Tag: UK

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First Amendment rights international affairs

Pigs Not Flying Over England

UK, censorship, free speech, 4CHAN

It can’t govern itself. But the UK, eager to govern the United States, is trying to impose fines on the loose-​talk website 4Chan for ignoring British censorship demands.

Preston Byrne, a lawyer representing 4Chan, has responded to UK regulator Ofcom’s attempt to impose the fines — more than $26,000 to start — with instructions to get lost.

Ofcom Enforcement Czar Suzanne Cater says that this fine “sends a clear message that any service which flagrantly fails to engage with Ofcom and their duties under the Online Safety Act can expect to face robust enforcement action.”

How robust, though? 

Byrne: “4chan’s constitutional rights remain completely unaffected by this foreign e‑mail. 4chan will obey UK censorship laws when pigs fly. In the meantime, there’s litigation pending in DC. Ofcom hasn’t yet answered.…

“That fine will never be enforced in the USA. The UK is welcome to try to enforce it in an American court if they disagree.”

The Trump administration has stressed its opposition to the UK’s global-​censorship agenda. So what is going on here? 

It appears that when some people over-​zealously seek to dominate others, the weaker they are the more desperate — and in their desperation they become more belligerent. Since the United Kingdom is in no position to launch an invasion of the United States in order to force us … well, they might just shut up already. 

Britain’s leadership is in disarray. The country is very weak — a least, unless it teams up with a more powerful country, like China. Which is what the UK indeed seems to be doing. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights international affairs Internet controversy privacy

Apple to Keep Encryption

UK, British, surveillance, censorship, iphone, Apple

Thanks, United Kingdom.

Following pressure on UK officials by the Trump administration and some congressmen, British censors have caved — the U.S. Director of National Intelligence confirmed that the UK was abandoning its demand that Apple burn a hole in its iPhone encryption.

So Apple may continue providing its flagship smartphone with robust encryption. Cyberhackers and autocratic regimes (including snoopy British officials) — who’d love a crashable gate into everyone’s private iPhone information — must now endure their extreme disappointment.

Director Tulsi Gabbard reported on X that the UK will “drop its mandate for Apple to provide a ‘back door’ that would have enabled access to the protected encrypted data of American citizens and encroached on our civil liberties.”

Such a back door would have rendered the encryption close to pointless, presenting a vulnerable target to all bad guys in addition to all “good” guys in the UK holding backdoor keys.

Under an agreement in effect since 2019, U.S. companies are obliged to comply with requests from UK officials for data relevant to criminal investigations.

The agreement prohibits surveillance of Americans. But this year British officials secretly demanded that Apple install a back door to enable the UK government to extract data from any iPhone. Yes, that’s any iPhone anywhere in the world. 

The British Government also planned to initiate these back-​door intrusions without even needing to show relevance to a UK criminal investigation, let alone provide a warrant.

How long will the reprieve last? Maybe only until we get another U.S. administration as eager to censor everything as the last one was.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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UK Targets Wikipedia

UK, British, Wikipedia, censorship, surveillance

It would be nice if Wikipedia were suing to challenge the United Kingdom’s entire Online Safety Act, not just the provision that most directly targets Wikipedia. 

Better something than nothing, however.

As Wikipedia describes it, the Act “creates a new duty of care for online platforms, requiring them to take action against illegal content, or legal content that could be ‘harmful’ to children where children are likely to access it. Platforms failing this duty would be liable to fines of up to £18 million or 10% of their annual turnover, whichever is higher.”

The Wikipedia Foundation objects to being classified as a category 1 service under the Act, a designation that imposes digital ID requirements on its contributors.

“Privacy is central to how we keep users safe and empowered,” says Phil Bradley-​Schmieg, lead counsel for the Wikipedia Foundation. “Designed for social media, this is just one of several category 1 duties that could seriously harm Wikipedia.”

“Designed for social media” — in other words, do it to the other guys, not us.

“Volunteer communities working in more than 300 languages could be exposed to data breaches, stalking, vexatious lawsuits, or even imprisonment by authoritarian regimes,” Bradley-​Schmieg adds.

True. But won’t those risks also be faced by those who surf in to say something on a social media platform and suddenly find themselves confronted with age-​verification — ID — demands?

We need a tsunami of lawsuits against the UK’s global assault on privacy and freedom of speech.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights general freedom international affairs

UK as China’s Thumb Puppet

Xi Jinping, China, UK, surveillance, censorship

British police do some good things. In 2023, officers were credited with reducing the number of phone snatchings by punks on mopeds. Great.

Let’s have more of that, less of telling victims of totalitarian dictatorship to shut up for their own good.

The UK police wanted expatriate Hongkonger Carmen Lau, a pro-​democracy activist and former Hong Kong politician who has been living in Britain since 2021, to stay out of trouble with China. So in March, London bobbies asked her to sign a “memorandum of understanding” obliging her to avoid public gatherings and “cease any activity likely to put you at risk.”

What activity? 

Not hang gliding.

The sickening effort to muzzle Lau came after neighbors got letters “offering a £100,000 bounty (US$131,947) for information on her movements” leading to her arrest by Hong Kong’s Chinese Communist Party authorities.

Hong Kong denies sending the letters. But in 2024, it placed bounties on the heads of six pro-​democracy activists, including Lau, who had fled overseas in the wake of China’s repressive national security law of 2020, which targeted Hong Kong liberties.

Lau felt constrained to submit to the police request when they came to her door but has continued to speak out. “A truly democratic response should center on protecting the rights of those targeted, not advising them to retreat from public life,” she says.

Responding to the revelations, Thames Valley police say that they’d never “confirm or deny safeguarding tactics that we may or may not use.…”

Is this the free world? Not if under China’s thumb. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment First Amendment rights

The Bobbies That Say NIII

UK, British flag, censorship, surveillance, internet, news

In Great Britain, you can get police to show up at your door just by posting an unauthorized opinion on social media.

Things are about to get worse. By talking about it online, Britons who think that the country has an immigration problem could draw the attention of a new police unit, National Internet Intelligence Investigations.

Saying “we’ve got to protest about this” will probably cause the sirens to go off.

Chris Philp, the shadow home secretary, says the government is trying “to police what you post, what you share, what you think” because it “can’t police the streets.… Labour have stopped pretending to fix Britain and started trying to mute it.”

However, this kind of thing happened under the Tories too.

People still speak their minds in the UK. They aren’t yet used to regarding their political opinions as prenatal forms of criminal activity.

One could use social media to plan or boast about what everybody agrees is a crime. A thug might post video showing how he beat somebody up. Bank robbers might share bank-​robbery plans on Facebook. Criminals tend not to do these things. But if they did, for real (that is, they’re not play-​acting), who could object if the police inspect the incriminating posts and take appropriate action?

But what’s happening in the UK is not that. 

It’s an attempt to prevent social unrest by finding expressions of dissent and pretending to divine which speech-​crime will lead to protest-crime.

It requires Big Brother Bobbies.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Brazilian Censors Banned!

liberty, freedom, censorship, Brazil, free speech

The American government — after years of nurturing a censorship agenda in the South American country — is now penalizing Brazil’s super-​censor Supreme Court justice, Alexandre de Moraes, along with various colleagues, for imposing censorship demands on U.S. companies.

The U.S. State Department revoked their visa privileges, preventing them from entering the United States. The general policy had been introduced May 28, when Secretary of State Rubio announced that it would apply to “foreign officials and [other] persons … complicit in censoring Americans.”

By then a UK police commissioner, Mark Rowley, had threatened to “come after” Americans who violate UK “hate speech” laws.

The Trump administration “will hold accountable foreign nationals who are responsible for censorship of protected expression in the United States,” Rubio says.

“Brazilian Supreme Federal Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes’s political witch hunt against Jair Bolsonaro created a persecution and censorship complex so sweeping that it not only violates basic rights of Brazilians, but also extends beyond Brazil’s shores to target Americans.”

Bolsonaro, a former president of Brazil, is on trial for allegedly seeking to overturn the country’s 2022 presidential election. He has been prohibited from posting on social media or communicating with others under investigation. 

One on this no-​contact order is his own son, Eduardo Bolsonaro, currently living in the U.S.

Having ordered social media platforms Rumble and X(-Twitter) to censor opposition figures, Justice Moraes acted to block both services from operating in Brazil when the platforms disobeyed him.

“Free speech,” said X’s Elon Musk, “is the bedrock of democracy and an unelected pseudo-​judge in Brazil is destroying it for political purposes.” 

It’s a wonderful thing to have our government once again defending democratic free speech — from its enemies foreign and domestic.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Leave Our Speech Alone

UK, censorship, freedom

Secretary of State Marco Rubio has announced that foreign officials who act to censor U.S. speech on U.S. soil won’t get visas.

They shouldn’t “issue or threaten arrest warrants on U.S. citizens or U.S. residents for social media posts on American platforms while physically present on U.S. soil.… [Or] demand that American tech platforms … engage in censorship activity that reaches beyond their authority and into the United States. We will not tolerate encroachments upon American sovereignty, especially when such encroachments undermine the exercise of our fundamental right to free speech.”

The policy is the least the U.S. can do to combat despots of even “friendly” countries who target speech in the U.S. or demand that U.S. firms abet local repression.

It would also be reasonable to tie trade agreements to willingness to abstain from censoring U.S. speech and bullying U.S. companies that protect speech and privacy. But a White House report on a recent agreement with the UK says nothing about these matters.

American companies have sometimes withdrawn from foreign markets or offered truncated products rather than cooperate with censorship or surveillance. When Britain demanded a global back door to iPhone encryption, Apple removed an encryption feature from iPhones for users in the UK. Better than rendering the feature useless everywhere in the world.

But it would be better still if a country like the United Kingdom simply agreed to leave us alone. Pretend we’re allies and so forth; pretend that they, too, think freedom is a good thing.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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free trade & free markets international affairs

Sabotage or Neglect?

UK, British, steel, manufacturing, China

“It might not be sabotage,” says Member of Parliament Jonathan Reynolds. “It might be neglect.”

Reynolds serves as the United Kingdom’s Business Secretary. He’s talking about the behavior of Jungye, the Chinese owner of troubled British Steel. 

“The conscious decision not just to not order raw materials but to sell existing supplies of raw materials …” Reynolds fulminated, leading him to tell the BBC that “he doesn’t want any future Chinese involvement in British steel making.”

Over the weekend, the UK Government seized British Steel, with Reynolds explaining that “he was forced to seek emergency powers to prevent owners Jingye” from “shutting down its two blast furnaces, which would have ended primary steel production in the UK.”

“They wanted to close down steel production in Britain,” argues Nigel Farage, an MP and leader of Reform UK, “This is a big strategic decision by the CCP.”

Asked if he was accusing the Chinese owners of “lying about the numbers,” the fiery Farage replied, “Yes, absolutely,” adding, “Lying about everything.”

In a single day, Saturday, Parliament passed emergency legislation to facilitate the Business Secretary’s request. 

One opposition MP called it a “botched nationalization,” as the company is still in Chinese hands. It seems more a rescue attempt for Chinese owners who don’t want to be rescued. 

Takeaway? Maybe China isn’t such a great economic partner after all. 

Free countries are reluctantly rediscovering that we still live in a dangerous world, in which we better be able to protect ourselves and not depend on the sworn enemies of freedom. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob. 

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First Amendment rights international affairs Internet controversy social media

Against British Censorship

U.K. British, censorship

The dictates of the neo-​redcoat British government, led by Prime Minister Keir Starmer, are out of control.

Starmer’s Labour government wants the whole world to obey its censorship demands. The latest is that its Office of Communications, called Ofcom, is threatening the American social media platforms Gab and Kiwi Farms with mega-​steep fines for unwaveringly safeguarding the freedom of speech of users. 

Which of course Gab and Kiwi Farms have every right to do.

Ofcom says it’ll sock Gab with fines of up $23 million USD for refusing to censor its users per UK orders. 

“We will not pay one cent,” says Gab CEO Andrew Torba.

Gab is not only not cooperating with Ofconjob’s insanity, it has also reported the Starmer government to the U.S. Trade Representative and the U.S. Department of Justice in hopes that the U.S. government will retaliate against the United Kingdom for trying to gag social media in the United States.

Kiwi Farms, threatened with the same fine of up to 10 percent of worldwide revenue, is telling UK users who want to use the site to access it through a VPN or Tor in order to protect their online traffic and disguise which country they’re from. Otherwise, they’re out of luck.

Kiwi has also reported success in obtaining pro bono counsel for dealing with “the UK’s attempts to enforce its censorship regime in the United States.”

As the U.S. president famously said in Butler, Pennsylvania: “Fight! Fight! Fight!”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Musk Avoids a Trap

Elon Musk, UK, censorship, freedom

After reports that British MPs wanted to summon Elon Musk to interrogate him about the role of his company, X (Twitter), “in disseminating ‘disinformation’ during the summer riots,” I didn’t suppose that he’d be eager to rush across the pond to be grilled by enemies of freedom of speech.

One of his would-​be interrogators, Chi Onwurah, a Labour committee chairwoman, said she wanted to “cross-​examine him to see … how he reconciles his promotion of freedom of expression with his promotion of pure disinformation.”

What a mystery. How can someone champion freedom of speech and letting people say things with which others disagree? Isn’t freedom of speech only for government-​authorized speech, the kind King George III would have approved?

On X, a Malaysian commentator sought to warn Musk: “This is a trap,” tweeted Miles Cheong, “They’ll detain him at the border, demand to see the contents of his phone, and charge him under counterterrorism laws when he refuses.”

If we were concerned even a little that Mr. Musk might fall into this or a similar trap, we needn’t have been.

In reply to Cheong, Musk asserted that MPs will, rather, “be summoned to the United States of America to explain their censorship and threats to American citizens.”

In September, in response to being pointedly and publicly not invited to a British investment conference, Musk had said, “I don’t think anyone should go to the UK when they’re releasing convicted pedophiles in order to imprison people for social media posts!”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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