UK Parliament undermined the privacy, security, freedom of all internet users | Hacker News Reader

UK Parliament undermined the privacy, security, freedom of all internet users

eff.org

672 pointsjudiisis403 comments

> The U.K. Parliament has passed the Online Safety Bill (OSB), which says it will make the U.K. “the safest place” in the world to be online.

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_...

Yes the only chance we have is big tech to massively boycott the UK

https://open.substack.com/pub/rakkhi/p/big-tech-vs-governmen...

Having been involved in this directly for 3 years, as a search company CEO and based in the UK, I would say some (if not all) big tech companies were broadly supportive of this bill. It is almost certain that regulatory compliance will fall disproportionately on challengers. With one exception major exception, there is no indication whatsoever that they will boycott the UK because if it, nor has there been much resistance to it in public at least from big tech. The exception is about the potential threat to E2EE services.

Fascinating. That reminds me that Sheryl Sandberg was one of the strongest proponents of FOSTA/SESTA in the US. Awful setback for safety and rights of actual sex-worker as well as trafficking victims, but excellent for creating a compliance-moat that would protect Facebook/Instagram against challenger apps.

Hate speech is just whatever they don't like such as opinions outside the Overton window. Even the law enforcement people are scared of being labeled hateful. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotherham_child_sexual_exploit... The UK's BBC also knew about kiddy fiddler Jimmy Saville but they kept calm and carried on letting him fiddle.

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 don't really understand the relevance of Jimmy Savile here.

I think the point was - if the BBC (closely tied with the political establishment) cared so much about children's safety they would have acted against Saville before they were compelled.

The establishment never acted against Saville in his lifetime. All the public allegations and investigations happened almost a year after his death.

Right. So the UK elite are not to be trusted.

What exactly were we talking about again? OP seemed to be saying "cops and the BBC don't care about child abusers, therefore hate speech isn't a real problem," which...seems to be missing several critical links.

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.

'Please sir, control and regulate the contents of our speech' - smacks of astroturfing to me

> Even the law enforcement people are scared of being labeled hateful. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotherham_child_sexual_exploit...

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.

The Rotherham case is an example of selective focus. There is no notable difference between how abuse cases were handled in Rotherham versus other towns and cities in England.

It's that bad nationwide? That's disheartening.

    Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.

Ben Frank may or may not be talking about Rust with this quote.

Maybe he will be correct here too. I think that isn't even too unlikely in the long run.

> The politicians passing this stuff are literally the least qualified people to discuss anything tech related.

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.

Politics are driven by dishonest narcissist liars so the default correct stance is no trust.

This is extremely dangerous to our democracy.

I see what you did there.

For the uninitiated: https://youtu.be/ZggCipbiHwE?si=xPe3SQI_lI309h6j

Yeah holy cow. I couldn't tell if parent was being sarcastic or not.

I could literally explain to any old person, common man or child why this is bad quite quickly. I maintain this stance.

> 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.

If you think you can explain to anyone and convince them easily, you’re likely wrong. Unless you’re some god of charisma.

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

C'est le ton qui fait la musique.

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.

Saying that a particular function in democracy is not best handled by bureaucrats (non-expert representatives) and would be handled better by subject matter experts or a pairing of the two with equal power is not anti-democratic. It's just saying out loud that certain functions within government require expertise over representation.

I know what you meant, but minor correction: subject matter experts are bureaucrats. They work in an office (bureau), and in a well-functioning government are appointed on the basis of merit and credentials. Politicians are elected, non-expert representatives.

> It only serves to drive the dislike against politics, and thus anti-democratic tendencies.

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.

I don't like the argument that backdoors are bad because they could fall in the wrong hands. It implies that one would be fine with backdoors if they could be made perfectly secure. Backdoors are bad simply because the government should not spy on their own citizens en masse, and it will still be bad when hypothetically perfect surveillance tech is invented.

It's the same argument if you consider the government also to be bad hands - but point taken.

Government are the wrong hands.

I blame the populace

The people always get the government they deserve.

No. Government grows like a cancer and keeps little options for people to do much about it. Voting by choosing between 2 cheeks of the same ass does not accomplish much either.

I tend to say 2 wings of the same bird, but that is an even more vivid image! Cheers

>"I tend to say 2 wings of the same bird"

Birds are offended ;)

>"Cheers"

My pleasure

Yes. If you are ruled by a government that does not have your best interests at heart, that is on you to change.

Government derives its power from the people it rules. There is no other source of that power.

I suggest you read the dictator’s handbook.

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.

The more powerful weapons become, the smaller that group can be.

Dictators power depends on the peoples fear .. this is why it always takes courage to remove a dictatorship.

ah, the illusion of people power. i would say the political parties have the power, and while they are "elected", clearly they're not working for the people but for the financial benefit of a few.

This is only true in countries where the people had any say in the establishing of power. Before 1776, that was just about nowhere.

Today, there are still many lands and 100s of millions of people who give no consent to be governed, and yet governed they are.

When the system is heavily stacked against you, such that you cannot change it meaningfully through legal means, what other options are there? If you want to totally reform the entire government, you can start a rebellion.

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.

It only takes an insurrection if you leave the problem to fester too long ..

What's stopping you standing for election?

Make a wild guess

Let's see, no political support, no financial support, not enough spare time, a specific desire to avoid politics because it's almost always a shitshow, absolutely zero charisma... what else?

I mean that's the whole point, if you don't like who's running, change it.

> It implies that one would be fine with backdoors if they could be made perfectly secure.

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.

A secure communication backdoor has the same logic as a two-sided triangle.

> * It implies that one would be fine with backdoors if they could be made perfectly secure.*

No, it implies that perfect security is impossible. Which is philosophically true.

The CSAM scan has been going on for years, at the server.

The Apple issue was Apple doing it on the handset.

Not for E2E, this would mean data could also be decrypted in transit for inspection.

That’s not strictly needed; it could be scanned by the E2E messenger app itself using an offline database of hashes, before sending.

Then it's not server side is it?

Where did any authority say the scanning had to be server-side?

It doesn’t always include _their_ messages too.

Forms of this legislation mandate exclusions for politicians and public figures.

Apologies for the vague statement - on my phone, short of time.

The politicians are aware their messages are being read already. This just opens up existing practice and levels the field.

> China or Russia! They have _really_ 'safe' internet. Even better, just cut the internet off

There's a huge difference between the cutoff and what happens in reality, in both of these countries.

I've said it before and I'll repeat it here - as someone who lives in the UK the thing that bothers me the most about it is a complete apathy from everyone I know, and I work in IT. People just go "meh what are you going to do", or recently very common "I don't have strength to be angry at this government all the time over everything, I just carry on forward and hope things improve". And of course the fact that this is getting 0 coverage from mainstream media doesn't help.

I think this hits the nail on the head. Pretty much everyone here in the UK is just waiting for the general election to remove the incumbent right wing party. The government itself seems utterly internally divided and unable to find a direction and after a while everyone (cabinet ministers included) is just waiting for it to be over.

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

The current government isn't even that right wing.

Whole I agree with everything you said, it's actually worse... nobody really believes the next (Labour) government will improve things either.

Economically it seems hard to differentiate as much further right than the previous Labour governments. It's certainly spending a lot more on the NHS (in real terms). Furlough was a pretty eye-wateringly expensive state intervention.

Traditional conservative economics don't seem to be on offer in the UK these days.

Furlough has driven an enormous increase in inequality though, thus not as left-wing as it might appear on the surface.

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.

So, 'the brexit' wasn't all that much out of character? *sadly

I mean, people are consistently voting conservative.

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)

While I believe this might not have come out under a Labour government, do you think Starmer will backpedal on it?

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.

The weird effect right now of conservatives winning elections is that more parties will be more like them in order to attract voters away.

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.

Starmer wouldn't but Corbyn would have and people voted against him in a landslide.

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.

Well, we might not have had Brexit if Corbyn had had a little spine and/or actually was against it himself.

It wasn't his job to manipulate the public into voting against it, nor was he able to do so. It was his job to present his honest opinion and he did.

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.

Oh certainly, Tories and perhaps the Russian influence on the Brexit fiasco had much bigger effect than Corbyn. I do not disagree.

It was kind of the opposite - the party forcing Corbyn to support a second referendum lost a lot of votes in the North and led to them losing the election.

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.

Blaming Corbyn for Brexit is one of the dumbest agro-centrist bits of nonsense that will not stop. It was concocted on the day after as part of the "chicken coup" to try and push out the democratically elected party leader and hasn't stopped since.

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.

OP didn't say that Corbyn caused brexit, but that we might not have had it if he had behaved differently, and I broadly agree; government could not agree what brexit should look like and rather than stopping to think it through, they bickered us into a corner - there was a brief (litterally hours) moment when the "rebels" had control over the order sheet and could have done something useful, but instead were fighting over who should be the figurehead.

Corbyn is a long way from blame for brexit, but he was part of the lunacy.

Wew taking it a little personal here, are you not? GP mentioned Corbyn, I pointed out his shortcomings.

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.

Corbyn's failure to oppose Brexit wasn't the result of a lack of spine; he was actually against the EU, an organisation specifically designed to avert the threat of communism/socialism in Europe. He was in favour of Brexit. His party wasn't, so he shut up.

It's not so much that people vote Tory more, but rather that people that used to vote Labour don't vote at all since Labour abandoned them. First-past-the-post will always allow the Tories to win with a minority of the national vote.

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.

But people keep voting them into office, literally the worst of all alternatives.

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.

I've heard more than one person completely honestly say "I hate the Tories, but not as much as I hate labour". There is some national belief that labour would destroy the country(even more than the Tories do) so in response labour is slowly morphing into Tory Party 2 just to get some voters over. Even if they win the upcoming election(and I really doubt that) I don't think the overall policy would be much different to what we have now.

I think you're making an assumption that the parliament is in any way an accurate representation of the opinion of the wider electorate.

Which, given the UK's insane voting system, is very unlikely.

  > the UK's insane voting system

i don't live in uk so i'm not familiar, but what is particularly bad about it?

They split the country into arbitrary plots of land which each get to elect one member for the national parliament. It used to be even worse, with the plots of land having no consistent size (with some of them having a population of 1).

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.

The thing I keep reminding myself is that most people don’t actually vote conservative, it’s just our skewed voting system that makes them appear to have vastly more support than they really do.

And the post 2019 Conservative Party effectively is UKIP - they were thoroughly infiltrated and most of the old school tories left the party

Most people are not voting conservative though, they win power on the back of 35-40% of the vote due to the electoral system.

> worst of all alternatives. (except maybe UKIP/Brexit/Reform

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.

It is depressing, but is it untrue? Yes, the prophecy can be self-fulfilling. But we have an impressive recent record of pulling the trigger on foot-guns.

I’m British, living in Germany now, and one thing that moving here made me realise is that in the UK almost everyone, even young generations, act as if the blitz is still going on. Somehow the British psyche became mortally wounded from WW2 and hasn’t recovered since. Everything is still “keep calm and carry on”. Any attempt at having a political effect is met with dismissal or even total anger

I a fellow Brit, I note that you still bring up the war! But yeah, this is true.

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...

2019 was as much as there could be a single-issue election about brexit. It's an anomaly as such and shouldn't be used to make trends. That said, I don't think it was any different in 2017 and I don't discredit the trend. 2017 was also out of the ordinary as there was an actually left-wing alternative offered.

I would agree but young people seem prone to it almost as much. It isn’t just voting conservatives, it goes deeper than that

Interesting take, I was having a conversation the other week where I reused a fun line from the Expeditionary Force books:

“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).

Britain feels like a giant retirement home, where you are sort-of tolerated and told not to make too much noise.

I’m currently reading a book about the history of the British Empire and I think this temperament is older. When Australian and Kiwi troops were called to support Britain in the first World War, they were baffled by how much shit the Brits were ok with taking from their superiors, while the Brits were surprised how undisciplined and prone to protest their Australian and Kiwi counterparts were. You can look even earlier. While France at the end of the XVIIIth century had a bloody revolution, which did make some people in Britain think about their lot in life, they ended up mostly just talking things over, making some mild reforms and that’s it.

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 First Word War, was a British/European war though. You bet your bottom dollar, Australians are going to protest being sent to fight in Europe (unless they like the hunt, then it's a whole 'nother story).

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!

Mustn't grumble is in my opinion our national motto. We do have dissidence, but is met with contempt and apathy. Look at the national outrage over just stop oil stopping some cars on the a motorway. The rage was baffling, mass psychosis just took over the nation.

Look at how Jeremy Clarkson reacted with anger that Megan had complaints about the royal family. He was absolutely feverish, animalistic

A lot of people did. The whole "how dare you" attitude was taken to an absolute extreme, it was as if she stabbed the queen personally for some people.

Cheeky as it may be to say...

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...

I agree. Also read chapter 10 of Karl Marx Capital to see what British people were willing to put up with in Victorian times

Ironically it was the post-war experience where most of Britain's egalitarian institutions got built: state education and the NHS. "Homes for Heroes", a massive housebuilding program to recover from the bombing damage, including social housing owned by councils. People attribute this to the cross-class effects of the war: having a more expensive house in a better postcode wasn't something the Luftwaffe respected.

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'm not in Britain, but I was before and honestly I prefer that sense of order and implicit trust. There truly are some things that go without saying and the internet breaks an awful lot of social rules.

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.

Glad that someone gets us a bit.

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.

> "I don't have strength to be angry at this government all the time over everything, I just carry on forward and hope things improve"

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".

This is a short list of issues many people are dealing with right now:

- 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

It seems like the government playbook reads as follows:

- 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.

Who is the evil bond villain behind this dastardly plan, exactly?

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.

So what you’re saying is, they’re just incompetent rather than malicious?

How anybody can look at the past few years of the Tories and go "there is a group of people clearly capable of planing and executing a genius level long term strategy with finesse and subterfuge", is beyond me.

Feigning incompetence is classic passive aggression and always has plausible deniability.

…because the Tories are the ones being manipulated. A PM earns less than 200k£, a Minister even less and an MP even less - they’re incredibly cheap to ‘buy’.

We should pay them 10x more

... because a billionaire will look at the £2M price tag for the British PM and throw up their hands and say "shucks"?

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.

It's definitely both.

Not that our other options at the moment are a significant improvement.

We have to excercise our choice whether or not we are delighted about the other options. We cannot let any party get too entrenched or feel too safe.

If the message "I suppose I'd rather eat cat shit than dog shit" is then interpreted as "I really love cat shit, feed me more" I'm not sure that works.

It's more like crop rotation than a message. If you grow the same crop in a field too often then it impoverishes the soil and allows pests and diseases to build up.

"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity"

Stupidity is indistinguishable from malice. Try again.

There's no such thing as an incompetent politician. They may be technically illiterate, but their personal goal is to maintain power, and a good part of the time they don't spend telling bullshit to the public is spent asking their experts in a given field (IT in this context) to find ways to do something that would increase their power and also can be advertised as good for the people by telling more bullshit.

This is what I was getting at - it is impossible for us underlings to imagine what it is like to have the grasp of power over millions of individuals and innumerable resources. We might experience something of it if someone comes to us for help, clueless, and sense we can say or do certain things that would profit us at the expense of the needy person.

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.

> There's no such thing as an incompetent politician.

I present Liz Truss as a counterexample.

>their personal goal is to maintain power

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...

I’m sure there are some devious plans taking advantage of the circumstances created.

You forgot about widening of the wealth gap and massive wealth transfer in the last couple of years.

That's not incompetence. The rich are in charge.

> There's no overarching devious plan to enslave us all, here. It's just classic honest-to-goodness incompetence and disinterest.

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.

> At least the overarching-plan theory has a boogie man to attack.

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.

The reality in the UK is worse than your proposed alternative - the government are simply too incompetent to effectively govern. The contents of the government's playbook is completely irrelevant, because they can't reliably deliver on anything. There's a kind of bleak slapstick humour to their sheer ineptitude.

It's because we have a government of aristocratic bimbos who have blundered through life studying a curriculum of ancient classics and pre-1950s history, with a sprinkling of "GDP is king" economics, which at best prepares them on how to accumulate a power base, but provides no practical knowledge on how to use said power effectively in a modern society.

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.

> just classic honest-to-goodness incompetence

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.

>Who is the evil bond villain behind this dastardly plan, exactly?

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.

https://metro.co.uk/2017/10/04/everyone-is-disgusted-by-bori...

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.

Ask Kanye West

All parties have supported and encouraged this bill. There have been a few individuals in each party willing to question it, and improve it, but they have been more or less ignored by all sides.

Honestly I think it's worse than that. Their playbook is just that last one.

- 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.

it's from the friedman/thatcher-esque neoliberal playbook.

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.

Don’t forget destroy education to make people less educated

The secondary education my children recieved was awful. UK Secondary schools seem more interested in their uniform policy than the quality of learning.

None of these problems are unique to the UK though. Many other EU countries struggle with all of these problems(and more!) and yet manage to preserve the privacy of their citizens regardless.

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".

> Many other EU countries

The UK is not a EU country. Just to remind those which think they can be in and out at the same time.

Maybe not, but lets not split hairs here. The op was discussing comparing nations and used a blanket "EU" moniker to denote this. You know, our next door neighbours of similar economic size...

I guess I will loose this on the ground of not being a native speaker. But to me, the little word "other" makes a difference. At least if I translate to my native language, the phrase "andere EU-Staaten" clearly implies that UK is also a EU country. Removing "andere" fixes the sentence to actually tell the truth.

And yes, this distinction is important. The british people have democratically decided to leave the EU.

No you are right, but my point was that it was an unnecessary observation in my opinion. Pointing out our choice on EU membership brought zero additional discussion to the points they made. Just like our little conversation now :)

The referendum was advisory. The decision to leave the EU was made by parliament, not by the people.

With that out of the way, you should read "EU" as being in parentheses.

> The decision to leave the EU was made by parliament, not by the people.

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.

> yet manage to preserve the privacy of their citizens regardless.

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

>>All European countries?

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.

> None of these problems are unique to the UK though. Many other EU countries struggle with all of these problems(and more!) and yet manage to preserve the privacy of their citizens regardless.

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.

In order to address those political people would need to go and demonstrate and become political active in order to bring in tax reforms, banking reforms, economic reforms, social welfare reforms, government administrative reforms, school reforms, healthcare reforms, police reforms, and possible more in order to take money from other sectors to pay for it.

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.

Yes, because we know in the '40s, that political groups built on disaffected men and brotherly evilness, threatened to take away the wealth and power we intend for our Sons to inherit.

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).

Because privacy is part of the same underlying issue: the centralisation of power, in both governments and big businesses.

Most of those are Government funded, and Government caused.

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.

I think it's because a lot of British people still live the dream of being a major superpower with strong and robust economy. In reality UK has decimated its manufacturing economy and relies almost entirely on being a service economy, skewed almost entirely towards London and other areas of the UK have been left to languish. People visiting places like Manchester, Newcastle, Leeds, Bristol and so on wonder how the hell is it possible that you're visiting what is ostensibly the 5th biggest economy in the world yet the infrastructure of nearly everything is crumbling, councils can't even afford to clean the streets, social programs are being shut left and right, police won't come unless there's an actual murder and so on and so on.

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.

divide and conquer, dealing with this problem in Canada Redditosphere atm, so much astroturfing going around. We need some next gen AutoMod improvements to deal with this bs.

There's nothing wrong with that list.

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.

I, for one, am not apathethic, but still feel completely powerless. Politicians do not represent me, the people have stopped protesting because it's been outlawed and it's completely useless.

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.)

> and do you truly believe they will step back from this bill?

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.

Anything for children safety, right? I have said years ago that all our rights, in all Western nations, will be stripped with that excuse, because it's so damn easy to convince the laymen that it's for the good of the children, and paint protestors are pedophile apologists.

Child safety laws are the Trojan horse of surveillance.

Child safety is what is pushed in the press, the act itself is filled with "content harmful to children and adults", see section 46 for the details.

Nice to know that Bravermen and the rest of them are protecting us from harm.

> Child safety is what is pushed in the press

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...

General apathy about this law is just another symptom of a failing democracy. It's not only this online safety law, there's been apathy over all laws and regulation about security and safety—they've all sailed through into law over the last 30 or so years without so much as a murmur from the GP. The only opposition comes from background noise—such as likes of us who post to columns on HN and we're easily discarded. Lawmakers and politicians know if they want a law passed for certain all they they have to do is to mention those 's' words in context.

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

> Imagine the impact of a political scandal like the 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.

Perhaps so, but back then it brought down the government, whether it would do so today in an era of poorer ethics, highly-tuned government spin and when both government bureaucrats and politicians are well immunized against public opinion is a moot point.

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.

Beginning 40 years ago, the same efforts were made under the guise of fighting the drug war. Then 15-20 years ago, it became clear that that boogeyman wasn't scary enough, so the messaging slowly shifted to terrorism and then children.

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.

Indeed, people are starting to understand that democracy is just another type of control, and most of its promises are actual lies. If you critically review what the parties you voted for have actually done, it is quite likely that you end up without a party to vote after a number of voting iterations. For me, it took roughly 25 years of being able to vote until I realized I dont want to do it anymore.

This sounds interesting. What do I need to know / learn to be part of this?

Decentralised network? Good question, there's a lot of things that are not very practical just yet. Name dropping off the top of my head: IPFS, Veilid, Dat, hypercore, maybe even Urbit (yes I know). Maybe simply not putting our entire lives on the internet.

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.

1: https://youtu.be/leqjwiQidlk?si=vSjt743jJ-yjsPfI

Thanks for your detailed reply. I shall use this as a jumping off point for further explorations.

I agree. I'm not a "rage against the machine" type of person, I just generally go with the flow.

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.

yep, we're a nation of cowards and we deserve it.

I said it in another post and it got downvoted but the fact is democracy just simply does not exist. This political apathy from the masses is the outcome of people being slowly ground down over the past decade+ and is intentional.

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...

While I agree with a lot of what you’ve said … Prince Andrew isn’t the monarch. He’s a Royal, certainly, but we * only have one monarch.

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.

Ah I wish I could edit my post to correct that! My bad, poor terminology.

There is nothing you can do, because the "opposition" also supports this.

What are we going to do? This went through with no vote that I am aware of.

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.

You can protest from the comfort of your own ho NO CARRIER

I'm not apathetic, I write to my MP, and I tell my non-techie friends about the implications. I donate to the EFF (used to donate to ORG until they decided other issues are more important than this one...). Still, nothing is done, and the slow decline into authortarianism continues.

What do you do?

What happened with ORG? Their email on Tuesday was how I heard the bill had passed.

I still get their updates and saw that email, too -- but I get the idea that their main focus seems to be on immigration law (e.g. https://www.openrightsgroup.org/blog/fines-hiked-for-firms-e..., https://www.openrightsgroup.org/blog/migrant-rights-update-j...)

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

Same things really, never got a reply from my MP, but the only action that feels like it achieves "something" is donating to the EFF since they are somewhat effective at lobbying.

Sorry, I can see how my last sentence may have come across as accusative; I meant it as "What does one do?" -- Short of a grassroots level / peasants revolt I don't know what we can do (and realistically, I'm too lazy to organise such an event)

Brit here. I'm apathetic going on mildly in favour. On the downside it limits the privacy of people who can't be bothered to turn on a VPN. On the plus it may protect kids from being bullied to suicide etc (https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11707945/Britain-wa...). I'm in favour of protecting kids and capable of clicking the VPN button.

That said I'm a bit meh as it's unclear how well it will work if at all.

The whole point of this bill is that your VPN will either be backdoored, or your ISP will be forced to block it. Then you have 0 options.

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.

> mainstream media

Mainstream media is just another name for propaganda at this stage

> fact that this is getting 0 coverage from mainstream media doesn't help.

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).

They are right.

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.

People in the UK are either:

- 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.

It is getting coverage from the MSM in the UK. The BBC's angle is teenage sexting and premeditated teenage gang attacks (especially one that ended in murder).

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.

Whatever happened to making governments regulate their own citizens? I remember a time on the internet where if a government wanted this sort of control they had to implement it themselves. Something happened at some point where Twitter, Google and Facebook began to comply and now it's the status quo. Why can't we go back to telling governments to go fuck themselves? Police your own fucking people, if you don't want them using our services then block them from doing so. I can't even run an XMPP server with OMEMO now without having to have a fucking legal department to respond to emails from these bureaucrats. I'm absolutely tired of this shit, and the meek response. I am not subject to your god damn jurisdiction.

Seems the number one fear of any government is it's citizens.

Too vague - the number one fear of any government is noncompliance. From citizens, bureaucrats, and enforcers (military + police).

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.

Though illusion plays a role in the formation of these phenomena (government, authority), I would disagree that the phenomenon itself is an illusion.

Wait what? Governments don’t mind noncompliance, they need a little and if we look at legal cases involving tech companies where they are being regulated we can see that tech companies are often noncompliant. Not to mention the whole police and judicial infrastructure.

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.

> we can see that tech companies are often noncompliant

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.

See: Prohibition Era USA.

>Something happened at some point where Twitter, Google and Facebook began to comply and now it's the status quo.

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.

> 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!

The internet happened and made every service – no matter how local – available everywhere in the world. And then companies happened and turned every online service into a business.

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.

In a democracy, the government represents the will and the interests of the citizens in that country. If UK citizens don't want such laws, they can always protest, at the voting booth or in the streets.

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.

The issue is, much like the us, the UK is a representational democracy. You vote for officials who you hope represent you and they often don’t.

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

> If UK citizens don't want such laws, they can always protest, at the voting booth or in the streets.

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...

Basic Computer Science - coupling and cohesion.

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.

As a citizen of the UK government I believe I am merely in a state of superposition. I do not exist until observed by HMRC.

Ain't that the damn truth.

Even playing into the system is pointless, my MP replies 6 months after things are passed lmao

Enforcement (or at least parts of it) of lots of financial rules (AML, etc) has been deputised to banks for a pretty long time.

Unless you are physically present in the UK or do business in the UK, just tell them to screw off. Treat their demands the same way you would an Iranian or Russian government bureaucrat demanding that you compromise the rights of your users. If they want authoritarian control over the internet, make them build their own great firewall.

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.

But no one cares about your server anyway let alone nation states so it’s not a realistic worry anyway at that level. Once you’re at the point of having relevance then you’ll probably find nation states have levers to pull.

Man, one day there's gonna be a news article on the front page of HN about a hobbyist or medium sized forum admin in the US being sued in federal court by the UK government (that's a thing now BTW) for not blocking UK IPs. Before that there's going to be one about a FOSS chat app maintainer from somewhere getting in trouble even though he runs no infrastructure that UK citizens use.

I don't want to fly under the radar with an ambiguous sense of my own safety.

Unfortunately that's not true. "Do business in the UK" means that a single British user has an account on my server. All the western nations have mutual agreements to enforce their civil laws in each others jurisdictions. Look at Kim Dotcom. I feel the same way as you: make them all build their own firewall. But unfortunately these governments don't see it that way anymore.

It seems a big majority in this thread agrees this is bad, and user privacy is key.

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.

I would love to see data driven statistics on the number of pedophiles that are caught each year owing to the onerous requirements that are being put on our internet infrastructure.

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.

We can instead look at the statistics for scanning of communications that aren't yet end-to-end encrypted, which will provide a good indication for the effect of bypassing encryption.

[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.)

The bigger problem is people taking the government's statements at face value.

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.

> that effectively user privacy is secondary to child protection

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"

We have an inalienable right to privacy. That means it doesn’t matter what others say or do, it’s ours to have. The UK government is now failing to guarantee this.

“He who sacrifices liberty for safety deserves neither and will lose both.”

Reasonable people would say, there are no inalienable rights, in extremis we give some up for something else. Anyone can be stopped by the police given a reasonable pretext, for example, despite an ironclad right to freedom. We like it because it saves us from violent people, for example.

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?".

These politicians couldn't care less about children, they're just the perfect political weapon to make the population accept never-ending amounts of tyranny. They say "children" and the next thing you know they are surveilling and policing your literal thoughts and speech. For your own good, of course!

It’s nothing to do with children. This government fought hard against feeding children in schools, something that India manages to do. They delayed rebuilding crumbling schools until the last moment when they were required to act.

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.

Here's something from gov.uk

>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.

Sadly there wasn't much hope of this bill not making it into law. The opposition parties if anything felt that the law wasn't strong enough and pushed to make it even more draconian. The British public at large are in favour of any law that imposes harsher penalties and regulation on the tech giants. 'Protect the children' is far more emotive than 'But we might eventually lose encryption', and the collateral damage to our freedoms is slow and insidious enough that it's not recognised or appreciated. I think given everything we have to take the governments vague concession of 'when the technology becomes available' as a win, it was the best we were going to get, no way was this bill not going to pass.

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

Very little coverage of this bill passing in the UK mainstream media that I have seen.

It has no tits.

Things without tits gets little coverage in the UK mainstream media ;)

Lot of truth in that though to be fair the 'page three' tradition (the inclusion of an image of a half-naked female on page 3 of a tabloid newspaper) finally ended in 2019. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Page_3

Also the disgustingly seedy countdowns to when certain girls turned 16 so they could be on page three. Thank god it’s in the past.

Nothing at all. It's crazy.

The media's very busy dealing with the Prime Minister announcing a policy that'll be reversed before it's ever implemented.

Delaying the 2030 ICE ban was inevitable. Moving it to 2035 puts it in line with the EU.

(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)

The poor don't buy new cars, which this ban affects. They buy second hand cars, which would only slowly be removed from the market as new ones were not entering. Indeed, old ICE cars would automatically stick around longer if electric cars were too expensive. This was not a big bang approach.

The question is whether there will ever be an affordable used market for EVs (comparable with the used ICE vehicle market), due to the high price of new vehicles combined with battery degradation.

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)

> Very little coverage of this bill passing in the UK mainstream media that I have seen.

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.

The UK MSM are highly in favor of it. The Daily Mail has pushed for this kind of thing for years.

All major political parties support it.

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.

For one thing mainstream media is exempt from the bill.

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?

Not quite two weeks ago I was discussing the censorship that we face in the west with a few other users here. Some of them seemed to not quite believe their ears when I brought up the phenomena.

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.

So are Whatsapp, Signal and Apple going to keep their word or has some minuscule thing changed in the legislation that they can backpedal by saying it's now fine with them?

Their opposition was that the motion was still in flux on the wording, and could have outright said “E2EE is illegal, we want either A) a backdoor into encryption if you use it B) on device monitoring for harmful content”.

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.

Makes me think of the approach Apple attempted

Nothing changed in the legislation from when those companies stated their concerns.

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".

I wrote a letter to my congressperson (US based) when this topic come up a few months ago.

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.

There are definitely two groups of people:

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

and even if we have government 1 now, we could always have government 2 after the next election

I'm thankful our constitution here in the U.S. seems to have been written entirely by people firmly in group 2. Sadly, it feels like those principles have been slowly eroding ever since...

What’s up with the UK and its surveillance heavy approach to its citizens? Reminds of what George Orwell feared.

UK still has the attitude that social classes are a legitimate and real thing. That there exist people to rule or be ruled. Similar attitudes manifest in other western nations but none so normalized that huge sums of taxpayer money funds the lavish lifestyle of a specific family's bloodline, so explicit that living rulers (not leaders, self identified rulers) are placed on every instrument of currency. Their de jure power may be ceremonial but the cultural effect is very real, even if subconscious.

Such an attitude enables practices that better attitudes would see as abhorrent.

While this is true, I don't think it's the actual cause.

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.

And so America was born.

The Conservative party are in government. Their programme is designed to extract wealth and political agency from the general populace, and suck it up into the control of their own class of people (a mixture of landed gentry, financiers etc).

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.

As a Brit I concur 100% with this. Eloquently explained

...and shame! for the opposition[s] parties and voters who have allowed it all, and for so long.

the opposition is criticising the government for watering down the law. they wanted it to go a lot further (for example making VPNs illegal).

there is widespread support for rules against the internet.

This is the problem, why turn up and vote Labour if they aren't that much better? Why waste an hour of your day that makes no practical difference to the sorry direction of our country? I despair of all politics.

>>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.

In this context it makes sense, but the context is false. Ever-deferring problems to class warfare just demotes this actual thing into a conspiracy theory.

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...

Labour also supports this.

Labour are Tory-lite. They are unable to win an election otherwise (or so they believe).

No, it should have to do with the British Culture, the lack of anti-authoritarian implants in it, or something like that. The fact that there is no broad political opposition to the laws like this one (There are many others enacted in the last 30 years) is just a symptom.

It’s the tories/conservatives. They love this sort of total authority stuff. They’re also keen to bail on intl human rights orgs because it limits what they can do to migrants.

Labour did the same thing too (c.f.: Jacqui Smith, et al.): so whichever party is in government they'll kowtow to the Home Office via the Home Secretary. For good, for bad, for worse.

(Note that I am not defending the Tories here)

You have to (I believe) acknowledge that this is a next level situation though.

I've never seen it this bad in the UK.

> kowtow to the Home Office

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."

> I'm convinced that this induction ritual is performed most thoroughly by the Home Office.

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.

Highly recommend watching Michael Cockerell's documentary series "The Great Offices of State".

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 tried to watch that episode; fail. I watched the initial (unskippable) ad; when I tried to skip to 12m, I got another unskippable ad. Is there some other source for this documentary?

I have a low tolerance for ads and propaganda!

Try using accessing the video via Invidious (FOSS YT frontend): https://yewtu.be/watch?v=TyGhg8BmECw

…pay for YouTube Premium?

Yeah, and a dozen other pay-for streaming services. Thanks; no thanks. I already pay £160 per year to watch basically anything (BBC licence fee is due even if you don't watch BBC - I live in the UK), and I'm not paying extra for every other streaming service I might watch for an hour every couple of months.

I largely live the US but I still pay my TV license fee for my UK address, FWIW.

Labour is worse if you look at the past years. They were pushing for harsher restrictions in the pandemic and they said this bill is 'watered down' by the conservatives.

That’s intentional, I think. An internal faction made false smears to get the progressives out of positions of influence so their right-wing faction (who are as conservative as any Tory) could take power.

the change was demanded a long time ago by civil society organisations.

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.

I guess one could also argue the other way around: that Orwell knew his compatriots all too well to come up with the particular fears expressed in 1984 and Animal Farm (both set in perverted late stage socialistic rather than capitalistic/neolib societies btw).

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.

It seems the government wants to move forward till the country actually looks like it does in “V for Vendetta”

It's not that bad. We don't have ID cards unlike places like Germany or Spain and don't have an equivalent of a US social security number. I've never felt particularly surveilled here.

I've been using VPN services for every byte of traffic in and out of my home and on my mobile phone for 15 years.

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)

> 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)

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

I don't know where your citations come from. EU law does not require such a thing. The Data Retention Directive mandated retention from 6 to 24 months, but it was invalidated by the CJUE years ago, and asserts that comparable national laws are illegal.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_retention

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....

Oh.

The ISP can only see domain right? As long as it is https.

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#...

Bravo, and in the future, just like meta/threads does now in eu, you'll not be able to access needed information even with vpn bc they'll somehow detect you are cheating the system

That until using VPN become illegal as it is a way to circumvent the bill.

I wrote to my MP about this and got a response.

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.

> They do note however that having Ofcom be the regulator and monitor isn't right

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.

This is an odd one, as it means that OFCOM are now regulating private citizens for the first time, to the best of my knowledge. Hmm, apart from Ham Radio Licenses, I guess.

What I really don’t understand is why parents aren’t responsible for monitoring they’re children's access to the Internet anymore?

Why does it need to be done at each website instead of at the point of access?

It’s not about the kids. It’s never about the kids.

Unless you're Prince Andrew

I think this could serve a good rule-of-thumb test. Whatever measure is being taken, would it stop (or have stopped) Prince Andrew (and similar)? If not, the measure is at best ineffective and at worst not intended to stop them. We can call this the Prince Andrew Test..

This current law fails the Prince Andrew Test.

Exactly. Making it about the kids makes it difficult for people to protest or object. I had an awkward time on our very technical team call yesterday when I ranted a bit about the bill passed. Senior engineers wanted me to 'move along' because somehow they believe that it is better for their own kids.

Children shouldn't be on the internet, just like they shouldn't be left to cycle on motorways. Or enter contracts and take on debt. Or fly jet planes. Or be left alone in a workshop or kitchen. Etc.

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.

They are using the concept of protecting children as a smokescreen. Speak to anyone that works in Trust & Safety teams and they'll tell you that countries like the UK are already under-resourced and overwhelmed with the volume of CSAM they are currently dealing with. This bill was never about protecting children.

Fundamentally, encryption is just math, and math is still mostly legal in the UK. There seems to be an obvious workaround here:

- 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.

It's not yet illegal to supply someone with an E2E encryption tool like OpenPGP.

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.

This only works if the judge actually cares about what is written in the law. Might work in the USA but hardly anywhere else.

Maybe I'm wrong but who can stop you or me from deploying VPN and providing secure comms channel to our families? surely, any user who encrypts their comms is suspicious to govt, but there needs to be something more than suspicion for govt to step in and tell me I can't encrypt my traffic?

They'll just make your resistance to monitoring a crime unto itself. Used PGP? They'll make it so the judge is allowed to just assume your guilt and sentence you as if concrete proof had been presented. You'll have to decrypt to prove your innocence.

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.

What relationship does a company need to have to UK to be subject to this?

(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?)

Most countries consider having users to be equivalent to having a presence, free or otherwise.

Would it apply to a website like Wikipedia for example ?

Wikipedia is actually trying to figure that out. Right now WMF legal says no.

That surprises me. The legislation in the form I last saw it says that they're not allowed to show user generated content to children without an age-gated login.

Your understanding of the law may be correct, but do remember that law is basically its own language with its own ideas of "common sense" and that if you're not legally trained (and even if you are but you've not read all the other laws that the law in question interacts with) then all sorts of weird misunderstandings can happen.

(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").

Thanks for your replies.

There you go. GDPR already made companies stop providing to users based on their location. This trend will likely continue.

How would these extra territorial laws be enforced?

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.

All it'll do is kill off small businesses and hobby projects in the UK. I'm furious about it; the idiots just made BBSes, MUDs, Git and Telnet illegal. The big companies get regulatory capture of all social communications.

If you're not in the UK and not using major services, yes, you don't have to care. The problem is basically that the major services will likely have to comply, because they do have a sizeable UK presence they'll want to maintain, hence they will introduce anti-features that basically ruin it for everyone. And if they do comply, it gives rope for the government to go after smaller players that don't.

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.

How was Saudi law enforced on Jamal Khasogghi? How was Indian law enforced on Hardeep Nijjar?

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.

The same way the US prevents me from buying cuban cigars here in Germany over the internet:

* 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 block your site at the ISP level. They’ve been doing that for years.

They’d fine you as well but that’s probably less enforceable.

"Users in the 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.

IRCv3: now with age verification for our UK users!

Under what circumstances is someone doing a startup in the US subject to this UK regulation?

If any of your users might conceivably be resident in Britain.

But we dumped all that tea in the harbor.

No.

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.

You say that, but if you want your site to be accessible from the UK or ever plan on touching down in the country, it applies to you.

I wonder if you could just add a link to a terms of service for your site that explicitly states the site was not for use by users in the UK, and that they should ensure they’re following all laws and using the site at their own risk.

Nope, that's probably not enough. With regulation, you have to do two things:

- 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.

> This violates fundamental principles about anonymous and simple access that has existed since the beginning of the Internet. You shouldn’t have to show your ID to get online.

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?

What if people sold their verified ID status to spammers? People already sell their kidneys.

The person whose identity is used will be held accountable. This is more like getting paid to serve a jail sentence in place of someone else.

What if it's a homeless person?

Accountable for what? Shilling is usually not provable in a legal sense even if you can smell it miles away.

Sure, someone who doesn't use facebook might not care if you sell essential oils in his name on facebook, but if you are required to prove your identity, presumably that identity is available to the service provider. So your identity will get permanently banned from the service after the first few violations, making it not cost effective for something like spamming. Its not like the captcha solving farms which sell them for 0.1 cent a piece.

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.

So many people fail to realize that it's not a partisan game. Surveillance and authortiarianism keeps going in one direction in many countries no matter what the party is.

Stop buying into this simplistic false dichotomies.

China: Look at our internet, users only do what we want.

UK: Hold my beer, I'm going to do this for the whole internet.

---

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.

Has anyone figured out what the wording "directly on the service" means - does that mean they've accidentally exempted federated content, ie. everyone having their own Mastodon server?

Ofcom are about to start a consultation with industry to figure out how to apply such vague laws.

What’s truly insane about this law is how pathetically performative it is.

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

> This Act changes nothing about those fundamental issues

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.

I don't think they're thinking beyond the end of the day. Look at today's news: the Tories are cancelling policies that don't even exist! This is why it's completely performative. They try to get the headlines without having to actually put in any work.

Dang. Well here’s my public apology to Stallman for thinking he was a kook for still using ancient cellphones. I’ve been obviously proven wrong

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.

Meanwhile, a British MP chairing a media committee thinks it's appropriate to write to content platforms to suggest that they demonetise people they don't like: https://twitter.com/rumblevideo/status/1704584929026216118

This should get more coverage, as it's a worrying development. The tone of the letter is disturbing.

Surprisingly enough, the mainstream media haven't covered it at all ...

I learnt about it from the BBC News homepage, where it currently remains, but I know they show different front page stories based on location.

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.

> 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).

Not a biggy. Let's have them implant backdoors everywhere, and then use it to acquire and publish all their data and their conversations.

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

I do so wish we could stop using the term "backdoor". When it comes to computer systems, there is really no "front" or "back" and so any access granted is just another door. This then removes the idea that it can be made "safer" just by calling it something different. There are so many cases of "hidden" or "secret" APIs being made public because people found them, there is absolutely no way that an additional can be made any safer.

What does this mean for Signal and Telegram in the UK?

Remains to be seen, but so far it seem that off they go.

Not true. The part of the bill that would force companies to decrypt messages has been scrapped.

We live at the time of democracy vs corporatocracy. Both have their weapons but we re reaching to the point of parity, onwards to the latter.

What would be a good country for vpn exit point? Something in Europe due to latency

Nothing to hide, but this just rubs me wrong out of principle

Ireland. But not N.Ireland as thats still under UK rule.

This will be great for governments who want to silence critics of corruption. Just place the targeted media the law is intended for on the targets phone and bam! You have a case against them to discredit anything that persons says from then on.

If I were an ISP in Briton. I would shutdown until this law is overturned.

Disgusting. Can the UK still be considered a democracy if the state has this access to private communication?

Was it ever? Last time I checked, it is still a monarchy.

Technically yes. The question should rather be: Can the UK be considered a state that respects basic human rights.

This just seems to add another pretext (alongside terrorism) to snoop on someone. Great...

Does the government only care about catching dumb paedophiles? Im pretty sure if your running a child abuse ring, your going to know how to circumvent these "protections"

serious question: there's been talk of rape gangs in britain that heir from india/pakistan

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?

What can I do as someone that lives in UK (but European nationality)? Is using a good VPN enough to mitigate these privacy and security issues?

> Is using a good VPN enough to mitigate these privacy and security issues?

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.

Yeah I also use Mullvad and only have good things to say about them. Besides that, what can a person do?

You'll end up like meta/threads is duing in eu: even with vpn you can't access their site

What happens if services just stop serving content in the UK? Will that get the attention of those who come up with these ridiculous laws?

If they’re big and important enough (eg: Google, Apple, WhatsApp), then yes, that would get their attention.

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.

Incidentally, @dang you're currently in violation of the law. HN has to be age-gated now.

How do UK laws apply to a US hosted website run by a company whose only legal entity AFAIK is in the US?

What action do you think the UK can take?

>>How do UK laws apply to a US hosted website run by a company whose only legal entity AFAIK is in the US?

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.

> 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?

The honest answer is - I don't know. But what I would like to happen is for my friends and colleagues to say "This sort of thing is unacceptable in a democratic society and it makes me upset" and not "meh what are you going to do". Going further you could support foundations fighting for our privacy rights, they have much better experience and are better connected to lobby on our behalf. I agree that merely voting for major parties is not enough - but there are organisations within this country that bring these issues up to the attention of the parliment, lords and various commissions and regulatory bodies.

Your first point is very important but, what can you expect when a large percentage of the world population went "meh, what are you going to do" or, worse, "it's necessary" when govs implemented inconstitucional Draconian laws and policies on the "war on covid".

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.

The bill has cross-party support, so you can't even vote for it to be repealed.

This is the issue. They've effectively made an enormous amount of stuff illegal, and we're in the realm of "you'll get prosecuted arbitrarily / if you piss the wrong person off" which isn't really conducive to civil society.

>HN has to be age-gated now.

"May contain nuts."

once again local first systems win.

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.

Having lived in China and now living in the UK, I really don’t see much difference between “The East” and “The West” in terms of freedom.

Whataboutism. In the West, I can vocally oppose this and peacefully protest without being detained, arrested, brutalized, or killed, and without destroying my 'social credit' or being banned from leaving the country. We can still work to overturn the legislation. You can't do that in the East

I wonder what the future of governance holds in the next 50 to 100 years.

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”.

Ironic that the UK wants to spy on its citizens to “protect the children” but it also just sealed Prince Andrew’s records until 2065 to hide his Epstein activity:

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.

The british are known for being this kind of people. They must be isolated and boycotted.

Trouble is that governments in their former colonies look up and say "That's a nice precedence for abusing our citizens, let's try that here!"

Nah, we just use our secret courts to issue secret orders to hand over data or just have the intelligence agencies backdoor everything without bothering to make a big fuss over it.

I am so disappointed by this.

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?

That's not only irrelevant to the discussion, WW2 ended 80 years ago. Anyone who was a Nazi or collaborated is well over 90.

Effects of this are felt today - policing of the population is worse in the countries that were either Nazi occupied or communist compared to the UK.

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)

I don't think policing in The Netherlands, Denmark or even Germany is bad.

> 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.

It's not that bad really. I'm sure it'll be done in a half arsed way.

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Sounds alright to me. Something needs to be done about young children accessing pornographic content, and terrorists and paedophiles using end-to-end encrypted chat systems to cover their tracks. This seems like a reasonable compromise that won't affect most users, while also not mandating any specific technical solution, leaving the implementation up to subject matter experts.

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.

Subject matter experts have unanimously said such a technology is not possible to implement safely.

> Something needs to be done about young children accessing pornographic content, and terrorists and paedophiles using end-to-end encrypted chat systems to cover their tracks

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.

With this type of measures, uk's internet will be just as safe as china's!!! What an achievement! Uk should also implement social score, this will also be done to protect the citizens from dangers! Maybe even some camps where people that are potentially dangerous/unwanted (afaik party said this about migrants, one of the reasons reason Brexit happened) would be isolated from good citizens. This internet act is also a perfect first step for detecting ill intented journalists, how they dare uncover corruption schemes, everything parliament does is for their citizens! Long live the queen!(ups) Long live the king(I mean parliament)!

> Something needs to be done about young children accessing pornographic content,

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.

Children in the UK are born without parents, so it's a valid point by OP.

Children, who don't experience sexual desire, are not interested in pornography. Whenever I encountered lewd content as a child, my reaction was always "uggh... adults are so gross" and I'd skip over it if I could. Children don't seek out pornography, and they spend almost all their time online on platforms like YouTube that don't host pornography that they might see inadvertently. And if they did see porn for whatever reason – why is this supposed to be such a big deal? As far as I can tell, the harm that comes from a child seeing porn is that they'll be grossed out. It seems roughly as bad as seeing the corpse of a rabbit that was run over by a car – a shame, but not something that we need to Do Something About. People act like encountering sexual content will somehow warp children's minds and make them homosexuals or deviants or something, but as far as I know this isn't based on any scientific evidence. It's entirely about adults' feelings.

I guess the fundamental is that pornography is embarrassing for the adults (as in, the collective of adults). So we try to hide it?

>Something needs to be done about young children accessing pornographic content

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.

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