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Analyzed from 5333 words in the discussion.
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#apple#police#https#government#don#speech#need#right#access#data
Discussion Sentiment
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Discussion (129 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/steveforbes/2025/09/09/people-a...
Stories like this quickly put to rest the idea that everyone who gets arrested must actually deserve it. The bar for posting content that violates the law is very low.
There was also the tragic story of the Cambridge professor who was completely unqualified and had a fake life story. When journalists would get close to the story he would report them to the police for harassment to spike the stories.
That's textbook intimidation, which in certain cases is a crime in the UK, and even some US states. You can also do it offline, for example, by sending a letter to the victim containing a photograph of the front of their house, and a photograph of you firing guns. The implication is pretty straightforward and doesn't even need to be stated: "I have guns and I know where you live. Pay me that money you owe me or I might use them." That implication is still there, for the victim, even if you add surface text like "Hey everyone look at these cool things!"
Only _after_ he was arrested, and the police went looking around his house for guns... did he admit that the pictures were taken overseas, he doesn't actually own the guns. And yet that's what the article leads with, like it was a known fact from the get-go and those silly-billy police knew that but went looking for them in the UK anyway.
This article is a great lesson in how to mislead without saying anything untrue.
His own words in a different article make the reason for the arrest clear:
https://nypost.com/2025/12/04/us-news/british-man-says-he-wa...
> “The arrest was based on two separate social media posts,” he said. “One was the photo of myself with the shotgun, [...] And the second one was my LinkedIn banner at the top of the page.”
> “I used the photo my business partner took on his premises as a header photo on LinkedIn with the intention he would look at that and go, ‘Why’s this guy posting that? I’d better call him and find out rather than dodging me’ as it had done for months,” he said.
EDIT: and your second example is also dangerously misleading. Jason Arday (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jason_Arday) and/or his university reported 2 professors and 1 journalist to the police, pretending their requests for comment on his plagiarism were harrassment. For all three reports, police chose to take no action (nonetheless it still had a chilling effect on speech). What spiked the story is that Jason Arday and/or his university got very expensive reputation lawyers Carter-Fuck to send a C&D to the journalist's newspaper, promising expensive litigation if they published the story. That is what spiked the story, not intimidation via false harassment claims. Expensive lawyers making baseless threats work equally well in the US and UK to chill legal speech, it's not a policy issue.
From your own link, this was from 2 separate posts. I don't know man, this sounds like an excuse from the company to cause trouble and avoid having to pay the owed money.
> A week later, on August 23, the officers returned and arrested him on suspicion of possessing a firearm with intent to cause fear of violence and another allegation of stalking related to a photograph of a house that appeared on his social media.
You’re trying hard to link the two as “textbook intimidation” but the firearm post that triggered this was just a vacation photo and post about his vacation.
> For all three reports, police chose to take no action (nonetheless it still had a chilling effect on speech).
Incorrect to say the police “took no action”. They contacted the journalist and instructed him to desist. The police later admitted it was a mistake to pursue the case. It says all of this in the link you used:
> Arday made a complaint about Grove to the Metropolitan Police, alleging harassment that was affecting his mental health; the police asked Grove to desist from further contact with Arday.[80] Mark Rowley, Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, later said that the complaint about Grove should not have been taken forward.[81]
It’s confusing that you’re trying to claim the police “took no action” when they admitted fault for following through with the complaint and they told the reporter to desist.
> Expensive lawyers making baseless threats work equally well in the US and UK to chill legal speech, it's not a policy issue.
If the expensive lawyers are equal in the UK and US, then that’s not the important point of this story. It’s the part about him engaging the police and the police following through with it.
I also strongly disagree that it’s equivalent in the US. That expensive legal firm would be utilizing the maximum extent of the laws available to them in the UK, which includes the very harassment laws we’re talking about!
You can’t say it’s “not a policy issue” by pointing to literal lawyers who are using the law.
- We just changed our PM, despite his party having a historic majority.
- Parliament routinely rebels against the government, and backbenchers have a lot of say about the business of government.
- We have a number of upstart parties; they might be populist, but at least it's not a two-party-forever system.
- We had a coalition government just a few years ago.
- We changed our constitution a few months ago (abolishing hereditary peers) and it was just another news among many.
- We ejected one of the previous PMs for having a party during a lockdown, with a massive scandal before that when the PM accepted a gift of some wallpaper.
Compare and contrast to the ossified and corrupt American system, where the president is openly enriching himself and his family and friends, and there's nothing threatening the presidency. The last amendment was passed half a century ago, and there's zero hope for reform.
Democracy is a living, breathing system of government, not a number of checkboxes like "can I shoot a gun for fun" or "can I call someone N-word online". It's important to see the forest for the trees.
"In democracy, one side always wins and makes its opponents illegal."
“The claim to legality renders every rebellion and counter-measure an injustice and a legal violation or ‘illegality.’ If legality and illegality can be arbitrarily at the disposal of the majority, then the majority can, above all, declare their domestic competitors illegal, that is, hors-la-loi… Whoever controls 51 percent would be able legally to render the remaining 49 percent illegal… and to treat partisan opponents like common criminals, who are then perhaps reduced to kicking their boots against the locked door.”
Carl Schmitt, Legality and Legitimacy
https://x.com/Tool_Being/status/2102495046260150596
I think this is the link where the chap asks for legal advice: https://www.reddit.com/r/LegalAdviceUK/comments/1vxkcic/poli...
This is completely false and comes from a commonly misrepresented statistic; '30 arrests a day' is plainly the arrests made under section 127 of the Communications Act 2003 and section 1 of the Malicious Communications Act 1988 which includes things like online stalking and harassment. I hope you're just mistaken and not willfully implying that those issues are merely offensive to the prevailing political orthodoxy.
You can argue it's highly improbable that all arrests are over 'hurty words online', definitely – but anyone claiming zero arrests seems improbable too.
I do also feel it's quite convenient that the lack of breakdown allows people to clap back with accusations of encouraging stalking and harassment.
Pretty sure she called for the murder, by arson, of asylum seekers although the article missed that bit out.
> The wife of a conservative politician was sentenced to 31 months in prison for what police said was an unacceptable post.
What did she say? The article does not elucidate.
Inciting violence for example is not legal. I believe spaces around abortion clinics are also to be free from demonstrations. US free speech absolutists seem to vehemently disagree until you say something unkind about Charlie Kirk or ICE.
The low point might be quoting Elon Musk. This is true in any context, but in particular here. The scandal is real, but none of it is about people being arrested for non-politically-correct speech.
There’s plenty of otherwise real stuff to poke the UK about.
> Mass deportation now, set fire to all the fucking hotels full of the bastards for all I care, while you’re at it take the treacherous government and politicians with them. I feel physically sick knowing what these families will now have to endure. If that makes me racist so be it
[0] https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Connolly...
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cx2910vrrygo
1. Holding up a sign offering help to any women being coerced into an abortion is illegal. 2. Standing silently on the road near one can be illegal. 3. parking a car with a bumper sticker near one can be illegal.
The whole paragraph about Musk and rape gangs is nonsense, of course. The biggest rape gang ever convicted in the UK was entirely white. Musk and his ilk only care about rape when the rapists are not white. On average immigrants are slightly less likely to commit sexual assaults (obviously averaging across many different groups).
> What did she say? The article does not elucidate.
She called for hotels housing asylum seekers to be burned. I think she is a nasty racist but I also think the sentence was excessive and I am not convinced it was a serious incitement to violence (and that was not what she was convicted of).
> US free speech absolutists seem to vehemently disagree until you say something unkind about Charlie Kirk or ICE.
Not American, and I entirely support the right of anyone to make unkind comments about anyone else. You are right that many people apply different standards to their own side, but right wing Americans are are from alone in that.
The emphasis on 'rape gangs', 'immigrants' and 'asylum seekers' isn't just objectively untrue, it's cynically manipulative. It's fundamentally a toxic and calculated form of marketing and branding.
And also a cynical distraction from - for example - the Epstein story and Musk's appearances in it.
There was a lot of this around Brexit. Many supporters voted to 'stop them coming over here'.
The government then ramped up immigration - a lot. For some reason the press failed to report this.
They only care when the rapists are coming from outside the UK, and being protected by the authorities.
>>On average immigrants are slightly less likely to commit sexual assaults (obviously averaging across many different groups).
I think that is called picking your sample carefully. No-one is worried about EG the Chinese or the French.
Recently I saw a clip on GB News where one of their analyst said that anyone that opposes a war and/or conscription with Russia will need to put in prison. The show host, Jacob Rees Mogg and Lord Redwood saw nothing wrong with the statements.
None of these people have been in the armed forces and are too old to be called up for conscription.
https://lordslibrary.parliament.uk/select-communications-off...
Citation please.
(EDIT: Citation of an arrest just for saying that, not an arrest for incitement.)
But I dislike even more that we decide that the solution to it is to pass laws prohibiting speech, and even more that the ones in charge of passing those laws are very incentivised to prohibiting criticism to themselves or their policies or their ideologies.
They're dragging grannies off to prison just for holding up signs, and literally accusing them of supporting terrorism.
It’s why the US has such a problem with gun control and laws.
I could argue everyone should have guns, and it’s just bad people, right?
Maybe Apple should withdraw all encryption support from all UK government accounts? The Prime Minister can use a Huawei or some chunky thing from a military contractor.
I am judging by a simple fact, that "please confirm your age" screen is now mandatory during the iPhone setup in all countries, and in some it's behind a KYC. I have a strong opinion that this is insane. And once they let the foot in the door - there is no closing it.
They obvioualy never ever resisted anything except its a good PR stunt.
Not quite.
The request to confirm age is there, but actually completing it isn't mandatory (though granted, it does leave an 'alert' thingy on your phone settings saying you haven't finished setting it up).
I would hope to see Apple pull out of the UK market over this, and certainly to stop selling Apple devices to the UK government and to remove the UK government entities from Apple services.
Also if you do revert account to UK you will get a warning that you either need to disable ADP or lose access to iCloud features.
It's almost as wild as when during the pandemic "lockdown", planes had to take off, burn tonnes of fuel and land empty some minutes later at the same airport, because there's some fucking law about landing spots and how they'd be lost if that bullshit wasn't done.
Before the COVID restrictions, airlines were required to use their allotted spots at least 80% of the time.[6] During the pandemic, the European Commission temporarily suspended Europe's airport slot rule for a short period.[citation needed] Due to travel restrictions, many flights were cancelled or had limited capacity, which made it difficult for airlines to fulfill all the requirements for possessing an airport slot. The suspension of the slot rule was reinstated in October 2021. After the slot rule was reinstated, the rule only required European airlines to use 75% of their flight slots for the winter season.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_flight_%28commercial_avi...
From what I remember it uses a combination of things like your current GPS location, your SIM cards reported country and more to determine what country you're really in to restrict certain features.
So it's not as simple as swapping your location in settings, or even traveling to somewhere in the EU, theres a certain sticky-ness to what your device thinks is your current country.
Edit: bit more info on eligibilityd here https://theapplewiki.com/wiki/Eligibility#eligibilityd
Some delusional "save the children" anti-privacy extremist doesn't have the political capital or the technical insight to convince the government to create a law to issue secret gag orders.
People with good civil intention don't just propose the idea, or get the momentum, to institutionalize such mechanisms.
So who are the major influencers, and their thoughts, for pushing this?
I think you can just start with:
1. Campaigning on behalf of a worthy victim, or against a terrible enemy, is a good way to become more socially powerful. Most people are less willing to disagree with you when you do this because it risks introducing motive uncertainty - are you criticising the means because you truly object to the means, or are you criticising the means because you don't support the worthy victim or oppose the terrible enemy? This is a socially disadvantageous position to argue from.
2. Exploited children are worthy victims, and drug traffickers and terrorists are terrible enemies.
3. Therefore, policies that nominally protect children or oppose drug traffickers and terrorists are socially advantageous, and arguing for them is likely to increase your social power.
The means here are disproportionately likely to be done in a concealed way if the underlying policy is not broadly popular, independently of the effects it has on localised politcal arguments. Many people, myself included, don't support every political cause that helps a worthy victim or opposes a terrible enemy.
Social pressure is harder to apply at a distance, so the reality-warping effects of motive uncertainty are less powerful, so it makes sense that it's kept to private pressure groups and lobbying.
Only disadvantage that you will need to pay fot services via US gift cards as you need US bank cards otherwise.
But keep in mind you have to disable all subscriptions first and also your family group if you have one must also switch their accounts to US.
So yeah pretending you're US customer is no brainer with Apple and unlike Google they dont have automatic detection that will move your account to other region.
Beware you can only change account region once a year or something.
I thought they at least used something complex to attempt to prevent non-EU users using third-party app stores. I also recall a legitimate EU user is not allowed to travel abroad too long before losing access to those stores.
Jeff Gray is a man who regularly gets arrested and/or trespassed from public places for holding up a sign saying "God bless the homeless vets". Seems to happen nearly every time he does it at various locations.
Oh, and flock cameras and ICE aren't exactly a sign that America is this beacon of freedom that it likes to portray.
You also don't have the right to a lawyer to be in a room with you and you are compelled to answer all their questions and they do not need to tell you why they stopped you.
Then if you are lucky they return your devices 7 days later after they have been through everything.
This guy went through it last year and talks bout what happens when they stop you: https://youtu.be/991kRp8KUmo?si=-5S1uLE7K9KG_gNj
Has the UK started attacking any open source E2EE projects yet?
Apple's control over iOS is the main reason I prefer GrapheneOS so much over it. You get amazing privacy and security without sacrificing control. GrapheneOS has said they won't introduce age verification and a backdoor they obviously won't implement.
That angry’s up the blood of libertarians, but ultimately from the point of view of the State it has to be able to do its job of detecting and prosecuting serious crime, and it will redraw privacy lines whenever that is substantially impeded by new technology.
It relays my main concern which is that while current governments may use this in moderation and under judicial oversight, future ones may not. And we should build tools for the future not just for now.
There’s a general regression towards fascist and right wing ideologies in the last few years and I don’t want to be up against a wall one day because someone did something with ignorant best intent.
The “fascist” part (authoritarian/totalitarian tendencies) came long before the resurgence of the right, but most people seem to approve of those methods as long as they target those they dislike, so I won’t be shedding any tears for them when it’s their turn at last.
It is self-evidently written by AI. You can tell from both tropes such as “To bring this into sharper focus” and the fact that it is entirely without an opinion or argument for most of the piece.
The whole "Apple won't do what the USG wants" story is farce, engineered specifically to protect Apple's brand image. Following the Snowden drop when we all learned that the USG has unfettered realtime access to everything in iCloud without a warrant via FAA702, Apple had a major fucking crisis on its hands, along with a lot of other companies. (If you think the CIA can't read any object in S3, you simply don't understand how the world works. Note also that AWS has built a custom, one-off, airgapped AWS region ON PREM for the CIA. https://aws.amazon.com/federal/us-intelligence-community/ )
Those CEOs all went to DC and sat down with Obama and talked it out. The official cover story was something like "Obama wants help with healthcare.gov".
> The top leaders from the world’s biggest technology companies pressed their case for reform of the National Security Agency’s controversial surveillance operations at a meeting with President Obama on Tuesday, resisting attempts by the White House to portray the encounter as a wide-ranging discussion of broader priorities.
https://www.businessinsider.com/tech-ceo-meeting-with-obama-... (includes photo)
It is very likely that this media plan was discussed and agreed upon in those meetings. Otherwise, nobody sane in any government in Europe would ever buy an iPhone (or let their citizens do same), given that the USG can read all their photos and messages and emails and contacts in iCloud instantly and without a warrant.
(China of course requires Apple run the iCloud servers for Chinese users in China via a joint venture with a CCP-operated company, which preserves the same realtime full access to all iCloud/iMessage data in China for the CCP as PRISM does for the USG.)
Don't believe the marketing hype.
Further reading:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM
The Snowden releases support very plainly the direct realtime access of the US intelligence community to tech company servers without search warrants (just FISA orders).
It is the single most used data source by the US intelligence community.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Prism_slide_5.jpg
Apple began providing such data in October 2012.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:PRISM_Collection_Det...
https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/new-slides-reveal-gr...
https://www.reuters.com/technology/cybersecurity/governments...
These aren't conspiracy theories, these types of secret agreements happen all the time.
EDIT: it seems the original poster I was replying to has deleted their post, and so this may not make as much sense in the thread now.
Getting really tired of the UK govs incompetence/maliciousness around digital law making
I guess if I lose my phone on a trip, I wanna be able to walk into an Apple store and restore it from their cloud copy that the feds have backed up & pored over by LLMs too. (not sure that’s done in realtime for 100% of the population, but tokens will be cheap enough eventually - they have their pre-LLM solution too)
I think I keep Signal data mostly out of the cloud though, declining to use their latest features. Hidden notifications too. Is it only personal family updates, yes, but the principle makes me feel good.