Tag: united kingdom

UK Government Secretly Orders Apple to Build Global iCloud Backdoor, Threatening Digital Privacy Worldwide

Imagine waking up one morning to find out your government has demanded the master key to every digital iPhone lock on Earth — without telling anyone. That’s exactly what British security officials have tried to pull off, secretly ordering Apple to build a backdoor into iCloud that would allow them to decrypt any user’s data, anywhere in the world. Yes, not just suspected criminals, not just UK citizens — everyone. And they don’t even want Apple to talk about it.

This breathtakingly authoritarian stunt, first reported by The Washington Post, is one of the most aggressive attempts to dismantle digital privacy ever attempted by a so-called Western democracy. It’s the kind of thing you’d expect from regimes that plaster their leader’s face on every street corner, not from a country that still pretends to believe in civil liberties.

This isn’t about catching a single terrorist or cracking a single case. No, this order — issued in secret last month by Keir Starmer’s Labour government — demands universal decryption capabilities, effectively turning Apple into a surveillance arm of the UK government. Forget warrants, forget oversight, forget even the pretense of targeted investigations. If this order were obeyed, British authorities would have the power to rifle through anyone’s iCloud account at will, no justification required.

The officials pushing for this monstrosity are hiding behind the UK’s Investigatory Powers Act of 2016, a law so Orwellian it’s lovingly referred to as the “Snoopers’ Charter.” This piece of legislative overreach forces tech companies to comply with government spying requests while making it illegal to even disclose that such demands have been made. It’s the surveillance state’s dream—limitless power, zero accountability.

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WHY the War on Farmers?

The recent Telegraph headline rang out of England recently with unsettling tones: Tenth of farmland to be axed for net zero

More than 10 per cent of farmland in England is set to be diverted towards helping to achieve net zero and protecting wildlife by 2050, the Environment Secretary will reveal on Friday.

Swathes of the countryside are on course to be switched to solar farms, tree planting and improving habitats for birds, insects and fish.

The move comes on the back of an aggressive and highly unpopular inheritance tax placed on generational farmers by British politician Rachel Reeves that has drawn sustained protest in the country. The commercial officer of Britain’s largest supermarket chain Tesco warned Reeves’ tax raid on farmers is placing “UK’s future food security is at stake.”

What if that’s the whole point? Tucker Carlson recently asked Piers Morgan this uncomfortable question.

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UK Home Secretary Signals Tougher Online Censorship Beyond Current Censorship Laws

Judging by the most recent statements made by UK Home Secretary Yvette Cooper, the government feels it will have to implement even more stringent speech-restrictive measures than those contained in the sweeping and controversial censorship law, the Online Safety Act.

Appearing on a BBC political talk show, Cooper kept beating the now well-established drum the ruling Labour has gone for in the wake of last year’s Southport killings, and subsequent mass protests – namely, to try to portray social media companies as somehow “a part of the crime,” which is verbatim how the cabinet minister put it.

One of the recurring themes these last weeks, since the Southport trial saw its conclusion, has been that tech companies are “morally responsible” for not deleting (that request came only last week) one of the violent videos viewed by the killer, Axel Rudakubana.

This request was made even though said companies are under no legal obligation to do that, until the spring of this year and the start of the enforcement of some parts of the Online Safety Act.

The stage set that way, Cooper’s logic – or lack thereof – goes like this: “We are being clear that we are prepared to go further if the Online Safety Act measures are not working as effectively as we need them to do,” she told the host, Laura Kuenssberg.

There is no way to predict how social media firms will act once they are under obligation to remove certain types of content – and yet Cooper is already threatening to make the Online Safety Act even worse.

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Tony Blair urges Starmer to bring in national digital IDs to use against the populist right

Former Prime Minister Sir Tony Blair wants his successor as British premier and Labour Party leader, Sir Keir Starmer, to impose a digital ID regime, in part to “flush out” anti-mass migration populists. 

“What the populists do is they take a real grievance and they exploit it but they very often don’t want to have a solution because solutions are much tougher than talking about problems,” Blair said, adding: “The grievance would be on immigration that the thing is out of control. The grievance would be on crime that we’re not doing enough on it. So you say, ‘OK, here’s what you do’. And then you have a big political fight. The populist is forced to choose. You’ve got to create an agenda that the other side has to respond to.”

Right-wing populists do offer solutions to Britain’s record-breaking mass migration influx – for example, simply capping visas issued at a set level – but in an interview with The Times,[1] Blair implies they have no proposed policy fixes and that digital ID can fill this gap.

“We are putting in place the building blocks for it, so that’s good. But we should embrace it fully and roll it out as soon as we can because it will have an immediate set of benefits,” the Iraq War architect told the newspaper, which revealed he is in regular contact with Prime Minister Starmer and his Cabinet.

“There will be a big debate coming down the line – and this is the political argument people should have – which is: how much privacy are you prepared to trade for efficiency? … My view is that people are actually prepared to trade quite a lot,” he argued, adding: “I think it’s a political debate the Government will win. It will also flush out a lot of people who want to talk about issues like immigration or benefit fraud but don’t actually will the means to get to the end.”

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UK Gov’t Wants Sweeping Powers to Spy on Your Bank Account

The UK’s Labour government announced plans this week that would further erode civil rights in the country, this time in the name of “preventing benefit fraud”.

The plans include revoking the driver’s licenses of those convicted of benefit fraud, “early morning raids” by “crack teams” from the DWP, and – most shockingly – permitting the government access to private banking information so they can take back money they believe they are owed, without the knowledge or permission of the accused.

In their own classically impartial fashion, the BBC reported this as:

Benefit cheats could be stripped of driving licenses

But this isn’t about “benefit cheats”. Even the government’s own figures say that benefit fraud makes up only ~3% of the welfare budget, and this move will only save £1.5 billion over the next five years.

£300 million per year is nothing in government terms. They just pledged 10x that amount, per year, to Ukraine.

They don’t care about the money, they care about power and precedent.

  • They want to be able to take away your driver’s license.
  • They want to be able to monitor your bank account.
  • They want to be able to take your money without your knowledge.
  • They want to be able to search your electronic devices and track your spending.

Maybe it will start with “reclaiming benefits”, but do you think it will end there?

Remember they also want to introduce Universal Basic Income, which would mean – technically – everyone is on “benefits”.

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Israel’s ‘Genocide General’ Welcomed in London – and the Media Yawns

There have been two stories deeply revealing – in starkly contrasting ways – of the West’s relationship to Israel’s industrialised, militarised slaughter of the people of Gaza over the past 15 months.

Last week, Declassified UK carried out one of the fundamental duties of journalism. Its reporter Alex Morris sought to hold accountable a war crimes suspect evading justice. And not just any suspect.

Morris doorstepped Major General Oded Basyuk as he led an Israeli military delegation through the streets of London in meetings with the Ministry of Defense and the Royal United Services Institute, a UK “security think-tank” with close ties to the British government.

Basyuk, sometimes spelt Basiuk, heads the Israeli military’s operations directorate, whose responsibilities have included the development of the military strategy that guided Israel’s brutal 15-month assault on Gaza.

The International Court of Justice ruled a year ago that a “plausible” case had been made that Israel was committing a genocide in Gaza. Israel has effectively been on trial ever since.

Meanwhile, the ICJ’s sister court, the International Criminal Court (ICC), has issued arrest warrants for Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defense minister, Yoav Gallant, for crimes against humanity – most notably for their policy of blocking aid and starving the entire population of 2.3 million Palestinians there.

Basyuk was one of the central figures helping to devise and direct these genocidal acts.

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Former senior policy advisor to Barack Obama’s White House who flew from New York to Britain to ‘rape a nine-year-old girl’ is jailed for 11 years

A former advisor to the US government who flew to the UK to rape a girl whom he believed to be a nine-year-old child has been jailed for 11-and-a-half years. 

International investment banker Rahamim Shy, 47, travelled to Bedfordshire from New York in February 2024 to have sex with the girl following more than a month of planning.

This followed correspondence with an individual describing herself as ‘Debbie’, the girl’s grandmother.

However, unbeknown to Shy, the girl did not exist and ‘Debbie’ was in fact an undercover officer with Bedfordshire Police.

Using an online forum and later messaging apps, Shy described in acute detail the disturbing acts he wanted to do to the girl and that he was fully prepared to travel to England to do so.

He described the girl’s age of nine as a ‘tad late’ to start sexual activity, and that it was an ‘honour’ to be considered ‘her first’.

Shy ultimately did travel to England on February 23 2024 via Gatwick Airport before driving to Bedford where he met the undercover officer and was promptly arrested.

Before his trial, the defence argued that Shy was in the USA at the time of the messaging, therefore was jurisdictionally exempt from prosecution. 

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UK Circling the Drain – Crisis what Crisis?

It is now almost five years since the start of the COVID event. The public was told there was a deadly disease that would affect the entire population, and everyone was at risk.

However, in order to truly understand COVID, that event must be situated within a framework that examines the underlying economic determinants. In fact, many on the “left” are notable for having failed to undertake such an analysis and merely capitulated to the mainstream narrative.

The COVID event had little if anything to do with public health. It was a policy mechanism deployed to manage an impending financial crisis.

COVID policies served as a pretext for halting economic activity in a controlled manner to address systemic contradictions within neoliberal capitalism. Unprecedented fiscal and monetary interventions were strategic tools to stabilise the economy and prevent a deeper collapse of financial markets. 

The lockdowns, framed as public health necessities, effectively suspended economic activity in ways that allowed capital to regroup and restructure. This included consolidating corporate power (e.g. through increased reliance on digital platforms), and creating conditions for new rounds of capital investment post-crisis, facilitated by a convenient debt crisis and World Bank loans with pro-neoliberal strings-attached conditionalities. 

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Leading UK Universities Look to Expand Use of Open-Book Exams to Help Grades of Minority Students

Leading British universities are preparing to lower test standards in a bid to help improve the grades of ethnic minorities and poorer students in a major DEI initiative.

The universities of Oxford and Cambridge are among those preparing to implement “inclusive assessments” such as open-book exams and take-home essays rather than monitored in-person testing in the hopes of cutting the gaps between groups of students, The Telegraph reported.

In its annual Access and Participation Plan (APP) — a yearly report into how a university is seeking to improve the lot of disadvantaged student groups — the University of Cambridge said that traditional “assessment practices” may be responsible for varying performances among groups.

Cambridge said that it would specifically seek to “improve outcomes” for Black and Bangladeshi heritage students. The university went on to cite research from its own academics, finding traditional tests represent “threats to self-worth” for students.

Meanwhile, Oxford University’s APP reportedly said that it would seek to “use a more diverse and inclusive range of assessments” in order to “improve the likelihood” of better grades for students from “lower socio-economic backgrounds”.

The Office for Students (OFS), which regulates higher education in England, has reportedly backed the plans, and other Russell Group elite schools are considering following the example of Oxford and Cambridge.

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Missing the Forest for the Trees: UK to Add More Restrictions on Buying Knives Online After Southport Stabbings

The British government is reportedly planning on banning doorstep drop-off deliveries of knives bought online following the mass stabbing at a children’s dance party in Southport by second-generation migrant Axel Rudakubana.

While critics have pointed to multiple failings of authorities to heed warnings about Rudakubana’s radicalisation, the left-wing Labour Party government appears intent on pinning the tragic stabbing spree — which left three young girls dead and several others injured — at the hands of supposed loopholes in purchasing knives online.

According to The Telegraph, online retailers such as Amazon will be prevented from delivering a knife to anyone other than the person who purchased it to provide a further ID check to prove the buyer is above 18. This will come in addition to a two-step verification, in which buyers must provide identification and a ‘selfie’ picture to verify the ID is theirs.

Rudakubana, who was sentenced to 52 years in prison this week over the Southport stabbings, had reportedly skirted the pre-existing checks by using software to disguise his internet address and identity.

The delivery of the two knives he bought while under 18 was reportedly accepted by an adult at his residence, believed to be one of his Rwandan parents.

Home Secretary Yvette Cooper said that it is a “total disgrace how easy it still is for children to get dangerous weapons online,” adding: “We cannot go on like this. We need much stronger checks – before you buy, before it’s delivered.

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