The problem with the "I've got nothing to hide" argument is it's not "you" who decides what is "right" or "wrong". The entity doing the "spying" determines what is right or wrong. "You" might think "x" is ok, however the "spying" entity may have the opposite view. And it is the "spying" entity's opinion that matters, not yours, because it always them that have the power and authority in determining what is "right" or "wrong". Moreover, definitions change on what is "right" or "wrong".
I live in the UK and when I raise concerns about government surveillance here people often say, "I've got nothing to hide".
I learnt of a case just this week where a guy on Reddit left a slightly controversial comment and ended up being charged with hate speech, lost his job and received hate abuse online for his opinion.
It was kinda crazy because "all" he said was that didn't care about a teen who died in police custody, specifically that this teen was a, "good for nothing, spice smoking, Toxteth monkey" (Toxteth being a fairly rough inner-city area of Liverpool).
The teen he was insulting was dead and unable to take offence, but the police officer on Reddit at the time took offence and decided to prosecute the guy anyway.
I'm bringing this up because I don't think most people in the UK realise this. Insulting people online or just saying something mildly offensive will often lead to prosecution. I mean just this week an autistic child got arrested for calling a lesbian police officer a lesbian here in the UK.
We all have something to hide when what's right and wrong is this arbitrary.
Legal notes:
I do not agree with the views of the Redditor referenced in my comment. I understand how someone may be offended by what he said, but disagree specifically with it being an offence to state an offensive position online.
I also do not agree with the behaviour autistic child mentioned in my comment. I understand that being autistic is not an excuse for being offensive. Again, I am only bringing this up because I do not believe it should be an offence to offend.
The offensive language used in my comment were direct quotes used specifically to make a point.
> Insulting people online or just saying something mildly offensive will often lead to prosecution.
"will often": no, not at all. Could occasionally. You're not helping your argument by overstating this. The courts are not stuffed with people being fined for saying things that are "mildly offensive".
And nothing of what you're talking about is government surveillance. The police aren't the government, and the police do not routinely surveil the populace.
They wouldn't have the staff, for one thing! The police actually wanted to close the police station in the town in which I live -- population over 100,000 in the wider borough -- and replace it with what amounted to a kiosk and service from police stations five miles away in each direction.
And yes, really: for those viewers who persist in believing that the surveillance system in Hot Fuzz exists in reality... nope
British police, significantly, police by consent, are operationally independent of HM government, and cannot (currently) prosecute without the aid of the (equally independent) CPS. In England there isn’t even one single police force, and unlike the FBI, no normal part of the police is a part of a government department. (MoD Police are, I guess, but their remit is military policing).
I was responding to the somewhat hysterical parent post to correct the conflation of: the police literally are not the government, do not spy for the government, and do not routinely surveil the population; their surveillance powers are limited and regulated.
Does any arm of the state surveil the populace in any sense? It falls within MI5’s remit to spot domestic threats. Their surveillance operation surely operates far less less broadly than that of the NSA, which has far less oversight.
We only know what the NSA does because a person who leaked highly confidential documents and is now a refuge for the crime of showing the world what the US govt does in secret.
Do you really think the UK govt, or any govt, doesn't use the cloak of security and classification to do questionable things?
I am just observing that the scope of GCHQ’s abilities are obviously limited compared to the NSA (unless they have the most cost-efficient IT infrastructure in the world, and we don’t do cost-efficient government IT here even now). The budget just isn’t there for them to operate the way the NSA does.
The thing you’re missing is that GCHQ spies on Americans (Foreigners from the UK perspective) using the NSA’s money, then it shares the findings from the spying with the NSA under an intelligence sharing agreement. GCHQ is mostly an outsourced wing of the NSA.
It's a lovely idea, but Peelian principles are currently only paid lip-service. People are trying to drag it back to something approaching that, but it's not the current actual situation, particularly in London. (Kettling, etc.)
> are operationally independent of HM government,
> the police literally are not the government,
> do not spy for the government,
Again, in the sense of "political party currently in control of Parliament", yes. But they're literally the enforcers of the law -- and their meaning of the law. People not in Parliamentary systems have a broader, and far more useful meaning of "government" -- those governing, determining what is going to be punished and what won't. If you're actually stuck on term "government" in the partisan meaning, please give me some other term to refer to the coherent actions of the state. The bureaucracy and enforcement arms actually do govern, regardless of whether they're doing so at the behest of particular partisan guidance (though sure, that's worse in terms of being able to politically course correct). An arrest and detention whilst CPS sorts out taking to the next level is actually a punishment. Hence the quote "You can beat the rap, but you can't beat the ride."
> do not routinely surveil the population; their surveillance powers are limited and regulated.
> "...Their surveillance operation surely operates far less less broadly than that of the NSA, which has far less oversight."
"The Investigatory Powers Tribunal, however, ruled on 30 January 2023 that MI5 broke key legal safeguards by unlawfully retaining and using individuals’ private data gathered via covert bulk surveillance." - https://www.computerweekly.com/news/365529894/MI5-unlawfully....
> for those viewers who persist in believing that the surveillance system in Hot Fuzz exists in reality...
They really do. Not just council cctv cameras, which are less problematic - any local Facebook group is full of pictures from ring doorbells of people who look like “trouble” who have the wrong skin colour, wrong clothing, wrong age etc.
This is the norm and is embraced by a nation of curtain twitchers.
That is not the surveillance panopticon that HNers imagine.
That is "Little Brother" -- prurient neighbour-watching.
Yeah, Little Brother is everywhere. (It's the bigger threat to our culture, IMO).
But this isn't a UK-specific problem. The USA, for example, has Homeowner Associations, which tie neighbourhood-watch curtain-twitching and petty compliance to personal freedoms, property values, paint colour and lawnmowing. The average suburban person in the UK arguably has more freedom from curtain-twitching busybodies than in the USA (where 26% of the population live in an HOA or condo association)
The British police do not have warrantless power to just lazily aggregate Ring doorbell footage or any other such thing (they may have faster access to cloud content with a warrant, but I suspect it is probably still faster to just look at the doorbells in the immediate vicinity and ask permission).
They do however have the ability to ask homeowners for ring footage without a warrant, and British homeowners on the whole are eager to inform on their neighbours
I understand that in the simplest way this is true, and I am sure it is very clever, poetic and pithy.
But this is not how it works in principle or in practice in the UK. The police work on behalf of the people, not the government. When government manages to suborn the police in even a small way it is very much noticed.
It’s difficult for people outside the UK to see this, I suppose, but our experience with this is that state directed police overreach is now unusual, and there is a lot of pushback from the chief police officers and the public when they are asked to oppress. There are aberrations (no police force in the world gets protest management right, and ours is no exception) but in general you have to be consciously right up in their faces to cause such an aberration.
The UK is a country of realpolitik at every level. The police go about their business unarmed, with the consent of the population, and generally speaking, they know the public will not put up with overreach anymore. We may find them pompous and overbearing but they are pretty much the envy of the world still.
I like that officers in the UK are unarmed. I'm sure there are other distinct differences in how the UK does policing from other countries that are worth pointing out that make a meaningful difference.
But every democratic country is operating on the principal that the police work on behalf of the people, and has mechanisms in place that are supposed to ensure that this is the case. The government works on behalf of and with the consent of the people too! When you get sent to prison for an insult on social media, it's all done in the name of (some of) your fellow citizens.
Much of this is about individual freedom vs the oppression of the collective. The operators who are tasked to enforce the collective's norms have personal decision making power, and power invariably corrupts.
> you have to be consciously right up in their faces to cause such an aberration.
What does this mean? That they are personally vindictive? That acting legally but in a way that is annoying to an officer should get me arrested?
> But every democratic country is operating on the principal that the police work on behalf of the people, and has mechanisms in place that are supposed to ensure that this is the case.
Not really. The specific culture of “policing by consent” that is foundational to policing (one of the Peel principles) is still really strongly defended as a matter of policing identity here (as it is in Canada and to a lesser but still noticeable extent Australia). The US police kits itself out with secondhand military equipment from the armed forces. I suspect in some situations this makes them a more effective law enforcement machine but tooling up with military equipment suggests a significant break from Peel principles.
> What does this mean? That they are personally vindictive? That acting legally but in a way that is annoying to an officer should get me arrested?
It means that the situations where our police overreact are the situations where they are outnumbered and in confrontation (riots etc.). It means the opposite of them being personally vindictive (though some are and they are depressingly hard to fire)
Again with your links. Is it performance art? Are you an AI aggregator?
(The violence against women thing is serious but it’s not a question of law enforcement behaviour or brutality. That is about the international problem of police being hard to fire when they are awful individuals in private; it’s an ongoing problem that is being addressed here through campaigns, and I am afraid I do not remotely believe that domestic and sexual violence is less of a problem in the USA. Canada takes this more seriously)
As opposed to your arguments, who are solely based on your individual statements, and advocacy for the MI5 being a well supervised mass surveillance organization?
I am assuming it is just a random police officer reading Reddit on a personal basis and deciding to act on evidence of a crime (either because they are the local force or by passing it on). Police aren’t ever really off duty in this sense.
Why assume a surveillance mechanism when police are individuals who also use the more popular sites?
It's not assuming a surveillance mechanism, it's _describing_ one. Individual police keeping their eyes open _is_ a surveillance mechanism. Admittedly, just about the most banal one possible, but the anti-social behavior it's catching is also the most harmless. But the bad law does actually make it a problem.
I don't understand the point of this kind of argument from absurdity. It's not as clever as you think.
Also it's worth observing that a possible outcome is the majority of people wouldn't want their government overthrown, and the police should act to prevent it. Another is that the police wouldn't preserve a government that does not have the slightest mandate. There is no benefit to the police to do that. (Do you expect the FBI and state police forces to maintain an actually illegitimate US government? Because even from outside, I don't).
Again: Britain runs on realpolitik, not extremist absolutes. At no point would we on a cultural level feel it important celebrate "the peaceful transfer of power", for example. It's just not how our minds work. Our police are small and unarmed. It's just a very different place and the fact that HNers don't really understand it doesn't help with the oversimplifications.
(FWIW, nobody ever needs to overthrow a British government. The party in power usually manages this from within.)
The thing is, few of these cases make it to trial, because the CPS has to demonstrate it’s in the public interest.
The result is that the police are still opening investigations they are asked to, and the CPS is still examining them; it’s a lot of energy spent on no outcome.
That is the actual problem, not the prosecutions, which remain unusual from what I can see.
There needs to be better guidance on the relevant legal standards. Separately we need to do something about (civil) libel laws, but that is a parallel and not criminal law issue.
I have to ask… do you disagree with prosecuting offensive comments or not? You say it doesn’t happen often and they can’t enforce it. But do you think its a bad thing? Doesnt seem that way. The point is it shouldn’t be legal.
Do I think offensive comments can be prosecuted in practice? Yeah, I do. Just as there are limits to free speech in the USA, there are comments that can have consequences.
The bar should be set high, and in general it is, but no, I don’t think hate speech is inherently free speech, for example.
The US way of doing things is not a) the only way of doing things, b) intrinsically the best way of doing things or c) trending in the right direction. Free speech is not something with a magical clear definition, and I think it goes without saying that we at least try to take incitement to actual race hate a little more seriously. We can set the bar differently; we have.
The problem in the UK is not a rash of prosecutions for offensive comments because despite what the parent comment says, they rarely come to trial. There is no enormous procession of these cases, and knobends are actually pretty free to be knobends here. Speech is free, newspapers don’t get raided when they happen to investigate the local police chief.
The problem at the moment is that the guidance is in flux, and too much time is wasted determining that something won’t be prosecuted. (Well, that’s the main problem. The secondary problem is the USA exporting its newest renewable resource, alt-right trolling, to every corner of the English speaking world, exhausting everyone’s patience.)
Right ok, so the reason why you're taking issue doesn't come from a principled place, but because you just so happen to believe these people should be prosecuted.
> "will often": no, not at all. Could occasionally. You're not helping your argument by overstating this. The courts are not stuffed with people being fined for saying things that are "mildly offensive".
Yes, sorry – you're right. It happens occasionally. If you're willing to take the risk generally speaking you can be offensive and get away with it.
> If you're willing to take the risk generally speaking you can be offensive and get away with it.
We have a whole small news channel dedicated to it now! ;-)
Offensiveness on the whole is not policed, at all. (Except by Facebook, of course.)
Offensiveness that rises to the level of a crime can end up policed. The guidance around that is still poorly defined, so it's very unusual to see a charge or a conviction and it's for sure wasteful of resources.
I'm obviously not arguing that it's always a good idea to prosecute when people are just offended -- of course it's not remotely a good idea to have that standard. But I do think we in this country should be allowed to draw a slightly different line on racism or hate speech or trolling/griefing/abuse campaigns without being insulted for our lack of "principle", which is the routine HN argument.
It is, in my estimation, unprincipled to stand around and do nothing while people are harassed online, driven from their online activities, doxxed, abused with poster and letter writing campaigns, or incited against by conspiracy newspapers. Freedom of speech can have different limits than those chosen by the US constitution without being morally defective.
> Offensiveness that rises to the level of a crime
The larger question is, how is this even possibly a thing?
That there are legal liabilities that are wholly dependent on the internal emotional state of another person is absolutely insane. How is it possible to take a government that treats its adult citizens like kindergartners seriously?
> How is it possible to take a government that treats its adult citizens like kindergartners seriously?
Because that isn't the standard. Why do you imagine it is? There you are assuming that Brits are mentally enfeebled. Standard HN position.
Look, just because the USA draws this nice simple extreme bright line doesn't mean it's magically the right line or that it works particularly well.
There is a coupling between your obsession with absolute freedom of speech and your obsession with absolute rights to bear arms that leads to you arming yourself in arguments that could be resolved better over a cup of tea.
Racist language isn't just offensive, for example -- it reinforces racist conduct and can be seen in that wider context. There's no reason to assume there's a freedom to be racist in actions in a country that still has racial divides; I'm not sure why "speech" is excluded from those actions. It can rise to the level of harassment. Trolling and griefing is a massive social problem; free speech shouldn't protect you if you make someone's life a misery even only online with entirely broadcast speech.
We (sometimes! actually unusually!) deal with this at the level of misdemeanour (magistrates courts).
The USA has been known to prosecute jaywalking and can't even deal with swatting -- a means of using overkeen armed police who can only perform conflict resolution if they are armed like soldiers to potentially accidentally murder someone at distance -- so I think perhaps it's a little churlish to come after us because we in our crowded little country think being rampantly offensive to large numbers of people sometimes rises to the level of misdemeanour.
I don’t mind that - if someone wants to tap Joe Bloggs’ phone then that’s fine. Get a court order with evidence that he might be doing something wrong
It’s scalable surveillance that worries me. Suddenly cctv which is pulled in case of a crime becomes constantly monitored, with face, gait, clothing, and other types of automated recognition, gathering data on everyone, pumping that data into pattern matchers.
This is the dark HN fantasy of scaleable British panopticon surveillance again.
The police have surprisingly little constantly available CCTV. Police and national government control a minuscule fraction of the CCTV in the UK. (Local government a bit more, but it’s town centre anti-nuisance stuff —- pickpockets —- and a few secure buildings, and the police do not have routine access to it). There isn’t the money, the intent or the legal framework to so what you’re suggesting, and nor, I would say, do we “love it”.
> I learnt of a case just this week where a guy on Reddit left a slightly controversial comment and ended up being charged with hate speech, lost his job and received hate abuse online for his opinion.
the guy publically posted a racist comment in the UK where there is not an unlimited right of free speech and anti-social behavior is regulated. I don't see the privacy concern. I prefer an unlimited right of free speech, but I don't call it privacy. This guy did have something to hide, shoulda kept it hidden.
I'm very charitable so perhaps that's why we disagree here, but I didn't read his comment as racist personally. That said, I understand the use of the word "monkey" could have been used with racist connotations, but the burden of proof would be on you to proof that instead of assuming guilt.
But either way he wasn't charged with being a racist. And outside of being a member of an extremist group I don't believe it's actually illegal to be a racist in the UK. It's illegal to be offensive. And that's what he was ultimately prosecuted for.
turns out, you do not decide what and on whom is the burden of proof; I'm just telling you what (obviously) happened. You may be fine with being oblivious, I'd just recommend you then also be less opinionated.
Where does have an unlimited right of free speech?
Because once you start threatening politicians in the US see how far it gets you. Post a picture of yourself with an AR15 and a comment of “looking for Biden” and see how well that first amendment works.
There was also a well publicised case where a mother was arrested in front of her children after misgendering a trans person on Twitter. The case was eventually thrown out but it seems the UK police have far too much power and flexibility in terms of what they can arrest someone for.
The true problem is, what offended 20 years ago, does not offend today. And the same is true for 20 years from now!
So how do you codify this? Legislation can't have specific words and actions in it, it would be out of date before it became law!
So to target "offensive things", depends upon the opinion of the officers, the prosecutor, and so on! And can change at a moments notice!
Oh bewoe to thee, which does not watch twitter and be ware of new words this week!
Here's an example. Where I grew up, colloquially, women were called 'chicks' and men 'boys'. "What are you chicks/boys up to", one might say.
This was used by extreme feminists too, with zero objection.
Flash forward a few years, and in a city 1000km away, I started to describe how I was deeply impressed with the clarity of <female author>, she's a chick to watch.
Zero offense at home. None. New city? All the women, and some men in the room, went ballistic.
Note that:
* I was complementing the intellect of a person
* The tone and mannerism I used, was as if I said "woman to watch"
Point is, a word which was encouraged and approved by feminists I grew up with, used 1000km away in the same province of my country, meant I was an anti-feminist, woman hater.
And how do you legislate that?!
And... what you say in one place, can be dangerous in another, all with no ill intent!
> The true problem is, what offended 20 years ago, does not offend today. And the same is true for 20 years from now!
Just don't make laws apply retroactively. Sounds like a trivial problem with a trivial solution. A woman misgendered etc doesn't matter that it was ok 20 years ago. It's not ok now and she did it now.
This still presumes that there is an accepted, official version of any specific language, and that all must adopt it, lest they court disaster.
The absurdity of trying to police language, is absolutely ridiculous. It stops nothing. For example, someone transitions from male to female. They want to be called a woman.
On twitter, I say 'Yes, you are a "woman"'. Note the quotes. What is the implication? Surely sarcasm, or an attempt to delegitimize the reference.
Are we going to send people to jail for quotes?
Are we going to be examining sentences for commas, quotes, and more?
And when is it an offense?
More so, who decides the rules? A committee of people from all walks of life? And who updates them?
After all, it was derogatory to call anyone "gay" 20 years ago, and you could be sued as a newspaper for saying so, and being wrong.
But now there is nothing wrong with being gay, so it is not hateful, and malicious to call someone gay.
Who manages the bad words?
And who informs everyone?
Most people in the US don't read twitter. Don't spend all day on Facebook. Many have no idea that "pronouns" are a thing.
If you look at twitter and Facebook, you'd think this stuff is all people talk about. If you talk to the average citizen, they rarely think about it, talk about it, or care.
So who updates them with this info, and, what words are ok this week?
This kind of language takes any presumption of good faith on your part. You cannot possibly believe that these kind of changes happen on a weekly basis, and yet you imply it in making your argument.
Can we just agree to disagree? Does anyone need to be charged with a criminal offence over that?
If you feel motivated to take female hormones and chop ya dick off, you’ve got problems, but being called a man really isn’t one of the ones worth worry about.
There's two separate issues here. Privacy should be a right, I agree. But also we shouldn't tolerate our countries becoming authoritarian police states. It's already happened in the UK early, Australia and Canada are well on the way, and the US isn't far behind. Good privacy as a substitute for a government that isn't batshit crazy is not going to work in any event. Advocate privacy, but also advocate not letting giving power to insane elements of our society like this.
I find this notion that the UK is a police state quite hilarious.
Ours is not the country where the police bring guns to seemingly every minor dispute and fairly often draw them. Ours is not the country where police kill you for resisting arrest, stand by while your kids are murdered in a school, or seize your money out on border roads without needing cause. Ours is not the country with a toxic plea bargaining system that throws the book routinely and a 90% conviction rate, or prosecutors who run for election on promises to be ever tougher. Ours is not the country with three strikes laws, death penalties, tent prisons run by fascist antiheroes, rampantly profiteering private prisons, corrupt local sheriffs, newspapers getting raided when they investigate the local police chief, Stand Your Ground and SWATting.
Yeah. We overpolice people being rude. It matters when you have the equivalent of one fifth of the population of the USA crammed into a country a bit smaller than Michigan.
Batshit crazy is clearly subjective, right? Try looking at things from a different perspective.
If its not a police state why do you need widespread videocamera surveillance?
Seems like you have an arbitrary definition of what a police state should be.
If the police just needs to take interest in you to find something to jail you because you are breaking hundreds of laws everyday anyway, this is a police state.
We don’t really have it in the way people in the US and those places influenced by their perception have come to believe. My experience is that US people tend to think that the police can follow you all over the place in real time using cameras. They cannot. They might be able to get the legal right to CCTV footage of all sorts of cameras but they will have to have the paperwork and knock on doors, not unlike the way they could in the USA. This is regulated by law.
Government and the police owns surprisingly little of the cameras in the UK. The vast majority are in private hands, and there is no “network” of them. Basically this perception of CCTV in the UK is unfounded.
> If the police just needs to take interest in you to find something to jail you because you are breaking hundreds of laws everyday anyway, this is a police state
Then the UK is not one, because this is your imagination. It bears no resemblance to the reality of life in the UK. It sounds like a closer fit for the plea bargain culture of the USA. Plea bargains are not a general part of our judicial process or culture.
So if the government wants to use the threat of a dozen other violations to make you talk, they will have to get the CPS to take them to trial, because as a general rule the system does not allow you to be pressured into pleading guilty on something else in return. Our system has a much lower conviction rate.
I do not, in fact, have an arbitrary definition of what a police state is. But this is the point. US commentators define “police state” to mean something narrow that does not overlap with the justice and incarceration culture of the USA, which has more police corruption than most of the developed world, and which is more unequally applied than most.
> If the police just needs to take interest in you to find something to jail you because you are breaking hundreds of laws everyday anyway, this is a police state.
Is it still a police state if you are breaking three laws every day?
For context, I'm generally sympathetic to the "I've got nothing to hide" people
I find your example illustrates the point . The UK has insane libel laws
The sane solution would be to address these laws, not to create mechanisms for people to arbitrarily evade laws
A lot of pro privacy arguments seem to boil down to "well we should make it a bit easier for people to break the law, cus maybe the laws are just bad". This line of reasoning just feels really unsatisfying..
The UK passes roughly 33 acts of parliament per year, and 3,000 Statutory Instruments. What other concern is so pressing that passing one act of parliament would render the nation unable to complete it?
I wouldn't annoy a police officer before the Pan-Opticon was installed anyway.
When a Cop in the 90s arrests a guy because the cop got annoyed at something the 'suspect' said, you had the option to blame it on the cop's thin-skinned personality. Now annoyed cops can use the law directly.
The UK police implicitly allowing retributive online abuse is subtly humorous.
> It was kinda crazy because "all" he said was that didn't care about a teen who died in police custody, specifically that this teen was a, "good for nothing, spice smoking, Toxteth monkey"
"
Rowan O’Connell, 23, was hit with a fine by magistrates today over the sick outbust following the death of Mzee, 18.
The teenager, described by his mother as a “gentle giant”, died after becoming unwell while detained by police officers at Liverpool ONE in July.
O’Connell took to social media website Reddit, where he made baseless allegations, labelling Mzee a “good for nothing, spice smoking, Toxteth monkey”.
> or just saying something mildly offensive will often lead to prosecution
That's not mild, and you either know it or should know it.
> I mean just this week an autistic child got arrested for calling a lesbian police officer a lesbian here in the UK.
No link eh? What a surprise.
---
edit: this isn't about the rights/wrongs of what was said in this case but your (deliberately?) incomplete description of them. I actually share your concern about freedom of speech but twisting facts doesn't build your case well.
I don't understand your point. You both said the exact same thing: "good for nothing, spice smoking, Toxteth monkey", except you also said the guy added "Who gives a fuck?" which basically means "who cares?". Does adding a "who cares?" make the originally phrase much different?
Your argument is rendered completely null by your flaccid half-apology at the end.
If you have something to say, say it and stand by it, or get out of the way.
What offensive language? Monkey? Was the guy black? One does have to admit some darker skinned people do look a little similar to gorillas. So what. That’s not an incitement to violence.
And the lesbian cop, she is a lesbian right? Who cares! How is that relevant to anything. A simple “don’t be a bellend” response should have covered it.
Sheesh! Some people really just need some bigger problems if the only things they feel motivated to act against is some low level name calling.
I think the person who said a kid deserved to die is a pos and he maybe needed his ass beat, but I can’t understand how anyone can be charged with hate speech for talking shit about a dead person. Who’s rights were violated there? Did it get thrown out? Maybe I’m obtuse and such a thing is not out of the ordinary.
No. He pleaded guilty to "sending a communication of an indecent or offensive nature" and was fined accordingly.
At the end of the day what he said was indecent and therefore is illegal in the UK. Perhaps he could have fought it, but I believe he would have needed to argue that a reasonable person wouldn't find his comments indecent, and that would probably be difficult.
The larger point here is that anyone who gives an opinion online here in the UK is at risk of something similar happening. It depends less on the opinion and far more on the subjective nature of what is and isn't offensive. For example I could say some highly offensive things, but so long as I say them about Nigel Farage or Piers Morgan I'd be unlikely to be charged. I'd argue these laws are very subjectively policed and typically used to against people with political opinions that are not considered "acceptable". For example, it's often used against feminists who argue in favour of women-only spaces since this is considered transphobic and hateful by some.
Are you: Jewish? Trans? Gay? A woman? Pregnant? Black? Brown? A furry? Muslim? Christian? Rich? Poor?
Need I go on? All these groups have at one time or another (including now) needed to hide. This is a forum full of techies, and I'm sure lots of people don't want to tell everyone they are a techie right away (remember when you'd get punched if you wore Google Glasses?), or talk about their income.
If you aren't willing to openly publish your bank statements and browser history, you got something to hide. Friends, family, government, foreign governments, big tech, church, whatever. You probably got something to hide.
We just got to stop equating hiding things with doing something nefarious. I don't shut the door when I poop because I'm hiding illegal activities, I just want privacy.
It isn't just the visibility side of privacy, it is the latent risk of all the stored information that is being tracked and analysed because many of the organisations stalking you through your life are not terribly good at keeping that information secure and some of them are actively selling it around to any bidder.
Even if you think that you have nothing specific to hide, identity fruad can be a signifiant risk factor.
And that's just the current list of groups / identifiers; this may change over time as well. Like, right now right-wing peoples are terrified / fearmongering that being white and straight will become a targeted minority.
The real problem is that this argument relies on people actually meaning “anything”. It’s a strawman that’s so good, you get people actually trying to argue it, but the real argument isn’t about absolute publicity of information, it’s about providing access to additional information as a means to investigate wrongdoing. Very few people are practically suggesting every single fact ought to be public about a person.
Besides, doomsaying that “anything could be illegal!” isn’t backed by anything real or lasting.
>"anything [harmful] could be illegal!" isn't backed by anything real or lasting
Are you serious? that's a pretty ahistoric view... Being jewish was illegal, being a free black person was illegal, shit, woman having freedom of medical procedure is illegal in some states today!
how on earth can you earnestly suggest things won't be made illegal that will harm people
And that usually happens quickly and with zero casualties? I'm sure that Alan Touring would be thrilled to learn that years later his nation has stopped castrating gay people.
Progress also isn't linear, backlash over transgender identity has gotten worse recently. People are being prosecuted over abortions that would have been legal a year ago. None of the people who are in those positions are going to be comforted by knowing that eventually someday other people won't be attacked for the same reasons.
Self correction protects the future; privacy protects the present. They're not interchangeable.
Why do you presume the number of acceptable casualties is zero? We don’t apply that kind of logic to any other aspect of risk management, why would that be the bar here?
And no, privacy advocates claim privacy protects against the future, not the present. Their whole argument is, “what if stuff you like is made illegal in the future?!?!” with absolutely no tether to realit
> Why do you presume the number of acceptable casualties is zero?
Fair enough. What is the acceptable number of casualties then? Do you have a number of people in mind that you think would need to be killed or harmed before you would agree that privacy is worthwhile?
> And no, privacy advocates claim privacy protects against the future, not the present.
This is a pretty big misunderstanding of what we're saying. Privacy protects against future threats, yes. At the point when you are experiencing those threats, they will be in the present. And at that point, privacy will protect you. Whether you want to call that the future or the present, whatever. I don't care, it doesn't matter.
In contrast, self correction does not protect you. Self correction is about the overall direction of society -- at the point where you are threatened, whether that's a threat in the present or in the future, the tendency of society to eventually stop doing awful things is of no protection at all to you.
Privacy is not a substitute for social change, but social change is also not a substitute for privacy. Social change is the thing that happens after people die. If you want to protect the people who are actually dying (see above, maybe you don't think that's worthwhile) then you need privacy.
> with absolutely no tether to reality
Just as a quick sidenote, there are people being charged for previously legal abortions right now. Maybe you don't think those people are worth protecting in the short term and we should accept the downsides and rely on eventually society changing and say "oh well."
But that's very different than saying that the risk isn't real. The only way that you could say that "what if a thing you like is made illegal" doesn't have a basis in reality is if you really aren't paying attention to reality in the US right now. None of this is theoretical, people are very literally getting prosecuted for abortions right now because Facebook doesn't E2EE its messages.
How many people do you think is an acceptable level of loss for cars to be justified?
How many people need to die because their medical information wasn't available quickly enough to deliver life saving treatment in time?
Pedophiles are walking free right now because the criminal justice system can't gain access to their computers to prove what it otherwise painfully obvious; they're hurting children.
I can make exactly the same arguments you're making here, just in the opposite direction. That doesn't mean I'm right or you are; the argument that anyone being harmed means an idea is not worth doing is pointless and doesn’t provide anything remotely resembling a reasonable view into the issue, but pretending like any loss at all is unacceptable, such as you're doing here, is a farce.
> but pretending like any loss at all is unacceptable, such as you're doing here, is a farce.
There's a weird transformation that this conversation has gone through. As a reminder it started out with you saying "besides, doomsaying that 'anything could be illegal!' isn’t backed by anything real or lasting."
Which is just false. And I'm not sure where I or frankly anyone else in this thread has suggested that even just a single person being hurt means that privacy is an existential problem. Quite the opposite, I accepted the premise that there's a threshold, asked you what your opinion of that threshold was, and responded to you saying:
> Every time in modern history western society has started down the path of outlawing some form of existence, we self correct.
and
> Their whole argument is, “what if stuff you like is made illegal in the future?!?!” with absolutely no tether to realit[y]
by pretty objectively correctly pointing out that this doesn't change anything for anyone caught out in the current situation and that, yeah, things being made illegal in the future is a completely realistic concern with countless historical examples backing it up.
Of course we balance concerns about safety. I still use a phone and participate in society, I'm using my real name online right now. Ironically, I'm being less pseudonymous than you are right now. Very clearly I am not saying that a single person dying means we all need to go live in the woods.
But "what is an acceptable level of sacrifice for convenience" really doesn't have anything to do with the argument "I have nothing to hide." If someone dismisses concerns about car safety or medical accessibility or criminal activity by saying that those dangers aren't real, then they'd be very much in the wrong. And it's equally wrong to dismiss privacy concerns by saying that concerns about future erosion of rights "aren't tethered to reality." They are a thing that happens. They're real, just as real as car accidents. So no you don't have to stop driving, but you should wear a seatbelt, look both ways before you cross the street, and use an encrypted messenger on your phone.
The negative consequences of incomplete privacy are certainly real, they’re just not nearly as numerous as you seem to believe.
I can and I will dismiss the kinds of privacy concerns that rely on me being unable to understand how risk works, that rely on me falsely believing a solution to any problem exists with zero downside, that rejects any decision that has even one casualty.
I tried to show you how futile a game of, “your idea hurts people” is, but you seem incapable of moving past it. What a shame.
Holy crud, HN has been weird lately :) So I learned today that suggesting Facebook should encrypt its messenger app is actually just me embracing a fantasy about the nature of safety and risk.
I don't know I feel like you're probably 3 messages away from telling me that I should remove my smoke alarms from my house because house fires are uncommon and then calling me deluded because I wear a helmet when I go biking. I didn't realize that me taking 30 seconds to install Signal and then using it to chat with my friends was a futile rebellion against the natural order ;)
Okay apologies, I really don't mean to be snarky. But you've taken this conversation in a very strange direction that I don't think is representative of what anyone who rejects the "I have nothing hide" narrative actually believes. I would just point out once again, I am less pseudonymous than you are right now. I'm using my real name, I have more contact information listed on my profile. Very obviously I am willing to publish information about myself. So the context of this conversation really just does not align with this view you've gotten that the people disagreeing with you are just privacy absolutists who think any privacy risk at all is too large to take.
If you're saying that someone is rejecting all risk and refusing to accept a privacy system with any downside, and at the same time you notice that they're actively and deliberately publishing their real name and email address, then that should give you pause and it should make you step back and think, "maybe I don't understand what their argument is." Maybe when that person points out that risks exist they're saying something more than "any risk is too much risk".
You compared using Whatsapp to wearing a seatbelt; the problem with this analogy is that many, MANY more people die in car accidents than from... whatever abstract value me using Whatsapp will provide you, a complete stranger.
You're failing to understand that the conversation does not end just because someone is harmed by something. You, and society generally, do not consider "one single negative outcome" to be enough of a reason to not do anything.
We can't get past this. You must either accept this as an observation about reality, or you will not understand whatever other direction this conversation may go.
> You, and society generally, do not consider "one single negative outcome" to be enough of a reason to not do anything.
Like I said, this is a completely incorrect reading of my position, and it should be obvious to you that it's incorrect because I'm taking privacy risks right now. If I believed that "a single negative outcome" was enough privacy risk to justify not doing something, I wouldn't be talking to you right now, I'd be living in the woods and shooting drones out of the sky. But I'm not, so very clearly you are missing something about my views.
> whatever abstract value me using Whatsapp will provide you, a complete stranger.
Collective usage of E2EE makes it easier for other people to blend into the crowd and makes usage of E2EE messaging less suspicious. This is not exactly hard to understand and it's not abstract. It's the same reason why many cisgender people list pronouns when filling out profiles on new services -- it's a very low-cost way to make it so that transgender users aren't singling themselves out.
Collective normalization of E2EE also encourages people who aren't technically inclined and who are just following network effects to switch over to better messengers, which makes them safer without forcing them to become privacy experts.
And of course, when we talk about the "nothing to hide" fallacy, we mean more than "your actions as a stranger benefit me" -- we're pointing out that the risk analysis most people do about privacy risks is flawed and over-optimistic and advising you that you might want to redo that risk analysis. For comparison, you wearing a helmet when you ride your bicycle won't keep me safe, but the safety benefits to you outweigh the downsides and you should still probably wear one anyway. Because people feel invincible about accidents even though they're very much not.
Your argument relies on "one single negative outcome" to be enough of a reason not to do anything. Obviously I know you live incongruously with your argument; that's my entire point! Glad you're figuring that out, but that doesn't mean your argument suddenly has merit, just because you're aware of how bad it is.
I'm not missing anything, you're just failing to resolve your internal inconsistency.
Look, your risk analysis of privacy harms does not become accurate just because you say it is. Saying that this is "one single negative outcome" a bunch of times doesn't make it true.
Pretty much the entirety of recorded human history backs up the idea that privacy matters, including the present where state governments are currently campaigning hospitals and social platforms to identify transgender people and to prosecute abortions.
Your risk analysis is wrong. That's what people are pointing out to you. We're not privacy absolutists, obviously we are not privacy absolutists. We are not suddenly having a realization about incongruity, it's honestly just really silly to suggest that this entire disagreement boils down to me seeing one trans person die and suddenly thinking "never again, no cost is too great." Take a step back out of the weeds and think about whether it's actually likely that anyone believes that :) That is not and has never been the argument, I haven't seen anyone in this entire thread even in sibling comments make that argument.
What we've all been pointing out is that the eventual arc of justice in the universe is unhelpful to people who are suffering right now, and that your risk analysis about the likelihood of people being put into that position is wrong. But go on, tell me again that this is actually a deep philosophical disagreement and I haven't internalized that safety measures involve tradeoffs.
You can call me wrong, you can claim you’re not arguing that one casualty is too many, but your actual argument remains that any negative consequences of giving up some privacy for substantive benefit are infinitesimally small yet somehow not worth the real value provided.
Stop trying to explain how your current argument isn’t what it clearly is, and make a better one!
What you think is a minor risk is a much larger risk than you suppose. And your analysis of the downsides of privacy improvements are wrong as well:
It takes 30 seconds to install Signal. There is no substantive benefit to Facebook's messenger not being E2EE. Privacy is not the reason why it's hard for you to get a copy of your medical records or migrate accounts across services. There is no massive substantive social benefit to advertisers tracking you across the web, and your life is not going to suddenly get worse if you install an adblocker.
This is the equivalent of putting on a bicycle helmet, getting a vaccine, wearing a seatbelt. It's not hard and it doesn't hurt you and the risks of ignoring clearly established safeguards are greater than you think. Your math is wrong.
> Stop trying to explain how your current argument isn’t what it clearly is
:D That is one way to approach a discussion, but it's not one I feel particularly obligated to take seriously or treat respectfully. I'm not really interested in having an argument about whether or not I'm lying to you when I tell you what exactly I believe. That would be a pointlessly inane, obviously unproductive waste of time.
I didn't know we were allowed to just say what the other person believes and then double down when they explain otherwise. If that kind of nonsense is allowed, then I've got to say that I think it's really weird that you've been secretly objecting to privacy on purely religious grounds the whole time :)
Your argument relies on the miscalculation of risk, and now exposed you can’t even actually articulate an alternative reason why privacy is so important.
> Your argument relies on the miscalculation of risk
:shrug: Six million Jews would like a word with you.
If that's not enough, consider that there might be a reason why we literally have laws preventing the requirement of disclosure of sex/race in hiring today? Consider the countless studies about how anonymity benefits the ability of oppressed groups (particularly women) to participate in public spaces online, consider that the Supreme Court has very directly said that anonymity and privacy are an essential component of 1st Amendment rights. You also still really haven't grappled with the fact that multiple states today are pushing to get access to medical records and social media messages both to prosecute people and label minority groups. These are not issues that are affecting only one or two people.
And again, the "benefit" that we're giving up by being more private is negligible. There's very little downside to encrypting messages or blocking ad networks from tracking people. The entirety of recorded human history disagrees with your risk analysis, in addition to pretty much every single 1st Amendment expert and minority advocacy/anti-hate group today. Your math is wrong.
> So you admit your argument is predicated on the number of people who are harmed.
What, yeah, of course it is. What on earth are you talking about, which part of "your math is wrong" didn't you understand?
Lack of privacy hurts people. Not one or two people, it hurts a lot of people. It might hurt you one day. And that's worth caring about. It's worth caring about because it's a lot of people. If you didn't realize that I was talking about risk/harms then you really didn't understand a word I was saying.
Yes, I'm talking about risk. Your math about the risk is wrong. It's not a gotcha that it's apparently taken you to this point in the conversation to understand that "your math is wrong" means "your analysis of the number of people that are hurt by lack of privacy is incorrect."
> and since then, society has improved in gigantic leaps and bounds.
Society has improved slowly, via heavy investment from anonymous activists and advocates who put themselves in harms way to improve it. Every single one of those activist movements relied on privacy. Quite frankly, there really aren't many examples of social movements that have improved society that haven't heavily used privacy and anonymity to aid them. Certainly at the very least this displays a startling lack of knowledge about the history of race and gender in America.
> is no longer possible in the western world
:) Citation very, very much needed. We have a political party in America with members who are openly calling for the extermination of transgender identity, headed by a political ideologue who's currently being prosecuted for (essentially) attempting a coup. Despite that he's still favored to be the next presidential nominee of that party because the majority of that party doesn't view attempting a coup as disqualifying from office.
It is incredibly naive to believe that we are no longer capable of doing terrible things in America to oppressed identities or capable of building political and social apparatus to do those terrible things.
> Every time in modern history western society has started down the path of outlawing some form of existence, we self correct.
And as I said, that self correction is of no benefit whatsoever for the 6 million Jews that died. Self correction is not protection. Privacy is protection.
You had to go back 80 years to find an example of a lack of privacy hurting enough people to make your point, and that's my point.
We don't have things like WW2 happen anymore, and living our life like the next Holocaust is just around the corner is paranoid and overly cynical.
We really did seem to learn that lesson. Your own example of trans rights is a great one; laws protecting trans people are enshrined in many US states already, and courts are annihilating many of the attempts made to the contrary.
We stumble, but we move forward, and without the loss of millions of people this time. Progress.
Cool. Real question, and truly think about it deep and hard: are you okay with being the martyr who ends up jailed, prosecuted, dead or what-have-you before we self correct?
These statements are very easy to make, but when push comes to shove the individuals saying it won't put their money where their mouth is. So, will you?
Someone once said to me, it is easy to be enlightened when you have a full belly.
In the same vein, it is easy to grant social gains when in easy times. But we are in the liminal space between the boom of the 20th century and the blow back from same century of reckless growth.
Nowadays a lot of nationalistic rhetoric that would not have flown far has had a lot of traction over the last decade or so. And it is slowly becoming obvious that the frameworks for oppression are being constructed.
The idea that we can only go forwards with minor trips along the way is a very narrow interpretation of history. That the example given before was of the Nazis is especially accurate considering it came after the Weinmar Republic that was known to be particularly ahead of the times in terms of social progress and cultural facets. It could be argued that wouldn't be for almost another 70-80 years that they gained back what was taken away in next to now time.
Unfortunately, the one thing I have taken away from those that work as war correspondents - do not under estimate how fragile society is and how quickly people will turn against others to try and ensure personal safety.
"The welfare of the people in particular has always been the alibi of tyrants, and it provides the further advantage of giving the servants of tyranny a good conscience.”
― Albert Camus"
The problem with your point is it misses the ACTUAL meaning of "I've got nothing to hide". What it actually means is "I'm more average and less likely to be targeted than you". Or "I have less to fear that you, and I'm more worried about you or think I have more to gain from non-averages people being persecuted, than I have to lose from it being used against normies like me".
Example: in the 1930, Dutch municipalities would record ethnicity for their citizens. The argument was that ethnicity wasn't something you'd need to hide, and it could be useful should you need to identify yourself.
When in 1940 the German occupiers took over, those records turned out to be very useful for their genocide.
It makes sense that ethnicity would have been recorded as well, but FAFAIK the Germans mostly used the data on religious identity (i.e. which persons were a member of which church community).
The point still stands; any kind of private information like ethnicity, religion, gender identity, sexuality - NONE of those are relevant to a government, and ANY of those can be used to identify and persecute people if there is a regime or law change aimed at any of those categories.
Tangentially related, it's why things like period trackers are dangerous too; the US has had a spate of anti-abortion laws, the data from those apps (if used) can be used to detect pregnancies and whether they have stopped prematurely. For example.
My reply wasn't meant to refute the parent's point. I wanted to clarify because in today's society ethnicity is a much more contentious data point than religion. Given the prevalence of race-related issues in the media it makes much more sense to a present-day mind to say "maybe we shouldn't be recording ethnicity" than to say "maybe we shouldn't record a person's religion".
In addition, "I've got nothing to hide" means precisely "I've nothing to my detriment". Needless to say, there is no such thing as a person who has nothing to his or her detriment. Of course, it is impossible to accurately know or predict one's disadvantage precisely. In essence, the removal of privacy is the deprivation of the right to remain silent in order to avoid such predictable and unpredictable situations.
At Def Con the EFF had a talk on just this addressing abortion rights and the means of the state to use your digital footprints against you if you decide to go to a other state for services.
I guess the saying should be "you may not have anything to hide until the moment you do"
And then it's too late. Like, early 1900's, it was quite common for people to have their religion listed in your government records or ID. But then one religion became persecuted and hunted down.
There's a few commended civilian heroes whose contribution was that they burned or otherwise destroyed records like these, like Willem Arondeus who bombed the Amsterdam public records office (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willem_Arondeus)
This is not the only problem. By giving up too much information, one also endangers the privacy of others. Ones own actions affect others. Those others can be journalists for example. I don't think I need to provide a list of all countries, where being a journalist can be a threat to ones own life.
There is a kind of sleight of hand at work in this counterargument, which is that nobody is advocating for a secret, extrajudicial, arbitrary set of rules about what is allowed and what isn't. Even if I say I'm OK with the government reading my email, all the work is ahead of them to prove specific charges in a court of law, should I catch their interest. The spy agency does not, in fact, get to decide what's right and wrong. The existence of a surveillance state does not imply the existence of a secret police with extrajudicial powers.
Not sure I see how it's relevant here, since we're granting that the spy agency in this case has every right to gather evidence. The point is that they don't get to unilaterally decide if that evidence constitutes a crime, which is what the original comment suggested.
The first thing that authoritarian and fascist states create is the police with extra judicial powers. Like flies and shit, they are always found together.
You're asking whether the ends justify the means; you should think about that yourself. Also, it's a slippery slope, and the end result of that has been philosophised about in media like 1984, where people lost the privacy of their own home, or Minority Report, where people lost the privacy of their own mind.
