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

FFS, leave crypto alone

[EndlessNameless]

Crypto is the only real privacy. You can see where someone truly stands on totalitarianism vs liberty by their attitude towards crypto.

Minutes from the Meeting

[JonnyCalcutta]

Amber Rudd: We need you to do more to combat extremists. How about you use some of those tools from CSI? And also give us back doors into your services.
Google: Sure, no problem
Facebook: OK
Twitter: What ever you say
MS: Why not

outside the meeting

Google: So you guys going to do anything?
MS: haha, fuck that.
Twitter: Yeh. Stupid cow, what the fuck was she talking about?
Facebook: Pub?

Re:Minutes from the Meeting

[Anonymous Coward]

Implausible. Twitter would not be invited to hangout with those three.

Who decides who is a terrorist?

[Anonymous Coward]

Who defines the "Terrorist"?

Is it just suicide bombers and folks assaulting civilians with deadly weapons?

Or is it anyone who opposes the policies and or people running their local and or national governments?

Re:Who decides who is a terrorist?

[gweihir]

These days it is mostly "person we don't like and can get away with calling terrorist". Even violence seems to have become optional.

Re:Who decides who is a terrorist?

[AmiMoJo]

A terrorist is someone who uses terror to effect political or social change. I.e. someone like Amber Rudd, who uses fear of terror attacks to destroy freedom and privacy.

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

[Nidi62]

Yeah, or how about just cutting down on the vast number of Muslims who immigrate every year?

You mean like the latest attacker who ran over those people and stabbed the police officer to death? Oh, wait, he was born in England....

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

[Nidi62]

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.

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.

Re:No, Britain wants surveillance tools

[coastwalker]

The UK does not suddenly have a million extra Muslim immigrants, it took ten years for this increase and they represent 5% of the population in total. There is certainly an issue with assimilation. Though we are too cheap assed as a nation to pay for them to learn English so it is probably not surprising that the men leave their women at home and don't bother to pay for them to learn for example. We have done a crap job of assimilating them so you cannot put all the blame on them. No doubt the current climate of hatred for Islam is doing a great job of helping assimilation.

What is it with people these days and stupid easy answers to everything? If you stop migrants to Britain your workforce collapses because of the post war baby boom ending. If you don't build houses for the population they get priced out of the reach of youngsters trying to join the market. If you do not spend enough on education the influx of migrants fucks up the schools. If you do not have a high minimum wage everybody ends up living on the breadline. All of Britain's problems are the fault of successive government policy not the blasted immigrants or the EU. Kicking them out would cause the economy to collapse but that is exactly what the tabloid newspapers are selling as the solution. Britain tamed the IRA and is perfectly capable of managing militant Islam within its boarders. What is the matter with you losers? Why do all of our problems have to be solved with concentration camps and deportation all of a sudden? - Unless that is the hateful propaganda in Non Dom owned tabloids that has been yelled at you for the last couple of decades has succeeded?

Politics, politics, politics.

[malkavian]

Amber Rudd is not being driven by the intelligence communities, or anyone who actually understands what this is all about. What she sees is a complete outsider's view of "Think of the " without actually thinking whether there's a problem that putting measures in place will fix. All the view of the intelligence communities and professionals is that there is no purely technical solution that can be put in place to fix this, without shooting off both feet. Still, she's adamant that "Things must be done", without a clear plan of what must be done, or, more importantly why it must be done and what impact it will have (real impact, not something that exists in her head, therefore it must be true!).. I used to dislike the old Labour government for knee jerk, uninformed action, creating situations worse than the ones they were trying to solve. And it just continues on this government. The running theme behind the two is career politicians.. If we got rid of those, then we'd be a step closer to real solutions.. Another step would be to make up the policy creation bodies from experts in the field (or at least very experienced people in the field, who are able to liaise with experts when serious policy decisions need to be made).. Idiocracy here we come.

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/

Why always these fake arguments?

[admin7087]

He sent encrypted messages moments before he killed four people last week, so how would unencrypted communication have prevented this? That's right, not at all, of course. Why can't they just state the obvious, that they are authoritarians who want to fully survey everyone in realtime and therefore encryption should be banned? Do voters in the UK reward hypocrisy?

I think what a reasonable person should want

[rsilvergun]

is an end to extremism. But there's an elephant in the room here. Going against extremism means going against the basic concept of deeply held religious beliefs. Not the "feelings" but the actual, raw beliefs. If one is going to be rational and believe in religion then one has to accept that most religions demand some pretty extreme things from their followers, especially the Judeo-Christian variety.

Basically, going after extremism for real is a very, very touchy subject...

Extremism

[PPH]

Like Brexit?