A prince, an ambassador, senior diplomats, top politicians. All brought down by the Jeffrey Epstein files. And all in Europe, rather than the United States.

The huge trove of Epstein documents released by the U.S. Department of Justice has sent shock waves through Europe’s political, economic and social elites — dominating headlines, ending careers and spurring political and criminal investigations.

Former U.K. Ambassador to Washington Peter Mandelson was fired and could go to prison. British Prime Minister Keir Starmer faces a leadership crisis over the Mandelson appointment. Senior figures have fallen in Norway, Sweden and Slovakia. And, even before the latest batch of files, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, brother of King Charles III, lost his honors, princely title and taxpayer-funded mansion.

  • hector@lemmy.today
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    1 day ago

    Without answering all your points yet, you don’t believe they are locking down the internet, doesn’t speak well to your undertanding

    You should know it’s already been locked down in the UK for a long time, not just by Palantir either, over ten years, going on 20 really. But what they are doing now is different, and this information will be accessible to more groups of people, and is being done to utilize new technology that didn’t exist back then.

    I seriously think we are being dosed with some toxin making us trusting and docile because previous generations never would’ve stood for this.

    • HamFistedVegan@lemmy.world
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      23 hours ago

      I

      you don’t believe they are locking down the internet

      No, I believe they are policing the internet more than previously. The part I definitely don’t believe is your idea that they are using this information to make secret social scores on citizens. That’s a dystopian fantasy in my view.

      Aside from introducing age verification checks do you have any evidence that it’s being “locked down”? You’re right in that my understanding is limited as I’m only aware of what our government has passed into law, not what people think is happening.

      If you have some article or evidence that helps explain it I would be grateful.

      • hector@lemmy.today
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        19 hours ago

        It’s sort of the whole thing about Palantir, and like companies, they aren’t the only ones. They are tapping into a lot of information streams, including ones people assume they don’t have access to, including ones they aren’t supposed to have access to. Because the information is never used in court it’s never challenged, any information they get from such systems they find parallel constructions for the evidence, a plausible legal way they found that evidence they want to use in court.

        I will jot a note on your comment and send you something about it when I find a good article about what I’m talking about. The article(s) I am referencing from memory are not findable by search engines as such due to enshitified search results, and time as one article about Palantir, and the UK, was like 2010 or so. Not just palantir, but they were setting Natsec to tap into the internet in the UK, and US was following suit, on a base level.

        But beyond that longstanding spying, this is a new beast entirely, utilizing new technologies past authoritarians couldn’t dream of, to run ai threat detection, and make scores on people, that they then discreetly filter through, to you getting that loan at your bank, that job, the background check, and in the dystopian future, determining the personalized prices you are offered for goods, online or in person with digital price tags, down to the results your search engine shows you.

        These ai systems are half baked too, it’s not like they will make good accurate determinations, or have accurate information, and as always to help sell it to the people in power they leave a way for it’s users to input ways to fuck people they don’t like. Anyway I will get back to you on a source on that part of it.