UK Home Office Floats Bill That Would Make It Illegal To Be Too Loud During A Protest

from the quiet,-you dept

The British government is looking to literally silence dissent. Protests are a fact of life. There hasn't been a government yet that's been able to avoid them. But governments still do all they can to prevent them from reaching critical mass. In Hong Kong, the Chinese government has turned protesting into a national security crime with life sentences. In the United States, legislators are still trying to find ways to shut people up without violating their long-protected right to be verbally and demonstratively angry at their government.

Over in the UK, the government wants people to shut up. So, the Home Office has crafted a bill that would do exactly that: criminalize the "noise" protesters make. The bill would amend the 1986's Public Order Act to make it a crime to do the one thing demonstrations and protests are supposed to do: draw the public's attention. Here's Ian Dunt, writing for Politics.co.uk.

On Tuesday, the Home Office published the police, crime, sentencing and courts bill. It covers a wide range of areas, from sentencing to digital information. But it has a specific section on the policing of protests. And the function of this section is simple: It aims to silence them.

This isn't a metaphorical silencing. It's a literal silencing. The 1986 law forbids protests that threaten serious damage or disruption. These amendments add "noise" to the list of aspects that allow the government to intervene or shut down demonstrations.

If the noise of the protest “may result in serious disruption to the activities of an organisation” – for instance by distracting employees in a nearby office, then the police can impose restrictions. It goes without saying that this applies to almost any protest at all around parliament, the whole purpose of which is to get the attention of politicians. It can therefore cause “serious disruption” of an organisation.

It also applies to passers-by. If the noise of the protest could have “a relevant impact on persons in the vicinity of the procession”, the police can impose restrictions. The standard for this threshold is very low indeed: If the police believe that just one person nearby could be caused “serious unease, alarm or distress”, they can impose restrictions.

Unease and alarm are often byproducts of even peaceful protests. It's something commonly suffered by those targeted by the targets of demonstrations. Their unease is the point, because without it, it's pretty hard to compel change.

With this amendment, anyone could complain about the "noise" made by protesters and prompt a law enforcement response. Law enforcement can also use any imagined level of noise as impetus for shutting down protests under the presumption that stopping a protest before it gets "too" loud is just proactive police work.

It's SHUT UP: the law. The entire point of protests is to draw attention to and disrupt the status quo. This bill makes it illegal to hold an effective protest. And that appears to be the way the Home Office wants it. As Dunt points out, Home Secretary Priti Patel has been openly critical of many different protests, calling Extinction Rebellion protesters "eco-terrorists" and saying Black Lives Matter protests are not "the right way" to protest.

This is a gag order on dissent. Every government would love to have one. And it looks like the UK may be the next to criminalize complaints by the public it's apparently failing to serve properly.

Filed Under: dissent, noise, protests, uk

DailyDirt: Improving Productivity

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

There are only so many hours in a day. It'd be great to be able to get more done in less time, and people are always looking for easy (or any!) solutions that might boost their productivity. Some folks try polyphasic sleep schedules to try to get more waking hours, but that's cheating. (Sleeping less is probably not healthy, either.) Here are just a few other stories about changes that you can try to get more things done.

• Coffitivity claims that ambient noise (like the kind from a local coffee shop) can increase creativity with "enough noise to work." Rooms that are too quiet can be distracting, and obviously, rooms that are too loud can impair mental focus and concentration -- and there's some research to back it up. [url]
• Pixar's headquarters is designed with all the bathrooms in the atrium -- so that employees from different departments might have more opportunities to mingle. Hopefully, though, people aren't discussing their work projects while taking care of other business.... [url]
• The Hawthorne Effect was named after a set of studies at the Hawthorne plant in the 1920s -- where increased productivity was observed when the factory lights were brightened OR darkened. Basically, the workers were more productive, not because of the lighting changes, but because they realized their bosses were checking on them. (The dramatic effect of changing the lighting was apparently fictional, but the Hawthorne Effect is still a phenomenon that researchers try to account for when designing psychological studies.) [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

Filed Under: creativity, design, distractions, employees, hawthorne effect, management, noise, productivity, work
Companies: coffitivity, pixar

DailyDirt: Listening To The Sounds of Silence (And Other Noises)

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Temporary hearing loss is not an uncommon experience after going to a loud music concert. It can almost be funny when you're talking too loud because you can't hear yourself, and thankfully, the ringing in your ears after a loud show usually goes away. People sometimes take their ability to hear for granted, but it's an important sense, and here are just a few interesting links on listening that you might want to check out before you need a hearing aid.

• The world's quietest room (AKA an anechoic chamber) is so quiet that it can cause people to start hallucinating and become disoriented by the lack of auditory feedback. Your brain is accustomed to a fair amount of background noise, so when it's deprived of nearly all ambient sounds, you'll find that peace and quiet are not as related as you might think. [url]
• MRI scans can measure how annoying some sounds are, and surprisingly "nails on a chalkboard" isn't the worst. If you want to listen to "knife on a bottle" to hear the most annoying sound (out of the 74 sounds that were tested), be prepared to cringe. [url]
• People with Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR) really like to listen to people whispering and making soft scratching noises. When the experience is triggered, it's reported to feel like a "brain tingle" -- and there are a bunch of YouTube channels that cater to these folks. [url]
• According to some researchers, the shape of your skull might actually influence your musical preferences. The effect is subtle, but the resonant structure around the cochlea can affect the perception of sounds. (Remember that the next time you're thinking about buying really expensive headphones...?) [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

Filed Under: anechoic chamber, asmr, autonomous sensory meridian response, hearing, music, noise, quiet, senses, skull, sounds

Hybrid Vehicles Are Quiet -- Maybe Too Quiet, According To A Couple Of Lawmakers

from the danger-will-robinson dept

One of the side effects of hybrid vehicles -- a positive one, for most people -- is quieter operation traditional vehicles in some situations. Less vehicle noise sounds like a good thing, unless you're blind, so a couple of senators have introduced legislation that would direct the Department of Transportation to study ways to protect blind people and other pedestrians (via Engadget) from silent vehicles. This isn't a new complaint: we reported last year about how Lotus was experimenting with putting speakers in hybrids to play engine noises, although we thought it might have been a joke. But apparently Lotus was just ahead of the legislative curve. Still, we have to wonder, is making cars noisier the best way to protect blind people and other pedestrians?

Filed Under: blind, hybrid vehicles, noise

97% Of All Email Is Spam, But How Much Of The Other 3% Is Just Noise?

from the overwhelmed dept

A new report from Microsoft says that 97 percent of all email is spam, reflecting the degree to which email systems worldwide are swamped with the messages. The figure seems high, but perhaps that's just because anti-spam tools have gotten better at deflecting spam away from most people's inboxes. But clearly enough is still getting through -- and enough people are buying what it's selling -- to make it financially worthwhile for spammers. Personally, I don't see too much spam these days, as Gmail's filter works pretty well for me. But what I do see lots of is "soft" spam -- messages that come from web services, retailers, mailing lists and thanks to writing on the web, PR people. Most of these messages come from things with which I've had some sort of relationship, commercial or otherwise, in the past, but most of them are still uninteresting and unwanted. While many of these people are pretty good about honoring unsubscribe requests, many are not, and also seem to share my email address with impunity. The result is that my email account is full of noise -- while my inbox isn't overrun by V1*GRA-type spam, all the other soft spam, as well as the bacn, or messages I've subscribed to but never read, obfuscate the messages I actually care about, making email a pain to deal with.

The point here isn't really to complain about my inbox, but rather to illustrate how even as "real" spam becomes more and more hidden from many users, email still has plenty of problems. Eliminating the 419 scams, joe-jobs, fake drug spam and the like would certainly be great, but even beyond that, email still has its flaws, leading people to communicate through IM, social networks and other means. To be sure, email is still eminently useful, but will that usefulness soon be outweighed by its detriments? And will it be salvageable?

Filed Under: bacn, email, noise, spam

Latest Pointless Law: Requiring Cameraphones To Click When Taking Photos

from the this-again? dept

History is littered with examples of new technologies causing people to freak out. When automobiles were introduced, laws were passed forcing people to walk in front of the cars, waving red flags. Years ago, I read a great article about how when regular film cameras were first introduced, there were regulations against them, due to fears about privacy violations (I could have sworn I wrote about it on Techdirt, but now I can't find it...). It seems that a similar concept may be showing up with cameraphones, as John writes in to let us know of new legislation in Congress that would require all cameraphones to "click" when taking a photo. The idea, of course, is to "protect the children" so that predators can't secretly take photos. The law is similar to one found in South Korea, so it's hardly a new idea -- though it still doesn't make much sense. Someone looking to do something illegal with their cameraphone will easily figure out a way to take silent photos. All this law will actually do is annoy those who have perfectly legitimate reasons for wanting to take photos quietly. Hell, you could just as easily come up with some silly scenario how this law would be damaging to children... such as if someone wanted to photograph a predator stalking children without the guy knowing... Anyway, vote on what you think of the law below:

Filed Under: cameraphones, noise

Lotus Adds Fake Engine Noise To Make Hybrids Sound Like Cars

from the is-it-april-fools-yet? dept

There have been a few stories over the past few years about the fact that hybrid cars (or just plain electric vehicles) are somehow "too quiet." The complaint is that pedestrians and bikers who are used to judging the safety of a road by vehicle noise are now somehow in danger from these quieter vehicles. Even so, reading this story and seeing the related video about how Lotus has been experimenting with adding a speaker under the hood that makes a noisy engine sound certainly feels like an April Fools joke, or possibly a bit from The Onion. No matter how many times I watch the video, I'm still not convinced that this is serious.

Filed Under: blind, fake noise, hybrid cars, noise
Companies: lotus

Your Electric Vehicle Is Too Quiet; Congress May Force It To Be Louder

from the this-will-go-over-well dept

Who knew silence was such a problem? Somewhat reminiscent of laws that required cameraphones to add a fake mechanical shutter sound, so people couldn't take pictures "silently," Congress is now looking at requiring electric vehicles to make additional noise to stop people from driving so quietly. Apparently, the real fear is that pedestrians can't hear these quiet cars, since we're all used to at least a certain level of engine noise that just isn't present. The whole thing seems rather silly. While the desire for safety is understandable, forcing these vehicles to make an unnecessary noise seems pretty extreme.

Filed Under: electric vehicle, noise, too quiet