Britain To Criminalize Reading Online Extremist Content

Authored by Stephen Lendman,

Like America, Britain is unfit and unsafe to live in – both countries police states, serving privileged interests exclusively, allied in waging wars OF terror in multiple theaters, along with abolishing fundamental homeland freedoms.

The latest civil rights abuse came from hardline home secretary Amber Rudd.

She’s spearheading a Tory effort to criminalize readership of so-called extremist content online – punishable by up to 15 years in prison.

The same holds for anyone publishing content Tories call extremist, especially about Britain’s military, intelligence services and police that could be considered related to preparing terrorist acts.

“I want to make sure those who view despicable terrorist content online, including jihadi websites, far-right propaganda and bomb-making instructions, face the full force of the law,” Rudd blustered, adding:

“There is currently a gap in the law around material (that) is viewed or streamed from the Internet without being permanently downloaded.”

“This is an increasingly common means by which material is accessed online for criminal purposes and is a particularly prevalent means of viewing extremist material such as videos and web pages.”

A Home Office analysis showed thousands of online ISIS tweets and other material over the past year.

Unmentioned was US and UK support for the terrorist group, recruiting, arming, funding, training and directing its fighters, using them as imperial foot soldiers in Syria, Iraq and elsewhere.

The way to end extremist online content from ISIS and likeminded terrorist groups is by no longer supporting them, combating their fighters instead of using them.

Most important is ending US-led imperial wars in multiple theaters. ISIS and likeminded terrorist groups were created to serve as imperial ground forces, aided by Pentagon-led terror-bombing.

Changes Rudd proposed aim to strengthen Britain’s 2000 Terrorism Act. It authorizes civil liberties-destroying police powers, including repressive stop-and-searches ruled illegal by the European Court of Human Rights.

It criminalizes being a member of, supporting, or wearing clothing arousing suspicion of involvement with a proscribed group. Dozens named are nearly all Muslim ones.

Current UK law applies only to downloaded and saved extremist material. Proposed changes criminalize reading it online.

Commenting on the proposed measure, Law Professor Jonathan Turley noted that “civil libertarians have warned that Great Britain has been in a free fall from the criminalization of speech to the expansion of the surveillance state.”

Tories aren’t “satiated by their ever-expanding criminalization of speech. They now want to criminalize even viewing sites on the Internet.”

“As always, officials are basically telling the public to ‘trust us, we’re the government.’ “ Criminalizing readership of online content amounts to “an anti-civil liberties campaign.”

A previous article discussed Prime Minister Theresa May wanting greater government control of the Internet.

If readership of material Tories call unacceptable is criminalized, what’s next?

Thought control? Criminalizing legitimate criticism of government policies? Public protests against government policies? Banning free expression on any topics online or in public spaces altogether?

Turley quoted from Orwell’s 1984 as follows:

“We are different from all the oligarchies of the past, in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites.”

“The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives.”

“They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just round the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal.”

“We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end.”

“One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.”

America, Britain and other Western nations are heading toward instituting full-blown tyranny.

Perhaps another state-sponsored 9/11-type incident will assure it.

The Over-Criminalization Of American Life

Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,

The over-criminalization of America has undermined justice, the rule of law and legal egalitarianism.

While the corporate media devotes itself to sports, entertainment, dining out and the latest political kerfuffle, America has become the Over-Criminalization Capital of the World. The proliferation of laws and administrative regulations, federal, state and local, that carry criminal penalties has swollen into the tens of thousands.

The number of incarcerated Americans exceeds 2.3 million, with the majority being non-violent offenders--often for War on Drugs offenses.

Holly Harris has written an important summary of this profoundly destabilizing trend: The Prisoner Dilemma: Ending America"s Incarceration Epidemic (Foreign Affairs, registration required).

The over-criminalization of America is a relatively recent trend. As Harris notes:

It wasn’t always like this. In 1972, for every 100,000 U.S. residents, 161 were incarcerated. By 2015, that rate had more than quadrupled, with nearly 670 out of every 100,000 Americans behind bars.

The over-criminalization of America is rooted in federal laws and regulations, and state and local governments have followed suite. here is Harris"s account:

The burgeoning U.S. prison population reflects a federal criminal code that has spiraled out of control. No one—not even the government itself—has ever been able to specify with any certainty the precise number of federal crimes defined by the 54 sections contained in the 27,000 or so pages of the U.S. Code. In the 1980s, lawyers at the Department of Justice attempted to tabulate the figure “for the express purpose of exposing the idiocy” of the criminal code, as one of them later put it. The best they were able to come up with was an educated guess of 3,000 crimes. Today, the conservative Heritage Foundation estimates that federal laws currently enumerate nearly 5,000 crimes, a number that grows every year.

Overcriminalization extends beyond the law books, partly because regulations are often backed by criminal penalties. That is the case for rules that govern matters as trivial as the sale of grated cheese, the precise composition of chicken Kiev dishes, and the washing of cars at the headquarters of the National Institutes of Health. State laws add tens of thousands more such crimes. Taken together, they push the total number of criminally punishable offenses in the United States into the hundreds of thousands. The long arm of the law reaches into nearly every aspect of American life. The legal scholar Harvey Silverglate has concluded that the typical American commits at least three federal felonies a day, simply by going through his or her normal routine.

Federal policies reward states for building prisons and mandating harsher sentences:

...federal incentives for states that safely decrease their prison populations and reconsider ineffective sentencing regimes...would represent a stark reversal of legislation signed into law by President Bill Clinton in 1994, which did just the opposite, offering federal dollars to states that imposed harsher criminal penalties and built more prisons, which contributed to the explosion of incarceration rates during the past two decades.

How did we become a Gulag Nation of tens of thousands of laws and regulations and mandatory harsh sentences for non-violent crimes--a society imprisoned for administrative crimes that aren"t even tried in our judiciary system? I would suggest two primary sources:

1. The relentless expansion of central-state power over every aspect of life. As I describe in my book Resistance, Revolution, Liberation: A Model for Positive Change, the state has only one ontological imperative: to expand its power and control. There are no equivalent mechanisms for reducing the legal/regulatory burdens imposed by the state; various reforms aimed at reducing the quantity of laws and regulations have not even made a dent in the over-criminalization of America.

The second dynamic is the political reality that the easiest way for politicos to be seen as "doing something" is to pass more laws and regulations criminalizing an additional aspect of life. The state and its elites justify the state"s relentless expansion of power and control by claiming problems can only be solved by centralizing power further and increasing the number and severity of penalties.

Criminalization is the ultimate expansion of the state"s monopoly on coercive violence. As the state expands its power to imprison or punish its citizens for an ever-wider range of often petty infractions, increasingly via a bureaucratic administrative process that strips the citizens of due process, another pernicious dynamic emerges: the informal application and enforcement of formal laws and regulations.

In other words, the laws and regulations are enforced at the discretion of the state"s officials. This is the systemic source of driving while black: a defective tail-light gets an African-American driver pulled over, while drivers of other ethnic origin get a pass.

This is also the source of America"s systemic blind eye on white-collar crimes while the War on Drugs mandates harsh sentences with a cruel vengeance. When there are so many laws and regulations to choose from, government officials have immense discretion over which laws and regulations to enforce.

Prosecutors seeking to increase their body count will use harsh drug laws to force innocents to accept plea bargains, while federal prosecutors don"t even pursue white-collar corporate fraud on a vast scale.

The over-criminalization of America has undermined justice, the rule of law and the bedrock notion that everyone is equal under the law, i.e. legal egalitarianism.

The over-criminalization of America breeds corruption as the wealthy and powerful evade the crushing burden of over-regulation by either buying political favors in our pay-to-play "democracy" (money votes, money wins) or by hiring teams of attorneys, CPAs, etc. to seek loopholes or construct a courtroom defense.

Meanwhile, the peasantry are offered a harsh plea bargain.

The over-criminalization of America is one core reason why the status quo has failed and cannot be reformed. That is the title of one of my short works, Why Our Status Quo Failed and Is Beyond Reform, which explains why the ceaseless expansion of centralized power leads to failure and collapse.

The Criminalization Of Financial Independence

Submitted by Charles Hugh-Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,

Independent enterprises are a source of political and financial independence... and any independent class is dangerous to the ruling elites.

Just as the "war on drugs" criminalized and destroyed large swaths of African-American and Latino communities, the "war on cash" will further criminalize the few remaining avenues to financial independence and freedom. The introduction of "entitlement" welfare in the 1960s generated a toxic dependency on the state that institutionalized worklessness, a one-two punch that undermined marriage and family in America"s working class of all ethnicities.

The "war on drugs" launched in the 1970s turned millions of American males into felons with severely restricted rights and opportunities in mainstream America.

Now we see the same destructive pattern repeating with "disability" being the new "welfare" and "legal" synthetic heroin (oxycotin etc.) being the new street-smack that lays waste to entire communities. Once you"re dependent on the state for disability and synthetic smack, you are owned by the government, lock, stock and barrel.

When the temptation to sell your $3 Medicaid prescription for synthetic smack for a quick $1000 becomes too much to resist, bang, you"ve got a one-way ticket into the Hell of America"s criminal "justice" system. Do you see the pattern? Offer the blandishments of "free money" and nearly free synthetic smack, and the vulnerable populace is quickly reduced to a dependent state of worklessness and addiction.

Needless to say, an addicted, ill, workless populace that is herded into the grinder of the criminal justice system isn"t going to create any political resistance. They have their hands full just trying to stay alive and avoid being sucked into the voracious maw of the criminalization meat grinder.

This is the context for the upcoming "war on cash" and the criminalization of financial independence. Every conventional means of remaining financially independent of the state-cartel-banking system is being restricted and criminalized, the better to herd everyone into centrally controlled institutions.

Those attempting to escape the political-financial pen are threatened with the other pen--the penitentiary.

Any form of resistance draws punitive criminal sanctions. If you attempt to resist the unfettered search of your property, your resistance is instantly criminalized.

If you resist the seizure of your property on some trumped up charge, your resistance is instantly criminalized.

If you resist being hassled for "driving while black," your resistance is instantly criminalized.

If you resist being shunted off public spaces while staging a political protest, your resistance is instantly criminalized.

Three charts help explain the criminalization of financial freedom. Wages as a percentage of economic activity (GDP) have been falling for decades. Wage earners are under pressure, and this generates dissatisfaction that eventually finds political expression. This is dangerous to the ruling elites, so criminalizing dissent, resistance and financial independence become essential tools to cow and control the masses.

Independent enterprises are a source of political and financial independence--and any independent class is dangerous to the ruling elites. The "solution" to the ruling elites is to crush independent enterprises with burdensome regulations that carry punitive penalties, raise junk fees (licensing fees, permits, etc.) to levels that make it difficult to remain compliant, and criminalize cash-only and home-based enterprises.

No wonder new business growth is a shadow of its former robustness. If you try to launch a legally compliant enterprise, the costs crush all but the most successful. Any less than fully compliant enterprise has been criminalized.

The upper 20% of wage earners are the tax donkeys that must be corralled so they can"t escape higher taxes. Whatever wealth they"ve accumulated must also be available for taxation, for this reason: as the super-wealthy sequester their immense wealth in legal tax dodges such as philanthro-capitalist foundations, this leaves the lion"s share of taxes to be paid by the upper-middle class / professional / technocrat / entrepreneur tax donkeys.

The coming War on Cash is also designed to bring in black-market cash from the bottom 40% who use cash businesses as a tax avoidance tactic. The state will leave no stone unturned in its campaign to close off any escape routes--except of course for those available to the super-wealthy and corporations which contribute the big bucks to the politicos" re-election campaigns.

There won"t be any legal assets that will not be exposed to taxation. As for precious metals--imagine a "wealth tax" that is first imposed on millionaires. Who will say that "taxing the rich" is a bad idea?

Then the definition of "rich" will be adjusted downward. Anyone owning gold is "rich," correct? So laws will be passed requiring all forms of wealth must be declared.

Anyone who fails to declare their wealth and pay a "wealth tax" on it will face punitive criminal charges.

The "wealth tax" will start small, and high up the food chain. Then it will quickly move down to include everyone with any assets of any kind. If you reckon this farfetched, check back in 2020, if not sooner.

The problem isn"t taxation per se--it"s preserving the freedom to become financially and politically independent that"s increasingly at risk. Once it becomes too complicated, costly and onerous for a working class household to start and operate an enterprise, small-scale capitalism is dead--strangled by the state at the behest of self-serving bureaucrats, elites and corporate cartels.