UK Home Secretary considering removing right to anonymity on social media
independent.co.uk
independent.co.uk
- build a wave machine to stop (drown?) immigrants coming from France
- build a floating wall in the Channel to stop immigrants from France
- send asylum seekers to concentration camps in some remote islands in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean
- send asylum seekers to concentration camps on abandoned oil rigs in the North Sea
- reintroduce capital punishment (but she wasn't Home Secretary at the time)
The UK equivalent was entrusting all drivers with a box of coins so they can use the phone boxes. Should have hear run out, the PM could call the operator and request reverse charge connection (with UK strategic command or sth presumably). This was also deemed failsafe, as there are many phone boxes around the country.
It was once described in length on QI...
This was in the 1950s and is described in Peter Hennessey's excellent book The Human Button.
It's been a while since I read the book, but from memory the cabinet office also purchased an AA membership so that the prime minister's driver would have a key giving them access to the private AA phone boxes that were fairly common back then. They had an arrangement with the AA call handlers to allow the PM to be connected to the appropriate part of government in an emergency.
Meanwhile the US and Russian government probably had satellite...
Silly old Britain relying on a largely subterranean circuit switched network whilst the cool kids might use the latest cool gear to get an important message through. Even today, whilst Facebook danced the grim fandango for an eye watering six hours, boring old standard issue comms carried on functioning.
It sounds a bit daft but there was a massive network of red boxes all over the country with decent connectivity back to a network of exchanges etc etc POTS n that. The AA (Automobile Association) had their own boxes too. To use this network you needed a few pence. To get the message through you use keywords and passwords ie a protocol. The failure modes for a satellite phone in those days doesn't bear thinking of.
When the message is important, keep it as simple as possible but no more.
Hell, the same is true today. Any significant conflict between world powers may start with knocking out the satellites.
"Will you accept this collect call from: LAUNCH-THE-MISSILES-DO-IT-NOW?"
The beard tax was cool, I also liked the sober pubs as described in the Licensing Act 1872 section 12: “Every person found drunk in any highway or other public place, whether a building or not, or on any licensed premises, shall be liable to a penalty”
Some of my favourite legalese euphemisms.
I love the idea of "finding oneself in a state of manifest drunkenness", how on Earth could that have happened?
What is your source? I hardly believe she said that and still a home minister of a free and democratic society.
> Downing Street has asked officials to consider the option of sending asylum seekers to Moldova, Morocco or Papua New Guinea and is the driving force behind proposals to hold refugees in offshore detention centres, according to documents seen by the Guardian.
> The documents suggest officials in the Foreign Office have been pushing back against No 10’s proposals to process asylum applications in detention facilities overseas, which have also included the suggestion the centres could be constructed on the south Atlantic islands of Ascension and St Helena.
I'm iffy on terming this "concentration camps". It fits the technical definition (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Boer_War_concentration_... as examples), but the line between "concentration" and "extermination" camps like Auschwitz has been entirely blurred for decades.
How is a detention Center the same as concentration camp?
My take on these hot button issues such as immigration is media (right or left) always tries to make this a polarizing issue to play the narrative for the side they are in.
I remember post 2016 during Trump presidency, detention camps for people from southern borders in US were a large issue even though they existed with the same level or lower humanitarian conditions for decades. media (on the left) would make huge deal when CBP would separate parents and hold people in detention camps even though same things happened in previous adminiStratton. This would lead media outlets calling Trump border enforcement secretary all sorts of names comparing him to Gestapo in some of those show congressional hearings. Now the exact same conditions exist, CBP has the exact same level of enforcement of border laws. But you don’t hear the same outlets coming out with their outrage machine. Except Fox and some other channels leaning right.
Neither right or left has any intention to solve the immigration crisis(at least in the US). Both sides use this issue to rile up their base, that’s all.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment
"The American Heritage Dictionary defines the term concentration camp as: "A camp where persons are confined, usually without hearings and typically under harsh conditions, often as a result of their membership in a group which the government has identified as dangerous or undesirable.""
Basically all immigration detention counts: people detained (not free to leave) without being charged with a crime.
This remains wrong regardless of cynical media games on the subject.
Because a valid definition of “concentration camp” is:
> A camp where persons are confined, usually without hearings and typically under harsh conditions, often as a result of their membership in a group which the government has identified as dangerous or undesirable
refugees are sent there before any hearing and life on an abandoned oil rig in the North Sea is extremely harsh. When these people are sent to remote locations, it is often to circumvent human rights protections (see the Australian government sending refugees to remote islands or the Italian government paying warlords to run concentration camps in Lybia). Also refugees are deemed undesirable and dangerous by a large fraction of the population, and so by the government.
We ticked all the boxes.
By intentionally conflating the detention camp with a concentration camp, you are seeking parallels with things such as forced detention and murder akin to what Nazis did.
> under harsh conditions
Define harsh conditions. This was the same tactic used by US media during Trump presidency when the camps where actually running for years under the same conditions with billions of dollars of funding. And somehow you don’t hear about these things anymore even though the same camps practically exist under the same conditions. Not to say many refugees/economic migrants essentially use cartels and risk their lives, being in detention camps is least of their worry and they know they will be in detention camps.
This is incorrectly conflating concentration/internment camps with death/extermination camps.
Guantanamo Bay is a concentration camp, as were the Japanese-American internment camps. Auschwitz was a death camp. The Nazis had both kinds.
The alternative would be to detain them respecting their human rights and eventually deporting them, if they don’t have a right to stay.
> By intentionally conflating the detention camp with a concentration camp
You must be conflating concentration, labor and extermination camps in Nazi Germany. Concentration camps are a much older idea. Besides, I used the dictionary definition of “concentration camp”. I understand “I want to put children in concentration camps” may sound bad in polite company. For this reason, and many others, I’d prefer to not do that.
> Define harsh conditions.
Hopefully I don’t have to explain why been detained on an abandoned oil rig in the middle of the North Sea would be harsh.
> This was the same tactic used by US media during Trump presidency when the camps where actually running for years under the same conditions with billions of dollars of funding.
I’m not much interested in discussing what the American press is or is not saying about whatever Trump or his predecessors did or did not do. I was just listing a bunch of blatantly stupid ideas Patel proposed in the past 2-3 years.
Also, didn't they actually spend millions on the porn filter just to call it quits later? Surely schools could've used that money instead.
You will not understand British politics until you realise that she is in power because of, not despite, these stupid suggestions. They're what you have to say to get there. That's why Johnson performs the idiot act.
This type of attack happened in 2016 when another MP was killed, in 2010 when it was an attempted murder (the MP survived), in 2000 (MP severely injured, his assistant was killed).
Before that there was the attack on the entire government at the party conference in 1984 by the IRA which killed 5 (including one MP), and assassination of the Northern Ireland secretary in 1979.
(Details seem to be scarce because it's sub judice, but presumably US media might have something?)
I don't see how social media anonymity == internet anonymity?
This will generate tons of noise for law enforcement that they cannot effectively find the true signals of those intending to commit violence as opposed to those that are just angry and like to vent online. There are just too many people posting angry stuff on social media these days to find the actually violent people. Whenever horrific school shootings happen, the media immediately looks at the attacker's social media and wonders why law enforcement didn't catch them ahead of time; this is why.
And since a crime hasn't yet been committed, there isn't much law enforcement can do to obtain a warrant (at least up until now). And even if they find someone that they suspect might commit a crime, they can't just hold that person indefinitely. They either need to have enough evidence to prosecute or let the target go.
Suggestions like this don't actually solve the problem, they just shift the blame elsewhere.
While not trivial it is fairly straightforward to get an anonymous e.g. FB account and a VPN and you are practically invisible to law enforcement. I suspect you don't even need the VPN for less serious offences.
For example, how would law enforcement go after someone who repeatedly said something like "Someone needs to take care of John Q. Politician because he's ruining the country"? That's just not legally sound enough to preemptively arrest the poster of that statement, but so many people talk that way online.
What I'm saying is there is low hanging fruit: Clearly illegal death threats that are posted by anonymous accounts and therefore not/hardly enforceable.
So with magical authoritarian thinking: 1) a troll is someone who rudely disagrees with a public person; 2) assassins and terrorists are people who very rudely disagree with public people; Conclusion: people who rudely disagree online are proto-terrorists.
Do you think the issues of Grenfell could have been solved by immediate action? I think an enquiry to figure out what went wrong was necessary.
You also seem to think there’s been a swift, wide reaching response to the MP’s murder. I’m not sure what that is, since this policy proposal has merely been mooted.
Or rather, not nothing. Live human watchmen are patrolling hundreds of buildings and will wake everyone up in case there’s a fire; because there are no fire alarms and if a fire does break out, you have no time to spare at all. Oh and the residents have to pay for this.
But the people who built these, designed them, accepted as safe, or indeed set the regulation, that’s all fine.
https://www.insidehousing.co.uk/insight/insight/waking-watch...
So unless you can afford to abandon them, there’s no option but to pray and stay. Heck, you might be paying a mortgage on it!
Of course if you are a council house renter, as many inhabitants are, then you can’t move out anyway, you’re there because you have no other options.
Here[1] is the Director of Policy at the British Safety Council commenting "Even allowing for the tardiness of statute and government process, two years on from the catastrophic events of Grenfell, the lack of tangible change to the underlying root causes and systemic failures is quite frankly lamentable." and that was in 2019, two years after it and now two years ago.
Edit: My original comment was too snarky and politically aggressive for the HN guidelines, and it is the case that there were £200M allocated for building improvements and that a huge police investigation takes time and charges of corporate manslaughter may still be brought in due time.
[1] https://www.britsafe.org/publications/safety-management-maga...
He was probably born in the UK, went through schools there, maybe his parents did too. But let’s just make it clear, he’s not British in the same way that someone white is. Or, you know, Pakistani, but from an upper-middle-class family of doctors.
No one reports that Wayne Rooney is British, of English origin.
If people stop rewarding this kind of writing, their wellbeing is not threatened in any way. If companies fail to observe the competitive edge which their competitors are utilizing...
Disagreeing with this is akin to putting your head in the sand and wishing for a reality that simply is not there.
I feel like the focus on “Somali” is meant to deflect any responsibility on domestic matters. This guy apparently was born, bred, schooled in the UK. Maybe he was radicalised by hardcore Somali-heritage islamists (if that’s a thing), but then it’s a failure of UK domestic policy for creating an environment, or cause, for them to organise, and UK domestic security for preventing this.
I’m not saying this is easy, rather that this is where the onus lies. But when we say “ah he’s Somali”, suddenly it’s someone else’s fault.
When a white British guy, with a name like Gary or Shaun stabs a teacher, say, you get stories from people who went to school with Gary or Shaun. He was an alright guy but a bit extreme when angry, maybe. Or no one would see it coming, he was a quiet guy. Why did no one see it coming? Ah well you can’t prevent everything.
But this guy is Somali, it’s their fault. I mean, ok he’s British but you know what I mean. Different British.
Was he British? <censored>.
Was he foreign? <censored>.
What in his upbringing could have had ties to extremism? <censored>.
Hmm. Great newspaper.
Naturalisation process as it currently stands. I believe the GP was alluding to the fact that that process could be changed. Though I agree the public should base their sentiment on, for example, per-capita homicide rates of various groups, and not anecdata. But graphs don't seem to move people the way stories do, and we are stuck with the public we have.
> When a white British guy, with a name like Gary or Shaun stabs a teacher, say, you get stories from people who went to school with Gary or Shaun. He was an alright guy but a bit extreme when angry, maybe. Or no one would see it coming, he was a quiet guy. Why did no one see it coming? Ah well you can’t prevent everything.
After Stephen Lawrence, a Black man, was murdered in the UK by whites, he was commemorated by, among other things, making 22 April "Stephen Lawrence Day": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Stephen_Lawrence
It's a high profile job and the danger comes with it. If you're the one writing laws for everyone to follow, it's highly likely that many people will want you dead.
It's a "fun" fact that US presidents have a nearly 20% death rate for example.
that's lower than the 100% death rate of general population.
With any terror event, tragic as it might be, the aftermath tends to be way more impactful than the actual event. The death of 5,000 people in WTC started at least one UN-sanctioned war and cost the lives of many times more than the airplane strikes.
So yes, I’m choosing to focus on the aftermath. But Sir David, rest in peace.
When talking about a hate crime the ethnicity of the perpetrator is hardly irrelevant. And for any terrorism-related incident the first question is going to be whether or not the perpetrators were domestic or foreign (especially if they just murdered a member of the government) - as this shapes the response massively. If this person was raised abroad and brought radicalism with them that’s totally different from someone raised in the UK who has been radicalised online (or possibly even in the community).
Political correctness aside, it's mostly either local nationalists (which are native, noone "let them in", and there's nowhere to deport them), or first or second generation immigrant islamists (which someone actually let inside the country relatively recently). If it's an immigrant, people of course want to know where they came from... and very few of them come from eg. japan. I know this fuels steretypes, but ignoring statistics is also bad.
Also, make your pick. What was this guy? British? Radical Islamist? Somali? I think these are reasonable labels. But “British but you know, kinda foreign” is unfair. It’s saying, well it’s kind of our fault, we can’t blame any foreigners, but oh look he’s really Somali, so it’s fine. Stiff upper lip prevails, unblemished.
I live in the balkans... back in the time, there was a lot of crime commited by people from here all over rich european countries, and everyone knew that... the germans/french/swiss/... and we, the balkaners did.
So yeah, considering the amount of somali immigrants and the number of native brits there, and the MP getting killed by a somali, what is it, that makes somalis more likely to do an act of terrorism? Is it something that they 'learned' from their families? Friends? Church/mosque? Why are immigrants overrepresented in crimes like that? Same for us balkaners... why do more Željkos rob banks than Hans's in germany?
This is a thing that should be looked over, and not just ignored, because things like these are not a one-time thing, but have been happening all over europe (and i'm talking about both terrorist attacks by islamists, and mostly money&drugs-related crimes by people from balkans).
So the general response from the left is to ban collecting any statistics which might reveal group differences, or to ban publication of such statistics if they are collected, or to assume that any such difference are the results of oppression if they are published.
Which is a shame because Europe desperately needs to find a way of integrating these populations, and pretending that there is no problem is just sticking your head in the sand.
But this style of writing, about an individual event, echoed in every media source I can find, is imho irresponsible. Sure, if there’s a rise in crime and terrorism from Somali-heritage Brits, write about it. But not on individual cases.
If nothing else, this guy is innocent until proven guilty. What if he’s totally clinically insane? A bunch of people will conclude from such coverage (their error but still) that Somalis are evil British-hating monsters. Not only is this guy not representative of an otherwise diverse group of people, his motives and actions might be nothing to do with his Somali-ness.
Maybe he’s the only Black member of the local fox hunt, or did this as part of a New Age pagan cult? I doubt it, but to imply the ethnic connection before anything concrete is known is wrong.
You should know better about the disasters possible when people are stereotyped on their ethnicity.
"Privacy activists oppose EU plans for a GDPR-compliant Whois v2" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28892013
Even with projects like GDPR, we're trying to build some pro-citizen rules. But we've still done nothing to defend or enable individuals, to grant them powers & rights to operate independently & freely online. There's no bill of hosting rights, that I'm aware of, anywhere on the planet. I want to see a nation step up & try to enhance & promote speech & data of it's citizen's in an supernational context. Our citizens have a right to have their words online! We are actively building & encouraging hosting solutions to enable that!
I wonder if the world always seems like this in real time. When I first learned about the Cuban Missile Crisis, it was described as a bit of a mild thriller with a happy end, much ado about nothing. But it must have seemed like apocalypse about to happen.
The UK should propose the outlaw of all bunny killing videos. Relatively benign you’d think, but as a sideshow it would require some kind of way of blocking the bad guy bunny killers and the way to do that is with a Great Wall of China^WTunbridge Wells^W^W^W^W^Wnational firewall.
Actually, it’s even more meta. The UK establishment has no intention of doing anything as base as constitutionally accountable lawmaking. Far better to allow these US corporations to dodge tax on their UK income, then threaten to crack down on the tax dodging unless FB/GOOG/ELLO bend to the government’s privately (and extra-parliamentary) will.
As for encryption, does this mean we can't do online banking if it's outlawed?
This isn’t true everywhere, and phone numbers work internationally. I’ve got a Weibo account with a +1 US phone number and it works (surprisingly). The problem with the phone number system is that quite honestly, it’s only not anonymous in cities/states/countries that make it closely linked to identity.
It will be licensed. Banks will have a license. Companies will be able to apply for VPN to carry on (and required to monitor employees traffic)
People with extreme views don’t care if their voice is public.
Extremism seems lower than ever to me.
Political extremism is at an all-time high in Western democracies: The US has seen a president that doesn't respect elections, an attack on the capitol, an ever widening gap between the left/right 'tribes', and poor and rich. Far-right extremism has overtaken Islamist fundamentalism. A decline of newspapers, 'the media' and journalism in general and the rise of Fox News and the like.
That's not a US exclusive: UK, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Poland paint a similar, slightly less pronounced, picture.
We live in a period of unprecedented peace in Western democracies and all signs are pointing towards increased nationalism and instability.
(Pop quiz: which newspaper columnist has been cited approvingly in more than one mass shooter manifesto?)
Rather comically, the morons in control of the social media companies have done Trump an extraordinary favor. They've made him look better than he otherwise would by denying him access to the megaphone. They're considerably helping him in the lead up to 2024 by keeping him off the social media platforms where he'd otherwise be constantly putting his foot in his mouth and reminding center voters why they elected Biden. The best thing social media companies could do if they wanted to stop the inbound 2024 Trump campaign, would be to let him actively Tweet.
- Don't care about the content of the tweet (no fact checking boards)
- Don't care to register who sent it (no privacy leak to government)
"Attack" the structure:
- Heavily tune down features that can enable posts on social media to go viral. Basically ban virality. Boosting high-emotion posts above all else is the largest systemic issue.
Yes, it's heavy-handed, but it's not censorship. It's not registering who has which political opinions. It's just changing the rules equally for all, to create a better forum.
Instead, just stop using those platforms if you don't like them. It's just that simple.
That's, like, exactly what the business of government is.
> There is no quantifiable harm.
If this is in reference to the particular mode of operation suggested to be regulated upthread (where it might, arguably, be true) rather than the generality in the previous sentence (where it clearly is false), then its an argument against the particular regulation, not against government regulation of private business patterns generally.
Government does exist to, among other things, regulate what private businesses can do.
I should have stated that governments should not create regulation when there is either no quantifiable externality or the harm is a part of a voluntary trade between private parties.
That seems roughly as feasible as banning maths.
The problem is that Yyu'd essentially be killing one of the primary revenue generators for these companies, which are already built on top of fundamentally unsustainable business models in terms of actually managing content. The thing is that you'd have to define what exactly "high-emotion" posts are and how content will be assessed, which is effectively a form of censorship.
but again, i just want to look at this less from the UK perspective, and to note once again this is some part of the world imagining it's going to create a strong guidelines for how the rest of the world has to operate.
/s, hopefully obviously.
They then demonstrated how you didn’t even need the person you were doing this to to be dead, as they got a provisional driving license in the name of David Blunkett. Who was the Home Secretary at the time. And is blind.
Apparently the UK police still use the Jackal method as of last year, though obviously no system can possibly prevent actions by its own enforcement body: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/dec/07/met-police-l...
Or it is anonymous tweeters of course.
I noticed one Conservative MP followed by thousands of bots presumably there to make him seem like an influencer to the algo. Then these weird networks of retweeters pile in to amplify what he said.
But it is everyone else who is at fault....
Not to mention the internet is global, so really they can't enforce anything.
> Priti Patel considering removing right to anonymity on social media to stop ‘relentless’ abuse of MPs
If they weren't so corrupt and inept they wouldn't be subject to 'abuse', it comes with the job.
Edit: also to add, abusing people online is an easy form of 'slactivism', people let off steam, it keeps them lazy and complacent, stops them taking action in the real world.
If that venue is removed, i.e arresting people for name calling on Facebook (which is already happening) then actual actions in the real world will escalate and dealing with name calling will be the least of these peoples problems.
Shifting potentially dangerous content from Twitter and Facebook to small, specialised sounds like a win win.
It'll be another guaranteed win, like FOSTA and SESTA in the US. Thank Congress that child prostitution has moved to places that law enforcement have no access to, and that sex workers require middlemen again in order to work.
It indeed comes with the job, but I think you are trying to shift the blame too much. Politicians cannot possibly do their job in a way that appeals to everyone and step on no one's toes. And some people out there are not entirely sane and the Internet has given them wings.
Every public figure, not just politicians, is a target of stupid hate. Actors, singers, journalists: if your face surfaces on people's screen too often, you will collect a team of disgusting haters.
The job of politics is contextually assigning weights to the interests of different social components: that some temporarily lose something as their interest is valued as minor in a big picture is part of the game. The phenomenon of «corrupt and inept» is completely different.
Anything can be the target of the hate of morons: that is noise by definition. Move above the noise, and reasons arise why some collect targeted ire more than others. That is not frequency related exposure («too often»). It is, correctly, exposure as «corrupt and inept», and something very frequent in some big tribes (surely 'cultures' would be improper) must be added: bestiality. The ways of the worse populists (speaking not from the head to the heads, but from the nasty bits to the nasty bits) are common, in some areas, to many paupers-in-spirit attempting to be culturemakers owing to the drives of ignorance. Rare in the UK (apparently), extremely frequent elsewhere.