edit: Don't shoot the messenger.
So I've stopped buying UK products and services (eg raspberry pi) and don't consider traveling there anymore. Just like I'm doing now with the US although the latter is more difficult to do.
The government says the individual thought they were sending a list of about 150 names, not the whole set.
Meanwhile the Taliban have been taking revenge: https://pressway.org.uk/news/300408-hunt_for_tranclators_tal...
This is why authorization matters. Don't send the spreadsheet; send a link to it, because e-mail doesn't implement authorization. Then you can revoke access at any time, and even prevent accidents by setting up access rules and monitoring at the org level.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/7/17/how-were-identities...
Regardless, the EU is also pushing for the same stuff.
Rupert Murdoch is 94.
I'm not being sarcastic. For real, what major government wouldn't want that in their favor?
Unless they're even more hubristic than we imagined.
They care about maybe a maximum of five having that access, and I'm sure they realize that #1 on that list (PRC) won't need much time to become a peer on any given technology.
That is the opposite of privacy.
Reminder that he's funded by Thiel and friends with Curtis Yarvin, which goals include the end of democracy and the federal state and replace the system with tech CEO kings over feudal states.
I'm not sure what you mean by "more" but what you are asking for is in fact happening.
Perhaps he likes the idea of E2E, but just for himself and his friends. I duno, but whatever it is, it's not about the important things after the fact.
DOGE is clearly operating illegally for other reasons - not distributions funds that were appropriated by Congress for instance. But data sharing isn’t the root issue. It’s spineless Republicans in Congress and a sycophantic Supreme Court.
And it’s possible to say both that if you are here illegally you should be deported and that it’s currently being driven by animus, cruelty and it should be easier to obtain legal residency especially in areas where we do need more workers and implement another program like Reagan did in the 80s
Beyond that many of the departments that this data is being extracted from have rules about who can access (no not everyone in the IRS has free reign) and what they can do with it. For good reason, IRS's job is to focus on what the law says they should do, not say punish political enemies and so on.
But transfer it to DODGE, ICE, Palantir, there are no laws at all regarding what they can do with that data.
In some countries, tax data is available to everyone. Norway, Finland and Sweden in particular. There may be others
You don't want your local dog catcher to be able to look at your medicare records just because "he's the government, and medicare records are government data".
Shouldn't everybody have access to government data, with a few exceptions?
The position of the US executive on encryption is well summarized by the Lavabit case.
> Tim Cook, the C.E.O. of Apple, which has been ordered to help the F.B.I. get into the cell phone of the San Bernardino shooters, wrote in an angry open letter this week that "the U.S. government has asked us for something we simply do not have, and something we consider too dangerous to create." The second part of that formulation has rightly received a great deal of attention: Should a back door be built into devices that are used for encrypted communications?
https://www.newyorker.com/news/amy-davidson/a-dangerous-all-...
This leaves contact mining as the odd one out, but given how many apps want to see your contacts, you know that those are being sold by at least one of those apps.
None of this stuff has ever been end-to-end encrypted, so there can't be any way people expect it to be private.
I have to imagine that the other companies are doing this as well.
Like for example, when they got caught selling location data they were required to protect. [0]
[0] https://www.theregister.com/2024/04/29/fcc_telecom_fines/
It's the reason that Apple and Google recently started rebooting devices that haven't been unlocked in a while.
It's no secret that there are groups actively looking for new exploits and that sometimes vulnerabilities are discovered that become zero days. It's a good bet that police and security services take an active interest in those vulnerabilities when they are found.
But that's very different to claiming the police can easily unlock any device any time they want to and there is a range of private companies around who provide that service to them.
The manufacturer provides the means to bypass many of the cheaper tools, but few people use them.
There are more exotic tools that can bypass security controls. These are more niche and not generally available to law enforcement. There may be some crossover when counter-intelligence interfaces with law enforcement. (Ie. FBI, DEA, RCMP, ICE, etc)
Yes they do. Now name one that works consistently against a fully patched modern iPhone.
"As with all of the other information these companies store for or about their users, because Apple and Google deliver push notification data, they can be secretly compelled by governments to hand over this information," Wyden wrote.
Then there are all the ways, both white and varying shades of gray, of installing software in the end devices. That's your primary threat right there.
Edit: And Magnet, and the internal capabilities of an acronymical agency or three...
Believe it or not, I actually care about privacy. Innuendo is not my intent, no maliciousness here, only stating there are programs that have access to your data. Telegram/Signal/Encrypted or not. They don’t need access to your device. Only access to the Internet.
For which you have provided not a shred of evidence here beyond the same type of innuendo you've been posting all along - even while implying that some of this is public knowledge that you could therefore cite to establish at least some credibility.
Your claims in combination appear to require that the technical foundation on which almost all serious security on Apple devices is built must be fundamentally flawed and yet somehow this hasn't leaked. That's like saying someone found an efficient solution to the discrete logarithm problem and it's in widespread use among the intelligence community but no-one outside has realised. It's theoretically possible but the chance of something so big staying secret for very long is tiny.
As I said before - extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Thank you for the discussion but there seems little reason to continue it unless you're able to provide some.
It’s not extraordinary if you’re in this space. This is but one of many such initiatives. A few have already been in the works for years.
He said Apple does not have and won’t create a backdoor. That was well crafted and means exactly what he said, any implicit meaning is an artifact of your brain.
I absolutely don't actually know anything about Apple, but I've seen some of the ways even small companies legally split themselves up to avoid tax or various forms of liability. Multiple phone numbers to the same phone, multiple domains and email providers to the same laptop. Multiple denials that you've ever heard of the other company let alone happen to share the same office space...
There's a massive difference between a truthful statement and an honest one; anyone that works with code should understand that.
Apple has since confirmed in a statement provided to Ars that the US federal government "prohibited" the company "from sharing any information," but now that Wyden has outed the feds, Apple has updated its transparency reporting and will "detail these kinds of requests" in a separate section on push notifications in its next report.
They also can't refuse to comply with warrants demanding any such unencrypted data that is stored on their servers.
That's not the same thing as adding a back door to allow access to encrypted user data that is stored on the user's device.
It's also different than storing encrypted user data on your server, when you have purposefully designed a system where you don't have access to the user's encryption key.
Encrypted user data backup is the feature that Apple disabled access to in the UK rather than comply with the order to insert a back door in the OS.
Good security models typically don't hinge on being lucky.
Should we disbelieve them when they say they don't do so?
I would also point out that it was Senator Wyden who initially informed the public of how much the government was already spying on their unencrypted communications.
His record on civil liberties is excellent.
That seems to be the most salient property of his presidency. His position on any issue is whatever he just said, with no regard to what it might have been yesterday.
I think we're up to the killing part now.
It's too bad that when he is in power he does not actually make the latter happen, because it should be scrapped entirely.
The only other country with a debt limit set in an absolute amount rather than as a percentage of GDP is Denmark, and they sensibly have set theirs far above their actual debt so it becomes just a legal formality rather than a policy tool.
The problem with it in the US is that the debt ceiling limits government borrowing to pay for debts that have already been incurred. It doesn't control the amount of spending or the deficit--that is controlled by the budget that Congress and the President approve.
If we can't just scrap it completely, then at least the budget process should be changed so every budget bill must be accompanied by a raise of the debt ceiling by enough to cover whatever extra debt that budget will be adding.
I'm reminded of that meme that goes something like "Heartbreaking: the worst person you know just made a great point."
I'm no Trump or Vance supporter, but I'd be disappointed if those two weren't going to bat for American companies in the global marketplace.
There are two problems here:
(1) We devote more resources to catching child abusers. There are all kinds of legal "if you see something, say something" requirements that make every doctor, nurse, and schoolteacher in the country part of the effort to do this.
(2) I see no particular reason to believe that additional resources would lead to a noticeable increase in detections. There are many, many circumstances where you're free to devote double the resources to something, but you'll see at best a trivial improvement in results.
You make this statement but provide no evidence. Because there's laws on the books, we "devote more resource" than, say the entire DEA, which unlike these laws has a gargantuan budget? That's nonsense.
> I see no particular reason to believe that additional resources would lead to a noticeable increase in detections.
Look harder? Read up on the topic? String operations work. More would work more often and catch more abusers.
Let alone the resources we could be pouring into children's mental health services (instead of kicking families off health insurance like the current administration has accomplished).
The Epstein list proves we do more to protect child abusers.
> Trump has also been critical of the UK stance on encryption. The US president has likened the UK’s order to Apple to “something... that you hear about with China,” saying in February that he had told Starmer: “You can’t do this.”
> US Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard has also suggested the order would be an “egregious violation” of Americans’ privacy that risked breaching the two countries’ data agreement.
I think that’s exactly why I want encryption.
Preposterous. Did the invention of the calculator make people dumber? A smartphone is another tool. Not Steve Jobs's fault people use it for TikTok or gooning instead of studying programming, math, medicine or whatever. Stupid people are gonna be stupid with or without smartphones.
Plus, we already had smartphones before Jobs, they were Pal OS, Windows Mobile or Symbian based.
Maybe it wasn’t intentional, but the form factor of the modern smartphone discourages creation.
When I was a young child me and all my friends would “use the PC together” just to open MSPaint and create shitty drawings. I don’t see anything similar today.
Ever take photos or videos with your phone? Is that not creation?
>When I was a young child me and all my friends would “use the PC together”
Same, but this is more "old man yells at clouds". Children today have their own way of creation, now using AI.
If you make a list of creative activities that can be done on a computer or phone, a big majority are notably harder to do on a phone.
But it’s not like many young adults today who grew up with mobile phones understand computers either. At 51 growing up with computers in the 80s, I find myself explaining what I think should be simple computer concepts to both my parents generation and my adult children.
My 80 year old mom is not a stereotypical old person who doesn’t know how to use a computer. She is a retired math teacher and has actively been using computers since we had an Apple //e in the house running AppleWorks in the mid 80s.
When she was tutoring teenagers mostly as volunteer work after she retired, she had to teach them how to use Office/Gsuite.
"Das Internet ist für uns alle Neuland" Angela Merkel (2013) during a press conference with Obama.
"The internet is uncharted territory for us"
This is going to be heresy here, but honestly I think it's a reasonable position. Not one I would take, but reasonable.
For the first time in human history there can be large scale communication it is mathematically impossible for governments to have any access to. If you believe that governments are doing the job of protecting their citizens (and many do), it's entirely reasonable for them to want this type of access.
They have it with the postal service, and analogue phones and the world didn't collapse, and many criminals got caught.
Phone wiretapping (until recently I suppose) and mail inspection required a human to take some action to listen in; you couldn't just monitor everyone's communications. Now you can.
I don't think anybody is saying that the motivations are bad. We all want safety, right?
The closest thing I hear is, they feel that the cons often outweigh the pros. I think this correlates with their trust in authorities, given the countless abuses we see authorities perpetrating when granted power.
There's a reason "think of the children!" is literally a joke mocking safety-based pretexts for reductions in rights.
Every time ukgov tries to make some sort of tech policy, it's embarassingly wrong, or naive, or both.
This comes from a country that effectively gave away ARM.
https://studee.com/media/mps-and-their-degrees-media
The most popular subjects for MPs who won seats in the Dec 2019 election
Politics - 20%
History - 13%
Law -12%
Economics - 10%
Philosophy - 6%
English - 4%Also, the people pushing for these measure (e.g., the U.K's equivalent of the NSA, GCHQ and most national-level police departments) understand these issues perfectly well.
Surely some of them understand the technical details. That doesn't necessarily mean they understand or respect the wider implications of a policy. This is why it's important to have a government that sets policy - taking into account all of the competing influences and potential consequences - and politically neutral technicians who then implement government policy.
No-one would dispute that if the government could examine every communication everyone ever sends then it could catch more very bad people and prevent more harm to innocent people. The problem is all the other stuff that also happens if you give a government that kind of power over its own people.
If by "hack" you mean she guessed the password, then yes.
It has nothing to do with their technical knowledge. It has everything to do with human nature.
If you want to push back, the law is not on your side.
The politicians might not know tech, but the NSA, GHCQ, etc. that push for these anti-encryption laws most definitely do know technology, and is the main lobby against encryption.
It goes beyond just getting politicians that understand tech. We need politicians willing to rein in the intelligence apparatus put in safeguards, and checks and balances on their power.
When politicians say "we need a special key for police to stop child abuse" it's not that they don't know this means "a backdoor with no technological way to limit its use". On the contrary, they know it very well and it's exactly what they want to achieve under the guise of children protection. It's the public at large that don't understand it -- or so they hope.
The scary thing about the UK regulators is that they seem to understand the stupidity of what they're doing, but believe it's worth it. You see this attitude everywhere in the UK – in our hate speech laws, our blasphemy laws, mass surveillance – the argument isn't that these things don't limit freedom and personal privacy. They'll agree that they do, their argument is that you shouldn't care.
With this encryption backdoor most wouldn't deny that it could be compromised, they just didn't think you should worry about it because they thought the benefits were worth it.
I think people on the internet in the 90s and early 00s were just weird people to be honest. We're very libertarian for whatever reason, and we wrongly assumed people our age were all as pro-freedom as us.
With a few notable exceptions, the level of knowledge, expertise and understanding amongst government advisers and policy makers is abysmally low. c.f. https://jackgavigan.com/2015/11/23/how-well-advised-was-the-...
I recently listened to some clips from a hearing with questions about zero-knowledge proofs, algorithmic transparency, etc...this was pretty unthinkable two decades ago. Some agencies and legislative bodies also now have technical staffers and some advisory boards with technologists. So, yeah it it slow and sometimes frustrating, but it's not static.
Turns out it was not 4D chess after all…
It never is. I'm guilty of thinking there's a secret master plan sometimes and there never is.
Authoritarianism has become very popular online these days for some reason. Giving in to fear and wanting total control are always going to be traits that pop up again and then humans have to relearn from history about why freedoms are important.
I don't think there is much disjoint if you see Trump as a fairly clean break with the cold-war era GOP. The thing is that no one in the US remembers the cold war with pride. The left thinks the cold war was US imperialism. The right kind of agrees, and has moved on to other issues anyways. And Europe nudges, saying: "Hey, you're America. You love fighting cold wars! Remember?"
Too many Europeans are Chomsky-brained and believe that US foreign policy is controlled by the CIA. The reality is that US grand strategy is incoherent and has been for decades. The US doesn't have any actual strategic imperatives at the moment, and it's being pulled in too many different directions. I believe George Friedman argues that this is a recurring pattern in US history, where US foreign policy alternates between listlessness, and maniac focus on some objective (most recently in the wake of 9/11).
What did they mean by this
They've been looking to use AI for consumer surveillance; AI user monitoring essentially.
"We can't have a backdoor so we can't use AI to monitor the user"
Hence, the confluence of AI and encryption.
The response was essentially: "Why? You are nothing". Britbongs stay losing.
Helpless indeed - but, government still requires the consent of the governed. It's just that we are all very comfortable, with a lot to lose and easily distracted, so that consent to be governed is too easily given nowadays.
If we do anything together as a society it should be making sure to preserve E2E Encryption as it's one of the most important tools to organize a resistance should we wish to revoke our consent to be governed.
Then people wonder why tech embraced Trump.
Right now there aren't too many EU alternatives yet which is why you don't really notice yet. But the damaged trust in the US as a 'partner' will outlive Trump for decades. As they say "trust arrives on foot and leaves on horseback".
Previously it was hard to compete with the US because the lack of regulation there and investors in the EU having more expectations rather than just throwing money at the wall and hoping it sticks.
But with the exploitative business models like Google's consumer tracking and now with Trump and his trade wars the US is no longer viewed as a friend or a country to look up to. I think it will only increase the EU's push for more privacy and ethical business models.
There's a big grassroots movement like "BuyFromEU" to cut US products and services out of our lives. I think that trade balance is only going to get worse. And really it was actually not bad at all, the problem is that Trump was only counting products not services when looking at the trade balance. I guess because his voters are primarily blue collar workers.
https://www.bankinfosecurity.com/eu-pushes-for-backdoors-in-...
I of course trust neither, but I do have to say they are doing good stuff limiting bad actors like Google and Microsoft. I just wish they would do more (e.g. ban third party cookies and tracking outright rather than forcing us to choose every time).
Anytime the lack of “influential European tech companies” come up, the best anyone can do is money losing/barely profitable Spotify.
And the data doesn’t back your idea up that Europe is moving away from any of those companies. The EU is moving its dependence away from the US military industrial complex admittedly.
It will take time to build local alternatives but I'm sure they will come. We have time. You can see that companies like Microsoft are really shaken up when they're starting appeasement projects like those vows to actually protect our data (though those promises are weak because they remain bound to US law)
And this goes hand in hand with the defense initiatives. IT is important though to society to be considered a critical asset.
And even a simplified version of AWS shouldn’t be impossible to build that’s “good enough” [1] or another search engine that’s good enough (Google) and Google search sucks these days anyway.
But Europe is not going to be able to replicate the ecosystem of Android like China did and definitely not Apple on the high end or MS for operating systems.
[1] before anyone replies that I don’t understand the complexity of AWS, I have been working with AWS technologies exclusively for over 7 years including a former 3+ year stint at AWS.
And cloud is only really cost-effective when it comes to startups that have not much cash flow but expect/hope to explode rapidly by going viral. Cloud gives them that kind of infinite scaling and the ability to pay as they go (the uptick in clients will pay for the increased hosting when they do make it).
In Europe this kind of business model is very rare though. We don't just spin stuff up like a weather balloon and hope it floats.
There are plenty of large private corporations and governments who host on AWS. Maybe they didn’t do it naively?
I see a lot of dumb implementations. At work we're picking up all our physical servers and moving them to AWS compute boxes that run 24/7. Purely statically, just because our idiot CIO wants to be a "cloud-driven company" so he can spout the buzzwords. We're spending a lot more money to get the same only on someone else's computers and get none of the actual benefits that cloud can offer.
Just because your company has a brain dead lift and shift implementation (don’t do that), doesn’t mean every company does.
As a former employee of AWS ProServe (Amazon’s internal cloud consulting department - full time direct hire employee) and now and outside consultant, I’ve seen and been involved in a lot of large scale implementations.
I have no love lost for AWS the company (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44607821) , but let’s not pretend it’s a bunch of startups and naive enterprise corporations that don’t know tech.
Even if 98% of it is unnecessary garbage, the functionality for that last 2% has provided a ton of utility to billions of people.
If meta would disappear we would either buy less and have more money to pay for communication (and doing more towards saving the planet as well!). We'd probably choose things to buy more on actual need and quality rather than marketing BS.
Well yes and no. Facebook, no. The concept of facebook as it was when it was first released was an interesting one to me. Staying in touch with your friends, I've lived in several countries so I have friends all over the world. This is nice. However they perverted it when they dropped the old timeline and moved to the algorithmic feed. It became useless to me then.
I do see a benefit to facebook-like services though, just ethical ones.
But what I do like about facebook, or rather meta now, is the investment they have done in VR. It's still full of data collection I'm sure, but to me VR is a very interesting tech and it really needed that to get off the ground. Right now it's not really moving along because "AI" stole all the hype limelight but it will come again, just like AI has had some false starts itself.
Don’t anthropomorphize the lawnmower, the “friendship” is nothing more than economic interdependency. French aircraft carriers are not using Windows because they trust the US government, their diagnostic software just doesn’t work on anything else.
It’s much harder to extricate yourself from the US influence on the world stage.
Not that I’m not seriously looking at a Plan B outside of the US after I retire. We are already planning to spend a few months a year between Costa Rica snd Panama City next year - warm, safe countries in US time zones.
They act like the choices are omni-powerful US tech companies, or a plethora of small companies building utopia. They say "we need to hamstring our most successful companies to make space in the market for smaller players."
The problem is that it isn't making space for smaller players; it's making space for countries with worse perspectives on human rights to try to catch up/fill the void. The world isn't a better place if we replace Google and Meta with ByteDance and Yandex. It's not even that those are bad companies (from what I hear, they're pretty similar internally to their US counterparts); it's that they are under the jurisdiction of administrations that are hostile to human rights.
I mean, the foreign companies taking that space can be solved with sanctions, or digital services taxes, etc.
What would you propose? Maybe Google, Apple, Meta, etc. are the lesser of the big evils but we definitely have a monopoly problem in the US, and there is very little space for competition, which only continues to harm consumers.
https://www.techradar.com/pro/security/the-european-commissi...
I wonder how this clash is going to turn up. I would hate this development. This proposal is worthy of the Chinese Communist Party, and I am aghast just how many member states are fine with the concept of a preemptive surveillance state and breaking privacy left and right.
Of course, that is what we get for giving Ursula von der Leyen a second term (why??) She already has a reputation from her career in German politics, having earned the nickname Zensursula (censoring Ursula).
To answer your question: because the Conservatives just couldn't be arsed to put up an alternative.
IIRC current Kanzler, Friedrich Merz, is not at all her friend and will complicate things for her on purpose. So we will see.
This must be some "technically correct" weasel words bullcrap, as without at least equivalent access there is no chance Apple would be operating in China.
Is that even necessary? A gag order means they can't reveal backdoors, and their entire stack is so locked down that discovering them is hard and unlikely.
If there's a gag order, then companies say "we have a gag order". Like Google and Twitter did back in the day when asked. And then immediately started releasing Transparency Report to show how many of the gag orders they receive, so gov't couldn't say "we don't request anything".
Apple (and many other organizations) contracts work out for liability reasons, this is not the first instance of it.
Also note the language - specifically a “back door” or “master key”. If you call it something else, literally anything else, the statement holds up.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/technology/apple-moves-to-st...
Every company from your device's manufacturer, OS vendor, telecom carrier, app distributors and 3rd party software providers can be compelled to help make that happen.
And then there's always Cellebrite and friends.
It is end-to-end encryption, where each device's key generation is handled by your phone's Secure Enclave.
This article is a decent starting point in terms of what Advanced Data Protection is:
https://support.apple.com/en-us/102651
If you want a deeper dive into the security engineering of iCloud Keychain, the second half of this Blackhat talk by Apple's head of Security Engineering & Architecture (SEAR) is really great:
Synchronizing secrets: https://youtu.be/BLGFriOKz6U?si=cY94TYo28bRj4G7y&t=1357
This is extremely ironic (“Americans’ privacy” basically does not exist), but I won't look a gift horse in the mouth.
Apple makes home computers, mobile devices, AV equipment and productivity/multimedia software.
Meta makes social media platforms, and vr headsets. What exactly makes them "rivals"? WhatsApp vs iMessage? They're two big companies in the same sector, sure, but do they really compete against each other in a major way?
We may not like everything about the current American administration, but credit where due.
The UK is the same country that arrests 12,000 people a year for posting online.
> Now every force in the country has a team sifting through people’s posts trying to determine what crosses an undefined threshold. “It is a complete nightmare,” one officer admits
Britain’s police are restricting speech in worrying ways https://www.economist.com/britain/2025/05/15/britains-police... From The Economist
Just wow. I wonder if we will study this in history textbooks about downfall of UK
(I still don't think the UK should jail people for being hateful online, though.)
I would be more likely to include some sections about the current US administration though.
I draw the bar for "political arrest" at somewhere like "arrested for opposing the incumbent in an election". I don't think "arrested for saying it's time to gas the muslims" - which is the sort of thing happening in the UK and getting counted in these numbers - should be called "political arrest". That's just called committing a crime. That would only become a "political arrest" if gassing the muslims was a politically acceptable viewpoint, equal in value to not gassing them.
(i think OP might be speedrunning a "what opinions, mfer?" goose meme thing. i bet the reason is "for posting right-wing nationalistic garbage likely to incite hatred", or similar)
"A spokeswoman for Leicestershire police said crimes under Section 127 and Section 1 include “any form of communication” such as phone calls, letters, emails and hoax calls to emergency services."
I expect it's mostly domestic abuse cases because what was once screamed through a closed door is now messaged online.
When a family member starts threatening others, an arrest is probably the necessary intervention to prevent actual violence. It's a similar story in cases like e.g. community racial tensions and gang violence. Once the threats are happening online, real violence is imminent and action warranted.
> Under these laws, British police arrest more than 30 people a day for online posts, double the rate in 2017. Some are serious offenders, such as stalkers.
How many of those 30 were for "online posts" (and of which nature - Lucy Connolly is a favourite example cited by the likes of Vance, but she was arrested for trying to stir up racial tension when there were already race riots going on)? Who can tell, because the article didn't seem to bother asking.
0: For anyone curious, https://archive.ph/vaCkJ#selection-1287.0-1298.0
Inciting Violence: Already a Crime
Posting nasty comments: Not a crime.
Glad I could clear things up for you.
You can be a cunt all you want, just make sure you're being nasty about them as a person not their religion or race or whatever group you might feel they belong to
All cases I've seen have been cut and dry in this regard. Racist or homophobic usually.
The medium she used to incite violence was a comment on a website. But she still incited violence, and was charged accordingly.
In Germany there are even stricter laws. Insulting someone is a crime, even if the things you say are factually true.
And then you have repressive dictatorships, like the UAE, USA and China, where you can't disagree with the government on anything. It's definitely a crime there, to say the president looks like Winnie the Pooh.
Section 127(1) makes it an offence to:
"Send by means of a public electronic communications network a message that is a -
(a) grossly offensive,
(b) indecent, obscene, or menacing, or
(c) false, known to be false, for causing annoyance, inconvenience, or needless anxiety."
Section 127(2) adds that: "A person is also guilty of an offence if they cause a message or other matter to be sent that is similarly offensive or menancing.
I googled Lucy Connolly out of curiosity. It indeed appears that she got 31 month of jail for a single tweet? You don't think this counts as "arrested for online posts"?
You've definitely missed some context. For example, and fairly significantly:
> Connolly previously admitted intending to stir up racial hatred.
If you plead guilty to a charge, there's not much defense left.
The offence she admitted to doesn't even take account of whether it's committed online - it's law that was passed in 1986. An aggravating factor that led to the sentence she got was that she had in fact posted multiple times in the same sort of way.
Details of her appealing the sentence as excessive, rejected by the appeals court https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/Lucy-Con...
She didn't throw rocks, she didn't set things on fire, she didn't stab anyone -- it was her speech that got her a multi-year jail term.
This alone makes free speech proponents upset, regardless of whether there were riots ongoing or not, or whether they agree or disagree with her political position.
> She didn't throw rocks, she didn't set things on fire, she didn't stab anyone -- it was her speech that got her a multi-year jail term.
Your contention seems to be that incitement shouldn't be an offence?
That's at odds with legal systems all over the world, including the US, where Brandenburg v Ohio [0] holds that if inflammatory speech is "directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action" that is an exception to the First Amendment and can be prosecuted, which seems to be at odds with "regardless of whether there were riots ongoing or not".
The original point of my first post in this thread was that lumping together arrests for stalking, incitement to violence and other forms of harassment to produce a big scary number makes the argument seem utterly dishonest. The fact that so many "free speech proponents" fixate on one example when, if the stated number is true, there should be thousands of examples every year is a good demonstration of that.
Not true. The US has a much higher bar for prosecuting speech than the UK.
Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969) - 395 U.S. 444
- https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/107965/brandenburg-v-o...
- Speech must be "directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action"
- AND "likely to incite or produce such action"
- General statements like "burn them all" typically fail both prongs
The "imminent" requirement is key. Connolly's Facebook post lacked:
- Specific targets or locations
- Timeframe for action
- Direct instructions to specific individuals
- Any indication people were prepared to act on her words immediately
Here are cases with far more explicit threats that were protected:
United States v. Bagdasarian (2009)
- https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/221261/united-states-v...
- Citation: 652 F.3d 1113 (9th Cir. 2011)
- Posted that Obama "will have a 50 cal in the head" with racial slurs
- Result: Conviction reversed as crude political statement, not true threat
United States v. Turner (2013)
- https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/904120/united-states-v...
- Citation: 720 F.3d 411 (2d Cir. 2013)
- Posted that three federal judges "deserve to die" with their photos and addresses
- Result: Conviction overturned as protected political hyperbole
Connolly's "set fire to all the hotels" would likely be viewed as angry hyperbole in the United States, not meeting Brandenburg's strict standard.
The distinction: The US prosecutes actual incitement (directing a mob to attack a building RIGHT NOW). The UK prosecutes offensive speech that merely might inspire someone, somewhere, someday. Your Brandenburg citation actually proves this difference rather than refutes it.
You want thousands of examples? Check Twitter during any US political crisis - they're not prosecuted precisely because Brandenburg protects them.
> You want thousands of examples?
Of people people prosecuted for innocuous speech in the UK, the original claim in this thread. Brandenburg doesn't apply there.
Edit: If I remove the reference to Brandenburg, I'm not sure my point substantially changes:
Incitement is an offence in the UK and also in other countries. You can argue whether that should be the case or not but that's completely orthogonal.
Gathering a whole lot of offenses which happened to include online activity to produce a big number of people who you can claim were prosecuted for something that you can claim is as innocuous as "online posts" is dishonest.
> lumping together arrests for stalking, incitement to violence and other forms of harassment to produce a big scary number
But that's exactly the problem - the UK defines "incitement" and "harassment" so broadly that ordinary political speech becomes criminal:
UK "Harassment" includes:
- Misgendering someone online
- Posting offensive jokes
- Retweeting protest footage
- Criticizing immigration policy "grossly"
UK "Incitement" includes:
- Lucy Connolly's Facebook post (31 months)
- Jordan Parlour's "every man and their dog should smash [hotel] up" (20 months)
- Tyler Kay's "set fire to all the hotels" retweet (38 months)
NONE of these would meet Brandenburg's standard in the US. They lack:
- Directed at specific individuals
- Imminent timeframe
- Likelihood of producing immediate action
> if the stated number is true, there should be thousands of examples every year
There ARE thousands. In 2023:
- 3,537 arrested for online speech
- 1,991 convicted under Section 127 Communications Act
- Hundreds more under Public Order Act
You don't hear about most because "UK citizen arrested for offensive tweet" stopped being newsworthy years ago.
You're using the word "incitement" to equate UK thought policing with legitimate US restrictions on speech that creates immediate danger. That's like defending China's censorship because "every country bans fraud."
The definitions matter. The UK criminalizes hurt feelings. The US criminalizes immediate threats to public safety.
And here you're getting in on the dishonesty.
How many of those were examples of "hurt feelings" and not "put a whole lot of foreigners at risk of their lives" or any of the other classes of "online posts"? We don't know because in their rush to say "the UK's arresting 30 people a day for posting things online", the Economist didn't bother breaking that down.
> NONE of these would meet Brandenburg's standard in the US.
None of them happened in the US so that's irrelevant. My misunderstanding of the precedent around incitement isn't central to my point.
Are we really going to have to have the "shouting fire in a crowded theatre" conversation?
I think there is some nuance to the conversation about this woman - but you are avoiding it with incredible agility.
I though it could not be true, but actually it is...WTF?
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/E-10-2025-0022...
There is "forbidden speech" (around lying about Holocaust related topics and insulting people online) and I think it's a good thing in total. You spew out the worst of the worst on the internet you should be able to be held accountable
https://archive.ph/xBtFI#selection-3249.145-3249.167
A spokeswoman for Leicestershire police said crimes under Section 127 and Section 1 include “any form of communication” such as phone calls, letters, emails and hoax calls to emergency services. “They may also be serious domestic abuse-related crimes. Our staff must assess all of the information to determine if the threshold to record a crime has been met. “Where a malicious communications offence is believed to have taken place, appropriate action will be taken. Our staff must consider whether the communication may be an expression which would be considered to be freedom of speech. While it may be unacceptable to be rude or offensive it is not unlawful — unless the communication is ‘grossly offensive’.
So... I dunno, neither option is good.
that's normal
Reminder that incitement is a crime in the USA too and there's nothing in the constitution that says it's okay just because it's on twitter not irl.
So far every story ive seen about arrest has been pretty cut and dry, they were blatantly hitler level racist, homophobic, or calling for others to attack people for their protected characteristics (eg race or sex).
Edit: why disagree?
UK law in this regard is far from perfect but this thread is mainly uninformed knee-jerking.
You shouldn't over-estimate the popularity of your favorite comic book authors.
Your search also answered the question, in the fourth result or so.
"moore authoritarianism fiction author" worked though.
They do.
The UK has an uncodified constitution, and this includes the Human Rights Act, which guarantees freedom of expression to UK citizens.
now sod off, as they might say
Probably well deserved to them if it was not contagious in Europe at the moment.
That being said, the crazy thing about this law and the other ones similar is this:
Under the terms of the legislation, recipients of such a notice are unable to discuss the matter publicly, even with customers affected by the order, unless granted permission by the Home Secretary
I really find that stunning that it is so widely accepted. The former german Stasi would probably have been proud of all the parlementaries in US, UK and Europe that allowed such things.
That has absolutely nothing to do with it. This was an act of parliament spearheaded by the house of commons which is entirely democratically elected. The UK has no one but themselves to blame for this.
sylware•12h ago
wkat4242•11h ago