Britain Moves to Criminalize Reading Extremist Material on the Internet

If oppression stems from people fostering fear in others, then the news outlets are the real oppressors.

Let's face it: Terrorism is really a minor threat to almost all people's safety, yet it's constantly evoked to further restrict people's liberties.

That is what happens now. Tomorrow the oppression would move to radicalized extremists who plan a protest for having more privacy.

"preparing themselves with terrorist training manuals" is of course already an offence.

I find it a little strange that people don't look into the reasons why terrorism exist. Wouldn't it be more efficient in trying to stamp out the root causes of terrorism?

People don't just wake up one morning and go, "Ah. Such a beautiful morning. I think I'll start terrorising people today."

Do they?

"The real oppression is terrorist attacks that leave people in fear of their safety."

What does this have to do with terrorism? It might be a stated excuse for implementing laws like this, but the intent does not equal actual result. Also, I have not been killed by a terrorist, but if a law like this is passed where I live I will have been limited in my freedoms by my government. I am not scared of terrorists as of yet, so the net result is that I am not oppressed by terrorists, but I am oppressed by the government.

News agencies and governments spread the fear of 'terrorist' attacks. Most of the time there are loners who carry out their 'attacks'. Calling them 'terrorists' makes them more scary, while in fact they are most often troubled individuals who choose to label their insanity with 'ISIS' so that the fear they spread is bigger. News agencies, eager to make money selling advertisement, use these mentally ill people by calling them 'terrorists' and sensationalising the events in order to get more viewers.

"Not oppression: arresting some radicalised extremist for preparing themselves with terrorist training manuals and suchlike."

This has nothing to do with what is happening. The article talks about making it illegal to read extremist websites. Intent and effect do not go hand in hand. On top of this stated intent and true intent do not go hand in hand either. Governments cannot be trusted with the authority to decide who gets access to which information, very recent example:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/10/no-justification-spani...

What happens when all extremist websites move to TOR at least now governments can monitor them. But with these extreme laws they are just going to start to use more secure communication channels

Then they should create a program where specific individuals can placed on a deradicalization program and be banned from extremist material. And then make it a crime to view the material while you are on that program.

PREVENT is pretty dire, though.

I agree it's a hard problem, but getting it wrong is going to lead to the Northern Ireland situation: overreaction by authorities creating political prisoners who will be martyrs to their cause. Bobby Sands is still a hero to many.

> there is nothing effectively you can do because no law has been broken until there's evidence that they start assembling the components for the bomb or whatever

Sure, but that is basically where we as a society have agreed the line is drawn for decades. Otherwise you start prosecuting people for "sedition". And it'll inevitably get used against peaceful leftwing groups and not against radical xenophobes, etc.

Thanks for broadening the discussion, authorities are a construct of our society that have come about usually in response to a need, they are mostly funded using our taxes and the output of the state's productivity, directed by our politicians, administered by our civil service and executed by employees of the state, they are not separate to society, they are within society, we made them and we influence the authorities behaviour by our actions. Trust is the glue that holds this together and transparency is the mechanism by which trust can be earnt. I'd like to see some strong progress in tools to visualise and inspect these systems, a way for me to connect the dots, the better these systems are, the more support they can be in demonstrating where transparency is lacking, open big data is helping, and it's exciting to imagine that a community led project could create a more complete picture of the systems we live in than we've ever had, if we can do that then perhaps there would be a better understanding of the constraints under which the authorities operate and the actions they take would have context.

The article is about a proposed change of law in the UK. Your commentary about the US seems rather off-topic.

2) of course it's ok, it's a sport? Injuries happen in sports. Particularly violent ones. Myke Tyson would probably break my skull as well if I was ever so dumb to get in the ring with him. There aren't only two genders just look at Caster Semenaya https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2016/jul/29/what-is-an-int... or look at this mess (and that's only part of it): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermaphrodite#Humans

The Conservative Party in the UK introduced introduced gay marriage and support the NHS, they're definitely not "far right".

Sorry for not being clearer, I'm trying to distinguish between active and passive use of the law. Active implying trying to track down those who are breaking it vs. passive implying using it against those who have been reprimanded already.

ah man! :) you just made HN an extremist propaganda website

(but yes exactly what you write, plus, its quite an extremist measure to say you can't read something of other extremists)

It’s happening here in France. A report in the free commuter newspaper in Lyon this morning recounted the arrest of a guy who had watched videos of decapitations (I presume ISIS-produced). Perhaps he downloaded the video, but likely he just viewed it online.

the temp cache still exists offline. This means that if I wanted to store "illicit" files I'd just store them in my temp cache under a plausibly temp-cachy sounding file name. Effectively the crime is distinguished by the directory path. In both cases the effect on your machine is identical. It loads the content to disk, then into memory and then displays it in your viewer/browser.

Unfortunately quite a bit more complicated on the back end of things when you need to report on it. Both loading a webpage and downloading it have a similar request pattern. Take, for example, a PDF file which loads seamlessly in Chrome.

If this is something you can currently distinguish, I’d be very interested in hearing more!

Not that they're universally defined, but I think the Tories would be left-of-centre in the US context even though they're considered right-wrong in the UK.

Apparently "all the censorship comes from the left" is the new "there is no global warming".

not right of centre, right of the left sure.

I'd say this is a bit misleading. It's centre-right.

In the UK, centre-left or centre-right tends to be in terms of economic policy anyway. Nearly all UK parties have mostly centre-left social policies.

In these times it is not happening from the far left much but there are still exceptions (eg. Antifa). However, this can be explained by the prevalence of leftist views. It is mostly the right that feels compelled to use violence.

It has in the past though. Pol Pot. The Chinese cultural revolution.

We've also seen an increase in racially motivated violence by Muslims such as the Ariana Grande concert and the London Bridge attack.

There have also been plenty of violent demonstration by left wing groups, so much so that a BBC reporter had to have a bodyguard at the Labour conference.

Finally, anti-semitism seems to be as much a thing on the left as the extreme right these days, as shown by the anti-Semitism at the Labour conference.

Around 20% of UK murders are committed by migrants who comprise some 10% of the population (FOI data). Are these migrants mostly on the far right? The rule seems to be that they suffer some mental disability unlike of course the nutcase who murdered the MP.

> You need to realise that the far-right spawns much more violence (against individuals; against groups; against the state) than the far left.

In the UK perhaps.

The most recent attempt on a US Congressman's life:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Congressional_baseball_sh...

On May 22, 2017, Hodgkinson wrote "Trump is a Traitor. Trump Has Destroyed Our Democracy. It's Time to Destroy Trump & Co." above his repost of a Change.org petition demanding "the legal removal" of Trump and Vice President Mike Pence for "treason". He belonged to numerous politically-oriented Facebook groups, including those named "Terminate the Republican Party," "The Road To Hell Is Paved With Republicans," and "Donald Trump is not my President."

When the media normalizes that "punching Nazis" is A-OK, this violence from very unhinged, disturbed individuals is the result.

.. which was the end of the old censorship regime and the point at which book, theatre and news censorship collapsed. In 1959.

Presumably something to do with heavy resistance to even very watered-down gun-control laws.

Gun control is the elephant in the room.

I think it would be a struggle to argue that the US's positions towards health care, free speech, guns and policing compare favourably to those of the majority of other rich Western democracies.

    > we do have a constitution, it's
    > just not all in one place and not
    > regularly invoked by laypersons

I remain comfortable describing that as not an "actual" constitution as most people would understand it.

    > This makes it difficult to work
    > out how constitutional crises will
    > play out

That's circular. By definition a constitutional crisis is difficult to predict the outcome of, or it wouldn't be a crisis. The Americans also seem to have plenty of difficulty working out the application of their constitution.

    > Is the Sewel Convention legally
    > binding for example?

The UK parliament retains ultimate authority, and I've not seen any sensible argument to suggest otherwise...

    > does the ECHR function as a
    > constitutional guarantee of rights
    > above Parliament

Ah, an excellent and interesting question, but in practice: parliament is able to withdraw from the jurisdiction of ECHR. Because it's sovereign. I will happily agree ECHR has been a massive win for the UK, but it's easily argued that in practice parliament has simply chosen to delegate some of its power to ECHR, as they maintain the authority to withdraw from it.

There are societies now with such a view of 'democracy and having from of choice'. The more conservative Muslim countries come to mind. Many of our ancestors would also see us this way. It's fully possible or descendants will look at our way of life the same way too.

Really, this liberalism of ours is an aberration. It's the way of 20% of the world population for a few decades... Nobody should be surprised if your 'polar opposite world', which comprises almost all people for almost all of history, reasserts itself.

I love freedom. There is also currently a lot of precedent for saying there are wrong ways that people talk. Twitter is full of conversations where one person is criticising the other for using a word the wrong way ( and I don't mean grammar ) or using a particular word, or having a particular idea.

I think theoretically more not less sounds technically correct, the problem is we seem to already been enveloped in too much information. So there has to be some filtering, and filtering is basically editorializing, so who decides?

I don't know if I'm right. And I don't know if I'm advancing even a coherent idea about this.

I think in reality people do justify violence by the narratives they are exposed to. I think they see other people justifying hate and violence with these narratives, and they think to do it as well. I think narrative can give a concrete form to a pre-existing hate, frustration, anger or disatisfaction, and narrate a villain responsible for that feeling. These narratives inform and shape a person's worldview and their notions of who or what is responsible for how they feel and things they see happening. Narrative is an incredibly powerful way to guide people's actions.

Observe this: your narrative about the weakness of narrative in determining action, guides us to believe we ought not regulate narrative. You're shaping reality using the very tool you are saying cannot be used to shape it!

Double-think extraordinaire! No offence to you, just trying to (en)lighten this up.

It's a compelling-sounding point, but it lacks nuance.

While I don't think many are advocating for a "fantasy land" with magic oracles to give us Perfect Truth, we can certainly approach the truth of guilt or innocence, using the courts and their accreted layers of checks and balances, such as appeals, standards of proof, and revisionable legal doctrines.

And when we reasonably dispense with the requirement of "Perfect Knowledge" we are left with the imperfect but practical and broadly satisfactory result that when the courts have adjudicated someone is guilty, they most likely are. This guilt "beyond reasonable doubt" means the system is able to express and satisfy what you ( I think ) rightly say is the sense of a decent chunk of people that death is appropriate for some crimes ( not saying I agree with it being so ). That we can approach truth "to within some epsilon" seems even more correct regarding the death penalty in the US, where, at the end of death row, you've now been through many appeals ( I think, I'm no expert ).

So shifting things back from your analogy to adjudication of which materials are "extremist" (or whatever language the actual proposed bill uses), I agree ( and I think few would dissent ) that we cannot magically know for sure whether it is or isn't so, but I want to expand your thinking to encompass the idea that we can approach the truth of whether it is or isn't, with a reasonable deal of accuracy.

And given we ought to be able to approach such a judgement reasonably accurately, I feel a system like this will be able to express the notion that: censorship or banning or punishment for propagation or use of some materials and information is a reasonable punishment, because those informations are so harmful.

So, not perfect, but mostly effective, is how I would wrap that up.

A second, more general, point this leads me to is that our systems do not begin as perfect, they evolve, and we must be prepared, as a collective of people, to take risks in order that we have progress.

When new laws and so on are introduced we are not experts in them, and there is fallout, and we make mistakes, and innocent people get hurt, but society makes progress. I think the risks we are prepared to take ought to be proportional to the reduction in harm achievable, and with things like terrorist propaganda, we are talking about significant harm, and the chance to reduce it. So, to risk wrongful imprisonment, is not perfect, and it's a tragedy to innocents, but I think it's an acceptable risk given the consequences of a failure to intervene.

It would certainly be nice to ensure zero harm is ever done, but in practice, we do not have such magic oracles to tell us how to achieve that, so on the road to progress, and getting results that improve us, we fuck up and people get hurt. It's not to condone in any way that this happens, but we must face the reality that this happens, be motivated by that reality to improve those false positives, and recognize that as we make introduce new laws and norms and make efforts to intervene and improve society, there are risks, just like with any new technology.

Ultimately I think society decides whether the risks are worth the potential improvement.

I fail at many things everyday, but I did not fail in the way you meant because I did not use 1984 as a neat metaphor.

What I meant was people use it as a neat metaphor, by likening anything that smells in anyway similar to 1984 with something bad, and unworthy of further consideration, thereby prematurely stunting critical debate.

Hilariously, such blinkered thinking, and confinement to a limited set of goodthink far afield from anything they could paint as similar to 1984, is the very rigidly-controlled result those people, who prematurely shutdown debate by invoking 1984, pretend to be against!

My only failing here is conveying this to you clearly. I'm sorry.

Unless the chemistry book has a chapter titled "how to make a bomb to kill lots of people" with full instructions on how to assemble and detonate one using readily sourced materials, then I'm sure such books will be entirely unaffected by police investigations.

Except if they invest a whole $0 in a letsencrypt cert or any service with one.... or have they persuaded the services to allow them to MITM their own citizens?

Considered by whom? The British constitution functions, yes, but not very well. It's a huge legacy mess of patch sets and emergency bug fixes.

No I don't; what happens is politicians do whatever will keep them in parliament even if it's immoral or illegal (see the Iraq war or The Great Repeal bill or The Regulatory Powers Act). Really there are any number of actions by parliament eroding our freedoms over the past 20 years or so.

If it wasn't obvious from my original statement; I was talking about a Donald Trump character with the backing of his party (on either the far Left or far Right).

How are people so niave as to not understand that such a broad concept like "neutrality" can easily be abused? Legislation is slow to change and adapt as is, you want to give government further power to apply law to an industry which has already been captured? Never mind the quickness with which tech like the internet changes.

I feel like I'm the only sane person on HN. How are people so oblivious to the downsides of broad, sweeping regulation?