Britain announces 15 years in prison for reading banned literature | Hacker News Reader

Britain announces 15 years in prison for reading banned literature

privateinternetaccess.com

26 pointsdoener11 comments

This is a terrible click-bait title. It is, as far as I can tell, completely factually inaccurate.

"Amber Rudd set out her intention to change the law to increase the maximum penalty from 10 years."

https://www.bbc.com/news/amp/uk-41479620

Someone in the British government has proposed increasing the penalty for what seems to be streaming terroristic material online. That's the story.

There is no penalty for these 'crimes' in most western countries because the activities are covered by freedom of speech etc and are not crimes.

The fact that the UK has been stumbling towards totalitarianism for a long time doesn't change the direction it is going in.

I'm amazed at how totalitarian the u.k is and, more surprising, how the population provides such little resistance.

One could say the same about the US, but there are large groups of resistance in both countries. The mainstream media doesn’t always cover it. The UK Labour Party is the largest and most radical party in Europe for instance. And there are many protests all over the US.

It used to be more mono-cultural so standards used to be relatively more universal among the population and one authority would be less controversial.

As a Brit I think it's caused by the success of Britain's foreign diplomacy and "image" projection reflecting back on the domestic population. The UK gets away with some pretty nasty shit abroad and has done for centuries but is rarely pulled up on it in the same way Russia, China or the US is.

Surprise, the UK also gets away with some pretty nasty shit at home too and is rarely pulled up on it.

For an illustration, you only need to watch Boris Johnson's speech at the Conservative party conference earlier this week where he says the world trusts Britain more than Russia, China and the US (see about 16m10s in here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NUPuArLSNs).

Whether that's true or not is debatable (I personally think the UK's game is up and any residual "free pass" given by other states/peoples is more due to our growing irrelevance than anything else) but it illustrates how the establishment (and by extension the populace) views itself.

Given the above, it's not surprising that most Brits would never stop to think how totalitarian their country has become. "That's something that happens in other countries, not ours!"

It's most likely because 99.9% of Britons do not experience anything they feel particularly oppressive or totalitarian in their daily lives. Or rather nothing noteworthy or above the level experienced by most of the rest of the civilised World.

How do you get these people to concern themselves with the 0.1% of people who do have these experiences? That is a question which no Western country has answered, not just the UK.

The linked article misrepresents the BBC report it is based on. The article suggests this is already the law. The BBC reports it is a proposal made at the Conservative Party conference.

Yes it’s not a law, but still quite an astonishing proposal.

Agreed!

> British lawmakers have announced 15 years in prison for taking part of banned literature. However, the threat of prison only covers new story formats that lawmakers think don’t deserve the same kind of protection as old-fashioned books: it’s only people who watch video on the Internet who will be put in prison, and only when they watch something that promotes terrorism, whatever that means this week.

How do they discern intention? What about videos that auto-play? Like, what if a nefarious website wanted to cause others harm or mock the law?

This seems preposterous.

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