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Remember this is “keeping files on posts that criticise education policies” — tracking political dissenters who don’t like the government’s policies but have do

Remember this is “keeping files on posts that criticise education policies” — tracking political dissenters who don’t like the government’s policies but have done nothing wrong or illegal. While we’re off focusing on encryption debates and the online safety bill, the UK government isn’t waiting around. Just what is “accredited technology”? As defined in that bill, and how much does encryption play a role when monitoring policies in general cause a general chill in what people are willing to talk about online? I wonder what other aspects of normal behavior are being tracked? It must be extensive.

bluescrn 3y ago
Meanwhile, when groups of activists surveil dissenters/wrongthinkers on social media, actively make lists of them and try to get them fired or worse for their speech/thoughts, many still defend that as 'perfectly reasonable consequences of unacceptable speech'
- space_fountain 3y ago
  I think regardless of what you think of policing speech generally it just is clearly worse when the entity controlling the police does it
- oooyay 3y ago
  Everyone across the spectrum does it. It's a way of reinforcing the power of a particular political camp. There's a way to fix that though, make it very difficult to fire people. Then companies will need to be incredibly clear about what conditions they're choosing to terminate under.
  - gs17 3y ago
    >make every state a right to work state instead of at will In the US, "right-to-work state" likely refers to the opposite of what you mean. It's "right to not join a union and not pay dues".
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - oooyay 3y ago
      I changed the terminology as suggested and was immediately down voted to -4.
  - mcguire 3y ago
    The United Kingdom is not a state in the United States.
    - tick_tock_tick 3y ago
      I mean technically you're right. England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are each oversea territories of the United States instead of the UK itself being a state.
    - comprev 3y ago
      Thanks to Brexit it's also becoming less "United" /s
      - Wildgoose 3y ago
        No, that's thanks to unbalanced Devolution which grants Parliaments and self-government to everyone except the English who are still (over-)ruled by the Union Parliament in Westminster.
        psd1 3y ago
        No, you misunderstand the situation. The electoral system for Westminster makes a handful of constituencies, all in England, the kingmakers, giving the national government a hubris that is not matched by their actual levels of support on the ground. So government is for a subset of the population and the rest can go hang. The deck is stacked. The regional assemblies are limited in power and subordinate to Westminster. Resenting that fact would remain a fringe position if it weren't obvious to all that the double whammy of safe seats in FPTP and the cahoots of the media will keep the tories in power vastly more than out of it, despite electoral results that can credibly be interpreted as regularly expressing a national and multiple regional preferences for anyone-but-the-tories to govern; and also that the tories don't give even the slightest smear of shit about the other nations in the union. But you can grift and shaft the populace indefinitely, in the normal run of things, and get nothing but grumbling. What has really lit the fuse is Brexit, which Scotland most assuredly did not want, and which was imposed on them by the English, and which the English then ballsed up like a classroom of problem children left unattended. Many Scots now see the cost/benefit proposition of the union shifting sharply away from remaining in it. Northern Ireland is probably also feeling aggrieved about Brexit given the fact that Brexit, as implemented by the aforementioned children, trampled all over the Good Friday Agreement, which did more to reduce daily violence than anything since Cromwell; the open border with RoI was a prerequisite for the GFA that we all took for granted; but their will is much harder to read, given the sectarianism still endemic and the challenges of Irish reunification. What certainly doesn't help is the tories getting into bed with the DUP, which I would call a blot on their record if their record were not just blot after blot merging into a uniform superblot, against which unblotted fragments of record are too dim to make out, like stars observed through the smoulder of a recently-burnt-out house. Wales voted for Brexit, the mugs.
  - deleted 3y ago
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  - deleted 3y ago
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- gretch 3y ago
  This is the government doing it, which is clearly wrong because they are supposed to be protecting your speech rights. If someone robs a corner gas station, you think “dang that’s a shame”. If the military robs a gas station, you think “umm wtf?”
  - jlawson 3y ago
    No, if someone robs me at a corner gas station, I think "my government should have done a better job protecting my rights". Having your human rights violated is not like stubbing your toe.
- ClumsyPilot 3y ago
  The problem is hypocrisy - UK government applied pressure to universities and other institutions to stop DE platforming, but itself bans industry experts from conferences when they disagree with government ministers.
- notahacker 3y ago
  Yes, because obviously the only possible options are a state surveillance program to flag up any teaching assistants who criticise any aspect of government policy and teaching bureaucracy, or the sort of "free speech absolutism" that concludes that literally nothing a teacher could say could ever render them unsuitable for a teaching job. No middle ground is possible.
  - robertlagrant 3y ago
    Good to get the sarcastic straw man out of the way, so we can get back to the actual conversation.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - notahacker 3y ago
      The "actual conversation" being one based entirely on the highlighted bad faith false equivalence between private citizens exercising their right to object to offensive and discriminatory behaviour and government resources being used to compile lists of people who has expressed doubts about its policy...
- partitioned 3y ago
  But that activism is free speech itself always funny when the free speech absolutist gets mad when people use free speech to cancel someone
  - hamhock666 3y ago
    Yes it’s free speech, I think the issue here is that companies care what their employees say about politics outside of work, enough to fire them if they find out. Not really in the spirit of free speech.
    - bluescrn 3y ago
      It's not so much that the companies care about the individual 'wrongthinkers', they're worried about what the activists could do to the reputation of their company/brand. The activist behaviour is close to blackmail - 'punish this person for us now, or we'll hurt your company'.
  - robertlagrant 3y ago
    People conspiring to raise up hatred of an individual, and people of the same mind in HR departments green lighting the acquiesence to that hatred, is the problem. Someone shouting a swear word at me while killing me is unpleasant, but I'll allow it. It's the killing that's the problem.
    - anigbrowl 3y ago
      That kind of depends on the individual and what they're doing, no?
      - robertlagrant 3y ago
        Not the individual, no. Only what they're doing.
        anigbrowl 3y ago
- tenebrisalietum 3y ago
  These groups can't secretly compel telecom companies to record or give you a copy of all your communications. It's not surveillance if it's public, it's sousveillance.
  - lmm 3y ago
    > These groups can't secretly compel telecom companies to record or give you a copy of all your communications. In practice they can. The method they use isn't the force of law, but the result is the same.
    - superb_dev 3y ago
      Which telecom company specifically is releasing people's records?
    - krisoft 3y ago
      > In practice they can. How would a group of private citizens get a copy of all communications of an other private citizen? Are there any documented cases of this ever happening?
kypro 3y ago
I'll be more specific about what I suspect the actual intentions are behind the online safety bill. A few months back the UK charged five retired police officers with hate crimes because they had a private WhatsApp group in which the police found content racist[1] comments about the Duchess of Sussex (Meghan Markle). In the UK it is illegal to say something online that could be considered hateful. But the issue is that in most cases when people are saying hateful things they do so in private, so most of the time offenders like these retired police offers go unpunished. People in the UK are very concerned about hate speech, and unlike these surveillance stories, this is something that UK media obsessively report on. The issue is that although the government can arrest your kids for saying hateful things in public[2][3] they cannot do this when they're being hateful in private. If we genuinely believe we need to stop hate speech, then it follows that we also need to do something about the large amount of hate speech which occurs in private. I suspect this is the primary reason why the government wants to know what content you have on your device and what you're saying to your friends because it's likely some of it is hateful, and if you have said something hateful in private then they want to know. [1] 100,000 people were charged with racist hate crimes last year, and around 1 in every 400 people are charge with some form of hate crime each year. I'm providing this context because these are extremely unlikely to be highly racist messages on par with what you might hear from say a neo-Nazi. More often than not it's simply something negative which could be classed as hateful. [2] Police arrest autistic child for commenting that an officer looked like her lesbian nana, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-leeds-66462895 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-leeds-66462895 [3] 17 year old arrest for tweeting Olympic driver, "You let your dad down i hope you know that". It was deemed "malicious communications" because the divers dad died the year before, https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/336534/Teenager-arrested-over-Tom-Daley-hate-tweets https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/336534/Teenager-arrested-o... ---- Legal note: I do not agree with hate speech in any form. My comment is not intended to downplay the seriousness of hate speech or question our need to enforce hate crimes, but simply to note that a lot of hate speech currently goes unpunished due to E2E encryption and the governments lack of visibility into what we do on our private devices.
- itronitron 3y ago
  Wow, I didn't realize just how messed up the UK is. Whatever happened to the childhood axiom, sticks and stones can break my bones but words will never hurt me?
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

bluescrn 3y ago

Meanwhile, when groups of activists surveil dissenters/wrongthinkers on social media, actively make lists of them and try to get them fired or worse for their speech/thoughts, many still defend that as 'perfectly reasonable consequences of unacceptable speech'

space_fountain 3y ago
I think regardless of what you think of policing speech generally it just is clearly worse when the entity controlling the police does it
oooyay 3y ago
Everyone across the spectrum does it. It's a way of reinforcing the power of a particular political camp. There's a way to fix that though, make it very difficult to fire people. Then companies will need to be incredibly clear about what conditions they're choosing to terminate under.
- gs17 3y ago
  >make every state a right to work state instead of at will In the US, "right-to-work state" likely refers to the opposite of what you mean. It's "right to not join a union and not pay dues".
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - oooyay 3y ago
    I changed the terminology as suggested and was immediately down voted to -4.
- mcguire 3y ago
  The United Kingdom is not a state in the United States.
  - tick_tock_tick 3y ago
    I mean technically you're right. England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are each oversea territories of the United States instead of the UK itself being a state.
  - comprev 3y ago
    Thanks to Brexit it's also becoming less "United" /s
    - Wildgoose 3y ago
      No, that's thanks to unbalanced Devolution which grants Parliaments and self-government to everyone except the English who are still (over-)ruled by the Union Parliament in Westminster.
      - psd1 3y ago
        No, you misunderstand the situation. The electoral system for Westminster makes a handful of constituencies, all in England, the kingmakers, giving the national government a hubris that is not matched by their actual levels of support on the ground. So government is for a subset of the population and the rest can go hang. The deck is stacked. The regional assemblies are limited in power and subordinate to Westminster. Resenting that fact would remain a fringe position if it weren't obvious to all that the double whammy of safe seats in FPTP and the cahoots of the media will keep the tories in power vastly more than out of it, despite electoral results that can credibly be interpreted as regularly expressing a national and multiple regional preferences for anyone-but-the-tories to govern; and also that the tories don't give even the slightest smear of shit about the other nations in the union. But you can grift and shaft the populace indefinitely, in the normal run of things, and get nothing but grumbling. What has really lit the fuse is Brexit, which Scotland most assuredly did not want, and which was imposed on them by the English, and which the English then ballsed up like a classroom of problem children left unattended. Many Scots now see the cost/benefit proposition of the union shifting sharply away from remaining in it. Northern Ireland is probably also feeling aggrieved about Brexit given the fact that Brexit, as implemented by the aforementioned children, trampled all over the Good Friday Agreement, which did more to reduce daily violence than anything since Cromwell; the open border with RoI was a prerequisite for the GFA that we all took for granted; but their will is much harder to read, given the sectarianism still endemic and the challenges of Irish reunification. What certainly doesn't help is the tories getting into bed with the DUP, which I would call a blot on their record if their record were not just blot after blot merging into a uniform superblot, against which unblotted fragments of record are too dim to make out, like stars observed through the smoulder of a recently-burnt-out house. Wales voted for Brexit, the mugs.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
gretch 3y ago
This is the government doing it, which is clearly wrong because they are supposed to be protecting your speech rights. If someone robs a corner gas station, you think “dang that’s a shame”. If the military robs a gas station, you think “umm wtf?”
- jlawson 3y ago
  No, if someone robs me at a corner gas station, I think "my government should have done a better job protecting my rights". Having your human rights violated is not like stubbing your toe.
ClumsyPilot 3y ago
The problem is hypocrisy - UK government applied pressure to universities and other institutions to stop DE platforming, but itself bans industry experts from conferences when they disagree with government ministers.
notahacker 3y ago
Yes, because obviously the only possible options are a state surveillance program to flag up any teaching assistants who criticise any aspect of government policy and teaching bureaucracy, or the sort of "free speech absolutism" that concludes that literally nothing a teacher could say could ever render them unsuitable for a teaching job. No middle ground is possible.
- robertlagrant 3y ago
  Good to get the sarcastic straw man out of the way, so we can get back to the actual conversation.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - notahacker 3y ago
    The "actual conversation" being one based entirely on the highlighted bad faith false equivalence between private citizens exercising their right to object to offensive and discriminatory behaviour and government resources being used to compile lists of people who has expressed doubts about its policy...
partitioned 3y ago
But that activism is free speech itself always funny when the free speech absolutist gets mad when people use free speech to cancel someone
- hamhock666 3y ago
  Yes it’s free speech, I think the issue here is that companies care what their employees say about politics outside of work, enough to fire them if they find out. Not really in the spirit of free speech.
  - bluescrn 3y ago
    It's not so much that the companies care about the individual 'wrongthinkers', they're worried about what the activists could do to the reputation of their company/brand. The activist behaviour is close to blackmail - 'punish this person for us now, or we'll hurt your company'.
- robertlagrant 3y ago
  People conspiring to raise up hatred of an individual, and people of the same mind in HR departments green lighting the acquiesence to that hatred, is the problem. Someone shouting a swear word at me while killing me is unpleasant, but I'll allow it. It's the killing that's the problem.
  - anigbrowl 3y ago
    That kind of depends on the individual and what they're doing, no?
    - robertlagrant 3y ago
      Not the individual, no. Only what they're doing.
      - anigbrowl 3y ago
tenebrisalietum 3y ago
These groups can't secretly compel telecom companies to record or give you a copy of all your communications. It's not surveillance if it's public, it's sousveillance.
- lmm 3y ago
  > These groups can't secretly compel telecom companies to record or give you a copy of all your communications. In practice they can. The method they use isn't the force of law, but the result is the same.
  - superb_dev 3y ago
    Which telecom company specifically is releasing people's records?
  - krisoft 3y ago
    > In practice they can. How would a group of private citizens get a copy of all communications of an other private citizen? Are there any documented cases of this ever happening?

kypro 3y ago

I'll be more specific about what I suspect the actual intentions are behind the online safety bill. A few months back the UK charged five retired police officers with hate crimes because they had a private WhatsApp group in which the police found content racist[1] comments about the Duchess of Sussex (Meghan Markle). In the UK it is illegal to say something online that could be considered hateful. But the issue is that in most cases when people are saying hateful things they do so in private, so most of the time offenders like these retired police offers go unpunished. People in the UK are very concerned about hate speech, and unlike these surveillance stories, this is something that UK media obsessively report on. The issue is that although the government can arrest your kids for saying hateful things in public[2][3] they cannot do this when they're being hateful in private. If we genuinely believe we need to stop hate speech, then it follows that we also need to do something about the large amount of hate speech which occurs in private. I suspect this is the primary reason why the government wants to know what content you have on your device and what you're saying to your friends because it's likely some of it is hateful, and if you have said something hateful in private then they want to know. [1] 100,000 people were charged with racist hate crimes last year, and around 1 in every 400 people are charge with some form of hate crime each year. I'm providing this context because these are extremely unlikely to be highly racist messages on par with what you might hear from say a neo-Nazi. More often than not it's simply something negative which could be classed as hateful. [2] Police arrest autistic child for commenting that an officer looked like her lesbian nana, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-leeds-66462895 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-leeds-66462895 [3] 17 year old arrest for tweeting Olympic driver, "You let your dad down i hope you know that". It was deemed "malicious communications" because the divers dad died the year before, https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/336534/Teenager-arrested-over-Tom-Daley-hate-tweets https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/336534/Teenager-arrested-o... ---- Legal note: I do not agree with hate speech in any form. My comment is not intended to downplay the seriousness of hate speech or question our need to enforce hate crimes, but simply to note that a lot of hate speech currently goes unpunished due to E2E encryption and the governments lack of visibility into what we do on our private devices.

itronitron 3y ago
Wow, I didn't realize just how messed up the UK is. Whatever happened to the childhood axiom, sticks and stones can break my bones but words will never hurt me?

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]