7 ms·

UK drops 'spy clause' for scanning encrypted messages, admits not 'feasible'

240 points by jjgreen 3y ago

nonrandomstring 3y ago
I've read six of these "Oh no we didn't back down" stories this morning. What worries me is the appearance of wishful thinking around the language of "technically feasible". Follow this road far enough and we'll have government ministers with marketing credentials defining what is "technically feasible", instead of scientists. https://cybershow.uk https://cybershow.uk #016 | S2 | Special | UK Online Safety Bill Published on Friday 01st Sep, 2023
- pipo234 3y ago
  The bigger picture of why UK is hell bent on surveilling their citizens, communities is that the number one problem is that governments are losing control over society. Off course the whole point of democracy is that governments should fear their citizens, rather than vice versa.
  - mcpackieh 3y ago
    Are they losing control, or are they becoming control freaks who want more control than they've traditionally had and have any right or business having? Both would manifest as the government thinking it has insufficient control, but the cause is very different.
    - pydry 3y ago
      Theyre authoritarian control freaks. The UK is undergoing progressive Russification with bipartisan support (Labour under Starmer and the Tories are both on board with it). Protesting is now effectively illegal thanks to a new law criminalizing it if it's a "nuisance". You're still technically allowed to hold up a blank piece of paper but the police will threaten to arrest you if you write something on it. That happened during the coronation. I'm fairly sure theyre going to borrow a whole lot more from Putin's playbook in the next few years - especially now that British oligarchs have managed to hammer the two previously opposing parties back into ideological alignment.
      - NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
        Yes, it is, in fact, illegal to pray in many locations of the U.K., and people have been arrested and charged for it. Think about it: prayer, an interior orientation of the mind to God; not even any audible speech is necessary to commit a heinous, treasonous act.
        robin_reala 3y ago
        [citation needed]
        flir 3y ago
        I'll bet you 50p it's the abortion facility buffer zones. Public space protection orders.
        tescocles 3y ago
        Not even close. The specific case I know you're talking about is the woman who was in an exclusion zone that was in place to stop people harassing women entering an abortion clinic. If she doesn't want "praying silently in her head" to be interpreted as harassment, maybe she should think about the behaviour she and her cohorts have engaged in that might have lead to this interpretation. Sure, you can disagree with that as well, but she wasn't arrested for praying. She was arrested for intimidation and harassment. She doesn't get a special pass just because of the method.
        sjducb 3y ago
        This is a common misunderstanding. Harassing people near abortion clinics is a separate offense. The lady in question has harassed people in the past, but she was specifically arrested and charged for prayer in this case. This offense of prayer is separate to her harassment of people. It’s like if you had drugs in your pocket while harassing someone. They’re separate offenses. This video explains the situation and references the original police and court records. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FS5FT-4Kx7E https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FS5FT-4Kx7E
    - slashdev 3y ago
      I think it’s very much this latter. The multiplying force of technology has made it extremely difficult to overthrow a government by force. I do not think it is possible in the West. Governments have never had so much control over money and information. They’re not losing control, they just keep tightening their grip. I don’t know if this Democratic experiment can survive in that environment. I certainly hope it does, but bills like this give me doubts.
      - robertlagrant 3y ago
        > Governments have never had so much control over money and information. They’re not losing control, they just keep tightening their grip. Well - East Germany must've had worse, surely? All money controlled by the state and state-sponsored spying?
        mcpackieh 3y ago
        I've heard the Stasi were breaking into people's homes and stealing their underwear to store in archives of scent jars for their dogs, but as extreme as that is I don't think that and their other tactics gave them anything close to the surveillance capabilities modern governments now have thanks to everybody carrying a smartphone 24/7.
        robertlagrant 3y ago
        Well, sometimes they'd have someone crouched in the room next door listening and looking. That seems fairly invasive even by today's standards.
        mcpackieh 3y ago
        Yes, the things the Stasi did were insanely paranoid. But I think they still got less "bang for their buck" than modern western democracies. The latter have a far more complete map of who associates with who, logs of where people have been even months before they become subjects of interest, etc.
  - PrimeMcFly 3y ago
    > The bigger picture of why UK is hell bent on surveilling their citizens It's just their culture. It probably won't change till they get rid of the anachronistic monarchy.
    - garblegarble 3y ago
      >It probably won't change till they get rid of the anachronistic monarchy. It's nothing to do with the monarchy - indeed, if anything I think the consensus amongst pro-monarchy folks is that the monarch is a constitutional escape hatch in the event of a government getting out of control. Both the Conservative and Labour parties have an authoritarian streak to them when in government, and a solid percentage of the population seem to trust that our institutions know what they're doing and can keep their databases secure (although I hope that's been shaken in the last month with a number of police and electoral register database leaks).
    - pipo234 3y ago
      I don't understand enough about UK to see why anachronistic monarchy would be at the heart. (To lesser extent) we see a lust for surveillance in many other democratic countries too. Isn't an easier explanation that society is getting more complex while politicians double down on managing their reputation, which inevitably results in loosing trust in institutions? (Or something along those lines.)
      - PrimeMcFly 3y ago
        > I don't understand enough about UK to see why anachronistic monarchy would be at the heart. Not saying the monarchy is at heart, just that the culture won't change until they have some sort of cultural revolution and get rid of it.
        pipo234 3y ago
        Yikes! Historically, revolutions are bloody and generally do not end well. Cultural revolutions less so. Having said that, I would not mind seeing King Charles abdicate; England, Wales, Scotland, N-Ireland become proper republics; help the remnants of upper class strongholds adapt to reality, if that's what you mean. :-)
  - hcfman 3y ago
    It's not just the UK. The Netherlands is like that as well and it's lost it's democracy. They can now hack anyone, not just criminals, without a judge being involved or even any evidence. They can shutdown speech that they don't like and they regularly commit criminal acts against non-criminally involved citizens organised by non-accountable organisations.
    - hcfman 3y ago
      Oh, and the Netherlands also holds provably completely sham court cases where the authorities pervert the course of justice in order to shutdown repercussions of criminal activity that they have been involved in.
      - pjc50 3y ago
        [citation needed]
    - jacquesm 3y ago
      This is a bit over the top, don't you think? Case in point: we will have elections one of these days, that seems to be proof to me that we still are a democracy. Or do you believe in widespread vote fraud?
      - master-lincoln 3y ago
        Elections alone don't make a democracy. Fair and free and secret elections are necessary but not sufficient for a democracy. Free press, protection of minorities, free speech, separation of powers, fundamental rights are other parts I think are necessary for a liberal democracy.
        jacquesm 3y ago
        To a large degree we have all of those, I'm not sure which countries rank better on those parameters but there can't be all that many of them. - #6 press freedom ranking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Press_Freedom_Index https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Press_Freedom_Index - #9 freedom house https://freedomhouse.org/countries/freedom-world/scores https://freedomhouse.org/countries/freedom-world/scores - #11 freedom of speech https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/countries-with-freedom-of-speech https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/countries... And so on. Now: this isn't saying that NL is perfect, not by a long shot. We have seen some absolutely terrible behavior by politicians, most notably on the right extreme part of the spectrum. Emboldened by Trump's election populism is on the rise here as well and we see just the same idiotic behavior as in the USA. Including word-for-word translations of talking points (which are utterly ridiculous in a Dutch context, but never mind that sort of detail), attempts (and some success) at polarization and so on. For that reasons alone the next elections are pretty exciting in that we can either further derail or - hopefully - that there will be some pushback against this. But it is usually the people arguing the loudest that there is no democracy, freedom of press and separation of powers here that are the ones that are trying to destabilize things further.
  - nonrandomstring 3y ago
    I try to take a charitable, open-minded position in this. Two of us in the cybershow are parents. Taking on analysis of this bill was a tough decision, but something we felt obliged and qualified to do as parents and security experts. There are obviously grave harms around digital technology, plus its obvious myriad benefits. Covert communications enabling criminal and anti-social activity is just one small part. Our thought experiment is to assume good faith. To assume the government is sincerely invested in doing it's job of protecting citizens. Then to figure out how this has gone so wrong. Who are the marginal influencers? Why is the standard of technical expertise and computer science in our government so woefully inadequate. Why has saving face become more important than actually tackling difficult issues? I would characterise our UK government as confused and frustrated. Perhaps we should be pleased our government is tenacious in pursuing a bill whose aims we broadly support. But a mixture of prideful ego-politics, poor advice and technologically laughable solutionism has led us into a corner. That's not a good look for a country that started the industrial and digital revolutions.
    - jacquesm 3y ago
      That's a very mature stance. Inside the government there are a ton of people doing really hard work who are frustrated by the rise of encryption, so they can no longer do the work that they were doing in the past effectively (some outside of government see this as a good thing). In those same governments there are those that dream of having access to all of this data with less honorable intentions. Because both are part of the same entity and once the capability is there it is pretty much a given that checks and balances will fail when you need them most I find myself both sympathetic to those that keep us safe and to those that object to this level of invasiveness, and I find myself opposed to those what effectively use terrorism and CP as a way to shepherd us into an authoritarian society. And then there are the consequences of finding yourself with a really bad instance of government at some point in the future, it could easily happen.
    - pjc50 3y ago
      > Our thought experiment is to assume good faith. At this stage, and in the dying days of a flailing Tory government, that simply makes you a mug. Also from today: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-66720994 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-66720994 ; this is specifically to protect murders carried out by and on behalf of the state in Northern Ireland. Along with historical matters such as the "spycops" scandal, and the abuses of PREVENT, there is a strong risk that mass surveillance will be used in political ways and in the service of misconduct. Accountability is poor and therefore trust is poor. > Who are the marginal influencers? The Daily Mail. Well, that and the security services who've clearly been pushing this.
  - eesmith 3y ago
    > the whole point of democracy is that governments should fear their citizens, rather than vice versa. I think that's more an optimistic interpretation of democracy. After all, it's the government that gets to decide who is a citizen, and who has the franchise. Historically the US said that African Americans were not citizens, within the meaning of the Constitution. In 1858 your statement might be 100% true about the US, but it would exclude a lot of people - who indeed were justifiably fearful of the democracy they lived in. While the 14th amendment made many new citizens, for many decades after the end of reconstruction these citizens feared their government far more than vice versa. You can see the variable concept of "citizen" when considering that a minor may be a US citizen for many purposes, but does not have the voting rights of full citizenship. Before the 26th amendment even 20-year-old adults were not full citizens. Something like 2% of US adult citizens cannot vote due to being a convicted felon, further showing how shaky your assertion is. There's also a large number of immigrants to the US who are not citizens, but ideally should not fear the government any more than citizens do. Perhaps the US doesn't count as democracy, but that sounds too much like a No True Scotsman response. Switzerland, with its famous direct democracy, didn't allow full women's suffrage until 1971-1990, depending on canton, again highlighting that "citizen" and "those who can vote" are not really the same thing in a democracy.
    - gottorf 3y ago
      To be fair, the GP said governments should fear their citizens, not that they do and always have done. It's an ideal end state, I guess.
      - eesmith 3y ago
        I think that veers too close to the No True Scotsman fallacy. It's like saying that in a {a benevolent dictatorship, real communism, true anarchy} the citizens will not fear the government.
        marcosdumay 3y ago
        That a goal. Equating it to a logical fallacy is meaningless noise. (Personally, I'm not sure how much it's an actionable or desirable goal. But it's a goal.)
  - bananapub 3y ago
    the UK has a weird culture of conformism and authoritarianism, and the weirdo part of the Tory party is deeply into that sort of thing, and is in power now. it's not very mysterious.
    - cimi_ 3y ago
      It's not only the tories: 'Labour pledges to toughen ‘weakened and gutted’ online safety bill' https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/jan/01/labour-pledges-toughen-online-safety-bill https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/jan/01/labour-pl... It's very disheartening to see no opposition to this.
      - bananapub 3y ago
        yes, the rightward authoritarian shift of the Labour party is also depressing, just less pressing since they're not the ones orchestrating these bills. I don't really know how Britain will become less like this.
      - chimprich 3y ago
        Labour don't oppose it because it makes no sense for them to do so. If they did oppose it, then the still-powerful right-wing press would be immediately printing LABOUR SUPPORT PAEDOPHILES on their front pages. Most people wouldn't care, but because of FPTP, elections are determined by a small number of swing voters. Anyone slightly left of the Tories is almost certainly going to vote Labour anyway, because they don't really have any political choice. It's just posturing for the media, I think. I suspect most people involved realise that what the bill is trying to do is unworkable.
  - andyjohnson0 3y ago
    > The bigger picture of why UK is hell bent on surveilling their citizens, communities is that the number one problem is that governments are losing control over society. I suspect theres a bunch of things going on. They've come down so hard on recent protest movements like Just Stop Oil, Insulate Britain, etc because as you say they feel like they've lost authority and they want it back. National-scale surveillance is a way to remind everyone who really runs the country, and who just does as they're told. The uk has almost always been governed by essentially the same elite group, and they have a lot of experience of keeping it that way. Not by Spectre-style secret meetings, just by convergent overlapping objectives. I think part of their fear comes from seeing how popular devolution has been in the UK. And partly how successful the EU has become, hence brexit. Theres also a part of the tory party that wants to nope out of the ECHR jurisdiction, and this kind of legislation potentially sets-up a fight with the court that could be used as a pretext for withdrawal. Some of them undoubtedly also simply see the potential to make some money from a surveylance society. I also suspect they've finally woken up to the climate-related crisies that are now just down the road and they've decided that a more authoritarian society is the only way to keep their position at the top. > Off course the whole point of democracy is that governments should fear their citizens, rather than vice versa. Err... nope. Can't build stable societies on fear. The "whole point of democracy" is how to negociate the divergent desires and opinions of the nation's citizens.
    - pipo234 3y ago
      > Can't build stable societies on fear. Yes, you're right. I meant to paraphrase Thomas Jefferson: “When the people fear the government, there is tyranny. When the government fears the people, there is liberty.” And indeed democracy isn't liberty, it's just the least bad attempt to achieve a bunch of laudable goals.
      - bee_rider 3y ago
        Ideally “the government” wouldn’t fear the people any more than, say, my computer fears me. It is a tool. It exists to implement my will. Fear derives from things like our sense of self-preservation, and other concerns that our goals might not be achieved. Since the government ideally has no goal but to serve the people, it should have no fear (perhaps other than the fear of failure).
  - kmlx 3y ago
    > The bigger picture of why UK is hell bent on surveilling their citizens because it's been asked for by various ONGs, civil society at large, even the opposition parties want it strengthened. it's not the government that is forcing these things. it's voters.
- slashdev 3y ago
  The thing is it is always technically feasible, even for end to end encryption ( you just do the scanning before encrypting on the device, or upload the plain text copy of all the messages to a government service.) I’m worried that it won’t offer any protection in the end.
  - pydry 3y ago
    "Technically infeasible" is code for "we asked the American tech companies for a backdoor, they told us to fuck off and we dont have the cojones to actually ban whatsapp". The phrase is only intended to imply that they didn't lose a political battle. Actual technical feasibility is beside the point. Whatsapp probably already has backdoors they just don't want to hand the keys over to 10 downing street.
    - PrimeMcFly 3y ago
      They couldn't ban WhatsApp even if they wanted to.
      - pydry 3y ago
        They could it would just make them very, very unpopular. This clearly isn't a hill they're prepared to die on. The fact that they tried this at all signals how weak this government is though, as well as how blithely unaware they are of it.
        PrimeMcFly 3y ago
        No, they couldn't. They could remove it from appstores and block certain domains, and that's it. They couldn't actually stop people from using it.
        pydry 3y ago
        That'd be enough to get people off it and unwind the network effects keeping people on it.
- dang 3y ago
  Can you please stop using HN to promote your podcast? You're doing it way too much and users are complaining. HN is supposed to be a place for curious conversation, and promotion is the opposite of that. Hence the guideline: "Please don't use HN primarily for promotion. It's ok to post your own stuff part of the time, but the primary use of the site should be for curiosity." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Mindwipe 3y ago
They really didn't! The bill went through it's third reading in the Lords with literally no changes yesterday! These stories are going to make people complacent that this terrible, terrible bill has gone away. It hasn't, it passed, more or less unchanged (except to make the age verification piece a little bit worse).
- pcrh 3y ago
  Could you expand on that?
  - reidrac 3y ago
    As I understand it, they just said they aren't going to do it because is not technically feasible, but the bill includes the clause to do it, if it was possible. I can't see anything to celebrate here. The bill should have been amended further. Source: https://www.theguardian.com/media/2023/sep/06/whatsapp-signal-online-safety-bill-uk-encryption-privacy https://www.theguardian.com/media/2023/sep/06/whatsapp-signa... They didn't change the bill, but also said "If the appropriate technology doesn’t exist which meets those requirements, then Ofcom will not be able to use clause 122 to require its use".
- Arathorn 3y ago
  Precisely!!! At this rate Signal's inexplicable desire to claim this as a victory (https://twitter.com/mer__edith/status/1699405364968423828 https://twitter.com/mer__edith/status/1699405364968423828) is distracting at the very worst possible time - this is the last chance to stop the bill, and instead of a final hail mary... we're congratulating ourselves? on the fact that scanning won't be implemented immediately but only once the government has decided that the tech is mature enough?!!
kome 3y ago
spying metadata is more than enough. and we know it thanks to snowden and assange. https://www.nybooks.com/online/2014/05/10/we-kill-people-based-metadata/ https://www.nybooks.com/online/2014/05/10/we-kill-people-bas...
- zirgs 3y ago
  But what's the solution to this? Legally requiring communications companies not to store metadata?
bananapub 3y ago
The reporting on this is horrific, including by the businesses involved. Absolutely nothing legally was changed. The government put out a press release saying some worthless crap, that's the entire thing that happened. edit: sorry, not a press release, sent a minion to read out a non-binding statement, who then confirmed the the law was not actually changed at all: https://www.reuters.com/technology/uk-minister-says-position-encryption-not-changed-2023-09-07/ https://www.reuters.com/technology/uk-minister-says-position...
- hathchip 3y ago
  So they are trying to get the law passed, despite the obvious objection that message filtering is impossible, by saying "we know it's impossible but we would like to have the legal right to do it in case it becomes possible in the future"?
  - bananapub 3y ago
    >they are trying to get the law passed they did pass the law through the lower house. the upper house can demand amendments and stall things a bit, but it can also just be completely ignored given enough time. > despite the obvious objection that message filtering is impossible it's not impossible, it's just a horrificly bad idea, and why would being impossible affect if it gets passed or not? > by saying "we know it's impossible but we would like to have the legal right to do it in case it becomes possible in the future"? no, they issued a press statement saying they won't implement the thing they passed until it's "practical". lots of governments pass lots of laws and regulations and are untruthful about what they'll do later.
    - cbluth 3y ago
      this narrative sounds like an acceptance of a cat n mouse game that has barely got started
      - bananapub 3y ago
        it's not very secret. a bunch of western governments want to be able to spy on the comms of their citizens and lazy terrorists/pedophiles/whatever with poor opsec. basically everyone including normies moving to well-encrypted chat systems makes this very hard (requires court-ordering/NSL/coercing software companies to 0wn their own customers), so instead they want to standardise making it easy for governments. the UK happens to 1) not have a proper constitution with any encoded human rights and also poor judicial review and 2) an inherently authoritarian currently-ruling party and media ecosystem and culture 3) be a UN SC member, Five Eyes member, G7 member, reasonably big economy etc so it's government is in a good spot to push hard on this and see if it can break the will of tech companies, which would be a great technical and social precedent to help other governments achieve the same goal. Australia is also a battleground for this for similar cultural and political and legal reasons. what is less clear is why Signal is saying this is a victory, unless they really are so cynical that saving face while losing is more important than standing up on this point of principle that their company was supposedly founded on.
Arathorn 3y ago
As I tried to explain on the thread about the Financial Times coverage of this (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37416203 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37416203), the headline here is COMPLETELY WRONG. It's doubly frustrating given i'm quoted in the article and i spoke to the journalist to try to ensure the "UK drops spy clause" falsehood wasn't propagated. The UK government has changed nothing. All that happened is that a junior minister said "obviously we won't implement this until it's technically feasible", (https://www.reuters.com/technology/uk-minister-says-position-encryption-not-changed-2023-09-07/ https://www.reuters.com/technology/uk-minister-says-position...) which was inexplicably seized on by Signal as evidence that the government was backing down. Cue this nightmarish news cycle of the press declaring "UK drops spy clause" when absolutely nothing has changed: the spy clause is still there, and the govt has explicitly said that they WILL utilise it if they think it necessary (once they consider the tech good enough). So it's incredibly counterproductive to claim this as a victory, and thus cause complacency, and distract from the fact that today more than ever we need to be putting the pressure on to get the clause dropped. It almost feels like a misinfo campaign: what better way to win a battle than to let the other side think they've already won so they sit back and selfcongratulate rather than fight at the critical decisive moment?! Meanwhile folks are misreading the "we didn't back down" coverage as evidence that the government really is about to back down. It's a kafkaesque nightmare!
bennyelv 3y ago
Something strange is going on here. Nothing has changed about the bill, yet all news outlets are reporting as if it has. All that happened was that somebody said "yeah but we won't use these controls so don't worry". What is the authority of that statement? The bill hasn't been changed.
- Arathorn 3y ago
  The root cause of the confusion seems to be https://twitter.com/mer__edith/status/1699405364968423828 https://twitter.com/mer__edith/status/1699405364968423828, which appears to be based on a wildly overenthusiastic misreading of this coverage: https://www.ft.com/content/770e58b1-a299-4b7b-a129-bded8649a43b https://www.ft.com/content/770e58b1-a299-4b7b-a129-bded8649a.... Basically, the government tried to deflect this by saying "don't worry, we'll pass this into law, but we'll only implement this when the scanning tech is ready", and inexplicably this was seen as a win?!?
  - kmlx 3y ago
    > Child safety campaigners have spent years pushing the government to be tougher on tech companies over abuse material that is shared on their apps. > Richard Collard, head of child safety online policy at the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, said: “Our polling shows the UK public overwhelmingly support measures to tackle child abuse in end-to-end encrypted environments. Tech firms can show industry leadership by listening to the public and investing in technology that protects both the safety and privacy rights of all users.”
_lvbh 3y ago
Media manipulation is rampant
Lolaccount 3y ago
Government by Press Release ... Like pieces of paper floating on an ocean of excrement. The pieces of paper are new, but the ocean has not changed. Welcome to the United Kingdom.
dang 3y ago
Recent and related: UK pulls back from clash with Big Tech over private messaging - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37408196 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37408196 - Sept 2023 (287 comments)

240 points by jjgreen 3y ago

I've read six of these "Oh no we didn't back down" stories this morning. What worries me is the appearance of wishful thinking around the language of "technically feasible". Follow this road far enough and we'll have government ministers with marketing credentials defining what is "technically feasible", instead of scientists. https://cybershow.uk https://cybershow.uk #016 | S2 | Special | UK Online Safety Bill Published on Friday 01st Sep, 2023

pipo234 3y ago
The bigger picture of why UK is hell bent on surveilling their citizens, communities is that the number one problem is that governments are losing control over society. Off course the whole point of democracy is that governments should fear their citizens, rather than vice versa.
- mcpackieh 3y ago
  Are they losing control, or are they becoming control freaks who want more control than they've traditionally had and have any right or business having? Both would manifest as the government thinking it has insufficient control, but the cause is very different.
  - pydry 3y ago
    Theyre authoritarian control freaks. The UK is undergoing progressive Russification with bipartisan support (Labour under Starmer and the Tories are both on board with it). Protesting is now effectively illegal thanks to a new law criminalizing it if it's a "nuisance". You're still technically allowed to hold up a blank piece of paper but the police will threaten to arrest you if you write something on it. That happened during the coronation. I'm fairly sure theyre going to borrow a whole lot more from Putin's playbook in the next few years - especially now that British oligarchs have managed to hammer the two previously opposing parties back into ideological alignment.
    - NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
      Yes, it is, in fact, illegal to pray in many locations of the U.K., and people have been arrested and charged for it. Think about it: prayer, an interior orientation of the mind to God; not even any audible speech is necessary to commit a heinous, treasonous act.
      - robin_reala 3y ago
        [citation needed]
        flir 3y ago
        I'll bet you 50p it's the abortion facility buffer zones. Public space protection orders.
      - tescocles 3y ago
        Not even close. The specific case I know you're talking about is the woman who was in an exclusion zone that was in place to stop people harassing women entering an abortion clinic. If she doesn't want "praying silently in her head" to be interpreted as harassment, maybe she should think about the behaviour she and her cohorts have engaged in that might have lead to this interpretation. Sure, you can disagree with that as well, but she wasn't arrested for praying. She was arrested for intimidation and harassment. She doesn't get a special pass just because of the method.
        sjducb 3y ago
        This is a common misunderstanding. Harassing people near abortion clinics is a separate offense. The lady in question has harassed people in the past, but she was specifically arrested and charged for prayer in this case. This offense of prayer is separate to her harassment of people. It’s like if you had drugs in your pocket while harassing someone. They’re separate offenses. This video explains the situation and references the original police and court records. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FS5FT-4Kx7E https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FS5FT-4Kx7E
  - slashdev 3y ago
    I think it’s very much this latter. The multiplying force of technology has made it extremely difficult to overthrow a government by force. I do not think it is possible in the West. Governments have never had so much control over money and information. They’re not losing control, they just keep tightening their grip. I don’t know if this Democratic experiment can survive in that environment. I certainly hope it does, but bills like this give me doubts.
    - robertlagrant 3y ago
      > Governments have never had so much control over money and information. They’re not losing control, they just keep tightening their grip. Well - East Germany must've had worse, surely? All money controlled by the state and state-sponsored spying?
      - mcpackieh 3y ago
        I've heard the Stasi were breaking into people's homes and stealing their underwear to store in archives of scent jars for their dogs, but as extreme as that is I don't think that and their other tactics gave them anything close to the surveillance capabilities modern governments now have thanks to everybody carrying a smartphone 24/7.
        robertlagrant 3y ago
        Well, sometimes they'd have someone crouched in the room next door listening and looking. That seems fairly invasive even by today's standards.
        mcpackieh 3y ago
        Yes, the things the Stasi did were insanely paranoid. But I think they still got less "bang for their buck" than modern western democracies. The latter have a far more complete map of who associates with who, logs of where people have been even months before they become subjects of interest, etc.
- PrimeMcFly 3y ago
  > The bigger picture of why UK is hell bent on surveilling their citizens It's just their culture. It probably won't change till they get rid of the anachronistic monarchy.
  - garblegarble 3y ago
    >It probably won't change till they get rid of the anachronistic monarchy. It's nothing to do with the monarchy - indeed, if anything I think the consensus amongst pro-monarchy folks is that the monarch is a constitutional escape hatch in the event of a government getting out of control. Both the Conservative and Labour parties have an authoritarian streak to them when in government, and a solid percentage of the population seem to trust that our institutions know what they're doing and can keep their databases secure (although I hope that's been shaken in the last month with a number of police and electoral register database leaks).
  - pipo234 3y ago
    I don't understand enough about UK to see why anachronistic monarchy would be at the heart. (To lesser extent) we see a lust for surveillance in many other democratic countries too. Isn't an easier explanation that society is getting more complex while politicians double down on managing their reputation, which inevitably results in loosing trust in institutions? (Or something along those lines.)
    - PrimeMcFly 3y ago
      > I don't understand enough about UK to see why anachronistic monarchy would be at the heart. Not saying the monarchy is at heart, just that the culture won't change until they have some sort of cultural revolution and get rid of it.
      - pipo234 3y ago
        Yikes! Historically, revolutions are bloody and generally do not end well. Cultural revolutions less so. Having said that, I would not mind seeing King Charles abdicate; England, Wales, Scotland, N-Ireland become proper republics; help the remnants of upper class strongholds adapt to reality, if that's what you mean. :-)
- hcfman 3y ago
  It's not just the UK. The Netherlands is like that as well and it's lost it's democracy. They can now hack anyone, not just criminals, without a judge being involved or even any evidence. They can shutdown speech that they don't like and they regularly commit criminal acts against non-criminally involved citizens organised by non-accountable organisations.
  - hcfman 3y ago
    Oh, and the Netherlands also holds provably completely sham court cases where the authorities pervert the course of justice in order to shutdown repercussions of criminal activity that they have been involved in.
    - pjc50 3y ago
      [citation needed]
  - jacquesm 3y ago
    This is a bit over the top, don't you think? Case in point: we will have elections one of these days, that seems to be proof to me that we still are a democracy. Or do you believe in widespread vote fraud?
    - master-lincoln 3y ago
      Elections alone don't make a democracy. Fair and free and secret elections are necessary but not sufficient for a democracy. Free press, protection of minorities, free speech, separation of powers, fundamental rights are other parts I think are necessary for a liberal democracy.
      - jacquesm 3y ago
        To a large degree we have all of those, I'm not sure which countries rank better on those parameters but there can't be all that many of them. - #6 press freedom ranking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Press_Freedom_Index https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Press_Freedom_Index - #9 freedom house https://freedomhouse.org/countries/freedom-world/scores https://freedomhouse.org/countries/freedom-world/scores - #11 freedom of speech https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/countries-with-freedom-of-speech https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/countries... And so on. Now: this isn't saying that NL is perfect, not by a long shot. We have seen some absolutely terrible behavior by politicians, most notably on the right extreme part of the spectrum. Emboldened by Trump's election populism is on the rise here as well and we see just the same idiotic behavior as in the USA. Including word-for-word translations of talking points (which are utterly ridiculous in a Dutch context, but never mind that sort of detail), attempts (and some success) at polarization and so on. For that reasons alone the next elections are pretty exciting in that we can either further derail or - hopefully - that there will be some pushback against this. But it is usually the people arguing the loudest that there is no democracy, freedom of press and separation of powers here that are the ones that are trying to destabilize things further.
- nonrandomstring 3y ago
  I try to take a charitable, open-minded position in this. Two of us in the cybershow are parents. Taking on analysis of this bill was a tough decision, but something we felt obliged and qualified to do as parents and security experts. There are obviously grave harms around digital technology, plus its obvious myriad benefits. Covert communications enabling criminal and anti-social activity is just one small part. Our thought experiment is to assume good faith. To assume the government is sincerely invested in doing it's job of protecting citizens. Then to figure out how this has gone so wrong. Who are the marginal influencers? Why is the standard of technical expertise and computer science in our government so woefully inadequate. Why has saving face become more important than actually tackling difficult issues? I would characterise our UK government as confused and frustrated. Perhaps we should be pleased our government is tenacious in pursuing a bill whose aims we broadly support. But a mixture of prideful ego-politics, poor advice and technologically laughable solutionism has led us into a corner. That's not a good look for a country that started the industrial and digital revolutions.
  - jacquesm 3y ago
    That's a very mature stance. Inside the government there are a ton of people doing really hard work who are frustrated by the rise of encryption, so they can no longer do the work that they were doing in the past effectively (some outside of government see this as a good thing). In those same governments there are those that dream of having access to all of this data with less honorable intentions. Because both are part of the same entity and once the capability is there it is pretty much a given that checks and balances will fail when you need them most I find myself both sympathetic to those that keep us safe and to those that object to this level of invasiveness, and I find myself opposed to those what effectively use terrorism and CP as a way to shepherd us into an authoritarian society. And then there are the consequences of finding yourself with a really bad instance of government at some point in the future, it could easily happen.
  - pjc50 3y ago
    > Our thought experiment is to assume good faith. At this stage, and in the dying days of a flailing Tory government, that simply makes you a mug. Also from today: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-66720994 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-66720994 ; this is specifically to protect murders carried out by and on behalf of the state in Northern Ireland. Along with historical matters such as the "spycops" scandal, and the abuses of PREVENT, there is a strong risk that mass surveillance will be used in political ways and in the service of misconduct. Accountability is poor and therefore trust is poor. > Who are the marginal influencers? The Daily Mail. Well, that and the security services who've clearly been pushing this.
- eesmith 3y ago
  > the whole point of democracy is that governments should fear their citizens, rather than vice versa. I think that's more an optimistic interpretation of democracy. After all, it's the government that gets to decide who is a citizen, and who has the franchise. Historically the US said that African Americans were not citizens, within the meaning of the Constitution. In 1858 your statement might be 100% true about the US, but it would exclude a lot of people - who indeed were justifiably fearful of the democracy they lived in. While the 14th amendment made many new citizens, for many decades after the end of reconstruction these citizens feared their government far more than vice versa. You can see the variable concept of "citizen" when considering that a minor may be a US citizen for many purposes, but does not have the voting rights of full citizenship. Before the 26th amendment even 20-year-old adults were not full citizens. Something like 2% of US adult citizens cannot vote due to being a convicted felon, further showing how shaky your assertion is. There's also a large number of immigrants to the US who are not citizens, but ideally should not fear the government any more than citizens do. Perhaps the US doesn't count as democracy, but that sounds too much like a No True Scotsman response. Switzerland, with its famous direct democracy, didn't allow full women's suffrage until 1971-1990, depending on canton, again highlighting that "citizen" and "those who can vote" are not really the same thing in a democracy.
  - gottorf 3y ago
    To be fair, the GP said governments should fear their citizens, not that they do and always have done. It's an ideal end state, I guess.
    - eesmith 3y ago
      I think that veers too close to the No True Scotsman fallacy. It's like saying that in a {a benevolent dictatorship, real communism, true anarchy} the citizens will not fear the government.
      - marcosdumay 3y ago
        That a goal. Equating it to a logical fallacy is meaningless noise. (Personally, I'm not sure how much it's an actionable or desirable goal. But it's a goal.)
- bananapub 3y ago
  the UK has a weird culture of conformism and authoritarianism, and the weirdo part of the Tory party is deeply into that sort of thing, and is in power now. it's not very mysterious.
  - cimi_ 3y ago
    It's not only the tories: 'Labour pledges to toughen ‘weakened and gutted’ online safety bill' https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/jan/01/labour-pledges-toughen-online-safety-bill https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/jan/01/labour-pl... It's very disheartening to see no opposition to this.
    - bananapub 3y ago
      yes, the rightward authoritarian shift of the Labour party is also depressing, just less pressing since they're not the ones orchestrating these bills. I don't really know how Britain will become less like this.
    - chimprich 3y ago
      Labour don't oppose it because it makes no sense for them to do so. If they did oppose it, then the still-powerful right-wing press would be immediately printing LABOUR SUPPORT PAEDOPHILES on their front pages. Most people wouldn't care, but because of FPTP, elections are determined by a small number of swing voters. Anyone slightly left of the Tories is almost certainly going to vote Labour anyway, because they don't really have any political choice. It's just posturing for the media, I think. I suspect most people involved realise that what the bill is trying to do is unworkable.
- andyjohnson0 3y ago
  > The bigger picture of why UK is hell bent on surveilling their citizens, communities is that the number one problem is that governments are losing control over society. I suspect theres a bunch of things going on. They've come down so hard on recent protest movements like Just Stop Oil, Insulate Britain, etc because as you say they feel like they've lost authority and they want it back. National-scale surveillance is a way to remind everyone who really runs the country, and who just does as they're told. The uk has almost always been governed by essentially the same elite group, and they have a lot of experience of keeping it that way. Not by Spectre-style secret meetings, just by convergent overlapping objectives. I think part of their fear comes from seeing how popular devolution has been in the UK. And partly how successful the EU has become, hence brexit. Theres also a part of the tory party that wants to nope out of the ECHR jurisdiction, and this kind of legislation potentially sets-up a fight with the court that could be used as a pretext for withdrawal. Some of them undoubtedly also simply see the potential to make some money from a surveylance society. I also suspect they've finally woken up to the climate-related crisies that are now just down the road and they've decided that a more authoritarian society is the only way to keep their position at the top. > Off course the whole point of democracy is that governments should fear their citizens, rather than vice versa. Err... nope. Can't build stable societies on fear. The "whole point of democracy" is how to negociate the divergent desires and opinions of the nation's citizens.
  - pipo234 3y ago
    > Can't build stable societies on fear. Yes, you're right. I meant to paraphrase Thomas Jefferson: “When the people fear the government, there is tyranny. When the government fears the people, there is liberty.” And indeed democracy isn't liberty, it's just the least bad attempt to achieve a bunch of laudable goals.
    - bee_rider 3y ago
      Ideally “the government” wouldn’t fear the people any more than, say, my computer fears me. It is a tool. It exists to implement my will. Fear derives from things like our sense of self-preservation, and other concerns that our goals might not be achieved. Since the government ideally has no goal but to serve the people, it should have no fear (perhaps other than the fear of failure).
- kmlx 3y ago
  > The bigger picture of why UK is hell bent on surveilling their citizens because it's been asked for by various ONGs, civil society at large, even the opposition parties want it strengthened. it's not the government that is forcing these things. it's voters.
slashdev 3y ago
The thing is it is always technically feasible, even for end to end encryption ( you just do the scanning before encrypting on the device, or upload the plain text copy of all the messages to a government service.) I’m worried that it won’t offer any protection in the end.
- pydry 3y ago
  "Technically infeasible" is code for "we asked the American tech companies for a backdoor, they told us to fuck off and we dont have the cojones to actually ban whatsapp". The phrase is only intended to imply that they didn't lose a political battle. Actual technical feasibility is beside the point. Whatsapp probably already has backdoors they just don't want to hand the keys over to 10 downing street.
  - PrimeMcFly 3y ago
    They couldn't ban WhatsApp even if they wanted to.
    - pydry 3y ago
      They could it would just make them very, very unpopular. This clearly isn't a hill they're prepared to die on. The fact that they tried this at all signals how weak this government is though, as well as how blithely unaware they are of it.
      - PrimeMcFly 3y ago
        No, they couldn't. They could remove it from appstores and block certain domains, and that's it. They couldn't actually stop people from using it.
        pydry 3y ago
        That'd be enough to get people off it and unwind the network effects keeping people on it.
dang 3y ago
Can you please stop using HN to promote your podcast? You're doing it way too much and users are complaining. HN is supposed to be a place for curious conversation, and promotion is the opposite of that. Hence the guideline: "Please don't use HN primarily for promotion. It's ok to post your own stuff part of the time, but the primary use of the site should be for curiosity." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Mindwipe 3y ago

They really didn't! The bill went through it's third reading in the Lords with literally no changes yesterday! These stories are going to make people complacent that this terrible, terrible bill has gone away. It hasn't, it passed, more or less unchanged (except to make the age verification piece a little bit worse).

pcrh 3y ago
Could you expand on that?
- reidrac 3y ago
  As I understand it, they just said they aren't going to do it because is not technically feasible, but the bill includes the clause to do it, if it was possible. I can't see anything to celebrate here. The bill should have been amended further. Source: https://www.theguardian.com/media/2023/sep/06/whatsapp-signal-online-safety-bill-uk-encryption-privacy https://www.theguardian.com/media/2023/sep/06/whatsapp-signa... They didn't change the bill, but also said "If the appropriate technology doesn’t exist which meets those requirements, then Ofcom will not be able to use clause 122 to require its use".
Arathorn 3y ago
Precisely!!! At this rate Signal's inexplicable desire to claim this as a victory (https://twitter.com/mer__edith/status/1699405364968423828 https://twitter.com/mer__edith/status/1699405364968423828) is distracting at the very worst possible time - this is the last chance to stop the bill, and instead of a final hail mary... we're congratulating ourselves? on the fact that scanning won't be implemented immediately but only once the government has decided that the tech is mature enough?!!

kome 3y ago

spying metadata is more than enough. and we know it thanks to snowden and assange. https://www.nybooks.com/online/2014/05/10/we-kill-people-based-metadata/ https://www.nybooks.com/online/2014/05/10/we-kill-people-bas...

zirgs 3y ago
But what's the solution to this? Legally requiring communications companies not to store metadata?

bananapub 3y ago

The reporting on this is horrific, including by the businesses involved. Absolutely nothing legally was changed. The government put out a press release saying some worthless crap, that's the entire thing that happened. edit: sorry, not a press release, sent a minion to read out a non-binding statement, who then confirmed the the law was not actually changed at all: https://www.reuters.com/technology/uk-minister-says-position-encryption-not-changed-2023-09-07/ https://www.reuters.com/technology/uk-minister-says-position...

hathchip 3y ago
So they are trying to get the law passed, despite the obvious objection that message filtering is impossible, by saying "we know it's impossible but we would like to have the legal right to do it in case it becomes possible in the future"?
- bananapub 3y ago
  >they are trying to get the law passed they did pass the law through the lower house. the upper house can demand amendments and stall things a bit, but it can also just be completely ignored given enough time. > despite the obvious objection that message filtering is impossible it's not impossible, it's just a horrificly bad idea, and why would being impossible affect if it gets passed or not? > by saying "we know it's impossible but we would like to have the legal right to do it in case it becomes possible in the future"? no, they issued a press statement saying they won't implement the thing they passed until it's "practical". lots of governments pass lots of laws and regulations and are untruthful about what they'll do later.
  - cbluth 3y ago
    this narrative sounds like an acceptance of a cat n mouse game that has barely got started
    - bananapub 3y ago
      it's not very secret. a bunch of western governments want to be able to spy on the comms of their citizens and lazy terrorists/pedophiles/whatever with poor opsec. basically everyone including normies moving to well-encrypted chat systems makes this very hard (requires court-ordering/NSL/coercing software companies to 0wn their own customers), so instead they want to standardise making it easy for governments. the UK happens to 1) not have a proper constitution with any encoded human rights and also poor judicial review and 2) an inherently authoritarian currently-ruling party and media ecosystem and culture 3) be a UN SC member, Five Eyes member, G7 member, reasonably big economy etc so it's government is in a good spot to push hard on this and see if it can break the will of tech companies, which would be a great technical and social precedent to help other governments achieve the same goal. Australia is also a battleground for this for similar cultural and political and legal reasons. what is less clear is why Signal is saying this is a victory, unless they really are so cynical that saving face while losing is more important than standing up on this point of principle that their company was supposedly founded on.

Arathorn 3y ago

As I tried to explain on the thread about the Financial Times coverage of this (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37416203 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37416203), the headline here is COMPLETELY WRONG. It's doubly frustrating given i'm quoted in the article and i spoke to the journalist to try to ensure the "UK drops spy clause" falsehood wasn't propagated. The UK government has changed nothing. All that happened is that a junior minister said "obviously we won't implement this until it's technically feasible", (https://www.reuters.com/technology/uk-minister-says-position-encryption-not-changed-2023-09-07/ https://www.reuters.com/technology/uk-minister-says-position...) which was inexplicably seized on by Signal as evidence that the government was backing down. Cue this nightmarish news cycle of the press declaring "UK drops spy clause" when absolutely nothing has changed: the spy clause is still there, and the govt has explicitly said that they WILL utilise it if they think it necessary (once they consider the tech good enough). So it's incredibly counterproductive to claim this as a victory, and thus cause complacency, and distract from the fact that today more than ever we need to be putting the pressure on to get the clause dropped. It almost feels like a misinfo campaign: what better way to win a battle than to let the other side think they've already won so they sit back and selfcongratulate rather than fight at the critical decisive moment?! Meanwhile folks are misreading the "we didn't back down" coverage as evidence that the government really is about to back down. It's a kafkaesque nightmare!

bennyelv 3y ago

Something strange is going on here. Nothing has changed about the bill, yet all news outlets are reporting as if it has. All that happened was that somebody said "yeah but we won't use these controls so don't worry". What is the authority of that statement? The bill hasn't been changed.

Arathorn 3y ago
The root cause of the confusion seems to be https://twitter.com/mer__edith/status/1699405364968423828 https://twitter.com/mer__edith/status/1699405364968423828, which appears to be based on a wildly overenthusiastic misreading of this coverage: https://www.ft.com/content/770e58b1-a299-4b7b-a129-bded8649a43b https://www.ft.com/content/770e58b1-a299-4b7b-a129-bded8649a.... Basically, the government tried to deflect this by saying "don't worry, we'll pass this into law, but we'll only implement this when the scanning tech is ready", and inexplicably this was seen as a win?!?
- kmlx 3y ago
  > Child safety campaigners have spent years pushing the government to be tougher on tech companies over abuse material that is shared on their apps. > Richard Collard, head of child safety online policy at the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, said: “Our polling shows the UK public overwhelmingly support measures to tackle child abuse in end-to-end encrypted environments. Tech firms can show industry leadership by listening to the public and investing in technology that protects both the safety and privacy rights of all users.”

_lvbh 3y ago

Media manipulation is rampant

Lolaccount 3y ago

Government by Press Release ... Like pieces of paper floating on an ocean of excrement. The pieces of paper are new, but the ocean has not changed. Welcome to the United Kingdom.

dang 3y ago

Recent and related: UK pulls back from clash with Big Tech over private messaging - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37408196 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37408196 - Sept 2023 (287 comments)