Are the riots over? This week’s predicted waves of protests never materialised, although predictably, the counter-protests to the non-existent protests did, inspiring jubilant headlines. Hundreds of arrests have been made and a fifty-five year old woman has been arrested for posting false information about the Southport attacker.

When a fifty-five year old woman shares something without checking it, she is arrested, and the country is warned to not even distribute footage of what is happening on their doorstop. Not because the imagery is harmful to some victim, and is not in the public interest. Instead, the footage is not allowed to be broadcast because it is in the public interest. 

This is not a standard we have anywhere else. When the French riot, we are permitted to see it all day – because we are not French and so our government is not threatened by unrest in France. The story here is different — there’s been little public interest in anything else. Palestine Action broke into a firm manufacturing weapons for the British military, filmed it, and posted it online. Literal sabotage of the British state’s military capacity and it’s drifted in and out of the news due to the level of public interest in these riots.

Meanwhile Nick Lowles, Director of Hope Not Hate, a charity receiving six-figure sums from the British government and wielding a position of influence far outstripping that of a fifty-five year old woman, can spread unsubstantiated rumours of acid attacks and not even be challenged on whether or not he is spreading misinformation. This is the kind of country that Britain is — where the difference in outcome on simply being wrong about something is the difference between being lauded by the government, or detained by it. In Nick’s own words, while Wednesday’s demonstration, the outpouring of support against them plastered on each headline makes it worthwhile. These are the Noble Lies that British people are expected to absorb. 

In reaction to this, we’ve seen calls to remove social media anonymity, ban Telegram, and even ban X after Elon Musk gave his view that civil war was somehow inevitable (it isn’t). We saw similar wishes being expressed after the death of Sir David Amess, with even less evidence to support them. 

Ultimately, the British government will not be pleased until it has successfully sealed itself off from the rest of the world so it doesn’t have to answer to anyone of significant influence who may have a differing view (and live in a country which is frankly, freer and richer than we are). Instead, Britain has become inward-looking. The British state is always asking itself “what do they think?” What do the Community Leaders think of our policing? What does the pensioner think of the new build on that empty unused field? What do those people think in their private conversations? Will it be a force for Division or Unity?

All of this reaches a head with the advent of technology. Who cares what “community leaders” think — the Internet is a space for building new communities. Who cares what people think of what you build online, you can just build it. Who cares what people say in their private conversations, we can encrypt things so by the time you get to read it — we’ll be so long-since dead that you won’t know where to exhume our remains to give our skeletons a talking to.

Britain needs, now more than ever, to advocate for its digital rights. On the 26th October 2023, we passed the Online Safety Act. The Act required that all applications scan images uploaded for Child Sex Abuse Material (CSAM). To scan for this content, the image must first be sent to an external service, converted to a hash (literally a string of characters) and then compared against known CSAM. Every image we send in the UK is now no longer shared between two parties, but instead is first sent to an external service to be scanned, and is consequently not private. This is not my personal view here in The Critic. It’s the view of Apple, Meta, the Wikimedia Foundation, the head of WhatsApp, and the UK’s own National Cyber Security Centre.

This is not a country serious about stopping crime, it’s a country serious about petty controls over the lives of ordinary people

We have done all this while giving a convicted child rapist a suspended sentence. This is not a country serious about stopping crime, it’s a country serious about petty controls over the lives of ordinary people. The Online Safety Bill also mandates that websites perform age restriction and verification measures, all while the British government refuses to implement a form of digital ID. This leaves companies with no choice but to collect and store this information themselves. If these websites are hacked, and some of them will be, your personal data will be bought and sold on the dark web and will be forever linked to whatever website you happened to be using. These “illegal harm codes” will be coming out Autumn of this year, at which time websites will attempt to implement them. Wikimedia has already outright refused to implement age verification, meaning Britain may well lose access to the largest collection of information on the worldwide web.

This is the way Britain is going. It is isolating itself from the rest of the world by insisting the rest of the world conform to the neuroses of our political class who know as much about technology as they do about governance. The reason Europe and the UK do not have even one area rivalling San Francisco is because we are fundamentally unfree as a nation. Where America has Section 230, freeing its service providers from culpability of the speech of those who use their platforms — the Defamation Act enables those with a defamation claim to take legal action against web hosts who host the alleged defamation. The host can then avoid liability by taking the claim down. Most web-hosts will simply comply to avoid a difficult court battle, all the while making the Internet less free for British people.

If there is a time to stop this, it’s now. A Labour government is more competent and more willing to attack digital rights than a Conservative one is. It is also politically easier to make a freedom argument against a Labour government too. On top of this, there are a lot of nominally freedom-oriented people who just lost their jobs and will be looking for causes to support. Britain needs to repeal the Online Safety Bill. It needs to repeal the Defamation (Operator of Websites) Regulations 2013, and replace them with an equivalent to America’s Section 230. Finally, Britain must pass laws to protect the publication of publicly-available information (such as footage of what is happening on their doorsteps) that is in the public interest.

These are the ways we can protect our digital rights. Ultimately technology is such that even should they keep all of these bans in place, there will be ways to evade them. Encryption is trivially easy to implement for anyone who cares enough to learn to write the software to implement it. But while the government goes on its impotent power trip, we will become poorer, less free, and detached from the rest of the world. And we will be all the worse for it.