The People’s Review of Prevent is an alternative review to the Government Shawcross Review.
This review provides a voice to the people most impacted by the Prevent Duty.
Prevent is described as ‘safeguarding’ children from harms. However, under Prevent, safeguarding is focused on protecting the wider public from children believed to be ‘risky’, rather than protecting children from harms.
Throughout our report we present case studies that show how real these harms can be and the distress they cause to children and their families and carers.
New legal child-specific terrorism orders should be brought in to tackle the growing numbers being arrested, the official adviser on terrorism law has told the UK government.
The Department for Education has released its new Prevent Duty Self-Assessment Tool for Schools, designed to help Designated Safeguarding Leads and wider Senior Leadership Teams implement Prevent.
An excerpt from the People’s Review of Prevent, on the Prevent strategy and children’s rights, data collection, bogus claims of ‘success’ and why Prevent must be delinked from Manchester.
The UK’s Prevent counter-extremism strategy involves data collection and retention that makes it a vast form of surveillance that can remain with a person for life, even when that person
JUMP TO: Prevent is a psychological control policy that is about placing whomever the target groups is, in a disempowered, apologetic and fearful position as a default. This can only be counter-productive to healthy society. It does this because it stops people from expressing our perfectly legal and non-violent beliefs fully and freely. Let’s start by acknowledging that there is a lot of money to be made in the “Prevent space”. In other words, there’s a monetary reward for “supporting Prevent”; that is, you get paid when you agree to report state-defined “suspects” in the community to Prevent. So Prevent is about creating divisions among people, when moderation actually happens when people are free to interact. How Prevent psychological control works Muslims who don’t opt into community-based Prevent, can face pressure to participate in the programme at work. It’s really important that people who work in public services like teachers
Each Other documents that UK Prime Minister Liz Truss promised to expand the UK’s involvement in ‘offshoring‘ refugees and asylum seekers and pledged to increase frontline border staff by 20%. She has also voted for restricting legal aid and voted in favour of allowing national-security-sensitive evidence to be put before courts in secret sessions and out of the eye of the media. On privacy rights, Truss voted in favour of the mass surveillance of people’s communications and activities. The right to privacy is currently enshrined in the HRA, but parliament will vote on plans to replace the act with the Bill of Rights on 12 September. Records show that under the current government the prime minister has never rebelled against the party majority in a vote. Source: Liz Truss: The new Prime Minister’s human rights record | EachOther
An agreement between the United States and United Kingdom to improve cross-border law enforcement data sharing will go into effect later this year, the two nations announced in a joint statement. They will now be able to directly request data like messages and pictures, for example, from telecommunications providers in the other’s jurisdiction. The non-profit digital rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation has previously criticized the foundational idea of data sharing with cross-border law enforcement as “a dangerous expansion of police snooping”. Source: What is the UK-US Data Access Agreement? | Popular Science
An ex-Royal Marine Special Forces operations planner turned spy agency consultant is advising on the appointment of the next top counter-extremism commissioner, reveals Nafeez Ahmed in another ground-breaking investigation for the Byline Times. The Government panel that will be deciding on the appointment of the next Lead Commissioner for Countering Extremism includes a former senior military officer who is a veteran of the Afghan and Iraq invasions. The former colonel now consults for overseas intelligence agencies and advises a private security firm specialising in “covert surveillance”. The Home Office assessor, Col. (ret) Robert Graham Cundy, is a former Royal Marine and British Army Special Forces officer who played a senior role in counterinsurgency operations in Afghanistan and Iraq after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Since retiring from the British Army, Cundy has contracted for various UK government departments including providing “capability training packages for overseas intelligence agencies,” according to his biography published
Claudia Glover writes in The Tech Monitor that the UK’s policing minister has rejected the suggestion that police forces might need ethical guidance in relation to emerging technologies. This, despite alarm from campaigners over live facial recognition and ‘predictive policing’. UK police forces are pursuing many of these technologies. Last year, the Mayor of London’s Office approved a new £3m “Retrospective Facial Recognition” system that will allow police to compare faces identified in CCTV footage against archival footage. “We have to be slightly careful not to stifle innovation,” UK policing minister Kit Malthouse Malthouse said, and that formal procurement frameworks “tend to be generally for more mature technology”. He said that while there could be room for regional bodies advising police forces on technology ethics, he would be “concerned about setting up a parallel ethics group” on a national level, as Parliament already serves that purpose. “In the end, aren’t
A Guardian investigation reveals that Europol, the EU police body, has been accused of unlawfully holding information and aspiring to become an NSA-style mass surveillance agency. An article co-authored by Apostolis Fotiadis, Ludek Stavinoha, Giacomo Zandonini, and Daniel Howden reveals that Europol will be forced to delete much of a vast store of personal data that it has been found to have amassed unlawfully by the bloc’s data protection watchdog. The unprecedented finding from the European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS) targets what privacy experts are calling a “big data ark” containing billions of points of information. Sensitive data in the ark has been drawn from crime reports, hacked from encrypted phone services, and sampled from asylum seekers never involved in any crime. According to internal documents seen by the Guardian, Europol’s cache contains at least 4 petabytes – equivalent to 3m CD-Roms or a fifth of the entire contents of
