The Weekly Weird #61

London's perma-FaRT, Magna Carta for online privacy, intelligence failure, 23AndEveryoneButYou, threat-o-rama, UK says 'No chat for you!', the sharp end of government power

Well howdy, and welcome back to your Weekly Weird, our lexical luge through the labyrinth of lunacy we call the 21st century!

• Intelligence Failure: You’ll definitely have already seen the amazingly hilarious and deeply worrying story about how Jeffrey Goldberg at The Atlantic was somehow added to a Signal chat group by Trump’s national security adviser, Michael Waltz and then made privy to the Trump administration’s plans for retaliatory action against Yemen’s Houthis. Caught with their pants down, the White House and associated walking haircuts responded in the time-honoured tradition of Yes-I-totally-did-the-thing-everyone-says-I-did-but-hell-no-I-won’t-admit-it. Here’s Pete Hegseth, Secretary of Defense and the dad who knows better than the Little League coach how the kid should hold the bat, dodging the question of how something so dumb happened on his watch by resorting to the oldest trick in the book - playing the man, not the ball.

  Should Goldberg, if he was genuinely interested in national security more that he was delighted by the scoop and eager to dunk on El Hombre Naranja, have probably removed himself from the group and sent a warning heads-up to Waltz about the breach? Sure. Does that make his huffy flagging of the incident a little hypocritical? Yes. Does it reduce how absolutely shockingly idiotic the whole thing is, and how badly the public needs to be reassured that the government’s security measures aren’t being overseen by a cigar-smoking chimp on rollerskates? Absolutely not. Haggling semantics after something this egregious and pretending it isn’t a big deal is not far off denying it altogether, which is a Grade A kakistocratic move. In other words, on behalf of anyone with eyes:

• The Sharp End of Government Power: Keir Starmer’s Labour government, having punted on the long-running scandal of mass rape plaguing Britain’s northern cities by giving themselves until Easter to figure out what they’ll do about the Jay inquiry’s recommendations on the nation’s epidemic of child abuse that were published in 2022, and furthermore having voted against a full national inquiry into decades of horror affecting thousands of children, have taken decisive action on crime that must have sounded like a slam dunk in a conference room but is drawing ridicule online: They’ve banned ninja swords. That’s right, the same party that couldn’t (or wouldn’t) figure out how to keep a welfare officer working for a Labour council from raping kids have decided that the blade ban is what will save their reputation and the country’s embattled young ‘uns. It seems that nostalgia is the order of the day - British children of the 1980s remember well that the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles beloved the world over were called Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles in Blighty because of the government’s obsession with the evils of nunchucks (“chainsticks”) and other ninja weaponry.

  • Mental Floss have a great description of the vibe at the time: “The censorship was so strict, that in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze, a scene in which Michelangelo uses a pair of sausage links as faux nunchucks was also edited out, leading to the following note from the British Board of Film Classification: "After turtle takes down sausages and uses them as a flail. Reduce to minimum dazzling display of swinging sausages indistinguishable from chainsticks."”

  Now it’s Starmer’s turn to lay on a “dazzling display of swinging sausages”, in the form of the following super-butch X post:

  

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Episode 134: Raja Miah MBE on Britain's Grooming Gangs

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• Magna Carta For Online Privacy: It’s not all bad news this week. The blogger and internet freedom advocate Doc Searls is pitching a new way of interacting with websites and companies online that he calls “MyTerms”.

  Ars Technica reports:

  • “The big concept is that you are the first party to each contract you have with online things. The websites, apps, or services you visit are the second party. You arrive with either a pre-set contract you prefer on your device or pick one when you arrive, and it tells the site what information you will and will not offer up for access to content or services. Presumably, a site can work with that contract, modify itself to meet the terms, or perhaps tell you it can't do that.”

  Perhaps it is less a Magna Carta and more a “user-first” legal framework, but it still acknowledges a reality we have been bullied into ignoring by the inaction and indifference of regulators, namely that web users are subjected to highly asymmetrical contractual arrangements by businesses online, commonly buried in hundreds of pages of legal drivel that nobody reads.

  • “Searls' and his group's standard is a plea for a sensible alternative to the modern reality of accessing web information. It asks us to stop pretending that we're all reading agreements stuffed full with opaque language, agreeing to thousands upon thousands of words' worth of terms every day and willfully offering up information about us.”

  Sign us up, Doc!

• Threat-O-Rama: It’s not quite a new Wu-Tang Clan album but the Annual Threat Assessment of the U.S. Intelligence Community has dropped. It focuses on drug cartels, fentanyl, terrorism, China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea. Regarding those four countries, the intelligence community judges that “[g]rowing cooperation among these actors expands the threat, increasing the risk that should hostilities with one occur, it may draw in others.”

  [Note: If you’re interested in the dystopian implications of these geopolitical forces, you might enjoy the upcoming episode of the podcast in which I’m joined by Velina Tchakarova, a geopolitical strategist who believes the West is now involved in Cold War 2.0 and that the alliance of Russia and China, which she calls the DragonBear, is a major challenge to the “rules-based international order” of the post-World War Two era.]

  Here are some ‘highlights’ from the report:

  • Unsurprisingly, China is the country deemed “most capable of threatening U.S. interests globally” and presenting the “most comprehensive and robust military threat”.

  • As for Russia, the people steaming open the world’s digital mail also say that “President Putin is resolved to prevail in his strategic competition with the U.S.” and has a “diverse and robust nuclear deterrent and asymmetric capabilities, particularly in counterspace and undersea warfare.”

  • Looking to the Middle East, “Iran continues to bolster the lethality and precision of its domestically produced missile and UAV systems, and it has the largest stockpiles of these systems in the region. It considers them as critical to its deterrence strategy and power projection capability...”

  • Assessing Little Rocket Man over in North Korea: “Kim has no intention of negotiating away his strategic weapons programs, which he perceives as a guarantor of regime security and national pride, because they threaten the Homeland, U.S. forces in the region, and U.S. allies like South Korea and Japan.”

• UK Says ‘No Chat For You!’: On March 17, the UK’s Online Safety Bill came into effect. Its stated purpose was to “protect children from harmful content such as pornography and limit people’s exposure to illegal content,” and the government claimed it would achieve that by requiring that “social media platforms, search engines and other apps and websites allowing people to post their own content to protect children, tackle illegal activity and uphold their stated terms and conditions.” In practice, “small but risky” sites like community or hobby forums are required to submit “illegal harms risk assessments” to Ofcom, the regulator empowered to punish and fine transgressors. The legal right given to Ofcom to place obligations on providers that fall “within scope” of the new law comes with rather salty enforcement powers as well, namely the ability “to issue fines of up to 10 percent of turnover or £18 million [$23 million]—whichever is greater—or to apply to a court to block a site in the UK.” The result is, predictably, that “UK chat forums are shutting themselves down rather than face regulatory burdens,” according to the Epoch Times.

  One such website is London Fixed Gear and Single Speed, a cycling forum:

  

  It’s worth quoting more from the heartfelt post by the forum’s owner explaining the reasons behind shutting it down (emphasis in the original):

  • “The Online Safety Act only cares that this site is "linked to the UK" (by me being involved as a UK native and resident, by you being a UK based user), and that users can talk to other users... that's it, that's the scope.

    I can't afford what is likely tens of thousand to go through all the legal and technical hoops over a prolonged period of time just to learn what I'd then need to technically implement and do, the site itself barely gets a few hundred in donations each month and costs a little more to run... this is not a venture that can afford compliance costs... and if we did, what remains is a disproportionately high personal liability for me, and one that could easily be weaponised by disgruntled people (trolls) who are banned for their egregious behaviour (in the years running fora I've been signed up to porn sites, stalked IRL and online, subject to death threats, had fake copyright takedown notices, an attempt to delete the domain name with ICANN... all from those whom I've moderated to protect community members)... I do not see an alternative to shuttering it.”

  What’s possible in this sort of regulatory environment, where the government showed no interest in providing a carve-out for small community and hobby sites that couldn’t meet the compliance burden being dumped on them by this Lovejoy law? As Conservative Peer Lord Daniel Moylan told the Epoch Times: “I suppose they can go back to putting notices in church porches and sending out newsletters by post.”

  Progress, English-style!

• 23AndEveryoneButYou: 23AndMe, the publicly-traded repository of personal genetic data masquerading as a cool way to find unknown relatives and discover elements of your background of which you were previously unaware, has entered bankruptcy proceedings. According to the press release on their website, the company “Intends to use Proceedings to Conduct a Value-Maximizing Sale Process” but claims that there will be “no changes to the way the Company stores, manages, or protects customer data.”

  After a “consumer alert” from California Attorney General Rob Bonta (of Dark Waters fame), NPR and the New York Times immediately ran articles explaining how to delete your data, with the NYT in particular opting for stylish understatement in their headline: 23andMe Just Filed for Bankruptcy. You Should Delete Your Data Now. The company’s website then crashed as people rushed to shut the barn door after the horse had bolted.

  Bonta’s alert explained how users could protect their data (after giving an internet company their actual DNA, as if that was ever a good idea):

  • “Due to the trove of sensitive consumer data 23andMe has amassed, Attorney General Bonta reminds Californians of their right to direct the deletion of their genetic data under the Genetic Information Privacy Act (GIPA) and California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA). Californians who want to invoke these rights can do so by going to 23andMe's website.”

  In 2023, 23AndMe had a hack that affected 6.9 million user profiles, so it’s unclear how safe the data they held ever was anyway. For good measure, the O’Keefe Media Group published a video featuring a covert recording of Nathaniel Johnson, a policy advisor for the U.S. Department of the Treasury, bluntly telling their undercover reporter “Do not give your information to those people.” Johnson describes how the standard user contract with 23AndMe permitted the company to share data with their shareholders, including “pharmaceutical companies in other countries [that] are like the property of, like the Ministry of Defense of Russia. Or, like, owned, by China.”

  But at least someone got to find out they were 4% Neanderthal, right?

London’s Perma-FaRT

Croydon, famously stolen with a giant grabber by Narg the Blarg in 1981 and held for ransom on the dark side of the moon (in the comic book 2000AD), is a focal point for villainy once again, forty-four years later.

In a definitely un-zarjaz move by London’s Metropolitan Police, “[f]acial recognition cameras that scan for wanted criminals are being installed permanently on UK high streets for the first time”, and of course they’re doing it in Croydon.

The Times reports:

The Metropolitan Police will permanently put up live facial recognition (LFR) cameras in Croydon, south London, as part of a pilot project that may see the scheme extended across the capital.

The cameras, set to go live in June or July, will monitor the faces of people on the high street and match their image to a database of alleged criminals, including rapists, burglars and robbers.

The Times can’t resist a little authoritarian cheerleading, calling the move “the progression of a successful programme the force has been running for the past two years, which involved deploying vans equipped with LFR cameras and resulted in hundreds of arrests.”

Rebecca Vincent, interim director of Big Brother Watch, called it a “disturbing new low” in an op-ed for CityAM that provided context for the claim that the roll-out of facial recognition on Britain’s streets has been a “successful programme”:

South Wales Police trialled the use of a network of LFR cameras across an entire city centre in Cardiff – a UK first – for two of the Six Nations games earlier this month. In the LFR zone were places of worship, a family court, abortion and health clinics, and other sites where anyone would want their right to privacy respected. This represented a gross violation of privacy of anyone who had reason to be in Cardiff on a busy Saturday.

The grand total of arrests during the Wales vs England rugby match on 15 March, when police scanned 162,680 faces? Zero – evidencing a shameful waste of police resources, on top of serious rights-based concerns.

In November 2024, Biometric Update reported that “[t]he Met Police used live facial recognition 117 times between January and August 2024, compared with 32 times between 2020 and 2023,” and Labour MP Dawn Butler was quoted describing the shift in legal philosophy heralded by the technology:

“Live facial recognition changes one of the cornerstones of our democracy, which is an individual is innocent until proven guilty. Now with live facial recognition, if the machine says you’re guilty because we’ve identified you through LFR, then you then have to prove you’re innocent…”

“The move represents an alarming expansion of the surveillance state,” wrote Rebecca Vincent in CityAM, “and a further slide towards a dystopian nightmare that could quickly take hold across the UK.” She then pointed out that the absence of clear regulations or guidelines permits FaRT to be used willy-nilly, in a kind of regulatory dead zone:

It also underscores the urgent need for legislative safeguards on LFR, which to date has not been addressed in any parliamentary legislation. Police forces have been left to write their own policies on how they plan to use LFR, and can choose how and when to employ it. For its part, the Met’s “LFR watchlist” expands beyond those suspected of criminal activity, including vulnerable persons and even victims of crimes.

Biometric Update supported Vincent’s point in an article on the Croydon installation on 25 March:

The UK currently lacks a consistent and unified legal framework regulating the technology and instead relies on a patchwork of legislation. The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has been warning that there are no clear guidelines for the police on using live facial recognition while the ­biometrics commissioner has highlighted that police are still storing images of innocent people in its databases.

The Times described how the system will work:

The system scans the faces of people as they walk past, immediately assessing them against a wanted list and alerting officers if there is a match. The data is immediately deleted if there is no match. It has been accredited by the National Physical Laboratory and does not exhibit the same racial bias as found in other forms of facial recognition, the Met has previously said.

Demonstrating that the real politics in Britain are carried out by the Power Party, to which there is no effective opposition, Chris Philp, the Conservative MP for Croydon South and shadow home secretary, delivered a typically manipulative syllogism in support of the plans:

“This technology will mean wanted criminals are unable to wander round town and city centres without getting caught…Those few people opposing this technology need to explain why they don’t want those wanted criminals to be arrested.”

Speaking of a passion for wanting criminals to be arrested, here’s Chris Philp telling Sky News in January that the previous Conservative government didn’t cover up the grooming gangs while calling the failure of police and local councils to deal with the scandal “morally bankrupt” (from 3:56):

Whatever this latest FaRT episode means for London, or the UK, at least one thing is certain for the moment: There’s now another compelling reason to avoid going to Croydon.

Some light viewing for those of you on the fence about facial recognition technology in law enforcement - check out the excellent show The Capture (word on the street is that Series 3 is in production now). Here’s the trailer for Series 1":

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That’s it for this week’s Weird, everyone. Thanks as always for reading.

Outro music is Somebody’s Watching Me by Rockwell, dedicated to all the poor souls trapped in the gravitational pull of Croydon and unable to escape its newly-minted status as the epicentre of everything wrong with the burgeoning British surveillance state.

Stay sane, friends.