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Forum with 2.6M posts being deleted due to UK Online Safety Act
- omer9 2y agoSo, what makes the UK Online Safety Act close the forum?
- lofaszvanitt 2y agothey don't want to reengineer the forum...
- jonatron 2y agoThis list of requirements is excessive and nobody wants to read through endless documents and do endless risk assessments. https://www.ofcom.org.uk/online-safety/illegal-and-harmful-content/important-dates-for-online-safety-compliance/#dutiesandactions https://www.ofcom.org.uk/online-safety/illegal-and-harmful-c... Children's access assessments - 32 pages Guidance on highly effective age assurance and other Part 5 duties - 50 pages Protecting people from illegal harms online - 84 pages Illegal content Codes of Practice for user-to-user services - 84 pages
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- dv_dt 2y agoWhat happens with cross nation access? Will international sites start to refuse accounts to brits?
- yuriks 2y agoI believe lobste.rs is one site that's going to geoblock the UK as a precautionary measure at least
- pbhjpbhj 2y agoI thought that was a tech site, are they hosting porn now? I'd have thought they'd already police hate crimes, encouraging suicide, self-harm, and such?? Perhaps they have a special section where they encourage kids to huff glue?
- Aurornis 2y agoYou’re missing the point. The law is so vague and broad that it could be interpreted as covering even far more innocuous content than the few extreme examples you listed here.
- thereisnospork 2y agoThe 'if they have nothing to hide' argument? Really? I look forward to reading your fully compliant risk assessment before interacting with this comment, lest it be judged to contain offensive, inappropriate, or pornographic content.
- mystified5016 2y agoBecause the UK refuses to elaborate on who qualifies under the act, and the only "safe" way to operate a website that might hypothetically be used by someone in the UK is to simply not. The costs required to operate any website covered by this act (which is effectively all websites) is grossly excessive and there are either NO exceptions, or the UK has refused to explain who is excepted.
- zimpenfish 2y ago> The costs required to operate any website covered by this act (which is effectively all websites) is grossly excessive That depends what you count as the costs. If you're a small site[0] and go through the risk assessment[1], that's the only costs you have (unless pornography is involved in which case yes, you'll need the age verification bits.) [0] ie. you don't have millions of users [1] Assuming Ofcom aren't being deliberately misleading here.
- hu3 2y agoCouldn't they wait for some kind of inquiry from UK Gov and then closed the forum reactively if it was an unreasonable financial burden?
- LinuxBender 2y agoWhat features are lacking from vBulletin that prevents being compliant? I suspect some details are missing.
- cricalix 2y agoIt's not necessarily a technological problem that software has to solve. There's a bunch of processes around reporting and age verification that have to be in place.
- LinuxBender 2y agoAh I see. I guess that's where the current direction of law and I have parted ways. Had they focused on making laws requiring better parental controls support on all devices then server operators could add a single RTA header and be done with it. It's not a perfect technical solution but I believe it delegates the legal liability on the parents where it belongs. Parents could then simply consent for their kids to view whatever they want if they feel they are psychologically ready.
- goalieca 2y agoModerating UKs regressive speech laws might be a problem.
- shmerl 2y agoInability by admins to police all their users the way that law wants them to.
- nerdile 2y agoSummary: The UK has some Online Safety Act, any websites that let users interact with other users has to police illegal content on its site and must implement strong age verification checks. The law applies to any site that targets UK citizens or has a substantial number of UK users, where "substantial number" is not defined. I'm going to guess this forum is UK-based just based on all the blimey's. Also the forum seems to have been locked from new users for some time, so it was already in its sunset era. The admin could just make it read only except to users who manually reach out somehow to verify their age, but at the same time, what an oppressive law for small UK forums. Maybe that's the point.
- zimpenfish 2y agoIANAL > any websites that let users interact with other users has to police illegal content on its site and must implement strong age verification checks. But I believe you only need age verification if pornography is posted. There's also a bunch of caveats about the size of user base - Ofcom have strongly hinted that this is primarily aimed at services with millions of users but haven't (yet) actually clarified whether it applies to / will be policed for, e.g., single-user self-hosted Fediverse instances or small forums. I don't blame people for not wanting to take the risk. Personally I'm just putting up a page with answers to their self-assessment risk questionnaire for each of my hosted services (I have a surprising number that could technically come under OSA) and hoping that is good enough.
- jonathanstrange 2y agoI geo-block UK visitors on all of my websites. It's sad but the safest solution.
- massifgreat 2y agoThese UK laws might boost Tor usage.. let's hope something good will come from the full censorship political tyranny in Europe.
- pmdr 2y agoI doubt it. I think these laws were made to herd users towards big tech's established platforms that are 'policed' by community guidelines deemed 'appropriate' and where the content is never more than a takedown request away. Welcome to the new internet. (and it's funny how everyone's yelling 'fascist' at whatever happens in the US instead)
- throw_m239339 2y agoRight, it is called Regulatory Capture, because big actors have the means to comply.
- pembrook 2y agoTrust me, while the big social media sites love this, it wasn't their lobbying that made this happen. The UK government has a long history of meddling in media coverage to achieve certain aims. Up until Covid, legacy media still had control over the narrative and the internet was still considered 'fringe,' so governments could still pull the tried-and-true levers at 1-3 of the big media institutions to shape opinion. Post-covid, everyone became internet nerds and legacy media in english-speaking countries fully lost control of the narrative. This regulation is intended to re-centralize online media and bring back those narrative control levers by creating an extremely broad surface area of attack on any individual 'creator' who steps out of line.
- tehjoker 2y agothey were alarmed they lost what used to be tight control of media narratives around e.g. the gaza genocide and are working overtime to concentrate control so it doesn't happen again let it be known the UK used its carve out territory in Cyprus to process bomb shipments to the IDF in furtherance of a genocide https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/1/15/uk-bases-in-cyprus-protests https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/1/15/uk-bases-in-cyprus-...
- ziddoap 2y agoRelated post with a large discussion from someone who said: "Lfgss shutting down 16th March 2025 (day before Online Safety Act is enforced) [...] I run just over 300 forums, for a monthly audience of 275k active users. most of this is on Linode instances and Hetzner instances, a couple of the larger fora go via Cloudflare, but the rest just hits the server. and it's all being shut down [...]" For the same reasons. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42433044 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42433044
- femiagbabiaka 2y agoLFGSS was a legendary forum, sad to see it go.
- _Wintermute 2y agoLooks like it's staying: https://www.lfgss.com/conversations/401988/#comment17640529 https://www.lfgss.com/conversations/401988/#comment17640529
- femiagbabiaka 2y agoawesome!
- mikrotikker 2y agoIf it's hosted in the USA what's the problem?
- hexator 2y agoFeels more and more like we're at the end of an era when it comes to the internet.
- mbostleman 2y agoBy Internet do you mean Western Civilization?
- DoingIsLearning 2y agoI was gonna say looking at world affairs, it's starting to feel like the end of the Westphalian system.
- TeaBrain 2y agoAny pretense of the Westphalian system in most of Europe ended with the European Union.
- Swenrekcah 2y agoThen how come the UK has left the European Union? This is a common misunderstanding, but a misunderstanding nonetheless. Any country in the EU has full sovereignty and chooses to exercise it by combining forces with other countries in order to strengthen their combined influence in the wider world.
- TeaBrain 2y ago>Then how come the UK has left the European Union? Are you suggesting that if the European Union were post-Westphalian that the UK wouldn't be able to leave? Not sure how that follows. That the EU is a post-Westphalian system is not a new idea.
- Swenrekcah 2y agofair point, I’m just a bit tired of people falsely claiming countries give up sovereignty by joining the EU. Thought you were making a point in that direction, but today we need to stay together and stay strong.
- smarx007 2y agoCould someone please shed any light on why simply geoblocking the UK in its entirety would not be sufficient for an average forum to avoid having to deal with the Act? A lot of US websites initially geoblocked EU to avoid dealing with GDPR, for example.
- ziddoap 2y agoIn this particular case, the forum is UK-based ("HEXUS is a UK-based technology reporting and reviews website founded by David Ross in 2000") In other non-UK-based cases, geo-blocking is the answer being used by some people. Per https://geoblockthe.uk/ https://geoblockthe.uk/, they state: "Luckily OFCOM (the UK Government department responsible for 'enforcement' of these new rules) have confirmed that blocking people in the UK from accessing your website is a perfectly legal and acceptable way to comply with the law.".
- tremon 2y agoWould be great if services like e.g. Wikipedia would do exactly that. "This website is not available in the UK. Ask your representative about the UK Online Safety Act for more information".
- ksp-atlas 2y agoWikipedia tries to act as a source for information all around the globe, they never block, they only get blocked, blocking the UK would go against their goals
- jszymborski 2y agoOther comments here have suspected its audience might be primarily UK-based, so geoblocking might not be the best option. I'm also not familiar with UK law, which may or may not deem that be a sufficient counter-measure against VPNs. Also, if the forum's operator is based in the UK this also might not be an option.
- wrs 2y agoThat doesn’t help a UK-based forum. But otherwise, the law doesn’t limit itself to the UK, so there is concern about what happens if you don’t comply with it and ever intend to visit the UK.
- bowsamic 2y ago[flagged]
- pcdoodle 2y agoCan't they just block the UK?
- nickdothutton 2y agoAnyone* would be crazy to run a UK-based or somewhat UK-centric forum today. Whether it be for a hobby, profession, or just social interaction. The government doesn’t perceive these sites as having any value (they don't employ people or generate corporation tax). [*] Unless you are a multibillion $ company with an army of moderators, compliance people, lawyers.
- _fjg8 2y agoThe opposite is true. The new law makes it considerably more risky for large companies because the law is specifically designed to hold them to account for conduct on their platforms. The (perceived) risk for small websites is unintended and the requirements are very achievable for small websites. The law is intended for and will be used to eviscerate Facebook etc. for their wrongs. We are far more likely to see Facebook etc. leave the UK market than we are see any small websites suffer. A small website operator can keep child pornography off their platform with ease. Facebook have a mountain to climb — regardless of their resources.
- CamperBob2 2y agoNo, that is not how it works. Large companies can afford compliance costs. Smaller ones can't.
- _fjg8 2y agoWhat are the compliance costs for this law that would apply to a small independent forum?
- TylerE 2y agoHave you run a forum, in, say, the last decade? The amount of spam bots constantly posting links to everything from scams to pints to guns is immense - and no, captchas don’t solve it.
- rjbwork 2y agoYou can just read any of the writing by the people operating these fora that are closing.
- aimazon 2y agoHeadline: 2.6M posts Reality: the forum has negative 358 posts in the last month. The forum has negative ~2k posts over the last 12 months. The forum is so inactive that they’re deleting posts faster than creating them. 8 people have created accounts in the last year. The forum has been long dead.
- ziddoap 2y agoI'm not sure why you're comparing total posts to monthly new posts. The tragedy here is that 2.6 million posts, potentially full of great content, is being deleted. >The forum is so inactive that they’re deleting posts faster than creating them. They've been in read-only mode, more or less, for awhile. Primarily, again, due to the (at the time proposed, now passed) law. Not to mention, this comment is missing the forest for the trees. This is not the only forum or website to shutter operations in the wake of the UK Online Safety Act.
- aimazon 2y agoThe forum has had less than 100k posts in the last 10 years. Forums and small websites have been killed off by changing consumer behaviour, the shift to big social media platforms. Using big numbers to suggest that the UK Online Safety Act is responsible for killing off these smaller independent websites is disingenuous. If you do the same exercise for the other forums, you’ll find they’re all long dead too.
- ziddoap 2y agoI posted another example in this thread of someone running forums with 275k monthly active users that also decided to shut down. That does not qualify as "long dead". That's just one other example. I can assure you that it is not just long-dead forums deciding to shut down, despite your preconceived notion.
- aimazon 2y agoYou’re falling for the big numbers that do not stand up to scrutiny. There’s no such forum shutting down. Are you referring to lfgss? First, it’s not shutting down, second, the user numbers are completely wrong. As is the claim that the platform supports over 300 forums. You’re an order of magnitude off. Go and visit it and look at the activity, it’s clinging to life. 275k active users? Pure fiction.
- aqueueaqueue 2y agoSome kinda online safety law is probably needed (download button is just up there if you must :/) but there should be a carve out for small operations. Set a revenue minimum or something.
- msie 2y agoSo sites will geoblock the uk and users will use VPN software. Ugh. More software layers, more waste. Also a problem that is solved by a layer of indirection.
- mjburgess 2y agoWhat is the meaning of "illegal content" given in the OSA? What will social media platforms be forced to censor (, remove, ..) ... let's take a look: Table 1.1: Priority offences by category ( https://www.ofcom.org.uk/siteassets/resources/documents/online-safety/information-for-industry/illegal-harms/overview-of-illegal-harms.pdf?v=390985 https://www.ofcom.org.uk/siteassets/resources/documents/onli... ) Disucssion of offenses related to: prostitution, drugs, abuse & insults, suicide, "stiring up of racial/religious hatred", fraud and "foreign interference". So one imagines a university student discussing, say: earning money as a prostitute. Events/memories related to drug taking. Insulting their coursemates. Ridiculing the iconography of a religion. And, the worst crime of all, "repeating russian propaganda" (eg., the terms of a peace deal) -- which russians said it, and if it is true are -- of course -- questions never asked nor answered. This free-thinking university student's entire online life seems to have been criminalised in mere discussion by the OSA, there may have been zero actual actions involved (consider, though, a majority of UK students have taken class-A drugs at most prominent universities). This seems as draconian, censorious, illiberal, repressive and "moral panic"y as the highs of repressive christian moralism in the mid 20th C.
- thrance 2y ago[flagged]
- milesrout 2y agoThe point the person you are responding to is saying is that even discussing this is, under his interpretation, "illegal content". Which presumably would make your comment illegal content. I am not sure I agree but either this law is very poorly communicated to the public, or it is batshit insane authoritarian nonsense, if that is what people are taking away from it, but either way it is a major fuckup.
- thrance 2y agoWell it's not obviously, otherwise the text of law would be illegal content too. It's just another bad faith interpretation of this kind of laws that I very often see on American-centered socials.
- rich_sasha 2y agoIt's awkward. It's clear this law affects terribly bona fide grassroots online communities. I hope HN doesn't start geoblocking the UK away! But then online hate and radicalization really is a thing. What do you do about it? Facebook seems overflowing with it, and their moderators can't keep up with the flow, nor can their mental health keep up. So it's real and it's going to surface somewhere. At some level, I think it's reasonable that online spaces take some responsibility for staying clear of eg hate speech. But I'm not sure how you match that with the fundamental freedom of the Internet.
- baggy_trough 2y agoGovernmental attempts to reduce "online hate" (however defined, as it is entirely subjective) are just going to make our problems worse.
- staticautomatic 2y agoHate and radicalization are products of existential purposelessness. You can’t make them go away by preventing existentially purposeless people from talking to each other.
- notatty 2y ago[flagged]
- rich_sasha 2y agoNo, you can't, but also theres is no reason why the law about allow these to be up. Plenty of people have racist thoughts, and that's not illegal (thoughts in general aren't), but go print a bunch of leaflets inciting racist violence and that is illegal. I see this as an internet analogy.
- mjburgess 2y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Quran_burnings_in_Sweden https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Quran_burnings_in_Sweden Does burning a religious book "incite violence" ? It causes it, for sure. Free expression brings about, in the fanatic, a great desire to oppress the speaker. That's why we have such a freedom in the first place.
- stonogo 2y agoHeavily editorialized headline here. Just as accurate: "Forum with 2.6M posts being deleted due to insufficient moderation"
- jonatron 2y agoIt already has moderators. But they'd need to know the details about the 17 types of illegal harm too. And someone would have to submit a yearly risk assessment and contact information to the regulator. And there's a children's access assessment. And there'd need to be a complaints procedure. Oh and a children's risk assessment. Plus whatever else is contained within the hundreds or thousands of pages of guidance.
- logicallee 2y agoThe State of Utopia has published this report on the source of funding of Ofcom, the U.K. statutory regulator responsible for enforcing the Online Safety Act: https://medium.com/@rviragh/ofcom-and-the-online-safety-act-funding-and-contracts-ff198fb4b320 https://medium.com/@rviragh/ofcom-and-the-online-safety-act-... (In short it is funded by the regulated tech companies, which must pay fees to it.)
- jonatron 2y agoHEXUS stopped publishing in 2021, and the company no longer exists. The forums were kept because they don't take much work to keep online. Now, there's a lot of work to do, like reading hundreds of pages of documents and submitting risk assessments. There's nobody to do that work now, so the idea was it could go into read only mode. The problem with that was, some users may want their data deleted if it becomes read only. Therefore, the only option is to delete it.
- ninininino 2y agoSort of like burning down a library because you can't make it ADA compliant and install a wheelchair ramp.
- zamadatix 2y agoI feel as though the "sort of" is doing a lot of work there.
- moffkalast 2y agoI think a more accurate comparison would be burning down a library because you can't afford the manpower to check every single book for arbitrarily defined wrongthink.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- crimsoneer 2y agoExcept you really don't need to do that. Your risk assessment could explain it's read only, you've done some basic searches, and that's proportionate given the content and the fact you're a small website. Job done.
- thereisnospork 2y agoIirc UC Berkeley(?) did exactly that to their YouTube library of recorded lectures due to an accessibility lawsuit.
- animitronix 2y agoJust host it all elsewhere, I don't understand the problem here. Double freedom rockets to the UK
- datadeft 2y agoFinally the true decentralized internet could start.
- kyleee 2y agoI would ordinarily be upset about this but in this case it is probably for the best as there is unfortunately a lot of islamophobic content on the site
- _bin_ 2y agoactual question, why bother? if they are domiciled in the UK, sell it to someone outside it or move the company elsewhere. let the britons kick and scream; the fun thing about the internet is they can't really do anything about it.
- nonrandomstring 2y agoFear/risk is at work here. Government by clear guidance, not guesswork is needed. The word "unlikely" is doing too much lifting in the guidance. OFCOM need to hard clarity with the kind of detail to satisfy lawyers. OSB is sound in its aims, a fumbled hot potato in its long-long discussion, a hash of an implementation, and the explication/communication is a regurgitated dogs dinner. Normally our gov communication is very good. Why can't OFCOM write? I guess we all know any forum with more than a few members likely already has software and some basic policy settings to do this. Unclear guidance is making operators jumpy and afraid. An opportunity for anyone with a transformer from "UK.GOV Hand-waving" -> forum_settings.json
- fuzzfactor 2y agoWhen lawmaking gets stupid, the stupid turn pro :0
- phendrenad2 2y agoDonate it to the internet archive.
- redm 2y agoI've been working with OFCOM on implementing the requirements of this act. They seem reasonable, and what they are looking for is mostly table stakes. That said, I wouldn't want to live in or run a UGC business in the UK right now.
- jlaporte 2y agoI sympathize with the operators of these forums of course -- the UK Online Safety Act is poorly conceived. HOWEVER. Deleting their forums? "The act will require a vast amount of work to be done on behalf of the Forums and there is no-one left with the availability to do it." [1] This is a false dichotomy. Put Cloudflare in front of the site, block UK traffic [2], and you're done. 5 minute job. [1] https://forums.hexus.net/hexus-news/426608-looks-like-end-hexus-forums.html#post4316908 https://forums.hexus.net/hexus-news/426608-looks-like-end-he... [2] https://developers.cloudflare.com/waf/custom-rules/use-cases/block-traffic-from-specific-countries/ https://developers.cloudflare.com/waf/custom-rules/use-cases...
- atherton33 2y agoI don't know the detail here, but in many of the discussions I've seen the operators themselves are based in the UK, and that changes the calculus.
- zinekeller 2y agoYeah, GP is, to put it charitably, not understanding the situation. > About Us > HEXUS.net is the UK’s number one independent technology news and reviews website.
- notatty 2y ago[flagged]
- csense 2y agoRather than shut it down, would it be possible to sell the forum to someone in the US for a little bit of money, like $20 or something? Idea being the US-based owner migrates the DB with posts and user logins to servers hosted on US soil, then if the UK government comes knocking the former owners in the UK can say "Sorry it doesn't belong to us anymore, we sold it, here's the Paypal receipt." (Ideally they'd sell the domain too, but as long as you still have the DB you could always host the forum at a different domain.) Any forum admins here willing to add another forum to their portfolio?
- CursedUrn 2y agoThe US owner would still be obliged to follow the UK rules, apparently. It's unclear how punishment will be enforced exactly.
- throwaway48476 2y agoJust create a block page for UK IPs with VPN ads.
- ryandrake 2y agoOr maybe open it up to scraping so someone can archive it--if the content is that useful, surely some hobbyist outside U.K. with a few GB of disk space would be willing to host it.
- hedora 2y agoArchive Team comes to mind. https://wiki.archiveteam.org/ https://wiki.archiveteam.org/ https://archive.org/details/archiveteam https://archive.org/details/archiveteam
- rsync 2y agoForgive me if I’m being dense… I just read through the entire HN discussion about lobste.rs and continued down that rabbit hole to other discussions of forum, deletions, and the safety act, etc. The part I don’t understand is: Why aren’t these operators placing the forum into a corporate or partnership entity, without personal liability, that would be the target of some eventual enforcement? These very small forums Are almost certainly not going to be targeted for enforcement… The issue is simply the risk… … So why not just incorporate, go on your merry way, and if enforcement goes very differently than we all assume then you walk away from a corporate entity And continue to vacation in London without fear of arrest. What am I missing here?
- will4274 2y agoThe corporate veil can be pierced. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piercing_the_corporate_veil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piercing_the_corporate_veil. From the Wikipedia page, it sounds like this is most common in the United Kingdom when a corporation "is established to avoid an existing obligation" - which is exactly what you're suggesting. I am not licensed to practice law anywhere, but particularly not in the United Kingdom, where I have never been. To my understanding working at American non-profits, however, corporations are most helpful as a liability shield when they are clearly distinct entities, with distinct goals, and distinct decision making. In practice, that means having multiple people, writing some sort of charter / statement of purpose, and having quarterly meetings of a board of directors with quorums where notes are written and votes are taken. This can all be a fair bit of work, where before nothing was required.
- pushcx 2y agoIn addition to the "you're not fooling anyone" bit about piercing the corporate veil that's already well-addressed, you missed provisions of the OSA. There's a requirement to name a senior manager: https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2023/50/section/103 https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2023/50/section/103 There's personal liability attached to being the named senior manager: https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2023/50/section/110 https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2023/50/section/110 Other nearby sections have additional personal liabilities. Like Sec 109 (5) (a) probably criminalizes your exact suggested response of walking away from Ofcom's inquiries: https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2023/50/section/109 https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2023/50/section/109 It depends on the legal definition of "permits the suppression of... any information required". We'd have to hire a UK lawyer for a confident answer. All this is a couple sentences in the law. The law is 250 pages long. Ofcom's guidance was rounding 3,000 pages the last time I counted. If you want to understand the OSA, I think the most accessible and valid writing available is by Neil Brown: https://onlinesafetyact.co.uk/ https://onlinesafetyact.co.uk/ There's a lot developing as Ofcom continues to publish new rules and ignore questions, so I suggest reading the 'Replies' tab of his fediverse account.
- chmorgan_ 2y agoWow, UK has these crazy laws too? The German hate speech laws made headlines a week or so ago (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/germany-online-hate-speech-prosecution-60-minutes/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/germany-online-hate-speech-pros...). They'll confiscate your electronics if you insult someone and they actively monitor the Internet for prohibited speech.
- gunian 2y agoi can feel them coming for porn and as someone who is ugly poor and has no interest in interacting with real humans me so sad
- phendrenad2 2y agoI think you're right. The elites want infinite population growth and we're not doing our part, so they're slowly turning the screws.
- this-is-sad 2y agoI wonder if closed forum would also fall under these laws. By closed forum I mean a forum where you can see posts only after signing in.
- onlinesafetyact 2y ago[flagged]
- motbus3 2y agoThis is a major blow to non-profit communities. Which also means that only for profit will make sense of maintaining such platforms, which in itself is contradictory to what the proposal of the this act is.
- jalapenos 2y agoCouldn't it be held in trust in the US or something? "Just shut it down" is the lazy thing to do. Should take tips from dissidents in other totalitarian shitholes - they just move it abroad to relatively free countries.