Two-tier encryption in the UK
macanorak.com
macanorak.com
I am judging by a simple fact, that "please confirm your age" screen is now mandatory during the iPhone setup in all countries, and in some it's behind a KYC. I have a strong opinion that this is insane. And once they let the foot in the door - there is no closing it.
Any other invasive privacy/encryption interventions from the government only affects their users, not their money, so they cave without issues.
That's not how to use "pearl clutch". And the UK doesn't do that, and it isn't very free or open, except in the deranged mind of Kier Starmer[0]. Classic liberalism in the UK has long given way to regulation of speech, proud conformity, state dependency, and all the other things that are hallmarks of people who treat the state as a surrogate parent.
[0] https://uk.news.yahoo.com/starmer-defends-uk-commitment-free...
The CCP would like nothing more than everyone living in a democracy saying they're just as oppressed as those living in China. Then their own citizens might abandon such foolish notions as human rights.
We should point out the hypocrisy of our governments but not by using that hypocrisy to minimize China's human rights abuses.
If you look at the treatment of pro-Palestine movements in the West, Flock cameras, Palantir contracts, age verification mandates, encryption 'front door' requests, clamping down on whistleblowers etc. then it seems to me that we're heading where China is pretty fast and that the West definitely wants to be where China is, just without the high speed trains.
What I am dismayed by in discussions like this is how simplistic they are i.e. China bad, West good so don't compare.
The collective West just assisted a genocide of an occupied population of people, so when is it going to be 'as bad'? My guess is never because people here want to feel superior over China without actually doing anything for it.
I wouldn't be surprised if you tried to come up with all sorts of excuses why the West is not responsible for Israeli actions in Gaza, it's not a genocide etc. without pausing for a second to realize the Chinese also have plenty to say about what you object to them doing not being authoritarian.
> What I am dismayed by in discussions like this is how simplistic they are
Once you really notice the anti-china framing literally everywhere in media, it is really hard for it all not to become meaningless propaganda. It's itself no different from state control just because it's private media because that private controls the state. We aren't allowed a clear eyed view of china, only a carefully curated antagonistic one. But they aren't our enemies at all, it's absurd how obvious that is, the west is the aggressor, not china.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houses_are_for_living,_not_for...
Even the Uyghurs?
I am not aware of a country where that's not true to some extent. But I can't see i.e. [1] happening in the West.
1 - https://www.reuters.com/legal/transactional/china-tax-crackd...
Apple is, from a purely practical standpoint, more a Chinese operation than an American one.
Additionally, the humans who make all of the iPhones and iPads are Chinese people, subject to Chinese law. Apple has to do exactly what the CCP wants, at least for now. They are desperately trying to ramp up phone production in India, but there is huge expertise at Foxconn that isn’t in India as yet.
Not quite.
The request to confirm age is there, but actually completing it isn't mandatory (though granted, it does leave an 'alert' thingy on your phone settings saying you haven't finished setting it up).
They obvioualy never ever resisted anything except its a good PR stunt.
We are quickly heading to a world where governments want us to KYC everything, and we saw with the Revolut breach what happens when very, very bad people gain access to our private data.
Even though they have zero presence in a country.
I'm generally okay with "how old are you?" without KYC and changeable later. It just allows apps and websites to display age-appropriate content.
It's a foot in the door. Once this question exists, the next logical one is "prove it".
But anyway it's not really the same thing until and unless governments start making motions to collect a legal name. And even then it still provides some general utility to the user which providing an age doesn't (unless you're setting up the device for a child ofc).
The EU digital id, ncluding the age verification part is (unless they fixed it already) limited to hardware attested, non-rooted, not-unlocked androids and apples for now. If you want to jerk off to porn, you're basically mandated to buy an american device (well, you will be, unless they fix it).
iCloud already protects sensitive categories of data (like Passwords, Health data, Messages in iCloud, etc) with end-to-end encryption by default.
Except that there is a footnote in Apple's security document where they confirm that Messages in iCloud is not end-to-end encrypted if you don't enable ADP and have iCloud Backup enabled (which is probably most users):
Standard data protection: When iCloud Backup is enabled, the keys to your backups are secured in Apple data centers. If you use both iCloud Backup and Messages in iCloud, your backup includes a copy of the Messages in iCloud encryption key to help you recover your data.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/102651
So, there is always a backup of Messages in iCloud accessible to Apple and thus (US?) law enforcement, unless you enable ADP and the people you communicate with also use ADP.
WhatsApp is similar by the way. Unless you enable E2E backups, they end up in iCloud/Google Drive backups and are only encrypted at rest. Of the major messengers, I think only Signal completely opts out of iCloud backups and have their own real E2E-encrypted backups.
Even most technical people I talk to do not know this and don't have ADP enabled.
There are a lot of weak defaults like that.
Apple has moved more things into the bucket of "we do not have the keys for this" over time, but pretending that this isn't a tradeoff for the common customer is disingenuous. That's why ADP exists, so that those who want to make a different tradeoff can do so.
Commenters on HN tend to be technically savvy and tend to want the defaults to be tailored to a technically savvy customer base. That's fine, but that's not a real representation of all of the smartphone users out there, and in this case Apple is directly offering the choice that they usually get knocked for taking away.
It should be possible to force your messages to be excluded from backup even by recipients. Otherwise it's just for show when it comes to real life.
Not all your data, just the data exchanged with that person.
But how could you force this? They could always copy it or whatever. Yes, I know, defaults.
But this would then need to be somehow enforced on the other side, right? Like preventing copying, or screenshotting, etc. And in that case, see the HN thread the other day about applications messing with these functions and how people want their devices to be theirs and not controlled by some third party.
You gave the answer yourself. If the person you are writing with has E2EE enabled for message backups then just exclude that chat from backups on your end or enable E2EE for that chat. That means if you take the restore route without having access to the keys that conversation will not be restored.
You could even let people overwrite that setting. Preventing screenshots or copying has nothing to with this. Apple is claiming that message are end to end encrypted when in reality their defaults are set so that they are not. That is a lie and al they would need to do to change that is to change those defaults.
One of the few good things about WhatsApp is that Meta can very credibly claim that they can't access the backups (as they're not stored by Meta). Meta holds the encryption key & Google/Apple hold the backups, so at least you now have deal with two entities to get the data.
I don't think without forcing more customers to loose data (e.g. by requiring them keeping an encryption pin/key) it's possible to perform backups in a (much) better way.
I have full confidence that the industry would be quick to innovate if they were forced to, but that's not in their interest nor the government's interest.
Here's a simple one: Build an open standards-based system where users choose their backup provider and let them decide whether they prefer to have full control over the encryption keys or whether they want them to be managed by a third party. Educate them so that they can at least try to make an informed decision. Warn them about the risks and jurisdictions of built-in providers.
If someone wants to continue using their device as-is? Cool, 2 taps and they're done.
Do they want to store all of their app backups on their NAS? Make it as easy as switching your default browser.
WhatsApp performs (on Android) backups inside a normal directory. You can just backup it via e.g. Syncthing, which I've done in the past.
It doesn't get much more standards based. Strongly pushing users to deviate from the standard flow IMHO risks them quickly choosing poorer options (e.g. a free, dubious, online hoster). At least with the current setup, the "easy option" is quite safe in terms of not loosing data and very low risk that anyone apart from you and governments with lawful access ever accesses the data.
> At least with the current setup, the "easy option" is quite safe in terms of not loosing data and very low risk that anyone apart from you and governments with lawful access ever accesses the data.
The backups would still be encrypted and you could even have Apple/Google hold onto the key (if you wanted to), but if the data was stored elsewhere then neither party could access it unilaterally.
There is an iCloud option on Signal. It's on by default - is that Apple or Signal's doing? - but yes, iCloud can be turned off and Signal have their own e2e backup, if you want to back up. Also a paid option.
That's a very user-unfriendly place to be. Most users won't understand why their data is gone, become unhappy, and distrust their devices to safely store their data. It's not even about buying more Apple products at that point - it's just literally reinforcing the stigma that "I can't understand tech, it's too complex".
You can't be security-maxxing and user-experience-maxxing at the same time. I do like Apple's approach which at least gives you the option.
Yes, because Apple knows the key, they can yield your cleartext data to law enforcement or whoever they authorise, but that is implied in the trust model, it isn't kept a secret or done dishonestly. A backdoor would is a devious or dishonest mechanism to siphon data, which nothing of the sort is happening here, because the trust model is transparent to the user.
The UK is a minor footnote. They can afford to lose it if push came to shove, but for now they're willing to make conciliatory gestures.
Maybe Apple should withdraw all encryption support from all UK government accounts? The Prime Minister can use a Huawei or some chunky thing from a military contractor.
Especially since big tech is steaming ahead to mandating passkeys that only they are allowed to control/backup. Not long until all governments could intercept your passwords to all services.
Apple should withdraw from the UK until the UK government learns to respect encryption and privacy.
I'm a Brit and I've advocated that Apple pull out of the UK over this. It annoys me that these companies seemingly have no principles and will just comply with our government's authoritarian demands. As a citizen there's nothing I can do, so it's really annoying that those who could be doing something choose to do nothing for a little extra profit.
- Which party do we vote for if we don't want the government to keep pushing digital id?
- Which party is committing to stopping facial recognition trials at London Underground stations?
Conservatives and Labour both push for the same things. With Reform's anti-immigration stance, I wouldn't bet on them finding some magical solution that doesn't involve even more demands for constant identity verification to prove you're allowed to be here.
Since last year, you now can't register a company in the UK without having your face scanned. Face scans are also now a very common requirement to open a bank account, get a tech job, buy a property, rent a property. I don't recall being asked to vote on that?
If you vote Democrat next election, will the US stop taking the fingerprints of every visitor upon entry?
All the political parties are completely apathetic about these sorts of issues.
The notion of democracy is used to justify and legitimise things that people don't get to vote on.
it is?
"
Unfortunately this first phrase is not strictly true in the sense that UK customers have their e2ee secrets exposed under common use cases, without requiring a passcode. My copresenter and I published some research at DEF CON 34 this year showing how the e2ee data is particularly vulnerable when ADP is off. Overall, people that do not work with extraction capabilities are currently over-estimating the strength of apple's e2ee and encryption in general. The platform security whitepaper documentation is insufficient on transparency and there are a number of best practices Apple is not following to better meet the e2ee claims they currently advertise.
I would hope to see Apple pull out of the UK market over this, and certainly to stop selling Apple devices to the UK government and to remove the UK government entities from Apple services.
Think different.
Don't be Evil.
Works better. Plays better
Where did that all go? Same place as the Christmas bonus and empathy above middle management.
Tim's public displays for privacy would be a perfect cover story for a gagged backdoored device.
Not likely the case in 2015 Apple nor probably even now, but perhaps a technique for the future or elsewhere to watch out for.
I disagree, I think it's 100% Apple to do that.
Could I flash coreboot/libreboot, (mostly) disable IME, get opensource firmware for every peripheral, and get a chain of custody for every part from boule to finished part? perhaps, but this is not realistic for most people.
You're making a long list of assumptions that are not true. Incremental, improved privacy offered by apple over something like Windows is a significant improvement for most people.
Going to court is the pretty good "put up or shut up", idk what else you are expecting here.
PS: If you think the British gov is authoritarian.. well, you might not know what the term means and/or anything about the spectrum of governments operating today or in the past.
The British government is certainly not as authoritarian as those in China or Russia, but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s still terrible and restricts people’s rights. For example, you can be detained for as long as they want if you refuse to unlock your encrypted device.
Supose you live in USA, your chickens have a list of laws, those laws apply to USA. If you try to sell those chickens in UK or Europe you'll find that your company will not be allowed to operate, and if you continue someone will go to jail.
Maybe digital products have an easy way out, but apple is not digital and they may need to find a way to comply.
Can Apple afford to lose the UK market? Almost certainly yes -- it's a fairly minor global player. Can the current UK government afford to deal with the massive fallout of banning all Apple products right now? That might be, as Sir Humphrey Appleby would say, a very courageous move.
In other words, Apple could simply state that in order to protect their users they cannot and will not do this, and will withdraw from the market rather than comply. That puts the onus on the UK government to either put up or shut up.
It would be fascinating to see how this would play out. Would "think of the children" and "OMG, terrorists!!" win against, "but I still want my iProducts"?
We don't want it the other way around; companies placed outside the borders doing and selling whatever they want without a care. So we end up in a negotiation.
Apple choose to maliciously comply; subtly revealing the TCN, giving all UK users notices about what their government demanded of them to encourage public outrage, and push on the correct parts of the UK government that has their interest in mind.
They can do both of things. There's no law against leaving a country for not respecting human rights like privacy and encryption.
No, but there is a cost.
It may actually be illegal in US law for Apple to leave the UK market for ideological reasons. Public companies are beholden to shareholders and can be sued for not acting in their interest (fiduciary duty, Delaware General Corporation Law). (I loathe these laws, but that's a separate discussion entirely.)
So sure they _can_, but at a cost that strikes the option from the cards entirely.
It's almost as wild as when during the pandemic "lockdown", planes had to take off, burn tonnes of fuel and land empty some minutes later at the same airport, because there's some fucking law about landing spots and how they'd be lost if that bullshit wasn't done.
Before the COVID restrictions, airlines were required to use their allotted spots at least 80% of the time.[6] During the pandemic, the European Commission temporarily suspended Europe's airport slot rule for a short period.[citation needed] Due to travel restrictions, many flights were cancelled or had limited capacity, which made it difficult for airlines to fulfill all the requirements for possessing an airport slot. The suspension of the slot rule was reinstated in October 2021. After the slot rule was reinstated, the rule only required European airlines to use 75% of their flight slots for the winter season.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_flight_%28commercial_avi...
Also if you do revert account to UK you will get a warning that you either need to disable ADP or lose access to iCloud features.
Unlike Android there are way more hassle in installing iOS apps under different accounts with different regions. On Android I just have 5 diffetent accounts with different billing countries and it just work.
Also AFAIK iCloud family features dont work cross-region.
From what I remember it uses a combination of things like your current GPS location, your SIM cards reported country and more to determine what country you're really in to restrict certain features.
So it's not as simple as swapping your location in settings, or even traveling to somewhere in the EU, theres a certain sticky-ness to what your device thinks is your current country.
Edit: bit more info on eligibilityd here https://theapplewiki.com/wiki/Eligibility#eligibilityd
This is not one. Nobody (within 2%) gives a stuff.
Most people's concerns are with the cost of living, and housing. Same as most European countries.
Within my friend group, no one cares about Apple because none of us use Apple.
Only disadvantage that you will need to pay fot services via US gift cards as you need US bank cards otherwise.
AFAIK you cant just assign non-US bank card to a billing on US Apple account. At least it was the case before and at least for purpose of switching account region.
Thus you use USD gift cards since they easy to buy.
Has the UK started attacking any open source E2EE projects yet?
Apple's control over iOS is the main reason I prefer GrapheneOS so much over it. You get amazing privacy and security without sacrificing control. GrapheneOS has said they won't introduce age verification and a backdoor they obviously won't implement.
crypto has a lot of theoretical value, but in practice people only really think of crypto when they want to tap into shadow economy.
I do not deny that this technology will be instrumental to network communities, provided we are ever allowed to form such. I do not deny that offline POSes and fully offline tap-to-pay may become a possibility if an existing fiat currency adopts crypto as one "interface" among traditional banking, Apple/Google Pay, and cash. (this, by the way, would be incredible in Ukraine - right now it's power off, and you can't use your bank for offline purchases.)
in practice it's only really shadow economy. at this point it's not even a speculative asset of some notable value
western governments are moving into more mass surveillance, more copyright (except for AI companies) and closed off platforms, more attempts to control what we do online but also in the outside world. all in the name of safety and security but for some reason all of it benefits corrupt billionaires and power mad cops. anonymous payments are one thing that can help us fight back.
https://www.nationalcrimeagency.gov.uk/what-we-do/crime-thre... for plebs, FCA for banks.
but bitcoin isn't anonymous, each coin and transaction is traceable, so its a terrible tool for money laundering.
no one writes a fresh C99 project in a 2000s Visual Studio with whatever formatting was the most trendy back then anymore.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/steveforbes/2025/09/09/people-a...
You gotta stay on-topic. You keep coming up with random things to compare to that make no sense to anybody but you. Who said it was legal to say "kill the king"?
Imagine if we jailed every gay person the moment they had a gay thought. How legal do you think being gay would be now?
My opinion is that free-speech absolutism is a policy position that causes much more harm than good, and which erodes social cohesion. There should be perpetual debate about where we as a society accept where the line is between speech which is allowed and that which is disallowed.
And to wit, on the tea party analogy: how's that working for the US now?
Why do you talk like that?
Are you one of the redditors that has been invading this heterodox environment.
>There's a spectrum of aggressive speech, ranging from
Is sufficient and much less cringe.
It’s why the US has such a problem with gun control and laws.
I could argue everyone should have guns, and it’s just bad people, right?
Let me give it a go; Switzerland has higher gun homicides than the UK.
They're dragging grannies off to prison just for holding up signs, and literally accusing them of supporting terrorism.
For example, the USA maintains a list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations, and penalities for providing support to those organisations are rather more severe than the in the UK.
Whether or not Palestine Action should be proscribed is a different matter - their most serious action to date has been simply damaging military aircraft. Personally, I'd tend to say that proscription is too harsh a response for property damage with no violence against a person.
I guess in the US that anyone doing something similar would simply have been killed, rather than their organisation being banned. That's not exactly great either!
No, that's actually the heart of the matter.
Palestine Action is not a terrorist organization. Full stop. This isn't even arguable.
Labeling them a terrorist organization and then arresting anyone who expresses support for them is a massive abuse of terrorism laws and an attack on the very heart of freedom of speech.
They called PA a terrorist organization, which is an insult to everyone's intelligence.
Then they carried out mass arrests of people protesting that decision.
Democracies don't do that.
But I dislike even more that we decide that the solution to it is to pass laws prohibiting speech, and even more that the ones in charge of passing those laws are very incentivised to prohibiting criticism to themselves or their policies or their ideologies.
Everyone here subconsciously understands that most laws are only intended to apply to people who regularly cause problems, and that creates an unjust system, especially when “causing problems” starts to include political activity.
The line gets s lot blurrier when you call fo arson and someone acts on it and burns down a building. Should you be liable for the actions of the third party that burnt down the building? Imho there's some responsibility to be held, yes, despite you only calling for it.
But I wouldn't want anybody to wield the power to legally shut down other people. The amount of abuse that can generate in the wrong hands is Tremendous (see what I did there?)
> The wife of a conservative politician was sentenced to 31 months in prison for what police said was an unacceptable post.
What did she say? The article does not elucidate.
Inciting violence for example is not legal. I believe spaces around abortion clinics are also to be free from demonstrations. US free speech absolutists seem to vehemently disagree until you say something unkind about Charlie Kirk or ICE.
The low point might be quoting Elon Musk. This is true in any context, but in particular here. The scandal is real, but none of it is about people being arrested for non-politically-correct speech.
There’s plenty of otherwise real stuff to poke the UK about.
> Mass deportation now, set fire to all the fucking hotels full of the bastards for all I care, while you’re at it take the treacherous government and politicians with them. I feel physically sick knowing what these families will now have to endure. If that makes me racist so be it
[0] https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Connolly...
> “Kill those motherfuckers. Let the streets soak in their red, capitalist blood, dude.” - Hasan Piker on landlords
I don't think that statement would go down too well here, but even then context is very important for incitement to violence. Considering people were and did set fire to hotels I think it was worthwhile investigating.
A guy Hasan didn't like got shot in the neck during a public debate. A pair of Jewish embassy workers were gunned down while walking to a museum. A health insurance company CEO was shot outside of a hotel. I could go on.
In the UK there was an attempted murder when someone attacked a protestor burning a Koran, but luckily the UK authorities convicted the victim of the attack with "asking for it"[1] so justice was served.
[1] https://www.gbnews.com/news/london-muslim-man-spared-jail-tu...
The victims fine was overturned and the attacker was convincted, justice system working as intended: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c9v7wlj3pr2o
Hasan is still not British.
When the context is altered it suddenly becomes worthy of prosecution? I don’t think that’s fair, by holding or stating an opinion you do not induce its outcome.
1. Holding up a sign offering help to any women being coerced into an abortion is illegal. 2. Standing silently on the road near one can be illegal. 3. parking a car with a bumper sticker near one can be illegal.
The whole paragraph about Musk and rape gangs is nonsense, of course. The biggest rape gang ever convicted in the UK was entirely white. Musk and his ilk only care about rape when the rapists are not white. On average immigrants are slightly less likely to commit sexual assaults (obviously averaging across many different groups).
> What did she say? The article does not elucidate.
She called for hotels housing asylum seekers to be burned. I think she is a nasty racist but I also think the sentence was excessive and I am not convinced it was a serious incitement to violence (and that was not what she was convicted of).
> US free speech absolutists seem to vehemently disagree until you say something unkind about Charlie Kirk or ICE.
Not American, and I entirely support the right of anyone to make unkind comments about anyone else. You are right that many people apply different standards to their own side, but right wing Americans are are from alone in that.
They only care when the rapists are coming from outside the UK, and being protected by the authorities.
>>On average immigrants are slightly less likely to commit sexual assaults (obviously averaging across many different groups).
I think that is called picking your sample carefully. No-one is worried about EG the Chinese or the French.
The emphasis on 'rape gangs', 'immigrants' and 'asylum seekers' isn't just objectively untrue, it's cynically manipulative. It's fundamentally a toxic and calculated form of marketing and branding.
And also a cynical distraction from - for example - the Epstein story and Musk's appearances in it.
There was a lot of this around Brexit. Many supporters voted to 'stop them coming over here'.
The government then ramped up immigration - a lot. For some reason the press failed to report this.
The last time it worked like that was in the 1970s. You can travel and move anywhere you want but you can't legally work, rent a state owned apartment, get social benefits or send you kids to public school unless you get a stamp from the local authorities. It's the same as migrant workers anywhere else.
Of course it's corrupt and unfair and they should stop doing it but "can't leave your area" is a big exaggeration.
[0] https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/R-v-Lucy...
Pretty sure she called for the murder, by arson, of asylum seekers although the article missed that bit out.
Stories like this quickly put to rest the idea that everyone who gets arrested must actually deserve it. The bar for posting content that violates the law is very low.
There was also the tragic story of the Cambridge professor who was completely unqualified and had a fake life story. When journalists would get close to the story he would report them to the police for harassment to spike the stories.
That's textbook intimidation, which in certain cases is a crime in the UK, and even some US states. You can also do it offline, for example, by sending a letter to the victim containing a photograph of the front of their house, and a photograph of you firing guns. The implication is pretty straightforward and doesn't even need to be stated: "I have guns and I know where you live. Pay me that money you owe me or I might use them." That implication is still there, for the victim, even if you add surface text like "Hey everyone look at these cool things!"
Only _after_ he was arrested, and the police went looking around his house for guns... did he admit that the pictures were taken overseas, he doesn't actually own the guns. And yet that's what the article leads with, like it was a known fact from the get-go and those silly-billy police knew that but went looking for them in the UK anyway.
This article is a great lesson in how to mislead without saying anything untrue.
His own words in a different article make the reason for the arrest clear:
https://nypost.com/2025/12/04/us-news/british-man-says-he-wa...
> “The arrest was based on two separate social media posts,” he said. “One was the photo of myself with the shotgun, [...] And the second one was my LinkedIn banner at the top of the page.”
> “I used the photo my business partner took on his premises as a header photo on LinkedIn with the intention he would look at that and go, ‘Why’s this guy posting that? I’d better call him and find out rather than dodging me’ as it had done for months,” he said.
EDIT 2: for avoidance of doubt, he did three days in a row of LinkedIn blog posts, where
1) his PFP at the time (shown in the top-right corner) was a picture of the business premises
2) the text of the post talked about the "delinquent client"
3) the post ended with a no-context-given picture of him posing with guns
Example: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jonrichelieu-booth_jonthehash...
EDIT: and your second example is also dangerously misleading. Jason Arday (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jason_Arday) and/or his university reported 2 professors and 1 journalist to the police, pretending their requests for comment on his plagiarism were harrassment. For all three reports, police chose to take no action (nonetheless it still had a chilling effect on speech). What spiked the story is that Jason Arday and/or his university got very expensive reputation lawyers Carter-Fuck to send a C&D to the journalist's newspaper, promising expensive litigation if they published the story. That is what spiked the story, not intimidation via false harassment claims. Expensive lawyers making baseless threats work equally well in the US and UK to chill legal speech, it's not a policy issue.
> A week later, on August 23, the officers returned and arrested him on suspicion of possessing a firearm with intent to cause fear of violence and another allegation of stalking related to a photograph of a house that appeared on his social media.
You’re trying hard to link the two as “textbook intimidation” but the firearm post that triggered this was just a vacation photo and post about his vacation.
You’re being misleading by saying he “posted them to a website” without explaining that what you mean by “website” is that he posted them on his personal social media.
> For all three reports, police chose to take no action (nonetheless it still had a chilling effect on speech).
Incorrect to say the police “took no action”. They contacted the journalist and instructed him to desist. The police later admitted it was a mistake to pursue the case. It says all of this in the link you used:
> Arday made a complaint about Grove to the Metropolitan Police, alleging harassment that was affecting his mental health; the police asked Grove to desist from further contact with Arday.[80] Mark Rowley, Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, later said that the complaint about Grove should not have been taken forward.[81]
It’s confusing that you’re trying to claim the police “took no action” when they admitted fault for following through with the complaint and they told the reporter to desist.
> Expensive lawyers making baseless threats work equally well in the US and UK to chill legal speech, it's not a policy issue.
If the expensive lawyers are equal in the UK and US, then that’s not the important point of this story. It’s the part about him engaging the police and the police following through with it.
I also strongly disagree that it’s equivalent in the US. That expensive legal firm would be utilizing the maximum extent of the laws available to them in the UK, which includes the very harassment laws we’re talking about!
You can’t say it’s “not a policy issue” by pointing to literal lawyers who are using the law.
That's not how it works. You get arrested on suspicion, the cops figure out if you actually did it or not, once they know you did it they charge you with counts of actual offences (not suspicions).
> That's not how it works. You get arrested on suspicion, the cops figure out if you actually did it or not, once they know you did it they charge you with counts of actual offences (not suspicions).
Isn’t that literally what the quote, which was from the article, says? It didn’t contain the word “count”. You added that. The quote says he was arrested on suspicion.
This is the quote from the article:
> > A week later, on August 23, the officers returned and arrested him on suspicion of possessing a firearm
You falsely added "[count]" to the quote and then argued about the count, which isn't in the quote.
> The article I linked clearly says he was arrested for one count of stalking and another account of suspicion of possession of a firearm:
It's not a UK speech policing policy issue, the topic of your post. The criminal law doesn't support Arday using false claims of harrassment to deter journalists.
You could say it's a worldwide civil law policy issue in terms of barratry / SLAPPs / cost of litigation / etc. No country, certainly not the US, has sufficient protection for whistleblowers against well-resourced litigants, and it is they (not the UK criminal law) who are successfully chilling speech.
It's the thing we're talking about.
The UK law was used to get police involved and the police told the journalist to desist.
> You could say it's a worldwide civil law policy issue
The fact that lawsuits exist everywhere does not make it equal everywhere.
We're talking about the UK's specific laws.
> There was also the tragic story of the Cambridge professor who was completely unqualified and had a fake life story. When journalists would get close to the story he would report them to the police for harassment to spike the stories.
You don't mention the threat that civil lawsuits pose to speech at all. And yet it was the threat of a civil lawsuit that actually quelled speech here.
You have no evidence that action A ("he would report them to the police for harassment") led to outcome B ("to spike the stories").
Jason Arday did not spike any journalist's story by reporting them for harrassment. He, or his universty, did spike the story by engaging reputation lawyers. He could do that in almost any country, including the US, despite its stronger free speech laws. Unless a US state has an effective anti-SLAPP law, it is very likely all that is needed to shut people up is to threaten a lawsuit they can't afford.
The thing you want to be mad about -- the police unlawfully instructing a journalist not to contact someone -- is a bad thing, is not even legal (i.e. the UK state doesn't actually allow it, let alone condone it), and it had no effect on the journalist. They still wanted their story published. It was the private threat of a lawsuit that spiked it.
As a result getting the police involved is often little more than a slightly awkward chat at the front door where the officers politely ask you to stop being arsehole, but everyone knows the police are a bit limited in what they can actual do. Either because no crime has actually been committed, or because they don’t really have the time to properly investigate even if a crime had been committed.
Actually getting arrested takes some effort. The police really don’t want to deal with all the paperwork and mess that comes afterwards if they can avoid it.
Especially rich to talk about habitual liars when it's a bunch of British press outlets and activists accusing others of being liars.
> 1 The Racism Of It All: It is not news when white men commit academic misconduct. It gets reported in a handful of stories, there’s a bit of media attention, but everyone quickly forgets about the problems.
> 2 Arday Was Definitely Guilty: The second point is somehow even more frustrating. Yes, Jason Arday was hounded by a society that demands different standards for young Black men than white guys. Yes, the amount of scrutiny he received was obviously connected to the colour of his skin. But also, he definitely did plagiarize. And not just a little bit. His work is riddled with clear, obvious, and extensive theft from other published academic papers.
> You do not need to trust race realists or other unpleasant people. Just download the thesis and check for yourself. It is clear that a significant portion of the thesis was copied directly from other people’s work. This is not in doubt, it’s not in question, and the fact that so many people online are arguing that the plagiarism charges are false because a university said so is deeply depressing. It’s arguably the worst case of plagiarism I’ve ever seen.
> Whatever your thoughts on plagiarism, it’s clear that Arday’s work harmed very few people. As he himself said, “I didn't murder somebody”. If he hadn’t been a Black academic and a poster child for diversity at Cambridge university, we’d probably have never known his name.
You sound like one of the Arday Truthers:
> For some of Arday’s supporters, acknowledging that any of the media scrutiny was justified has become tantamount to siding with his “killers.” He is instead a martyr—the victim of a “lynching”—and the inconvenient fact of his fabulism must be tidied away from the virtual shrine. This is an emotional position rather than a rational one, and its very indefensibility makes it a greater demonstration of tribal loyalty. Insisting that the academic was completely innocent, in the face of all the evidence, sends a strong social signal that you hate the right-wing media and care about racism.
> The postmortem airbrushing of Arday’s story also ignores how that story twisted and turned while he was alive. When The Guardian confronted him with the implausibility of some of his tall tales, Arday responded by editing them in real time: Yes, he had once claimed to have run 600 miles in six days, an exceptional feat for an endurance athlete, but what he actually meant was that he took daylong rest breaks in between. Yes, he had claimed to have raised more than £5 million for charity, but actually this was with the help of “many fundraising collectives” whose participants he could not name because they had signed nondisclosure agreements.
As they might say on Reddit, "Everybody Sucks Here". Arday the fabulist and plagiarist, the academic institutions who didn't vet him because they were razzle-dazzled by his bullshit lifestory (then drop him like a stone when their attempts to keep his plagiarism hidden don't work any more), the popular press who are happy to amp up a public shaming for clicks and views, the anti-woke and the racists who say this just confirms what they thought about DEI, and the anti-anti-woke and anti-racists who will deny the bleeding obvious if it makes them appear virtuous to their peers.
Step 1: put out the suggestion that the lies weren't lies
Step 2: don't read the responses
Job done!
EDIT: I'll give you one set of lies. Is it "exaggerated versions of statements" or you just didn't see them?
If I say I won the Nobel Peace Prize for inventing a cure for cancer, and I have no evidence of either, but I insist I did both and make up a lame excuse as to why you can't see my prize (it's away being washed today) or why you can't find my cure (the journal pretended someone else wrote the article because they're all against me, but trust me mate it was really me who wrote it) am I just making "exaggerated versions of statements" in your view?
https://www.theguardian.com/education/ng-interactive/2026/au...
> In a subsequent interview with the Guardian, Arday claimed to have been confronted at his faculty building on two separate occasions by a masked man threatening to harm him if he did not resign, and evading detection both times. On the second occasion Arday said the intruder produced a knife and threatened him with it.
> The Guardian understands that after Arday reported the first intrusion to the university, enhanced CCTV was placed in the faculty and a panic alarm was installed in his office. The professor said he hit the panic alarm during the second confrontation, but that no one responded. It should have triggered an alarm alerting the faculty’s security team, all of whom were present at the time of the alleged incident.
> The intruder was not picked up by CCTV on either occasion and no one in the faculty reported seeing anyone suspicious. Arday did not report either intrusion at the time, telling the Guardian that after the second incident he continued his working day and even conducted a PhD viva for a student less than two hours later.
> He did not inform colleagues that a masked man with a knife was in the faculty building.
> Arday confirmed in an interview with the Guardian that the “mutilated animals sent to his family home” mentioned in the open letter was a severed pig’s head, delivered in a large cardboard box to his parents’ home address in south London. He claimed to have intercepted the package and immediately thrown it away, only telling the police several months later.
> In a subsequent interview he claimed the police investigated, checking with butchers in south London if they had sold a pig, eventually finding one that had sold a “whole hog” on the morning the head was left outside the family home.
> When the Guardian checked those details with the local butchers Arday named, they said no police officer had come in to ask them about a pig. When asked if they were sure, the butcher said “that’s the kind of thing we’d remember”.
> When the details Arday gave about the pig’s head investigation were checked by London’s Metropolitan police, the Guardian was told they were “categorically” incorrect and no investigation had taken place.
> Arday had contacted the Met to lodge a complaint of harassment against Harris after his plagiarism allegations and, because he was based in Plymouth, the case was handed over to Devon and Cornwall police. Correspondence seen by the Guardian confirmed that the force declined to pursue a case against Harris.
> Arday took no photographs of the bullet, the banana, the corrosive substance or the pig’s head. The only other people who saw any of the items were close family members, who told the Guardian Arday had shown them the bullet and the “poison”. Arday could produce no messages from the time in which he discussed any of the items with friends, family, colleagues or the police.
> There are many examples of prominent black figures being intimidated [...] But the abuse and harassment Arday has outlined would be some of the most extreme any academic has been subjected to in the UK. When Arday was asked about his claims by the Guardian, he stood by them. “To be honest with you, I thought you’d just believe me,” he said. “Why would I lie?” He would be jeopardising his career.
A victim under a years long hate campaign by activists getting a bit jumpy or making a false alarm then becoming further fuel to the fire as those stories in turn get blown up is just proving the point. Someone with known mental health history raising a false alarm of a break in then becomes further perpetuation of the story. If security failed to respond to an alarm then that doesn't seem like the fault of the victim but even that is then snuck in as "evidence" in this list. Argument by volume basically summarises this whole thing.
> There are many examples of prominent black figures being intimidated [...] But the abuse and harassment Arday has outlined would be some of the most extreme any academic has been subjected to in the UK. When Arday was asked about his claims by the Guardian, he stood by them. “To be honest with you, I thought you’d just believe me,” he said. “Why would I lie?” He would be jeopardising his career.
Again the implications of some sort of ranking comes from the perpetrators in the media. But nonetheless The guy was hounded to death over several years so it's at least up there a little wouldn't you think unless you think it somehow didn't exist?
I mean, it opens with "It is not news when white men commit academic misconduct." then lists several cases where white men committed academic misconduct and made headlines in mainstream media around the world. Then walks that back with "This sort of massive media storm almost never happens for white academics".
Ultimately it's true that racists amplified the story, and once the story was positioned as being about race/racists that contributed (in part) to its longevity, but I don't see anything in that post to justify the claim that "If Arday had not been a young, successful Black academic, the chances that anyone would’ve looked into his work are low." and especially that "no one would’ve cared."
There was plenty of drama to fuel the media too. The accuser was suspended from the university where he worked, lawsuits were filed to try to bury the story, the police publicly apologized for harassing a journalist, new laws were proposed limiting the freedom of the press, statements were made by high ranking politicians and by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, the accused committed suicide, there was a whole lot going with that situation way beyond the internal academic investigation about plagiarism and race issues. Of course it'd generate more mainstream press than say, a spider biologist who faked research data https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Pruitt (although that was a pretty big story in certain circles)
OP appears to claim that involving the police is the way to get journalists off your tail. It isn't, and it didn't deter either the professors or the journalist. The much more effective way to get journalists off your tail, which OP didn't even mention, is lawyers. But that doesn't let OP rage against UK laws so he went with the bullshit claim instead.
There was absolutely zero media attention at the time police processed Arday's complaint against professor David Harris, in 2023. They closed the complaint without taking action. The professor didn't even know he was being investigated. His colleague Martyn Hammersley then went over Arday's head straight to the faculty. So much for the police getting people off your case!
In the case of the journalist Arday reported in 2025, police again did not arrest or charge him, but they (wrongly, in my opinion) phoned him and asked him not to contact Arday. This had a chilling effect and the police had no legal basis to direct him so. Again, this was long before any 2026 media attention.
It wasn't media attention that saved these people, it was that what they did wasn't illegal. The police shouldn't have given Arday's claims as much merit as they did, but no matter what Arday said, there was no evidence of crime there, it was never going any further than that.
Only once the deets about Arday were leaked by Cambridge faculty to Cofnas and he published them, and the media firestorm begain, did the details of the police phoning the journalist become known, and in reaction to that, the head of the police said that was clearly wrong and should not have happened: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c0rd9y99grzo
In the second case, the person involved was weaponizing the police against a journalist who had uncovered something about a completely unqualified university professor who had a fraudulent background story. The police didn’t do it “randomly”. The professor knew how to use the laws to intimidate and silence his critics (when even the GP comment admits).
Even the police later admitted they should not have gone as far as they did.
But I agree that the law is being weaponised by bad actors, but irrespective of that the police are duty bound to investigate. They take the blame too. It's one of the few jobs everyone else knows how to do better than the people doing it.
In the second case, once again you repeat your nonsense. The chilling effect the police had, a wrong in and of itself, did not put the journalist off publishing.
You can read the journalist's own words right here: https://www.timeshighereducation.com/opinion/i-was-reported-...
> Despite the thoroughness of my investigation, THE did not run the story. While I was personally disappointed, I understood; by this point, Arday’s solicitors had been in touch with THE and it was clear that the story could tie the publication up in months of expensive litigation. Even if we were right – and I stand by my reporting – it would have been ruinously expensive.
You want to say POLICE POLICE POLICE were chilling speech here. Bullshit. It was LAWYERS LAWYERS LAWYERS suppressing the story.
You're the only person in this thread using the phrase "chilling speech" and you keep admitting that they did.
Let me quote you on this topic:
> The chilling effect the police had, a wrong in and of itself,
> In the case of the journalist Arday reported in 2025, police again did not arrest or charge him, but they (wrongly, in my opinion) phoned him and asked him not to contact Arday. This had a chilling effect
> For all three reports, police chose to take no action (nonetheless it still had a chilling effect on speech).
These are all three your own quotes from this thread. The last quote isn't even accurate because the police DID take action in the form of contacting the journalist and telling him to desist.
You're trying to argue that Jason Arday held journalists at bay by reporting them for harrassment, therefore the UK speech laws are bad because they let wrongdoers avoid scrutiny by making harrassment claims against their scrutinisers. That is incorrect. There was only one journalist, and Arday held him off by engaging private lawyers. The harrassment reporting did not stop the journalist.
Arday falsely reported two people for harrassment to the Metropolitan Police, one professor in 2023 and one journalist in 2025. The (Devon and Cornwall) police declined to pursue the 2023 case. The (Metropolitan) police investigated the 2025 case for four months, then decided to take no action (no charge, arrest or caution). The investigating officer phoned the journalist to tell him the case was closed (they can do that). The fact that there had even been an investigation caused a chilling effect:
https://www.timeshighereducation.com/opinion/i-was-reported-...
> But were my enquiries grounds for a criminal complaint? That was hugely troubling to me as a reporter who specialises in examining issues of research integrity and ethics.
I'd say that even in the professor's case, it could've had a chilling effect. If the police had interviewed anyone related to the professor, there could've been leaks and/or career-stunting rumours.
The officer requested the journalist not contact Arday. That's overreach, and shouldn't have happened.
The head of the Metropolitan police admitted the investigation should not have even been started. That's not the law at fault, that's shoddy policing: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c0rd9y99grzo
But ultimately, it did not "spike the story". That was 100% on the lawsuit. Both things are bad
From your own link, this was from 2 separate posts. I don't know man, this sounds like an excuse from the company to cause trouble and avoid having to pay the owed money.
Now imagine you owe this guy money, he's admitted in public that he put a picture of your business premises at the top of every blog post he makes on LinkedIn in order to get your attention, and his latest blog posts on the LinkedIn website therefore shows YOUR WORKPLACE and HIM SHOOTING GUNS.
Juxtaposition that he admits he wants you to see.
You can read all three blogposts. Note he has switched out the picture of the workplace (top-right PFP):
1. https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jonrichelieu-booth_jonthehash...
> Top of my agenda Today is getting a follow-up email to the Secretary of State for Business and Trade regarding my delinquent Client
"delinquent client" and no mention of why there's a picture of him with guns or where it was taken
2. https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jonrichelieu-booth_jonthehash...
> I am disappointed that absolutely nothing has come back from the Secretary of State for Business and Trade (OR his Department) regarding my delinquent Client.. this is concerning as despite continuing to owe me
"delinquent client" who "owes" him and once again, picture of him shooting guns apropos of nothing, nothing explaining where he is, whose guns they are, just him shooting guns. Guess he just likes to shoot guns while talking about his "delinquent client" who "owes" him and he's put a picture of the delinquent client's premises as his PFP.
3. https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jonrichelieu-booth_jonthehash...
> Today I'll be following up on my message to the Yorkshire Post by calling the Secretary of State for Business and Trade regarding my delinquent Client.. it's become necessary given what the Owner of said Client is currently doing. I'm also going to escalate my concerns to North Yorkshire Police, then I'll grab the Popcorn and see where this goes.
And again no-context gun photo to add to the blog post about his delinquent client
Hopefully you can understand why the guy who owes him money would feel intimidated and call the police, and you can see why there appears to be enough evidence to charge the guy for harrassing the ower, and to arrest him so you can establish if he possesses the guns he has posted himself shooting.
The photos are obviously target shooting. This is a common sport in many countries.
Your argument is that because he wrote long daily updates about what he was doing and included two unrelated things, that he's implying that the guns are for those offhand remarks?
We get getting farther and farther from the real problem, which is that the UK police have been weaponized to respond to people's social media posts about how they make others feel. That's a ridiculously low bar.
From https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/consultant-arrested-posi...
> However, he said that a police officer later visited his home to warn him that concerns had been raised about the post.
> "I was told to be careful what I say online and I need to understand how it makes people feel," he said.
No, I don't understand why he would.
Nothing there was intimidation. Pretending it is intimidation is stretching crudility. The fact that he got arrested over this is straight up nonsense, IMO.
All the posts read like blog-style posts, and there wasn't any aggressive language used there at all. He also mentioned he was meeting with people to resolve the issue through legal means in the posts.
I suspect the owner who owed him money was acting maliciously.
If you're buying that, I've got a bridge to sell you.
Both the police and whoever claimed to be intimidated would/should have known better.
The problem whenever discussion of any of these subjects is that there will be people that are determined to pretend there isn't a problem in the UK with these laws when it is quite clear there is.
This is one of three days worth of posts where he talks about his "delinquent client" and ends with a picture of him and guns (with no explanation of why, where or how him and the guns are related to the body text). He put an image of the business owner's premises as his PFP in the top-right corner, which is now a picture of some people sitting in chairs. The business premises, "delinquent client" body text and gun photos appear on the same page.
Further details: https://www.snopes.com/news/2025/12/01/uk-police-arrest-gun-...
> Today I'll be following up on my message to the Yorkshire Post by calling the Secretary of State for Business and Trade regarding my delinquent Client.. it's become necessary given what the Owner of said Client is currently doing. I'm also going to escalate my concerns to North Yorkshire Police, then I'll grab the Popcorn and see where this goes.
Wait, this is the threat?
I'm bewildered this could be grounds for an arrest. That's pretty scary.
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jonrichelieu-booth_jonthehash...
It's the combination of the paragraph about the 'delinquent client' and the picture of him pointing a gun which could be construed as an implied threat. I don't know if that would hold up legally, but in any case, no charges were brought in the end.
As to why the police did anything at all, the most likely explanation is that once the 'delinquent client' reported the LinkedIn posts, the Police saw a photo of someone using a shotgun who didn't have a shotgun license. Unaware that the photo was taken outside the UK, they probably decided that the combination of an unlicensed firearm and a possible implied threat was worth investigating.
Exactly.
Every time I hear a story of "horrible abuses in UK where people get arrested for talking on the internet" it turns our they intimidated or scammed or bullied someone.
I wonder why people keep lying about it.
What seems to happen on these stories that anything that might be construed as a threat will be, to pretend there isn't a problem with the speech and online laws in the UK.
It very tiring to have people like those on this thread pretend there isn't a huge problem.
No point even arguing with them, it's a lost cause.
Given you got the nationality wrong 2/3 times in this comment section and they weren't bot accounts either, you might want to adjust that number.
You got the political lean wrong at least once as well. This might be the time to adjust your worldview. Empirically it doesn't seem to mesh with reality.
Until this exchange, I hadn't realised I would be doing anyone a favour. I'll have a think about it.
Someone got arrested and intimidated by police because they criticized someone with even only a modicom of authority: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/mar/29/parents-arre...
Imagine getting six police officers sent to your house and spending 11 hours at a police station for causing "disharmony" by disagreeing with how your daughter's school operates in a WhatsApp group. In a sensible country that might've been a phone call or a single officer stopping to chat and defusing the situation if police decided to get involved at all.
* The Police admitted their obvious error and paid £20k in damages: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c4gz1qy30v5o
* This bizarre case has nothing to do with "speech that offends the prevailing political orthodoxy" (root comment).
If you look for examples of the police arresting people for stupid and unjustifiable reasons, you can find them in lots of countries, including the US. For example, here is someone being arrested in Kansas for clapping too loudly during a meeting: https://www.kbtx.com/2026/07/27/teacher-arrested-repeatedly-... It's absolutely right that this sort of thing is reported and it's right for people to be outraged about it. However, I'd be cautious about drawing overly sweeping conclusions about the UK from such cases.
So yes, we might not be so dreadful compared to Hicksville, US or some craphole country like India,but that's a very low bar for the police of a G5 nation.
Absolutely go ahead and make sweeping generalisations about the state of the police in the UK. It's all true (except if anyone claims they are systemically racist, or some other clickbaity nonsense).
In the UK, they can't force you to speak, but not answering questions can be interpreted as evasion / "adverse interference".
They do not need a warrant to search your phone. Not providing them with a PIN can be a separate charge, with up to 2 years imprisonment.
They can hold you up to 36 hrs if the police decide so. Up to 14 days without charge under modern broad "anti terrorism" laws.
Also note the absence of large scale destructive anti-police riots in the UK over the past decade.
As for police killings, you are comparing an event that’s extremely unlikely to happen with an event that’s multiple orders of magnitude more likely. Speech offense prosecutions in UK are more common today than political prosecutions were in post Kruschev Soviet Union. The only reason UK has fewer political prisoners than Soviet Union had is that the sentences are shorter and typically non-custodial.
The UK have about 13,000 arrests per year over social media etc. Without litigating all 13,000 of them for validity, that's about 185 microliberties.
Birth control is about 1-5 micromorts.
So you're 30x more likely to be arrested for a social media post than death by getting out of bed, and 55x more than being killed by police. And it's in the same range as taking birth control.
Realistically, these are population estimates. Your actual risk of dying by police is highly correlated with the number of violent interactions you have with them. If you're a getaway driver or a bank robber vs SW developer, you probably have significantly different risk profiles.
On the other hand, edgy social media posts are potentially much more diffuse across populations.
That's the figure (slightly inflated) for arrests under both the Malicious Communications Act 1988 and Communications Act 2003. That's not reasonably described as arrests for 'social media etc.' It's quite likely the the majority of those arrests have nothing to do with content that people post on social media.
Wasn't there a story about a woman getting put in jail for having spaghetti on a spoon that they thought was drugs? Lost her job?
https://www.syracuse.com/news/2014/09/florida_woman_jailed_s...
Yeah, imagine that. Getting put in jail for a month.
Also I'm not from Florida or the US for that matter.
But you're just peddling false narratives which are easily disproved, which are rampant especially on right wing news sites. So you might not be right leaning, but people who write and share them generally are.
This is completely false and comes from a commonly misrepresented statistic; '30 arrests a day' is plainly the arrests made under section 127 of the Communications Act 2003 and section 1 of the Malicious Communications Act 1988 which includes things like online stalking and harassment. I hope you're just mistaken and not willfully implying that those issues are merely offensive to the prevailing political orthodoxy.
You can argue it's highly improbable that all arrests are over 'hurty words online', definitely – but anyone claiming zero arrests seems improbable too.
I do also feel it's quite convenient that the lack of breakdown allows people to clap back with accusations of encouraging stalking and harassment.
Just very heavily implying it, thinking they're being clever
I think this is the link where the chap asks for legal advice: https://www.reddit.com/r/LegalAdviceUK/comments/1vxkcic/poli...
----
Police have arrested and questioned 3 of my mates from our private WhatsApp group chat. They're asking to speak to me too, but I'm working abroad.
They've all been arrested and had interviews under s127 of the Communications Act.
There's 4 of us in a group chat on WhatsApp where we chat and also make some edgy jokes and stuff. We're two white, an Indian and a black guy who studied at uni together.
All three of them have been arrested and interviewed today. I don't know anyrhing more than this. This info comes from their gf and fiance.
I'm working abroad but I have received a WhatsApp message and attempted call from a UK officer who identified himself wanting to speak to me about an ongoing enquiry into a reported issue.
My mate's fiance says it was reported by another guy's ex who he dumped 4 weeks ago. I'm inclined to believe that as the officer's message said he was acting on a report.
The thing is, we shared a lot of edgy jokes beteen us - but it was literally just the 4 of us in a private fucking chat. Some of the jokes we made were racisr, but they were all banter directed at each other. Others were just taking the piss out of the major news events like saying "Who needs people flying planes when our own shitty buildings just burn themselves down?" about Grenfell.
It's crass, but it's literally just us talking shit in private. These messages arent public or anything.
I can't get through to any of the guys. Is this something the police are actually going to try and prosecute?!
At this point should I just not come home? I'm dual Austrian-British and Austria doesn't extradite to the UK.
How so? Since Austria doesn't (typically) allow dual citizenship.
> Austria doesn't extradite to the UK.
With what guarantee? In 2013 Austria forced the landing of the plane of the Bolivian president on orders from the US because they had intelligence Snowden might be on board.
So if you think Austria will hesitate to ship your ass to the UK if you piss off the wrong elites, just because there's no official bi-lateral extradition agreement, you're kidding yourself. If needed, they'll just make up a spin story that you're some major child molester or something, to justify their actions in the media and reassure the public on why the violation of your rights was justified and they'll never ever do it again to anyone else as long as they behave, pinky promise wink-wink. In short, the people with guns can break the rules at will with little to no accountability.
However, if you want hard evidence what that post was claiming, I can give you a real citation from 2018:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-46106224
> A house linked to an "offensive" video showing a model of Grenfell Tower being burned on a bonfire has been searched by police. Six men [...] were arrested on suspicion of a public order offence and have been released under investigation. A video shared on social media shows a cardboard model of the tower being set alight by a laughing crowd.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-46112026
> Can I be offensive in my own home?
> Basically, yes. [...] if you make offensive comments in your home and they are recorded and posted online, it might be possible that you could be prosecuted.
However, the CPS appealed against his acquittal, and it was quashed in 2021: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-58054431
He was retried in 2022, where this time he pled guilty and was given ultimately a minor slap on the wrist: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-61160971
Ultimately, everyone is happy:
- people who saw the video and were offended by it are happy "something was done"
- the CPS is happy because they gott'im
- the courts are happy because they got paid double
- the guy accused of offending people is happy this multi-year ordeal where the CPS won't stop hounding him until he confesses his guilt is finally over
- MPs are happy they didn't need to change any laws no matter how unreasonable they were
All good, right?
Are we also going to spend years prosecuting someone who mockingly reenacts the sinking of the Titanic? Or is that somehow water under the bridge?
It's political correctness gone mad.
> "By 2017, Grenfell Tower housed a remarkably diverse community. Up to 600 people lived in the building’s 120 flats, representing a rich tapestry of nationalities, ethnicities, and generations. Residents hailed from countries including the UK, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Egypt, Eritrea, Iran, Lebanon, Morocco, and Syria, among others." - https://grenfell.soton.ac.uk/week-1-who-lived-in-the-tower/
> "The Grenfell Tower fire inquiry "must not ignore" the impact of race and poverty on the disaster, a lawyer representing survivors has said. .. The inquiry returned this week after a four-month break due to coronavirus. "The Grenfell fire did not happen in a vacuum," said Mr Thomas in his opening statement. "A majority of the Grenfell residents who died were people of colour."""" - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-53320082
The people in the video didn't upload it to a social media platform like Youtube, they wanted to keep it private to their friends. It would also have been taken down by the likes of Youtube. The only reason this case got to where it did is because the video ultimately reached a wide audience virally by people forwarding it on, and that enough of that audience didn't like it and wanted someone "done" for it, and the state obliged. But nasty, mean, dark, sick, racist, sexist, bigoted, misogynist and all other -ist jokes are told day-in, day-out, between people who like that sort of humour, no matter how much other morally righteous "right side of history" people want that not to happen. You can't stop them. You can only go after scapegoats if such things breach their usual boundaries.
Over 1,500 people died at sea when the Titanic sank, including black, Chinese, Jewish, Turkish, etc. passengers. It was an dreadful fate for each person, and it caused much grief for the victims' families and friends. I'm still going to joke about it, though. "How do you think the unthinkable? With an itheberg."
The state has a century long history of answering that in the positive; under the Criminal Law Act 1977 a person agreeing with another person to do a crime is guilty of conspiracy to commit that crime[1]; section 5 talks about "the offence of conspiracy at common law" which it replaces, including when it does/doesn't apply to "conduct which tends to corrupt public morals or outrages public decency".Further back, the Offenses Against The Person act of 1861 says that encouraging, soliciting, or proposing to any person to murder another person is a misdemanour punishable by imprisonment for life[2].
AFAIK the UK doesn't ban the classic film The Towering Inferno which is about people dying in a burning tower block. The Titanic has no remaining survivors to be offended where the video here was <2 years after the Grenfell Tower fire, and your joke about the Titanic isn't mocking the dying, it's mocking the builder's hubris. So it's more about the "outraging public decency" part.
Even the most free-speechy places have arguments about what free speech is acceptable (classic example: yelling 'FIRE!' in a crowded theatre) and have ideas about free speech, with consequences.
I would rather the UK government had put that effort into earlier holding the tower management company to fixing the problems reported by the fire brigade and the Grenfell Action Group in the years before the fire, and knocking the Council for trying it silence that group for repeatedly reporting fire problems, and of course for the excellent business decisions to save money by using flammable cladding.
[1] https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1977/45/section/1
[2] https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/Vict/24-25/100/section/...
I would rather it didn't. It dangles like the sword of Damocles over a number of acts, and it's very selectively enforced, and really depends on the tastes/mood of the public and or prosecutors. My example with the Titanic was to determine where the outrage is meant to lie; is it in the act of mocking a tragedy or not? Does it matter if the families of the victims are alive or dead, if neither are the intended audience?
It also interferes with what ought to be private, let's say an entirely willing, paying theatreful of Jerry Sadowitz fans enjoying his attempts to offend them in exciting and new ways. A recent development is that Scotland introduced its Hate Crime act, which insisted that even things said inside your own home to your own family could be a hate crime. Legal theorists warned about introducing this, but as per usual the ScotGov didn't listen. On the day it came into force, J.K. Rowling basically said "here's a list of convicted rapist men who think they're women, they aren't women, I fucking dare you to prosecute me for saying that", and the police did nothing. They also did nothing when right-wingers mass reported Humsa Yousaf's "white people" speech for racism. So it's an empty-threat law, on the books to be threatened or used quietly against someone stepping out of line, rather than setting a clear line in the sand as to what's sayable and what's unsayable.
From a legal aspect, another thing that bugs me is this was a private gathering of (presumably) like-minded individuals. That it was filmed and shared among each other should be fine. They could equally have been indoors and swinging or orgying, or something else that harms nobody if it's consenting adults, but would disgust the public at large if spread to them.
If you're then going to nab people for "outraging public decency", and there's no principal tortfeasor, the onus should be on those who spread that video outwith the participants who wanted it kept private, but the liability on each person would be very dilute, and the public who were "outraged" were likely participants in their own victimisation by passing it on themselves. It's not the same as someone intentionally going on social media and uploading it in a prominent place.
I too would rather the UK government spent more time writing regulations about how people safely construct buildings rather than what private individuals do with their time. There's a terrible web of fingerpointing: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c049yvrd5qxo - but my main takeaway was that the privatised certification body, BBA, was hopelessly incompetent, and the French company selling cladding (that they wanted to offload onto the UK because it was illegal to sell it in their own country and they had a large stock of it) took full advantage of that fact. There is plenty more blame to go round, even London Fire Brigade fucked up, but that's the crux of it.
Recently I saw a clip on GB News where one of their analyst said that anyone that opposes a war and/or conscription with Russia will need to put in prison. The show host, Jacob Rees Mogg and Lord Redwood saw nothing wrong with the statements.
None of these people have been in the armed forces and are too old to be called up for conscription.
319 years, 4 months, 3 weeks, 2 days to be exact.
Generally this applies to all governments anyway. The British state is just the most blatant at it currently, as they are losing control.
https://lordslibrary.parliament.uk/select-communications-off...
This is part of what started the death of BBM and proliferation of news via social media. You’d go on Twitter and see all the reports or riots and burning buildings then go to the BBC and… nothing.
All of this is to say that successive British governments, over a span of decades, have been actively destroying freedom of speech and a right to privacy for its citizens.
With AI and the rise of populism combined with the absolute decimation of the average person’s attention span it is going to get a lot worse.
What we have is a lot of people changing the narrative since to discredit the BBC and divide everyone further.
The point at which the BBC started reporting was the same as all other major news outlets: after the point that they just looked daft for not reporting it.
I know this as my videos of the riots took my little blog from 50 - 100 views a day to thousands per minute…
There is speech and there are consequences for speech.
If I incite or state that I am going to commit violence, stalking, rape or murder, should I face consequences? Yes. That's what is happening.
There are outlying cases which will be used to discredit this perspective but reality is there are a hell of a lot of very not nice people out there making active threats and inciting hatred and violence.
And everyone gets their day in court.
Also, shit like, "Authorities arrested a grandmother for silently holding a sign outside an abortion clinic that said “Coercion is a crime, here to talk, if you want.”" - Yeah, take your fucking signs away from people trying to get an abortion. It's harassment.
And, to top if off, you're American. I'm not sure how you can call our government the "bad guys".
Some delusional "save the children" anti-privacy extremist doesn't have the political capital or the technical insight to convince the government to create a law to issue secret gag orders.
People with good civil intention don't just propose the idea, or get the momentum, to institutionalize such mechanisms.
So who are the major influencers, and their thoughts, for pushing this?
I think you can just start with:
1. Campaigning on behalf of a worthy victim, or against a terrible enemy, is a good way to become more socially powerful. Most people are less willing to disagree with you when you do this because it risks introducing motive uncertainty - are you criticising the means because you truly object to the means, or are you criticising the means because you don't support the worthy victim or oppose the terrible enemy? This is a socially disadvantageous position to argue from.
2. Exploited children are worthy victims, and drug traffickers and terrorists are terrible enemies.
3. Therefore, policies that nominally protect children or oppose drug traffickers and terrorists are socially advantageous, and arguing for them is likely to increase your social power.
The means here are disproportionately likely to be done in a concealed way if the underlying policy is not broadly popular, independently of the effects it has on localised politcal arguments. Many people, myself included, don't support every political cause that helps a worthy victim or opposes a terrible enemy.
Social pressure is harder to apply at a distance, so the reality-warping effects of motive uncertainty are less powerful, so it makes sense that it's kept to private pressure groups and lobbying.
You won't be criticizing your boss/mayor/president/local politician/whoever, if you have to do it from an account tied to your own name. Having everyine install a digital ID on their phones (to prove they're old enough to jerk off to pornhub) is the first step, the "real name" policy is the next. The encryption ... well, one of the separate steps inbetween those two.
For the last 25 years certain western governments (especially the US and UK/5 eyes) have focused on control over democracy. They've sold it as protections, defense, safety, etc. It's the opposite. Control, power, abuse, and the votes/$$$ to ignore their constituents. This is usually lead by conservative or far right parties who have zero history with abusing power and control (ex McCarthyism in the US).
We live in a world of surveillance. Even if most of that is to market you ads and extract capital it's still degrading and less safe for anyone but the core in group(s).
the governments themselves. left, right, or center, their number one priority is to maintain their power.
it amuses me immeasurably when the useful idiots in the West cheer on the policies of China and Russia. think of the children, think of the terrorists, think of the racists, think of the disinformation, blah blah blah. there are a myriad excuses but only one true goal -- suppression of dissent.
the UK establishment in particular primarily feels threatened by unredacted coverage of the consequences of its immigration policy, which they know gives voters to Reform. not because Reform would reverse that policy -- every "far-right fascist racist nazi" party in Europe had at best slowed the influx, not halted or reversed it -- but simply because someone else would be receiving lobbyists' money, favors, and sinecures after retirement.
If they were able, why would the UK government, or any other government, not also be able?
https://citizenlab.ca/research/russia-breaks-into-human-righ...
But keep in mind you have to disable all subscriptions first and also your family group if you have one must also switch their accounts to US.
So yeah pretending you're US customer is no brainer with Apple and unlike Google they dont have automatic detection that will move your account to other region.
Beware you can only change account region once a year or something.
I thought they at least used something complex to attempt to prevent non-EU users using third-party app stores. I also recall a legitimate EU user is not allowed to travel abroad too long before losing access to those stores.
What Google does is completely different - they enforce local regulations on your accounts just if you keep using them within specific region for too long. Though Google dont actually change billing region or Google Play region.
After spending 8-12 years in a single gmail account I learned my lesson. Don't get entrenched or you can't be flexible.
Jeff Gray is a man who regularly gets arrested and/or trespassed from public places for holding up a sign saying "God bless the homeless vets". Seems to happen nearly every time he does it at various locations.
Oh, and flock cameras and ICE aren't exactly a sign that America is this beacon of freedom that it likes to portray.
You also don't have the right to a lawyer to be in a room with you and you are compelled to answer all their questions and they do not need to tell you why they stopped you.
Then if you are lucky they return your devices 7 days later after they have been through everything.
This guy went through it last year and talks bout what happens when they stop you: https://youtu.be/991kRp8KUmo?si=-5S1uLE7K9KG_gNj
That is something that can happen at nearly every international border crossing. Before posting I tried to find a list of countries that require a warrant to search your stuff and the only place that came up was Hong Kong. New Zealand requires some suspicion, but that's effectively the same as they can simply state "they were acting suspiciously to my eye."
>Oh, and flock cameras and ICE aren't exactly a sign that America is this beacon of freedom that it likes to portray.
The US never said that you won't be observed in public nor that you can enter, remain, and travel freely around the country forever without permission.
This reads like Soviet-era whataboutism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/And_you_are_lynching_Negroes
Used to live there now I don't even want to visit.
Ah, just like that.
Of course something that is just possible in the public eye, after a lot of public scrutiny and for all accounts at once.
A single account, in secret? IMPOSSIBLE!
They never needed to build a backdoor....
Yeah I read the next few paragraphs and I've seen the turn off button....
That angry’s up the blood of libertarians, but ultimately from the point of view of the State it has to be able to do its job of detecting and prosecuting serious crime, and it will redraw privacy lines whenever that is substantially impeded by new technology.
In reality the secret police did not care about laws or constitution, so private mail correspondence was intercepted and opened, read, then closed again with care, trying to make this undetectable, and the telephone lines of persons of interest were tapped.
Nonetheless, it was understood that this surveillance is actually illegal, so it was hidden as much as possible.
Nowadays, the government institutions of most "free" states, like USA and UK have granted themselves far more rights to do surveillance of their citizens than the dictators of the past.
Detecting and prosecuting serious crime does not need any such general surveillance. The general surveillance just makes much cheaper the detecting of serious crimes, but in exchange it gives the means to the government employees to commit more serious crimes themselves.
The whole "Apple won't do what the USG wants" story is farce, engineered specifically to protect Apple's brand image. Following the Snowden drop when we all learned that the USG has unfettered realtime access to everything in iCloud without a warrant via FAA702, Apple had a major fucking crisis on its hands, along with a lot of other companies. (If you think the CIA can't read any object in S3, you simply don't understand how the world works. Note also that AWS has built a custom, one-off, airgapped AWS region ON PREM for the CIA. https://aws.amazon.com/federal/us-intelligence-community/ )
Those CEOs all went to DC and sat down with Obama and talked it out. The official cover story was something like "Obama wants help with healthcare.gov".
> The top leaders from the world’s biggest technology companies pressed their case for reform of the National Security Agency’s controversial surveillance operations at a meeting with President Obama on Tuesday, resisting attempts by the White House to portray the encounter as a wide-ranging discussion of broader priorities.
https://www.businessinsider.com/tech-ceo-meeting-with-obama-... (includes photo)
It is very likely that this media plan was discussed and agreed upon in those meetings. Otherwise, nobody sane in any government in Europe would ever buy an iPhone (or let their citizens do same), given that the USG can read all their photos and messages and emails and contacts in iCloud instantly and without a warrant.
(China of course requires Apple run the iCloud servers for Chinese users in China via a joint venture with a CCP-operated company, which preserves the same realtime full access to all iCloud/iMessage data in China for the CCP as PRISM does for the USG.)
Don't believe the marketing hype.
Further reading:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM
The Snowden releases support very plainly the direct realtime access of the US intelligence community to tech company servers without search warrants (just FISA orders).
It is the single most used data source by the US intelligence community.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Prism_slide_5.jpg
Apple began providing such data in October 2012.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:PRISM_Collection_Det...
https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/new-slides-reveal-gr...
https://www.reuters.com/technology/cybersecurity/governments...
These aren't conspiracy theories, these types of secret agreements happen all the time.
EDIT: it seems the original poster I was replying to has deleted their post, and so this may not make as much sense in the thread now.
It relays my main concern which is that while current governments may use this in moderation and under judicial oversight, future ones may not. And we should build tools for the future not just for now.
There’s a general regression towards fascist and right wing ideologies in the last few years and I don’t want to be up against a wall one day because someone did something with ignorant best intent.
The “fascist” part (authoritarian/totalitarian tendencies) came long before the resurgence of the right, but most people seem to approve of those methods as long as they target those they dislike, so I won’t be shedding any tears for them when it’s their turn at last.
It is self-evidently written by AI. You can tell from both tropes such as “To bring this into sharper focus” and the fact that it is entirely without an opinion or argument for most of the piece.
Getting really tired of the UK govs incompetence/maliciousness around digital law making
I guess if I lose my phone on a trip, I wanna be able to walk into an Apple store and restore it from their cloud copy that the feds have backed up & pored over by LLMs too. (not sure that’s done in realtime for 100% of the population, but tokens will be cheap enough eventually - they have their pre-LLM solution too)
I think I keep Signal data mostly out of the cloud though, declining to use their latest features. Hidden notifications too. Is it only personal family updates, yes, but the principle makes me feel good.