The Road to Hell Is Paved with Good Intentions: The Dangers Surrounding the UK Online Safety Law

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The Road to Hell Is Paved with Good Intentions: The Dangers Surrounding the UK Online Safety Law

Ray Green • May 11, 2022

The Wild West of the internet is the target of new laws to tame the nasty stuff.

The UK is attempting something very brave; it is attempting to frame a law that controls what content is not allowed because it presents a risk of physical or psychological harm to adults or children. This has to be policed by the providers of user-to-user services, search engines or any function where an individual might encounter content. Fines of up to 10% of worldwide revenues can be imposed should a company fail to control the content going across its system.

Cleaning the open sewer of the internet is a good idea and no one would argue that objective. The difficulty comes in the detail. While the extremes of harm are easy to agree on, such as encouraging suicide or distributing child pornography, it becomes harder to impose a standard rule as you slide towards grey areas. The draft law refers to “significant adverse psychological impact” but what would this mean in real terms? The provider of the service would need to assesses that.

There are various examples of grey areas where content may be construed as harmful, to at least some potential audiences: Catfishing, Bullying, extreme political views, unorthodox political views, pro-choice and pro-life abortion lobbying, or even comedy? Deliberations about what is harmful soon become subjective.

The proposed law would control what can be said and so amounts to censorship. This is a road that should be trod carefully. The official arbitrator will be the government regulator Ofcom. This offers the prospect of governments attempting to remove contentious issues from debate. I know that other countries are watching to see how this works in practice.

The real arbitrator of public decency will be the algorithms that service providers use to monitor and block content. The fear of large fines means service providers will inevitably tune those algorithms to protect themselves, which means they will err on the side of caution by blocking more content than is strictly necessary. Large amounts of content will be censored “just in case” and this will be harmful to free speech and democracy.

While the UK Government’s intentions are good, there are possible consequences that are dangerous. The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

Draft Online Safety Bill - GOV.UK (www.gov.uk)

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Intrusion into the privacy of private citizens? Government not keen to lose access to data.

by Ray Green • 08 Nov, 2023

King Charles III opened and addressed UK Parliament on 7 November 2023, with the announcement that the UK intends to pass laws that require tech companies to tell them if they plan to introduce new security technologies and how to disable them. His Majesties Government is keen not to lose its access to communications and associated data. This may seem an outrageous intrusion into the privacy of private citizens. However, it may be interesting to look back to the history of state interference in communications. It was the current King’s name’s sake, Charles I in 1634 who set up the Post Office in the UK, partly to deliver letters but also to “discover wicked designs against the state”. In other words – intercept mail. The power to do this was deemed a Royal Prerogative. Fast forward to the 20th Century and many of your will be familiar with the story of Alan Turin cracking the German Enigma code by building the first programmable computer. The machine was actually built by a Post Office engineer – Tommy Flowers. In those days the Post Office also provided the telephone network before that was spun off into British Telecom. Although Alan Turin has passed into history as a hero, it was his colleague in Hut 6, Gordon Welchman, whose analysis of German Luftwaffe radio message transmissions provided an early breakthrough. Although the content was encrypted, the volume, velocity and location of the transmissions enabled Welchman to predict when the Luftwaffe was about to launch an air raid. His methodology of traffic analysis is a now widely used with cell-phone Call Data Records to penetrate Organised Crime Groups. So, is it outrageous that the UK’s intends to pass laws enabling them to access communications and its associated data? No, it is just business as usual.