Exclusive: Ministers had ‘chilling’ secret unit to curb lockdown dissent | Hacker News Reader

Exclusive: Ministers had ‘chilling’ secret unit to curb lockdown dissent

telegraph.co.uk

72 pointselectic28 comments

I'm not surprised at all. A few months back it was revealed that the Army's information warfare unit was involved in monitoring lockdown critics.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/01/29/armys-informatio...

https://archive.is/WkAqc

If anything, what surprises me is that it's able to be confirmed so specifically and confidently this soon.

At least in the U.S., the "public health emergency" "ended" less than a month ago!

Surprise surprise, government can mobilise police/army to protect their citizens. Who would have thought.

Come on, no one knew if it was a new black death or just a harmless virus. The hysteria about government taking valid steps in an unclear situation is childish.

This would be more credible if BoJo (and many other elites) had not been partying while the government "protected" its citizens.

The situation is unclear and no one knows what is going on, so dissent from the government's valid and totally non-hysterical steps will not be tolerated.

One issue is that it's a political decision on which citizens were protected.

Should we close schools semi-indefinitely to protect the elderly after vaccines were widely available (like in SF)?

Shutting down debates on these issues was and is controversial.

The elderly vote Conservative, almost by definition. QED.

Not women, and they far out survive men. QED?

We knew at the beginning of 2020 that the mortality rate was below 1%, we new it wasn't a new black death.

It was also quickly made taboo to say anything comparing it to a common cold. Many platforms silenced these ideas by censoring posts and shadow banning users.

There absolutely was hystaria involved but it was leaders, medical experts, and society responding irrationally based on fear. We did know it wasn't the plague, there were some in early 2020 raising valid points that it looked to have a mortality rate closer to 0.1% largely impacting the elderly and seriously ill.

How where these steps taken by governments valid, both legally and morally, when they were driven by fear and crushing individual rights?

> We knew at the beginning of 2020 that the mortality rate was below 1%, we new it wasn't a new black death.

And yet hospitals and ICUs were still packed. No one remember when Italy first got hit and the military had to be called in to remove bodybags/coffins?

* https://nationalpost.com/news/world/covid-19-italy-videos-sh...

* https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2020/04/coronavirus-unimag...

Even one year later morgues needed refrigerated trailers:

* https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/london/bodies-stored-trailer-...

* https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/texas-request...

What happened in Italy, New York City, and others was absolutely tragic. No one should die that way and a very good argument could be made that we as society failed all of those people and their loved ones.

Death tolls in this early outbreaks did, though, show that severe illness and death was almost entirely impacting individuals with multiple comorbidities, which weights heavily towards the elderly population.

We also knew as soon as the vaccine study preprints were released that the studies were not designed to test for protecting against infection or transmission, they were only comparing symptomatic illness over roughly 30 days.

Governments coordinating censorship of any ideas that question the relative risk of the virus or the vaccine efficacy claims touted by politicians was completely unreasonable. Not only was it a massive overreach and destruction of many democratic values, it was silencing discussion of reasonable concerns given scientific information that was already available at the time (namely the population distribution of deaths and the tested hypothesis in the vaccine trials).

We were all operating at some level of fear during the pandemic, but now that we've largely moved on its time we actually take a sober look at what was known when and how the decisions made at the time actually measure up.

Now all we need to do is police the dissent caused by the speech restrictions; and counteract it by having media voices repeat loudly and often that such concerns are based on (mis|dis|mal)information; and everything is fixed and everyone happy, right?

The Netherlands had a similar unit; I’d imagine other countries had as well.

In The Netherlands it’s mostly a secret which people were part of the unit, though a couple have been discovered and perhaps there will be more to come.

> no one knew if it was a new black death or just a harmless virus

When did "no one know"?

There was already data in early May 2020 showing risk by age group

https://twitter.com/d_spiegel/status/1260542469256753153

Yep, I looked at Out World in Data [0] at the time and from the numbers it was very clear to me that it was a disease that was mainly risky for old people and people with co-morbidities. At that point it was clear to me that most people wouldn't need to be very scared.

---

[0]: https://ourworldindata.org

I was scared because I had elderly relatives.

The idea that we should only worry about ourselves feels deeply immoral to me.

What about the idea that we should do every panicky thing we are told, including shun loved ones and demand people be rounded up or locked in their houses forcibly? Does that feel deeply immoral to you?

The people that just went along with it didn't know. They stuck their fingers in their ears and called the rest of us bad people. At least we know who they are now.

This is from The Telegraph so you’ll find many truthful things that are twisted or presented in a way to push their narrative.

See the Twitter Files coverage for another example etc.

From the article: “This is not what ought to happen in a free country.”

What do you expect from a country that's been a police state for the last 23 years or so.

With the introduction of the RIP Act in 2000, which compels those with encrypted data to divulge the keys, under penalty of imprisonment. From that, I could tell something had gone very wrong with our government, even back then.

The RIP Act opened the door to government policing of what information we are reading. Because you could no longer encrypt your data to hide it from the state's prying eyes. It was a watershed moment. And that point was where I could say the UK is no longer a free country anymore.

Interesting to see what happens to the current campaign against encryption, in light of them trying to keep WhatsApp messages from an enquiry for the sake of their privacy.

The UK is an absolute mess in regards to this stuff ... from anti monarchy protestors being arrested, to journalists questioning the Ukraine narrative being arrested (https://thegrayzone.com/2023/05/30/journalist-kit-klarenberg...)

https://archive.ph/Svc9i

It might be concerning, but this isn't some great exclusive. The establishment was reported in March 2020.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/09/cross-whitehal...

Governements are in a weird place on those fronts. Either they don't try to interfere with what happens on social media, and they are criticized for not protecting people, and also have to deal with the consequences (I'd argue that misinformation about a disease will have health consequences. Maybe they're overedtimated, though ?)

Alternatively, they have to try and "police" social media, which can not look like anything but policing free speech, which, especially in times of uncertainty, is bound to backfire.

I wonder if people would be concerned too if the social media platforms were, in the end, ruled by juges rather than governments?

It would still be a "them", but at least it would not be the same "them". Or would the social networks start to revolt against judges ?

(Yes, I know, it will look a lot like separation of powers ((c) Montesquieu), and like we're going to reinvent "judges" and "the laws of free press from the late 1800s" any time soon.)

It's really quite amusing to see The Telegraph trying to claim the moral high ground over government interference and disinformation.

For those who don't know, The Telegraph is an extreme right media outlet which regularly publishes absolutely batshit denialist nonsense about Covid, climate change, immigration, and all the usual hits.

It's a Q drop for the UK's upper class.

Not coincidentally it used to employ Boris Johnson, and while PM he allegedly said that it was his real boss.

https://www.lbc.co.uk/news/boris-johnson-refers-telegraph-re...

So here we are with more than 200,000 dead and more than 2 million with Long Covid.

Good job, Telegraph writers. I hope you're all proud of your "journalism."

I can't read the article because it's paywalled (and I'm unwilling to give the Barclay family any cash) but I'm very sceptical about the accuracy of the article given the Telegraph's history of printing lies and nonsense about the pandemic.

See for example: https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-55676037

Does HN have any guidelines about paywalled articles? I assume a large proportion of people commenting here won't have read the article.

>Many of the issues being raised were valid at the time and have since been proven to be well-founded.

No, they were not.

More evidence of the Fox-ification of the Telegraph, a once respectable source of news...

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