Your question can be read one of two ways. Either you mean "Can an applicant with an unspent conviction not declare it and get away with it?" or you mean "If an employee has a spent conviction and is not obligated to declare it, is there anything in place to prevent him/her from declaring it and/or anything in place to ensure that the potential employer can be forced to disregard it?"

If the former:
The short version - in non-high-risk jobs, it depends if the employer chooses to carry out checks (if no, getting away with it is easy. If yes, getting away with it is not so easy). The long version - In high-risk roles, it should not be possible. My understanding of it (and remember, IANAL) is that if you are explicitly asked about convictions on a normal (i.e. for a non-high-risk role) application, you only have to declare "unspent" convictions. If your employer then applies for a criminal records check (which, as I understand it, any employer can do with the individual's consent) it will only return "unspent" convictions. "Spent" convictions remain on record. They are not expunged. If you are applying for a higher-risk role, your employer may have the right to request a more complete criminal records check, under which circumstances ALL records are returned, "spent" and "unspent". Indeed, if you are applying for a high-risk role, my understanding is that the application form MUST make clear that you need to declare both "spent" and "unspent" convictions and that (unlike in a non-high-risk role, where the criminal records check is optional) the company MUST have you vetted by the DBS (Disclosure & Barring Service. I believe that this replaces the CRB - Criminal Records Bureau). In low risk roles, however, because formal checks are optional, it has the potential to be relatively easy.

If the latter:
I'm not aware of anything being in place, other than human nature of a person not normally wanting to portray themselves in a negative light, to prevent an applicant from declaring spent convictions that (s)he does not need to. That being said, if (s)he does declare it, depending on how much detail (s)he gives, the employer should be able to determine for themselves whether a conviction is spent (the length of time it takes for a conviction to be spent is, I think, determined by the length of the sentence. Therefore, provided the applicant can give accurate dates, the employer should be able to do the math without needing so much as a calculator). The downside it that, whilst the employer should be able to determine that the conviction is spent, and thus should be disregarded, I am not aware of anything in place to ensure that once they have determined such that they do disregard it. Indeed, it is likely that, should an applicant slip up and disclose a spent conviction when there is no duty to do so, the employer will take it into consideration and choose an alternative candidate but, when pressed for a reason, will not admit to this being it (as can be fairly common with ageism and other forms of discrimination).

As for the question of whether the employer is allowed to ask, only when hiring for high-risk roles are they permitted to ask about spent convictions. I am not sure what the legal options are for an applicant with spent convictions who is asked about whether (s)he has any by an employer who is not afforded such an exemption. I am not even sure whether they could be found guilty of fraud if they lied and didn't disclose them as, as far as the employers legitimate entitlement to information is concerned, the spent convictions do not exist. I'm also not sure whether there are any sanctions laid down that can be imposed on employers who ask when they do not have such an exemption. Maybe a real lawyer would like to chip in here and fill in the blanks?

As for being expunged from public records, the answer is no, as they still need to be declared for high-risk roles. My understanding is that they cannot, however, be referred to in most court proceedings. I also believe that it is an offence to publish details of spent convictions for malicious purposes. I am not aware, however, whether this means that archived/historic publication of such convictions made whilst the conviction was unspent are required to be purged (I doubt it).

Again, IANAL, and I look forward to any clarification that can be made by a real lawyer.

Then there's the flip-side of that argument... What if the police subsequently dropped the accusations because they found the real culprit, but because it was never reported in the public domain, it's not available for Google et al to index. Because the sites reporting the original police accusation are reporting fact, you can't use libel laws to force a take-down. Based on your argument, you seem to be saying that it's OK for the first, falsely accused, individual to suffer in perpetuity as a result of a false accusation. Am I misinterpreting your comment, or did you not consider that side?

Actually... Scratch that! IP address based location would probably work, but not exactly as implemented on YT. IIRC, searching for restricted material on YT still brings up the search results, and even brings up the individual pages, it's just the video content itself that's blocked.

They already have a better way to manage this than via which TLD the query is run against. On YouTube, it is apparent that they use IP address to determine the location of the client (that is, software client. Let's leave the argument about users being the product and the advertisers being the clients for another thread!) and thus block content in territories where they have been asked to prevent its distribution. Why not implement the same here?

One point I haven't seen raised in the debate thus far is that of "spent" convictions.

Here in the UK (and possibly other EU jurisdictions, I don't know), if you are convicted of a crime and have served your sentence, after a defined period the conviction will cease to appear on most employment-related criminal records checks (with obvious exceptions for high-risk roles such as those working with the young/vulnerable) and no longer have to be declared. This defined period varied with the severity of the crime involved/sentence served.

Historically, this meant potential employers in the lower-risk roles didn't know of convictions from a long time in the past unless the applicant volunteered the information, the HR staff involved had a far greater than average memory or could be bothered to pop down to the library and trawl the (barely indexed) microfiches of old newspapers on the slim chance that one of the current batch of applicants may have been convicted in a case considered significant enough to make it into the press. Now, it's just a couple of minutes on Google (or your other search provider of choice) to get this information that was considered unobtainable without compulsion or formal regulated checks when the law covering spent convictions was enacted.

This change is pretty fundamental, and MAY have been at least subconsciously involved in the court judgements that led to this discussion. That being said, IANAL. I do have a vague recollection of the statute being called the "Rehabilitation of Offenders Act" (there was a section about it and why it didn't apply on a set of security clearance application forms I had to complete over a decade ago, which, being a 20-year-old without so much as a speeding ticket, I only skimmed due to its irrelevance to me. Hence why my recollection is merely somewhat vague on the specifics), but I'm sure that if I'm wrong, some lawyer lurlikg in the /. undergrowth will jump in and correct me (and even if I'm right, will still likely jump in to add the date the act was passed).

My guess is, different groups involved here. IIRC the "law" in question is in fact case law, not (as yet) codified in statute or treaty. As such, the current state of the law (with all its lack of limitations, clarifications, etc) is the result of judgements made by the judiciary. IANAL so I won't start delving into the rights and wrongs of whether they should have the power to make judgements that interpret the law in such a way that they extend/expand it to such a great degree, but what I will say is that I believe that, should the decision be taken that the law is important enough to warrant codifying in treaty/statute, that codification should NOT be in the hands of the judiciary. My guess is that someone fairly senior in the EU bureaucracy has determined that this matter is getting enough column inches that it warrants codifying in an attempt to bring a degree of clarity (or, and I guess that this is just me being overly cynical, they've run out of things they have been tasked with and need to find something to do to use up remaining budget/resources to justify its maintenance/increase in the next round of budget negotiations). The obvious first step in this is to determine how the major players are interpreting and implementing the judgement thus far. They will likely then determine whether this is the interpretation of the judgement that they want to see applied, and codify legislation either to maintain the current way the industry is operating, or to encourage it in their preferred direction. Of course, the whole process is somewhat iterative, inasmuch as it only being a matter of time before some case hits the courts due to a disagreement over interpretations of this new law, and we'll be back to judges again (potentially on and on, ad infinitum). Tl;dr... The questions weren't asked when the law was written because the law was never envisaged as covering these sorts of situations. Judges interpreted the law as encompassing them (this is within their power) but did not rewrite the underlying law (as this is NOT, or at least shouldn't be, within their power).

Surprising??? You must not read the news much!

Sorry to break this to you, but in the vast majority of cases:

Gate staff != flight crew

My understanding is that this amendment was intended (and has since been interpreted) to protect free speech and the right to assemble and petition the govt for redress where THE GOVERNMENT is the cause of such grievances. I do not believe it applied in this case. That being said, IANAL. More to the point, I do agree that the reaction of the airline staff was grossly lacking in proportionality.

Probably because it's using the same SoC as the B model. IIRC the A and B variants were different not only in the layout/ports, but also the underlying SoCs (CPU, GPU, RAM combination). This would suggest that the major model identifier will be used to indicate the underlying SoC, while suffixes like '+' will be used to indicate layout/ports. This is, however, just a somewhat educated guess on my part...

Local dealers insure safety? Personally, I'm no fan of any insurance company, but I'd still rather get insurance from them than from any dealer... Or did you mean ensure?

Actually, according to the summary, one half DID catch fire, the other half briefly became an aircraft (and let's not dwell on the fact that it did so with neither a properly filed flight plan, nor any communication with any form the air traffic control).

Are you also proposing that this browser not support plugins? Otherwise, what's to stop malware writers creating a plugin that captures input and phones home with it? Or are you suggesting that the browser only support plugins obtained from some kind of walled garden? Who will police it? In the end, the problem remains that people will be the weak link. When discussing security, even computer security, it has always been thus, and likely always will be.

And now I feel really daft, because up to this point I was thinking they meant draft as in 'non-final version'. As a result, the biggest question I was thinking of was 'sure, it's embarrassing that copies were sent to the dead, but more importantly, why not wait for the final version?'