It’s only too late when we stop fighting back and accept it as a given. Don’t underestimate civil disobedience and the hacker spirit.
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UK showed how to deal with civil disobedience (fast tracked judicial process). Hardware attestation will deal with the hacker spirit.
Above all, the LLM panopticon will watch us all.
Technology will not save us. Nothing will save us but ourselves and we're busy making rent and doomscrolling.
We won't save ourselves. We might slow the process, but the information environment is permanently altered and we can't put it back.
The information asymmetry between individuals and the powerful is permanently reversed.
Thinking about it in terms of the monopoly of violence being the root of power negotiations; typically a resistance movement has more information about the state/colonizer than vice versa, because power has to be visible - guerilla warfare thrives on this.
That's gone. The powerful will have complete detailed information and automatic analysis.
The medium is the message.
There will always be some form of underground.
What's different is that, for a while, the early Internet age (and a little bit earlier - Usenet etc) made that underground very accessible. Now we're reverting back to the original situation where it was very much shunned and criminalized.
> UK showed how to deal with civil disobedience (fast tracked judicial process)
What is it you mean by this?
I see so many offhand comments about the dystopian UK here but AFAICT there’s a lot of noise and very little meat. The only thing I can think you mean is the UK is currently debating a bill to limit jury trials to more serious offences. While I do find that pretty offensive, there’s nothing fast track about any of its justice system at the moment.
On the contrary, people are waiting years for trial, which is bad for the accused because they have it hanging over them, and bad for victims who get no swift resolution.
I meant the way it deal with the southport rioters (no judgement value on the riot itself or its reasons, just noticing how the uk gov dealt with the it)
For example:
>Courts will sit for 24 hours to fast-track sentencing under government plans to crack down on far-Right riots that swept Britain on Saturday.[1]
[1]https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/08/03/courts-open-24-h...
There is also this:
>Only Australia arrested climate and environmental protesters at a higher rate than UK police. One in five Australian eco-protests led to arrests, compared with about 17% in the UK. The global average rate is 6.7%.
>The UK’s Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2021 and the Public Order Act 2022 transformed the relationship between protesters and the state, handing police extensive new powers to curtail protests and criminalising a range of protest activities. [2]
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/dec/11/britain-...
Boot, face, forever, etc
Honestly, so long as there is adequate time for everyone to prepare and adequate oversight, fast tracking like seems to me far preferable to waiting for 2-3 years!
And given the Southport riots were, well riots, it’s unsurprising they were dealt with harshly.
That said, I agree that what’s happening with protest in both the UK and Australia is deeply wrong. New South Wales in particular seems to be awful on this front.
It’s a shame that guardian article doesn’t link to the actual study.
It’s not especially surprising that there is a high rate of arrests in the subcategory of protests they picked - environmental (not climate) protests often involve things like blockading mine sites and blocking roads here in Aus. In some of the countries mentioned in the article you may just be physically moved, beaten or even shot for that behaviour. Which is not to say that the higher arrests aren’t concerning, but the picture isn’t exactly clear after reading the article, particularly as it mentions over 2000 environmental protestors were killed during that period, I’d hope none in the UK or Aus, which to me that even though the arrests aren’t rates are higher in these countries, to imply that they are the worst in their treatment of protest is probably wrong.
>And given the Southport riots were, well riots, it’s unsurprising they were dealt with harshly.
you didn't read or care to understand my argument at all, which is not about the target of the process, but the existence of the process and the process itself. Looks like I have to spell it out: next time won't be race rioters, next time will be protesters protesting the farage gov crackdown on immigrants and minorities.
>It’s not especially surprising that there is a high rate of arrests in the subcategory of protests they picked
the article mentions the rate of arrests is high COMPARED with other countries. And again you're getting lost in the details; this wasn't about what the protests were about, but the brutal swift crackdown AND the laws passed giving police more powers.
Yes, this time they hit your out-group, so all is well. fine. next time, (and this is the crux of my argument), _using the exact same tools_, it's your group, you, that will be targeted.
> the existence of the process
Yes, I know you think it’s bad that it exists. I don’t.
So long as it is carried out with proper oversight and people have time to prepare their cases, it actually appears preferable to endless delay which is the current hallmark of the British justice system. Do you disagree? Why?
Do you have a reason to think that justice served this way is less fair or rigorous?
Because frankly I’d rather get in the express lane at that point if I was on the receiving end, than have to live with the process over my head for 2-3 years.
> the article mentions the rate of arrests is high COMPARED with other countries.
Yes, and it also says some of those other countries are killing environmental protestors, so the picture is not as clear cut as you might like. It certainly suggests problems, but it also suggests that we may not be comparing apples to apples with these figures.
Seriously, maybe read it again if you think this is entirely un-nuanced. Personally I’d like to know more.
I agree with you that giving the police extra powers is bad. I agree the direction of travel is bad.
I disagree that faster justice is bad.
I disagree that a higher arrest rate than other countries on a subset of protests is as black and white as you think.
Presumably the 2011 riots: a college student with no criminal record was jailed for six months for stealing a £3.50 case of bottled water [0]
Or perhaps our current Home Sec in 2014 declaring "Rioters face years in prison as Home Secretary Yvette Cooper promises ‘swift justice’" [1]
[0] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/8695988/London...
[1] https://www.standard.co.uk/news/crime/riots-prison-justice-l...
It's all part of making effective protesting illegal. You can justify each little step as you clutch your pearls (even me, to an extent if I don't think of the bigger picture), but then when you realise that the sum of all that is permitted is standing alone creating no disturbance for anyone, effecting no change, and you realise effective protesting is banned.
Those riots in 2011 were not protest in any meaningful way. I was in London at the time, it was a bunch of people stealing shit and setting fires because they thought they could. What was shocking was how hands-off the police were when they routinely kettle and arrest peaceful protestors. When confronted with people who were actually looting and burning stuff down, they were nowhere to be seen.
And the second article is about people setting fire to cars and buildings.
This is not “effective protest”, it’s criminal damage and arson and would be prosecuted as such in any western nation.
Are you seriously arguing you should be able to get away with setting fire to a community library because you reckon you’ve got a legit grievance?
Yeah nah, no thanks.
I neither argued that the 2011 riots were protest nor that setting fire to a community library is justified.
Are there any strawmen left or did you buy them all? Jesus
"Are you seriously arguing...?" style of discussion belongs to Reddit, not here.
Though it's clear that you are part of the pearl-clutching group that wants any protest banned and would support any law and any new law dreamt up by a Home Sec, so thanks for doing your bit. No doubt you believe "the law is the law" and any law is just.
edit: You're not British are you (based on your English – it's pretty good, but not quite good enough). Where were you born, out of interest? I always enjoy a foreigner lecturing me about my place of birth
LOL. Home-counties born and bred, attended a minor public school and a Russel group university. Grandad was a Desert Rat, one grandmother was brought up in colonial India. I’m so English I’m a fucking stereotype, though it’s true I no longer live there.
Perhaps my English is so superior to yours that you’re having trouble understanding?
> Though it's clear that you are part of the pearl-clutching group that wants any protest banned
What were you saying about straw men?
Perhaps you could enlighten me here. If you believe that promising swift justice for arsonists and other rioters is a way to suppress effective protest, are you not categorising arson as a form of protest? If not, what is your objection to said swift justice for people who commit acts of criminal damage, arson etc?
I support the right to protest. I believe the UK state is on a bad path and has been for a long time with restrictions on this right. But it gives me no pause when rioting and looting is treated harshly.
Sure, with those over-corrected "’" apostrophes. "I’m so English I’m a fucking stereotype" is such a contorted sentence.
"The UK has problems, but it's not very useful to throw all of these cases together to make a big number", "None of which is to say I think the UK has things right" – literally nobody native to the UK writes like that.
Again, nice try, but try harder.
I'm /actually/ from a home county ;)
edit: Home counties isn't hyphenated btw.
While I agree with you, my worry is that younger generations have been conditioned to just expect privacy invasions, and I hear the same "Well I have nothing to hide" more and more with my younger family at least.
> and I hear the same "Well I have nothing to hide" more and more with my younger family at least.
Which is funny as thats what I heard from my older family growing up. Except it's a lie and they have plenty to hide!
"Pass me your phone, I want to screenshot a few things and post on social media".
Absolutely, but this can only happen if we refuse to run nonfree software on our machines. Even if the maintainers of a Linux distro decided to somehow implement some anti user feature like age attestation, it would be trivial to patch that out from the source or to remove it from a running system with root access. The real danger here is devices that are not fully owned by the user, such as iPhones.
And the overwhelming majority of anything running Android.
This. Fatigue and despair are by far the most effective way to control a population. You don’t need to convince people you’re doing the right thing, you just have to convince them that it’s too late.
I do underestimate the hacker spirit. HN's response to Client Side Scanning was disheartening, barely anyone could condemn Apple despite the obvious red-line being crossed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28068741
And once you step outside HN, forget it. You can save yourself, but there are thousands of people that do respond to the "think of the children!" nonsense and will call you a creep for objecting to it. It's game over now, you will fight against this for the rest of your life.
HN is mostly for people with entrepreneur spirit, not hacker spirit - entrepreneurs who want to be known as hackers. The difference is vast.
big opportunity here for therealhackernews.com
Not really. You couldn't get the network effect. Real hackers hang out on IRC.
That was almost 5 years ago. Lately, though, I see more people have stopped tolerating these attacks on freedom. See pewdiepie, louis rossman, deflock, piracy ressurection. Uk petition against digital ID becomes one of the largest petitions in history.