Independent Review of UK National Security Law Warns of Overreach
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The UK's national security law has sparked controversy, with an independent review warning that creating apps like Signal or WhatsApp could be considered "hostile activity." Commenters are having a field day, with some poking fun at being labeled "hostile actors" while others are sounding the alarm about government overreach. As one commenter noted, the UK is "just saying the quiet part out loud," echoing similar concerns about the EARN IT Act in the US and "Chat Control" proposals in the EU. The thread is abuzz with concerns about the erosion of free speech and the potential for governments to crack down on encryption.
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mi6govukbfxe5pzxqw3otzd2t4nhi7v6x4dljwba3jmsczozcolx2vqd.onion
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYB129pGq0k
As many personal details as possible
EDIT: You added a lot more after I replied to your post.
So again, it just harms the general public, while making it harder to catch criminals.
Probably a lot, given how booming the illegal drug market is. Obviously you don't hear about the successful ones, you only hear about the incompetent ones that get caught.
I have designed the software to be as secure as possible. no accounts to compromise, everything is device/person created/initiated/stored on device) to make it incredibly easy for the law to do their jobs while maintaining high security for the 99% of people just going about their lives
Looks like all this hard work will soon be illegal? f*k this insane shit
That incident was four hundred and twenty years ago. There was no Great Britain, no United Kingdom. Scotland was an independent country.
The UK today is not the same place, not in the slightest.
But it seems mostly due to a revolt against the "two tier Kharmer" policy of the current government: where normal people are jailed for online posts while others are free to break a female policer's nose at the airport and then be let to walk free by the judge and while others also get to rape hundreds of girls on an industrial scale and enjoy a nation-wide cover-up attempt (thankfully foiled) by the state...
Usually those types are the prime threat to the country.
By the time the leopards eat their faces, it's too late.
[0] Much like the people who voted for Trump and are now slated for deportation because 15 years ago they cashed a check that bounced, etc.
[1] Also the BBC has some blame here because if they weren't platforming Farage for years when it was unnecessary, it's conceivable that he wouldn't/couldn't have forced first the Tories and now Labour into their hard-right turns and we'd all be better off.
Farage is one of the few politicians who has opposed these laws. He wants to repeal the Online Safety Act.
Farage is in the same position as the Tories currently - he can say whatever he wants because he's not in power and has no responsibility to anyone.
I would be wholly unsurprised that if Reform won a GE and Farage became PM, anything he said before that would be unceremoniously dropped (see: almost every politician who gains power) and, frankly, Farage goes full Trump and, e.g., applies the OSA to censoring everyone he disagrees with.
The underlying argument was essentially the same one used in the US: almost anything is justified if it helps prevent anything they subjectively determine as “terrorism”.
"Tough on crime" and "tough on terrorism" are magic bullets for winning authoritarian support. That's how people are being persuaded that ECHR is a bad thing.
The UK has been heavily surveilled for several decades, if anything the pace has slowed especially in comparison to the modern US network of CCTV cameras on every doorstep and "private" survillence apparatus that has taken over.
As a personal observation - I think this might start to change over the next few years and the current positions of MPs and government might start to look very out of touch. We are seeing the fall of our long-standing "big" political parties and the rise of a very right wing populist party that is increasingly looking like it might actually win significant power at the next general election. I think awareness of the potential for abuse by the next people to run the government and agencies is growing among the general public. Whether it grows enough to stop some of these policies from becoming law in the near future is a different question of course.
Who's going to stop them?
We should probably stop saying and believing that. This is basically the UK government making a deal to the developers they cannot refuse: cooperate (install backdoors) or get prosecuted. The French tried to do something similar not so long ago.
A decade ago politicians genuinely didn’t know much about the internet so most of the laws were terribly ill informed good ideas. The new sweep of internet legislation like chat control, age verification and banning of vpns are much more dangerous because those pushing know exactly what they are doing.
(Great username, btw, SirHumphrey)
It would involve a more active MITM but would work.
Certificate Transparency thankfully means this is a tool a government could only use once if at all, and then they've burned an entire CA.
Sounds like Let's Encrypt would also fall under that.
This has got to stop. If you want to stop criminals, then focus on their illegal activites, not the streets they walk on. I walk on them too. And don't use CP as a catch-all argument to insert backdoors.
Their big problem here is that previously, it was hard to find people with the same opinion as you. If you couldn't find someone in the same village who wanted to start a rebellion, it probably wouldn't happen. Today, someone can post a Telegram group message and make thousands of people rally to a town square. I see the dangers, and I see why governments think they are doing this to protect the people. No one wants civil war. That is still not a strong enough reason to call road construction a hostile activity.
I'm back in Sweden after 12 years abroad. Time to read up on which parties are sane and which aren't when it comes to technical infrastructure.
That would be against everything european governments stand for.
I really struggle to understand why the hell this is always only applied to european governments? The idea to take 1984 as a book of requirements seems to extend *far* beyond europe.
not some vague far away "the EU (personalized)" thing
which also mean you can locally enact pressure on them
furthermore the EU supreme court(s) might have more often hindered mass surveillance laws in member states then the council pushing for them...
and if we speak as of "now", not just the UK, but also the US and probably many other states have far more mass surveillance then the EU has "in general".
so year the whole "EU is at fault of everything" sentiment makes little sense. I guess in some cases it's an excuse for people having given up on politics. But given how often EU decisions are severely presented out of context I guess some degree of anti-EU propaganda is in there, too.
Factually incorrect.
The European Parliament is elected. The Council is appointed, so there is no direct democratic incentive for the council to act on and no direct electorate to please.
On top of that the actually elected European Parliament can only approve (or turn down) directives authored by the Council. They have no authority to draft policies on their own.
To make matters even worse the European Council, which drafts the policies, has no public minutes to inspect. Which obviously makes it ripe for corruption. Which evidently there is a lot of!
Looking at the complete picture, the EU looks like a construct designed intentionally to superficially appear democratic while in reality being the opposite. The more you look at how it actually works, the worse it looks. Sadly.
Europe deserved something better than this.
no please read what I wrote
_local elected leaders_
they are the leaders each member state democratically elected in their own way
and that makes a lot of sense the EU isn't a country after all so using the already democratically elected leaders makes a lot of sense
> They have no authority to draft policies on their own.
yes neither did I claim so, the EU is by far not perfect
In short, there are three core institutions, the "technocratic" European Commission, the European Parliament elected by direct popular vote, and the Council ("of the EU"/"of ministers") made up of the relevant (in terms of subject matter) ministers of the standing national govs. The law-making procedures depend on policy areas etc. but usually in the policy areas where EU is fully competent, the Commission — the democratically least unaccountable of the three bodies — by default makes the initiatives and negotiates/mediates them further along with the Parliament and Council, but only the last two together really have the power to finally approve actual legislation, usually either Regulations (directly applicable in member states as such — so an increasingly preferred instrument of near-full harmonisation), or Directives (requiring separate national transposition / implementation and usually leaving more room for national-level discretion otherwise as well).
While not fully comparable to nation-state parliaments, the powers of the EU Parliament have been strengthened vis-à-vis both the Commission and the Council, and it's certainly long been a misrepresentation to say that they, e.g., only have the power to "approve or turn down" proposals of the Commission and/or the Council.
Yes, there are governments that are worse than European, but the decline of European government is the fastest.
You may be surprised that the UK is the world leader in the number of people arrested because of internet posts. And that Germany, which is still way behind the UK, has more people arrested for the same reason than Russia, China, North Korea, Iran, Belarus, Saudi Arabia, and a few others combined.
And many people still believe that those countries are beacons of democracy while the others are backward dictatorships.
“An X user who posted two anti-immigration tweets been handed a 18-month jail sentence.”
> I think it’s time for the British to gang together, hit the streets and start the slaughter.
> Violence and murder is the only way now. Start off burning every migrant hotel then head off to MPs’ houses and Parliament, we need to take over by FORCE.
I'm not sure what the punishment for such a clear but ineffective incitement to violence should be, but it shouldn't be nothing.
So, uh, yes. It's definitely something that the federal authorities take a dim view on.
> Several additional conditions not in evidence are required for speech of this type to fall outside of First Amendment protections.
Perhaps your point would be clearer if you indicated what specific conditions you believe are missing. Maybe the tweeter had no followers? Idk, I can only vaguely guess at what you're referring to.
- intent
- imminence
- likelihood
If the UK had speech protections like the US (which I wish they would) then it would fail the imminence and probably the likelihood tests (you rightly note that it is ineffective).
[1] https://uslawexplained.com/incitement
I think that puts the likelihood-factor at zero.
That would be important context to mention, don't you think?
That's terrorist speech tho. My problem is that everyone can reasonably get on board with banning speech that indicates violent action, and that the reliance on "muh free speech!!!" has been a net negative for actually defending the right of people to have privacy, because people rely on that sans any other (better) arguments.
Look I think there are problems with the UK's policy here, but this comment is either disingenuous or naive.
Because his post contributes nothing to the discussion.
> Yes, there are governments that are worse than European, but the decline of European government is the fastest.
What makes it the fastest?
> You may be surprised that the UK is the world leader in the number of people arrested because of internet posts. And that Germany, which is still way behind the UK, has more people arrested for the same reason than Russia, China, North Korea, Iran, Belarus, Saudi Arabia, and a few others combined.
Don't know about you but I'd rather be arrested for posting something in EU then be disappeared in any of the countries that you mentioned.
> And many people still believe that those countries are beacons of democracy while the others are backward dictatorships.
That is because Germany and UK are beacons of democracy when compared to the countries that you listed.
> That is because Germany and UK are beacons of democracy when compared to the countries that you listed.
Read my comment again. The fact that the UK and Germany are in some aspects still better than the ones I mentioned doesn't make them beacons of democracy. It's sad that those countries declined so fast that we are now comparing them.
[1] https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/E-10-2025-0022...
This doesn't mean anything in isolation.
> Here's the citation from the EU parliament itself [1], since I doubt you'd believe non-government sources.
Do we know each other?
> The fact that the UK and Germany are in some aspects still better than the ones I mentioned doesn't make them beacons of democracy.
No, but there aren't many that are much better so when you take all of that in to account, yes UK an Germany are beacons of democracy.
> It's sad that those countries declined so fast that we are now comparing them.
I already asked this but by what metric are they declining faste?
It's pretty good proxy for freedom of speech, one of the features without which democracy is not possible.
>> Here's the citation from the EU parliament itself [1], since I doubt you'd believe non-government sources.
> Do we know each other?
Probably not, but I can smell a state believer when I see him.
> No, but there aren't many that are much better so when you take all of that in to account, yes UK an Germany are beacons of democracy.
If they are, it's a pretty low baseline. They are but a shadow of what they once were.
>> It's sad that those countries declined so fast that we are now comparing them.
> I already asked this but by what metric are they declining faste?
The article I posted has a link [1]. There you can see the number of people arrested went up from 5502 in 2017 to 12183 in 2023. It's a pretty sharp decline in freedom of speech.
[1] https://archive.is/kC5x2
The second problem is that American conservatives have framed Nazi speech as a free speech issue, so to an onlooker who is not in the USA, when people talk about "free speech", it comes across as someone defending someone's right to say incredibly harmful, violent things about Jewish people, Transgender people, and so on. I think for most people outside of the USA (and, to be honest, most minority populations within the USA) you should consider "free speech" as being an incredibly tainted phrase for that purpose.
The flipside of all of this is that fascism is very, very possible even with freedom of speech (actually it seems to rely on it, given how virulent the spread of outright Nazi rhetoric has been in the USA so far). Freedom of speech is not the sole thing that holds up a democracy and it weakens your arguments for you to rely upon it like this.
The famous US Supreme Court case[0] that explicitly confirmed that "Nazi speech is free speech" was brought to the court by the ACLU[1], a left-leaning organization that defends things like LGBTQ rights. Your take is completely divorced from factual reality.
American conservatives aren't "framing" it. They are restating what the US Supreme Court has already determined it in a case brought to the court by the liberal left. This is a principled defense of free speech that has historically been supported by people across the political spectrum.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Socialist_Party_of_Am...
[1] https://www.aclu.org
I do not think you understand the optics of how this looks outside of your USA-centric echo-chamber audience.
>This doesn't mean anything in isolation.
For anyone who cares about free speech, this is very scary and very troubling, regardless of any other factors at play.
What about the other 11999?
A spokesperson for Leicestershire police clarified that offences under section 127 and section 1 can include any form of communication and may also be “serious domestic abuse-related crimes”. [1]
It seems misleading to count arrests related to domestic abuse as "anti-free speech".
[1]: https://lordslibrary.parliament.uk/select-communications-off...
This is what governments do when they want to avoid public scrutiny. This is not the win you are looking for.
I'm not trying to win anything, and I do support privacy. I just think any argument, especially those citing specific numbers, should be based on an accurate description of reality.
Give them a little time. They'll catch up. Comparatively to what the UK used to be it is sliding down, more and more. One should be more concerned about what is happening in their country rather than consoling themselves that there are worce places.
Is that a bad thing? I've got friends in the UK crying out for something like ICE so keen to understand why it's viewed as rapid decline.
https://news.bloomberglaw.com/us-law-week/ice-apprehension-o...
It's absolutely hopeless at protecting citizens from foreign threats.
95% of the arrests aren't actually arrests. The police send you a polite letter, you write a polite response, and at least 90% of the time the case is dropped.
Compare with various authoritarian dictatorships where if the police turn up at your door you're unlikely to survive.
And - unlike the US - no one is hauling random British brown people off the streets and sending them to prison camps.
The UK does have a far-right party desperate to end judicial oversight and remove legal protections from torture, etc, by ending support for the ECHR.
There's currently a huge online campaign, funded in part with foreign money and supported by most of the British press (foreign billionaire owned...), to make their far-right dictatorship seem like a political inevitability.
It isn't. But they're trying really really hard to pretend otherwise.
Putin is also really, really pissed at the EU for taking Russian money and using it for defence and reparations.
But - you know - if you start a war because you're a grandiose psychopath, that's what happens.
Bahaha, as if that's any better.
Guess cops showing up to your door for being mean to someone online is just an inevitability when there is no "second amendment" equivalent in said country.
Sad state of affairs, if they weren't british I'd almost feel bad.
This is completely untrue, as I've previously pointed out here [0] and here [1].
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41488099
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45412989
In your linked post [1] you suggest that this figure is completely wrong. To demonstrate this, you linked to a FOI request for the Metropolitan Police which shows that the actual figures for 2023 are 124 for Section 127 of the Communications Act and 1,585 for Section 1 of the Malicious Communications Act. This is, ironically, completely wrong. These figures are only applicable for the Metropolitan Police in the Greater London area, if you want figures for the UK you need to file FOI requests for all 45 territorial police forces in the UK. This is what The Times did, and 37 of them responded.
The Standard(1) attempts to address the claim of whether the UK arrests more people for social media posts by looking at figures from other countries, fails to point out a country with more arrests for social media posts, and concludes that open and liberal societies will have more arrests for social media posts because we are more free to do so. Go figure.
You also suggest that racial harassment, domestic abuse, stalking, and grooming are covered under the law, which is somewhat true, The Times quoted a spokesperson from Leicestershire police which stated that the laws cover any communications and may deal with cases of domestic abuse, and this is often the only example given to explain the figures. However it should be noted that the Communications Act(2) only covers electronic communications that are 'grossly offensive or of an indecent, obscene or menacing character' (or posts a message known to be false for the purposes of causing 'annoyance, inconvenience or needless anxiety', prior to 2024), and the Malicious Communications Act(3) while covering letters, EC, articles, etc, only applies if the communication is 'indecent or grossly offensive' (or a threat, prior to 2024).
For some of those issues it can be easy to point to communications that are 'grossly offensive' or threatening/menacing, however there are other more applicable laws to choose from such as the Public Order Act, the Crime and Disorder Act, and the Domestic Abuse Act which largely covers hate crimes and domestic abuse. An order of magnitude more people are arrested for hate crimes under these and similar laws than they are for malicious communications. The Protection from Harassment Act which covers harassment and stalking, the Serious Crime Act covers controlling and coercive behaviour, the Criminal Justice and Courts Act for revenge porn, and the Sexual Offences Act which covers an incredible amount of offences (it's a large act), including everything related to grooming.
The CPS largely discourage using communications offences (unsourced, but (4) is a good starting point), possibly because of the mens rea requirements for 'grossly offensive' or causing distress or anxiety, possibly because the sentencing limit for either communications act limited at 6 months or 12 months for malicious communications (also 6 months for offences prior to 2022), possibly because it has to weigh whether the sentencing is within the public interest with regards to the chilling effect it can have on speech, especially when concerns about Article 10 of the ECHR are brought up, but it has recommended using these acts as a fallback. Prior to 2015 revenge porn wasn't a specific offence but could still be considered under the communications acts for instance.
All of this to say, if the communications acts are being used as a fallback for the issues you mention, it can't be seen as anything other than a failure that the more specific legislation fails to address issues of or prosecuting issues of 'grossly offensive' or 'threatening' communications appropriately, which seems unlikely, but if it is the case, why then is the sentencing rate so pitiful? 10%? For 'racial harassment' and domestic abuse? In a country that records around 130k hate crimes and 230k cases of domestic abuse (of which 35% are related to malicious communications, do the maths) yearly? When the bar is as low as racial slurs or 'threats'?
For a number of high profile cases you could perhaps make the case that the arrest was justified, but these cases are high profile for a reason, they're testing the limits of what can be considered 'grossly offensive' that aren't covered by other more applicable laws. But even then, there are high profile cases simply because the police had absolutely no business arresting anybody(5). For it to be the case that these laws, specific to 'grossly offensive' and 'threatening' behaviour, are being used to address these issues it needs to be demonstrated, and I don't think that has been the case, and the issue of wasted police time needs to be addressed when 90% of arrests didn't need to be made. The last point is especially relevant at a time where petty crime has all but decriminalised over the past decade and when police chiefs are suggesting citizens are the ones that need to do something about shop lifters(6).
In the greater context of the conversation, it should be obvious that police are arresting people for social media posts, regardless of whether you agree with the intent or not, and it should be obvious that the police are interested in policing social media given the absurd number of Non-Crime Hate Incidents being recorded, also around 13,000(7) a year, and I can't see things getting better with the introduction of the OSA. Blaming these issues on a 'right-wing narrative' seems naive at best and missing the forest for the trees at worst. Labour having absolutely abysmal polling issues should suggest that this isn't a partisan issue in the slightest.
(0) https://www.thetimes.com/uk/crime/article/police-make-30-arr...
(1) https://www.standard.co.uk/news/tommy-robinson-uk-speech-cla...
(2) https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2003/21/section/127
(3) https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1988/27/section/1
(4) https://www.cps.gov.uk/prosecution-guidance/communications-o...
(5) https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4gz1qy30v5o
(6) https://www.lbc.co.uk/article/its-up-to-the-public-to-stand-...
(7) https://hansard.parliament.uk/lords/2024-11-19/debates/0DE7E...
I'm not convinced by the rest of your argument. For example:
> there are other more applicable laws to choose from such as the Public Order Act, the Crime and Disorder Act, and the Domestic Abuse Act which largely covers hate crimes and domestic abuse
Isn't it possible that people get arrested both for malicious communications and for harrassment, say?
> In the greater context of the conversation, it should be obvious that police are arresting people for social media posts
I mean, yes of course. What's not obvious (or even likely) is that 12000 people are being arrested for social media posts.
it was the EU which had stopped many similar unhinged attempts from the UK when the UK was still a member
similar it had been the EU which had shut down various other surveillance nonsense of the EU
you are basically pretending the EU is a person with one uniform opinion and goals
but it's like the opposite of it, like in a lot of way
it's a union of states, each having a vastly different goals and culture and non of them having a "single uniform opinion" either but (in most cases) a more complex political field then the US (on a federal level)
Furthermore the most influential organ of the EU when it comes to making changes is literally a composition of the elected leaders of the member states. So for most big controversial decisions the driving and directing force isn't "the EU" but but the various elected leaders of the member states. For EU citizens blaming "the EU" instead of blaming your own elected leaders is common, but pretty counter productive, as it's basically pretending you have no power to change things.
Furthermore in the EU you have an additional parliament which (in general) needs to ratify laws and two high courts which can (and in context of mass surveillance repeatedly have) shut down misguided "laws", including in many cases local attempts at mass surveillance laws.
So while some parts of the EU have consistently pushed for mass surveillance in recent years other parts also have consistently moved against it.
In general while the EU needs a lot more transparency and some more democratic processes in some aspects a lot (not all) of the "stories told to make the EU look dump/bad" have a lot of important context stripped from that (like e.g. that a lot of the current push for surveillance comes from the locally elected leaders not the EU parliament or some other abstract "the EU" thing, it's your own countries leader/lead party(1) which does or at least tolerates that shit).
The elected leaders like to blame the EU (or for those without an EU - any external body or even the mythical deep state) for everything adverse. The reality is these "failures" they blame on someone else are generally in alignment with their own policies goals and objectives.
Could? I know of government employees who literally cannot do their job, yet somehow they've been employed for over twenty years. When I say they can't do their job, I mean they have to ask coworkers how to do something that is and always has been a job requirement, and they have to "ask for help" every time. People are actually enabling massive amounts of waste and inefficiency.
Then there are those who don't even have work to do, and will take offense if you ask them to justify their continued employment. As though they are owed a position in the organization tomorrow just because they have a position in the company today.
I wish I could say that was an unusual experience. In another jurisdiction it took two months and we finally got to the point where even providing specific coaching telling them that it wasn't working because they opened the TCP port numbers we said instead of UDP, even though UDP was heavily emphasized. The stonewalling and constant battling ended up delaying our launch to the point where the decision makers decided to just can it instead of fight with their own IT organization.
Now that said, I have worked with some truly incredible and brilliant people on the government side. There definitely are some fantastic people that work for the government. Unfortunately they seem to be in a minority.
Which means that the truly good people are basically quirky people with strong work ethic/believe in the mission that happened to join the organization for some reason.
Indeed it is not. I'm not going to list all the examples I know as embarrassing some departments does not end well but I have to share this one. I tried to email someone at the California DMV a couple decades ago. My email bounced and I got a strange routing error. I assumed the problem was on my end. The first thing I did was dig their MX records and what did I get? 2 MX records with RFC1918 address space (10.0/8). I managed to get through to a real person on the phone and that went nowhere. They eventually fixed it some months later but they probably enjoyed the email silence.
The argument is so fundamentally stupid that they should be embarrassed just putting it down in writing!
What right-wing institutions have noticed all around the world is that you can just kind of ignore all that shit now. Centrists are flailing around begging for an explanation for "how this could happen" and folks on the left, marginalized for years in favor of free markets, are just kind of facepalming and saying we told you so.
You need to put it in writing somewhere that there's a limit on governmental authority and enforce the hell out of it. You need to do the same to clamp down on the power of special interests and corporations. More than anything, you need robust mechanisms that make government representatives vulnerable to the voting public. The people need to be the ones that they scramble to please and when we get mad that should be dangerous and difficult for those holding the reins of government. Their existence needs to depend on the mandate of the public.
Governments of both flavours are ignoring the voting public, for various reasons, e.g. they are signatory to agreements that no longer work for the public but are difficult to break, the public is increasingly economically irrelevant compared to businesses, and, of course, the greedy self-interest of the politicians themselves.
I agree with you on the third paragraph, but it's also the reason that I believe the US will be okay compared to other Western democracies (an opinion I'm not sure you would share, judging by your post). The Constitution is already a thing, and is on its own a declaration that certain rights derive from a higher authority than government. The second amendment in particular is under siege (again, by the left), but does equalize things in a way that many of its opponents are reluctant to admit.
The idea that "they're coming for your guns" is something we can begin to discuss when the first step to curb our mass shooting problem is actually taken. For now, it's a little ridiculous to infer that there's any kind of 'siege' on the second amendment given that we have them all the damn time and they're not slowing down.
I would ask folks in the EU whether they think they're leaning left at the moment. Reading their news it doesn't seem to be the case [0 1 2 3].
Just out of curiosity - in what concrete way do you think the second amendment serves as an equalizer? Do you imagine that the government sees an armed populace as any kind of a threat?
Leaving the left-right debate behind for just a second - I smell that there is something perhaps we may agree on. Representation is fundamentally broken. Even given our ideological differences, how do you feel about direct democracy? I think we'd benefit.
0 - https://www.ibanet.org/The-year-of-elections-The-rise-of-Eur...
1 - https://ecfr.eu/publication/rise-to-the-challengers-europes-...
2 - https://fortune.com/europe/2025/02/25/europe-far-right-movem...
3 - https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2024/12/24/european-polit...
To what extent does the US have the right to maintain its borders? The idea that anyone should be able to enter the country illegally and be given the right to due process presupposes that the state has the resources to deal with the volume of people who decide to do that. And in most of the world, it would be uncontroversial to suggest that people entering a country illegally have -- effectively, if not necessarily legally -- zero recourse should the state decide to remove them.
>The idea that "they're coming for your guns" is something we can begin to discuss when the first step to curb our mass shooting problem is actually taken. For now, it's a little ridiculous to infer that there's any kind of 'siege' on the second amendment given that we have them all the damn time and they're not slowing down.
There is a sustained anti-gun lobby, and California has taken significant steps to restrict gun ownership. The US is too far gone for any one government to be able to swoop in and completely remove all guns, so the goal is long-term. Sway people's opinions, change the culture, and implement controls that skirt the edge of violating the second amendment, or set a precedent for limits on the second amendment. I don't live in the US, but even what I see as an outsider looking in makes it clear that this is happening.
Governments as an organization are perfectly capable of putting down an armed population, but individual members of a government certainly do see an armed population as a threat. I know for a fact that senior members of the (large, US) company that I work for take security very seriously. And though I don't support or condone shooting government officials and CEOs in any way, shape or form, I do believe that all peaceful negotiations, whether they be between employees and employer, or citizens and government, are purchased through a credible threat of violence. Otherwise, there are no negotiations, just suggestions. We're the lucky ones who got to live through a time when those fights have already been had, but there's nothing to say they won't need to happen again.
>I would ask folks in the EU whether they think they're leaning left at the moment. Reading their news it doesn't seem to be the case [0 1 2 3].
Incumbent governments in western Europe are mostly left wing, especially by US standards. The population is pushing right as a response to those governments refusing to address valid concerns of the voting public. This is why right wing "populist" parties are on the rise, but they aren't in power yet. The push for surveillance has been bipartisan at best, and more realistically driven by the political left under the guise of limiting hate speech.
>Leaving the left-right debate behind for just a second - I smell that there is something perhaps we may agree on. Representation is fundamentally broken. Even given our ideological differences, how do you feel about direct democracy? I think we'd benefit.
I agree that representation is fundamentally broken across much of the west, but I believe that the cause is ultimately a crisis of sovereignty.
As an example: it's no secret that there's a major backlash against migration in many western countries, but with the volume of people coming across, what do you do? You can't shoot them, and if you spend resources shipping them home, a non-trivial (and generally privileged and insulated) chunk of your population wants to save the world and will protest. And the business lobby is all over it because they like the idea of lower wages, so you've also got an army of neoliberal economists and lawyers telling you why you should just let all these people stay. Then you've got all the NGOs that your country is signatory to that want you to invest resources in helping illegal migrants, and in the case of Europe, the EU might try to directly tell your government it needs to do its fair share of taking those people anyway. And even if an individual member of government privately thinks there's an issue with an unpoliced border, the party number-crunchers are telling them that these people vote for the party, so letting them stay and giving them a path to voting actually helps the bottom line. And of course, you've also got a few investment properties...
The end result of all of this is that governments change, but the course stays the same, because in the absence of a government that is willing to risk never being in power again no one is willing to do anything. At worst, you get voted out, the next group does the same thing until people are angry again, and then you get voted back in.
Which of course brings us to Trump. A lot of what Trump is doing, at least to me, is reasserting US sovereignty. He's forcing US companies to heel through the H1B visa change and tarriffs, rattling treaties to get allies to absorb some of the expenditure of maintaining security, and enforcing the nation's border. These aren't historically radical concepts. If the US is going to be a country where the government has an opinion and can advocate for itself as an entity, this probably needs to happen, because no one wants to fight for a shared economic zone. And eventually, if a government can't enforce its borders and exercise its monopoly on violence, another entity will fill that void.
I guess this is a long way of saying that I have no issue with direct democracy, but I don't know that it's the answer, because I don't think it addresses the real problem. Maybe it circumvents some of these issues, but how does a direct democracy raise and maintain an army? Or pass a budget?
No. It presupposes that every human being deserves to be treated with dignity no matter the circumstances. But I don't expect you to agree with me. Your interpretation of contemporary life in the USA is clearly distorted, but again, I don't expect you to agree. You're being lied to, fwiw.
> what do you do? You can't shoot them
There's no reason for me to engage with you further if this is how you think.
I remember when I found out that a highly intelligent friend believed the earth was six-thousand years old. But at least he had the excuse that his idiotic religion was pushed on him since birth. Intelligent people on this site are sometime incapable of basic media literacy and I find it wholly depressing.
Keep voting against your interests while others of us fight you tooth and nail to try to make the world better for everyone (rather than just our own teams), even including you.
Lobbying is only tiny if you look at the individual amounts. Most lobbyists only put forth $5-10,000 at a time because they're not doing it at a national level. But it's the fact that so many do it in so many different places that makes it a threat. Somebody running to be on the city board can have their entire campaign financed by a single donor. A mayor can have their entire income for the year matched by two lobbyists laying the groundwork for a national campaign. One Senator or House member having seven to eight lobby sponsors can almost match their guaranteed salary for that year. There are entire divisions of the finance departments of companies that are dedicated to budgeting for lobbying over the fiscal year. It's a massive force, composed of nearly $4,000,000,000 in "contributions" in 2024 alone.
This is a warning from the independent reviewer that the law is too potentially broad, not an argument to retain these powers.
[1] https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/69411a3eadb57..., pages 112 and 113
It’s the same with the multi billion ID cards and digital ID which is almost impossible for a government as incompetent as this one to implement.
they're not doing this to protect people, they're doing this to ensure there cannot be rebellion against unpopular policies. Organization is harder if all communications is monitored.
But this is how gov't get to be kept in check - the risk of "rebellion". If this risk is removed, you get authoritarian states - see north korea.
Don't get me started on locksmiths, oh the horror!
Check out the Pirate party's stance on integrity and internet:
https://piratpartiet.se/sakpolitik/integritetspolitik/
https://piratpartiet.se/sakpolitik/natpolitik/
If there was ever a signal that it should be done, it is that the government agency thinks it is a bad idea.
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