The UK is quickly deploying surveillance state technology that people once decried China for. Whether or not this is ethical or useful, I wish the hypocrisy would be acknowledged. The OSA, the Apple encryption demands, LFR, …, it’s clearly a trend. Has society really become this dangerous that we must deploy these things?
The first time I taught, it was a rather interesting experience realizing how little capacity teachers actually have to deal with e.g. a disruptive student. Yeah you can pass them along to the disciplinarian or whatever, but in the end it's often empty threats - especially if the parents themselves don't particularly care, which in the case of highly disruptive students is nearly always the case. But if a class itself, or even a significant minority of a class, simply chose to stop cooperating - there's not much of anything anyone could do about it.
But when I went to school, I somehow felt like teachers had the power of the world behind them. I imagine, to some degree, politicians have a similar experience. There are countless people that wouldn't be upset at all about their decline, or worse. Of course this has always been the case, but I think modern politicians are becoming increasingly out of touch with society, and consequently also becoming increasingly paranoid about society turning against them. And society doesn't just mean you or me, but also the police and military, without the support of whom they'd just be some rich old frail men sitting around making lofty proclamations and empty threats.
I think this issue largely explains the increasingly absurd degrees of apparent paranoia and fear of the political establishment in most countries. As well as the push for domestic establishment propaganda, censorship of anti-establishment propaganda, defacto mandating politics from a young age, imposing it on the police and even the military, and so forth.
I come from Poland, where the streets are generally quite peaceful. Some of my friends from France and Germany say things feel less peaceful there. They believe immigration has played a role in that. I’m not here to agree or disagree — I can only share my own experiences.
The more disruption there is in society, the more people seem willing to accept increased control by authorities. I'm not necessarily saying this is part of some grand plan, but it does seem convenient for politicians when circumstances justify stronger control measures.
Yeah, I always wonder: is the tail wagging the dog or vice versa? Like maaaybe society is going through some organic disruption at the moment, but it’s so easy to foment a sense of crisis through mass media that it seems more likely it’s just being done to serve an agenda (start a war, consolidate power, disrupt opposition, extract wealth upwards, etc…).
My measuring stick is how “on message” the people reporting it tend to be. A real disaster or crisis is
chaotic, and authentic reporting about it tends to be too (think about mixed messaging during the early days of COVID). If something happens and there’s a very clear narrative from the start about who the good guys and bad guys are, especially if it is trying to make me scared or mad, I just assume I’m being manipulated.
I was taking an intercity coach to Glasgow recently and a teenage kid was on his phone browsing social media without headphones. I made a comment that he should use headphones or turn the volume off. He got defensive and angry. I did not to escalate, and put my earplugs on.
I do believe certain parcels of the society need to be restrained.
Exactly. I would expect it not to bother anyone on a busy street, but I would expect to told to stop it in a library, and to be kicked out in a theatre.
Phones on silent in a theatre yet with a sea of bright silent phone screens surrounding you as people watch TikTok, text, etc., the movie won't be very entertaining. Why I stopped going to movie theatres about 10 years ago.
Also the work breakroom should be a headphone only zone.
No Sharron I don't want to hear the gosip about your extended family as you talk on speaker with your sister about your trailer trash cousins. And Jack I don't want to hear your shitty political podcast with their hosts room temperture IQ...
IMO it shouldn't even get that far, to questions of how much we should be allowed to ask of others in the name of basic decency; there's been a massive shift from people being self-regulating and trying to be considerate to others, to the conversation changing to something like, "how dare you even speak to me while I'm blasting tiktok loudly, I'm going to look up the letter of the law and see what the maximum disruption I can legally get away with is, fuck you!"
Basically sometime around the 00s-10s, seemingly everyone decided to become a massive dickface with zero concept of social cohesion, and it's just me me me me me me, and fuck everyone else.
Society needs a reset, pretty much everyone has just become vile, angry and inconsiderate / extreme main-character syndrome.
It's only a small minority who do things like that. Perhaps the proportion has increased slightly, but the biggest change is people are more afraid to challenge antisocial behaviour than before. So they are more bold.
The counter-culture movement was quite explicit in their mission to replace traditional social norms and values that led to social order with their opposites.
In the real world things seem to be pretty much the same as they have been for most of my life (and I am 60 in a few months).
Online, yes some people behave like monsters and occasionally some of that bleeds across into the real world - but overall I think we are pretty far from saying that "society has fallen".
Ive identified several aspects. Moral injury, new status baseline due to social media, and lack of awareness of effects our digital powers. Not enough time to type on this phone keybd but if ppl upvote i'll elaborate.
Older persons are more often guilty of making noise with their phones, like talking loudly, having an obnoxious ringtone or watching a movie in full volume.
How can you do effective conflict resolution in a society where someone reads an anecdote about a rude teenager and immediately assumes the problem is multiculturalism?
I don't remember bringing up race. Another interesting leap.
But please do elaborate on what sort of 'dominant culture' you're longing for and what sort of policies you'd love to see to (re-)establish that 'dominant culture' to resolve the incredibly new phenomenon of teenagers being rude and rebelling against social norms.
Come on, don't be a coward and just drop the dogwhistling. You're bad at it.
A dominant culture means a step back from individualist values. The most effective 'policies' are created through communities not through law. We cannot rely only on the law for a healthy society; it is necessary but not sufficient.
Rebelling against cultural norms is not the problem. The problem is when people escalate quickly because of it and threaten others. That means the gaps between cultures/subcultures have gotten too big.
You randomly bring up multiculturalism as a problem to be solved in response to a story about a rude teenager of unknown cultural background, and assume I'm dogwhistling? Please elaborate because all I'm seeing here is projection.
But I see we've pivoted from "multiculturalism bad" to pseudo-intellectual theorizing about collective cultural conformity. Very smooth. Different packaging, still trying to sell the same product, though.
> The problem is when people escalate quickly because of it and threaten others.
Guy asked teenager to use headphones, teenager got defensive, guy put in earplugs. That's... literally de-escalation and conflict avoidance. Are we reading the same anecdote?
You've managed to escalate "rude teenager won't use headphones" into a lament about the decline of Western civilization and the need for cultural homogeneity. It's almost impressive how much ideological weight you're hanging on one kid's refusal to wear headphones.
More name-calling. You still haven't addressed my initial question yet. I'll rephrase it again for you: How do you enforce norms without a dominant culture? Do we even need norms at all?
You're asking about norm enforcement failure, but the story shows norms working fine: expectation communicated, pushback received, de-escalation chosen, situation resolved peacefully, albeit not to the satisfaction of the commenter. The system worked.
The fact that the teenager got defensive is indicative of his understanding of societal expectations and norms. Bending and pushing against norms is what teenagers do, and have done since the dawn of time, regardless of their cultural background and regardless of whether they're navigating the norms of a dominant monoculture or those of a multicultural society.
Your question assumes there was some breakdown that needs fixing, but the only 'problem' was mild inconvenience. When did that become evidence of cultural collapse requiring homogeneity to solve?
You still haven't explained why 'teenager won't use headphones' made you think 'multiculturalism is a problem.' For all you know, this story involved two white Christian Scots from the same cultural background. I'll gladly discuss theories about norm enforcement with you once you've explained why you deemed it necessary to inject race and culture into a story that mentioned neither.
I'm not going to entertain your 'just asking questions' routine until you do.
That's a firm 'no' on explaining your original non sequitur then? I told you I'm happy to dive into theories, philosophy, and other theoretical scenarios once you've answered that simple question.
But you're welcome, I guess. At least one of us did.
I doubt you would be happy to hear it, actually. And I doubt it would change your opinion one bit.
You've kicked this entire thread off with an incredibly telling non sequitur: teenager won't use headphones -> multiculturalism bad. When called out on that leap, you pivoted to abstract questions about norm enforcement while ignoring that the norms actually worked fine in this situation.
You're not interested in debate. You're interested in getting someone to validate your predetermined conclusion about the necessity of a cultural hegemony. Having to acknowledge that norm enforcement wasn't actually broken here is pretty inconvenient for that narrative, isn't it?
Still waiting for you to explain that original leap, but we both know you won't. Because you can't without exposing yourself further. Good day. Thanks for playing.
The same way you do in monoculturalism, so that's a meaningless distinction.
If the families did not impart these values to children from a young age, the "owner" of a space advertises and enforces the rules.
In this particular case the coach company should have had clear rules displayed in the coach (at least the basic and generic ones) and the driver should have enforced them at least on demand. Follow the rules or get off the coach.
You're shifting the blame from politicians to society because in your field teachers have lost power over students. It is a huge mistake to make such a parallel. In fact, teachers have lost power because the power has become much more centralized - thanks to the politicians. You're not allowed to punish a disruptive student singlehandedly - the government took that from you and gave it to people who don't really care. The government itself can't care less. The mass hypersurveillance is not designed to solve your problems, sorry, it solves problems of people with control buttons.
I kind of wonder how much of the apparent paranoia from politicians is that they always hear the worst. I doubt its coincidence that Home Secretaries almost invariably turn into huge supporters of surveillance and cracking down on things, and I think that probably comes from the fact they get a briefing everyday from various organisations who's entire reason for existence is to find and keep track of the very worst people. If I were in that position I imagine I'd find it difficult to keep perspective as well.
I think politicians are right to be afraid. Surveillance of this magnitude isn't a ballot-box-level grievance. It's a Guy Fawkes/V-level injustice. They're stepping into territory where the very people they're supposed to stop might instead turn justified.
It is fascinating, isn't it. It is like a downwards spiral with a line most people would not even think of considering crossing. That said, current version of the surveillance appears a little more pervasive ( and to an extent a little self-imposed ) so I wonder if that 'feeling justified' will even matter. Examples do exist of enduring dictatorships with extremely efficient intelligence apparatus turned on its populace.
> The UK is quickly deploying surveillance state technology that people once decried China for.
they always had been or at least tried, for decades by now, the only thing which had been holding them back was the EU frequently being like "no wtf UK, that is against human rights, EU law, etc."
> Has society really become this dangerous that we must deploy these things?
no, and it also has a long track record of not only marginally improving your crime statistics. And especially stuff like facial recognition vans are most times not used to protect citizens but to create lists for who attended demos and similar. Which is most useful for suppressing/harassing your citizens instead of protecting them.
No, it is more like UK is now the new surveillance supermarket for EU: implementing what “works” for UK - trusted and applied technology.
And also the excuse included: “not China”, but even this doesn’t come as cause for concern anymore.
Have a look at the latest US “country report on human rights practices 2025”. Germany is flagged as unsafe so to say.
It is as you can only hope that the NSA has some way to spy on your data when EU gets more on more anti privacy and data protection means EU only storage is mandatory.
Anything coming out of a US government institution today is not trustworthy. Not sure why you'd reference the 2025 report. It's a laugh and a half that the country deploying the national guard in their own capital and putting the capital's police under federal government control is saying Germany is unsafe. The country that's rounding up immigrants and even US citizens to be deported to random countries.
Please. Stop falling for the right-wing propaganda.
We don't need national guard in the capitol deployed. Completely fabricated claim that crime is out of control. Absolutely a move to gain power and create internal enemies to fight while a certain list of clients is being much discussed.
the murder rate in American cities is out of control. Maybe Americans are blind to this, but there are 274 murders in DC alone in 2023. In ALL of Germany, there were something like 600 murders in 2023. DC has 730,000 people living there. Germany has 83 million people. What do you mean that DC doesnt have a crisis going on? The homicide rate is 4,500% higher than Germany, lol.
How can geemany be considered unsafe to the average american? The homicide and violent crime rate in the US is 10x higher than germany, even in the quiet and posh parts of the USA the murder rate is insanely high compared to anywhere in germany.
Nonsense. The murder rate in most of the USA is similar to Germany. My small city has literally zero murders most years. The vast majority of violent crime happens in few cities such as St. Louis, Baltimore, Chicago, and Washington DC. And then it's only in a handful of neighborhoods within those cities. We should fix those places but basic safety isn't something that most Americans have to worry about.
the EU has literally banned facial recognition by law enforcement across the entire bloc.
HN has terrible EU Derangement Syndrome:
any time its mentioned here, suddenly there are tens of people lining up to blindly shit on it, usually for laws it hasn't actually passed, or literal anti-truths like your comment, despite the fact that it is consistently passing the best tech-focused laws of any major governmental body anywhere, and the proposed laws that everyone repeatedly loses their minds over have never once actually come to pass. even when they released the DMA and DSA, possibly the two most HN-friendly pieces of legislation of all time, half the comments were attempts at criticism, basically seemingly because people here just love to hate the EU, sans facts
I edited mine to add additional observation, leaving the central focus the same. your edit entirely changed the meaning of your comment, changing the meaning of my reply
They have outlawed _live_ facial recognition in public places. And with exemptions such as e.g. terrorism, which I'm guessing is what UK is going to go for with protesters.
my friend, I'm sorry but this is simply a factual bridge too far. the EU has quite specifically brought out wide-ranging laws heavily restricting the very thing the UK is doing, plus a load of other very positive restrictions on the use of AI and biometrics in general, and yet your conclusion is that they're on the same path? it's like if I say I'm never going to eat meat except rare unavoidable occasions, and you think I'm en route to becoming the liver king. just admit you like criticising the EU and be done with it
We have another token legislation from EU forbidding private parties to most anything, and carefully inserting loopholes for authorities and government to do as they please.
True, the restrictions on live facial recognition is a bit more severe for law enforcement than usual.
But:
A. It's not something most people here care about a lot. Law enforcement are still allowed to use AI to create a file on every citizen.
B. It gives them political points, because now people less-in-the-know will think that they are actually protecting privacy, which is again, not true.
well thank fuck for that! besides financial self-interest, why would you want private parties doing anything with AI and biometrics whatsoever? if anyone is to at all, it should be publicly accountable bodies that aren't operating based on a profit motive, but really it should be none at all!
>It gives them political points, because now people less-in-the-know will think that they are actually protecting privacy, which is again, not true.
this entire sentence stinks of "I just don't like the EU and I'm just going to criticise it no matter what". people in the know? people who have read the law specifically stating that facial recognition can only be used in severe, clearly-defined cases, with judicial approval, in highly time-limited windows? people who've read that if it is to be used post-hoc, it has to have judicial authorisation linked to a criminal offence. and you're saying that this in no way protects privacy?
the UK is rolling out AI police vans all over the country to try and recognise people they have on lists. no judicial approval is required, there's no time-limit, and as far as I'm aware there's no restriction on what crimes it's used for either. private companies are allowed to use it, obviously equally with no judicial approval
essentially mate, I think you need to have a good look at whether your opinions here are coming from "I genuinely think the EU's legislation is an issue here" or "I don't like the idea of the EU in general and I'm going to criticise anything it does"
I don't get this attitude. Private parties are me and you. I have many interests and ideas, and now many of those have been forbidden for no discernible reason, while the government is still allowed to spy on us to their hearts content.
"Private parties" are _not_ me and you. _I_ can't begin to fathom how you come to believe you are, unless you consider yourself a temporarily embarrassed billionaire, held back from success only by all this legislative overreach.
"Private parties" are mighty multinational enterprises with essentially limitless pockets, entities whose factual power and political influence rivals most governments. Countries all over the world have been struggling to restrain them for the past decade in order to keep their sovereignty.
What exact "interests and ideas" do you have that would involve the necessity for public facial recognition? Because I, for one, don't want my biometric data in your system without my explicit consent.
The beautifully named 32024R1689, aka AI Act, prohibits a lot of random stuff. It definitely makes many AI efforts into a legal minefield. It does not just cover live facial recognition in public spaces, which I personally could live without.
"Private parties" refer to non-governmental entities, such as individuals or businesses. You may be acting on a governments behalf, but I am not.
Private parties are quite literally me and you in addition to large multinational corporations. If you think large multinationals need to be restricted then just say that directly instead of putting forward nonsensical semantic arguments.
> I, for one, don't want my biometric data in your system without my explicit consent.
If it's a single individual watching (for example) the sidewalk in front of his house and not disseminating the data in any way then what does it matter? Where is the potential downside? There are plenty of neighborhoods with at least a few retirees sitting staring out the front window for multiple hours each day.
As far as I can tell in the vast majority of cases surveillance only becomes problematic when both ubiquitous and centralized.
Please stop telling people what stuff "reads like" until after you go over what they actually said. And never say something "reads like" anything akin to "you sound like a hater."
Or at least just say that straight instead of surrounding it with empty verbiage. The overwhelming proportion of people all over the world don't care about the EU until it does a horrible (or a good) thing, and then they care about the thing it did and why it might have done it. It's not their ex-boyfriend.
People are trying to figure out why it's run by crazy people now, and they blame this on the fact that it is largely an undemocratic organization run by extreme multi-generational elites with a quickly lowering opinion on human rights, freedom of speech and the importance of peace. This is not personal. The EU is not a person.
I vouched for this, because there is spirited discussion happening here.
Also, since the UK has now criminalized calling the Gaza situation a genocide under terrorism statutes, the camera vans make sense in driving by peaceful protestors and getting all their faces for arrest later.
For all the Chinese surveillance hatred I've seen over the years, what the UK is doing is loads worse.
It's a war, not a genocide. Gaza is under seige. Hamas should unconditionally surrender but they prefer to put their children in harm's way than to surrender.
Tell me, if this is a genocide, what has happened to all the Jews in Jordan, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Afghanistan since 1950?
No, defense of Israel is the last stand of a people that has been slowly eradicated from their indigenous region for the last 80+ years.
Hamas simply needs to surrender in this round of the war they started. But they won't unless they control Jerusalem.
Whatever they were before, no reasonable person can consider hamas to be the government of Gaza. Or to be a credible military threat to anyone. They are a convenient excuse to continue the aggression.
FWIW, for much of the early months I would have agreed. Hamas was the de-facto government, and had an obligation to unconditionally surrender. Blending in with civilians can’t be a method to avoid military force.
You say that hamas is no "credible military threat" - may I beg you please reconsider this in light of the 1195 killed when they attacked on October 7? They're no world-class army, to be sure, but it's not like they have no teeth whatsoever...
you don't shoot children in the head and genitals in war.
you don't kill doctors and medical first responders in war.
you don't commit a policy of mass starvation against children while gaslighting us about it.
People like you need to be called out. its disgusting and I can't believe we're all still here putting up with it. the IDF is no better than hamas. they justs have bigger guns.
>Hamas should unconditionally surrender but they prefer to put their children in harm's way than to surrender.
"Surrender" means leaving their kids with more of the same until the next flashpoint. Israel has orchestrated a no win scenario, and some people forced into that place have decided they would prefer violence now instead of later.
>what has happened to all the Jews in Jordan, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Afghanistan since 1950?
Some have been forcibly removed. Some of those countries also worked with the zionists to relocate those people willingly to palestinian land.
>Hamas simply needs to surrender in this round of the war they started. But they won't unless they control Jerusalem.
"Hamas wont stop until they are in a better position to defend palestinians" isnt the amazing argument you might think it is.
> "Hamas wont stop until they are in a better position to defend palestinians" isnt the amazing argument you might think it is.
Hamas has no interest in defending Palestinians much less peaceful coexistence [1]. Their primary goal is to conquer and destroy Israel for the glory of Islam.
> Ismail Haniyeh in 2020: He explained that Hamas rejects ceasefire agreements by which, “Gaza would become Singapore,” preferring to remain at war with Israel until a Palestinian state is established from the River to the Sea: “We cannot, in exchange for money or projects, give up Palestine and our weapons. We will not give up the resistance... We will not recognize Israel, Palestine must stretch from the [Jordan] River to the [Mediterranean] Sea.”
Truth is that there was a population exchange between Jews and Arabs after the 1948 war between their nations similar to what happened between Greece and Turkey in 1924 and several other regions during the 20th century. It’s tragic but those peoples accepted it and now largely live in peace. I believe many Gazans desire peace with Israel [3].
However instead of accepting reality, Hamas official policy is the destruction of Israel and the Jews [2].
>Hamas has no interest in defending Palestinians much less peaceful coexistence [1]. Their primary goal is to conquer and destroy Israel for the glory of Islam.
Right, which is why I wouldnt ascribe to them the goal of creating a Palestinian state. They might say they want it, but it isnt really the result they are looking for. The comment I was responding to was making them look good.
>Truth is that there was a population exchange between Jews and Arabs after the 1948 war between their nations similar to what happened between Greece and Turkey in 1924 and several other regions during the 20th century. It’s tragic but those peoples accepted it and now largely live in peace. I believe many Gazans desire peace with Israel [3].
The majority of Gazans would be happy if Israel just respected their right to return. Israel could simply let all the gas out of the issue immediately. Send the settlers home, and let the victims of the nakba return to their land. I dont think anyone desires "peace" where peace is living in a giant open air prison subject to raids and interference from an external military.
>However instead of accepting reality, Hamas official policy is the destruction of Israel and the Jews [2].
Exactly. They perfectly mirror the zionist terrorists who fought for the establishment of Israel. And look where that got us. Israel being ruled and directed by those terrorists has created the current crisis. We cannot repeat that mistake and simply leave Hamas in charge of Palestine. But likewise the terrorist state of Israel must also be either reformed or replaced.
> The majority of Gazans would be happy if Israel just respected their right to return.
Sure and Greeks would love to have Constantinople back. Greece attacked Turkey to get Thrace back and failed. Most of the Greeks living there were expelled. Sucks but that’s war and conflict.
Yet we see that Greeks and Turks don’t suicide bomb each other daily to regain some lost historic sense of pride. They accepted their Diaspora, not kept them locked up as political pawns like the Arab countries did with Palestinians.
Statements like yours sound nice on the surface but are ignorant of practical realities and the messiness of the history.
Even by your own logic, after all, Israeli Jews are just exercising their “right of return” no?
> Israel could simply let all the gas out of the issue immediately. Send the settlers home, and let the victims of the nakba return to their land.
That would not work. You see what Hamas is willing and was able to do on Oct 7th. If Israel allowed that they’d likely be facing the same as Oct 7th continually.
The Arabs that remained after the Nakba are full Israeli citizens now. It’s not perfect but to my eyes living next to several Palestinian Israelis they have pretty good lives. Much better than in Jordan actually.
> They perfectly mirror the zionist terrorists who fought for the establishment of Israel. And look where that got us. Israel being ruled and directed by those terrorists has created the current crisis.
Atrocities were committed by both Arabs and Jews prior to 1948. Again you have a very slanted and inaccurate “white colonizers bad” of the history.
When two ethnicities begin fighting it’s very difficult for either side to remain docile. Naturally populations that once lived together will separate. I’m not justifying it, just pointing out the reality of the matter.
Even the British prior to 1948 proposed forced resettlement of Jews and Arabs in the region to reduce tensions and fighting. Both sides had terrorist elements. Your post minimizes and ignores that both sides were guilty.
Israel being formed just forced the issue and after all the surrounding Arab nations attacked them. Every other situation like that in recent history has had refugees leave or flee their homelands. Most have been allowed to resettle and make new lives, unlike the Palestinians.
Unlike the Palestinian governments, Israel has already given citizenship to remaining Arabs and proved they can live peacefully with their minorities. They grant the right to vote. They protect places of worship for all faiths. They’re not perfect but far better than how the Arab peoples and nations treat Jewish minorities pretty much anywhere in the Middle East.
I did a study abroad in Israel when they withdrew from Gaza in 2005. Most Israelis were supportive of it and removing illegal settlers in Gaza, yet it was a political battle against their own extremist elements. Yet despite doing that it only took a couple years before the rockets started coming from Gaza.
>Even by your own logic, after all, Israeli Jews are just exercising their “right of return” no?
No. There are surviving people with a clear right to return they were removed from. Its those people that Israel seeks to outlive by holding them in Gaza. Its happening now. That's not equivalent to some loose claim from a long time ago.
>That would not work. You see what Hamas is willing and was able to do on Oct 7th. If Israel allowed that they’d likely be facing the same as Oct 7th continually.
Lmao, if theres a fear that returned people would continue terrorism, the anger is coming from being held in an open air prison for decades. It should be a police matter, from a government that protects all citizens. Thats the only way to start to repair things.
>The Arabs that remained after the Nakba are full Israeli citizens now. It’s not perfect but to my eyes living next to several Palestinian Israelis they have pretty good lives. Much better than in Jordan actually.
Yes so the arabs that didnt let themselves get forced or ordered off their land retain some rights. That's not the amazing argument you might think it is.
>Unlike the Palestinian governments, Israel has already given citizenship to remaining Arabs and proved they can live peacefully with their minorities. They grant the right to vote. They protect places of worship for all faiths. They’re not perfect but far better than how the Arab peoples and nations treat Jewish minorities pretty much anywhere in the Middle East.
Yet you continually see them being forced off their land by settlers. If you have proven coexistence possible, you would only strengthen it by returning the refugees. If you want a 1 state solution, that state needs to demonstrate it is capable.
>Most Israelis were supportive of it and removing illegal settlers in Gaza, yet it was a political battle against their own extremist elements. Yet despite doing that it only took a couple years before the rockets started coming from Gaza
You need to understand that removing illegal settlers from gaza is like saying you stole someones house and gave them back the couch.
Israel literally has members of its own cabinet that pursue the extermination of palestinians. Gvir literally shows up to pro settler demonstrations and demands people be shot. You need to understand that a decade ago Israel was able to have its global image be quite pure, and people didn't read what Israelis and their government were saying at home. Now its quite easy to access, it would be simpler to drop the pretense.
> No. There are surviving people with a clear right to return they were removed from.
There’s very few Palestinians in Gaza alive from that time. Even then, while they may have a desire to return home it’s not something any other people in similar conflicts have gotten.
Just as the equivalent numbers of Sephardic Jews who had their properties and homes stolen in Arab nations aren’t going to get them back or get a right of return.
Again it sucks, but you’re asking for a fantasy that modern western people love. We forget how much of our peaceful lives were built on terrible histories.
However Gazans need to begin caring more about the lives of their children rather than trying to regain lost homes or some lost honor in controlling Jerusalem. Homes can be rebuilt.
> Lmao, if theres a fear that returned people would continue terrorism, the anger is coming from being held in an open air prison for decades.
Yet you forget that many Sephardic Jews in the Middle East lived under similar oppression for almost a millennia under various Muslim colonial powers. Yet you don’t give a pass for their terrible actions. That just shows your bias and lack of understanding of the actual history of the region.
You place all the blame on Israel, but Egypt controlled Gaza for decades. They also kept the Gazans trapped. They built concrete walls before the Israelis did.
Jordan keeps 2.39 million Palestinians trapped in refugee camps as well. Jordan tried allowing them to integrate in the 1970’s and they tried to assassinate the king and take over.
> It should be a police matter, from a government that protects all citizens. Thats the only way to start to repair things.
Also there is no “government” that could magically do what you’re saying. Governments aren’t magic. They’re created by people.
The UN British Mandate that was such a government and they proposed forcibly resettling and separating Jewish and Arab populations in the region. So even when your neutral government was tried it advocated for the same separation that happened.
Israeli Jews created a state to protect their people. Yet despite centuries of oppression by Muslim colonizers across the Middle East, Israel decided to give equal rights to their Arab citizens. In the past they’ve offered to allow some Palestinians to return as part of peace-fires and were rejected because they didn’t just want to return home. They have wanted to destroy Israel and install their own Islamic government. Arab nations around them encouraged this and funded this ideology.
> You need to understand that removing illegal settlers from gaza is like saying you stole someones house and gave them back the couch. Israel literally has members of its own cabinet that pursue the extermination of palestinians.
Again with the your simple slogans. Israeli people and their government went against their extremists and did the right thing in 2005.
Hamas did not reciprocate.
> You need to understand that a decade ago Israel was able to have its global image be quite pure, and people didn't read what Israelis and their government were saying at home. Now it’s quite easy to access, it would be simpler to drop the pretense.
You seem to forget that seemingly unlike yourself I lived there and studied Middle Eastern studies. I even learned a fair bit of Hebrew and a very little Arabic.
I even met some of those Israeli settlers. Generally unpleasant types.
However I rarely or never Israelis Jews say they wanted to kill all Palestinians. Most Israelis actually empathize with them and wished for peace but also want to protect their people. They cared less about houses and more about the lives of their people.
On the other hand, it was relatively common to hear Arab Palestinians wish for the death of all Jews when they learned I am not Jewish.
While I hope for peace in Gaza, I also know generations of ideological indoctrination of extremist Islamic won’t disappear overnight. You should study more on the history of the region, not this shallow westernized version.
> There’s very few Palestinians in Gaza alive from that time.
Ok and then who are those people that are living in Gaza and the West Bank right now? To which country do they belong?
> Even then, while they may have a desire to return home it’s not something any other people in similar conflicts have gotten.
I notice this kind of double-sided argument in lots of discussions. Human rights, Post-WWII world order when Israel is in the defensive, but "Everyone is doing it" and a weird fallback into 19th century "Great Game" morals when Israel is on the offensive.
Homes can be rebuilt, they can be rebuilt where settlers destroyed them.
>it’s not something any other people in similar conflicts have gotten.
If your perspective is "Might makes right" that's a worse position for a people with the history that the jewish people have, than a position that seeks justice.
Justice, and Israel being seen to be doing justice, would make Jews much much much more secure than chasing refugees into a prison and then failing to return them to their land because "it just doesn't happen".
>Jordan keeps 2.39 million Palestinians trapped in refugee camps as well. Jordan tried allowing them to integrate in the 1970’s and they tried to assassinate the king and take over.
Likewise, pushing the idea that a people can be bad, the most literal genetic fallacy, is also not making jewish people safer.
>Also there is no “government” that could magically do what you’re saying. Governments aren’t magic. They’re created by people.
Theres the Israeli government. If they wanted to be seen as legitimate (instead of simply a tool for the settler movement) they would be seen to be doing justice.
>Israeli people and their government went against their extremists and did the right thing in 2005.
Thats crazy. It wasnt even the minimum required.
>However I rarely or never Israelis Jews say they wanted to kill all Palestinians. Most Israelis actually empathize with them and wished for peace but also want to protect their people. They cared less about houses and more about the lives of their people.
I mean its so easily sourced why bother denying it lmao.
>While I hope for peace in Gaza, I also know generations of ideological indoctrination of extremist Islamic won’t disappear overnight. You should study more on the history of the region, not this shallow westernized version.
I know quite a lot about the history of this region, and everything I learn makes me even more angry with the state of Israel, and the extremists who built it.
> If your perspective is "Might makes right" that's a worse position for a people with the history that the jewish people have, than a position that seeks justice.
It’s not right, it just is. Ignoring realities of the situation has just made the lives of Gazans worse.
Accepting that the Jewish and an Arab populations separated and were exchanged after decades of fighting and massacres on both sides is just embracing reality.
The lives of the Palestinians would be better if as a culture and society, they accepted what happened and built new lives. The Israelis did.
Instead Gazan leaders with near unanimous popular support have continually tried to use violence and force to reconquer the lands they lost rather than protect their people. They use the lives of their children as human shields and their deaths as propaganda as they know militarily they’re weaker. They openly admit this.
Personally I find it cruel that parents in Gaza subject their children to indoctrination that being a jihadist and retaking Jerusalem is their noblest goal in life in order fuel a never ending conflict.
Again it’s tragic that two people groups with long established roots in the region were separated and displaced with both sides losing lands and properties during those decades.
However there’s no justice in saying only one of the two groups (the Palestinians) should be given their grand parents lands and properties back. That’s what the right of return of Palestinians would be as the Arab Muslim nations aren’t going to reciprocate for the displaced Jews.
Forcing relocation to “traditional” pre state of Israel regions would require even more horrible violence and force with people of both ethnicities loosing what they’ve built up in their lives. That’s not justice either.
That’s just wishful western liberal thinking. There’s usually a dash of racism of “poor brown people” too, despite the majority of Israeli Jews not being “white” or even from Europe.
> I mean it’s so easily sourced why bother denying it lmao.
I’m not denying it. Just saying that in my experience having met dozens or hundreds from both sides that one group was much more open on average to finding peace and even coexistence. That’s just my anecdotal data.
> I know quite a lot about the history of this region, and everything I learn makes me even more angry with the state of Israel, and the extremists who built it.
Then perhaps do you know enough of the history to be aware that Palestinians are largely descendants of the extremist Islamic colonizers who conquered the lands starting a thousand years back? The indigenous peoples there weren’t Arabs after all.
Those Muslim conquerors have for centuries persecuted not just Jewish, but also Christian, Druze, and many other minorities in not just Greater Syrian (what Israel and Palestine was called under the Ottoman Empire) but also the rest of the Middle East?
Again, I’ll point out that Arabs in Israel have equal rights as citizens and better lives than those in most of the surrounding Arab countries. There’s certainly some racism against them but they can and do build prosperous lives.
Trying to recast the history of the region into a white-colonial issue of the past 120 years is being ignorant of the history of the peoples and ethnicities in the area over the past 1000 years and more.
>The lives of the Palestinians would be better if as a culture and society, they accepted what happened and built new lives. The Israelis did.
The Israelis imported jewish people from all over the world to live on land that they pushed the palestinians out of. Its not exactly an equivalent "Move on" situation. Moving on would be aided by getting access to their land.
>However there’s no justice in saying only one of the two groups (the Palestinians) should be given their grand parents lands and properties back. That’s what the right of return of Palestinians would be as the Arab Muslim nations aren’t going to reciprocate for the displaced Jews.
I mean, happy for jewish refugees to be returned to various arab countries, heck even germany. I would not argue if they wanted to return to where they were removed from in living memory. The issue is that they don't, they are happy living on Palestinian land, while holding palestinians hostage.
>Then perhaps do you know enough of the history to be aware that Palestinians are largely descendants of the extremist Islamic colonizers who conquered the lands starting a thousand years back? The indigenous peoples there weren’t Arabs after all.
I am aware, but 1000 years ago is kind of outside of our timescale. If it helps, sometimes I do think Britain would be better off without the angles or saxons, but too much time has passed in both circumstances.
>Again, I’ll point out that Arabs in Israel have equal rights as citizens and better lives than those in most of the surrounding Arab countries. There’s certainly some racism against them but they can and do build prosperous lives.
Its fairly plainly false. Again, you speak of knowing so much about the region, but if you see how people are forced to live in the west bank you would never use the term equal.
Even it were a siege you also have the West Bank situation, where people have been squeezed into smaller and smaller areas with roadblocks and the establishment of settlements, and even that situation at its present intensity with actual killings is genocide.
I'm very happy to call what's happened to Jews in the middle east for the past century a genocide, but you don't earn genocide brownie points that you can inflict on another group.
If the war in Gaza was really just about Hamas, then a) Israel wouldn't have been tacitly supporting them for decades, and b) It would be well and truly over already, given that they're completely defanged and have no more competent regional allies.
>Has society really become this dangerous that we must deploy these things?
Over the last hundred years, violent crime has droped sharply worldwide.
Over the last twenty years, it has fallen alot in developed countries such as Western Europe, North America, Japan and South Korea.
In the United Kingdom, both violent and property crime have gone down in the past two decades. The main exception is fraud, scams and cybercrime, which have increased.
Overall, crime, especially violent crime, is far lower now than it used to be.
So why does it not feel that way? Mostly because we are floded with news about every incident. It sticks in our heads and makes us beleive things are worse than they are. It is like air travel: whenever there is a major crash, the headlines fill up with every minor incident, even though flying has never been safer than it is today.
This is less about criminality and more about control.
There's definitely an argument to be made that things have gotten safer because we have more surveillance, but that argument also has many valid counter-arguments, and giving away your freedom for absolute law and order isn't the way to go in my opinion, especially when you use narratives like "crime in DC is at an all time high" like we've seen in the USA lately which is false. https://www.justice.gov/usao-dc/pr/violent-crime-dc-hits-30-...
A balance of surveillance and freedom is necessary for a healthy society. (By surveillance in this context, I mean simple things like CCTVs, police patrols, not necessarily drag-nets, face rec, whatever mind you).
Yeah, I mean if the UK is covering up and not counting 1000's of underaged girls being raped (with some police literally participating in the rape) the statistics are bound to look better than they are in reality.
Having said that, I don't think the surveillance state they're setting up even has the intent to change any of that.
Thanks for posting the link, can't believe it was happening in 2016
> The police collected bags of clothes the girl had saved as evidence, but lost them two days later. The family was sent £140 compensation for the clothes and advised to drop the case.
"I wouldn’t believe everything you read in the BBC or that comes out of Starmer or Blair's mouth."
How about instead of attacking credentials we attack the arguments, you know, with evidence? Or, if your best defence is saying "your ideas/evidence come from unsavoury sources (to me)" maybe your positions are more reflective of your own biases than reality.
The poster implied there is an active cover up whereas the case went to court, was prosecuted and became the subject of a judge led enquiry
The accusation that immigrant men from Muslim backgrounds are sex offenders is a well worn trope pushed by the far right and people like Farage and Yaxley-Lennon
If you actually look at crime statistics in the UK sex offenders, including grooming gangs are overwhelming white men — if you look closer you often find that a reasonable proportion of people on the far-right have convictions for sex offences
It doesnt take a lot for people to feel less safe in their environment. So for example violent muggings on the subway may be down, but if the subway is grimy, degraded, and there are young men hanging around, people get antsy. And then selling surveillance etc is an easy push to the voters.
I don't think its fair for someone to say, "well, its all scare mongering by the Daily Mail". They certainly have an interest in making the world seem scary, but the perception of danger is very strong regardless of what a tabloid rag says.
"Broken windows" policing, as tried under Mike Bloomberg in New York, is unfashionable in the US and the UK, and has led to abuses, but there's a kernel of truth in there somewhere.
I often think about how much of an effect things like "see it, say it, sort it" and "we do not tolerate abuse to our staff" and "you are being watched, cctv" and "thieves will be prosecuted" and "smartwater in operation" and "cash not left in tills overnight" in otherwise wealthy and low crime areas contributes to a feeling of unsafety and dog-eat-dog world
It's possible that these kinds of signs actually have the reverse deterrent effect.
Criminals might be deterred by knowing that people definitely get arrested in a certain location, because, say, they've seen it themselves, or because they see a presence of law enforcement, or because they innately sense its a high status environment where law enforcement response is to be expected.
A criminal seeing a sign might conclude that the sign is actually telling them that no immediate law enforcement response is likely.
For example, in London, you dont see CCTV signs in the shops along Sloane Street (super high end retail) but you definitely see them in Primark (very ordinary store, like US Kohls).
They've been doing this for years at protests, using "Forward Intelligence Teams". Even back in 2010 [1] there was an action group trying to protest this growing police-state (Fitwatch). The UK has had an insane number of CCTV cameras for as long as I can remember.
I don't know if you're awaee, but the number of arrests for terrorism has skyrocketed in recent months, in the UK.
Sounds terrifying, until you realise people were arrested as terrorists for holding placards. (That fact is of course terrifying, but in a chilling way).
I hope I’m not adding 2 + 2 to get 5, but it’s incredibly convenient that a lot of people are being charged for supporting a proscribed group the same month as the online safety act is rolled out…
The cynic in me almost wonders if when it comes to re-election time, these increased numbers in terrorist charges will be trotted out and the context conveniently forgotten.
It does sound terrifying that arrests for terrorism have skyrocketed lately, given that I'm pretty sure that it's neither the case that the number of terrorists has skyrocketed lately, nor the ability of the police to catch terrorists.
You forgot to mention those people are holding placards in support of an illegal "terror" group whose objective is to protest the unnecessary human loss of life in Palestine by spray painting British military equipment.
Obligatory legal notice that I obviously do not support said group, but historically terrorists would actually need to commit acts that instil a sense terror in people to further their political objectives. N one I've spoken to feels even remotely terrorised by Palestine Action, and it wouldn't even make sense to be given what they stand for.
I say this as someone who neither supports Palestine Action or shares their concerns.
Even more chilling when you find out that sentences for previous criminals are being commuted and reduced significantly for heinous crimes (theft, burglary, rape, assault, etc.), so as to clear space and make room in prisons to accommodate these "terrorists".
The more dangerous people they can get on the street the more fear they can generate and the more they can whip the public to their bidding. Getting rid of the few people trying educate the public on these matters goes hand in hand.
Spraying paint down military jet engines rendering them inoperable until repaired, at a cos of millions of pounds.
> historically terrorists would actually need to commit acts that instil a sense terror in people to further their political objective
The legal definition of terrorism in the UK has for many years (at least all of the current century, I think a lot longer) included "serious damage to property":
and I think causing many millions of pounds worth of damage is clearly serious.
I do not entirely agree with the definition (I particularly oppose making collecting information and disseminating publications terrorism) but it is what has long been accepted.
Palestinian Action are a sanitised, Westernised front for Hamas fundraising. Their founders have praised the Oct 7th attacks and called for repeats. That by most measures counts as being an active part of terrorism. The spray painting was pretty small in the list of threats they pose.
Palestine Action broke into a British military base and sabotaged millions of pounds' worth of equipment. What did you expect the government to do exactly — shrug it off? What kind of message would that have sent?
The Terrorism Act 2000 gives "serious damage to property" as one definition of terrorism so I find it hard to argue that the government was doing anything more than neutrally applying the law here. Those protestors knew full well they were supporting a proscribed group and they were warned what the consequences would be. Protesting in support of Palestine remains entirely legal in the UK just as long as you don't use the name and branding of this one specific group.
I'll probably regret posting this but there are some extremely disingenuous half-truths in this thread and I think that readers should know the full context.
Personally I expected prosecutions for sabotage rather than for terrorism.
The UK has very broad terrorism legislation, but conventionally terrorism is something directed at civilians, and it's not something we usually tar, for example, resistance groups with.
I think you even have to be able to kill people in internal political conflict without being called a terrorist. There are many circumstances during which such things are necessary.
FWIW the specific activists who entered the base were charged with "conspiracy to commit criminal damage" and "conspiracy to enter a prohibited place knowingly for a purpose prejudicial to the safety or interests of the UK", not terrorism. [0]
If the government wants to shut this group down (which I think is a reasonable response to an attack on our military) then I'm not sure what other options were available to them. And like I said, what they did seems to meet the legal definition of terrorism (regardless of whether that definition is a good one.)
Of all the arguments we could be having about Palestine, I'm really not going to shed any tears for Palestine Action.
But I'm not here to get lost in the weeds, I just objected to the misleading half-truths that were being presented above. Most people reading this don't follow UK news closely and might come away with the impression that the government is banning pro-Palestine protest entirely, or is making it illegal to merely "hold placards". That's an outrageous distortion, and it hardly helps the pro-Palestine cause. I couldn't let it slide.
Here in Sweden what organizations are engaged in terrorism is up the courts and the government has no right to intervene at all to proscribe a group, with EU and other political terrorism designations being irrelevant.
Furthermore, I think that there is a duty, if one suspects that a capability is or may be used to aid genocide, to destroy that capability. Hopefully Palestine Action are incorrect, and targeting assets that have not been used to aid genocide or otherwise make it easier, but if they are right and the UK have actually aided genocide, then they have done too little violence.
> You forgot to mention those people are holding placards in support of an illegal "terror" group whose objective is to protest the unnecessary human loss of life in Palestine by spray painting British military equipment.
Yet more false equivalence.
You can be for Palestine.
You can be for Hamas.
You can be against ethnic cleansing.
You can be against genocide.
These are all different things. And note, this smearing of things like equating 'genocide to Hamas so they deserve it' doesn't make genocide better.
This smearing terms together is also being done by Israel as well, by trying to equate Israel with Judaism, and all Jews across the world. And that any denouncing of actions done in a genocide or ethnic cleansing is somehow antisemitic.
All of these false equivalence arguments are basically just motte-and-bailey fallacies.
Hamas won that election in large part by throwing their opponents off the tops of buildings, and then, having secured power in Gaza, never allowed another election, to the point where a plurality of Gazan Palestinians are not old enough ever to have participated in an election. Anyone calling Hamas "freedom fighters" is telling on themselves. No, I don't think you can reasonably be for Hamas.
I don't have anything else to nitpick about your comment! Just that one thing you said stuck out, because, no; being for Hamas is like being for the Khmer Rouge. Like, yeah, western imperialism in Indochina was absolutely a thing at the time of the Khmer Rouge. But no, you don't get to be for the Khmer Rouge!
("Last elections too"? What did you mean by that?)
It still arguably complies with the Paradox of Tolerance.
Terrorists (as well as their supporters) are intolerant and non-pluralist. Therefore, for a pluralist society to survive, it must be intolerant of one thing- intolerance.
The paradox of tolerance isn't wrong, but it's also invoked awfully quickly in the last years, often by people who weren't tolerant to begin with.
I'd at least like to know who defines who is a "Pluralist" and who is a "Terrorist".
Also: The paradox of tolerance can legitimately be used to call intolerant behaviors of individuals. When you use it to define entire population groups as "intolerant", and therefore not worth of protection, you have joined the side that you ostensibly want to fight against.
> When you use it to define entire population groups as "intolerant", and therefore not worth of protection, you have joined the side that you ostensibly want to fight against.
Suppose there was an organization that had written by-laws which were not permitted to be changed but which demanded adherence (on pain of death), including never leaving the organization. Also suppose that most of the members of that organization collectively decided not to adhere to all of its rules (some were considered incompatible with "progress")... but some continued to. And others sometimes began to, but only under stress, because the by-laws book (which, again, cannot be changed, on pain of death) made NO clarification on scope of application, and people were free to interpret the by-laws literally.
Why would you not judge that organization, given that its by-laws are its core? Why would you make special exceptions for ANY organization (or its members), here?
I mean, objectively-speaking, if we weren't reflexively defending the org we're of course discussing, it sounds like a dystopian science-fiction novel. (If I'm being honest, it sounds A LOT like Warhammer, actually.)
"With few exceptions, Islamic revelations do not state which Quranic verses or hadith have been abrogated, and Muslim exegetes and jurists have disagreed over which and how many hadith and verses of the Quran are recognized as abrogated, with estimates varying from less than ten to over 500."
Also note that naskh tends to recognize later passages as overriding earlier passages. Guess which ones are the more violent ones...
See a problem, yet? Please don't gaslight me into not seeing one.
Who decides who is considered “tolerant” and who isn’t? This idea is ripe for manipulation and will end up producing the opposite of what was intended.
To be sure, in the original context of Popper's writing, I believe "intolerant" meant something like "committing violence against others for disagreeing with you", and "tolerate" meant "refrain from intolerance". The full quote is below:
"Less well known [than other paradoxes] is the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal."
> I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force;
Sounds like speech suppression with force because (later in the quote) the speech may later give way to force. If he was only talking about force in response to force it wouldn't be considered a paradox I don't think. This quote hasn't dispeled popular characterizations of his stance for me, it seems in line with what most people say he's saying.
As you say, it's because the speech may later give way to force. It does go farther than American free speech law permits: the latter draws the line at something like "threats of immediate criminal action", whereas this would attack "propagating ideologies that one thinks will eventually lead the followers to criminal action". There are certainly deep problems with potential implementation here: e.g. the main American political parties would probably both accuse each other's ideology of eventually leading the followers to criminal action. One would want high standards for that (of, say, what percentage engage in what magnitude of criminal action; as well as evidentiary standards), and want it to be established in a mega-trial, or by a supermajority of Congress declaring war on an ideology; and even that might not be enough. I'm not necessarily in favor of Popper's approach, except in emergencies.
However, I think that, when most people use the word "intolerance" today, they include things like speaking racial slurs or expressing any negative emotion towards a demographic group. There are contexts in which these things are done, and manners in which they are done, in which, yes, they do give a significant signal that the speaker is the type who would cheerfully escalate to aggressive violence towards the targeted group; but also contexts and manners in which they do not give such a signal.
I think there is a distinction to be drawn here, between "always tracking whether this is likely to escalate to criminal action" and "just attacking anyone who vaguely resembles a known 'intolerant' group". The latter is essentially an autoimmune disorder, which has led to massive collateral damage and its own discrediting. The former ... has a danger of turning into the latter, certainly (which has an interestingly meta angle to it), but is there any version of it that is well-protected against that fate? I expect there's room for improvement compared to earlier versions. I don't know if it can be done well enough to be worthwhile.
I think we can have stronger protections in the US, while keeping it within existing frameworks. Why is it constitutionally ok to give mega corporations strong protections against slander backed by the state who will enforce the ruling, but protection of ethnic groups from slander is constitutionally off limits? It doesn't follow from the constitution.
No, we need to be intolerant of people who threaten others freedom. It does not require preventing them from expressing intolerant views. It means preventing them from actively trying to harm or intimidate others - e.g. making threats, becoming actually violent etc.
Are you talking about the tit-for-tat strategy in the Prisoner's Dilemma? That's a particular toy model with an exaggeratedly punitive payoff matrix. But not every daily interaction can be reasonably mapped onto that matrix. A random interaction with a brusque stranger in a queue isn't necessarily going to result in a good outcome for your being rude ('defecting') in a tit-for-tat. If anything it might cause you more stress and embarrassment than if you'd remained mum.
But with the smaller space for the population, it's nearly total coverage from multiple angles vs the wide distances separating the equivalent number of cameras in the US.
The CCTV cameras I've never really had a problem with - despite what TV shows and films would like to tell you they're not actually a single coherent CCTV network, a vast proportion of them are operated by random shopkeepers, private home owners, and other such places. If they want footage from them the police are typically going to have to send someone out to ask for it, and then hope they haven't reused the storage already.
This sort of thing, deploying facial recognition systems in the street in the hope of finding someone, is much more insidious. Technically you can choose to bypass it, or pull something over your face, but that's more or less guaranteeing that you'll be stopped and questioned as to why you're concerned about it.
Sadly the UK never met an authoritarian they didn't like (apart from Hitler, so long as you're not as bad as Hitler himself you're good though). When surveyed the British public will call for banning basically anything they don't like, even if it doesn't impact them at all.
I don't think this is true. Apparently the operation of a large majority of those private cameras is in fact outsourced to a handful of big security companies, and many of them are remotely operated. This makes getting access to private cameras a lot easier for police than you think.
If you've ever had to deal with the UK police as a victim of a crime, you'll quickly find out they're pretty useless at obtaining CCTV footage. I was asked to get it myself, to which the business who owned the CCTV told me they would only hand it to the police, so nothing happened.
There's no small irony that facial recognition isn't going to recognise the faces of those currently racing around on e-bikes stealing phones wearing their 'safety balaclavas'. Or, indeed, some of the more militant protesters that are turning up all over the place. It's a cliche, but if you have nothing to hide, and intend to protest peacefully, why are you covering your face?
> It's a cliche, but if you have nothing to hide, and intend to protest peacefully, why are you covering your face?
because who says the state (and the people acting for it, e.g. police) are always the good guys
there is a VERY long history of people being systematically harassed and persecuted for things which really shouldn't be an issue, and might not have been illegal either (but then the moment a state becomes the bad guy "illegal" loses meaning as doing the ethical right thing might now be illegal)
like just looking at the UK, they e.g. "thanked" Alan Turing for his war contributions by driving him into Suicide because he was gay
or how people through history have been frequently harassed for "just" not agreeing with the currently political fraction in power, and I really mean just not agreeing not trying to do anything to change it
and even if we ignore systematic stuff like that there has been also more then just a few cases of police officers abusing their power. Including cases like them stalking people, or them giving the address of people to radical groups, or blackmailing them for doing stuff which is legal but not publicly well perceived. (E.g. someone had sex with their wife on a balcony not visible from the street but visible from a surveillance camera).
And even if nothing of this applies to you, if there is no privacy and mass surveillance this can also help people in power to frame you for something you didn't do. Like e.g. to make you lose your job so their brother in law can get it instead.
and even ignoring all that you should have a right for privacy and since when is it okay to harass people which just want to defend their rights?
anyway if you think is through "I have nothing to hide" is such a ridiculous dump argument.
Just because there is a chance he did not kill himself, that does not negate the fact that homosexuality was illegal, and that the state expended resources to prosecute him! British people now overwhelmingly see such policies as reprehensible, regardless of who might or might not have considered suicide because of them.
> Over the past year, there have been a number of headline-grabbing legal changes in the US, such as the legalization of marijuana in CO and WA, as well as the legalization of same-sex marriage in a growing number of US states.
> As a majority of people in these states apparently favor these changes, advocates for the US democratic process cite these legal victories as examples of how the system can provide real freedoms to those who engage with it through lawful means. And it’s true, the bills did pass.
> What’s often overlooked, however, is that these legal victories would probably not have been possible without the ability to break the law.
But it's not you that decides that what you are doing is harmless. It's what the authorities decide; and that can be quite different from what you or other people deem "nothing to hide".
You're mixing your definitions of authoritarian, there's authoritarian in the 'Nolan chart' sense of the word, which just means 'not a Libertarian', which is like 98% of people, which is different to the Hitler meaning of authoritarian, which means 'rejecting democracy'. If the people agree to ban things they don't like, that's democracy, so it's the Nolan kind of authoritarian but not the Hitler kind of authoritarian. Deciding the people shouldn't be allowed to agree collectively to ban certain things is rejecting democracy, so it's Hitler authoritarian but not Nolan authoritarian.
> The UK has had an insane number of CCTV cameras for as long as I can remember.
By the way, do anybody care what would happen (at least psychologically) in case of a massive blackout or cyber-incident?
Just imagine something akin to what happened to the Iberian peninsula a few months ago, the country goes into flame quickly preventing recovery and then it's on. Most of the systems the UK has to control its population are inoperable.
I am pretty sure it is in the back of the mind of the UK leaders when they negotiate with Russia and China....
Suppose it depends on what it's used for. We could trust the government to be good, but governments are made from people, elected by people. And people are often shitbags to each other.
For all the CCTV in London I've been mugged twice and nothing was captured on CCTV nor were the police all that interested in doing anything about it. As an outsider living here I think the UK has huge social problems that are neglected in favour of retaining classism. America has the same problems but at least it's more "ah, what can ya do about it huh" rather than "we are a perfect polite society British values bla bla".
even if you have perfect faith in current government, you're one election away from something different.
CCTV is also extremely ineffective in crime prevention in general, and actually catching criminals - one of few studies(back when i did write my thesis on subject related to it) used different areas of UK to measure crime fighting capability and effect of CCTV - by finding similar areas with and without CCTV and comparing crime statistics.
they only worked on parking lots, there was no measurable differences in plazas, alleys, roads, highstreets etc.
and a bit of anecdotal evidence - once cameras at my older workplace caught robbery to a place next door. With criminal looking directly at the camera, before bashing the window with a brick, jumping in, and hopping out with accomplice. They never got caught. This was quite decent camera, with face clearly visible - i know this because we directly cooperated with police.
The 2 best surveillance methods for crime investigation are LPR Cameras and cashless public transport.
Both of them then rely on the next step after providing information, following the people who triggered the first layer with CCTV.
If I went into my local CBD right now, and comitted some badass crime. explode a cop car or something we all yearn to do. All the exits are covered. I wont get anywhere walking and covering my face. I can get on a train but the rozzers will know where I get off. Likewise, if I jump in a car, they can track it almost anywhere for the next 100 kilometers.
I dont think the goal is prevention, its the guaranteed catch. Its the body of evidence that starts piling up when you burn cop car 1.
When brisbane introduced the go card system, we had our first arrest based on go card travel data within a month.
Sad really.
>bit of anecdotal evidence - once cameras at my older workplace caught robbery to a place next door. With criminal looking directly at the camera, before bashing the window with a brick, jumping in, and hopping out with accomplice. They never got caught. This was quite decent camera, with face clearly visible - i know this because we directly cooperated with police.
I helped an employer comply like this once. Someone had been brutally killed by a driver. The victim only existed for like 3 frames on the recording. But the cop wasnt interested in that anyway. They had managed to sneak drugs out of their car, into their pocket and then hide them in our garden, mid arrest. Embarrasing for the cop you see. The cop already had the driver on vehicular manslaughter, but thanks to the power of CCTV, they could also add a charge for drug crimes.
Totally agree; because us humans are animals. Without editing the genetic history of our evolution and hence all a manner of behaviours out of ourselves this will never change - because would we be human afterwards?
It's human to help your friend because they're in need; that's how tribes work. But it's just as human to disparage or sabotage someone who isn't a part of your tribe, to not care about them. To lie and cheat and be corrupt.
As for police effectiveness; there are shady groups of people that hang out in dark alleys in some central London areas every single weekend. You need only walk around/down the wrong place to meet them. All it takes is sting operations where a plainclothes officer acts drunk and hits a "get 'em, boys" button to bring in the fuzz when they inevitably get attacked.
There are all sorts of socio-economic-political issues that contribute to all this, though. But the root problem is in the apathy of the general public, none of us care about anything unless it affects us personally.
Yeah, for sure. In NZ I used to see cops on the beat, just walking around and showing a presence. It also means that people see them as there to help out.
You can kinda see that in some parts of the UK still, but certainly lack of staff really affects them; particularly when UK seems to have higher incidences of more violent crimes, more drug related crimes, etc. Turkish gangs shooting little girls in the middle of London.
Even if you have a "good" government that goodness will make it a target for those who seek to co-opt it as a means to their desired end, and their desired ends are never good because if they were they would pursue cheaper less circuitous paths to them.
I commented about this on another thread, and probably most around here disagree with my general point there, but this fact amazes me. We have gotten all this tech creating a surveillance state but then it isn't even used to give better policing. You will just get mugged on camera by someone with ten prior charges and then be ignored by police.
All the recent policy, technical leaps, and innovation around policing seem to be focused on cracking down on protesting and speech, and not really on what people would consider "fighting crime". You could get mugged on the street corner in broad daylight (or worse) and the police won't even answer your phone call, but the minute you show up on that street corner with 10 friends carrying signs and shouting, 20 officers will show up in riot gear, and every one of you will be identified using technology.
The purpose of the system (the police in this casse) is what it does.
Nope. That's an ideology, not a statement of fact. It completely negates the possibility that systems can become corrupted (or simply fail) and no longer work towards their original purpose.
The surveillance is there not to catch small thieves, but those who are against the government, against wars etc. A small thief doesn't threaten the regime in any way so he can be dealt with after more dangerous people are dealt with.
Not in Britain there isn't. We have constant retail theft and violence against staff and the Police and Crime Commissioner for Thames Valley asking the public to do the crime fighting
CCTV can absolutely be made to be effective and protect citizen's privacy at the same time. A legal requirement to store only encrypted data, which can only be decrypted via a court warrant (so a similar standard to searching your home or tapping your phones, not the blanket panopticon they wish to create), plus enforcement and heavy fines + prison time for anyone caught storing unencrypted data.
You need political will for this and for enforcement to take it seriously, since the technology to do so is almost trivial nowadays.
This is the kind of techno-utopian fantasy that keeps authoritarianism looking respectable. “Just encrypt it and only decrypt with a warrant” sounds lovely on paper, but in practice you’ve still built the infrastructure for a 24/7 panopticon - you’ve just wrapped it in a legal fig leaf.
Governments break their own rules all the time, warrants get rubber-stamped, and “heavy fines + prison time” magically evaporate when the offenders are the state or its contractors. The technology isn’t the hard part - it’s the fact you can’t meaningfully enforce limits on a system whose entire purpose is to watch everyone, all the time. You don’t make mass surveillance safe by adding a padlock. You stop it by not building it.
And so it's just a bill away from the data is suddenly being available for any purpose. For public safety of course. The same people who want Chat Control to scan our messages for sure want to scan and raise alarms for suspicious behaviors in public places too. They just can't implement it all at once or there'd be an uproar. But if it happens slowly like this, bit by bit... frogs getting boiled in the UK (and elsewhere too).
If you trust that the law works then the data is protected by it and there is no need for encryption. But it seems that you don't trust. Aren't you planning something illegal by chance?
This is how Germany ended up with a ton of organized crime.
The organized crime organizations just mostly focus on crime which mainly hurts immigrants and people racist police personal might not see as German even if they have a passport, and also mostly only crime which isn't publicly visible.
In turn a mixture of corrupt and racist police/politicians and having other more visible problems lead to there not being any large scale actions against them hence why they could grow to quite large size.
There's this movie [1], created like 20 years ago, that perfectly predicted this evolution of the UK. It's bizarre that it's turned out to be prophetic.
No it hasn’t become so dangerous and surveillance doesn’t help. Neither cameras nor real-name accounts actually helped to prevent crimes. Same with databases, lists or other surveillance tools. Many criminals who committed terrorism were known to the police before and they chose not to act or processes were not in place. All it does is lead to less freedom and security. The government itself is the security threat. There are always black sheep working there. They sell private details, enforce their own agenda or fail to secure sensitive information. Also extreme political parties can and did/will use it to silence undesired persons. Ask anyone who knows a bit of German history for many good examples.
That probably is true by some measure. There are a lot of cameras in the UK - rather more than when I was a nipper!
I'm 55 and pretty well travelled and I've noted similar levels of coverage in many EU countries and the US and CA and of course CN (to be fair, my experience of CN is only HK).
I don't know why people get so whizzed up about London's CCTV coverage. For me the scariest area is the M42 south of Birmingham. Every few 100 yards there is a high level camera at height and lots of ANPR.
It is quite a logical place to concentrate on. Look at a map of England - Brum is in the middle of England and the main roads run nearby. M1 from the southeast, M5 from the southwest, then M1 and M6 (takes over from M5) carry on to the northeast and west.
My own house has six HD cameras with Frigate to co-ordinate, analyse and record. My Reolinks never get to see the internet! Four are on the garden and two watch the front door, one is the door bell.
Now ... "since the '70s": I'm old enough to remember the seventies (I still have several mugs for the Queen's Silver Jubilee in 1977, when I was seven). Back then video (VHS) was not a thing, neither was CCTV. We had three TV channels FFS! A cutting edge TV camera at the time was a huge beast and certainly was not mounted on a building or street lamp.
Ah the Silver Jubilee Mugs, we had a grey one with that weird bumpy ceramic effect.
Anyway, on the cameras you're spot on. I do wonder how much UK cameras are used though - like a microcosm of our national potential, the cameras have potential but how often are they really used: half are likely faulty, most have the person monitoring them on a tea break when something happens and it seems to need an extreme act of violence before they get used in earnest.
We lived in Manc in 1977 (Dad was a soldier and did a year at UMIST to get to Lt Col, family in tow). Then we buggered off to Germany (again). For a kiddie, I had an amazing life! We were posted to Cyprus too.
Our Jub mugs were mostly transfer printed. We had coloured ones and ones with a sort of silvery monochrome effort.
I'm not too sure that the meme that the UK is the most monitored nation in the world is too true.
You probably remember 1984. I went to a jolly posh school in Devon (Wolborough Hill School, Newton Abbot) and we had to discuss 1984 in 1984.
Do you feel too monitored? I suspect that monitoring is under-reported elsewhere.
This is what Western governments miss: China didn’t get rich from its surveillance state - it got rich from manufacturing, much of it handed to them by the West. If we were serious about prosperity, we’d be copying their industrial base, not their domestic spying. But rebuilding skills and factories is hard; building tools to monitor and manage a population in decline is easy - and far more entertaining for a state that seems to prefer watching the poor struggle to fixing the conditions that keep them there.
> If we were serious about prosperity, we’d be copying their industrial base,
Why would we work down the prosperity chain?
There's a pretty clear prosperity heirarchy in the world economy and the financing/services dominant economies are ahead of the manufacturing economies who are ahead of the ag/raw materials economies.
Yeah, industrialization has been important for China’s recent development just as it was for the US in the late 19th to early 20th centuries or for Britain a bit earlier. But it was important because it happened at a time when China was at a lower tier in the heirarchy.
>There's a pretty clear prosperity heirarchy in the world economy and the financing/services dominant economies are ahead of the manufacturing economies who are ahead of the ag/raw materials economies.
This is very wrong, in the sense that not everyone can do "financing/services". Lots of people, even some on this website in fact, pretend that everyone can but it just isn't true. What financializing your economy does is exacerbate existing inequalities, or build new ones where they didn't exist.
It's also, ahem, a very bad idea to intentionally deconstruct your industrial base so you can make a couple bps every quarter. The reasons for this should be quite obvious, but since for many they apparently are not ... there are very real geopolitical tensions between PRC and the US, and these tensions present a very real possibility of war. Should that happen, PRC will have the ability to squeeze US supply chains in a very devastating way. This isn't to say it would provide them an easy path to victory, but just the ability to do this increases the probability that they would initiate a conflict in the first place. This is to say that there is no such thing as a "prosperity chain" that everyone should all strive to emulate.
> There's a pretty clear prosperity heirarchy in the world economy and the financing/services dominant economies are ahead of the manufacturing economies who are ahead of the ag/raw materials economies.
Drive through the metro areas of the Great Lakes and Great Plains states and tell me that's universally true.
There's a bump in prosperity for the people doing the financing and servicing in a given country. If you're not doing that, it's at best a wash. At worst it's turned otherwise sustainable communities into impoverished deathtraps.
But these said economies all seem to just focus on asset-buying. Hence the massive house inflation. They don't make anything. No production, only asset-accumulation.
Building a Feudal Economy.
That “hierarchy” only works if the foundations stay intact. A service/finance economy without domestic manufacturing is like a skyscraper with no lower floors - great view until the support gives way. Manufacturing isn’t just a rung you discard, it’s strategic infrastructure. Lose it and you become dependent on those “lower tier” nations for essentials - and your position in the hierarchy is theirs to decide.
And participation in the service economy isn’t even open to everyone. In the UK, a working-class person can’t just start a small service business - IR35 and similar rules ensure they can’t make a profit. The rich have captured both the economy and policymaking, shifting into pure wealth extraction mode. Everything gets more expensive, ordinary people get poorer, and with no stake in production or ownership, there’s no one left to buy the services the “upper tier” depends on. Western capitalism is eating itself.
>There has to be an incentive to not do these things as a government. There is none in the UK.
The only incentive governments ever have to not do bad shit is that the people will hate it so much that the government will wind up with less power than they started with.
But, decisions are ultimately made by individuals or small groups of them who have interest (profit, legacy, etc) in doing what the people wand and what is good for the people.
If enough people in government's personal interest is aligned with that of the people you get more outcomes that are aligned with the people.
> The only incentive governments ever have to not do bad shit is that the people will hate it so much that the government will wind up with less power than they started with.
Well, that's the trick, isn't it? You have to give people a way to reduce government's power if the government does something the people don't like, but do it in a way that keeps society from flying apart.
Guns are an answer to the first problem but not the second, which is why the claim that guns protect the people from tyranny is so wrong.
The best solution i can think of is constantly seeking to reduce the government and limit it's power, size and responsibilities, always trimming the hedge. I.E. conservatism. Any government fundementally should be trusted and relied upon as little as possible, if you want to prevent abuses.
No the world is actually much much safer especially in these first world countries.
However our society is now flooded with Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt campaigns that foreigners, terrorists, criminals, are out to get you.
This creates the dellusion that all these security companies are here to help and protect us. Really it's just politicians handing out tax money to private corporations (cronyism) for no improvement to security or life. But at least you'll tell yourself you feel safer because of it.
These disgusting corporations run by wealthy people want to make everything a TSA line, because they think you are cattle.
It means everyone suffers and your 4th Amendment is taken away (in US).
The fact that these people and corporations are successful as they are is a condemnation of a subset of the people in our society and the public policy that has been pushed at their behest.
In the same way that moralizing karens create drug cartels rich off trafficking scared morons unable to think a few steps ahead create Peter Theils rich off building 1984.
And Britain was Airstrip One in 1984 with most of the scenes taking place in what would have been London. Orwell definitely considered it possible that they could go that way.
> Has society really become this dangerous that we must deploy these things?
Rather than dangeours, society became dumber in a sense. overload of data resulted attemps to summarize or even make anything binary (I'm Pro X or Anti X).
(the text below is opinionated so please be forgiving :) )
I can name multiple countries (as I'm coming from one) that makes more "reforms" that has or will hurt human rights.
(and we're still talking only on the "western world" which suppose to aim for freedom and human rights).
Coming from such a complex place in the world, I sadly say, that looking at stages in my life, I can easily remember the "good'ol'days" where there was one horrible thing, but I didn't know it can get worse.
I do hope society (and brits in the context of the above), will find the right balance to make a balance between feeling secured and invading privacy.
> Has society really become this dangerous that we must deploy these things?
From the article:
> Under the plans, 10 live facial recognition (LFR) vans will be used by seven forces across England to help identify "sex offenders or people wanted for the most serious crimes", according to Home Secretary Yvette Cooper.
I guess it depends on how dangerous these criminals are. If there was someone offing kids randomly in my neighborhood, I wouldn't necessarily be against this technology. I think it would be good in schools, where we really should know exactly anyone entering the school. But of course there is a limit.
I'd bet good money "sex offenders and people wanted for the most serious crimes" end up being just a tiny fraction of the use to which the systems are put to in practice. The age verification law was supposed to be protecting children from adult content, but on the very first day they used it to lock down video of political demonstrations.
I am pretty sure that the government did not directly instruct websites to remove protest footage in the case you are referring to. There is substantial ambiguity in the Online Safety Act, so it is only natural that companies that don't have a stake in what they're publishing will be quick to consider it too risky to show.
This is important, because if your point ever becomes a significant argument against the Online Safety Act, it is likely that the government will be able to retort that it was the online services voluntarily censoring - conveniently ignoring, of course, the context which you and I know of.
“The state must declare the child to be the most precious treasure of the people. As long as the government is perceived as working for the benefit of the children, the people will happily endure almost any curtailment of liberty and almost any deprivation.”
I seriously doubt this would stand up to a rational cost benefit analysis. If the lives of children are so very valuable I’m sure there are many more effective and cheaper things they could be doing on a per-life basis.
If you oppose it then the right will say you support criminals and illegal immigrants and the left will say you harbor racist desires to express hatred under the guise of free speech and privacy.
It's worth recognising this is a very, very limited application of facial recognition, and miles away from what China deploys (or what's regularly used in the US)
The form of government matters a lot, when evaluating its security apparatus. I feel a lot differently about the death penalty in America than in Iran too.
There is barely any demand for this from the public and a fair bit of pushback. This is something the government is just trying to ram through regardless.
Maybe that's true but there's also the down-stream effect of a persistent public voice telling us 'we should be ashamed of this country's (UK) past'. If accepted without examination, this view has rather obvious consequences as revealed in a poll from 2024 tt '17 per cent of British people would “willingly” fight for the UK in a war'. Other polls have found similar results. Why care about public order?
Usually it is more about the weakness and incapacity of the authorities that are unable to carry out their job well, or several times they are lazy to perform difficult and tedious tasks, so they put limits on everyone instead, making everyone suspect, just to catch those very very few cases, that they are increasingly unable to.
Racism/ Sinophobia makes people think that there’s a Chinese surveillance and a western surveillance when in fact there is just surveillance.
The media was the main culprit. When an article comes out they would use words that make one surveillance sound dystopian and the other sound vigilant.
The end result is that surveillance in the west has been scoring small wins under the radar and what’s happening in the UK is the “breaking stealth” of a surveillance state.
Had people just seen surveillance as surveillance none of this would have happened.
It's a sign that Labour and Conservatives are worried they are about to lose power. They "fumbled" the economy by selling everything out to the highest bidder, created captive labour market cementing the class divide - free market only for big corporations. Now they have to protect it and themselves. They need to know what people are talking about.
Paranoia gets bigger every year. They are addicted to money and power.
China is strict with people rioting or complaining a little too much about the government, but they don't lock people up for saying general no no words or being too patriotic/nationalistic online. And apparently Chinese courts even limited facial recognition (no clue how it'll work in practice though). [1]
> China is strict with people rioting or complaining a little too much about the government, but they don't lock people up for saying general no no words or being too patriotic/nationalistic online.
How absurd is this statement. China jails and disappears people for online statements at a rate several orders of magnitude larger than any western country.
It's borderline ridiculous to even make a comparison. Some quick examples:
Picking quarrels is a crime in the UK too and people get sentenced for it. [1] The only difference is people will say "actually that's good" when the UK does it, but it's for some reason bad when China does the same exact stuff. According to the UK gov, they're arresting 30 people a day for it. [2] That's nearly 8000 people a year for what they say online.
And when it comes to online behavior: 1. governments do monitor citizen's words online, like in QQ groups (something like slack / discord). 2. In most circumstances, complaining too much or even curse the country will not be punished, only those who take action in reality will be sent to prison, e.g. organizing demonstrations. 3. But discussing about things like how to build a bomb will lead to a conversation between you and the police.
I know these because I have experienced all these kinds of things in China. However, most (at least 80% of my acquaintance) do NOT care about this and support these policies. (To be honest, I personally also do not care about this kind of policy —— as long as the government does not raise taxes, I and most chinese do not care where the tax goes.)
Actually, there is no limit on facial recognition in China, government uses it, universities use it, even middle schools use it. yes there is a consent form for u to sign and you can refuse to sign it, but then lots of trouble come: e.g. you need facial recognition to enter school, so now since you didnt sign the consent form, you need to spend half an hour or more arguing with the security guard.
It appears that the kosher way of doing this by US standards is to partner with a for-profit company(ehm Palantir, Meta, Google etc.) to do it for you or you become a surveillance state.
Not saying to bash on US, it's just a curiosity of mine. In a similar way USA&UK diverge from most EU by not issuing national ID cards and not having central resident registries but then having powerful surveillance organizations that do that anyway just illegally(Obama apologized when they were caught).
I don't say that Europeans are any better, just different approaches to achieve the same thing. The Euros just appear to be more open and more direct with it.
The tech is there, the desire to have knowledge on what is going on is there and the desire to act on these to do good/bad is there and always has been like that. Now that it's much easier and feasible, my European instinct say that let's have this thing but have it openly and governed by clear rules.
The American instincts appear to say that let's not have it but have it with extra steps within a business model where it can be commercialized and the government can then can have it clandestinely to do the dirty work.
IMHO it is also the reason why extremist governments in US can do decade worth of work of shady things in few months and get away with it when in Europe that stuff actually takes decades and consumes the whole career of a politician to change a country in any way.
Also, the Brits are usually in between of those two extremes.
This may make sense to you if you live in a big city, but luckily a lot of the US is uninhabited, especially in the western US. There’s many places you can drive hundreds of miles and not see anyone or be monitored like you would be in a large city. That’s not to say there’s no monitoring at all, but policies of uniformly tracking everyone in the US, as if big cities are the same as the middle of nowhere in South Dakota or most of Utah, is neither practical nor desired by the people that live there
Are you unaware of Flock pushing their cameras to all the small town sheriffs? It's definitely not just in New York City.
I live in an incorporated area whose population is less than 10,000. The police have mounted Flock license plate cameras pointing both directions at every road leading out. Every shopping center is adding them too.
Also: not being subject to pervasive surveillance when you're in the middle of nowhere hundreds of miles from another person or human settlement is a pretty low bar.
There’s Flock, there’s police drones, there’s Ring cameras everywhere, etc. yes I’m aware
My point wasn’t to say there’s no monitoring in the US. It’s that there’s extreme variance in population densities which therefore means less opportunity and necessity for the same uniform surveillance in many places compared to countries with more even population densities. Whether the power of the federal government keeps expanding and eroding the federalist design the US was founded on to push uniform surveillance policies is another matter
> Also: not being subject to pervasive surveillance when you're in the middle of nowhere hundreds of miles from another person or human settlement is a pretty low bar.
OP was comparing the US to Europe and the UK, which have much more even population densities than the US. Finding sparsely populated areas there is a much higher bar than in the US
Yeah, all the people who stand to lose from oppressive surveillance can just gtfo into the desert, that will solve their problems and definitely isn’t what the surveyors wanted then to do in the first place. Yeah, like, if you do not like being surveilled in the society, have you considered not participating in it? This marginally better than being exiled forcefully.
> but policies of uniformly tracking everyone in the US, as if big cities are the same as the middle of nowhere in South Dakota or most of Utah
This makes it seem like the entire UK is an urban sprawl, evenly monitored, which it isn’t.
In London you’re likely to be on someone’s camera pretty much all the time, much less so in suburbs and smaller towns. There is plenty of countryside, woodland, rural land and villages where there is no CCTV coverage at all.
> or be monitored like you would be in a large city.
Thanks to flock that's increasingly untrue. Most rural areas only have a few ways in and out. I've even seen roads closed off to force traffic past flock cameras.
It's not particularly desired, but it happens anyways.
Honestly a pretty good point, the US already has "facial recognition vans" on the road in the form of Waymos that will provide video to police upon request. In most states, I think police could also just buy a Tesla, have an officer drive it around and set up a system to continuously upload video to a facial recognition service.
> the US already has "facial recognition vans" on the road in the form of Waymos that will provide video to police upon request.
These seem meaningfully different than UK's facial recognition vans. The government has to request the footage from Waymo for a specific place/time. I don't think they can put in requests like "analyze all Waymo video data for
this particular face and tell me where they were and when". It's much narrower in scope.
It is definitely different. I do think they could put in a request like "give me all footage between these hours in this area", and then do the facial recognition themselves.
Right, also regulations on data collection and processing in America are much more relax anyway which results in proliferation of abundant data collection for business purposes and this moves the barrier to "data is collected and being processed but you can't touch unless for profit". In Europe the barriers are on the collection and processing level.
This perverse desire for commercialization is almost comical. It is so effective that I feel like America will be the first country to implement a form of communism once they figure out the business model and produce profit charts showing promising growth expectations.
The American businesses are already coming up with stuff like "sharing economy", billionaires re-invent the metro and call it hyperloop or communal housing and call it AirBnB, public transport and call it Uber :) Publicly traded corporations that are not making any profits from the services they provide and yet providing value for the customers which are often also the owners through stock trading.
What a fascinating country. Being free of baggage and tradition and hacking around a few principles is so cool and terrifying at the same time. Nothing is sacred, there are no taboos and everything is possible.
Yep. My city did a deal with Hyperloop to build an express airport train instead of contracting with a European or Japanese company. Hyperloop pulled out and now there is no train, what a surprise.
You might ask "why don't they just re-bid the contract?" Answer: The new 'progressive' city government is opposed to building a train for 'rich people' since there's already a non-express metro that goes through some of the most crime-ridden neighborhoods of the city. Of course no businesspeople use it and they all take Ubers (many of which are Teslas)
Are you talking about Chicago? An express train sounds great, they should absolutely build one, but I think you're being a little harsh on the existing train. By America's (very low) standards it is quite convenient. It is already much faster and cheaper than driving, I have never even considered taking an Uber and I'm not sure it would be worth paying much more for an express train.
Correct, Chicago. The city's even already bored the station downtown as part of another project, so there's a massive underground cavern in the middle of downtown currently going unused.
The last time I took the Blue Line to the airport it was indeed fast and convenient - but dealing with luggage was kind of annoying, and there was a guy smoking weed on the train. If I were traveling for business there's no way I would use the Blue Line unless it was peak rush hour, and indeed most business travelers don't. Getting weed smoke on your work clothes is a less than ideal way to start a trip, nor is getting sweaty in your work clothes from hauling luggage around the station.
Thus the case for an express train - it would capture those price insensitive business travelers. You could charge $20 a ticket and it would still be a significant savings over Uber. Heathrow Express in London is like this and it seems to work well.
The UK has been a surveillance state for a long time.
I've been the victim of property crime 4x in the UK, and 3 of those times the entire thing was caught on multiple CCTVs. But that didn't help me get my stuff back or prosecute criminals. The one time I did get my computer back was when the police raided a stash house (due to an anonymous tip, not surveillance) and found a treasure trove of stolen electronics, which included my computer.
But having cameras everywhere in London didn't help at all, so AFAICT they only exist to surveil you.
I was robbed at knifepoint on Oxford Street at about 3am while drunk, and let me say, there had to have been about 100 cameras pointed in my direction at the time of the mugging. Despite all this, the police told me nothing could be done because they were unable to acquire any useful footage at the time of the robbery. I lost a lot of faith in the Met after this incident, or that mass CCTV was even really that useful in getting a prosecution.
This is untrue? Cameras in the UK are not "just used for surveillance". The facial recognition used recently has led to arrest of many offenders.
> The Met reported that in 12 months they made 580 arrests using LFR for offences including, rape, domestic abuse, knife crime, GBH and robbery, including 52 registered sex offenders arrested for breaching their conditions.
> The facial recognition used recently has led to arrest of many offenders.
I'm confused as to how that isn't also "surveillance".
Being able to know where someone is on your city sure seems like it fits the bill to me, unless you're considering it "enforcement" (and different from surveillance)?
Realistically, CCTV probably will help catching and prosecuting the people who invaded your home.
But CCTV doesn’t act as a deterrent like a bobby on the street would. And because there’s a lack of visibility of criminals being caught, it just feels like the police are doing nothing.
If they’re caught down the line it’s unlikely you’d hear about it anyway. The police can’t tell you without it being proven in court unless essentially caught red-handed, and even if proven successfully that could be months or even years away.
Unfortunately, it’s impractical for them to track down your stolen items without investing much more time than the value of those goods (though I would rather they did that than, say, arrest hundreds of peaceful protestors).
This isn’t unique to the UK; my house was raided when I lived in another country and the police attitude was only to record the theft and assume it was gone for good. It really hurts and makes you feel unsafe but I doubt the police force in any major city in any country will spend time looking for stolen goods after a break-in.
(I’m not saying that the surveillance aspect isn’t a very real problem.)
If the CCTV gives a clear and obvious result they will pursue it. If there’s a string of thefts they will investigate and use the CCTV to provide evidence. CCTV won’t always provide that but sometimes it does.
What they won’t do is send Columbo to track down your laptop, because your laptop is worth a few minutes of police time at best, and by the time you report it it’s already been fenced and there is almost zero chance of recovery. They should prioritise violent crime.
I just want to point out that theft can be violent. In England and Wales, burglary is considered to be a more severe crime if house was occupied, due to the psychological effects on the victims.
The famous 'phone-snatching' can hardly be considered non-violent either, given that it requires physical contact and is almost guaranteed to produce fear in the victim. (I don't personally know how it has been prosecuted - if at all - in the past though.)
> If the CCTV gives a clear and obvious result they will pursue it.
And how are you defining "clear and obvious"? Because unless the robber writes his name and address on some paper and holds it to the camera, it wont get investigated mate.
> What they won’t do is send Columbo to track down your laptop, because your laptop is worth a few minutes of police time at best, and by the time you report it it’s already been fenced and there is almost zero chance of recovery. They should prioritise violent crime.
Which is exactly what I said, they dont bother with non-violent crime. But if laptops arent worth investigating, they should make stealing one legal, or at the very least tell the public they cant be bothered with laptops. Because I was under the impression you could ring the police to enforce the law, not just the parts they deem "worth police time"
If they see their face or some defining characteristics that help them identify the perpetrator, and that person is known, then obviously they’re going to try to bring that person in and prosecute. I keep hearing that most thefts are made by repeat offenders in the same area, so the evidence can build up, eventually leading to an arrest.
I didn’t say it would help in every case, it might even be a tiny proportion of cases, but court records show CCTV recordings are used as evidence, so it happens.
Is that number of crimes it helps solve worth the trade-off in personal freedoms? That’s where we are now.
> But if laptops arent worth investigating, they should make stealing one legal, or at the very least tell the public they cant be bothered with laptops.
That’s hyperbole and also a misreading of what I said.
The chance of recovering a laptop once stolen is close to zero. If the police attempt to track down the stolen item they will most likely not find it, it is literally a waste of their time. Best you can hope for is that they find a stash of them in future and can identify yours.
If they have a lead on who did it, they will focus on the culprit. Or they may choose to focus on prevention, if they think it will reduce the chances of it happening again. Or they may have nothing in which case they can do nothing.
Either way, if your laptop’s been nicked (as mine was) then you’ll get no catharsis, even if they catch the guy who did it. It sucks, but there isn’t a practical alternative.
The police cannot guarantee every crime get solved and it’s unreasonable to expect that. That is not the same as saying that they have no effect at all, that they don’t reduce the number of robberies that take place, or that you might as well make theft legal.
Is there a public conversation in European countries about the value of liberty? I don't mean arguments about how liberty can lead to more economic prosperity, I mean how liberty is valuable on its own terms.
Without this value, the state can continue to erect legislation in the name of "safety", or any other perceived inequity in society, until you can no longer move.
How perverse that English law used to be a bastion of civil liberty protections. Here's a great scene from A Man For All Seasons that shows what I mean: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PDBiLT3LASk
Depends what you mean by liberty. If you mean the sort of American Libertarianism that's popular in tech circles, then no. That's never really been a thing in Europe.
If you mean liberty as in Human Rights, it waxes and wanes. Broadly speaking in the EU in the 90s/00s human rights were improved and expanded. The European human rights courts were strengthened, more laws passed aimed at opposing discrimination. And the Human rights act in the UK was codified into law in 1998, for example.
The pendulum is presently swinging the other way, mainly due to a populist revolt against mass migration to Europe. It also doesn't help that mass surveillance has become so cheap and an easy way for politicians to be 'tough on crime'. Plus American tech treats privacy as a revenue model rather than a right, and that bleeds into policy expectations via lobbying.
European liberalism is the wellspring of American liberalism, but Europe has - for obvious, historical reasons - much better organised reactionary elites. The equilibrium between the European publics and elites does indeed wax and wane.
In the 1990s a whole bunch of elite shibboleths were encoded into supranational law (so that no elected government is able to repeal them) as incredibly vaguely defined "human rights", which in turn have given rise to a vast bureaucratic apparatus to administer them (often staffed by the children of elite families). This apparatus is used as a cudgel to chip away at basic liberties - abstract, ill-defined communitarian rights (eg "safety") are used to sweep aside actual, tangible individual rights (eg speech, privacy).
(As an aside, the Soviet Union did effectively the same thing with their emphasis on "social rights" - such as those in the ICESCR - as opposed to "bourgeois" individual rights - such as those in the ICCPR. Didn't work out great for Soviet citizens.)
Since the 1990s, as a result of misgovernance by its chronically incompetent elites, Europe has been in decline by almost every metric. In the past ten years or so, the European publics have been in increasingly open revolt about this. A bunch of populist opportunists have seized on this revolt to offer various alleged alternatives, but been unable to deliver any sort of tangible change. (There is no reason to believe any change will come from this group, since they are basically just the second-rate members of the existing elite who have bet on populism as their ticket to the top.)
Europe tells itself stories about being a "human rights superpower" as an adaptive mechanism for its clear decline in prosperity, freedom, and relevance.
IMHO, Europeans deserve much better than this sad, managed decline. But given the deep structural barriers to protect the elites and prevent change, I just cannot see how this gets better.
Will the last European please turn out the lights?
The ECHR was signed in the 1950s, not 1990s. 1998 happened to be the point the UK actually made it national law too. It's complicated, I'm not going into it here. I was simply using it as an example of EU governments passing pro-liberty legislation in the 90s.
Hard to take the rest of your post seriously as that is EU history 101. Pre-101 really, they teach it to teenagers.
By your logic, the 1950s should then have been a high point of human freedom and flourishing, no? Yup, those famously progressive *checks notes* nineteen-fifties.
In reality, the ECHR was effectively toothless before the 1990s. It's no coincidence you single out dates in the 1990s in both this and your earlier post. It's no coincidence virtually every major bit of leading European human rights jurisprudence is dated from the 90s onwards. It's no coincidence that there was a marked growth in state- and quasi-state institutions in the 1990s. There is an obvious pre-90s and 90s-onwards era of European human rights jurisprudence.
But you already knew this. You yourself correctly singled out the 1990s! You're just trying to hand-wave points you don't like with an argument to authority (and a very strange one, given the authority appears to be... children? And their understanding of the periodisation of human rights jurisprudence? Maybe we should consult European toddlers for their take on the œuvre of Montesquieu, just to make sure we're not missing anything?)
It's kind of striking to observe you reject my point that the human rights narrative is just a story that Europeans tell themselves, on the apparent grounds that that criticism doesn't jibe with the story that Europeans tell their children about Europe. This kind of makes my point.
So long as Europeans cling to fictitious narratives about their having transcended history into some kind of human rights nirvana, they will remain unable to push back on the actual, real decay of their freedoms and societies. Which is the desired outcome as far as elite institutions are concerned, so expect that narrative to be roundly enforced within Europe.
Hashtag celebrating seventy years of the ECHR! So much freedom - insert face here, thank you!
In the EU we have different liberties to the US. That doesn't necessarily make Europeans less free. For example, wlthe EU has free movement of goods, capital, services, and people across borders. None of which are present in the USA. Does that make Americans less free than Europeans? Some would argue so, but I don't see it.
The UK however, maybe. Brexit was a real dumb idea.
Agreed, but in terms of moving around a similar land mass, an even bigger economy, integrated currency, etc the comparison seems reasonable. If anything the US has more freedom in that sense, at least on paper. I don’t need to register with the gemeente when I move interstate. (Though I’d likely need a new drivers licence)
Also, for better or for worse it helps that almost everyone speaks English everywhere.
The US economy is about 1.5 times larger than the entire EU.
The US is over 2 times larger by land.
Population is about a quarter smaller. Still, Massachusetts has more people than Denmark, New York has the same as Romania, California has more people than Poland.
Our original founding documents cite "these united states", interestingly and very tellingly "these", not "the." States are their own entities, and you'd find many to have very different cultures and laws — probably the same level of variance you'd find in the EU.
I agree with your points. It's ridiculous to suggest Americans don't have freedom of movement. The US economy is actually roughly double that of the EU.
But European countries are much more different from one another than the States are. I think it's actually quite a challenge to doing business there - growing into another country means you have to appeal to a very different culture, deal with different laws, speak a different language.
The US states have their differences but there's a reason they're part of the same nation.
> free movement of goods, capital, services, and people across borders
What in the world are you talking about? The US has all of this internally. If on the one narrow point you want to claim that EU has open-borders to the rest of the world, no you don't and that's not something that's good to have anyways. Both US and European citizens are fighting their own governments to decrease immigration as polling shows large opposition to current immigration levels for many years now. A big part of the crackdown on speech in the UK is to restrict criticism of immigration policy.
The European Union has, in practice, lacked genuine free movement of people across internal borders for some time (I went through complete and very aggressive border control entering France via airplane three years ago). Schengen arrangements have been curtailed in Germany[^1]. Part of the challenge is that Europeans appear out of touch with rapidly changing realities (I say this as a European). Additionally, some argue that the European Parliament is operating under an unofficial coup[^2].
The rearmament initiative is particularly concerning. Over the past three years, communities in Italy, Spain, Greece, and Germany have been devastated by flooding, wildfires, etc. Rather than prioritizing investment in resilient infrastructure, leaders are channeling resources into rearmament to confront Russia and China (or so they say - since they are acting as clowns anyway no one really pays attention). My concern is that these weapons may ultimately be used by Europeans against one another; It happened twice already.
Italy is spending the 5% target on building a bridge to Sicily. They should have done that years ago, it would have transformed the Island's economy and dealt a large blow to the Mafia. Hope other countries can find ways to spend the 5% on critical infrastructure.
Greeks borrowing money to buy completely unnecessary weapons from Germany was probably the main precipitating factor leading up to the Greek debt crisis.
Greece buys guns from several countries primarily for “protection” in case of war. There is a lot of corruption happening in these deals, but that’s not unique to Greece. Greece is in a very tough spot compared to other EU countries (ie Belgium) and hence everything is a bit more complicated.
The couple of times I’ve even done as little as fly through Heathrow it has been apparent to me that the UK is on its way to becoming an unfettered surveillance state, and I never hear anyone talking about it.
You say "on its way" as if it hasn't been at the forefront of this for decades. Until China and post-9/11 US ramped up facial recognition and CCTV projects MASSIVELY, the UK didn't just have more CCTV units per capita than anywhere else on Earth, they had the most in absolute terms. Even now last I checked the UK has about 1 camera for every 11 people.
Sao Paulo (the city) just rolled out facial recognition for police bikes, too, despite evidence showing[0] the program doesn't reduce criminality. Smart Sampa even has a feature where you can become a snitch yourself, lending your camera spot to the network... Great stuff
As a Brit my feeling is that the state has basically given up on the concept of doing the right thing (not even from an ivory tower moral perspective, but from a realpolitik grow the economy / fix the issue sense) and is just throwing sticking plasters everywhere.
The recent issues with crime are, at root, apparently down to the fact that we don’t have enough prison places and we don’t have enough police.
The obvious solution is to hire more police, raise the wages, compulsory purchase a big field somewhere, make a massive prison and lock up the worst offenders for a long time.
There is some obsession with “making the books balance” as if this even matters. The Government is sovereign but acts as if somehow they have to do everything at market price like a private individual would.
> Various privacy considerations are made with each LFR deployment in the UK, the cops say. These include notifying the public about when, where, and for how long LFR will be used in a given area, allowing them to exercise their right not to be captured by the technology.
Are they trying to normalize wearing masks, helmets, burkas and balaclavas everywhere?
Where is this quote from? I couldn't see it in the article.
If true, wouldn't that simply lead to wanted suspects simply avoiding the cameras, meaning innocent people who aren't monitoring these notifications to have their faces and locations captured, while criminals avoid it?
You need photo ID to verify your age to access "adult content" (which definition is ever-expanding outside the boundaries of smut) and now police begin using this new pool of facial data to surveil the public en masse.
They didn't even wait half a year to show their hand. That's how confident they are.
Tony Blair's biggest legacy was to take power out of Parliament and spread it wafer-thin over a byzantine network of quangos, courts, public sector bodies and Whitehall bureaucracies to ensure that no matter who you vote for, nothing ever changes.
This was the Brexiteers' biggest folly, I think. They blamed the EU for the fact that power had become completely unaccountable to the public. But the call was coming from inside the house: in theory we reclaimed our sovereignty, in practice your vote still doesn't matter and your opinion still isn't wanted.
Now the same crowd is turning their attention to the ECHR. It won't help.
I don't think remaining in the EU would have helped matters considering they are enacting their own spooky internet/tech legislation. I don't know enough about the ECHR to comment.
I think it is a combination of many things. To make meaningful change each one of these entities (quangos) will have to be examined, reformed or reviewed.
I am not sure it is even possible for that to happen without a collapse and/or crisis at this point.
I listened to a podcast with Dominic Cummings last night and he is of the opinion that the UK government is extremely weak at the moment and if there was another black swan event that they would crumble. I don't know if that is true, but it seems plausible.
The frustration I've had in the US, and I known has been felt by friends from the UK, is that no matter who you vote for or what they promise it seems you always get more of the same.
I think you'd be surprised how large the public support for these initiatives actually is. E.g. few on HN would guess it aligned with what the public wanted, yet it's hard to find a poll saying that's the case. And I don't just mean "of sleazily worded polls", even when the poll explicitly calls out the privacy concerns or other side effects more want to try the law than not.
In a first-past-the-post electoral system (UK, USA), it always degenerates into 2 parties, which over time becomes entrenched and diverge from popular opinion.
A proportionally representative system in IMO better from this perspective.
Much of the issue with western democracies is that people assume consistently within their politicians.
A pro surveillance party should also address crime. If someone sees crime as a big issue then they will be for the surveillance.
Unfortunately what actually happens is that the surveillance is used to track anti government sentiment, while the crime is not any more prioritised than before the surveillance.
But we know from comparative study of representative democracy that it does work, and it doesn't have to be "misrepresenting", and the reason certain representative democracies do a bad job of representation boils down to features o their electoral structures that produce results that are both poorly representative in the immediate term, and which also narrow the space of ideas and debate in the longer term.
> There isn't a one size fits all party.
Seems to be a non-sequitur, there isn't a one-size fits all policy, either.
It worked until the people who manipulated elections worked out how to manipulate elections and started forming parties. Breaking it down to policy level makes it far harder to manipulate an election.
A good example is the UK Labour party. People want the social side of their policies but not the surveillance. They could have voted for the social policies and against the surveillance. But no we have to eat the surveillance if we want the social policies.
It's also now the law to remove a face covering when requested by the police (it's supposed to be under certain conditions, but have fun arguing that with a jake). Actually love living in a police state. At least we repealed the law making cable ties illegal I guess.
Sounds funny, unless you are young looking and went to a store without ID to buy a pair of scissors. Happened to me, but I've managed to convince the staff that I'm old enough to cut the letters from a newspaper.
I mean, yes, if you're in a violent protest the police might ask you to remove your balaclava. Given the current political climate in the US that doesn't feel like the end of days.
Small mindedness (to use your words, though I think other sets of words are perhaps more descripitive) is a condition that spreads like the plague. If you don't constantly stamp it out through ostracizing and marginalizing the infected and those who intentionally create the conditions for it then you will be overrun.
If "just persuade them with your good ideas" was a workable solution it would've worked at least once by now, instead the means of persuasion are owned by psychopaths who continually convince the public to vote self-destructively. The enshittification of society continues.
>If "just persuade them with your good ideas" was a workable solution it would've worked at least once by now
If I have this right: your measurement for whether or not people are in their right mind is if they take to your specific ideas?
Have you considered the possibility that people are most often persuaded by good ideas and your ideas are awful?
And insofar as you present them in an ostensibly good light, you are lying somewhere in the presentation and people can see that.
To be clear, your perspective is that everyone else is a psychopath or so much dumber than you, personally, as to be led by psychopaths.
And it's not you that's dumber than most others, nor who is led by the psychopath(s), nor who is the psychopath that needs to advance their ideas by marginalizing people who have other ideas.
And the strategy is to marginalize people because...checks notes... your ideas are unpalatable to the population. For no good reason.
Why are your ideas unpalatable to the population, from their perspective?
Any good policy wonk will know that much, will be able to explain the opposition's reasons accurately and in detail, and will be able to steel-man their own argument utilizing that perspective.
Whereas a manipulative person will avoid that level of analysis.
You've demonstrated the problem with good ideas, and the vulnerabilities they have quite well. The parent poster said nothing of the sort, but you've:
* inserted a bunch of words into their mouth
* engaged in a gish-gallop
* insulted the person you are replying to
* accused the person you are replying to of lying
All of which are widely deployed techniques used to prevent good ideas from being heard, let alone from being adopted. It was probably unintentional, but it's pretty amazing how quickly you've made a case for why "good ideas" alone aren't sufficient by demonstrating all the ways savvy opponents can shut them down.
Largest empire in history in 1920 to small isolated island speedrun any %.
It's a good modern historical example of how you cannot take anything for granted on a long enough timescale (wink wink USA), and it wasn't even that long, no matter how good or bad things are looking right now all it takes is a couple of generations to radically change the situation
That's because empires don't work. In order to make them work what's needed is to have the center of the empire maintain infrastructure on the borders of the empire. The center grows when you get an empire, but ... it's an absurdly small growth compared to the border growth. Hence empires exhaust themselves attempting to guard borders and you start seeing absurdities like military fortresses manned by 5 unarmed (because too expensive) soldiers. Both the English and Roman empires did that. And then they abandon their borders to save some more money, and it all just ... fades away.
And this is a cursed choice because empires need resources (as they will find themselves in a war with just about everyone else at some point, so imports don't work). Those resources are only available in far away mines. So you need to have the huge area and borders, and infrastructure everywhere..
But you can't have the huge area and borders, and infrastructure because you can't defend it, you can't build, you can't pay for it.
So ... no empires. Or at least, no permanent ones. People keep trying though.
Plenty of big thinkers out there think nations and citizenship are outmoded concepts, or they are concepts that provoke needless violence. They find their own nationalities an embarrassment.
> Plenty of big thinkers out there think nations and citizenship are outmoded concepts.
Big thinkers tend to live in wealthy, leafy areas where they don't have to worry about someone jumping over their fence, or appreciate the need for demarcation of land.
Same goes for people who are pro-immigration/pro-drugs/pro-construction - but just don't do it their affluent area.
I've been to plenty of Food Not Bombs events where people are being fed and the prevailing attitude was, "If there are people needing to be fed, let them come and we'll feed them." The same folks were handing out harm reduction supplies.
These same folks went on to figure out the logistics of preparing food. So no, I don't think it's at all axiomatic that the people who disagree with nationalism are necessarily affluent in the slightest. In fact, I've found most solidarity with refugees and anti-nationalist movements in the working class. The overall community of folks I saw ranged across income brackets -- plenty of software engineers, tech folks, trades folks, unemployed folks...
I think that when people say, "They don't really mean it" or "their principles wouldn't stand up if it meant a disruption to their lives", they are not aware of just how much work folks are actively doing every day to live by those principles and invite people in.
Who needs the vans when one has Tesla's roaming the streets and parked in random places? Those things have a myriad of cameras. What stops Telsa from providing access to (insert highest paying agencies and/or companies)? Surely by now some other modern cars have followed this pattern. There's even a camera pointed at the drivers face. It's only a matter of time before they have fast uplinks to Starlink. I have to assume the car could do some local AI to minimize uploading noise and only upload the interesting bits.
telsa> give me the location and names of everyone currently picking their nose, lol.
Pretty much. The more they fear the blowback of the actions of civilisation, the more this in power try to hold any semblance of normality in place by force.
Decades of neoliberalism and mass immigration (but I repeat myself) dissolved all the ties — family, community, faith, national identity — that once bound us together. Now there's no social solidarity or cohesion and no-one trusts each other, so they turn to the all-powerful state as the only thing left that can maintain order.
Yes, the English isles were crime riddled sh*t-holes until only recently. Rapes were so common girls had to cover their whole body to avoid unwanted attention.
Nope. They started a long time ago with the cameras and didn't upgrade them, because money. Which means a pretty large part of the cameras have pathetic resolution and are black and white, as well as being too far away from much of their vision. Useful for locating protestors sorry ("getting a general idea of criminal activity"), not so useful for recognizing anyone.
That is interesting because it implies either the UK's camera infrastructure has simply amazing reliability with parts never failing. Or it could be that they have huge stocks of the hardware that they haven't yet exhausted.
Not really. The UK government does not operate a centrally-controlled CCTV surveillance system, contrary to popular myth. There are a lot of privately owned cameras (but no reliable estimates of how many), and some local authorities, police forces, etc. operate CCTV cameras in certain locations.
If you actually dig in to the statistics that sometimes get quoted about CCTV in the UK you’ll find that a lot of the numbers have very little foundation.
I want to hide what I had for breakfast. I want to hide what books I read recently. I want to hide which TV shows I watch. I want to hide who I have conversations with. I want to hide who I avoid. I engage in so much completely legal behaviour, much of it quite laudable, that I simply want to hide.
Laudable too. I do things that are laudable, that most of society would applaud, that I nonetheless routinely do not disclose and sometimes hide. You will note, perhaps, that I didn't disclose them.
And you’re not trans. And you don’t perform drag. And you don’t go to an event with a lot of gay people. And you don’t get mistaken for someone because ai isn’t perfect. (Especially if your race doesn’t have many people in the dataset.)
But the people that don’t have anything to fear don’t see anything wrong with “inconveniencing” these groups.
This is the UK, and it's the police controlling these vans. So trans, drag and gay are not at issue here.
And somehow, the countries where it is a problem are never discussed. All muslim countries, for example, almost like not all religions are equal ... if you read hrw or amnesty you'll find that even the most moderate muslim countries like Morocco or Turkey deal violently with sexuality (all forms, really, yes, being trans drag will, of course, attract immediate attention. But let's not pretend they leave public displays of straight sexuality (including subtle and tasteful) alone). And Morocco and Turkey are absolutely nothing like something like Afghanistan or even Iran.
But in the UK the line is drawn pretty damn far. Are you seriously complaining about that?
I'm in particular speaking about the UK, actually. consider how much anti-trans backlash there has been in the country. Consider how in Weimar Germany there was a fair bit of acceptance for the LGBT community that was quickly undone - all it takes is a charismatic leader or a king that goes along with it.
I guess at present the UK is very tolerant. But no one can predict the future. It can go downhill. Even for developed western countries. Once surveillance is setup, it is hard to restrict its usage. Especially when the society gets used to it.
If it's used to track folks out on bail or already convicted of violent crimes then great. However seeing what the UK police are like right now it's likely to be applied to harass genteel retirees protesting about Israeli barbarity in Palestine.
You can get UV protection hats that have a clip-able face cover for those times you just want to go outside for a minute without having to slap on sunscreen.
Have a few at home just for that, but they could definitely have a dual-use.
> The government also insists the tech is independently tested at the National Physical Laboratory, which found the underlying algorithm to be accurate and free of age, gender, or ethnicity-related bias.
I feel so much better! /sarcasm
How tone deaf can they be?
Whenever there are serious privacy concerns about how this sort of technology, you have a statement like attached. It doesn't address what people are worried about. They never directly address it.
I was listening to an interview with Dominic Cummings while walking this evening. It was about two hours long. I don't really know what to make of Dominic Cummings, I did think it would be interesting to hear his perspective.
During the interview he explained how many people in the government essentially wanted to please their own, which includes their own class of people (city people essentially) and the media. He said that ministers were much more worried about how media was covering them, than anything else.
The same people essentially see see the normal general public and people like myself as criminal. They see us a criminal because by in large much of the general public and people like myself don't agree with them.
This sort of statement is very "on brand" if what he said is true.
Well there had been system with very high rates of false positives for certain ethnicities which if wide scale deployed would in effect be like systematic harassment of this people.
So it is a thing people which in general are okay with mass surveillance might worried about.
And convincing the people you have a chance to convince is much more useful the pointlessly trying to convince the people which anyway won't like what you do no matter what you say.
You're in a comment section full of criticism. When China did it the criticism was irrelevant. The citizens are powerless and don't care. When the UK does it the criticism will also be irrelevant. The citizens are powerless and don't care. I don't see why any contradiction or double standard.
All of my acquaintances from the UK have had really critical things to say about their present government and _especially_ about the OSA and surveillance state stuff.
I campaigned in the recent council elections (we lost) and knocked on hundreds of doors in my area, speaking to people of all demographics about politics.
I can't exaggerate the collective despair that I witnessed. Young or old, black or white, Labour or Tory, every single person I spoke to without exception had something negative to say about the state of the country. No matter what their politics, no-one was optimistic, and why would they be?
In recent weeks we've seeing unprecedented protests against migrant hotels, but opposition to immigration is just part of the picture. Brits are giving up on normal politics in ways I wouldn't have imagined even two years ago.
Why do the beat when you can sit at your desk and watch or wait for the cameras to pick something up?
They seem to have forgotten that a police presence, i.e. a patrol car cruising around or police walking or cycling the streets not only prevents some crime but makes people feel safer by their visibility.
People act like the UK is lawless and people can just steal bikes from public bike rakes, steel food from stores, or even turn up on UK shores illegally and be given 4* hotels, but presumably this isn't true given how strictly they enforce almost completely irrelevent stuff like a dude on an electrified skateboard.
It's called anarcho-tyranny. Certain crimes, and certain types of criminal, go unpunished almost as a rule. But it's very easy and not politically inconvenient to harass guys on skateboards, and people who post edgy memes on Facebook are a grave threat to our society, so there you have it.
English politicians are just a decade ahead than the rest of the Western world. They are not the only ones doing massive surveillance, but they are some of the first to have learned that the masses are completely powerless against the state, so do not even have to hide their intentions any more. What are citizens gonna do? Vote for the other colour that wants the exact same thing? Start a new petition? Go cry to the media that are perpetuating state propaganda?
Democracy has completely lost its meaning, and we're ruled by oligarchs and room-temperature IQ career politicians. I'm so glad to have left that silly island after more than a decade there, but sadly where I am now UK is seen as a model to imitate, and likewise in the rest of Europe. Citizens are completely f'd, and they've also been defanged thanks to modern tech and the entertainment business. Apart from the few that take to the streets to protest with little achievement other than a stint in jail, the vast majority are scrolling TikTok and watching US politics drama as if it was reality TV.
I'm waiting for bated breath for Reform to be voted in, and be as utterly useless as the other two parties. What a bloody farce.
Mobile facial recognition systems suffer from significantly reduced accuracy compared to fixed installations due to variable lighting, angles, vibration, and lower-quality optics - making these vans likely less effective than the existing CCTV network.
Democracy is like Communism. Every time you point out a problem with Democracy, someone else can point out how it isn't True Democracy(R). For example, in the West there are massive support for applying pressure to Israel to stop the genocide. But very little actually happens because, at least in my country, Israel has literally bought off the key politicians[1]. This isn't True Democracy(R) because the people's representatives have been paid to represent a foreign nation.
Yeah, Australia's conservative side of politics (arguably both sides are conservative in this regard) have, at various times, tried to make protesting itself illegal.
I like the irony of it, and doubt that "real" protesters give much of a fuck what kinds of boundaries the protested try to put around protesting.
These kinds of things are just another data point documenting "the general decline".
I wonder if they left the EU so they could monitor and restrict their citizens even more effectively and quickly. Just like limiting the length of knives this will definitely not solve their crime problem.
I’ve always wanted to visit the UK but it really sounds like a shithole now where you will be treated as guilty just for existing in public and your every move will be monitored at all times.
And now they have this new visa thing for US visitors, pretty intrusive, won't fill it. I know the US started that sh*t, the world is enshittificating quickly.
You can get a feeling of the scope of the crisis to come, on just how much government is ready to clamp down and trying to preserve "civilization" through surveillance. Even if western liberal society vanishing in the process makes that protection measure in relation to the protection goal is dizzying.
And encoded in all that ruckus is a uncomfortable truth! This is as far as we will go! There is no miracle tech on the horizon, that can be handed out to the masses, bribing all of us with a 60s like surplus to be peaceful. Instead its panopticon or bust!
What is the point if there are people on many streets with CCTVs doing drugs openly. I saw a cop simply walk by someone overdosing. Nothing will happen.
Again, what is the point exactly? Can anyone tell me?
(Again, what is the point of the down-vote? I am asking for people's thought and opinions in the hope of a fruitful conversation).
The point of the police state is not to prevent crime, but to silence dissent and foster cooperation with whatever government propaganda and initiatives are popular at the time.
In fact, often defeating crime is bad for this purpose. If you want to maintain a propaganda machine of an enemy within, you need crime. You might even, say, give drugs to those communities. Looking at you, CIA.
Overdosing is not a crime, it's not even the job of the Police to help, and possession of drugs is being ignored by most forces because an arrest takes two officers off frontline services for 4 hours, when it will most likely result in a caution.
>Here, if the cop sees someone overdosing, they immediately call the ambulance, not walk by and do nothing.
This unevidenced claim is probably nonsense in any case, no police officer would simply walk by. They may very well walk by and talk into their radio to summon the right kind of help, or they may be responding to a higher priority call.
Just because your mate Bob claims they saw something, doesn't mean Bob had any real idea what was going on.
It's like the old saw about a window blind for a hospital ward costing £200, when you can buy one for £20 elsewhere. Thing is the one for £20 doesn't come with a specialised coating that eliminates bacterial or viral spread, or with a bloke that installs it according to the relevant safety regulations, or the supervisor who certifies the installation. It certainly doesn't come with a number you can call to fix the blind if there's a problem with it that includes on site service.
You and I have very different experiences with police officers. Police Officers may walk by someone overdosing is hardly a claim that needs any evidence in my experience because it's so widely understood to be true.
I saw it on video (inb4 deepfake), I did not hear it from Bob. So yeah, the cop in London did just simply walk by and did nothing. I can give you the video if you so want.
Wait, where's "here"? You just said you'd seen the police do nothing about somebody overdosing - and now you're saying that's exactly what they never do, where you are. Wherever that is.
What's your threshold for when it becomes a problem? Should we wait until it becomes a problem, or should we try to stop this level of facial recognition?
You should also assume this is a proof of concept. It'll get improved and scaled down to run on every police vehicle, and on every camera the police already control.
It has already been scaled down to android phones (you'll find phones are an excellent platform for this), where you can find apps that are meant to let venue-owners guard entrances against specific individuals. That's illegal, but obviously common enough to make such apps.
Then it will be sold to the public as being successful (they are already claiming that in the article itself that it is successful). Then that will be used to justify them in other places.
No, but also yes in the sense that we don't even know how many people are in the country and it's much easier to make things worse for everyone else than actually confront what has happened to the nation
If you think every politician in every country hasn't been trying to ban private communications since forever I've got a bridge to sell you.
They're certainly ahead on locking up the people who dislike Israel - you're correct on that count. Though I think the USA's still the undisputed king of that.
trying to become a EU member state citizen as a UK citizen is still much easier then for many other countries
through often not on paper, but in practice, like the people which can throw rocks in your path do that less likely
in the end it's a question of job (in country you want to move to), money/liquidity, and moral restraints you have.
Like e.g. buying yourself citizen ship through an arranged marriage should be something like 30k-50k€ depending on EU state, context etc. And that is if you go through organized crime rings which take a cut.
And if are rich there probably should be a lot of more legal-ish ways to get citizenship. Some countries outright allow buying citizenship, but I think besides the "buying" cost you need to be quite stacked.
And if you have good job qualifications you might get a job in the EU -> long term right to stay -> and then find one way or another to convert it to citizenship. It's probably ethically most upright but also hardest path.
But it is the daily norm pretty much in any country people do want to frequently get into.
Actually if I had to recommend anything it would be to stay very very very far away from any organized crime organizations. Doing business with them rarely ends well (as it always exposes you to them being able to blackmail you).
I guess I should have put that into the original post.
People act like they weren't able to live and work in Europe before the EU - people did it, it was fine, it's not that difficult if you actually want to do it.
Also from the country that pissed on the request of its population to curb immigration decade after decade, for cheap labor force, political gains, and globalist ideology...
> Colonial powers are not entitled to that argument, it's hypocritical.
Yes they are. Everyone everywhere has invaded or otherwise traded their way into power in other countries (or pre-country equivalents). It's extremely foolish to bucket the world into Britain and not-Britain if one isn't entirely ignorant of history.
The vast majority in any given colonial nation neither partook nor benefited much if at all.
For the vast crimes of leopold and subsequently to lesser extent the belgian state in congo the biggest chunk of money got invested in the brazilian rail network to make one family very rich for example. My great grandparents being subsistence farmers didn't see shit and you'd punish not just them but me for it.
Typically the people moving in are from countries which given fair comparison are similarly not owed an opinion given their sins of the father and many a nation is not allowed it's borders likely also yours lest you live in Buthan or so.
They are entitled to that argument by virtue of having guns and borders. I would rather be hypocritical than have my government expend resources on other countries altruistically
Did the people suffering the consequences of illegal immigration today performed that colonialism?
Not even their ancestors at colonial times benefitted much from it: the industrial working class of Britain was in dire position despite Britain being a colonial Empire. That money and power went to the ruling classes and their middle class bootlickers.
No, but they benefitted from the colonialism and fight efforts to return those benefits to the colonized. We're not talking about something that happened thousands of years ago here.
>We're not talking about something that happened thousands of years ago here.
I'm not talking about that happened thousands of years ago either. I'm talking about the conditions of the working and poor classes when Britain was a colonial superpower, like througout the 19th century. Hell, even post WWII most of Britain working classes were living very modestly, in wretched wretched council houses, and with low means.
Generalize this line of thought. "A thief stole an iphone and dropped it on my doorstep. I kept it, despite knowing it was stolen, because I did not ask the thief to steal it for me".
It's very silly on the small scale. It's no less silly on the large scale, you are simply more accustomed to the cultural understanding the colonialism is not something you have any responsibility for.
That's not a generalization. That's a totally separate argument. Making someone whole for the loss of a phone does not require you to provide them housing (which is significantly more valuable than the phone was.) It probably means returning the phone -- and if you gained some money from the use of that phone, perhaps some portion of that as well.
Taking that example back to colonialism, it means probably returning stolen wealth and some portion of capital earned on the back of that stolen wealth.
But it literally isn't something I have responsibility for. I hate this white guilt fetish and think it's dumb and unproductive I actively use my money to reduce inequality through things such as the lebanese red cross and national conservation foundations.- Whilst not feeling guilty for the circumstances I was born into because logically I had no control over it.
It has nothing to do with "white guilt" or fetishism. It's not a race thing at all.
It's a "my nation recently and currently systematically exploited people. I would like my nation to try to make those people whole" thing. It happens to be the case that many targets of exploitation were non-white, but the concern is the exploitation not the race of the exploited. We systematically exploited plenty of poor white people too, we should make them whole too.
Redlining in my city "ended" officially in 1968, but in practice it was probably another two decades before it really was removed from standard operation. And in my city, plenty of white people were considered undesirable and redlined. I guarantee you there are people directly impacted by this policy who are still alive, this isn't some far away past long since forgotten by time.
As an example, the city should be considering whether reduced interest rate loans, subsidized housing, rent freezes, or other benefits can be passed on to families directly impacted by redlining policies from the 60s, 70s, and 80s. Just because it's been 40 years doesn't mean the city should just give up trying to make people whole.
He just had no conception of all the fun technologies that would later come along in a digitized, microprocessor-rich world of the future. Reading 1984 today, you want to laught at the simplistic and almost benign weakness of telescreens for surveillance.
Were Orwell to have been deeply informed about the surviellance mechanisms of the future, he'd likely be both surprised into horror at their innovative intrusions, and completely unsurprised that such a vast percentage of the UK's (and world's) population completely accepts them with hardly a sigh.
The last part wits the nail on the head. Orwell envisioned a future where everyone was forced to have a telescreen watching them at all times. He never for a second dreamed of a future where people would buy a telescreen for the most trifling convenience of going "alexa, is it going to rain today".
This is actually why I always considered Brave New World to be much closer in predicting the future, at least in spirit if not in hard details. Let people access personal distractions, conveniences and pleasures on your road to total surveillance, and attempts at social control, and you can apply them with very little need to ever enforce miseries like those of "1984"
There's a resurgence of patriotism in the political right in Britain from what I hear. They have a few years yet before the next election so we'll see where this goes, but I wouldn't count out the English people yet.
It’s very sad how quickly their culture is devolving. I was in the UK last year and I probably won’t be back.
The weirdest thing to me was that all the news stations covered US politics extensively, but said little about domestic politics. Not sure what to make of that.
This might be a hot take, but watching countries from pointing fingers and lecturing others about democracy to adopting the same tactics and use the cutting edge technology they have rambled about is both interesting and sobering.
Honestly I wouldn’t mind it if the police actually did anything. The UK has American style public services with European tax rates. They have Chinese style surveillance and thought control with LATAM levels of criminality.
They constantly seem to implement the worst of all possible solutions.
This has nothing to do with immigration and everything to do with the UK being a addicted to surveillance. They have a long history of spying on their own citizens.
The country hasn't produced anything of real value in decades - its economy is entirely held together by selling money laundering services to the rich - which brings in an enormous amount of money in percentage fees, but is only available to a few people. Since the money involved is so large, this crowds out actual production.
Yes, it's well known that UK police and politicians have abused children at scale, hence why Saville was able to get away with what he did. He was protected by the crown. There are even pictures of Ghislane Maxwell and Kevin Spacey sitting on the throne (can google it).
The grooming gangs in those towns consisted of men from a variety of occupations, though a clear pattern was the involvement of takeaways and taxi firms. The involvement of police and politicians was mostly limited to denial, dismissal, and cover-up.
Although there have been individual allegations against local politicians[1] and police[2], they do little to help your case here. There certainly were thousands of victims, and I'm not clear why you'd deny that.
I said "mostly", did you miss that? The reality is that these gangs were overwhelmingly not made up of police or politicians, and they did indeed have thousands of victims.
We are long past the point where this sort of denialism will work - it will only generate further backlash. Is that your intention?
I'll leave you with a quote from Baroness Casey's recent report on the subject[1], the recommendations of which have been entirely accepted by the UK Government[2]:
> Despite reviews, reports and inquiries raising questions about men from Asian or Pakistani backgrounds grooming and sexually exploiting young White girls, the system has consistently failed to fully acknowledge this or collect accurate data so it can be examined effectively.
> Instead, flawed data is used repeatedly to dismiss claims about ‘Asian grooming gangs’ as sensationalised, biased or untrue. This does a disservice to victims and indeed all law-abiding people in Asian communities and plays into the hands of those who want to exploit it to sow division.
The important question, only important question IMHO, is how they handle positives. Do they go all guns blazing and arrest the person on the spot? Or do they use a restrained approach and first nicely ask the person if they have any ID, etc? That's the important bit.
Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 means authorities can request encryption keys (passwords) from you and you can't say no.
Investigatory Powers Act 2016 literally nicknamed Snoopers' Charter. Means ISPs keep all your traffic for minimum a year, police are given access to it, but politicians are exempt and need a warrant to have their data viewed?!?!?
UK police have been rolling out Live Facial Recognition in London and Wales for the last few years. Seven new regions are being added. 10 new vans coming in.
Supermarkets are using facial recognition to keep a database of people they deem criminals.
UK tried to make Apple put in a backdoor to its encrypted storage. Apple removed the ability for UK citizens to use that feature.
Online Safety Act forced online services to implement age verification for "adult" content. Many niche forums closed down because they would face large fines and jail time if they didn't comply. Larger businesses offloaded this requirement onto third party companies so now if you want to see "adult" content online you need to share your face or bank details or government ID with a random third party likely from a different country.
None of the major political parties care about digital rights and in fact want MORE surveillance.
> None of the major political parties care about digital rights and in fact want MORE surveillance.
This is because most of the public don't care about those rights either, and are entirely happy with surveillance. You've got nothing to hide right? If you don't the government to know what you're looking at its probably because you're a paedo, or maybe a terrorist. Maybe even both.
Its not the government who need to be convinced on this, it's the general public, and currently there's not really anyone out there explaining how you can't have a backdoor that only the government and good guys will be able to use.
No, the IPA 2016 does not require all ISPs to retain copies of all traffic for one year. There are already enough bad things to say about that act without making shit up.
Those 'niche' forums you mention are explicitly excluded from the Act.
Apple made the change to advanced security in advance of the bill being finalised, now the government has gone in another direction.
All the online safety act does is implement online the law as it stands IRL. British folk have been using the same ID verification systems to validate identity for nightclub admission, passport applications, driving licence applications, benefits claims, state pension claims, disclosure and barring checks, tax filings, mortgage deeds, security clearances, job applications, and court filings since 2016.
All the reaction is just pearl clutching - 5 million checks a day are being performed, the law itself is wildly popular with 70% support amongst adults after implementation.
There are three levels of checks - IAL1 (self-asserted, low confidence), IAL2 (remote or physical proof of identity), and IAL3 (rigorous proof with biometric and physical presence requirements).
IPA 2016 affords police access to your domain history, not content history, provided police can obtain a warrant from a senior High Court Judge. The box which stores the data is at ISP level and is easily circumvented with a VPN, or simply not using your ISP's DNS servers.
IPA 2016 doesn't exempt politicians from surveillance. It includes specific provisions for heightened safeguards when intercepting their communications. The Act establishes a "triple-lock" system for warrants targeting members of a relevant legislature, requiring approval from the Secretary of State, a Judicial Commissioner, and the Prime Minister. This heightened scrutiny is in recognition of the sensitivity involved in surveilling politicians, particularly given the surveillance of Northern Irish politicians and others in the 1950s, 60s, 70s, and 80s.
Part III of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 (in force 1 October 2007), and Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act 2000 provides powers over encryption keys/passwords etc. Section 49, RIPA can be used to force decryption, Section 51 to supply keys or passwords. These are identical to powers the police have IRL over safes, deposit boxes etcetera, and the penalty for non-compliance is identical.
You cannot use encryption or passwords to evade legal searches with a scope determined by a court on the basis of evidence of probable cause shown to the court by the entity requesting the search. A warrant from the High Court is required for each use.
Notable cases:-
- Blue chip hacking scandal - corrupt private investigators were illegally obtaining private information on behalf of blue chip companies.
- Phone hacking scandal - corrupt private investigators were illegally hacking voice mail on behalf of newspapers.
- Founder of an ISP using his position to illegally intercept communications and use them for blackmail.
> Those 'niche' forums you mention are explicitly excluded from the Act.
No, they are not.
> Our research indicates that over 100,000 online services are likely to be in scope of the Online Safety Act – from the largest social media platforms to the smallest community forum. We know that new regulation can create uncertainty – particularly for small organisations that may be run on a part time or voluntary basis.
Yes, they are in scope but a "small community forum" has nothing to do but to fill and keep a few self-assessments just in case. There is no requirement to implement age verification across the board (hence why current official guidelines target only porn sites in relation to age verification).
You are being facetious as "priority illegal contents" are the sort that are the ones that are obviously very unlikely to be encountered on a "normal" small community forum. So this is no more than a box-ticking exercise, really.
Regarding age verification, the OSA is explicit states that if you ban all such content in your T&Cs you do NOT need to have age verification.
I take it you didn't read your own link, the language used is "services".
If you happen to be running the UK panty wetters forum from your own server, then you have a problem, but grandma Jessie's knitting circle is explicitly not in scope.
YOUR link goes on to say
>the more onerous requirements will fall upon the largest services with the highest reach and/or those services that are particularly high risk.
Even if your forum falls in scope, you're only required to do a risk assessment, if at that stage you are likely to have a lot of underage users, then there might be an issue.
However, if you're not an adult site, you only need to comply by providing the lowest level of self certified check. Handily, most of the big forum software providers have already implemented this and offer a free service integration.
> I take it you didn't read your own link, the language used is "services".
I do love it when people lie and then try to get sassy when called out.
> Even if your forum falls in scope, you're only required to do a risk assessment, if at that stage you are likely to have a lot of underage users, then there might be an issue.
I also like it when people who accuse others of not reading prove themselves incapable of reading - as pointed out below, what I linked is required regardless of the assumed age of your userbase.
All positives are verified by humans first before action is taken, all the system does is flag positives to an operator. Once verified, then the action movie starts.
Match quality below 0.64 is automatically discarded >0.7 is considered reliable enough for an enquiry to be made.
So far ~1,035 arrests since last year resulting in 773 charges or cautions, which is pretty good when you consider that a 'trained' police officer's odds of correctly picking a stop and search candidate are 1 in 9.
In the UK you don't have to provide ID when asked, appropriate checks are made on arrest, and if you lied you get re-arrested for fraud.
The system has proved adept at monitoring sex offenders breaching their licence conditions - one man was caught with a 6-year-old when he was banned from being anywhere near children.
Before anyone waxes lyrical about the surveillance state and the number of CCTV cameras, me and the guy who stabbed me were caught on 40 cameras, and not a single one could ID either of us.
> "In the UK you don't have to provide ID when asked"
Well if you are suspected of a crime they can arrest you if you refuse to identify yourself. I 'suspect' that being flagged by this system counts as such if you match someone who is wanted or similar.
You can't make an arrest on the basis of refusal to verify identity, unless a specific law is in play, or the Police officer has proof you are lying.
If the police have probable cause to suspect you've committed an actual crime, then you have to ID yourself, you are entitled to know what crime you are suspected of. Yes, facial recognition does count, but it has to be a high confidence match >0.7, verified by a police officer personally, after the match is made, and verified again on arrest.
If you are suspected of Anti-Social Behaviour then you have to ID (Section 50 of the Police Reform Act)
If you are arrested, then you have to provide your name and address (Police and Criminal Evidence Act 2000).
If you are driving, you have to ID (Section 164 of the Road Traffic Act).
Providing false information or documents is a separate criminal offence.
Essentially, police can't just rock up, demand ID, and ask questions without a compelling reason.
> You can't make an arrest on the basis of refusal to verify identity, unless a specific law is in play, or the Police officer has proof you are lying
> If the police have probable cause to suspect you've committed an actual crime, then you have to ID yourself, you are entitled to know what crime you are suspected of
It's always been my impression that this kind of ambiguous phrasing combined with the power imbalance gives the public absolutely no protection whatsoever. Let's say you don't want to provide ID: the copper could come up with some vague excuse for why they stopped you / want your ID. Good luck arguing with that
>the copper could come up with some vague excuse for why they stopped you / want your ID.
In which case, their sergeant will tear them a new one, right after the custody sergeant has finished tearing their own hole because the careers of both of those people rely on supervising their coppers and supervising their arrests. If the custody sergeant has to release someone because the copper can't account for themselves, that is a very serious matter. The sergeant's can smell a bad arrest a mile away.
The copper has to stand up in a court of law, having sworn an oath, and testify on the reasonable suspicion or probable cause they had. If they are even suspected of lying, that's a gross misconduct in a public office investigation.
Assuming they weren't fired over that, any promotion hopes are gone, any possibility of involvement in major cases or crime squads, hope of a firearms ticket, advanced driving, or even overtime are gone. Their fellow officers will never trust them to make an arrest again.
It's not consequence free, I'm not saying it doesn't happen, or that some officers rely on you not knowing your rights, but it is a serious matter.
Then what happens if you don't have ID on you (which, for now, is entirely legal in the UK)? What if you're hours from home? Do you then need to completely cancel your day to spend it with the cops instead satisfy some shit algorithm that misidentified you as some known threat? What if you refuse to cooperate because you have better things to do than waste your time with the police? I'm sure that'll go well for you.
What if your child falls victim to a false identification, and then given that children are far less likely to have some form of ID on them than adults, they're stuck for much longer?
Do you trust the British police to take good care of your child? Or will they strip-search her and threaten her with arrest like they did with the then-15-year-old Child Q because they decided that she "smelled of weed"?
Do you really want more unnecessary interactions with the police for yourself or those you care about when your "suspicious behaviour" was having an algorithm judge that your face looked like someone else's?
It's also worth noting that if you are arrested for a serious offence your DNA and biometrics will taken and held for ever even if you are release without charge and the real perpetrator latter convicted.
In the eyes of the law you will be innocent but you'll still be treated like a criminal.
The same could accidentally happen for a minor offence too.
West Yorkshire, West Mids, The Met and Great Manchester Police have all made admin "mistakes"[1] where they failed to delete DNA evidence since the Protection of Freedoms Act 2012 came into force.
No one has been sanctioned or fined for those mistakes.
You might not think being on that list matters but during the good ol' days of the 1980s innocent trades union activists were placed on a secret list by the Met's Special Branch and that list passed potential empoyers to bar them from getting jobs.
Again, no one punished for that and if it's happend once it can happen again.
See the Scott Inquiry for details.
1. These scare quotes are because I don't beleive this always happens through incompetence. I'm not saying it's always the case but some of the time the police are just ignoring the rules because the rules have no teeth.
On arrest, you're required to provide your name and address, not proof. For the absolute majority of UK adults, it takes exactly 2 minutes to verify that data against public records - passport, driving licence, council tax, voter registration.
Lying in that situation is a separate criminal offence all of its own.
>satisfy some shit algorithm that misidentified you as some known threat
Matches with a confidence rating of <0.64 are automatically deleted >0.7 is considered reliable enough to present to a human operator, and before any action is taken a serving police officer must verify the match, and upon arrest verify the match against the human.
>What if your child falls victim to a false identification
The age of criminal responsibility is 10, and absent any personal identification parental identification is the standard everywhere.
>15-year-old Child Q
The good old slippery slope fallacy. Both the officers who strip searched that child were fired for gross misconduct. North of 50,000 children are arrested each year and this happened once.
>Do you really want more unnecessary interactions with the police for yourself or those you care about when your "suspicious behaviour" was having an algorithm judge that your face looked like someone else's?
Thing is 12 months on, 1035 arrests, over 700 charges, and that hasn't happened because the point of testing the scheme thoroughly was to stop that from happening.
A constable is not going to be scanning the faces everyone going to Wembley in one night. Even 100 constables looking at faces entering faces going to Wembley is not going to scan everyone and recognise someone they know from a wanted poster (of maybe a couple hundred faces in their head).
The Met have already lied about the scale of false positives[0] by nearly 1000x, and it's not obvious how much better it will get. With the current tech, this rate will get worse as more faces are being looked for. If it's only looking for (I'm guessing) a thousand high-risk targets now and the rate is 1/40, as more and more faces get searched for this problem gets exponentially worse as the risk of feature collisions rise.
Of course, it'll also disproportionately affect ethnic groups who are more represented in this database too, making life for honest members of those groups more difficult than it already is.
The scale is what makes it different. The lack of accountability for the tech and the false confidence it gives police is what makes it different.
"The Metropolitan Police say that around one in every 33,000 people who walk by its cameras is misidentified.
But the error count is much higher once someone is actually flagged. One in 40 alerts so far this year has been a false positive"
These are 2 different metrics that measure 2 different things and so they are both correct at the same time. But I must say I am not clear what each exactly means.
Again worth mentioning something I've mentioned in other comments, and it's enormously obvious: There's a massive differene between unluckily being misindentified by some random copper who needs to get his memory or eyesight checked, and the percentage of false positives that's nearly guaranteed from a mass digital facial rec surviellance system working around the clock on categorizing millions of faces all over the country. The first is a bit of bad luck, the second will likely become pervasive, systemic and lead to assorted other shit consequences for many people being cross-checked and categorized in all kinds of insidiuous ways
You raise a good point that if the system wrongly ID you once it means that you're probably liable to be flagged every time you walk past one of those vans...
I think it's almost inevitable. The very nature of the bureaucratic procedures that grow up around these sorts of flag lists is that effort tends to accumulate at those points, right or wrong, and your being listed on them becomes almost self-reinforcing through bureaucratic inertia and over-caution, mixed with laziness about investigating if their own systems are wrong and repairing the problem.
Security theatre, like TSA shoe policies, inducing the panopticon.
Leaked rumors about facial recognition vans serve their purpose, and we post in these comments while literally in front of networked cameras.
The UK is quickly deploying surveillance state technology that people once decried China for. Whether or not this is ethical or useful, I wish the hypocrisy would be acknowledged. The OSA, the Apple encryption demands, LFR, …, it’s clearly a trend. Has society really become this dangerous that we must deploy these things?
The first time I taught, it was a rather interesting experience realizing how little capacity teachers actually have to deal with e.g. a disruptive student. Yeah you can pass them along to the disciplinarian or whatever, but in the end it's often empty threats - especially if the parents themselves don't particularly care, which in the case of highly disruptive students is nearly always the case. But if a class itself, or even a significant minority of a class, simply chose to stop cooperating - there's not much of anything anyone could do about it.
But when I went to school, I somehow felt like teachers had the power of the world behind them. I imagine, to some degree, politicians have a similar experience. There are countless people that wouldn't be upset at all about their decline, or worse. Of course this has always been the case, but I think modern politicians are becoming increasingly out of touch with society, and consequently also becoming increasingly paranoid about society turning against them. And society doesn't just mean you or me, but also the police and military, without the support of whom they'd just be some rich old frail men sitting around making lofty proclamations and empty threats.
I think this issue largely explains the increasingly absurd degrees of apparent paranoia and fear of the political establishment in most countries. As well as the push for domestic establishment propaganda, censorship of anti-establishment propaganda, defacto mandating politics from a young age, imposing it on the police and even the military, and so forth.
I come from Poland, where the streets are generally quite peaceful. Some of my friends from France and Germany say things feel less peaceful there. They believe immigration has played a role in that. I’m not here to agree or disagree — I can only share my own experiences.
The more disruption there is in society, the more people seem willing to accept increased control by authorities. I'm not necessarily saying this is part of some grand plan, but it does seem convenient for politicians when circumstances justify stronger control measures.
Yeah, I always wonder: is the tail wagging the dog or vice versa? Like maaaybe society is going through some organic disruption at the moment, but it’s so easy to foment a sense of crisis through mass media that it seems more likely it’s just being done to serve an agenda (start a war, consolidate power, disrupt opposition, extract wealth upwards, etc…).
My measuring stick is how “on message” the people reporting it tend to be. A real disaster or crisis is chaotic, and authentic reporting about it tends to be too (think about mixed messaging during the early days of COVID). If something happens and there’s a very clear narrative from the start about who the good guys and bad guys are, especially if it is trying to make me scared or mad, I just assume I’m being manipulated.
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I was taking an intercity coach to Glasgow recently and a teenage kid was on his phone browsing social media without headphones. I made a comment that he should use headphones or turn the volume off. He got defensive and angry. I did not to escalate, and put my earplugs on.
I do believe certain parcels of the society need to be restrained.
Go to any hospital waiting room, and 80% of the time there will be a 60+ year old woman playing some inane phone game with the sound on max.
Callous anti-social phone behavior isn't just the prerogative of teens.
There will also be the occasional large family cousins and all who tend to be very aggressive.
However, you won't notice the noise from her phone because it will be inaudible compared to the wall-mounted TV playing at high volume 24/7.
I have a far bigger problem with adults having calls in public places with their phones on speaker... should they be "restrained" as well?
Depends on public space. Busy street, who cares. Silent intercity bus, maybe. Library, for sure.
Exactly. I would expect it not to bother anyone on a busy street, but I would expect to told to stop it in a library, and to be kicked out in a theatre.
Phones on silent in a theatre yet with a sea of bright silent phone screens surrounding you as people watch TikTok, text, etc., the movie won't be very entertaining. Why I stopped going to movie theatres about 10 years ago.
I meant a theatre as in stage, not cinema. Rare for phones to be used even on silent in my experience.
Now is your time. Everyone else stopped going to the movies 10 years ago too!
Also the work breakroom should be a headphone only zone.
No Sharron I don't want to hear the gosip about your extended family as you talk on speaker with your sister about your trailer trash cousins. And Jack I don't want to hear your shitty political podcast with their hosts room temperture IQ...
Yes, if you want to live in a decent society that respects the personal space and rights of others, and not a zoo
I see this more of an invasion of the privacy of the other party and feel bad for them.
Also it's very rude (in British terms, so it's off-the-charts for me).
IMO it shouldn't even get that far, to questions of how much we should be allowed to ask of others in the name of basic decency; there's been a massive shift from people being self-regulating and trying to be considerate to others, to the conversation changing to something like, "how dare you even speak to me while I'm blasting tiktok loudly, I'm going to look up the letter of the law and see what the maximum disruption I can legally get away with is, fuck you!"
Basically sometime around the 00s-10s, seemingly everyone decided to become a massive dickface with zero concept of social cohesion, and it's just me me me me me me, and fuck everyone else.
Society needs a reset, pretty much everyone has just become vile, angry and inconsiderate / extreme main-character syndrome.
It's only a small minority who do things like that. Perhaps the proportion has increased slightly, but the biggest change is people are more afraid to challenge antisocial behaviour than before. So they are more bold.
this
The counter-culture movement was quite explicit in their mission to replace traditional social norms and values that led to social order with their opposites.
We shouldn’t be surprised society has fallen.
"society has fallen"
In the real world things seem to be pretty much the same as they have been for most of my life (and I am 60 in a few months).
Online, yes some people behave like monsters and occasionally some of that bleeds across into the real world - but overall I think we are pretty far from saying that "society has fallen".
Ive identified several aspects. Moral injury, new status baseline due to social media, and lack of awareness of effects our digital powers. Not enough time to type on this phone keybd but if ppl upvote i'll elaborate.
Yes.
Yes
Older persons are more often guilty of making noise with their phones, like talking loudly, having an obnoxious ringtone or watching a movie in full volume.
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Interesting leap you made there.
How can you do effective conflict resolution in a society where someone reads an anecdote about a rude teenager and immediately assumes the problem is multiculturalism?
I don't know if that's what they meant, but a generation gap in a rapidly changing society can absolutely be considered a cultural gap.
Culture and race are not the same thing.
Rephrased for you: If there is no dominant culture, how do you resolve conflicts like that?
> Culture and race are not the same thing.
I don't remember bringing up race. Another interesting leap.
But please do elaborate on what sort of 'dominant culture' you're longing for and what sort of policies you'd love to see to (re-)establish that 'dominant culture' to resolve the incredibly new phenomenon of teenagers being rude and rebelling against social norms.
Come on, don't be a coward and just drop the dogwhistling. You're bad at it.
Sorry, I thought you were dogwhistling.
A dominant culture means a step back from individualist values. The most effective 'policies' are created through communities not through law. We cannot rely only on the law for a healthy society; it is necessary but not sufficient.
Rebelling against cultural norms is not the problem. The problem is when people escalate quickly because of it and threaten others. That means the gaps between cultures/subcultures have gotten too big.
You randomly bring up multiculturalism as a problem to be solved in response to a story about a rude teenager of unknown cultural background, and assume I'm dogwhistling? Please elaborate because all I'm seeing here is projection.
But I see we've pivoted from "multiculturalism bad" to pseudo-intellectual theorizing about collective cultural conformity. Very smooth. Different packaging, still trying to sell the same product, though.
> The problem is when people escalate quickly because of it and threaten others.
Guy asked teenager to use headphones, teenager got defensive, guy put in earplugs. That's... literally de-escalation and conflict avoidance. Are we reading the same anecdote?
You've managed to escalate "rude teenager won't use headphones" into a lament about the decline of Western civilization and the need for cultural homogeneity. It's almost impressive how much ideological weight you're hanging on one kid's refusal to wear headphones.
> pseudo-intellectual
More name-calling. You still haven't addressed my initial question yet. I'll rephrase it again for you: How do you enforce norms without a dominant culture? Do we even need norms at all?
You're asking about norm enforcement failure, but the story shows norms working fine: expectation communicated, pushback received, de-escalation chosen, situation resolved peacefully, albeit not to the satisfaction of the commenter. The system worked.
The fact that the teenager got defensive is indicative of his understanding of societal expectations and norms. Bending and pushing against norms is what teenagers do, and have done since the dawn of time, regardless of their cultural background and regardless of whether they're navigating the norms of a dominant monoculture or those of a multicultural society.
Your question assumes there was some breakdown that needs fixing, but the only 'problem' was mild inconvenience. When did that become evidence of cultural collapse requiring homogeneity to solve?
You still haven't explained why 'teenager won't use headphones' made you think 'multiculturalism is a problem.' For all you know, this story involved two white Christian Scots from the same cultural background. I'll gladly discuss theories about norm enforcement with you once you've explained why you deemed it necessary to inject race and culture into a story that mentioned neither.
I'm not going to entertain your 'just asking questions' routine until you do.
All that and no answer? Thanks for trying, I guess.
That's a firm 'no' on explaining your original non sequitur then? I told you I'm happy to dive into theories, philosophy, and other theoretical scenarios once you've answered that simple question.
But you're welcome, I guess. At least one of us did.
Happy to hear an answer if you've got one.
I doubt you would be happy to hear it, actually. And I doubt it would change your opinion one bit.
You've kicked this entire thread off with an incredibly telling non sequitur: teenager won't use headphones -> multiculturalism bad. When called out on that leap, you pivoted to abstract questions about norm enforcement while ignoring that the norms actually worked fine in this situation.
You're not interested in debate. You're interested in getting someone to validate your predetermined conclusion about the necessity of a cultural hegemony. Having to acknowledge that norm enforcement wasn't actually broken here is pretty inconvenient for that narrative, isn't it?
Still waiting for you to explain that original leap, but we both know you won't. Because you can't without exposing yourself further. Good day. Thanks for playing.
You still haven't answered the question.
I've encountered this exact behaviour with teenagers both white and of colour. I am also an immigrant in the UK (racially white).
Okay. So how do you determine who is wrong?
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The parent said teenager - race was not mentioned.
I didn't mention race either. Why do you think culture and race are the same thing?
The same way you do in monoculturalism, so that's a meaningless distinction.
If the families did not impart these values to children from a young age, the "owner" of a space advertises and enforces the rules.
In this particular case the coach company should have had clear rules displayed in the coach (at least the basic and generic ones) and the driver should have enforced them at least on demand. Follow the rules or get off the coach.
Monocultures don't need explicit laws to regulate things, so it's not the same.
Your libertarian argument works in theory, but the reality is much harder when you can't rely on a shared culture.
Sure everything is simpler on Mars, move there then
No need. I live in a place which enforces the dominant culture.
You're shifting the blame from politicians to society because in your field teachers have lost power over students. It is a huge mistake to make such a parallel. In fact, teachers have lost power because the power has become much more centralized - thanks to the politicians. You're not allowed to punish a disruptive student singlehandedly - the government took that from you and gave it to people who don't really care. The government itself can't care less. The mass hypersurveillance is not designed to solve your problems, sorry, it solves problems of people with control buttons.
I kind of wonder how much of the apparent paranoia from politicians is that they always hear the worst. I doubt its coincidence that Home Secretaries almost invariably turn into huge supporters of surveillance and cracking down on things, and I think that probably comes from the fact they get a briefing everyday from various organisations who's entire reason for existence is to find and keep track of the very worst people. If I were in that position I imagine I'd find it difficult to keep perspective as well.
I think politicians are right to be afraid. Surveillance of this magnitude isn't a ballot-box-level grievance. It's a Guy Fawkes/V-level injustice. They're stepping into territory where the very people they're supposed to stop might instead turn justified.
It is fascinating, isn't it. It is like a downwards spiral with a line most people would not even think of considering crossing. That said, current version of the surveillance appears a little more pervasive ( and to an extent a little self-imposed ) so I wonder if that 'feeling justified' will even matter. Examples do exist of enduring dictatorships with extremely efficient intelligence apparatus turned on its populace.
men and women**
> The UK is quickly deploying surveillance state technology that people once decried China for.
they always had been or at least tried, for decades by now, the only thing which had been holding them back was the EU frequently being like "no wtf UK, that is against human rights, EU law, etc."
> Has society really become this dangerous that we must deploy these things?
no, and it also has a long track record of not only marginally improving your crime statistics. And especially stuff like facial recognition vans are most times not used to protect citizens but to create lists for who attended demos and similar. Which is most useful for suppressing/harassing your citizens instead of protecting them.
> was the EU frequently being like "no wtf UK, that is against human rights, EU law, etc."
The EU courts have sometimes been helpful, but the EU lawmakers have been atleast as bad as the UK: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Retention_Directive
As other comments have pointed out the EU has also pushed a lot of other privacy invasive legislation.
No, it is more like UK is now the new surveillance supermarket for EU: implementing what “works” for UK - trusted and applied technology.
And also the excuse included: “not China”, but even this doesn’t come as cause for concern anymore.
Have a look at the latest US “country report on human rights practices 2025”. Germany is flagged as unsafe so to say.
It is as you can only hope that the NSA has some way to spy on your data when EU gets more on more anti privacy and data protection means EU only storage is mandatory.
Dire times. Double standards are in full effect.
sure, we will trust USA to talk about human rights.
Don’t attack the messenger, attack the message.
A more applicable cliché might be,"Consider the source."
Anything coming out of a US government institution today is not trustworthy. Not sure why you'd reference the 2025 report. It's a laugh and a half that the country deploying the national guard in their own capital and putting the capital's police under federal government control is saying Germany is unsafe. The country that's rounding up immigrants and even US citizens to be deported to random countries.
Please. Stop falling for the right-wing propaganda.
Both things can be true at the same time, is not laughable at all.
Germany can be unsafe and US too to the extent they need national guard to get back control
We don't need national guard in the capitol deployed. Completely fabricated claim that crime is out of control. Absolutely a move to gain power and create internal enemies to fight while a certain list of clients is being much discussed.
the murder rate in American cities is out of control. Maybe Americans are blind to this, but there are 274 murders in DC alone in 2023. In ALL of Germany, there were something like 600 murders in 2023. DC has 730,000 people living there. Germany has 83 million people. What do you mean that DC doesnt have a crisis going on? The homicide rate is 4,500% higher than Germany, lol.
I define "in control" as dropping for the last 30 years
How can geemany be considered unsafe to the average american? The homicide and violent crime rate in the US is 10x higher than germany, even in the quiet and posh parts of the USA the murder rate is insanely high compared to anywhere in germany.
Nonsense. The murder rate in most of the USA is similar to Germany. My small city has literally zero murders most years. The vast majority of violent crime happens in few cities such as St. Louis, Baltimore, Chicago, and Washington DC. And then it's only in a handful of neighborhoods within those cities. We should fix those places but basic safety isn't something that most Americans have to worry about.
I think you should look up the stats instead of going based on vibes.
> EU frequently being like "no wtf UK, that is against human rights, EU law, etc."
And yet they are still pushing [0]
[0] https://edri.org/our-work/despite-warning-from-lawyers-eu-go...
It's almost like huge organizations built off the backs of many different parties working in tandem, will at times have contradictory aims.
In that case it would be nice to see any effort from EU against government surveillance.
Sure GDPR and what not, but they're full of loopholes for allowing government to do what private parties are not.
Certain EU citizens remeber the Stasi & friends. That's why Chat Control should be associated with the Stasi by anyone opposing it.
EU is trying to implemement chat control... again. That's their effort.
https://stopchatcontrol.eu/
It would be nice if we removed the security guards for politicans, and if they're not doing bad stuff, they have nothing to fear.
the EU has literally banned facial recognition by law enforcement across the entire bloc.
HN has terrible EU Derangement Syndrome:
any time its mentioned here, suddenly there are tens of people lining up to blindly shit on it, usually for laws it hasn't actually passed, or literal anti-truths like your comment, despite the fact that it is consistently passing the best tech-focused laws of any major governmental body anywhere, and the proposed laws that everyone repeatedly loses their minds over have never once actually come to pass. even when they released the DMA and DSA, possibly the two most HN-friendly pieces of legislation of all time, half the comments were attempts at criticism, basically seemingly because people here just love to hate the EU, sans facts
> the EU has literally banned facial recognition by law enforcement across the entire bloc.
This is simply wrong:
They have banned _live_ facial recognition - and with exemptions such as e.g. for terrorism and other severe crimes, which is becoming quite broad.
They are allowing facial recognition when done after-the-fact for law enforcement. Probably also for petty crimes.
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/press-room/20240308IP...
if you're going to change the central focus of your comment, do it in a reply not an edit
I edited mine after you edited yours.
Here is an article about live/post facial recognition:
https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-ai-facial-recognition-tec...
I edited mine to add additional observation, leaving the central focus the same. your edit entirely changed the meaning of your comment, changing the meaning of my reply
EU is on exactly the same road, just with a (tiny) delay.
except no, the EU has specifically outlawed facial recognition in public places
They have outlawed _live_ facial recognition in public places. And with exemptions such as e.g. terrorism, which I'm guessing is what UK is going to go for with protesters.
my friend, I'm sorry but this is simply a factual bridge too far. the EU has quite specifically brought out wide-ranging laws heavily restricting the very thing the UK is doing, plus a load of other very positive restrictions on the use of AI and biometrics in general, and yet your conclusion is that they're on the same path? it's like if I say I'm never going to eat meat except rare unavoidable occasions, and you think I'm en route to becoming the liver king. just admit you like criticising the EU and be done with it
What is non-factual?
We have another token legislation from EU forbidding private parties to most anything, and carefully inserting loopholes for authorities and government to do as they please.
True, the restrictions on live facial recognition is a bit more severe for law enforcement than usual.
But: A. It's not something most people here care about a lot. Law enforcement are still allowed to use AI to create a file on every citizen. B. It gives them political points, because now people less-in-the-know will think that they are actually protecting privacy, which is again, not true.
>forbidding private parties to most anything
well thank fuck for that! besides financial self-interest, why would you want private parties doing anything with AI and biometrics whatsoever? if anyone is to at all, it should be publicly accountable bodies that aren't operating based on a profit motive, but really it should be none at all!
>It gives them political points, because now people less-in-the-know will think that they are actually protecting privacy, which is again, not true.
this entire sentence stinks of "I just don't like the EU and I'm just going to criticise it no matter what". people in the know? people who have read the law specifically stating that facial recognition can only be used in severe, clearly-defined cases, with judicial approval, in highly time-limited windows? people who've read that if it is to be used post-hoc, it has to have judicial authorisation linked to a criminal offence. and you're saying that this in no way protects privacy?
the UK is rolling out AI police vans all over the country to try and recognise people they have on lists. no judicial approval is required, there's no time-limit, and as far as I'm aware there's no restriction on what crimes it's used for either. private companies are allowed to use it, obviously equally with no judicial approval
essentially mate, I think you need to have a good look at whether your opinions here are coming from "I genuinely think the EU's legislation is an issue here" or "I don't like the idea of the EU in general and I'm going to criticise anything it does"
I don't get this attitude. Private parties are me and you. I have many interests and ideas, and now many of those have been forbidden for no discernible reason, while the government is still allowed to spy on us to their hearts content.
I can't really begin to fathom how this is good.
"Private parties" are _not_ me and you. _I_ can't begin to fathom how you come to believe you are, unless you consider yourself a temporarily embarrassed billionaire, held back from success only by all this legislative overreach.
"Private parties" are mighty multinational enterprises with essentially limitless pockets, entities whose factual power and political influence rivals most governments. Countries all over the world have been struggling to restrain them for the past decade in order to keep their sovereignty.
What exact "interests and ideas" do you have that would involve the necessity for public facial recognition? Because I, for one, don't want my biometric data in your system without my explicit consent.
The beautifully named 32024R1689, aka AI Act, prohibits a lot of random stuff. It definitely makes many AI efforts into a legal minefield. It does not just cover live facial recognition in public spaces, which I personally could live without.
"Private parties" refer to non-governmental entities, such as individuals or businesses. You may be acting on a governments behalf, but I am not.
Private parties are quite literally me and you in addition to large multinational corporations. If you think large multinationals need to be restricted then just say that directly instead of putting forward nonsensical semantic arguments.
> I, for one, don't want my biometric data in your system without my explicit consent.
If it's a single individual watching (for example) the sidewalk in front of his house and not disseminating the data in any way then what does it matter? Where is the potential downside? There are plenty of neighborhoods with at least a few retirees sitting staring out the front window for multiple hours each day.
As far as I can tell in the vast majority of cases surveillance only becomes problematic when both ubiquitous and centralized.
Please stop telling people what stuff "reads like" until after you go over what they actually said. And never say something "reads like" anything akin to "you sound like a hater."
Or at least just say that straight instead of surrounding it with empty verbiage. The overwhelming proportion of people all over the world don't care about the EU until it does a horrible (or a good) thing, and then they care about the thing it did and why it might have done it. It's not their ex-boyfriend.
People are trying to figure out why it's run by crazy people now, and they blame this on the fact that it is largely an undemocratic organization run by extreme multi-generational elites with a quickly lowering opinion on human rights, freedom of speech and the importance of peace. This is not personal. The EU is not a person.
and they will race ahead if they get chat control through.
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I vouched for this, because there is spirited discussion happening here.
Also, since the UK has now criminalized calling the Gaza situation a genocide under terrorism statutes, the camera vans make sense in driving by peaceful protestors and getting all their faces for arrest later.
For all the Chinese surveillance hatred I've seen over the years, what the UK is doing is loads worse.
It's a war, not a genocide. Gaza is under seige. Hamas should unconditionally surrender but they prefer to put their children in harm's way than to surrender.
Tell me, if this is a genocide, what has happened to all the Jews in Jordan, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Afghanistan since 1950?
No, defense of Israel is the last stand of a people that has been slowly eradicated from their indigenous region for the last 80+ years.
Hamas simply needs to surrender in this round of the war they started. But they won't unless they control Jerusalem.
Whatever they were before, no reasonable person can consider hamas to be the government of Gaza. Or to be a credible military threat to anyone. They are a convenient excuse to continue the aggression.
FWIW, for much of the early months I would have agreed. Hamas was the de-facto government, and had an obligation to unconditionally surrender. Blending in with civilians can’t be a method to avoid military force.
You say that hamas is no "credible military threat" - may I beg you please reconsider this in light of the 1195 killed when they attacked on October 7? They're no world-class army, to be sure, but it's not like they have no teeth whatsoever...
I think they agree with you. Did you read the second paragraph?
> Tell me, if this is a genocide, what has happened to all the Jews in Jordan, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Afghanistan since 1950?
Maybe they were genocides too. I don't know enough about them. The holocaust certainly was a genocide. Yes.
But one genocide doesn't justify another. That's the thing.
Even what Hamas did (terrible as it was) doesn't justify all the dead civilians, withholding food, shooting at food pickup points etc.
I have no patience for this anymore.
you don't shoot children in the head and genitals in war.
you don't kill doctors and medical first responders in war.
you don't commit a policy of mass starvation against children while gaslighting us about it.
People like you need to be called out. its disgusting and I can't believe we're all still here putting up with it. the IDF is no better than hamas. they justs have bigger guns.
>It's a war, not a genocide. Gaza is under seige.
It can be 2 things.
>Hamas should unconditionally surrender but they prefer to put their children in harm's way than to surrender.
"Surrender" means leaving their kids with more of the same until the next flashpoint. Israel has orchestrated a no win scenario, and some people forced into that place have decided they would prefer violence now instead of later.
>what has happened to all the Jews in Jordan, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Afghanistan since 1950?
Some have been forcibly removed. Some of those countries also worked with the zionists to relocate those people willingly to palestinian land.
>Hamas simply needs to surrender in this round of the war they started. But they won't unless they control Jerusalem.
"Hamas wont stop until they are in a better position to defend palestinians" isnt the amazing argument you might think it is.
> "Hamas wont stop until they are in a better position to defend palestinians" isnt the amazing argument you might think it is.
Hamas has no interest in defending Palestinians much less peaceful coexistence [1]. Their primary goal is to conquer and destroy Israel for the glory of Islam.
> Ismail Haniyeh in 2020: He explained that Hamas rejects ceasefire agreements by which, “Gaza would become Singapore,” preferring to remain at war with Israel until a Palestinian state is established from the River to the Sea: “We cannot, in exchange for money or projects, give up Palestine and our weapons. We will not give up the resistance... We will not recognize Israel, Palestine must stretch from the [Jordan] River to the [Mediterranean] Sea.”
Truth is that there was a population exchange between Jews and Arabs after the 1948 war between their nations similar to what happened between Greece and Turkey in 1924 and several other regions during the 20th century. It’s tragic but those peoples accepted it and now largely live in peace. I believe many Gazans desire peace with Israel [3].
However instead of accepting reality, Hamas official policy is the destruction of Israel and the Jews [2].
1: https://www.adl.org/resources/article/hamas-its-own-words 2: https://avalon.law.yale.edu/21st_century/hamas.asp 3: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Gaza_Strip_anti-Hamas_p...
>Hamas has no interest in defending Palestinians much less peaceful coexistence [1]. Their primary goal is to conquer and destroy Israel for the glory of Islam.
Right, which is why I wouldnt ascribe to them the goal of creating a Palestinian state. They might say they want it, but it isnt really the result they are looking for. The comment I was responding to was making them look good.
>Truth is that there was a population exchange between Jews and Arabs after the 1948 war between their nations similar to what happened between Greece and Turkey in 1924 and several other regions during the 20th century. It’s tragic but those peoples accepted it and now largely live in peace. I believe many Gazans desire peace with Israel [3].
The majority of Gazans would be happy if Israel just respected their right to return. Israel could simply let all the gas out of the issue immediately. Send the settlers home, and let the victims of the nakba return to their land. I dont think anyone desires "peace" where peace is living in a giant open air prison subject to raids and interference from an external military.
>However instead of accepting reality, Hamas official policy is the destruction of Israel and the Jews [2].
Exactly. They perfectly mirror the zionist terrorists who fought for the establishment of Israel. And look where that got us. Israel being ruled and directed by those terrorists has created the current crisis. We cannot repeat that mistake and simply leave Hamas in charge of Palestine. But likewise the terrorist state of Israel must also be either reformed or replaced.
> The majority of Gazans would be happy if Israel just respected their right to return.
Sure and Greeks would love to have Constantinople back. Greece attacked Turkey to get Thrace back and failed. Most of the Greeks living there were expelled. Sucks but that’s war and conflict.
Yet we see that Greeks and Turks don’t suicide bomb each other daily to regain some lost historic sense of pride. They accepted their Diaspora, not kept them locked up as political pawns like the Arab countries did with Palestinians.
Statements like yours sound nice on the surface but are ignorant of practical realities and the messiness of the history.
Even by your own logic, after all, Israeli Jews are just exercising their “right of return” no?
> Israel could simply let all the gas out of the issue immediately. Send the settlers home, and let the victims of the nakba return to their land.
That would not work. You see what Hamas is willing and was able to do on Oct 7th. If Israel allowed that they’d likely be facing the same as Oct 7th continually.
The Arabs that remained after the Nakba are full Israeli citizens now. It’s not perfect but to my eyes living next to several Palestinian Israelis they have pretty good lives. Much better than in Jordan actually.
> They perfectly mirror the zionist terrorists who fought for the establishment of Israel. And look where that got us. Israel being ruled and directed by those terrorists has created the current crisis.
Atrocities were committed by both Arabs and Jews prior to 1948. Again you have a very slanted and inaccurate “white colonizers bad” of the history.
When two ethnicities begin fighting it’s very difficult for either side to remain docile. Naturally populations that once lived together will separate. I’m not justifying it, just pointing out the reality of the matter.
Even the British prior to 1948 proposed forced resettlement of Jews and Arabs in the region to reduce tensions and fighting. Both sides had terrorist elements. Your post minimizes and ignores that both sides were guilty.
Israel being formed just forced the issue and after all the surrounding Arab nations attacked them. Every other situation like that in recent history has had refugees leave or flee their homelands. Most have been allowed to resettle and make new lives, unlike the Palestinians.
Unlike the Palestinian governments, Israel has already given citizenship to remaining Arabs and proved they can live peacefully with their minorities. They grant the right to vote. They protect places of worship for all faiths. They’re not perfect but far better than how the Arab peoples and nations treat Jewish minorities pretty much anywhere in the Middle East.
I did a study abroad in Israel when they withdrew from Gaza in 2005. Most Israelis were supportive of it and removing illegal settlers in Gaza, yet it was a political battle against their own extremist elements. Yet despite doing that it only took a couple years before the rockets started coming from Gaza.
>Even by your own logic, after all, Israeli Jews are just exercising their “right of return” no?
No. There are surviving people with a clear right to return they were removed from. Its those people that Israel seeks to outlive by holding them in Gaza. Its happening now. That's not equivalent to some loose claim from a long time ago.
>That would not work. You see what Hamas is willing and was able to do on Oct 7th. If Israel allowed that they’d likely be facing the same as Oct 7th continually.
Lmao, if theres a fear that returned people would continue terrorism, the anger is coming from being held in an open air prison for decades. It should be a police matter, from a government that protects all citizens. Thats the only way to start to repair things.
>The Arabs that remained after the Nakba are full Israeli citizens now. It’s not perfect but to my eyes living next to several Palestinian Israelis they have pretty good lives. Much better than in Jordan actually.
Yes so the arabs that didnt let themselves get forced or ordered off their land retain some rights. That's not the amazing argument you might think it is.
>Unlike the Palestinian governments, Israel has already given citizenship to remaining Arabs and proved they can live peacefully with their minorities. They grant the right to vote. They protect places of worship for all faiths. They’re not perfect but far better than how the Arab peoples and nations treat Jewish minorities pretty much anywhere in the Middle East.
Yet you continually see them being forced off their land by settlers. If you have proven coexistence possible, you would only strengthen it by returning the refugees. If you want a 1 state solution, that state needs to demonstrate it is capable.
>Most Israelis were supportive of it and removing illegal settlers in Gaza, yet it was a political battle against their own extremist elements. Yet despite doing that it only took a couple years before the rockets started coming from Gaza
You need to understand that removing illegal settlers from gaza is like saying you stole someones house and gave them back the couch.
Israel literally has members of its own cabinet that pursue the extermination of palestinians. Gvir literally shows up to pro settler demonstrations and demands people be shot. You need to understand that a decade ago Israel was able to have its global image be quite pure, and people didn't read what Israelis and their government were saying at home. Now its quite easy to access, it would be simpler to drop the pretense.
> No. There are surviving people with a clear right to return they were removed from.
There’s very few Palestinians in Gaza alive from that time. Even then, while they may have a desire to return home it’s not something any other people in similar conflicts have gotten.
Just as the equivalent numbers of Sephardic Jews who had their properties and homes stolen in Arab nations aren’t going to get them back or get a right of return.
Again it sucks, but you’re asking for a fantasy that modern western people love. We forget how much of our peaceful lives were built on terrible histories.
However Gazans need to begin caring more about the lives of their children rather than trying to regain lost homes or some lost honor in controlling Jerusalem. Homes can be rebuilt.
> Lmao, if theres a fear that returned people would continue terrorism, the anger is coming from being held in an open air prison for decades.
Yet you forget that many Sephardic Jews in the Middle East lived under similar oppression for almost a millennia under various Muslim colonial powers. Yet you don’t give a pass for their terrible actions. That just shows your bias and lack of understanding of the actual history of the region.
You place all the blame on Israel, but Egypt controlled Gaza for decades. They also kept the Gazans trapped. They built concrete walls before the Israelis did.
Jordan keeps 2.39 million Palestinians trapped in refugee camps as well. Jordan tried allowing them to integrate in the 1970’s and they tried to assassinate the king and take over.
> It should be a police matter, from a government that protects all citizens. Thats the only way to start to repair things.
Also there is no “government” that could magically do what you’re saying. Governments aren’t magic. They’re created by people.
The UN British Mandate that was such a government and they proposed forcibly resettling and separating Jewish and Arab populations in the region. So even when your neutral government was tried it advocated for the same separation that happened.
Israeli Jews created a state to protect their people. Yet despite centuries of oppression by Muslim colonizers across the Middle East, Israel decided to give equal rights to their Arab citizens. In the past they’ve offered to allow some Palestinians to return as part of peace-fires and were rejected because they didn’t just want to return home. They have wanted to destroy Israel and install their own Islamic government. Arab nations around them encouraged this and funded this ideology.
> You need to understand that removing illegal settlers from gaza is like saying you stole someones house and gave them back the couch. Israel literally has members of its own cabinet that pursue the extermination of palestinians.
Again with the your simple slogans. Israeli people and their government went against their extremists and did the right thing in 2005.
Hamas did not reciprocate.
> You need to understand that a decade ago Israel was able to have its global image be quite pure, and people didn't read what Israelis and their government were saying at home. Now it’s quite easy to access, it would be simpler to drop the pretense.
You seem to forget that seemingly unlike yourself I lived there and studied Middle Eastern studies. I even learned a fair bit of Hebrew and a very little Arabic.
I even met some of those Israeli settlers. Generally unpleasant types.
However I rarely or never Israelis Jews say they wanted to kill all Palestinians. Most Israelis actually empathize with them and wished for peace but also want to protect their people. They cared less about houses and more about the lives of their people.
On the other hand, it was relatively common to hear Arab Palestinians wish for the death of all Jews when they learned I am not Jewish.
While I hope for peace in Gaza, I also know generations of ideological indoctrination of extremist Islamic won’t disappear overnight. You should study more on the history of the region, not this shallow westernized version.
> There’s very few Palestinians in Gaza alive from that time.
Ok and then who are those people that are living in Gaza and the West Bank right now? To which country do they belong?
> Even then, while they may have a desire to return home it’s not something any other people in similar conflicts have gotten.
I notice this kind of double-sided argument in lots of discussions. Human rights, Post-WWII world order when Israel is in the defensive, but "Everyone is doing it" and a weird fallback into 19th century "Great Game" morals when Israel is on the offensive.
>Homes can be rebuilt.
Homes can be rebuilt, they can be rebuilt where settlers destroyed them.
>it’s not something any other people in similar conflicts have gotten.
If your perspective is "Might makes right" that's a worse position for a people with the history that the jewish people have, than a position that seeks justice.
Justice, and Israel being seen to be doing justice, would make Jews much much much more secure than chasing refugees into a prison and then failing to return them to their land because "it just doesn't happen".
>Jordan keeps 2.39 million Palestinians trapped in refugee camps as well. Jordan tried allowing them to integrate in the 1970’s and they tried to assassinate the king and take over.
Likewise, pushing the idea that a people can be bad, the most literal genetic fallacy, is also not making jewish people safer.
>Also there is no “government” that could magically do what you’re saying. Governments aren’t magic. They’re created by people.
Theres the Israeli government. If they wanted to be seen as legitimate (instead of simply a tool for the settler movement) they would be seen to be doing justice.
>Israeli people and their government went against their extremists and did the right thing in 2005.
Thats crazy. It wasnt even the minimum required.
>However I rarely or never Israelis Jews say they wanted to kill all Palestinians. Most Israelis actually empathize with them and wished for peace but also want to protect their people. They cared less about houses and more about the lives of their people.
I mean its so easily sourced why bother denying it lmao.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2015/12/24/israeli-wedding-pa...
>While I hope for peace in Gaza, I also know generations of ideological indoctrination of extremist Islamic won’t disappear overnight. You should study more on the history of the region, not this shallow westernized version.
I know quite a lot about the history of this region, and everything I learn makes me even more angry with the state of Israel, and the extremists who built it.
> If your perspective is "Might makes right" that's a worse position for a people with the history that the jewish people have, than a position that seeks justice.
It’s not right, it just is. Ignoring realities of the situation has just made the lives of Gazans worse.
Accepting that the Jewish and an Arab populations separated and were exchanged after decades of fighting and massacres on both sides is just embracing reality.
The lives of the Palestinians would be better if as a culture and society, they accepted what happened and built new lives. The Israelis did.
Instead Gazan leaders with near unanimous popular support have continually tried to use violence and force to reconquer the lands they lost rather than protect their people. They use the lives of their children as human shields and their deaths as propaganda as they know militarily they’re weaker. They openly admit this.
Personally I find it cruel that parents in Gaza subject their children to indoctrination that being a jihadist and retaking Jerusalem is their noblest goal in life in order fuel a never ending conflict.
Again it’s tragic that two people groups with long established roots in the region were separated and displaced with both sides losing lands and properties during those decades.
However there’s no justice in saying only one of the two groups (the Palestinians) should be given their grand parents lands and properties back. That’s what the right of return of Palestinians would be as the Arab Muslim nations aren’t going to reciprocate for the displaced Jews.
Forcing relocation to “traditional” pre state of Israel regions would require even more horrible violence and force with people of both ethnicities loosing what they’ve built up in their lives. That’s not justice either.
That’s just wishful western liberal thinking. There’s usually a dash of racism of “poor brown people” too, despite the majority of Israeli Jews not being “white” or even from Europe.
> I mean it’s so easily sourced why bother denying it lmao.
I’m not denying it. Just saying that in my experience having met dozens or hundreds from both sides that one group was much more open on average to finding peace and even coexistence. That’s just my anecdotal data.
> I know quite a lot about the history of this region, and everything I learn makes me even more angry with the state of Israel, and the extremists who built it.
Then perhaps do you know enough of the history to be aware that Palestinians are largely descendants of the extremist Islamic colonizers who conquered the lands starting a thousand years back? The indigenous peoples there weren’t Arabs after all.
Those Muslim conquerors have for centuries persecuted not just Jewish, but also Christian, Druze, and many other minorities in not just Greater Syrian (what Israel and Palestine was called under the Ottoman Empire) but also the rest of the Middle East?
Again, I’ll point out that Arabs in Israel have equal rights as citizens and better lives than those in most of the surrounding Arab countries. There’s certainly some racism against them but they can and do build prosperous lives.
Trying to recast the history of the region into a white-colonial issue of the past 120 years is being ignorant of the history of the peoples and ethnicities in the area over the past 1000 years and more.
>The lives of the Palestinians would be better if as a culture and society, they accepted what happened and built new lives. The Israelis did.
The Israelis imported jewish people from all over the world to live on land that they pushed the palestinians out of. Its not exactly an equivalent "Move on" situation. Moving on would be aided by getting access to their land.
>However there’s no justice in saying only one of the two groups (the Palestinians) should be given their grand parents lands and properties back. That’s what the right of return of Palestinians would be as the Arab Muslim nations aren’t going to reciprocate for the displaced Jews.
I mean, happy for jewish refugees to be returned to various arab countries, heck even germany. I would not argue if they wanted to return to where they were removed from in living memory. The issue is that they don't, they are happy living on Palestinian land, while holding palestinians hostage.
>Then perhaps do you know enough of the history to be aware that Palestinians are largely descendants of the extremist Islamic colonizers who conquered the lands starting a thousand years back? The indigenous peoples there weren’t Arabs after all.
I am aware, but 1000 years ago is kind of outside of our timescale. If it helps, sometimes I do think Britain would be better off without the angles or saxons, but too much time has passed in both circumstances.
>Again, I’ll point out that Arabs in Israel have equal rights as citizens and better lives than those in most of the surrounding Arab countries. There’s certainly some racism against them but they can and do build prosperous lives.
Its fairly plainly false. Again, you speak of knowing so much about the region, but if you see how people are forced to live in the west bank you would never use the term equal.
You should really educate yourself on this topic.
Even it were a siege you also have the West Bank situation, where people have been squeezed into smaller and smaller areas with roadblocks and the establishment of settlements, and even that situation at its present intensity with actual killings is genocide.
I'm very happy to call what's happened to Jews in the middle east for the past century a genocide, but you don't earn genocide brownie points that you can inflict on another group.
If the war in Gaza was really just about Hamas, then a) Israel wouldn't have been tacitly supporting them for decades, and b) It would be well and truly over already, given that they're completely defanged and have no more competent regional allies.
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It's only genocide if it happened in Europe in the 20th Century - otherwise it's just a sparkling ethnic-cleansing.
Israel needs to open it's borders and embrace multi-culturalism.
"Death to Israel" is not a culture. The surrounding countries don't care about Palestinians or Israelis.
The surrounding countries are not massacring civilians for the purpose of creating a racially pure ethnostate.
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“Tell me, if this is a genocide, what has happened to all the Jews in Jordan, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Afghanistan since 1950?”
Wtf does some history lesson you want to be coy about have to do with innocent civilians starving, every day, more and more, in the present moment?
>Has society really become this dangerous that we must deploy these things?
Over the last hundred years, violent crime has droped sharply worldwide.
Over the last twenty years, it has fallen alot in developed countries such as Western Europe, North America, Japan and South Korea.
In the United Kingdom, both violent and property crime have gone down in the past two decades. The main exception is fraud, scams and cybercrime, which have increased.
Overall, crime, especially violent crime, is far lower now than it used to be.
So why does it not feel that way? Mostly because we are floded with news about every incident. It sticks in our heads and makes us beleive things are worse than they are. It is like air travel: whenever there is a major crash, the headlines fill up with every minor incident, even though flying has never been safer than it is today.
This is less about criminality and more about control.
There's definitely an argument to be made that things have gotten safer because we have more surveillance, but that argument also has many valid counter-arguments, and giving away your freedom for absolute law and order isn't the way to go in my opinion, especially when you use narratives like "crime in DC is at an all time high" like we've seen in the USA lately which is false. https://www.justice.gov/usao-dc/pr/violent-crime-dc-hits-30-...
A balance of surveillance and freedom is necessary for a healthy society. (By surveillance in this context, I mean simple things like CCTVs, police patrols, not necessarily drag-nets, face rec, whatever mind you).
Yeah, I mean if the UK is covering up and not counting 1000's of underaged girls being raped (with some police literally participating in the rape) the statistics are bound to look better than they are in reality.
Having said that, I don't think the surveillance state they're setting up even has the intent to change any of that.
I wouldn’t believe everything you read in the Daily Mail or that comes out of Farage or Yaxley-Lennon‘s mouth
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotherham_child_sexual_exploit...
Thanks for posting the link, can't believe it was happening in 2016
> The police collected bags of clothes the girl had saved as evidence, but lost them two days later. The family was sent £140 compensation for the clothes and advised to drop the case.
"I wouldn’t believe everything you read in the BBC or that comes out of Starmer or Blair's mouth."
How about instead of attacking credentials we attack the arguments, you know, with evidence? Or, if your best defence is saying "your ideas/evidence come from unsavoury sources (to me)" maybe your positions are more reflective of your own biases than reality.
The poster implied there is an active cover up whereas the case went to court, was prosecuted and became the subject of a judge led enquiry
The accusation that immigrant men from Muslim backgrounds are sex offenders is a well worn trope pushed by the far right and people like Farage and Yaxley-Lennon
If you actually look at crime statistics in the UK sex offenders, including grooming gangs are overwhelming white men — if you look closer you often find that a reasonable proportion of people on the far-right have convictions for sex offences
And if you want statistics
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/aug/14/grooming-gangs...
3.7% of sexual abuse cases involved group based abuse
Asian or British Asian people account for 5% of offenders while making up 9% of the British populatiin
It doesnt take a lot for people to feel less safe in their environment. So for example violent muggings on the subway may be down, but if the subway is grimy, degraded, and there are young men hanging around, people get antsy. And then selling surveillance etc is an easy push to the voters.
I don't think its fair for someone to say, "well, its all scare mongering by the Daily Mail". They certainly have an interest in making the world seem scary, but the perception of danger is very strong regardless of what a tabloid rag says.
"Broken windows" policing, as tried under Mike Bloomberg in New York, is unfashionable in the US and the UK, and has led to abuses, but there's a kernel of truth in there somewhere.
I often think about how much of an effect things like "see it, say it, sort it" and "we do not tolerate abuse to our staff" and "you are being watched, cctv" and "thieves will be prosecuted" and "smartwater in operation" and "cash not left in tills overnight" in otherwise wealthy and low crime areas contributes to a feeling of unsafety and dog-eat-dog world
It's possible that these kinds of signs actually have the reverse deterrent effect.
Criminals might be deterred by knowing that people definitely get arrested in a certain location, because, say, they've seen it themselves, or because they see a presence of law enforcement, or because they innately sense its a high status environment where law enforcement response is to be expected.
A criminal seeing a sign might conclude that the sign is actually telling them that no immediate law enforcement response is likely.
For example, in London, you dont see CCTV signs in the shops along Sloane Street (super high end retail) but you definitely see them in Primark (very ordinary store, like US Kohls).
Wonder if there are any studies on this?
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That's been the biggest thing in the news for years now.
They've been doing this for years at protests, using "Forward Intelligence Teams". Even back in 2010 [1] there was an action group trying to protest this growing police-state (Fitwatch). The UK has had an insane number of CCTV cameras for as long as I can remember.
Must be a truly dangerous place...
https://web.archive.org/web/20100824175032/http://fitwatch.o...
> Must be a truly dangerous place...
I don't know if you're awaee, but the number of arrests for terrorism has skyrocketed in recent months, in the UK.
Sounds terrifying, until you realise people were arrested as terrorists for holding placards. (That fact is of course terrifying, but in a chilling way).
I hope I’m not adding 2 + 2 to get 5, but it’s incredibly convenient that a lot of people are being charged for supporting a proscribed group the same month as the online safety act is rolled out…
The cynic in me almost wonders if when it comes to re-election time, these increased numbers in terrorist charges will be trotted out and the context conveniently forgotten.
I dont think it really signifies anything more than there being a rather dim and unimaginative set of authoritarians in charge.
Terrorism hasn’t historically been an election issue in the UK, so this seems enormously unlikely.
It does sound terrifying that arrests for terrorism have skyrocketed lately, given that I'm pretty sure that it's neither the case that the number of terrorists has skyrocketed lately, nor the ability of the police to catch terrorists.
You forgot to mention those people are holding placards in support of an illegal "terror" group whose objective is to protest the unnecessary human loss of life in Palestine by spray painting British military equipment.
Obligatory legal notice that I obviously do not support said group, but historically terrorists would actually need to commit acts that instil a sense terror in people to further their political objectives. N one I've spoken to feels even remotely terrorised by Palestine Action, and it wouldn't even make sense to be given what they stand for.
I say this as someone who neither supports Palestine Action or shares their concerns.
Even more chilling when you find out that sentences for previous criminals are being commuted and reduced significantly for heinous crimes (theft, burglary, rape, assault, etc.), so as to clear space and make room in prisons to accommodate these "terrorists".
https://news.sky.com/story/prisoners-to-be-released-after-se...
The more dangerous people they can get on the street the more fear they can generate and the more they can whip the public to their bidding. Getting rid of the few people trying educate the public on these matters goes hand in hand.
> spray painting British military equipment.
Spraying paint down military jet engines rendering them inoperable until repaired, at a cos of millions of pounds.
> historically terrorists would actually need to commit acts that instil a sense terror in people to further their political objective
The legal definition of terrorism in the UK has for many years (at least all of the current century, I think a lot longer) included "serious damage to property":
https://www.cps.gov.uk/crime-info/terrorism
and I think causing many millions of pounds worth of damage is clearly serious.
I do not entirely agree with the definition (I particularly oppose making collecting information and disseminating publications terrorism) but it is what has long been accepted.
Palestinian Action are a sanitised, Westernised front for Hamas fundraising. Their founders have praised the Oct 7th attacks and called for repeats. That by most measures counts as being an active part of terrorism. The spray painting was pretty small in the list of threats they pose.
Palestine Action broke into a British military base and sabotaged millions of pounds' worth of equipment. What did you expect the government to do exactly — shrug it off? What kind of message would that have sent?
The Terrorism Act 2000 gives "serious damage to property" as one definition of terrorism so I find it hard to argue that the government was doing anything more than neutrally applying the law here. Those protestors knew full well they were supporting a proscribed group and they were warned what the consequences would be. Protesting in support of Palestine remains entirely legal in the UK just as long as you don't use the name and branding of this one specific group.
I'll probably regret posting this but there are some extremely disingenuous half-truths in this thread and I think that readers should know the full context.
Personally I expected prosecutions for sabotage rather than for terrorism.
The UK has very broad terrorism legislation, but conventionally terrorism is something directed at civilians, and it's not something we usually tar, for example, resistance groups with.
I think you even have to be able to kill people in internal political conflict without being called a terrorist. There are many circumstances during which such things are necessary.
FWIW the specific activists who entered the base were charged with "conspiracy to commit criminal damage" and "conspiracy to enter a prohibited place knowingly for a purpose prejudicial to the safety or interests of the UK", not terrorism. [0]
[0] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c3dp5158720o
Yes, but then the organization was proscribed as a terrorist organization.
There's no legal mechanism to ban/proscribe a group in the UK except under terrorism legislation: https://www.perplexity.ai/search/for-what-reasons-other-than...
If the government wants to shut this group down (which I think is a reasonable response to an attack on our military) then I'm not sure what other options were available to them. And like I said, what they did seems to meet the legal definition of terrorism (regardless of whether that definition is a good one.)
Of all the arguments we could be having about Palestine, I'm really not going to shed any tears for Palestine Action.
But I'm not here to get lost in the weeds, I just objected to the misleading half-truths that were being presented above. Most people reading this don't follow UK news closely and might come away with the impression that the government is banning pro-Palestine protest entirely, or is making it illegal to merely "hold placards". That's an outrageous distortion, and it hardly helps the pro-Palestine cause. I couldn't let it slide.
Here in Sweden what organizations are engaged in terrorism is up the courts and the government has no right to intervene at all to proscribe a group, with EU and other political terrorism designations being irrelevant.
Furthermore, I think that there is a duty, if one suspects that a capability is or may be used to aid genocide, to destroy that capability. Hopefully Palestine Action are incorrect, and targeting assets that have not been used to aid genocide or otherwise make it easier, but if they are right and the UK have actually aided genocide, then they have done too little violence.
> You forgot to mention those people are holding placards in support of an illegal "terror" group whose objective is to protest the unnecessary human loss of life in Palestine by spray painting British military equipment.
Yet more false equivalence.
You can be for Palestine.
You can be for Hamas.
You can be against ethnic cleansing.
You can be against genocide.
These are all different things. And note, this smearing of things like equating 'genocide to Hamas so they deserve it' doesn't make genocide better.
This smearing terms together is also being done by Israel as well, by trying to equate Israel with Judaism, and all Jews across the world. And that any denouncing of actions done in a genocide or ethnic cleansing is somehow antisemitic.
All of these false equivalence arguments are basically just motte-and-bailey fallacies.
You can be for Hamas?
I'm not, but I know those who are.
Hamas won the 2006 Palestinian legislative elections. Last elections too. For quite many, Hamas are freedom fighters defending against invaders.
Hamas won that election in large part by throwing their opponents off the tops of buildings, and then, having secured power in Gaza, never allowed another election, to the point where a plurality of Gazan Palestinians are not old enough ever to have participated in an election. Anyone calling Hamas "freedom fighters" is telling on themselves. No, I don't think you can reasonably be for Hamas.
I don't have anything else to nitpick about your comment! Just that one thing you said stuck out, because, no; being for Hamas is like being for the Khmer Rouge. Like, yeah, western imperialism in Indochina was absolutely a thing at the time of the Khmer Rouge. But no, you don't get to be for the Khmer Rouge!
("Last elections too"? What did you mean by that?)
Its Orwellian.
It still arguably complies with the Paradox of Tolerance.
Terrorists (as well as their supporters) are intolerant and non-pluralist. Therefore, for a pluralist society to survive, it must be intolerant of one thing- intolerance.
The paradox of tolerance isn't wrong, but it's also invoked awfully quickly in the last years, often by people who weren't tolerant to begin with.
I'd at least like to know who defines who is a "Pluralist" and who is a "Terrorist".
Also: The paradox of tolerance can legitimately be used to call intolerant behaviors of individuals. When you use it to define entire population groups as "intolerant", and therefore not worth of protection, you have joined the side that you ostensibly want to fight against.
You can define who is tolerant and who is not literally from the definition of the word. It's not a problem.
> When you use it to define entire population groups as "intolerant"
There are suitable cases, eg. if you are in jihad or other extremist sect where part of ideology is intolerance
> When you use it to define entire population groups as "intolerant", and therefore not worth of protection, you have joined the side that you ostensibly want to fight against.
Suppose there was an organization that had written by-laws which were not permitted to be changed but which demanded adherence (on pain of death), including never leaving the organization. Also suppose that most of the members of that organization collectively decided not to adhere to all of its rules (some were considered incompatible with "progress")... but some continued to. And others sometimes began to, but only under stress, because the by-laws book (which, again, cannot be changed, on pain of death) made NO clarification on scope of application, and people were free to interpret the by-laws literally.
Why would you not judge that organization, given that its by-laws are its core? Why would you make special exceptions for ANY organization (or its members), here?
I mean, objectively-speaking, if we weren't reflexively defending the org we're of course discussing, it sounds like a dystopian science-fiction novel. (If I'm being honest, it sounds A LOT like Warhammer, actually.)
Here's a fun thing to read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naskh_(tafsir)
"With few exceptions, Islamic revelations do not state which Quranic verses or hadith have been abrogated, and Muslim exegetes and jurists have disagreed over which and how many hadith and verses of the Quran are recognized as abrogated, with estimates varying from less than ten to over 500."
Also note that naskh tends to recognize later passages as overriding earlier passages. Guess which ones are the more violent ones...
See a problem, yet? Please don't gaslight me into not seeing one.
"Sovereign is he who decides on the exception."
Exceptions are hypocrisy, by definition.
If you need exceptions, abandon the rule, because it is no longer a rule, it is just a discriminatingly applied proscription.
Who decides who is considered “tolerant” and who isn’t? This idea is ripe for manipulation and will end up producing the opposite of what was intended.
To be sure, in the original context of Popper's writing, I believe "intolerant" meant something like "committing violence against others for disagreeing with you", and "tolerate" meant "refrain from intolerance". The full quote is below:
"Less well known [than other paradoxes] is the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal."
> I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force;
Sounds like speech suppression with force because (later in the quote) the speech may later give way to force. If he was only talking about force in response to force it wouldn't be considered a paradox I don't think. This quote hasn't dispeled popular characterizations of his stance for me, it seems in line with what most people say he's saying.
As you say, it's because the speech may later give way to force. It does go farther than American free speech law permits: the latter draws the line at something like "threats of immediate criminal action", whereas this would attack "propagating ideologies that one thinks will eventually lead the followers to criminal action". There are certainly deep problems with potential implementation here: e.g. the main American political parties would probably both accuse each other's ideology of eventually leading the followers to criminal action. One would want high standards for that (of, say, what percentage engage in what magnitude of criminal action; as well as evidentiary standards), and want it to be established in a mega-trial, or by a supermajority of Congress declaring war on an ideology; and even that might not be enough. I'm not necessarily in favor of Popper's approach, except in emergencies.
However, I think that, when most people use the word "intolerance" today, they include things like speaking racial slurs or expressing any negative emotion towards a demographic group. There are contexts in which these things are done, and manners in which they are done, in which, yes, they do give a significant signal that the speaker is the type who would cheerfully escalate to aggressive violence towards the targeted group; but also contexts and manners in which they do not give such a signal.
I think there is a distinction to be drawn here, between "always tracking whether this is likely to escalate to criminal action" and "just attacking anyone who vaguely resembles a known 'intolerant' group". The latter is essentially an autoimmune disorder, which has led to massive collateral damage and its own discrediting. The former ... has a danger of turning into the latter, certainly (which has an interestingly meta angle to it), but is there any version of it that is well-protected against that fate? I expect there's room for improvement compared to earlier versions. I don't know if it can be done well enough to be worthwhile.
I think we can have stronger protections in the US, while keeping it within existing frameworks. Why is it constitutionally ok to give mega corporations strong protections against slander backed by the state who will enforce the ruling, but protection of ethnic groups from slander is constitutionally off limits? It doesn't follow from the constitution.
Huh? Have you even read the Constitution? This has nothing to do with slander.
No, we need to be intolerant of people who threaten others freedom. It does not require preventing them from expressing intolerant views. It means preventing them from actively trying to harm or intimidate others - e.g. making threats, becoming actually violent etc.
The paradox of tolerance disappears if you look at tolerance not as a moral standard, but as a social contract.
If someone does not abode by the terms of the contract, they are not covered by it.
In other words, the intolerant are not following the rules of the social contract of mutual tolerance.
Since they have broken the terms of the contract, they are no longer covered by the contract, and their intolerance will NOT be tolerated.
Aka the "fundamental contradiction of liberalism".
It’s basic game theory. If someone is not nice to you, you have to be not nice for them.
Are you talking about the tit-for-tat strategy in the Prisoner's Dilemma? That's a particular toy model with an exaggeratedly punitive payoff matrix. But not every daily interaction can be reasonably mapped onto that matrix. A random interaction with a brusque stranger in a queue isn't necessarily going to result in a good outcome for your being rude ('defecting') in a tit-for-tat. If anything it might cause you more stress and embarrassment than if you'd remained mum.
I can't tell if this is serious or not, but I strongly disagree with this advice if it is.
>* The UK has had an insane number of CCTV cameras for as long as I can remember.*
Per-capita it’s less than the US.
But with the smaller space for the population, it's nearly total coverage from multiple angles vs the wide distances separating the equivalent number of cameras in the US.
The original figure included private CCTV systems which to all intents and purposes aren't available to government bodies without a warrant.
And generally people speak about London specifically and not about rural UK areas.
The CCTV cameras I've never really had a problem with - despite what TV shows and films would like to tell you they're not actually a single coherent CCTV network, a vast proportion of them are operated by random shopkeepers, private home owners, and other such places. If they want footage from them the police are typically going to have to send someone out to ask for it, and then hope they haven't reused the storage already.
This sort of thing, deploying facial recognition systems in the street in the hope of finding someone, is much more insidious. Technically you can choose to bypass it, or pull something over your face, but that's more or less guaranteeing that you'll be stopped and questioned as to why you're concerned about it.
Sadly the UK never met an authoritarian they didn't like (apart from Hitler, so long as you're not as bad as Hitler himself you're good though). When surveyed the British public will call for banning basically anything they don't like, even if it doesn't impact them at all.
I don't think this is true. Apparently the operation of a large majority of those private cameras is in fact outsourced to a handful of big security companies, and many of them are remotely operated. This makes getting access to private cameras a lot easier for police than you think.
If you've ever had to deal with the UK police as a victim of a crime, you'll quickly find out they're pretty useless at obtaining CCTV footage. I was asked to get it myself, to which the business who owned the CCTV told me they would only hand it to the police, so nothing happened.
> despite what TV shows and films would like to tell you they're not actually a single coherent CCTV network
Isn't that the CC in CCTV? Closed circuit implies that it's restricted to an on prem network
There's no small irony that facial recognition isn't going to recognise the faces of those currently racing around on e-bikes stealing phones wearing their 'safety balaclavas'. Or, indeed, some of the more militant protesters that are turning up all over the place. It's a cliche, but if you have nothing to hide, and intend to protest peacefully, why are you covering your face?
> It's a cliche, but if you have nothing to hide, and intend to protest peacefully, why are you covering your face?
because who says the state (and the people acting for it, e.g. police) are always the good guys
there is a VERY long history of people being systematically harassed and persecuted for things which really shouldn't be an issue, and might not have been illegal either (but then the moment a state becomes the bad guy "illegal" loses meaning as doing the ethical right thing might now be illegal)
like just looking at the UK, they e.g. "thanked" Alan Turing for his war contributions by driving him into Suicide because he was gay
or how people through history have been frequently harassed for "just" not agreeing with the currently political fraction in power, and I really mean just not agreeing not trying to do anything to change it
and even if we ignore systematic stuff like that there has been also more then just a few cases of police officers abusing their power. Including cases like them stalking people, or them giving the address of people to radical groups, or blackmailing them for doing stuff which is legal but not publicly well perceived. (E.g. someone had sex with their wife on a balcony not visible from the street but visible from a surveillance camera).
And even if nothing of this applies to you, if there is no privacy and mass surveillance this can also help people in power to frame you for something you didn't do. Like e.g. to make you lose your job so their brother in law can get it instead.
and even ignoring all that you should have a right for privacy and since when is it okay to harass people which just want to defend their rights?
anyway if you think is through "I have nothing to hide" is such a ridiculous dump argument.
> like just looking at the UK, they e.g. "thanked" Alan Turing for his war contributions by driving him into Suicide because he was gay
Well. Maybe[0].
[0] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-18561092
Just because there is a chance he did not kill himself, that does not negate the fact that homosexuality was illegal, and that the state expended resources to prosecute him! British people now overwhelmingly see such policies as reprehensible, regardless of who might or might not have considered suicide because of them.
You're countering things I didn't say.
Wow, never heard this version. Fascinating.
I'm thinking it through, and I've arrived at the puzzling conclusion we shouldn't make it too hard for people to break the law.
Isn't that precisely the point. If there are so many laws that are so easily broken, you have a reason to pickup anyone of interest at any time.
Eh, I see what I wrote was ambiguous. I meant "not hard to defy the law", you're on "not hard to be tripped up by the law".
Same jail
Not so puzzling; see also this classic post from Moxie Marlinspike, founder of Signal: https://moxie.org/2013/06/12/we-should-all-have-something-to...
> Over the past year, there have been a number of headline-grabbing legal changes in the US, such as the legalization of marijuana in CO and WA, as well as the legalization of same-sex marriage in a growing number of US states.
> As a majority of people in these states apparently favor these changes, advocates for the US democratic process cite these legal victories as examples of how the system can provide real freedoms to those who engage with it through lawful means. And it’s true, the bills did pass.
> What’s often overlooked, however, is that these legal victories would probably not have been possible without the ability to break the law.
The optimal amount of fraud or lawlessness isn't zero.
>if you have nothing to hide
But it's not you that decides that what you are doing is harmless. It's what the authorities decide; and that can be quite different from what you or other people deem "nothing to hide".
You're mixing your definitions of authoritarian, there's authoritarian in the 'Nolan chart' sense of the word, which just means 'not a Libertarian', which is like 98% of people, which is different to the Hitler meaning of authoritarian, which means 'rejecting democracy'. If the people agree to ban things they don't like, that's democracy, so it's the Nolan kind of authoritarian but not the Hitler kind of authoritarian. Deciding the people shouldn't be allowed to agree collectively to ban certain things is rejecting democracy, so it's Hitler authoritarian but not Nolan authoritarian.
> The UK has had an insane number of CCTV cameras for as long as I can remember.
By the way, do anybody care what would happen (at least psychologically) in case of a massive blackout or cyber-incident?
Just imagine something akin to what happened to the Iberian peninsula a few months ago, the country goes into flame quickly preventing recovery and then it's on. Most of the systems the UK has to control its population are inoperable.
I am pretty sure it is in the back of the mind of the UK leaders when they negotiate with Russia and China....
You think it would turn into an impromptu de facto purge (of The Purge fame)?
Judge Dredd was an 80s reaction to this ethos. It’s old.
The fact the UK police deploy teams with cameras to record crime is really not the dystopian hellscape Fitwatch like to make out it is.
Suppose it depends on what it's used for. We could trust the government to be good, but governments are made from people, elected by people. And people are often shitbags to each other.
For all the CCTV in London I've been mugged twice and nothing was captured on CCTV nor were the police all that interested in doing anything about it. As an outsider living here I think the UK has huge social problems that are neglected in favour of retaining classism. America has the same problems but at least it's more "ah, what can ya do about it huh" rather than "we are a perfect polite society British values bla bla".
> We could trust the government to be good
no. you cannot. ever.
even if you have perfect faith in current government, you're one election away from something different.
CCTV is also extremely ineffective in crime prevention in general, and actually catching criminals - one of few studies(back when i did write my thesis on subject related to it) used different areas of UK to measure crime fighting capability and effect of CCTV - by finding similar areas with and without CCTV and comparing crime statistics.
they only worked on parking lots, there was no measurable differences in plazas, alleys, roads, highstreets etc.
and a bit of anecdotal evidence - once cameras at my older workplace caught robbery to a place next door. With criminal looking directly at the camera, before bashing the window with a brick, jumping in, and hopping out with accomplice. They never got caught. This was quite decent camera, with face clearly visible - i know this because we directly cooperated with police.
The 2 best surveillance methods for crime investigation are LPR Cameras and cashless public transport.
Both of them then rely on the next step after providing information, following the people who triggered the first layer with CCTV.
If I went into my local CBD right now, and comitted some badass crime. explode a cop car or something we all yearn to do. All the exits are covered. I wont get anywhere walking and covering my face. I can get on a train but the rozzers will know where I get off. Likewise, if I jump in a car, they can track it almost anywhere for the next 100 kilometers.
I dont think the goal is prevention, its the guaranteed catch. Its the body of evidence that starts piling up when you burn cop car 1.
When brisbane introduced the go card system, we had our first arrest based on go card travel data within a month.
Sad really.
>bit of anecdotal evidence - once cameras at my older workplace caught robbery to a place next door. With criminal looking directly at the camera, before bashing the window with a brick, jumping in, and hopping out with accomplice. They never got caught. This was quite decent camera, with face clearly visible - i know this because we directly cooperated with police.
I helped an employer comply like this once. Someone had been brutally killed by a driver. The victim only existed for like 3 frames on the recording. But the cop wasnt interested in that anyway. They had managed to sneak drugs out of their car, into their pocket and then hide them in our garden, mid arrest. Embarrasing for the cop you see. The cop already had the driver on vehicular manslaughter, but thanks to the power of CCTV, they could also add a charge for drug crimes.
Totally agree; because us humans are animals. Without editing the genetic history of our evolution and hence all a manner of behaviours out of ourselves this will never change - because would we be human afterwards?
It's human to help your friend because they're in need; that's how tribes work. But it's just as human to disparage or sabotage someone who isn't a part of your tribe, to not care about them. To lie and cheat and be corrupt.
As for police effectiveness; there are shady groups of people that hang out in dark alleys in some central London areas every single weekend. You need only walk around/down the wrong place to meet them. All it takes is sting operations where a plainclothes officer acts drunk and hits a "get 'em, boys" button to bring in the fuzz when they inevitably get attacked.
There are all sorts of socio-economic-political issues that contribute to all this, though. But the root problem is in the apathy of the general public, none of us care about anything unless it affects us personally.
Cutting the amount of police per person from 1 per 1000 to 1 per 10,000 under conservative rule did a lot of damage.
Yeah, for sure. In NZ I used to see cops on the beat, just walking around and showing a presence. It also means that people see them as there to help out.
You can kinda see that in some parts of the UK still, but certainly lack of staff really affects them; particularly when UK seems to have higher incidences of more violent crimes, more drug related crimes, etc. Turkish gangs shooting little girls in the middle of London.
Even if you have a "good" government that goodness will make it a target for those who seek to co-opt it as a means to their desired end, and their desired ends are never good because if they were they would pursue cheaper less circuitous paths to them.
I commented about this on another thread, and probably most around here disagree with my general point there, but this fact amazes me. We have gotten all this tech creating a surveillance state but then it isn't even used to give better policing. You will just get mugged on camera by someone with ten prior charges and then be ignored by police.
All the recent policy, technical leaps, and innovation around policing seem to be focused on cracking down on protesting and speech, and not really on what people would consider "fighting crime". You could get mugged on the street corner in broad daylight (or worse) and the police won't even answer your phone call, but the minute you show up on that street corner with 10 friends carrying signs and shouting, 20 officers will show up in riot gear, and every one of you will be identified using technology.
The purpose of the system (the police in this casse) is what it does.
Always been that way, always will be. It's just a little harder to bury your head in the sand than it used to be.
The purpose of the system (the police in this casse) is what it does.
Nope. That's an ideology, not a statement of fact. It completely negates the possibility that systems can become corrupted (or simply fail) and no longer work towards their original purpose.
"systems can become corrupted (or simply fail) and no longer work towards their original purpose"
Er, that's exactly what "the purpose of a system is what it does" means.
No, “the purpose of a system is what it does” implies that the original intent of the creators of a system was for it to become corrupted.
That's one way to read the literal meaning of the words, but it's not what the phrase means as originally intended.
Right, but then we apply the phrase to itself and this is what we get!
Nope. You added that extra word "original" in there.
Nope. That's an imposition of metaphysics onto what is solely clearly mere empiricism.
the purpose of circular logic is circular logic
The surveillance is there not to catch small thieves, but those who are against the government, against wars etc. A small thief doesn't threaten the regime in any way so he can be dealt with after more dangerous people are dealt with.
In fact, the petty criminal may benefit the regime, if his crimes damage those the regime sees as a greater threat to itself and its goals.
The petty thief causes the useful idiots to clamor for more dragnet.
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Not in Britain there isn't. We have constant retail theft and violence against staff and the Police and Crime Commissioner for Thames Valley asking the public to do the crime fighting
https://www.witneygazette.co.uk/news/25365950.thames-valley-...
That's not true whatsoever for the UK, the police barely respond to shoplifting.
CCTV can absolutely be made to be effective and protect citizen's privacy at the same time. A legal requirement to store only encrypted data, which can only be decrypted via a court warrant (so a similar standard to searching your home or tapping your phones, not the blanket panopticon they wish to create), plus enforcement and heavy fines + prison time for anyone caught storing unencrypted data.
You need political will for this and for enforcement to take it seriously, since the technology to do so is almost trivial nowadays.
This is the kind of techno-utopian fantasy that keeps authoritarianism looking respectable. “Just encrypt it and only decrypt with a warrant” sounds lovely on paper, but in practice you’ve still built the infrastructure for a 24/7 panopticon - you’ve just wrapped it in a legal fig leaf.
Governments break their own rules all the time, warrants get rubber-stamped, and “heavy fines + prison time” magically evaporate when the offenders are the state or its contractors. The technology isn’t the hard part - it’s the fact you can’t meaningfully enforce limits on a system whose entire purpose is to watch everyone, all the time. You don’t make mass surveillance safe by adding a padlock. You stop it by not building it.
Because if you build it, they will come and use it for any purpose they can think of in the end!
And so it's just a bill away from the data is suddenly being available for any purpose. For public safety of course. The same people who want Chat Control to scan our messages for sure want to scan and raise alarms for suspicious behaviors in public places too. They just can't implement it all at once or there'd be an uproar. But if it happens slowly like this, bit by bit... frogs getting boiled in the UK (and elsewhere too).
If you trust that the law works then the data is protected by it and there is no need for encryption. But it seems that you don't trust. Aren't you planning something illegal by chance?
This is how Germany ended up with a ton of organized crime.
The organized crime organizations just mostly focus on crime which mainly hurts immigrants and people racist police personal might not see as German even if they have a passport, and also mostly only crime which isn't publicly visible.
In turn a mixture of corrupt and racist police/politicians and having other more visible problems lead to there not being any large scale actions against them hence why they could grow to quite large size.
That's exactly China's line. They say it helps catch criminals. And to their credit, it does, but at the expense of dissidents and activists.
There's this movie [1], created like 20 years ago, that perfectly predicted this evolution of the UK. It's bizarre that it's turned out to be prophetic.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children_of_Men
Except that its main plot point was about infertility. And we’re not living in camps. And we haven’t gone feral with guns.
It's not 2027 yet!
No it hasn’t become so dangerous and surveillance doesn’t help. Neither cameras nor real-name accounts actually helped to prevent crimes. Same with databases, lists or other surveillance tools. Many criminals who committed terrorism were known to the police before and they chose not to act or processes were not in place. All it does is lead to less freedom and security. The government itself is the security threat. There are always black sheep working there. They sell private details, enforce their own agenda or fail to secure sensitive information. Also extreme political parties can and did/will use it to silence undesired persons. Ask anyone who knows a bit of German history for many good examples.
> Many criminals who committed terrorism were known to the police before and they chose not to act or processes were not in place
In the case of the UK they've often also been operating in collusion with state forces, see: Northern Ireland.
it's always easier to get funding if there's a threat
People beat up the UK for their stance on this stuff all the time.
>it’s clearly a trend. Has society really become this dangerous that we must deploy these things?
No
Quickly? London is one of the most CCTV covered cities in the world, and has been since the 70s
As shocking as this is, it's not _surprising_
That probably is true by some measure. There are a lot of cameras in the UK - rather more than when I was a nipper!
I'm 55 and pretty well travelled and I've noted similar levels of coverage in many EU countries and the US and CA and of course CN (to be fair, my experience of CN is only HK).
I don't know why people get so whizzed up about London's CCTV coverage. For me the scariest area is the M42 south of Birmingham. Every few 100 yards there is a high level camera at height and lots of ANPR.
It is quite a logical place to concentrate on. Look at a map of England - Brum is in the middle of England and the main roads run nearby. M1 from the southeast, M5 from the southwest, then M1 and M6 (takes over from M5) carry on to the northeast and west.
My own house has six HD cameras with Frigate to co-ordinate, analyse and record. My Reolinks never get to see the internet! Four are on the garden and two watch the front door, one is the door bell.
Now ... "since the '70s": I'm old enough to remember the seventies (I still have several mugs for the Queen's Silver Jubilee in 1977, when I was seven). Back then video (VHS) was not a thing, neither was CCTV. We had three TV channels FFS! A cutting edge TV camera at the time was a huge beast and certainly was not mounted on a building or street lamp.
Are you a local?
Ah the Silver Jubilee Mugs, we had a grey one with that weird bumpy ceramic effect.
Anyway, on the cameras you're spot on. I do wonder how much UK cameras are used though - like a microcosm of our national potential, the cameras have potential but how often are they really used: half are likely faulty, most have the person monitoring them on a tea break when something happens and it seems to need an extreme act of violence before they get used in earnest.
We lived in Manc in 1977 (Dad was a soldier and did a year at UMIST to get to Lt Col, family in tow). Then we buggered off to Germany (again). For a kiddie, I had an amazing life! We were posted to Cyprus too.
Our Jub mugs were mostly transfer printed. We had coloured ones and ones with a sort of silvery monochrome effort.
I'm not too sure that the meme that the UK is the most monitored nation in the world is too true.
You probably remember 1984. I went to a jolly posh school in Devon (Wolborough Hill School, Newton Abbot) and we had to discuss 1984 in 1984.
Do you feel too monitored? I suspect that monitoring is under-reported elsewhere.
Well, China got away with it.
More than got away with it, actually... they prospered.
There has to be an incentive to not do these things as a government. There is none in the UK.
This is what Western governments miss: China didn’t get rich from its surveillance state - it got rich from manufacturing, much of it handed to them by the West. If we were serious about prosperity, we’d be copying their industrial base, not their domestic spying. But rebuilding skills and factories is hard; building tools to monitor and manage a population in decline is easy - and far more entertaining for a state that seems to prefer watching the poor struggle to fixing the conditions that keep them there.
> If we were serious about prosperity, we’d be copying their industrial base,
Why would we work down the prosperity chain?
There's a pretty clear prosperity heirarchy in the world economy and the financing/services dominant economies are ahead of the manufacturing economies who are ahead of the ag/raw materials economies.
Yeah, industrialization has been important for China’s recent development just as it was for the US in the late 19th to early 20th centuries or for Britain a bit earlier. But it was important because it happened at a time when China was at a lower tier in the heirarchy.
>There's a pretty clear prosperity heirarchy in the world economy and the financing/services dominant economies are ahead of the manufacturing economies who are ahead of the ag/raw materials economies.
This is very wrong, in the sense that not everyone can do "financing/services". Lots of people, even some on this website in fact, pretend that everyone can but it just isn't true. What financializing your economy does is exacerbate existing inequalities, or build new ones where they didn't exist.
It's also, ahem, a very bad idea to intentionally deconstruct your industrial base so you can make a couple bps every quarter. The reasons for this should be quite obvious, but since for many they apparently are not ... there are very real geopolitical tensions between PRC and the US, and these tensions present a very real possibility of war. Should that happen, PRC will have the ability to squeeze US supply chains in a very devastating way. This isn't to say it would provide them an easy path to victory, but just the ability to do this increases the probability that they would initiate a conflict in the first place. This is to say that there is no such thing as a "prosperity chain" that everyone should all strive to emulate.
> There's a pretty clear prosperity heirarchy in the world economy and the financing/services dominant economies are ahead of the manufacturing economies who are ahead of the ag/raw materials economies.
Drive through the metro areas of the Great Lakes and Great Plains states and tell me that's universally true.
There's a bump in prosperity for the people doing the financing and servicing in a given country. If you're not doing that, it's at best a wash. At worst it's turned otherwise sustainable communities into impoverished deathtraps.
>financing/services dominant economies
But these said economies all seem to just focus on asset-buying. Hence the massive house inflation. They don't make anything. No production, only asset-accumulation. Building a Feudal Economy.
That “hierarchy” only works if the foundations stay intact. A service/finance economy without domestic manufacturing is like a skyscraper with no lower floors - great view until the support gives way. Manufacturing isn’t just a rung you discard, it’s strategic infrastructure. Lose it and you become dependent on those “lower tier” nations for essentials - and your position in the hierarchy is theirs to decide.
And participation in the service economy isn’t even open to everyone. In the UK, a working-class person can’t just start a small service business - IR35 and similar rules ensure they can’t make a profit. The rich have captured both the economy and policymaking, shifting into pure wealth extraction mode. Everything gets more expensive, ordinary people get poorer, and with no stake in production or ownership, there’s no one left to buy the services the “upper tier” depends on. Western capitalism is eating itself.
>There has to be an incentive to not do these things as a government. There is none in the UK.
The only incentive governments ever have to not do bad shit is that the people will hate it so much that the government will wind up with less power than they started with.
But, decisions are ultimately made by individuals or small groups of them who have interest (profit, legacy, etc) in doing what the people wand and what is good for the people.
If enough people in government's personal interest is aligned with that of the people you get more outcomes that are aligned with the people.
> The only incentive governments ever have to not do bad shit is that the people will hate it so much that the government will wind up with less power than they started with.
Well, that's the trick, isn't it? You have to give people a way to reduce government's power if the government does something the people don't like, but do it in a way that keeps society from flying apart.
Guns are an answer to the first problem but not the second, which is why the claim that guns protect the people from tyranny is so wrong.
The best solution i can think of is constantly seeking to reduce the government and limit it's power, size and responsibilities, always trimming the hedge. I.E. conservatism. Any government fundementally should be trusted and relied upon as little as possible, if you want to prevent abuses.
You're not describing conservatism, you're describing anarchism.
This public information poster is from 2002.
https://live.staticflickr.com/2314/2171185463_92a40441ab_b.j...
The Brits have been going full steam ahead for many decades.
No the world is actually much much safer especially in these first world countries.
However our society is now flooded with Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt campaigns that foreigners, terrorists, criminals, are out to get you.
This creates the dellusion that all these security companies are here to help and protect us. Really it's just politicians handing out tax money to private corporations (cronyism) for no improvement to security or life. But at least you'll tell yourself you feel safer because of it.
These disgusting corporations run by wealthy people want to make everything a TSA line, because they think you are cattle.
It means everyone suffers and your 4th Amendment is taken away (in US).
The fact that these people and corporations are successful as they are is a condemnation of a subset of the people in our society and the public policy that has been pushed at their behest.
In the same way that moralizing karens create drug cartels rich off trafficking scared morons unable to think a few steps ahead create Peter Theils rich off building 1984.
> No the world is actually much much safer especially in these first world countries.
Is that true, or first world just became older, not exactly safer?
Now I understand why Black Mirror is a British show.
And Britain was Airstrip One in 1984 with most of the scenes taking place in what would have been London. Orwell definitely considered it possible that they could go that way.
> Has society really become this dangerous that we must deploy these things?
Rather than dangeours, society became dumber in a sense. overload of data resulted attemps to summarize or even make anything binary (I'm Pro X or Anti X).
(the text below is opinionated so please be forgiving :) )
I can name multiple countries (as I'm coming from one) that makes more "reforms" that has or will hurt human rights. (and we're still talking only on the "western world" which suppose to aim for freedom and human rights).
Coming from such a complex place in the world, I sadly say, that looking at stages in my life, I can easily remember the "good'ol'days" where there was one horrible thing, but I didn't know it can get worse.
I do hope society (and brits in the context of the above), will find the right balance to make a balance between feeling secured and invading privacy.
> Has society really become this dangerous that we must deploy these things?
From the article:
> Under the plans, 10 live facial recognition (LFR) vans will be used by seven forces across England to help identify "sex offenders or people wanted for the most serious crimes", according to Home Secretary Yvette Cooper.
I guess it depends on how dangerous these criminals are. If there was someone offing kids randomly in my neighborhood, I wouldn't necessarily be against this technology. I think it would be good in schools, where we really should know exactly anyone entering the school. But of course there is a limit.
I'd bet good money "sex offenders and people wanted for the most serious crimes" end up being just a tiny fraction of the use to which the systems are put to in practice. The age verification law was supposed to be protecting children from adult content, but on the very first day they used it to lock down video of political demonstrations.
I am pretty sure that the government did not directly instruct websites to remove protest footage in the case you are referring to. There is substantial ambiguity in the Online Safety Act, so it is only natural that companies that don't have a stake in what they're publishing will be quick to consider it too risky to show.
This is important, because if your point ever becomes a significant argument against the Online Safety Act, it is likely that the government will be able to retort that it was the online services voluntarily censoring - conveniently ignoring, of course, the context which you and I know of.
“The state must declare the child to be the most precious treasure of the people. As long as the government is perceived as working for the benefit of the children, the people will happily endure almost any curtailment of liberty and almost any deprivation.”
I’ll let you figure out who’s quote that is
This is a manufactured, made up "quote". There's no such passage in the book you claim it comes from.
Good to know
I seriously doubt this would stand up to a rational cost benefit analysis. If the lives of children are so very valuable I’m sure there are many more effective and cheaper things they could be doing on a per-life basis.
once they have them, over time they will justify widening their use - just a little bit each time.
If you oppose it then the right will say you support criminals and illegal immigrants and the left will say you harbor racist desires to express hatred under the guise of free speech and privacy.
It's worth recognising this is a very, very limited application of facial recognition, and miles away from what China deploys (or what's regularly used in the US)
The form of government matters a lot, when evaluating its security apparatus. I feel a lot differently about the death penalty in America than in Iran too.
Are you American, Iranian, or some other?
that is very funny thank you
> Has society really become this dangerous that we must deploy these things?
No but the people have become so alienated and afraid as to demand it anyway.
There is barely any demand for this from the public and a fair bit of pushback. This is something the government is just trying to ram through regardless.
Maybe that's true but there's also the down-stream effect of a persistent public voice telling us 'we should be ashamed of this country's (UK) past'. If accepted without examination, this view has rather obvious consequences as revealed in a poll from 2024 tt '17 per cent of British people would “willingly” fight for the UK in a war'. Other polls have found similar results. Why care about public order?
https://www.thenational.scot/news/24076378.just-17-per-cent-....
Usually it is more about the weakness and incapacity of the authorities that are unable to carry out their job well, or several times they are lazy to perform difficult and tedious tasks, so they put limits on everyone instead, making everyone suspect, just to catch those very very few cases, that they are increasingly unable to.
I often compare China to the British empire: ruthless autocratic capitalistic dictatorship.
The USA is doing the same, it’s just quieter.
Racism/ Sinophobia makes people think that there’s a Chinese surveillance and a western surveillance when in fact there is just surveillance.
The media was the main culprit. When an article comes out they would use words that make one surveillance sound dystopian and the other sound vigilant.
The end result is that surveillance in the west has been scoring small wins under the radar and what’s happening in the UK is the “breaking stealth” of a surveillance state.
Had people just seen surveillance as surveillance none of this would have happened.
> Has society really become this dangerous that we must deploy these things?
There is always a danger that the ruling class may not stay in power forever, unless the others are nailed to the ground.
Cynically, it's just another form of infrastructure we are behind the curve on.
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It's a sign that Labour and Conservatives are worried they are about to lose power. They "fumbled" the economy by selling everything out to the highest bidder, created captive labour market cementing the class divide - free market only for big corporations. Now they have to protect it and themselves. They need to know what people are talking about.
Paranoia gets bigger every year. They are addicted to money and power.
Whatever they accuse China of is always a projection.
At least China has manufacturing, jobs and thriving middle class.
I wouldn't be so sure about the jobs and thriving middle class.
Every accusation from the West towards China is an admission of guilt. It is called projection: accusing others of what you actually are doing.
In some ways, it's far exceeded China.
China is strict with people rioting or complaining a little too much about the government, but they don't lock people up for saying general no no words or being too patriotic/nationalistic online. And apparently Chinese courts even limited facial recognition (no clue how it'll work in practice though). [1]
[1] https://www.reuters.com/technology/china-says-facial-recogni...
> China is strict with people rioting or complaining a little too much about the government, but they don't lock people up for saying general no no words or being too patriotic/nationalistic online.
How absurd is this statement. China jails and disappears people for online statements at a rate several orders of magnitude larger than any western country.
It's borderline ridiculous to even make a comparison. Some quick examples:
1. https://thediplomat.com/2025/03/chinas-system-of-mass-arbitr...
2. https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/28/china/hong-kong-security-arre...
You can get arrested for "picking quarrels" online:
3. https://www.scmp.com/news/china/politics/article/3146188/pic...
Picking quarrels is a crime in the UK too and people get sentenced for it. [1] The only difference is people will say "actually that's good" when the UK does it, but it's for some reason bad when China does the same exact stuff. According to the UK gov, they're arresting 30 people a day for it. [2] That's nearly 8000 people a year for what they say online.
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cr548zdmz3jo.amp
[2] https://hansard.parliament.uk/lords/2025-07-17/debates/F807C...
And when it comes to online behavior: 1. governments do monitor citizen's words online, like in QQ groups (something like slack / discord). 2. In most circumstances, complaining too much or even curse the country will not be punished, only those who take action in reality will be sent to prison, e.g. organizing demonstrations. 3. But discussing about things like how to build a bomb will lead to a conversation between you and the police. I know these because I have experienced all these kinds of things in China. However, most (at least 80% of my acquaintance) do NOT care about this and support these policies. (To be honest, I personally also do not care about this kind of policy —— as long as the government does not raise taxes, I and most chinese do not care where the tax goes.)
Actually, there is no limit on facial recognition in China, government uses it, universities use it, even middle schools use it. yes there is a consent form for u to sign and you can refuse to sign it, but then lots of trouble come: e.g. you need facial recognition to enter school, so now since you didnt sign the consent form, you need to spend half an hour or more arguing with the security guard.
It appears that the kosher way of doing this by US standards is to partner with a for-profit company(ehm Palantir, Meta, Google etc.) to do it for you or you become a surveillance state.
Not saying to bash on US, it's just a curiosity of mine. In a similar way USA&UK diverge from most EU by not issuing national ID cards and not having central resident registries but then having powerful surveillance organizations that do that anyway just illegally(Obama apologized when they were caught).
I don't say that Europeans are any better, just different approaches to achieve the same thing. The Euros just appear to be more open and more direct with it.
The tech is there, the desire to have knowledge on what is going on is there and the desire to act on these to do good/bad is there and always has been like that. Now that it's much easier and feasible, my European instinct say that let's have this thing but have it openly and governed by clear rules.
The American instincts appear to say that let's not have it but have it with extra steps within a business model where it can be commercialized and the government can then can have it clandestinely to do the dirty work.
IMHO it is also the reason why extremist governments in US can do decade worth of work of shady things in few months and get away with it when in Europe that stuff actually takes decades and consumes the whole career of a politician to change a country in any way.
Also, the Brits are usually in between of those two extremes.
This may make sense to you if you live in a big city, but luckily a lot of the US is uninhabited, especially in the western US. There’s many places you can drive hundreds of miles and not see anyone or be monitored like you would be in a large city. That’s not to say there’s no monitoring at all, but policies of uniformly tracking everyone in the US, as if big cities are the same as the middle of nowhere in South Dakota or most of Utah, is neither practical nor desired by the people that live there
Are you unaware of Flock pushing their cameras to all the small town sheriffs? It's definitely not just in New York City.
I live in an incorporated area whose population is less than 10,000. The police have mounted Flock license plate cameras pointing both directions at every road leading out. Every shopping center is adding them too.
Also: not being subject to pervasive surveillance when you're in the middle of nowhere hundreds of miles from another person or human settlement is a pretty low bar.
There’s Flock, there’s police drones, there’s Ring cameras everywhere, etc. yes I’m aware
My point wasn’t to say there’s no monitoring in the US. It’s that there’s extreme variance in population densities which therefore means less opportunity and necessity for the same uniform surveillance in many places compared to countries with more even population densities. Whether the power of the federal government keeps expanding and eroding the federalist design the US was founded on to push uniform surveillance policies is another matter
> Also: not being subject to pervasive surveillance when you're in the middle of nowhere hundreds of miles from another person or human settlement is a pretty low bar.
OP was comparing the US to Europe and the UK, which have much more even population densities than the US. Finding sparsely populated areas there is a much higher bar than in the US
Yeah, all the people who stand to lose from oppressive surveillance can just gtfo into the desert, that will solve their problems and definitely isn’t what the surveyors wanted then to do in the first place. Yeah, like, if you do not like being surveilled in the society, have you considered not participating in it? This marginally better than being exiled forcefully.
> but policies of uniformly tracking everyone in the US, as if big cities are the same as the middle of nowhere in South Dakota or most of Utah
This makes it seem like the entire UK is an urban sprawl, evenly monitored, which it isn’t.
In London you’re likely to be on someone’s camera pretty much all the time, much less so in suburbs and smaller towns. There is plenty of countryside, woodland, rural land and villages where there is no CCTV coverage at all.
> or be monitored like you would be in a large city.
Thanks to flock that's increasingly untrue. Most rural areas only have a few ways in and out. I've even seen roads closed off to force traffic past flock cameras.
It's not particularly desired, but it happens anyways.
Honestly a pretty good point, the US already has "facial recognition vans" on the road in the form of Waymos that will provide video to police upon request. In most states, I think police could also just buy a Tesla, have an officer drive it around and set up a system to continuously upload video to a facial recognition service.
> the US already has "facial recognition vans" on the road in the form of Waymos that will provide video to police upon request.
These seem meaningfully different than UK's facial recognition vans. The government has to request the footage from Waymo for a specific place/time. I don't think they can put in requests like "analyze all Waymo video data for this particular face and tell me where they were and when". It's much narrower in scope.
If the US government requests such access, do you see a world in which Waymo says no, given the current landscape?
Furthermore, if a National Security Letter came along with that request, Waymo wouldn't be able to let anyone know about it.
It is definitely different. I do think they could put in a request like "give me all footage between these hours in this area", and then do the facial recognition themselves.
It's conceptually pretty similar to cell tower dumps, where they ask for all data from a cell tower during a particular time frame. This was recently ruled unconstitutional (https://www.courtwatch.news/p/judge-rules-blanket-search-of-...), but they used it for like 15 years before that (https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/08/how-cell-tower-d...). I can imagine blanket car footage dumps working for a similar amount of time.
Right, also regulations on data collection and processing in America are much more relax anyway which results in proliferation of abundant data collection for business purposes and this moves the barrier to "data is collected and being processed but you can't touch unless for profit". In Europe the barriers are on the collection and processing level.
This perverse desire for commercialization is almost comical. It is so effective that I feel like America will be the first country to implement a form of communism once they figure out the business model and produce profit charts showing promising growth expectations.
The American businesses are already coming up with stuff like "sharing economy", billionaires re-invent the metro and call it hyperloop or communal housing and call it AirBnB, public transport and call it Uber :) Publicly traded corporations that are not making any profits from the services they provide and yet providing value for the customers which are often also the owners through stock trading.
What a fascinating country. Being free of baggage and tradition and hacking around a few principles is so cool and terrifying at the same time. Nothing is sacred, there are no taboos and everything is possible.
Musk didnt try the hyperloop to be altruistic
He did it to kill any chance of the state improving the train/tram network so that Tesla cars would have less competition for public transport
Yep. My city did a deal with Hyperloop to build an express airport train instead of contracting with a European or Japanese company. Hyperloop pulled out and now there is no train, what a surprise.
You might ask "why don't they just re-bid the contract?" Answer: The new 'progressive' city government is opposed to building a train for 'rich people' since there's already a non-express metro that goes through some of the most crime-ridden neighborhoods of the city. Of course no businesspeople use it and they all take Ubers (many of which are Teslas)
Are you talking about Chicago? An express train sounds great, they should absolutely build one, but I think you're being a little harsh on the existing train. By America's (very low) standards it is quite convenient. It is already much faster and cheaper than driving, I have never even considered taking an Uber and I'm not sure it would be worth paying much more for an express train.
Correct, Chicago. The city's even already bored the station downtown as part of another project, so there's a massive underground cavern in the middle of downtown currently going unused.
The last time I took the Blue Line to the airport it was indeed fast and convenient - but dealing with luggage was kind of annoying, and there was a guy smoking weed on the train. If I were traveling for business there's no way I would use the Blue Line unless it was peak rush hour, and indeed most business travelers don't. Getting weed smoke on your work clothes is a less than ideal way to start a trip, nor is getting sweaty in your work clothes from hauling luggage around the station.
Thus the case for an express train - it would capture those price insensitive business travelers. You could charge $20 a ticket and it would still be a significant savings over Uber. Heathrow Express in London is like this and it seems to work well.
Source: https://x.com/parismarx/status/1167410460125097990/photo/2
Archived here: https://archive.is/iBAJr
The UK has been a surveillance state for a long time.
I've been the victim of property crime 4x in the UK, and 3 of those times the entire thing was caught on multiple CCTVs. But that didn't help me get my stuff back or prosecute criminals. The one time I did get my computer back was when the police raided a stash house (due to an anonymous tip, not surveillance) and found a treasure trove of stolen electronics, which included my computer.
But having cameras everywhere in London didn't help at all, so AFAICT they only exist to surveil you.
I was robbed at knifepoint on Oxford Street at about 3am while drunk, and let me say, there had to have been about 100 cameras pointed in my direction at the time of the mugging. Despite all this, the police told me nothing could be done because they were unable to acquire any useful footage at the time of the robbery. I lost a lot of faith in the Met after this incident, or that mass CCTV was even really that useful in getting a prosecution.
This is untrue? Cameras in the UK are not "just used for surveillance". The facial recognition used recently has led to arrest of many offenders.
> The Met reported that in 12 months they made 580 arrests using LFR for offences including, rape, domestic abuse, knife crime, GBH and robbery, including 52 registered sex offenders arrested for breaching their conditions.
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/live-facial-recognition-t...
That's statistics for London, not the rest of the UK.
> The facial recognition used recently has led to arrest of many offenders.
I'm confused as to how that isn't also "surveillance".
Being able to know where someone is on your city sure seems like it fits the bill to me, unless you're considering it "enforcement" (and different from surveillance)?
It doesn’t say how many times they handcuffed the wrong guy.
Realistically, CCTV probably will help catching and prosecuting the people who invaded your home.
But CCTV doesn’t act as a deterrent like a bobby on the street would. And because there’s a lack of visibility of criminals being caught, it just feels like the police are doing nothing.
If they’re caught down the line it’s unlikely you’d hear about it anyway. The police can’t tell you without it being proven in court unless essentially caught red-handed, and even if proven successfully that could be months or even years away.
Unfortunately, it’s impractical for them to track down your stolen items without investing much more time than the value of those goods (though I would rather they did that than, say, arrest hundreds of peaceful protestors).
This isn’t unique to the UK; my house was raided when I lived in another country and the police attitude was only to record the theft and assume it was gone for good. It really hurts and makes you feel unsafe but I doubt the police force in any major city in any country will spend time looking for stolen goods after a break-in.
(I’m not saying that the surveillance aspect isn’t a very real problem.)
>Realistically, CCTV probably will help catching and prosecuting the people who invaded your home.
not if the police cant be bothered to investigate. they dont bother with anything non-violent.
Not true.
If the CCTV gives a clear and obvious result they will pursue it. If there’s a string of thefts they will investigate and use the CCTV to provide evidence. CCTV won’t always provide that but sometimes it does.
What they won’t do is send Columbo to track down your laptop, because your laptop is worth a few minutes of police time at best, and by the time you report it it’s already been fenced and there is almost zero chance of recovery. They should prioritise violent crime.
> They should prioritise violent crime.
I just want to point out that theft can be violent. In England and Wales, burglary is considered to be a more severe crime if house was occupied, due to the psychological effects on the victims.
The famous 'phone-snatching' can hardly be considered non-violent either, given that it requires physical contact and is almost guaranteed to produce fear in the victim. (I don't personally know how it has been prosecuted - if at all - in the past though.)
Yep, you’re right.
> If the CCTV gives a clear and obvious result they will pursue it.
And how are you defining "clear and obvious"? Because unless the robber writes his name and address on some paper and holds it to the camera, it wont get investigated mate.
> What they won’t do is send Columbo to track down your laptop, because your laptop is worth a few minutes of police time at best, and by the time you report it it’s already been fenced and there is almost zero chance of recovery. They should prioritise violent crime.
Which is exactly what I said, they dont bother with non-violent crime. But if laptops arent worth investigating, they should make stealing one legal, or at the very least tell the public they cant be bothered with laptops. Because I was under the impression you could ring the police to enforce the law, not just the parts they deem "worth police time"
If they see their face or some defining characteristics that help them identify the perpetrator, and that person is known, then obviously they’re going to try to bring that person in and prosecute. I keep hearing that most thefts are made by repeat offenders in the same area, so the evidence can build up, eventually leading to an arrest.
I didn’t say it would help in every case, it might even be a tiny proportion of cases, but court records show CCTV recordings are used as evidence, so it happens.
Is that number of crimes it helps solve worth the trade-off in personal freedoms? That’s where we are now.
> But if laptops arent worth investigating, they should make stealing one legal, or at the very least tell the public they cant be bothered with laptops.
That’s hyperbole and also a misreading of what I said.
The chance of recovering a laptop once stolen is close to zero. If the police attempt to track down the stolen item they will most likely not find it, it is literally a waste of their time. Best you can hope for is that they find a stash of them in future and can identify yours.
If they have a lead on who did it, they will focus on the culprit. Or they may choose to focus on prevention, if they think it will reduce the chances of it happening again. Or they may have nothing in which case they can do nothing.
Either way, if your laptop’s been nicked (as mine was) then you’ll get no catharsis, even if they catch the guy who did it. It sucks, but there isn’t a practical alternative.
The police cannot guarantee every crime get solved and it’s unreasonable to expect that. That is not the same as saying that they have no effect at all, that they don’t reduce the number of robberies that take place, or that you might as well make theft legal.
That’s fallacious, they could have a deterring effect and crime would be even worse without cameras.
Is there a public conversation in European countries about the value of liberty? I don't mean arguments about how liberty can lead to more economic prosperity, I mean how liberty is valuable on its own terms.
Without this value, the state can continue to erect legislation in the name of "safety", or any other perceived inequity in society, until you can no longer move.
How perverse that English law used to be a bastion of civil liberty protections. Here's a great scene from A Man For All Seasons that shows what I mean: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PDBiLT3LASk
Depends what you mean by liberty. If you mean the sort of American Libertarianism that's popular in tech circles, then no. That's never really been a thing in Europe.
If you mean liberty as in Human Rights, it waxes and wanes. Broadly speaking in the EU in the 90s/00s human rights were improved and expanded. The European human rights courts were strengthened, more laws passed aimed at opposing discrimination. And the Human rights act in the UK was codified into law in 1998, for example.
The pendulum is presently swinging the other way, mainly due to a populist revolt against mass migration to Europe. It also doesn't help that mass surveillance has become so cheap and an easy way for politicians to be 'tough on crime'. Plus American tech treats privacy as a revenue model rather than a right, and that bleeds into policy expectations via lobbying.
This is almost entirely backwards.
European liberalism is the wellspring of American liberalism, but Europe has - for obvious, historical reasons - much better organised reactionary elites. The equilibrium between the European publics and elites does indeed wax and wane.
In the 1990s a whole bunch of elite shibboleths were encoded into supranational law (so that no elected government is able to repeal them) as incredibly vaguely defined "human rights", which in turn have given rise to a vast bureaucratic apparatus to administer them (often staffed by the children of elite families). This apparatus is used as a cudgel to chip away at basic liberties - abstract, ill-defined communitarian rights (eg "safety") are used to sweep aside actual, tangible individual rights (eg speech, privacy).
(As an aside, the Soviet Union did effectively the same thing with their emphasis on "social rights" - such as those in the ICESCR - as opposed to "bourgeois" individual rights - such as those in the ICCPR. Didn't work out great for Soviet citizens.)
Since the 1990s, as a result of misgovernance by its chronically incompetent elites, Europe has been in decline by almost every metric. In the past ten years or so, the European publics have been in increasingly open revolt about this. A bunch of populist opportunists have seized on this revolt to offer various alleged alternatives, but been unable to deliver any sort of tangible change. (There is no reason to believe any change will come from this group, since they are basically just the second-rate members of the existing elite who have bet on populism as their ticket to the top.)
Europe tells itself stories about being a "human rights superpower" as an adaptive mechanism for its clear decline in prosperity, freedom, and relevance.
IMHO, Europeans deserve much better than this sad, managed decline. But given the deep structural barriers to protect the elites and prevent change, I just cannot see how this gets better.
Will the last European please turn out the lights?
The ECHR was signed in the 1950s, not 1990s. 1998 happened to be the point the UK actually made it national law too. It's complicated, I'm not going into it here. I was simply using it as an example of EU governments passing pro-liberty legislation in the 90s.
Hard to take the rest of your post seriously as that is EU history 101. Pre-101 really, they teach it to teenagers.
By your logic, the 1950s should then have been a high point of human freedom and flourishing, no? Yup, those famously progressive *checks notes* nineteen-fifties.
In reality, the ECHR was effectively toothless before the 1990s. It's no coincidence you single out dates in the 1990s in both this and your earlier post. It's no coincidence virtually every major bit of leading European human rights jurisprudence is dated from the 90s onwards. It's no coincidence that there was a marked growth in state- and quasi-state institutions in the 1990s. There is an obvious pre-90s and 90s-onwards era of European human rights jurisprudence.
But you already knew this. You yourself correctly singled out the 1990s! You're just trying to hand-wave points you don't like with an argument to authority (and a very strange one, given the authority appears to be... children? And their understanding of the periodisation of human rights jurisprudence? Maybe we should consult European toddlers for their take on the œuvre of Montesquieu, just to make sure we're not missing anything?)
It's kind of striking to observe you reject my point that the human rights narrative is just a story that Europeans tell themselves, on the apparent grounds that that criticism doesn't jibe with the story that Europeans tell their children about Europe. This kind of makes my point.
So long as Europeans cling to fictitious narratives about their having transcended history into some kind of human rights nirvana, they will remain unable to push back on the actual, real decay of their freedoms and societies. Which is the desired outcome as far as elite institutions are concerned, so expect that narrative to be roundly enforced within Europe.
Hashtag celebrating seventy years of the ECHR! So much freedom - insert face here, thank you!
The law has always distinguished between public and private. These vans are in public places.
In the EU we have different liberties to the US. That doesn't necessarily make Europeans less free. For example, wlthe EU has free movement of goods, capital, services, and people across borders. None of which are present in the USA. Does that make Americans less free than Europeans? Some would argue so, but I don't see it.
The UK however, maybe. Brexit was a real dumb idea.
Huh? The US has all of that. You can move freely between states.
Internal movement doesn't count. Only a real hell-hole like North Korea will prevent you moving around in your own country.
The EU and US are roughly equivalent in size. I’m not sure it’s fair to say that doesn’t count.
It’s (nominally) a union of states after all
There is far more cultural diversity between the EU countries than states in the US - it’s not close.
Agreed, but in terms of moving around a similar land mass, an even bigger economy, integrated currency, etc the comparison seems reasonable. If anything the US has more freedom in that sense, at least on paper. I don’t need to register with the gemeente when I move interstate. (Though I’d likely need a new drivers licence)
Also, for better or for worse it helps that almost everyone speaks English everywhere.
The US economy is about 1.5 times larger than the entire EU.
The US is over 2 times larger by land.
Population is about a quarter smaller. Still, Massachusetts has more people than Denmark, New York has the same as Romania, California has more people than Poland.
Our original founding documents cite "these united states", interestingly and very tellingly "these", not "the." States are their own entities, and you'd find many to have very different cultures and laws — probably the same level of variance you'd find in the EU.
I agree with your points. It's ridiculous to suggest Americans don't have freedom of movement. The US economy is actually roughly double that of the EU.
But European countries are much more different from one another than the States are. I think it's actually quite a challenge to doing business there - growing into another country means you have to appeal to a very different culture, deal with different laws, speak a different language.
The US states have their differences but there's a reason they're part of the same nation.
> free movement of goods, capital, services, and people across borders
What in the world are you talking about? The US has all of this internally. If on the one narrow point you want to claim that EU has open-borders to the rest of the world, no you don't and that's not something that's good to have anyways. Both US and European citizens are fighting their own governments to decrease immigration as polling shows large opposition to current immigration levels for many years now. A big part of the crackdown on speech in the UK is to restrict criticism of immigration policy.
The European Union has, in practice, lacked genuine free movement of people across internal borders for some time (I went through complete and very aggressive border control entering France via airplane three years ago). Schengen arrangements have been curtailed in Germany[^1]. Part of the challenge is that Europeans appear out of touch with rapidly changing realities (I say this as a European). Additionally, some argue that the European Parliament is operating under an unofficial coup[^2].
The rearmament initiative is particularly concerning. Over the past three years, communities in Italy, Spain, Greece, and Germany have been devastated by flooding, wildfires, etc. Rather than prioritizing investment in resilient infrastructure, leaders are channeling resources into rearmament to confront Russia and China (or so they say - since they are acting as clowns anyway no one really pays attention). My concern is that these weapons may ultimately be used by Europeans against one another; It happened twice already.
[^1]: https://www.aa.com.tr/en/europe/temporary-border-controls-to...
[^2]: https://www.politico.eu/article/ursula-von-der-leyen-europe-...
Italy is spending the 5% target on building a bridge to Sicily. They should have done that years ago, it would have transformed the Island's economy and dealt a large blow to the Mafia. Hope other countries can find ways to spend the 5% on critical infrastructure.
Really? I happen to be Sicilian from my mother’s side :-) - what makes you think this time will happen?
What usually is that they spend a few hundred millions in consultancy and plans. And then off we go for the next round :-)
Greeks borrowing money to buy completely unnecessary weapons from Germany was probably the main precipitating factor leading up to the Greek debt crisis.
Greece buys guns from several countries primarily for “protection” in case of war. There is a lot of corruption happening in these deals, but that’s not unique to Greece. Greece is in a very tough spot compared to other EU countries (ie Belgium) and hence everything is a bit more complicated.
EU is not a single country. Most if not all countries allows free travel between their own regions, provinces or states.
A better example would be Americans being able to travel freely to USMCA countries.
The couple of times I’ve even done as little as fly through Heathrow it has been apparent to me that the UK is on its way to becoming an unfettered surveillance state, and I never hear anyone talking about it.
You say "on its way" as if it hasn't been at the forefront of this for decades. Until China and post-9/11 US ramped up facial recognition and CCTV projects MASSIVELY, the UK didn't just have more CCTV units per capita than anywhere else on Earth, they had the most in absolute terms. Even now last I checked the UK has about 1 camera for every 11 people.
Singapore should have that beat. I’m not saying the UK isn’t nuts for CCTV, it’s just that Sg feels like it is on another level.
Singapore has a much lower crime rate though.
What did you witness or experience flying via Heathrow that made it apparent to you?
We're too scared to talk about it lest our faces get added to a list.
Sao Paulo (the city) just rolled out facial recognition for police bikes, too, despite evidence showing[0] the program doesn't reduce criminality. Smart Sampa even has a feature where you can become a snitch yourself, lending your camera spot to the network... Great stuff
[0]: https://g1.globo.com/sp/sao-paulo/noticia/2025/08/01/reconhe... (don't know how to link a translated page)
As a Brit my feeling is that the state has basically given up on the concept of doing the right thing (not even from an ivory tower moral perspective, but from a realpolitik grow the economy / fix the issue sense) and is just throwing sticking plasters everywhere.
The recent issues with crime are, at root, apparently down to the fact that we don’t have enough prison places and we don’t have enough police.
The obvious solution is to hire more police, raise the wages, compulsory purchase a big field somewhere, make a massive prison and lock up the worst offenders for a long time.
There is some obsession with “making the books balance” as if this even matters. The Government is sovereign but acts as if somehow they have to do everything at market price like a private individual would.
The British state is actually very effective at doing what it wants to do - it just doesn't want to do the things we consider to be 'right'.
The government prioritises order over law, liquidity over solvency and the status of our politicians at international dinner parties.
> Various privacy considerations are made with each LFR deployment in the UK, the cops say. These include notifying the public about when, where, and for how long LFR will be used in a given area, allowing them to exercise their right not to be captured by the technology.
Are they trying to normalize wearing masks, helmets, burkas and balaclavas everywhere?
Currently, the police are catching up with shopping centres and entertainment chains who've been using this tech for years.
The Police themselves have been using facial recognition to scrub tapes for far longer than LFR.
Amusingly, the firm the gazanaughts have been complaining was being used to spy on Palestinians was recently sold to an American Parking Lot operator.
The time to complain about high street facial rec sailed by a decade ago.
Where is this quote from? I couldn't see it in the article.
If true, wouldn't that simply lead to wanted suspects simply avoiding the cameras, meaning innocent people who aren't monitoring these notifications to have their faces and locations captured, while criminals avoid it?
You need photo ID to verify your age to access "adult content" (which definition is ever-expanding outside the boundaries of smut) and now police begin using this new pool of facial data to surveil the public en masse.
They didn't even wait half a year to show their hand. That's how confident they are.
Isn't UK a democracy? Why then have the people not rejected the initiative? Ah, right - they haven't even been asked.
Tony Blair's biggest legacy was to take power out of Parliament and spread it wafer-thin over a byzantine network of quangos, courts, public sector bodies and Whitehall bureaucracies to ensure that no matter who you vote for, nothing ever changes.
This is often not understood by many people who simply say "well you should vote harder" or "we need <X> system of voting".
The government structure seems to be setup in such a way that any meaningful change is rejected.
This was the Brexiteers' biggest folly, I think. They blamed the EU for the fact that power had become completely unaccountable to the public. But the call was coming from inside the house: in theory we reclaimed our sovereignty, in practice your vote still doesn't matter and your opinion still isn't wanted.
Now the same crowd is turning their attention to the ECHR. It won't help.
I don't think remaining in the EU would have helped matters considering they are enacting their own spooky internet/tech legislation. I don't know enough about the ECHR to comment.
I think it is a combination of many things. To make meaningful change each one of these entities (quangos) will have to be examined, reformed or reviewed.
I am not sure it is even possible for that to happen without a collapse and/or crisis at this point.
I listened to a podcast with Dominic Cummings last night and he is of the opinion that the UK government is extremely weak at the moment and if there was another black swan event that they would crumble. I don't know if that is true, but it seems plausible.
The frustration I've had in the US, and I known has been felt by friends from the UK, is that no matter who you vote for or what they promise it seems you always get more of the same.
I think you'd be surprised how large the public support for these initiatives actually is. E.g. few on HN would guess it aligned with what the public wanted, yet it's hard to find a poll saying that's the case. And I don't just mean "of sleazily worded polls", even when the poll explicitly calls out the privacy concerns or other side effects more want to try the law than not.
"What do I care, I've got nothing to hide."
Its a democracy in that we vote for the next people to ignore all their campaign promises and screw us over
In a first-past-the-post electoral system (UK, USA), it always degenerates into 2 parties, which over time becomes entrenched and diverge from popular opinion.
A proportionally representative system in IMO better from this perspective.
Much of the issue with western democracies is that people assume consistently within their politicians.
A pro surveillance party should also address crime. If someone sees crime as a big issue then they will be for the surveillance.
Unfortunately what actually happens is that the surveillance is used to track anti government sentiment, while the crime is not any more prioritised than before the surveillance.
It's representative democracy so we can choose which party who will misrepresent us. Then choose another one which will misrepresent us.
It's about time that idea was crushed and we moved to voting on policies rather than parties and personalities. There isn't a one size fits all party.
But we know from comparative study of representative democracy that it does work, and it doesn't have to be "misrepresenting", and the reason certain representative democracies do a bad job of representation boils down to features o their electoral structures that produce results that are both poorly representative in the immediate term, and which also narrow the space of ideas and debate in the longer term.
> There isn't a one size fits all party.
Seems to be a non-sequitur, there isn't a one-size fits all policy, either.
It worked until the people who manipulated elections worked out how to manipulate elections and started forming parties. Breaking it down to policy level makes it far harder to manipulate an election.
A good example is the UK Labour party. People want the social side of their policies but not the surveillance. They could have voted for the social policies and against the surveillance. But no we have to eat the surveillance if we want the social policies.
Because the curtain-twitching UK public loves this sort of stuff?
democracy isnt for the peasants
No, "democracy" is when the peasants vote for the thing you were going to do anyway. If they vote the wrong way then it's "populism".
It's also now the law to remove a face covering when requested by the police (it's supposed to be under certain conditions, but have fun arguing that with a jake). Actually love living in a police state. At least we repealed the law making cable ties illegal I guess.
God help you if you walk out of a store with a butter knife and forget your receipt.
Sounds funny, unless you are young looking and went to a store without ID to buy a pair of scissors. Happened to me, but I've managed to convince the staff that I'm old enough to cut the letters from a newspaper.
> but I've managed to convince the staff that I'm old enough to cut the letters from a newspaper.
So that you can write ransom notes? They should have locked you up.
I mean, yes, if you're in a violent protest the police might ask you to remove your balaclava. Given the current political climate in the US that doesn't feel like the end of days.
I'm so embarrassed to be British these days. We're a small island of small minded people.
Small mindedness (to use your words, though I think other sets of words are perhaps more descripitive) is a condition that spreads like the plague. If you don't constantly stamp it out through ostracizing and marginalizing the infected and those who intentionally create the conditions for it then you will be overrun.
We're already well into the process of being overrun so that strategy obviously didn't work.
Are your ideas not good enough to persuade?
If "just persuade them with your good ideas" was a workable solution it would've worked at least once by now, instead the means of persuasion are owned by psychopaths who continually convince the public to vote self-destructively. The enshittification of society continues.
>If "just persuade them with your good ideas" was a workable solution it would've worked at least once by now
If I have this right: your measurement for whether or not people are in their right mind is if they take to your specific ideas?
Have you considered the possibility that people are most often persuaded by good ideas and your ideas are awful?
And insofar as you present them in an ostensibly good light, you are lying somewhere in the presentation and people can see that.
To be clear, your perspective is that everyone else is a psychopath or so much dumber than you, personally, as to be led by psychopaths.
And it's not you that's dumber than most others, nor who is led by the psychopath(s), nor who is the psychopath that needs to advance their ideas by marginalizing people who have other ideas.
And the strategy is to marginalize people because...checks notes... your ideas are unpalatable to the population. For no good reason.
Why are your ideas unpalatable to the population, from their perspective?
Any good policy wonk will know that much, will be able to explain the opposition's reasons accurately and in detail, and will be able to steel-man their own argument utilizing that perspective.
Whereas a manipulative person will avoid that level of analysis.
You've demonstrated the problem with good ideas, and the vulnerabilities they have quite well. The parent poster said nothing of the sort, but you've:
* inserted a bunch of words into their mouth
* engaged in a gish-gallop
* insulted the person you are replying to
* accused the person you are replying to of lying
All of which are widely deployed techniques used to prevent good ideas from being heard, let alone from being adopted. It was probably unintentional, but it's pretty amazing how quickly you've made a case for why "good ideas" alone aren't sufficient by demonstrating all the ways savvy opponents can shut them down.
Good ideas don't have to be persuassive to be good
Largest empire in history in 1920 to small isolated island speedrun any %.
It's a good modern historical example of how you cannot take anything for granted on a long enough timescale (wink wink USA), and it wasn't even that long, no matter how good or bad things are looking right now all it takes is a couple of generations to radically change the situation
That's because empires don't work. In order to make them work what's needed is to have the center of the empire maintain infrastructure on the borders of the empire. The center grows when you get an empire, but ... it's an absurdly small growth compared to the border growth. Hence empires exhaust themselves attempting to guard borders and you start seeing absurdities like military fortresses manned by 5 unarmed (because too expensive) soldiers. Both the English and Roman empires did that. And then they abandon their borders to save some more money, and it all just ... fades away.
And this is a cursed choice because empires need resources (as they will find themselves in a war with just about everyone else at some point, so imports don't work). Those resources are only available in far away mines. So you need to have the huge area and borders, and infrastructure everywhere..
But you can't have the huge area and borders, and infrastructure because you can't defend it, you can't build, you can't pay for it.
So ... no empires. Or at least, no permanent ones. People keep trying though.
>But you can't have the huge area and borders, and infrastructure because you can't defend it, you can't build, you can't pay for it.
Rome figured this out I think. It didn’t fall. It silently converted into a church. More reach, less defending walls.
Being embarrassed by your nationality or citizenship is certainly a feat of small mindedness.
Plenty of big thinkers out there think nations and citizenship are outmoded concepts, or they are concepts that provoke needless violence. They find their own nationalities an embarrassment.
> Plenty of big thinkers out there think nations and citizenship are outmoded concepts.
Big thinkers tend to live in wealthy, leafy areas where they don't have to worry about someone jumping over their fence, or appreciate the need for demarcation of land.
Same goes for people who are pro-immigration/pro-drugs/pro-construction - but just don't do it their affluent area.
I've been to plenty of Food Not Bombs events where people are being fed and the prevailing attitude was, "If there are people needing to be fed, let them come and we'll feed them." The same folks were handing out harm reduction supplies.
These same folks went on to figure out the logistics of preparing food. So no, I don't think it's at all axiomatic that the people who disagree with nationalism are necessarily affluent in the slightest. In fact, I've found most solidarity with refugees and anti-nationalist movements in the working class. The overall community of folks I saw ranged across income brackets -- plenty of software engineers, tech folks, trades folks, unemployed folks...
I think that when people say, "They don't really mean it" or "their principles wouldn't stand up if it meant a disruption to their lives", they are not aware of just how much work folks are actively doing every day to live by those principles and invite people in.
We're so small-minded we let in more than basically anyone else as a percentage of our population and land area.
I mean, if by small minded you mean "stupid" you're probably right, but I don't think you can mean much else. Unless you've never been anywhere else.
Stupid has boundaries on the evil it can do. Smart people of good intent are far more dangerous than stupid people.
Who needs the vans when one has Tesla's roaming the streets and parked in random places? Those things have a myriad of cameras. What stops Telsa from providing access to (insert highest paying agencies and/or companies)? Surely by now some other modern cars have followed this pattern. There's even a camera pointed at the drivers face. It's only a matter of time before they have fast uplinks to Starlink. I have to assume the car could do some local AI to minimize uploading noise and only upload the interesting bits.
They're already doing this so that the feds can slap terrorism charges on people who vandalize Teslas.
Related: https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/13/uk_expands_police_fac...
(via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44887373, but we merged that thread hither)
This is the same country that couldn’t introduce driver’s licences with pictures for privacy and surveillance for years. What happened?
Increased paranoia among the rulers because of their guilty conscience.
Pretty much. The more they fear the blowback of the actions of civilisation, the more this in power try to hold any semblance of normality in place by force.
Decades of neoliberalism and mass immigration (but I repeat myself) dissolved all the ties — family, community, faith, national identity — that once bound us together. Now there's no social solidarity or cohesion and no-one trusts each other, so they turn to the all-powerful state as the only thing left that can maintain order.
Neoliberalism's end game.
This would lead to a rise in doctors and accountants wearing the combo of Canada goose jacket, balaclava and man-sling-bag in summer.
can someone explain this reference to me please
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Because they're English, presumably. Homelands aren't interchangeable cogs anymore than people are.
Yes, the English isles were crime riddled sh*t-holes until only recently. Rapes were so common girls had to cover their whole body to avoid unwanted attention.
Never been a better time than now to engage yourself politically.
None. We have more to lose and are losing more than ever before.
The UK is broke but has infinite money for a surveillance state.
One justification for increased surveillance is that it is cheaper than hiring police officers.
Is it if equipment maintenance and building/installing costs keep going up?
Replacing police officers is about removing a human decision element from lower class suppression.
ask yourself why.
Doesn't the UK have cameras everywhere doing this anyways?
Nope. They started a long time ago with the cameras and didn't upgrade them, because money. Which means a pretty large part of the cameras have pathetic resolution and are black and white, as well as being too far away from much of their vision. Useful for locating protestors sorry ("getting a general idea of criminal activity"), not so useful for recognizing anyone.
That is interesting because it implies either the UK's camera infrastructure has simply amazing reliability with parts never failing. Or it could be that they have huge stocks of the hardware that they haven't yet exhausted.
Or that when they fail, they get left up anyway
Not really. The UK government does not operate a centrally-controlled CCTV surveillance system, contrary to popular myth. There are a lot of privately owned cameras (but no reliable estimates of how many), and some local authorities, police forces, etc. operate CCTV cameras in certain locations.
If you actually dig in to the statistics that sometimes get quoted about CCTV in the UK you’ll find that a lot of the numbers have very little foundation.
If you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear.
We are going to be hearing that argument a lot as the AI police state evolves
I have so much to hide.
I want to hide what I had for breakfast. I want to hide what books I read recently. I want to hide which TV shows I watch. I want to hide who I have conversations with. I want to hide who I avoid. I engage in so much completely legal behaviour, much of it quite laudable, that I simply want to hide.
Laudable, or laughable? I only ask because "laudable" didn't quite seem to fit with most of the examples you gave.
Laudable too. I do things that are laudable, that most of society would applaud, that I nonetheless routinely do not disclose and sometimes hide. You will note, perhaps, that I didn't disclose them.
Got it! Thanks for clarifying
And you’re not trans. And you don’t perform drag. And you don’t go to an event with a lot of gay people. And you don’t get mistaken for someone because ai isn’t perfect. (Especially if your race doesn’t have many people in the dataset.)
But the people that don’t have anything to fear don’t see anything wrong with “inconveniencing” these groups.
This is the UK, and it's the police controlling these vans. So trans, drag and gay are not at issue here.
And somehow, the countries where it is a problem are never discussed. All muslim countries, for example, almost like not all religions are equal ... if you read hrw or amnesty you'll find that even the most moderate muslim countries like Morocco or Turkey deal violently with sexuality (all forms, really, yes, being trans drag will, of course, attract immediate attention. But let's not pretend they leave public displays of straight sexuality (including subtle and tasteful) alone). And Morocco and Turkey are absolutely nothing like something like Afghanistan or even Iran.
But in the UK the line is drawn pretty damn far. Are you seriously complaining about that?
I'm in particular speaking about the UK, actually. consider how much anti-trans backlash there has been in the country. Consider how in Weimar Germany there was a fair bit of acceptance for the LGBT community that was quickly undone - all it takes is a charismatic leader or a king that goes along with it.
I guess at present the UK is very tolerant. But no one can predict the future. It can go downhill. Even for developed western countries. Once surveillance is setup, it is hard to restrict its usage. Especially when the society gets used to it.
Not for trans people, especially trans women
"It's not that I have something to hide. It's that I have nothing I want you to see."
A great quote from an otherwise OK movie ("Anon").
Brass eye came true! What is this for? Laser audio mics into the bedrooms of suspected anime forum members?
If it's used to track folks out on bail or already convicted of violent crimes then great. However seeing what the UK police are like right now it's likely to be applied to harass genteel retirees protesting about Israeli barbarity in Palestine.
We shall have to adopt a new fashion for Australian style cork hats:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cork_hat
You can get UV protection hats that have a clip-able face cover for those times you just want to go outside for a minute without having to slap on sunscreen.
Have a few at home just for that, but they could definitely have a dual-use.
Damn could you link me? That’s exactly what I’m after. Or give me the search terms? Thanks.
Have a look at the Solbari Ultimate Sun Hat UPF 50+
I suppose it beats mobile xray vans.
Or, I've always had trouble looking on the bright side.
1. https://www.rapiscan-ase.com/products/mobile/zbv-cargo-and-v...
2. https://www.rapiscansystems.com/en/technologies/z_backscatte...
> The government also insists the tech is independently tested at the National Physical Laboratory, which found the underlying algorithm to be accurate and free of age, gender, or ethnicity-related bias.
I feel so much better! /sarcasm
How tone deaf can they be?
Whenever there are serious privacy concerns about how this sort of technology, you have a statement like attached. It doesn't address what people are worried about. They never directly address it.
The vast majority of newspaper articles/videos about this tech relate to innocent black people being flagged.
Racism is certainly the biggest concern of the media, which may or may not reflect the publics general concern.
I was listening to an interview with Dominic Cummings while walking this evening. It was about two hours long. I don't really know what to make of Dominic Cummings, I did think it would be interesting to hear his perspective.
During the interview he explained how many people in the government essentially wanted to please their own, which includes their own class of people (city people essentially) and the media. He said that ministers were much more worried about how media was covering them, than anything else.
The same people essentially see see the normal general public and people like myself as criminal. They see us a criminal because by in large much of the general public and people like myself don't agree with them.
This sort of statement is very "on brand" if what he said is true.
Well there had been system with very high rates of false positives for certain ethnicities which if wide scale deployed would in effect be like systematic harassment of this people.
So it is a thing people which in general are okay with mass surveillance might worried about.
And convincing the people you have a chance to convince is much more useful the pointlessly trying to convince the people which anyway won't like what you do no matter what you say.
It reads more like something to appease some media outlets and activist groups than the general public.
So when China did this, this was criticised.
When the UK do it...
Double standards are wonderful.
You're in a comment section full of criticism. When China did it the criticism was irrelevant. The citizens are powerless and don't care. When the UK does it the criticism will also be irrelevant. The citizens are powerless and don't care. I don't see why any contradiction or double standard.
All of my acquaintances from the UK have had really critical things to say about their present government and _especially_ about the OSA and surveillance state stuff.
I campaigned in the recent council elections (we lost) and knocked on hundreds of doors in my area, speaking to people of all demographics about politics.
I can't exaggerate the collective despair that I witnessed. Young or old, black or white, Labour or Tory, every single person I spoke to without exception had something negative to say about the state of the country. No matter what their politics, no-one was optimistic, and why would they be?
In recent weeks we've seeing unprecedented protests against migrant hotels, but opposition to immigration is just part of the picture. Brits are giving up on normal politics in ways I wouldn't have imagined even two years ago.
Dark times are ahead.
Watch out. Someone on HN might send you a link to "Whataboutism" in order to dodge double standard accusations.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism
I might as well do it first.
For whatever reason, people on HN seem to think double standards are ok as long as the west do it but not when China does it. Maybe because "freedom"?
They seem to be doing everything except actual policing.
Correct.
Why do the beat when you can sit at your desk and watch or wait for the cameras to pick something up?
They seem to have forgotten that a police presence, i.e. a patrol car cruising around or police walking or cycling the streets not only prevents some crime but makes people feel safer by their visibility.
To be fair they did stop a guy on a skateboard the other day, fined him £300, and gave him 6 points on his non-existent license, https://x.com/JamesHarvey2503/status/1955215331959394764
People act like the UK is lawless and people can just steal bikes from public bike rakes, steel food from stores, or even turn up on UK shores illegally and be given 4* hotels, but presumably this isn't true given how strictly they enforce almost completely irrelevent stuff like a dude on an electrified skateboard.
It's called anarcho-tyranny. Certain crimes, and certain types of criminal, go unpunished almost as a rule. But it's very easy and not politically inconvenient to harass guys on skateboards, and people who post edgy memes on Facebook are a grave threat to our society, so there you have it.
Either the England is a shithole overrun with crime, or English elites are paranoid. Locals can tell me which one it is.
That could be a false dichotomy.
It has been said that England is a 3rd world country attached to London. That kind of dilemma will come out in odd ways like this.
Said by someone who hasn't been to the less affluent parts of London, I suspect.
English politicians are just a decade ahead than the rest of the Western world. They are not the only ones doing massive surveillance, but they are some of the first to have learned that the masses are completely powerless against the state, so do not even have to hide their intentions any more. What are citizens gonna do? Vote for the other colour that wants the exact same thing? Start a new petition? Go cry to the media that are perpetuating state propaganda?
Democracy has completely lost its meaning, and we're ruled by oligarchs and room-temperature IQ career politicians. I'm so glad to have left that silly island after more than a decade there, but sadly where I am now UK is seen as a model to imitate, and likewise in the rest of Europe. Citizens are completely f'd, and they've also been defanged thanks to modern tech and the entertainment business. Apart from the few that take to the streets to protest with little achievement other than a stint in jail, the vast majority are scrolling TikTok and watching US politics drama as if it was reality TV.
I'm waiting for bated breath for Reform to be voted in, and be as utterly useless as the other two parties. What a bloody farce.
shithole
Mobile facial recognition systems suffer from significantly reduced accuracy compared to fixed installations due to variable lighting, angles, vibration, and lower-quality optics - making these vans likely less effective than the existing CCTV network.
Who is pushing this within the UK- government aside? I want some avenues of search that help me make sense of where the world is heading. Thanks.
Can email my proton proxy in my profile if you want to be discreet. I have a whole life ahead of me and need to know how to prepare.
Even within the government I can’t understand how a democratically elected politician could support something like this.
maybe democracy isn't so great after all ...
Democracy is like Communism. Every time you point out a problem with Democracy, someone else can point out how it isn't True Democracy(R). For example, in the West there are massive support for applying pressure to Israel to stop the genocide. But very little actually happens because, at least in my country, Israel has literally bought off the key politicians[1]. This isn't True Democracy(R) because the people's representatives have been paid to represent a foreign nation.
[1] https://www.commondreams.org/news/aipac-100-million
Suitably organised protest folks need to roll out anti facial recognition tools. Maybe even turn facial coverings into a source of revenue.
One tool would be methods to blind said facial recognition vans. Cameras are relatively easily "blinded".
Assuming those don’t become illegal - Australian authorities are looking to ban face masks at protests- https://www.hrlc.org.au/explainers/human-rights-briefing-vic...
Yeah, Australia's conservative side of politics (arguably both sides are conservative in this regard) have, at various times, tried to make protesting itself illegal.
I like the irony of it, and doubt that "real" protesters give much of a fuck what kinds of boundaries the protested try to put around protesting.
These kinds of things are just another data point documenting "the general decline".
I wonder if they left the EU so they could monitor and restrict their citizens even more effectively and quickly. Just like limiting the length of knives this will definitely not solve their crime problem.
Whenever a brutal regime rise again, it will thrive due to the amount of work being done on surveillance tech.
Can you imagine Adolf (DE), Benito (IT), and Joseph (RU) with access to the same surveillance tech?
I’ve always wanted to visit the UK but it really sounds like a shithole now where you will be treated as guilty just for existing in public and your every move will be monitored at all times.
And now they have this new visa thing for US visitors, pretty intrusive, won't fill it. I know the US started that sh*t, the world is enshittificating quickly.
You can get a feeling of the scope of the crisis to come, on just how much government is ready to clamp down and trying to preserve "civilization" through surveillance. Even if western liberal society vanishing in the process makes that protection measure in relation to the protection goal is dizzying.
And encoded in all that ruckus is a uncomfortable truth! This is as far as we will go! There is no miracle tech on the horizon, that can be handed out to the masses, bribing all of us with a 60s like surplus to be peaceful. Instead its panopticon or bust!
From a lot of different angles, the UK is going full dystopia: privacy, civil rights, economy, demography
time to vote with your feet people.
What is the point if there are people on many streets with CCTVs doing drugs openly. I saw a cop simply walk by someone overdosing. Nothing will happen.
Again, what is the point exactly? Can anyone tell me?
(Again, what is the point of the down-vote? I am asking for people's thought and opinions in the hope of a fruitful conversation).
The point of the police state is not to prevent crime, but to silence dissent and foster cooperation with whatever government propaganda and initiatives are popular at the time.
In fact, often defeating crime is bad for this purpose. If you want to maintain a propaganda machine of an enemy within, you need crime. You might even, say, give drugs to those communities. Looking at you, CIA.
Overdosing is not a crime, it's not even the job of the Police to help, and possession of drugs is being ignored by most forces because an arrest takes two officers off frontline services for 4 hours, when it will most likely result in a caution.
Why are you making excuses like this? Demand better from the people that would hold authority over you.
They don't have "authority over you" unless you've committed a crime.
Here, if the cop sees someone overdosing, they immediately call the ambulance, not walk by and do nothing.
Also if someone is overdosing, they are probably possessing.
People should do it at home or somewhere else, not on the streets. I don't care if someone is consuming inside their home.
>Here, if the cop sees someone overdosing, they immediately call the ambulance, not walk by and do nothing.
This unevidenced claim is probably nonsense in any case, no police officer would simply walk by. They may very well walk by and talk into their radio to summon the right kind of help, or they may be responding to a higher priority call.
Just because your mate Bob claims they saw something, doesn't mean Bob had any real idea what was going on.
It's like the old saw about a window blind for a hospital ward costing £200, when you can buy one for £20 elsewhere. Thing is the one for £20 doesn't come with a specialised coating that eliminates bacterial or viral spread, or with a bloke that installs it according to the relevant safety regulations, or the supervisor who certifies the installation. It certainly doesn't come with a number you can call to fix the blind if there's a problem with it that includes on site service.
> no police officer would simply walk by
You and I have very different experiences with police officers. Police Officers may walk by someone overdosing is hardly a claim that needs any evidence in my experience because it's so widely understood to be true.
I saw it on video (inb4 deepfake), I did not hear it from Bob. So yeah, the cop in London did just simply walk by and did nothing. I can give you the video if you so want.
Go ahead and post.
You're right! Your anecdote is much better than theirs. You won me over at least.
Lmao. Hey, I have it on video. I will post it if he really wants it.
Wait, where's "here"? You just said you'd seen the police do nothing about somebody overdosing - and now you're saying that's exactly what they never do, where you are. Wherever that is.
I said "Here, if the cop sees someone overdosing, they immediately call the ambulance".
"Here" being "Hungary".
> Again, what is the point exactly? Can anyone tell me?
To haras and punish people disagreeing with the ruling class?
Out of curiosity exactly who is this ruling class?
Let's say those people for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partygate
You mean idiots who went to private schools then?
The Conservatives are out of power. They were defeated in the last election.
You can just say it.
One doesn't do drugs. One consumes or sells them.
Next time do HN better :)
The moment the Brexit referendum results were in I knew exactly where this will lead... I wish I was wrong.
Whole world is reeling in the same direction quite briskly, I may say. So, Brexit or not, this would have happened.
10 vans works out at one for every 10,000 square miles. Hardly a "roll out across the UK".
> Hardly a "roll out across the UK".
What's your threshold for when it becomes a problem? Should we wait until it becomes a problem, or should we try to stop this level of facial recognition?
You should also assume this is a proof of concept. It'll get improved and scaled down to run on every police vehicle, and on every camera the police already control.
It has already been scaled down to android phones (you'll find phones are an excellent platform for this), where you can find apps that are meant to let venue-owners guard entrances against specific individuals. That's illegal, but obviously common enough to make such apps.
It is the "Thin end of the wedge".
Then it will be sold to the public as being successful (they are already claiming that in the article itself that it is successful). Then that will be used to justify them in other places.
Why do people need to be surveilled in the first place? Is Britain so full of offenders?
Colonial/empire mentality. It always comes home to roost, and the people are always surprised when it does.
that's a very political question you pose here
who cares?
No, but also yes in the sense that we don't even know how many people are in the country and it's much easier to make things worse for everyone else than actually confront what has happened to the nation
I would honestly start looking to flee the UK.
And go where? Also how to do that legally? You just can't show up to say Moldova and start living there.
Ireland, Isle of Man, or Gibraltar.
Most of European Union?
They are just a couple of years behind. Currently trying to ban private communications. Ahead on locking up political rivals.
If you think every politician in every country hasn't been trying to ban private communications since forever I've got a bridge to sell you.
They're certainly ahead on locking up the people who dislike Israel - you're correct on that count. Though I think the USA's still the undisputed king of that.
5 years too late for that!
trying to become a EU member state citizen as a UK citizen is still much easier then for many other countries
through often not on paper, but in practice, like the people which can throw rocks in your path do that less likely
in the end it's a question of job (in country you want to move to), money/liquidity, and moral restraints you have.
Like e.g. buying yourself citizen ship through an arranged marriage should be something like 30k-50k€ depending on EU state, context etc. And that is if you go through organized crime rings which take a cut.
And if are rich there probably should be a lot of more legal-ish ways to get citizenship. Some countries outright allow buying citizenship, but I think besides the "buying" cost you need to be quite stacked.
And if you have good job qualifications you might get a job in the EU -> long term right to stay -> and then find one way or another to convert it to citizenship. It's probably ethically most upright but also hardest path.
Are you recommending immigration fraud with a straight face?
I'm not recommending it.
But it is the daily norm pretty much in any country people do want to frequently get into.
Actually if I had to recommend anything it would be to stay very very very far away from any organized crime organizations. Doing business with them rarely ends well (as it always exposes you to them being able to blackmail you).
I guess I should have put that into the original post.
[dead]
Disingenuous. Get a visa.
People act like they weren't able to live and work in Europe before the EU - people did it, it was fine, it's not that difficult if you actually want to do it.
There seems to only be a single free country left sadly.
Namely, the Netherlands.
Why not do it? You could start right now. There's no rule against it.
Well, that's some distopean shit right there ain't it
From the country that brought you vans telling immigrants to "GO HOME OR FACE ARREST" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%22Go_Home%22_vans
Also from the country with television detection vans so you can pay your TV tax, what CAN'T vans do?
Which country do you mean? :)
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Funkmesswagen_(Fernmeldewesen)...
Also from the country that pissed on the request of its population to curb immigration decade after decade, for cheap labor force, political gains, and globalist ideology...
Not immigrants. Illegal immigrants.
Colonial powers are not entitled to that argument, it's hypocritical.
> Colonial powers are not entitled to that argument, it's hypocritical.
Yes they are. Everyone everywhere has invaded or otherwise traded their way into power in other countries (or pre-country equivalents). It's extremely foolish to bucket the world into Britain and not-Britain if one isn't entirely ignorant of history.
The vast majority in any given colonial nation neither partook nor benefited much if at all.
For the vast crimes of leopold and subsequently to lesser extent the belgian state in congo the biggest chunk of money got invested in the brazilian rail network to make one family very rich for example. My great grandparents being subsistence farmers didn't see shit and you'd punish not just them but me for it.
Typically the people moving in are from countries which given fair comparison are similarly not owed an opinion given their sins of the father and many a nation is not allowed it's borders likely also yours lest you live in Buthan or so.
They are entitled to that argument by virtue of having guns and borders. I would rather be hypocritical than have my government expend resources on other countries altruistically
Oh f*ck off, if that's the stance then we should just recolonise those countries and send these doctors and engineers back to help rebuild them.
Did the people suffering the consequences of illegal immigration today performed that colonialism?
Not even their ancestors at colonial times benefitted much from it: the industrial working class of Britain was in dire position despite Britain being a colonial Empire. That money and power went to the ruling classes and their middle class bootlickers.
No, but they benefitted from the colonialism and fight efforts to return those benefits to the colonized. We're not talking about something that happened thousands of years ago here.
>We're not talking about something that happened thousands of years ago here.
I'm not talking about that happened thousands of years ago either. I'm talking about the conditions of the working and poor classes when Britain was a colonial superpower, like througout the 19th century. Hell, even post WWII most of Britain working classes were living very modestly, in wretched wretched council houses, and with low means.
Did they ask to benefit from it? Being nice to everyone and accepting mass immigration aren't the same thing.
Generalize this line of thought. "A thief stole an iphone and dropped it on my doorstep. I kept it, despite knowing it was stolen, because I did not ask the thief to steal it for me".
It's very silly on the small scale. It's no less silly on the large scale, you are simply more accustomed to the cultural understanding the colonialism is not something you have any responsibility for.
Generalize this futher. "So now it's only logical that the children of the owner of the phone should get to stay in my house".
That's not a generalization. That's a totally separate argument. Making someone whole for the loss of a phone does not require you to provide them housing (which is significantly more valuable than the phone was.) It probably means returning the phone -- and if you gained some money from the use of that phone, perhaps some portion of that as well.
Taking that example back to colonialism, it means probably returning stolen wealth and some portion of capital earned on the back of that stolen wealth.
But it literally isn't something I have responsibility for. I hate this white guilt fetish and think it's dumb and unproductive I actively use my money to reduce inequality through things such as the lebanese red cross and national conservation foundations.- Whilst not feeling guilty for the circumstances I was born into because logically I had no control over it.
It has nothing to do with "white guilt" or fetishism. It's not a race thing at all.
It's a "my nation recently and currently systematically exploited people. I would like my nation to try to make those people whole" thing. It happens to be the case that many targets of exploitation were non-white, but the concern is the exploitation not the race of the exploited. We systematically exploited plenty of poor white people too, we should make them whole too.
Redlining in my city "ended" officially in 1968, but in practice it was probably another two decades before it really was removed from standard operation. And in my city, plenty of white people were considered undesirable and redlined. I guarantee you there are people directly impacted by this policy who are still alive, this isn't some far away past long since forgotten by time.
As an example, the city should be considering whether reduced interest rate loans, subsidized housing, rent freezes, or other benefits can be passed on to families directly impacted by redlining policies from the 60s, 70s, and 80s. Just because it's been 40 years doesn't mean the city should just give up trying to make people whole.
Orwell was way too kind.
He just had no conception of all the fun technologies that would later come along in a digitized, microprocessor-rich world of the future. Reading 1984 today, you want to laught at the simplistic and almost benign weakness of telescreens for surveillance.
Were Orwell to have been deeply informed about the surviellance mechanisms of the future, he'd likely be both surprised into horror at their innovative intrusions, and completely unsurprised that such a vast percentage of the UK's (and world's) population completely accepts them with hardly a sigh.
The last part wits the nail on the head. Orwell envisioned a future where everyone was forced to have a telescreen watching them at all times. He never for a second dreamed of a future where people would buy a telescreen for the most trifling convenience of going "alexa, is it going to rain today".
Huxley and Bradbury did.
This is actually why I always considered Brave New World to be much closer in predicting the future, at least in spirit if not in hard details. Let people access personal distractions, conveniences and pleasures on your road to total surveillance, and attempts at social control, and you can apply them with very little need to ever enforce miseries like those of "1984"
Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four still function as science fiction, Fahrenheit 451 basically captures the present.
Orwell turned in his friends and acquaintances. He was against totalitarianism and that is all.
The UK is almost lost.
It's done been lost.
They are a failed people.
There's a resurgence of patriotism in the political right in Britain from what I hear. They have a few years yet before the next election so we'll see where this goes, but I wouldn't count out the English people yet.
It’s very sad how quickly their culture is devolving. I was in the UK last year and I probably won’t be back.
The weirdest thing to me was that all the news stations covered US politics extensively, but said little about domestic politics. Not sure what to make of that.
This might be a hot take, but watching countries from pointing fingers and lecturing others about democracy to adopting the same tactics and use the cutting edge technology they have rambled about is both interesting and sobering.
We're all human, we're all the same.
The Khans are relentless on making Briton islamic as fast as they possibly can aren't they
There is no expectation of privacy in public and there never has been.
Honestly I wouldn’t mind it if the police actually did anything. The UK has American style public services with European tax rates. They have Chinese style surveillance and thought control with LATAM levels of criminality.
They constantly seem to implement the worst of all possible solutions.
They should have stayed in the EU.
Facial recognition vans sounds like something out of a dystopian sci-fi indie game that’s intentionally trying to be funny/absurd.
See also
https://adam.harvey.studio/cvdazzle
^camouflage face paint against facial recognition
Some context with a link, beyond "just click this", would be nice
Its all very dystopian.
People say we need to fight back against this but realistically how?
i mean, they do fuck all anyway so its a moot point
Fuck the UK Government. Do something.
HN title is wrong - the article title says "...across police forces in England".
It's not wrong as England is within the UK: it's just not as precise as it could have been.
HN Guidelines say "please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait"
The changed title is actually misleading since it includes three other countries that didn’t appear in the original.
That's on me, i made a mistake when writing the title
Thanks! We've changed the title now.
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This has nothing to do with immigration and everything to do with the UK being a addicted to surveillance. They have a long history of spying on their own citizens.
More, the country is approaching an impasse and they know it.
What kind of impasse?
The country hasn't produced anything of real value in decades - its economy is entirely held together by selling money laundering services to the rich - which brings in an enormous amount of money in percentage fees, but is only available to a few people. Since the money involved is so large, this crowds out actual production.
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Thousands of children aren't being assaulted, unless you count by Jimmy Saville and his friends.
The comment you're replying to isn't greatly helpful, but neither is yours.
Rotherham alone, a town of ~250k people, had an estimated 1,400 victims.
Then there's Rochdale, Oxford, Telford, Huddersfield, Derby...
Yes, it's well known that UK police and politicians have abused children at scale, hence why Saville was able to get away with what he did. He was protected by the crown. There are even pictures of Ghislane Maxwell and Kevin Spacey sitting on the throne (can google it).
The grooming gangs in those towns consisted of men from a variety of occupations, though a clear pattern was the involvement of takeaways and taxi firms. The involvement of police and politicians was mostly limited to denial, dismissal, and cover-up.
Although there have been individual allegations against local politicians[1] and police[2], they do little to help your case here. There certainly were thousands of victims, and I'm not clear why you'd deny that.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/feb/26/rotherham-gr...
[2] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cn9y0lvpyqvo
> One woman says as a child she would hear a police officer having sex with girls in exchange for drugs and money.
That sounds like a lot more than denial to me! It’s safe to say any evidence gathered by the same cops raping kids should be thrown out.
I said "mostly", did you miss that? The reality is that these gangs were overwhelmingly not made up of police or politicians, and they did indeed have thousands of victims.
We are long past the point where this sort of denialism will work - it will only generate further backlash. Is that your intention?
I'll leave you with a quote from Baroness Casey's recent report on the subject[1], the recommendations of which have been entirely accepted by the UK Government[2]:
> Despite reviews, reports and inquiries raising questions about men from Asian or Pakistani backgrounds grooming and sexually exploiting young White girls, the system has consistently failed to fully acknowledge this or collect accurate data so it can be examined effectively.
> Instead, flawed data is used repeatedly to dismiss claims about ‘Asian grooming gangs’ as sensationalised, biased or untrue. This does a disservice to victims and indeed all law-abiding people in Asian communities and plays into the hands of those who want to exploit it to sow division.
[1] https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/685559d05225e... (PDF)
[2] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/national-audit-on...
This is just racist propaganda. There’s no evidence to back up your claims. The links you posted talk about the police raping kids.
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In itself this is a storm in a teacup.
The important question, only important question IMHO, is how they handle positives. Do they go all guns blazing and arrest the person on the spot? Or do they use a restrained approach and first nicely ask the person if they have any ID, etc? That's the important bit.
Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 means authorities can request encryption keys (passwords) from you and you can't say no.
Investigatory Powers Act 2016 literally nicknamed Snoopers' Charter. Means ISPs keep all your traffic for minimum a year, police are given access to it, but politicians are exempt and need a warrant to have their data viewed?!?!?
UK police have been rolling out Live Facial Recognition in London and Wales for the last few years. Seven new regions are being added. 10 new vans coming in.
Supermarkets are using facial recognition to keep a database of people they deem criminals.
UK tried to make Apple put in a backdoor to its encrypted storage. Apple removed the ability for UK citizens to use that feature.
Online Safety Act forced online services to implement age verification for "adult" content. Many niche forums closed down because they would face large fines and jail time if they didn't comply. Larger businesses offloaded this requirement onto third party companies so now if you want to see "adult" content online you need to share your face or bank details or government ID with a random third party likely from a different country.
None of the major political parties care about digital rights and in fact want MORE surveillance.
> None of the major political parties care about digital rights and in fact want MORE surveillance.
This is because most of the public don't care about those rights either, and are entirely happy with surveillance. You've got nothing to hide right? If you don't the government to know what you're looking at its probably because you're a paedo, or maybe a terrorist. Maybe even both.
Its not the government who need to be convinced on this, it's the general public, and currently there's not really anyone out there explaining how you can't have a backdoor that only the government and good guys will be able to use.
No, the IPA 2016 does not require all ISPs to retain copies of all traffic for one year. There are already enough bad things to say about that act without making shit up.
Those 'niche' forums you mention are explicitly excluded from the Act.
Apple made the change to advanced security in advance of the bill being finalised, now the government has gone in another direction.
All the online safety act does is implement online the law as it stands IRL. British folk have been using the same ID verification systems to validate identity for nightclub admission, passport applications, driving licence applications, benefits claims, state pension claims, disclosure and barring checks, tax filings, mortgage deeds, security clearances, job applications, and court filings since 2016.
All the reaction is just pearl clutching - 5 million checks a day are being performed, the law itself is wildly popular with 70% support amongst adults after implementation.
There are three levels of checks - IAL1 (self-asserted, low confidence), IAL2 (remote or physical proof of identity), and IAL3 (rigorous proof with biometric and physical presence requirements).
IPA 2016 affords police access to your domain history, not content history, provided police can obtain a warrant from a senior High Court Judge. The box which stores the data is at ISP level and is easily circumvented with a VPN, or simply not using your ISP's DNS servers.
IPA 2016 doesn't exempt politicians from surveillance. It includes specific provisions for heightened safeguards when intercepting their communications. The Act establishes a "triple-lock" system for warrants targeting members of a relevant legislature, requiring approval from the Secretary of State, a Judicial Commissioner, and the Prime Minister. This heightened scrutiny is in recognition of the sensitivity involved in surveilling politicians, particularly given the surveillance of Northern Irish politicians and others in the 1950s, 60s, 70s, and 80s.
Part III of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 (in force 1 October 2007), and Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act 2000 provides powers over encryption keys/passwords etc. Section 49, RIPA can be used to force decryption, Section 51 to supply keys or passwords. These are identical to powers the police have IRL over safes, deposit boxes etcetera, and the penalty for non-compliance is identical.
You cannot use encryption or passwords to evade legal searches with a scope determined by a court on the basis of evidence of probable cause shown to the court by the entity requesting the search. A warrant from the High Court is required for each use.
Notable cases:-
- Blue chip hacking scandal - corrupt private investigators were illegally obtaining private information on behalf of blue chip companies.
- Phone hacking scandal - corrupt private investigators were illegally hacking voice mail on behalf of newspapers.
- Founder of an ISP using his position to illegally intercept communications and use them for blackmail.
> Those 'niche' forums you mention are explicitly excluded from the Act.
No, they are not.
> Our research indicates that over 100,000 online services are likely to be in scope of the Online Safety Act – from the largest social media platforms to the smallest community forum. We know that new regulation can create uncertainty – particularly for small organisations that may be run on a part time or voluntary basis.
https://www.ofcom.org.uk/online-safety/illegal-and-harmful-c...
Yes, they are in scope but a "small community forum" has nothing to do but to fill and keep a few self-assessments just in case. There is no requirement to implement age verification across the board (hence why current official guidelines target only porn sites in relation to age verification).
> a few self-assessments just in case
Ah right, just a couple of forms how bad can it possi...
> Step 1: identify the 17 kinds of priority illegal content that need to be separately assessed
lol.
https://www.ofcom.org.uk/online-safety/illegal-and-harmful-c...
You are being facetious as "priority illegal contents" are the sort that are the ones that are obviously very unlikely to be encountered on a "normal" small community forum. So this is no more than a box-ticking exercise, really.
Regarding age verification, the OSA is explicit states that if you ban all such content in your T&Cs you do NOT need to have age verification.
> this is no more than a box-ticking exercise, really
You won't mind getting rid of it, then.
>identify the 17 kinds of priority illegal content that need to be separately assessed
If you're a site with lots of child users, or if your site holds pornography.
No. What you have in mind is probably a Children’s Access Assessment[1], which is not what I linked.
[1] https://www.ofcom.org.uk/online-safety/illegal-and-harmful-c...
I take it you didn't read your own link, the language used is "services".
If you happen to be running the UK panty wetters forum from your own server, then you have a problem, but grandma Jessie's knitting circle is explicitly not in scope.
YOUR link goes on to say
>the more onerous requirements will fall upon the largest services with the highest reach and/or those services that are particularly high risk.
Even if your forum falls in scope, you're only required to do a risk assessment, if at that stage you are likely to have a lot of underage users, then there might be an issue.
However, if you're not an adult site, you only need to comply by providing the lowest level of self certified check. Handily, most of the big forum software providers have already implemented this and offer a free service integration.
Storm meet teacup.
> I take it you didn't read your own link, the language used is "services".
I do love it when people lie and then try to get sassy when called out.
> Even if your forum falls in scope, you're only required to do a risk assessment, if at that stage you are likely to have a lot of underage users, then there might be an issue.
I also like it when people who accuse others of not reading prove themselves incapable of reading - as pointed out below, what I linked is required regardless of the assumed age of your userbase.
All positives are verified by humans first before action is taken, all the system does is flag positives to an operator. Once verified, then the action movie starts.
Match quality below 0.64 is automatically discarded >0.7 is considered reliable enough for an enquiry to be made.
So far ~1,035 arrests since last year resulting in 773 charges or cautions, which is pretty good when you consider that a 'trained' police officer's odds of correctly picking a stop and search candidate are 1 in 9.
In the UK you don't have to provide ID when asked, appropriate checks are made on arrest, and if you lied you get re-arrested for fraud.
The system has proved adept at monitoring sex offenders breaching their licence conditions - one man was caught with a 6-year-old when he was banned from being anywhere near children.
Before anyone waxes lyrical about the surveillance state and the number of CCTV cameras, me and the guy who stabbed me were caught on 40 cameras, and not a single one could ID either of us.
Thanks, very informative.
> "In the UK you don't have to provide ID when asked"
Well if you are suspected of a crime they can arrest you if you refuse to identify yourself. I 'suspect' that being flagged by this system counts as such if you match someone who is wanted or similar.
You can't make an arrest on the basis of refusal to verify identity, unless a specific law is in play, or the Police officer has proof you are lying.
If the police have probable cause to suspect you've committed an actual crime, then you have to ID yourself, you are entitled to know what crime you are suspected of. Yes, facial recognition does count, but it has to be a high confidence match >0.7, verified by a police officer personally, after the match is made, and verified again on arrest.
If you are suspected of Anti-Social Behaviour then you have to ID (Section 50 of the Police Reform Act)
If you are arrested, then you have to provide your name and address (Police and Criminal Evidence Act 2000).
If you are driving, you have to ID (Section 164 of the Road Traffic Act).
Providing false information or documents is a separate criminal offence.
Essentially, police can't just rock up, demand ID, and ask questions without a compelling reason.
> You can't make an arrest on the basis of refusal to verify identity, unless a specific law is in play, or the Police officer has proof you are lying
> If the police have probable cause to suspect you've committed an actual crime, then you have to ID yourself, you are entitled to know what crime you are suspected of
It's always been my impression that this kind of ambiguous phrasing combined with the power imbalance gives the public absolutely no protection whatsoever. Let's say you don't want to provide ID: the copper could come up with some vague excuse for why they stopped you / want your ID. Good luck arguing with that
>the copper could come up with some vague excuse for why they stopped you / want your ID.
In which case, their sergeant will tear them a new one, right after the custody sergeant has finished tearing their own hole because the careers of both of those people rely on supervising their coppers and supervising their arrests. If the custody sergeant has to release someone because the copper can't account for themselves, that is a very serious matter. The sergeant's can smell a bad arrest a mile away.
The copper has to stand up in a court of law, having sworn an oath, and testify on the reasonable suspicion or probable cause they had. If they are even suspected of lying, that's a gross misconduct in a public office investigation.
Assuming they weren't fired over that, any promotion hopes are gone, any possibility of involvement in major cases or crime squads, hope of a firearms ticket, advanced driving, or even overtime are gone. Their fellow officers will never trust them to make an arrest again.
It's not consequence free, I'm not saying it doesn't happen, or that some officers rely on you not knowing your rights, but it is a serious matter.
The police will protect their own first. The blue code of silence is a thing that happens in the UK.
Then what happens if you don't have ID on you (which, for now, is entirely legal in the UK)? What if you're hours from home? Do you then need to completely cancel your day to spend it with the cops instead satisfy some shit algorithm that misidentified you as some known threat? What if you refuse to cooperate because you have better things to do than waste your time with the police? I'm sure that'll go well for you.
What if your child falls victim to a false identification, and then given that children are far less likely to have some form of ID on them than adults, they're stuck for much longer?
Do you trust the British police to take good care of your child? Or will they strip-search her and threaten her with arrest like they did with the then-15-year-old Child Q because they decided that she "smelled of weed"?
Do you really want more unnecessary interactions with the police for yourself or those you care about when your "suspicious behaviour" was having an algorithm judge that your face looked like someone else's?
It's also worth noting that if you are arrested for a serious offence your DNA and biometrics will taken and held for ever even if you are release without charge and the real perpetrator latter convicted.
In the eyes of the law you will be innocent but you'll still be treated like a criminal.
The same could accidentally happen for a minor offence too.
West Yorkshire, West Mids, The Met and Great Manchester Police have all made admin "mistakes"[1] where they failed to delete DNA evidence since the Protection of Freedoms Act 2012 came into force.
No one has been sanctioned or fined for those mistakes.
You might not think being on that list matters but during the good ol' days of the 1980s innocent trades union activists were placed on a secret list by the Met's Special Branch and that list passed potential empoyers to bar them from getting jobs.
Again, no one punished for that and if it's happend once it can happen again.
See the Scott Inquiry for details.
1. These scare quotes are because I don't beleive this always happens through incompetence. I'm not saying it's always the case but some of the time the police are just ignoring the rules because the rules have no teeth.
>Then what happens if you don't have ID
On arrest, you're required to provide your name and address, not proof. For the absolute majority of UK adults, it takes exactly 2 minutes to verify that data against public records - passport, driving licence, council tax, voter registration.
Lying in that situation is a separate criminal offence all of its own.
>satisfy some shit algorithm that misidentified you as some known threat
Matches with a confidence rating of <0.64 are automatically deleted >0.7 is considered reliable enough to present to a human operator, and before any action is taken a serving police officer must verify the match, and upon arrest verify the match against the human.
>What if your child falls victim to a false identification
The age of criminal responsibility is 10, and absent any personal identification parental identification is the standard everywhere.
>15-year-old Child Q
The good old slippery slope fallacy. Both the officers who strip searched that child were fired for gross misconduct. North of 50,000 children are arrested each year and this happened once.
>Do you really want more unnecessary interactions with the police for yourself or those you care about when your "suspicious behaviour" was having an algorithm judge that your face looked like someone else's?
Thing is 12 months on, 1035 arrests, over 700 charges, and that hasn't happened because the point of testing the scheme thoroughly was to stop that from happening.
What proof do you have that it doesn't work.
What happens when a police constable thinks they recognise you from evidence they have in an investigation or a wanted person notice?
This is nothing new. It is all about what is reasonable in the circumstances.
A constable is not going to be scanning the faces everyone going to Wembley in one night. Even 100 constables looking at faces entering faces going to Wembley is not going to scan everyone and recognise someone they know from a wanted poster (of maybe a couple hundred faces in their head).
The Met have already lied about the scale of false positives[0] by nearly 1000x, and it's not obvious how much better it will get. With the current tech, this rate will get worse as more faces are being looked for. If it's only looking for (I'm guessing) a thousand high-risk targets now and the rate is 1/40, as more and more faces get searched for this problem gets exponentially worse as the risk of feature collisions rise.
Of course, it'll also disproportionately affect ethnic groups who are more represented in this database too, making life for honest members of those groups more difficult than it already is.
The scale is what makes it different. The lack of accountability for the tech and the false confidence it gives police is what makes it different.
[0]: Met's claim was 1/33,000 false positives, actual 1/40 according to this article from last year https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-69055945
> [0]: Met's claim was 1/33,000 false positives, actual 1/40 according to this article from last year https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-69055945
The article does not claim this:
"The Metropolitan Police say that around one in every 33,000 people who walk by its cameras is misidentified.
But the error count is much higher once someone is actually flagged. One in 40 alerts so far this year has been a false positive"
These are 2 different metrics that measure 2 different things and so they are both correct at the same time. But I must say I am not clear what each exactly means.
Again worth mentioning something I've mentioned in other comments, and it's enormously obvious: There's a massive differene between unluckily being misindentified by some random copper who needs to get his memory or eyesight checked, and the percentage of false positives that's nearly guaranteed from a mass digital facial rec surviellance system working around the clock on categorizing millions of faces all over the country. The first is a bit of bad luck, the second will likely become pervasive, systemic and lead to assorted other shit consequences for many people being cross-checked and categorized in all kinds of insidiuous ways
You raise a good point that if the system wrongly ID you once it means that you're probably liable to be flagged every time you walk past one of those vans...
I think it's almost inevitable. The very nature of the bureaucratic procedures that grow up around these sorts of flag lists is that effort tends to accumulate at those points, right or wrong, and your being listed on them becomes almost self-reinforcing through bureaucratic inertia and over-caution, mixed with laziness about investigating if their own systems are wrong and repairing the problem.
The UK ran out of colonies to oppress so they turned on their own people.
a.k.a. Foucault's Boomerang. All empires do it eventually.
Sort of silly to talk about this when everyone is holding a facing-them network camera in front of themselves much of every day.
Straw man.
Sippy cup, man.
Paper straw man*
Bees-wax-coated, non-pfas, organic hay straw man?
Security theatre, like TSA shoe policies, inducing the panopticon. Leaked rumors about facial recognition vans serve their purpose, and we post in these comments while literally in front of networked cameras.