Civil Liberties

“This is the worst interference with personal liberty in our history. For what is by historical standards not a very serious pandemic except for particular categories of vulnerable people who can isolate themselves voluntarily.”
-Lord Sumption, former UK Supreme Court Judge

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News

UK ‘test and trace’ service did not complete mandatory privacy checks – Politico

The so-called “test and trace” rollout will see thousands of people handing over their personal data to U.K. authorities via contact tracers as part of efforts to inform others if they have been in contact with people infected with the virus. The personal information, including names, zip codes, phone numbers and email addresses, will be held by government bodies for up to 20 years.

But Public Health England, the agency overseeing the system in England, confirmed to POLITICO that it had yet to complete a so-called data protection impact assessment — a mandatory requirement under U.K. law — before the system started on Thursday.

Under U.K law, such an assessment, detailing the potential privacy concerns of collecting reams of people’s sensitive data, is obligatory and must be completed before data collection begins. It has to be submitted to the country’s privacy watchdog for review.

https://www.politico.eu/article/uk-test-trace-privacy-data-impact-assessement/

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News

Civil liberty campaigners hit out at ‘draconian intrusion of privacy’ after Matt Hancock’s threat to issue fines for people not obeying 14-day test and trace isolation orders – Daily Mail

  • Groups hit out over threat of forced 14-day quarantine for test and trace scheme
  • It comes as the NHS Test and Trace scheme faced issues on its first official day 
  • Other groups have raised concerns over how people’s data will be stored safely

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8366481/Civil-liberties-groups-slam-Matt-Hancock-dranconian-coronavirus-test-trace-fine-threat.html

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Opinion

The new authoritarian State’s dream has come true thanks to the repulsive word ‘lockdown’: they’ve made us all prisoners – Peter Hitchens, The Mail on Sunday

I think I now understand why this period has come to be known by the repulsive word ‘lockdown’, an American term which describes the punishment of rioting convicts in a penitentiary, by confining them in their cells for long periods. 

We are learning, during this induction period, to do what we are told and to become obedient, servile citizens of a new authoritarian State. We are unlearning the old rules of freedom. 

..all the proper institutions of a civil society have grown so weak that the Strong State can now get its way.

The married family, the independent middle-class, able to make a decent living on the basis of hard-won qualifications, the political parties, Parliament itself, the Opposition, the Monarchy, the Armed Forces, the Church (pathetically anxious to close itself), the Civil Service, most of the media, the BBC, are just husks of what they were 50 years ago.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-8351423/PETER-HITCHENS-new-authoritarian-States-dream-come-true.html

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Opinion

Britain’s chilling slide into totalitarianism – Spiked

For the first time in my lifetime, a British government has drawn a utilitarian line in the sand and declared that no peaceful protest can be tolerated.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/05/22/britains-chilling-slide-into-totalitarianism/

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Opinion

The war on transport – Spiked

It is hard to know where to start with transport. One certainly shouldn’t start from home, if at all possible. In our age of lockdown, transport away from the home is considered anti-social, if not downright dangerous.

In this atmosphere, it is worth recalling that democratic rights relate not just to free speech, but also to freedom of movement and freedom of assembly. Some restrictions on travel have been lifted recently. But with every new official statement about how we can and cannot move around, the government confirms that the state and only the state holds the cards in relation to our basic freedoms.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/05/21/the-war-on-transport/

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Opinion

Under the Corona Act, Dr Shipman could have got away with more murders – The Critic

[O]ne thing the Coronavirus pandemic has shown us is that rather than turn away from experts plenty of people appear to ascribe almost supernatural powers to them.

The bottom line is this: if Shipman were killing under the Coronavirus Act, he might have gotten away with even more murders. And if the safeguards held others back from killing their patients, well, they’re not anymore.

“What’s happening, exceptionally, with Covid is that not only do you not have to be an attending doctor to make a statement that someone has died of Covid, you don’t have to discuss it with anybody else, you don’t even have to be medical, you don’t have to have any test positivity – you can even deem a death to be due to Covid if it’s not mentioned on the death certificate and, say, you’re a care home provider and you think it ought to be mentioned.. and few of these cases are being autopsied. So we’re not building up any sort of knowledge about what this disease actually does to the body, or even whether it was present in the body of somebody who was said to have died of Covid. We actually know less about who’s dying of what now, particularly concerning Covid, than at any time in the past. So it really is a complete mess”.

https://thecritic.co.uk/under-the-corona-act-dr-shipman-could-have-got-away-with-more-murders/

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Opinion

Set us free from lockdown, ministers, and stop covering your backs – Lord Sumption, The Times

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Opinion

Patel’s ‘Social Distancing is Here to Stay’ Warning Presents Inhumane, Nightmare Vision of Future – Sputnik

Most people have accepted a temporary period of ’social distancing’ to contain the spread of COVID-19, but it seems that some in authority, like UK Home Secretary Priti Patel, would like to see us keep our distance from each other indefinitely. We must never let this happen because if we do, humanity is dead.

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Opinion

Screen New Deal – Naomi Klein, The Intercept

Under Cover of Mass Death, Andrew Cuomo Calls in the Billionaires to Build a High-Tech Dystopia

It’s a future in which our homes are never again exclusively personal spaces but are also, via high-speed digital connectivity, our schools, our doctor’s offices, our gyms, and, if determined by the state, our jails.

https://theintercept.com/2020/05/08/andrew-cuomo-eric-schmidt-coronavirus-tech-shock-doctrine/

Categories
News

Coronavirus tracking apps pose ‘a serious risk to human rights’ and ‘may introduce unjustified surveillance disguised as health measures’ – Daily Mail

[Humans Rights Watch] considered how the technology has been used by China, Israel, South Korea, the United States, and other governments, and gives guidelines to governments on ‘human rights risks’ posed by using mobile location data.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8314843/Coronavirus-tracking-apps-pose-risk-human-rights-says-humans-rights-organisation.html

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News Opinion

Lord Sumption discusses Coronavirus lockdown on BBCR4 PM with Evan Davis

The is the worst interference with personal liberty in our history. For what is by historical standards not a very serious pandemic except for particular categories of vulnerable people who can isolate themselves voluntarily.

The problem about law is that it excludes common sense.

Categories
Opinion

Press freedom in the time of Covid – Spiked

They stopped trying to provide profound and challenging explanations, according to their different points of view, of events or trends. They were too worried that such an approach might estrange readers. Likewise, articles and news items became shorter and shallower, because they were worried about the attention span of consumers, who were deemed all too ready to read the competition just a click away.

Something else shifted, too. Modern journalism ceased to try to report the facts, and then allow the reader to make up his or her own mind. Instead it started to act almost as a teacher, standing by the reader’s side, and guiding him or her towards the ‘right’ viewpoint.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/05/11/press-freedom-in-the-time-of-covid/

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Opinion

Has our mad mass house arrest during Covid-19 saved even a single life? – Peter Hitchens, The Mail on Sunday

Normal life will be virtually impossible. Previously simple actions will be endlessly complicated and expensive. And while this farce continues, businesses will continue to close and jobs continue to vanish, visiting misery and sickness on millions.

I have seen this before in the old Communist world, a mad, fixed idea pursued by dense men relentlessly and without opposition or thought, until the whole thing collapses or explodes. Now I see it here.

https://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2020/05/peter-hitchens-has-our-mad-mass-house-arrest-during-covid-19-saved-even-a-single-life-1.html

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Opinion

In London today, the police behaved disgracefully – Spiked

I have not seen the police like this before. Sure, I’ve seen police heavy-handedness; I’ve actually encountered it, on demonstrations many years ago. I’ve seen police harassing homeless people for no good reason. I’ve seen the over-policing of certain streets and certain communities and seen how dispiriting people find it. But this arrogant, sneering barking of orders at sunbathers and mums and homeless people resting under trees on a warm day is completely new. It is lockdown fanaticism in action. This rude and heartless officiousness is the logical conclusion of the culture of hysteria our political and media elites have whipped up over Covid-19.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/05/09/in-london-today-the-police-behaved-disgracefully/

Categories
Videos

14 arrested by police at London anti-lockdown protest – 9 May 2020

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_S4A-EWGlWw
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Opinion

We need to stop the spread of Big Tech censorship – Spiked

It is time to draw a line. In the fight against Covid-19, people across the world have been required to suspend many hard-won freedoms – to give up travel, loved ones, places of worship, the pub. They have gone along with it because they understand that some temporary restrictions on liberty are sometimes needed in times of crisis (even though we must ensure they do not become permanent). But one thing we cannot give an inch on is freedom of speech, our right to speak and our right to hear others, which is under serious threat right now.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/05/08/we-need-to-stop-the-spread-of-big-tech-censorship/

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Opinion

Lockdown fanatics scare me far more than Covid-19 – Spiked

The Covid threat is not the apocalypse we were warned about. Its death rate is low. Its impact on younger people is negligent. Just 0.75 per cent of deaths in the UK have been among under-40s, and the majority of those were people with underlying health conditions. And yet most under-40s – fit, healthy workers – remain locked at home, denied the right to work and play and keep society going.

The horror stories that were spread about Covid-19 by government officials and media fearmongers have been exposed as inaccurate, and in some cases hysterical. As the government adviser Professor Robert Dingwall says, the government has ‘effectively terrorised’ us into ‘believing that this is a disease that is going to kill you’. When in the vast majority of cases that simply isn’t true. As Professor Dingwall points out, 80 per cent of people who get the virus never have to go to a hospital, and of those who do, ‘most of them will come out alive – even those who go into intensive care’.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/05/08/lockdown-fanatics-scare-me-far-more-than-covid-19/

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Opinion

‘This is international hysteria’ – Spiked

Lionel Shriver and Brendan O’Neill discuss the irrational response to Covid-19 and the cruel regime of social distancing.

https://www.spiked-online.com/podcast-episode/this-is-international-hysteria/

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Opinion

Bruce Schneier on COVID-19 Contact Tracing Apps

“My problem with contact tracing apps is that they have absolutely no value…I’m not even talking about the privacy concerns, I mean the efficacy. Does anybody think this will do something useful? … This is just something governments want to do for the hell of it. To me, it’s just techies doing techie things because they don’t know what else to do.”

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2020/05/me_on_covad-19_.html

Categories
News Opinion

Boris Johnson must end the absurd, dystopian and tyrannical lockdown – Steve Baker, The Telegraph

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2020/05/03/boris-johnson-must-end-absurd-dystopian-tyrannical-lockdown2/