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Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Samizdata quote of the day – A ‘safe’ internet is an unfree internet The free and open internet has now ceased to exist in the UK. Since Friday, anyone in Britain logging on to social media will have been presented with a censored, restricted version – a ‘safe’ internet, to borrow the UK government’s language. Vast swathes of even anodyne posts are now blocked for the overwhelming majority of users.
The Online Safety Act was passed by the last Conservative government and backed enthusiastically by Labour. Both parties insisted it is necessary to protect children. Supposedly, its aim is to shield them from pornography, violence, terrorist material and content promoting self-harm. Age-verification checks, we were assured, would ensure that children would not be exposed to inappropriate content, but adults could continue using the internet as they please. Yet as we have seen over the past few days, on many major tech platforms, UK-based adults are being treated as children by default, with supposedly ‘sensitive’ content filtered from everyone’s view.
– Fraser Myers
Police state Britain needs nothing less than a revolution.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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In China they used to circumvent this sort of thing by using a VPN, but now VPNs are largely banned in China.
I wonder when VPNs will be banned in the UK?
And when do we turn from banning porn to banning hateful speech to banning unpatriotic speech to banning anything that opposes the government?
And the Tories started this? And the British people rolled over and let it happen?
You Brits might consider moving to Siberia so that you can at least get some of your rights back. And with global warming and all it’ll be a tropical paradise before too long.
Well, if you have “Non-crime Hate Incidents” then what do you expect?
@NickM
Well, if you have “Non-crime Hate Incidents” then what do you expect?
To clarify, everywhere has non crime hate incidents, what they don’t have is the police involved in things that aren’t crimes.
Fraser,
That’s what I meant. In the UK you can get three cars full of police round your home over them…
I remember when the phrase “oh, they would never do THAT . . .” could be uttered non-ironically.
Does Tor do any good in this situation? (Assuming someone set up a net route through it.) Or did VPN’s sort of supplant it?
A question on VPNs if I may. It uses a server abroad but I assume if one logs in to comment, say blogspot, wordpress,youtube etc then the VPN doesn’t help to cover one’s identity? Someone would have to comment unlogged?
There were a series of laws and regulations going back decades – but, yes, the “On Line Safety Act” completes the process.
In a way this is, bizarrely, a good thing – as we no longer need to worry about what dissent is legal and what dissent is not legal – as all dissent is now illegal, for example this comment would be described, by the regime and its courts, as “knowingly false statements – meant to cause psychological harm”.
Dissenters, such as a myself, will be sent to prison – it is only a matter of time.
“Police state Britain needs nothing less than a revolution”.
Perry – I know you have, sensibly, moved overseas – but, if you have not already done so, it might well be wise to formally renounce British citizenship – as, I believe, the Czech Republic has an extradition agreement with the United Kingdom.
Otherwise you might find yourself sharing a prison cell with me – and I snore.
Comments concerning such things as immigration are already being removed on such sites as YouTube (owned by Google) – as official guidance on the law states that immigration is one of the subjects covered by the Act of Parliament.
Of course, this is building on previous Acts (going all the way back to 1965) – incitement to racial hatred and all that, each Act being more radical than the last (so they build on each other).
The idea that the “Online Safety Act” (which stupid politicians in what J.S. Mill called “the stupid party” may really have believed) was about “protecting children”, has already been exposed as absurd. This Act was designed by officials and “experts” with the same purpose as previous Acts over the last 60 years (each Act being more extreme than the last) – to crush dissent, specifically dissent over the demographic transformation of the population of this island.
All this shows a very serious problem in the system of thought of some Conservative thinkers – Conservative thinkers who are by no means “stupid” but are still wrong.
For example, the distinguished historian and political thinker Dr David Starkey argues that there is no such thing as universal human liberty rights – that everything depends on the specific history and tradition of the country one is in.
Well for the last 60 years Britain has had a history and tradition of the state attacking dissenters on certain topics (for example the demographic transformation of the population of this island) – and even if we go back centuries before the present day, the state, for example, hanged people (even under the relatively mild Queen Elizabeth the First) for such “crimes” as distributing books by Robert Browne arguing that a congregation should pick their own minister of religion (the idea of the “Brownists” who later went to America in the Mayflower) – so censorship, even killing dissenters, is very much part of the “history and tradition” of this land.
Dr Starkey also argues, as have many distinguished thinkers going back to Sir William Blackstone in the 1700s, that there is no Natural Law (Natural Justice) above the will of Parliament – that whatever Parliament wants is “the law”.
In which case nothing bad is happening in Britain – as Parliament (which is mostly filled with people with a deep hatred of liberty) is very supportive of what the government is doing.
This-form-of British Conservatism (which is very different from American Conservatism) which holds that there is no such thing as universal human liberty rights (Natural Law, Natural Justice) and that there is no law above the will of Parliament, that whatever Parliament wills is “the law” (a view that would have disgusted Lord Chief Justice Sir Edward Coke, and Lord Chief Justice Sir John Holt) has reached an intellectual dead-end.
Trying to base liberty on Sir William Blackstone (the Divine Right of Parliament) or David Hume (with his indifference to the “euthanasia of the constitution” – in his case to be replaced by a strong monarchy rather than Parliament – as if monarchs could be trusted), is like building on quicksand.
In the end there is no substitute for the vision of the Bill of Rights – an armed citizenry quick to defend Freedom of Speech and other fundamental liberties.
The Constitution of New Hampshire (1784) states that there is a right of Revolution – against the “slavish doctrine of non resistance” to tyranny – the Constitution of New Hampshire did not “give” people this right, Constitutions do NOT “give rights” – right (truthful) Constitutions state what natural rights (under natural law) are, and have always been.
That a free human is an armed one is not discovery of the 1700s, it was known to the Republican Romans, to the Ancient Greeks and to the Germanic tribes. And Samuel warned the Jews against seeking a King to “fight our battles for us” – see the First Book of Samuel, Chapter Eight.
This used to be well known in Britain – before the First World War the British National Rifle Association was bigger (far bigger) than the American one – and there was a network of Constitution Clubs.
The political line of thought (absolutism – of King or Parliament, or both) of Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, Sir William Blackstone, David Hume and Jeremy Bentham is indeed powerful in this island – but their despicable doctrines are not the only tradition of thought here.
Nadine Dorries: the woman who was given the job of reforming the BBC and decided to censor the internet, instead.
She truly is the Mark David Chapman of the Tory party.
Apart from not enough people who could see what was happening, it appears that the citizens of the UK are suffering from boiling frog syndrome.
This is worrying. The government is saying Nigel Farage is a a supporter of the likes of Jimmy Savile.
Here’s the link. Yes, from the BBC who have never ever enabled sexual predators in any way.
How long until Mr Farage’s laptop is “found” to contain kiddie porn?
This law is designed to do two things. It is designed to ensure everyone is free to use the internet for “approved purposes” and is sufficietly wide-ranging that it is also designed to scare the masses. And it doing this cynically “for the children!” It has nothing to do with protecting anyone.
@Jay
A question on VPNs if I may. It uses a server abroad but I assume if one logs in to comment, say blogspot, wordpress,youtube etc then the VPN doesn’t help to cover one’s identity?
Sure it does. You call yourself “Jay” here, how can I possibly know who you are? In this space everyone effectively comments anonymously — I could pretend to be you by posting under the same name. In many spaces though you have to log in, which is to say I could not comment as “Jay” unless I had a password you created.
Internet snoopers though have an alternative means of identifying you: your IP address. This is a unique number assigned to your computer or phone (this is not quite true, but close enough for government work) which the police can trace back to your phone or residence and from this determine who you actually are. Most blog systems keep a log of which comments were made by which IP address. So you post “The police suck”, the police can use subpoena power to look at the server logs, find what IP address originated that comment, and trace it back to you. (How? IP addresses are allocated in large blocks to your internet service provider, and this is public information. From this they subpoena the provider (or sometimes they just ask the provider without a subpoena, and they fold like a cheap suit) to demand who pays the bill for your IP address, and voila, they trace it back to the billing address.)
Also, spooks track a lot of traffic going over the networks in Britain, often scanning for key words, and that snooping logs the comment and the IP address it came from. This is often made more difficult if the traffic is encrypted, as it is over an https connection, but even then they can use meta data analysis to get a lot of information (what time did data travel from your computer to the blog, and what time was the “offensive” comment made.) Sounds like a lot of work, except that it is all automated with tools.
A VPN does a few things to protect this:
* It disguises your IP address, so that the blog comment is logged under an IP address that cannot be traced back to your residence or phone.
* Moreover generally speaking VPN providers do NOT log IP addresses (or anything) and so a subpoena cannot be used to map from the disguised address to your actual address.
* All traffic from your computer is encrypted and goes to one single destination — the VPN provider. And it cannot be traced after that since VPN providers don’t log and so you cannot tell which of their customers went to the blog to make the “offensive” comment.
* Often the jurisdiction for a subpoena is considerably confused since it isn’t obvious what country or locality originated the “offense”.
So it provides a number of layers that pretty effectively prevent tracing from an “offensive” comment back to you.
Which is why I think there is a pretty decent chance that VPNs will get banned in Britain, or at least legally compromised. What does that mean? Either the cops insist on a backdoor that lets them see unencrypted traffic, and/or they demand logging of IP addresses and other traffic information, and/or they block access to overseas VPN providers that do not follow these rules.
However, for now they will go after the low hanging fruit though. So, if you are British, don’t be the low hanging fruit.
@NickM
This is worrying. The government is saying Nigel Farage is a a supporter of the likes of Jimmy Savile.
Well, in fairness to the government minister, we all know that Jimmy Savile did find all his victims by using the Internet, amirite?
As to finding CSAM on his computer, frankly I am surprised that doesn’t happen a lot more often against the opponents of the swamp. It is hard to believe they didn’t do that with Trump for example. Perhaps he has a team that locked his computer systems down really tight. It doesn’t seem all that hard to do for most people, so I do wonder what is holding them back. How? A bit of phishing to get some malware on your computer that includes some CSAM images. Have the computer post to a forum with some of the material giving the police PC to search your computer, and bob’s your creepy pedophilic uncle. This is not hard, with a bit of effort I could probably create the tools to do it and get it done (though obviously I don’t have access to CSAM materials), for the intelligence services, this is a piece of cake.
Maybe the reserve it for special cases.
Fraser,
I think it was firing a shot across Farage’s bow… Also just sowing a few seeds in the public’s mind by linking Farage to the most notorius serial sex offender in UK history…
But what of Our Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology, Peter Kyle who is behind this bill, now act…
From Wikipedia:
I suppose it would be too much to ask for this cabinet post to be held by someone with a background in STEM or even private sector business…
Yes, I’m totally moving to Russia to safeguard my rights, that’s a great idea 😛
Simon Jester – I would be astonished if Nadine Dorries “decided” anything.
Like most politicians – she did what she was “advised” to do by officials and “experts”.
It takes great strength of will NOT to do so – and politicians who are that strong willed get forced out “for bullying” – or “violating the ministerial code”.
The British system of government is greatly admired by MSNBC (owned by Comcast – a vast corporation) because the British system of governance “gets things done”.
And so it does – as long as you mean BAD things, which MSNBC most certainly do.
“You Brits might consider moving to Siberia”.
My great grandfather had that option.
He did not want to remain in the Jewish Pale of Settlement – and he did not have the money to buy his way into Moscow or Saint Petersburg, but he could have gone to Siberia – Jews were allowed to do that, and some prospered – they really did (till the First World War messed up everything).
But he did not choose Siberia – he choose to come to Britain.
Why Britain rather than America? I suspect he did not have the money for a longer journey.
On my mother’s side – English (her mother’s name was “Ethel Draper” – classic Anglo Saxon) and Irish (“Power” – although if you trace that right back it is a Norman name), my mother always wanted to go to America, but never did.