Does the UK Think It Can Police the Internet?
theengineeringmanager.com
theengineeringmanager.com
Sajid Javid, the current home secretary, clearly has ambitions to lead the country. Within the purview of his ministry, he is attempting to position himself as a decisive strong-man, in contrast to the weak and ineffectual prime minister. His ability to actually reduce crime is hamstrung by years of austerity, which have led to a substantial reduction in the number of police officers and other law enforcement resources. He wants more money, but he doesn't really have the influence to get it. He needs to look tough on crime, but he can't do anything that costs money.
Silly legislation is practically free, even if it doesn't achieve much. We've had a worrying increase in knife crime over the past few years. How should the government respond? More police patrols in violence hot spots? Better intelligence on gang-related disputes that might lead to violence? Social work interventions to work with troubled young people who are at risk of becoming involved in violent crime? No, because all of those things would cost money.
The government's only substantive policy has been the creation of "knife crime prevention orders", which restrict the civil liberties of people who are suspected of carrying knives with violent intent. It's illiberal, there's no evidence that it'll work, but it looks tough and it doesn't really cost anything.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/feb/24/sajid-javid-...
The internet censorship agenda plays into this perfectly. It costs almost nothing to force foreign internet companies to censor their content, but it looks tough in the headlines. Terrorist attacks? Blame Facebook. Sex offences? Blame Google. Gang crime? Blame Snapchat. It's free, it distracts the newspapers for a couple of days and you get to make some vague but tough-sounding pronouncements without actually being accountable for anything.
As far as Westminster governments are concerned we don't exist, have good ideas or get infrastructure. Just somewhere to park nuclear things and fracking.
Fwiw the average MP (in 2009, has it changed) represented 70k people in England, 65k in Scotland, 55k in Wales. Which is probably the reverse of how people "feel" they're represented.
First one search turned up:
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/dec/05/north-contin...
FWIW, your north-south divide article talks, amongst other things, about life-expectency (LE). I think the thing you notice most in https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthan... (eg figure 5 of whole UK) is that England has higher LE than the other parts of the UK, and that there are a number of northern areas (Ribble, Harogate, York, etc.) with higher LE than any area of Scotland, say.
Funnily enough Wales/Scotland get the same issues in miniature, where spending is focussed on the larger population centre in the South. But all areas have representation. Still if you're working poor, you can live anywhere, the spending in that area may be higher, but that doesn't mean you have a better life; it might even be harder if you're living amongst richer people (higher prices for accommodation, etc.).
It's one of the things that I've liked about being in the EU, spending is distributed better to poor areas than it would normally be under Tory spending control.
That's a big can of worms for HN. Suffice to say we have one of the least representative democracies and it's steadily getting worse. First past the post is no longer fit for an electorate that wants to vote increasingly for minor parties. It works where there are just two choices. Individual constituencies, especially safe seats, are often hugely unrepresentative. Finally add demographics that skew the ageing electorate ever more tory, until the baby boom finishes playing out.
So that's less North-South more safe seats vs everywhere else. Yet it does often play out North-South most when seeing election results maps.
Still Scotland votes overwhelmingly against Conservative, who barely exist in Scotland, yet gets English Tory government. Admittedly they won a couple back in 2017, but I can see why they inch toward independence. It's different this side of the border, but NW and NE England issues are equivalent in scale.
CGP Grey summarises it well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9rGX91rq5I
I'm trying hard to avoid a political argument. :)
> spending does localise in high population areas, no?
Well it does, but thanks to the ever increasing centralisation of funding - started in 1974 I think, but especially since replacement of rates with council tax, even high population areas can't compete. The funding Leeds or Manchester gets for infrastructure, services is declining compared to the SE. Even though both are booming, they are permitted to do less per capita. We've ended up with one of the most centrally funded, and controlled, countries on the planet.
The rules limit what can be done, whether on services, transport or housing. The days when Manchester or Edinburgh could provide what was most needed locally are long past. Only London still gets that.
At the same time the rural bits of Scotland, Yorkshire, Cumbria etc used to be able to be cross-subsidised to provide mobile libraries, rail and bus routes etc. The market approach means those areas are increasingly forgotten and services and routes closed. Simply put, we went too far - both centralised funding and market solutions favour the City most. The pressure to move away is ever increasing, while it's never been easier to telecommute or locate your business anywhere there's a net link.
> there are a number of northern areas
Sure there are comfortable well off areas. Harrogate, Ribble Valley, Cheshire, York - are well off and attractive retirement locations. Yet it's also true that the worst areas for mental health, life expectancy and so on are clustered mainly in the north too - there's one just 50 odd miles down the road in Blackpool that's in the worst 5 in the country for lots of measures. I think there's a few bits around Barrow, Burnley and Preston that are little better and crop up in deprivation news stories.
Talking of Blackpool, their county council votes against fracking, the minister simply overrules them and changes the rules. That probably adds to feeling unrepresented by their MPs. :)
> It's one of the things that I've liked about being in the EU, spending is distributed better to poor areas than it would normally be under Tory spending control.
Totally agree. It was disappointing that the EU didn't trumpet their benefits a little more, as the areas benefiting most were often heavily voting for Brexit - because they were deprived, not because they seemed anti-EU as such. Without the EU many of those spots wouldn't have got the development funding. Despite its many flaws I also felt the EU was a natural limiting factor on the increasingly extremist stance of the Tory party.
Edit: That was longer than intended. Sorry!
Fracking isn't the greatest example, as I'm against it, but there are localised things that we all perhaps wouldn't want -- power plants, maybe -- but do want the benefit of. Even if there weren't a N-S divide, and large wealth gap, and poor democratic representation -- we'd still need to do things that people want just not near them (NIMBY!).
How do we go about that IYO?
As is, the TL;DR is it's the lack of real power and budget in the regions that's the problem. Whitehall, or a minister can simply overrule, and most of the big ideas originate there now, anyway. I really should write less. :)
In the olden days, if Manchester or Cumbria wanted to build some infrastructure project, including huge ones like commission a new power station, reservoir or tram route, they first needed a local mandate. At least some of these projects were promoted locally, with exhibitions, models and leaflets, though I don't know if this was a required step. For some things, like most of our older power stations etc, the city would set up a corporation for it. Then they sponsored a private member's bill in parliament, usually via the local MP, and it required a majority vote of MPs, not just a yes from some mandarins at the department and a minister's OK like today. No vote in parliament, no enabling act: no reservoir. I'm hazy on the details of it, I'm certainly no expert in this area, but Westminster was sanity check rather than originator of ideas. I think this process died in the 1974 local government reorganisation[1].
Where an idea did originate in Westminster - say a naval base or nuclear plant, I'm even more hazy, but I think that this then required local assent as well. So for something unpalatable government needed to find a way to sweeten the deal locally.
If we include some of the modern requirements for environmental impact, and proper public consultation I think we would have a chance of a system that works for most. If Leeds and Edinburgh decide amongst themselves a high-speed rail link between them would work, then once the councils get a local mandate they can try for parliamentary assent. Not wait for whatever scraps HS3 or other never-to-be-built pipe dreams are offered them.
This is roughly the process that gave the great city trams and railways, power stations and beautiful council estates or garden cities with parks and plenty of play space. Also road and rail links with large borders as they bought enough land for an expansion or two, rather than the sink estates and duct tape of the cheapest bid. I trust the county or city to decide where they want their treatment plant or power station far more than Whitehall. I trust the city to sometimes spend a little more to get something that's not an eyesore. Most of these things used to be local decisions! Different places had very different ideas.
Of course it wasn't perfect - this is the process that gave Manchester Hulme Crescents, probably the most nationally notorious tower block hell-hole ever built. Enough public consultation should ensure it's not "take this worthy offering, you insignificant little person" ever again. Still, we're not nearly so deferential as in the 50s. :)
We might then find that a few places start pushing to emulate Orkney and get off fossil, or start implementing combined heat and power and such like, maybe pushing to develop some local skills etc. We'd certainly have a little local flavour once again, even if a few ideas turn out to be mistakes.
I may as well wish for rainbows and unicorns as this would need an undoing of a lot of the centralisation of power and funding, and an unwinding of some of the neo-liberal market as solution for everything. I think we've become far too centralised for the health of the country, and it's badly hurting everyone everywhere. Yes, even London. If Edinburgh or Truro want to build more public housing, what the hell is it to do with Westminster if local taxes support it? (This gets to the core of why we became so centralised) I wish it could become a hot political issue, but seems vanishingly unlikely.
[1] Enacted 72, took effect 74: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_Government_Act_1972
In Glasgow, that targeted about 3,000 people, and reached enough that even non-participants were affected by reduced revenge violence. In London, that would be about 40,000 people....
The program has been tried in bigger cities, but none larger than half London, and it looks like the effect broadly weakens as population grows. (Among other things, people who refuse to participate are only helped if enough people are reached to intervene in reciprocal violence.) That doesn't mean the intervention wouldn't help, but between costs and very weak starting trust, its hard to imagine the Met actually doing it.
[1] https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/3/26/18281325/ecuado...
From that article's evidence: In 2004/05 there were 137 homicides in Scotland... By 2016/17 the number had more than halved to 62. Last year this had reduced by a further three to 59... This homicide figure was the joint lowest number of recorded homicide cases for a single 12-month period since 1976.
So homicides fell from ~2.5/100k to ~1/100k, which is pretty impressive. But 2004/05 is cited because it was a spike 20% above the 2000-2008 average. London homicides also fell by about 50% over that same period before the recent spiek, without equivalent programs, which raises some questions about whether this was simply demographic. And the population pyramid for Glasgow (where 1/3 of the murders were happening) sort of supports that theory; there's a large population boom-and-hollow, for which the boom was 16-20 during the murder spike and is now into the lower-crime late 20s. London has similar demography, slightly older, with a slightly earlier crime drop. So there's some reason to believe the recent murder spike with no population change is qualitatively different from the mid-2000s peak that Scotland and London both saw.
On the other hand, that "further three" claim in the article is a statistically meaningless bounce in a number that's been basically flat for since 2013/14. Almost all of the real-looking change is a murder rate that plummeted from 2008 to 2012. That's actually sort of promising: it means the falloff was faster than the decline in the 16-26 population. And the gang-alternative program mentioned launched in 2009, based on a Boston system which was also followed by a sharp decline in murder rate. Both systems work on redirecting a small population with an extremely high murder rate, so a fast response and then a plateau is actually a very plausible outcome.
That technique of proactively engaging gang members has been repeated in many cities at different times, and the statistical evidence for it looks surprisingly strong. I initially suspected that the problem was engaging large networks, since Glasgow and Boston had much lower raw murder rates and at-risk populations than London, but Chicago also showed promising results.
Tentatively, it looks like this really was an intervention that caused a major improvement. But I can't find any sign of a comparable program being tried in London - does anyone happen to know one?
edit: Chicago had 200% London's raw homicide count, but only 25% of its population. Operation Ceasefire theoretically targets a percentage of the population, independent of lethality, so it may still have been a much lower number than London. As far as I can see, none of this ever caught on in NYC.
Everything else you have said is interesting but irrelevant (when it isn't outright mind reading). Of more importance than the possible motivations and causes is whether this is a good idea, whether it will achieve its aims, and whether those aims are desirable.
But the restriction of free speech in the UK in the name of anti-terrorism has a long history. I'm old enough to remember when the Sinn Fein MPs were prohibited from speaking on television: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1988%E2%80%9394_British_broadc...
It's not clear how best to campaign against this, since the legacy print media know that no matter how bad their hate content gets the law is unlikely to inconvenience them, so they're happy to campaign against free speech for their enemies.
> asking difficult questions like "how will this work" and "will it achieve the stated purpose"
I think that's been steadily dying since the mid and later Thatcher years, and accelerated rapidly under Blair. This current lot have just achieved peak "strong and stable" absurdity. It really takes some doing to achieve a slogan the journos are taking the piss out of on the first and second day it's used.
As brilliantly parodied by The Day Today:
It was pretty disappointing.
Pick one.
Edit: I want to clarify that I'm not in favor of surveillance or opaque mechanisms run by any State.
They are a balancing act, you can't maximise both. If you maximised safety in recreation, for instance, you would make things like horse racing illegal. If you maximised business opportunity, you'd be allowed to feed the horse pcp before the race.
Of course "safety" out of a politician's mouth is usually an excuse for a power grab. It is also abused in such a way that proving that the mayor is a serial killing cannibal, that the police knew about this and did nothing about it is a threat to public safety because it could incite a riot. However the cannibal mayor is not.
OTOH, this is probably a small percentage of what most people think of as digital businesses, and might be seen as a price worth paying.
As I grew up outside the USA and never lived in a culture of “freedom of speech is an inalienable right” (even after it became a right in the UK in 1998), I’ve always been comfortable with the principle of censorship. However, I do also understand the inherent danger of censorship, and that it makes certain social and political movements totally impossible. For example, one of the examples given in this story is that moderators are exposed to bestiality — an act which was legal until a few years ago in Germany when a moral panic about animal brothels caused the law to change. Just like a Bayesian trap, when it became illegal, any evidence that it shouldn’t be illegal automatically got zero credence and was no longer able to change the average person’s beliefs (if you are willing to continue to update your beliefs about that, good for you, but the ability is uncommon).
Now, I’m not going to argue for any particular prohibition policy positions on that or any other topic, but just the fact that “harm” isn’t defined in the UK proposal means that the censorship they call for is vulnerable to very large changes in short periods, and the nature of censorship means it’s likely to ratchet up rather than stay at any particular level. Not so much a “slippery slope”, more of a drunk walk/hill climber.
Of course, as I said before, I’m not a free-speech absolutist. I’d be very happy if we start with the basics like “don’t make death threats” and “take steps to prevent your users making death threats”. I just want it done properly, and one thing most people can agree on these days is that the UK government isn’t capable of doing anything properly right now.
[0]: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/feb/21/high-cou...
Even if a user or $/yr minimum is implemented in law, then what happens as distributed and federated technology becomes more common? What does Mastadon or Scuttlebutt count as?
I am not an expert but from my perspective I don't see why these would be illegal due to copyright or data protection laws in the UK?
Please link to the actual law you think is banning this content.
That refers to this: https://www.legislation.gov.uk/cy/uksi/2014/2916/made/data.h...
Which refers to this: https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2003/21/section/368A
This splits content into three types: prohibited content (doesn't include face-sitting), specially restricted content (18R) (does include face sitting), and regular 18 content.
If you are a tv channel providing tv programmes and you have a VOD service you cannot provide prohibited content, and you must not provide 18R content unless you have a suitable age wall.
But their latest methods are scarily effective.
They now do a man in the middle attack to decrypt ssl, and store all of it, if you use openvpn as a proxy without accounting for this they own you.
They also have the ability to send fake a close packet (I think its a corrupt packet and most ssl / ssh will just drop the connection) to stop you tunnelling out and around their censorship.
The average citizen could not possibly hope to overcome this censorship and I find my own abilities more and more challenged to stay ahead of them, they have a whole army of people that understand the internet better than me, eventually they will exceed my abilities, its only a matter of time.
Is there any evidence of this?
They have never claimed they send fake ssl packets to drop the stream but they have done it to me and the uk governments stance is kind of against modern tls greater than 1.2 which fixes the drop stream packet bug [4].
There is plenty more detail about what they are doing out there, search snoopers charter and GCHQ snowden to see what they have been doing and are now trying to make legal.
[1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/u-k-spy-agencies-plan-to-insta... [2] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/05/nsa-gchq-encry... [3] https://www.libertyhumanrights.org.uk/human-rights/privacy/s... [4] https://www.ncsc.gov.uk/blog-post/tls-13-better-individuals-...
I was told they have intermediate keys for certificate authorities(probably done legally with the ca permission), generate a new key signed with the real intermediate. This would be detectable as the cert fingerprint would be different from the legit legit one, while SSH checks for this by default SSL does not.
I have tried to detect the above and as far as I can tell they are not doing it, but I believe the people I heard more than I believe my ability to detect it.
Have there been any evidence of HTTPS and/or VPNs being MITM'd by UK ISPs?
Unless the UK government has cracked all the ciphers used by HTTPS + VPNs and have backdoored every CA, I think we'd already know about widespread systematic MITM attacks in UK users. If they have done all of that, then you can bet others have too then the whole world is screwed
Please cite your sources of actual evidence. Talking about mysterious black boxes doesn't count - they could be pollution sensors for all we know.
[1] There is evidence GCHQ are doing attacks on HTTPS via UK ISPs pre-snowden, post-snowden what does it matter? There is no evidence they have stopped. [2] The Investigatory Powers Act legalizes the governments use of this technology. If you are going to argue that they no longer have this capability or Snowden made it all up Im gonna need some sources.
> Unless the UK government has cracked all the ciphers used by HTTPS + VPNs and have backdoored every CA
You don't need to hack all the things you just need to hack like 95% of the things and [1] is evidence GCHQ have that. I mean I guess you can say "yea but im in that 5% the system works!" while GCHQ work to close the gap.
I mean just read some of the stuff GCHQ do:
https://theintercept.com/2015/09/25/gchq-radio-porn-spies-tr...
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/05/nsa-gchq-encry... [2] https://www.libertyhumanrights.org.uk/human-rights/privacy/s...
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-manchester-47963134
So British government can write all the laws it likes, until it starts paying for enforcement I don't see how it matters.
This has been the UK governments stance toward child pornography they could do something about it but like you said enforcement is expensive, its easier to just censor the child porn and pretend the problem doesn't exist.