You think the UK is safe, go to China or Russia! They have _really_ 'safe' internet. Even better, just cut the internet off, it couldn't be any safer!
The politicians passing this stuff are literally the least qualified people to discuss anything tech related. They literally do not understand (or possibly don't care) that a backdoor for them is a backdoor for any motivated attacker.
> A clause of the bill allows Ofcom, the British telecom regulator, to serve a notice requiring tech companies to scan their users–all of them–for child abuse content.
This is Apple's CSAM [1] all over again. I'm sure it won't be used at all for out-of-scope reasons... Firstly expanded to terrorism, and then generic crime, then extreme political views, then hate speech, etc.
Can somebody in 'Big Tech' please remind them that this includes _their_ messages too? I want you to email them on a regular basis something like: "We have scanned all of your files and private communications as per the requirement of the OSB, and found nothing currently deemed unacceptable by the current government. This is a reminder that any content sent now or any time in the past will be retroactively scanned and reported based on continuously evolving guidelines."
> This would affect even messages and files that are end-to-end encrypted to protect user privacy. As enacted, the OSB allows the government to force companies to build technology that can scan regardless of encryption–in other words, build a backdoor.
It looks like I will be moving to E2E via private servers.
[1] https://www.apple.com/child-safety/pdf/Expanded_Protections_...
Given that the terminology comes straight of Orwell's 1984 they're barely even trying to hide the blatant power grab with a few cliche excuses (children, terrorism).
I think you're trying to say that the police and the council ignored the rape gangs because they were scared of being called racist, but your link doesn't bear that out. IIRC it's an excuse they've tried to use to justify their staggering, inexcusable failures in this case--"it's not our fault, it's those nasty progressives!"--but it doesn't really make sense.
I think they're trying to say that "hate speech" was invented by a hypocritical government to control people and it's not a real concern for regular folks, but that's obviously not true; it was born out of civil rights campaigns in the '50s and (eventually) adopted by governments due to popular demand.
No, I don't see how that's implied at all.
The arguments against back doors isn't that someone bad _might_ use it, it's that there is no need for the backdoor in the first place and there is no such thing as a secure back door that only intended people can use.
Authentication is not identification -- a client passing a secret to the server doesn't mean the person sending the secret should have this secret/be allowed to use this secret, it just means that they have the correct secret to get authorization from the server.
Thus, there is no such thing as a backdoor that only the "good guys" can use, this is an absurd statement (I am not implying you said this, but it seems to be the goal of governments and many tech companies for some reason...)
Technology is already chatty and insecure enough, we don't need yet another way for someone to get access to our personal devices.
The argument against back doors isn't misuse of the backdoors, it's that they shouldn't exist in the first place. There is no way to have a "safe" backdoor if any attackers with enough intent want to get access to whatever has the backdoor.
Perhaps some persons argue they'd be "okay" with the theoretical "good" backdoor, but I don't think that such arguments have been taken to their logical conclusions to explain how such a backdoor would ever ensure that only a person who really should be using it could be using it.
Government derives its power from the people it rules. There is no other source of that power.
Government derives its power from some percentage of the population it rules.
That percentage can be measured and is extremely low in most present-day democracies.
A military may be more merciful if it's just a small insurrection, but if the government is in real danger, a military has far, far more power than needed to put down any rebellion. So what, do you expect the citizens to storm the Bastille? The only reason any uprisings are successful is because the military allows them to be.
Sure, we can absolutely make smaller changes with votes, but when it comes down to it, if you have the support of the military, you have all the power. And because of that, citizens have relatively little power.
I'm not advocating for an insurrection against any government, but "that is on you to change" is nonsense.
Today, there are still many lands and 100s of millions of people who give no consent to be governed, and yet governed they are.
Birds are offended ;)
>"Cheers"
My pleasure
No, it implies that perfect security is impossible. Which is philosophically true.
Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.
https://open.substack.com/pub/rakkhi/p/big-tech-vs-governmen...
Forms of this legislation mandate exclusions for politicians and public figures.
Apologies for the vague statement - on my phone, short of time.
That kind of ranting goes too far. Why the exaggerations? I count three. It only serves to drive the dislike against politics, and thus anti-democratic tendencies.
> It only serves to drive the dislike against politics, and thus anti-democratic tendencies.
I'm pro-democracy (in the sense that I don't have a better alternative). You can still disagree with the actions of politicians without being anti-democratic - in fact open disagreement is absolutely fundamental to democracy.
Try and make someone have your opinion, it’s incredibly hard. If they disagree they won’t say so openly but they will vote for politicians trying to make the internet safer
You're not disagreeing with the actions of politicians, you're calling all of them "literally the least qualified people to discuss anything tech related". That is an incredibly big lie, and you know it. Yet you wrote it anyway. It's ranting, and the target is representative democracy.
Let them be driven. I find it curious how these "democratic" states have a tendency to turn into tyrannical surveillance police states. At least in a literal dictatorship people know they are powerless instead of having this delusion that they have "democratic" power.
For the uninitiated: https://youtu.be/ZggCipbiHwE?si=xPe3SQI_lI309h6j
The Apple issue was Apple doing it on the handset.
There's a huge difference between the cutoff and what happens in reality, in both of these countries.
But I am still looking to spend my energy in decentralised, fully-encrypted networks, I'm still banging on about the sham that is our democratic Western world, and researching modern technological ways to protest against the status quo (agorism, etc.)
It's small but honest work, yet the vast majority of people, here included, think working with the system and the thieves is better than accepting we've been lied to for decades.
But the point is, we are powerless against any decision Westminster does. We are all waiting to vote the other party next year, and do you truly believe they will step back from this bill? After all, they too care about the children, and it is us that want to harbour pedophiles.
(I am thoroughly disgusted by how major newspapers have framed this law as a win, or relegated it to a footnote.)
step back? they're criticising the government for not doing more/watering it down.
if anything the next government will strengthen these rules, not water them down.
Child safety laws are the Trojan horse of surveillance.
As some have said, people are apathetic about protesting over this issue—and I'd add many other issues as well—as it does no good. I'd essentially agree, protesting is damn hard and thankless work especially so given that it's effectively banned in most anglophone countries.
Seems to me little or nothing can be done until the political climate changes, when or if that will be is anyone's guess.
One issue that may tip the balance after backdoors are added to encryption is when politicians are caught out by their own law—as, no doubt, sooner or later they will be. Imagine the impact of a political scandal like the Profumo Affair after having been exposed by a backdoor hack. Only then will politicians realize what they've actually done—so too will the GP.
For those not old enough to realize how huge the Profumo scandal was here's the Wiki (I remember it being headline news for days and I wasn't even in the UK at the time): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Profumo_affair
I can imagine it. It would be declared to be the personal failing of the persons concerned and the political ship would sail on without so much as a shudder.
In ways I agree with your assessment as I've been around long enough to witness those changes. I can only add that unless we citizens insist on changes that actually benefit us and not the Establishment/Ruling Elite then we'll end up imprisoned in a totalitarian dictatorship.
At some point the current trend/movement will have to stop or that's where we'll end up by default.
Those two together seem to have been the key to shifting public opinion.
The terrorism threats started as racist fear mongering before shifting to highlighting threats from internal nationalist groups.
This combination gives every political leaning something to fear and someone to demonize.
Nice to know that Bravermen and the rest of them are protecting us from harm.
For example, in yesterday's Guardian [1]. Meta introducing encryption "will let child abusers ‘hide in the dark’".
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/sep/20/meta-encr...
Counter-economics? Get infatuated with anarchism, the free-market variant, mutualism, read up on agorism (on my reading list is "How to Opt-Out of the Technocratic State" by Derrick Broze), understand that cryptocurrencies, with all their problems, could be the only tool to take down a capitalist system from the inside the more our rights are stripped away. People, and the market itself, do not care about laws or prohibition. For the first time in history, we have a way to exchange value that does not respect borders or physical constraints. Even mainstream economists such as Milton Friedman believed such an invention could radically reshape the world. [1]
That's an open discussion, nothing I can go over in a forum comment, and there is no panacea. I'm simply exploring the option that it might be possible to have a fairer world, while collectively we have decided this is the best we can do, and point and laugh at whoever tries to dispute that. We have lost the idealism of the thinkers of the last two centuries, those that fought tooth and nail for civil and worker rights. Now all you get is a pin saying "I voted!"
Feel free to email me to discuss any of these topics.
But over the years I've developed an actual underlying seething rage at how removed politicians are from us. They operate in a way that they're almost entirely unaccountable and that we are subordinate to them, rather than the actual fact that they are our employees, they work for us, we pay them to do our bidding. But the structures have developed in such a way that this is now reversed. The system has set itself up such that we only ever get variations of the same people who do whatever it takes to keep protecting the system that protects them.
If you look at a party like AfD in Europe, I have no love at all for right wing populism, and I don't support AfD themselves, but I actually do support some of what their manifesto stands for. Far more accountability to people and much more direct democracy, more referendums and so on.
- affording heating
- affording food
- affording their mortgage
- being kicked out of their rented accommodation
- unable to find somewhere to rent
- unable to afford somewhere to rent
- badly maintained rented properties
- bad public transport making commutes miserable
- increasing petrol prices
- unaffordable nursery fees
- long NHS wait times
- unable to find an NHS dentist
- crime
Please explain why and how privacy can rank above this on a day to day basis about things they have the energy to care about. You kind of acknowledged this but then disregard it
- Make the practicalities of everyday life extremely miserable
- Make the population worn down and apathetic because things are so bad, a better life unattainable for all but a few
- Then, no one will notice while we pass bills that heavily restrict your liberty and vastly entrench our power
- Profit
It's a sinister genius, and smacks of contempt for the governed.
The UK government has made the practicalities of everyday life extremely miserable through a combination of
(a) ham-fisted political decisions (Brexit referendum held for party-political reasons, followed by the multi-decade car crash that is still ongoing); plus
(b) plain and simple not giving a single shit about the majority of the population, because it isn't in the personal interests of most of the current set of ruling MPs to give said shit.
There's no overarching devious plan to enslave us all, here. It's just classic honest-to-goodness incompetence and disinterest.
1. Appoint Evgeny Alexandrovich Lebedev to House of Lords as Lord of Siberia. His dad is a Russian oligarch and owns evening standard.
2. Handing out billions in PPE contracts to Tory donors to companies that were literally registered yesterday.
3. Privatise rail. Allow massive dividends from private rail companies. Spend 3.5 billion bailing out the same rail companies.
4. Allow 80 billion in dividents to be extracted from private water companies. Legalised dumping of raw sewage into rivers by water companies. Infrastructure is not maintained and most of water is lost to leaks. Enter talks about bailout with water companies.
At least the overarching-plan theory has a boogie man to attack. This is preferable to the alternative of nobody being directly at the helm and all these transgressions are done for a purely political game of chess that awards the person responsible with marginally more power than they had prior.
Honestly, that reality terrifies me more than some secretive cabal.
Our Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology is a woman called Michelle Donelan. She graduated with a BA in history and politics, and her career outside of being a career politician was in marketing, including a time working on Marie Claire magazine and for World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE). How in the world is she qualified for to run the nations tech initiatives? If she was appointed as CEO of a tech company, the stock would sink like a rock over night. Dare I even get started on Michael Gove, who originally wanted the role. Let's compare this to some other comparable countries to the UK:
Canada's Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry; François-Philippe Champagne. Ex Vice-President and Senior Counsel of ABB Group, as well as Strategic Development Director, acting General Counsel, and Chief Ethics Officer and Member of the Group Management Committee of Amec Foster Wheeler.
Taiwan's Minister of Digital Affairs; Audrey Tang. Tang was a child prodigy, reading works of classical literature before the age of five, advanced mathematics before six, and programming before eight, and she began to learn Perl at age 12. On CPAN, Tang initiated over 100 Perl projects between June 2001 and July 2006, including the popular Perl Archive Toolkit (PAR), a cross-platform packaging and deployment tool for Perl 5.
South Korea's Minister of Science and ICT; Lee Jong-ho. Professor of electrical and computer engineering at Seoul National University. He was named Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in 2016 for contributions to development and characterization of bulk multiple-gate field effect transistors.
Australian Minister for Industry and Science; Edham Husic. Husic worked as a research officer for the member for Chifley, Roger Price. Husic was first elected as a branch organiser in 1997. In 1998, he was elected as vice-president of the Communications Division of the CEPU. From 1999 to 2003, he worked for Integral Energy as a communications manager.
I can do the same peer-to-peer analysis when looking at our agricultural, education, health, and transport secretaries. Our government is criminally incompetent when compared to the majority of other first world countries. It's a fucking embarrassment.
Oh but there is such an overarching plan: some people have power, and they want to keep it. It’s not even a secret, see how increasingly plutocratic governance is becoming across the whole West. Problem is, the known methods to thwart that plan (that is, taking power from those who currently have it), tend to be unpredictable and deadly.
That's not incompetence. The rich are in charge.
Idk, maybe start with the 8 people who own more wealth than 3.6 billion people combined? 3 own more wealth than half the US. Probably freaking them?!? I really hope this is rhetorical.
>There's no overarching devious plan to enslave us all, here.
Of course not... Enslaving us is not the goal, just the best means to infinite wealth/power accumulation. The US is built on free labor, from slaves to the prison labor we use as slaves today.
>It's just classic honest-to-goodness incompetence and disinterest.
Laughably naive. You're describing the apathetic's contribution, the banality of the evil, not the people who really drive decisions who rely on that apathy.
This guy? "Boris Johnson Libya 'dead bodies' comment provokes anger"
"There's a group of UK business people, actually, some wonderful guys who want to invest in Sirte on the coast, near where Gaddafi was captured and executed as some of you may have seen."
"They have got a brilliant vision to turn Sirte into the next Dubai."
"The only thing they have got to do is clear the dead bodies away," he said, before laughing.
As long as extreme wealth inequality exists, politicians will keep being bought and sold by the minority for their own interest at the expense of the majority.
Even if the political class don't rationally understand everything they do, they are very good at dressing their apelike dominance-pleasure in saleable words instead of naked aggression, because modern politicians are essentially just trained PR mouthpieces. What they are doing feels right, and that's enough reason to continue because they are addicted to power, one of the most addictive things we can experience. It's perverse and we're all trapped in it.
I present Liz Truss as a counterexample.
The current government have largely given up on that goal - they're so disastrously far behind in the polls that they're facing a historic defeat and staying in power is a near-impossibility. They've fallen back on a damage-limitation strategy, using culture war wedge issues to try and secure their base and set a lower bound on how badly they'll lose. They're positioning themselves well to the right of the median voter, because they simply don't have the credibility to fight over the middle ground.
https://www.politico.eu/europe-poll-of-polls/united-kingdom/
https://edition.cnn.com/2023/09/20/uk/uk-sunak-climate-targe...
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/04/world/europe/uk-rishi-sun...
Not that our other options at the moment are a significant improvement.
manufacture a crisis that creates the scenarios which are most pliable for the policies you want to impose.
or as chomsky called it "manufacturing consent"
UK has had 15 years of getting battered with elite-imposed financial austerity, and the outcome.....brexit. says it all.
- Profit
Everything else is a mere side effect of that rather than a plan to end up there.
And we're worried about AI alignment, lol. Bring on the grey goo.
The purpose of anti-privacy laws is to make sure that such activity is fully monitored and dealt with in proper manner before they can become a problem. The rise of new political parties is in particular important to keep in check, and that is impossible if people have private communication and unchecked travel.
This why and how privacy rank above those issues. Naturally most people are not political active, and most who are do not threaten to partake or create competing political movements.
Nobody is going to SAY this basic truth and give disaffected men a chance to make a moral decision, instead we are going to enslave the entire planet, to ensure security and freedom for Anakin's new Empire (lol).
And I'm not saying that someone worrying about affording food and energy bills should prioritize privacy over it, but the way I see it there is apathy on all levels of the society. I have friends who are very firmly in the top 1% of the British society and they also don't care too much about it, it's just yet another thing that they feel doesn't affect them so why worry about it. It's very different feeling to the one you can get in the US or in Germany or Poland, where even people who are theoretically not affected by surveillance laws are upset about them and will be very vocal about them.
Like I Said in another comment - on a personal level all I want is my friends, colleagues and family to say "this kind of thing is unacceptable in democratic society and I don't agree with it" instead of "meh I don't care".
I'll presume good faith and assume you are not aware the EU Commission are planning similar, indeed more far reaching laws applicable to all member states. And various other states want to do it themselves.
https://www.wired.com/story/europe-break-encryption-leaked-d...
Perhaps you are only familiar with the anglosphere.
The UK is not a EU country. Just to remind those which think they can be in and out at the same time.
And yes, this distinction is important. The british people have democratically decided to leave the EU.
With that out of the way, you should read "EU" as being in parentheses.
What a nice excuse. I dont buy it. No decision is ever made by "the people", every poll will end up being discussed in some parliament, and politicians will have the final say.
But the british people voted to exit, and that is what happened. I really dont know why supporters of democracy have any problem with that.
All European countries? I think you might have some rose (or, blue and yellow starry) tinted glasses on.
With your specific mention of EU I would hazard a guess you’re thinking of GDPR. Don’t be fooled be the existence of it. It mostly doesn’t apply to government and law enforcement. GDPR was some great PR by the EU I tell you.
I’m on mobile atm but I’d be happy to do some quick research in to how various EU countries invade their citizens privacy in the name of crime prevention
I said many, not all.
And no I'm not thinking of GDPR - my other home(Poland) is turning into a radical right wing hell hole yet people are active politically and will vocally opose the idiotic government and its policies. I don't see any such fervour in the UK, people are generally happy to go with whatever the government comes up with as long as it doesn't bother them too much.
Want a NHS dentist? Ok, the Government finds another way to tax you to fund that. Now the Government taxes landlords on their rental income. Landlords exist the market en-masse. Rents go up, availability goes down.
Want somewhere to rent? Oh dear, the Government just taxed those "greedy" landlords out of the market.
Want "better" public transport? Let's introduce a top 50% rate on the most "mobile" and tax paying part of the electorate to fund that as well. Then they leave the UK or offshore their accounts etc., just like in the 70s. Maybe Australia will reintroduce the 10 Pound Poms again.
Want shorter NHS waiting times? Let's bring in more doctors and nurses, which of course is more of a cost to the NHS. So the NHS needs even more funding, which comes from... more tax. Of course fewer people would reduce NHS waiting times, but apparently we're not allowed to say that.
I honestly don't see taxation in the UK coming down for a generation at this rate.
This country currently has an addiction to wanting the Government to pay for everything, whilst blaming it for everything, because it is involved in everything. Maybe Thatcher was right about the State being small.
My point is - a lot of people would say "but Germany can have a working public transport and functional police force and not tax its citizens to death". Like...yes, they can, but they have a functional economy which can support most of the country not just Berlin. If UK had a working local economy then councils would get funding from local businesses operating where they are - but right now most of the industry is gone or barely functional.
On the other hand, when it comes to legislation, MPs and committees consider only the legislation under question.
Nothing on that list suggests that privacy should be deprecated.
So I don’t think it’s blitz. It’s an older trait of avoiding internal confrontation (which doesn’t seem to extend to the Irish who on a number of occasions throughout British history decided to either leave Britain for greener pastures, or were more willing to be a bit more aggressive).
The Brits do internal confrontation, behind closed doors in private, and in negative inferences/sarcasm/irony in public.
What Brits don't do, is go against the establishment, which is what most foreigners bump into on day one. And brits have the concept of something being 'not the done thing'.
So you end up with a society that agrees on most things and has a fine line of disagreement that is invisibly negotiated...
Good luck!
I always preffered Russel Crowe in Master and Commander as the ideal image of Brits, rather than a dressed up car salesman.
Hammond and May are spiffing, but Clarkson too often, only shows up to the job and doesn't follow meaningfully through.
What a world we live in where an Australian actor and director (Peter Weir) in Master and Commander put on a more realistic image for British values, than Clarkson's hundred-million-pound productions...
“Britain: striving for mediocrity”
People are run down, fed up and have no idea what to do about it because as a nation we have culturally been conditioned (over generations) to accept our lot.
Striving for better (not just individually but societally) is sneered at and things going badly is shrugged at as the norm.
I sometimes feel we have this idea that the the UK is feature complete. Any new infra project is protested, new initiatives to try to improve things are eye rolled at - even talking about new ideas leads to back lash.
I honestly don’t think it’s some top down grand plan for control, I think it’s just incompetence, lack of leadership and fear of the above points.
So yeh, heads down, carry on and hope for the best (well, hope for “not too bad” really).
Honestly, I don't think we get out of this hole until demographic churn (ugly phrase yeah) rebalances the electorate.
If we look at the 1992 election there's a 13% gap in conservative votes between the youngest and oldest brackets [1]. By 2019 that's a 36-46% gap [2].
[1] https://www.ipsos.com/en-uk/how-britain-voted-1992 [2] https://yougov.co.uk/politics/articles/26925-how-britain-vot...
No, just as people post all those "good thing/bad thing" graphs that diverge in 1971 for the US, the big political scar across the UK is the Winter of Discontent (1978/79) and subsequent Thatcherism. Middle-class voters chose suppression of internal dissent and a retreat from social policy, up to and including effectively abandoning cities that weren't London to their own devices. ("Managed decline" for Liverpool, Glasgow etc)
But remember: the suppression of dissent is a popular policy. Nobody in the marginal voter class wants to think, engage, be challenged, or deal with real problems. They want to retreat into Facebook boomer nostalgia instead.
There's also another breakpoint in how the introduction of student loans and fees in the late 90s means that a large section of the middle class under 40 is much poorer and to the left - permanently, as a cohort effect, not an age effect. Hopefully this will push the pendulum back.
I know the narrative is that the Brits are sinking into darkness (or whatever)... but they are a ray of hope for a world that has sane heirarchies and can satisfy consciousness.
IF you value keeping porn out of children's eyes and keeping philosophy managing experience, instead of expereince trying to manage philosophy... you could do worse than a sometimes-sarcastic and ironic, Brit.
In the long term we have the superpower of faith in our institutions, education and timeless ideas.
But day-to-day, it's all the more painful to watch everything torn by opportunists, narcissists and criminals who have displaced genuine leaders and decimated our institutions.
We have a lot of rebuilding to do as a nation.
What do you do?
I'm not unsympathetic to the plight of migrants, but I didn't think that was the purpose of the ORG, so I stopped donating.
I'd really rather they focus their entire resources on internet privacy/democracy, instead of spreading their limited resources thinly on a bunch of other - however important - issues
That's not true. Maybe the Times HE isn't "mainstream" any more, but I just wrote a scathing piece which is leading the magazine this month, about how we got the Online Safety Bill as the wages of technical ignorance and abandoning basic digital literacy for three generations.
The OSB is essentially a good thing. It's designed with a good heart, and addresses many abuses of technology that government should rightly legislate on.
The implementation is garbage.
It was written by people who were not competent to do so, since they were advised by deceptive and self-interested parties, and were not able to distinguish computer science from wishful thinking.
The Times article places some of the blame on our crumbing university system (which is now run by professional managers instead of academics and no longer serves the public interest).
UK universities now provide only expensive training certificates and no longer strive for education of the kind that produces leadership.
As a result we get Michelle Donelan serving as Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology, because there nobody else to fill the post except someone with a degree in History and a career in Marketing.
Besides, government and the state institutions cannot compete with Big Tech, and so we cannot recruit conscientious and technically capable people to key roles (Sunak plays up to the "tech savvy" persona, but is another PPE grad who blags his way by association and bluster).
And I'm confident this is intentional, and happening all over; on the one side we live a dystopia where more and more people have to worry about themselves, what they'll eat next, whether they can pay the bills, etc. That leaves them with no headspace to look beyond themselves. On the other there's entertainment and distractions everywhere.
But then there's the endless torrent of shitty policies and noises. Take Donald Trump; one thing he did was post something outrageous on Twitter pretty much daily, so all the media outlets homed in on that, pushing less interesting but no less important things down the list of things that demand your attention. And another thing was to push far-right ideas, and keep pushing them, so that on a long enough timescale, the less extreme ideas gain more support because "well it's not as bad as proposed".
Of course those things should be prevented.
As usual with the UK government, there's a guy at the bottom of the pile that "knows tech" and can make a real world assessment and comes up with a pragmatic approach. That is then diluted by the increasingly tech-ignorant layers of the Civil Service, to the point where they might as well not have bothered, and we get our Dear Leader promoting a "safety bill" that isn't fit for purpose.
On the plus side, I expect we'll see an uptick in Mullvad subscriptions in the UK.
I emailed my MP a while back when I first heard of this, I'll let you know when she gets back to me.
Short of a 1-man protest (is protesting still legal?) I got nothing.
Whether it is by carefully curated news articles aimed at pushing a specific agenda via complex algorithms, or just the complete omission of important current events (London Riots, anyone?) we have all been getting moulded into apathetic sacks of flesh and bone, spending the majority of our lives accruing tax bills to pay the salaries of those whom avoid tax altogether.[0][1]
We have allowed ourselves to get into a situation where a paedophilic monarch walks freely and part-takes in elaborate, televised, celebrations while those whom call him a paedo end up being arrested.[2]
We are in a situation where our most vital services are underfunded, their staff are grossly underpaid/overworked and our government have the audacity to tell people to go outside on a Thursday night and make some noise for them. All the while refusing to pay them what they are worth.[3][4]
We are in a situation where a young girl gets kidnapped, raped and killed by a police officer which then leads to protestors being arrested[5]
How can the 'will of the people' be enacted when 'the people' are constantly lied to and manipulated?
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/apr/09/rishi-sunak...
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-64360260
[2] https://www.insider.com/heckler-arrested-after-calling-princ...
[3] https://www.england.nhs.uk/long-read/information-for-the-pub...
[4] https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/may/28/clap-for-our...
[5] https://theconversation.com/sarah-everard-vigil-shows-the-ur...
I’d prefer it be zero, of course…
And I would add to your list the arrest of the anti-monarchy protestors before the coronation. That was awful.
* I say ‘we’, I’m watching on from Australia these days. Unfortunately they’re our bloody royals too.
Mainstream media is just another name for propaganda at this stage
- Descended from the very rich (and therefore still very rich),
- Descended from people who said "meh, what are you going to do" and didn't move to America.
This bill has cross party consensus. The opposition once said it didn't go far enough.
There's nothing you can do. The blob cometh.
Its hard to fathom for me, true that I was raised in a labour strong-hold; but the decimation of industry, housing and the selling of previously nationalised infrastructure has had long reaching and devastating consequences for a large contingent of the population.
But people keep voting them into office, literally the worst of all alternatives. (except maybe UKIP/Brexit/Reform which is the same party that keeps rebranding)
Of course not, and his excuse will be "the Tories will use that to paint us as anti-children", when in reality, the surveillance state is older and more engrained than any party.
The Tories have ruined the country, but I wish people stopped seeing them as pure evil against the pure good that is Labour, which is far from the case. They're all rotten in their own way, and it's not them pulling the pervasive surveillance strings. I wouldn't know who is for certain, but it's a combination of being in the Five Eyes, our friendship with the USA, the very favourable media, and the cultural fact that British people have been OK with total surveillance for decades.
Even now there are millions of people convinced that this is better just as there are millions still convinced that Brexit was worthwhile.
As HL Mencken said, Democracy is the theory that common people know what they want and they deserve to get it good and hard. The UK really did have an alternative and they chose to be ruled by psychopathic, greedy incompetent old Etonians.
You'd think the head of the Remain campaign might deserve a little blame? Totally blameless for their failure apparently. The actual strategy of the campaign is never even discussed. It's just "how dare Corbyn cause Brexit! The Fiend!" How about all the other names and faces leading the Remain campaign? Cameron, Osborne? Nope. He gets more blame than fucking Farage.
I have no respect for anyone that pushes this shit. It's just disgusting post-factual factional lying crap. Stop it.
Corbyn is a long way from blame for brexit, but he was part of the lunacy.
No need to go "what about Osborne or Cameron?" I know they're tw*ts and nowhere in my comment I went to defend those reprehensible pillocks, nor I placed all the blame at Corbyn's feet.
Again, you're taking it a bit personal here, for some reason.
The alternative that possibly could have happened was a sanely negotiated Brexit, which would have been fine (lots of countries aren’t in the EU but have extensive trade relations etc.) but no brexit wasn’t really going to happen at the time.
If you want somebody to blame you need to look at the British media barons. Lord Rothermere, etc. They were the ones who manipulated two rather pathetic warring tribes into existence and played them both like puppets against each other.
We all lose.
That's why "starmer is a red tory" doesn't jibe with me, Blair is also a "red tory" and is/was painted as such; but he won by a landslide on that.
The media was so against Corbyn, progress away from conservative ideology will be long and it requires people to show determination to move away. Even if it's little by little.
However, politics do exist beyond elections. Strikes have again become common, which could build up to larger campaigns and even a general strike. The organised working class can force even a Tory government to act or face the beginning of revolution.
And the post 2019 Conservative Party effectively is UKIP - they were thoroughly infiltrated and most of the old school tories left the party
I would prefer UKIP victory - it would be brief, exciting and painfull, and a lesson that lasts. Like this isn't a slower burn with greater total damage.
I think for the last 50 years, possibly excepting one Labour leader, the wider electorate have seen Labour as literally the worst of all alternatives. That's why the Conservatives are consistently voted in.
The problem isn't really either of our two terrible main political parties though, it's the absence of any realistic competition. If there were an obviously better alternative I believe that despite any historical affiliations voters today on all sides would leap to it. We've had that 50 years to find an alternative and there's still nothing palatable waiting in the wings.
Why this is, I think is more debatable. Maybe the answer is PR, maybe we need to pay MPs more in line with historic rates in real terms (and more than some recent software dev grads), maybe it's something else. But it's pretty clear to me that as much as people don't want the Conservatives, they really don't want Labour either.
Which, given the UK's insane voting system, is very unlikely.
> the UK's insane voting system
Rather predictably this means the number of votes a party gets has no relation to the number of seats they get in parliament. Since the number of seats per party is far more important for the political course than who gets elected for each party this is undesirable.
This gives weird results like the Scottish nationalist party getting 3.9% of the vote and 48 seats, while the libdems got 11.6% of the vote and 11 seats.
So this slips in and most peoples reaction if they know about it at all is "this is not legitimate because the people enforcing it are so weak"
Basically it's set up to be ignored - a populist press release dressed up a legislation.
Worrying
Whole I agree with everything you said, it's actually worse... nobody really believes the next (Labour) government will improve things either.
Traditional conservative economics don't seem to be on offer in the UK these days.
Money was given to ordinary working people (whose outgoings, being essentials, didn't change much), and then went straight to the landlords etc (whose outgoings, being more discretionary, were massively cut during the pandemic). So everyone who hasn't significantly increased their wealth over the pandemic in nominal terms (and many did, we had rising stocks and housing prices.. during a pandemic!!) is today poorer than before.
That said I'm a bit meh as it's unclear how well it will work if at all.
Governments have legislative control over the companies which provide you an internet connection, physical infrustructure which your connection runs over, and network/IT hardware which is allowed to be sold and imported in your country that makes the internet possible, as well as the vendor which made and sold you your device you use to access the internet.
There is no way to win against this.
Monopolistic practices happened. How does any regime force people to comply? First you have to make people you want to comply criminals by passing certain laws. Then you selectively enforce these laws on a whim of gov officials. Presto, you've now created a system where you may tell the gov to fuck off, but you'll get prosecuted for something that wolill ruin your day tomorrow.
Mind that I'm not making a value judgement that anti monopolistic laws are bad. No, I'm just stating a fact they can be used to coerce monopolies like Google to do whatever regulators want. Incidentally this is why these laws are so selectively enforced.
Also if the roof needs fixing then there's always the prospect of a hundreds of millions of dollars fine. Pop the champagne!
Even playing into the system is pointless, my MP replies 6 months after things are passed lmao
Governments often want to regulate business involving entities physically present in the country. If foreign companies refuse to comply, governments could in principle just block them. But they often don't want to, because they benefit more from continued business on their terms. They would prefer that the foreign companies just comply "voluntarily". For example by realizing that the company could lose access to any financial institution that wants to continue operating in that country. And the companies often comply, because they are amoral profit maximizers without any real principles.
It's not the job of multinational companies to have principles regarding the citizens of a country. And indeed, they can comply with the law, or GTFO. And in case they get out, it won't be because of principles, but rather because users of other countries may leave them in case they install backdoors. It's simple economics, and that's good actually, as people in general don't want to be governed by multinationals.
Protest has been restricted [1], and neither the Conservatives or Labour offer different positions. For example, Labour have pledged to "toughen" the OSB [1].
[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-56400751 [2] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/jan/01/labour-pl...
Also you’re assuming that users leave platforms because of security issues and that’s obviously untrue for most people. I mean… just look at almost any social media platform
Big tech companies are vulnerable to financial pressure, but a one admin Matrix server or XMPP server hosted in the US has no reason to comply.
I don't want to fly under the radar with an ambiguous sense of my own safety.
There's an important concept in the military wherein you should never give an order you think might not be followed, because it collapses the illusion of authority. Authority is, after all, an illusion. The same is true for governments.
It's why governments that want total surveillance and police states must tippie toe their way there with bills like this, or, do things in total secrecy like the NSA. Try to push the overton window too quickly and you risk noncompliance from a tech company, non compliance from juries, sometimes even (extremely rarely) non compliance from cops, at which point you're facing a governmental crisis of the highest degree.
The Military also expects noncompliance which is why there are military equivalents.
What both need is majority consent and general noncompliance is only a symptom of that being removed. Authoritarian regimes often force compliance even without consent.
I also expect that it would take an awful lot more than regulation like this to get anyone in a western country to rise up enmasse to replace the government. The mess that is this regulation being created just demonstrates how bad the current UK government is at governing.
To a degree, sure, but only because of the fluidity of the US justice system. Tech companies, like anyone, always in the end bow to the whims of congress. Consider how much information Google has or could have on any given member of the government - it could begin blackmailing, but hasn't dared take that step. Consider the actual power over money the banks have - they are one of the primary mechanisms the US government uses to regulate the economy, set interest rates and etc. They twist the law to serve them but no bank has ever outright disavowed a law, despite it being as simple as making the numbers be what the bank wants them to be.
Yes, laws aren't the only pressure mechanism affecting banks, google, etc, but my point is that true noncompliance is representative of a rejection of a given authority. It's more than just breaking a law. The US government remains a competent enough authority to acknowledge, but if congress came out and amended the constitution to remove all term limits, and the supreme court put out a statement that it will interpret these changes as written, and then the three branches went from there to establish an overt authoritarian regime, at that point you'd start seeing true non compliance.
I use the extreme example to show the balance that has to be struck by authority to maintain the illusion of authority. The US government maintains authority so long as it's useful to those others with extraordinary power (banks, tech companies, the People in their entirety, the military-industrial complex, big oil, etc). It can't risk pushing against those interests too far in any direction.
We have a highly coupled world, which means that the Brussels effect, the California effect and now the London effect all combine to produce the lowest common denominator.
Networks aren't all positive.
I wonder, what do you think about the Government's counter-argument, that effectively user privacy is secondary to child protection? I'm just playing devil's advocate, and not endorsing this position.
- Is the internet a major medium for child exploitation?
- If this bill puts N offenders in prison per year, is it worth it? What is N?
I agree this is bad for internet privacy, and likely just a privacy grab by the government. Equally, I think discussing it without referencing the stated goals ("it's just a power grab", "we have a right to privacy", "this won't save any children because, erm, it won't") is counterproductive to getting the point across to a wider population.
Not just pedophiles though. How many criminals are government backdoors catching? How often do NSL's turn up data or leads that allow the government to catch criminals that would otherwise go free? How much does KYC/AML enforcement (which causes a huge clamping effect on our economy) actually control the actions of criminals, versus inhibit the daily lives of citizens?
I'm so confident that the evidence would show that these rights-violating laws are a net harm to society that I think all we need to push for is data, and that alone will highlight how terrible these ideas are.
[Edit:] I know this is not a great source, but from https://www.gov.uk/government/news/home-secretary-urges-meta...
> Currently, 800 predators a month are arrested by UK law enforcement agencies and up to 1,200 children are safeguarded from child sexual abuse following information provided by social media companies.
There are also some interesting NCMEC statistics which provide a sense of scale, at https://www.missingkids.org/gethelpnow/cybertipline/cybertip...
> The CyberTipline receives reports from the public and online electronic service providers (ESPs). ... U.S. based ESPs are legally required to report instances of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) or “apparent child pornography” to the CyberTipline when they become aware of them, but there are no legal requirements regarding proactive efforts to detect CSAM
(Reports are also in various other categories aside from CSAM.)
> In 2022, NCMEC staff escalated over 49,000 reports to law enforcement as the reported incident was urgent in nature or there was information that a child was in imminent danger. ... NCMEC designated 49% of the reports from the tech industry as “actionable” when referring them to law enforcement in 2022
(49000 is a heavily filtered fraction of the 32 million total reports.)
>New poll finds 7 in 10 adults want social media firms to do more to tackle harmful content https://www.gov.uk/government/news/new-poll-finds-7-in-10-ad...
Not really stats on online harm but there's a public demand which is probably what both political parties are reacting to.
The government conveniently only cares about children when they can use them as pawns to obtain more power.
Their framing of the issue is malicious, by accepting it you fall into their trap. Better to ignore it and go with your own frame.
“He who sacrifices liberty for safety deserves neither and will lose both.”
The government is saying that it is nuking online privacy because children. To argue against, it is not sufficient to say you have a holy and unmovable right to it, because you don't really have a holy unmovable right to anything - everything gives in the end. Personal freedom, freedom of speech, etc.
Hence I'm curious about the other side of arguments. The "this is bad because it limits my freedom, yes, AND... doesn't achieve the goals?".
i think you should have the right to protect your child from the government, given the nature of things that people abuse bureaucracy to achieve today. there are blatant infringements on freedom of religion
so the government wants to decide what is and isn't harmful to children
why do they want this? because they screwed up with immigration. the elite circles of the government assumed the immigrants would assimilate with time, but that goal has not been achieved. so it seems like they're taking the dystopian approach to fixing a problem rather than admitting they were wrong in the first place, and their dystopian solution is to decide what is "harmful to children"
No, they're not doing it because of think-of-the-children. Whenever we mention their talking points, which both we and them know are a lie, we tacitly support their cause.
And their cause is that they feel scared of losing control of things, and they entered a profession where power was the goal, and they're looking at their contemporaries in China with envy.
No sicko is going to be caught by this, certainly not with the publicity. They'll keep on with their sick ways. The only people this is aimed at is the people as a whole.
We are still in the early Wild West days of the internet, but in the decades ahead bills like this will become more commonplace as governments try to wrestle back control of what citizens can access
Many of the newspapers have campaigned in support of it.
Various major charities have campaigned in support of it.
Polls show the bill has high public support.
That leaves very little room for reasoned criticism of the bill.
because there's no opposition to it. everyone wants these rules. the opposition wants them strengthened for example. since there's no discord, there's really no news.
(But it'll probably get delayed again. You can't just price the poor off the roads nationwide and expect the economy not to nosedive. As well as charging options for people without large detached homes with private driveways/garages, we need affordable used EVs, and we need to be sure thet battery packs in those older vehicles won't be utterly worthless)
Will EVs have the multi-decade lifespan of a well-maintained ICE vehicle, or will they be on the scrapheap much sooner due to battery longevity issues, or repair-hostile practices as cars move ever further into 'tech product' status, unrepairable without proprietary tools/information/parts.
Meanwhile, the world seems to be getting ever more hostile to personal light EVs (e-scooters/bikes/skateboards)
It has been there, just not directly. Always ask yourself; what is the deeper unstated reasons why a story is being covered widely by mainstream media?
Things without tits gets little coverage in the UK mainstream media ;)
I think that some good can come of bills like this, and the letters which the UK parliament recently sent out to question various internet platforms about a users ability to operate on the platforms. Clear cut government censorship like this, can bring to attention how pervasive censorship in general actually is.
And I strongly hold that this is just the tip of the iceberg, the visible censorship, when governments ask explicitly try to stop freedom of speech, not only in their own countries but among neighbors as well. What lies beneath the surface is untold amounts of private censorship which certainly is not often government affiliated, but still politically motivated.
It came to pass that MP’s realised they couldn’t do that… yet. So what has actually gone in is some vague wording on “should the technology become available you’ll have to implement it”.
Now most people are taking that as a win, that the wording is admitting defeat. Surely you can’t circumvent privacy whilst maintaining freedoms, you may as well put in “when 1+1=3”. And the companies are saying that’s fine, it doesn’t affect us.
But you can’t help but feel pessimistic. That clause is Chekhov’s gun, it’s put in there in its nebulous state exactly to be vague. I’ve no doubt in the coming years there’ll be a consensus where “the technology is available” comes down to MITM or something.
All that happened is a gov spokesman stood on his hind legs in the Lords, and in effect said "Trust us. we won't use these powers - yet".
His reply was, basically, there are exactly two distinct groups of people:
1. People that think their government should be able to read what they do online.
2. Child molesters.
I don't have a lot of faith in the system anymore.
1. people who trust that the government both has their best interest at heart and also makes very few mistakes
2. people who realize that governments have a long legacy of committing both intentional and unintentional atrocities on the people of the world
Unfortunately, very few of the latter end up working for the government
Their vehicles for doing this are fear and distraction, propagated by the media outlets they and their friends own.
In this context, zeal for surveillance makes perfect sense. It plays well with people convinced by the Daily Mail that some boogyman (immigrants, paedophiles, whatever) is coming to get them and their children. And it's also useful for keeping tabs on protesters and strikers, who try to draw attention to their tactics and goals.
It's also worth reminding people that UK government has almost outlawed protesting in this country, by making it illegal for any protest to "cause a disruption", which of course any protest does and police are free to interpret this as they want to.
E.g. British security services unlawfully collected citizen data for 17 years[0]. They started doing so 4 years into Labour's reign, and it eventually got stopped under the Conservatives.
The "nerd harder" decryption stuff comes up across the aisle, because both sides of the aisle are populated by non-technical people keen to avoid looking as though they're soft on child pornography.
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20161018003035/https://www.thegu...
there is widespread support for rules against the internet.
the opposition is criticising the government for watering it down (for example: the opposition wanted VPNs to be made illegal).
there is widespread approval of anything that curbs the power of internet companies.
Following this line of thought, not only did Orwell describe surveillance, but also mass manipulation, so perhaps in UK more than elsewhere there's a tangible fear of mobilizing and polarizing the masses through media, fuelled by liberal press laws, class awareness, and traumatic experience in eg Brexit campaigns, possibly at least partly financed by a foreign adversary.
Such an attitude enables practices that better attitudes would see as abhorrent.
The cause is that they're oblivious to how computers work and think they can do things like this without any important side effects just by saying so.
(Note that I am not defending the Tories here)
The Home Office was described by a former Labour Home Secretary as "not fit for purpose" (and he promptly broke it up). That's the only time I can recall a Home Secretary not following the Home Office's repressive, xenophobic attitude.
New ministers undergo an induction ritual with their civil servants; they are told what polcies are favoured, and what policies are no-go. They are confronted by a succession of generals and spies, explaining tothem that the world will fall apart if they don't toe the departmental line.
I'm convinced that this induction ritual is performed most thoroughly by the Home Office. Apparently-reasonable politicians always turn into authoritarian nutters when they become Home Secretary. I assume that the process amounts to blackmail: "The Prime Minister wants repressive policies from this department, but with deniablility. You are that deniability. Rest assured that if you don't toe the departmental line, you will be fired by the PM."
Episode 1 covers the Home Office: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TyGhg8BmECw
~12 minutes in, it covers the Home Office civil service culture.
I have a low tolerance for ads and propaganda!
Perhaps, but I'm inclined to believe it starts-off with someone leaving a copy of the Daily Express around where someone else might possibly read it.
I've never seen it this bad in the UK.
This sort of thing is why and I will continue to do so.
Based on stories I've heard from people work in industry, every major ISP in the UK keeps DNS query logs and "internet connection records" and makes these available to authorities (without a warrant)
Correct - this is due to the Investigatory Powers Act 2016.
The list of agencies that can access internet connection records without a warrant is baffling (and scary): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Investigatory_Powers_Act_2016#...
there's no "story". it's the law in many countries:
> In many countries, ISPs are legally required to monitor and store data about your browsing history for an extended period of time. This is called mandatory data retention. This data is used for policing, government surveillance, and sometimes even advertising.
> The length of time that ISPs must retain data varies by country. The U.S. government requires ISPs to keep records of customers’ internet history for a minimum of 90 days, while the UK and European Union requires ISPs to keep browsing records for up to 12 months.
6 months: Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Sweden
1 year: Finland, France, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Portugal, Spain, UK
18 months: Latvia
2 years: Australia, Poland
the EU directive was invalidated, but member states still hold on to all the data.
for example: https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/data-retention-france-illeg....
The ISP can only see domain right? As long as it is https.
They agreed with me that it is "important to protect users' freedom of expression and personal privacy".
They "do not believe it is right for encrypted messages to become decrypted. There must be a balance between our fundamental right to privacy and keeping people safe online, which raises difficult questions for platforms such as WhatsApp".
But they "do not believe that the legislation impacting private messaging will damage this encryption, as a variety of technologies are emerging that could allow for scanning on issues such as child sexual abuse material while retaining the privacy benefits afforded by end-to-end encryption".
They do note however that having Ofcom be the regulator and monitor isn't right, which seems to have been a bit under reported to my knowledge.
Funnily enough, they did not vote on this matter and I shall be finding out why.
When the UK Government adds yet another enforcement responsibility to OFCOM's list of duties, you know that's a task they don't really want done. OFCOM has always been seriously underfunded. Most of OFCOM's "activity" consists of sending out letters to offenders, drawing their attention to the relevant legislation, and advising them of the steps they should take to come into compliance. Actual fines are as rare as unicorn shit.
Why does it need to be done at each website instead of at the point of access?
We restrict their activities because their judgement is limited, and this most certainly extends to Internet access, which ought to be adult-only. It should be seen as extremely irresponsible parenting to leave your kids online. This is the answer to what to do to 'keep kids safe' - the same things parents have done for millennia. Restrict their activities.
No one who 'gets' the internet wants the government's opinion of what is 'safe' applied to it. The only reason this sells is because lazy fucks of parents who want the Internet as a substitute for interaction that they owe their children. Or other activities that they could organise which would be more suitable for children. This is too much effort for them apparently - just dump little Johnny and Lucy in the corner with their iPads!
Of course access to unlimited information and communication is dangerous for children - they don't know how to handle it, they have limited experiences of trust and how to manage that, such things only come with growth, involved parenting and repeated interactions over the years. Again, the Internet is no substitute for that, and only adults can reasonably manage their lives online.
This current law fails the Prince Andrew Test.
- It's not illegal to supply someone with an E2E encryption tool like OpenPGP.
- It's not illegal to provide a messaging service.
- The OSB seems to make it illegal to provide both of these things in a single package.
So there is now a bit of friction involved for anyone who wants E2E communication in the UK, but there doesn't have to be that much friction. You just need separate legal entities to provide you with the 2 tools involved (the encryption tool and the messaging service), and you need to keep track of your own private keys.
Sure, the vast majority of people will not bother with this, but it's really not enough friction to stop even the casually motivated; i.e. anybody involved in anything even remotely illegal.
I'd applaud the implementation of a maximally convenient system like this, just to lay bare the idiocy of this law.
People are concentrating on the technicalities of implementation and completely missing the point that a substantial fraction of the UK population appears to think that pervasive surveillance is the solution to crime of all kinds.
That it might or might not be feasible while still allowing people to have secure communications is not really relevant because there are enough people who would be quite happy for their communications to be less secure just so long as one more paedophile or protester can be brought to justice.
Hiding something with cryptography? You're obviously a mass murdering child molesting money laundering drug trafficking terrorist and it's off to the gulag with you unless you show us the decrypted bits and it turns out there's nothing of interest in there.
(Have an office in the UK? Use a SaaS/PaaS subject to UK? Have users from UK? Want your iOS or Android app to be available from the official store to UK users? Want your DNS and routing to work in UK?)
Yes, that means it applies to you if you run a Telnet server and a British person logs in to it and might find a text file created by someone from the US there. You need an age gate in front of the login, unless you can satisfactorily demonstrate that you have few under-18s as users. How to prove that? The law doesn't say.
The UK doesn't get to enforce its law everywhere just because it says its law is enforceable everywhere.
There's already precedent here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPEECH_Act
> The Securing the Protection of our Enduring and Established Constitutional Heritage (SPEECH) Act is a 2010 federal statutory law in the United States that makes foreign libel judgments unenforceable in U.S. courts, unless either the foreign legislation applied offers at least as much protection as the U.S. First Amendment (concerning freedom of speech), or the defendant would have been found liable even if the case had been heard under U.S. law.
> The act was passed by the 111th United States Congress and signed into law by President Barack Obama.
[snip]
> The act was written as a response to libel tourism.[1] It creates a new cause of action and claim for damages against a foreign libel plaintiff, if they acted to deprive an American (or certain lawful aliens) of their right to free speech.[2] Despite its goals, it is seen as a weak response to the problem of libel tourism as, although it establishes a new cause of action in § 4104, and allows for the collection of "reasonable" attorneys' fees in § 4105,[note 1] it does not allow for damages to plaintiffs in contrast with stronger provisions in proposed bills which did not pass such as the Free Speech Protection Act of 2009 (H.R.1304, 111th Congress).[3]: 22
> It was inspired by the legal battle that ensued between Dr. Rachel Ehrenfeld and Saudi businessman Khalid bin Mahfouz over her 2003 book Funding Evil.[4]
Just to make it even clearer: "Libel tourism" basically means taking your case to British courts, which are hilariously pro-plaintiff when it comes to libel. That's what happened with Ehrenfeld.
(As your profile is empty, for all I know you've an actual lawyer in this specific field — NH is this kind of place after all — but most of us aren't, and I've been surprised by legal principles that LegalEagle has described as "law school 101, and I mean literally I taught XYZ in a 101 class").
I mean I break Chinese law all the time; I have a blog without the necessary permits delivered by the PRC bureaucracy.
How is this UK law any different? Unless you have some kind of tie to the UK why should you care? What are they going to do? They can’t fine you nor put you in jail. Are they going to block your sites? Then everybody in the UK will use VPNs (just like China) undermining the ability of the government to enforce such laws even further.
GDPR was a EU law (much bigger than UK), it was not as tedious to comply with, and the PR would have been bad for any company breaching it. None of this is true here. The PR is actually good if you don’t follow this law; you can say you’re defending human rights and stuff.
If the law won't be enforced on you in particular, it's because the UK government does not care enough to enforce it on you in particular. It has very little to do with where you live or what courts have "jurisdiction" over you.
I doubt that social media execs would avoid traveling to the UK of all places in order to not piss off the handful (and I say this as a long-time EFF member) of people who really care about this law. To make things worse, major services tend to have presence in almost every country, especially the UK, and leadership tend to have personal connections and property in these places. They will just comply (as long as not offering their service in certain locations is an acceptabpe form of compliance, they might opt to do that if the financial calculus works out, but it's not necessarily an option at all). They don't even have to go straight to physical or financial punishment: if a service accept any kind of payment, they can get compliance by ezerting influence through various international card networks as well. If they don't have to comply, and can keep offering their service anyway, it's only because the UK didn't squeeze hard enough: but they could, and if they do, there'll be nothing your government or geographical location will do to protect you.
There is no such thing as a sovereign entity "not having jurisdiction" over you: that would be an oxymoron, they do as they please by definition. If they don't make you comply with their orders, it's only because some economic factor prevents them from doing so.
As a UK resident, I hope this will go the way of anti-piracy legislation - i.e. enforced against big services only while everyone else just continues to do whatever they want.
* execs are liable for breaches of the law if/when they travel to the US. * companies in the US are forbidden to do business with companies in Germany that breach the US law
There are a handful of small companies doing direct sales that are small enough that they do not have US partners. The rest complies because doing otherwise is financially disadvantageous.
They’d fine you as well but that’s probably less enforceable.
- Show that you are aware of the regulation
- Implement some kind of thing to comply with the regulation. The degree of that is debatable and ultimately can only be decided by a court.
Just pointing to a ToS is not enough, because nobody reads them.
Implementing a geofence and denying service to UK ip addresses is probably a good start. If UK citizens want to access your service, they could still use a VPN, but then the "malice" is on them.
The bigger/widespread your service, the more effort you might have to put in to prevent malicious intent.
Think about this way: You are liable for the services you offer. You must comply with local laws. It's up to you how much liability you want to carry. If your compliance with laws is extremely weak, your liability is high.
My current hypothesis is that this will start happening within the next few years anyway, regardless of such laws - there will come a point when spammers start making massive use of LLMs to post to forums, comment sections, chat rooms, etc., and there doesn't seem to be a way to defend against that taking over your websites, unless you implement a "one ID-verified person = one account" type policy.
Am I wrong about that? Are there any other reasonably implementable solutions that people have been thinking about?
If, instead of just spamming, you want to do something a little more devious, like running a pyramid scheme, making a bomb threat or posting whatever your government calls hate speech - the person who gave you his identity is in trouble. It's kind of like saying "I will [digitally] sign any paper you want for $100". The ceiling for negative consequences is practically limitless.
He might get away by claiming the identity was somehow stolen, but that would have to be a lot of money for so much potential trouble.
Stop buying into this simplistic false dichotomies.
UK: Hold my beer, I'm going to do this for the whole internet.
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All the companies that said they would stop operating in the UK if this bill was passed, need to now do so. There are provision in place that say companies won't be forced to do so unless technologically possible. But I think we all know how that plays out.
Let’s pretend it was a good idea to break encryption for users.
The current prosecution rate for rape accusations stands at 2% in the U.K. with only half of those leading to conviction. These problems come from poor training, lack of police and lack of funding for the court system.
This Act changes nothing about those fundamental issues so, assuming you catch someone with child pornography on their iPhone, you still won’t be able to convict them!
Edit: typo
That doesn't matter to the politicians pushing for such laws. They want two things: government control over the populace, re-election.
The second is the most important. Can we be sure that Labour would repeal such a law? If they try then the Conservatives, Daily Mail, etc., will claim that Labour are enabling paedophiles and other criminals. That will give Labour an incentive to keep the law or even to strengthen it in order to appear more virtuous than the Conservatives.
However I probably won’t make it out of this fever so perhaps I’m going to die at just the right time
Obviously the “think of the children” justification is more about partisan censorship but I kinda still believe it’s up in the air that all this censorship is going to work out.
Surprisingly enough, the mainstream media haven't covered it at all ...
But yes, it's a nasty bit of overreach. What's annoying is all the people I see being vocal about it on Twitter are the alt-right or pro-Tory/Telegraph/Mail folks I wouldn't usually want to align with. I suspect the presence of Brand is key to them, and if a similar letter had been written targeting someone on the left, they would be quiet.
The author of the letter, Dame Dinenage, is a Tory MP. To my mind, the letter is quite mild; there are no threats or demands, just questions. In view of her job as Chair of the Culture, Media and Sport committee, it seems a reasonable letter to write (even on House of Commons notepaper).
I'm sure that besides loosing their power quickly, they also going to face prison time for abusing it.
It would be such a wonderfully poetical end of them!
/sacrasm off
Nothing to hide, but this just rubs me wrong out of principle
If I were an ISP in Briton. I would shutdown until this law is overturned.
i've never been so i don't understand the situation outside of that
but from what i gather it seems the police in the uk don't do much about them, meanwhile there's videos of them harassing people over much more minor offenses, and lately there was a video where an autistic child said something mild to a english lesbian cop and this resulted in the gestapo showing up at her house.
so is this really over child abuse?
No, you don't ever use VPN for privacy. 99% of the VPN providers log every single activity on their servers.
I am using Mullvad and they seem take privacy very seriously and I kind of trust them, certainly more than all the other providers. Do I trust them 100%? Definitely not.
But nobody’s going to notice/care if some small services pull out. Some US websites still refuse to serve content to the UK and Europe due to GDPR, and no one seems to care much.
What action do you think the UK can take?
If you serve content to UK users, UK government thinks you should be bound by this law.
>>What action do you think the UK can take?
Short term it can order ISPs to ban HN traffic until it complies(as it already does with many websites), and prosecute dang if he should ever vist the UK. Of course the chances of that happening are very small given the size of this website, but you never know and it's this permanent state of "everyone is doing something bad we are just choosing not to prosecute it" that creates a surveilance state for everyone. UK ISPs are already required to keep 12 months of browsing history from everyone and it can be accessed warrant free by 17 different agencies including department of agriculture. As a Brit, I can only conclude that the majority of the population doesn't care, or is too mesmerized by whatever is the current topic in the media instead.
I'm a Brit too and I can do nothing about it, not even vote because I live outside the UK.
But what exactly do you propose that people who can vote do? It's not as if one can vote on this particular law. You can just vote for a Conservative or a Labour MP, the rest don't matter. Do you really expect people to vote against the MP or party that they otherwise support merely to get this one law defeated?
People at large have shown they'll go with whatever power pushes them to go because they're quite afraid to lose what they little material position they have.
"May contain nuts."
instead of relying on 3rd parties for your privacy.
rely to everything being local first. download copies of things. because nothing lasts forever on the internet.
have multiple offline copies.
encrypt your drives.
On one hand technology will amplify surveillance powers in the hands of few, and explode misinformation/propaganda.
On the other hand internet and AI compute costs will go down making the average person able to digest more information.
China is a great example with great firewall, restricted speech and citizens rights restricted.
Technology is just a tool, a very powerful tool that holds a serious risk of suppressing “others”.
https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2023/09/prince-andrew-gover...
Also, Jimmy Saville sure spent a lot of time with the royal family and government leadership.
I moved to the UK from Eastern Europe and it's hands down better in almost every way if you consider personal freedom, in my opinion.
In terms of policing, it's better than most EU states. See this for reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jUxiTdRTPMg The argument in the video is that French police is brutal because of the remnants of Nazi collaborationists in the police, and this applies to everywhere in Europe occupied by Nazis. And then you have Eastern Europe with its brutal communism.
I hear a lot of British people complain about how bad society has gotten etc. I'm not saying it's perfect, but it's something to still be proud of. But this kind of shit will break it.
To the people saying it's the fault of people being apathetic, what would you have done?
:(
My point was that measures like this destroy this 'advantage'. (I don't know if advantage is the right word but I can't come up with a better one)
> My point was that measures like this destroy this 'advantage'.
First, I don't think politicians care about this 'advantage'. Second, policing is necessary, and with changing conditions, the means for policing change. There's always tension between individual freedom and security/safety. But I agree that this is not a great move.
These type of restrictions are always going to be somewhat difficult to fully realise due to the multi-jurisdictional nature of the Internet, but at least the UK is trying to do what's right for its own citizens. Which is quite an unusual yet welcome action for the current Government.
When you come up with an approach that doesn't involve breaking the system for literally everyone else, please let us know.
There isn't anyone who would dispute that these issues are serious but hammering backdoors (of which clientside scanning is effectively one) into encrypted chat systems is not and never will be the answer.
It is not the case that if you put a backdoor into WhatsApp that the criminals suddenly have nowhere to go. They will simply move to lesser-known and possibly even more effective platforms instead, ones that are outside the scope of regulation. Perhaps they'll just build their own. It isn't exactly difficult to do — all of the necessary pieces are out there as open-source.
What we absolutely cannot accept is that all of the mass-market platforms become broken to the point that everyone else, including the less technical users who don't know about the alternatives, can no longer trust them.
The solution for this exists. It's the same solution that prevents young children from accessing a bottle of bleach and drinking it. Parental responsibility and education.
Does it?
At least some other countries don't seem to have a problem with children accessing pornography. I don't know if the children simply don't do it or that they are sufficiently well educated and secure in their society that they can see it and understand that real life is not like that.
> Ian Levy, the NCSC’s technical director, and Crispin Robinson, the technical director of cryptanalysis – codebreaking – at GCHQ, said the technology could protect children and privacy at the same time.
> “We’ve found no reason why client-side scanning techniques cannot be implemented safely in many of the situations one will encounter,” they wrote in a discussion paper published on Thursday, which the pair said was “not government policy”.
> They argued that opposition to proposals for client-side scanning – most famously a plan from Apple, now paused indefinitely, to scan photos before they are uploaded to the company’s image-sharing service – rested on specific flaws, which were fixable in practice.
Also, WhatsApp already has client-side scanning for spam link detection, so even Meta, despite their complaints about having to prevent the sharing of CSAM via their platform, aren't really against the underlying principle of doing this: https://faq.whatsapp.com/393169153028916, https://faq.whatsapp.com/667552568038157
Regardless of the merits of the particular case, the possibility of doing so exists and this is bad enough even when it is a private company and isn't being kept secret by court order like LavaBit, nor likewise when we have evidence of agents misusing their powers to spy on people they fancy AKA "LOVEINT", nor likewise when we have evidence of legally required technological measures becoming abusable by hackers e.g. the downgrade attacks to the 40-bit "export grade" cyphers from the 90s still popping up in the 2010s.
"Fixable in practice" is really not a sufficient rebuttal when the people tasked with actually building this stuff have given clear and specific reasons why building this stuff safely is impossible.
That the government think it's totally fine if the government have the power to listen in on everything is not especially surprising. The problem is most people don't actually trust the government with this power.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2207.09506.pdf
Do you have a reasonable counterargument to any of the points they make in this work?
I am familiar with this area of technology but by no means an expert. However the vast majority of people who appear to actually have experience building and running these systems all seem to disagree with the government that this is actually cool and safe and generally give much better explanations as to why that's the case than the government do. And so I side with them.
Citing more vague government sources that don't directly contradict the work of the people building the things isn't a very convincing argument to me.
If they go for the former, and implement their system in line with the principles that Levy and Robinson set out, would you change your mind? As this would be an indication that actually it can work in the field, if the political will is there.