alt Hacker NewsThe UK is shaping a future of precrime and dissent management (2025)
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> The focus of policing is also shifting. As street crime continues to fall, more attention is directed toward protest, dissent, and the perceived risk of unrest.
Does street crime in fact continue to fall? I keep hearing about bicycles getting stolen, or how in London, mobile phones get snatched. It was also common to hear how police fails to prosecute various kinds of crime (usually mentioned in contrast to how they do prosecute noncrime crimes such as 'hate speech').
Here, for comparison, is a paragraph from an essay by Konstantin Kisin:
> A month earlier, I was walking through a posh part of London when I saw a young man in a balaclava snatch a bag from a tourist. When I told people about what I saw at various meetings, most people were surprised that I was surprised. Phone thefts, muggings and all kinds of petty crime are now considered normal and routine.
Which story is correct?
[0] -https://www.konstantinkisin.com/p/theres-good-news-for-brita...
In the UK what you are going to need to do going forward is essentially have an official and a non-official presence online. You are also going to need to use the cockroach strategy (at least tech wise), until this stuff gets unpopular enough amongst enough people that there is large push back that can't be ignored.
> The surveillance and predictive systems now being assembled are being designed not only for the current moment, but in preparation for what comes next. Whether in response to renewed austerity, military escalation, or widespread resistance, these tools are positioned to contain unrest before it surfaces. What’s emerging is a model of preemptive policing—structured around behaviour, association, and predicted risk. Individuals are reduced to data profiles, tracked not for what they’ve done but for their statistical proximity to disruption. Suppression is exercised in advance.
That is why they are so keen to backdoor any popular encrypted messaging platform. They can't monitor communications. Unfortunately most people seem to supportive of this. I was quite surprised when my Father (who is a layman) told me he supported this, this is a person that doesn't vote largely for the same reasons that I don't (I think all politicians are awful)..
Additionally. I was listening to someone that engaged at essentially Red Teaming for UK authorities (I forget who it was now). They stated that if you were a dissident, if you kept your activities offline and organise in person the authorities wouldn't be aware of this activity. I don't know if this is true, but it sounds plausible.
What’s unsettling here isn’t any single policy, but the convergence: predictive policing, protest restrictions, and administrative punishments all justified as “risk management.” Even if each tool seems narrow, together they normalize acting on suspicion rather than action, which quietly lowers the bar for dissent.
The UK faces real structural problems with the inflating cost of living regardless of government, roughly halfway attributable to failing the lower-level challenge of continuing to import adequate quantities of diesel at affordable prices and the rest mostly coming from an aging population. Spot diesel has come down from the price spike of covid to approximately 1.3x the 2019 price.
Almost all physical goods have diesel prices contribute to their sticker price in a significant way. The diesel exporting countries are all incrementally increasing their domestic consumption, leaving less for the world market year on year.
The UK government isn't trying much policy for tackling the causes or the symptoms, largely because the government is disproportionately drawn from a class of people who don't want those policies. The media of the upper middle class of the UK has sincere column after sincere column of hating the rest of the population and calling for better controls over the cattle.
Tens of millions of people, held hostage by a clique of crabs in a bucket.
In China, the social contract at least is "you give up some individual freedoms and some privacy, never dissent against the government, and in exchange the government promises you prosperity"
I wonder what the Brits get in exchange for their giving up of personal freedoms?
I'm aware this is a cultural difference, government betrayal and overreach are hotbutton and mainstay topics in the common culture of the UK and related states (e.g. the US).
It is nevertheless so weird to me that rather than trying to monitor and mitigate the abuses of legal instruments like the ones proposed, people are trying to prevent and abolish things wholesale.
Everything is depicted as a slippery slope to abuse or as an excuse for abuse, and perhaps because people actually believe in it, they do materialize as one too. Presents as a vicious cycle to me, and as if people were disallowing themselves from recovering of it.
I really have to wonder how much of it is the available options always being just two parties in these territories, and the electoral systems supporting that convergence. In such a scheme, I can indeed definitely imagine people being compelled to vote further and further from their own interests and values, and the slippery slope rhetoric being finding a manifestation.
I'm very confused by this, on many fronts.
I don't really know why the government is doing it. It's not for grand headline reasons, as it's all pretty quiet, for this and for prior changes.
I also really don't think the UK is in the grips of some kind of authoritarian nightmare. If anything, my experience is that it's impossible to convince the police to do anything. These days, surveillance state or not, when your car or phone get stolen, the police write you a crime number to take to the insurers and consider their job done. Even if it's all done for nefarious reasons, this would be an easy sidekick to running a surveillance state that earns the state some cash, and every autocrat likes money. The UK democracy is flawed in many ways, but I really don't think a spy state is currently the problem.
So... Why?
Here is a good book on how pre-crime society is created, who is driving more "management" and who benefits
https://www.amazon.com/Compliance-Industrial-Complex-Operati...
God bless Managed Democracy.
Not a word on Palantir. Is this because of the adept wording by the ministry of justice? I highly doubt they are developing this in a vacuum.
As re reminder, In the UK Palantir holds extensive contracts across defense (multi-billion MoD deals for AI-driven battlefield and intelligence systems) and healthcare (7y £330m+ NHS Data Platform). In France, its involvement is narrower but concentrated on *domestic* intelligence.
UK dystopia: accelerating (Precrime)
EU dystopia: accelerating (Chat Control)
US dystopia: probably accelerating?
What a time to be alive!
Day by day these things sound more like Sci-Fi series announcments.
Public money gets spent on the advice of AI systems and consultancies.
Costs overrun, benefits are unclear, and it quietly disappears.
Those responsible resurface later at consultancies, selling the same ideas elsewhere.
A lot of these attacks on the UK regarding free speech are coming from the American Right, an obsession which I can't quite understand the motive for.
Notably, stories on HN about the very severe repression on civil liberties in the US (get shot in the face for protesting about ICE...) get flagged for closure, but putting the boot into the UK for much more wishy-washy issues like this seem to be fair game.
I'm not saying there aren't genuine issues with civil liberties (for example, things like the Online Safety Act are ridiculous) but they are magnified out of all proportion by the US media / social media disinformation megaphone.
This particular article is an opinion piece from last April by "the world's oldest surviving anarchist publication" (apparently). I'm not sure why it deserves front page HN status. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_(British_newspaper)
As a Brit, I find it very hard to believe that the majority of comments in this thread are not either written out of ignorance or are bots.
The article is from an anarchist organisation and sensationalist. 'Precrime' in the sense described is performed routinely by all intelligence agencies and police networks in the West.
Criticisms from across the pond reflect a spectacular lack of perspective. The UK is far more free than the US - a country with a fascist leader, ICE thugs who go about masked with guns and shoot to kill US citizens apparently with the full endorsement of the US President, a weaponised justice system that can target the chairman of the federal bank and strip a military Senator of his pension and rank simply for what he says (so much for 'free speech!'), and levels of inequality and centralised wealth and political funding that undermine democracy.
Isn't Minority Report a documentary about why this doesn't work?
just think if the prior election went the other way in the US, this is where the us would be right now
Orwell worked in Spain for about a year, 1936-37, his work on BBC during WWII was twice as long.
In my opinion, 1984 was shaped by his work in Britain.
I think Orwell was prescient and attuned to this sort of thinking in England at his time. Perhaps, it never really went away? e.g.: "crimestop"
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/725596-crimestop-means-the-...
It isn't precrime or "dissent management" that is the problem, but the engineering of behavior and thought in society where such concepts are acceptable to people.
I don't think we can discuss it in detail here, but with this , chat control, and all sorts of other controversial laws, you'll notice the people of the country actually support that stuff. There is an interesting conversation there about democracy, and the priority of the working class people. Naturally, a person living paycheck-to-paycheck and fighting for healthcare and keeping their job (or getting one) does not care about this stuff. So who does? Not the ruling class. A lot of people (including on HN) who think this stuff is important (rightfully) are not poor people, perhaps middle-class?
Is democracy itself something that can survive, if it is left entirely up to popular vote? Power has gravity, it always wants more. Ideally, there would be institutions that are democratically established and managed that would be trusted to safeguard the people's interests. In the US, there are executive department agencies for example like the FCC, FTC, FDA and more, but they are subject to those in power who are elected by the people.
My "food for thought" here is that similar to supreme courts, there needs to be a regulatory and oversight branch of the government, whose chiefs are apolitical (like actually, not like the US supreme court), well compensated, long-tenured (but not lifetime, more like 20 years), and appointed by confirmation of all other branches of government.
We need to address the problem of power, influence to wield power and incentives for those entrusted with power to act in good faith, but also with good competence. The last part is important, because I have no doubt, a lot of the politicians that come up with this Orwellian nonsense have good intentions, the outcome they seek are noble, just not the means. they just happen to be incompetent when it comes to the subject matter.
I wonder how many people are actually from the UK on these threads. There is always comments about "diversity" and "grooming rape gangs" and how everything labour do is bad, or about how the UK is an oppressive regime or somehow fundamentally anti-freedom. This always reads like fear mongering / Russian psy-ops propaganda to me.
I have many bones to pick with the UK government but a large number of people sprinting to these talking points at every chance they get is highly suspicious to me.
I hope they name it Pickles
This is a thousand times as concerning in the context of London than in the context of Baltimore. It addresses a concern that doesn't exist for the UK public, in a way that appears intended to oppress from the start, against a backdrop of arresting thousands of pensioners for disagreeing about a genocide.
where is my minority report?
Dobleplusgood.
I wonder at what point these countries will loose any moral ground against the likes of Russia, China etc.
Up until this point it was mostly that they would gladly fuck the other countries up but treated their own people way better than the other camp. But this difference is disappearing.
Of course there is always North Korea and other totally fucked up regimes they could use to compare and look white and fluffy
"We detected that you are about to commit a crime. Here is provisional 2-years sentence shall you decide to go ahead with the plans. It includes free single room, 3 meals a day, gym, library, daily walks and company of people like yourself. You will also receive counselling and you could take up a free course to advance your skills in desired field and post-release support for a year."
[dead]
Between arresting grannies for saying they support Palestinian Action and using armed officers to apprehend comedy writers I doubt they'll have the time.
The US is rounding up and murdering people like cattle. And also managing dissent with bot farms and deliberate suppression of bad think on social media and also normalising a president who is not just senile, but likely also a psychopath, and very possibly - and this is, sadly, not exaggeration, given recent revelations - not just a sexual predator, but a serial killer.
Compared to Rest of World, the UK is barely making a dent on the Authoritarian Leaderboard.
Which is not to say things are great, because they really aren't, and the deals with Palantir are especially suspect.
But so far at least, the death toll is still pretty low.
That’s just the way “freedom news” is framing it.
Social movements don’t just happen from grassroots these days. They’re seeded by foreign states. A simpler solution would be require ids for social media posting. If you don’t provide an id you get a limited number of views.
And I don’t see anything wrong with a preventative system in principle, we should be able to join up social services information with policing, because we have had cases where a mass murderer has been known to multiple services.
Edit: probably not ids but a token that verifies my nationality would be enough.
This is how you govern from a position of unpopularity.
The government knows they’re on the wrong side of many issues, to the point they know they can’t win an open debate.
So media control, regulation by enforcement, and institutional control becomes the focus of effort.