UK government keeping files on education critics’ social media activity | Hacker News Reader

UK government keeping files on education critics’ social media activity

theguardian.com

35 pointsClumsyPilot9 comments

"At least nine experts have uncovered files held on them", but the only criticism of education policy included in the article is "her criticisms of the department’s controversial new baseline assessments for four-year-olds in their first term at school."

Does anyone have more information about this criticism, or what the objections were of the 8 other critics? I was surprised the entire article about surveillance of critics, contains literally only a single sentence about the criticisms that landed them on government surveillance.

i have also noticed this trend in western mainstream media where they publish an entire article that doesn’t really inform more than at a superficial level.

Yeah the worst ones are the outrage articles about what someone said. They never tell you what was actually said (presumably because it's usually far less awful than they make out).

This seems like a behavior from a government that can be trusted to have access to all encrypted communications traffic from its citizens. This is definitely confidence inspiring.

> When asked why the government had been compiling files on the social media activity of its critics, the DfE said it did not comment on individual cases.

Every time I see this excuse, I wonder. What the heck does it even mean? That they are incapable of saying anything but useless, super generic statements? But then how can they work on individual, specfic policies if they can't even talk about it to the public?

The recipe for government PR

- we don’t comment on individuals

- we don’t comment on hypotheticals

- we don’t comment on anonymous sources

- we don’t comment on politics.

TL;DR we don’t comment on anything, ask someone else!

Before a policy is announced, we don't want to pre-empt the process of consultation and policy development, and an announcement will be made in due course. After a policy is announced, it's time to move forward with implementation, not quibble about details that are water under the bridge now.

The policy of tracking critics of government policy and shunning them was never announced.

Democracy is predicated on an informed public. The government therefore needs to be transparent and accountable to the people. Being silent so they can feel like they're allowed to do whatever they please is only acceptable in an authoritarian society.

They've been caught red handed engaging in wrongdoing and refusing to explain themselves. There's no possible excuse for that.

This is not especially surprising IMO. This is from the department that criminalised term time holidays based on nonsense statistics. They're clearly control freaks that fear counter arguments because of how thin their own position is.

Still it would have been nice to know what they're trying to suppress.

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