Tag: united kingdom

UK Crime Agency Backs “Upload Prevention” Plan to Scan Encrypted Messages

Britain’s Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) has decided that privacy needs a chaperone.

The group has launched a campaign urging tech companies to install client-side scanning in encrypted apps, a proposal that would make every private message pass through a local checkpoint before being sent.

The IWF calls it an “upload prevention” system. Critics might call it the end of private communication disguised as a safety feature.

Under the plan, every file or image shared on a messaging app would be checked for sexual abuse material (CSAM).

The database would be maintained by what the IWF describes as a “trusted body.” If a match is found, the upload is blocked before encryption can hide it. The pitch is that nothing leaves the device unless it’s cleared, but that is like claiming a home search is fine as long as the police do not take anything.

As has been shown in Germany, this technology would not only catch criminals. Hashing errors and false positives happen, which means lawful material could be stopped before it ever leaves a phone.

And once the scanning infrastructure is built, there is nothing stopping it from being redirected toward new categories of “harmful” or “illegal” content. The precedent would be set: your phone would no longer be a private space.

Although the IWF is running this show, it has plenty of political muscle cheering it on.

Safeguarding Minister Jess Phillips praised the IWF campaign, saying: “It is clear that the British public want greater protections for children online and we are working with technology companies so more can be done to keep children safer. The design choices of platforms cannot be an excuse for failing to respond to the most horrific crimes…If companies don’t comply with the Online Safety Act they will face enforcement from the regulator. Through our action we now have an opportunity to make the online world safer for children, and I urge all technology companies to invest in safeguards so that children’s safety comes first.”

That endorsement matters. It signals that the government is ready to use the already-controversial Online Safety Act to pressure companies into surveillance compliance.

Ofcom, armed with new regulatory powers under that Act, can make “voluntary” ideas mandatory with little more than a memo.

The UK’s approach to online regulation is becoming increasingly invasive. The government recently tried to compel Apple to install a back door into its encrypted iCloud backups under the Investigatory Powers Act. Apple refused and instead pulled its most secure backup option from British users, leaving the country with weaker privacy than nearly anywhere else in the developed world.

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Leaked UK memo pinpoints new sites to host illegal immigrants

The British government is facing growing backlash after a leaked Home Office document revealed that up to 14 additional sites across the country have been identified to house thousands of undocumented migrants, British media have reported.

The initiative forms part of Labour’s pledge to end the use of taxpayer-funded asylum hotels by 2029, which currently cost billions of pounds annually. Marked “official sensitive,” the memo, first cited by the Sunday Times, stated that the Home Office has drawn up plans to resettle as many as 10,000 asylum seekers across the UK.

Under the proposed plan, migrants would be accommodated at former military facilities that have been upgraded and could begin receiving arrivals immediately.

So far, two locations have been confirmed by British media: Cameron Barracks in Inverness and the Crowborough Army Training Camp in East Sussex.

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Convicted Paedophile Wanted in Germany Was Housed in UK Migrant Hotel

The British government placed a convicted paedophile wanted by German authorities in a migrant hotel and is paying for his legal defence against extradition, sparking outrage from local MPs.

Izalden Alshaik Suleman, 32, was detained by the National Crime Agency (NCA) at the Britannia Ashley Hotel in Hale last month and now faces deportation to Germany where he is wanted for a child sex offence.

His detention at the hotel, which has been used to house alleged asylum seekers at taxpayer expense since 2023, has sparked questions as to why the government placed the convicted paedophile within the accommodation in the first place, rather than immediately removing him from the country.

Speaking to the Altrincham Today publication, Local MP Connor Rand said: “The individual who has been arrested should never have been allowed into the country. I understand they now face extradition, and I will be writing to the Home Office to request they are deported as soon as possible.”

Rand went on to reveal that the NCA failed to inform local authorities, including himself, the Greater Manchester Police, or the local Trafford Council about their plans to arrest Suleman as the hotel.

“While I am grateful to the NCA for their work to apprehend a clearly dangerous individual, I share the anger of residents that we were kept in the dark about such a serious incident,” he said.

A member of the governing left-wing Labour Party, Rand said that he has urged Prime Minister Starmer’s government to shut down migrant accommodation at the Ashley Hotel as well as the Cresta Court migrant hotel, and said that he has received assurances that they will both be shut, but did not disclose any timeline.

The leader of the Trafford Conservatives Cllr Nathan Evans said that it was “outrageous” for a convicted pedophile to be housed in the hotel, saying: “We have been mocked by the Greens, Lib Dems, Labour and I even got a letter from the churches saying we were wrong to call these facilities inappropriate. These are the places we should not be housing these illegal migrants.”

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UK Man Arrested for Possessing Gunpowder Recipe

Here in the United States, we have a serious DIY culture. People will make their own anything if they think it’s cool enough. Despite being the wealthiest nation on the planet, people build their own furniture, make their own clothes, make pottery, take up blacksmithing, or any number of activities that they could just pay for, but would rather do it themselves.

And we celebrate this.

Yes, that also includes people making their own guns and ammunition. I get that not everyone feels the same way we do about the right to keep and bear arms, but it seems the UK is even more down on it than I thought.

After all, some words on paper are too much for them, apparently.

A 49-year-old man from Leeds has been sentenced to three years and nine months in prison for possessing a handwritten recipe for gunpowder.

…

He will serve an additional four years on extended licence and will be subject to a Serious Crime Prevention Order for five years, along with terrorism notification requirements for ten years.

[Martin Paul] Gilleard admitted possessing information likely to be useful to someone committing or preparing an act of terrorism under Section 58 of the Terrorism Act 2000. The document was discovered at his home during an intelligence-led search by West Yorkshire Police on May 28 and referred to Counter Terrorism Policing North East for investigation.

Now, there doesn’t seem to be any evidence that he did anything with the recipe. He just happened to have it.

As a result of those words on a piece of paper, though, he’s being treated like a terrorist in his home country, even as actual acts of terrorism keep being dismissed as nothing to be concerned about.

That entire country has lost its ever-loving mind, and that’s a shame because that’s where my roots are from, for the most part, and I’d love to visit someday. I just don’t know that I’d be safe there based on everything I see.

Especially since defending myself would be virtually impossible there.

And before anyone tries the “it can’t happen here” thing, remember that some states have tried making it illegal to possess 3D printer files for making your own firearm. That’s still just information that is harmless on its own. How long before some ninny here in the States tries to ban reloading your own ammo, followed by banning information pertaining to reloading?

We’re not as far away from something like this as we might like to believe.

That’s especially true as this was folded under anti-terrorism laws. The specter of terrorism has made our own lawmakers opt for some stupid things in the past, and to forget that freedom is and remains the guiding principle of this great nation, so it’s not hard to see this happening here.

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Climate Activists Who Vandalized Stonehenge Acquitted And Set Free

Within a progressive controlled nation, who gets punished by the law is greatly dependent on their political and ethnic affiliations.  Left leaning groups (and people like migrants who are useful to left leaning groups) enjoy a separate set of legal standards compared to people who oppose leftist ideology.  This has become a clear trend within the UK in recent years.

This two tier legal system helps the encourage future crimes by leftists and their allies while the hammer is brought down on conservatives and patriots to ensure they are fearful of stepping out of line in the slightest.  

This double standard is obvious once again in the recent acquittal of three Just Stop Oil activists who made headlines after they spraying down the historic site of Stonehenge with a mixture of powder and orange dye.  The dye cost around $1000 to clean but luckily did not leave lasting damage.  The stunt was allegedly designed to draw attention to JSO’s climate change agenda.

The activists, Rajan Naidu, Niamh Lynch and Luke Watson have been found not guilty this week of criminal damage and causing a public nuisance.  The suspects cited human rights law in their defense, arguing that they had a “reasonable excuse”, and they they are protected under Articles 10 and 11 of the European Convention on Human Rights to freedom of speech and freedom to protest.

The judge emphasized that democratic protest rights can sometimes render otherwise unlawful actions lawful, even if disruptive.  In other words, suspects who commit a clear crime (such as vandalizing an ancient heritage site) will not be punished as long as they support causes that the current government agrees with.  UK patriots, on the other hand, will still get years in prison for posting memes on social media that are critical of mass immigration.

Just Stop Oil’s insanity was rampant across Europe over the course of the last few year until the group disbanded on the grounds that they had been “victorious” in achieving their primary goal (did they beat climate change?).  However, it is more likely they disbanded because of rising public anger over their disruptive tactics. 

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Foreign Election Interference? UK Leftists Campaign For Mamdani In NYC Race

A member of the United Kingdom’s parliament announced Sunday that he was campaigning on behalf of socialist New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani.

Independent Member of Parliament for Islington North Jeremy Corbyn posted on X that he was “hosting a phone bank” with the Democratic Socialists of America “to Get Out The Vote for” Mamdani.

“Let’s get Zohran over the finish line for a New York that’s affordable for all!” Corbyn posted on X.

The Federalist’s CEO and co-founder Sean Davis pointed out that Corbyn was engaging in “literal foreign election interference on behalf of a Ugandan Muslim who wants to ‘globalize the intifada’ in America’s largest city.”

Notably, Corbyn once decried President Donald Trump for allegedly interfering in Britain’s elections.

In a June 1, 2019, post, Corbyn posted to Twitter: “President Trump’s attempt to decide who’ll be Britain’s next PM is an entirely unacceptable interference in our democracy. The next PM should be chosen not by the US president … but by the British people in a general election.”

A second Corbyn post just a few months later said: “Donald Trump is trying to interfere in UK election to get his friend Boris Johnson elected.”

Perhaps Corbyn’s election interference is unsurprising. Corbyn, much like the Democratic Socialists of America and other far-left activists, sees himself as part of a globalist movement in which national borders are obstacles that must be erased in order to achieve a global socialist agenda. Corbyn’s phone banking makes that clear. And it makes sense: Mamdani himself sees elections, no matter how “local,” as just a battlefield in a global ideological struggle. It’s exactly why Mamdani refuses to condemn calls for globalizing the intifada.

Globalists like Corbyn and Mamdani see no difference between London and New York, or Gaza and Manhattan. These are merely different fronts of the same fight, which is why Corbyn has no problem interfering in our elections.

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UK Supplies Ukraine With More Storm Shadow Missiles for Strikes Inside Russia

The UK has supplied Ukraine with more Storm Shadow missiles, which are air-launched and have a range of 155 miles, for strikes inside Russian territory, Bloomberg reported on Monday.

The report came about two weeks after the Ukrainian military claimed an attack on a Russian chemical plant using Storm Shadows, which signaled the US was again backing Ukrainian missile strikes on Russian territory since the British-made missiles require US targeting data to be fired.

Ukraine first began firing Storm Shadow missiles into Russia last year, which coincided with the Biden administration giving it the green light to use US-provided ATACMS missiles in strikes on Russian territory. At the time, Russia responded by altering its nuclear doctrine to lower the threshold for the use of nuclear weapons, making it clear that the US-backed missile strikes risk a major escalation from Moscow.

It’s unclear how many Storm Shadows or ATACMS Ukraine currently has, and the Bloomberg report didn’t specify how many Storm Shadows the UK has recently supplied. The US has also been backing long-range Ukrainian drone attacks on Russian territory, according to a report from the Financial Times.

The news about the Storm Shadow supply comes as President Trump has once again said that he doesn’t plan on providing Ukraine with Tomahawk missiles, at least for now. Sending Tomahawks would mark a huge escalation of the proxy war since they have a range of over 1,000 miles and are nuclear-capable.

CNN reported on Friday that the Pentagon gave the White House the green light to send Tomahawks to Ukraine if it chooses to, because it determined doing so wouldn’t negatively impact the US military’s stockpiles.

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UK Lords Debate Impact of VPNs on Censorship Laws

It began as a plan to “keep children safe online.” It has become a national realization about how far the government can reach into the digital lives of its citizens.

The UK’s Online Safety Act has turned into a case study in how a law written for protection can give no protection and end up with mass surveillance.

When peers in the House of Lords met this week to examine its effects, they sounded little like guardians of youth safety, and it was easy to tell they don’t have enough self-awareness to realize they’ve helped unleash a monster.

Lord Clement-Jones, the Liberal Democrat technology spokesperson, noted that young people are already avoiding the law’s controls.

VPNs, he said, are now used on a “widespread” scale, which “risks rendering age-assurance measures ineffective.”

The statement revealed a central problem: the people being protected are already finding their way around the digital ID rules. They always will.

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales expressed the issue plainly. Calling the Act “very poorly thought-out legislation,” he told The House magazine: “We will not be age-gating Wikipedia under any circumstances, so, if it comes to that, it’s going to be an interesting showdown, because we’re going to just refuse to do it. Politically, what are they going to do? They could block Wikipedia. Good luck with that.”

Wales’s refusal is part of a natural broader discomfort with the idea of regulating access to information through identification.

Under the new law, platforms must verify users’ ages through ID checks or similar systems. Millions of users will have to prove their identity before they can post or browse. Privacy groups describe this as a national identity program introduced without open debate.

With data breaches still frequent across both government and corporate systems, the setup creates an environment where every login carries potential exposure.

VPN use has increased in response. These tools, once associated with cybersecurity professionals, now serve anyone who prefers to maintain privacy online. They allow people to move through the internet without revealing personal data.

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UK DYSTOPIA: Mass Stabbing in Train Sees at Least 10 People Wounded at Huntingdon – Police Now Says It Was NOT a Terrorist Attack – 2 Suspects in Custody

How long must this go on?

The scourges of unchecked mass migration and Islamic invasion keep fraying the social fabric in the United Kingdon.

A Saturday night train commute turned into hell as a couple of men – said at this point to be ‘British citizens’ but who victims heard shout ‘Allahu Akbar’ – went on a stabbing spree that reportedly left ten people wounded, with two fighting for their lives.

Initially, the incident had been investigated as a terrorist attack, but now UK police has reversed course and is saying it was no such thing.

The Mirror reported:

“A statement from Superintendent John Loveless which was delivered at the scene of Huntingdon station this morning:

‘This is a shocking incident and my thoughts are with those who have been injured and their families. At 7.42pm we were called to reports of a multiple stabbing on board the 6.25pm train service from Doncaster to London King’s Cross.

Officers immediately attended Huntingdon station alongside paramedics, where armed police from Cambridgeshire Police boarded the train and arrested two people within 8 minutes of the first 999 call. The two men remain in police custody’.”

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London Police Suggest Sharing Afghan Migrant MURDER Video Is “MISINFORMATION”

Following the brutal and senseless murder of a man out walking his dog in West London by an Afghan illegal migrant, London police are urging the public not to share footage of the incident. 

As we highlighted, this latest horrific attack was carried out seemingly completely randomly.

While many reacted to the incident with anger, others expressed a feeling of abandonment and total fear to step out their front doors.

Because video of the barbaric attack was captured and shared online, it has only heightened these concerns.

Now London’s Metropolitan Police are suggesting that everyone sharing the video is encouraging the spread of “misinformation.”

In a statement, Chief Superintendent Jill Horsfall said “I am aware of footage circulating online that relates to yesterday’s incident in Uxbridge. I would urge people to stop circulating this on social media.”

The reason they don’t want people to see it?

“In order to avoid speculation and further misinformation, we can confirm that the suspect lived in a private residential address.”

So not in a migrant hotel. Right, but why does that mean people shouldn’t see what this crazed savage who arrived in the country illegally did?

The statement continues, “Our priority is securing justice for the man who sadly died and the others who were injured during this incident. Sharing this footage could impede future court proceedings and cause further distress to those directly impacted by these events, as well as their loved ones.”

“Please be considerate with what you are sharing online, and keep up to date with our news website for any accurate updates on this incident,” the statement concludes.

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