6 ms·

> Insulting people online or just saying something mildly offensive will often lead to prosecution. "will often": no, not at all. Could occasionally. You're no

> Insulting people online or just saying something mildly offensive will often lead to prosecution. "will often": no, not at all. Could occasionally. You're not helping your argument by overstating this. The courts are not stuffed with people being fined for saying things that are "mildly offensive". And nothing of what you're talking about is government surveillance. The police aren't the government, and the police do not routinely surveil the populace. They wouldn't have the staff, for one thing! The police actually wanted to close the police station in the town in which I live -- population over 100,000 in the wider borough -- and replace it with what amounted to a kiosk and service from police stations five miles away in each direction. And yes, really: for those viewers who persist in believing that the surveillance system in Hot Fuzz exists in reality... nope

ekianjo 3y ago
> The police aren't the government, The police is the dog of the government. What difference does it make to you if the dog or the master attacks you?
- bemusedthrow75 3y ago
  I understand that in the simplest way this is true, and I am sure it is very clever, poetic and pithy. But this is not how it works in principle or in practice in the UK. The police work on behalf of the people, not the government. When government manages to suborn the police in even a small way it is very much noticed. It’s difficult for people outside the UK to see this, I suppose, but our experience with this is that state directed police overreach is now unusual, and there is a lot of pushback from the chief police officers and the public when they are asked to oppress. There are aberrations (no police force in the world gets protest management right, and ours is no exception) but in general you have to be consciously right up in their faces to cause such an aberration. The UK is a country of realpolitik at every level. The police go about their business unarmed, with the consent of the population, and generally speaking, they know the public will not put up with overreach anymore. We may find them pompous and overbearing but they are pretty much the envy of the world still.
  - prox 3y ago
    Curious: then how did the mechanism work of the Redditor that got arrested in the parent comment?
    - bemusedthrow75 3y ago
      I am assuming it is just a random police officer reading Reddit on a personal basis and deciding to act on evidence of a crime (either because they are the local force or by passing it on). Police aren’t ever really off duty in this sense. Why assume a surveillance mechanism when police are individuals who also use the more popular sites?
      - wnoise 3y ago
        It's not assuming a surveillance mechanism, it's _describing_ one. Individual police keeping their eyes open _is_ a surveillance mechanism. Admittedly, just about the most banal one possible, but the anti-social behavior it's catching is also the most harmless. But the bad law does actually make it a problem.
        bemusedthrow75 3y ago
        Public racist abuse of a dead victim is the most harmless? Well it's a take, I guess. Go with it.
        ekianjo 3y ago
        Oh you are among the 'words are violence' folks?
  - miracle2k 3y ago
    I like that officers in the UK are unarmed. I'm sure there are other distinct differences in how the UK does policing from other countries that are worth pointing out that make a meaningful difference. But every democratic country is operating on the principal that the police work on behalf of the people, and has mechanisms in place that are supposed to ensure that this is the case. The government works on behalf of and with the consent of the people too! When you get sent to prison for an insult on social media, it's all done in the name of (some of) your fellow citizens. Much of this is about individual freedom vs the oppression of the collective. The operators who are tasked to enforce the collective's norms have personal decision making power, and power invariably corrupts. > you have to be consciously right up in their faces to cause such an aberration. What does this mean? That they are personally vindictive? That acting legally but in a way that is annoying to an officer should get me arrested?
i8comments 3y ago
Government snooping is a reality if they find you interesting, even if youve done nothing.
- midasuni 3y ago
  I don’t mind that - if someone wants to tap Joe Bloggs’ phone then that’s fine. Get a court order with evidence that he might be doing something wrong It’s scalable surveillance that worries me. Suddenly cctv which is pulled in case of a crime becomes constantly monitored, with face, gait, clothing, and other types of automated recognition, gathering data on everyone, pumping that data into pattern matchers. But the U.K. population love it.
  - bemusedthrow75 3y ago
    This is the dark HN fantasy of scaleable British panopticon surveillance again. The police have surprisingly little constantly available CCTV. Police and national government control a minuscule fraction of the CCTV in the UK. (Local government a bit more, but it’s town centre anti-nuisance stuff —- pickpockets —- and a few secure buildings, and the police do not have routine access to it). There isn’t the money, the intent or the legal framework to so what you’re suggesting, and nor, I would say, do we “love it”.
    - wnoise 3y ago
      Which means they get all the downsides, and none of the upsides...
wnoise 3y ago
> The police aren't the government Not in the ridiculous "party controlling parliament" sense, no. But they are absolutely the enforcement arm of the state, which is more on point.
- bemusedthrow75 3y ago
  No, they aren’t. British police, significantly, police by consent, are operationally independent of HM government, and cannot (currently) prosecute without the aid of the (equally independent) CPS. In England there isn’t even one single police force, and unlike the FBI, no normal part of the police is a part of a government department. (MoD Police are, I guess, but their remit is military policing). I was responding to the somewhat hysterical parent post to correct the conflation of: the police literally are not the government, do not spy for the government, and do not routinely surveil the population; their surveillance powers are limited and regulated. Does any arm of the state surveil the populace in any sense? It falls within MI5’s remit to spot domestic threats. Their surveillance operation surely operates far less less broadly than that of the NSA, which has far less oversight.
  - HardlyCurious 3y ago
    We only know what the NSA does because a person who leaked highly confidential documents and is now a refuge for the crime of showing the world what the US govt does in secret. Do you really think the UK govt, or any govt, doesn't use the cloak of security and classification to do questionable things?
    - bemusedthrow75 3y ago
      I didn’t suggest any such thing, did I? I am just observing that the scope of GCHQ’s abilities are obviously limited compared to the NSA (unless they have the most cost-efficient IT infrastructure in the world, and we don’t do cost-efficient government IT here even now). The budget just isn’t there for them to operate the way the NSA does.
      - 3y ago
nonethewiser 3y ago
I have to ask… do you disagree with prosecuting offensive comments or not? You say it doesn’t happen often and they can’t enforce it. But do you think its a bad thing? Doesnt seem that way. The point is it shouldn’t be legal.
- bemusedthrow75 3y ago
  Do I think offensive comments can be prosecuted in practice? Yeah, I do. Just as there are limits to free speech in the USA, there are comments that can have consequences. The bar should be set high, and in general it is, but no, I don’t think hate speech is inherently free speech, for example. The US way of doing things is not a) the only way of doing things, b) intrinsically the best way of doing things or c) trending in the right direction. Free speech is not something with a magical clear definition, and I think it goes without saying that we at least try to take incitement to actual race hate a little more seriously. We can set the bar differently; we have. The problem in the UK is not a rash of prosecutions for offensive comments because despite what the parent comment says, they rarely come to trial. There is no enormous procession of these cases, and knobends are actually pretty free to be knobends here. Speech is free, newspapers don’t get raided when they happen to investigate the local police chief. The problem at the moment is that the guidance is in flux, and too much time is wasted determining that something won’t be prosecuted. (Well, that’s the main problem. The secondary problem is the USA exporting its newest renewable resource, alt-right trolling, to every corner of the English speaking world, exhausting everyone’s patience.)
  - HardlyCurious 3y ago
    [flagged]
  - sdfghswe 3y ago
    Right ok, so the reason why you're taking issue doesn't come from a principled place, but because you just so happen to believe these people should be prosecuted.
    - bemusedthrow75 3y ago
runagate 3y ago
> The courts are not stuffed with people being fined for saying things that are "mildly offensive". If these sorts of speech laws were more consistently applied on everyone, maybe we could get rid of them.
- bemusedthrow75 3y ago
  The thing is, few of these cases make it to trial, because the CPS has to demonstrate it’s in the public interest. The result is that the police are still opening investigations they are asked to, and the CPS is still examining them; it’s a lot of energy spent on no outcome. That is the actual problem, not the prosecutions, which remain unusual from what I can see. There needs to be better guidance on the relevant legal standards. Separately we need to do something about (civil) libel laws, but that is a parallel and not criminal law issue.
midasuni 3y ago
> for those viewers who persist in believing that the surveillance system in Hot Fuzz exists in reality... They really do. Not just council cctv cameras, which are less problematic - any local Facebook group is full of pictures from ring doorbells of people who look like “trouble” who have the wrong skin colour, wrong clothing, wrong age etc. This is the norm and is embraced by a nation of curtain twitchers.
- bemusedthrow75 3y ago
  That is not the surveillance panopticon that HNers imagine. That is "Little Brother" -- prurient neighbour-watching. Yeah, Little Brother is everywhere. (It's the bigger threat to our culture, IMO). But this isn't a UK-specific problem. The USA, for example, has Homeowner Associations, which tie neighbourhood-watch curtain-twitching and petty compliance to personal freedoms, property values, paint colour and lawnmowing. The average suburban person in the UK arguably has more freedom from curtain-twitching busybodies than in the USA (where 26% of the population live in an HOA or condo association) The British police do not have warrantless power to just lazily aggregate Ring doorbell footage or any other such thing (they may have faster access to cloud content with a warrant, but I suspect it is probably still faster to just look at the doorbells in the immediate vicinity and ask permission).
  - midasuni 3y ago
    They do however have the ability to ask homeowners for ring footage without a warrant, and British homeowners on the whole are eager to inform on their neighbours
kypro 3y ago
> "will often": no, not at all. Could occasionally. You're not helping your argument by overstating this. The courts are not stuffed with people being fined for saying things that are "mildly offensive". Yes, sorry – you're right. It happens occasionally. If you're willing to take the risk generally speaking you can be offensive and get away with it.
- tim333 3y ago
  At least get away with it legally. It can effect you in other ways also.
- bemusedthrow75 3y ago
  > If you're willing to take the risk generally speaking you can be offensive and get away with it. We have a whole small news channel dedicated to it now! ;-) Offensiveness on the whole is not policed, at all. (Except by Facebook, of course.) Offensiveness that rises to the level of a crime can end up policed. The guidance around that is still poorly defined, so it's very unusual to see a charge or a conviction and it's for sure wasteful of resources. I'm obviously not arguing that it's always a good idea to prosecute when people are just offended -- of course it's not remotely a good idea to have that standard. But I do think we in this country should be allowed to draw a slightly different line on racism or hate speech or trolling/griefing/abuse campaigns without being insulted for our lack of "principle", which is the routine HN argument. It is, in my estimation, unprincipled to stand around and do nothing while people are harassed online, driven from their online activities, doxxed, abused with poster and letter writing campaigns, or incited against by conspiracy newspapers. Freedom of speech can have different limits than those chosen by the US constitution without being morally defective.
  - caeril 3y ago
    > Offensiveness that rises to the level of a crime The larger question is, how is this even possibly a thing? That there are legal liabilities that are wholly dependent on the internal emotional state of another person is absolutely insane. How is it possible to take a government that treats its adult citizens like kindergartners seriously?

ekianjo 3y ago

> The police aren't the government, The police is the dog of the government. What difference does it make to you if the dog or the master attacks you?

bemusedthrow75 3y ago
I understand that in the simplest way this is true, and I am sure it is very clever, poetic and pithy. But this is not how it works in principle or in practice in the UK. The police work on behalf of the people, not the government. When government manages to suborn the police in even a small way it is very much noticed. It’s difficult for people outside the UK to see this, I suppose, but our experience with this is that state directed police overreach is now unusual, and there is a lot of pushback from the chief police officers and the public when they are asked to oppress. There are aberrations (no police force in the world gets protest management right, and ours is no exception) but in general you have to be consciously right up in their faces to cause such an aberration. The UK is a country of realpolitik at every level. The police go about their business unarmed, with the consent of the population, and generally speaking, they know the public will not put up with overreach anymore. We may find them pompous and overbearing but they are pretty much the envy of the world still.
- prox 3y ago
  Curious: then how did the mechanism work of the Redditor that got arrested in the parent comment?
  - bemusedthrow75 3y ago
    I am assuming it is just a random police officer reading Reddit on a personal basis and deciding to act on evidence of a crime (either because they are the local force or by passing it on). Police aren’t ever really off duty in this sense. Why assume a surveillance mechanism when police are individuals who also use the more popular sites?
    - wnoise 3y ago
      It's not assuming a surveillance mechanism, it's _describing_ one. Individual police keeping their eyes open _is_ a surveillance mechanism. Admittedly, just about the most banal one possible, but the anti-social behavior it's catching is also the most harmless. But the bad law does actually make it a problem.
      - bemusedthrow75 3y ago
        Public racist abuse of a dead victim is the most harmless? Well it's a take, I guess. Go with it.
        ekianjo 3y ago
        Oh you are among the 'words are violence' folks?
- miracle2k 3y ago
  I like that officers in the UK are unarmed. I'm sure there are other distinct differences in how the UK does policing from other countries that are worth pointing out that make a meaningful difference. But every democratic country is operating on the principal that the police work on behalf of the people, and has mechanisms in place that are supposed to ensure that this is the case. The government works on behalf of and with the consent of the people too! When you get sent to prison for an insult on social media, it's all done in the name of (some of) your fellow citizens. Much of this is about individual freedom vs the oppression of the collective. The operators who are tasked to enforce the collective's norms have personal decision making power, and power invariably corrupts. > you have to be consciously right up in their faces to cause such an aberration. What does this mean? That they are personally vindictive? That acting legally but in a way that is annoying to an officer should get me arrested?

i8comments 3y ago

Government snooping is a reality if they find you interesting, even if youve done nothing.

midasuni 3y ago
I don’t mind that - if someone wants to tap Joe Bloggs’ phone then that’s fine. Get a court order with evidence that he might be doing something wrong It’s scalable surveillance that worries me. Suddenly cctv which is pulled in case of a crime becomes constantly monitored, with face, gait, clothing, and other types of automated recognition, gathering data on everyone, pumping that data into pattern matchers. But the U.K. population love it.
- bemusedthrow75 3y ago
  This is the dark HN fantasy of scaleable British panopticon surveillance again. The police have surprisingly little constantly available CCTV. Police and national government control a minuscule fraction of the CCTV in the UK. (Local government a bit more, but it’s town centre anti-nuisance stuff —- pickpockets —- and a few secure buildings, and the police do not have routine access to it). There isn’t the money, the intent or the legal framework to so what you’re suggesting, and nor, I would say, do we “love it”.
  - wnoise 3y ago
    Which means they get all the downsides, and none of the upsides...

wnoise 3y ago

> The police aren't the government Not in the ridiculous "party controlling parliament" sense, no. But they are absolutely the enforcement arm of the state, which is more on point.

bemusedthrow75 3y ago
No, they aren’t. British police, significantly, police by consent, are operationally independent of HM government, and cannot (currently) prosecute without the aid of the (equally independent) CPS. In England there isn’t even one single police force, and unlike the FBI, no normal part of the police is a part of a government department. (MoD Police are, I guess, but their remit is military policing). I was responding to the somewhat hysterical parent post to correct the conflation of: the police literally are not the government, do not spy for the government, and do not routinely surveil the population; their surveillance powers are limited and regulated. Does any arm of the state surveil the populace in any sense? It falls within MI5’s remit to spot domestic threats. Their surveillance operation surely operates far less less broadly than that of the NSA, which has far less oversight.
- HardlyCurious 3y ago
  We only know what the NSA does because a person who leaked highly confidential documents and is now a refuge for the crime of showing the world what the US govt does in secret. Do you really think the UK govt, or any govt, doesn't use the cloak of security and classification to do questionable things?
  - bemusedthrow75 3y ago
    I didn’t suggest any such thing, did I? I am just observing that the scope of GCHQ’s abilities are obviously limited compared to the NSA (unless they have the most cost-efficient IT infrastructure in the world, and we don’t do cost-efficient government IT here even now). The budget just isn’t there for them to operate the way the NSA does.
    - 3y ago

nonethewiser 3y ago

I have to ask… do you disagree with prosecuting offensive comments or not? You say it doesn’t happen often and they can’t enforce it. But do you think its a bad thing? Doesnt seem that way. The point is it shouldn’t be legal.

bemusedthrow75 3y ago
Do I think offensive comments can be prosecuted in practice? Yeah, I do. Just as there are limits to free speech in the USA, there are comments that can have consequences. The bar should be set high, and in general it is, but no, I don’t think hate speech is inherently free speech, for example. The US way of doing things is not a) the only way of doing things, b) intrinsically the best way of doing things or c) trending in the right direction. Free speech is not something with a magical clear definition, and I think it goes without saying that we at least try to take incitement to actual race hate a little more seriously. We can set the bar differently; we have. The problem in the UK is not a rash of prosecutions for offensive comments because despite what the parent comment says, they rarely come to trial. There is no enormous procession of these cases, and knobends are actually pretty free to be knobends here. Speech is free, newspapers don’t get raided when they happen to investigate the local police chief. The problem at the moment is that the guidance is in flux, and too much time is wasted determining that something won’t be prosecuted. (Well, that’s the main problem. The secondary problem is the USA exporting its newest renewable resource, alt-right trolling, to every corner of the English speaking world, exhausting everyone’s patience.)
- HardlyCurious 3y ago
  [flagged]
- sdfghswe 3y ago
  Right ok, so the reason why you're taking issue doesn't come from a principled place, but because you just so happen to believe these people should be prosecuted.
  - bemusedthrow75 3y ago

runagate 3y ago

> The courts are not stuffed with people being fined for saying things that are "mildly offensive". If these sorts of speech laws were more consistently applied on everyone, maybe we could get rid of them.

bemusedthrow75 3y ago
The thing is, few of these cases make it to trial, because the CPS has to demonstrate it’s in the public interest. The result is that the police are still opening investigations they are asked to, and the CPS is still examining them; it’s a lot of energy spent on no outcome. That is the actual problem, not the prosecutions, which remain unusual from what I can see. There needs to be better guidance on the relevant legal standards. Separately we need to do something about (civil) libel laws, but that is a parallel and not criminal law issue.

midasuni 3y ago

> for those viewers who persist in believing that the surveillance system in Hot Fuzz exists in reality... They really do. Not just council cctv cameras, which are less problematic - any local Facebook group is full of pictures from ring doorbells of people who look like “trouble” who have the wrong skin colour, wrong clothing, wrong age etc. This is the norm and is embraced by a nation of curtain twitchers.

bemusedthrow75 3y ago
That is not the surveillance panopticon that HNers imagine. That is "Little Brother" -- prurient neighbour-watching. Yeah, Little Brother is everywhere. (It's the bigger threat to our culture, IMO). But this isn't a UK-specific problem. The USA, for example, has Homeowner Associations, which tie neighbourhood-watch curtain-twitching and petty compliance to personal freedoms, property values, paint colour and lawnmowing. The average suburban person in the UK arguably has more freedom from curtain-twitching busybodies than in the USA (where 26% of the population live in an HOA or condo association) The British police do not have warrantless power to just lazily aggregate Ring doorbell footage or any other such thing (they may have faster access to cloud content with a warrant, but I suspect it is probably still faster to just look at the doorbells in the immediate vicinity and ask permission).
- midasuni 3y ago
  They do however have the ability to ask homeowners for ring footage without a warrant, and British homeowners on the whole are eager to inform on their neighbours

kypro 3y ago

> "will often": no, not at all. Could occasionally. You're not helping your argument by overstating this. The courts are not stuffed with people being fined for saying things that are "mildly offensive". Yes, sorry – you're right. It happens occasionally. If you're willing to take the risk generally speaking you can be offensive and get away with it.

tim333 3y ago
At least get away with it legally. It can effect you in other ways also.
bemusedthrow75 3y ago
> If you're willing to take the risk generally speaking you can be offensive and get away with it. We have a whole small news channel dedicated to it now! ;-) Offensiveness on the whole is not policed, at all. (Except by Facebook, of course.) Offensiveness that rises to the level of a crime can end up policed. The guidance around that is still poorly defined, so it's very unusual to see a charge or a conviction and it's for sure wasteful of resources. I'm obviously not arguing that it's always a good idea to prosecute when people are just offended -- of course it's not remotely a good idea to have that standard. But I do think we in this country should be allowed to draw a slightly different line on racism or hate speech or trolling/griefing/abuse campaigns without being insulted for our lack of "principle", which is the routine HN argument. It is, in my estimation, unprincipled to stand around and do nothing while people are harassed online, driven from their online activities, doxxed, abused with poster and letter writing campaigns, or incited against by conspiracy newspapers. Freedom of speech can have different limits than those chosen by the US constitution without being morally defective.
- caeril 3y ago
  > Offensiveness that rises to the level of a crime The larger question is, how is this even possibly a thing? That there are legal liabilities that are wholly dependent on the internal emotional state of another person is absolutely insane. How is it possible to take a government that treats its adult citizens like kindergartners seriously?