Should officials be permitted to create a database of people who criticise government policy?
A Home Office-linked unit called StaCU has logged 77 observations of people and groups criticising the Prevent counter-extremism programme on X, Reddit and in media between March 2024 and February 2025. These are stored internally as open-source complaints. The practice echoes past government monitoring of critics for event vetting and raises concerns about freedom of expression amid wider surveillance expansions including facial recognition and data platforms.
5 Opinions
StaCU? Or do we mean Stasi? The whole thing is just laughable... Prevent itself treats basic dissent as radicalisation, and bins the vast majority of its own useless referrals, so criticising it utterly valid. Oops... Looks like I just made StaCU's burn book.
Not if they want the current Government to win the next General Election.
No government should be free from scrutiny and critic. Only illegal activities should be matter of government interest. What next, thought police and reeducation camps?
Everyone should have the right to freely criticise or support Government policy. Why would a database of critics be kept and what would it be used for? The existence of such a database would be a massive government overreach.
An outrageous affront to freedom of speech and civil liberties. It wouldn't stop there. We're already seeing too much function creep with existing laws.