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Comment by Angostura | Hacker News Reader

I've been involved peripherally in working with anti-radicalisation programmes in UK schools. I imagine that the issue that authorities are bumping up against are the situations, where you know someone has been radicalised, but 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.

This is a hard problem and leads to all those 'the bomber was described as being on the intelligence services radar' lines in news stories.

The benevolent reading of these kinds of moves is that it at least gives the authorities to intervene, though I recognise the risks to liberty.

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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.

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.

In a democratic society, you generally can't put adults in "programs" without their consent, unless they already committed a crime.

> you generally can't put adults in "programs" without their consent, unless they already committed a crime.

Sure you can - there's plenty of precedent for e.g. sectioning people into mental hospitals for their own safety or removing people's driving licenses when they might be a danger (without committing a crime - bad eyesight, bad motor control, drug regimen, etc.)

A driving license is a privilege that comes with rules, taking it away is not the same as imposing unilateral restrictions.

Sending people to mental hospitals is a fair example, but that's why I wrote "generally", acknowledging the existence of exceptions. In that case, it's accepted that consent is an oxymoron, which doesn't really apply here.

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