You do realise there's a very consistent theme here?
It's not about terrorism. It's not about the media. It's not even about internet. The underlying narrative is a systematic need to be able to control the messengers. Why impose hard propaganda when you can have unlimited pressure points available to influence what is being relayed to the public at large?
For some reason, the UK government (regardless of parties in power) seems to be fundamentally attracted to autocracy.
I have always found it interesting that the great dystopian fiction is always set in the UK: 1984, V for Vendetta, etc. And yet, UK politicians regularly make statements about surveillance that would immediately invoke those associations in the US, but UK residents, seen from the outside at least, don't bat an eye. In the US, we have a great deal of surveillance as well, but the government at least feels the need to hide it rather than flaunt it.
In other words, perhaps those authors also recognized this autocratic tendency (assuming it exists).
Specific, targeted actions like this are a far cry from dragnet responses like the snooper's charter or calls for banning encryption (at least any kind that can't be decrypted by the government). The danger of dragnets is that they pick up incidental thought-crime. It's why warrants exist.
Although certainly a case could be made that the media is in a better position than the government to decide what should be made public.
I think that there is a substantial minority of both politicians and public who would have no problem with that at all. just read the Daily Mail comments on such stories; they are full of 'nothing to hide, nothing to fear'.
Theresa May served as Home Secretary for about six years before becoming Prime Minister. Throughout that time, on most days she probably spent several hours just reviewing cases where the police and security services wanted to do something that required explicit authorisation at that level.
It's reasonable to assume that many, even most, of those cases really did relate to the worst in our society. It also seems reasonable to assume that in at least some of those cases someone known to be very bad could not easily be brought to justice through our normal legal processes without undermining some other ongoing investigation. In addition, she was presumably given information and advice primarily by the police and security services, and those same organisations and the officials representing them would be the people either enabled or limited by her decisions.
It isn't hard to see how someone exposed to that pressure for such a sustained period of time would become extremely authoritarian. I don't know how anyone's view of society after such an experience could not be so biased that it would be hard to see what normal life looks like any more. Just about everyone who has become Home Secretary in my adult life has moved in that direction during their time in office.
The only difference here is that by a quirk of political fate Theresa May then became the most senior politician in the UK, with a majority government that gave her the power to drive through almost any legislation if she wanted it strongly enough. She achieved that position without anyone actually voting for that outcome in the first place. Until very recently, she also had little significant opposition to challenge her.
And so here we are, with the Investigatory Powers Act on the books and a government whose most senior representatives don't seem to understand even the basics of modern technologies and their implications yet have little hesitation about proposing regulation or outright bans of some of that same technology if it makes them look strong to enough voters in the week before a general election.
The Home Sec position is a revolving seat used as a political parking lot, so the only people who stayed more than a year and had time to move in any direction in this century were T. May and Blunkett. And the latter started in a position where he regarded civil liberties as "airy fair" and expressed the aim to make the previous law&order hard liner "seem liberal".
It seems to me that the causation is the other way around - the only people really really craving that sort of position with immense secret powers but little public spotlight are those who are intrinsically authoritarian and power hungry.
Since most politicians start out as lawyers, many will inevitably have exposure to crime. So I too appreciate the humanization of May but don't see it as an excuse for authoritarianism. In fact, these people more than any should know about the delicate balance between liberty and security.
Just to be clear, I'm not defending May's policies as either HS or PM here. I think she demonstrates both a lack of technical knowledge and a biased perspective that make her very dangerous to the public good, and as such I believe she is not the right person to serve as PM. I just think that those flaws are somewhat understandable and probably something that would affect any human being who had served in her former post for as long as she did, unless perhaps they came from a background particularly relevant to these kinds of issues. The real problem may be expecting any single individual to do what is currently required of a Home Secretary for an extended period, certainly without some sort of mandatory recovery period after they leave the post before they take any other high-level position within the government.
Do they? I guess you’re talking from a US point of view maybe.
* Free speech (see prohibitions on "hate speech" and "extremism")
* The right to remain silent (your silence can be used as evidence of guilt in court)
* The right to a jury trial (the UK now allows majority, 10-2, verdicts. The right to a jury trial can also be removed in cases where the government suspects jury tampering.)
* Habeas Corpus (up to 14 days detention without charge of terrorism suspects. it was 28 days until 2011)
* The right to be secure from unreasonable search and seizure (in many situations the standard of evidence has been lowered from "probable cause" to "reasonable suspicion" and is increasingly at the discretion of police/government instead of courts)
* The prohibition on double jeopardy (the government can petition for a new trial after acquittal if substantial new evidence comes to light)
* The exclusion of illegally gathered evidence from court (the UK never had an exclusionary principle)
* The right to self-defense (there is no castle doctrine in the UK. In every US state except Vermont, you can use lethal force with impunity against an intruder to your home. See the UK case of Tony Martin, who was convicted of murder for shooting robbers who were in his home)
* The right to assemble
* The right to keep arms (I realize this crowd may not be a fan of this right, but nevertheless it used to be a right Englishmen and Americans both enjoyed)
Self defence is still as you say, completely legal.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juries_in_England_and_Wales#Tr...
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_disclosure_law#United_King...
The right to remain silent in the US (and previously in the UK) means that your silence cannot be presented as evidence of guilt in court. In the UK, such evidence may be presented and the the jury is instructed that they may make negative inferences from your refusal to speak with the police.
The right to a jury trial has been limited by changes that allow juries to reach majority (10-2) verdicts and by removing the right to a jury trial in cases where the government suspects jury tampering.
I'm not trying to get into a debate about guns. But any list of rights no longer enjoyed by Englishmen wouldn't be complete without mentioning it. Whether it's for the better or worse is another issue.
He used an illegally held weapon to 'defend his property'. He lay in wait for the burglars and shot at them in the dark and again shot at them (killing one) as they attempted to flee.
How in any world is that self-defence? As they were fleeing he was under no threat and therefore such deadly force is completely unreasonable and no longer being used in defence of anything anyway.
Unless you want to live in a world where people are shot dead for accidentally wandering on to another persons land the concept of necessary and reasonable force is a fair one.
So, maybe a blanket law saying you can cause essentially unlimited harm or death to anyone entering your property without your consent isn't such a good idea? There are at least two main legal foundations in England for what we casually refer to as a right to self defence, but both of them rely on a test of reasonableness if force is used. Also, it's already acknowledged that someone's idea of what seems reasonable won't be perfect if, say, they are half-awake at 3am and find an intruder standing in the dark outside their child's bedroom, and so there is already an element of benefit of the doubt being given in such situations. Going beyond that would have to be based on either an argument that the current law isn't clear enough to make someone confident to act reasonably (which is a legitimate concern) or an argument that we want to legitimise the deliberate use of grossly excessive force (which, IMHO, is not).
Well, if you're going back that far as to consider carrying guns as a lost right, what about the vote for women? That's been gained. As has welfare. Occupational health and safety. Universal healthcare. The right to be protected by a professional police force (and emergency services in general). The abolition of slavery. Abolition of debtors prisons. Legalisation of homosexuality. Environmental protections. There are a shitload of legal rights gained since the era of English self-arming.
Cherry-picking rights from yesteryear is a crappy way to go about complaining of an issue. Guns aren't a legal mechanism; they don't belong on a list of legal processes.
This one's active in Australia (or at least the east coast of Australia). There was specific legislation apparently made to combat "biker gangs".
http://nswcourts.com.au/articles/the-right-to-remain-silent/
It also mentions the UK. Specifically:
According to the law, for a serious indictable offence, unfavourable inferences (once not allowed) may be drawn if a defendant didn’t mention something which:
* he or she could reasonably have been expected to mention in the circumstances; and
* is relied on by the defence in the proceeding
So... not exactly great... but not world-ending either. Basically if the police question you about where you were, and you have a lawyer with you, and you say you don't remember - you can't then go to court and say, "Well actually I was at XYZ" because that'll be used against you.
I'm not sure exactly how that pans out in real life though. It is not unexpected that you'd lose your memory when in a high pressure situation like that.
I don't think that's a proper reading of the change. What you're describing was never protected by the right to remain silent. The right to remain silent applies to just that, silence. You changing your story is and has been admissible evidence in all jurisdictions.
Meanwhile, the jury selection process in the US is, in my eyes, a complete distortion of the whole concept.
Shooting someone in the back whilst they're running away doesn't constitute self-defence.
Don't forget "drawings we find digusting", too.
Essentially if you have a knife on your person, and you've not got a damn good reason (e.g. it's a breadknife and you're on your way to work at a bakery) you're committing a crime.
Cars are basically impossible to legislate against. What they did is already illegal.
So to answer your question - what's left when everything is already illegal?
When all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.
There are plenty of other ways to address this that are not legislative. A legislative approach would only be counter productive. When people are breaking the laws, making more laws doesn't help.
We would probably get much better reduction in these types of events if we spent the same resources on supporting mental health issues than wire tapping the internet.
EDIT: People don't understand politics for the same reason they don't understand Facebook. If you're not the big lobby consultant getting these people elected, you are the product.
Even if you were to find that every single terrorist has a mental illness (and we know that most of the killers in the UK didn't) it still gives you no useful information.
Violence is prevalent. Mental illness is prevalent. There's obviously going to be some overlap. It's a coincidence, not a cause.
If the police pull you over and find a baseball bat without a ball, you are in violation of the offensive weapons act.
Forget about handguns with legislation like that - which are also illegal but under a separate piece of legislation afaik.
We are less liberal in a lot of ways, both socially and economically but not consistently. In some areas, the reverse
Since a baseball bat is not made for causing injury, and is generally not adapted for this purpose (though it might be, e.g. by stacking nails into it), it would be necessary to show that it was possesed with the intention of causing injury. Note that posession for the purpose of 'self-defence' is not a legal defence.
Knives are different - it's an offense to possess a 'bladed' (excluding non-locking knives under 7.62 cm / 3 inches) or 'sharply pointed' article in a public place, even if there is no intent to cause harm, with certain exceptions (lawful authority, for use at work, religious reasons, or national costume).
This has been in the context of searches based on unrelated suspicions but the strong implication was there i.e "there better be a ball in the car to go with this".
Knives it's much more clear cut there. The baseball bat thing sticks out but to be honest, in the UK, a baseball bat may well be more commonly an offensive weapon than used for sport - the sport is no where near as popular.
I was going to add that I doubt officers would demand to see wickets and ball when finding a cricket bat.
My point was that it can and has been broadly applied. If an officer believes an object is intended to cause harm, you can be arrested for it.
In contrast, the US enshrines gun possession as a basic constitutional right so baseball bats and knives are small fry. This was the comparison I was trying to extend.
At some point, after we've exhausted all options, we might have to ask ourselves why so many people want to kill random strangers, and then deal with that.
Having asked the question of "why do they want to kill random strangers", the answer they arrived at is "because they were brainwashed by religious fundamentalism they found on the internet".
Obviously nobody knows yet the specifics of this case, but I'm not sure why they think that given that the Ariane Grande event seemed to be radicalisation through family. It wasn't clear the internet played much role.
However, the UK Government has made repeated references to plots that were foiled (no details provided). If those plots were investigated and the root cause was frequently identified as "spent too much time surfing jihadi ideology" then I can see why they'd conclude the answer is internet regulation.
To a reasonable person, it should be obvious this is just a proximate cause and not the root cause. Browsing the internet and then being exposed to hateful ideas doesn't automatically turn you into a murderer.
The deeper cause is surely that "jihadi ideology" is effective at appealing to European youth. But nobody is talking about why this is in fact the case or what are the reasons why it is so attractive to some people.
For one thing, the problem of jihadi terrorism isn't going to go away without confronting the ideology head-on. I think we must have a painfully honest discussion about "jihadi ideology" and to debunk it. Radicalization isn't an inevitable outcome of being exposed to these ideas but is rather the result of losing the argument with friends, loved ones, civilization.
Banning this stuff isn't going to make it less appealing to some people or to make it disappear from the internet. But it does give government the power to censor ideas they deem to be dangerous and liable to "brainwash" the youth. And you have to ask whether you trust your politicians to use such powers responsibly.
This is a problem in open societies like the US and Europe. There a lot of "sects" choosing to wall themselves off, but they are learning to wield considerable political power in doing so.
I think a lot of people are talking about that, and have been for some years. There's certainly a lot of articles to be found about it going back a few years, and many of the intervention and prevention programmes discuss the appeal of jihadi ideology to European youth.
A major problem in Europe is that there is no challenge to jihadi rhetoric, except for the far-right freak show, because the whole thing is taboo. You can't defeat jihadi ideology by pretending it doesn't exist, which is what you're effectively doing when you restrict online access and communication. It's a knee-jerk yet cowardly way to avoid confronting the problem.
Just on a point of fact, Abedi almost certainly wasn't radicalized by his own family, although some of them knew it was happening.
From The Telegraph/NYT:
Salman Abedi is understood to have made calls to two mobile phone numbers based in Libya, which were not registered to his family, moments before the massacre that killed 22 people.
Abedi, 22, has been connected to Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (Isil) terror group Katibat al-Battar al-Libi, based in Libya, which is credited with being behind a number of attacks in Europe, including the Paris attacks which left 129 people dead and dozens injured after coordinated attacks on the Bataclan concert hall and the Saint-Denis Stadium. Two senior US intelligence officials told the New York Times that Abedi was in contact with al-Battar members both on his visits to Tripoli and by phone while in the UK.
There is lots of other information which ties these dots together, such as the particular materials and techniques used to construct the bomb he exploded.
"Freedom" of religion is not understood properly today.
Radicalization takes place within an atmosphere of complicity, which is part of the problem, but hardly the root cause.
On the other hand, teaching young impressionable men how to make a bomb designed specifically to kill people, and to give them the mens rea, motive and encouragement is radicalization.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_and_Environmental_Zone
So in that case, the question becomes, has the UK already passed that point for internet regulation? I don't know the answer, but I assume that plotting specific attacks or making specific threats online is punishable in the UK just as it is in the US.
Looks like it's enforcement.
What, from the looks of it, would be nightmarish enough. No need for any new law.
I do wonder, more broadly, whether it is possible for a country to have the benefits of the "European" approach (better social services) and of the "American" approach (more robust civil liberty) all in one, or if they are somehow mutually exclusive.
From the standpoint of security, I don't see much of a correlation between the level of surveillance/repression/etc and the level of terrorist activity. It seems to me the biggest determinants of whether a country will suffer terrorist attacks are: 1) immigration policy, 2) perceived level of "colonialist"/"globalist" behavior, and 3) wealth. It is very interesting to me that Poland has virtually no terrorist attacks whereas their neighbors, Germany, France, and UK, have them quite regularly, but I don't know the explanation. It is surely not that Poland regulates the internet more tightly.
It's obviously not a perfect world and certainly we do still have some problems with discrimination and wrongful use of powers, but perhaps we are culturally a little more pragmatic about these things than our friends across the pond. Whether that tolerance will one day come back to haunt those who supported stronger government powers if we elect our own Trump is a different question.
This must be why persecuted religions fled from UK to US :-D
They weren't persecuted, they left the UK so they themselves were free to persecute others, which they were not permitted to do in England.
The Puritans believed there was one true religion and wanted this 'fact' to be reflected in English law, government and society. They wanted a theocracy.
These people were only persecuted if you believe that the store owner that was told he couldn't refuse to sell cakes to a gay couple on religious grounds also amounted to persecution (hint: it doesn't).
Stopping somone from persecuting others does not mean that person is being persecuted. Something the so-called 'Christian' conservatives in the new world and now the US still fail to grasp after 300+ years.
There's been a law since 2000 compelling suspects of crimes to divulge their encryption keys or go to jail, for example. The lack of speech protection isn't new.
The origin of the USA's prohibition against self-incrimination was people who were tortured into confessions and other forms of undermining their own freedom. The original logic for this right does not apply to divulging encryption keys. It's not clear what higher purpose is being served by allowing people under investigation to halt those investigations by using encryption: it's not like they can be tortured into revealing incorrect information inside the encrypted files.
Don't make the mistake of comparing another country's highlight reel with the day-to-day living you're familiar with here. I promise you that if you lived there (or just about any other country) for a while, you would start to see the warts along with the successes.
This is in no way a knock on the UK.
Short of policing thoughts, at some point, they'll have to admit 'MONITOR EVERYTHING, POLICE EVERYTHING' won't actually solve the problem.
The root cause here is more strategic and difficult to fix. The west needs to disengage from meddling in the Middle East and stop shipping boatloads of money there.
The UK isn't. Some of our politicians are. Please understand the difference.
I appreciate the issues FPTP presents and that people need to assess party platforms as a whole but the truth is most people don't care enough about privacy to make it a priority and so the UK will continue to get a bit more authoritarian every election.
Our political system is fundamentally broken, and it's not (only) because of FPTP. In many cases, there may not be any potential representative you can vote for who is even close to your own position on even most issues.
Saying that people "don't care" about an issue because they don't vote for a party that opposes the problem on that one issue makes no sense. For example, in the case you mentioned, the Lib Dems have essentially made themselves a single-issue party this election. By your own reasoning, should someone who supports their stance on civil liberties but disagrees with their headline position on Brexit vote for them?
Having said that, I don't think any of that detracts from my point - the electorate don't care enough about privacy to make it their hot-button issue. The people have chosen to prioritise the NHS, Brexit, Immigration and the War on Terror over privacy. All of those are important and the politicians up for election respond accordingly to their priorities. If a UKIP-like party that focused on civil liberties started hoovering up votes then the main parties would also respond; unfortunately I don't see that happening due to voter apathy on the topic.
Might have something to do with the absurd level of right wing control of the popular media. The Daily Mail preaches it's daily diet of,'jail em, hang em, deport em' for everything it doesn't care for. The snoopers charter achieved almost zero coverage during its final stages. All the papers were discussing was Brexit.
To simplify a little, in a democracy, if 51% of voters are "backwards" in some way, I see it as an acceptable shorthand to say that the country as a whole is (in that particuar way). Because that group will be making the decisions for 100% of residents.
This is the big problem with a "pure" direct democracy: you automatically get tyranny of the majority.
Most of our real world democracies suffer worse problems than this, though. The leadership elected to make the decisions may not even enjoy a majority of popular support. Even having had popular support at an election, there may be no mechanism to compel a government to actually act as it promised to win those votes, other than voting for someone else several years later. The nature of the electoral system may lead to very short-term, populist thinking, particularly towards the end of each electoral cycle.
My own view is that in light of these kinds of weaknesses, many of our political systems in the West are simply not fit for purpose, and that once-pragmatic reasons for accepting those limitations mostly expired with the rise of modern transportation and communication infrastructure. Sadly, I have not yet been made supreme ruler of the universe, so I have limited ability to do anything about this unless a lot of other people start to agree...
Website browsing activity can be hidden too, but new recruits like ignorant teenagers looking for a meaningful purpose, they might be careless with their internet anonymity. You'd want to get to them before they hit the streets with murderous intent.
Cars, knives (and guns) has been regulated in UK years ago already...
however I really don't understand the surveillance thing
If I call you a child rapist I have to be able to prove to a court that on the balance of probabilities you are a child rapist. That seems like a reasonable approach. What's wrong with it?
I guess the problem is that the nature of speech often results in opinion-based insults being interpretable as a literal factual claim, and that the benefits of people being able to express their opinions freely generally outweigh the potential reputational costs to insulted individuals.
It is really analogous to the ongoing debate in US universities about whether mere words can cause such a high degree of harm as to be actionable. I think they can cause harm, but that the chilling effects caused by restricting speech are almost always greater.
You can say all of that in England.
Before someone can take a case of defamation through the courts they have to show there's actual or probable serious harm. (For for-profit companies that would be serious monetary loss).
The defences are that the comment is true; or that it's honest opinion, or that it's a matter of public interest, or that it's in a privileged publication (which includes peer reviewed journals).
When you say "Trump is an idiot" he can't show any harm at all, let alone serious harm; and it's an opinion that many people have.
When you say "Ballmer / Nadella are incompetent" either they personally have to show serious harm (and they can't) or Microsoft has to show serious financial harm (and it can't). And it's an opinion that while strongly held and expressed is expressed by many people.
> but that the chilling effects caused by restricting speech are almost always greater.
If I take a photograph of you and make a flyer saying "XAA RAPES CHILDREN" and spread that around your workplace and your local community you probably want a few methods to make that stop. One would be harassment law. Another would be defamation law. This is really the only kind of thing stopped by English law.
(Are you aware that the English law changed in 2013? Are you talking about the old law? I agree that was terrible.)
I think criminalizing (or even "tortifying") lies is completely unworkable. This kind of edifice has to be full of exceptions to avoid immediately collapsing under its own weight. In the average political campaign (US or UK), how many lies are told that cause harm to a candidate's reputation or future employment prospects? One a day, conservatively.
The real linchpin is whether these laws are used in practice to protect the powerful from criticism, or normal people from vindictive harassment as you suggest in your example.
If your example actually happened, I think that first, people would ask the person claiming "XAA RAPES CHILDREN" for evidence. If the claimant failed to provide it, listeners would rightly view them as crazy. In any case, it is unlikely I could afford to prosecute it, especially if it caused me harm to the extent of causing me to lose my job or something.
Like everything in law, it's complicated and has pros and cons. My personal bias is to lean towards free speech if individual cases are in doubt.
This has happened. A national newspaper (yes, the one involved in phone hacking) began a campaign to name and shame child sex offenders.
A woman's house was attacked. Far from being a paedophile, she was in fact a paediatrician.
Any UK resident have insight on why the UK is so backwards on these issues? It is pretty obvious to anyone with a cursory knowledge of computers that terrorist "safe spaces" (assuming that big internet companies knowingly provide them, which I find dubious) are kind of impossible to remove or regulate. The ability of the internet to provide encrypted, point-to-point communications is a pretty core feature.