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Make no mistake: the Online Safety Bill has absolutely nothing to do with protecting children. End-to-end encryption is the first line of defence against govern

• sph 4y ago
  The "children" excuse + most of the population saying "I don't need privacy, I have nothing to hide" is a double whammy against any form of encryption and it's just a matter of time before our Internet privacy rights are completely stripped away. A huge educational campaign is necessary to convince people and the average politician that being pro-encryption doesn't mean being criminals or pedophiles. So it's a lost battle already, and the intelligence services everywhere know it's just a matter of time. Eventually a pro-privacy activist will be found with child pornography and everybody will cheer and applaud any form of privacy-stripping law. The children angle is insidious, and where the discussion keep devolving even in tech-savvy forums like this one, instead if seeing it's convenient and very effective marketing to hide anti-privacy goals.
  • ta1243 4y ago
    Easy to frame a headline against it. "New bill to allow Jeremy Corbyn to read your secret messages and Tories WONT FIGHT IT"
    • d3nj4l 4y ago
      The poor man’s not even in labour anymore, let him rest!
      • vaccarium 4y ago
        Nitpick: he is a Labour member but not a member of the Parliamentary Labour Party, so he sits in the Commons as an independent.
        • toyg 4y ago
          He'll stand as independent at the next election, hence getting automatically expelled from the party.
  • roenxi 4y ago
    > The children angle is insidious... The entire rhetorical position is difficult. One of the (somewhat implicit) rules of public discourse seems to be "assume good faith". To make the argument that people should have freedom from government requires an acknowledgement that government officials regularly do more harm than good. It is insanely challenging to carry that position in a debate. Keep your eye out for the handful of people who manage to do it without being tarred as crazy. That rhetorical imbalance makes it safe and straightforward for power politicians and police to argue that they should get to read everyone's emails. It is tricky to understand why centralised power is a terrible thing that will lead to corruption and injustice. Implementing a system that tolerates privacy requires the bureaucracy to not grasp power. We've always been lucky in a sense that a critical mass of people learned they need to fight to protect freedom as an ideal, even if they can't exactly explain why or if the details seem to lead to bad outcomes (see also "fight for your right to say it"). It may be the only defence against a Stalinist- or Maoist-style collapse.
    • robertlagrant 4y ago
      > requires an acknowledgement that government officials regularly do more harm than good I don't think it's that. The argument should be similar to the Veil of Ignorance: do you want every conceivable future government to have these powers?
      • roenxi 4y ago
        Well, hypothetically, if the government on average does more good than harm why would you not want that? Sure you'd get Hitler-lite on occasion, but that would be balanced out by anti-Hitler-lite doing good. Of course, the damage the bad apples do far outweighs the benefits of the good so that argument doesn't hold. A century of good governance with global assistance barely balanced out the damage Hitler triggered in 5 years. Destruction is easy and creation is hard. And that plays out on the small scale too with small numbers of corrupt officials undoing huge amounts of work by good people. If we had perfect information, we'd find that the spying apparatus of the 5 Eyes has done far more bad than good to the general welfare. The political corruption that must be causing is immense, we already know that every president since Obama has been targeted by the intelligence apparatus in some form. It is unlikely it ends there. I'm less sure about the situation in the UK, but they generally follow the US trend.
  • survirtual 4y ago
    100% I see you posting an opinion I agree strongly with here often. Glad you’re still at it. I will offer a positive side to this situation. Their war against math proves the math works and they don’t have an internal workaround. Since a war against math is bound to fail in long term (just like the war on vegetables aka “war on drugs”), short term victories of oppression won’t shut down the future. The children angle is insidious, especially when whistle blowers, reporters, and power players in revealing high up people involved in pedophilia seem to all magically have unfortunate accidents. It is a tool to emotionally manipulate a population which is ravenous against pedophilia. A very effective one. I look forward to the day these people are all held accountable.
    • 908B64B197 4y ago
      [flagged]
      • bombolo 4y ago
        I'm having a hard time taking a website called "free minds and free markets" seriously as a reliable source.
  • aftbit 4y ago
    There is already a more subtle problem here, at least in countries with case law. The people who end up on trial trying to defend encryption are typically guilty (as very roughly 90% of people who go to trial are). Many of them are guilty of things that most of us look very strongly down upon, like possessing and sharing child sexual abuse material. Thus if you want to set a strong precedent for protection of encryption, you end up defending exactly this sort of person.
    • ThePowerOfFuet 4y ago
      [citation needed]
• jojobas 4y ago
  [flagged]
  • sbuk 4y ago
    I’m sorry, but if that’s your idea of freedom, you can fucking keep it. Our police, though not saints, don’t shoot unarmed people. At least in Britain we are free from being shot in school.
    • jojobas 4y ago
      Americans kill more people by non-gun means than say Australians total (per year per 100k). Whatever their problem is it's not guns.
      • Nextgrid 4y ago
        Guns are definitely a major problem - a lot of people who shouldn't have access to guns do and use them. I'm not talking about intentional, targeted murders or settling gang disputes - those will happen anyway regardless of the law. However, easy access to guns mean that people in an unstable mental state might use one to commit (mass?) murder in an act of folly that they would otherwise not do (or at the very least significantly reduce the amount of victims if they had to use a knife instead of a ranged weapon).
        • Bloating 4y ago
          Only in California, where they cause cancer
        • jojobas 4y ago
          Those who want to kill a lot of people just rent a truck and wait for a big public gathering. What you describe is a definition of a nanny state.
        • staringback 4y ago
          > I'm not talking about intentional, targeted murders or settling gang disputes Once you exclude these.... > commit (mass?) murder in an act of folly that they would otherwise not do These become so rare that they are effectively non existent when compared to literally any other cause of death.
• Ntrails 4y ago
  > the Online Safety Bill has absolutely nothing to do with protecting children. I wish people would acknowledge both sides of the coin instead of simply pretending the other side doesn't exist. Yes society uses surveillance to identify and prosecute criminals (of various ilks, including those who abuse children). If you render that surveillance impossible by construction then people who might previously have been caught will not be. Instead you pretend that the only goal here is am authoritarian state straight from 1984. The risk of the second is one reason not to do it. IMO it's easier to think what happens when you make it easier for people to be blackmailed, manipulated, impersonated, defrauded. But again, that's just an opinion.
  • cm2187 4y ago
    I remember the UK using its anti-terrorist laws to freeze Icelandic banks assets during the financial crisis. There is a probability 1.00 that this will be used for purposes that have absolutely nothing to do with the pretext used to pass the bill. So it's a pointless exercise to debate about that pretext. The only thing that matters is what right does that give the government?
  • roenxi 4y ago
    Do you think pervasive spying would have made it more or less likely that the Jeffrey Epstein case made it to the public eye? Running a paedophile ring is not some small thing that is easy to hide. In all the cases I've taken note of (in churches, schools, local clubs, etc) the problem is almost never that the crime is unknown, it is that the perpetrators have too many tools to shield themselves from consequences and discredit the victims. In the future, maybe tools like going through people's internet history or planting fake evidence using their online accounts. Society shouldn't use surveillance to identify criminals. We'd look back at dragnets to catch runaway slaves or hunt down the homosexuals with horror (as, indeed, we generally do in states that successfully institute mass surveillance to catch criminals). As recently as a few years ago, 'criminals' were people found outside their own homes and places like China were successfully catching them much to the net loss for everyone. There is a strong - indeed, overwhelming - link between places with good privacy, good protection of freedoms and citizens living happy prosperous lives. The people pushing mass surveillance know all this. It has been bought up every time some bright spark comes up with the idea of rolling out mass surveillance. These people understand the societal consequences that they are ushering in. Too many of them understand what they are doing to pretend they have pure motives. This is empowering the worst of the authoritarians.
• daveoc64 4y ago
  >Make no mistake: the Online Safety Bill has absolutely nothing to do with protecting children. I don't think that's entirely true. I am sure many MPs, charities, and campaigners do only see this as an issue of child (and more generally, public) safety. I think the difficulty has always been explaining to laypeople that allowing any kind of monitoring or surveillance significantly weakens the security of encrypted messaging.
  • stephen_g 4y ago
    I think of it another way. The bill itself isn’t anything to do with protecting children - but lots of people (MPs, charities, campaigners) have been misled into supporting it. It’s what makes “think of the children” the best way to pass bad legislation. Not only does it make it very hard to object to a bill that won’t actually help children, but you get lots of free support from well-meaning people who don’t understand the implications of the bad legislation they’ve been conned into fighting for!
• tolstoshev 4y ago
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3jFqhjaGh30 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3jFqhjaGh30
• moremetadata 4y ago
  >Make no mistake: the Online Safety Bill has absolutely nothing to do with protecting children Exactly, they could start teaching law in a concept understandable manner from primary school age, concentrating on what can cause the damage mentally and physically, like the spread of germs from a young age. But they dont, so kids cant even protect themselves in an offline world and the state gets to maintain its air of pseudo respectability whilst most people dont understand how the state is causing lifelong trouble.