by jackgavigan on 10/5/17, 7:23 AM with 177 comments
by mosselman on 10/5/17, 8:35 AM
by akerro on 10/5/17, 8:01 AM
by villaaston1 on 10/5/17, 8:45 AM
> Speaking about preventing the upload of objectionable content, Home Secretary Amber Rudd said the government needs to get people who "understand the necessary hashtags" talking.
> That was of course in addition to Rudd's widely criticised remarks that encryption has no place in citizens' hands, in the wake of revelations that Westminster attacker Khalid Masood was using WhatsApp shortly before murdering pedestrians with his car.
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/04/03/uk_home_secretary_a...
by PeachPlum on 10/5/17, 8:28 AM
Will I be able to check my remaining allocation at far-right-views.direct.gov.uk ?
They labelled Le Penn and AFD as "far right extremists", can I only read their websites so many times ?
Is Islamofacism far-right ?
Can Jews be far-right ?
by fredley on 10/5/17, 8:36 AM
Secondly, even if this law was passed, it would never be actively used against the public. It would be used to throw more charges at people they have arrested already, or to have some charges to throw at people who they have arrested but can't charge. It's a handy catch-all (along with vague bans on pornography) that criminalises many normal people who have internet-connected devices. It means they can haul you over at Heathrow, search your device and say "Ah! You've looked at this naughty thing! Too bad!", for example - giving the state an easy way to reject people they don't like much more easily.
A lot of this approach stems from Theresa May herself, who spent many years as Home Secretary struggling to deport Anjem Choudary.
by tmnvix on 10/5/17, 8:24 AM
by martinko on 10/5/17, 8:10 AM
by Quarrelsome on 10/5/17, 8:02 AM
I personally like how they've attempted to distinguish downloading and reading as if when you browse to a website it doesn't download the HTML and store it in a temp cache on your local disk. This suggests that today the difference between innocent and guilty is the directory path of an illicit file. :D
by jlebrech on 10/5/17, 8:08 AM
also will certain passages or holy books be deemed extremists or not.
what of movies that they don't like, will those be banned?
by mverwijs on 10/5/17, 8:19 AM
I cannot find the sources of that statement. Which law? Where is the text?
by return0 on 10/5/17, 8:34 AM
by k-mcgrady on 10/5/17, 8:33 AM
by peteretep on 10/5/17, 8:21 AM
> Britain has long relied on the
> presumed benevolence of the
> government
Yes. That's what parliamentary sovereignty actually means. We don't have an actual constitution. In fairness, we've been at it for 90 years longer than the US has had a constitution, and so far it works.Most of the worst excesses of US politics seem to go back to deep mistrust of government and people taking about their "rights".
by DanBC on 10/5/17, 8:10 AM
the changes are to increase the sentence for repeated visits to 15 years.
since reading extremist material is already illegal the article could point to all the miscarriages of justice caused by people convicted for mere possession of a chemistry textbook or for journalistic research into terrorist organisations.
by SideburnsOfDoom on 10/5/17, 8:33 AM
Also since this would be inspected from the ISP's end of the pipe, it's easy to simulate the network traffic of a lot of page views without the user ever seeing anything. See also "curl".
by BrockSamson on 10/5/17, 8:52 AM
by oliwarner on 10/5/17, 10:11 AM
But while censorship in the UK is nothing new, I feel like we're entering grand new era where I can send you a few links to extremist material, an encrypted USB stick without keys and you disappear into a black hole. Forever.
If that —or even the heightened fear of that— isn't terrorism, I don't know what is. I certainly feel more threatened by accidentally breaking a law than terrorists where I am.
by nbevans on 10/5/17, 8:39 AM
by phatbyte on 10/5/17, 8:21 AM
We need to discuss this as a society, not hiding it.
by projectant on 10/5/17, 8:53 AM
Why? Violence is supported and enabled by the narratives people use to justify it. Some element of policing & countering the narrative is going to control ideas that embolden people to commit crimes or to harm others.
It's really no different than saying the way we talk about women, or PoC, or gender, or sex helps constructs the reality of how we behave. A lot of people are already shouldering the burden of trying to police and counter how other people speak and think, but they are often not backed up by legislation in doing so.
Trying to stamp out the wrong ways people talk and think about other people is part of making a society that is more free and just.
I think actually in this case 1984 has the unfortunate chilling effect of making it so easy to equate any sort of control with dire, evil and illogical totalitarian government. It's the sort of "short circuited" thinking that i think impedes people actually thinking clearly or deeply or even at all about these things. In that sense, having neat metaphors from literature to reach for actually harms the public discourse, because it is silenced before it can start.
We do need to be talking about these things, and looking at them, not stereotyping and simplifying them, so I think a proposed piece of legislation is a good start and a sign that people are waking up to the importance of the stories we tell each other about who we are, and what's okay, in shaping and normalizing the culture and society we have.
by keitarofujiwara on 10/5/17, 8:28 AM
by milesf on 10/5/17, 8:24 AM
by flotillo on 10/5/17, 8:51 AM
It saddens me that a rational move to prevent terrorism in its formative stages leads to such a knee-jerk negative reaction, with commenters ranting about "1984" and "infringing our civil liberties" and "leftist censorship" and other such overreacting nonsense.
by inasring on 10/5/17, 8:17 AM
by 0xbear on 10/5/17, 8:31 AM
by enterx on 10/5/17, 9:18 AM
by andy_ppp on 10/5/17, 8:19 AM
by nnfy on 10/5/17, 8:01 AM
Do you really want your government deciding what is and is not neutral content delivery? No one sees any way in which it can go wrong?