Britain Wants Tech Firms to Tackle Extremism (fortune.com)

Britain will tell Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Microsoft on Thursday to do more to stop extremists posting content on their platforms and using encrypted messaging services to plan attacks. From a report: Home Secretary Amber Rudd said on Sunday tech companies should stop offering a "secret place for terrorists to communicate," after British parliament attacker Khalid Masood was widely reported to have sent encrypted messages moments before he killed four people last week. Rudd has summoned the Internet companies to a meeting to urge them to do more to block extremist content from platforms like Facebook and Google's YouTube, but a government spokesman said encryption was also on the agenda. "The message is the government thinks there is more they can do in relation to taking down extremist and hate material and that is what they are going to be talking about this afternoon," the prime minister's spokesman said on Thursday.

Comments

No, Britain wants surveillance tools

[rsilvergun]

If they wanted to tackle extremism they would do that by going after the things that make people take things like religion and political beliefs to their extremes.

Re:No, Britain wants surveillance tools

[jez9999]

Aaaaaaand he was a Muslim convert. What's your point? That if we hadn't imported tons of Islam he would still have converted?

Re:No, Britain wants surveillance tools

[s.petry]

Aaaaaaand he was a Muslim convert. What's your point? That if we hadn't imported tons of Islam he would still have converted?

Quite possibly. There is this thing called the Internet, you know.

So to circumvent the spreading of Islamic danger, we should control every form of communication? I see where this is going.

Nope, I'm saying you will never be able to stop extremism, and fascist acts such as destroying personal privacy and xenophobic/nationalistic acts such as barring all immigrants from a single specific category won't work and will end up hurting, not helping your society in the long run.

There is a sliding scale. Most Muslims in the US have integrated into society quite nicely. The UK used to be able to say the same thing. Letting a million or so come in at once and not even attempting to ensure assimilation has caused the problem. We could say the same of Germany, Poland, Sweden, and any other Country who has done the same thing as the UK.

Going a bit further, I don't believe that this is an issue with just Muslims. They happen to be the biggest influx in most of those countries so the easiest to discuss. The US has similar issues with people from South America who have no interest in integrating and hate the US. They just want the stuff the US hands out (not all of them, but there is a measurable percentage).

When people come from areas that do not have free speech and they learn the power of suppressing speech, why would you think they would want free speech when they move into your country? If people come from an area that deals with legal issues by violence, why would that immediately change in your country?

Assimilation of immigrants should be the discussion, which requires temperament with how many immigrants a Country allows.

Freedom of speech is needed for unpopular content

[Anonymous Coward]

In the United States we have this idea that even speech we don't necessarily like should be protected- especially so. Speech that is popular doesn't need protection after all. While the US has done a piss poor job at protecting freedom of speech in the most outrageous of circumstances there is at least protection for KKK-style "hate" speech, pornography to one extent or another, and similar communications.

If terrorists are actually threatening to use violence against people you can arrest them for it. If you criminalize the speech (and your laws/police were effective at dealing with it) it doesn't mean terrorism will end. The police would have had seconds to deal with this particular case if that under the propaganda here- so eliminating encryption wouldn't have done a darn thing. And that seems to be true for most of the encryption scenarios involving terrorism that have been brought to our attention by the propaganda/media. These are nothing but scare tactics that are aimed at getting the government to eliminate freedom of speech.

Plus- a success here merely means you've succeeded in creating a larger group of disgruntled people- of which more people will then lash out violently. You can only hush people up and back them into a corner for so long. Eventually people will get together and act- often rightfully so- in violent defensive ways. Violence for the sake of violence or gain is immoral. Violence for the sake of self defence is not. We need to stop throwing people in prison who've committed no violence. We need to stop stealing (taxes) from people who have not stolen themselves. If you'd rather live in a free society with the occasional violent individual or risky driver check out the Free State Project, as we've successfully completed a project to migrate 20,000 people and with 5,000 people here already we're having a lot of success at breaking down big government and government violence used on people here in New Hampshire: http://www.freestateproject.org/