How is this different than refusing to tell where you've buried the bodies? Why should the police be permitted to assume you're guilty and in possession of vital information under certain circumstances?
if they can prove you were using the phone an hour ago that would probably do it
the prosecution would show up with when you bought the phone, how many times you'd used it, that you used it 80 times in the last hour, and so on
and it comes down to whether or not a jury would believe that you had really forgotten it (despite that evidence)
but playing devil's advocate, without this specific offence the disclosure sections would be completely ineffectual
(remember the UK also allows adverse inferences to be made from silence, it is not the US)
Yes, the Scottish Hate Crime bill. And as expected, they are trying to expand it to cover misogyny. So someone's going to end up serving time for a silly joke they made in a pub.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/scots-give-backing-to-mak...
https://www.spiked-online.com/2021/09/11/why-misogyny-must-n...
https://www.spiked-online.com/2022/03/16/dont-make-misogyny-...
If we break down what you're saying, you're saying it's acceptable for the government to punish and "readjust" (euphemism for re-educate?) someone for mere speech, including /in the "privacy" of their own home/?
Attitudes like this are unfortunately prevalent in Europe, or these types of laws wouldn't pass. I reiterate my earlier comment, that only the US has any real protection for freedom of speech.
I think I should be able to tell a joke "Two catholics and a jew ..." as long as it's not a veiled way to call for harm to anyone, and I don't think a joke about the sexes in a similar vein should be a problem.
But, if you physically attack a catholic because they're a catholic, or a woman because she's a woman, then that is a hate crime - where you're just looking for someone of a class you don't like to inflict punishment on. A sentencing modifier doesn't seem like a bad idea.
Remember this important advice—shut the fuck up. https://youtu.be/sgWHrkDX35o
Even in the US, the law has changed rather drastically[0]:
“The only way to prevent the government from introducing evidence of the suspect's silence at trial is to explicitly invoke (assert) the right to say nothing. In other words, without being warned by the police or advised by a lawyer, and without even the benefit of the familiar Miranda warnings (which might trigger an ‘I want to invoke my right to be silent!’), the interviewee must apparently say words to the effect of, ‘I invoke my privilege against self-incrimination.’”
[0] https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/when-how-invoke-your...
I ordered a new SIM card which was luckily enough. But sometimes you store something in muscle memory, not number memory.
I had gotten used to putting in the passcode without even seeing the screen and completely lost this muscle memory at the time of the accident - likely due to high stress. I did not remember it later either - it was like my mind just rejected the memory and simply couldn't place out what were the exact digits.
Became far more understanding of my parents forgetting stuff after that incident.
Anyways, the point is that you can un-believably forget the phone passcode at a time of stress. Sure, some cool-as-cucumber humans will never forget anything, but the vast majority of people are not like that.
Disclosing those keys is probably a serious legal decision. The police will copy your entire phone including any nude pics, saucy messages etc.
Given the absurd number of UK police who have gotten in trouble recently for sharing pictures of dead bodies it's understandable you wouldn't want to just give them forever access to that or take a decent period to fully consider.
They can get away with it because it’s on a computer. The voters don’t care, and the MPs by and large don’t understand. Those who do would love the same principle to apply to the body case as well.
US/UK/France, on the other hand...
https://elamerican.com/germany-mocked-trump-dependence-on-ru...
I remember growing up reading Harrison Bergeron (in school) and always thinking there's no way such a system would ever come about by the will of the people... yet SF proves people are all too happy to implement such a system (tearing down gifted students for the perceived benefit of everyone else). SSDD.
And on top of it they claimed it was a success as failure rates went down. The failure rate went down because nobody was being tested.
https://www.joannejacobs.com/post/algebra-for-none-fails-in-...
> The district had bragged that algebra failure rates had dropped. Families for San Francisco, a parent group, analyzed the data: Failure rates dropped after the district dropped the end-of-course exam.
I think it's that, after a fascist government is ousted via violence, people spend so much time and effort to demonize them, that Joe Blow on the street doesn't see them as 'Us' anymore.
We would never make decisions like They made, so We don't have to worry if Our leader is a fascist. Our leader is nothing like Their leader was, other than in absolute power. Our leader has our best interests in mind. Their leader was just a power hungry madman.
When we remove the humanity from the monsters, we fail to remember that we could be monsters, too.
Why did so many turn a blind eye to the Holocaust? Why did so many ignore the Holodomor? Why did no one stand against great evil?
Presently, there is debate about whether there is true Evil, as well as some absolute Truth. And if there's no foundation on which to build a case of "this is evil", then why would anyone act? Couple that with the fact that -- at least in the United States -- it is legal for the government to propagandize (re lie) the American peoples, and you have a perfect storm of stress and lies that leads to "I'm alone and there's nothing I can do in face of all that is terrible".
What is one man to do?
The one man at Tianeman Square became an emblem of standing up to tyranny. What if there had been another with him? Or ten more?
Solzhenitsyn claims that a little resistance would have completely disabled the Russian Communists.
And was never seen again. :/
I'm not sure where the line in the sand is.
The Russian civil war lasted six years, was a bit more than 'a little resistance', killed ten million people, and it didn't quite achieve the desired effect.
If anything, it grew and encouraged the winners' paranoia, and put them on a permanent war footing.
> When we remove the humanity from the monsters, we fail to remember that we could be monsters, too.
I could not agree more.
If that holds true the next fews years are going to be interesting
It usually starts with lack of representation, then coercion and then compulsion. I'd say its probably closer to 60 years, all you really need is one bad large generational cohort to get the snowball rolling, and then it becomes almost impossible to reverse, 2 generations down; with the standard generational time period being 20 years.
unless ofcourse we get WWIII early due to Russia....
Eh, the Parliament Act 1911 was passed by a Liberal Government.
> who utterly failed to anticipate how fascism could easily manifest through such a system.
The Liberal Party, and its successor the Liberal Democrats, has long been in favour of electoral reform.
(and the Terrorism Act)
A recent effort to go "back to their roots" (the Corbyn years) ended with a stalinesque purge of such leader. Sadly this leaves free reign for upstart neonazi and neonazi-adjacent parties (BNP, UKIP, Brexit Party/Reform UK...) to rip through traditional Lab heartlands.
I think this needs justification. There is no evidence that Clinton has ever been in favour of socialized healthcare for example, investment in which was a major tenet of the Blair platform.
On healthcare, the difference was due to the starting points in the two countries. What eventually turned into "Obamacare" was a push started under Clinton to address the obvious shortcomings of insurance-based healthcare in the US, providing an approximation of European universal-healthcare principles that could actually be applicable to the US context. Hillary Clinton was a massive supporter of that effort, effectively the link between the two Democratic presidencies. It just so happened that, because of the specific peculiarities of the US system (i.e. massive lobbying and astroturfing from insurance and healthcare giants), the actual law eventually morphed into what Obama enacted.
... sustained by Labour MPs, and mostly in order to bust a ironclad Tory majority in the Lords that was effectively "ruining" every progressive bill.
It was then further strengthened in 1949 (Lab) and 1999 (Lab).
I mean, there is no shame in this: it was a worthy and progressive cause to drag a XVIII-century model (kicking and screaming) into modernity. It's just a shame that the execution was fairly poor, particularly in 1999 - when there was a unique chance to build something more theoretically sound, and (unlike 1911) there was a lot of history to learn from.
Labour's position changing from 'abolish the house of lords' originally, to 'get rid of some hereditary peers' in 1999 was incredibly poor, as you say.
And they now want a similar thing in the US:
https://www.vox.com/mischiefs-of-faction/2019/4/9/18300749/s...
The best is the unwritten rules. Which are ironclad and “part of the constitution of this country”, except when they aren’t and get just ignored because it’s convenient. But hey, every couple of years journalists can play fun what-if games tracking down ancient customs and speculate whether a 300 years old precedent could be used to behead the PM or some other nonsense.
There is no upper chamber that I know of (the Lords is legislatively dead, a strong government can simply ignore it), and the powers of the High Court, already diminished by recent reforms, are likely to be further curtailed very soon (read the tea leaves: the debate on "abusing judicial procedures to make law", once the remit of right-wing Americans, was the subject for an entire Reith Lecture cycle only a couple of years ago; after the Brexit saga, Tories will take an axe to the HC as soon as they can afford to do so).
Of cases they consider more important are the late Aaron Carter's drug use, a mystery spiral in Alaskan skies, Russian ships accused of spying in Norway, how to combine Ramadan fasting with fitness, potholes in Uganda to name a few.
Now, I definitely prefer the US's stance of a password being illegal self-discrimination, but I don't think it's unreasonable to have built legal precedent around that other view.
Is that true though? Never heard that before.
It would be more equivalent to refusing to let the police search one room in your house after they’ve established a reason to believe that you might be hiding bodies in it.
> Why should the police be permitted to assume you're guilty and in possession of vital information under certain circumstances?
They haven’t assumed guilt of the suspected crimes. However, if they have sufficient reason to believe that evidence of a crime exists in a certain location then they can compel someone to provide access to it. It’s similar to how the police can search your private property if they have sufficient evidence that a crime has been committed
That said, I don’t know the standard of evidence necessary in the UK to get this far.
Put another way, the police do not require you to produce the keys to the subject of a warrant, they will enter by force if necessary. It's perverse that technology is different only because the police have no means of forcible entry.
Technically they do as seen in the San Bernardino shooter case, it's just expensive
No, it isn't. The police searching a room in my house doesn't require me to do anything. They can even do it while I'm in a coma or dead. It's nothing like forcing me to tell them my passwords or any other information.
The way I understand it, they don't accuse him of being a terrorist, they are accusing him of having information about terrorists and refusing to release them. To follow your analogy, the police doesn't think you are the murderer, but they believe you know the location of the bodies and accuse you of covering for the murderer.
Or, more likely, they would do both.
They would drill it, and prosecute you for failing to comply with a valid court order (obstruction of justice, interfering with an investigation, contempt of court, or whatever...).
It’s like if they were trying to search your house for the dead children but you say you’ve lost the front door key and accidentally put a forcefield around it. Did you really forget to deactivate the forcefield or are you obstructing justice?
It shouldn't but... Tacitus, 2000 years ago: "The more numerous the laws, the more corrupt the state".
And we have oh so so many laws.