The government’s secret anti-disinformation policy has been revealed – Big Brother Watch

Big Brother Watch investigates the UK’s secret government counter-disinformation units and opposes their opaque, censorship activities.

Organize something on assumption fightting ‘disinformation’, the reality we discovered Is This TThese units monitored legal, accurate online speech titled parliamentarians, scientists, journalists, human rights defenders and the public when they disagree with government policy. We outdoor is a speech critical of government policy, AND even individual ministers collected and distributed so-called “disinformation reports”, even though the content doesn’t fit inside any reasonable definition of disinformation.

Topic access requests submitted by affected persons

In a democracy, is it important that we can criticize and debate government policies – without being unfairly vilified? sharing “disinformation” or existence censorship on the Internet.

After inspired by our revelations important reaction from parliamentarians, the press and the public, the government changed the name of its“Counter disinformation unit” How “National Security Internet Information Team” (“NSOIT”). The government has made every effort to emphasize the role of the individual in national security, trying to distance itself from the CDU’s excessive efforts.

But how much has actually changed? It took us months of digging and pushing, but in the end we I grabbed it NSOIT’is new rules, which we publish here today.

NSOIT draft data protection and compliance policy

Significantly, their policy document makes almost no reference to national security. Instead, the policy document states that the function of NSOIT is to “build a picture of the risks of misinformation/disinformation.”

In addition to national security, NSOIT’s broad remit also covers issues related to “public security”. Publicly, the government has tried to deflect criticism of NSOIT, saying it has national security responsibilities and focuses on foreign threats rather than domestic speeches. However, it is clear from the program document that the scope of the unit’s analyzes is virtually unlimited.

While it states that any “data collection activity” must be related to an “identifiable and legitimate government department policy objective,” this is not a restriction at all – that’s exactly what we mean. Government policy can cover almost any issue. NSOIT’s policy states that it is “not intended to capture real political debate.” Labeling some political debates as “real” and others as not is disturbing – and open to abuse.

The policy also states that:

• monitoring can only be overt (e.g. viewing publicly available posts on X/Twitter) and not covert (e.g. viewing private messages)

• targeted surveillance is NOT allowed – i.e. NSOIT must search for content, not people; they cannot repeatedly select specific people to monitor, although it is acceptable for the same people to appear multiple times in content searches

• ““continuous monitoring of disinformation narratives” must have ministerial consent – this has been sought, for example, in relation to Russia/Ukraine and Covid-19

• NSOIT will reduce the amount of personal data it holds in its records – which, while good for privacy, may mean that the use of ‘data access requests’ to check whether you have been influenced by an entity (which was the basis of our investigation) is now much less chance of success

Legal but harmful

NSOIT is Still required to tag content on social media platforms, If Contents understood as harmfulviolatebelongs to the platform Thmm aboutF Sserviceor constitutes an emerging threat. These offer of unclear categories NO security from lawful speech existence by marked by NSOIT analysts to remove. In fact, social media platforms’ Terms of Service restrict speech far beyond the law and work with platforms to remove content, this policy could they undermine the government’s commitment to freedom of speech.

One sec NSOIT’The policy says yes does not mean diary contentbut, political parties, Parliamentarians Or elected representatives, this two-tier system is only for emphasis the risk NSOIT items to freedom of speech on the Internet. What should journalists and parliamentarians be protected from if this policy does not pose a threat to freedom of speech? Why aren’t citizens afforded the same protection against censorship?

We have sought legal advice regarding NSOIT’s policy and believe that without the person we are know has been affected by NSOIT censorship, your chances of winning a legal challenge are low or non-existent. That’s the frustratingly Kafkaesque nature of many of the surveillance and censorship issues we work on – the secrecy makes these issues very difficult to overcome.

However, despite NSOIT’s liberal policies, our investigation shows that in practice we have had a profound impact on the government’s counter-disinformation efforts – not only has the government completely shut down one counter-disinformation unit (the Rapid Response Unit), but NSOIT is now much more cautious than its predecessor.

Today we can reveal the number of times the government has flagged the speech on social media platforms dropped by 95% since we published our investigation. This means much less government censorship – exactly what we wanted to achieve.

Our campaign is not over at all. With a new government expected to be formed within a few weeks, new hands will be at the helm of government units dealing with countering disinformation.

We will be watching them very closely.

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Below you will find links to the policy documents we obtained:

National Security Team Online Information Policy and Compliance Policy Document

National Security Online Information Team – GOV.UK privacy notice

Report – Ministry of Truth: Secret government entities are spying on your speech

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