00:02:24.660So I think around March 2020, 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.
00:02:45.240and so when the coronavirus bill was published it was published about three days before it being
00:02:55.200passed 360 pages that is where my sleepless nights began because no one was really scrutinizing it
00:03:03.740certainly not the opposition very much and in there it's now an act it's still in force well
00:03:10.940over a year later in there you have the power to detain potentially infectious people which can be
00:03:19.020in a pandemic anyone there's no kind of clear threshold there's no detention time limit there's
00:03:24.840no clear place you would keep these people quarantine centers or anything no clear access
00:03:29.960to legal advice just the kind of legal constructions you don't normally see in a in a democracy or even
00:03:35.980in an emergency, the power to suspend the right to protest, the power to cancel gatherings,
00:03:42.940cancel elections, a reduction of thresholds around mental health detention. I mean, just a really,
00:03:49.720really broad range of sweeping powers, massive state enlargement with very little scrutiny. And
00:03:57.300that was supposed to last for two years. At that point, and of course, now we know people haven't
00:04:03.400been shipped off into quarantine centres for unknown amounts of time. They could be under
00:04:08.280the current law that we have, which is worrying enough in itself. And protests have basically
00:04:13.920been banned. But to have those kinds of powers at the fingertips of government so readily,
00:04:21.620so easily, cancelling elections even, you know, this is, it's really, really serious
00:04:26.980stuff, it puts us in a very perilous position where all you need is really, you know, a change
00:04:35.380of breeze. And suddenly we're living in a very, very different society. And let's remember as
00:04:41.100well, I mean, the whole idea of us being in this emergency, yes, it's very terrible. I mean, we are
00:04:47.200in quite mature democracy where we have the Civil Contingencies Act, for example. I mean, there are
00:04:52.080structures and laws in place that are designed for emergency situations. Why the government
00:04:59.060didn't use the Civil Contingencies Act, I don't know. There's never been a clear answer to that.
00:05:04.040It would mean that Parliament would be scrutinising what the government is doing
00:05:07.180very regularly. Instead, what they did with the Coronavirus Act is basically hand over
00:05:14.120the keys to the country, abdicate scrutiny to the government in perhaps most the enabling kind of
00:05:24.280way. That's where it started. I mean, obviously, since then, we've had literally hundreds of
00:05:29.380statutory instruments. So small pieces of legislation that go under the radar in Parliament
00:05:33.940that have changed the way that we live, that have criminalised pretty much every aspect of
00:05:38.380everyday life at different points. But that's where it started. And by that, I just want to
00:05:44.980be clear, I'm not saying at all in a pandemic that you want the government to sit back and
00:05:48.960do nothing, that they shouldn't be legislating, that we might not need to have extraordinary
00:05:53.060measures. But I don't think we need, I don't think we needed kind of blank check authoritarian
00:06:00.940measures. And that is completely what we've seen over the last 18 months and a breakdown of the
00:06:07.280rule of law do you think the the public are less concerned about it than perhaps they ought to be
00:06:12.880because we've been so terrified about covid that a lot of people feel like well any measure to to
00:06:18.340help with that is necessary uh we we certainly see people you know people were talking about
00:06:23.240how anyone who goes abroad and then brings back covid should be you know sent to jail for 10 years
00:06:27.860or something like people see no just fibbing on the form you can go to jail for 10 years right
00:06:32.940Wow. So 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?
00:06:50.280it's a good question i think that the public my sense is that the public is quite divided
00:07:00.720i think particularly people who have been living in fairly comfortable situations making sourdough
00:07:07.960for the last year are not that concerned they might be used to working from home they might
00:07:14.280not be economically hit as much as everyone else they might not be the kinds of people that are
00:07:18.600targeted by the police when they go out. But I think that there are probably millions of people
00:07:27.880who are actually completely alarmed and freaked out by what's happened over the last year and who
00:07:34.220don't have a voice and haven't been given a voice because the media has been doing the government's
00:07:39.480work for it. And you might, again, you might say there are very good reasons for that, but there
00:07:44.080hasn't been any balance and even on like really simple matters like how democracy and politics
00:07:50.940work um you know i've been watching incredulously political correspondents
00:07:57.940fail to even acknowledge basic massive changes in the way that parliament works or total lack of
00:08:06.500of scrutiny total lack of opposition um the way that timing of introducing some of this legislation
00:08:13.460has been so completely cynical to basically disempower Parliament. Now compare that to what
00:08:21.660happened when the same, broadly the same government, tried to disempower Parliament over Brexit.
00:08:28.320It was top of the news. It was the biggest news story. Everyone became aware of the importance of
00:08:36.300Parliament, a parliamentary procedure, the power of MPs. We have a parliamentary democracy. We
00:08:42.140don't have a completely executive dominated democracy and that was a completely different
00:08:46.500type of of of coverage um and brexit too was important because it was uh you know it was the
00:08:53.140will of the the people the pandemic is important but could i say have some have some balance and
00:08:58.660i think part it doesn't also doesn't help people who are losing trust in the establishment
00:09:03.740and in institutions because they feel deliberately silenced
00:09:10.240and not represented, whether that's on the media
00:09:12.900or actually whether it's online as well, where you, I mean,
00:09:18.080I could go on forever about this, but, you know,
00:09:21.520the severely shrinking space for the sorts of things you can say
00:09:25.680about the current situation on Facebook, for example.
00:09:28.580Oh, we'll get into that. Don't worry about that.
00:11:22.500It's been used as another stick to beat people with,
00:11:24.940and it's been used for 100% unlawful prosecutions.
00:11:28.660And 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.
00:11:38.540And they've found that hundreds of people have been unlawfully prosecuted, not a single lawful prosecution.
00:11:47.700And we have lobbied Parliament to remove those powers for obvious reasons.
00:11:51.380We've never had a law that's being used only ever unlawfully
00:11:56.740to jail people, and it remains in power now.
00:12:03.100It's very hard to motivate the opposition
00:12:43.660Yeah, the atmosphere at the vigil was, you know,
00:12:48.280the way the police were dealing with it was typically kind of brutish, really, for no obvious reason.
00:12:58.180But actually, people have been treated like that at protests for quite a long time.
00:13:04.420And, you know, I might really care about that particular one, but there are other ones.
00:13:09.080If you defend the right to free speech, you defend it agnostically for whatever it is that individuals are speaking about.
00:13:14.840there had been plenty of other protests that had been brutally policed where people have been
00:13:20.420arrested and now facing prosecutions the prosecution is now coming through the courts
00:13:24.520and no one was willing to speak up for them very few people we did but very few few people were
00:13:30.060willing to speak up for them so actually one of the things that we did was look at all of those
00:13:36.440MPs who came out after the vigil and said that was terrible policing we should defend the right
00:13:43.820to protest and said um asked them to sign a joint statement saying we think that there should be an
00:13:51.980exemption for the right to protest in the lockdown regulations which many of them hadn't said before
00:13:57.540we'd been saying this is really important you can't ever criminalize uh protest um and then we
00:14:05.040released it uh on a weekend when there was a massive anti-lockdown protest uh which i don't
00:14:12.260know that all of the MPs have maybe clocked I'm not saying it was like a deliberate thing
00:14:16.380um but I think it was really important that you know if you're defending the right to protest
00:14:20.880you defend it for everyone um and and also you defend it because you have to bear in mind that
00:14:27.580as in that case you never know what's around the corner so you never know if there's going to be
00:14:32.980some change of circumstance or event or some kind of outpouring where people want to express
00:14:38.000themselves are you really going to criminalize those people you're going to give them a criminal
00:14:41.460record where it's going to ruin their career or limit their life opportunities just because they
00:14:46.260wanted to hold a placard and say something they cared about. But that is literally, those protest
00:14:52.260restrictions remain in place today. And I'm aware there's big protests this weekend, and I'm sure
00:14:58.180more people will be arrested and prosecuted, unfortunately. Well, you talk about we don't
00:15:02.820know what will happen in the future and how rules and regulations and laws are going to be used. And
00:15:07.060I think that's such an important point because we are also not party political. I mean, we think
00:15:11.200they're all bloody useless at the moment. At the moment? Well, yeah, for a very long time now,
00:15:16.580but particularly at the moment. But nonetheless, I think a lot of people might be willing to kind
00:15:21.940of allow the current sort of, you know, people would, I think, see it as a sort of softer version
00:15:28.200of what a conservative government could be, potentially. So Boris Johnson isn't someone
00:15:32.840people think is going to, you know, start the fourth right in the UK. But you are putting
00:15:38.100things in place where there's no democratic accountability things aren't being checked
00:15:41.640things aren't being vetted extraordinary powers are being given they're being misused as you say
00:15:46.760no legal use of a law would seem to me that to suggest that it's a bad law right but do you
00:15:53.560think there's people just not thinking ahead in terms of what the consequences of this will be
00:15:58.100down the line well i think i guess um part of the luxury of living in a relatively stable democracy
00:16:04.280is that people get complacent but not everyone is again I mean I do actually think there's been a
00:16:10.220bit of a sea change I can only say it from my perspective I mean Big Brother Watch we're still
00:16:14.380a really small organisation but for us we've had a massive surge of support the phone never stops
00:16:20.260some people just want to talk and sometimes I find myself spending just a couple of hours on
00:16:25.020the phone just talking to someone who has actually just suddenly become quite freaked out by the
00:16:29.300situation that we're in even if that's a journalist or a member of the public or sometimes a member
00:16:33.640of parliament I mean there really are members of parliament who are freaked out by what they are
00:16:42.240seeing from their perspective some of whom aren't speaking about it completely frankly in the public
00:16:48.060domain and so this is kind of this is one of the things that really worries me about the current
00:16:53.340situation that we're in it's this kind of like it's kind of a bit North Korean the way that
00:17:00.460people are self-censoring and so even though there might be broad acknowledgement that
00:17:06.020we're in a very perilous position things have gone too far uh there's been a breakdown of some
00:17:13.320of the the the basic architecture of what makes us a democracy um when people are witnessing uh
00:17:21.600you know you know the 90 year old man that got thrown in the back of a police van for going to
00:17:26.680protest things just start uh triggering people to really really acknowledge that we've gone perhaps
00:17:35.340beyond a point of return but people won't talk about it and even within social circles um a lot
00:17:41.600of you know kind of um you know ordinary liberal social circles these are difficult things to talk
00:17:50.580about um even in mine you know it's it's a lot of people don't want to talk about you you know you
00:17:58.200want to be you there's this odd kind of sense emergence what you want to be seen as like a
00:18:02.260true believer in the national program and the clapping and everything I mean there's something
00:18:06.620that's a bit too um you know I like the NHS as much as anyone but there was the whole you know
00:18:11.580banging the pots and stuff it there is the um there's something a bit disturbing about this
00:18:18.840level of uh self censorship yeah i mean i didn't take part in any of that because i'm a miserable
00:18:24.600git but uh she just laughed like yeah probably yeah i mean there's there's no dispute there's
00:18:30.700no dispute about that i just find this so so worrying and i know and i really like your
00:18:37.900opinion on this you think the government gonna give back some of these powers because i look
00:18:41.940at them and i go will they they don't like giving up power any of these fuckers yeah they they will
00:18:47.160never give back powers never um and I suppose that's why I see I don't think we can really
00:18:54.560understand the context that we're in now without understanding the post 9-11 context right that
00:19:00.320completely changed everything and to this day has changed everything and all we've ever seen
00:19:06.420since then is a ratcheting of powers uh which is why it was like you know the privilege of my life
00:19:13.480to work at Liberty because Liberty did so much in the post-9-11 years under Shammy to challenge
00:19:20.560some of those excesses of government power. But we do still broadly live under all the
00:19:28.980counter-terror legislation, so much change, mass surveillance. And so it's going to be the same.
00:19:38.560I 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 states, that each of us is a potential not only terrorist, but biohazard.
00:19:57.460and there's this whole new raft of state controls
00:20:00.980that are going to be deemed as acceptable or even necessary
00:20:07.020or even that it would be unsafe not to have them.
00:20:25.400So, yeah, people need to get involved now and take action now and realise 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.
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00:21:47.500You 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 young 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.
00:22:13.780But 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.
00:22:25.640I 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.
00:24:01.120so yeah and now you know right up to till where we are now months later um the app the the vaccine
00:24:12.100passport is now a feature of the nhs app um and it says on the privacy policy that they envisage
00:24:18.920using it domestically this might be useful for access to domestic events whilst um in public and
00:24:27.240parliament saying we're really not sure about whether whether we're going to do this it was
00:24:31.160very finely balanced you know we're really looking at the facts we're doing a consultation
00:24:34.900etc etc but all the all the architecture is there and actually Michael Gove said this week
00:24:42.080no matter what decision is made they're going to build the architecture because they could at some
00:24:48.020point spring it up and that was his reflection on what happened in Israel as well because they
00:24:53.000had the green pass um which is now being rolled back and there was you won't hear about it in the
00:24:59.100press here but i'm in touch with people there there was a lot of pushback to it um and he
00:25:06.760similarly said um but it might be reignited at any point so um yeah there and that's the idea
00:25:14.960with test and trace as well you know um it's 30 plus billion pounds of public money on a whole new
00:25:22.420architecture that can just be used you know that that's not a temporary thing that's not for an
00:25:28.020immediate uh the immediate situation that's a long-term plan and and this is the thing i mean
00:25:33.580it happened after 9-11 as well in that when you know there are certain projects that some people
00:25:40.060in government have always wanted to pursue and uh then an emergency can give you an opportunity to
00:25:49.680very quickly with less scrutiny and with very few limitations on public spending just start to change
00:25:56.060everything and there certainly are all sorts of visions within government about the ways
00:26:01.100to use technology and change the way that we live. Well what are your concerns with the vaccine
00:26:07.640passports because some people might be watching this going well look it's making us safer we can
00:26:12.040know who's got COVID who doesn't you know maybe I haven't done a good job of explaining like what's
00:26:17.900the argument against vaccine passports? What are you concerned about? What should people watching
00:26:23.600this be like, oh, wow, okay, I hadn't thought of that? Well, we'll talk about COVID passports more
00:26:29.180generally, if that's okay, because that's where the government wants to at least start. So test,
00:26:35.360vaccine, or antibody status. There are problems with each. I mean, first of all, it's not going
00:26:40.260to make anyone any safer. People who want to get vaccinated are going to get vaccinated. People who
00:26:45.240don't want to are not going to we don't yet have mandatory vaccines in this country so we will see
00:26:51.760each other we will mix the whole idea that you can create this theater around certain events
00:26:57.060and places where it's like a clean zone and you've only got the green ticks are allowed in and
00:27:02.420somehow that's going to change the whole public health situation it's not what it might do is
00:27:08.320alleviate liability on those businesses and on those events because they can say we've we've
00:27:14.140done this although one thing that was interesting that Michael Gove said yesterday is they're not
00:27:18.220going you know one of the concerns we were raising is how does that affect staff if you work for
00:27:23.660example at a football stadium and you're a steward does that mean now as part of your work you are
00:27:30.420forced to either have a vaccine or have a medical test in order just to go to work
00:27:35.940but he said that they're not going to put the obligation on staff which makes it even the
00:27:43.500theatre even more ridiculous because you're not going to have only green ticks and the whole idea
00:27:48.100of that stupid how do you get to the football stadium you get there on the coach with everyone
00:27:51.580else or the bus or the tube where you're packed in with you know spreaders or you know whatever
00:27:56.500we now are um so i think the risk is that this but it's an id system it's a digital id system
00:28:04.000and back when you had the id debate after 9-11 it was treated as kind of a future risk like
00:28:11.080imagine if you had to have your health records on there i've got to imagine if people started
00:28:14.780asking to see your health status or you know had hiv on there or something these kind of things
00:28:19.660that come with a lot of stigma and and uh control that's the starting point for this is that you
00:28:26.760have your health records and you show them to people and you carry it with you most places you
00:28:33.080go or you know you're deemed a different class of citizen so this is id cards and digital id cards
00:28:39.560on steroids population-wide and it will become a tool for discrimination for division it will be
00:28:49.320used as as as i'm afraid yet another stick to beat people with you know there will be certain people
00:28:57.120will ask other certain people to see their past um and uh i think that will make us into a very
00:29:03.680very ugly checkpoint dystopian society do you think it's because they're going to pass it
00:29:10.240through they're going to pass the legislation to enforce this do you know what i think i think
00:29:15.100there might still be something to play for and i think um watching michael gove in his evidence
00:29:19.920session this week um he was he actually always looks quite inflated but he was quite deflated
00:29:28.320it was quite deflated in the way that he was presenting it he didn't seem to really
00:29:35.620i i don't know what's going on behind the scenes but i get the sense i mean it's no secret i think
00:29:41.820within cabinet this is very controversial idea um and uh anyone with any political sense knows
00:29:47.860they're going to get a hammering going for it i mean uh there will be serious serious kickback
00:29:54.000I think. And I think they'd be making a grave, grave mistake. I mean, I think the Conservative
00:30:00.560Party forgets they are, especially where this kind of electoral shift has happened, they are
00:30:08.600kind of on licence from the working class. You know, this is not, they really shouldn't assume
00:30:15.600that this is a new permanent state of affairs, nor should they assume that the failure of the
00:30:22.100opposition equates to their success. And I think a lot of it stems from the kind of anti-establishment
00:30:30.080sentiment around Brexit and the sense of being betrayed and all this kind of thing.
00:30:36.000I can't think of anything more establishment, more controlling than foisting digital IDs
00:30:42.140and COVID IDs on a public that has a historic, long-held aversion and scepticism towards the
00:30:51.460idea. In fact, it was one of the reasons that Tories got into power in 2010. They promised
00:30:57.140to scrap ID cards. So I think there are people probably who are thinking about the political
00:31:02.880ramifications of this, also the fact that there's no real point, there's going to be
00:31:06.320no real benefits, either in public health terms or political terms. And I do get the
00:31:11.840sense that now that there's some, it's like the wind's been taken out of the sails of
00:31:18.600the idea and i think that is down to our campaigning and uh everyone who's speaking out
00:31:23.920against this in uh you know rights groups media um the protests um i think that's that's really
00:31:31.620visible and tangible and if we continue to do that it might just be that we won't actually see
00:31:37.720this come to fruition uh however if we're not successful in that then um they're going to
00:31:45.160introduce them for covid passports for large event large ticketed events like sports music
00:31:52.740festivals all venues of a certain capacity and he also said he would do that through a statutory
00:32:00.860instrument so it's not even primary legislation in a normal sense which means you can't mps can't
00:32:06.160amend it it's like an all or nothing my understanding where the numbers are on there
00:32:11.200would still be a vote my understanding on where the numbers are is that they would have a hard
00:32:16.700time getting that through parliament but it all comes down to labor actually i mean the numbers
00:32:22.400are much well that's reassuring the numbers are much easier to do on the on the conservative side
00:32:28.540because i think they don't have the confidence of their own party the question is will will labor
00:32:35.480oppose them. And certainly the Labour back benches will, but whether the front bench will
00:32:41.340remains to be seen. It's just very much on the fence at the moment. But I think what Keir did
00:32:44.900say, which is right, is that it's fundamentally un-British. Well, we've done quite a lot of
00:32:50.580things that are fundamentally un-British in the last year. I guess the takeaway from this is
00:32:53.980everyone should write to their MP, I think, about this. Is that? I think it has a surprisingly more
00:32:59.000impact than people think. I mean, often when we're lobbying MPs, they'll say, I just don't have
00:33:05.160emails in my inbox about this um all right well let's make sure there's some emails in the inbox
00:33:10.660yeah so let's move on a little bit uh we've talked about government action uh i actually
00:33:16.160no longer think government is the most powerful institution that exists in in the world it's me
00:33:21.280and you mate it's just me and you she's laughing more than any and more than at any point during
00:33:26.660the interview so there we go um i actually think that the biggest powers in the world are the big
00:33:31.360tech companies at the moment. They control who gets to be president of the United States and
00:33:37.080what they can influence that. They've shown their willingness to do that. And in terms of the issue
00:33:43.920of COVID, we have seen that, for example, the lab leak hypothesis, the idea that the COVID-19 came
00:33:50.860from a lab in China, initially was dismissed as a conspiracy theory. Anyone who said anything about
00:33:56.820it would be banned from Twitter, banned from Facebook, the YouTube channel would be deleted,
00:34:00.280etc now that issue is coming back as potentially the truth about what happened now we don't know
00:34:06.160but the conversation wasn't able to be had and it's only thanks to a lot of people bravely
00:34:11.180going against that that we seem to have that conversation now we've had a conversation on
00:34:16.900our show with a doctor about some aspects of COVID-19 medical microbiologist which was taken
00:34:22.700down by YouTube and YouTube was very heavy in its censorship of people who had a view about
00:34:29.700COVID-19 that was not the particular view that was supposed to be allowed at that moment in time.
00:34:36.260And then three months later, suddenly all of that actually turned out about the efficacy of masks,
00:34:41.240for example, right? So what is the situation with regards to big tech? Where are we? Like,
00:34:48.520they just, it seems to me, just deciding what we can and can't talk about now.
00:34:52.340Yeah, completely. It's such an inversion of everything that the internet promised to be this big space for people to speak without barriers and, you know, speak directly to power.
00:35:11.280and increasingly it's becoming like a controlled government controlled actually speech zone
00:35:17.300because even finding a distinction between some of the big tech companies and governments is
00:35:22.420becoming increasingly hard and again this is another extraordinary thing that this government
00:35:27.740is wading into with a new um bill the online safety bill whereby um they they have invented
00:35:36.260a category of content that is harmful anything that's harmful needs to be regulated on the
00:35:46.000internet or taken off the internet even if it's lawful and so part of what the tech companies
00:35:52.840are doing is pre-empting that they they can see this regulation coming and they're pre-empting
00:35:59.900that part of it i think is driven by kind of reputational concerns this is whole god only
00:36:04.800knows why but there's this whole category of journalism at the moment it's like we found a
00:36:09.840bad thing on the internet um it's like what really all those billions of people you found a nasty one
00:36:16.680in there like that that's become a whole category and so they're very responsive to that um and
00:36:22.640yeah now we're kind of completely through the looking glass in terms of where the uh the shape
00:36:29.800of the restrictions online um i know you have felt the brunt of that a bit i've actually felt
00:36:36.920the brunt of that uh myself um you know perfectly reasonable ordinary stuff um that you can be
00:36:44.240banned online for for saying um and i think especially given the proximity of some of that
00:36:52.580recently over coronavirus to uh the pr wishes of the chinese government um is pretty chilling
00:36:59.880um yeah i mean i know ian birrell's piece on um unheard which just merely sort of questioned the
00:37:07.760efficacy of the world health organization um investigation into the origins of covid was
00:37:14.020marked as as false on on facebook um yeah and now of course they're they're they're rolling back
00:37:21.460Well, who'd have thought it? Facebook should never be, big tech companies 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.
00:37:42.580I mean, the whole point of free speech is it allows ordinary citizens to speak their, sorry, truth, their opinions.
00:37:52.120I fucking hate that, my truth. No such thing.
00:38:01.640And actually now what they're saying is you can say what you like if it agrees with the government's view on things.
00:38:12.580And 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.
00:38:28.480and especially given how much we spend our lives online,
00:38:33.120the shrinking space to think freely as well
00:38:37.260and how it's actually shaping the kinds of conversations
00:38:53.660Well, 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.
00:39:22.200So this is a very serious type of censorship. Yes, they're 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,
00:39:46.980then yeah we're no longer looking at the free will of private companies we're looking at
00:39:53.900the total integration wherever we heard this before of the private and public sphere into a
00:40:01.060system that controls what people can say I can't think of anything more dangerous more ludicrous
00:40:07.920than that and also creates a barrier to entry so even if you are a new company that wants to create
00:40:16.220a new platform then then you've got all of these regulatory um barriers that mean you know you
00:40:24.960would need a team far bigger you need an infrastructure of a size uh that you clearly
00:40:32.940can't have as a fledgling company so there's a total barrier to entry as well as this monopolization
00:40:39.380it's it's so worrying isn't it and it just i've cheered you up then yeah yeah you have well i'm
00:40:45.880miserable anyway and you've just made me more miserable so thank you very much for that but
00:40:50.180let's look at sort of what what can people do because what we're doing is we're analyzing
00:40:56.940the problems but what do you think are going to be the solutions moving forward um i mean
00:41:02.580obviously i think that joining with or supporting organizations like us like big brother watch
00:41:09.900is important as part certainly part of it because we're tracking this we see we're scrutinizing
00:41:16.940what's going on we're lobbying on these bills we are trying to bring more to public attention
00:41:22.700certainly to political attention and producing research and analysis around this and litigation
00:41:28.080where necessary as well so we're currently crowdfunding to bring a challenge to COVID
00:41:33.920passports if they go ahead we just won a challenge on uh mass surveillance post snowden i mean so we
00:41:41.360we do we do litigate as well but i think i think that's i think that's really important kind of
00:41:47.140finding your crowd and you know finding like-minded people who are concerned about these things
00:41:51.780i think also this may be a very hard thing but actually even just talking about these issues
00:41:57.940uh with people there is definitely and also to your member of parliament of course because
00:42:05.140um it's often people who are the most kind of disillusioned who realize uh the kind of
00:42:10.400uh problems with the political system they don't want to engage with it i completely empathize
00:42:15.840with that i understand that but it's a necessary thing to do especially in this kind of uh you
00:42:21.960know dangerous moment that we're in um we have to be ringing alarm bells you know wherever we can
00:42:27.920particularly with people that hold the reins on on power or at least who should do um but i think
00:42:32.820actually even talking about these things is is really important i think the kind of um spiral
00:42:38.300of silence um among a lot of um you know otherwise liberal people is a real problem it's a massive
00:42:45.620problem and i i don't think you know spaces like this i bet there's a lot of i bet you've had
00:42:52.060emails from people that say i've been looking for something like this so i'm really glad you
00:42:56.320had this conversation i haven't seen it elsewhere or just somewhere you can actually think and speak
00:43:00.560freely about some uh issues that otherwise aren't discussed very much in the media or um among the
00:43:08.380chatterati more generally yeah those are some of the emails we get we get a few others as well
00:43:12.480But 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 the 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 it 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.
00:43:39.460And I have no idea what your politics are.
00:44:08.900It's a very, very good question, isn't it? I don't know. And it's.
00:44:15.680Yeah, I was looking back to, you know, the ACLU in the US and.
00:44:22.640They've changed the tune lately, haven't they?
00:44:24.340Yeah, there's been some big changes over there. I mean, obviously a really important organization.
00:44:28.380They 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.
00:44:38.900they defended the rights of neo-nazis to march through a jewish area of uh in the us and to do
00:44:48.800these neo-nazi marches you wouldn't actually be able to do that under uk law so already this is
00:44:53.580more you know this is we look at something under the kind of american model of free speech
00:44:57.300uh it would be definitely incitement all sorts of offenses that could fall under here but it forced
00:45:03.780the ACLU and many of their advocates who are Jewish to put forward a very very compelling
00:45:13.580argument about why they thought that that was not only in principle but in practice the right thing
00:45:18.560and there is a long Jewish tradition of defending the right to free speech and and human rights and
00:45:23.680civil liberties generally obviously given modern history and we've come so so far away from that
00:45:32.740um they were i think absolutely vindicated in the campaigns that that they did they showed
00:45:37.760themselves to be truly agnostic truly dedicated to the principles of free speech um it eventually
00:45:43.880defused the situation um and like you say if you if you believe in kind of post enlightenment idea
00:45:53.240of rationality how does rationality work why do we have free speech because we we trust in
00:46:00.040individuals, in people, in publics, to explore information, deal with it, and that through
00:46:10.060free and fair access to information, rationality will prevail. The Enlightenment idea was not,
00:46:18.140it was obviously, in fact, a kickback to the idea that the elites control the information for the
00:46:24.200benefit of the public. We've just gone back about 500 years, because we're back at this kind of view
00:46:30.920that the elites need to control the information for the benefit of the public. And I think there's
00:46:36.540perhaps a problem with maybe elitism in some liberal circles, certainly in rights organisations.
00:46:42.620I mean, they are generally, you know, middle class, you know, organisations, but they simply
00:46:48.160don't trust ordinary people with information. As you saw a lot of this rhetoric around Brexit,
00:46:54.200this kind of idea of, you know, whatever your views on it, again,
00:51:35.340And that people are curating their often increasingly radical worldviews by deciding who they hear from on heavily curated timelines.
00:51:44.640And 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.
00:52:02.480And the same happens across all the platforms.
00:52:30.260If 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.
00:52:46.700And I think half of those problems, I think more than half of those problems would just fall away.
00:52:51.540So 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 restricting what people can say. If they just allowed the echo chambers not to form in the first place, we wouldn't have the issue.
00:53:05.320I 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. Like, I'm not saying that videos that are deliberate falsehoods, etc, are not problematic. Of course they are.
00:53:23.120but the belief in free speech is that the best way to deal with them is by having a free and
00:53:29.640open environment um and by having forums where people can speak and challenge if you don't have
00:53:36.680that if you don't have debates and if you push people into uh kind of their like deeper darker
00:53:44.300echo chambers where they can't be seen and heard it's not going to change their point of view it's
00:53:48.680going to make them feel marginalized and ignored and it's not going to expose them to the challenges
00:53:52.620they would otherwise encounter. And moving on, I saw a very, very interesting article about one of
00:54:00.180the head bods at Microsoft worrying about AI and the fact that we're essentially, if we don't
00:54:07.300actually challenge the progress that we're making and we let technology run away with itself,
00:54:12.860we're going to be in a dystopian society very, very quickly and far sooner than we originally
00:54:17.740thought. To me, that was one of the head guys at Microsoft. What do you think about that?
00:54:23.100Elon Musk has been warning of the same thing for a long time as well.
00:54:26.060Yeah, there's a lot of people who work in the tech sector. It's where you find a lot of preppers
00:54:33.220as well. People who are worried about the direction of travel and how bad things might get
00:54:41.420and the kind of tech dystopia that awaits. Most of them are still willing to make some money out
00:54:46.600of it before they decide to you know pack a get a backpack and and move on um but yeah i mean
00:54:53.040already um you know what some of our work has looked at is how that's creeping into uh how
00:54:59.700that's affecting citizens here um early uses of ai so you see ai in the criminal justice system
00:55:06.460already uh there was a system used by durham police where um when someone was suspected of
00:55:12.780an offence, they could be put through this AI tool that would assess how likely they were to
00:55:21.200re-offend. This is before they've even been prosecuted, by the way. So we don't even know
00:55:27.900if they've offended yet, essentially, from a criminal justice point of view. Yeah. And there
00:55:32.380was this data fed in about the individual, judge whether they're going to re-offend, and then judge
00:55:39.240are you going to prosecute them or put them through to a rehabilitation program
00:55:43.460and we were then looking at the types of data that were being fed into that and and and that's
00:55:50.180often where the problem i mean there are obvious problems risks with ai but i mean i think you have
00:55:55.020to start from the point of what's the ai built on often it's masses of personal data um that kind
00:56:02.680feeds the beast. And so they were using postcode data. So, you know, this postcode would say
00:56:13.400something about you. And also a what's called a geodemographic segmentation tool. They're very
00:56:21.880popular in government now. It's basically every single person in this country has a profile given
00:56:27.820to them by this tool uh this more or less built on your postcode um and millions of pieces of
00:56:36.360data that ranges from gcse results electricity usage ratio of gardens to buildings to kind of
00:56:44.020get a sense of like what kind of class and category of there's about 60 odd different
00:56:48.980codes that you can be and so this stuff was fed in to judge someone's life outcome basically um
00:56:57.540I remember a film about something like that.
00:57:00.220There's a minority report or something?
00:57:02.480Yeah, there's so many things like that now.
00:57:06.100In the criminal justice system in particular,
00:57:08.400we've got facial recognition now that the police want to use,
00:58:02.540You know, I think anyone, if you're civil liberties or a rights advocate, you have to scrutinise 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.
00:58:21.080whether it's governments or technology companies and so on um but i think one one of the things
00:58:27.320that is obviously um you know not great about my line of work is that often because of the
00:58:33.060situation when when you acknowledge it and i think this is why so many people are in denial or
00:58:37.060cognitive dissonance about the current situation that we're in when you when you really take stock
00:58:41.120of it and acknowledge it it's quite daunting and the overwhelming sense is fear and fear is just a
00:58:47.700very low vibration thing to uh you know to to dwell on so uh you know that that's a problem
00:58:56.160and i think we have to get beyond that i think i think what's perhaps exciting about the moment
00:59:01.200that we're in as much as it is extremely challenging is that whenever you see a force
00:59:07.200an action there's a reaction um and i do think you know people talk about the tech lash there's
00:59:14.400some of that I think that there will be probably delayed but there will be a response to you know
00:59:21.940the harder and faster the pace of authoritarianism that we're experiencing right now we will see the
00:59:27.020same kind of reaction to that and how that's going to play out politically etc is something to watch
00:59:34.320but I do think wherever there's a vacuum that vacuum a political vacuum that will be filled
00:59:40.120um like we can see over the last 10 years with some of the anti-establishment kind of political
00:59:45.760movements um you know we have to make sure those vacuums are filled in the right way but i think
00:59:50.080that they will be and that's why i think anyone who is uh motivated by this moment uh what we're
00:59:58.320currently going through as a country and and more broadly who is motivated to uh build you know
01:00:06.020actually have a say about the future especially if you're a parent you know a lot of people are
01:00:10.780worried about the kind of world that their kids are going to grow up in we'll do something about
01:00:14.500it um you know the future is absolutely ours for the taking and and we just have to claim it and
01:00:22.020i think that will be an interesting thing to to be part of and watch over the next few years
01:00:27.000well it's a lovely note to end the interview on uh we always finish uh with our final question
01:00:32.720which is what is the one thing we're not talking about