This week we held an online briefing about our report, 'Prevent and the Pre-Crime State: How unaccountable data sharing is harming a generation.'
Hear more about the UK Prevent programme and its dangers from Sara Chitseko (ORG), Dr Layla Aitlhadj (PreventWatch), Ilyas Nagdee (Amnesty International UK and Professor Charlotte Heath-Kelly (The University of Warwick).
Under the pretense of safeguarding, the programme harvests and retains people's data, mostly children, even when no action is taken.
We need to stop Prevent before it becomes a global problem.
Read this new report by Rights and Security International: "The UK is helping Indonesia violate freedom of religion, risks complicity in torture and disappearances." ⬇️
"The lack of right of reply for groups that fall under the new definition [of extremism] shows the UK government is using it for political point scoring and playing to the populist gallery, rather than any meaningful attempt to protect public safety."
As the new extremism definition hasn't been introduced through UK legislation and Parliamentary scrutiny, there's room for confusion over its application by public bodies.
This may result in even more people being swept under the Prevent programme for surveillance and data misuse.
The redefinition of extremism adds to the authoritarian lurch of recent years in the UK, as seen in restrictions on the right to protest, sweeping new police powers and the censorship of online expression.
We're left asking whose free speech is protected and who must keep quiet under the threat of being labelled an extremist?
Children referred to Prevent will have their referral shared with children’s services and this data kept for 25 years after their 18th birthday.
So it'll still be available when they're an adult and may impact any future assessment concerning their own children and any children’s services interventions.
The data of people referred to Prevent, including children, could be shared with airports, ports and immigration services, which could result in them being stopped under Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act.
Read our report on how unaccountable data sharing under Prevent is harming a generation for more ⬇️
ORG is concerned about reports that the organisations who will fall foul of this new definition od extremism appear to be ones advocating for the rights of Muslims.
Yet just this week, the UK Tory Party has shown willingness to accept money from a donor who made racist, misogynist comments about a fellow MP.
Our recent report shows that the majority of Prevent referees (UK) don't meet the threshold for deradicalisation, but data can be retained for years even when their case is marked ‘no further action’.
The more people whose data is hoarded, the worse it'll get.
The fact that this is non-statutory guidance means that the public are denied parliamentary scrutiny of changes that will impact freedom of expression and political engagement in the UK.
The new definition of extremism is an undemocratic attack on our rights for political point-scoring.
“Despite the lack of utility to state security, [Prevent] referrals – and their storage, retention and sharing – can have disruptive and lasting impacts on individuals, including children as young as 6-years-old.”
If you’re referred to Prevent, your data rights are made difficult to enforce.
The right to erasure is weakened by a lack of transparency about data sharing between multiple databases and national security exemptions used by counter-terrorism police.
I use nftables to set my firewall rules. I typically manually configure the rules myself. Recently, I just happened to dump the ruleset, and, much to my surprise, my config was gone, and it was replaced with an enourmous amount of extremely cryptic firewall rules. After a quick examination of the rules, I found that it was...
Don’t know what it’s actually doing, I’m just learning how to work with nftables, but I saved that link in case oneday I want to manage the iptables rules myself :)
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I use nftables to set my firewall rules. I typically manually configure the rules myself. Recently, I just happened to dump the ruleset, and, much to my surprise, my config was gone, and it was replaced with an enourmous amount of extremely cryptic firewall rules. After a quick examination of the rules, I found that it was...