Source: https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/climate/maps-and-data/location-specific-long-term-averages/

Police spent over £3m and deployed over 1,000 officers from nearly every force in the country in order to arrest 24 climate activists, Novara Media can reveal.

In August 2024, as the country was gripped by far-right riots, cops swooped on activists planning to hold a mass protest camp near Drax – a power station in north Yorkshire accused of greenwashing.

Police stopped vehicles heading for the camp and made arrests for “public order offences relating to interference with key national infrastructure”. They seized equipment such as compost toilets, wheelchair access ramps and camping equipment.

The protest camp, organised by campaign group Reclaim the Power, was to involve “six days of workshops, communal living and direct action to crash Drax’s profits”. Following the arrests, the camp was cancelled.

150 environmental organisations signed a statement accusing the police of acting as “private security” for Drax, while activists said the sting showed the police had the wrong priorities.

A spokesperson for Reclaim the Power said: “In Yorkshire this morning, police prioritised locating and arresting people suspected of organising peaceful protest with tents, toilets and track for wheelchairs over locating and arresting people who are actually organising far-right riots.”

15 of those arrested face plea hearing at Leeds magistrates court on Thursday, charged with conspiracy to lock on. They deny the charges.

A freedom of information (FOI) request shared with Novara Media can now reveal the scale and cost of the operation.

1,070 officers were deployed during Operation Infusion – the codename for the operation. This includes 334 from North Yorkshire Police, 100 from Police Scotland and 57 from the Metropolitan Police. Officers from 39 police forces were involved in the operation – nearly every constabulary in the country.

North Yorkshire Police used contractors to provide accommodation, vehicle hire, hire of portaloos, carparking, skips and fencing. The names of the contractors were exempted from the FOI request. The total cost of the operation was £3,168,432.

Kevin Blowe, campaigns coordinator at the Network for Police Monitoring (Netpol), said: “The scale of the police operation shows how much money the police are willing to throw at shutting down a protest before it even takes place.”

In July 2024, Drax had secured an injunction which created a “buffer zone” against the threat of direct action protests around its north Yorkshire power plant. The plant has been a magnet for protesters for years, with previous protests against Drax infiltrated by undercover police officers.

Some of the arrests in August were made for conspiracy to “lock on” – when protesters attach themselves to people or buildings making it difficult to remove them. “Locking on” was specifically criminalised for the first time by the Public Order Act 2023, brought in by the Conservative government which cited “groups such as Just Stop Oil and Insulate Britain” to justify its crackdown on protest.

Blowe said: “In 2024 there was a marked rise in the use of conspiracy charges to arrest campaigners for the newly introduced or expanded offences included in recent anti-protest legislation. Invariably this is because they were associated with groups targeted for ongoing police surveillance.”

Blowe is the author of a forthcoming report which claims that aggressive policing and the portrayal of protesters as threats to democracy has grown so routine and so severe that it amounts to state repression. He said: “Events at Drax last summer are one of the reasons why, for the first time, we are calling this state repression: measures to disproportionately deter, disrupt, punish or otherwise control protesters, campaign groups and entire social movements, with a total disregard for their human rights.”

A spokesperson for North Yorkshire Police said: “Whilst part of our role is to facilitate peaceful protest, we also have a responsibility to minimise disruption and prevent a breach of the peace.

“There is an ongoing court case relating to the operation in question, so it would be therefore inappropriate to comment further at this time.”

Drax used to be the UK’s biggest coal fired power station. It has transitioned to use what the company claims is “sustainable bioenergy”, but it has been found to burn wood from “old-growth” forests, pumping huge amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. It has also been accused of “environmental racism” as its toxic wood processing plants are mostly based in poor communities of colour in the southern United States.

In February, the government extended subsidies for Drax until 2031 to the dismay of environmentalists and communities in the southern United States.

Simon Childs is a commissioning editor and reporter for Novara Media.

crosspost from !news@lemmy.world

Summary

Wisconsin resident Bradley Bartell voted for Trump’s promise to crack down on “criminal illegal immigrants,” but now his Peruvian wife Camila Muñoz has been detained by ICE.

Muñoz, from Peru, overstayed her visa but had applied for legal residency. On their way home from a honeymoon, immigration agents detained her at a Puerto Rico airport.

Despite no criminal record, she remains in a Louisiana detention center. Her case reflects ICE’s broadened enforcement that now includes documented immigrants.

Bartell, once supportive of stricter immigration policies, now questions the impact on families like his own.

Security officials in the United Kingdom have demanded that Apple create a back door allowing them to retrieve all the content any Apple user worldwide has uploaded to the cloud, people familiar with the matter told The Washington Post.

The British government’s undisclosed order, issued last month, requires blanket capability to view fully encrypted material, not merely assistance in cracking a specific account, and has no known precedent in major democracies. Its application would mark a significant defeat for tech companies in their decades-long battle to avoid being wielded as government tools against their users, the people said, speaking under the condition of anonymity to discuss legally and politically sensitive issues.

Rather than break the security promises it made to its users everywhere, Apple is likely to stop offering encrypted storage in the U.K., the people said. Yet that concession would not fulfill the U.K. demand for backdoor access to the service in other countries, including the United States.

The office of the Home Secretary has served Apple with a document called a technical capability notice, ordering it to provide access under the sweeping U.K. Investigatory Powers Act of 2016, which authorizes law enforcement to compel assistance from companies when needed to collect evidence, the people said.

The law, known by critics as the Snoopers’ Charter, makes it a criminal offense to reveal that the government has even made such a demand. An Apple spokesman declined to comment.

Apple can appeal the U.K. capability notice to a secret technical panel, which would consider arguments about the expense of the requirement, and to a judge who would weigh whether the request was in proportion to the government’s needs. But the law does not permit Apple to delay complying during an appeal.

In March, when the company was on notice that such a requirement might be coming, it told Parliament: “There is no reason why the U.K. [government] should have the authority to decide for citizens of the world whether they can avail themselves of the proven security benefits that flow from end-to-end encryption.”

The Home Office said Thursday that its policy was not to discuss any technical demands. “We do not comment on operational matters, including for example confirming or denying the existence of any such notices,” a spokesman said.

Senior national security officials in the Biden administration had been tracking the matter since the United Kingdom first told the company it might demand access and Apple said it would refuse. It could not be determined whether they raised objections to Britain. Trump White House and intelligence officials declined to comment.

One of the people briefed on the situation, a consultant advising the United States on encryption matters, said Apple would be barred from warning its users that its most advanced encryption no longer provided full security. The person deemed it shocking that the U.K. government was demanding Apple’s help to spy on non-British users without their governments’ knowledge. A former White House security adviser confirmed the existence of the British order.

At issue is cloud storage that only the user, not Apple, can unlock. Apple started rolling out the option, which it calls Advanced Data Protection, in 2022. It had sought to offer it several years earlier but backed off after objections from the FBI during the first term of President Donald Trump, who pilloried the company for not aiding in the arrest of “killers, drug dealers and other violent criminal elements.” The service is an available security option for Apple users in the United States and elsewhere.

While most iPhone and Mac computer users do not go through the steps to enable it, the service offers enhanced protection from hacking and shuts down a routine method law enforcement uses to access photos, messages and other material. iCloud storage and backups are favored targets for U.S. search warrants, which can be served on Apple without the user knowing.

Law enforcement authorities around the world have complained about increased use of encryption in communication modes beyond simple phone traffic, which in the United States can be monitored with a court’s permission.

The U.K. and FBI in particular have said that encryption lets terrorists and child abusers hide more easily. Tech companies have pushed back, stressing a right to privacy in personal communication and arguing that back doors for law enforcement are often exploited by criminals and can be abused by authoritarian regimes.

Most electronic communication is encrypted to some degree as it passes through privately owned systems before reaching its destination. Usually such intermediaries as email providers and internet access companies can obtain the plain text if police ask.

But an increasing number of tech offerings are encrypted end to end, meaning that no intermediary has access to the digital keys that would unlock the content. That includes Signal messages, Meta’s WhatsApp and Messenger texts, and Apple’s iMessages and FaceTime calls. Often such content loses its end-to-end protection when it is backed up for storage in the cloud. That does not happen with Apple’s Advanced Data Protection option.

Apple has made privacy a selling point for its phones for years, a stance that was enhanced in 2016 when it successfully fought a U.S. order to unlock the iPhone of a dead terrorist in San Bernardino, California. It has since sought to compromise, such as by developing a plan to scan user devices for illegal material. That initiative was shelved after heated criticism by privacy advocates and security experts, who said it would turn the technology against customers in unpredictable ways.

Google would be a bigger target for U.K. officials, because it has made the backups for Android phones encrypted by default since 2018. Google spokesman Ed Fernandez declined to say whether any government had sought a back door, but implied none have been implemented. “Google can’t access Android end-to-end encrypted backup data, even with a legal order,” he said.

Meta also offers encrypted backups for WhatsApp. A spokesperson declined to comment on government requests but pointed to a transparency statement on its website saying that no back doors or weakened architecture would be implemented.

If the U.K. secures access to the encrypted data, other countries that have allowed the encrypted storage, such as China, might be prompted to demand equal backdoor access, potentially prompting Apple to withdraw the service rather than comply.

The battle over storage privacy escalating in Britain is not entirely unexpected. In 2022 U.K. officials condemned Apple’s plans to introduce strong encryption for storage. “End-to-end encryption cannot be allowed to hamper efforts to catch perpetrators of the most serious crimes,” a government spokesperson told the Guardian newspaper, referring specifically to child safety laws.

After the Home Office gave Apple a draft of what would become the backdoor order, the company hinted to lawmakers and the public what might lie ahead.

During a debate in Parliament over amendments to the Investigatory Powers Act, Apple warned in March that the law allowed the government to demand back doors that could apply around the world. “These provisions could be used to force a company like Apple, that would never build a back door into its products, to publicly withdraw critical security features from the UK market, depriving UK users of these protections,” it said in a written submission.

Apple argued then that wielding the act against strong encryption would conflict with a ruling by the European Court of Human Rights that any law requiring companies to produce end-to-end encrypted communications “risks amounting to a requirement that providers of such services weaken the encryption mechanism for all users” and violates the European right to privacy.

In the United States, decades of complaints from law enforcement about encryption have recently been sidelined by massive hacks by suspected Chinese government agents, who breached the biggest communications companies and listened in on calls at will. In a joint December press briefing on the case with FBI leaders, a Department of Homeland Security official urged Americans not to rely on standard phone service for privacy and to use encrypted services when possible.

Also that month, the FBI, National Security Agency and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency joined in recommending dozens of steps to counter the Chinese hacking spree, including “Ensure that traffic is end-to-end encrypted to the maximum extent possible.”

Officials in Canada, New Zealand and Australia endorsed the recommendations. Those in the United Kingdom did not.

Dropout is a subscription service born from the ashes of College Humor. It features live-play TTRPG series, improv comedy, panel shows and more. There's a lot of their content on YouTube for free, the subscription service costs $60 a year and they encourage password sharing.

I made !dropout@lemmy.blahaj.zone and a cobbled-together open source bot so that there would always be a place on lemmy/the fediverse to discuss the twists and turns of the current Dimension 20 campaign or share laughter from the latest crazed invention of the Game Changer writers.

Clare Rogers says her daughter Zoe has been branded a terrorist

In August, Clare Rogers' daughter was arrested after allegedly taking part in direct action at an Israeli defence firm near Bristol.

"I discovered, three days in, still no phone call, that she was held under the Terrorist Act. And that meant seven days in solitary, and no right to a phone call... It was shocking," she said.

Zoe Rogers, 21, is one of a group of pro-Palestinian protesters charged in relation to an incident at the Elbit UK, part of Elbit Systems, a global Israeli defence firm.

Zoe was eventually charged with criminal damage, violent disorder and aggravated burglary and denied bail. Her trial is not set to take place until November 2025.

Zoe Rogers is one of 10 activists who was arrested by counter terror police

"The idea of my daughter being branded a terrorist just fills me with horror," Clare said.

She added: "Someone who believes so passionately in justice, is lamenting the deaths of innocent civilians and children. To be called a terrorist?

"That really disgusts me.

"It makes me very angry and it worries me about the future of activists in this country, and the expression of free speech."

Zoe Rogers is being held without bail

Although Zoe was not charged with a terror offence, she and the other activists arrested at the same time were denied bail because the Crown Prosecution Service claimed there might still be a terror link. It was Zoe's first alleged offence.

"The day she appeared in court I will remember for the rest of my life. I hadn't seen her for seven days. I hadn't been able to speak to her," recalled Clare tearfully.

"The judge said 'no bail', and the next few seconds she was led out of the courtroom.

"That memory, it will stay with me forever. It was literally my child being taken away from me. I will never rid myself of that memory and the trauma that went with it."

'Mum, the marches aren't working'

Clare believes Zoe should have got bail

"She is someone who is very loving and very shy," Clare says of her daughter.

"She thinks very deeply and cares very deeply about social justice. She started to see what was unfolding in Gaza and that became a huge part of her life."

Zoe went on most of the pro-Gaza marches calling for an immediate ceasefire, but started to feel disheartened.

"She said to me: 'Mum the marches aren't working, the government's not listening.'"

Counter-terror laws 'used to intimidate'

Sukaina Rajwani's daughter is also being held without bail

Sukaina Rajwani is from Merton in south London. Her daughter Fatema Zainab was also arrested and charged as part of the same operation, and is also being held without bail.

"I believe the counter-terrorism legislation was used to intimidate and scare them and used as an excuse to keep them for longer," she told BBC London.

"I honestly thought she would get bail because she doesn't have a criminal record or convictions. She met all the bail conditions.

"She is literally a baby for me. She had only just turned 20 a week before."

Neither Clare nor Sukaina say they had any idea that their daughters might have been planning direct action with the group Palestine Action.

In a statement to the BBC, Palestine Action defended direct action and condemned the use of anti-terror laws.

"Elbit Systems, Israel's largest weapons producer, market their arms as "battle-tested" on the Palestinian people," it said.

"By misusing counter-terrorism powers against those who take direct action to shut Elbit down, the state is prioritising the interests of a foreign weapons manufacturer over the rights and freedoms of its own citizens."

Elbit Systems UK told the BBC: "We are proud to provide critical support and advanced technology to the British armed forces from our sites in Bristol, and this work has continued uninterrupted today.

"Any claims that these facilities supply the Israeli military or Israeli Ministry of Defence are completely false.”

'Law being correctly used'

Jonathan Hall KC is the independent reviewer of terrorism legislation

Some UK human rights organisations are concerned the legal definition of terrorism is too wide and is increasingly being used to crack down on legitimate protest and free speech.

And organisations such as the National Union of Journalists (NUJ) are also worried about the use of counter-terror legislation by police.

Michelle Stanistreet, NUJ general secretary, said: “The rise in the use of counter-terror legislation by British police against journalists is alarming and we are concerned recent cases are without clear or sufficient explanation to those under investigation.

"Being able to report freely on issues in the public interest without fear of arrest is a fair expectation for every journalist abiding by the union’s code of conduct. We have urged an end to the apparent targeting for its harm on a free press and the risks posed to both journalists and their sources.”

However, the independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, external, Jonathan Hall KC, believes the law is being correctly used on the whole.

"Just gluing yourself to the road is never going to be terrorism. Holding a placard is never going to be terrorism unless it's for a proscribed organisation. It's got to be serious violence against people or serious damage to property.

"It's got to hit that seriousness threshold before that could even apply."

But he says it is a fair criticism that the authorities hold a huge amount of power in the context of terrorism arrests. These situations, he says, are an operational decision for the police.

Human rights lawyer Michael Mansfield says the definition of terrorism is "in the eye of the beholder"

Michael Mansfield KC is a leading barrister in human rights and civil liberties. Without commenting on this specific case, he told the BBC that he believed protest was a right, not a crime.

"Genocide is occurring in many areas of the world. Genocide is an international crime. You've had a court recently indicating that the occupation of the Palestinian territories has also been unlawful for the past 75 years.

"People are saying, 'What is happening about this? Where is the accountability?'"

He admits that direct action can sometimes be a crime.

"Whether the crime you've committed is terrorism, that is the question," Mr Mansfield added. "Some of these issues are in the eye of the beholder."

'She should be at university now'

The probability of being held without bail until November 2025 has had a dramatic effect on the lives of both Zoe and Fatema, whose university places are at stake.

"She should be at university now. She'd got a place to start this autumn, her first year at university," said Clare of her daughter, who has been diagnosed as autistic.

"She worked so hard for that place. She had to do an extra year of sixth form because of Covid; she didn't get the A-levels she needed for her chosen university.

"She did another year of study, got the place, and now she can't start. She can't even start next year, because she will be standing trial. That has been devastating for her."

Fatema Zainab would be doing her final year in media studies at Goldsmith University were she not behind bars.

"God forbid if they do not get bail on their next appeal, then she will try to defer for another year, " said Sukaina. "It's all unchartered waters. Every day brings a new challenge."

Clare and Sukaina have been supporting each other while their daughters are in jail

I asked Clare whether there is a difference between the right to free speech and direct action.

"Someone taking direct action to disrupt the Israeli arms industry, there is a law that oversees that and it is called criminal damage," she maintains. "It's not terrorism."

"If you look at what the suffragettes did, they were quite violent, they destroyed property, they put bricks through windows. We look on them as heroes.

"I think people will look back at people who took direct action in this context as heroes in the future."

I just read of Radicle on another post and I'm wondering if people have used it and what their experiences have been like