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This is one of the most overtly authoritarian proposals for internet regulation I've ever heard from a democratic, Western nation. How in the hell are the peopl

This is one of the most overtly authoritarian proposals for internet regulation I've ever heard from a democratic, Western nation. How in the hell are the people of the UK supporting something like this? As an American who cherishes liberty and freedom, I'm shocked that anyone could support these laws in the UK. They are straight up Orwellian...

CiaranMcNulty 9y ago
Whether we are supporting it or not remains to be seen. May has always had this authoritarian streak but rose to the office of Prime Minister without being elected. Sadly this is unlikely to become a key issue in the forthcoming election, so an attempt at implementation is likely and we'll end up 'supporting' it passively by voting for the proposers.
- coldtea 9y ago
  >Whether we are supporting it or not remains to be seen. After living quietly with 24/7 cctv monitoring, all kinds of anti-privacy laws, etc, it's not like it's a real nail-biting mystery this one...
jansho 9y ago
We've just become very passive. No one makes a noise about being the most CCTV-ed nation in the world. Even when the leaks about the true nature of GCHQ surveillance came out, there wasn't much rage in the streets. I guess we are all secretly OK with it. "You shouldn't worry, unless you have something to hide."
- spaceribs 9y ago
  I was thinking about this in relation to the pirate radio history of the UK. Maybe people are apathetic because everyone knows no matter how "Nanny State" things get, smart people can skirt their draconian tendencies no matter what? If the more fascist members of society are placated by technical placebos, why not allow them to pretend they are actually in control of the "situation"? I'm personally keeping a close eye on lifi. In the US the FCC restrictions on the range of wifi networks restricts mesh networking substantially. If it's just invisible gigabit light communication from rooftop to rooftop, it could be a huge gamechanger.
  - mattnewton 9y ago
    I don't think this is a real solution. I need to talk to my friends and family privately without installing conspicious hardware on their house. The right to encrypt and the right to privacy too are precedents that need to be defended, otherwise as soon as the law catches up and learns about the loophole, it will be closed quickly.
    - spaceribs 9y ago
      Sorry if I gave you the impression that it was a solution! What I'm saying is that the technical cat is already out of the bag, we're already moving forward with stronger encryption and a multilayered internet. Adding restrictions on the ISP level just creates a market to get around that restriction, be it mesh networks, li-fi, or low earth orbit satellites.
- rogerbinns 9y ago
  Do people in the UK see the police as adversarial, like they do in the US? To me (a perception) it seems like US police are expected to act disproportionately and have the system on their side. See for example advice on never talking to them, profiling, civil asset seizures, swat raids, plea bargains etc. It doesn't seem like UK police are seen the same way or even close. CCTV and internet control are additional tools for them.
  - mike-cardwell 9y ago
    As a UK citizen, my impression is that the relationship is more adversarial in the US. But as far as the US side goes, all I have is what I see on the Internet. Perhaps this has something to do with the fact that the Wikipedia list of people killed by the police in the UK since the year 2000 fits on 1 screen on my (admittedly large) monitor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_killings_by_law_enforcement_officers_in_the_United_Kingdom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_killings_by_law_enforc...
  - pjc50 9y ago
    UK police are nowhere near close to US police in terms of everyday brutality. Generally people in the UK are comfortable with the police. There's a few big exceptions: policing in Northern Ireland was so sectarian it had to be rebuilt. The Met (London) police have a bit of a race relations problem, although again nowhere near as bad as most large US cities. And the police have a record of tracking and interfering with peaceful left-wing political groups to a disproportionate extent. There's cases outstanding relating to undercover officers who had relationships with women they were spying on.
  - Silhouette 9y ago
    Do people in the UK see the police as adversarial, like they do in the US? No. Ordinary police officers that you might meet day to day are mostly just decent people who want to be approachable and have good relations with their local communities. The collective organisations that represent those officers within senior management and to the wider government often defend these principles. Policing by consent remains the foundation of our system, at least for now. I fear this will change over time, though, not because of the generally decent people working on the front lines in policing, but because of the authoritarian measures pushed through by their government masters and the bias in how they are used, the perception that if something does go seriously wrong then the police involved will not be held accountable, and probably also some element of having a lot of US TV shows and films where we see a theatrical portrayal of a very different kind of relationship.
- anigbrowl 9y ago
  I've found this extremely frustrating because people in hacking culture for the main part are unwilling to invest time to figure out the psychology of the larger population. Yes, most people are OK with it. Hackers' response to this datum tends to be 'well they shouldn't be because liberty and reasons,' but what hackers are missing is that most people are not logical an also there are far more of them than you so it's important to get to people where they are rather than where you would like them to be. It's the same thing when people get upset about the NSA or other spy agencies. I have been pointing out for years now that such agencies perform an important task of government (because no government, organization or nation prospers by being less informed or allowing others to gain an information asymmetry over it). Instead of acknowledging this social reality and developing strategies that incorporate, people demand absurd quixotic solutions that ignore everything we know about economics and human behavior. The sad reality is that most people (~80%) are passive and just go along with whatever they're told to. There's a small sadistic fringe at one end of the political spectrum that responds to all problems by blaming them on the weakest people they can find as scapegoats, and a small idealistic fringe at the other that clings to a nive idealism; both fringes are capable of totalitarianism. People in hacker culture decry this state of affairs, but most of them don't want to give up their cushy jobs or privileges or take any risks, and so they get co-opted into building the next iteration of oppressive technology by default.
coldtea 9y ago
>As an American who cherishes liberty and freedom, I'm shocked that anyone could support these laws in the UK. They are straight up Orwellian... Well, those (liberty and freedom) are mostly cherished in lip service by most, and only when it comes to government. Otherwise, few bat an eye that between them Google and Facebook (and perhaps 2-3 other players) control and have access to 90% of what people do on the internet. And that they also sleep with their government for their nation's interests.
- mattnewton 9y ago
  >Otherwise, few bat an eye that between them Google and Facebook (and perhaps 2-3 other players) Big difference there between the one government that can put you in jail and you cannot divorce without leaving the country (sometimes not even then), and some fragmented web services you can point your browser in a different place. Enormous, meaningful difference worth fighting over.
  - codedokode 9y ago
    What prevents Google and Facebook from sharing data with the government? Especially if nobody would know about it?
    - allover 9y ago
      I can choose not to use/give meaningful data to Google and Facebook, but I don't get to opt out of elected government. I agree with GPP that the 2 aren't really comparable.
      - coldtea 9y ago
        >I can choose not to use/give meaningful data to Google and Facebook Between Google Ads on tons of site, their Google Analytics in tons of sites, your friends sharing stuff, photos etc with you on Facebook, your friends receiving your messages on their Gmail account, and the several other (differently branded) services they own, not to mention sites hosted by them on GAE and such, sites serving you Google Web Fonts, etc, you don't really have much choice... Especially with Google being the only game in town for quality search results.
rorygreen 9y ago
As a person from and living in the UK, I'm equally shocked and appalled as you. Everybody I know is baffled by and vehemently against these ridiculous proposals. Quite frankly I have no idea who is voting for the Conservatives. Anybody with half a brain cell and not pushing an evil agenda seems to despise the Conservative party. (I'm sure there are some reasonable Tory supporters out there, I've never met them though. I also think in this current sociopolitical climate it's plain dangerous to vote for the Conservatives, even if you believe you have good reasons to support them.) As a country, we've lost faith in politics and I fully expect this to be demonstrated by a very low turnout for the general election in June. The issue with this is we currently have no strong enough opposition to the Tories (thanks to an incredibly effective smear campaign against Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the Labour party, led by the media and perpetuated by the Labour MPs themselves) so will end up with an even greater Conservative majority and another 5 years of this dystopian madness. I very much hope I'm proven wrong. I'd be happy to elaborate on some of these points if you're interested; I have a few theories about what is currently going on and what has led us here. It is both very interesting and incredibly upsetting to observe and analyse the state of politics in this country at the moment. Edit: I should state that I am not a Labour party supporter, I was just trying to give a vague overview of the state of our politics at the moment.
- keithpeter 9y ago
  I suspect that most people decide who to vote for based on money, trust on things like jobs, and fear of unemployment &c. I don't think internet policy comes into the decision really for people who don't follow these things and who are not technical. UK: anyone got a good simple page I can point neighbours at about why this should be an election issue?
- mike-cardwell 9y ago
  This issue is deeper than party politics. You can blame the Tories, but the Labour party gave us RIPA. They're just as bad, if not worse. It does not matter which political party is in power at the moment, they all want to increase surveillance. And if they say they don't want to before they get into power, they seem to change their tune for some reason once they're in.
mike-cardwell 9y ago
As an American who cherishes liberty and freedom, your relationships, conversations, location and political opinions are tracked, logged, and available to your government.
AJ007 9y ago
We can't forget that the whole purpose of the internet is decentralization. Perhaps if authoritarian regimes are able to regulate it, that is a sign things have become too centralized. The more chilling question is why is a Western democracy trying to copy the frameworks of China, the UAE, and other crumbling regimes? This feels like a shadow of the Cold War where certain people believed that the US would fail because capitalism was weaker than communism (parallels abound.)
- Lordarminius 9y ago
  I agree with all your points except to point out that CCCP is not a "crumbling regime" and a little reflection would indicate why we should not even wish it to be one.
Silhouette 9y ago
How in the hell are the people of the UK supporting something like this? Firstly, a lot of people know little if anything about what's going on. They're quite understandably more concerned about high profile issues like Brexit and the collapsing NHS and trains that don't run so they can't get to work and the cost of their kid going to university. The mainstream media is also more concerned with those things. Secondly, even those who do have some idea of what's going on overall support authoritarian measures if those measures are presented as providing necessary tools to the police and security services to combat serious crime and terrorism, and of course they always are presented that way. When normal people are asked about the actual measures in the laws, for example about all the different government organisations that now have powers to access surveillance data and all the different purposes they can use it for, a lot of people do have significant reservations or even object strongly. But we still tend to trust our government organisations to basically do the right thing in this country, for better or worse, and so supporting the police and security services with new powers is a vote-winner.
snowwolf 9y ago
Normally the conservatives would never be able to push this authoritarian agenda so openly, but a unique set of circumstances has given them the opening to push through some of their most extreme objectives. The Conservatives are the only mainstream party promising to follow through with Brexit, and Labour have disintegrated under the 'leadership' of Jeremy Corbyn. This means that many traditional Labour voters are willing to vote Conservative to ensure they get their Brexit, regardless of whatever else the Tories are putting forwards in their manifesto. They've can basically put whatever they want in their manifesto and people will still vote for them to ensure Brexit happens - that's how determined the Leave voters are. Current polls (although we know how reliable those are) suggest the Tories will take over 400 seats at the general election, giving them absolute control of the government with no other party able to oppose them.
- vidarh 9y ago
  As much as things are looking bad, saying Labour has disintegrated under Corbyn is a truth with severe modifications. Labour is currently polling higher than Ed Milliband was, and has been steadily improving. The biggest problem now is not that Labour has disintegrated, though the infighting certainly have not made things easy, but that UKIP and the Lib Dems have been disintegrating, and UKIP voters in particular appears to be largely going Tory. Labour might lose a lot of seats based on current polling, but that is more down to a blatantly undemocratic electoral system than to how the party is polling.
  - ed_blackburn 9y ago
    The Conservatives have stolen UKIPs voters by swinging them to the right. They've been able to do this with impunity, in part because of the Labour Leadership, whilst supported on a level I've never seen before in terms of passion, it is frankly not universally popular enough. The only metric you can measure against is how many seats a party wins by. Will Corbyn build on Milliband, or fair worse? I speak to some hardcore Corbyn supports and their passion is incredible, but alas, only one person get a vote and for all someone passion a pensioner will vote Conservative out of habit and inertia.
IanDrake 9y ago
"Are you on the side of the terrorists and child pornographers?" That is how resistance will be framed and it could play just as well here, but I hope I'm wrong.
hollander 9y ago
Maybe it's the cue to vote for the other party, which will mean the end of Brexit?

CiaranMcNulty 9y ago

Whether we are supporting it or not remains to be seen. May has always had this authoritarian streak but rose to the office of Prime Minister without being elected. Sadly this is unlikely to become a key issue in the forthcoming election, so an attempt at implementation is likely and we'll end up 'supporting' it passively by voting for the proposers.

coldtea 9y ago
>Whether we are supporting it or not remains to be seen. After living quietly with 24/7 cctv monitoring, all kinds of anti-privacy laws, etc, it's not like it's a real nail-biting mystery this one...

jansho 9y ago

We've just become very passive. No one makes a noise about being the most CCTV-ed nation in the world. Even when the leaks about the true nature of GCHQ surveillance came out, there wasn't much rage in the streets. I guess we are all secretly OK with it. "You shouldn't worry, unless you have something to hide."

spaceribs 9y ago
I was thinking about this in relation to the pirate radio history of the UK. Maybe people are apathetic because everyone knows no matter how "Nanny State" things get, smart people can skirt their draconian tendencies no matter what? If the more fascist members of society are placated by technical placebos, why not allow them to pretend they are actually in control of the "situation"? I'm personally keeping a close eye on lifi. In the US the FCC restrictions on the range of wifi networks restricts mesh networking substantially. If it's just invisible gigabit light communication from rooftop to rooftop, it could be a huge gamechanger.
- mattnewton 9y ago
  I don't think this is a real solution. I need to talk to my friends and family privately without installing conspicious hardware on their house. The right to encrypt and the right to privacy too are precedents that need to be defended, otherwise as soon as the law catches up and learns about the loophole, it will be closed quickly.
  - spaceribs 9y ago
    Sorry if I gave you the impression that it was a solution! What I'm saying is that the technical cat is already out of the bag, we're already moving forward with stronger encryption and a multilayered internet. Adding restrictions on the ISP level just creates a market to get around that restriction, be it mesh networks, li-fi, or low earth orbit satellites.
rogerbinns 9y ago
Do people in the UK see the police as adversarial, like they do in the US? To me (a perception) it seems like US police are expected to act disproportionately and have the system on their side. See for example advice on never talking to them, profiling, civil asset seizures, swat raids, plea bargains etc. It doesn't seem like UK police are seen the same way or even close. CCTV and internet control are additional tools for them.
- mike-cardwell 9y ago
  As a UK citizen, my impression is that the relationship is more adversarial in the US. But as far as the US side goes, all I have is what I see on the Internet. Perhaps this has something to do with the fact that the Wikipedia list of people killed by the police in the UK since the year 2000 fits on 1 screen on my (admittedly large) monitor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_killings_by_law_enforcement_officers_in_the_United_Kingdom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_killings_by_law_enforc...
- pjc50 9y ago
  UK police are nowhere near close to US police in terms of everyday brutality. Generally people in the UK are comfortable with the police. There's a few big exceptions: policing in Northern Ireland was so sectarian it had to be rebuilt. The Met (London) police have a bit of a race relations problem, although again nowhere near as bad as most large US cities. And the police have a record of tracking and interfering with peaceful left-wing political groups to a disproportionate extent. There's cases outstanding relating to undercover officers who had relationships with women they were spying on.
- Silhouette 9y ago
  Do people in the UK see the police as adversarial, like they do in the US? No. Ordinary police officers that you might meet day to day are mostly just decent people who want to be approachable and have good relations with their local communities. The collective organisations that represent those officers within senior management and to the wider government often defend these principles. Policing by consent remains the foundation of our system, at least for now. I fear this will change over time, though, not because of the generally decent people working on the front lines in policing, but because of the authoritarian measures pushed through by their government masters and the bias in how they are used, the perception that if something does go seriously wrong then the police involved will not be held accountable, and probably also some element of having a lot of US TV shows and films where we see a theatrical portrayal of a very different kind of relationship.
anigbrowl 9y ago
I've found this extremely frustrating because people in hacking culture for the main part are unwilling to invest time to figure out the psychology of the larger population. Yes, most people are OK with it. Hackers' response to this datum tends to be 'well they shouldn't be because liberty and reasons,' but what hackers are missing is that most people are not logical an also there are far more of them than you so it's important to get to people where they are rather than where you would like them to be. It's the same thing when people get upset about the NSA or other spy agencies. I have been pointing out for years now that such agencies perform an important task of government (because no government, organization or nation prospers by being less informed or allowing others to gain an information asymmetry over it). Instead of acknowledging this social reality and developing strategies that incorporate, people demand absurd quixotic solutions that ignore everything we know about economics and human behavior. The sad reality is that most people (~80%) are passive and just go along with whatever they're told to. There's a small sadistic fringe at one end of the political spectrum that responds to all problems by blaming them on the weakest people they can find as scapegoats, and a small idealistic fringe at the other that clings to a nive idealism; both fringes are capable of totalitarianism. People in hacker culture decry this state of affairs, but most of them don't want to give up their cushy jobs or privileges or take any risks, and so they get co-opted into building the next iteration of oppressive technology by default.

coldtea 9y ago

>As an American who cherishes liberty and freedom, I'm shocked that anyone could support these laws in the UK. They are straight up Orwellian... Well, those (liberty and freedom) are mostly cherished in lip service by most, and only when it comes to government. Otherwise, few bat an eye that between them Google and Facebook (and perhaps 2-3 other players) control and have access to 90% of what people do on the internet. And that they also sleep with their government for their nation's interests.

mattnewton 9y ago
>Otherwise, few bat an eye that between them Google and Facebook (and perhaps 2-3 other players) Big difference there between the one government that can put you in jail and you cannot divorce without leaving the country (sometimes not even then), and some fragmented web services you can point your browser in a different place. Enormous, meaningful difference worth fighting over.
- codedokode 9y ago
  What prevents Google and Facebook from sharing data with the government? Especially if nobody would know about it?
  - allover 9y ago
    I can choose not to use/give meaningful data to Google and Facebook, but I don't get to opt out of elected government. I agree with GPP that the 2 aren't really comparable.
    - coldtea 9y ago
      >I can choose not to use/give meaningful data to Google and Facebook Between Google Ads on tons of site, their Google Analytics in tons of sites, your friends sharing stuff, photos etc with you on Facebook, your friends receiving your messages on their Gmail account, and the several other (differently branded) services they own, not to mention sites hosted by them on GAE and such, sites serving you Google Web Fonts, etc, you don't really have much choice... Especially with Google being the only game in town for quality search results.

rorygreen 9y ago

As a person from and living in the UK, I'm equally shocked and appalled as you. Everybody I know is baffled by and vehemently against these ridiculous proposals. Quite frankly I have no idea who is voting for the Conservatives. Anybody with half a brain cell and not pushing an evil agenda seems to despise the Conservative party. (I'm sure there are some reasonable Tory supporters out there, I've never met them though. I also think in this current sociopolitical climate it's plain dangerous to vote for the Conservatives, even if you believe you have good reasons to support them.) As a country, we've lost faith in politics and I fully expect this to be demonstrated by a very low turnout for the general election in June. The issue with this is we currently have no strong enough opposition to the Tories (thanks to an incredibly effective smear campaign against Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the Labour party, led by the media and perpetuated by the Labour MPs themselves) so will end up with an even greater Conservative majority and another 5 years of this dystopian madness. I very much hope I'm proven wrong. I'd be happy to elaborate on some of these points if you're interested; I have a few theories about what is currently going on and what has led us here. It is both very interesting and incredibly upsetting to observe and analyse the state of politics in this country at the moment. Edit: I should state that I am not a Labour party supporter, I was just trying to give a vague overview of the state of our politics at the moment.

keithpeter 9y ago
I suspect that most people decide who to vote for based on money, trust on things like jobs, and fear of unemployment &c. I don't think internet policy comes into the decision really for people who don't follow these things and who are not technical. UK: anyone got a good simple page I can point neighbours at about why this should be an election issue?
mike-cardwell 9y ago
This issue is deeper than party politics. You can blame the Tories, but the Labour party gave us RIPA. They're just as bad, if not worse. It does not matter which political party is in power at the moment, they all want to increase surveillance. And if they say they don't want to before they get into power, they seem to change their tune for some reason once they're in.

mike-cardwell 9y ago

As an American who cherishes liberty and freedom, your relationships, conversations, location and political opinions are tracked, logged, and available to your government.

AJ007 9y ago

We can't forget that the whole purpose of the internet is decentralization. Perhaps if authoritarian regimes are able to regulate it, that is a sign things have become too centralized. The more chilling question is why is a Western democracy trying to copy the frameworks of China, the UAE, and other crumbling regimes? This feels like a shadow of the Cold War where certain people believed that the US would fail because capitalism was weaker than communism (parallels abound.)

Lordarminius 9y ago
I agree with all your points except to point out that CCCP is not a "crumbling regime" and a little reflection would indicate why we should not even wish it to be one.

Silhouette 9y ago

How in the hell are the people of the UK supporting something like this? Firstly, a lot of people know little if anything about what's going on. They're quite understandably more concerned about high profile issues like Brexit and the collapsing NHS and trains that don't run so they can't get to work and the cost of their kid going to university. The mainstream media is also more concerned with those things. Secondly, even those who do have some idea of what's going on overall support authoritarian measures if those measures are presented as providing necessary tools to the police and security services to combat serious crime and terrorism, and of course they always are presented that way. When normal people are asked about the actual measures in the laws, for example about all the different government organisations that now have powers to access surveillance data and all the different purposes they can use it for, a lot of people do have significant reservations or even object strongly. But we still tend to trust our government organisations to basically do the right thing in this country, for better or worse, and so supporting the police and security services with new powers is a vote-winner.

snowwolf 9y ago

Normally the conservatives would never be able to push this authoritarian agenda so openly, but a unique set of circumstances has given them the opening to push through some of their most extreme objectives. The Conservatives are the only mainstream party promising to follow through with Brexit, and Labour have disintegrated under the 'leadership' of Jeremy Corbyn. This means that many traditional Labour voters are willing to vote Conservative to ensure they get their Brexit, regardless of whatever else the Tories are putting forwards in their manifesto. They've can basically put whatever they want in their manifesto and people will still vote for them to ensure Brexit happens - that's how determined the Leave voters are. Current polls (although we know how reliable those are) suggest the Tories will take over 400 seats at the general election, giving them absolute control of the government with no other party able to oppose them.

vidarh 9y ago
As much as things are looking bad, saying Labour has disintegrated under Corbyn is a truth with severe modifications. Labour is currently polling higher than Ed Milliband was, and has been steadily improving. The biggest problem now is not that Labour has disintegrated, though the infighting certainly have not made things easy, but that UKIP and the Lib Dems have been disintegrating, and UKIP voters in particular appears to be largely going Tory. Labour might lose a lot of seats based on current polling, but that is more down to a blatantly undemocratic electoral system than to how the party is polling.
- ed_blackburn 9y ago
  The Conservatives have stolen UKIPs voters by swinging them to the right. They've been able to do this with impunity, in part because of the Labour Leadership, whilst supported on a level I've never seen before in terms of passion, it is frankly not universally popular enough. The only metric you can measure against is how many seats a party wins by. Will Corbyn build on Milliband, or fair worse? I speak to some hardcore Corbyn supports and their passion is incredible, but alas, only one person get a vote and for all someone passion a pensioner will vote Conservative out of habit and inertia.

IanDrake 9y ago

"Are you on the side of the terrorists and child pornographers?" That is how resistance will be framed and it could play just as well here, but I hope I'm wrong.

hollander 9y ago

Maybe it's the cue to vote for the other party, which will mean the end of Brexit?