Free speech is on the line as UK revives controversial non crime hate reports
By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim The Net | August 30, 2024
“Non-crime hate incident” (NCHI) recording is about to come back with a vengeance in the UK.
The recently-elected Labour government has decided to reverse the previous cabinet’s decision to stop wasting police time by having them report such huge numbers of these, often in reality trivial events.
However, even before this policy u-turn engineered by Labour, there were already 12,340 NCHI reports in the first half of the year, rights group Big Brother Watch revealed.
The now former Conservative government hardly put its foot down against such a “granular” (and some would say, absurd) way of policing people’s behavior, that wouldn’t sit oddly with an Orwell novel.
The Conservatives’ solution was to tell the police to report only what they viewed as real risks that could escalate into significant harm – a definition already clear as mud, one might say.
Now, Labour is happy to announce that they are reversing even that attempt at toning down the practice, and the spin to justify this latest decision is that it is needed to “monitor” antisemitic and anti-Islamic “non crime incidents.” Other communities are not mentioned.
This appears to be one of the “band-aid solutions” applied to recent serious rioting in the country, and the UK government didn’t forget to reassure citizens that the right to free speech will – somehow – be preserved in the process.
Just to illustrate what type of “events” the police include in their NCHI reporting – the UK press mentions a case where “a woman said children had used chalk on the pavement outside her home, claiming she was targeted as she was not from the UK.”
In another case, somebody’s “emotional distress” because they were removed from a WhatsApp group was also reported as a “non-crime hate incident.”
However, trying to whittle down this type of “HCHI spamming” to what could reasonably be treated as a threat has now failed.
Home Secretary Yvette Cooper said the new approach would be that of “zero tolerance.”
And – likely of thousands upon thousands of reports, including distinctly dubious ones, every month.
Big Brother Watch noted that in addition to children playing with chalk on sidewalks, “sticking flags on poles” also featured among NCHI reports in the past period.
“Police should protect free speech and privacy by only putting details on file only when necessary,” the group recommended.
Telegram’s Durov Case: Should Tech CEO Bear Responsibility for Users’ Crimes?
By Ekaterina Blinova – Sputnik – 29.08.2024
French authorities announced preliminary charges against Telegram CEO Pavel Durov for allegedly enabling criminal activities on his messaging app. He was ordered to pay €5 million bail and barred from leaving France while the probe continues.
Sputnik reached out to international experts to ask if social media bosses should be held personally responsible for what happens on their apps.
Zach Vorhies, a former senior software engineer at YouTube and Google turned whistleblower, believes that “in an era where a digital footprint can directly lead to a jail cell, the concept of ‘privacy by design’ becomes not just a best practice but a moral imperative.”
He stressed that “if tech companies continue to acquiesce to government demands that undermine user privacy, we may be witnessing the end of digital anonymity as we know it.”
Ryan Hartwig, Facebook whistleblower and co-author of Behind the Mask of Facebook said: “No, social media owners shouldn’t be responsible for what is on their platform, unless they are aware of illegal activity and do nothing to stop it or report it.”
“A dictatorship can declare political activity illegal, thus instantly turning millions of political posts into ‘illegal content’,” Hartwig said.
Philip Giraldi, Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest and former CIA field officer, said it was clear that “if free speech is the standard there should be no such responsibility as the actual poster is the one who should be responsible for the content if it is criminal in nature.”
“To behave otherwise would require a massive censorship presence as well as detailed rules about what is acceptable, which would defeat the purpose of having free speech online,” he said.
No deal with Telegram founder – Kremlin
RT | August 30, 2024
Telegram CEO Pavel Durov did not strike any special arrangement with the Russian government, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov confirmed on Friday. The tech entrepreneur left Russia after a conflict with the authorities in 2014.
Durov, who is a citizen of four countries including France, was arrested in Paris last Saturday and accused of complicity in illicit activities by users of his messaging app. His supporters claim that Paris is trying to intimidate him into violating the privacy of Telegram clients and imposing stricter moderation of public content, which would align with French policies.
The billionaire, who is currently based in the UAE, left Russia in 2014, after law enforcement accused him of protecting terrorists by refusing to give Russian investigators access to suspects’ communications. He claimed that his platform was designed in a way that made such surveillance impossible.
The row effectively ended in 2020, when the Russian telecoms regulator announced that it no longer had any issues with Telegram. There were rumors at the time that company management and the Russian government had secretly come to an understanding.
”There was no deal between the Kremlin and Durov,” Peskov told journalists, when asked whether there was such a relationship.
Asked whether President Vladimir Putin met Durov in person, the presidential spokesman said to his knowledge no such encounter ever happened. Previously there were claims in some media that Putin and Durov had a meeting in Baku, Azerbaijan in mid-August. Peskov denied that earlier this week.
On Wednesday, Durov attended a court in Paris, which formally indicted him on a slate of charges and released him on a €5 million ($5.55 million) bond. He has been banned from leaving France while the case continues.
Durov faces a potentially lengthy prison term in France on charges of “administering an online platform” used by criminals and refusing to cooperate with authorities in their investigation. French President Emmanuel Macron has denied that the case against Durov is political in nature.
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From the Archives
The lies about the 1967 war are still more powerful than the truth
By Alan Hart | June 4, 2012
In retrospect it can be seen that the 1967 war, the Six Days War, was the turning point in the relationship between the Zionist state of Israel and the Jews of the world (the majority of Jews who prefer to live not in Israel but as citizens of many other nations). Until the 1967 war, and with the exception of a minority of who were politically active, most non-Israeli Jews did not have – how can I put it? – a great empathy with Zionism’s child. Israel was there and, in the sub-consciousness, a refuge of last resort; but the Jewish nationalism it represented had not generated the overtly enthusiastic support of the Jews of the world. The Jews of Israel were in their chosen place and the Jews of the world were in their chosen places. There was not, so to speak, a great feeling of togetherness. At a point David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s founding father and first prime minister, was so disillusioned by the indifference of world Jewry that he went public with his criticism – not enough Jews were coming to live in Israel.
So how and why did the 1967 war transform the relationship between the Jews of the world and Israel? … continue
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