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.
"
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”.
He added: “As I say, who gives a f**.”
"
https://www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/news/liverpool-news/watch-mo...
So, Not quite what you said.
> 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.
https://www.independent.co.uk/tv/news/police-arrest-autistic...
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?
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.
"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
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.
Not in the ridiculous "party controlling parliament" sense, no. But they are absolutely the enforcement arm of the state, which is more on point.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
If these sorts of speech laws were more consistently applied on everyone, maybe we could get rid of them.
The police is the dog of the government. What difference does it make to you if the dog or the master attacks you?
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_surveillance_in_the_Unite...
> 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.
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.
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.
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!
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..
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?
Is it still a police state if you are breaking three laws every day?
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Three-Felonies-Day-Target-Innocent/...
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.
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.
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.
But the U.K. population love it.
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.
It is somewhat strange since the tabloids are extremely toxic and spam gossip.
If we were to try walking around with batons, truncheons, handcuffs as they do, we'd be arrested for carrying offensive weapons.
[1] Some routinely carry Tasers, which are counted as "firearms" here.
"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....
"MI5 spy who fantasised about ‘eating children’s flesh’ escaped prosecution despite machete attack" - https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/05/19/mi5-spy-fantasis...
"Americans pay GCHQ £100m to spy for them, leaked NSA papers from Edward Snowden claim" - https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/americans-pa...
"Police ‘warrior culture’ makes US-style police brutality a UK problem too" - https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/news/2023/police-warrior-cultur...
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.
Toughen up princesses.
You might think your a woman, I might disagree.
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.
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?
And it worked very well, because precisely nothing happened.
> 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.
Quite untrue but it does fit the default HN pattern of assumption about the UK.
American exceptionalism is a hell of a drug.
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)
(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)
Why assume a surveillance mechanism when police are individuals who also use the more popular sites?
I have been complimented.
I was politely asked a question, I politely gave an answer and set some context. You’re just being rude.
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”.
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.
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.
These kind of restrictions are quite common re the holocaust and jew killing for fairly obvious reasons.
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.
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.)
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.
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?
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).
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.
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.
Hah. Hah. Hah. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/24/business/london-police-fa... .
Well it's a take, I guess. Go with it.