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They're framing it as a choice between child safety and encryption. I think everyone on HN knows how utterly stupid that is, so I won't belabour the point. How

• HL33tibCe7 5y ago
  Yes, although keep in mind that these efforts have strong cross-party support. This isn't only an issue with the Conservative party.
  • satronaut 5y ago
    • mtoner23 5y ago
      Most college students hate both parties, just like they always have
      • satronaut 5y ago
        not really. they were fawning over bernie then hillary in 2016 and bernie then biden in 2020.
        • gurleen_s 5y ago
          With all due respect I don’t believe you’re in tune with what college students are feeling. —- a college student
          • satronaut 5y ago
            maybe you're the exception to the norm, or maybe I am out of touch. When I was in college (in the last decade), everyone gave democrats a free pass to do whatever they wanted. I have heard that gen-z leans more libertarian though
            • hcrean 5y ago
              A saying normally attributed to Churchill: "If you are not a liberal in your twenties you have no heart, if you are not a conservative in your thirties you have no brain".
              • bee_rider 5y ago
                It is older than Churchill and the parties are switched up according to current events. https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/02/24/heart-head/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/02/24/heart-head/ Nowadays, in the US at least, given the significant correlation between education level and Democratic party alignment, it is probably due for another change. Sadly "If you are not a socialist in your twenties you have no heart, if you are not a centrist Democrat in your thirties you have no brain" does not roll off the tongue.
                • satronaut 5y ago
                  *correction, if you're not right of center in your twenties you have no heart, if you're not conservative in your 30's, you have no brain. The socialists are pushing for dangerous governance methods that have caused genocide and economic collapse over the 20th century and actively discriminate based on people's gender, ethnicity, and sexual orientation. The "centrist Democrats" stick their heads in the sand ignoring the crimes of the leaders they elect and the influence of the far left progressive wing of the Democratic party.
    • rkachowski 5y ago
      You're conflating the American Conservative party with the UK Conservative / Tory party.
• throwaway984393 5y ago
  Both major political parties in U.S. did the same thing with SESTA/FOSTA. Every smart politician will exploit anyone they can to get what they want (in that case, scoring cheap political points with their base) as long as their base do not complain loudly. UK peeps: complain loudly!
  • zohch 5y ago
• toyg 5y ago
  This is the worst generation of Tory politicians in living memory, although sadly the authoritarian streak is not absent from the Labour party either.
  • Aromasin 5y ago
    I've been working within the Liberal Democrats to try and push policies that are pro-privacy for the past few years, revoking some of the acts put in by the current Conservative government and pushing new ones to protect against future government breaches like this. Unfortunately, it simply doesn't stick when polled to the general public. The average person simply doesn't care it seems, no matter how you frame it, and as such it's almost impossible to break ground into updates to the party manifesto. I tried the same thing within Labour a few years before and the same barriers existed, with the added fact that many of the MPs seemed to be cut from the same cloth as the Tories, and that they were incredibly resistant to change outside of their traditional focuses (NHS, Unions, Immigration, Education, blah, blah). To be frank, it seems like most politicians would rather be at war with the technologically apt than to work with them. All we can hope is that technologies adapt at a faster rate than authoritarian governments can, and the witty can outwit the witless.
    • da39a3ee 5y ago
      These normal people don't vote for it for a good reason! The importance of online security is massively overstated, especially by specialists like us on forums like HN. We've got to keep our credit card details private, yes. But in general we (e.g. HN community) completely fail to do the cost benefit analysis -- we talk about security as if you always have to have maximum security, rather than recognizing that it's a trade off with convenience. That combined with the tin foil hat tendencies of some HN types who comment on security. Really the best thing for almost everyone is to just keep everything in Google Drive: the probability of google employees stealing it multiplied by the loss is much smaller than the probability they won't multiplied by the convenience. I hope this comment doesn't come across as trolling-- I found your post genuinely interesting and I genuinely think that the normal folk who you're having a hard time convincing have a point -- the correct position to adopt lies in between the two camps. Which is a truism. But I mean, like, relatively far from either!
• dfxm12 5y ago
  They're framing it as a choice between child safety and encryption Politicians can always rely on any part of the holy trinity of terrorism, piracy or child to either justify or manipulate their constituency to support a measure that infringes on their security/privacy. The media plays along too easily. Interestingly, conservatives in the US made anti end to end encryption legislation part of the EARN IT act, which also claims to deal with child abuse: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EARN_IT_Act_of_2020#Legislation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EARN_IT_Act_of_2020#Legislatio...
  • ben_w 5y ago
    Do politicians actually care about piracy? I get how IP holders care about piracy, but I don’t think it resonates enough with the general public for it to really matter to politicians… Unless the politicians are literally just being paid by IP holders to care about it, which could be a thing.
    • mistrial9 5y ago
      NEWS from California / Hollywood : "politicians are literally just being paid by IP holders to care about it"
      • rusk 5y ago
        > NEWS from California / Hollywood Reports are also coming in from certain parts of Central Europe …
  • marto1 5y ago
    > holy trinity of terrorism, piracy or child you forgot to add the mandatory element of ignorance on a particular subject matter to make the mix truly explosive, but fair point.
  • mgdlbp 5y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Infocalypse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Infocalyp...
• starkd 5y ago
  [flagged]
  • hkt 5y ago
    They're definitely inconsistent.
• lbriner 5y ago
  > It's disgusting. They have no morals. You've gone pretty extreme there. There is a much more plausible explanation, which is that they genuinely believe that more people would be saved if the security services could access messaging apps and they don't think the level of potential abuse is worth worrying about. Don't get me wrong, I think they have made bad decisions etc. but in this case, I think it is simply naive "if you haven't done anything wrong..."
  • throwaway894345 5y ago
    > You've gone pretty extreme there. There is a much more plausible explanation, which is that they genuinely believe that more people would be saved if the security services could access messaging apps and they don't think the level of potential abuse is worth worrying about. I think both can be true: the government believes it can increase security in general by expanding the state's surveillance powers--the state always wants to trade privacy for security. However, they're not framing it as a general "give us more surveillance powers and we'll increase security"; they're framing it narrowly as about protecting children ("give us more surveillance powers and we promise we'll only use them to protect sexually exploited children") which is exploiting victimized children in my book.
  • outime 5y ago
    I don't believe the UK government for this matter is naive. They know very well what and why they are doing this and it's the same strategy used in different parts of the world. It's not new and there's no need to come up with anything new because it works so well and you can justify trading privacy (or even more important things) for security this way no matter how little sense this makes. I do think that it's naive to think that one of the most important countries in the world with a rather effective intelligence service and a lot of smart people everywhere in the state is naive. I really don't think the UK government believes that if they remove encryption from popular chat apps the tiny percentage of population that might use it for evil purposes will be caught instead of, you know, moving to a different mechanism.
  • onion2k 5y ago
    There is a much more plausible explanation, which is that they genuinely believe that more people would be saved if the security services could access messaging apps and they don't think the level of potential abuse is worth worrying about. There's an even more plausible explanation, which is that both are true. They're aware that stopping encryption might save a few children, but they're also aware that it enables the mechanisms of the surveillance state that give them extraordinary power over the public. They want to stop child sex trafficking and they want to abuse people's privacy.
• ljm 5y ago
  > If I was in the U.K., this would be enough to forever turn me off the ruling Conservative party. It's disgusting. Unfortunately this isn't unique to the Tories. Politicians across the whole political spectrum have fought to introduce increasingly authoritarian controls over the internet and technology over the past 30 years. UK culture as a whole is more authoritarian than you'd expect. Labour would gladly implement their own version of the same if they had the opportunity. To that point, any UK millennial will likely not be able to remember a time where there wasn't some hand wringing campaign about online privacy or porn.
  • andysomniac 5y ago
    The problem is that Blairite/Starmer Labour are just Tories wearing a red rosette, they do not differ on policy in any meaningful manner.
    • bencollier49 5y ago
      You think Corbynites would be less keen on authoritarianism?
      • dijit 5y ago
        Unsure. His voting record indicates that he is anti-authoritarian, but the telegraf tells me he is pro-authoritarian. He has publicly clashed with the powers that be about increasing police powers. But I don’t have a clear answer for your question, especially as he has many supporters who might not vote along his own lines. https://www.bbc.com/news/election-2017-40154361 https://www.bbc.com/news/election-2017-40154361
      • hkt 5y ago
        In all likelihood, yes: they are from a faction of the Labour party that was routinely surveilled by police throughout the 20th century (and more recently, in all likelihood). The election manifesto for Labour in 1983 contained pledges to abolish the secret services, too. Not to mention the fact that this same part of the Labour party is often engaged in protests that will have left wingers as attendees and speakers. They're very often on the sharp end of both surveillance and crackdowns on protest. That combined with their belief that the police are racist (eg the Met) and that prison is generally harmful is not likely to produce an authoritarian programme. They'd have dealt with large scale tax dodgers too, unlike the current leadership.
• zohch 5y ago
• fuzzer37 5y ago
  > this would be enough to forever turn me off the ruling Conservative party Welcome to every conservative party in every country. They're all terrible humans
• bodge5000 5y ago
  > They're framing it as a choice between child safety and encryption Its worse than that by the looks. They're trying to convince people you can still have end to end encryption whilst having a man in the middle scan it to make sure its all A-Okay. Again, I think everyone knows how stupid this is. I seem to remember Theresa May talking about this a few years ago and the idea was quickly shot down, and here I was hoping that was the end of it.
• kurthr 5y ago
  It's classic, fighting the last war, for the "security" agencies. They think that by surveilling their own people they can protect the politicians. What they have in fact done is collected huge dossiers on their public (and gov employees), which can be compromised and used by foreign powers for targeted misinformation, agitprop, and blackmail. They are the weakest link. Since the rise of PGP and fall of key-escrow it has become more and more clear that spreading free (ussurveilled) communication between individuals and businesses was necessary to the operation of capitalist democracies. However, they can't give up their dreams of controlling their own populations so they will cede them to competing totalitarian states, which already know how to control their populations and can well afford to breach such "security".
  • marcosdumay 5y ago
    > They think that by surveilling their own people they can protect the politicians. That idea is so outrageously stupid that no, I don't believe they think that. Every one of those intelligence agencies are perfectly aware they are collecting dossiers on their public (with emphasis to gov employees) that can be used to compromise the administration and coerce people into doing illegal or immoral acts. You just got the wrong adversary in mind.
    • kurthr 5y ago
      Wow, you really think they are either completely treasonous or utterly incompetent? If they wanted to surveil their own (as presumably some do), they wouldn't need to compromise standard coms protocols. It's not collecting the dossiers... it's that they are the weak link, whether they like it or not.
      • marcosdumay 5y ago
        > Wow, you really think they are either completely treasonous or utterly incompetent? Well, any other one would require that people on the intelligence community, whose work consists mostly on either using dossiers to compromise people or avoiding the creation of dossiers so people aren't compromised to not noticing that they are collecting a dossier on every citizen or not being aware that will lead to people being compromised... and incompetence or dishonesty not being involved.
• kmlx 5y ago
  > They're framing it as a choice between child safety and encryption. doesn't seem so: > End-to-end encryption is valuable technology designed to keep our data and conversations safe. We are not opposed to end-to-encryption in principle and fully support the importance of strong user privacy. Instead, our campaign is calling for social media companies to work with us to find a solution that protects privacy, without putting children at even greater risk. they apparently claim to be looking for a third way.
  • nybble41 5y ago
    There is no "third way". End-to-end encryption means no one other than the sender and the intended receiver(s) can access the decrypted messages; full stop. That includes the social media companies and the government. This obviously also precludes hacks like subverting the client software on either side to report back on the content of the messages (i.e. Apple's implementation)—if the user can't trust their client not to deliberately leak details about the message then they don't have E2EE, since someone else's agent has been placed in the communication path.
    • bmh100 5y ago
      A third way would be to use a neural network to analyze a message before encryption, or to duplicate the message for receipt by the service provider.
      • nybble41 5y ago
        I specifically covered that. If anyone other than the original sender (one end of the communication channel) and the intended recipient(s) (the other end of the channel) is granted access to any information about the content of the messages (including not just the full plaintext but also e.g. a digest created by a neural network on behalf of the service provider) then the system does not have the characteristics of end-to-end encryption. You've only encrypted part of the communications channel. In any case, advocating for mandatory digital spies on end-users' devices is arguably worse than attempting to undermine E2EE.
      • 5y ago
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• Hakashiro 5y ago
  Why do you think Brexit was what it was? UK wants to dominate and enslave its population for the political gain of the ruling class. It is clear as day to me.