We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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DR, Denmark’s equivalent of the BBC, reports that:
The Danish presidency of the EU is currently working to gain support for the CSA regulation, which will open a backdoor to all Europeans’ phones in an attempt to trap and track down criminals who share sexual abuse material with children.
If the CSA regulation is voted through, police and judicial authorities will be able to access encrypted communication services such as WhatsApp and Signal – and thus the private communications of many millions of Europeans.
A leaked document from the European Council states that this will be done through client-side scanning . The technology works by scanning images, video and text on the user’s device before sending and encrypting them, including with the help of AI.
[…]
The CSA regulation was taken off the agenda of the EU Council of Ministers in June 2024 due to the risk of mass surveillance of EU citizens and a concern that the law could represent a setback for freedoms.
But two months later, the Minister of Justice [Peter Hummelgaard] stated to TV 2 that “we need to break with the completely erroneous perception that it is every man’s right to freedom to communicate on encrypted messaging services, which are used to facilitate many different serious forms of crime”.
Thousands upon thousands of ULEZ cameras have been destroyed by the Bladerunners (way more than 5,000 last year alone)
“We know that the Online Safety Act (OSA) is a disaster. The group it is billed as protecting, children and young people, is not only rebellious: it is precisely the class most adept at using VPNs and other devices to circumvent it. And this is even before you get to the unintended consequences. The more we try to regulate the semi-respectable internet sites out there, the more we push thrill-seeking young people to the darkest and most frightening corners of cyberspace, where they can suffer serious harm. Furthermore, the greater the pressure on the young to sign up to dodgy free VPNs, the greater the likelihood of their later suffering trolling and identity theft. Some protection.”
– Andrew Tettenborn
This is interesting.
“American businesses do not surrender their First Amendment rights because a foreign bureaucrat sends them an e-mail.”
Hopefully more sites and services outside the UK will refuse to comply with the appalling Online Safety Act.
A trade group representing companies that build age verification systems is now lobbying to extend these checks to anyone using a VPN in the UK. The Age Verification Providers Association (AVPA) wants online platforms that fall under the UK’s censorship law, the Online Safety Act, to not only detect VPN usage but also analyze user behavior to guess whether someone might be a minor in disguise.
If flagged, users would face a prompt: prove your age, or allow a one-time geolocation to confirm you’re outside the UK.
According to the AVPA, this process is necessary because VPNs can mask users’ actual locations, allowing them to appear as though they are in countries where age verification laws do not apply. The association points to data showing a dramatic increase in VPN use around the time the UK’s new internet rules were enforced, suggesting people are using these tools to bypass restrictions.
This approach treats privacy tools as a form of defiance. Here, VPNs, once considered sensible and essential for online security, are being rebranded as suspicious.
– Richard Eldred
News comes to me that an advert, a video in the style of a musical, for something called Coinbase, which I understand is some form of crypto set up, which is why the advert has been banned, and about which I know nothing more, (and this is not advice or recommendation on financial matters) is not permitted in the UK by the regulator, OFCOM. Not that I doubt that OFCOM are interpreting the regulations correctly. That the advert might be termed mildly satirical would be a fair description, and take a look at the shop names. It’s almost an updated Oliver Twist. Has it been made by people familiar with modern Britain? I would say so.
As Burns said in his ode ‘To a louse’:’O wad some Power the giftie gie us / To see oursels as ithers see us!’.
Thanks to comedian Andrew Lawrence for the tip.
War Footing Latest, against you that is, not the Russians
– Think Defence
I cannot recall a more disgusting article being published in a mainstream newspaper than this one written by His Majesty’s Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology:
Farage is siding with disgusting internet predators – Peter Kyle
Last year, Nicholas Hawkes sent photos of his erect penis to a 15-year-old girl. It’s sadly too common an occurrence, making victims feel exploited, disgusted and unsafe.
But in this case there were consequences. A month later, Hawkes was convicted under the new offence of cyber-flashing created by the Online Safety Act – the first person to be convicted.
So when Nigel Farage, the leader of Reform UK, boasts about his plans to repeal the Online Safety Act, it makes my blood boil.
Repealing the law would benefit men like Hawkes, a registered sex offender, and other disgusting predators who contact children and groom them online.
[…]
But as well as blocking disturbing and upsetting images and messages from children’s feeds, it [the Online Safety Act] also makes huge changes to the online environment children inhabit.
For the first time, it gives social media platforms an obligation to proactively keep children safe. It forces them to detect and remove horrific child sexual abuse material, which has shamefully lurked on the internet, barely hidden from those sick enough to seek it out.
[…]
And these are not just warm words – it’s a regime with teeth. If companies don’t follow the law, then Ofcom, our independent regulator, has the power to fine them up to 10 per cent of their global turnover.
For the most serious of offences, allowing child sexual abuse to run riot on a platform could even see someone criminalised. Plus it gives our police forces new offences to go after online criminals.
I cannot understand how anyone can be against these measures. How could anyone question our duty to keep children safe online – particularly when it comes to child sexual abuse content and from online grooming?
“Why do you hang back from punishing the traitors, comrade? Is it because you are one of them?” Demagogues have used that line for centuries.
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.
So, President Macron’s wife appeared to push him in the face.
A flood of analysis immediately followed. Here is the Guardian‘s offering: “Brigitte Macron’s push has reverberated around the world. Why was it met with a shrug in France?”
The standfirst to Pauline Block’s article is: “Whatever the explanation for the incident, the reaction points to backward French attitudes – including from the president himself”. Although Ms Bock probably did not write those words, they are a fair reflection of her article. It casts its net wide, and among the fish brought up from the depths are the age gap between the Macrons, the convention by which the French press says nothing about the romantic relationships of French politicians, how would we feel if it was a man pushing a woman, and…
That Macron doesn’t see the potential problem in the video points to a narrow, obsolete understanding of couple dynamics and domestic violence. He has twice proclaimed gender equality to be the “great cause” of his presidential mandates before refusing to properly fund it; he has spoken in support of the French actor Gérard Depardieu, who has recently been found guilty of sexual assault and is soon to be on trial again for rape; and to this day, the former interior minister and current justice minister, Gérald Darmanin, who was accused of sexual assault (the case has now been dismissed), has remained in Macron’s cabinet.
It would have been easy enough to turn this moment into a public health message. He could have simply said that he’s all right, thanks for your consideration, but that men who do experience violence should feel no shame in seeking help, using it as an opportunity to discuss domestic violence prevention. Instead, he mocked the “fools” who thought anything could be amiss.
But why should he turn it into a “public health message” if he and his wife really were only larking around? There is something very cavalier about the Guardian‘s “whatever” in “Whatever the explanation for the incident”. The true explanation of the incident is the only thing that matters. If it was play, even play mixed in with annoyance (and such pretended fighting moves can be used to defuse quarrels as well as to escalate them), then it is nobody’s business other than the Macrons’ own, and the demand that he – or she – use it as a teaching moment is intrusive. How would Mme Bock like it if a similar demand for an impromptu sermon were made of her after some innocent but embarrassing incident in her private life was accidentally caught on camera?
But if it was a real attack, there are indeed things to discuss. Does anyone have the right not to have their act of domestic violence investigated because their spouse or partner has not officially complained? Does anyone have the right not to have an act of domestic violence against them investigated because they have made no official complaint? Does it make any difference whether either party is male or female? Does it make a difference if either party is a political leader?
If it was real. But we don’t know if it was. Looking at the video at quarter speed, I still couldn’t decide. So all the questions above are repeated with “act of domestic violence” replaced with “what looks on the face of it like an act of domestic violence”.
In favour of the push crossing the threshold into being an assault, albeit not one intended to cause injury, is the fact that Mme Macron looked angry and refused to take her husband’s arm as she descended the steps, and that the Elysée Palace initially lied and said the video was fake. In favour of it being mere bickering horseplay is that the plane was full of bodyguards specifically charged with protecting the President of France.
What do you think?
Triggered by the political shocks of Brexit and Donald Trump’s election, the EU Commission launched a campaign to reassert control over Europe’s political narrative. Central to this is the rhetoric of ‘hate speech’ and ‘disinformation’, framed as threats to democratic stability. The Commission presents these programmes as public-interest research initiatives, but they constitute a form of soft authoritarianism, enshrining speech codes and narrowing acceptable opinion through bureaucratic manipulation. This is a top-down, authoritarian, curated consensus where expression is free only when it speaks the language of compliance established by the Commission.
The Digital Services Act (DSA), which should be relabelled as the ‘Digital Surveillance Act’, is the crown jewel of this strategy. The legal framework enables the EU to regulate online speech under the guise of protection.
The MCC Brussels report underlines a disturbing fact: the Commission spends 31 per cent more on narrative control than on research addressing cancer, despite cancer causing nearly two million deaths annually in Europe. This prioritisation signals that Brussels fears the cancer of free speech more than the disease. Public funds are being funnelled unaccountably into a disinformation narrative designed to shape, limit and manage the terms of public debate.
– Norman Lewis
I am travelling to the US soon. I go there regularly for work. Reason magazine has this article. Worth a read:
Border phone searches are in the news a lot lately. Last month, a French scientist was allegedly blocked from coming to a conference in Houston after U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) found statements against President Donald Trump on his phone. A few days later, Brown University doctor Rasha Alawieh was turned away at the airport after CBP allegedly found pro-Hezbollah images on her phone.
How does CBP have the power to rummage through phones so easily? After all, ordinary police can’t just stop you on the street and search your phone without a warrant. But courts have recognized a border exemption to the Fourth Amendment, allowing the government to conduct routine anti-smuggling searches of travelers. Although some lower courts have weighed in on whether that exemption applies to personal electronic files, there’s no definitive ruling yet on phone searches at the border.
Until the Supreme Court rules on the issue, CBP officers are mostly limited by the agency’s own internal regulations. The regulations allow officers to conduct a “basic search” (flipping through the phone by hand) at their discretion, and require “reasonable suspicion” or a “national security concern” to conduct an “advanced search” with forensic phone hacking software such as Cellebrite. The regulations also restrict officers to searching what’s already on the phone, not downloading new data, so phone searches should be conducted in airplane mode or otherwise disconnected from the internet.
As the article notes, organisations such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation have put up advice on what to do. The EEF states this: “As of this writing, the federal government is considering requiring disclosure from certain foreign visitors of social media login credentials, allowing access to private postings and “friend” lists.”
For what it is worth, I haven’t ever been asked to show my phone to immigration authorities in places including Hong Kong, Singapore, Dubai, Switzerland, France, Germany, Malta, or for that matter, the US at airports in California, Boston, Miami, New York and Chicago. But that might change. Sadly, where the US “leads”, the rest of the world can follow. The US is land of the free, and all that. It does, or at least has, set the tone, even if performance was spotty in actual reality.
The Reason article makes the following points about the UK, Australia, New Zealand and Canada:
Another consideration is what happens on the other side of the journey. Canada, Britain, Australia, and New Zealand, which all share intelligence with the U.S. government under the Five Eyes program, have different border privacy policies. Under Australian law, travelers do not have to unlock their phones. Canadian authorities, like US authorities, say they will seize a phone if a traveler refuses to unlock it. New Zealand imposes a $5,000 fine for failing to unlock a phone, and Britain considers refusing to unlock a phone for police to be a counterterrorism offense.
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