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Comment by bemusedthrow75 | Hacker News Reader

> Insulting people online or just saying something mildly offensive will often lead to prosecution.

"will often": no, not at all. Could occasionally. You're not helping your argument by overstating this. The courts are not stuffed with people being fined for saying things that are "mildly offensive".

And nothing of what you're talking about is government surveillance. The police aren't the government, and the police do not routinely surveil the populace.

They wouldn't have the staff, for one thing! The police actually wanted to close the police station in the town in which I live -- population over 100,000 in the wider borough -- and replace it with what amounted to a kiosk and service from police stations five miles away in each direction.

And yes, really: for those viewers who persist in believing that the surveillance system in Hot Fuzz exists in reality... nope

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> The police aren't the government

Not in the ridiculous "party controlling parliament" sense, no. But they are absolutely the enforcement arm of the state, which is more on point.

No, they aren’t.

British police, significantly, police by consent, are operationally independent of HM government, and cannot (currently) prosecute without the aid of the (equally independent) CPS. In England there isn’t even one single police force, and unlike the FBI, no normal part of the police is a part of a government department. (MoD Police are, I guess, but their remit is military policing).

I was responding to the somewhat hysterical parent post to correct the conflation of: the police literally are not the government, do not spy for the government, and do not routinely surveil the population; their surveillance powers are limited and regulated.

Does any arm of the state surveil the populace in any sense? It falls within MI5’s remit to spot domestic threats. Their surveillance operation surely operates far less less broadly than that of the NSA, which has far less oversight.

We only know what the NSA does because a person who leaked highly confidential documents and is now a refuge for the crime of showing the world what the US govt does in secret.

Do you really think the UK govt, or any govt, doesn't use the cloak of security and classification to do questionable things?

I didn’t suggest any such thing, did I?

I am just observing that the scope of GCHQ’s abilities are obviously limited compared to the NSA (unless they have the most cost-efficient IT infrastructure in the world, and we don’t do cost-efficient government IT here even now). The budget just isn’t there for them to operate the way the NSA does.

The thing you’re missing is that GCHQ spies on Americans (Foreigners from the UK perspective) using the NSA’s money, then it shares the findings from the spying with the NSA under an intelligence sharing agreement. GCHQ is mostly an outsourced wing of the NSA.

> GCHQ is mostly an outsourced wing of the NSA.

Quite untrue but it does fit the default HN pattern of assumption about the UK.

American exceptionalism is a hell of a drug.

"NSA pays £100m in secret funding for GCHQ" - https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2013/aug/01/nsa-paid-gch...

"Americans pay GCHQ £100m to spy for them, leaked NSA papers from Edward Snowden claim" - https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/americans-pa...

> "...Their surveillance operation surely operates far less less broadly than that of the NSA, which has far less oversight."

"The Investigatory Powers Tribunal, however, ruled on 30 January 2023 that MI5 broke key legal safeguards by unlawfully retaining and using individuals’ private data gathered via covert bulk surveillance." - https://www.computerweekly.com/news/365529894/MI5-unlawfully....

"MI5 spy who fantasised about ‘eating children’s flesh’ escaped prosecution despite machete attack" - https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/05/19/mi5-spy-fantasis...

Do these address my point? They don’t.

> police by consent

It's a lovely idea, but Peelian principles are currently only paid lip-service. People are trying to drag it back to something approaching that, but it's not the current actual situation, particularly in London. (Kettling, etc.)

> are operationally independent of HM government,

> the police literally are not the government,

> do not spy for the government,

Again, in the sense of "political party currently in control of Parliament", yes. But they're literally the enforcers of the law -- and their meaning of the law. People not in Parliamentary systems have a broader, and far more useful meaning of "government" -- those governing, determining what is going to be punished and what won't. If you're actually stuck on term "government" in the partisan meaning, please give me some other term to refer to the coherent actions of the state. The bureaucracy and enforcement arms actually do govern, regardless of whether they're doing so at the behest of particular partisan guidance (though sure, that's worse in terms of being able to politically course correct). An arrest and detention whilst CPS sorts out taking to the next level is actually a punishment. Hence the quote "You can beat the rap, but you can't beat the ride."

> do not routinely surveil the population; their surveillance powers are limited and regulated.

Hah. Hah. Hah. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/24/business/london-police-fa... .

> for those viewers who persist in believing that the surveillance system in Hot Fuzz exists in reality...

They really do. Not just council cctv cameras, which are less problematic - any local Facebook group is full of pictures from ring doorbells of people who look like “trouble” who have the wrong skin colour, wrong clothing, wrong age etc.

This is the norm and is embraced by a nation of curtain twitchers.

That is not the surveillance panopticon that HNers imagine.

That is "Little Brother" -- prurient neighbour-watching.

Yeah, Little Brother is everywhere. (It's the bigger threat to our culture, IMO).

But this isn't a UK-specific problem. The USA, for example, has Homeowner Associations, which tie neighbourhood-watch curtain-twitching and petty compliance to personal freedoms, property values, paint colour and lawnmowing. The average suburban person in the UK arguably has more freedom from curtain-twitching busybodies than in the USA (where 26% of the population live in an HOA or condo association)

The British police do not have warrantless power to just lazily aggregate Ring doorbell footage or any other such thing (they may have faster access to cloud content with a warrant, but I suspect it is probably still faster to just look at the doorbells in the immediate vicinity and ask permission).

They do however have the ability to ask homeowners for ring footage without a warrant, and British homeowners on the whole are eager to inform on their neighbours

> The police aren't the government,

The police is the dog of the government. What difference does it make to you if the dog or the master attacks you?

I understand that in the simplest way this is true, and I am sure it is very clever, poetic and pithy.

But this is not how it works in principle or in practice in the UK. The police work on behalf of the people, not the government. When government manages to suborn the police in even a small way it is very much noticed.

It’s difficult for people outside the UK to see this, I suppose, but our experience with this is that state directed police overreach is now unusual, and there is a lot of pushback from the chief police officers and the public when they are asked to oppress. There are aberrations (no police force in the world gets protest management right, and ours is no exception) but in general you have to be consciously right up in their faces to cause such an aberration.

The UK is a country of realpolitik at every level. The police go about their business unarmed, with the consent of the population, and generally speaking, they know the public will not put up with overreach anymore. We may find them pompous and overbearing but they are pretty much the envy of the world still.

Curious: then how did the mechanism work of the Redditor that got arrested in the parent comment?

I am assuming it is just a random police officer reading Reddit on a personal basis and deciding to act on evidence of a crime (either because they are the local force or by passing it on). Police aren’t ever really off duty in this sense.

Why assume a surveillance mechanism when police are individuals who also use the more popular sites?

It's not assuming a surveillance mechanism, it's _describing_ one. Individual police keeping their eyes open _is_ a surveillance mechanism. Admittedly, just about the most banal one possible, but the anti-social behavior it's catching is also the most harmless. But the bad law does actually make it a problem.

Public racist abuse of a dead victim is the most harmless?

Well it's a take, I guess. Go with it.

Oh you are among the 'words are violence' folks?

I like that officers in the UK are unarmed. I'm sure there are other distinct differences in how the UK does policing from other countries that are worth pointing out that make a meaningful difference.

But every democratic country is operating on the principal that the police work on behalf of the people, and has mechanisms in place that are supposed to ensure that this is the case. The government works on behalf of and with the consent of the people too! When you get sent to prison for an insult on social media, it's all done in the name of (some of) your fellow citizens.

Much of this is about individual freedom vs the oppression of the collective. The operators who are tasked to enforce the collective's norms have personal decision making power, and power invariably corrupts.

> you have to be consciously right up in their faces to cause such an aberration.

What does this mean? That they are personally vindictive? That acting legally but in a way that is annoying to an officer should get me arrested?

They are not "unarmed", it is just that they do not generally carry firearms[1].

If we were to try walking around with batons, truncheons, handcuffs as they do, we'd be arrested for carrying offensive weapons.

[1] Some routinely carry Tasers, which are counted as "firearms" here.

> But every democratic country is operating on the principal that the police work on behalf of the people, and has mechanisms in place that are supposed to ensure that this is the case.

Not really. The specific culture of “policing by consent” that is foundational to policing (one of the Peel principles) is still really strongly defended as a matter of policing identity here (as it is in Canada and to a lesser but still noticeable extent Australia). The US police kits itself out with secondhand military equipment from the armed forces. I suspect in some situations this makes them a more effective law enforcement machine but tooling up with military equipment suggests a significant break from Peel principles.

> What does this mean? That they are personally vindictive? That acting legally but in a way that is annoying to an officer should get me arrested?

It means that the situations where our police overreact are the situations where they are outnumbered and in confrontation (riots etc.). It means the opposite of them being personally vindictive (though some are and they are depressingly hard to fire)

"More than 1,500 UK police officers accused of violence against women in six months" - https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/mar/14/more-than-15...

"Police ‘warrior culture’ makes US-style police brutality a UK problem too" - https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/news/2023/police-warrior-cultur...

Again with your links. Is it performance art? Are you an AI aggregator?

(The violence against women thing is serious but it’s not a question of law enforcement behaviour or brutality. That is about the international problem of police being hard to fire when they are awful individuals in private; it’s an ongoing problem that is being addressed here through campaigns, and I am afraid I do not remotely believe that domestic and sexual violence is less of a problem in the USA. Canada takes this more seriously)

As opposed to your arguments, who are solely based on your individual statements, and advocacy for the MI5 being a well supervised mass surveillance organization?

Try to overthrow the government and watch your “police that work for the people and not the government” do a lot of work for the government.

I don't understand the point of this kind of argument from absurdity. It's not as clever as you think.

Also it's worth observing that a possible outcome is the majority of people wouldn't want their government overthrown, and the police should act to prevent it. Another is that the police wouldn't preserve a government that does not have the slightest mandate. There is no benefit to the police to do that. (Do you expect the FBI and state police forces to maintain an actually illegitimate US government? Because even from outside, I don't).

Again: Britain runs on realpolitik, not extremist absolutes. At no point would we on a cultural level feel it important celebrate "the peaceful transfer of power", for example. It's just not how our minds work. Our police are small and unarmed. It's just a very different place and the fact that HNers don't really understand it doesn't help with the oversimplifications.

(FWIW, nobody ever needs to overthrow a British government. The party in power usually manages this from within.)

> The courts are not stuffed with people being fined for saying things that are "mildly offensive".

If these sorts of speech laws were more consistently applied on everyone, maybe we could get rid of them.

The thing is, few of these cases make it to trial, because the CPS has to demonstrate it’s in the public interest.

The result is that the police are still opening investigations they are asked to, and the CPS is still examining them; it’s a lot of energy spent on no outcome.

That is the actual problem, not the prosecutions, which remain unusual from what I can see.

There needs to be better guidance on the relevant legal standards. Separately we need to do something about (civil) libel laws, but that is a parallel and not criminal law issue.

I have to ask… do you disagree with prosecuting offensive comments or not? You say it doesn’t happen often and they can’t enforce it. But do you think its a bad thing? Doesnt seem that way. The point is it shouldn’t be legal.

Do I think offensive comments can be prosecuted in practice? Yeah, I do. Just as there are limits to free speech in the USA, there are comments that can have consequences.

The bar should be set high, and in general it is, but no, I don’t think hate speech is inherently free speech, for example.

The US way of doing things is not a) the only way of doing things, b) intrinsically the best way of doing things or c) trending in the right direction. Free speech is not something with a magical clear definition, and I think it goes without saying that we at least try to take incitement to actual race hate a little more seriously. We can set the bar differently; we have.

The problem in the UK is not a rash of prosecutions for offensive comments because despite what the parent comment says, they rarely come to trial. There is no enormous procession of these cases, and knobends are actually pretty free to be knobends here. Speech is free, newspapers don’t get raided when they happen to investigate the local police chief.

The problem at the moment is that the guidance is in flux, and too much time is wasted determining that something won’t be prosecuted. (Well, that’s the main problem. The secondary problem is the USA exporting its newest renewable resource, alt-right trolling, to every corner of the English speaking world, exhausting everyone’s patience.)

Right ok, so the reason why you're taking issue doesn't come from a principled place, but because you just so happen to believe these people should be prosecuted.

This is pure ad hominem and not remotely responding to anything I actually said, but whatever.

I was politely asked a question, I politely gave an answer and set some context. You’re just being rude.

> "will often": no, not at all. Could occasionally. You're not helping your argument by overstating this. The courts are not stuffed with people being fined for saying things that are "mildly offensive".

Yes, sorry – you're right. It happens occasionally. If you're willing to take the risk generally speaking you can be offensive and get away with it.

At least get away with it legally. It can effect you in other ways also.

> If you're willing to take the risk generally speaking you can be offensive and get away with it.

We have a whole small news channel dedicated to it now! ;-)

Offensiveness on the whole is not policed, at all. (Except by Facebook, of course.)

Offensiveness that rises to the level of a crime can end up policed. The guidance around that is still poorly defined, so it's very unusual to see a charge or a conviction and it's for sure wasteful of resources.

I'm obviously not arguing that it's always a good idea to prosecute when people are just offended -- of course it's not remotely a good idea to have that standard. But I do think we in this country should be allowed to draw a slightly different line on racism or hate speech or trolling/griefing/abuse campaigns without being insulted for our lack of "principle", which is the routine HN argument.

It is, in my estimation, unprincipled to stand around and do nothing while people are harassed online, driven from their online activities, doxxed, abused with poster and letter writing campaigns, or incited against by conspiracy newspapers. Freedom of speech can have different limits than those chosen by the US constitution without being morally defective.

> Offensiveness that rises to the level of a crime

The larger question is, how is this even possibly a thing?

That there are legal liabilities that are wholly dependent on the internal emotional state of another person is absolutely insane. How is it possible to take a government that treats its adult citizens like kindergartners seriously?

> How is it possible to take a government that treats its adult citizens like kindergartners seriously?

Because that isn't the standard. Why do you imagine it is? There you are assuming that Brits are mentally enfeebled. Standard HN position.

Look, just because the USA draws this nice simple extreme bright line doesn't mean it's magically the right line or that it works particularly well.

There is a coupling between your obsession with absolute freedom of speech and your obsession with absolute rights to bear arms that leads to you arming yourself in arguments that could be resolved better over a cup of tea.

Racist language isn't just offensive, for example -- it reinforces racist conduct and can be seen in that wider context. There's no reason to assume there's a freedom to be racist in actions in a country that still has racial divides; I'm not sure why "speech" is excluded from those actions. It can rise to the level of harassment. Trolling and griefing is a massive social problem; free speech shouldn't protect you if you make someone's life a misery even only online with entirely broadcast speech.

We (sometimes! actually unusually!) deal with this at the level of misdemeanour (magistrates courts).

The USA has been known to prosecute jaywalking and can't even deal with swatting -- a means of using overkeen armed police who can only perform conflict resolution if they are armed like soldiers to potentially accidentally murder someone at distance -- so I think perhaps it's a little churlish to come after us because we in our crowded little country think being rampantly offensive to large numbers of people sometimes rises to the level of misdemeanour.

Government snooping is a reality if they find you interesting, even if youve done nothing.

I don’t mind that - if someone wants to tap Joe Bloggs’ phone then that’s fine. Get a court order with evidence that he might be doing something wrong

It’s scalable surveillance that worries me. Suddenly cctv which is pulled in case of a crime becomes constantly monitored, with face, gait, clothing, and other types of automated recognition, gathering data on everyone, pumping that data into pattern matchers.

But the U.K. population love it.

This is the dark HN fantasy of scaleable British panopticon surveillance again.

The police have surprisingly little constantly available CCTV. Police and national government control a minuscule fraction of the CCTV in the UK. (Local government a bit more, but it’s town centre anti-nuisance stuff —- pickpockets —- and a few secure buildings, and the police do not have routine access to it). There isn’t the money, the intent or the legal framework to so what you’re suggesting, and nor, I would say, do we “love it”.

Which means they get all the downsides, and none of the upsides...

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