March 28, 2024

The UK Government Actually Hates The Internet



Published June 7, 2023, 11:20 a.m. by Naomi Charles


The United Kingdom, branded as the Énemy of the Internet, is on the path to become the world's first democracy turned into a digital dictatorship. This is how surveillance and censorship is changing the UK.

You can push back against the Online Hárms White Paper by giving your response at https://dcms.eu.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_5nm7sPoxilSoTg9 by July 1 2019.

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Sources

Online Harms White Paper full text https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/online-harms-white-paper

News coverage & blogs

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/apr/04/online-harms-white-paper-regulation-without-killing-innovation

https://www.wired.co.uk/article/online-harms-white-paper-uk-analysis

https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/mediapolicyproject/2019/04/10/the-online-harms-white-paper-its-approach-to-disinformation-and-the-challenges-of-regulation/

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/apr/14/white-paper-online-harms-global-first-needed-tech-industry-dcms-google-facebook

Enemies of the Internet by Reporters without Borders

https://rsf.org/sites/default/files/2014-rsf-rapport-enemies-of-the-internet.pdf

https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/04/201241373429356249.html

David Cameron calls to block social media

https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2011/aug/11/cameron-call-social-media-clampdown

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/jan/26/egypt-blocks-social-media-websites

https://news.yahoo.com/blogs/cutline/british-pm-david-cameron-considers-ban-twitter-facebook-150616849.html

Super-injunctions and libel laws

https://www.zdnet.com/article/google-facebook-twitter-warned-in-privacy-report/

https://www.zdnet.com/article/facebook-twitter-libel-claims-double-celebrities-still-prefer-super-injunctions/

https://www.zdnet.com/article/tech-injunction-gags-twitter-facebook-users-why-super-injunctions-only-apply-to-britain/

ISP blocking & age verification

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/9236667/Pirate-Bay-must-be-blocked-High-Court-tells-ISPs.html

https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/porn-filters-overwhelmingly-rejected-by-uk-internet-users-9623489.html

https://www.wired.co.uk/article/uk-porn-age-verification

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/jun/20/uks-porn-age-verification-system-to-be-delayed-indefinitely

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/nov/23/internet-age-checks-are-an-overreaction

UK mass surveillance

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/jan/30/uk-mass-digital-surveillance-regime-ruled-unlawful-appeal-ruling-snoopers-charter

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-02-11/-snooper-s-charter-would-make-brits-most-spied-upon-people

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/apr/07/surveillance-technology-repressive-regimes

UK CCTV cameras and street surveillance

https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2011/mar/02/cctv-cameras-watching-surveillance

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2012/oct/30/cctv-increases-peoples-sense-anxiety

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/aug/18/former-burglars-barking-dogs-cctv-best-deterrent

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/2071496.stm

http://www.1in12.com/publications/cctv/ditton.htm

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Do you know what all these countries have in common?

They are all branded as Enemies of the Internet.

Maintained by Reporters without Borders Enemies of the Internet is a list of countries with

the most oppressive censorship and surveillance capabilities and practices.

And in 2014, three democracies made into the list for the first time ever: India, the United

States and the United Kingdom.

The United Kingdom entered the list as the “world champion of surveillance” for their

capability to collect 25% of global Internet traffic.

No other nation in the world is able to tap into more data than the UK government.

With legal boundaries on free speech and privacy unimaginable to US citizens, the UK is on

the verge of becoming the first digital dictatorship in the Western world.

The only thing that keeps the worst case scenario from happening is the international community

of human rights advocates and civil libertarians, that always speak out against all authoritarian

efforts with huge force.

During London riots in 2012, then British Prime Minister David Cameron proposed that

the government should block access to social media for alleged rioters, because some of

them happened to organize through those websites.

It was only after this censorship proposal was compared to that of an Egyptian president

during the Arab spring revolution, that the conservative-led government felt too awkward

to materialize their plans.

When it comes to free speech, the British government inspires world-class dictatorships.

UK is a haven for copyright-holders and a hell for content creators.

That is because copyright-holders enjoy a special privilege to use court orders on Internet

Service Providers to block access to websites with copyright-infringing materials.

Perhaps the most famous manifestation of this procedure was the ruling of the High Court

that ordered UK broadband providers to block access to the Pirate Bay website, one of the

Alexa’s top 100 websites in the world.

Needless to say, this ban was completely pointless, as it is trivially easy to bypass ISP restrictions

with a VPN, Tor or a proxy.

But the precedent for unilateral censorship has already been set, the Pandora box of rights-holders’

supremacy was open and the consolidation of the market for content took off.

With a very noble goal of keeping children safe, the Online Safety Act requires all Internet

Service Providers to block adult websites by default.

This law was meant to extend to music videos by artists like Rihanna or Beyonce which are

considered by the government to be “highly suggestive”.

It turns out that 87 per cent of new Internet users opted out of these default filters,

which infuriated the conservative government even more.

So they decided to introduce age verification requirement as a landing page for all pornographic

websites accessed from the UK.

Those that ignore this verification would be blocked nationwide.

How would these age checks work?

Turns out there is an entire business of software providers that enable websites to verify their

users through credit or identity cards or by phone numbers.

This wouldn’t just be an age verification.

It would be a perfect identification of individuals matching their browsing habits with their

real life identity.

Beware that these checks are mandatory for legal websites with adult content.

This doesn’t affect illegal websites with child abuse as only 0.2% of such content is

hosted in the UK and the country is pretty effective at removing those websites within

the first two hours.

The launch date for age verification was meant to be 15th of July, but it was delayed by

six months due to technical reasons.

Technical being the government’s inability to understand how draconian they would have

to be to enforce this law and how it trivially easy it is to bypass it with a VPN.

Unlike the United States, UK still drowns in libel laws, where the average cost of libel

cases is 140 times higher than in the rest of Europe.

While in the United States, “a published statement about a public figure is assumed

to be true and complainant must prove it's false”, publishers in the UK must first

prove their content is true before releasing it.

Even the UN Committee on Human Rights warns this system severely discourages free press

and critical reporting.

But the UK government doubles down with super injunctions.

Super injunctions are court-ordered gag orders that are frequently used by the elite celebrity

and economic class in the UK, to prevent individuals or entire organizations from disclosing information

about them.

Once such a super-injunction barred British citizens and journalists from talking about

soccer Player Ryan Giggs and his affair with an ex-Big Brother contestant.

But a far larger blanket gag order was imposed on all Facebook and Twitter users in the UK

who were banned from identifying the names of individuals involved in a case where someone

switched off someone’s life-support.

The UK government has always been of the strongest proponents of advancing their mass surveillance

capabilities by forcing ISPs to install hardware that would provide British law enforcement

real time access to every Internet user’s IP address and to their email, phone and messaging

metadata.

Under Theresa May, the parliament passed the Investigatory Powers Act that would require

companies to weaken their own encryption as well as keep records of their users data for

up to a year to be accessed by granted authorities without a warrant.

This allowed dozens of government agencies look up your Internet records on a whim.

And not just law enforcement and intelligence agencies.

Among the most ridiculous examples are UK’s National Health Service, HM Revenue & Customs,

Department for Work and Pensions, Food Standards Agency, or Competition and Markets Authority.

This law is so intrusive the Chinese government cited it to defend its own surveillance apparatus

and the European Court of Human Rights ruled its bulk collection and data retention regimes

violated human rights conventions.

The Court’s ruling didn’t change anything significant about the surveillance powers

and the bill remains a current legislation.

The Investigatory Powers Act is so privacy-invasive that digital rights groups and journalists

fear it would also impede freedom of expression as it would discourage whistle-blowing and

investigative journalism.

UK’s surveillance doesn’t just end in cyber space.

You won’t find privacy even in physical world.

It is a regular routine for the UK police to secretly use “IMSI catchers” - covert

devices that can identify nearby phone users by collecting their cellular information.

The police are using IMSI catchers particularly during protests and strikes to maintain records

with the names of participants.

UK is also massively obsessed with surveillance cameras.

Estimates vary that there could be between 2 to 4 million CCTV cameras monitoring public

and private spaces in the country.

On average, a British citizen is captured by 70 CCTV cameras a day.

Some estimates quote up to 200 cameras.

Despite the massive surveillance apparatus and the strict ban on guns and offensive items,

violent crime rapidly increases.

In 2018, homicides increased by 15%, gun crime rose by 11%, knife crime showed 22% increase,

car crime jumped 17% and burglary increased by 9%.

But of course, the UK government doesn’t reflect on its own austerity measures that

decreased the number of police officers in the country from 143 thousand in 2010 to 123

thousand in 2017.

Or the fact their law enforcement staff are overwhelmed and without proper care, with

one in five police officers suffering from PTSD, five times higher than the national

average, when two thirds of those don’t even know they have a form of PTSD.

Instead of supporting its own police force and letting the police do their work instead

of relying on mass surveillance to solve everything, the UK government blames the Internet.

The logic they use is that because the world is a place where people breathe, air allows

bad people to exist.

So the UK government is now pushing for new efforts to control, monitor and censor the

free flow of information.

Online Harms is an outline of new regulatory ambitions of the conservative-led government

that would give them powers to hold platforms and websites liable for user generated content,

even if it is perfectly legal.

The White Paper heavily emphasizes child safety and terrorism, but it lumps it together with

bullying, harassment, drug market, online content originating from prisons, fake news

and persuasive design of apps.

The goal of Online Harms is rather mutually exclusive: The government wants the UK to

be the safest place in the world to go online, and the best place to start and grow a digital

business.

Which begs the question: how many businesses are there in prisons?

Because the only place where you are the safest you can be is prison.

Online Harms would create a new regulator, who would mandate tech companies to follow

a new regulatory framework called statutory duty of care.

Which is a confusing term that basically means a government regulator will be giving tech

developers instructions on how to design their products.

This framework has its own loophole that allows tech companies to ignore the steps in duty

of care provided they give a justification and their own alternative that the regulator

deems reansonable.

The regulator will have the power to issue fines and even impose personal liability on

members of senior management.

Companies will also be required to issue annual transparency reports where they outline prevalence

of harmful content and what steps they are taking to mitigate it.

The framework will apply to all companies that “allow users to share or discover user-generated

content or interact with each other online.”

Which is effectively every company operating on the Internet from the most basic ISP to

the smallest edge provider of user content or a forum.

The big question that the white paper doesn’t answer is whether this scope includes private

communication channels, like instant messengers.

Online Harms is self-aware enough that including private messaging could cause too much of

an uproar.

So they are avoiding any clear statements for now.

This will depend, like everything in law, on the definition of “private communications”

which the UK government can make it as broad or narrow as they want to make apps like WhatsApp

or Wire basically illegal in the country.

Consultations for the Online Harms White Paper close on the 1 July and you can respond by

following the link in the description.

It is very important that you follow this initiative especially when it starts morphing

into first drafts and then proposed bills.

All the voice will be necessary to make sure the argument for digital rights and Internet

freedom prevails.

The trends towards more centralization and authoritarianism in the UK seem to be irreversible.

But if you are in the UK, speak up for free speech and Internet freedom.

There might be a lot more people like you waiting for someone to speak first.

The coverage of the Online Harms by the mainstream media is almost non-existent.

I wouldn’t have known about this either.

It was brought to my attention by a user on TheHatedOne subreddit.

If you want to join the community of like minded individuals, ask questions or post

your suggestions feel free to join us there.

Thank you for watching.

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