UK backing down on Apple encryption backdoor after pressure from US
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
This must be some "technically correct" weasel words bullcrap, as without at least equivalent access there is no chance Apple would be operating in China.
Is that even necessary? A gag order means they can't reveal backdoors, and their entire stack is so locked down that discovering them is hard and unlikely.
If there's a gag order, then companies say "we have a gag order". Like Google and Twitter did back in the day when asked. And then immediately started releasing Transparency Report to show how many of the gag orders they receive, so gov't couldn't say "we don't request anything".
Yes it can, thats the whole point.
They can "No comments" all the way, but there's no way to legally forcing a commercial company to lie. The company can lie, of course, but it's their choice, not an order.
https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/debanking-and-debunki...
Even if no formal regulation to that effect exists for social media companies, intelligence agencies presumably have sufficient leverage to ensure similar access.
The communist party doesn't have "access" to a billion phones: what would they even do with all that garbage. They can ask Wechat what you send your friends, sure, and that's enough to police most crimes.
We don't have the budget or organizational acumen of the NSA.
Apple (and many other organizations) contracts work out for liability reasons, this is not the first instance of it.
Also note the language - specifically a “back door” or “master key”. If you call it something else, literally anything else, the statement holds up.
The feature is not named "back door" or "master key". It's a feature of iMessage with various names such as "zero click".
Also note they have created features before that provides law enforcement access to data at different stages of a pipeline.
All web results for `imessage "zero click"` are about vulnerabilities/exploits. Are you claiming some of these are intentional, or what?
"An Israeli spyware company has reportedly cut access to its clients in Italy following allegations that its product was used to target critics of the Italian government.
"The move comes after WhatsApp alleged last week that spyware made by Paragon Solutions was used to target 90 WhatsApp users in two dozen countries, including journalists and civil society members.
"Italy's government confirmed in a statement on Wednesday that seven mobile phone users in the country had been targeted by spyware on WhatsApp, calling the incident "particularly serious"."
(Not that the article has any evidence supporting the same claim about WhatsApp, either. In fact, the article describes WhatsApp/Meta claiming to have "disrupted" the spying and reporting it to the Italian government.)
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/technology/apple-moves-to-st...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICloud#Advanced_Data_Protectio...
> On December 7, 2022, Apple announced Advanced Data Protection for iCloud, an option to enable end-to-end encryption for almost all iCloud data including Backups, Notes, Photos, and more. The only data classes that are ineligible for Advanced Data Protection are Mail, Contacts, and Calendars, in order to preserve the ability to sync third-party clients with IMAP, CardDAV or CalDAV.
https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/21114562/jan-2021-fbi...
Every company from your device's manufacturer, OS vendor, telecom carrier, app distributors and 3rd party software providers can be compelled to help make that happen.
And then there's always Cellebrite and friends.
It is end-to-end encryption, where each device's key generation is handled by your phone's Secure Enclave.
This article is a decent starting point in terms of what Advanced Data Protection is:
https://support.apple.com/en-us/102651
If you want a deeper dive into the security engineering of iCloud Keychain, the second half of this Blackhat talk by Apple's head of Security Engineering & Architecture (SEAR) is really great:
Synchronizing secrets: https://youtu.be/BLGFriOKz6U?si=cY94TYo28bRj4G7y&t=1357
Yes of course, but it's not so simple to bypass the hardware-enforced protections that exist both device side and server side. As far as I can tell, it seems effort was made to design/architect everything in such a way such that the protections can't be retroactively circumvented even under legal compulsion.
Disclosure: I previously worked for Apple, but not on the design/implementation of any of this stuff and this is all my own opinions, not those of Apple.
Advanced Data Protection is mostly concerned with protecting data from attackers on the server and in transit.
If you're interested in protections when an attacker has physical access to your device, you should read the "Encryption and Data Protection" section of Apple's Platform Security Guide.
Web: https://support.apple.com/guide/security/welcome/web
PDF: https://help.apple.com/pdf/security/en_US/apple-platform-sec...
If they can fish remotely and automatically, accountability goes completely out the window.
I suspect that disabling advanced data protection in the UK was meant to let Apple say it was complying as far as it could while fighting the main order.
A future update was going to ask users themselves to disable it in order to continue backing up their phones to iCloud.
You shouldn't over-estimate the popularity of your favorite comic book authors.
Your search also answered the question, in the fourth result or so.
"moore authoritarianism fiction author" worked though.
You realize capeshit is for children and being overly inured to the silver screen is for basement dwellers, right? Right...?
They do.
The UK has an uncodified constitution, and this includes the Human Rights Act, which guarantees freedom of expression to UK citizens.
> they have raided newspapers offices and destroyed data, arrested journalists and taken people's private information at borders
This does not happen in many countries.
The situation in the UK is particularly bad I think because the legal situation is a hodgepodge of a missing written constitution, interweaving of the government branches (as I understand, the government can sometimes ignore the courts or is above them), the libel laws, and while still (for now) a member of the ECHR which gives some guarantees, it's rulings are always (many years) after the fact. Crucially, the UK is a very class-based society. The ruling class gets what it wants and it does not want free speech.
Like many countries, the UK government makes the laws and the courts interpret them. The government can't ignore the courts, but can introduce new legislation.
The UK population leans more conservative than many other European countries, but free speech, for the most part, has broad public support. There's a lot of discussion around where the line should be drawn, however, and the government tends toward a more restrictive interpretation, while the opposition tends to oppose censorship.
There is a strong element of class in the UK, but this is often misinterpreted. Class in the UK is not particularly fluid. You can have power and wealth, and still not be considered upper class. In the current government, only a minority of MPs are upper class, and of the current cabinet, only one attended a private school (a typical indicator of being upper-class).
The raiding of the Guardian over the Snowden leaks was justified as recovering stolen national security information, and was widely (and rightly) criticised by the press at the time. It's not a common occurrence.
Now, I don't mean to justify the UK government's behaviour. The government bows to the whims of GHCQ far more than it should do, particularly on any technological issue, where it seems GHCQ is the only one ever consulted. Obviously putting backdoors in messaging software, or raiding newpapers, is both incredible stupid and has ultimately lead to the UK government backing down.
But that, I think, is the important part - that it backed down. The UK has a lot of flaws, and certainly isn't at the top of the press freedom list, but it's also consistently in the upper quartile (and notably above Slovakia, if you want a reference point). Looking from the outside, you see the exceptions and controversies - the parts where the system fails - which makes it easy to get a distorted picture of the situation.
And yet their policies are broadly right-wing conservative. Point is the government itself does not have to consist of upper-class people for the class to steer and benefit from the policies. Why is that? Well...
> The UK population leans more conservative than many other European countries
We really don't know that because the population has been massaged by right-wing propaganda for (at least) decades. I remember even in the 90's reading Financial Times or something like that and the opinion articles about the EU were quite simply lying. Can imagine it was even worse in the Daily Mail etc. The result regarding the EU is well known, but I think this applies to everything; the population seems to lean conservative because the ruling class prefers it like that and the media owners oblige.
To return to the free speech/press freedom issue, it's the same again: it only works as far as the ruling class allows that. One obvious example are the past climate and current anti-genocide protests, where the government heavily abuses anti-terrorism laws to limit free speech.
edit: from today, this: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jul/23/private-eye-ca...
Stuff like this simply does not happen here.
I'm not going to defend the actions of the UK government, but I will ask that you give time for the courts to do their work before passing final judgement. In the case of the article you linked, for example, the man was arrested but not charged, and in the case of Palestine Action as a whole, there's an ongoing court case against the government's ban, which seems likely to succeed.
Obviously these incidents shouldn't have occurred in the first place, and I fully agree that the government is abusing the law to get its way. But the actions of the home office don't necessarily reflect the country as a whole. They don't even necessarily reflect the Labour Party as a whole.
Yes but the issue is already the government acting like this. They most probably know they are in the wrong and are acting anyway, because they want to quell the dissent. The damage is already done.
> They don't even necessarily reflect the Labour Party as a whole.
Of course. I still think about the Labour as 'the good ones', compared with the Tories (or Reform) anyway. OTOH I think this does reflect the country as a whole and not only the current government. That is my feeling from living in the UK some time ago.
I will end this saying that IMO the main difference in speech/press freedom between the UK and say Slovakia is that the UK imagines itself a powerful country fully in control of its destiny, and this illusion enables executive overreach. While Slovakia is a small country thrown around by external forces so much that only the dumbest politicians waste their energy trying to limit press freedom.
It may be that I'm conditioned to expect the Home Office to be authoritarian screw-ups that need to be babysat by the courts and principled backbenchers. But you're right that, ideally, the government shouldn't be doing this in the first place.
However, it seems to be the case that, even amongst conservatives, the view in the UK is that the government is infringing on free speech.
> The exercise of these freedoms, since it carries with it duties and responsibilities, may be subject to such formalities, conditions, restrictions or penalties as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society, in the interests of national security, territorial integrity or public safety, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, for the protection of the reputation or rights of others, for preventing the disclosure of information received in confidence, or for maintaining the authority and impartiality of the judiciary.
https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1998/42/schedule/1/part...
While the US has restrictions on speech, there are far far fewer restrictions.
The "uncodified constitution" that we have doesn't guarantee you "Freedom of Speech" either. I've read the relevant parts of the constitution in the UK. It gives Parliamentarians the right to unlimited speech.
Finally "Freedom of Expression" and "Freedom of Speech" are not the same thing.
"This right shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers."
As you point out, all countries have some restrictions on speech. We can obviously agree that somewhere like North Korea has no freedom of speech, in the same way we can agree the Moon is clearly outside our atmosphere. But in the margins it comes down to where you draw the line.
There's also a difference when it comes to theory and practice. In theory the US is more permissive; it lacks the ECHR's caveats that permit restricting speech to protect health, morals and territorial integrity. But in practice the US is rated as coming below the UK in the World Press Freedom Index and the Freedom of Expression Index. The US government has a lot of power to lean on organisations and individuals to stifle speech, which of course it's currently doing.
Pointing at extreme examples like North Korea and pretending their isn't an issue because we are better them is classic whataboutism.
I also don't care about what some random index that people pull out of their backsides. I care about the legality. Freedom of Speech in the US is enshrined in the constitution. It is not enshrined anywhere in UK law.
As for the section you quoted, that is made effectively moot by the exceptions that I originally quoted.
Generally I am pretty tired of people engaging in apologia for the British state.
I mean, I agree with you on that, but it's a circular argument.
My comparison to North Korea wasn't whataboutism; it was intended to illustrate that while there are obvious points for agreement (i.e. that the DPRK obviously has no freedom of speech), for many countries the comparison is less black and white. Which restrictions on free speech can you accept and still call it free speech?
I also respectfully disagree with you that only legality matters. If a government is actively punishing those who speak against it, even if it is strictly legal for them to do so, then I'd question whether that country is has freer speech in practice. Few developed countries have a government as hostile to the press as the current US administration!
I certainly don't align with the British government on many issues, encryption backdoors being one of them, but framing free speech as a binary is, I think, ultimately unhelpful. All countries have restrictions on speech, and drawing a line upon what is in reality a gradient over-simplifies the issue.
I personally agree that morality and territorial integrity aren't adequate reasons to restrict speech, and I'd say that a country without those restrictions has freer speech (from a legal perspective) than those with them. But again, it's a relative comparison; I wouldn't say that a country had no free speech if they did have those restrictions.
No. My point is that in the UK we do not have freedom of speech enshrined in constitution or law.
I believe Freedom of Expression is weasel words to obfuscate the conversation as now you have an additional legal concept in the mix, with some nebulous definition that reads like a Terms and Conditions from one of the big tech players.
That is it.
> My comparison to North Korea wasn't whataboutism; it was intended to illustrate that while there are obvious points for agreement (i.e. that the DPRK obviously has no freedom of speech), for many countries the comparison is less black and white. Which restrictions on free speech can you accept and still call it free speech?
It is the fact that it is brought up at all is engaging in whataboutism.
Why are you even mentioning NK? Why do you care what old Kim Jong does? Really think about why you are even mentioning North Korea. I don't expect or want an answer BTW.
> I also respectfully disagree with you that only legality matters. If a government is actively punishing those who speak against it, even if it is strictly legal for them to do so, then I'd question whether that country is has freer speech in practice. Few developed countries have a government as hostile to the press as the current US administration!
I don't care about the left/right slop politics. I don't care who the "villian of the week" is. Most politics is presented to you in the same way as Scooby Doo.
Why do you care about what Donald Trump is doing in the US? Please actually think about why you are even mentioning it. I don't expect (or want) an answer BTW.
> I certainly don't align with the British government on many issues, encryption backdoors being one of them, but framing free speech as a binary is, I think, ultimately unhelpful. All countries have restrictions on speech, and drawing a line upon what is in reality a gradient over-simplifies the issue
The very fact that you are making this argument about gradients of freedom, and everyone has restrictions etc. Is literally the issue. The conversation about it has been obfuscated deliberately.
I don't care what restrictions they have in France, NK, China or anywhere else. That is their business.
I care about the restrictions in the UK, why they exist and whether they are valid.
As for the encryption back-doors, why do you think they actually want to do it? GCHQ just happens to be looking for more developers BTW! I know this for a fact because I had one of their recruiters phone me. I told him what I thought about the British state and not to ever call me again.
We do, in the Human Rights Act 1998.
Now, you've said you don't believe that the definition of freedom of expression in the HRA and ECHR lines up with your definition of free speech. That's fine. You are of course welcome to that opinion.
But you act as though your definition of free speech is authoritative, and yet you also have not defined it. When I've prompted you to narrow it down, you avoid the question.
So let me ask you extremely directly: what's your definition of "free speech"? Or to be more precise: which restrictions on speech are allowed, and which are forbidden, in order for a country to have "free speech" in your book?
No we don't. I've explained why. It even says in the text of the law the caveats it carves out.
But you can believe whatever fantasy you like. I am tired of trying to convince the fish that they are indeed swimming in water. The funniest thing is that until you've had it affect something/someone you like or respect, you won't change your mind.
BTW, I used to make all of the same arguments as you do btw about the Human Rights act and the ECHR etc. I realised after actually reading them, and seeing what actually happened and how the state operates, that what I believe was all bollox and I had been deceived.
> Now, you've said you don't believe that the definition of freedom of expression in the HRA and ECHR lines up with your definition of free speech. That's fine. You are of course welcome to that opinion.
It doesn't line up with any definition of free speech because it is a separate legal concept. I've already explained why they are different.
I happen to believe that legal concept is done deliberately so people like yourself will engage in this time wasting discussions about what is and isn't free expression. That is evidenced in this very discussion.
Ask yourself. If you happen to support Palestinian Action and do so publicly how long until police visit you or you are put on a watch list? Probably not long.
> But you act as though your definition of free speech is authoritative, and yet you also have not defined it. When I've prompted you to narrow it down, you avoid the question.
If I provide you with any sort of definition someone else will say "well that definition isn't correct", all of which ultimately deflects from the issue and is another waste of time.
The issue is that speech is restricted in the UK. It is done selectively. Some viewpoints are allowed by the British state and other aren't. Some of this is done directly, some of this is done indirectly.
e.g. There was a super injunction granted sometime last year to hide information about a large number of Afghan migrants / refugees / nationals being resettled after the Taliban took back control. Therefore the public, the press (little good they are) and presumably oppositional political parties couldn't scrutinise these plans. These types of super injunctions happen all the time.
What good is it that someone it is written on a piece of paper that you are legally able to have opposing view (as long as they fit inside the Overton window), when they literally hide information that is important for you to have any sort of informed view from you?
I asked you in my previous reply to go away and think about why certain narratives are presented to you. I never mentioned Trump, yet you seemed to want to talk about him without explicitly saying his name.
Someone somewhere wants you to worry about the press freedoms in the US. This is likely to distract you from more important things like the US have just landed some strategic nuclear bombers in the UK ahead of peace talks between Ukraine/Russia.
> So let me ask you extremely directly: what's your definition of "free speech"? Or to be more precise: which restrictions on speech are allowed, and which are forbidden, in order for a country to have "free speech" in your book?
It is irrelevant, I've explained why above. Any nation state will suppress your speech when it deems it to be necessary and will invent excuses as why it has to do it. That is the reality of it. How you choose to deal with that reality is your own choosing.
You believe that the HRA does not grant "free speech" due to some, or all, of the exceptions.
You refuse to define which specific exceptions you have a problem with, or define what you mean by "free speech", because if you did, people could argue against you.
That's all fine, but I wish you'd led with that. Next time write something like:
"I have my own definition of 'free speech' which I will not share, and according to this definition the UK has no freedom of speech."
To which the only response can be: "OK."
The former includes things like how much editorial control journalists are subjected to, the right of journalists to unionize, the cost to print/distribute newspapers, whether journalists are subject to economic constraints (like being dependent on advertising money), etc.
The later is not only far more opaque in how it measures things, relying on a panel of country-specific experts, but it also more press/media related and includes things like media bias and print/media perspectives which is more about diversity of press opinion than freedom of expression (arguably, media bias shouldn't negative affect a freedom of expression index unless it is government imposed).
A more objective comparison of freedom of expression/speech would rate how the government would respond to specific instances of public and private speech - like say calling for the king/president/prime minister/etc. to be replaced, posting nudes (or going nude), blaspheme a particular religion, publishing embarrassing and reputation harming information about a celebrity/someone powerful/a judge/a religious figure, playing loud music outside, refusing to speak when ordered to by a police/judge/legislature/ruler, wearing the clothes various sexes, etc.
It might be difficult to create perfectly equivalent speech across countries, but I think one could get close enough.
Guarantee is too strong of a word, but this is the concept.
It’s difficult to decide what type of political speech is and isn’t okay, without censoring.
(Said as someone in favor of public funding only for campaigns, but who acknowledges external funding would be a nightmare to police)
regrettably the latter one may be correct but it'd be nice to see at least some pushback every time this happens.
What did they mean by this
They've been looking to use AI for consumer surveillance; AI user monitoring essentially.
"We can't have a backdoor so we can't use AI to monitor the user"
Hence, the confluence of AI and encryption.
Turns out it was not 4D chess after all…
It never is. I'm guilty of thinking there's a secret master plan sometimes and there never is.
Authoritarianism has become very popular online these days for some reason. Giving in to fear and wanting total control are always going to be traits that pop up again and then humans have to relearn from history about why freedoms are important.
Or, reap your fascist just deserts. Why the hell should I waste my time calling Apple a fascist if I haven't daily-driven one of their devices in a decade? You want us to protest, standing arm-in-arm with you against Apple? You wanted this, you told yourself Apple was a secure business.
The only person who insists on using technology that coddles it's user is you.
For example, Nazi Party didn't come to power democratically. Hitler lost 1932 elections to Hindenburg, and didn't get any position. But in two months, Hindenburg appointed him to Chancellor position, opening way to big money. And there was no democracy after that: in about a month they organize the Reichstag fire and issue a lot of consecutive "emergency" decrees, kill political opponents etc.
I don't think there is much disjoint if you see Trump as a fairly clean break with the cold-war era GOP. The thing is that no one in the US remembers the cold war with pride. The left thinks the cold war was US imperialism. The right kind of agrees, and has moved on to other issues anyways. And Europe nudges, saying: "Hey, you're America. You love fighting cold wars! Remember?"
Too many Europeans are Chomsky-brained and believe that US foreign policy is controlled by the CIA. The reality is that US grand strategy is incoherent and has been for decades. The US doesn't have any actual strategic imperatives at the moment, and it's being pulled in too many different directions. I believe George Friedman argues that this is a recurring pattern in US history, where US foreign policy alternates between listlessness, and maniac focus on some objective (most recently in the wake of 9/11).
The response was essentially: "Why? You are nothing". Britbongs stay losing.
The Brexit negotiations proved to me that the UK government will simply assume they have leverage and try to assert it even when they have none. Combined with the lack of negotiating talent during a high stakes deal created a perfect storm.
Rupert Murdoch is 94.
I'm not being sarcastic. For real, what major government wouldn't want that in their favor?
Unless they're even more hubristic than we imagined.
They care about maybe a maximum of five having that access, and I'm sure they realize that #1 on that list (PRC) won't need much time to become a peer on any given technology.
That is the opposite of privacy.
Reminder that he's funded by Thiel and friends with Curtis Yarvin, which goals include the end of democracy and the federal state and replace the system with tech CEO kings over feudal states.
I'm not sure what you mean by "more" but what you are asking for is in fact happening.
Perhaps he likes the idea of E2E, but just for himself and his friends. I duno, but whatever it is, it's not about the important things after the fact.
DOGE is clearly operating illegally for other reasons - not distributions funds that were appropriated by Congress for instance. But data sharing isn’t the root issue. It’s spineless Republicans in Congress and a sycophantic Supreme Court.
And it’s possible to say both that if you are here illegally you should be deported and that it’s currently being driven by animus, cruelty and it should be easier to obtain legal residency especially in areas where we do need more workers and implement another program like Reagan did in the 80s
Beyond that many of the departments that this data is being extracted from have rules about who can access (no not everyone in the IRS has free reign) and what they can do with it. For good reason, IRS's job is to focus on what the law says they should do, not say punish political enemies and so on.
But transfer it to DODGE, ICE, Palantir, there are no laws at all regarding what they can do with that data.
In some countries, tax data is available to everyone. Norway, Finland and Sweden in particular. There may be others
You don't want your local dog catcher to be able to look at your medicare records just because "he's the government, and medicare records are government data".
Shouldn't everybody have access to government data, with a few exceptions?
The position of the US executive on encryption is well summarized by the Lavabit case.
> Tim Cook, the C.E.O. of Apple, which has been ordered to help the F.B.I. get into the cell phone of the San Bernardino shooters, wrote in an angry open letter this week that "the U.S. government has asked us for something we simply do not have, and something we consider too dangerous to create." The second part of that formulation has rightly received a great deal of attention: Should a back door be built into devices that are used for encrypted communications?
https://www.newyorker.com/news/amy-davidson/a-dangerous-all-...
He said Apple does not have and won’t create a backdoor. That was well crafted and means exactly what he said, any implicit meaning is an artifact of your brain.
I absolutely don't actually know anything about Apple, but I've seen some of the ways even small companies legally split themselves up to avoid tax or various forms of liability. Multiple phone numbers to the same phone, multiple domains and email providers to the same laptop. Multiple denials that you've ever heard of the other company let alone happen to share the same office space...
There's a massive difference between a truthful statement and an honest one; anyone that works with code should understand that.
Apple has since confirmed in a statement provided to Ars that the US federal government "prohibited" the company "from sharing any information," but now that Wyden has outed the feds, Apple has updated its transparency reporting and will "detail these kinds of requests" in a separate section on push notifications in its next report.
They also can't refuse to comply with warrants demanding any such unencrypted data that is stored on their servers.
That's not the same thing as adding a back door to allow access to encrypted user data that is stored on the user's device.
It's also different than storing encrypted user data on your server, when you have purposefully designed a system where you don't have access to the user's encryption key.
Encrypted user data backup is the feature that Apple disabled access to in the UK rather than comply with the order to insert a back door in the OS.
Good security models typically don't hinge on being lucky.
Should we disbelieve them when they say they don't do so?
I would also point out that it was Senator Wyden who initially informed the public of how much the government was already spying on their unencrypted communications.
His record on civil liberties is excellent.
That seems to be the most salient property of his presidency. His position on any issue is whatever he just said, with no regard to what it might have been yesterday.
I think we're up to the killing part now.
It's too bad that when he is in power he does not actually make the latter happen, because it should be scrapped entirely.
The only other country with a debt limit set in an absolute amount rather than as a percentage of GDP is Denmark, and they sensibly have set theirs far above their actual debt so it becomes just a legal formality rather than a policy tool.
The problem with it in the US is that the debt ceiling limits government borrowing to pay for debts that have already been incurred. It doesn't control the amount of spending or the deficit--that is controlled by the budget that Congress and the President approve.
If we can't just scrap it completely, then at least the budget process should be changed so every budget bill must be accompanied by a raise of the debt ceiling by enough to cover whatever extra debt that budget will be adding.
There are two problems here:
(1) We devote more resources to catching child abusers. There are all kinds of legal "if you see something, say something" requirements that make every doctor, nurse, and schoolteacher in the country part of the effort to do this.
(2) I see no particular reason to believe that additional resources would lead to a noticeable increase in detections. There are many, many circumstances where you're free to devote double the resources to something, but you'll see at best a trivial improvement in results.
You make this statement but provide no evidence. Because there's laws on the books, we "devote more resource" than, say the entire DEA, which unlike these laws has a gargantuan budget? That's nonsense.
> I see no particular reason to believe that additional resources would lead to a noticeable increase in detections.
Look harder? Read up on the topic? String operations work. More would work more often and catch more abusers.
Let alone the resources we could be pouring into children's mental health services (instead of kicking families off health insurance like the current administration has accomplished).
The Epstein list proves we do more to protect child abusers.
> Trump has also been critical of the UK stance on encryption. The US president has likened the UK’s order to Apple to “something... that you hear about with China,” saying in February that he had told Starmer: “You can’t do this.”
> US Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard has also suggested the order would be an “egregious violation” of Americans’ privacy that risked breaching the two countries’ data agreement.
I think that’s exactly why I want encryption.
Preposterous. Did the invention of the calculator make people dumber? A smartphone is another tool. Not Steve Jobs's fault people use it for TikTok or gooning instead of studying programming, math, medicine or whatever. Stupid people are gonna be stupid with or without smartphones.
Plus, we already had smartphones before Jobs, they were Pal OS, Windows Mobile or Symbian based.
Maybe it wasn’t intentional, but the form factor of the modern smartphone discourages creation.
When I was a young child me and all my friends would “use the PC together” just to open MSPaint and create shitty drawings. I don’t see anything similar today.
Ever take photos or videos with your phone? Is that not creation?
>When I was a young child me and all my friends would “use the PC together”
Same, but this is more "old man yells at clouds". Children today have their own way of creation, now using AI.
If you make a list of creative activities that can be done on a computer or phone, a big majority are notably harder to do on a phone.
Spending time learning how to actually create it, and then actually creating it is what makes someone an artist.
The children's "own way of creation", in your own words is to imagine what they want to create, and then ask something else to try doing what they want. If it's not what they want they complain and ask the system to try again.
I wouldn't be called an artist if I imagined a picture of myself riding a dragon, and then proceeded to commission a painting of that. Asking someone else to do the thing for you isn't being creative. It's being lazy. It's not making art "accessible". They couldn't do art before, and they still can't now. They just believe they can, just because they can "bark out an order at a slave".
Says who? Someone sold a white canvas with a banana taped to it, that a toddler could have done in 3 minutes. What's there to learn to do something like that?
>I wouldn't be called an artist
Pretty sure people do whatever they enjoy doing, and they don't give a f if some pretentious people call them artists or not.
This comment is a very narrow and elitist PoV, focusing on art specifically, which is a thing a lot of people would struggle to define, and also has nothing to do with the topic of using computers, since most people don't use computers for art but to make their lives easier, more efficent and more fun.
But it’s not like many young adults today who grew up with mobile phones understand computers either. At 51 growing up with computers in the 80s, I find myself explaining what I think should be simple computer concepts to both my parents generation and my adult children.
My 80 year old mom is not a stereotypical old person who doesn’t know how to use a computer. She is a retired math teacher and has actively been using computers since we had an Apple //e in the house running AppleWorks in the mid 80s.
When she was tutoring teenagers mostly as volunteer work after she retired, she had to teach them how to use Office/Gsuite.
"Das Internet ist für uns alle Neuland" Angela Merkel (2013) during a press conference with Obama.
"The internet is uncharted territory for us"
This is going to be heresy here, but honestly I think it's a reasonable position. Not one I would take, but reasonable.
For the first time in human history there can be large scale communication it is mathematically impossible for governments to have any access to. If you believe that governments are doing the job of protecting their citizens (and many do), it's entirely reasonable for them to want this type of access.
They have it with the postal service, and analogue phones and the world didn't collapse, and many criminals got caught.
Phone wiretapping (until recently I suppose) and mail inspection required a human to take some action to listen in; you couldn't just monitor everyone's communications. Now you can.
I don't think anybody is saying that the motivations are bad. We all want safety, right?
The closest thing I hear is, they feel that the cons often outweigh the pros. I think this correlates with their trust in authorities, given the countless abuses we see authorities perpetrating when granted power.
There's a reason "think of the children!" is literally a joke mocking safety-based pretexts for reductions in rights.
The analogue systems had fundamental limits on how many people could be surveilled, and still we had abuses of the system. The digital system makes you choose between "surveil absolutely everyone all of the time" and "surveil nobody".
Note that you mention the postal service. Remember the Horizon Post Office scandal, where there was a huge swathe of wrongful prosecutions?
Every time ukgov tries to make some sort of tech policy, it's embarassingly wrong, or naive, or both.
This comes from a country that effectively gave away ARM.
https://studee.com/media/mps-and-their-degrees-media
The most popular subjects for MPs who won seats in the Dec 2019 election
Politics - 20%
History - 13%
Law -12%
Economics - 10%
Philosophy - 6%
English - 4%Also, the people pushing for these measure (e.g., the U.K's equivalent of the NSA, GCHQ and most national-level police departments) understand these issues perfectly well.
Surely some of them understand the technical details. That doesn't necessarily mean they understand or respect the wider implications of a policy. This is why it's important to have a government that sets policy - taking into account all of the competing influences and potential consequences - and politically neutral technicians who then implement government policy.
No-one would dispute that if the government could examine every communication everyone ever sends then it could catch more very bad people and prevent more harm to innocent people. The problem is all the other stuff that also happens if you give a government that kind of power over its own people.
If by "hack" you mean she guessed the password, then yes.
It has nothing to do with their technical knowledge. It has everything to do with human nature.
If you want to push back, the law is not on your side.
The politicians might not know tech, but the NSA, GHCQ, etc. that push for these anti-encryption laws most definitely do know technology, and is the main lobby against encryption.
It goes beyond just getting politicians that understand tech. We need politicians willing to rein in the intelligence apparatus put in safeguards, and checks and balances on their power.
When politicians say "we need a special key for police to stop child abuse" it's not that they don't know this means "a backdoor with no technological way to limit its use". On the contrary, they know it very well and it's exactly what they want to achieve under the guise of children protection. It's the public at large that don't understand it -- or so they hope.
The scary thing about the UK regulators is that they seem to understand the stupidity of what they're doing, but believe it's worth it. You see this attitude everywhere in the UK – in our hate speech laws, our blasphemy laws, mass surveillance – the argument isn't that these things don't limit freedom and personal privacy. They'll agree that they do, their argument is that you shouldn't care.
With this encryption backdoor most wouldn't deny that it could be compromised, they just didn't think you should worry about it because they thought the benefits were worth it.
I think people on the internet in the 90s and early 00s were just weird people to be honest. We're very libertarian for whatever reason, and we wrongly assumed people our age were all as pro-freedom as us.
With a few notable exceptions, the level of knowledge, expertise and understanding amongst government advisers and policy makers is abysmally low. c.f. https://jackgavigan.com/2015/11/23/how-well-advised-was-the-...
I recently listened to some clips from a hearing with questions about zero-knowledge proofs, algorithmic transparency, etc...this was pretty unthinkable two decades ago. Some agencies and legislative bodies also now have technical staffers and some advisory boards with technologists. So, yeah it it slow and sometimes frustrating, but it's not static.
https://www.techradar.com/pro/security/the-european-commissi...
I wonder how this clash is going to turn up. I would hate this development. This proposal is worthy of the Chinese Communist Party, and I am aghast just how many member states are fine with the concept of a preemptive surveillance state and breaking privacy left and right.
Of course, that is what we get for giving Ursula von der Leyen a second term (why??) She already has a reputation from her career in German politics, having earned the nickname Zensursula (censoring Ursula).
To answer your question: because the Conservatives just couldn't be arsed to put up an alternative.
IIRC current Kanzler, Friedrich Merz, is not at all her friend and will complicate things for her on purpose. So we will see.
Helpless indeed - but, government still requires the consent of the governed. It's just that we are all very comfortable, with a lot to lose and easily distracted, so that consent to be governed is too easily given nowadays.
If we do anything together as a society it should be making sure to preserve E2E Encryption as it's one of the most important tools to organize a resistance should we wish to revoke our consent to be governed.
We may not like everything about the current American administration, but credit where due.
This is the propaganda I'm talking about. We had a summer of race riots and people were held accountable for inciting violence. Vance doesn't like that. Meanwhile his own government is deporting people for peaceful protest, cracking down on free speech at Universities, and banning journalists that it doesn't like.
You realise its only the UK that is the surveillance nightmare here? EU has strong privacy and data protections.
Then again im probably talking to a maga republican that just regurgitates what their media tells them
If the UK wants to snoop they better grovel before US feds like everybody else to get access.
Then people wonder why tech embraced Trump.
Right now there aren't too many EU alternatives yet which is why you don't really notice yet. But the damaged trust in the US as a 'partner' will outlive Trump for decades. As they say "trust arrives on foot and leaves on horseback".
Previously it was hard to compete with the US because the lack of regulation there and investors in the EU having more expectations rather than just throwing money at the wall and hoping it sticks.
But with the exploitative business models like Google's consumer tracking and now with Trump and his trade wars the US is no longer viewed as a friend or a country to look up to. I think it will only increase the EU's push for more privacy and ethical business models.
There's a big grassroots movement like "BuyFromEU" to cut US products and services out of our lives. I think that trade balance is only going to get worse. And really it was actually not bad at all, the problem is that Trump was only counting products not services when looking at the trade balance. I guess because his voters are primarily blue collar workers.
https://www.bankinfosecurity.com/eu-pushes-for-backdoors-in-...
I of course trust neither, but I do have to say they are doing good stuff limiting bad actors like Google and Microsoft. I just wish they would do more (e.g. ban third party cookies and tracking outright rather than forcing us to choose every time).
Talk is cheap. People say they want local services up to the point someone offers local services and no one will buy them because they are not the same as what "BigTech" offers.
Anytime the lack of “influential European tech companies” come up, the best anyone can do is money losing/barely profitable Spotify.
And the data doesn’t back your idea up that Europe is moving away from any of those companies. The EU is moving its dependence away from the US military industrial complex admittedly.
It will take time to build local alternatives but I'm sure they will come. We have time. You can see that companies like Microsoft are really shaken up when they're starting appeasement projects like those vows to actually protect our data (though those promises are weak because they remain bound to US law)
And this goes hand in hand with the defense initiatives. IT is important though to society to be considered a critical asset.
And even a simplified version of AWS shouldn’t be impossible to build that’s “good enough” [1] or another search engine that’s good enough (Google) and Google search sucks these days anyway.
But Europe is not going to be able to replicate the ecosystem of Android like China did and definitely not Apple on the high end or MS for operating systems.
[1] before anyone replies that I don’t understand the complexity of AWS, I have been working with AWS technologies exclusively for over 7 years including a former 3+ year stint at AWS.
And cloud is only really cost-effective when it comes to startups that have not much cash flow but expect/hope to explode rapidly by going viral. Cloud gives them that kind of infinite scaling and the ability to pay as they go (the uptick in clients will pay for the increased hosting when they do make it).
In Europe this kind of business model is very rare though. We don't just spin stuff up like a weather balloon and hope it floats.
There are plenty of large private corporations and governments who host on AWS. Maybe they didn’t do it naively?
I see a lot of dumb implementations. At work we're picking up all our physical servers and moving them to AWS compute boxes that run 24/7. Purely statically, just because our idiot CIO wants to be a "cloud-driven company" so he can spout the buzzwords. We're spending a lot more money to get the same only on someone else's computers and get none of the actual benefits that cloud can offer.
Just because your company has a brain dead lift and shift implementation (don’t do that), doesn’t mean every company does.
As a former employee of AWS ProServe (Amazon’s internal cloud consulting department - full time direct hire employee) and now and outside consultant, I’ve seen and been involved in a lot of large scale implementations.
I have no love lost for AWS the company (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44607821) , but let’s not pretend it’s a bunch of startups and naive enterprise corporations that don’t know tech.
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/03/23/strategy-letter-iv...
Everyone needs a different 90%.
I’m not trying to wear “I worked at AWS” on my chest like a 22 year old posting on Blind. But my experience working at AWS ProServe before working at 3rd partner consulting company I’ve seen a lot of different implementations even though my focus was on cloud native applications.
These are all of AWS’s named specialties.
https://aws.amazon.com/professional-services/
Large companies aren’t going to go to a smaller provider. Yes I know about “hybrid cloud”. But modt companies don’t want to go that.
Even if 98% of it is unnecessary garbage, the functionality for that last 2% has provided a ton of utility to billions of people.
If meta would disappear we would either buy less and have more money to pay for communication (and doing more towards saving the planet as well!). We'd probably choose things to buy more on actual need and quality rather than marketing BS.
Well yes and no. Facebook, no. The concept of facebook as it was when it was first released was an interesting one to me. Staying in touch with your friends, I've lived in several countries so I have friends all over the world. This is nice. However they perverted it when they dropped the old timeline and moved to the algorithmic feed. It became useless to me then.
I do see a benefit to facebook-like services though, just ethical ones.
But what I do like about facebook, or rather meta now, is the investment they have done in VR. It's still full of data collection I'm sure, but to me VR is a very interesting tech and it really needed that to get off the ground. Right now it's not really moving along because "AI" stole all the hype limelight but it will come again, just like AI has had some false starts itself.
Don’t anthropomorphize the lawnmower, the “friendship” is nothing more than economic interdependency. French aircraft carriers are not using Windows because they trust the US government, their diagnostic software just doesn’t work on anything else.
It’s much harder to extricate yourself from the US influence on the world stage.
Not that I’m not seriously looking at a Plan B outside of the US after I retire. We are already planning to spend a few months a year between Costa Rica snd Panama City next year - warm, safe countries in US time zones.
Personally I hope the EU works more on the nuclear umbrella. It was the US that didn't really want us to have much of our own to establish dependency on them, but now that the US has become an unreliable partner we'll have to. France and perhaps the UK will have to scale theirs up. It's the only thing where we really need the US militarily, as any regular military is not sufficient to deter enemies like Russia and China, no matter how much we have.
But Big Tech is very hard to cut until the EU clouds step up a lot more. Maybe not for you yourself personally but for industry.
Are we? My impression is the other way around so could you clarify what are we building that is going to move away from US tech?
They act like the choices are omni-powerful US tech companies, or a plethora of small companies building utopia. They say "we need to hamstring our most successful companies to make space in the market for smaller players."
The problem is that it isn't making space for smaller players; it's making space for countries with worse perspectives on human rights to try to catch up/fill the void. The world isn't a better place if we replace Google and Meta with ByteDance and Yandex. It's not even that those are bad companies (from what I hear, they're pretty similar internally to their US counterparts); it's that they are under the jurisdiction of administrations that are hostile to human rights.
I mean, the foreign companies taking that space can be solved with sanctions, or digital services taxes, etc.
What would you propose? Maybe Google, Apple, Meta, etc. are the lesser of the big evils but we definitely have a monopoly problem in the US, and there is very little space for competition, which only continues to harm consumers.
This sort of shit is pure Home Office authoritarian bullshit and the culture there is such that it perpetuates. They seem to be particularly skilled in getting MPs to side with their world view, but it is the Home Office leading this, not the MPs.
See the proscription of Palestine Action for a textbook example of Home Office bullshit.
Apple makes home computers, mobile devices, AV equipment and productivity/multimedia software.
Meta makes social media platforms, and vr headsets. What exactly makes them "rivals"? WhatsApp vs iMessage? They're two big companies in the same sector, sure, but do they really compete against each other in a major way?
now sod off, as they might say
The UK is the same country that arrests 12,000 people a year for posting online.
> Now every force in the country has a team sifting through people’s posts trying to determine what crosses an undefined threshold. “It is a complete nightmare,” one officer admits
Britain’s police are restricting speech in worrying ways https://www.economist.com/britain/2025/05/15/britains-police... From The Economist
Just wow. I wonder if we will study this in history textbooks about downfall of UK
(I still don't think the UK should jail people for being hateful online, though.)
I would be more likely to include some sections about the current US administration though.
https://hansard.parliament.uk/lords/2025-07-17/debates/F807C...
I draw the bar for "political arrest" at somewhere like "arrested for opposing the incumbent in an election". I don't think "arrested for saying it's time to gas the muslims" - which is the sort of thing happening in the UK and getting counted in these numbers - should be called "political arrest". That's just called committing a crime. That would only become a "political arrest" if gassing the muslims was a politically acceptable viewpoint, equal in value to not gassing them.
(i think OP might be speedrunning a "what opinions, mfer?" goose meme thing. i bet the reason is "for posting right-wing nationalistic garbage likely to incite hatred", or similar)
"A spokeswoman for Leicestershire police said crimes under Section 127 and Section 1 include “any form of communication” such as phone calls, letters, emails and hoax calls to emergency services."
I expect it's mostly domestic abuse cases because what was once screamed through a closed door is now messaged online.
When a family member starts threatening others, an arrest is probably the necessary intervention to prevent actual violence. It's a similar story in cases like e.g. community racial tensions and gang violence. Once the threats are happening online, real violence is imminent and action warranted.
> Under these laws, British police arrest more than 30 people a day for online posts, double the rate in 2017. Some are serious offenders, such as stalkers.
How many of those 30 were for "online posts" (and of which nature - Lucy Connolly is a favourite example cited by the likes of Vance, but she was arrested for trying to stir up racial tension when there were already race riots going on)? Who can tell, because the article didn't seem to bother asking.
0: For anyone curious, https://archive.ph/vaCkJ#selection-1287.0-1298.0
Inciting Violence: Already a Crime
Posting nasty comments: Not a crime.
Glad I could clear things up for you.
You can be a cunt all you want, just make sure you're being nasty about them as a person not their religion or race or whatever group you might feel they belong to
All cases I've seen have been cut and dry in this regard. Racist or homophobic usually.
The medium she used to incite violence was a comment on a website. But she still incited violence, and was charged accordingly.
In Germany there are even stricter laws. Insulting someone is a crime, even if the things you say are factually true.
And then you have repressive dictatorships, like the UAE, USA and China, where you can't disagree with the government on anything. It's definitely a crime there, to say the president looks like Winnie the Pooh.
Section 127(1) makes it an offence to:
"Send by means of a public electronic communications network a message that is a -
(a) grossly offensive,
(b) indecent, obscene, or menacing, or
(c) false, known to be false, for causing annoyance, inconvenience, or needless anxiety."
Section 127(2) adds that: "A person is also guilty of an offence if they cause a message or other matter to be sent that is similarly offensive or menancing.
I googled Lucy Connolly out of curiosity. It indeed appears that she got 31 month of jail for a single tweet? You don't think this counts as "arrested for online posts"?
You've definitely missed some context. For example, and fairly significantly:
> Connolly previously admitted intending to stir up racial hatred.
If you plead guilty to a charge, there's not much defense left.
The offence she admitted to doesn't even take account of whether it's committed online - it's law that was passed in 1986. An aggravating factor that led to the sentence she got was that she had in fact posted multiple times in the same sort of way.
Details of her appealing the sentence as excessive, rejected by the appeals court https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/Lucy-Con...
She didn't throw rocks, she didn't set things on fire, she didn't stab anyone -- it was her speech that got her a multi-year jail term.
This alone makes free speech proponents upset, regardless of whether there were riots ongoing or not, or whether they agree or disagree with her political position.
> She didn't throw rocks, she didn't set things on fire, she didn't stab anyone -- it was her speech that got her a multi-year jail term.
Your contention seems to be that incitement shouldn't be an offence?
That's at odds with legal systems all over the world, including the US, where Brandenburg v Ohio [0] holds that if inflammatory speech is "directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action" that is an exception to the First Amendment and can be prosecuted, which seems to be at odds with "regardless of whether there were riots ongoing or not".
The original point of my first post in this thread was that lumping together arrests for stalking, incitement to violence and other forms of harassment to produce a big scary number makes the argument seem utterly dishonest. The fact that so many "free speech proponents" fixate on one example when, if the stated number is true, there should be thousands of examples every year is a good demonstration of that.
Not true. The US has a much higher bar for prosecuting speech than the UK.
Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969) - 395 U.S. 444
- https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/107965/brandenburg-v-o...
- Speech must be "directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action"
- AND "likely to incite or produce such action"
- General statements like "burn them all" typically fail both prongs
The "imminent" requirement is key. Connolly's Facebook post lacked:
- Specific targets or locations
- Timeframe for action
- Direct instructions to specific individuals
- Any indication people were prepared to act on her words immediately
Here are cases with far more explicit threats that were protected:
United States v. Bagdasarian (2009)
- https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/221261/united-states-v...
- Citation: 652 F.3d 1113 (9th Cir. 2011)
- Posted that Obama "will have a 50 cal in the head" with racial slurs
- Result: Conviction reversed as crude political statement, not true threat
United States v. Turner (2013)
- https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/904120/united-states-v...
- Citation: 720 F.3d 411 (2d Cir. 2013)
- Posted that three federal judges "deserve to die" with their photos and addresses
- Result: Conviction overturned as protected political hyperbole
Connolly's "set fire to all the hotels" would likely be viewed as angry hyperbole in the United States, not meeting Brandenburg's strict standard.
The distinction: The US prosecutes actual incitement (directing a mob to attack a building RIGHT NOW). The UK prosecutes offensive speech that merely might inspire someone, somewhere, someday. Your Brandenburg citation actually proves this difference rather than refutes it.
You want thousands of examples? Check Twitter during any US political crisis - they're not prosecuted precisely because Brandenburg protects them.
> You want thousands of examples?
Of people people prosecuted for innocuous speech in the UK, the original claim in this thread. Brandenburg doesn't apply there.
Edit: If I remove the reference to Brandenburg, I'm not sure my point substantially changes:
Incitement is an offence in the UK and also in other countries. You can argue whether that should be the case or not but that's completely orthogonal.
Gathering a whole lot of offenses which happened to include online activity to produce a big number of people who you can claim were prosecuted for something that you can claim is as innocuous as "online posts" is dishonest.
> lumping together arrests for stalking, incitement to violence and other forms of harassment to produce a big scary number
But that's exactly the problem - the UK defines "incitement" and "harassment" so broadly that ordinary political speech becomes criminal:
UK "Harassment" includes:
- Misgendering someone online
- Posting offensive jokes
- Retweeting protest footage
- Criticizing immigration policy "grossly"
UK "Incitement" includes:
- Lucy Connolly's Facebook post (31 months)
- Jordan Parlour's "every man and their dog should smash [hotel] up" (20 months)
- Tyler Kay's "set fire to all the hotels" retweet (38 months)
NONE of these would meet Brandenburg's standard in the US. They lack:
- Directed at specific individuals
- Imminent timeframe
- Likelihood of producing immediate action
> if the stated number is true, there should be thousands of examples every year
There ARE thousands. In 2023:
- 3,537 arrested for online speech
- 1,991 convicted under Section 127 Communications Act
- Hundreds more under Public Order Act
You don't hear about most because "UK citizen arrested for offensive tweet" stopped being newsworthy years ago.
You're using the word "incitement" to equate UK thought policing with legitimate US restrictions on speech that creates immediate danger. That's like defending China's censorship because "every country bans fraud."
The definitions matter. The UK criminalizes hurt feelings. The US criminalizes immediate threats to public safety.
And here you're getting in on the dishonesty.
How many of those were examples of "hurt feelings" and not "put a whole lot of foreigners at risk of their lives" or any of the other classes of "online posts"? We don't know because in their rush to say "the UK's arresting 30 people a day for posting things online", the Economist didn't bother breaking that down.
> NONE of these would meet Brandenburg's standard in the US.
None of them happened in the US so that's irrelevant. My misunderstanding of the precedent around incitement isn't central to my point.
Are we really going to have to have the "shouting fire in a crowded theatre" conversation?
I think there is some nuance to the conversation about this woman - but you are avoiding it with incredible agility.
Both are technically correct. People who want to threaten to assassinate the president more often will call it "arrested for an online post". People who think assassination threats are bad and think it should happen less often call it "arrested for threatening assassination". The former group are currently much louder and their propaganda has worked.
> The tendency to police—literally—what people are saying has been encouraged and enabled by not just this Government but their predecessors. The Malicious Communications Act 1988 and the Communications Act 2003, specifically Sections 1 and 127, give the police the power to arrest individuals for what they say online. On average, 30 people are arrested daily. In 2014, under the coalition Government, something called non-crime hate incidents were introduced—words uttered that are not yet criminal in themselves but which the police should officially record none the less and hold against people. Since 2014, more than 133,000 such incidents have been recorded; that is more than 13,000 each year. Some of those who have had their names recorded in police files are children whose words were taken down when they were below the age of criminal responsibility and may be held against them for the rest of their lives. The innocence of youth has been replaced with the presumption of guilt. https://hansard.parliament.uk/lords/2025-07-17/debates/F807C...
I though it could not be true, but actually it is...WTF?
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/E-10-2025-0022...
There is "forbidden speech" (around lying about Holocaust related topics and insulting people online) and I think it's a good thing in total. You spew out the worst of the worst on the internet you should be able to be held accountable
WAHAT?! Are we making up new terms for "someone offended me online and since I feel threatened I call it terroristic"?
Actual threats are already legally defined and punished. So is terrorism.
So it's either terrorism or it's not, and it's either a threat or it's not.
https://archive.ph/xBtFI#selection-3249.145-3249.167
A spokeswoman for Leicestershire police said crimes under Section 127 and Section 1 include “any form of communication” such as phone calls, letters, emails and hoax calls to emergency services. “They may also be serious domestic abuse-related crimes. Our staff must assess all of the information to determine if the threshold to record a crime has been met. “Where a malicious communications offence is believed to have taken place, appropriate action will be taken. Our staff must consider whether the communication may be an expression which would be considered to be freedom of speech. While it may be unacceptable to be rude or offensive it is not unlawful — unless the communication is ‘grossly offensive’.
So... I dunno, neither option is good.
that's normal
Reminder that incitement is a crime in the USA too and there's nothing in the constitution that says it's okay just because it's on twitter not irl.
So far every story ive seen about arrest has been pretty cut and dry, they were blatantly hitler level racist, homophobic, or calling for others to attack people for their protected characteristics (eg race or sex).
Edit: why disagree?
UK law in this regard is far from perfect but this thread is mainly uninformed knee-jerking.
edit: Don't shoot the messenger.
So I've stopped buying UK products and services (eg raspberry pi) and don't consider traveling there anymore. Just like I'm doing now with the US although the latter is more difficult to do.
On the other point, while you can of course boycott anything for whatever reasons you want for as long as you want, you do realise that the UK has a different government now. One that opposed Brexit, and has already signed agreements for closer cooperation with the EU. I still boycott Dyson because of his support for Brexit, but boycotting an entire country because of the actions of a former government that is now in opposition seems a bit pointless.
Like I said elsewhere, it's like with the US, the trust is just gone. Besides, the tories will come back sooner or later (or worse, reform UK). They're not gone.
I'm not going to switch back and forth. Maybe if they play nice for a decade or so I'll change my mind.
The government says the individual thought they were sending a list of about 150 names, not the whole set.
Meanwhile the Taliban have been taking revenge: https://pressway.org.uk/news/300408-hunt_for_tranclators_tal...
This is why authorization matters. Don't send the spreadsheet; send a link to it, because e-mail doesn't implement authorization. Then you can revoke access at any time, and even prevent accidents by setting up access rules and monitoring at the org level.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/7/17/how-were-identities...
Regardless, the EU is also pushing for the same stuff.
This is extremely ironic (“Americans’ privacy” basically does not exist), but I won't look a gift horse in the mouth.
Probably well deserved to them if it was not contagious in Europe at the moment.
That being said, the crazy thing about this law and the other ones similar is this:
Under the terms of the legislation, recipients of such a notice are unable to discuss the matter publicly, even with customers affected by the order, unless granted permission by the Home Secretary
I really find that stunning that it is so widely accepted. The former german Stasi would probably have been proud of all the parlementaries in US, UK and Europe that allowed such things.
That has absolutely nothing to do with it. This was an act of parliament spearheaded by the house of commons which is entirely democratically elected. The UK has no one but themselves to blame for this.