Jonathan Hall, a UK government-appointed Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation, has dubbed reforms announced by PM Keir Starmer in this legislative area as “unacceptable” – specifically in how that would restrict freedom of expression.
These changes came as part of the Labour government’s reaction to the Southport murders and subsequent protests and unrest.
The issue addressed by Hall’s report published this week is the legal definition of terrorism, and whether it needs to be expanded to acts of extreme violence like those perpetrated by Axel Rudakubana in Southport last summer.
Hall’s overall conclusion is that there is no need to amend the definition of terrorism, as it is “already wide.”
One of the implications, should proposed changes be adopted, concerns speech, writes the terrorism watchdog. He warns about risks involving “major false positives” – i.e., persons that would get prosecuted although they cannot be considered terrorists “by any stretch of the imagination.”
However, there is also the issue of definition expansion into what Hall refers to as novel territory.
“For example, any person who glorified ‘extreme violence’ would be at risk of arrest and prosecution as a terrorist. People swapping violent war footage would be at risk of encouraging terrorism, resulting in unacceptable restriction on freedom of expression,” he writes.
Hall also argues against the notion that it is possible to examine the browsing history of a perpetrator like Rudakubana and from that alone deduce which point in his online activities fatefully influenced his real world actions.
Expansion of the definition of terrorism to include such crimes – as essentially a way to give the authorities greater powers – is not likely to be effective for the purposes declared by the government, Hall suggests.
Many opponents of the UK government’s decisions and initiatives in the wake of the Southport murders have been warning that redefining legislation paves the way for greater mass surveillance capabilities.
Hall thinks that expectations when it comes to actually dealing with extreme violence in the proposed way might be unrealistic.
“There is no supercomputer or algorithm that can magically scan all online communications and tell who is an attacker and who is a fantasist,” he observes.
In order to avoid what the report describes as an extremely high risk of unintended consequences of rushed changes to the definition of terrorism, Hall advises the government to consider “a new offense, adapted from terrorism legislation, to deal with non-terrorist mass casualty attack-planning.”
