Category: Big Brother

Stifling Dissent

Big Brother, Foreign Affairs, Government Thugs

I see with extreme displeasure that the foul UKgov has finally managed to suffocate the brilliant Kathy Gyngell and her wonderful newspaper, The Conservative Woman.

Did they do it by an outright ban?  Noooo that would have been the manly thing to do, and would have caused a massive backlash — and rightly so.

Instead, they did it by stealth:

TCW is closing as a daily site because the British state and its allies have made honest dissent increasingly impossible to sustain. The cowardice began under a Conservative government. During covid, lawful doubt was treated as a public danger. Citizens who questioned lockdowns, masks, vaccine mandates, school closures and the destruction of livelihoods were smeared as cranks or extremists. Platforms were encouraged to police opinion. The MSM supinely obeyed. The BBC was, as usual, complicit. Conservative ministers talked about liberty while presiding over one of the greatest assaults on free speech in modern British history.

Then the Tories put the machinery on the statute book.

The Online Safety Act was driven through under a Conservative government and received Royal Assent in October 2023. The Act passed into law on October 26, 2023, and made Ofcom responsible for implementing the new online safety regime. It was sold as ‘protection for children’. In reality, it created a vast regulatory structure for online speech and made Ofcom the policeman of the internet. Platforms were pushed into permanent risk-avoidance. Lawful speech became a compliance problem. ‘Safety’ became the master word. Once that word rules, freedom withers. Free speech has never been ‘safe’.

This was one of the great betrayals of modern Conservatism. The party that should have defended liberty built the legal runway for censorship. It handed power to Ofcom, trained platforms to fear liability, and wrapped the whole operation in the language of harm prevention. The result was predictable. Companies do not defend free speech when regulators are watching. They protect themselves. They over-remove, over-block, over-filter and over-comply.

That is how dissent gets buried.

The same Act reinforced Ofcom’s media literacy role. That matters. Media literacy sounds harmless. It is not harmless when the regulator, the Government, public broadcasters and tech platforms are all marching in the same direction. It becomes the polite name for teaching the public which sources to trust and which to distrust.

This is the bridge to the next phase. First the state regulates platforms in the name of safety. Then it works with broadcasters, tech companies, charities and public bodies to shape what citizens are taught to regard as reliable. Then it proposes to promote ‘trusted news’ above rival voices.

That is the censorship escalator. Labour is now riding it with enthusiasm.

The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology’s 2026-2029 Media Literacy Action Plan, A Safe, Informed Digital Nation, dresses control in the language of confidence, safety, critical thinking and resilience. Published on March 16, 2026, it sets out the steps departments across government are taking to strengthen media literacy over the next three years, including helping people ‘think critically about online content’ and ‘find trustworthy information’. The state wants to shape how citizens consume information online. It says it wants people to find trustworthy information. That sounds innocent until you ask the only question that matters: trustworthy according to whom?

Well, there you have it.  If the above doesn’t make your blood boil, we can’t be friends.

And this, children, is why we have a First Amendment Over ere, despite the many efforts by Gummint, the Left and their lickspittle allies to undermine or bypass it.

Am I angry about this?  You bet your ass I am.  It’s bullshit like this which moves people from:

…to:

And note that had I published this post in the UK, I would have been shut down and/or arrested for “inciting violence” or some such twaddle.

It’s also another reason why I have eschewed any form of advertising on this particular website:  I’m not going to hand the cocksuckers a means to shut me up.

Range time?  What do you think?  I had planned on doing some .22 plinking anyway, but now I think I may have to expend something of a somewhat larger caliber.

So Much For Privacy

Big Brother, Government Thugs, Technology

Here’s one guaranteed to make us all feel better:

Dubai police snooped on a private WhatsApp group to snare an airline worker who shared images of a building damaged in the Middle East crisis.

Authorities accessed a closed chat between colleagues, downloaded evidence and then lured the man to a meeting and arrested him.

He is in custody facing charges including publishing information deemed harmful to state interests which carries a maximum sentence of two years.

Radha Stirling, chief executive of Detained in Dubai, said: ‘Dubai Police have now explicitly confirmed they are conducting electronic surveillance operations capable of detecting private WhatsApp messages.

‘Individuals are being tracked, identified, and arrested not for public statements, but for private exchanges between colleagues.

‘Companies like WhatsApp must answer urgent questions about user privacy.

‘If private communications can be detected and used as the basis for arrest by overreaching or hypersensitive states, users worldwide need clarity on how their data is being accessed.’

According to the police report, authorities stated the clip was detected ‘through electronic monitoring operations’.

So much for “privacy” and “end-to-end encryption”.  The question — now that the cat’s out of the bag — is quite simple:  did the Dubai feds hack into WhatsApp, or did WhatsApp just hand the encryption key over to them?

We all know that in Arab nations, personal freedoms have about as much permanence (and relevance) as an ice cube in the desert when it comes to their governments.

But lest we get all smug and complacent, I’m willing to bet that a similar situation is in place pretty much everywhere — and the United States is no exception.

Keeping It Anonymous

Big Brother, Deep Thoughts, Rights

POTUS-wannabe Nikki Haley and some others have come right out and said that Internet anonymity should be banned.

I think that’s bullshit, despite the fact that I myself have eschewed Internet anonymity (for the most personal of reasons).  I think that while anonymity can breed mischief, it can also protect someone from retaliation when, for example, shining light on the inner workings of an institution.

Whistle-blowers in large institutions (especially government and large corporations) would almost certainly be silenced because of (justified) fears that they’d lose their job by so doing — even if they were exposing extreme malfeasance or negligence.  That cannot be a good thing.

Of course, anonymity affords trolls and other such excrescences the ability to say awful things — such as defamation or character assassination — not to mention unacceptable utterances such as… racism?

Oh yeah, and that’s the problem.  Because the minute you say “You can say this and not that”, there’s a little question of who decides the parameters of accepted speech.

We have a First Amendment that addresses that issue, I believe, and it was thoroughly covered in the Anti-Federalist by — ho! — the anonymous “Brutus”.

There is a vulnerability in that freedom, of course, just as there’s vulnerability in all our social and political freedoms.  But confining ourselves to speech for a moment, we know the old adage that a lie travels round the world before the truth can get out of bed, and anonymity is the prime facilitator thereof.

Online commenter “Fred_The_Wise” can post on Xwitter that he has proof that Bill Clinton is a serial molester of underage girls, and even Clinton’s feral lawyers would have a problem stopping that “untruth” from spreading and “contaminating” Clinton’s good name.  “Kim du Toit” can do no such thing, of course, unless he has the actual proof that Bill Clinton is such a pervert.

The problem, as we all know, is that “Fred_The_Wise”, even if he has actual proof of said molestation, is not going to be the next “suicide” at the hands of the Clinton “Hit Squad” because nobody knows who he is;  whereas “Kim du Toit” would have to be extremely careful of slippery soap in the shower and random nooses hanging from trees, if you get my drift.

That “Fred_The_Wise” might just be indulging in a little gratuitous character assassination is just a malevolent by-product of the freedom of speech.

Which is terrible, but unfortunately for goons like Nikki Haley, they’re just going to have to live with it, as we all have to do.

What Woody Said

Big Brother, Surveillance Society

In one of his rare funny moments, Woody Allen once referred to people glued to their cell phones as “connectivity assholes”.  Here’s a story which, if true, provides ample proof of the pitfalls thereof:

Amazon reportedly shut down a customer’s smart home after the delivery driver claimed he heard a racial slur coming through the doorbell, even though no one was home. 

Brandon Jackson, of Baltimore, Maryland, came home on May 25 to find that he had been locked out of his Amazon Echo, which many devices, including his lights, are connected to.

Yeah… so much for that “convenience” that people are always bleating about when the discussion moves to “smart homes”, “self-drive cars” and all that similar nonsense.

So don’t complain when Big Tech, or Big Brother, or Biggus Dikkus turns off your lights, takes your house through “emininent domain” then bends you over the desk and gives it to you good and hard in your connectivity asshole.