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The problem is that what they've written looks very reasonable. After all, who could disagree with a statement such as the quote below? "It is in no-one’s inte

The problem is that what they've written looks very reasonable. After all, who could disagree with a statement such as the quote below? "It is in no-one’s interest for the foundations of strong societies and stable democracies – the rule of law, privacy and security – to be undermined." The Internet is a dangerous place at times. As anyone who needed the NHS a few days ago is all too aware, modern technologies can be vulnerable to very damaging attacks. There are whole new variations of criminal activity, from bullying and harassment to fraud and identity theft, that have been enabled by our modern, highly connected lives, and these often do have serious consequences for the victims. None of this is seriously in dispute, and no-one would seriously suggest that it wouldn't be better if these problems were effectively addressed. The real problem is that I suspect Theresa May and her government have a very different idea about what things like "effectively addressed" mean compared to most of us here. The biggest single step to undermining privacy and security online in our country may well have been the Internet surveillance laws passed recently by the current government, laws which started out as a personal goal of May herself from her time as Home Secretary. In their haste to ensure that laws and principles can be applied online as well as offline, it appears that the Conservative leadership has forgotten that offline we also have rules about following due process and principles about being innocent until proven guilty and legal requirements for reasonable grounds for suspicion before doing various things that interfere with a private citizen's life.

mal808 9y ago
"The Internet is a dangerous place at times. As anyone who needed the NHS a few days ago is all too aware, modern technologies can be vulnerable to very damaging attacks." But this was a failure of the government to fund the required security for the NHS. It was dangerous because the government was complacent, they cut funding to the support that kept the data safe, they used outdated technologies. This incident was the governments fault. And after reading this manifesto, it wouldn't surprise me if they let it happen on purpose to help push this agenda.
- Silhouette 9y ago
  But this was a failure of the government to fund the required security for the NHS. Perhaps, though a lot of the later reporting I saw suggested that the situation was far less clear than it initially seemed. For example, the vast majority of the systems affected by the recent involuntary encryption problems were reportedly running Windows 7. An update had been made available on that platform but only a few weeks earlier, so in some cases it was still in review before being deployed by IT departments etc. For home users affected by similar attacks, there have also been various problems with getting Windows 7 updates deployed in timely fashion, not least because Microsoft borked the Windows 7 update mechanism for a lot of people a few months ago and even systems set to automatically install important updates may have been silently failing to do so. In any case, this is all rather academic. You and I and no doubt many other people reading these comments on HN might understand the technical issues involved, and we might have reasonable discussions about different strategies for updating systems to mitigate such threats. The average non-geek reading the paper just sees "Your local hospital Emergency Department was closed this week, with ambulances rerouted to other hospitals 20 miles away, as a result of evil people doing bad stuff that made the computers stop working." If the government promises to stop the evil people doing bad stuff so hospitals can carry on helping people, that average non-geek is going to support them, blissfully unaware of either the prospects for success or the unintended (or, more cynically, unadvertised) side effects.

mal808 9y ago

"The Internet is a dangerous place at times. As anyone who needed the NHS a few days ago is all too aware, modern technologies can be vulnerable to very damaging attacks." But this was a failure of the government to fund the required security for the NHS. It was dangerous because the government was complacent, they cut funding to the support that kept the data safe, they used outdated technologies. This incident was the governments fault. And after reading this manifesto, it wouldn't surprise me if they let it happen on purpose to help push this agenda.

Silhouette 9y ago
But this was a failure of the government to fund the required security for the NHS. Perhaps, though a lot of the later reporting I saw suggested that the situation was far less clear than it initially seemed. For example, the vast majority of the systems affected by the recent involuntary encryption problems were reportedly running Windows 7. An update had been made available on that platform but only a few weeks earlier, so in some cases it was still in review before being deployed by IT departments etc. For home users affected by similar attacks, there have also been various problems with getting Windows 7 updates deployed in timely fashion, not least because Microsoft borked the Windows 7 update mechanism for a lot of people a few months ago and even systems set to automatically install important updates may have been silently failing to do so. In any case, this is all rather academic. You and I and no doubt many other people reading these comments on HN might understand the technical issues involved, and we might have reasonable discussions about different strategies for updating systems to mitigate such threats. The average non-geek reading the paper just sees "Your local hospital Emergency Department was closed this week, with ambulances rerouted to other hospitals 20 miles away, as a result of evil people doing bad stuff that made the computers stop working." If the government promises to stop the evil people doing bad stuff so hospitals can carry on helping people, that average non-geek is going to support them, blissfully unaware of either the prospects for success or the unintended (or, more cynically, unadvertised) side effects.