UK lawyers uneasy about plan to prosecute hate speech at home | Hacker News Reader

UK lawyers uneasy about plan to prosecute hate speech at home

theguardian.com

17 pointsgrawprog10 comments

Good thing we don't have "assistants" at home that listen to everything we say and pipe it off to a datacenter somewhere, where it can be analyzed for "problematic" speech and alert the relevant authorities.

Oh wait.

Sometimes I think part of Orwell's 1984 is lost in translation for me, being from the US and not the UK. A surveillance state in the US wouldn't care what people say in their homes (phonecalls though...), but maybe in the UK the hints of a surveillance state that Orwell extrapolated in the 40s would take the form of monitoring what people say but also think, especially at home.

Can you explain why a surveillance state in the US would not care about what people say at home? A surveillance state able to collect this data (and we're virtually there) would absolutely care, regardless of the country.

"They have also recommended that more should be protected against hate crimes including sex, gender, age, homelessness, sex workers, non-philosophical beliefs and alternative subcultures such as punks or goths." https://metro.co.uk/2020/11/04/stirring-up-divisions-in-priv...

Fascinating. We can re-invent the Rickroll much darker...

I feel like there is something terribly ironic in punks becoming protected by the government.

How far is it from this, to having the state monitor what you're saying via Alexa?

In the U.S., a very short step since the courts have already held that e-mail service providers' copies of messages don't get the same protection as personal copies. I don't see how Alexa or any of the other "Hey, Spy" devices' third-party handling of speech for translation/interpretation would be considered differently. Especially given the ignored/clicked-through ToS that say "we're sending this home, is that OK?".

tldr; leave the family alone.

The UK lost the plot on civil rights and reasonableness in the past 10 years or so. This is only one of the recent bizarre legal changes (there was another recent one on consent being impossible to establish.)

There are so many things wrong with intruding into the home:

1) As mentioned in the article, this creates a pervasive surveillance state similar to the Stasi, where on average, there was a spy in each home in the country. The standard tip payment to inform on your relative was a pair of jeans.

2) A law like this further erodes the nuclear family as the foundation of a nation. We are already seeing the impact of that in the USA, with a rapidly increasing number of single-parent households, mainly due to family courts intervening into families. There is a tipping point where you regulate families out of existence, and we're a lot closer than you think.

(US Black leaders have warned other groups that they're on the same path to family destruction as they already followed in the past 2 generations. That should be a wake-up call for everybody.)

3) The law can be used against domestic partners in family court. Already unsubstantiated domestic violence claims are allowed, next there will be unsubstantiated racial claims?

The only way to protect yourself is to video-record all family interactions. Is that what we want?

4) Who is to decide whether a statement is hate speech or not, or what the intent is? If you ask different generations of Americans what hate speech is, you get widely varying answers that vary from things that are obvious, to simply not meeting any standard. Yet there's one law for all, despite varying personal standards.

(One of the most public examples was Ben Affleck calling Sam Harris a racist when discussing Islam on television. In fact, Islam is an ideology/religion, not a race at all. So even adults prepared for a debate can't get their viewpoint across accurately. Do we arrest all of the participants in that debate?)

The title is clickbait. This is the quote that says it all:

"The commission said on Wednesday that it was “not intending for private conversations at the dinner table to be prosecuted as hate speech”, although that appears to be one possible consequence of the proposed change."

Are you saying the intent of the commission has an obvious relationship to the consequences?

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