Certainly, calling the UK "ultra-authoritarian" is incorrect. But the point about attempts of completely deanonymizing Internet access is still important.
The inability of the government to know everything about its citizens is an important check that prevents it from slipping towards illiberal, even if prosperous, system, like that in mainland China, or Singapore.
OK, but the order of "importance", as stated by the government, was:
- easier access to the services - remember this is supposed to be STRICTLY digital only, so presumably on par with government gateway ID?
- control of illegal immigration - with scale of the problem wildly blow out of proportion - presumably by helping control the border? how? And ostensibly by making impossible to work without right - which is a check mandatory already based on the existing digital-only online check -- once again fake non-solution
Certainly after experiencing multiple problems with the existing eVisa (Digital only) and reading multiple horror stories of faults and errors it proves to me the government is NOT taking ANY of the best practices into consideration while unfairly using parallel to the (like Estonian ID)
The only thing it would do is to cut the fraud a bit, but the impact would once again be limited because it would be a physical document (which, I must repeat from the abundance of caution, might bear a certificate or a chip that makes it incredibly hard to make a fake version of it).
I'm sorry but the government made it a fight for the souls of the rightwing voters once again, it didn't show the awesome project. It showed the stick it want to introduce to conduct the same checks it runs already :)
Just VERIFY and examine their claims. It's been discussed so many times, not only on HN.
Arresting a person for holding a blank placard would indeed be Russia-level oppression. The person in question was not arrested, but threatened to be arrested if he wrote a particular phrase on it [1]. Not great at all, but still no cigar.
A man wearing the "Plasticine Action" T-shirt was indeed arrested [2]. That was extra absurd because the protest was against AI-generated animation, not about a political cause.
Yeah, that’s dumb. Curious what they were charged with, e.g. if they were told to disperse and didn’t, and if the charges will stick.
As dumb as it may be, you should be free-in a democracy, with limited exceptions—to verbalize support for a foreign or even domestic terrorist organization as long as you aren’t materially aiding it.
Spray painting a panzer tank in 1939 with "free the jews" would have been a pretty much identical form of "terrorism".
Nobody killed, no real damage done.
Obviously the Nazis back then would agree with modern far right that defacing weapons used to commit genocide fits the definition of terrorism and that voicing support for such a crime demands prison time.
And, modern liberals have always had an easier relationship with the far right than they have had with free speech.
