The UK will treat images of immigrants crossing the Channel as criminal offence | Hacker News Reader

The UK will treat images of immigrants crossing the Channel as criminal offence

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53 pointsmritzmann40 comments

This is a very British (and specifically Conservative) approach to problems: just forbid people to talk about them. Britain is well on its way to becoming an authoritarian failed state, there just happens to still be a lot of money washing around and as an island it's relatively easy to limit movement in or out.

Exactly how is taking and/or sharing images of illegal immigrants entering the UK aiding them? If anything, might make identifying them easier.

Not to mention seemingly bizarre reasoning given UK only has jurisdiction over content viewed in the UK, which means anyone viewing the content would already be in the UK. If they are suggesting it’s a tool to recruit those in UK to aid illegal immigrants in entering the country, find it hard to believe children are being recruited to help.

Using similar reasoning, is anyone donating to an organization to change UK laws to be more immigration friendly is also committing a crime?

It’s aiding them because if voters see them the might see that they are people or at least develop some sense of empathy. If your platform is driven by a bunch of anti-immigrant rhetoric that’s not good.

Also the irony of England complaining about immigrants when they invaded entire continents will never not be lost on me.

Your hypothesis is literally the exact inversion of reality.

Kinda proves the dangers of flooding a nation with foreigners though doesn’t it? I mean if it’s bad when a bunch of Brits come invade some place why isn’t it bad when Pakistanis or “Syrians” do the same? Are you for, or against colonialism?

"colonialism is when folks whose country I annihilated try to seek shelter somewhere around where I live"

It’s when outsiders invade some place. So is it good or bad?

I missed the bit where immigrants had military superiority over us and were in the business of excluding locals from meaningfully exercising political and administrative power without the approval of the competent authority in the metropole.

Still seems in the interest of the natives to keep foreigners out though eh? They didn’t make the policies after all.

It is the other way around. Any criticism of immigration, even if it is illegal, is now being categorized as racist 'hate speech' supposedly being promulgated by the 'far right.'

There is no First Amendment in the UK, and the police have become notoriously active in prosecuting and jailing for 'hate speech' in the last decade, even as they become lax in investigating robbery and assaults. The new Online Safety Bill has a lot of draconian and arguably over-broad measures against what they call 'harmful speech' and 'hate' (who gets to define these things?) and one of them is a prohibition against showing migrants arriving illegally across the English Channel from Calais.

Idea that anti-immigration speech is hate speech is a stretch. Hate speech is hate speech. Yes, there might be a correlation between the two and might even be exploited as an indirect means of expressing hate, but equating anti-immigration speech as equal is deeply flawed.

It is deeply flawed, but once you introduce the notion of hate speech, the definition can be expanded indefinitely to include any speech that can conceivably cause 'offense,' which is now defined as 'harm.'

OFCOM, the British media regulation authority has recently defined 'hate speech' as:

‘All forms of expression which spread, incite, promote or justify hatred based on intolerance on the grounds of disability, ethnicity, social origin, gender, sex, gender reassignment, nationality, race, religion or belief, sexual orientation, colour, genetic features, language, political or any other opinion, membership of a national minority, property, birth or age.’

It is a good thing that British weather is so variable, because that is pretty much all they will legally be permitted to talk about. Even tea and crumpets is out of bounds because 'tea' might offend the Chinese, and 'crumpets' may offend women.

Bit of a stretch to call the OFCOM’s definition of hate speech inaccurate. Obviously if someone is going to use slang terms to spew hatred it should not be excusable.

They're not saying the definition itself is inaccurate.

They're saying that its reliance on terms that are they themselves being liberally redefined to change the meaning of the passage, makes the passage irrelevant in the first place.

Real world examples?

Otherwise in my experience if sounds like a duck, walks like a duck, it must be a duck; that is it’s hate speech. For example, “we do not want X near us” is not a phrase based on inclusion and might easily ”spread, incite, promote or justify hatred based on intolerance” - while “all Z have committed to killing us” is obviously valid criticism, if true, which though is highly unlikely.

Define "real".

Otherwise the example to which you originally replied to was exactly offered as one such real example, explaining the reasoning behind the selected example, and why that has important implications.

Which is why “on device” scanning of images is also nonsense: it has nothing to do with protecting children, “think of the children” is so that they can get the legislation and technology in place to prosecute what they actually care about. Remember by design CSAM hashes, etc are opaque and it is not possible to determine what is present in those lists, there is no audit of those lists, etc.

It does seem to be this way, unfortunately. I don't think many people are against CSAM hashes being used to find that type of content on private devices. But when a politically inconvenient photo of an immigrant becomes as illegal as CSAM, it puts the overall purpose of such tech into perspective.

The actual quote by the member of parliament talks about pictures/videos that promotes such crossings and puts them in a positive light... and in terms of abusing the law for killing freedom of speech, this doesn't make it any better, but it does put a slightly different light on things, it isn't all "images of immigrants crossing the channel" and thanks to her saying this out loud parliament it does mean when the courts take into account "the will of parliament" it's clear and abusive prosecutions shouldn't succeed.

This is absurd. I think it's time to do something. Freedom of speech is dying in the UK.

https://radicalthinktank.files.wordpress.com/2015/12/how-to-...

To be fair, the reason that the UK is constantly producing headlines about destroying free speech is that they've been fucking around with this ridiculous online safety bill for 4 years now. They produced a whitepaper in 2019, it took them 2 years to turn it into a bill, that was completely full of holes, then COVID happened and the whole thing got thrown up in the air. Then the UK government decided to play musical chairs and then finally Michelle Donelan got put in charge and stripped out some of the worse bits (the whole "legal but harmful" language)... oh but then Sunak decided to rip up the entire department that is responsible for this bill so it's back up in the air.

Oh and don't forget, this whole thing contains a bill to remove age verification for porn sites which is a bit of ridiculous absurdity they passed in 2017 but never enforced.

This whole story is less about the UK's over-reaching authoritarianism, it's a story about how totally incompetent they've become, and as a result they aren't actually capable of writing legislation that makes any sense. Thats why we've got all of these silly headlines, because they putting together the legislation without actually thinking about it.

Legislation that eventually is passed into law. The recent laws on protests are a good example.

They were so ridiculous no one thought it'd happen. But here we are.

I assumed this would be the other way round. As in "show the true numbers and you get banged up".

So if it's Illegal to take images of illegal immigrants because of the unsafe boats -> something -> children, is it also illegal to take images of unsafe play equipment? Or photograph a teacher assaulting a child. What about children paddling in the sea? Plenty of kids have drowned?

The news shows plenty of unsafe things, perhaps we should get rid of the press?

UK has a long history of the press freely speaking as long as it suits the government, but it has no constitutional guarantee of the freedom of the press. As long as UK remains a constitutional monarchy, this is unlikely to change.

What has constitutional monarchy got to do with it, the 2 aren't mutually exclusive. If the ERA protected freedom of the press, we'd have freedom of the press.

Monarchy uses the press bans all the time to hide internal family drama. All the press bans related to UK government, for example, ban of satirical references to government, are done in the name of enabling constitutional monarchy. If not for the monarchy, why else would the people limit their own freedoms for the sake of the government?

It’s almost as if there are vested bureaucratic interests in Britain’s constitutional democracy as in any other state.

Difference being in some countries they are unable to hide or criminalize sharing information on their hypocrisy — unlike the UK, which is not for the people, by the people.

Ignorance is bliss.

>for example, ban of satirical references to government

Examples?

Sure, here’s the relevant rule from the “House of Commons: Broadcasting Committee: The Rules of Coverage” on page 17 — “no extracts of Parliamentary proceedings may be used in any light entertainment programme or in a programme of political satire”; link to related document:

- https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200203/cmselect/cmbr...

This is a rule of coverage for Parliamentary footage that has existed since 1989. It is an infringement on both freedom of speech and press. With the globalisation of media through the internet and social media, it is now foolish to assume that the electorate will be 'protected' from seeing satirical footage of Parliament — yet the law still stands.

List of other forms of censorship in UK:

- https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_in_the_United_Kingdom

Which includes specific examples related to rule mentioned above; search for ”satir” on the page.

That isn't a ban on satirical references to the government though. I would guess it came about because like the courts, filming in parliament wasn't allowed until the 80s. When they did introduce it, they had rules like this because they weren't sure how it would be used.

As to the question of whether it's needed now after 30 years, probably not, but then it's probably not high up anyone's agenda to get it repealed.

It is not about protecting children. It is considered illegal because criticism of mass immigration and the strain that puts on society is now categorized as racist hate speech. This escalation in policing all online communication and categorizing dissent from government policy as 'far right' appears to have been decided at the meeting of the World Economic Forum at Davos in 2023.

FTA

Mrs Elphicke’s amendment called for the removal of “content that may result in serious harm or death to a child while crossing the English Channel with the aim of entering the United Kingdom in a vessel unsuited or unsafe for those purposes.”

I mean I know what they want it to do, but if they state a bs official reason, surely I can criticise on the basis of that reason.

> because criticism of mass immigration and the strain that puts on society is now categorized as racist hate speech

I do not think the Tory party are categorising "criticism of mass immigration and the strain that puts on society" as "racist hate speech" because that would put most of them and their manifesto under that banner and, dumb as they are, they're not quite -that- dumb as to out themselves directly.

> they're not quite -that- dumb as to out themselves directly

I don't know. Have you heard some brexiteers complaining about brexit. Of course the problem is that Brexit wasn't done 'properly'. 'brexit means brexit' and all that.

Don’t speak about it, will be the next law.

Wow, this law would be a stretch.

oi guvna, ave u got a loicense for dem images?

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