to court and say, "Well actually I was at XYZ" because that'll be used against you.
I don't think that's a proper reading of the change. What you're describing was never protected by the right to remain silent. The right to remain silent applies to just that, silence. You changing your story is and has been admissible evidence in all jurisdictions.
It's unlikely we could have more strict laws on knives in the UK. It's illegal to carry them and illegal to own many types of them (e.g. flick-knives).
Essentially if you have a knife on your person, and you've not got a damn good reason (e.g. it's a breadknife and you're on your way to work at a bakery) you're committing a crime.
Cars are basically impossible to legislate against. What they did is already illegal.
So to answer your question - what's left when everything is already illegal?
When all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.
There are plenty of other ways to address this that are not legislative. A legislative approach would only be counter productive. When people are breaking the laws, making more laws doesn't help.
We would probably get much better reduction in these types of events if we spent the same resources on supporting mental health issues than wire tapping the internet.
Why would they want to solve the mental health issues when they provide so many good excuses for wire tapping the internet?
EDIT: People don't understand politics for the same reason they don't understand Facebook. If you're not the big lobby consultant getting these people elected, you are the product.
I don't think better mental health support would have any effect on Islamic terror attacks. These religious zealots are not mentally ill in the traditional sense.
People with mental illness are not violent. Knowing the mental health status of someone gives you very little predictive power about whether they pose a risk of violence or not - even if we restrict ourselves to severe illness such as psychosis.
Even if you were to find that every single terrorist has a mental illness (and we know that most of the killers in the UK didn't) it still gives you no useful information.
Violence is prevalent. Mental illness is prevalent. There's obviously going to be some overlap. It's a coincidence, not a cause.
An offensive weapon is an article made, adapted or intended for causing injury.
Since a baseball bat is not made for causing injury, and is generally not adapted for this purpose (though it might be, e.g. by stacking nails into it), it would be necessary to show that it was possesed with the intention of causing injury. Note that posession for the purpose of 'self-defence' is not a legal defence.
Knives are different - it's an offense to possess a 'bladed' (excluding non-locking knives under 7.62 cm / 3 inches) or 'sharply pointed' article in a public place, even if there is no intent to cause harm, with certain exceptions (lawful authority, for use at work, religious reasons, or national costume).
I've seen police officers search for a ball when finding a baseball bat in someone's possession, implying that, without a ball, they consider it an offensive weapon.
This has been in the context of searches based on unrelated suspicions but the strong implication was there i.e "there better be a ball in the car to go with this".
Knives it's much more clear cut there. The baseball bat thing sticks out but to be honest, in the UK, a baseball bat may well be more commonly an offensive weapon than used for sport - the sport is no where near as popular.
I was going to add that I doubt officers would demand to see wickets and ball when finding a cricket bat.
Sure, but those laws are not enforced to the letter of the law, but to the 'spirit' of the law. Which means your not going to get arrested for taking your kid and their bat home from practice just because you forgot the ball.
Not at all. I've seen this when police are searching cars owned by young drivers without children.
My point was that it can and has been broadly applied. If an officer believes an object is intended to cause harm, you can be arrested for it.
In contrast, the US enshrines gun possession as a basic constitutional right so baseball bats and knives are small fry. This was the comparison I was trying to extend.
They could require places with the highest pedestrian traffic have elevated walkways for crossing streets, and reinforced barriers between the roadway and pedestrian traffic. Or ban cars and stick to trolleys, buses, trains.
At some point, after we've exhausted all options, we might have to ask ourselves why so many people want to kill random strangers, and then deal with that.
I've never liked May's authoritarian tendencies - no way does that stuff remain restricted to targeting Islamism - but your last paragraph is in fact exactly what they are doing.
Having asked the question of "why do they want to kill random strangers", the answer they arrived at is "because they were brainwashed by religious fundamentalism they found on the internet".
Obviously nobody knows yet the specifics of this case, but I'm not sure why they think that given that the Ariane Grande event seemed to be radicalisation through family. It wasn't clear the internet played much role.
However, the UK Government has made repeated references to plots that were foiled (no details provided). If those plots were investigated and the root cause was frequently identified as "spent too much time surfing jihadi ideology" then I can see why they'd conclude the answer is internet regulation.
> Having asked the question of "why do they want to kill random strangers", the answer they arrived at is "because they were brainwashed by religious fundamentalism they found on the internet".
To a reasonable person, it should be obvious this is just a proximate cause and not the root cause. Browsing the internet and then being exposed to hateful ideas doesn't automatically turn you into a murderer.
The deeper cause is surely that "jihadi ideology" is effective at appealing to European youth. But nobody is talking about why this is in fact the case or what are the reasons why it is so attractive to some people.
For one thing, the problem of jihadi terrorism isn't going to go away without confronting the ideology head-on. I think we must have a painfully honest discussion about "jihadi ideology" and to debunk it. Radicalization isn't an inevitable outcome of being exposed to these ideas but is rather the result of losing the argument with friends, loved ones, civilization.
Banning this stuff isn't going to make it less appealing to some people or to make it disappear from the internet. But it does give government the power to censor ideas they deem to be dangerous and liable to "brainwash" the youth. And you have to ask whether you trust your politicians to use such powers responsibly.
You mention "European youth"... my guess is that many of these people who end up radicalized do not self-identify as European.
This is a problem in open societies like the US and Europe. There a lot of "sects" choosing to wall themselves off, but they are learning to wield considerable political power in doing so.
But nobody is talking about why this is in fact the case or what are the reasons why it is so attractive to some people.
I think a lot of people are talking about that, and have been for some years. There's certainly a lot of articles to be found about it going back a few years, and many of the intervention and prevention programmes discuss the appeal of jihadi ideology to European youth.
There will always be a set of mentally ill people who have the potential to be influenced to violence by rhetoric: not everyone is rational. In these circumstances, why do you think it is desirable to create an unfettered communication platform that allows everyone easy access to this population?
Unlike famous mass shootings and stabbings in recent years by depressed or mentally disturbed individuals, most jihadi fighters don't have such problems. The fact is that jihadi terrorists usually turn out to be otherwise normal people. They are as rational as you or me, and people can't seem to accept or understand this. Just look at the numbers of Europeans travelling to Iraq, Libya, Syria to fight, to sacrifice their lives for this ideology. Or the tens of thousands who are already in ISIS. You can't tell me that most of them have mental problems.
A major problem in Europe is that there is no challenge to jihadi rhetoric, except for the far-right freak show, because the whole thing is taboo. You can't defeat jihadi ideology by pretending it doesn't exist, which is what you're effectively doing when you restrict online access and communication. It's a knee-jerk yet cowardly way to avoid confronting the problem.
Everyone is influenced by rhetoric (to some degree). Everyone has irrational weaknesses. It is one of the reasons why a monopoly on communication is very dangerous.
Exactly. To me, if the reason why folks kill others is because they were brainwashed (due to religious fundamentalism or not), the correct action would be to solve the issues that cause folks to be drawn to such fundamentalism.
> I'm not sure why they think that given that the Ariane Grande event seemed to be radicalisation through family
Just on a point of fact, Abedi almost certainly wasn't radicalized by his own family, although some of them knew it was happening.
From The Telegraph/NYT:
Salman Abedi is understood to have made calls to two mobile phone numbers based in Libya, which were not registered to his family, moments before the massacre that killed 22 people.
Abedi, 22, has been connected to Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (Isil) terror group Katibat al-Battar al-Libi, based in Libya, which is credited with being behind a number of attacks in Europe, including the Paris attacks which left 129 people dead and dozens injured after coordinated attacks on the Bataclan concert hall and the Saint-Denis Stadium. Two senior US intelligence officials told the New York Times that Abedi was in contact with al-Battar members both on his visits to Tripoli and by phone while in the UK.
There is lots of other information which ties these dots together, such as the particular materials and techniques used to construct the bomb he exploded.
That info doesn't mean that he haven't received radical ideas in his mosque and his family. Unless you consider "Islam will rule the world soon" and "death to the homosexuals" not radical. Specifically in the mosque site there were "favourite videos" of one U.S. Islam preacher with these messages.
"Freedom" of religion is not understood properly today.
"Islam will rule the world soon" and "death to the homosexuals" are not radical ideas in Muslim communities, and certainly aren't sufficient to incite anyone in the legal sense.
Radicalization takes place within an atmosphere of complicity, which is part of the problem, but hardly the root cause.
On the other hand, teaching young impressionable men how to make a bomb designed specifically to kill people, and to give them the mens rea, motive and encouragement is radicalization.
I assumed as much. The question was half-rhetorical, though: such regulations did not and could not prevent what happened. There seems to be a law of diminishing returns on regulation: sure, common-sense things like not allowing weapons to mentally ill people go a long way, but increasing regulation past a certain point doesn't reduce problems and only restricts freedom.
So in that case, the question becomes, has the UK already passed that point for internet regulation? I don't know the answer, but I assume that plotting specific attacks or making specific threats online is punishable in the UK just as it is in the US.
Annecdotaly, most non-tech people I speak to just don't understand the Internet (or how far it extends into their lives). They seem to see the internet as the web browser they use for Facebook, and not how far it extends into what they do every day. As such many seem to think it can be regulated like television, and few seem to understand the implications of backdooring encryption and whatever else.
Ultimately it's a 'we trust the government' and 'I have nothing to hide'. It seems difficult for most people to see outside their own bubble, especially when they're frightened of an invisible enemy.
Both the main parties are in many ways authoritarian, and both have gone along with increased powers for the secret services. The UK has rarely had either a libertarian right (the Tory party are historically a party of the land owners and aristocracy and the broader establishment) or a liberal left (the Labour party was founded by trade unions. The liberalisation on social issues has generally come from social pressure (suffragettes, women working, sexual liberation and gay rights in the 1960s) and the judiciary who sometimes (or juries, eg Lady Chatterly) have acquitted people, changing things.
Fascinating and useful explanation. I think, then, the difference compared to the US must be that in the US, the majority of both parties have authoritarian tendencies, but there is a vocal minority of "libertarians" in both parties, whereas in the UK, you seem to be saying that libertarian pressure comes mostly from the outside the traditional political structure.
I do wonder, more broadly, whether it is possible for a country to have the benefits of the "European" approach (better social services) and of the "American" approach (more robust civil liberty) all in one, or if they are somehow mutually exclusive.
From the standpoint of security, I don't see much of a correlation between the level of surveillance/repression/etc and the level of terrorist activity. It seems to me the biggest determinants of whether a country will suffer terrorist attacks are: 1) immigration policy, 2) perceived level of "colonialist"/"globalist" behavior, and 3) wealth. It is very interesting to me that Poland has virtually no terrorist attacks whereas their neighbors, Germany, France, and UK, have them quite regularly, but I don't know the explanation. It is surely not that Poland regulates the internet more tightly.
I suspect the main difference between the US and the UK is simply that in the UK the average citizen is more trusting of their government to do the right thing with any powers it has. That in turn may be because historically the level of abuse in the UK has been lower and abuses that come to light do tend to get challenged and to result in changes in policy.
It's obviously not a perfect world and certainly we do still have some problems with discrimination and wrongful use of powers, but perhaps we are culturally a little more pragmatic about these things than our friends across the pond. Whether that tolerance will one day come back to haunt those who supported stronger government powers if we elect our own Trump is a different question.
They weren't persecuted, they left the UK so they themselves were free to persecute others, which they were not permitted to do in England.
The Puritans believed there was one true religion and wanted this 'fact' to be reflected in English law, government and society. They wanted a theocracy.
These people were only persecuted if you believe that the store owner that was told he couldn't refuse to sell cakes to a gay couple on religious grounds also amounted to persecution (hint: it doesn't).
Stopping somone from persecuting others does not mean that person is being persecuted. Something the so-called 'Christian' conservatives in the new world and now the US still fail to grasp after 300+ years.
Somewhat flippant answer: you were just imagining the UK being saner.
There's been a law since 2000 compelling suspects of crimes to divulge their encryption keys or go to jail, for example. The lack of speech protection isn't new.
You're comparing the UK to the USA there and assuming the USA is saner.
The origin of the USA's prohibition against self-incrimination was people who were tortured into confessions and other forms of undermining their own freedom. The original logic for this right does not apply to divulging encryption keys. It's not clear what higher purpose is being served by allowing people under investigation to halt those investigations by using encryption: it's not like they can be tortured into revealing incorrect information inside the encrypted files.
> In most ways, the UK seems more sane than the US
Don't make the mistake of comparing another country's highlight reel with the day-to-day living you're familiar with here. I promise you that if you lived there (or just about any other country) for a while, you would start to see the warts along with the successes.
Also, aren't they already monitoring all international communication lines? I don't remember the last time any of these attacks were actually coordinated by international agents (all are homegrown, most are lone wolf)
Short of policing thoughts, at some point, they'll have to admit 'MONITOR EVERYTHING, POLICE EVERYTHING' won't actually solve the problem.
The UK doesn't have a fundamental right of free speech in the same way that US has. Attacks on free speech in the US need to be more subtle.
The root cause here is more strategic and difficult to fix. The west needs to disengage from meddling in the Middle East and stop shipping boatloads of money there.
If the people cared about individual liberty they'd vote outside the big two parties (Tories and Labour) and take a look at the Lib Dems who have promised to repeal the Investigatory Powers Act rather than enhance it. The fact that the electrate doesn't care about these issues (and that the Lib Dems are on track to lose vote share) means they'll end up with the politicians they deserve.
I appreciate the issues FPTP presents and that people need to assess party platforms as a whole but the truth is most people don't care enough about privacy to make it a priority and so the UK will continue to get a bit more authoritarian every election.
The trouble is that we only get one vote at each general election, and those normally only happen once every few years. That isn't even close to enough to express any sort of nuanced view on important issues like civil liberties. It's not even enough to express a clear view on headline issues like economic policy or the NHS. And yet politicians produce these gazillion-page manifesto documents and the winners then claim a public mandate to implement the policy mentioned vaguely in the footnote on page 87.
Our political system is fundamentally broken, and it's not (only) because of FPTP. In many cases, there may not be any potential representative you can vote for who is even close to your own position on even most issues.
Saying that people "don't care" about an issue because they don't vote for a party that opposes the problem on that one issue makes no sense. For example, in the case you mentioned, the Lib Dems have essentially made themselves a single-issue party this election. By your own reasoning, should someone who supports their stance on civil liberties but disagrees with their headline position on Brexit vote for them?
I was hoping to capture your last point when I said people need to assess party platforms as a whole. I understand that most people who voted Leave cannot really vote Lib Dem in good conscience. I hate to see parties lock up single issue voters into electoral blocks like that but that's what happens under our current (broken) system.
Having said that, I don't think any of that detracts from my point - the electorate don't care enough about privacy to make it their hot-button issue. The people have chosen to prioritise the NHS, Brexit, Immigration and the War on Terror over privacy. All of those are important and the politicians up for election respond accordingly to their priorities. If a UKIP-like party that focused on civil liberties started hoovering up votes then the main parties would also respond; unfortunately I don't see that happening due to voter apathy on the topic.
>The fact that the electrate doesn't care about these issues..
Might have something to do with the absurd level of right wing control of the popular media. The Daily Mail preaches it's daily diet of,'jail em, hang em, deport em' for everything it doesn't care for. The snoopers charter achieved almost zero coverage during its final stages. All the papers were discussing was Brexit.
Believe me that I would vote lib dem, if they had stances I agreed on outside the issues of personal freedoms, and even some of those they aren't willing to stick up for. I am much more sympathetic to more of Labour's policies.
Believe me, I do. I didn't vote for Donald Trump or GWB. But I have to accept that their actions constitute a big part of what the US is, especially as seen from the outside.
To simplify a little, in a democracy, if 51% of voters are "backwards" in some way, I see it as an acceptable shorthand to say that the country as a whole is (in that particuar way). Because that group will be making the decisions for 100% of residents.
To simplify a little, in a democracy, if 51% of voters are "backwards" in some way ... that group will be making the decisions for 100% of residents.
This is the big problem with a "pure" direct democracy: you automatically get tyranny of the majority.
Most of our real world democracies suffer worse problems than this, though. The leadership elected to make the decisions may not even enjoy a majority of popular support. Even having had popular support at an election, there may be no mechanism to compel a government to actually act as it promised to win those votes, other than voting for someone else several years later. The nature of the electoral system may lead to very short-term, populist thinking, particularly towards the end of each electoral cycle.
My own view is that in light of these kinds of weaknesses, many of our political systems in the West are simply not fit for purpose, and that once-pragmatic reasons for accepting those limitations mostly expired with the rise of modern transportation and communication infrastructure. Sadly, I have not yet been made supreme ruler of the universe, so I have limited ability to do anything about this unless a lot of other people start to agree...
I suppose she's talking about websites visited rather than message communication. Terrorists likely have similar website browsing patterns... their hunger for like-minded material, news and propaganda from fellow "soldiers".
Website browsing activity can be hidden too, but new recruits like ignorant teenagers looking for a meaningful purpose, they might be careless with their internet anonymity. You'd want to get to them before they hit the streets with murderous intent.
If I call you a child rapist I have to be able to prove to a court that on the balance of probabilities you are a child rapist. That seems like a reasonable approach. What's wrong with it?
If the laws were the same in the US, and I called Donald Trump an idiot, would I have to furnish an IQ test? If I wrote that Ballmer/Nadella was incompetent and Microsoft products are crap?
I guess the problem is that the nature of speech often results in opinion-based insults being interpretable as a literal factual claim, and that the benefits of people being able to express their opinions freely generally outweigh the potential reputational costs to insulted individuals.
It is really analogous to the ongoing debate in US universities about whether mere words can cause such a high degree of harm as to be actionable. I think they can cause harm, but that the chilling effects caused by restricting speech are almost always greater.
> If the laws were the same in the US, and I called Donald Trump an idiot, would I have to furnish an IQ test? If I wrote that Ballmer/Nadella was incompetent and Microsoft products are crap?
You can say all of that in England.
Before someone can take a case of defamation through the courts they have to show there's actual or probable serious harm. (For for-profit companies that would be serious monetary loss).
The defences are that the comment is true; or that it's honest opinion, or that it's a matter of public interest, or that it's in a privileged publication (which includes peer reviewed journals).
When you say "Trump is an idiot" he can't show any harm at all, let alone serious harm; and it's an opinion that many people have.
When you say "Ballmer / Nadella are incompetent" either they personally have to show serious harm (and they can't) or Microsoft has to show serious financial harm (and it can't). And it's an opinion that while strongly held and expressed is expressed by many people.
> but that the chilling effects caused by restricting speech are almost always greater.
If I take a photograph of you and make a flyer saying "XAA RAPES CHILDREN" and spread that around your workplace and your local community you probably want a few methods to make that stop. One would be harassment law. Another would be defamation law. This is really the only kind of thing stopped by English law.
(Are you aware that the English law changed in 2013? Are you talking about the old law? I agree that was terrible.)
I am aware the law changed, now; admittedly I didn't until reading other replies to my OP. And I am not familiar with the nuance. We certainly have defamation laws in the US as well, so there's that.
I think criminalizing (or even "tortifying") lies is completely unworkable. This kind of edifice has to be full of exceptions to avoid immediately collapsing under its own weight. In the average political campaign (US or UK), how many lies are told that cause harm to a candidate's reputation or future employment prospects? One a day, conservatively.
The real linchpin is whether these laws are used in practice to protect the powerful from criticism, or normal people from vindictive harassment as you suggest in your example.
If your example actually happened, I think that first, people would ask the person claiming "XAA RAPES CHILDREN" for evidence. If the claimant failed to provide it, listeners would rightly view them as crazy. In any case, it is unlikely I could afford to prosecute it, especially if it caused me harm to the extent of causing me to lose my job or something.
Like everything in law, it's complicated and has pros and cons. My personal bias is to lean towards free speech if individual cases are in doubt.
In allmost all terrorist attacks in europe(also 9/11), the police had alarming data about the attackers before and in some cases even recieved explicit warnings about the attackers - yet the attacks still happened.
But still every politician demandes MORE surveilance, even though they allready had all the data. So maybe they need more personal. But not more surveillance.
It would not surprise me, if this case is similar.
They have lots of non-actionable data on thousands of individuals ("individual X is a potentially violent extremist but hasn't committed any actual crimes yet").
One could make an argument that what they are after here is to get actually actionable data ("individual X is plotting an attack next week together with individuals Y and Z").
I don't think this is devil's advocate arguing.. There's a slippery slope from what you describe to the concept of "thought crime", which sounds hokey and conspiracy-ish but given the level of surveillance we have, we're not that far off.
Thought crime already exists for a long time already. Planning to commit murder (thinking about it) is punished nearly as harshly as succeeding. Is it really so controversial?
I suppose machine learning could study communication patterns to see what patterns are there before an attack.. e.g. if suddenly they started talking about birds when they never did before, did they just establish some code words? The dark part is the computers will need training data...
There's a genuine reason why machine learning seems to be the Holy Grail - man has dominated this planet, solved his problems and overcome challenges by his intelligence (ability to learn and adapt). Bequeathing these same abilities to machines is a big deal and might be the solution to everything.
That's not actionable. The dark part here is the serious threat of applying oppressive prior restraint policies at will. Employing machine learning in the process would only offer a false sense of legitimacy.
I suspect that they have this kind of alarming data on so many people they don't have the resources to act on all of it or it would require to round up entire communities which is politically infeasible.
Since 2010 the UK government has reduced the police force by 19k officers. The border force by another huge number I don't have to hand...
After the Manchester attacks they ran so short of police they had to call the army in to do routine guard work ('had to', perhaps chose to?)
If they wanted to actually act on intelligence a foil plots then they would need more police to follow, watch analyse wouldn't they? I wonder if it is actually as simple as the idea that bulk surveillance might be cheaper than real police officers, and is actually more effective at keeping the public quiet?
No but if she says the Conservatives have cancelled it for the day and the other parties don't they'll get crucified by the right wing press (particularly print).
So you are buggered if you do respond and buggered if you don't.
UKIP are very right wing, are already villified by the left, and who rely on incidents like this for their conversions. They stand to lose nothing by doing so.
Small incident? This was a coordinated attack by three terrorists. More than 40 injured. Truck and knives used as weapons on Saturday night crowds.
Look at the intended carnage. Police response time has nothing to do with evaluating the seriousness of the crime. Think about the organised networks behind these attacks, and the "routine" nature they are becoming, and then perhaps contribute ideas to help prevent them.
How many people died last week in the UK from fentanyl overdoses? How many from alcohol involved traffic accidents? More than this. Why is terror more terrible than unexpected death by other means?
> Why is terror more terrible than unexpected death by other means?
You haven't given this much thought have you. Describing mass murder as an "unexpected death" is not smart.
First of all, your overdose and traffic deaths are *accidents", there was no intent to murder involved. This means we work to minimise the likelihood of such deaths via preventative measures from education, health and legal through to building safer roads and vehicles.
Mass murder on the other hand is no accident and is less manageable. Murder affects the community more due to the nature of the crime. The callous intent leading up to the crime, the actual violence and consequences after.
When people ask "how can we prevent this", and the answers don't come as easily as preventing drunk driving, then obviously the problem is worse. Combined with brainwashed religious extremist ideology, you have yourself a more terrible problem than what road safety measures can ever hope to deal with.
Put simply, it's much easier to argue that you must sacrifice all liberty for protection against terror than against drunk driving. Terror serves your oppressor's needs better than anything else.
If you want to know why political and religious violence is worse than drug overdose and why we have to resist it, look at Iraq, Syria, Libya, Afghanistan. Although we can say it was Bush then Obama who destabilized the country by removing the tyrants, in the tyrants' absence, religion-influenced political struggles (ie. Sunni vs Shiite, Islam vs Kurd) blew the countries apart, and continues to blow the countries apart.
So drug addictions can be bad, but religously-motivated wars are worse because they will destroy everyone. Even stable countries like Saudi Arabia is not immune, and people are worried that the more radical elements there will take power if the country loses its wealth, wealth which is used to pacify the population.
I have an idea. The western populace especially the US, needs to take ownership of the wars they have voted for and the power vacuums they have resulted in. ISIS and taliban are proofs that if you vote for unecessary wars half way around the world, it will come back to bite you.
Its very convenient to now attribute the radicalization to "jihadi mentality", when the real answer is the much more painful realization that we contributed to this radicalization by voting in and re-electing war mongers. Its very convenient to say British born, "of Libyan descent", as if to distance a radicalized person's Britishness and attribute all their radicalization completely to their descent. Maybe looking inward for blame is the answer.
Power vacuum is term so fitting i will be using it from now on. If you do personal research on this topic it becomes very clear. Even the rise of ISIS is possible because how US decimated countries like Iraq. You are left with almost no gov, scared frustrated population and space (vacuum) for new power to emerge.
I mean why are we so suprised that there are terorists from pakistan. US has had drones bombing the place since 2004. I am sure i am not the only one who would try to do something about it (eventualy figure out how to shoot it down). Paradoxically aren't Americans the first ones to take out their big guns from the basement to shoot trespassers - because it is their right?
Give me a break. There is no relationship between a "power vacuum" and mass murder of innocent people by this so-called "power" you speak of.
If you allowed these "powers" to be in power by way of the ballot box, they'd be finished after the first few votes were counted.
Please don't give any credit or reasoning to these cancerous terrorist organisations. Never forget their idea of justice is to murder cartoonists because "they drew first" and to behead those who insult the prophet.
Don't give them motivating credibility by your political sympathising, you're not helping. When one of these assholes decides to knife someone in the street, they're not thinking "this is for the drone strikes", they're shouting God Is Great as they assume the role of "soldier of Allah". They are NOT thinking of the innocent victims of US drone strikes.
After the recent attack near parliament Amber Rudd (home secretary) wasted no time at all in blaming WhatsApp, because the guy used WhatsApp. He could have used WhatsApp to send a cat meme to his mum for all we know. It is disgusting the way they are prepared to use these events to push their totalitarian agenda
She's actually been saying this for quite a while but nobody's listening. Now she's using the incident to bolster her argument. It's a pretty ridiculous claim to state that this type of monitoring will help - "these terrorists have safe spaces on the Internet". Smart terrorists will find a "space" to communicate where big brother is not listening. If you eliminate one, they'll simply move elsewhere but there's no practical chance of removing them all.
I am against may's plan, but pushing terrorist propaganda into the dark would be a good thing.
The harder it is to find for authorities, the harder it is to find for impressionable people.
The argument is not to keep terrorists from communicating internally, but to keep them from publishing.
This sentiment is common but misguided. For one thing, "impressionable people" will always seek out taboo information. Banning jihadi messaging isn't going to make it less appealing to them (when they find it elsewhere) or to make it disappear from the internet (there's always a way). So this is an ineffective strategy.
It is better to target the root cause, which is that jihadi ideas are clearly attractive to a large group of European youths. Just look at the numbers of Europeans travelling to Iraq, Libya, Syria to fight, to sacrifice their lives for this ideology. You can't dismiss all these people as "impressionable". As far as I can tell, they are otherwise normal people who are as rational as you or me.
Sure, there are some truly impressionable people out there. And we should prevent them from being radicalized. But it's like with sex or drugs... We talk to our kids about difficult subjects so they are well-informed and are not so naive and easy to manipulate. But we don't talk about jihadi ideology. Why is mainstream society unwilling to challenge their ideas and expose them as wrong?
You can't defeat an ideology by pretending that it doesn't exist, which is what you're effectively doing when you censor it. It's a knee-jerk yet cowardly way to avoid confronting the actual problem. And the problem isn't going to go away unless you confront the ideology head-on. Radicalization isn't the inevitable outcome of being exposed to these ideas but is rather the result of losing an argument.
The question here is how propaganda works. If you compare it to advertising, it would seem that widespread and indiscriminate dissemination works wonders.
That is not to say you should deny jihadism exists, but letting the most vocal jihadis be the ones to tell the story doesn't seem wise.
The best argument I see against this is essentially the martyrdom of oppression. It doesn't help when they can claim "See, they are afraid of us so they must censor us".
Consider the 'fair and balanced' approach to global warming. Giving the obviously wrong a platform doesn't seem to have worked.
The root of the problem as I have mentioned previously is that the propaganda is actually effective. And until you identify the reasons why this is the case, and directly start addressing those reasons, whatever actions you take aren't going to make much of a difference.
Banning propaganda from "vocal jihadis" won't make their words any less appealing. And no matter how good your technical controls, it won't prevent a motivated person from finding such material online, one way or another.
And while there are many reasons why the jihadi message is so effective, I happen to believe that it is sustained not because the ideas are being widely and indiscriminately dissiminated, but rather because the ideas are not being exposed and challenged.
It is bizarre that there are people committing mass murder, motivated by a concrete and well-documented set of beliefs, which nobody is criticizing let alone even willing to discuss in public. Doesn't that sound to you like "they are afraid of us"? I'm sure that's how it looks like to a jihadi recruit.
Interesting angle. I suppose to get onto news stands would require a distributor to pick it up and people to stock it. I suppose this is where the argument about how the internet compares to publishers/distributors/retailers rears its head. Maybe it is no more than infrastructure, like the roads a delivery driver drives down?
A lot of people in the UK don't know what surveillance powers the government has enacted into law. Nor do they know the plans the government has in their 2017 manifesto.
I created a campaigning site to dissuade people from voting for the Conservatives in the election - I know that will be frowned up on here, but I wrote an entire section on the site to explain (in laypersons terms) what surveillance powers have been legislated and proposed by the Conservatives:
It does look like either the Labour or the Tories favour surveillance heavily. It makes me wonder, do the leaders of these parties actually believe that such surveillance can ensure security ? Or, is it that most of the common people see surveillance as a good security measure and the political parties are just appeasing these people. I can't help but extrapolate this situation to the scenario depicted in "V for Vendetta".
There is also the opposite problem. The public aren't asking for it not to be done either. Internet surveillance isn't a hot button political topic either way. However, terrorism is. Hence the problem.
>The Prime Minister said introducing new rules for cyberspace would “deprive the extremists of their safe spaces online” and that technology firms were not currently doing enough.
We had widespread uncatchable for years (or decades) terrorism in the 60s and 70s (from RAF in Germany and Brigate Rosse in Italy, Action Direct in France, to Carlos, and tons of others) without the internet. Hundreds of bombings, kidnappings, executions, etc.
Where does the BS idea come that if you track the internet you will stop modern terrorism?
Saying that we've 'had terrorism for ages' is like saying that we 'had war for ages' and so firearms didn't change anything.
I have no idea what the 'official' idea is around trying to lock down 'safe spaces' on the internet, but the idea that the reduction of the availability of certain material may reduce the impact of certain material isn't beyond the realms of reason.
We legislate against all sorts of things that should have no effect if everyone were a level-headed rational actor.
In days of old, the only way you could recruit people to your cause was likely in person. Now you can do this in a much more distributed way over the internet.
When a certain (admittedly vanishingly small) proportion of the population is susceptible to certain arguments, for whatever reason, with lethal consequences, then is suggesting that those arguments should be suppressed a bad idea?
>Saying that we've 'had terrorism for ages' is like saying that we 'had war for ages' and so firearms didn't change anything.
For the comparison to be apt, firearms should play the same role in war that the internet (or lack of it) plays in terrorism.
Which I don't think is the case.
My point is, even without access to modern telecommunications at all, terrorisms could be as effective, if not more, back in decades past. So suddenly tapping the internet would stop them?
>I have no idea what the 'official' idea is around trying to lock down 'safe spaces' on the internet, but the idea that the reduction of the availability of certain material may reduce the impact of certain material isn't beyond the realms of reason.
Well, it has worked wonders for alcohol (the prohibition), drugs, pornography, and everywhere else this concept has been tried.
>In days of old, the only way you could recruit people to your cause was likely in person. Now you can do this in a much more distributed way over the internet.
Which doesn't matter much, since you still need lots of in person checking out the person, plus meetings give them physical equipment they'll need (guns or whatever). Unless they fed-ex those...
> For the comparison to be apt, firearms should play the same role in war that the internet (or lack of it) plays in terrorism.
I used the example of firearms as it's a force multiplier (and yeah, it's not a great analogy I admit). This allows a single person to have a potentially much larger impact by reaching more people, some of which may be susceptible to the message.
The internet allows lots of people with similar opinions/interests to communicate (and find each other) which either would not have not been possible in the past, or very difficult. You see this played out in all sorts of places where there are communities built up online that wouldn't have been possible before, in all sorts of niche interests.
> Well, it has worked wonders for alcohol (the prohibition), drugs, pornography, and everywhere else this concept has been tried.
Did less (in number) people drink during prohibition than before/after? Would less people do drugs if they were legalised? Any reasonable argument would suggest that you obviously can't prevent all 'bad' communication, but you want to try and reduce the ease of availability of propaganda.
Although I admit there is an obvious parallel with the 'gateway drugs' argument that's frequently made :-)
> Which doesn't matter much, since you still need lots of in person checking out the person, plus meetings give them physical equipment they'll need (guns or whatever). Unless they fed-ex those...
For a good number of recent attacks, this isn't necessarily true. Attackers use everyday items (vehicles, knifes etc.) and you don't need to 'check anyone out' because it's not a conversation, it's just a 'go out and kill people' message.
The inability to monitor suspects telecommunications is a very recent phenomenon. Governments had that ability more or less from the moment Bell started building his system.
>The inability to monitor suspects telecommunications is a very recent phenomenon.
First, for actual suspects there never was any inability to monitor their telecommunications. (and any legal inability never meant much to the agencies doing it).
This is not about this (targeted taps), it's about tapping everyone and at all times. Which they also do, but now they want to make it official and sanctioned.
> We need to work with allied democratic governments to reach international agreements that regulate cyberspace to prevent the spread of extremist and terrorism planning. And we need to do everything we can at home to reduce the risks of extremism online.
Other interesting quotes:
> "While we have made significant progress in recent years, there is - to be frank - far too much tolerance of extremism in our country. So we need to become far more robust in identifying it and stamping it out across the public sector and across society. That will require some difficult, and often embarrassing, conversations."
> "And if we need to increase the length of custodial sentences for terrorist-related offences - even apparently less serious offences - that is what we will do."
> We need to work with allied democratic governments to reach international agreements that regulate cyberspace to prevent the spread of extremist and terrorism planning. And we need to do everything we can at home to reduce the risks of extremism online.
It may appear that terrorists are planning something but in reality it is probably unplanned copy-cat behavior.
Theresa May is the politician behind the nasty snoopers charter and is likely to win the upcoming election. She is particularly dangerous to internet freedom in the UK
And internet freedom in the rest of the world, by extension. If they go through with this nonsense, a lot of EU politicians will push for similar things, with the excuse that "if the UK can do it, why can't we?".
The Prime Minister said introducing new rules for cyberspace would “deprive the extremists of their safe spaces online” and that technology firms were not currently doing enough.
...
"We cannot allow this ideology the safe space it needs to breed - yet that is precisely what the internet, and the big companies that provide internet-based services provide,” Ms May said.
Is it fair to say that the seeds for these attacks were first sown well before the emergence of the technology companies she's criticising? I remember reading of a private suggestion by someone in (US?) foreign affairs that this broad wave of terrorism is "birds come home to roost".
I'm a bit out of the loop on these sorts of discussions so apologies if this is retreading old ground, but... let's asssume I want to engage in some form of population monitoring or profiling. Based purely on available facts, what actually is the best indicator of propensity to commit terror attacks? Is it being Muslim, spending time on Islamist websites, being a marginalized single man, something else, or is there in fact no pattern distinguishable from random noise?
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Has she specified anywhere what 'the internet must be regulated' might mean? There's a huge difference between having Facebook-and-Twitter type organisations share stuff with the police, and trying to manage every possible means of communication.
If it was possible to regulate the internet for the average person, would it be right to regulate it?
From what I read, the police arrived within 2-5 minutes after the attack started. The only way to pre-empt it would be to have information about the terrorist's plans beforehand. Encryption on phones is widely available to the average person, and this makes it very difficult to stop terrorists from planning attacks.
In the grand scheme of things, terrorist attacks do not kill very many people. However, they brutalise public discourse. Every time this happens it draws us closer to authoritarianism: loss of privacy, mass internment, ethnic cleansing. The conversation after attacks seems to be becoming more and more sarcastic and bitter on one hand, and counter-establishment/authoritarian on the other. For example, photos of Sadiq Khan telling the population that these attacks are 'part and parcel' of living in a major city; and the mockery of people saying "we don't yet know if this is a muslim".
I'm pro-free-speech and pro-encryption, but I am not sure whether grinning and bearing it is really an effective weapon against terrorist activity, considering its ratcheting effects on public opinion. So, if we don't ban encryption, what are we going to do?
>> I'm free speech and pro-encryption, but I am not sure whether grinning and bearing it is really an effective weapon against terrorist activity, considering its ratcheting effects on public opinion. So, if we don't ban encryption, what are we going to do?
I'm in the same position. It's getting harder to stick to my principals. The way I'm trying to think about it though is this: banning encryption and destroying privacy will not fix terrorism. Governments should be focusing on actual solutions to the root cause. Maybe we should stop blowing up the middle-east. We need to work for stability in those regions. Ban encryption and the terrorists will find another avenue to communicate and we'll lose freedoms for nothing.
> Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety. - Franklin
If the price for living in a free society is that the same freedoms are abused by a vanishingly small minority of people then I'm ok with that, I'm not ok with what those people do but I think the loss of freedom for 60m people is a greater problem than some brainwashed idiots going on a rampage once in a while.
> Maybe we should stop blowing up the middle-east.
I agreed with this in the past but I was happy to see ISIS driven back from the territories they conquered. I wish we had never gone to war with Iraq and I wish we hadn't cheered during the 'Arab Spring', however that is now in the past. I care about what we do now and whether it can disrupt a violent ideology that is currently rapidly spreading from one person to the next across the world. The less violently it can be disrupted the better.
I'm strongly of the opinion that democracy will never flourish in the Middle East. Any attempts by the US and its allies to impose democratic systems are naïve (although I suspect those at the top are well aware, but just won't admit so).
Libya, Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan all need secular dictators who can keep the populations under control.
Legislators sure seem to assume that legislation can fix anything but it’s a dangerously ignorant attitude to have about technology. There is no single governing body, no single country and usually not even a single access point for Internet data. Even if a country seems to create what sounds like a decent law for that country, there is no way to apply that law to everybody. It’s also particularly ironic when a restriction is proposed for dealing with people that are probably already untouchable anyway.
Also, “the Internet” is not just what you can see on a web page, and screwing with traffic invariably damages everything else. (Ever see HTML returned in places where it wasn’t supposed to be there? Thanks, ISPs.) If your law can’t even reach the people it’s supposed to reach and your implementation is shoddy on top of it all, you’ve just caused a problem that you didn’t have before due to paranoia.
We should probably think of the Internet like the ocean: it connects everybody, maybe there are areas we can control for added safety, and in the end we all know in International Waters there are some shady things going on that we can’t do anything about. That’s life.
It's still high time to withdraw any and all support from the people who have to gain from terrorist attacks. The likes of Theresa May and the war criminals she probably hands with, the "security industry" that is working so hard to make the world less secure for the innocent and more secure for those who want to hide their guilt.
Te real way to curb terrorism and other crime is to have more sane parents who have more time for their kids, more affordable education, that sort of thing. War, poverty, etc.; what happens today determines the tragedies of the next 30 years. We'd need to be very different, much better societies for at least a few decades for any real change.
But the people like May don't want that. They want more of what uproots us, and they want power that can be used nilly-willy, both against criminals and anyone else. Notice how you can't use "honest parents who give their children hugs and answer their question" against innocents the way that "fights crime". Don't tell me it's about resources, it's about intent which in turn results from dysfunction and psychopathology. They need to control the narrative because a mirror would kill them, that's the gist. Be the mirror.
It's not just individual conditions like upbringing, poverty or education. There is a problem with segregation. Not any form of mandated segregation, but emergent segregation due to social constructs.
Racism, latent or otherwise, makes minorities feel more comfortable with people of their own ethnicity. Whilst that same racism makes the majority want to move away from the minority.
Obviously, this segregation isn't the only issue. There are more minorities that appear to have self-segregated than just the Arabic/Muslim. In the UK, e.g. Indians, Eastern-Europeans, perhaps black people. Those minorities seem to have a lot fewer terrorists, if any.
And regulating DIY stores selling knives? Our local one here could provide for a brigade of militias. This is not the solution. I doubt the murder squad in London thought they'd have much a chance to get away and in general these ISIS-style assassins are fully prepared to die for their belief so how about an examination of what that belief is, where is comes from and on what authority? Sensitive stuff! And we can be pretty sure this won't be happening.
What if the terrorists start using plain old mail? Or the telephone? Or just meeting up in a cafe? Do all of those things need to be regulated? Should they open everyone's mail and read it?
After all, you could be writing bad words. Should we just have everyone in the country "check in" every week to make sure they aren't doing anything unusual? Where does it stop?
I thought the UK was very forward looking in their responses so far to the violence. Things I've seen on TV have lead me to believe that standing up and not being afraid is the best medicine for this type of action. Maybe I was wrong.
Theresa May should educate herself before making statements like that.
Any person with half a brain and has some knowledge about how the internet works, knows that it's not possible to regulate it entirely.
For example, any image can be made to contain an encrypted message, without anyone ever knowing it's there [1].
This will just be another blow to everyone's privacy if she gets her way.
At this point, I am pretty certain that deciding to have children is unethical, due to the various types of suffering they are nearly certain to endure.
I'm sorry to break it to you Theresa, but the internet didn't attack anyone. I wish people didn't lose their ability to think rationally in these moments.
I don't know about the internet being regulated, however it is clear to me that our politicians idiotic utterances need a serious amount of regulating.
"New international agreements should be introduced ..."
The governing 'muppets' worldwide agree with her. The ruling clique is in mortal fear of open communication between the global serf class. They all agree on that, 'entertaining' muppet conflicts notwithstanding.
Can someone explain to me why this link has such a low ranking on HN, already? It's pretty fresh and has lots of upvotes. I was trying to post it, because I didn't see it yet.
Using "safety" as an excuse for surveillance and censorship is a popular action from the Fascist Playbook. I just hope that those in the U.K. don't fall for it.
So what if someone thinks that GTA multiplayer has enough ways to communicate each other without transfering a word (for example driving a taxi means tuesday and changing a weapon you can direct message to ceratin person in team).
This can be done in any video game that has multiplayer.
It's not the internet, internet propoganda is the final chapter in the process, the bed of thorns is laid by the Mosques in the UK and the dumbest ones are then influenced.
The burden of proof doesn't lie on the voice of skepticism.
I think it's condescending to Islamic terrorists to pretend that their attacks are an illness rather than a calculated move to further the goals of their thoughtful interpretation of Islamic scripture: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/03/what-is...
It's also hurtful to the real mentally ill people, who overwhelmingly are a danger to themselves, to lump them in with murderers.
You are getting off track. The point I was trying to make is there are other routes besides legislative. Maybe it's not mental illness. Maybe it's Peace Corp. Maybe its less bombing of Muslim countries. Whatever it is, it's probably not wiretapping the internet.
>The IRA were not on the scale of Islamic terrorism...
Seriously? When I was a child the Northern Ireland troubles were in the news every single day! At times it was a constant stream of bombings and executions. There were roadblocks in the street run by paramilitaries. Whole communities were controlled by these organisations and their fundraisers. The scope may have been restricted to England and the island of Ireland, but in these areas it was all out. The scale of Islamic terrorism in the UK does not even come close
Yes a lot of the time. I also deliberately didn't mention the IRA by name, as there were a number of groups involved on both sides. A counter example would be the 'Real IRA' and the Omagh bombing where it appears the telephone warning was designed to move more people into the path of a bomb
Being Muslim is not a necessary pre-condition. A lot of Europeans and north-American joining ISIS are not of Muslim background.
Trying to understand what leads human beings to kill and die for fuzzy causes might help. I suspect a perfect storm of mental issues, undesirable social status and support from the wrong people at the right time.
I also suspect we don't want all the answers, because we wouldn't want to expose how we convince our own young military not to walk out when sent to unjustified wars.
They convert as they join, but a lot of them did not grow up as Muslim. Being Muslim (as per ISIS definition of what muslim means) is part of the ISIS rhetoric, and people convert to be part of ISIS.
OP says that only people part of "a subset of people" can be part of ISIS and propagate terror. implying that only people who grew up as muslim can become terrorists.
>>>implying that only people who grew up as muslim can become terrorists.
>>OP here. I did not say that.
>OK. So what "subset of people" then?
Two corrections:
You talk like I mean general terrorists.
I'm talking only about the types of attacks we are talking about in this thread (attacks primarily target against civilians by attackers that do not expect or even attempt to get away alive).
It is written above: "everyone of these criminals belong to a very specific subset of people." (emphasis added).
>So what "subset of people" then?
Only the subset that are or are about to become muslims.
Again, until someone enlightens me I have yet to be aware of any of this kind of attacks by neither Christians nor Atheists.
>In the debate regarding Islamic terrorism, in the West liberals tend to ascribe it to
Well I am a Western liberal and I believe much more often we have blamed it on foreign policy, amongst other things. You go on to make offensive gross simplifications/generalisations i simply don't recognise in liberals I know.
>Thank-you Merkel.
If you don't know why Merkel is liberal when it comes to immigration then i don't think Hacker news is the place for you
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You are not supposed to insinuate such a thing in a western democracy. Those things never happen, those in power are ethical and bounded by laws.
And even when they do, and come up in courts (as has happened e.g. in Italy in the 70s and 80s and other places), well, that was in the past, and this is now.
Oh, and Asia, Latin and Central America, Africa are totally different places, with inferior cultures, which explains why such things happen there all the time.
I think assertions of this kind either need to come with proof, of which I doubt you have any, or some form of credit to the writers of the latest season of House of Cards as you seem to be lifting your half baked conspiracy theories right from Netflix.
Any UK resident have insight on why the UK is so backwards on these issues? It is pretty obvious to anyone with a cursory knowledge of computers that terrorist "safe spaces" (assuming that big internet companies knowingly provide them, which I find dubious) are kind of impossible to remove or regulate. The ability of the internet to provide encrypted, point-to-point communications is a pretty core feature.