Agreed. The UK is very clearly the least free of all "western" countries. You're only touching on government surveillance. There are other aspects too, like super injunctions.

I say that as someone with a UK passport.

Most of the problems are actually EU-wide, even including a few not-quite-EU countries.

I wonder why this is being downvoted so badly.

Because it's absurd to throw all EU countries into one pot in this regard, especially if you include (and focus on) the UK?

Yeah, for freedom of speech you can simply see where Nazi websites are hosted. It's not the EU.

But the UK really stands out within the EU.

I don't think that is related. A lot of the Nazi websites are hosted via HostKey in Russia. In fact, some of these websites were used to start "white power" rallies in the US just to stir up the hornets nest. I'm a fan of free speech, but am generally against Nazis as a concept. We fought a war over this :)

> I don't think that is related. A lot of the Nazi websites are hosted via HostKey in Russia.

In isolation you're right. To expand it: "If you want to host an anti-{russia,putin,trump,jew,white,black,asian,democracy,kim} 'news' website" (as in against all or some of those) then the US would be the place to do it.

IOW: Good luck with anti-Putin in Russia or Nazi in Germany. The US is your best bet. The US didn't raid news papers forcing journalists to drill holes through their hard drives. The UK did.

> I'm a fan of free speech, but am generally against Nazis as a concept. We fought a war over this :)

We didn't fight a war over someone's right to be a Nazi. They really did start it. And the US didn't really join until it was actually attacked, if you're American. They also didn't fight a war about someone's right to be Japanese (or even their right to believe in the divinity of their emperor).

Chamberlain even thought Nazis could be part of the "peace for our time".

But it is. If people/their government are not prepared to defend what's unpleasant for them, it means they're not entirely dedicated to free speech in Voltaire's sense (“I disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it”). Who knows, what minority opinion will they decide to ban next?

I don't think anyone should be dedicated to Voltaire's sense of free speech, as it's a ludicrously absolutist position. I'm fairly certain that in Voltaire's time, they didn't have coordinated harassment/doxxing campaigns on social media.

You don't think (coordinated) harassment existed before social media?

Please.

(and doxxing is not about expressing your thoughts and ideas)

"You don't think (coordinated) harassment existed before social media?"

Where on earth did I say that? You cannot deny, however, that it is far more prevalent.

And that doesn't stop people from crying "censorship" when people who dox get banned from Twitter.

Here:

> I'm fairly certain that in Voltaire's time, they didn't have coordinated harassment/doxxing campaigns on social media.

Harassment: Existed.

Doxxing: Off topic. Not thoughts and opinions. (Voltaire said "disagree". You don't agree or disagree about someone's home address or real name)

Social media: We live in a more connected world. In a less connected world the same effects would be had in your local community.

> And that doesn't stop people from crying "censorship" when people who dox get banned from Twitter.

Straw man. Also publishing other people's copyrighted works is not censorship.

You're changing the topic. doxxing (which you have now brought up TWICE) has nothing to do with it.

Surveillance with out warrant, but which is not actively used for malign purposes, is a matter of concern. If it could be used for malign purposes it’s very concerning.

China routinely imprisons political subversives. It has among the lowest rates of voluntary organ donors in the world, yet it has one of the largest rates of organ transplants. Those organs come from prisoners, many of them political prisoners. They’re using that surveillance system to identify and incarcerate these people right now.

But hey. The NSA has files on people too so who cares? How many people, have been broken up for spare parts by the NSA or due to overreaching US and British Intelligence? In China it’s probably in the tens to hundreds of thousands. This isn’t ‘very concerning’. It’s horrifying.

EDIT: I think I misunderstood your point. In my post I did specifically call out British involvement in mass surveillance right alongside the US. Or maybe you think I should have called it out more? I’m a bit confused.

> China routinely imprisons political subversives.

And the US and UK, the Netherlands, France and I believe Italy have all been caught protecting police officers that used surveillance powers for that purpose I alluded to (finding boyfriends of a girl a police officer likes and beating them up). Given that list, I feel like we can safely assume that all EU states in fact de-facto allow and protect police officers doing this. Likewise police officers have been caught sporadically using official "legal intercept" tools to "help" in divorce, finding children they abused, finding ex-lovers they had a quarrel with, and the like.

Note: I don't mean just that police officers did that, that's troubling enough by itself that those tools allow that. My main complaint is that the justice system protected those police officers from the consequences of those actions.

The only case where the police seems to find this behavior by their own officers unacceptable is when it's directly used to help a (non-police-officer) criminal. And this is very widespread behavior. It happens in the US (but of course, in the US the victims (eventually) get notified that an officer did that, so you can sue them), it happens in the EU, and in the EU it's completely unchecked and unchallengeable, and "surprisingly" this does not lead to them using it more responsibly.

I find things just baffling. FB/Google/MS/... are all begin vigorously pursued for essentially selling your contact list ... by people who used violence against ISPs/ASPs (like FB/Google/MS/... but not just them) to allow police officers to beat up love rivals and abuse children. And when they got caught doing that ... they immediately rallied behind the criminals (because yes, what those officers did was in fact criminal in almost all cases).

I feel like we've got much bigger problems here than Trump's campaign using contact lists from phones/FB to get more people to vote for him. And I feel like the EU should not be criticizing anyone for being weak on privacy.

Thank you. I'm emigrating from the UK soon and this is one of the many reasons why.

You had me until “the US is a champion of privacy in this particular fight” - I think they are just further behind, and not particularly championing anything privacy related.