No need to speculate that the UK government "might" one day become the bad guys: they already arrest over 30 people a day for speech that offends the prevailing political orthodoxy.
Stories like this quickly put to rest the idea that everyone who gets arrested must actually deserve it. The bar for posting content that violates the law is very low.
There was also the tragic story of the Cambridge professor who was completely unqualified and had a fake life story. When journalists would get close to the story he would report them to the police for harassment to spike the stories.
In this particular case, the IT consultant was owed money by a failing business, and he put 1) a picture of the business premises, and 2) pictures of him firing guns, on a website where he was sure the business owner would see it.
That's textbook intimidation, which in certain cases is a crime in the UK, and even some US states. You can also do it offline, for example, by sending a letter to the victim containing a photograph of the front of their house, and a photograph of you firing guns. The implication is pretty straightforward and doesn't even need to be stated: "I have guns and I know where you live. Pay me that money you owe me or I might use them." That implication is still there, for the victim, even if you add surface text like "Hey everyone look at these cool things!"
Only _after_ he was arrested, and the police went looking around his house for guns... did he admit that the pictures were taken overseas, he doesn't actually own the guns. And yet that's what the article leads with, like it was a known fact from the get-go and those silly-billy police knew that but went looking for them in the UK anyway.
This article is a great lesson in how to mislead without saying anything untrue.
His own words in a different article make the reason for the arrest clear:
> “The arrest was based on two separate social media posts,” he said. “One was the photo of myself with the shotgun, [...] And the second one was my LinkedIn banner at the top of the page.”
> “I used the photo my business partner took on his premises as a header photo on LinkedIn with the intention he would look at that and go, ‘Why’s this guy posting that? I’d better call him and find out rather than dodging me’ as it had done for months,” he said.
EDIT: and your second example is also dangerously misleading. Jason Arday (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jason_Arday) and/or his university reported 2 professors and 1 journalist to the police, pretending their requests for comment on his plagiarism were harrassment. For all three reports, police chose to take no action (nonetheless it still had a chilling effect on speech). What spiked the story is that Jason Arday and/or his university got very expensive reputation lawyers Carter-Fuck to send a C&D to the journalist's newspaper, promising expensive litigation if they published the story. That is what spiked the story, not intimidation via false harassment claims. Expensive lawyers making baseless threats work equally well in the US and UK to chill legal speech, it's not a policy issue.
> In this particular case, the IT consultant was owed money by a failing business, and he put 1) a picture of the business premises, and 2) pictures of him firing guns, on a website where he was sure the business owner would see it.
From your own link, this was from 2 separate posts. I don't know man, this sounds like an excuse from the company to cause trouble and avoid having to pay the owed money.
Also the “website where he was sure the business owner would see it” is a cheap way to hide the fact that he posted on his on LinkedIn, which he used as his social media network. You can just say LinkedIn. We know what LinkedIn is.
Your own quote clearly says it was “two separate social media posts”. The article I linked clearly says he was arrested for one count of stalking and another account of suspicion of possession of a firearm:
> A week later, on August 23, the officers returned and arrested him on suspicion of possessing a firearm with intent to cause fear of violence and another allegation of stalking related to a photograph of a house that appeared on his social media.
You’re trying hard to link the two as “textbook intimidation” but the firearm post that triggered this was just a vacation photo and post about his vacation.
You’re being misleading by saying he “posted them to a website” without explaining that what you mean by “website” is that he posted them on his personal social media.
> For all three reports, police chose to take no action (nonetheless it still had a chilling effect on speech).
Incorrect to say the police “took no action”. They contacted the journalist and instructed him to desist. The police later admitted it was a mistake to pursue the case. It says all of this in the link you used:
> Arday made a complaint about Grove to the Metropolitan Police, alleging harassment that was affecting his mental health; the police asked Grove to desist from further contact with Arday.[80] Mark Rowley, Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, later said that the complaint about Grove should not have been taken forward.[81]
It’s confusing that you’re trying to claim the police “took no action” when they admitted fault for following through with the complaint and they told the reporter to desist.
> Expensive lawyers making baseless threats work equally well in the US and UK to chill legal speech, it's not a policy issue.
If the expensive lawyers are equal in the UK and US, then that’s not the important point of this story. It’s the part about him engaging the police and the police following through with it.
I also strongly disagree that it’s equivalent in the US. That expensive legal firm would be utilizing the maximum extent of the laws available to them in the UK, which includes the very harassment laws we’re talking about!
You can’t say it’s “not a policy issue” by pointing to literal lawyers who are using the law.
> arrested on... another [count] of suspicion of possession of a firearm:
That's not how it works. You get arrested on suspicion, the cops figure out if you actually did it or not, once they know you did it they charge you with counts of actual offences (not suspicions).
> > arrested on... another [count] of suspicion of possession of a firearm:
> That's not how it works. You get arrested on suspicion, the cops figure out if you actually did it or not, once they know you did it they charge you with counts of actual offences (not suspicions).
Isn’t that literally what the quote, which was from the article, says? It didn’t contain the word “count”. You added that. The quote says he was arrested on suspicion.
Are you really defending Arday harassing journalists through the police and being overjoyed because just this time the police was not overzealous enough to arrest them (very likely they were fine only thanks to the huge media attention)? Unbelievable.
I'm not defending Arday at all. I'm pointing out OP's claims are bullshit. At no point did anyone "spike" stories because Arday called the police on them.
OP appears to claim that involving the police is the way to get journalists off your tail. It isn't, and it didn't deter either the professors or the journalist. The much more effective way to get journalists off your tail, which OP didn't even mention, is lawyers. But that doesn't let OP rage against UK laws so he went with the bullshit claim instead.
There was absolutely zero media attention at the time police processed Arday's complaint against professor David Harris, in 2023. They closed the complaint without taking action. The professor didn't even know he was being investigated. His colleague Martyn Hammersley then went over Arday's head straight to the faculty. So much for the police getting people off your case!
In the case of the journalist Arday reported in 2025, police again did not arrest or charge him, but they (wrongly, in my opinion) phoned him and asked him not to contact Arday. This had a chilling effect and the police had no legal basis to direct him so. Again, this was long before any 2026 media attention.
It wasn't media attention that saved these people, it was that what they did wasn't illegal. The police shouldn't have given Arday's claims as much merit as they did, but no matter what Arday said, there was no evidence of crime there, it was never going any further than that.
Only once the deets about Arday were leaked by Cambridge faculty to Cofnas and he published them, and the media firestorm begain, did the details of the police phoning the journalist become known, and in reaction to that, the head of the police said that was clearly wrong and should not have happened: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c0rd9y99grzo
Well he's dead now in no small part because he was 100% correct that partisan activists amplified by friendly "journalists' would follow the usual playbook of creating a reality distortion field by repeatedly lying and republishing each others half truths and outright lies into a massive gish gallop.
Argh yes, context. I was wondering why the police were doing what they were doing. Police don't randomly do that to someone, there had to be a reason. Context is king.
Read the actual articles the person linked. The comment you’re replying to uses weasel words like saying “put them on a website” to conceal the fact that the “website” was the guy posting different unrelated things on his social media feed.
In the second case, the person involved was weaponizing the police against a journalist who had uncovered something about a completely unqualified university professor who had a fraudulent background story. The police didn’t do it “randomly”. The professor knew how to use the laws to intimidate and silence his critics (when even the GP comment admits).
Even the police later admitted they should not have gone as far as they did.
I did read the article, and my only takeaway was that it was missing context.
But I agree that the law is being weaponised by bad actors, but irrespective of that the police are duty bound to investigate. They take the blame too. It's one of the few jobs everyone else knows how to do better than the people doing it.
- We just changed our PM, despite his party having a historic majority.
- Parliament routinely rebels against the government, and backbenchers have a lot of say about the business of government.
- We have a number of upstart parties; they might be populist, but at least it's not a two-party-forever system.
- We had a coalition government just a few years ago.
- We changed our constitution a few months ago (abolishing hereditary peers) and it was just another news among many.
- We ejected one of the previous PMs for having a party during a lockdown, with a massive scandal before that when the PM accepted a gift of some wallpaper.
Compare and contrast to the ossified and corrupt American system, where the president is openly enriching himself and his family and friends, and there's nothing threatening the presidency. The last amendment was passed half a century ago, and there's zero hope for reform.
Democracy is a living, breathing system of government, not a number of checkboxes like "can I shoot a gun for fun" or "can I call someone N-word online". It's important to see the forest for the trees.
> We ejected one of the previous PMs for having a party during a lockdown
Weirdly that never happened, but that's how many people remember it.
He was ejected because he lost the support of his ministers (most of who resigned over a period of a few weeks) after he had made them to go out and lie to the public on his behalf in the case of Chris Pincher MP.
To be entirely fair, that was a combination of many things (Pincher, wallpaper, partygate, covid deaths, covid deals, brexit, etc). The ministers are also MPs, and they want to be reelected. By that point it was clear that the partygate is not going away, so they needed a scapegoat.
The point still stands though. A populist PM who did a tiny bit of mismanagement and corruption (relative to his current peer in the US) was forced to resign. Trump isn't.
Both the UK and the US fail in rule of law regarding "all citizens and leaders must be equal before the law, supported by strong anti-corruption measures."
UK has stated separation of powers but the crown reportedly nudged Starmer to step down. The king is the one that can formally appoint government following elections.
Prince Andrew had and other royals have control over military forces in the UK, canada, australia, nz, ect. You can hem and haw all you want but the crown has constitutional and ceremonial control over the armed forces.
The King gives 'the kings speech' which is used to set the governments legislative agenda to parliment.
The king also gives royal assent to bills passed by parliment.
Black spider memos
The king also steers diplomatic efforts abroad.
every single aspect of UKs democracy can be cut by the King whenever he wants.
What is the actual purpose of freedom of expression in a democracy? Is it being able to call people N-word online with no repercussions, or is it being able to organise, form political parties, and change the country?
If it's the former, then indeed the US has more of it.
If it's the latter, the UK has three new major parties with very different policies that openly and vocally oppose Labour, Conservatives, and Libdems. Mainstream media regularly broadcasts their views. I might strongly disagree with those views, but these parties are clearly freely operating political organisations. How is the US doing with viable non-Dem and non-Republican parties?
I won't comment on your Crown conspiracy theories.
Calling big changes in power, substantive shifts in policy, and constitutional changes "government theatre" to then link to "Flying_Rodent" on twitter as "reality" is just comically unselfaware.
I don't get why you're making excuses for this stuff. Trump is one kind of bad, but almost all western governments are increasingly unaccountable to their voters. And these are usually the folks that claim to be defenders of democracy. The hypocrisy is breathtaking.
> almost all western governments are increasingly unaccountable to their voters
In this country, the government with a vast majority couldn't even withdraw a small cash payment from better off pensioners without a rebellion from their own MPs.
Those generalising takes are entirely disconnected from the political reality of the UK outside of twitter.
> We just changed our PM, despite his party having a historic majority.
Yeah? The country got to vote for the PM? I don't recall there being a national election. Having a bunch of party insiders replace the leader who won an election with an unelected one is the opposite of democracy.
The leader of the party stepping down (for non-medical reasons) should trigger an election. The fact that it doesn't is scandalous. We have the same problems in Canada where we elected a minority Liberal government that has now magically turned into a majority due to legislators switching parties. How can someone flip from the opposition party to the ruling one and still claim to be representing the will of the people who voted for them?
Funny thing is, your desired system is a constitutional change and it's entirely feasible in the UK if there's enough support for it. Which is exactly my point.
"In democracy, one side always wins and makes its opponents illegal."
“The claim to legality renders every rebellion and counter-measure an injustice and a legal violation or ‘illegality.’ If legality and illegality can be arbitrarily at the disposal of the majority, then the majority can, above all, declare their domestic competitors illegal, that is, hors-la-loi… Whoever controls 51 percent would be able legally to render the remaining 49 percent illegal… and to treat partisan opponents like common criminals, who are then perhaps reduced to kicking their boots against the locked door.”
this is not limited to democracy - every form of government does this to varying degree, and in fact democracy tends to be (perhaps marginally) better than say autocracy.
as is often said with a sigh, "democracy is the worst form of government, except for every other."
to me, democracy is really about giving the masses enough feeling of agency, because the alternatives are either revolution and/or disengagement / low productivity / low creativity, and both are "bad for business" i.e. cannot compete with democracies.
China will be an interesting test of this theory. Notably, in China they have a terrific education system and the government is able to attract/retain smart ambitious people.
Another test will be the power of governments to thwart revolutions using digital and kinetic assymmetry. The masses have individual hackers and pea shooters and the government has digital armies and autonomous drone swarms. In turn, since revolution is off the table, governments don't need the overhead of democracy. In the US, we see this with the rise of Executive Orders for example.
> to me, democracy is really about giving the masses enough feeling of agency, because the alternatives are either revolution and/or disengagement / low productivity / low creativity, and both are "bad for business" i.e. cannot compete with democracies.
I'll pick this one because it is the easiest to refute (but the others are wrong, too). What form of government was predominant during the most creative and productive periods in recent history, namely the industrial revolution and the Italian Rennaissance?
You even mention China yourself, but do not update your priors.
The magic of democracy isn't that it promises good governance, the magic of it is that it provides a clear avenue for a peaceful transfer of power that is exercised every few years.
Most functioning democracies require more than 51% of a senate and six justices and a criminal head of state to completely unravel.
> The magic of democracy isn't that it promises good governance, the magic of it is that it provides a clear avenue for a peaceful transfer of power that is exercised every few years.
We are currently witnessing the dismantling of this illusion. The reason western governments increasingly engage in lawfare against the opposition is that for the first time since the post-WWII order, they are threatened by a real regime change.
The problem is not democracy, it's corruption fueled by sociopaths who insist on controlling everything and buy politicians. The problem with everything in society is that many people are fundamentally broken. Plenty of people aren't broken and can get along without committing crimes or plotting to take over the world.
yes, its not legal to harass women getting an abortion. That includes being in a given range of an abortion clinic and making a political statement. What part of that is hard to understand?
People know the laws and yet they still do it thinking they're some sort of Catholic Batman. You want to change the law, do what we all do; write to your fucking MP, join a political party, campaign, donate. Don't harass someone vulnerable in a difficult state of mind and impose your morality upon them. Respect their choice and their agency.
In the US you can be arrested for the following speech:
* true threats of violence
* incitement to break the law specifically
* crimes of speech: soliciting crime, fraudulent representations, lying under oath
* stalking/cyberstalking
So lets quit this idea that its some abstract of "political orthodoxy". Stop framing crime as "difference of opinion". Hate speech and incitement to racial/religious hatred or violence are crimes here. People publishing hate speech online and then being all Pikachu face when they get arrested for breaking the law are not victims. The highest profile pretend victim was the wife of a Conservative Councillor who posted a message online that hundreds of thousands of people saw that encouraged people to set fire to hotels where asylum seekers were staying. The judges sentencing remarks were particularly eye opening given she demonstrated a relative lack of respect for the court ("If I get in trouble then I'll play the mental health card").
Anyone old enough to remember the London riots should remember the fact that the acting government issued a D notice to all broadcasters, preventing them from reporting the issue.
This is part of what started the death of BBM and proliferation of news via social media. You’d go on Twitter and see all the reports or riots and burning buildings then go to the BBC and… nothing.
All of this is to say that successive British governments, over a span of decades, have been actively destroying freedom of speech and a right to privacy for its citizens.
With AI and the rise of populism combined with the absolute decimation of the average person’s attention span it is going to get a lot worse.
This is wrong. The BBC were reporting on it in detail both online and on TV news. I know this because I was actually working on contract for them at the time.
What we have is a lot of people changing the narrative since to discredit the BBC and divide everyone further.
Police have arrested and questioned 3 of my mates from our private WhatsApp group chat. They're asking to speak to me too, but I'm working abroad.
They've all been arrested and had interviews under s127 of the Communications Act.
There's 4 of us in a group chat on WhatsApp where we chat and also make some edgy jokes and stuff. We're two white, an Indian and a black guy who studied at uni together.
All three of them have been arrested and interviewed today. I don't know anyrhing more than this. This info comes from their gf and fiance.
I'm working abroad but I have received a WhatsApp message and attempted call from a UK officer who identified himself wanting to speak to me about an ongoing enquiry into a reported issue.
My mate's fiance says it was reported by another guy's ex who he dumped 4 weeks ago. I'm inclined to believe that as the officer's message said he was acting on a report.
The thing is, we shared a lot of edgy jokes beteen us - but it was literally just the 4 of us in a private fucking chat. Some of the jokes we made were racisr, but they were all banter directed at each other. Others were just taking the piss out of the major news events like saying "Who needs people flying planes when our own shitty buildings just burn themselves down?" about Grenfell.
It's crass, but it's literally just us talking shit in private. These messages arent public or anything.
I can't get through to any of the guys. Is this something the police are actually going to try and prosecute?!
At this point should I just not come home? I'm dual Austrian-British and Austria doesn't extradite to the UK.
There is speech and there are consequences for speech.
If I incite or state that I am going to commit violence, stalking, rape or murder, should I face consequences? Yes. That's what is happening.
There are outlying cases which will be used to discredit this perspective but reality is there are a hell of a lot of very not nice people out there making active threats and inciting hatred and violence.
> they already arrest over 30 people a day for speech that offends the prevailing political orthodoxy.
This is completely false and comes from a commonly misrepresented statistic; '30 arrests a day' is plainly the arrests made under section 127 of the Communications Act 2003 and section 1 of the Malicious Communications Act 1988 which includes things like online stalking and harassment. I hope you're just mistaken and not willfully implying that those issues are merely offensive to the prevailing political orthodoxy.
You can't argue with data that doesn't exist, either. The arrests are not broken down, so nobody really knows. Both sides can argue their opinion
You can argue it's highly improbable that all arrests are over 'hurty words online', definitely – but anyone claiming zero arrests seems improbable too.
I do also feel it's quite convenient that the lack of breakdown allows people to clap back with accusations of encouraging stalking and harassment.
No one is encouraging you to argue with data that doesn't exist and no one is claiming that no arrests are being made over political speech online. I don't disagree with your third paragraph but it seems clear to me that my original statement stands and it's quite suspicious that you responded it to with these strawmen.
If they'd wanted the data, they could have submitted an FOI and asked for it, but the journalists far preferred to just run "30 people a day arrested for hurty words" rather than "this is quite complicated but potentially problematic and we should dig into it"
Well, the breakdowns are according to the offences the arrests come under. The police can't really release official figures for "arrests that would seen unjustifiable to libertarian-leaning HN readers", or "arrests for things that would not be a crime in the US".
I’d say it is a very low quality article. There is very little detail about what the offending speech actually includes. For example:
> The wife of a conservative politician was sentenced to 31 months in prison for what police said was an unacceptable post.
What did she say? The article does not elucidate.
Inciting violence for example is not legal. I believe spaces around abortion clinics are also to be free from demonstrations. US free speech absolutists seem to vehemently disagree until you say something unkind about Charlie Kirk or ICE.
The low point might be quoting Elon Musk. This is true in any context, but in particular here. The scandal is real, but none of it is about people being arrested for non-politically-correct speech.
There’s plenty of otherwise real stuff to poke the UK about.
I don't have time to dig up her post - but she was calling on people to set fire to hotels housing asylum seekers - she had around 10,000 followers, and her post was read 300,000 times: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c5yl7p4l11po
I am disappointed in most reporting on this case. I wish they would include what she actually said. Here is the full tweet:
> Mass deportation now, set fire to all the fucking hotels full of the
bastards for all I care, while you’re at it take the treacherous government
and politicians with them. I feel physically sick knowing what these
families will now have to endure. If that makes me racist so be it
UK abortion clinic laws go a lot further than banning demonstrations.
1. Holding up a sign offering help to any women being coerced into an abortion is illegal.
2. Standing silently on the road near one can be illegal.
3. parking a car with a bumper sticker near one can be illegal.
The whole paragraph about Musk and rape gangs is nonsense, of course. The biggest rape gang ever convicted in the UK was entirely white. Musk and his ilk only care about rape when the rapists are not white. On average immigrants are slightly less likely to commit sexual assaults (obviously averaging across many different groups).
> What did she say? The article does not elucidate.
She called for hotels housing asylum seekers to be burned. I think she is a nasty racist but I also think the sentence was excessive and I am not convinced it was a serious incitement to violence (and that was not what she was convicted of).
> US free speech absolutists seem to vehemently disagree until you say something unkind about Charlie Kirk or ICE.
Not American, and I entirely support the right of anyone to make unkind comments about anyone else. You are right that many people apply different standards to their own side, but right wing Americans are are from alone in that.
>>The whole paragraph about Musk and rape gangs is nonsense, of course. The biggest rape gang ever convicted in the UK was entirely white. Musk and his ilk only care about rape when the rapists are not white.
They only care when the rapists are coming from outside the UK, and being protected by the authorities.
>>On average immigrants are slightly less likely to commit sexual assaults (obviously averaging across many different groups).
I think that is called picking your sample carefully. No-one is worried about EG the Chinese or the French.
Musk and his ilk care about dog whistle topics that can be used to trigger people into supporting them.
The emphasis on 'rape gangs', 'immigrants' and 'asylum seekers' isn't just objectively untrue, it's cynically manipulative. It's fundamentally a toxic and calculated form of marketing and branding.
And also a cynical distraction from - for example - the Epstein story and Musk's appearances in it.
There was a lot of this around Brexit. Many supporters voted to 'stop them coming over here'.
The government then ramped up immigration - a lot. For some reason the press failed to report this.
I would have thought immigration was mainly a factor of the immigrants, not the government. Do people not support free movement? In China you're assigned to a city or rural zone and you can't leave that area.
This is a deeply deranged opinion piece. The author ties himself into knots to conflate a tiny number of high profile instances involving social media posts with harassment and other negative behavior involving electronic communication.
The British Government has be consistently violating people's rights for decades and probably well before that.
Recently I saw a clip on GB News where one of their analyst said that anyone that opposes a war and/or conscription with Russia will need to put in prison. The show host, Jacob Rees Mogg and Lord Redwood saw nothing wrong with the statements.
None of these people have been in the armed forces and are too old to be called up for conscription.
Sigh, this is an absolute bullshit figure and people need to stop parroting it - it's 30 arrests under the mal comms act which might include for example, phoning your ex girfriend to say you're coming to stab her. Or phoning in a bomb threat via telephone. Or any number of pretty terrible things it's perfectly reasonable to get nicked for. Or posting on Facebook telling everyone we should set the local migrant hotel on fire. These are not political prisoners.
Considering they arrest people for saying "there are only two genders", I'm fairly certain the bar is incredibly low. I'm not sugar-coating this by the way, saw a Youtube video of this happening a week or so ago on one of those police watch videos. Someone in a pub was having a verbal debate with someone about genders, then a bystander told the police and had them arrested for "hate crime" for saying "there are only two genders".
He's clearly quoting the Graham Linehan case where a group of police officers arrested him for his tweets that did include the only-two-gender thing. However, as you suspected, that's not all he said. Linehan suggested in another tweet that people should punch transwomen in the face if they refuse to leave the female bathroom.
I'm not actually. How did you get "arrested for tweets" from my post where I said it was a video of a 20-something year old having a debate with someone at a pub?
I'll take that as confirmation that it happens all the time though - since this was evidently not an isolated case, as you have pointed out.
If a trans-identified male is in a female-only space,
he is committing a violent, abusive act. Make a scene,
call the cops and if all else fails, punch him in the
balls.
By inference he thinks that if someone makes you feel uncomfortable, by doing nothing illegal nor immoral (in the mind of a right-thinking person), punching their genitalia is acceptable. If I ever meet him I think I might feel quite uncomfortable, which would be unfortunate.
This comment is remarkable in its lack of nuance. There's a huge spectrum of, let's call it, aggressive speech, ranging from trying to organize against an oppressive figure or class, to just punching down against people and groups who have either done nothing to the author of that speech which warrants an aggressive response, or where the target of that speech is already a victim.
My opinion is that free-speech absolutism is a policy position that causes much more harm than good, and which erodes social cohesion. There should be perpetual debate about where we as a society accept where the line is between speech which is allowed and that which is disallowed.
And to wit, on the tea party analogy: how's that working for the US now?
Diffrence being state did not have control to stop disgruntled people from organizing. And it might be that preventing such formations is actually detrimental long run.
Buddy you aren't addressing the comments that are replying to you.
You gotta stay on-topic. You keep coming up with random things to compare to that make no sense to anybody but you. Who said it was legal to say "kill the king"?
I dislike harassing, threats, hate speech and everything wrong that people yell to other people.
But I dislike even more that we decide that the solution to it is to pass laws prohibiting speech, and even more that the ones in charge of passing those laws are very incentivised to prohibiting criticism to themselves or their policies or their ideologies.
Why is speech a specific, precise red line? Yelling "fire" in a crowded theatre (and I'm aware that the case which coined this phrase was completely stupid, but the phrase itself stands) should probably not be legal, even though it is speech.
> Faced with a legal order that would have required it to change the security architecture on which ADP depended, Apple found a third option: stop offering the feature that made this dilemma exist in the first place. It reverted affected UK iCloud data to Standard Data Protection, where Apple does hold the keys and can respond to lawful legal procress (except the baseline categories that stay end-to-end encrypted either way). This satisfied the underlying legal requirement without ever building a ‘backdoor’.
Maybe Apple should withdraw all encryption support from all UK government accounts? The Prime Minister can use a Huawei or some chunky thing from a military contractor.
I genuinely believe that in 2015 Apple had the balls to resist and today they don't.
I am judging by a simple fact, that "please confirm your age" screen is now mandatory during the iPhone setup in all countries, and in some it's behind a KYC. I have a strong opinion that this is insane. And once they let the foot in the door - there is no closing it.
They never did. they had the balls to resist against western governments, where it was politically adventagous to do so. They folded to China real quick, because they wanted to make sales. All "icloud storage" in china has been on another storage platform, that follows all the local laws.
> "please confirm your age" screen is now mandatory during the iPhone setup in all countries
Not quite.
The request to confirm age is there, but actually completing it isn't mandatory (though granted, it does leave an 'alert' thingy on your phone settings saying you haven't finished setting it up).
A non-trivial reason I bought a fairly closed device (macbook) was that Tim Cook, at least publicly, told the FBI to get bent when asked to create a backdoor. Exactly what I want to see, a fight in court.
I would hope to see Apple pull out of the UK market over this, and certainly to stop selling Apple devices to the UK government and to remove the UK government entities from Apple services.
If Bill left the UK temporarily would the ability to turn on ADP come back? Or is a device from the UK that’s not able to enroll somehow prevented forever? Not saying that this makes it OK, just curious
You can switch your Apple ID's region to another country, enable ADP then revert your account's region back to the United Kingdom. You've got to leave Family Sharing first and may also need to adjust/cancel subscriptions - I don't think it's totally straightforward.
I changed countries a few months ago. It took me about two months with all the roadblocks, while I already had government issued proofs from both countries about the change and new address.
What a crazy answer you've written. In the sense of: it's wild that the procedure is like that.
It's almost as wild as when during the pandemic "lockdown", planes had to take off, burn tonnes of fuel and land empty some minutes later at the same airport, because there's some fucking law about landing spots and how they'd be lost if that bullshit wasn't done.
Off topic - but I am not sure that is true in the UK/EU - did it happen elsewhere in the world?:
Before the COVID restrictions, airlines were required to use their allotted spots at least 80% of the time.[6] During the pandemic, the European Commission temporarily suspended Europe's airport slot rule for a short period.[citation needed] Due to travel restrictions, many flights were cancelled or had limited capacity, which made it difficult for airlines to fulfill all the requirements for possessing an airport slot. The suspension of the slot rule was reinstated in October 2021. After the slot rule was reinstated, the rule only required European airlines to use 75% of their flight slots for the winter season.
I've not looked into it but I suspect this uses eligibilityd, the same thing that does the location based checks to see if EU users can use 3rd party app stores.
From what I remember it uses a combination of things like your current GPS location, your SIM cards reported country and more to determine what country you're really in to restrict certain features.
So it's not as simple as swapping your location in settings, or even traveling to somewhere in the EU, theres a certain sticky-ness to what your device thinks is your current country.
Yeah, good point. I wonder what would happen if someone without ADP in the UK changed over the region settings to the United States, switched ADP on, and then switched the region back to the UK. I wonder if anybody's tried this?
To an extent. My account is on a different country. Even using a VPN, I was still asked to verify my age to access certain websites. The only explanation I could think of is that iOS abused my consent to them using location data for that.
Strange and hypothetical thought: could Bill purchase a US or international model of the iPhone with US or international iCloud account capable of ADP to activate ADP? Would this allow somebody living or working in the UK the ability to use ADP?
given the story there, I'm surprised apple are still allowed to apply end to end encryption the the "baseline categories" such as messages etc in the UK. Anyone understand how that's happened? To be clear I am not saying what I think should happen, just it seems inconsistent with the UK's stance
Anyone have any steps on how I can enable this in the UK? I guess I need to update my billing details to a non UK address and hop on a VPN or something?
You can change billing details to US and then activate US gift card that you can buy of Amazon.com.
But keep in mind you have to disable all subscriptions first and also your family group if you have one must also switch their accounts to US.
So yeah pretending you're US customer is no brainer with Apple and unlike Google they dont have automatic detection that will move your account to other region.
Beware you can only change account region once a year or something.
I thought they at least used something complex to attempt to prevent non-EU users using third-party app stores. I also recall a legitimate EU user is not allowed to travel abroad too long before losing access to those stores.
Might be in case of moving region to EU there are something like this, but to move it to US all you need is US gift card.
What Google does is completely different - they enforce local regulations on your accounts just if you keep using them within specific region for too long. Though Google dont actually change billing region or Google Play region.
It's crazy SimpleX is fine being based there. I mean, everything is open, the clients have reproducible builds, but it seems like it may end up being a hassle.
Has the UK started attacking any open source E2EE projects yet?
Apple's control over iOS is the main reason I prefer GrapheneOS so much over it. You get amazing privacy and security without sacrificing control. GrapheneOS has said they won't introduce age verification and a backdoor they obviously won't implement.
I'm guessing they could, in theory, attack open source projects, but it would not be very effective as those could be infinitely forked. That's the reason why governments will actually support an encourage an oligopoly of proprietary platforms via regulations (e.g. mandatory automated scanning) which only companies can practically comply with.
There's no way to obtain root access on GrapheneOS without making your own builds (which won't be affected by many of the apps adding support for GrapheneOS, who likely would only whitelist the official signing keys) or keeping the bootloader unlocked in perpetuity (because AFAIK there is currently no way to recalculate verified boot hashes on top of a systemless root like Magisk -- not that I even know if that works on GOS in the first place). Some years back I was actually working on calculating AVB2 hashes from a live system rather than ONLY through the Android build process, until TWRP wiped my phone without consent or confirmation due to an OpenRecoveryScript that I absolutely did not put there and I basically stopped tinkering with Android root due to that. I have an iPhone nowadays.
Border agents in America can search your phone or laptop without a warrant or sufficient suspicion at the border.
Jeff Gray is a man who regularly gets arrested and/or trespassed from public places for holding up a sign saying "God bless the homeless vets". Seems to happen nearly every time he does it at various locations.
Oh, and flock cameras and ICE aren't exactly a sign that America is this beacon of freedom that it likes to portray.
> Border agents in America can search your phone or laptop without a warrant or sufficient suspicion at the border.
That is something that can happen at nearly every international border crossing. Before posting I tried to find a list of countries that require a warrant to search your stuff and the only place that came up was Hong Kong. New Zealand requires some suspicion, but that's effectively the same as they can simply state "they were acting suspiciously to my eye."
>Oh, and flock cameras and ICE aren't exactly a sign that America is this beacon of freedom that it likes to portray.
The US never said that you won't be observed in public nor that you can enter, remain, and travel freely around the country forever without permission.
The UK border agents (technically counter terrorism) can also stop you at the border, force you into a room, ask for your passwords to all your devices and you don't have the right to refuse.
You also don't have the right to a lawyer to be in a room with you and you are compelled to answer all their questions and they do not need to tell you why they stopped you.
Then if you are lucky they return your devices 7 days later after they have been through everything.
Back in the early 00s the UK seemed to go all in on mass surveillance, with massive amount of cameras in public places and all that. I still remember how shocking it all looked even from Canada. So these 1984 parallels are certainly not a new development.
Worth recognising this was (and still is) mostly nonsense. There were loads of figures like "3 CCTV cameras per person" that included your local shop having a camera in the back, which has nothing to do with state surveillance. The police in the UK have significantly less power to surveil people than police in the UK. Council CCTV is shockingly rare now days.
What I don't understand, or what I can only guess at, is the cabal & likely global network of interests that are behind the push for this kind of legislation to exists in the first place.
Some delusional "save the children" anti-privacy extremist doesn't have the political capital or the technical insight to convince the government to create a law to issue secret gag orders.
People with good civil intention don't just propose the idea, or get the momentum, to institutionalize such mechanisms.
So who are the major influencers, and their thoughts, for pushing this?
I don't think you need a huge, wide-ranging conspiracy to end up with a strong anti-privacy movement, even in a state which otherwise tries to defend consumer rights (in varying degrees of competency) for the most part.
I think you can just start with:
1. Campaigning on behalf of a worthy victim, or against a terrible enemy, is a good way to become more socially powerful. Most people are less willing to disagree with you when you do this because it risks introducing motive uncertainty - are you criticising the means because you truly object to the means, or are you criticising the means because you don't support the worthy victim or oppose the terrible enemy? This is a socially disadvantageous position to argue from.
2. Exploited children are worthy victims, and drug traffickers and terrorists are terrible enemies.
3. Therefore, policies that nominally protect children or oppose drug traffickers and terrorists are socially advantageous, and arguing for them is likely to increase your social power.
The means here are disproportionately likely to be done in a concealed way if the underlying policy is not broadly popular, independently of the effects it has on localised politcal arguments. Many people, myself included, don't support every political cause that helps a worthy victim or opposes a terrible enemy.
Social pressure is harder to apply at a distance, so the reality-warping effects of motive uncertainty are less powerful, so it makes sense that it's kept to private pressure groups and lobbying.
This’ll go down well (/s) but if you accept that the State has the right to be able to surveil public communications infrastructure (which it has been doing since paper mail was invented, through: radio, telegraph, telex, telephone, fax, email, and mobile telephony) then it’s not surprising certain commoditised public data handling services might be required to provide government access on demand or be restricted from implementing features that can effectively deny that access.
That angry’s up the blood of libertarians, but ultimately from the point of view of the State it has to be able to do its job of detecting and prosecuting serious crime, and it will redraw privacy lines whenever that is substantially impeded by new technology.
A term I've seen thrown around is "good old-fashioned police work" and to me the clear distinction is that it can't be done en masse - a real human police officer had to spend time tracking down each known suspect. E.g. clipping a pen register onto someone's telephone wires, tailing someone, asking the hotel clerk if he's been there, unlocking someone's phone to read their messages, and even watching footage on airgapped CCTV systems are all tasks that can be done one-at-a-time and require human power proportional to how much of them you do. This forces the state to only use them on actual suspects instead of using them on everyone, but still doesn't prevent the state from catching criminals.
The quantity and quality of communications that have been externalized and become effectively searchable and retrievable has increased by many orders of magnitude since paper mail was invented. I think even if you agreed that the State might have had that right then (which not everyone would), it would be good to reconsider what that means with the communications and information systems of today.
Even many dictatorship states, like many of the "socialist" countries, had in the past articles in their constitutions that guaranteed the secrecy of the mail and of the telephone communications (other telecommunications did not exist at that time). Thus it is false that there is some kind of established tradition that governments may have access to private communications.
In reality the secret police did not care about laws or constitution, so private mail correspondence was intercepted and opened, read, then closed again with care, trying to make this undetectable, and the telephone lines of persons of interest were tapped.
Nonetheless, it was understood that this surveillance is actually illegal, so it was hidden as much as possible.
Nowadays, the government institutions of most "free" states, like USA and UK have granted themselves far more rights to do surveillance of their citizens than the dictators of the past.
Detecting and prosecuting serious crime does not need any such general surveillance. The general surveillance just makes much cheaper the detecting of serious crimes, but in exchange it gives the means to the government employees to commit more serious crimes themselves.
It relays my main concern which is that while current governments may use this in moderation and under judicial oversight, future ones may not. And we should build tools for the future not just for now.
There’s a general regression towards fascist and right wing ideologies in the last few years and I don’t want to be up against a wall one day because someone did something with ignorant best intent.
> There’s a general regression towards fascist and right wing ideologies in the last few years
The “fascist” part (authoritarian/totalitarian tendencies) came long before the resurgence of the right, but most people seem to approve of those methods as long as they target those they dislike, so I won’t be shedding any tears for them when it’s their turn at last.
It is self-evidently written by AI. You can tell from both tropes such as “To bring this into sharper focus” and the fact that it is entirely without an opinion or argument for most of the piece.
The Apple-vs-FBI narrative is constructed fiction. Sure, they didn't make a custom firmware to dump the phone's contents, but that's irrelevant. Everything relevant to the investigation on that phone was in the non-E2EE iCloud Backup, which the FBI got from Apple long before, via normal search warrant means. Apple likely either got an FAA702 order (aka PRISM, aka the "backdoor" that Tim Apple says doesn't exist - it allows the USG to access anyone's iCloud data immediately, with no warrant (it's not an encryption backdoor, just an access backdoor)) or a standard search warrant and most probably turned over everything they had in iCloud instantly, just as they do constantly when receiving a search warrant or FAA702 order. (As I mentioned, the FAA702 order fulfillment is likely instantaneous/automated, which amounts to direct access to the storage servers.)
The whole "Apple won't do what the USG wants" story is farce, engineered specifically to protect Apple's brand image. Following the Snowden drop when we all learned that the USG has unfettered realtime access to everything in iCloud without a warrant via FAA702, Apple had a major fucking crisis on its hands, along with a lot of other companies. (If you think the CIA can't read any object in S3, you simply don't understand how the world works. Note also that AWS has built a custom, one-off, airgapped AWS region ON PREM for the CIA. https://aws.amazon.com/federal/us-intelligence-community/ )
Those CEOs all went to DC and sat down with Obama and talked it out. The official cover story was something like "Obama wants help with healthcare.gov".
> The top leaders from the world’s biggest technology companies pressed their case for reform of the National Security Agency’s controversial surveillance operations at a meeting with President Obama on Tuesday, resisting attempts by the White House to portray the encounter as a wide-ranging discussion of broader priorities.
It is very likely that this media plan was discussed and agreed upon in those meetings. Otherwise, nobody sane in any government in Europe would ever buy an iPhone (or let their citizens do same), given that the USG can read all their photos and messages and emails and contacts in iCloud instantly and without a warrant.
(China of course requires Apple run the iCloud servers for Chinese users in China via a joint venture with a CCP-operated company, which preserves the same realtime full access to all iCloud/iMessage data in China for the CCP as PRISM does for the USG.)
The Snowden releases support very plainly the direct realtime access of the US intelligence community to tech company servers without search warrants (just FISA orders).
It is the single most used data source by the US intelligence community.
Heres a favourite of mine. Apple & Google were/still are syphoning off all mobile device push messages to US government. They flat out denied it for years until it got leaked from another source, as soon as it was out in the open they admitted and said they were doing it all along but weren't allowed to tell anybody due to government NDAs.
If it was irrelevant then why did the FBI make such a big deal about it? Are you saying the FBI did that just to make Apple look good? Why would they care about Apple's reputation?
Since Epstein is no more, the governments became crazy about going after people's private data, perhaps hoping to find some spice. Like some politicians lost their source.
If you didn't want it before, you probably never will. It comes with a convenience cost and the risk you may permanently lose access to your iCloud stuff if you lose your password. With the normal level of privacy, Apple is there to help you or your loved ones get access to your stuff. Most people need that much more than they need inviolable privacy.
I’m rolling the dice myself. No ADP here. If I were a political activist (US) I’d definitely need it.
I guess if I lose my phone on a trip, I wanna be able to walk into an Apple store and restore it from their cloud copy that the feds have backed up & pored over by LLMs too. (not sure that’s done in realtime for 100% of the population, but tokens will be cheap enough eventually - they have their pre-LLM solution too)
I think I keep Signal data mostly out of the cloud though, declining to use their latest features. Hidden notifications too. Is it only personal family updates, yes, but the principle makes me feel good.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/steveforbes/2025/09/09/people-a...
Stories like this quickly put to rest the idea that everyone who gets arrested must actually deserve it. The bar for posting content that violates the law is very low.
There was also the tragic story of the Cambridge professor who was completely unqualified and had a fake life story. When journalists would get close to the story he would report them to the police for harassment to spike the stories.
That's textbook intimidation, which in certain cases is a crime in the UK, and even some US states. You can also do it offline, for example, by sending a letter to the victim containing a photograph of the front of their house, and a photograph of you firing guns. The implication is pretty straightforward and doesn't even need to be stated: "I have guns and I know where you live. Pay me that money you owe me or I might use them." That implication is still there, for the victim, even if you add surface text like "Hey everyone look at these cool things!"
Only _after_ he was arrested, and the police went looking around his house for guns... did he admit that the pictures were taken overseas, he doesn't actually own the guns. And yet that's what the article leads with, like it was a known fact from the get-go and those silly-billy police knew that but went looking for them in the UK anyway.
This article is a great lesson in how to mislead without saying anything untrue.
His own words in a different article make the reason for the arrest clear:
https://nypost.com/2025/12/04/us-news/british-man-says-he-wa...
> “The arrest was based on two separate social media posts,” he said. “One was the photo of myself with the shotgun, [...] And the second one was my LinkedIn banner at the top of the page.”
> “I used the photo my business partner took on his premises as a header photo on LinkedIn with the intention he would look at that and go, ‘Why’s this guy posting that? I’d better call him and find out rather than dodging me’ as it had done for months,” he said.
EDIT: and your second example is also dangerously misleading. Jason Arday (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jason_Arday) and/or his university reported 2 professors and 1 journalist to the police, pretending their requests for comment on his plagiarism were harrassment. For all three reports, police chose to take no action (nonetheless it still had a chilling effect on speech). What spiked the story is that Jason Arday and/or his university got very expensive reputation lawyers Carter-Fuck to send a C&D to the journalist's newspaper, promising expensive litigation if they published the story. That is what spiked the story, not intimidation via false harassment claims. Expensive lawyers making baseless threats work equally well in the US and UK to chill legal speech, it's not a policy issue.
From your own link, this was from 2 separate posts. I don't know man, this sounds like an excuse from the company to cause trouble and avoid having to pay the owed money.
> A week later, on August 23, the officers returned and arrested him on suspicion of possessing a firearm with intent to cause fear of violence and another allegation of stalking related to a photograph of a house that appeared on his social media.
You’re trying hard to link the two as “textbook intimidation” but the firearm post that triggered this was just a vacation photo and post about his vacation.
You’re being misleading by saying he “posted them to a website” without explaining that what you mean by “website” is that he posted them on his personal social media.
> For all three reports, police chose to take no action (nonetheless it still had a chilling effect on speech).
Incorrect to say the police “took no action”. They contacted the journalist and instructed him to desist. The police later admitted it was a mistake to pursue the case. It says all of this in the link you used:
> Arday made a complaint about Grove to the Metropolitan Police, alleging harassment that was affecting his mental health; the police asked Grove to desist from further contact with Arday.[80] Mark Rowley, Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, later said that the complaint about Grove should not have been taken forward.[81]
It’s confusing that you’re trying to claim the police “took no action” when they admitted fault for following through with the complaint and they told the reporter to desist.
> Expensive lawyers making baseless threats work equally well in the US and UK to chill legal speech, it's not a policy issue.
If the expensive lawyers are equal in the UK and US, then that’s not the important point of this story. It’s the part about him engaging the police and the police following through with it.
I also strongly disagree that it’s equivalent in the US. That expensive legal firm would be utilizing the maximum extent of the laws available to them in the UK, which includes the very harassment laws we’re talking about!
You can’t say it’s “not a policy issue” by pointing to literal lawyers who are using the law.
That's not how it works. You get arrested on suspicion, the cops figure out if you actually did it or not, once they know you did it they charge you with counts of actual offences (not suspicions).
> That's not how it works. You get arrested on suspicion, the cops figure out if you actually did it or not, once they know you did it they charge you with counts of actual offences (not suspicions).
Isn’t that literally what the quote, which was from the article, says? It didn’t contain the word “count”. You added that. The quote says he was arrested on suspicion.
OP appears to claim that involving the police is the way to get journalists off your tail. It isn't, and it didn't deter either the professors or the journalist. The much more effective way to get journalists off your tail, which OP didn't even mention, is lawyers. But that doesn't let OP rage against UK laws so he went with the bullshit claim instead.
There was absolutely zero media attention at the time police processed Arday's complaint against professor David Harris, in 2023. They closed the complaint without taking action. The professor didn't even know he was being investigated. His colleague Martyn Hammersley then went over Arday's head straight to the faculty. So much for the police getting people off your case!
In the case of the journalist Arday reported in 2025, police again did not arrest or charge him, but they (wrongly, in my opinion) phoned him and asked him not to contact Arday. This had a chilling effect and the police had no legal basis to direct him so. Again, this was long before any 2026 media attention.
It wasn't media attention that saved these people, it was that what they did wasn't illegal. The police shouldn't have given Arday's claims as much merit as they did, but no matter what Arday said, there was no evidence of crime there, it was never going any further than that.
Only once the deets about Arday were leaked by Cambridge faculty to Cofnas and he published them, and the media firestorm begain, did the details of the police phoning the journalist become known, and in reaction to that, the head of the police said that was clearly wrong and should not have happened: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c0rd9y99grzo
In the second case, the person involved was weaponizing the police against a journalist who had uncovered something about a completely unqualified university professor who had a fraudulent background story. The police didn’t do it “randomly”. The professor knew how to use the laws to intimidate and silence his critics (when even the GP comment admits).
Even the police later admitted they should not have gone as far as they did.
But I agree that the law is being weaponised by bad actors, but irrespective of that the police are duty bound to investigate. They take the blame too. It's one of the few jobs everyone else knows how to do better than the people doing it.
- We just changed our PM, despite his party having a historic majority.
- Parliament routinely rebels against the government, and backbenchers have a lot of say about the business of government.
- We have a number of upstart parties; they might be populist, but at least it's not a two-party-forever system.
- We had a coalition government just a few years ago.
- We changed our constitution a few months ago (abolishing hereditary peers) and it was just another news among many.
- We ejected one of the previous PMs for having a party during a lockdown, with a massive scandal before that when the PM accepted a gift of some wallpaper.
Compare and contrast to the ossified and corrupt American system, where the president is openly enriching himself and his family and friends, and there's nothing threatening the presidency. The last amendment was passed half a century ago, and there's zero hope for reform.
Democracy is a living, breathing system of government, not a number of checkboxes like "can I shoot a gun for fun" or "can I call someone N-word online". It's important to see the forest for the trees.
Weirdly that never happened, but that's how many people remember it.
He was ejected because he lost the support of his ministers (most of who resigned over a period of a few weeks) after he had made them to go out and lie to the public on his behalf in the case of Chris Pincher MP.
The point still stands though. A populist PM who did a tiny bit of mismanagement and corruption (relative to his current peer in the US) was forced to resign. Trump isn't.
Both the UK and the US fail in rule of law regarding "all citizens and leaders must be equal before the law, supported by strong anti-corruption measures."
UK has stated separation of powers but the crown reportedly nudged Starmer to step down. The king is the one that can formally appoint government following elections.
Prince Andrew had and other royals have control over military forces in the UK, canada, australia, nz, ect. You can hem and haw all you want but the crown has constitutional and ceremonial control over the armed forces.
The King gives 'the kings speech' which is used to set the governments legislative agenda to parliment.
The king also gives royal assent to bills passed by parliment.
Black spider memos
The king also steers diplomatic efforts abroad.
every single aspect of UKs democracy can be cut by the King whenever he wants.
If it's the former, then indeed the US has more of it.
If it's the latter, the UK has three new major parties with very different policies that openly and vocally oppose Labour, Conservatives, and Libdems. Mainstream media regularly broadcasts their views. I might strongly disagree with those views, but these parties are clearly freely operating political organisations. How is the US doing with viable non-Dem and non-Republican parties?
I won't comment on your Crown conspiracy theories.
33% of the vote is a historically low majority, so I guess you're technically correct.
Here's the reality: https://x.com/flying_rodent/status/2102527889556291773
And also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Wilson_plot_allegations
non-democratically. there was no election. the ruling party simply made a decision itself. Just like in China.
The ruling party has changed just two years ago. Hardly China, is it
In this country, the government with a vast majority couldn't even withdraw a small cash payment from better off pensioners without a rebellion from their own MPs.
Those generalising takes are entirely disconnected from the political reality of the UK outside of twitter.
Yeah? The country got to vote for the PM? I don't recall there being a national election. Having a bunch of party insiders replace the leader who won an election with an unelected one is the opposite of democracy.
I invite you to consider the rest of the points, too.
"In democracy, one side always wins and makes its opponents illegal."
“The claim to legality renders every rebellion and counter-measure an injustice and a legal violation or ‘illegality.’ If legality and illegality can be arbitrarily at the disposal of the majority, then the majority can, above all, declare their domestic competitors illegal, that is, hors-la-loi… Whoever controls 51 percent would be able legally to render the remaining 49 percent illegal… and to treat partisan opponents like common criminals, who are then perhaps reduced to kicking their boots against the locked door.”
Carl Schmitt, Legality and Legitimacy
https://x.com/Tool_Being/status/2102495046260150596
as is often said with a sigh, "democracy is the worst form of government, except for every other."
to me, democracy is really about giving the masses enough feeling of agency, because the alternatives are either revolution and/or disengagement / low productivity / low creativity, and both are "bad for business" i.e. cannot compete with democracies.
China will be an interesting test of this theory. Notably, in China they have a terrific education system and the government is able to attract/retain smart ambitious people.
Another test will be the power of governments to thwart revolutions using digital and kinetic assymmetry. The masses have individual hackers and pea shooters and the government has digital armies and autonomous drone swarms. In turn, since revolution is off the table, governments don't need the overhead of democracy. In the US, we see this with the rise of Executive Orders for example.
I'll pick this one because it is the easiest to refute (but the others are wrong, too). What form of government was predominant during the most creative and productive periods in recent history, namely the industrial revolution and the Italian Rennaissance?
You even mention China yourself, but do not update your priors.
Most functioning democracies require more than 51% of a senate and six justices and a criminal head of state to completely unravel.
We are currently witnessing the dismantling of this illusion. The reason western governments increasingly engage in lawfare against the opposition is that for the first time since the post-WWII order, they are threatened by a real regime change.
People know the laws and yet they still do it thinking they're some sort of Catholic Batman. You want to change the law, do what we all do; write to your fucking MP, join a political party, campaign, donate. Don't harass someone vulnerable in a difficult state of mind and impose your morality upon them. Respect their choice and their agency.
In the US you can be arrested for the following speech:
* true threats of violence
* incitement to break the law specifically
* crimes of speech: soliciting crime, fraudulent representations, lying under oath
* stalking/cyberstalking
So lets quit this idea that its some abstract of "political orthodoxy". Stop framing crime as "difference of opinion". Hate speech and incitement to racial/religious hatred or violence are crimes here. People publishing hate speech online and then being all Pikachu face when they get arrested for breaking the law are not victims. The highest profile pretend victim was the wife of a Conservative Councillor who posted a message online that hundreds of thousands of people saw that encouraged people to set fire to hotels where asylum seekers were staying. The judges sentencing remarks were particularly eye opening given she demonstrated a relative lack of respect for the court ("If I get in trouble then I'll play the mental health card").
This is part of what started the death of BBM and proliferation of news via social media. You’d go on Twitter and see all the reports or riots and burning buildings then go to the BBC and… nothing.
All of this is to say that successive British governments, over a span of decades, have been actively destroying freedom of speech and a right to privacy for its citizens.
With AI and the rise of populism combined with the absolute decimation of the average person’s attention span it is going to get a lot worse.
What we have is a lot of people changing the narrative since to discredit the BBC and divide everyone further.
I think this is the link where the chap asks for legal advice: https://www.reddit.com/r/LegalAdviceUK/comments/1vxkcic/poli...
----
Police have arrested and questioned 3 of my mates from our private WhatsApp group chat. They're asking to speak to me too, but I'm working abroad.
They've all been arrested and had interviews under s127 of the Communications Act.
There's 4 of us in a group chat on WhatsApp where we chat and also make some edgy jokes and stuff. We're two white, an Indian and a black guy who studied at uni together.
All three of them have been arrested and interviewed today. I don't know anyrhing more than this. This info comes from their gf and fiance.
I'm working abroad but I have received a WhatsApp message and attempted call from a UK officer who identified himself wanting to speak to me about an ongoing enquiry into a reported issue.
My mate's fiance says it was reported by another guy's ex who he dumped 4 weeks ago. I'm inclined to believe that as the officer's message said he was acting on a report.
The thing is, we shared a lot of edgy jokes beteen us - but it was literally just the 4 of us in a private fucking chat. Some of the jokes we made were racisr, but they were all banter directed at each other. Others were just taking the piss out of the major news events like saying "Who needs people flying planes when our own shitty buildings just burn themselves down?" about Grenfell.
It's crass, but it's literally just us talking shit in private. These messages arent public or anything.
I can't get through to any of the guys. Is this something the police are actually going to try and prosecute?!
At this point should I just not come home? I'm dual Austrian-British and Austria doesn't extradite to the UK.
There is speech and there are consequences for speech.
If I incite or state that I am going to commit violence, stalking, rape or murder, should I face consequences? Yes. That's what is happening.
There are outlying cases which will be used to discredit this perspective but reality is there are a hell of a lot of very not nice people out there making active threats and inciting hatred and violence.
And everyone gets their day in court.
This is completely false and comes from a commonly misrepresented statistic; '30 arrests a day' is plainly the arrests made under section 127 of the Communications Act 2003 and section 1 of the Malicious Communications Act 1988 which includes things like online stalking and harassment. I hope you're just mistaken and not willfully implying that those issues are merely offensive to the prevailing political orthodoxy.
You can argue it's highly improbable that all arrests are over 'hurty words online', definitely – but anyone claiming zero arrests seems improbable too.
I do also feel it's quite convenient that the lack of breakdown allows people to clap back with accusations of encouraging stalking and harassment.
> The wife of a conservative politician was sentenced to 31 months in prison for what police said was an unacceptable post.
What did she say? The article does not elucidate.
Inciting violence for example is not legal. I believe spaces around abortion clinics are also to be free from demonstrations. US free speech absolutists seem to vehemently disagree until you say something unkind about Charlie Kirk or ICE.
The low point might be quoting Elon Musk. This is true in any context, but in particular here. The scandal is real, but none of it is about people being arrested for non-politically-correct speech.
There’s plenty of otherwise real stuff to poke the UK about.
> Mass deportation now, set fire to all the fucking hotels full of the bastards for all I care, while you’re at it take the treacherous government and politicians with them. I feel physically sick knowing what these families will now have to endure. If that makes me racist so be it
[0] https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Connolly...
> “Kill those motherfuckers. Let the streets soak in their red, capitalist blood, dude.” - Hasan Piker on landlords
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cx2910vrrygo
1. Holding up a sign offering help to any women being coerced into an abortion is illegal. 2. Standing silently on the road near one can be illegal. 3. parking a car with a bumper sticker near one can be illegal.
The whole paragraph about Musk and rape gangs is nonsense, of course. The biggest rape gang ever convicted in the UK was entirely white. Musk and his ilk only care about rape when the rapists are not white. On average immigrants are slightly less likely to commit sexual assaults (obviously averaging across many different groups).
> What did she say? The article does not elucidate.
She called for hotels housing asylum seekers to be burned. I think she is a nasty racist but I also think the sentence was excessive and I am not convinced it was a serious incitement to violence (and that was not what she was convicted of).
> US free speech absolutists seem to vehemently disagree until you say something unkind about Charlie Kirk or ICE.
Not American, and I entirely support the right of anyone to make unkind comments about anyone else. You are right that many people apply different standards to their own side, but right wing Americans are are from alone in that.
They only care when the rapists are coming from outside the UK, and being protected by the authorities.
>>On average immigrants are slightly less likely to commit sexual assaults (obviously averaging across many different groups).
I think that is called picking your sample carefully. No-one is worried about EG the Chinese or the French.
The emphasis on 'rape gangs', 'immigrants' and 'asylum seekers' isn't just objectively untrue, it's cynically manipulative. It's fundamentally a toxic and calculated form of marketing and branding.
And also a cynical distraction from - for example - the Epstein story and Musk's appearances in it.
There was a lot of this around Brexit. Many supporters voted to 'stop them coming over here'.
The government then ramped up immigration - a lot. For some reason the press failed to report this.
Recently I saw a clip on GB News where one of their analyst said that anyone that opposes a war and/or conscription with Russia will need to put in prison. The show host, Jacob Rees Mogg and Lord Redwood saw nothing wrong with the statements.
None of these people have been in the armed forces and are too old to be called up for conscription.
319 years, 4 months, 3 weeks, 2 days to be exact.
https://lordslibrary.parliament.uk/select-communications-off...
Pretty sure she called for the murder, by arson, of asylum seekers although the article missed that bit out.
Citation please.
(EDIT: Citation of an arrest just for saying that, not an arrest for incitement.)
I'll take that as confirmation that it happens all the time though - since this was evidently not an isolated case, as you have pointed out.
My opinion is that free-speech absolutism is a policy position that causes much more harm than good, and which erodes social cohesion. There should be perpetual debate about where we as a society accept where the line is between speech which is allowed and that which is disallowed.
And to wit, on the tea party analogy: how's that working for the US now?
You gotta stay on-topic. You keep coming up with random things to compare to that make no sense to anybody but you. Who said it was legal to say "kill the king"?
But I dislike even more that we decide that the solution to it is to pass laws prohibiting speech, and even more that the ones in charge of passing those laws are very incentivised to prohibiting criticism to themselves or their policies or their ideologies.
They're dragging grannies off to prison just for holding up signs, and literally accusing them of supporting terrorism.
It’s why the US has such a problem with gun control and laws.
I could argue everyone should have guns, and it’s just bad people, right?
Let me give it a go; Switzerland has higher gun homicides than the UK.
Maybe Apple should withdraw all encryption support from all UK government accounts? The Prime Minister can use a Huawei or some chunky thing from a military contractor.
I am judging by a simple fact, that "please confirm your age" screen is now mandatory during the iPhone setup in all countries, and in some it's behind a KYC. I have a strong opinion that this is insane. And once they let the foot in the door - there is no closing it.
They obvioualy never ever resisted anything except its a good PR stunt.
I'm generally okay with "how old are you?" without KYC and changeable later. It just allows apps and websites to display age-appropriate content.
It's a foot in the door. Once this question exists, the next logical one is "prove it".
Not quite.
The request to confirm age is there, but actually completing it isn't mandatory (though granted, it does leave an 'alert' thingy on your phone settings saying you haven't finished setting it up).
I would hope to see Apple pull out of the UK market over this, and certainly to stop selling Apple devices to the UK government and to remove the UK government entities from Apple services.
Also if you do revert account to UK you will get a warning that you either need to disable ADP or lose access to iCloud features.
It's almost as wild as when during the pandemic "lockdown", planes had to take off, burn tonnes of fuel and land empty some minutes later at the same airport, because there's some fucking law about landing spots and how they'd be lost if that bullshit wasn't done.
Before the COVID restrictions, airlines were required to use their allotted spots at least 80% of the time.[6] During the pandemic, the European Commission temporarily suspended Europe's airport slot rule for a short period.[citation needed] Due to travel restrictions, many flights were cancelled or had limited capacity, which made it difficult for airlines to fulfill all the requirements for possessing an airport slot. The suspension of the slot rule was reinstated in October 2021. After the slot rule was reinstated, the rule only required European airlines to use 75% of their flight slots for the winter season.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_flight_%28commercial_avi...
From what I remember it uses a combination of things like your current GPS location, your SIM cards reported country and more to determine what country you're really in to restrict certain features.
So it's not as simple as swapping your location in settings, or even traveling to somewhere in the EU, theres a certain sticky-ness to what your device thinks is your current country.
Edit: bit more info on eligibilityd here https://theapplewiki.com/wiki/Eligibility#eligibilityd
Only disadvantage that you will need to pay fot services via US gift cards as you need US bank cards otherwise.
But keep in mind you have to disable all subscriptions first and also your family group if you have one must also switch their accounts to US.
So yeah pretending you're US customer is no brainer with Apple and unlike Google they dont have automatic detection that will move your account to other region.
Beware you can only change account region once a year or something.
I thought they at least used something complex to attempt to prevent non-EU users using third-party app stores. I also recall a legitimate EU user is not allowed to travel abroad too long before losing access to those stores.
What Google does is completely different - they enforce local regulations on your accounts just if you keep using them within specific region for too long. Though Google dont actually change billing region or Google Play region.
Has the UK started attacking any open source E2EE projects yet?
Apple's control over iOS is the main reason I prefer GrapheneOS so much over it. You get amazing privacy and security without sacrificing control. GrapheneOS has said they won't introduce age verification and a backdoor they obviously won't implement.
Jeff Gray is a man who regularly gets arrested and/or trespassed from public places for holding up a sign saying "God bless the homeless vets". Seems to happen nearly every time he does it at various locations.
Oh, and flock cameras and ICE aren't exactly a sign that America is this beacon of freedom that it likes to portray.
That is something that can happen at nearly every international border crossing. Before posting I tried to find a list of countries that require a warrant to search your stuff and the only place that came up was Hong Kong. New Zealand requires some suspicion, but that's effectively the same as they can simply state "they were acting suspiciously to my eye."
>Oh, and flock cameras and ICE aren't exactly a sign that America is this beacon of freedom that it likes to portray.
The US never said that you won't be observed in public nor that you can enter, remain, and travel freely around the country forever without permission.
You also don't have the right to a lawyer to be in a room with you and you are compelled to answer all their questions and they do not need to tell you why they stopped you.
Then if you are lucky they return your devices 7 days later after they have been through everything.
This guy went through it last year and talks bout what happens when they stop you: https://youtu.be/991kRp8KUmo?si=-5S1uLE7K9KG_gNj
Some delusional "save the children" anti-privacy extremist doesn't have the political capital or the technical insight to convince the government to create a law to issue secret gag orders.
People with good civil intention don't just propose the idea, or get the momentum, to institutionalize such mechanisms.
So who are the major influencers, and their thoughts, for pushing this?
I think you can just start with:
1. Campaigning on behalf of a worthy victim, or against a terrible enemy, is a good way to become more socially powerful. Most people are less willing to disagree with you when you do this because it risks introducing motive uncertainty - are you criticising the means because you truly object to the means, or are you criticising the means because you don't support the worthy victim or oppose the terrible enemy? This is a socially disadvantageous position to argue from.
2. Exploited children are worthy victims, and drug traffickers and terrorists are terrible enemies.
3. Therefore, policies that nominally protect children or oppose drug traffickers and terrorists are socially advantageous, and arguing for them is likely to increase your social power.
The means here are disproportionately likely to be done in a concealed way if the underlying policy is not broadly popular, independently of the effects it has on localised politcal arguments. Many people, myself included, don't support every political cause that helps a worthy victim or opposes a terrible enemy.
Social pressure is harder to apply at a distance, so the reality-warping effects of motive uncertainty are less powerful, so it makes sense that it's kept to private pressure groups and lobbying.
That angry’s up the blood of libertarians, but ultimately from the point of view of the State it has to be able to do its job of detecting and prosecuting serious crime, and it will redraw privacy lines whenever that is substantially impeded by new technology.
In reality the secret police did not care about laws or constitution, so private mail correspondence was intercepted and opened, read, then closed again with care, trying to make this undetectable, and the telephone lines of persons of interest were tapped.
Nonetheless, it was understood that this surveillance is actually illegal, so it was hidden as much as possible.
Nowadays, the government institutions of most "free" states, like USA and UK have granted themselves far more rights to do surveillance of their citizens than the dictators of the past.
Detecting and prosecuting serious crime does not need any such general surveillance. The general surveillance just makes much cheaper the detecting of serious crimes, but in exchange it gives the means to the government employees to commit more serious crimes themselves.
It relays my main concern which is that while current governments may use this in moderation and under judicial oversight, future ones may not. And we should build tools for the future not just for now.
There’s a general regression towards fascist and right wing ideologies in the last few years and I don’t want to be up against a wall one day because someone did something with ignorant best intent.
The “fascist” part (authoritarian/totalitarian tendencies) came long before the resurgence of the right, but most people seem to approve of those methods as long as they target those they dislike, so I won’t be shedding any tears for them when it’s their turn at last.
It is self-evidently written by AI. You can tell from both tropes such as “To bring this into sharper focus” and the fact that it is entirely without an opinion or argument for most of the piece.
The whole "Apple won't do what the USG wants" story is farce, engineered specifically to protect Apple's brand image. Following the Snowden drop when we all learned that the USG has unfettered realtime access to everything in iCloud without a warrant via FAA702, Apple had a major fucking crisis on its hands, along with a lot of other companies. (If you think the CIA can't read any object in S3, you simply don't understand how the world works. Note also that AWS has built a custom, one-off, airgapped AWS region ON PREM for the CIA. https://aws.amazon.com/federal/us-intelligence-community/ )
Those CEOs all went to DC and sat down with Obama and talked it out. The official cover story was something like "Obama wants help with healthcare.gov".
> The top leaders from the world’s biggest technology companies pressed their case for reform of the National Security Agency’s controversial surveillance operations at a meeting with President Obama on Tuesday, resisting attempts by the White House to portray the encounter as a wide-ranging discussion of broader priorities.
https://www.businessinsider.com/tech-ceo-meeting-with-obama-... (includes photo)
It is very likely that this media plan was discussed and agreed upon in those meetings. Otherwise, nobody sane in any government in Europe would ever buy an iPhone (or let their citizens do same), given that the USG can read all their photos and messages and emails and contacts in iCloud instantly and without a warrant.
(China of course requires Apple run the iCloud servers for Chinese users in China via a joint venture with a CCP-operated company, which preserves the same realtime full access to all iCloud/iMessage data in China for the CCP as PRISM does for the USG.)
Don't believe the marketing hype.
Further reading:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM
The Snowden releases support very plainly the direct realtime access of the US intelligence community to tech company servers without search warrants (just FISA orders).
It is the single most used data source by the US intelligence community.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Prism_slide_5.jpg
Apple began providing such data in October 2012.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:PRISM_Collection_Det...
https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/new-slides-reveal-gr...
https://www.reuters.com/technology/cybersecurity/governments...
These aren't conspiracy theories, these types of secret agreements happen all the time.
EDIT: it seems the original poster I was replying to has deleted their post, and so this may not make as much sense in the thread now.
Getting really tired of the UK govs incompetence/maliciousness around digital law making
I guess if I lose my phone on a trip, I wanna be able to walk into an Apple store and restore it from their cloud copy that the feds have backed up & pored over by LLMs too. (not sure that’s done in realtime for 100% of the population, but tokens will be cheap enough eventually - they have their pre-LLM solution too)
I think I keep Signal data mostly out of the cloud though, declining to use their latest features. Hidden notifications too. Is it only personal family updates, yes, but the principle makes me feel good.