Dan Milmo – Darrin // Nightingale

Coercive control by another name

Imagine every time you leave your house handing your name, address, and telephone number to every Tom, Dick, or Harriet you meet. What about giving your passport or driving licence numbers to a high-street shop before you’re allowed in? Sounds ridiculous? Well that’s what the government’s Online Safety Bill is proposing.

UK based digital campaigning organisation the Open Rights Group are warning of far-reaching consequences if plans to mandate “age verification for much of the web” are enacted.

UK ONLINE SAFETY BILL WILL MANDATE DANGEROUS AGE VERIFICATION FOR MUCH OF THE WEB — Open Rights Group

This will result in an enormous shift in the availability of information online, and pose a serious threat to the privacy of UK internet users.
Open Rights Group

The bill will force sites to verify your age by using either government issued identification documents or biometric information, face scans, to accurately estimate your age. The problem with this technology is it doesn’t exist, certainly not while also protecting your privacy.

There is no privacy-protective age estimation or verification process currently in existence that functions accurately.
Open Rights Group

Not only will your ability to access content both privately and anonymously disappear completely, it could result in “large swathes of content” being removed for all UK users. Sites will have to choose between expensive, privacy-intrusive, age checks or sanitising their sites based on your IP address.

I’m aware GCHQ already monitors internet traffic with their Tempora programme.

In June 2013 the US whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed that the US and the UK security services are routinely collecting, processing and storing vast quantities of global digital communications.
Amnesty International

Their actions are so intrusive, in 2020 Amnesty International announced plans to take the UK government to court over what they called “industrial scale spying”.

The system seems to operate by allowing GCHQ to survey internet traffic flowing through different cables at regular intervals, and then automatically detecting which are most interesting, and harvesting the information from those.
The Guardian

As reprehensible as Tempora is, the Online Safety Bill is more insidious. While GCHQ’s internet surveillance is scraping metadata searching for evidence of wrongdoing, the Online Safety Bill presumes guilt, that we’re trying to access something we shouldn’t, so preemptively restricts access. In the eyes of the government we’re all children in need of correction and training.

Opposing these plans will invariably be met with hostility. Without a hint of hypocrisy, proponents of the bill will jettison the previously sacrosanct principle that parents should be responsible for safeguarding their children, preferring instead the paternalistic high-handedness so often favoured by those who think they’re our betters, labelling critics as irresponsible, or some kind of predator, if you don’t accept the need for the government’s intrusions.

While I agree protecting children is important, I wonder about the real motivations for such draconian measures? Why does such an outwardly libertarian free-market government want to control the trade in information?

Perhaps restricting access is a Trojan Horse, and the real reasons can be found elsewhere. Back in July The Guardian reported Apple are threatening to withdraw FaceTime and iMessage from the UK because the Online Safety Bill wants to give “the Home Office the power to seek access to encrypted content”.

The company said the proposals would “result in an impossible choice between complying with a Home Office mandate to secretly install vulnerabilities into new security technologies (which Apple would never do), or to forgo development of those technologies altogether.
The Guardian

The government wants a back door into secure end-to-end encryption, so like some tabloid journalist hacking your phone, they can access your private, personal, intimate, communications. With a swing of a legislative axe, under the guise of protecting children, the privacy of all UK internet users will be excised. Worse than that, everyone in the UK will know, if they didn’t already, nothing they think or do is private.

Some might be happy to make that trade, I am not. It’s just another tributary swelling the river of authoritarianism. A river already bloated by this government’s Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act, described by Sacha Deshmukh, CEO of Amnesty International in the UK, as a “dark day for civil liberties”.

This deeply-authoritarian Bill places profound and significant restrictions on the basic right to peacefully protest.
Amnesty International

The genesis of the act is a report, published by the opaque right-wing think-tank the Policy Exchange, warning of Extinction Rebellion’s “subversive agenda” and urging government to legislate against their actions.

As this paper shows… the leaders of Extinction Rebellion seek a more subversive agenda, one that is rooted in the political extremism of anarchism, eco-socialism and radical anti-capitalist environmentalism.
Policy Exchange

The Policy Exchange was set up in 2002 by Nicholas Boles, Michael Gove, and Francis Maude. In 2007 it was described as “the largest, but also the most influential think tank on the right” by The Daily Telegraph. In a not unsurprising twist, openDemocracy revealed in 2022 the Policy Exchange received money from the ExxonMobil Corporation. In 2017 the fossil fuel giant gave $30,000 to the American Friends of Policy Exchange.

Policy Exchange has also received donations from several leading UK oil and energy companies.
openDemocracy

The report, Extremism Rebellion, is a seventy-six page attack on Extinction Rebellion, claiming to expose the history and strategies of an “extremist organisation” that threatens “democracy and the state” by seducing “celebrities, politicians and members of the public” into thinking their “methods and tactics are honourable and justified”.

No one can now plead ignorance of the ominous and threatening intentions of this campaigning organisation.
Policy Exchange

No one is, and by presuming people don’t understand the radical intentions of Extinction Rebellion, the Policy Exchange want readers to believe they’re uncovering something hidden. They’re not. Extinction Rebellion grew out of the anti-globalisation Occupy Movement, which took its inspiration from the Arab Spring, and unlike the Policy Exchange has an absolute commitment to openness and participatory democracy. All of the documents, reports, and videos quoted by the Policy Exchange, as evidence of Extinction Rebellion’s hidden agenda, are public and freely available on the internet. How long they remain accessible is anyone’s guess? Who knows what will happen when the Online Safety Bill becomes an Act?

Personally I don’t think anyone interested in Extinction Rebellion misunderstand their intentions. They understand perfectly well what’s at stake and what needs to be done. They agree with Extinction Rebellion’s “Declaration of Rebellion” and all that entails.

We, in alignment with our consciences and our reasoning, declare ourselves in rebellion against our government and the corrupted, inept institutions that threaten our future… the wilful complicity displayed by our Government has shattered meaningful democracy and cast aside the common interest in favour of short-term gain and private profits.
Policy Exchange

People understand all too well, they live with it every day, the free market “will inevitably destroy life on earth and must therefore be brought to an end”. The Policy Exchange knows this, that’s why they wrote the report. The government understands it, that’s why they created the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act. One is the most influential think-tank on the right and gets money from the fossil fuel industry, the other services the needs of the existing economic order. Both are intent on silencing groups protesting the calamities caused by the current economic death-cult.

The thinking that underpins the Policy Exchange report recently made an ignominious appearance in government. A story in Byline Times reported on the significant impact financial scandals surrounding Coronavirus contracts is having on the UK’s international reputation. We’ve dropped ten places on the Corruption Perceptions Index compiled by Transparency International.

The UK has gone from being perceived as the eighth least corrupt nation out of 180 countries to the 18th least corrupt between 2017 and 2022.
Byline Times

When the Cabinet Office permanent secretary Alex Chisholm gave evidence to the Commons’ Public Accounts Committee, he blamed “noisy reporting” for the decline in the UK’s international standing.

This led to a strong response from Labour’s Dame Meg Hillier, the committee’s chair, who accused the Government of “flying blind” on the levels of fraud and corruption perpetrated against it “despite widespread awareness of the toxic threat posed by these despicable crimes”.
Byline Times

Personally I think Chisholm’s response exposes the patronising contempt government has for anyone who isn’t them. It screams privilege and entitlement, belligerently embracing the gangster maxim, if no one sees it, it didn’t happen.

None of this is new, but helped by a complicit media, I think it’s been getting steadily worse since the 2016 referendum. The government achieved their current majority because a coordinated media campaign eviscerated Jeremy Corbyn’s chances in the 2019 general election. Why’s that important? Because that win allowed the government to pass the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act. Journalists should be holding the government to account, investigating the implementation and impact of the Online Safety Bill, but they’re not.

Journalist think of themselves as fearless crusaders, speaking truth to power.

It was the job then and it is the job now for the BBC, for journalism in general, to challenge those in power.
The Free Press

I’d argue most, certainly the heavy hitters of British journalism, are so embedded in the very narrow orthodoxies of the British Establishment, their analysis is at best biased, at worst propagandist.

The thing is, far too many journalist are educated and shaped by the institutions of the ruling class. With their private school educations, and Oxbridge degrees, and nepotistic connections, they’re as much a part of the establishment as the Church of England, and believe the orthodoxies of this elitism to be the natural order. As Noam Chomsky told Andrew Marr in 1996 “if you believe something different, you wouldn’t be sitting where you’re sitting”. [[The Big Idea – Noam Chomsky on Propaganda]]

Again not new, George Orwell described this topography in the proposed preface to Animal Farm. First published in the Times Literary Supplement in 1972, under the title “Freedom of the Press” it was rejected by the publisher in the 1940s because at a time, when the “prevailing orthodoxy is an uncritical admiration of Soviet Russia”, he was critical of Russia.

At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question.
George Orwell

By rejecting the orthodoxies of current economic age and demand something more sustainable Extinction Rebellion made themselves a target. It’s why the government created the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act. They want to silence the chorus of rebellion. It’s why we’ll end up with the restrictions and intrusions of the Online Safety Bill. The government want to limit the information we can access, profoundly restricting what we can see and hear. It’s hard for me not to see all of this an attempt to coerce and isolate people in United Kingdom.

This desire to isolate the United Kingdom may be one of the many reasons we were manipulated into leaving the European Union. In 2019 Thomas Friedman wrote an opinion piece for the New York Times, The United Kingdom Has Gone Mad. It struck me at the time as refreshingly antagonistic to the orthodoxy being pushed by the British media.

What we’re seeing is a country that’s determined to commit economic suicide but can’t even agree on how to kill itself.
The New York Times

One of the things that stands out now is a quote from John Hagel, the co-head of Deloitte’s Center for the Edge.

The companies that will create the most economic value in the future, will be the ones that find ways to participate more effectively in a broader range of more diverse knowledge flows that can refresh knowledge stocks at an accelerating rate.
The New York Times

We’re being ruled by a government that “wants to disconnect from a connected world”. They’re doing this by restricting what we can see, say, and do. In another context this might be called coercive control.

This controlling behaviour is designed to make a person dependent by isolating them from support, exploiting them, depriving them of independence and regulating their everyday behaviour.
Women’s Aid Federation of England

To paraphrase the Woman’s Aid description of coercive control, this pattern of abuse works to limit human rights by reducing a victims ability for action. Think Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act and restrictions on the right to protest. This is done by depriving independence and regulating everyday behaviour. Think about what’s happening with the Online Safety Bill’s demands for access to secure end-to-end encryption. Both bits of legislation seeking to regulate everyday behaviour.

How we escape such widespread abuse is beyond me? Perhaps realising what’s happening is the first step?

Sources:

Coercive control by another name

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