The Weekly Weird #73

Germany goes retro, all your face are belong to us, UK gets digital ID, Google says the thing that didn't happen won't happen again, no jail for Slashy Slasherson

Mike Freedman

Sep 29, 2025

Welcome back to your Weekly Weird, the internet’s #1 source of dystopian nutrition1!

It’s been a heck of a week, so let us not tarry.

Germany Goes Retro

The northern town of Flensburg is where Nazi Germany went to die.

After Hitler’s suicide, Admiral Dönitz fled to the coastal conurbation by the Danish border and assembled a cabinet known as ‘the Flensburg Government’ which presided over the ruins of the Third Reich for approximately three weeks before they were all arrested by the Allies.

Eighty years later, Flensburg is the site of a rebirth.

Jews are banned from here!!!!

Nothing personal, not even anti-Semitism, I just can’t stand you.

The above sign was placed in the window of a shop in the Duburg district of Flensburg by the 60-year-old owner, who obviously was confused by the kerfuffle over his words since he made it clear in an easily readable font that prohibiting Jews from his premises was “nothing personal”.

Welt reported that local politicians flocked to the police to report the incident of anti-Semitism, and commented to the press about how the historical context demands a zero-tolerance approach to Jew hate:

The Flensburg SPD member of the state parliament Kianusch Stender emphasized that “we are an open, colorful city that, simply because of its historical responsibility, has a duty to take action against anti-Semitism anytime and anywhere.”

The sign remains in the store, which “sells, among other things, Gothic items and used books.” Are any of those history books, by any chance?

Nostalgia ain’t what it used to be.

All Your Face Are Belong To Us

More nostalgia now as I reference an obscure decades-old meme to shoehorn in a pun about the recent Telegraph report that UK police “have used live facial recognition (LFR) cameras to scan up to 50,000 faces in a single day near London Underground stations”.

LFR technology connects cameras to a watch list containing photos of suspects wanted for a range of offences.
As an individual walks past a camera, their facial measurements are scanned for a positive match against the database, sending an alert to officers.
Comparing data from 2020 to 2022, the number of people on the watch list has gone from about 6,500 to more than 16,000 in 2025. Face scans per deployment have also surged from under 12,000 to tens of thousands in a single day.

The Telegraph report includes an announcement by the Metropolitan Police that “[w]eekly LFR deployments in London will double to ten” to “drive up arrests”.

How many faces?

The data show the highest number of people scanned in a single session was on August 25 when 51,221 faces were seen over a period of nine hours and 39 minutes.
The highest number at Oxford Circus was 36,140 faces scanned over a period of five hours 18 minutes on May 15.

The figures are staggering enough without factoring in the rate of growth of the technology’s deployment.

Earlier this year, it was found that police believe live facial recognition cameras may become “commonplace” in England and Wales, according to internal documents, with the number of faces scanned having doubled to nearly 5 million in the last year.
Police forces scanned nearly 4.7 million faces last year, more than twice as many as in 2023. LFR vans were deployed at least 256 times in 2024, according to official records, up from 63 the year before.

Concerns over the use of LFR, or FaRT as we call it here at the Weird, date back at least as far as 2021 in the UK, when the Home Office and police were “accused of bypassing Parliamentary debate on the rollout of facial recognition by quietly sanctioning its widespread use in new guidance.”

There doesn’t seem to have been any regulatory action or oversight implementation since then, which leaves campaigners like Liberty and Big Brother Watch aghast as more and more people are subjected to the intrusion of their privacy based on what is effectively the presumption of their guilt.

An open letter from 30 campaign groups in 2021 included the following, which remains true today:

“Police and the Home Office have, so far, completely bypassed Parliament on the matter of live facial recognition technology (LFRT).”
“We are not aware of any intention to subject LFRT plans to parliamentary consideration, despite the intrusiveness of this technology, its highly controversial use over a number of years, and the dangers associated with its use.”

The 2021 “guidance” from the College of Policing which triggered the backlash from civil rights groups was cited by the Home Office as recently as August 2025, in a story whose headline said it all: UK rolls out more live facial recognition, safeguards and oversight framework to follow.

To follow when, exactly?

Despite the rocketing use of FaRT on the streets of Britain over the past four years, no meaningful steps have been taken to create a framework or other legislative safeguards that define the rights of the public and protect their privacy from police prying. The Home Office, accused of stalling and bypassing Parliament in 2021, is still relying on non-binding extralegal “guidance” as a fig leaf for what is in fact an unregulated police operation violating the privacy of British citizens.

Meanwhile, in July 2025 the Home Office announced that they were working on a “governance framework for police use of facial recognition”, as if the use of that technology before the existence of a governance framework is remotely acceptable in a democratic society that takes civil liberties seriously.

So it seems to be the policy of His Majesty’s Government to inflict live facial recognition on the populace, regardless of the implications for privacy, data security, fraud, overreach, false positives, and function creep.

Somebody in Whitehall has been watching Yes, Minister.

Almost all government policy is wrong, but frightfully well carried out.

UK Gets Digital ID

Speaking of wrong policy, Prime Minister Keir Starmer (pictured below leering at the corpse of a unicorn after karate-chopping it to death) has announced that the British government will roll out mandatory digital ID in Britain.

In a speech at the Global Progress Action Summit in London, fittingly wrapped up with a statement on the importance of wind power, Starmer told the audience that social democrats are in a fight for the trust of “working people”, who are at risk of being seduced by those with “a cynical intent to exploit their fears to benefit themselves”.

Starmer went on to call out “the politics of predatory grievance” and admit that “[w]e’ve been squeamish about saying things that are clearly true” when it comes to illegal migration.

Then he went on:

This government will make a new free-of-charge digital ID mandatory for the right to work by the end of this Parliament.

He finished the brief announcement, light on details, with a firm statement:

You will not be able to work in the United Kingdom if you do not have digital ID. It’s as simple as that.

To anyone who isn’t Dave’s Not Here-stoned, this comes as somewhat of a surprise considering that the same Labour government under the same Prime Minister unequivocally rejected digital ID cards as recently as July 2024.

From the BBC on 7 July 2024:

The government has ruled out the introduction of digital ID cards, after former Labour Prime Minister Sir Tony Blair said they could help control immigration.

Would that be the same Tony Blair pictured below exuding joie-de-vivre at the World Economic Forum?

Indeed, do not adjust your screen. The same toothy troll who (allegedly) sexed-up a dossier of intelligence to justify a long, bloody, fruitless invasion of Iraq came out of his crypt as soon as a new Labour government was in power to tell anyone who would listen that they should resurrect his derided, despised, and ultimately defeated attempt to turn Britain into a “papers, please” society.

In May 2010, the BBC published a handy timeline of Blair’s efforts, after the Conservative-LibDem coalition government repealed and scrapped the entire scheme, including a national identity register, less than a year after the first cards entered circulation.

From that BBC timeline:

July 2002…Labour had mooted the idea before as a way of combating terrorism after 9/11, but now it was being billed as an “entitlement card” to combat benefit fraud and illegal workers.

Sound familiar?

Labour in the Noughties were similarly interested in the public’s feelings about ID cards, in the sense that they, like the Starmer incarnation of the party, couldn’t give a toss:

June 2003: The results of the public consultation are in and the Home Office admits that more than 5,000 of the 7,000 responses were against the scheme.

Then-Home Secretary David Blunkett said in September 2003 that the cards would make sure that “people don’t work if they are not entitled to work, they don’t draw on services which are free in this country, including health, unless they are entitled to”.

Again, sound familiar?

Let’s not forget the November 2003 demand for ID cards from the Metropolitan Police Commissioner at the time, in which he said they were needed as “an ‘essential’ weapon in the fight against terrorism.” At least terrorism hasn’t been trotted out this time.

The Identity Cards Act became law in 2006, 54 years after ID cards were scrapped for the second time due to public discontent.

Britain had ID cards introduced during World War I and repealed immediately afterwards. In 1939 they were introduced again for World War II, and kept on afterwards until 1952. The public objection to ID cards that led to the end of the policy then was their increased use for purposes outside the original intention.

By 2009, David Blunkett had been replaced as Home Secretary with Alan Johnson, who cited exposure to Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four at school as an influence on his outlook and politics despite considering himself a Marxist and sympathising with the Communist Party of Great Britain. One wonders if he understood the book that resonated so strongly.

As the campaign group Liberty put it in their response to the 2025 announcement about digital ID:

The ID cards of the 2000s were a policy silver bullet, championed in the various battles against terrorism, welfare fraud, and immigration depending on the issue of the day. The scheme proposed to retain biometric data and track every use of the ID in a central database. It collapsed under the weight of its expense and controversy.

As late as 2012, Blair was swirling around the Westminster toilet bowl telling policymakers and the BBC that “ID cards are the only way of dealing with illegal immigration.”

Twelve years later he scored an official denial from the new Labour government, so naturally the next step was to make the thing that they said they definitely wouldn’t do into government policy.

Like Jim Hacker says in Yes, Minister: “First rule of politics - never believe anything until it’s been officially denied.”

Times Radio were assured by the government’s Business Secretary in 2024 that “ID cards were not part of the government’s plans”. Now they are part of the government’s plans, but we shouldn’t worry because the culture secretary and failed Labour leadership candidate Lisa Nandy (pictured below after hearing the limerick about the sailor from Brighton) told the Guardian that they have “no intention of pursuing a dystopian mess”.

Fourteen months ago, their way of avoiding a dystopian mess was rejecting ID cards. Now they’ll avoid it by bringing in a mandatory digital biometric identity verification system that connects with an app on your smartphone and uses a government digital wallet to centralise your access to all state services and benefits in a move eerily similar to the social credit system in China?

Is there an outside chance that Lisa Nandy might figure out that nobody plans a “dystopian mess”? Dystopian messes are created not on purpose but by trying to do things, at least theoretically for the good, which are ill-conceived, terrible, and/or lead to unforeseen, underestimated, or ignored second- and third-order effects.

At the time of writing, a Parliament petition to scrap the digital ID scheme has over 2.4 million signatures (3.5% of the UK population) and rising, with the government now obligated both to respond and consider the petition for parliamentary debate. It’s open to UK residents or citizens if you feel like signing it.

Iain Davis has written up a comprehensive piece about this latest incarnation of digital ID in Britain, which is worth a read. He goes into depth on some of the technology involved, including a proposed “National Data Library” (NDL). Proposed by whom?

You guessed it, sportsfans - the Tony Blair Institute (TBI), the grift that keeps on giving.

From Davis’s coverage:

The TBI wants the data from all corners of the society and the economy, all public and private services, all industry, all business and all of us, to be stored in one unified central database: the NDL.

Meanwhile, the government already has a digital identity verification system called One Login, which was outed by The Telegraph in May 2025 as being”an insecure system”. Their sub-header was that “the risk of a national disaster is very real”.

In January, The Telegraph was contacted by a whistleblower working on the Government’s new digital identity verification system, One Login. The plan is that this will be the way we sign in to pay our taxes, collect pensions and other benefits, and in time other things.
The senior civil servant, a professional in assessing risk and security, was shocked by what he had found at the Government Digital Service (GDS) which is developing One Login. The GDS had inherited the “move fast and break things” culture of Silicon Valley. At once, I alerted Parliamentarians with an interest in security and critical national infrastructure.
The whistleblower’s testimony, backed by copious evidence, was disturbing. He said that developers on the One Login project had been routinely accessing the system without the required security clearance and background checks on laptops that were not secure. Some development on One Login was even taking place in Romania, without the top leadership’s knowledge. Foreign intelligence services are active in Romania, which is a favourite with cyber criminals. All of this should have alarmed senior management at GDS, but instead, their response was to disband the whistleblower’s team.

In March, One Login was tested for vulnerability, and failed miserably.

In the course of a “red-team” penetration exercise by an external specialist, which simulates a hostile cyber attack, One Login was penetrated at the highest level without detection. No flags were raised, and no alarms went off.

“Penetrated at the highest level” is a schoolyard insult you would expect to hear between kids slinging ‘your mama’ jokes around, not a technical description of a government database that is specifically built to hold all of the sensitive personal, biometric, and financial information about everyone in the country.

Given that the government is unresponsive to Freedom of Information requests about that incident and the issues with the project, and is now going ahead with a mandatory national scheme to force everyone in the country to use it, the vulnerability of that or any other central database is a crucial issue.

I’ve prepared a ‘primer’ that responds to the most common arguments used in favour of digital ID, with links to the sources of quotes and information. Use as needed.

Claim #1: Digital ID will help prevent illegal migration in a way that is not currently in practice.

“[M]any unauthorised migrants first arrived in the UK legally, usually by air, rather than without authorisation”, according to Oxford’s Migration Observatory.
If someone comes to the UK legally as a tourist or student and then overstays a visa, they don’t become a UK resident and therefore they wouldn’t require a UK digital ID.
“Most people who arrive in the UK by small boat subsequently apply for asylum – around 94% of those who arrived between 2018 and the end of September 2024. Of those who received an initial decision, around 70% were granted protection, similar to the grant rate for all asylum applications.”
- Therefore, see next point about the asylum process, and bear the following in mind: If 94% of those who arrive to the UK through an unauthorised method apply for asylum, and 70% are granted protection, then any measures discussed are targeting only 30% of the ‘small boat’ people, a vanishingly small number compared to the people affected by digital ID.

Claim #2: Asylum seekers need to be identified through the use of a card.

According to Star Network, when someone applies for asylum in the UK, “[f]ingerprints, a photograph and other physical identification information are collected and the applicant is given an application registration card.”
- Therefore, asylum seekers already give their biometric information and are issued with a card linked to a digital database. ‘BritCard’ adds nothing.

Claim #3: Digital ID will prevent illegals from accessing work and housing.

Proof of the right to work and the right to rent are already legally required, and penalties accrue to the employer and landlord respectively. If someone is in the UK illegally, has not been registered as an asylum seeker or given temporary leave as part of the process of dealing with their claim, and is working or renting a property without proper identification proving they have the right to do so, their employer or landlord is already breaking the law. If such employers or landlords are willing to break the law now, why would digital ID make them less willing to break the law?
Anyone working in the UK already needs to have a National Insurance Number, which is linked, you guessed it, to a central database containing their personal information. The idea that an insecure, hyperintrusive, overly-complicated digital identity framework is needed to police illegally itinerant labour is total nonsense. Someone who is giving jobs to people who don’t have a National Insurance card is already breaking the law, and there is already a tracking and enforcement infrastructure in place to deal with that.

Claim #4: Digital ID is a response to a pressing immigration crisis, not a government plan for long-term privacy intrusion.

The opening paragraph of this Institute for Government’s article on digital ID says the quiet part out loud (emphasis mine):
- “ID cards…were abolished in 1952 after criticism of how they were increasingly being used for more general purposes such as law enforcement – which was coupled with a widespread sentiment that compulsory ID cards were acceptable in continental Europe but fundamentally at variance with British values and civil liberties. One of the lessons of past experience is that public acceptance of ID cards depends on them having a clear purpose and being linked into a needed use.”
ID cards re-entered government’s wish list in 1995 during the John Major years after a 43-year hiatus. At that time, there was nowhere close to the level of immigration (legal or otherwise) that there is now. Blair pushed for it twice throughout his premiership, using terrorism first and then immigration. None of that happened at a time when there was a ‘small boats’ problem, or when the level of illegal immigration was as high as it is today. Simply put, unless the migrant crisis predates the migrant crisis, this is not about the migrant crisis.

Claim #5: Digital ID will help solve or prevent illegal/mass migration.

This is demonstrably false, and laughably so. Europe has had mandatory ID cards since the mid-20th century at least, and also has stringent bureaucracy around immigration, access to housing etc. The use of fiscal codes or social security numbers like Britain’s National Insurance number, to monitor and enforce access to work, benefits, and civic participation, has been common practice in Europe since before any of us were born. Yet somehow Europe is also dealing with a ‘migrant crisis’ and is also arguing that the problem is a lack of digital identity verification. If ID verification was the solution, Europe would be an exemplar of limited illegal labour and controlled migration.

As the track record of successive governments and their justifications shows, digital ID is authoritarian bullshit, dissolved in a spoonful of the fear-du-jour and tipped into the public’s maw whenever a politically opportune moment arises. Don’t swallow it.

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Google Says The Thing That Didn’t Happen Won’t Happen Again

On September 23, the House Judiciary Committee announced in a press release that Google have agreed “to offer all creators previously kicked off YouTube due to political speech violations on topics such as COVID-19 and elections an opportunity to return to the platform.”

The decision to kick those creators off YouTube was, as per Google’s letter to the committee, the result of direct pressure from senior Biden Administration and White House officials:

Senior Biden Administration officials, including White House officials, conducted repeated and sustained outreach to Alphabet and pressed the Company regarding certain user-generated content related to the COVID-19 pandemic that did not violate its policies. While the Company continued to develop and enforce its policies independently, Biden Administration officials continued to press the Company to remove non-violative user-generated content.

In a show of positively British understatement, Google stated that the Biden Administration “created a political atmosphere that sought to influence the actions of platforms based on their concerns regarding misinformation.”

The letter also shows that, until as late as December 2024, “discussion of various treatments for COVID-19” were not permitted on YouTube.

The committee’s press release summarises the Google gleanings:

Google also admitted the following to the House Judiciary Committee:
The Biden Administration pressured Google to censor Americans and remove content that did not violate YouTube’s policies.
The Biden Administration censorship pressure was “unacceptable and wrong.”
Public debate should never come at the expense of relying “authorities.”
The company will never use third-party “fact-checkers.”
Europe’s censorship laws target American companies and threaten American speech, including the removal of “lawful content.”

Those of you who can remember the vociferous protestations from the Biden Administration, Google, and other tech companies that no such actions were taking place might do well to pause here for a cool drink and a lie down.

No Jail For Slashy Slasherson

Back in April, I wrote up the Hamit Coskun case in Hamit in Wonderland and read that coverage out in Episode 140.

In brief, in February 2025 Coskun stood on a public street at the end of the private road where the Turkish consulate in London is located and burnt a copy of the Koran in protest over what he perceived as the Islamisation of Turkey under President Erdogan. A man named Moussa Kadri came out of a nearby house, threatened to kill him, went back inside and returned with a knife, attacked Coskun and slashed at him until he fell to the ground, then stomped on him and spat at him until a bystander interrupted him, at which point he left the scene after stealing Coskun’s copy of the Koran.

Coskun was convicted of a public order offence aggravated by hatred during a bizarre trial at Westminster Magistrate’s Court in April. At the time, Coskun’s defence argued that the prosecution were effectively punishing him for the violence of another person. The prosecution’s excuse, which found favour with the judge, was that the fact of Kadri being slated for criminal prosecution in 2026 proved that both parties to the disorder were being legally sanctioned, and that therefore any noises about ‘two-tier’ justice were ill-founded.

Last week, Kadri received a 20-week sentence suspended for 18 months.

The BBC reported that, when questioned by police about his knife attack on Coskun, Kadri told them “he was protecting his religion”.

Kadri’s defence was that “[h]is reaction was in the heat of the moment to what he perceived was a deeply offensive act on a holy book”.

It’s noteworthy that Kadri was charged with common assault rather than attempted murder, despite being filmed telling Coskun he was going to kill them, re-entering and then emerging from his home with a knife for the purpose of doing just that, and then attempting to kill Coskun with the knife until the bystander filming the altercation intervened (and received some knife-wielding belligerence for his trouble).

Toby Young of the Free Speech Union responded to Kadri’s sentence:

“The court is effectively saying that if you attack a blasphemer with a knife, he will be convicted of causing you harassment, alarm or distress and you won’t have to spend a day behind bars.”

The sentencing remarks by the judge in the case of Rex v. Moussa Kadri make clear how Young came to that conclusion.

Nowhere in the charges or sentencing is there any reference to hatred, harassment, alarm, or distress.

Hamit Coskun, a secular political activist, protested lawfully in public by burning the Koran, and was convicted of a public order offence aggravated by hatred because of Kadri’s knife attack.

Now, Kadri has been given a shockingly light sentence for his violent assault on a peaceful political protestor without any question being raised as to why, when it comes to hatred, Islam and atheism are being treated by the Crown Prosecution Service and courts as if they were legally distinct, despite the CPS’s own legal guidelines making it clear that the protected class of “a religious group” in law means “a group of persons defined by reference to religious belief or lack of religious belief.”

Kadri may have been offended as a Muslim, but he was offended by an atheist demonstrating his own protected beliefs. Isn’t slashing an atheist with a knife while he is burning the Koran a hate crime against people who don’t believe that the Koran is holy?

Coskun was told by the court that saying “Fuck Islam” was legal, burning the Koran was legal, doing those things in public was legal, but taken together with the violent response from Kadri, those individual actions collectively crossed the threshold into being a public order offence.

Kadri was told by the court that if you say you are going to kill someone and then attack them with a knife until a bystander stops you, that isn’t attempted murder.

Anyone picking up mixed messages here?

The most telling omission in the sentencing remarks is any mention of Coskun as being the victim of a violent assault.

You were clearly deeply offended by a man who was protesting outside the consulate and who as part of his protest had set fire to the holy Quaran [sic]. You were heard to issue threats to him, calling him’ a fucking idiot’ and telling him that you were going to kill him. You then returned inside your property. When you came back outside, you had armed yourself with a knife and you went to confront him. What happened next was graphically recorded on CCTV and it showed what, to any passing member of the public, must have appeared to be a a very frightening and violent attack in the street by a man armed with a knife. You slashed towards the other man and when he went to the ground you kicked at him a number of times and spat at him. These events must have been very frightening indeed for other members of the public to observe.

Surely “these events” weren’t particularly fun for Hamit Coskun either?

Considering how much time was spent at Coskun’s trial hammering the point of the alleged “harassment, alarm, or distress” his burning of the Koran might cause any nearby devout Muslims, and painting his objection to political Islam and Islamist terrorism as a broad-brush hatred of all Muslims, isn’t it odd that the judge in Kadri’s case doesn’t seem to be concerned about whether being attacked by a knife-wielding lunatic caused any troublesome feelings like fear or distress to arise in Coskun?

Also, it “must have appeared to be a very frightening and violent attack”? Is the judge suggesting it was therefore not an attack of that character? Is the problem that it looked that way to the public, rather than that Kadri attacked Coskun with a knife because of a book?

“Even if you never had any intention to stab him,” the judge continued. “Your actions, in public, in Central London and during the day were wholly unacceptable.”2

Kadri told Coskun “I’m going to fucking kill you”, then went back into his home, came out with a knife, and proceeded to try to kill him with that knife. Are his intentions in any doubt?

Losing your temper and your self-control in the way that you did that day was disgraceful and is something that I know you are rightly ashamed of. I accept that you are remorseful…

Pardon me for being overly interested in the basis of Kadri’s violent outburst, but if he hasn’t recanted his religion since the attack, told police the attack was in defence of his religion, and still believes that his religion needs defending against atheists who burn the Koran, how exactly is he “remorseful” or “rightly ashamed” in any meaningful sense?

Is the judge seriously suggesting that poor Kadri, at the age of fifty-nine, somehow couldn’t be expected to understand right from wrong when the Koran was being burnt in front of him, as if his faith is an automatic red-mist generator? If that’s the case, what happens the next time he sees someone burning a Koran? Is he allowed to do the same thing again because of how sorry he’ll be afterwards, without ever being pressed to interrogate or face up to the urge to violence associated with his supposed protection of a holy book?

In a series of words that only the most generous of interpretations would call a line of reasoning, the judge then wrote that while the sentencing guidelines show that Kadri’s conduct “clearly crosses the custody threshold”, there is “no reason for that sentence to result in immediate custody”.

The judge then gave Kadri a credit of 20-25% off the sentence length for cutting a plea, and determined that the sentences should run concurrently.

British justice has spoken. The severity of your crime is now at least in part decided by how offended you claim to be and how violent and unreasonable your most extreme co-religionists are. The injuries sustained by your victim, the lawful nature of their conduct, and your likelihood to reoffend are beside the point.

Slash accordingly.3

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