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Comment by SimonPStevens | Hacker News Reader

I watched Amber Rudd interviewed by Andrew Marr this morning and the scariest thing about it was that Marr completely agreed with her. Rather than providing an opposing viewpoint and counteracting her points, he agreed with the idea that it was unacceptable for people to be allowed to use encryption and that it was terrible these companies were using it as a selling point. All he pushed her on was if she would enforce cooperation from tech companies.

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This isn't all that surprising, given that the government has repeatedly threatened the BBC with the loss/alteration of their charter for being critical of the government and not sufficiently jubilant about Brexit. ITV owning the BBC would arguably be a greater disaster than watered down coverage.

For a corollary see the paucity of coverage on the mass demonstration in London yesterday.

We saw prominent features on the BBC, furious headlines from the Daily Mail and self-congratulation from the Guardian. What would you have considered sufficient coverage for yesterdays demonstration?

It isn't all that surprising to me either. But for different reasons. They have no idea what they are talking about.

Do we think they know our online banking software uses the same kind of encryption? Probably not. Andrew Marr not knowing this is annoying. But an entire government being ignorant of it is deeply worrying.

Why do you think the government doesn't know? Why do you think they believe what they say?

This is just populist bullshit. It follows on from other populist bullshit.

I think they don't know because I've never seen any of them describe encryption in a way that would suggest they know what they are talking about.

I don't doubt that someone in government knows. Probably an entry level staffer. But whenever technology comes up (such as blocking types of content from the internet) the policy is always utterly ham fisted.

I agree that the policies are always ham fisted, but I'm not sure how you could have a policy that achieves the goal of blocking specific "bad sites" without it being ham fisted.

How would you achieve the goal of coming up with a non-ham fisted technical solution to a ham fisted problem?

He actually asked a very unprofessional leading question.

Given that the BBC is a state funded organisation, why would you expect anything else?

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