The Weekly Weird #46

Trump trumps, New York executes a squirrel, UK shoots for Net Zero and poops on prayer, Australia FaRTs and poops on privacy, the Internet Archive slips down the memory hole

Mike Freedman

Nov 07, 2024

Welcome once more to your Weekly Weird, our dystopian dip into the dark waters of worry!

Up-fronts:

Donald Trump has won the US presidency, crossing the 270 Electoral College vote threshold to secure victory. The count currently stands at 295-224 and Trump leads the popular vote by around five million. By any metric used in previous elections, he has won convincingly. In his victory speech, Trump showed his characteristic measure and historical perspective by declaring that “this was a movement like nobody’s ever seen before, and frankly, I believe this was the greatest political movement of all time, there’s never been anything like this in this country.” How bigly is he humble? YUGE.
The state government’s seizure and killing of a pet squirrel and a pet raccoon in New York has triggered a public outcry, a lawsuit, and media chatter over the intrusive nature of the administrative state. Peanut was a squirrel rescued by Mark Longo and kept as a pet for around seven years. Longo built up Instagram and TikTok followings for Peanut, and leveraged them into a healthy income by sharing sex videos of himself and his wife Daniela on OnlyFans. Last week the Department of Environmental Conservation raided their farm, took away Peanut and a raccoon named Fred, and put them down. Longo has said that he suspects the raid was actually motivated by objections to his “spicy social media presence” rather than the keeping of wild animals as pets.
According to 404 Media, Mark Zuckerberg has told investors that Meta will “add a whole new category of content, which is AI generated or AI summarized content or kind of existing content pulled together by AI in some way,” and proudly declared that “more than 1 million businesses are now creating more than 15 million ads per month on Meta platforms using generative AI.” In short, Meta is committing itself to the grey-goo internet.

Moving on!

UK Shoots For Net Zero

For those unfamiliar, a glossary of terms:

Net Zero: Cutting carbon emissions to a level that, when removal and storage are accounted for, leaves no additional carbon in the planet’s atmosphere.
Quango: A Britishism for a ‘quasi-non-governmental organisation’, i.e. an organisation that is funded or controlled by the government but is nominally1 independent of it.
Ed Miliband: A former Labour Party leader, called ‘Red Ed’ by some media for his socialist views, mocked as a socially awkward Wallace look-a-like (see Photo #1 below), infamous for steering Labour into what, in 2015, was its worst election loss in 30 years2, immortalised in an inopportune photograph of him wrestling unattractively with a bacon sandwich (see Photo #2 below).

Photo 1:

Photo 2:

Ed Miliband is back, as the Labour government’s Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero3, a role that involves setting out and actioning carbon reduction strategies and targets over successive five-year periods. If that sounds an awful lot like the government having a ‘climate tsar’ pursuing a ‘five-year plan’ for reducing the amount of energy the UK uses, your eyes and ears are working just fine.

According to David Turver, in its recently-announced Budget, the Labour government increased funding to Miliband’s oxymoronic department by 22% out to 2025/26.

The vast majority of this extra spending is on capital items, much of which will be squandered on thermodynamic abominations like Carbon Capture, Usage and Storage (CCUS) and green hydrogen.
They also plan to spend at least £3.4bn on household heat decarbonisation and energy efficiency. In plain terms, this means keeping the increased subsidies for heat pumps and spending on insulation measures. As we shall in in the main article on Sunday, most of these insulation measures have payback periods measured in centuries, and some have payback periods further away from today than the Roman occupation.
There is a further £1bn planned for hundreds of local energy schemes to decarbonise the public estate. For this read more solar panels on council buildings.

The UK’s Office for Budget Responsibility reported on the sharp rise in ‘green levies’ as well:

The latest figures show overall green levies are forecast to rise from about £11bn in 2023/24 to a peak of £16.4bn in 2026/27, before falling back to £15.5bn in 2027/28. This is latter figure is some 122% more than was forecast in March 2023 for the same year.

On November 5, an organisation called the National Energy System Operator (NESO) announced on X that it had “published [their] independent analysis to advise @energygovuk how to achieve Clean Power in 2030.”

Ed Miliband was quick to follow suit, sharing the post on X in a thread on the “independent advice” NESO had provided to his department.

It took X users less than four hours to point out that NESO is not independent, and is in fact owned by…you guessed it: the Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero. In legal terms, that means the British government, and in practical terms, that means a gentleman named Ed Miliband.

Here’s the UK government’s press release from 13 September 2024 announcing its ownership of NESO.

Andrew Montford, the Director of Net Zero Watch, claimed on X that NESO’s report actually “shows that we would be better off *not* pursuing a Net Zero grid in 2030, *even taking into account the cost of global warming*.”

Montford goes on to state that the report is “absurdly biased in Mr Miliband's favour” because NESO over-estimated the price of carbon while under-estimating the cost of renewables infrastructure.

One element of the NESO report has drawn particularly heated criticism: The use of the term “flexibility” in relation to demand.

For example:

Flexibility from both demand and supply will be vital to managing the system and keeping costs down, while offering an opportunity for consumers to engage with the energy system and unlock lower costs for their energy. Data and digital will be key enablers across the whole energy system, but particularly for more efficient use of greater levels of flexibility, to the benefit of consumers.

“Flexibility from…demand” means people who want energy changing how and when they use that energy. The touting of “data and digital” as “key enablers…for more efficient use of greater levels of flexibility” might sound like impenetrable swot-talk, but the jargon masks a simple message: Your energy use will be made flexible through punitive pricing, technological surveillance, limited energy availability, and “the adoption of smart home devices.”

Their “clean power pathways see a four-to-fivefold increase in demand flexibility,” meaning a much less on-demand energy system than we have today. Their (mis)use of language would not consider that framing to be accurate, though, since by forcing you to change your energy demands, and then meeting the changed demand they forced you to accept, they would still be “meeting demand.” See? Semantics can be fun!

The use of the passive voice in describing these rather sweeping changes to how society currently functions helps downplay the severity of the implications:

Flexibility is vital in a system with more variable renewables. […] However, flexibility is not currently valued in full and faces multiple barriers. Markets and processes must be redesigned, and data and digital approaches embraced, enabling infrastructure must be delivered and barriers unblocked.

Translation: Renewables don’t work at full capacity all the time, so to run a national power grid on renewables, we need to be able to control how and when people use energy.

Of course, that’s not how they describe it. They frame it as “time-shifting household demand,” which is “an opportunity to transform how residential, industrial and commercial consumers engage with their energy use.”

The advent of smart technology, electric vehicles (EVs) and electrified heating provides new ways for consumers to engage with the energy system and cut their costs by flexing their demand.

How do they envisage the public “flexing their demand” for the benefit of the Net Zero grid? Simple.

“[E]ffortless participation in demand flexibility through digitalisation and automation is likely to be the path to the highest and most effective levels of responsiveness.”

Is there a more chilling bureaucratic Newspeak term for forcing people to do something than “effortless participation”? Whoever wrote the report must have needed a thesaurus, and then a good scrub with a ball of steel wool afterwards.

And how will such “effortless participation” be achieved?

Virtually, all of this demand side flexibility will be connected onto the distribution network, providing flexibility throughout the network.

Finally, they drop a paragraph that almost makes the intention clear:

Most of the demand flexibility will be enabled by automation and digitalisation, from a growth in smart appliances and implementation of the Energy Smart Appliances Regulations in the government’s Smart Secure Energy System Programme, and the Electric Vehicles (Smart Charge Points) 2021 Regulations which require chargers installed after this date to default to off-peak charging. To increase participation in smart technologies and demand side flexibility, innovative tariffs and other retail market offerings will be needed.

I have questions:

If ‘peak’ demand is when most people use energy, and ‘off-peak’ is when fewer people use energy, and everyone is pushed into owning ‘smart’ appliances that ‘default to off-peak charging’ or only function ‘off-peak’, won’t ‘off-peak’ just become ‘peak’?
What then? Will there be regional schemes so that only people in one area can have a hot shower, heat their home, charge their car, or boil the kettle at one time of day, and then they’ll be cut off while other parts of the country get power?
Would this be applied universally, to everyone in the country, including the government, the civil service, businesses, and the wealthy? Or will it only be the plebes who have their demand flexed?

“Demand-side flexibility” is also framed in the report as low-hanging fruit, since “many of the interventions necessary to release the potential of demand side flexibility are administrative or regulatory,” while infrastructure faces far more hurdles. Why build the equipment needed to deliver energy to the public when you can just change a few pesky privacy and consumer-protection laws and cut them off whenever you want, to protect a power grid that you neutered by switching a famously cloudy, rainy, foggy nation to renewables that need a sun that only gives an average of two and a half hours of peak sunshine per day, and wind that might blow not enough, or too much?

Let’s leave it there for now. Suffice it to say that the word “demand” appears in NESO’s report 160 times, and the word “voluntary” appears once. Make of that what you will.

Britain Poops On Prayer

The UK’s Public Order Act has been amended to enforce Public Spaces Protection Orders (PSPOs), or so-called ‘buffer zones’, around abortion clinics. The intention is to prevent the distress, harassment, and intimidation of women accessing abortion services and the healthcare workers providing those services.

However, a ‘grey area’ in the law remains unresolved, leaving both pro-choice campaigners and pro-life activists unsatisfied. The bone of contention is ‘silent prayer’, which is when someone stands near an abortion clinic and prays to themselves, usually holding no sign or bearing any outward symbol of their objection to abortion. Some people might mistake that for thinking, or, to be uncharitable, thinking while loitering. Does penalising people for doing that seem a little…thought-crime-y?

The Catholic Herald and other Christian groups claim the law effectively bans silent prayer, but the AP reports that, rather than an outright ban, Parliament “left a question mark over whether anti-abortion demonstrators who pray silently will be breaking the law.”

One might argue that the question mark should be in relation to whether or not praying silently can reasonably be called a demonstration or protest.

From the AP:

The law, which applies to England and Wales, bars protests within 150 meters (164 yards) of clinics. Scotland and Northern Ireland, which make their own health policies, recently enacted similar bans.
The new rules make it an offense to obstruct someone using abortion services, “intentionally or recklessly” influence their decision, or cause “harassment, alarm or distress.” Offenders face a fine, with no upper limit.
The buffer zone rule was passed 18 months ago as part of the previous Conservative government’s Public Order Act, but wrangling over whether it would apply to silent prayer protests, and a change in government in July, have delayed it taking effect.
The Crown Prosecution Service says silent prayer near an abortion clinic “will not necessarily commit a criminal offense,” and police say they will assess each case individually.

For contrast, multiple instances of imams preaching (out loud) in British mosques against “the usurping Jews” and “infidels,” and praying (out loud) for Allah to “ruin their houses and destroy their homes,” and to “kill them indiscriminately and don’t leave any of them alive” have drawn no arrests, prosecutions, or demands from activists or Members of Parliament to change or tighten existing laws because of “harassment, alarm, or distress.”

Is that discrepancy due to a belief among the British establishment and public that God might listen to Christians praying, but not to Muslims? Or does Britain have a two-tier system in which an overtly expressed wish for violence against fellow human beings is fine at the mosque pulpit, but a Christian’s silent reflection on the moral question posed by abortion is potentially illegal on the street?

The Independent reports on the frustration of pro-choice campaigners at the lack of a total ban on silent prayer.

Pro-choice campaigners had called for a total ban on silent prayer within the zones, arguing a woman using a clinic can feel intimidated by the presence of someone standing in the area praying, even if they are not speaking, but it has now emerged that instances will be dealt with on a case-by-case basis.
The decision has led to claims that the measures have been “watered down” and the lack of a total ban on silent prayers “defeats the point” of the buffer zones.

The Crown Prosecution Service is due to publish full guidance on the law this week, but its initial guidance, according to the Shropshire Star, doesn’t seem to leave as much of a grey area as the AP believes.

Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) guidance states that a person carrying out activities within a zone such as silent prayer “will not necessarily commit a criminal offence”.
[…]
The department listed silent prayer as being among examples of behaviour which could amount to an offence, alongside holding vigils and handing out anti-abortion leaflets.
The person suspected of an offence does not have to know or believe they are in a safe access zone, the guidance states.
It is understood local police forces will work with clinics to decide whether signage marking out the zones would be helpful or not. It is not a requirement under the new law.
Anyone convicted faces an unlimited fine.

So, to summarise, the Safe Access Zone zone does not have to be signposted, and the offender doesn’t need to know they are in the zone, but if they are deemed to be committing an offence, the outward manifestation of which can be simply standing still, with or without their head bowed, with or without any trappings of protest or faith, they can be arrested and handed an unlimited fine. Does that sound far-fetched?

Adam Smith-Connor, a 51 year-old British man from Southampton, was convicted two weeks ago after refusing to move on when he was approached by officers while standing near an abortion clinic in Bournemouth with his head bowed in 2022.

Here’s the video, where he is asked the definitely-not-horrifying question “What is the nature of your prayer today?”

The Independent, in a ‘fact check’ that tried to debunk the suggestion that he was convicted for a thought-crime, stressed that “[t]he conviction was not related to Mr Smith-Connor’s thoughts while he was in the safe zone.”

He attested that he had been engaging in silent prayer as a vigil for his unborn son following an abortion procedure 22 years ago.
[…]
Remaining in the safe zone after being asked to leave by a police officer, PCSO “or any other person designated by BCP Council” contravenes the order, which “could result in a fine or prosecution”.

According to ADF International, who funded Smith-Connor’s defence:

According to the rules of the censorship zone in which he was praying, if Adam were thinking about any other issue – the economy, immigration, or healthcare, for example – he wouldn’t have been fined. It was the nature of his thoughts, his silent prayer, that got him in legal trouble.
The UK has witnessed a modern-day ‘thought crime’ trial.

Since the nature of his prayer was the reason he was asked to leave, it’s weak tea to argue that refusing to leave was the crime. If you’re only allowed to be somewhere if you are thinking accepted thoughts, and you refuse to leave that place because you want to assert your right to think whatever thoughts you please wherever you are, and you get arrested and prosecuted, it’s a little cute for the government or the media to try to weasel out of the implication of that process, which is that you can be prosecuted for your thoughts.

The ADF noted that it was the content of Smith-Connor’s thoughts that justified a guilty verdict from the Court:

In Adam’s case, the defence contended that his prayerful thoughts and the fact that he held certain beliefs and opinions could not in themselves amount to a crime, particularly when he stood peacefully and silently on a public street.
He did not outwardly manifest his prayer by kneeling, speaking, or holding any signs. He made every effort to be out of the line of sight of the abortion facility, positioned behind a tree with his back to the facility and did not engage with any other person.
[…]
In its decision, the court reasoned that his prayer amounted to “disapproval of abortion” because at one point his head was seen slightly bowed and his hands were clasped.

If Smith-Connor is guilty of a crime, it is unclear under what circumstances silent prayer is not now illegal in England and Wales, unless the caveat is that, if asked by the police to gather your prayers and jog on, you comply.

Four poops. 💩💩💩💩

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Australia FaRTs And Poops On Privacy

In case you think I’m being childish, FaRT is our acronym here at the Weird for Facial Recognition Technology.

As reported by Biometric Update, Australian police “want changes to privacy legislation that would enable them to use facial recognition to identify victims and perpetrators of child sexual abuse material (CSAM),” a classic Lovejoy argument.

Who could say no to protecting the kids?

Information Age with more:

Multiple figures admitted the public had a negative view of law enforcement using AI, partly due to previous issues caused by police secretly using AI facial recognition software created by controversial American company Clearview AI.
Members of Australian police departments were caught using Clearview AI’s facial recognition tool in 2020 after the company collected biometric data from the internet and social media platforms without individuals’ consent.

Why would Australians be worried about their police going enforcement-mad with a little bit of extra power?

Is there also a reason why the public might not have total faith in the regulatory process meant to protect their privacy?

Information Age again:

The Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC) found in 2021 that Clearview AI had breached Australia’s Privacy Act by collecting facial images and biometrics of citizens.
OAIC ordered Clearview AI to stop and to delete those images, but the company co-founded by Australian entrepreneur Hoan Ton-That has not proved whether it deleted images of Australians or stopped collecting them.
In August, OAIC announced that it would not pursue further legal action against Clearview AI, which was already facing investigations and lawsuits in other countries.

So Australia’s police secretly used an illegal facial recognition system, and then the company running that system was ordered by the country’s regulator to shut it down and delete the data it held on Australian citizens, but when they failed to prove they had complied with the order, the regulator responded by saying “it would not pursue further legal action”?

Is that a process that would inspire your trust?

The police and government Down Under want to amend Australia’s privacy laws to prevent end-to-end encryption from getting in the way of a good investigation, “by forcing online services to comply with some new privacy obligations.”

End-to-end encryption technology used by many communications platforms including Telegram and Meta’s WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook Messenger systems were “significantly impacting” law enforcement’s ability to identify CSAM offenders, the [Australian Federal Police]’s [Ian] McCartney said.
“We continue to be deeply, deeply concerned that end-to-end encryption has been rolled out in a way that will undermine the work of law enforcement,” he said.

The anti-privacy vibe has gotten so tough that the founder of the encrypted app Session has moved from Australia to Switzerland “after police unexpectedly visited an employee’s home,” according to The Guardian.

Session was created by the Australian-based Oxen Privacy Tech Foundation, which in October announced it was transferring responsibilities to a newly created Switzerland-based body, the Session Technology Foundation. It was first reported by 404 Media.
The move came after employees working for OPTF were approached by the Victoria police and Australian federal police over several months including via help chat messages, letters and phone calls. Victoria police also visited the apartment of an employee late last year, asking questions about the app and its encrypted messaging, the company says.

Australian law already provides for granting investigators access to encrypted data, under special circumstances.

Under anti-terrorism laws passed in 2018, law enforcement can issue notices requiring developers to assist with an investigation. This can include technical assistance which could require companies to build capability for law enforcement to break the encryption used in their services.
But the powers have rarely been used. And if they had, neither the AFP or the services targeted can divulge what an organisation has been ordered to do.

You have to love that last paragraph. These special powers haven’t been used, but even if they had been used, we wouldn’t know…but they haven’t been used. Wouldn’t it be more accurate to say that we have no idea how often these powers have been used, because their use is shrouded in secrecy?

The director of OPTF, Alex Linton, said the looming threat of this legislative power, along with the wider regulatory environment in Australia, had been the tipping point for the organisation shifting to Switzerland.
“The legislative and regulatory landscape in Australia is just completely hostile towards building a privacy tool such as an encrypted messaging app,” he said. “The ongoing threat of these special powers actually being used against us, in the end, being in Australia just threatened our credibility as a privacy tool.”
[…]
Linton also pointed to the expected arrival of age assurance for social media, as well as a new code coming into effect in December on cloud and encrypted messaging providers from the eSafety commissioner, as other evidence of the hostile environment for privacy-focused apps.

I anticipate four poops for this one, but we’ll have to wait and see what the actual laws say.

The Internet Archive Slips Down The Memory Hole

The Internet Archive is one of those projects that maintains one’s faith in the internet as, on balance, a good thing. It’s a non-profit project that stores audio, video, and text, and runs a ‘snapshot’ system that keeps archived copies of websites for reference. The latter function, the Wayback Machine, is invaluable to researchers, and is often the only way that someone can see how a website has been changed, which is especially useful when governments, companies, and powerful interests suddenly decide to delete things they no longer want the public to know they said or did.

Orwell famously called the place to which such undesirable knowledge is consigned ‘the Memory Hole’.

Archive.org was hacked in October, and as a result, as of the time of writing, the website is back up in ‘read-only’ mode, meaning that you can search what’s there but no longer archive websites.

PC Mag reports:

Last week, a hacking group breached the website, stole its data, and put up a pop-up that said: "Have you ever felt like the Internet Archive runs on sticks and is constantly on the verge of suffering a catastrophic security breach? It just happened. See 31 million of you on HIBP!"
HIBP is a website users visit to check if their data was leaked in a cyberattack. Its creator, Troy Hunt, confirmed the Internet Archive breach and said the hackers had sent him 6.4GB of data stolen from 31 million user accounts, including email addresses, usernames, and hashed passwords. According to Kahle, the web data hosted by the site is "safe."

The Verge reports:

The Internet Archive is now back online in a “provisional, read-only manner,” according to founder Brewster Kahle. “Safe to resume but might need further maintenance, in which case it will be suspended again.”
While you can access the Wayback Machine to search 916 billion web pages that have been archived over time, you can’t currently capture an existing web page into the archive.

The inability to archive websites right now, combined with Google’s recent removal of its ‘cache’ function, provides an opportune window for online information to be changed, scrubbed, or otherwise polluted. The Archive hack is a stark reminder of how fragile the reliability of information on the internet is, and how easily we can be fed a false history or robbed of an accurate present.