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UK pulls back from clash with Big Tech over private messaging
- jjgreen 3y agoThis didn't even make the evening news, the Rolling Stones have a new album out!
- disgruntledphd2 3y agoIt made my evening news as I subscribe to the FT.
- jiofj 3y agoThey announced a new album but it won't come out until late next month.
- nonrandomstring 3y agoI feel it can be said, without "conspiracy" or paranoia, that there's a widespread will to bury all activity around this bill. Government doesn't want it debated or scrutinised. Tech companies want it to go away. The media doesn't understand it and cannot communicate the issues. People are scared or too pre-polarised to take a position. It's been kicked into the long grass by 4 prime-ministers. Even mentioning here that it is complex and worth examining both sides gets one down-voted to hell (judging by my other comment).
- tremon 3y agoThat "other comment" of yours did nothing of the sort. You merely stated "it's something we strongly support" without further elaboration or explanation.
- phoe-krk 3y ago> The UK government has conceded it will not use controversial powers in the online safety bill to scan messaging apps for harmful content until it is “technically feasible” to do so (...) That would be waiting for a quantum computer and quietly hoping that a) nobody develops a strong enough post-quantum scheme and b) there is still civilization after RSA and ECC are broken? Correct me if I'm wrong.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- monero-xmr 3y agoQuantum computing doesn’t matter. Nothing in the universe can break a one time pad.
- blurbleblurble 3y agoUnderappreciated fact
- contact9879 3y agoOnce again, every cryptographic problem reduces to a key distribution problem :)
- phoe-krk 3y agoAnd nothing in the post-quantum universe seems to reliably solve the problem of transmitting a one-time pad.
- maxbond 3y agoIs quantum computing relevant to symmetric encryption like OTP? GP was talking about asymmetric encryption. My limited understanding is that quantum computing is a threat to asymmetric encryption. There's also the question of, if you can distribute a key which is at least the same size as your message over a secure channel - why not just distribute your message over that channel in the first place?
- karmanyaahm 3y ago> why not just distribute your message over that channel in the first place Latency? You can hand deliver a password ahead of time, but not messages.
- ianburrell 3y agoOne-time pad isn't a password. It is a flash drive or hard drive full of random bits.
- JoshTriplett 3y ago"abandons" seems overstated; "The UK government has conceded it will not use controversial powers" does not mean it doesn't claim to have those powers based on the legislation.
- tomatocracy 3y agoI wouldn't be surprised if this is a political attempt to stop the legislation being amended to remove the powers. I would hope that it fails.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- ajb 3y agoIt's a little unclear, but my reading of this is that the power to do it will still be in the law, requiring at most secondary legislation to put into effect (perhaps not even that) if they think they ever have enough leverage over messaging providers, or are willing to spend the political capital. Not a great place to be in really, but better than it actually being deployed.
- halJordan 3y agoYeah that was my reading as well. The legislation isn't being changed. The statement even says "We know you can develop [the methods to access], and we still have the authority to order it." The only relevant part of from op is the govt acknowledging that 2+2 = 4. But it fails to acknowledge that if they want to get 5, they can still order the equation to be 3+2.
- nonrandomstring 3y agoThrough most of history government always has the power, but the question is whether it has the legitimacy. In this case it has the legitimacy, but lacks the power. This is an unusual turn. We need online safety for kids. The aims of this bill should obtain widespread support from everyone. But instead of carefully researching and implementing difficult ideas, framing it properly and obtaining permission from the people - a remit to empower us to embrace online safety on our own terms - it's taken a strictly 20th Century "Mother knows best, think of the children" approach and made this a battle with Big Tech. It is laughably "Yes, Prime-Minister" in its clumsiness. We have anachronistic throwbacks in charge.
- whatshisface 3y agoI already have a remit to embrace online safety on my own terms - I can install a local filtering system if I choose to.
- nonrandomstring 3y agoOf curse, but it's not terribly easy for the average person to put sophisticated filters into multiple content pipelines on every child's device (imagine having 4 or 5 kids of different ages and needs). So a solution I think we brainstormed on the show was mandating open interoperable APIs that allow easy insertion of (presumably commercial or open source) plugins into the system, within the user's end-to-end digital estate, under the control of the user (parent) and completely rejecting the MITM and endpoint compromise via back-doors that the government naively proposed. In many ways that would take a much bigger stick to Big Tech, It also transitions the definition of "online harms" to those defined by the guardian/parent rather than problematically allowing the State to define harms and control the selectors. What that says to me is that the government are dishonest about the real aims of the bill. And further, as a consequence, it crushes my belief that the government even truly care out child safety except as a vehicle to greater tyranny.
- nonrandomstring 3y ago[flagged]
- toyg 3y ago> How could such a gulf emerge between good intent and practice? Road to hell paved with good intentions - always has been. To be honest, I don't think it could have gone any differently. It's an eminently hard thing to achieve: we want everyone to be free on the internet, but we also want "bad guys" not to be, and you can't really disjoint the two sets of people.
- nonrandomstring 3y agoI agree on the intractability of the problem. But could it have gone differently? I'd like to think so. How could it have gone differently? Sincerity and honesty from the get-go. Using science and mathematics? It is the deceit and self-deceit, the avoidance of difficult questions that has marred this bill from the start. Ambitious social aims need backing up with outstanding technical competence, in computing, law, social sciences.... That didn't happen. Ignoring the advice of experts has been business as usual for our government, at least since Covid.
- kelseyfrog 3y agoIt's very easy to protect kids online - simply don't allow them online. Banning children from the internet violates fewer people's rights(the number of children) than violating everyone's right to privacy(the total population: adults + children). The podcast makes a unsubstantiated and unexamined assumption: kids must be online. A cursory glance reveals that they in fact do not.
- nonrandomstring 3y ago> The podcast makes a unsubstantiated and unexamined assumption: kids > must be online. You haven't listened to a single word of it have you? https://soundcloud.com/chrismorrisbits/peter-ohanraha-hanrahans-911-at-the-world-trade-center-the-day-today https://soundcloud.com/chrismorrisbits/peter-ohanraha-hanrah... It says precisely the opposite.
- thinkingemote 3y agoSo it seems from the news that it was industry that forced this, but do we know how effective our campaigning and emails to MPs were? Or just some un-noteworthy political cog wheel action? How could we find out? Do the reasons get leaked unofficially usually?
- lozf 3y agoWe'd probably need to decrypt MP's WhatsApp messages to find out!
- nonrandomstring 3y agoMaybe don't over-rate the influence of the industry. The Conservative party's own members tore it to shreds. From: https://cybershow.uk/media/episodes/OSB1_r2_2023-08-27.mp3 https://cybershow.uk/media/episodes/OSB1_r2_2023-08-27.mp3 * "The source of the bill itself, the UK Conservative Party, has a significant number of its own critics calling it "fundamentally misdesigned" David Davis said its well-intentioned attempts may constitute "the biggest accidental curtailment of free speech in modern history." (* sadly my other sincere comment has been buried by people who apparently can't read past the first line)
- midasuni 3y agoDavid Davis is somewhat unusual - he actually resigned as MP to protest against an erosion of civil liberties (and stood on a civil liberty platform) Westminster will be a worse place when he goes, which I assume will be in next year’s election.
- developer93 3y agoHe knew he would get reelected though, it was more about publicity for the cause than principal.
- midasuni 3y agoOh no someone championing civil liberties You don’t get many MPs doing that - especially Tory ones.
- merpnderp 3y agoThe real question is why did they want this? Is the UK suffering some giant crime wave or are the powers that be just really intent on making sure people are using Bad Think in their private chats?
- aaomidi 3y ago“Eco terrorism” is on the rise. As we progress with climate change and climate disaster, it’s clear that eco terrorism is going to be increasing. This has been especially highlighted in UK. I put it in quotes because honestly it’s just fighting for survival at this point, but the ones in charge have decided to add the word terror to make it scarier.
- seabass-labrax 3y agoI had to read through your comment a few times to try to understand it. I think what you're saying is that ecological campaigning groups (particularly, I would guess, those such as XE without a formal hierarchy) are perceived by the current British government to be a threat to the establishment and so they want to prohibit these groups' use of encrypted group chats. Personally, I don't think this is a particularly legitimate concern (and by extension, not one which I would assume the government has), since the whole point of revolutions is that they don't need to be planned; they are a groundswell of popular opinion turned violent. Even if encrypted group chats were necessary for ecological campaigning groups, I don't believe they are popular enough among the British public or violent enough to make even a minor dent in the Britain establishment.
- developer93 3y agoAnd I question how much terror stopping traffic generates, generally more just irritation.
- colinsane 3y agopretty sure “eco terrorism” includes things like sabotaging pipelines and such too. though to your point, that form’s more of an economic weapon than it is terror.
- Jigsy 3y agoI'm not sure why people are assuming they've abandoned the idea. They've simply said it's not technically feasible. Which implies that later - through the power of delusions of grandeur - that it will become feasible.
- glitchc 3y agoNot technically feasible is akin to abandonment in government circles. To revive this, they would have to find an expert to attest that it is technically feasible to have security with a backdoor that government can access, but at the same time is impossible for malicious entities to access. Ergo, this is technically dead, which is the best form of dead.
- orlp 3y ago> To revive this, they would have to find an expert to attest that it is technically feasible to have security with a backdoor that government can access, but at the same time is impossible for malicious entities to access. > Ergo, this is technically dead, which is the best form of dead. Except it's not. There exist such cryptographic trapdoor constructions that are perfectly secure, if the government backdoor key is kept safe. The problem is keeping the government backdoor key safe. But that's not a literal impossible technical problem. It's much more a social problem. Don't get me wrong, I really, really wish what you said was true and we could kill this garbage forever by nature of technical argument. But it isn't, so we must keep fighting against it for the real reason: we simply don't want this.
- rightbyte 3y agoYe I find it somewhat amusing that sharing a private key with the government is technically impossible. I guess you could be philosophical about whether it is private though, in that case. Anyway, I am gladly surprised they seem to back off.
- ncallaway 3y agoThe part that's technically impossible is _keeping that key secure_. https://www.pcmag.com/news/master-key-for-tsa-approved-locks-leaked-again https://www.pcmag.com/news/master-key-for-tsa-approved-locks... More importantly, the thing that's technically impossible is a scheme to detect that the key has become compromised before it is used maliciously.
- b800h 3y agoThat bit isn't as bad as the part that says you can't run an interactive service without age verification though....
- dmje 3y agoThis is the bit that is scaring me, as someone who manages website for clients..
- b800h 3y agoIt blows a hole in all sorts of internet activities. We're going to have to rework a lot from scratch when it goes through. And of course the big internet companies won't complain about it because it gives them legislative capture of the web.
- seabass-labrax 3y agoWhat's weird about that is how it has leapfrogged law in 'real-life'. Minors aren't prohibited from talking to adults face-to-face, and you don't need to show proof of age before starting a conversation with someone! This new bill would turn the internet from an environment where nothing is age-restricted (in practice, if not in law) to one where everything is^. ^ Again, in practice if not in law: since no service provider could fully identify and restrict all 'adult' material in real-time, they will be effectively unable to serve any interactive content to minors. Only if the penalties for non-compliance were low enough would the largest of companies take that risk.
- ascorbic 3y agoThe whole UK government is run via WhatsApp. The threat to withdraw service should have concentrated minds.
- hn_throwaway_99 3y agoThis isn't true, is it? If so that's slightly terrifying.
- midasuni 3y agoThe political communications are done with WhatsApp. This is illegal of course. There has been no discussion of the obvious national security risk. https://www.theguardian.com/law/2022/mar/22/uk-ministers-accused-of-government-by-whatsapp-in-court https://www.theguardian.com/law/2022/mar/22/uk-ministers-acc...
- kmeisthax 3y agoThis isn't even limited to the UK. In the US, we have presidents, vice presidents, and presidential candidates all under investigation for mishandling records by running their own e-mail servers. The most charitable explanation being that they don't want to have to deal with separate personal and work devices; the less charitable explanation being "fuck records laws".
- jiqiren 3y agoI was a federal contractor for NASA and let me tell you about government email: quota of 250MB of storage (2010-2012). I spent every morning moving emails with attachments to local folders on my Mac (which had no backups) to keep from going over quota. If I went on a 2 week vacation emails would start to bounce to me. After that fiasco I understood why Colin Powell told Hillary Clinton to just run her own email server (for non-classified communication).
- midoridensha 3y ago
- javajosh 3y agoWhy ban e2ee when you could just pass a law giving LEO's the right to passively turn on any mic or camera or look through photos and messages on any smartphone at any time? I mean, how can they keep people safe without that access? Think of the children!
- greybox 3y agoThe government are denying the 'U-Turn' which of course, as always, confirms it :P https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-66716502 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-66716502
- tempodox 3y ago> the tech regulator would only require companies to scan their networks when a technology is developed that is capable of doing so. IOW, as soon as backdoors are implemented. And we only have to lose this battle once.
- outside1234 3y agoLet's start with Prince Andrew's messages!
- arichard123 3y agoTheir purposes have been served. Values have been signalled. Implementation was never going to be possible, which made it all the better a choice, as it means you don't have to actually do anything except blame tech companies when it doesn't happen. Job done.
- codeptualize 3y agoYou see this time and time again, some initiative to "just introduce some backdoors, what could go wrong", and then it takes some time for people who understand what it actually means to convince them that it is in fact a really bad idea and it would be a giant disaster.
- Clamchop 3y agoUnfortunately I suspect they will just keep trying it out over and over until the public gets too exhausted to rally against it anymore.
- developer93 3y agoAs they have been, at least since Tony Blair
- Nifty3929 3y agoOr until the voters wise up and start electing people that believe and espouse imperfect freedom rather than perfect control.
- exodust 3y ago> until the public gets too exhausted I see this theory pop up around here every few months. Where does it come from? I suspect it's a meme without basis. Can you please name one time in history where the public gets "exhausted", and as a consequence unwanted legislation is passed?
- ChoHag 3y ago[dead]
- codeptualize 3y agoI’m not too worried about that as I assume it’s not (just) the public but also lobby groups and industries who have an interest in this. It’s not that hard to explain what would happen and any politician will understand doing something like this would be quite bad for their career. I do agree that they will keep trying, but the chance of it happening seems slim, as there is just no way to implement this.
- mfDjB 3y agoI wonder where does this end? I do feel like nearly once a year some country in western world tries to ban encryption. Can we just make it a right to encrypt communications and be done with this endless debate?
- brobinson 3y agoYup, see you guys in the thread next year.
- DubiousPusher 3y agoIt should be a fundamental human right to have and communicate secrets. That's the end of the story for me. There should be things the state simply cannot touch not just things which it should not touch.
- blowski 3y agoPlaying devil’s advocate, under this legislation, you can have secrets and you can communicate them secretly - just not via some channels.
- lapetitejort 3y agoTake a step back from communicating secrets. It should be a fundamental human right to perform math. That's what they're trying to ban. Some equations are apparently too powerful to be performed by lowly humans.
- gdcbe 3y agoMath isn’t the same as what you do with Math though. Math is the science of patterns. As such following your reason you could apply the same to anything that is a crime today and say it’s your way to express your relationship with Math. Just to be clear I’m all for encryption and our right to do so, but I feel that equating this to our defence for math is a couple bridges too far?
- midoridensha 3y ago>It should be a fundamental human right to perform math. Why? What if society could be destroyed by performing math? Should it still be a fundamental right? What if the entire universe could be destroyed by doing math? This reminds me of a couple episodes of The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits. In one ("Need to Know"), there's some secret; when person A tells person B the secret, person B goes insane (and then tries to tell others the secret). Should a verbally-communicated secret be illegal? In the other, a disgruntled college student figures out how to build a small fusion bomb, and uses it for terrorism and threatens to detonate much larger versions of the bomb. At the end, he's killed and takes his secret with him, but the implication is that the principles aren't really that difficult, and sooner or later some other angry person will figure out how to make such bombs and humanity will be doomed.
- GEBBL 3y agoWould this have impacted on e2e encryption with SaaS apps or mTLS between one micro service to another?
- shmerl 3y agoSo they idiotically put into the law something like "wait for technology to be developed to allow snooping without compromising security"? Such lawmakers shouldn't allowed anywhere near making laws.
- developer93 3y agoThe entire Tory party shouldn't be allowed anywhere near making laws...
- happytiger 3y agoIt’s time that encryption rights become human rights.
- owlbite 3y agoThis is a right-wing Tory government. The same people who initiated the Brexit mess mainly because they wanted to opt out of human rights (sorry I mean "reclaim their sovereignty").
- hosteur 3y agoThey will try again. And again and again.
- fmajid 3y agoIt’s not science or logic that convinced the UK government, one of the most determined enemies of the Internet. It’s that Meta showed it will follow up on threats when it removed all links to news sites in Canada. UK politicians love WhatsApp’s end to end encryption as it allows them to evade public records laws (as well as snooping by UK spooks who have not hesitated to wiretap British Prime Ministers like Harold Wilson). Boris Johnson’s extensive use of WhatsApp specifically was in the news during the Covid inquiry. It’s perfectly OK for the proles to lose encryption, but not for politicians.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- dfawcus 3y agoThe real question is will Signal, WhatsApp, Apples, etc stick to their principals and withdraw UK service if the Bill passes in its current form? Or will they decide to believe that the powers will not be used, and keep their service in operation?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- nonethewiser 3y agoCan you elaborate? The article is paywalled. In what sense did they “back down” if not by backing down from the legislation that would violate privacy?
- SKarasu 3y agohttps://archive.ph/HDnUa https://archive.ph/HDnUa
- nojvek 3y agoGoogle pulled from China, but Microsoft bowed down. It’s really upto a few execs at tech giants betting how much money is at risk. For UK and Canada, the state isn’t competent at building a clone of social networks with wide adoption. China can throw insane money, regulation and Human Resources until they get what they want.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- lwhi 3y agoThese messages are backed up regularly using third party servers. Does this affect security?
- lost_tourist 3y agoI've found people usually don't understand encryption enough, once you explain to them it's pretty much all or nothing and the ramifications, they usually come around to the common sense version of "we indeed do need encryption"
- simonjgreen 3y agoWhen privacy is criminalised only criminals will have privacy
- jtode 3y agoSeems like they keep dancing up to this in democratic countries and then back off. Presumably there is someone who understands the universe somewhere along the way who gives them a compelling warning.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- dang 3y agoUrl changed from https://daringfireball.net/linked/2023/09/06/uk-encryption-win https://daringfireball.net/linked/2023/09/06/uk-encryption-w..., which points to this. Submitters: "Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- neonate 3y agohttps://archive.ph/HDnUa https://archive.ph/HDnUa
- markhahn 3y agounbelievable how pols never seem to get it. the purpose of making new laws is to further protect the public - not damage the public to make LEO jobs easier. sure, it sucks that they can't sit in their office and wiretap anyone, or might seize a phone that they can't crack. all it does mean they have to get off their asses and investigate at point-of-crime, possibly in person. to society, the great thing about that is that direct investigation is not scalable, which means that collateral damage will be less common among the innocent and bystanders.
- yafbum 3y agoUnpopular puffin opinion ahead, for the sake of argument only. Pls respond with arguments vs just downvoting. Throughout history, encryption has always been a government privilege. Only very recently, and then only in the West, practically speaking, is encryption that is safe from the eyes of government available. The liberalization of encryption has been concomitant with a naive "end of history" belief that once everyone was connected as part of a global network, we'd see an inevitable global rise in liberal forces that would make governments unable to control speech. See Bill Clinton's on "nailing Jello to the wall". Clinton whose administration did liberalize encryption quite a bit. That "end of history" mindset was wrong. We are back in a quasi cold war, with an active proxy war on top of it and a few more smoldering. And so my prediction is that we will see a reversal to the mean of history, and cryptography become again a govt granted privilege with conditions attached. (Yes yes I know public implementations of every algorithm exist, but China showed the blueprint of the machine that nails Jello to the wall anyways.)
- bryanrasmussen 3y ago>Throughout history, encryption has always been a government privilege. no, throughout history has always been the privilege of those with the ability to encrypt, which was often governments, big businesses, or in some cases very clever individuals. with the ability to encrypt becoming simpler it follows that the cleverness of individuals to achieve it has decreased.
- jupp0r 3y agoThere's no way bad actors will adhere to these restrictions anymore. Unless one's view of government is a very cynical one (they only care about controlling the general population vs actually fighting crime), tightly controlling cryptography is just not the effective tool anymore that it had been in the 90s.
- yafbum 3y agoIs this the same argument as "bad people will always flout rules, might as well give every person a machine gun so the good guys can have an even fight"? Looking at China, I think that it is very possible to make it least very uncomfortable, so uncomfortable as to be an effective deterrent.
- sys_64738 3y agoI’d like to see social media companies taking the opportunity to cut off all services to this country. Use them as an example so other nations don’t get any wild ideas.
- untitaker_ 3y agobrilliant idea. let those governments know who really rules the world. we already have a bunch of dictatorships censoring the internet on purpose, so let's do their job for countries whose democratic processes can't do it for them.
- tjpnz 3y agoGiven all of the societal ills caused by social media it could backfire.
- jll29 3y ago> A planned statement to the House of Lords on Wednesday afternoon will mark an eleventh-hour effort by ministers to end a stand-off with tech companies, including WhatsApp, that have threatened to pull their services from the UK Dear FT, WhatsApp is not a company, the owner of the WhatsApp service is Meta Inc., also the owner of Facebook and Instagram. (It is misleading to citizens that companies can hide behind the names of their acquisitions.)
- msla 3y agoThis is framed wrong: It isn't UK against "Big Tech" it's the UK government against privacy and, to some extent, basic logic. That is, the UK government demanded something that's impossible to deliver, and would have ruined the privacy rights of its own citizens had it been able to force companies to deliver the next closest thing which actually got the government its core demands of the police being able to snoop on everyone's messages.
- tremorscript 3y agoI don't really like the headline, it makes it sound negative. Big Tech tends to have negative connotations, nowadays. So, here the FT is trying to say that a democratically elected government is living in fear of private firms. While it may be true that our government are now living in fear of not just Big Tech but all types of Big whatever, the fight was way beyond just big tech. Sure Big Tech helped but it still is a badly written and badly thought out think-about-the-children type law that was being fought by everyone not just big tech. I didn't bother to read the article. Headlines are important There are other things to rage about Big Tech, this is not the one.
- simonjgreen 3y agoFT is a conservative-centre aligned news outlet, so stands to reason they'd favour their preferred party
- creativenolo 3y agoDo you read it regularly? It is centre aligned but as a reader, I wouldn’t say it was Conservative aligned. It certainly is a mile off its alignment with the “Tory press” that typically set the new agenda.
- frereubu 3y agoI'm a subscriber and I'd say it is small-c conservative (which I'm not really, I just appreciate that it's relatively open about its biases and enjoy the quality of writing), but it isn't aligned with the Conservative Party, which has become almost entirely unmoored from reality.
- ftreader4350 3y agoUsually I would tend to agree that the articles are well written and well researched, however after reading this steaming pile of surface level dross on a subject I have technical knowledge of, I might be less trusting of their editorial slant and quality of journalism in future.
- unnouinceput 3y agoI really wish this was a thing. No encryption, or a weak one, or backdoor with government keys that gets leaked (they always leak). Then use those to really spy and watch a firestorm of publicly washed clothes scandals. I really want that. Then, maybe then, the idiots idiots in parliaments around the world will stop this idiocy once and for all. Imagine nuclear secrets being accessed by every grandma on the planet, that would be laughable. Or the politicians payments to their who...i mean deluxe escorts.
- gorgoiler 3y ago[The law] will only require companies to scan their networks when a technology is developed that is capable of doing so […] experts believe it could be years before any such technology is developed What do they mean? Image recognition via homomorphic encryption? “Years” feels like an understatement!
- drumhead 3y agoMPs got worried they'd lose access to WhatsApp and Signal which most of them use for private communication, so they had to back out of the changes.
- Havoc 3y agoSummer break. The “think of the children” and security will be back shortly in a tweaked version
- Arathorn 3y agoThis article is completely wrong, and almost sabotages the fight against the UK Online Safety Bill, given it claims a victory that simply doesn't exist, and so lures everyone into a false sense of complacency. The UK govt must be ecstatic that they have changed nothing and yet the tech industry seems to believe that they've won something. All the govt said was "we'll only force scanning when it's "technically feasible" to do so" - i.e. when someone believes the CSAM scanning quality is high enough beyond some given threshold. It's still scanning though, and still fundamentally undermines encryption; it's just potentialy delaying the implementation a bit... having enabled it in law. The thing we should be fighting is enabling it in law. Politico just published an article which nailed it: https://www.politico.eu/article/whatsapp-signal-meta-facebook-uk-online-safety-bill-encryption/ https://www.politico.eu/article/whatsapp-signal-meta-faceboo... > "On Wednesday, Whittaker and other privacy campaigners falsely claimed that London was pulling back from its bid to access encrypted messages" Likewise, the Government has spelt out very clearly that they consider absolutely nothing to have changed: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-66716502 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-66716502 dang: it's almost worth flagging this thread as being based on entirely incorrect data. For whatever reason, the desire to make progress on this issue means that folks have jumped the gun and are prematurely celebrating a win which is not a win, and thus undermining the whole campaign to protect encryption.
- stephen_g 3y agoBasically all of the secure messaging platforms have indicated that they will pull out of the UK rather than weaken the security model, if or when they are instructed to. That hasn’t changed either. What this may be politically is a way of the Government saying they won’t actually do it, while pretending that nothing has changed to make it look like it’s not a U-turn and pretending they’re not backing down. Hence their eagerness to pretend nothing is different. As long as the messaging platforms don’t change their commitment then celebrating a small acknowledgement from the Government that the bill is basically unworkable is not a huge issue.
- Arathorn 3y ago> What this may be politically is a way of the Government saying they won’t actually do it But this is the problem: the Government is NOT saying they won't actually do it. They're saying "we'll do it (when we consider it technically feasible)". The ability to force 3rd party scanning software is STILL going into law, and that's the catastrophic bit! It's terrifying that this story has been perceived as a victory, and therefore we can take the pressure off. The OSB is STILL on track to go into law giving the government the right to tell Signal or WhatsApp or Element etc that they either need to do compulsory scanning or they are breaking the law. I am literally receiving emails from Element customers and suppliers which begin: > Saw that the government backed down from their plans last night and immediately thought of Element – you must be pleased! ...which just leaves me speechless. I'm almost wondering if there's a deliberate misinformation campaign here to prematurely claim victory in order to derail the attempt to protect encryption in the bill.
- layer8 3y agoThe UK does not pull back it seems: https://www.reuters.com/technology/uk-minister-says-position-encryption-not-changed-2023-09-07/ https://www.reuters.com/technology/uk-minister-says-position...
- _8j50 3y agoI just wanna tell everyone here who is happy about how this outcome was acheived, never to complain about corporations running your democracy. You can't complain only when the outcome is undesirable. You surrendered "by the people" part if democracy because it suited your views.