5 ms·

Ok, but I feel like the UK government hasn't thought this matter through. Think about what happens if the US decides it can enforce US law on UK soil against U

Ok, but I feel like the UK government hasn't thought this matter through. Think about what happens if the US decides it can enforce US law on UK soil against UK citizens. The main industry of the UK is questionable international finance using legal fictions on various islands. What happens when the US decides that that shouldn't be happening anymore? Its the same logic OfCom is using here. And unlike the UK government, the US could actually enforce this stuff in person. The US literally has military bases outside London with tanks and artillary and airstrips. This isn't a road to continue down. PS The UK doesn't have free speech and never has. Free Speech was invented by the Dutch and the US was the first to put it in a founding document. PPS I know of no government that thinks it can enforce their law outside of their borders against foreigners. That is outside the definition of sovereignty and something the UK government seems to have invented lately.

mike_hearn 1y ago
> PPS I know of no government that thinks it can enforce their law outside of their borders against foreigners. The USA does this quite regularly. Look at FATCA as one example.
- hunterpayne 1y ago
  That law only covers US citizens (that are living abroad). So no, that's not a counter example.
  - Hizonner 1y ago
    Um, no, it attempts to compel foreign banks, which may not even have a presence in the US, to disclose information about US citizens, using various threats. It doesn't threaten to throw foreigners in jail, but it does threaten to use US government "clout" against them... and the actors it's trying to put obligations on are absolutely not US citizens.
    - hunterpayne 1y ago
      Funny how you make tax evasion and money laundering on par with political speech. Fighting for your rights to be corrupt is a pretty weird take. If we can talk someone into doing what we want, that's perfectly legal as long as we or they aren't violating any laws. And nobody complains because getting dirty banks to spill is in everyone's best interests. Remember how happy everyone was at all the FIFA corruption data we uncovered.
      - deaux 1y ago
        They didn't make anything on par, they gave an example of the US government enforcing US laws on foreign entities abroad. Another example is that e.g. AWS Europe, even if every single one of its employees, board and what have it are all Germans, are still compelled to hand over their data if Amazon US is the parent company, under the likes of the CLOUD Act or FISA. That's a foreign entity comprised of foreign citizens and concerns the assets (data) of foreign citizens.
      - hansvm 1y ago
        It's only a tax evasion concern in the first place because the US started the trend of hoovering up wealth generated in other countries, which in-context still sounds like US overreach. They weren't arguing for anyone's right to be corrupt in the first place though. If US citizens really have to pay extra taxes and have arduous reporting requirements then so be it, but why is the rest of the world dragged into that mess? This isn't a "dirty banks" issue; it's nearly impossible to get a bank account at any reputable institution as a US citizen abroad just because of the PITA of the reporting requirements. It's a mediocre law from questionable authority.
      - rwarfield 1y ago
        Besides the extraterritoriality issue, the other problem with FATCA is that it makes Americans living overseas (99% of whom are just normal people not trying to evade taxes) radioactive to overseas financial institutions because of the potential consequences of failing to report on someone's accounts properly. Sadly a lot of Americans hear "foreign bank account" and immediately think "tax evasion" without realizing there are a lot of ordinary Americans overseas who just want to pay the rent and save for retirement but can't because Uncle Sam follows us wherever we go for life.
  - mike_hearn 1y ago
    No, it places requirements on all bankers worldwide regardless of whether they have any presence in the USA. This is enforced requiring compliance from all US banks, and then by making any bank that comes into compliance sever relationships with any peered bank that isn't in compliance, so via a sort of recursive graph walk it brings every bank globally under US law because every bank is ultimately connected to some US bank somewhere.
- AnthonyMouse 1y ago
  > The USA does this quite regularly. Look at FATCA as one example. The problem here is that some twits did something like this once and since then everyone is saying "but look, they're doing it, why shouldn't we?" when they ought to be saying "we're all going to be imposing sanctions on that country until they stop doing that". If someone is doing something, that's precedent -- but the precedent can either be "someone who does that can get away with it" or "someone who does that is not going to get away with it". And when making the decision, think through the consequences of everybody doing it to you if you allow it to be the first one.
Pet_Ant 1y ago
> What happens when the US decides that that shouldn't be happening anymore? Like the US did with Swiss banks? “…the standard of justice depends on the equality of power to compel and that in fact the strong do what they have the power to do and the weak accept what they have to accept.” — Thucydides, 5.89 (trans. Rex Warner, Penguin Classics edition) (half-remembered quote found using AI) original source https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/History_of_the_Peloponnesian_War/Book_5#Sixteenth_Year_of_the_War_-_The_Melian_Conference_-_Fate_of_Melos https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/History_of_the_Peloponnesian_... Book 5, end of paragraph 89
- hunterpayne 1y ago
  The US government in that case was requesting information on US citizens and not foreign nationals. I put in those last two words ("against foreigners") for a reason. If the UK government was trying to enforce UK law on UK citizens in the US, that's one thing. That's not what is happening with Ofcom, they want to enforce these laws against US citizens in US territory. That is a very blatant violation of US national sovereignty.
Nursie 1y ago
> Think about what happens if the US decides it can enforce US law on UK soil against UK citizens. Yeah about that … Try looking up Gary McKinnon or Larry Love. The US has a history of this stuff, those are just a couple of examples. Hell, Kim Dotcom (NZ but same deal). And that’s before we get into whatever the f*ck was happening at Guantanamo Bay. > I know of no government that thinks it can enforce their law outside of their borders against foreigners. Then you haven’t been paying attention.
verzali 1y ago
The US is quite literally killing people outside its borders every day. It even ran a program of kidnapping and torturing people from foreign countries for years, and still maintains a network of prisions outside America. The US very much thinks it can enforce its laws however and in whatever twisted fashion it likes.
- exe34 1y ago
  > it can enforce its laws however and in whatever twisted fashion it likes. The whims of its god-emperor/president. A lot of the enforcement is against US law.
  - etiennebausson 1y ago
    That would be an acceptable response if it was just the last one president doing it, but it's been ongoing since WW2 at the very least. I hold Russia as a whole accountable for Russia's recent war in Ukraine, it's their Responsibility to get rid of their leader when he started an unjustified invasion. I hold the U.S. as a whole responsible for their successive presidents antics.
dragonwriter 1y ago
> Think about what happens if the US decides it can enforce US law on UK soil against UK citizens. The US has asserted that right globally for quite some time, and literally threatened force against other countries to get them to actively support (not merely tacitly permit) such enforcement, even when it directly violated the constitutions of the countries involved (as well as simply doing armed enforcement without consent of the government iinvolved in other cases.) This has been particularly notable since the outset of the “Global War on Terror”, but didn’t start there (it was a big part of US counter-narcotics policy long before the GWoT.)
- HPsquared 1y ago
  There's a clear directionality there though. It doesn't work in reverse!
hexbin010 1y ago
> I know of no government that thinks it can enforce their law outside of their borders against foreigners. Really, not a single one? Like, a really big obvious one? LOL!
ndsipa_pomu 1y ago
> I know of no government that thinks it can enforce their law outside of their borders against foreigners. That is outside the definition of sovereignty and something the UK government seems to have invented lately. The USA has been doing this for a long time e.g. Wikileaks and Julian Assange, Kim Dotcom etc.
vintermann 1y ago
They have thought about it. They're betting on a global turn towards censorship and opinion control. "One hour before your time - no more!"

mike_hearn 1y ago

> PPS I know of no government that thinks it can enforce their law outside of their borders against foreigners. The USA does this quite regularly. Look at FATCA as one example.

hunterpayne 1y ago
That law only covers US citizens (that are living abroad). So no, that's not a counter example.
- Hizonner 1y ago
  Um, no, it attempts to compel foreign banks, which may not even have a presence in the US, to disclose information about US citizens, using various threats. It doesn't threaten to throw foreigners in jail, but it does threaten to use US government "clout" against them... and the actors it's trying to put obligations on are absolutely not US citizens.
  - hunterpayne 1y ago
    Funny how you make tax evasion and money laundering on par with political speech. Fighting for your rights to be corrupt is a pretty weird take. If we can talk someone into doing what we want, that's perfectly legal as long as we or they aren't violating any laws. And nobody complains because getting dirty banks to spill is in everyone's best interests. Remember how happy everyone was at all the FIFA corruption data we uncovered.
    - deaux 1y ago
      They didn't make anything on par, they gave an example of the US government enforcing US laws on foreign entities abroad. Another example is that e.g. AWS Europe, even if every single one of its employees, board and what have it are all Germans, are still compelled to hand over their data if Amazon US is the parent company, under the likes of the CLOUD Act or FISA. That's a foreign entity comprised of foreign citizens and concerns the assets (data) of foreign citizens.
    - hansvm 1y ago
      It's only a tax evasion concern in the first place because the US started the trend of hoovering up wealth generated in other countries, which in-context still sounds like US overreach. They weren't arguing for anyone's right to be corrupt in the first place though. If US citizens really have to pay extra taxes and have arduous reporting requirements then so be it, but why is the rest of the world dragged into that mess? This isn't a "dirty banks" issue; it's nearly impossible to get a bank account at any reputable institution as a US citizen abroad just because of the PITA of the reporting requirements. It's a mediocre law from questionable authority.
    - rwarfield 1y ago
      Besides the extraterritoriality issue, the other problem with FATCA is that it makes Americans living overseas (99% of whom are just normal people not trying to evade taxes) radioactive to overseas financial institutions because of the potential consequences of failing to report on someone's accounts properly. Sadly a lot of Americans hear "foreign bank account" and immediately think "tax evasion" without realizing there are a lot of ordinary Americans overseas who just want to pay the rent and save for retirement but can't because Uncle Sam follows us wherever we go for life.
- mike_hearn 1y ago
  No, it places requirements on all bankers worldwide regardless of whether they have any presence in the USA. This is enforced requiring compliance from all US banks, and then by making any bank that comes into compliance sever relationships with any peered bank that isn't in compliance, so via a sort of recursive graph walk it brings every bank globally under US law because every bank is ultimately connected to some US bank somewhere.
AnthonyMouse 1y ago
> The USA does this quite regularly. Look at FATCA as one example. The problem here is that some twits did something like this once and since then everyone is saying "but look, they're doing it, why shouldn't we?" when they ought to be saying "we're all going to be imposing sanctions on that country until they stop doing that". If someone is doing something, that's precedent -- but the precedent can either be "someone who does that can get away with it" or "someone who does that is not going to get away with it". And when making the decision, think through the consequences of everybody doing it to you if you allow it to be the first one.

Pet_Ant 1y ago

> What happens when the US decides that that shouldn't be happening anymore? Like the US did with Swiss banks? “…the standard of justice depends on the equality of power to compel and that in fact the strong do what they have the power to do and the weak accept what they have to accept.” — Thucydides, 5.89 (trans. Rex Warner, Penguin Classics edition) (half-remembered quote found using AI) original source https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/History_of_the_Peloponnesian_War/Book_5#Sixteenth_Year_of_the_War_-_The_Melian_Conference_-_Fate_of_Melos https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/History_of_the_Peloponnesian_... Book 5, end of paragraph 89

hunterpayne 1y ago
The US government in that case was requesting information on US citizens and not foreign nationals. I put in those last two words ("against foreigners") for a reason. If the UK government was trying to enforce UK law on UK citizens in the US, that's one thing. That's not what is happening with Ofcom, they want to enforce these laws against US citizens in US territory. That is a very blatant violation of US national sovereignty.

Nursie 1y ago

> Think about what happens if the US decides it can enforce US law on UK soil against UK citizens. Yeah about that … Try looking up Gary McKinnon or Larry Love. The US has a history of this stuff, those are just a couple of examples. Hell, Kim Dotcom (NZ but same deal). And that’s before we get into whatever the f*ck was happening at Guantanamo Bay. > I know of no government that thinks it can enforce their law outside of their borders against foreigners. Then you haven’t been paying attention.

verzali 1y ago

The US is quite literally killing people outside its borders every day. It even ran a program of kidnapping and torturing people from foreign countries for years, and still maintains a network of prisions outside America. The US very much thinks it can enforce its laws however and in whatever twisted fashion it likes.

exe34 1y ago
> it can enforce its laws however and in whatever twisted fashion it likes. The whims of its god-emperor/president. A lot of the enforcement is against US law.
- etiennebausson 1y ago
  That would be an acceptable response if it was just the last one president doing it, but it's been ongoing since WW2 at the very least. I hold Russia as a whole accountable for Russia's recent war in Ukraine, it's their Responsibility to get rid of their leader when he started an unjustified invasion. I hold the U.S. as a whole responsible for their successive presidents antics.

dragonwriter 1y ago

> Think about what happens if the US decides it can enforce US law on UK soil against UK citizens. The US has asserted that right globally for quite some time, and literally threatened force against other countries to get them to actively support (not merely tacitly permit) such enforcement, even when it directly violated the constitutions of the countries involved (as well as simply doing armed enforcement without consent of the government iinvolved in other cases.) This has been particularly notable since the outset of the “Global War on Terror”, but didn’t start there (it was a big part of US counter-narcotics policy long before the GWoT.)

HPsquared 1y ago
There's a clear directionality there though. It doesn't work in reverse!

hexbin010 1y ago

> I know of no government that thinks it can enforce their law outside of their borders against foreigners. Really, not a single one? Like, a really big obvious one? LOL!

ndsipa_pomu 1y ago

> I know of no government that thinks it can enforce their law outside of their borders against foreigners. That is outside the definition of sovereignty and something the UK government seems to have invented lately. The USA has been doing this for a long time e.g. Wikileaks and Julian Assange, Kim Dotcom etc.

vintermann 1y ago

They have thought about it. They're betting on a global turn towards censorship and opinion control. "One hour before your time - no more!"