TRIGGERnometry - Your Government is Spying on You - Silkie Carlo

Episode Date: June 2, 2021

Silkie Carlo is a lifelong campaigner for the protection of civil liberties and is the director of Big Brother Watch, a leading civil liberties and privacy NGO. Join our exclusive TRIGGERnometry community on Locals! https://triggernometry.locals.com/  OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: https://www.PayPal.me/triggerpod https://www.subscribestar.com/triggernometry https://www.patreon.com/triggerpod Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Buy Merch Here: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: [e-mail] Join the Mailing List: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/sign-up/ Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media:  https://twitter.com/triggerpod https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod About TRIGGERnometry:  Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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I'm Constantine Kishin. And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people. Our brilliant guest today is the director of Big Brother Watch. Silky Carla, welcome to Trigonometry. Thank you very much.

It's great to have you on. Listen, for anyone who does not know who you are, tell us a little bit about your background. Who are you? How are you where you are? What has been the journey through life that leads you here sitting, talking to us? I'm the director of Big Brother Watch. We're a UK privacy and civil liberties organisation. I've been a Big Brother Watch for a few years. Previously, I worked at Liberty and started the tech and human rights program there, focusing mainly on surveillance. That was when the Investigatory Powers Act was going through Parliament, a big mass surveillance law, the Snoopers Charter. And kind of that's my journey into human rights campaigning. I mean, I've...

You don't like being watched, I take it. Except right now. I was always a civil liberties campaigner. And obviously growing up in the post-9-11 years, I mean, there were really live debates about civil liberties. And then in 2013, when Snowden blew the whistle, I felt really compelled to make that part of my kind of life mission, maybe sounds like grandios, my focus of work.

I mean, it's so, to me, it's very, very important, felt like a watershed moment. And I started working for his legal defence fund, which then became an NGO that now looks after whistleblowers and truth tellers, including Snowden and Chelsea Manning and many others, called the Courage Foundation. So I've been working a lot around surveillance, technology and human rights as a civil liberties human rights advocate. Well, we're really excited to have you on the show, because as you're not. Silky. It's a great time for civil liberties in this country. We haven't lost any of them over COVID. No, yeah, everything's great. No work to do. Yeah. So could you just give an example of all the things that have happened over COVID, particularly the most important civil liberties that we've actually lost? Oh, yeah. How long have you got? About an hour. About an hour. So I think around March

2020, we all got, things changed rapidly, very, very quickly, even though I think the machinations of government had been preparing for some of the legislative changes for a bit longer than the public knew. And so when the coronavirus bill was published, it was published about three days before it being passed, 360 pages. That is where my sleepless nights began, because no one's really scrutinising it, certainly not the opposition very much. And in there, it's now an act.

It's still in force, well over a year later. In there, you have the power to detain potentially infectious people, which can be in a pandemic anyone. There's no kind of clear threshold. There's no detention time limit. There's no clear place you would keep these people, quarantine centres or anything, no clear access to legal advice, just the kind of legal constructions you don't normally see in a democracy or even in an emergency.

The power to suspend the right to protest, the power to cancel gatherings, cancel elections, a reduction of thresholds around mental health detention. I mean, just like a really, really broad range of sweeping powers, massive state enlargement with very little scrutiny. And that was supposed to last for two years. At that point, and of course now we know people haven't been shipped off into quarantine centres for unknown amounts of time. They could be under the current law that we have, which is worrying enough in itself. And protests have basically been banned. But to have those kinds of powers at the fingertips of government so readily, so easily,

canceling elections even. You know, this is, it's really, really serious stuff. It puts us in a very perilous position where all you need is really, you know, a change of breeze, and suddenly we're living in a very, very different society. And let's remember as well, I mean, the whole idea of us being in this emergency,

yes, it's very terrible. I mean, we are in quite mature democracy, where we have the Civil Contingencies Act, for example. I mean, there are structures and laws in place that are designed for emergency situations. Why the government didn't use the Civil Contingencies Act, I don't know. There's never been a clear answer to that. It would mean that Parliament would be scrutinising

what the government is doing very regularly. Instead, what they did with the Coronavirus Act is basically hand over the keys to the country, abdicate scrutiny, to the government in perhaps most the enabling kind of way. That's where it started. I mean, obviously since then, we've had literally hundreds of statutory instruments. So small pieces of legislation that go under the radar in Parliament that have changed the way that we live,

that have criminalised pretty much every aspect of everyday life at different points. But that's where it started. And by that, I just want to be clear, I'm not saying at all in a pandemic that you want the government to sit back and do nothing, that they shouldn't be legislating, that we might not need to have extraordinary measures. But I don't think we needed kind of blank check authoritarian measures. And that is completely what we've seen over the last 18 months and a breakdown of the rule of law. Do you think the public are less concerned about it than perhaps they ought to be because we've been so terrified about COVID that a lot of people feel like, well, any measure to

to help with that is necessary. We certainly see people, you know, people were talking about how anyone who goes abroad and then brings back COVID should be, you know, sent to jail for 10 years or something. Like people see... Oh, no, just fibbing on the form, you can go to jail for 10 years.

Right, right. Wow. So, so Pete, I guess what I'm getting at is we can complain that it hasn't been properly democratically scrutinized. And I think that's a very important point, which I want to come to a bit later. But on the broad side of it, I think, is it fair to say the public generally

haven't really been that concerned about this? It's a good question. I think that the public, my sense is that the public is that the public is quite divided. I think particularly people who have been living in fairly comfortable situations making sourdough for the last year are not that concerns. They might be used to working from home. They might not be economically hit as much as everyone else. they might not be the kinds of people that are targeted by the police when they go out.

But I think that there are probably millions of people who are actually completely alarmed and freaked out by what's happened over the last year and who don't have a voice and haven't been given a voice because the media has been doing the government's work for it. And you might, again, you might say there are very good reasons for that, but there hasn't been any balance. and even on like really simple matters like how democracy and politics work. You know, I've been watching incredulously political correspondence fail to even acknowledge basic massive changes in the way that Parliament works or total lack of scrutiny, total lack of opposition. The way that timing of introducing some of this legislation has been so completely, cynical to basically disempower Parliament. Now compare that to what happens when the same, broadly the same government, tried to disempower Parliament over Brexit. It was top of the news.

It was the biggest news story. Everyone became aware of the importance of parliament, a parliamentary procedure, the power of MPs. We have a parliamentary democracy. We don't have a completely executive-dominated democracy. And that was a completely different type of coverage. And Brexit too was important because it was, you know, it was the will of the people. The pandemic is important, but for the sake, have some balance. And I think it also doesn't help people who are losing trust in the establishment and in institutions because they feel deliberately silenced and not represented, whether that's on the media or actually whether it's online as well,

where you, I mean, I could go on forever about this, but, you know, severely shrinking space for the sorts of things you can say about the current situation on Facebook, for example. Oh, we'll get into that. Don't worry about that. Yeah. We'll get into that. But didn't you find it surprising?

You know, the whole point of an opposition is to challenge the government. If anything, they were even more authoritarian. Yeah, even more authoritarian. and also I think the general Keir Stama's general approach seems to be

you won't be able to put a paper wedge between me and the government and a kind of like sit back let's see if they fail maybe then I'll pick up some votes that seems to be the kind of strategy to me I just want to be clear by the way Big Brother Watch is a non-partisan organisation

I'm actually personally a non-partisan person as well and part of the reason for that and I think part of the reason that a lot of people are disillusioned with politics is we're back in the realms of a kind of, you can't, a kind of bipartisan consensus. I mean, there's a growing consensus between the two main parties. This is what we had kind of for a lot of the Blair years as well. And then just this whirlpool of authoritarianism at the center of it where citizens are losing out. And I think, I think it's a really bad strategy

for any political party. It's deeply, deeply unfair to the people that they claim to represent. And it's bad for British democracies, actively harms democracy. And it has been left to rights groups and NGOs like us to do the hard scrutiny work. And you're basically delivering scrutiny work to MPs

and say, please look at this. Just don't have to do the work yourself. Just have a look at what's actually going on. Speak up for the people who care about this. For example, under the Coronavirus Act, the power that I mentioned to detain potentially infectious people, unsurprisingly, has never been used lawfully to detain potentially infectious people. It's been used as another stick to beat people with, and it's been used for 100% unlawful prosecutions. We know that because we campaigned as soon as it was passed to say the CPS needs to be reviewing every prosecution that's happening under this power, because it's so extreme.

And they've found that hundreds of people have been unlawfully prosecuted, not a single lawful prosecution. And we have lobbied Parliament to remove those powers for obvious reasons. We've never had a law that's being used only ever unlawfully to jail people. And it remains in power now.

It's very hard to motivate the opposition to even say anything about it. Do you think there's been a watershed moment with the murder of Sarah Everard where suddenly people realised that, hang on, you can't even attend, you know, a vigil without the police coming in and literally kneeling on people's necks, particularly women. And there was that very striking image. Do you think the tide has turned? She was kneeling on her back. The officer was kneeling on her back, yeah. I think it obviously shook a lot of people. and the optics of it were absolutely awful.

I was there as well. It was pretty bad. Yeah, the atmosphere at the vigil was, you know, the way the police were dealing with it was typically kind of brutish, really, for no obvious reason. But actually, people have been treated like that at protests for quite a long time.

and, you know, I might really care about that particular one, but there are other ones, if you defend the right to free speech, you defend it agnosticly for whatever it is the individuals are speaking about. There had been plenty of other protests that had been brutally policed, where people have been arrested and now facing prosecutions. The prosecution is now coming through the courts, and no one was willing to speak up for them.

Very few people, we did, but very few people were willing to speak up for them. So actually, one of the things that we, did was look at all of those MPs who came out after the vigil and said that was terrible policing, we should defend the right to protest, and said, asked them to sign a joint statement saying we think that there should be an exemption for the right to protest in the lockdown regulations, which many of them hadn't said before. We'd been saying, this is really important. You can't ever criminalise protest. And then we released it on a weekend when there was a massive anti-lockdown protest,

which I don't know that all of the MPs have maybe clocked. I'm not saying it was like a deliberate thing, but I think it was really important that, you know, if you're defending the right to protest, you defend it for everyone. And also you defend it because you have to bear in mind that, as in that case, you never know what's around the corner. So you never know if there's going to be a sun change of circumstance or an event

or some kind of outpouring where people want to express themselves. Are you really going to criminalise those people? You're going to give them a criminal record where it's going to ruin their career or limit their life opportunities just because they wanted to hold a placards and say something they cared about. But that is literally the, those protest restrictions remain in place today. And I'm aware there's big protests this weekend. And I'm sure more people will be arrested and prosecuted, unfortunately.

Well, you talk about we don't know what will happen in the future and how rules and regulations and laws are going to be used. And I think that's such an important point because we are also not party political. I mean, we think they're all bloody useless at the moment. At the moment. Well, yeah, for a very long time now, but particularly at the moment. But nonetheless, I think a lot of people might be willing to kind of allow the current sort of, you know, people would, I think, see it as a sort of soft a version of what a conservative government could be, potentially.

So Boris Johnson isn't someone people think is going to, you know, start the fourth right in the UK. But you are putting things in place where there's no democratic accountability. Things aren't being checked. Things aren't being vetted. Extraordinary powers are being given. They're being misused, as you say. No legal use of a law would seem to me to suggest that it's a bad law, right? But do you think people just not thinking ahead in terms of what the consequences of this will be down the line? Well, I think I guess part of the luxury of living in a relatively stable democracy is that people get complacence.

But not everyone is. Again, I mean, I do actually think there's been a bit of a sea change. I can only say it from my perspective. I mean, Big Brother Watch, we're still a really small organization. But for us, we've had a massive surge of support. The phone never stops. Some people just want to talk. and sometimes I find myself spending just a couple of hours on the phone just talking to someone who has actually just suddenly become quite freaked out by the situation that we're in. Even if that's a journalist or a member of the public or sometimes a member of parliament, I mean, there really are members of parliament who are freaked out by what they are seeing from their perspective, some of whom aren't speaking about it completely frankly in the public domain.

And so this is kind of, this is one of the things that really worries me about the current situation that we're in. It's kind of like, it's kind of a bit North Korean, the way that people are self-censoring. And so even though there might be broad acknowledgement that we're in a very perilous position, things have gone too far, there's been a breakdown of some of the basic architecture of what makes us a democracy. when people are witnessing, you know, the 90-year-old man that got thrown in the back of a police van for going to a protest, things just start triggering people to really, really acknowledge that we've gone perhaps beyond a point of return, but people won't talk about it. And even within social circles, a lot of, you know, kind of, you know, ordinary, liberal, social, circles, these are difficult things to talk about. Even in mine, you know, it's, it's, a lot of people don't want to talk about. You know, you want to be, there's this is odd kind of sense emerged as what you want to be seen as like a true believer in the national program and the clapping and everything.

I mean, there's something that's a bit too, you know, I like the initiative so much as anyone, but there was the whole, you know, banging the pots and stuff. There is, there's something a bit disturbing about. this level of self-censorship. Yeah, I mean, I didn't take part on any of that because I'm a miserable gip. She just laughed like, yeah, probably. Yeah, I mean, there's no dispute.

There's no dispute about that. I just find this so, so worrying. And I really like your opinion on this. Do you think the government are going to give back some of these powers? Because I look at them and I go, will they? They don't like giving up power any of these fuckers. Yeah, they will never give back. powers, never. And I suppose that's why I see, I don't think we can really understand the context

that we're in now without understanding the post-9-11 context. That completely changed everything and to this day has changed everything. And all we've ever seen since then is a ratcheting of powers, which is why it was like, you know, the privilege of my life to work at Liberty because Liberty did so much in the post-9-11 years under Shammy to challenge some of those excesses of government power. But we do still broadly live under all the counter-terror legislation,

you know, so much change, mass surveillance. And so it's going to be the same. I think now we've got an emerging concept of bioterrorism. The idea that we perhaps will walk around society with health passes, increasing surveillance generally, the idea that we're kind of now on license from the state, that each of us is a potential, not only terrorist, but biohazard. And there's this whole new raft of state controls that are going to be deemed as acceptable or even necessary, or even that would be unsafe not to have them.

And so how do you peel back that? You'd have to peel back that. You'd have to peel back the whole narrative. I think we, I mean, obviously it's our mission to try and get the government to give some of those powers up, but it won't happen by itself. So yeah, people need to get involved now and take action now and realize their own power and influence now, which everyone does have, and I think is underestimated, because this is going to be a marathon and it's almost too late, I think. Hey, Constantine, do you love trigonometry? Of course, incredible interviews, hilarious live streams, hard-hitting satire, plus my

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That's right. It's a place for you to hang out with like-minded people, share thoughts, memes and discuss the show. You can enjoy it for free, but it also gives you the option of supporting us for as little as $7 a month. And if you want to give more, you can. We have incredible rewards for our higher tier supporters as well. We've got everything for mugs, monthly group calls and one-on-two chats with me and KK. Get in. Join our community by hitting the link in the description and the pin comment below. See you there, guys. You raised one thing that I really care about very strongly, and this is the vaccine passport thing. And people should be making their own decision about the vaccine. I think if people are at risk or whatever, they should be

definitely taking it. That's my opinion. For younger and healthy people, I think it's a different calculation. But it doesn't matter where you are on the vaccine. The vaccine passport thing, I think people need to understand the implications of this. But there's also another dimension to this, which is that ministers like Michael Gove and others said to us there were no plans to introduce vaccine passports. And this wasn't true, was it? No.

I mean, yeah, this is the other kind of worrying facet of this is that there have been barefaced and not even really effectively concealed lies consistently and a kind of choreography through the building of this growing authoritarianism. And so, yeah, contracts were going out from late last year to build vaccine passports or COVID passports. I mean, the way that they're looking at it now is it will be vaccine or test result or antibodies.

So while that's going on, people are going on television and saying we have no plans to do this while handing out millions of pounds in contract. Not just television, but stating on record in Parliament that we have no plans. And in fact, the Dean Zahari said, in fact, we urge businesses not even to think about it whilst they're setting up focus groups to talk about how it's going to go down with the public and starting to invest lots of money in building them. I think there's an element of cock up there really. I mean, I think, I don't know if Nadine Zahari actually knew what was going on

within his own brief. But there was a time in politics where you'd maybe resign after that. But now no one resigns over anything. The age of shame is over. Completely. Just fine in a fridge. Yeah.

You'll go away. So yeah. And now, you know, right up to where we are now, months later, the app, the vaccine passport is now a feature of the NHS app. And it says on the privacy policy that they envisage using it domestically. This might be useful for access to domestic events. Whilst in public and in Parliament saying we're really not sure about whether we're going to do this,

it was very finely balanced. You know, we're really looking at the facts. We're doing a consultation, et cetera, et cetera. but all the architecture is there. And actually Michael Gove said this week, no matter what decision is made, they're going to build the architecture because they could at some point spring it up.

And that was his reflection on what happened in Israel as well because they had the Green Pass, which is now being rolled back. And there was, you won't hear about it in the press here, but I'm in touch with people there. There was a lot of pushback to it. And he said, similarly you said, but it might be reignited at any point. So, yeah, and that's the idea

with test and trace as well, you know, it's 30 plus billion pounds of public money on a whole new architecture that can just be used. You know, that's not a temporary thing. That's not for the immediate situation. That's a long-term plan. And this is the thing. I mean, it happened after 9-11 as well, in that when, you know, there are certain projects that some people in government have always wanted to pursue. And then an emergency can give you an opportunity to very quickly, with less scrutiny and with very few limitations on public spending, just start to change everything. And there certainly are all sorts of visions within government about the ways to use technology and change the way that we live.

Well, what are your concerns with the vaccine passports? Because some people might be watching this going, well, look, it's making us safer. We can know who's got COVID, who doesn't. You know, maybe I haven't done a good job of explaining it. Like, what's the argument against vaccine passports? What are you concerned about? What should people watching this be like, oh, wow, okay, I hadn't thought of that. Well, we'll talk about COVID passports more generally, if that's okay, because that's where the government wants to at least start. So test, vaccine or antibody status. There are problems with each. I mean, first of all, it's not going to make anyone any safer. People who want to get vaccinated are going to get vaccinated. People who don't

want to are not going to. We don't yet have mandatory vaccines in this country. So we will see each other. We will mix. The whole idea that you can create this theatre around certain events and places where it's like a clean zone and you've only got the green ticks are allowed in and somehow that's going to change the whole public health situation. It's not. What it might do is alleviate liability on those businesses and on those events

because they can say, we've done this. Although one thing that was interesting that Michael Gove said yesterday is they're not going, one of the concerns we were raising is how does that affect staff? If you work, for example, at a football stadium and you're a steward, does that, That means now, as part of your work, you are forced to either have a vaccine or have a medical test in order just to go to work. But he said that they're not going to put the obligation on staff, which makes the theatre even more ridiculous.

Because you're not going to have only green ticks. And the whole idea of that stupid. How do you get to the football stadium? We get there on the coach with everyone else or the bus or the tube where you're packed in with, you know, spreaders or, you know, whatever we now are. So I think the risk is that this, it's an ID system, it's a digital ID system. And back when you had the ID debate after 9-11, it was treated as kind of a future risk. Like, imagine if you had to have your health records on there. I've got to imagine if people started asking to see your health status or, you know,

they had HIV on there or something. These kind of things that come with a lot of stigma and control. That's the starting point for this is that you have your health records and you're, you show them to people and you carry it with you most places you go or, you know, you're deemed a different class of citizen. So this is ID cards and digital ID cards on steroids, population-wide. And it will become a tool for discrimination, for division. It will be used as, as I'm afraid, yet another stick to beat people with.

You know, there will be certain people will ask other certain people. people to see their pass. And I think that will make us into a very, very ugly checkpoint dystopian society. Do you think they're going to pass it through? They're going to pass the legislation to enforce this? Do you know what? I think there might still be something to play for. And I think watching Michael Gove in his evidence session this week, he was, he actually

always looks quite inflated, but he was quite deflated. but he was quite deflated. I think that's just his face, I'll be going to be honest with you. He was quite deflated in the way that he was presenting it. It didn't seem to really... I don't know what's going on behind the scenes,

but I get the sense... I mean, it's no secret, I think, within cabinet, this is a very controversial idea. And anyone with any political sense knows they're going to get a hammering going for it. I mean, there will be serious, serious kickback, I think. And I think they'd be making...

They definitely will be. grave, grave mistake. I mean, I think the Conservative Party forgets they are, especially where this kind of electoral shift has happened. They are kind of on licence from the working class. You know, this is not a, they really shouldn't assume that this is a new permanent state of affairs, nor should they assume that the failure of the opposition

equates to their success. And I think a lot of it stems from the kind of anti-establishment sentiment around Brexit and the sense of being betrayed and all this kind of thing. I can't think of anything more establishment, more controlling than foisting digital IDs and COVID IDs on a public that has a historic, long-held, aversion and skepticism towards the idea. In fact, it was one of the reasons. that the Tories got into power in 2010, they promised to scrap ID cards.

So I think there are people probably who are thinking about the political ramifications of this also the fact that there's no real point, there's going to be no real benefits, either in public health terms or political terms. And I do get the sense that now that there's some, it's like the wind's been taken out of the sales of the idea. And I think that is down to our campaigning and everyone who's speaking out against. this in, you know, rights groups, media, the protests. I think that's really visible and tangible. And if we continue to do that, it might just be that we won't actually see this come to

fruition. However, if we're not successful in that, then they're going to introduce them for COVID passports for large event, large ticketed events like sports, music, festivals. or venues of a certain capacity. And he also said he would do that through a statutory instrument. So it's not even primary legislation in a normal sense, which means you can't, MPs can't amend it. It's like an all or nothing.

My understanding where the numbers are, there would still be a vote. My understanding on where the numbers are is that they would have a hard time getting that through Parliament, but it all comes down to labour, actually. I mean, the numbers are much. Well, that's reassuring. The numbers are much easier to do on the conservative side

because I think they don't have the confidence of their own party. The question is, will Labor oppose them? And certainly the Labour back benches will, but whether the front bench will remains to be seen. There's just very much on the fence of the moment. But I think what Keir did say, which is right, is that it's fundamentally un-British. Well, we've done quite a lot of things that fundamentally un-British in the last year.

I guess the takeaway from this is everyone should. write to their MP, I think, about this. Is that? I think it has a surprisingly more impact than people think. I mean, often when we're lobbying MPs, they'll say, I just don't have emails in my inbox about this. All right, well, let's make sure there's some emails in the inboxes about this. So, okay, let's move on a little bit.

We've talked about government action. I actually no longer think government is the most powerful institution that exists in the world. It's me and you, mate. It's just me and you. She's laughing more than any, and more than at any point during the interview. So there we go. I actually think that the biggest powers in the world are the big tech companies at the moment.

They control who gets to be president, who of the United States, and they can influence that. They've shown their willingness to do that. And in terms of the issue of COVID, we have seen that, for example, the lab leak hypothesis, the idea that the COVID-19 came from a lab in China. initially was dismissed as a conspiracy theory. Anyone who said anything about it would be banned from Twitter,

banned from Facebook, the YouTube channel would be deleted, etc. Now that issue is coming back as potentially the truth about what happened. Now, we don't know, but the conversation wasn't able to be had. And it's only thanks to a lot of people bravely going against that, that we seem to have that conversation now. We've had a conversation on our show with a doctor about some aspect of COVID-19, medical microbiologist, which was taken down by YouTube. And YouTube was very heavy in the censorship of people who had a view about COVID-19 that was not the particular view that was supposed to be

allowed at that moment and time. And then three months later, suddenly all of that actually turned about the efficacy of masks, for example, right? So what is the situation with regards to big tech? Where are we? Like, they just, it seems to me, just disliked. what we can and can't talk about now? Yeah, completely. It's such an inversion of everything that the internet promised to be, this big space for people to speak without barriers and speak directly to power.

And increasingly it's becoming like a controlled, government-controlled actually, speech zone. Because even finding a distinction, between some of the big tech companies and governments is becoming increasingly hard. And again, this is another extraordinary thing that this government is wading into with a new bill, the online safety bill, whereby they have invented a category of content that is harmful. Anything that's harmful needs to be regulated on the internet or taken off the internet, even if it's lawful. And so part of what

the tech companies are doing is preempting that. They can see this regulation coming and they're preempting that. Part of it I think is driven by kind of reputational concerns. There's this whole, God only knows why, but there's this whole category of journalism at the moment. It's like, we found a bad thing on the internet. It's like, what? Really?

All those billions of people who found a nasty one in there? That's become a whole category. and so they're very responsive to that. And yeah, we're kind of completely through the looking glass in terms of where the shape of the restrictions online. I know you have felt the brunt of that a bit. I've actually felt the brunt of that myself. Perfectly reasonable, ordinary stuff

that you can be banned online for saying. And I think especially given the proximity of some of that recently over coronavirus to the PR wishes of the Chinese government is pretty chilling. Yeah, I mean, I know Ian Beryl's piece on unheard, which just merely sort of questioned the efficacy of the World Health Organization investigation into the origins of COVID was marked as as false on Facebook. And now, of course, they're rolling back. Well, who'd have thought it? Facebook should never be. Big tech company should never be the arbiters of free speech. And also the whole concept of free speech has never ever been

and should never be the accepted consensus of government authorities or intergovernmental authorities. I mean, the whole point of free speech is it allows ordinary citizens to speak their truth, their opinions. I fucking hate that. My truth. No such thing.

I didn't mean that. I know you didn't. But to give their views to power. Yeah. And actually now what they're saying is you can say what you like if it agrees with the government's view on things. And I don't even think that that...

It's crazy. isn't it? Why is this so accepted? I mean, it's like a big alarm bell moment. I think it should be for all of us that there is this shrinking space to speak freely and especially given how much we spend our lives online, the shrinking space to think freely as well and how it's actually shaping the kinds of conversations

we're having when we're offline. You say that, and look, I'm going to give the argument and people always say, look, they're private companies, they can do what they want. If you don't like it, go somewhere else. What is your response to that? Well, I mean, the idea that this isn't de facto censorship is crazy. I mean, of course it is. I mean, they are hosting the conversations of billions of people.

There are more people on Facebook than the populations of many, many countries around the world. And just with one policy change, they can affect what literally billions of people can say to each other. So this is a very serious type of censorship. Yes, the private companies, but part of what I'm worried about actually with the online safety bill is that because the government is saying, is creating these expectations on them, that they are doing regulation and censorship of lawful content if it's basically undesirable, harmful, then, yeah, we're no longer looking at the free will of private companies. We're looking at

the total integration, where we heard this before, of the private and public sphere into a system that controls what people can say. I can't think of anything more dangerous, more ludicrous than that. And also

it creates a barrier to entry. So even if you are a new company that wants to create a new platform. Parlet. Then you've got all of these regulatory barriers that mean, you know, you would need a team far bigger. You'd need an infrastructure of a size that you clearly can't have as a fledgling company.

So there's a total barrier to entry as well as this monopolisation. It's so worrying, isn't it? I've cheered you up then. Yeah, yeah, you have. Well, I'm miserable anyway, and you've just made me more miserable. So thank you very much for that. Sorry. But let's look at sort of what can people do?

Because what we're doing is we're analysing the problems. But what do you think are going to be the solutions moving forward? I mean, obviously I think that joining with or supporting organisations like us, like Big Brother Watch, is important as part, certainly part of it, because we're tracking this. We're scrutinising what's going on. We're lobbying on these bills. We are trying to bring more to public attention,

certainly to political attention and producing research and analysis around this. And litigation where necessary as well. So we're currently crowdfunding to bring a challenge to COVID passports if they go ahead. We just won a challenge on mass surveillance post-Snowden. So we do litigate as well.

But I think I think that's really important kind of finding your crowd and finding like-minded people who are concerned about these things. I think also this may be a very hard thing but actually even just talking about these issues

with people, there is definitely, and also to your member of parliament, of course, because it's often people who are the most kind of disillusioned who realize the kind of problems with the political system. They don't want to engage with it. I completely empathise with that. I understand that.

But it's a necessary thing to do, especially in this kind of, you know, dangerous moment that we're in. We have to be ringing alarm bells, you know, wherever we can, particularly with people that hold the reins on power, or at least who should do. But I think actually even talking about these things is really important. I think the kind of spiral of silence among a lot of, you know, otherwise liberal people is a real problem. It's a massive problem. And I don't think, you know, spaces like this, I bet there's a lot of, I bet you've had emails from people that say, I've been looking for something like this. So I'm really glad you had this conversation, I haven't seen it elsewhere, or just somewhere you can actually think and speak freely about some issues that otherwise

aren't discussed very much in the media or among the chatterati more generally. Yeah, those are some of the emails we get. We get a few others as well. But actually, you bring up the political point, and I know that you are not partisan, and we try and stay away from picking sides as much as we can. We just try and operate on basis of principles of what we think is important. And you mentioned that there's a silence seemingly, particularly on the sort of liberal side of the spectrum. And I find that very odd. I found a very odd when I, as a comedian, started saying, well, there's a bit of an issue with free speech going on. People immediately assumed that I was right wing.

Yeah. And I don't, I have no idea what your politics are. frankly, it doesn't even interest me. We're talking about this issue. To me, this is not a political issue. It's an issue of like the West for centuries has been trying to get to a point of enlightenment where there's certain things that we all understand are important for liberal society. How has that link been made between freedom and being like a bigger of some kind? Like, how did that happen? It's a very, very good question, isn't it? I don't know. And it's, yeah, I was looking back to, you know, the ACLU in the US and...

They've changed the tune lately, haven't they? Yeah, there's been some big changes over there. I mean, obviously a really important organisation. They do loads of really important work. But, you know, they made their reputation through doing some of the hardest free speech work you can imagine. They defended the rights of neo-Nazis to march through a Jewish area in the US and to do these neo-Nazi marches, you wouldn't actually be able to do that under UK law. So already this is more, you know, this is, we're looking at something under the kind of American model of free speech.

It would be definitely incitement, all sorts of offences that could fall under here. But it forced the ACLU and many of their advocates who are Jewish to put forward a very, very competitive. argument about why they thought that that was not only in principle but in practice the right thing. And there is a long Jewish tradition of defending the right to free speech and human rights and civil liberties generally, obviously, given modern history. And we've come so far away from that. They were, I think, absolutely vindicated in the campaigns that they did. They showed themselves to be truly agnostic, truly dedicated to the principles of free speech. It abysed, it abysed. It

eventually defused the situation. And like you say, if you believe in kind of post-enlightenment idea of rationality, how does rationality work? Why do we have free speech? Because we trust in individuals, in people and publics, to explore information, deal with it. And through free and fair access to information, rationality, will prevail. The Enlightenment idea was not, it was obviously, in fact, a kickback to the idea that the elites control the information for the benefit of the public. We've just gone back about 500

years because we're back at this kind of view that the elites need to control the information for the benefit of the public. And I think there's perhaps a problem with maybe elitism in some liberal circle, certainly in rights organizations. I mean, they are generally, you know, middle class, you know, organizations, but they simply don't trust ordinary people with information. As you saw a lot of this rhetoric around Brexit, it's kind of idea of, you know, whatever your views on it, again, but the very dominant... We were on the right side of that one. The very, the very dominant idea of, like, anti-Brexit was that you have these like poor, brutish people

who can't properly understand information, they're just duped. And you actually had a bit of that after the most recent election as well. You know, these working class people don't really know, you know, they're just kind of duped, you know, idiots. This is kind of like amorphous group

of dumb people who make mistakes. Unsurprisingly, you know, that's not going to pay off politically, but also it's just not true. And I think the damage that is, I think it's a real, I think it's actually a travesty that there is such an abandonment

of free speech principles that that kind of philosophical underpinning of free speech and why it matters on the left, it's really sad. And the other kind of practical thing about it is that there's just no, part of the reason maybe you see less from rights organisations

is there's no there's no funding for free speech work anymore and this is maybe interesting to only people inside my world but it might help to explain to people why you see less of it I mean you have big funding organisations a lot of groups rely on them

to do their work and no one's funding free speech stuff there's a lot of funding for disinformation misinformation type work Do you think that's maybe because to just offer a little bit of a counter, the internet has opened up a massive can of worms when it comes to mass communication. So 50 years ago, if someone was standing on the street corner banging on about how vaccines are actually microchips and whatever, you know, people, 20 people would walk past probably all ignore that person and there was no harm done. Nowadays, David Ike says something.

People are burning down 5G masks the next day. there's a bit more of a consequence to speech when it's done online because of the multiplication factor of it because you can reach millions of people. And because let's be honest, the internet does incentivize the spreading of misinformation because it's exciting. It's like extra spicy food or extra flavorful. Like people want it. They want to hear the, oh, the secret answer to all actually was, you know, the lizards or whatever. I don't know that the consequences of speech have changed. I mean, people made the same kind of arguments when the printing press was invented.

But the printing press did allow for mass communication in a way that previously wasn't possible. Yeah. Yeah, so people also had this kind of panic about, you know, the proles having access to information. Yeah, the lack of control, lack of centralised control over it. I mean, the thing about the internet is that if you truly democratize information, you can then, especially if you're in a kind of forum environment, you will have at your disposal lots of different views and interpretations of what you're reading and seeing. You can do your own research. You can find academic papers. You can find journalism, unheard views, whistleblowers. Yeah, but that isn't how most people consume their information. people go on YouTube and go, oh, there's a thing here about how the vaccines are bullshit. I'll click on that.

I'll watch that. And they won't then go to a forum or anywhere else to check out the counterfactuals and the counter arguments. That's kind of the argument that, you know, I do have some sympathy with, which is the internet has created unique challenges around this issue. Because people don't just, you know, not everyone is going around seeking all the different points of view on a particular issue. You know, you go on a Mumsnet forum about the trans issue.

There's only one view being represented there, right? And I'm not saying it's the wrong or right view, but it's only one view. And increasingly, everyone is kind of stuck in the echo chamber of their own opinion. And I think that that's maybe where I have some understanding of the issues that the big tech companies are trying to address. Do you see what I'm getting that? No. No. No.

No, for why. I agree that echo chambers are a problem. I think that's a massive problem and that people are curating their often increasingly radical worldviews by deciding who they hear from on heavily curated timelines. And also, you know, for example,

even when you go on Twitter, hardly anyone uses it chronologically anymore. So Twitter is pushing you the things that they think are going to be most attention-grabbing. Sometimes even people that you're not following, you know, they're trying to feed you things that are going to maintain your attention

because that's where the money is. And the same happens across all the platforms. It's not just there. So I think the echo chamber is a real problem much more than the availability of to speak freely and to access information freely, which let's not forget is a fundamental right and for very good reasons.

And I think the reason that those echo chambers are not the subject of scrutiny is because that's the business model and that's where the money is. If there was a proposal that said, I'd be really interesting. If we just were to try this thing, first of all, for a year, ban micro-targeted advertising, ban that kind of granular data collection from individuals and see what happens. And I think half of those problems, I think more than half of those

problems would just fall away. So what you're really saying is they're pretending to try and fix the problem. The problem is echo chambers, but they are pretending to fix it by restructions. in what people can say. If they just allowed the echo chambers not to form in the first place, we wouldn't have the issue. I think echo chambers are a problem. I mean, I also wouldn't say that it's not to say, free speech comes with problems, for sure. I'm not saying that videos that are deliberate falsehoods, etc., are not problematic. Of course they are. But the belief in free speech is that the best way to deal with them is by having a free and open environment. and by having forums where people can speak and challenge.

If you don't have that, if you don't have debates, and if you push people into kind of their deeper, darker, echo chambers where they can't be seen and heard, it's not going to change their point of view. It's going to make them feel marginalized and ignored, and it's not going to expose them to the challenges they would otherwise encounter. And moving on, I saw a very, very interesting article

about one of the head bods at Microsoft worrying about AI. And the fact that we're essentially, if we don't actually challenge the progress that we're making and we let technology run away with itself, we're going to be in a dystopian society very, very quickly and far sooner than we originally thought. To me, that was one of the head guys at Microsoft. What do you think about that?

Elon Musk has been warning of the same thing for a long time as well. Yeah, there's a lot of people who work in the tech sector, some of the, you know, it's where you find a lot of preppers as well. You know, people who are worried about the direction of travel and how bad things might get and the kind of tech dystopia that awaits. Most of them are still willing to make some money out of it before they decide to, you know, pack a, get a backpack and move on. But yeah, I mean, already, you know, some of our work has looked at

as how that's creeping into, how that's affecting citizens here, early uses of AI. So you see AI in the criminal justice system already. There was a system used by Durham Police where when someone was suspected of an offence, they could be put through this AI tool that would assess how likely they were to re-offend. This is before they've even been prosecuted, by the way. So we don't even know if they've offended yet, essentially, from a criminal justice point of view. Yeah. And there was this data fed in about the individual, judge whether they're going to re-offend. And then, judge, are you going to prosecute them or put them through to a rehabilitation program? And we were then looking at the types of data that were being fed into that. And that's often where the problem, I mean, there are obvious problems and risks with AI. But I mean, I think you have to start from the point of what's the AIS. I built on, often it's masses of personal data that kind of feeds the beast. And so they were

using postcode data. So, you know, this postcode would say something about you. And also a what's called a geodemographic segmentation tool. They're very popular in government now. It's basically every single person in this country has a profile given to them by this tool. There's more or less built on your postcode and millions of pieces of data that ranges from GCSE results, electricity usage, ratio of gardens to buildings, to kind of get a sense of like what kind of class and category of, there's about 60 odd different codes that you can be. And so this stuff was fed in to judge. someone's life outcome, basically.

I know a film about something like that. There's a minority report, something here? Yeah, there's so many things like that now. In the criminal justice system in particular, we've got facial recognition now that the police want to use, facial recognition cameras. Yeah, in local councils as well, one of the things we've been analysing recently

we've got a report coming up is about the use of automates, automated decision-making and big data in the welfare system, once you apply, what kind of profiling and processing are they now doing there? Starting a business can seem like a daunting task, unless you have a partner like Shopify. They have the tools you need to start and grow your business. From designing a website to marketing, to selling and beyond,

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Oh yeah, I'll just walk into the real world. But more and more, it just seems that technology is going at hyper speed and it's running away from us. Yeah. It's a classic story of power. You know, I think anyone, if you're civil liberties or a rights advocate, you have to scrutinize power and look where the sites of power are and try to, you know, make sure there's a healthy balance between citizens and those sites of power, whether it's governments or technology companies and so on. But I think one of the things that is obviously not great about my line of work is that often because of the situation, when you acknowledge it, and I think this is why so many people are in denial or cognitive dissonance about the current situation that we're in, when you really take stock of it and acknowledge it, it's quite daunting and the overwhelming sense is fear. And fear is just a very low vibration thing to dwell on. So, you know, that's a very low vibration thing to dwell on. So, you know, that's a problem. And I think we have to get beyond that.

I think what's perhaps exciting about the moment that we're in, as much as it is extremely challenging, is that whenever you see a force or an action, there's a re-action. And I do think, you know, people talk about the tech clash. There's some of that. I think that there will be probably delayed, but there will be a response to, you know,

the harder and faster, the pace of authoritarianism that we're experiencing right now, we will see the same kind of reaction to that. And how that's going to play out politically, et cetera, is something to watch. But I do think wherever there's a vacuum, that vacuum, a political vacuum, that will be filled. Like we can see over the last 10 years

with some of the anti-establishment kind of political movements, you know, we have to make sure those vacuums are filled in the right way. But I think that they will be. And that's why I think anyone, who is motivated by this moment, what we're currently going through as a country and more broadly, who is motivated to actually have a say about the future, especially if you're a parent, you know,

a lot of people are worried about the kind of world that their kids are going to grow up in, will do something about it. You know, the future is absolutely ours for the taking and we just have to claim it. And I think that will be an interesting thing to be part of and watch over the next few years. Well, it's a lovely note to end the interview on. We always finish with our final question, which is what is the one thing we're not talking about, but we really should be? Well, since we had this week our legal win in the legal challenge against mass interception after Snowden blew the whistle in 2013.

So we've just done eight years of a legal challenge. I think it's important for everyone to know if they don't already, if it's the last decade didn't get it through, that even in the UK, we are now living in an environment of mass electronic surveillance and our own government spy on us. What does that mean practically when you say mass electronic surveillance? Is your phone listening to you right now? The government collects and can collect and access.

calls, video calls, texts, messages. They can hack devices. They can hack entire nation's devices if they want to. We have the most totalitarian surveillance legislation of any democracy in the world in the UK and some of the most advanced capabilities. We've seen over the last few decades how you've had environmental activists,

race equality campaigners, environmentalists being spied on by their own government and sometimes with very negative impacts. That is a big chunk of the battle that we have to fight. And I would like to see a bit more that to kind of register on the political spectrum a bit more. But meanwhile, I would say to everyone, use signal. And we've gone back into being depressed. Well, you're back where you belong, mate. But we're going to do a couple more questions for locals only in a second.

But Silky, thank you so much for coming on the show. It's been a pleasure having you on. I have no doubt we will be calling you again very soon. Probably from a prison cell. Yeah, we could be. Help me. We could be meeting in prison. But tell everybody what they can do, how they can get involved with Big Brother Watch,

where they can find you and your work online. Thank you. Well, we are bigbrotherwatch.org.org. We're on Twitter. the watch. And we have some micro sites now as well. I think one that people might be interested at the moment is stopvaccinepassports.com.uk. Excellent. All right. Well, thank you so much for coming and thank you for watching at home. We will see you very soon with another brilliant interview like this one if we're not in prison. Which we probably will be. But anyway, keep following the channel

and we'll be streaming live from Belmont. See you soon, guys.