15 ms·

Are we doing this again? Yes, we're doing this again

225 points by Doches 3y ago

stuaxo 3y ago
Good write up, and encompassing a lot of the frustration people that deal with this feel.
mgaunard 3y ago
I always feel somewhat awkward reading blog articles like this. While the author is certainly fighting a good cause, their writing style is very self-righteous and shows lack of self-awareness. Is it working in politics that makes one so jaded and fond of their own prose?
- namaria 3y ago
  The most jaded thing about all of this was your commentary.
  - narinxas 3y ago
    relax, it's just color VS colour all over again
- lewispollard 3y ago
  As a UK citizen, I feel jaded and bitter about this topic, as the government have been pushing to "ban encryption" in one form or another for... it feels like decades now? And each time they're advised against it or unable to get it into law, they draw up another proposal and try to sneak it in another way. It feels like one of these days, if they keep trying, they'll manage get it past the experts/lawyers somehow and it'll doom our privacy for a long time. So in the writing, I don't detect over-reaching self-righteousness or a lack of self-awareness - more, awareness of just how tiring and arduous this push for "encryption bans" is getting to everyone who understands the implications of it, and how frustrating it is to have to repeatedly deal with this kind of insidiousness in government.
  - anyoneamous 3y ago
    > It feels like one of these days, if they keep trying, they'll manage get it past the experts/lawyers I felt exactly the same way about Brexit; it was clear that if we voted Remain that Nigel Farage would still be there - alongside Maxwell's Demon - to shove us towards the door at the next opportune moment. Seems like this is one of the hardest problems in modern politics - populists only have to win once, due to us having a complex system of preferential arrangements and one-way door decisions.
    - ppp_p 3y ago
      [flagged]
      - 0dayz 3y ago
        >statists Oh cry me a river with that cynical view of democracy. Just because you aren't engaged in democracy doesn't mean everyone wants to be a lame duck.
  - M2Ys4U 3y ago
    To use an infamous quote: We have to be lucky every time. They only have to be lucky once.
    - robin_reala 3y ago
      (for people who don’t know the origin, it’s from the IRA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brighton_hotel_bombing#IRA_statement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brighton_hotel_bombing#IRA_sta...)
    - nonrandomstring 3y ago
      The quote is a pithy formulation of Blotto game theory, or "front analysis" [0] which I've taught in cybersecurity for some years now as an introductory concept alongside Dolev-Yeo [1]. It is obliquely connected to the "attackers advantage" (here as a business concept [2]) and "terrorists always win in the end". As the number of fronts to defend grows, in space or time, the uncertainty of how to allocate resources against novel attacks becomes overwhelming, as does the burden of hyper-vigilance. The enemy can afford to sleep and wait. Security is an essentially conservative project. One is defending existing resources, rights, powers... against an opportunistic insurgent. Security of democracy (as Franklin said, "if you can keep it") against tyrants (who are simply "terrorists" in waiting) is no different. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blotto_game https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blotto_game [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolev%E2%80%93Yao_model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolev%E2%80%93Yao_model [2] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/21413841-the-attacker-s-advantage https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/21413841-the-attacker-s-...
- mrd3v0 3y ago
  I understand that the writer makes a lot of presumptions about the reader, but this is to be expected it is a personal blog called "Hi, I'm Heather Burns" and from the title there is a certain narrative with context implied. There is not an inch of objectivity explicitly or implicitly expected here. Politics are "self-righteous", if you are not "self-righteous" in discussing and arguing for policies - no matter which view or policy we are talking about - you are not really making a good point, you certainly aren't trying to advocate for whatever you believe in, and you are not morally consistent. That aside, this particular issue has been beaten over and over, and for someone who is an expert and a career policy advocate: they are not going to waste effort and time by repeating the same points almost everyone reading their blog agrees upon.
  - mgaunard 3y ago
    I'd argue good policy is a matter of compromise, not conviction.
    - di4na 3y ago
      You need both. As there are some things you cannot conpromise on. Like. Idk. Things factually impossible. Or Human Rights.
    - mrd3v0 3y ago
      Maybe I would tend to agree with you in a different context, but here there is no compromise: it is either backdoor communications at mass or encryption.
      - nonrandomstring 3y ago
        I agree with all the other points made here around politics; Compromise, check. Realism, check. Popular conviction, check! ... But one simply cannot go up against mathematics armed with wishful thinking. The reason this is an issue for splitting is that there really are no half-measures. One must choose a path. The confounding thing about the UK and encryption these past years is that we've had a technically uneducated government and/or advisors that are mischievous. Nowhere have I ever seen the basic humility and falliblism to say; "This is a complex issue. We don't really understand the parameters. Choosing this or that path could have terrible consequences. What do you the people think?" Of course most will say, the uneducated "people" are the last to have any useful input. At least the elected government have some political chops, if not any technical vision. But we're not asking "the people" to weigh in on the merits of key escrow or weakened PRNGs - the choice is fascism or democracy - because people have a fundamental right to privacy and democracy cannot thrive without that.
- atoav 3y ago
  Everything sounds silly if you read it to yourself in a silly voice. The whole thing did not come across self righteous at all to me. Maybe it is because I follow the developments in net politics enough to know that the cynical undertones here are totally warranted. Like in Germany, where the supreme court told the government twice that storing all communication data of their citicens without any cause or court order is totally illegal. Guess what: they try it again right now. The UK government demonstrated in similar fashion that they are not just incompetent, but act with incompetent mallice. Acting above them is hard to avoid, because they make it very hard not to. One could wonder why it is always the people fighting the good causes that have to act perfectly and self-aware, while the bad actors are given all the slack in the world constantly, while they lie, deceive and twist everything that comes in front of them. "Oh you naive fool, you actually want to be GOOD? Let me find a hair in your soup to validate my own fatalistic position!"
- rob74 3y ago
  If this blog post makes you feel awkward, then you really shouldn't read Marina Hyde's opinion pieces for the Guardian, such as this one: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/nov/03/rishi-sunak-elon-musk-prime-minister-spacex-silicon-valley https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/nov/03/rishi-... This way of making fun of politicians is more a British thing I guess...
- fullarr 3y ago
  It's the result of online culture rewarding snarky hot takes with increased ad revenue And it's infected the whole web so that even free blogs use the same voice
- art-not 3y ago
  As someone who did activism work involving working my provincial government in Canada, sorta ya. For a lot of people, you’re basically navigating the nearly kafka-esc political process, but from the perspective of a ‘normal’ person, as opposed to a politician who gets paid to do so 8 hours a day or whatever. Also surrounding oneselves with like-minded people who all believe they’re, to some extent, ‘saving the world’, does in fact make you a bit pompous(if only temporarily haha)
alex-moon 3y ago
I love this writing style. I would love to be courageous and impassioned enough about something to write this way.
- toyg 3y ago
  It takes no courage to write about politics, just enough rage or cynicism.
  - joeblubaugh 3y ago
    Tell it to the folks in Hong Kong
  - emblaegh 3y ago
    Even the most milquetoast political opinion attracts an unreasonable amount of hate online. Not everyone can handle this kind of stuff.
csmattryder 3y ago
> and while the public knows full well that the Conservatives are openly shitting the bed on their way out, knowing it will be someone else’s responsibility to change the sheets, they’re not dumb. The author really believes that Labour are gonna throw out this overreaching set of powers? They were the ones arguing that the Online Safety Bill didn't go far enough as to include VPNs...
- radicalbyte 3y ago
  They never have and never will.. and that is what makes this kind of legislation extremely dangerous. After all the talk from the Tories around Brexit and "public mandates" - this is controversial regulation being passed by an non-elected Prime Minister of what can only be described as a dead duck government. They should be calling a General Election not passing legislation like this.
  - cbeach 3y ago
    Are you aware that Labour want to "toughen" the 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... A snap General Election would make our situation worse, not better. We need to ensure the opposition parties (all of them, not just Labour), understand our concerns about weakening encryption.
    - pimterry 3y ago
      The toughening discussed in that article entirely applies to protections for children themselves on social media - requiring limits to stop them seeing harmful content. An interesting debatable question, but not related to the encryption & communication security concerns being discussed here. Also, from a political POV, they're clearly incentivized to say that what the government is doing is wrong, in all cases - that doesn't necessarily imply that's exactly what they'd actually do in practice (when they too would have to deal with industry backlash directly). If they have publicly stated somewhere that they'd like to create tougher controls, banning or limiting security tools like encryption I'd be interested to see more information, but I haven't seen any obvious discussion of that.
narinxas 3y ago
pity the british, whose king is already so old that they don't undrestand the smartphone... no wonder the entire government institution, from that famous historical island, is so woefully unprepared to deal with a world where the smartphone is on.
- cjs_ac 3y ago
  The King doesn't have all that much to do with this. He reads the speech, but he doesn't write it, and he reads it in a flat monotone so that no one knows whether he personally agrees with the government's legislative agenda. It's just one of his duties, along with welcoming foreign heads of state and opening hospitals. The UK doesn't have a fixed constitution stating who may and may not do what, it has a set of documents and conventions that vaguely add up to a constitution. This has been evolving for the best part of a thousand years, mostly peacefully, and will continue to evolve for the foreseeable future.
  - boffinAudio 3y ago
    The King has a lot to do with human rights issues - it is, after all, in his name that war crimes and other crimes against humanity committed by the state are kept in confidence, away from the publics' prying eyes. It is because of The King that, for example, Australians are not allowed to investigate their military - a privilege only deigned to be granted by the Sovereign at his whim, and thus rarely if ever actually given. >mostly peacefully I beg to differ. Millions of human beings have suffered immense repression from this regime. You may not be one of them, and thus disinclined to observe it, but for those outside the empires citizenship boundaries, this has not been a peaceful situation by any stretch of the imagination. What The King and his flunkies want to do to the people of the UK, they have been doing to the rest of their Empire for centuries...
    - jemmyw 3y ago
      > It is because of The King that, for example, Australians are not allowed to investigate their military - a privilege only deigned to be granted by the Sovereign at his whim, and thus rarely if ever actually given. That is blatantly untrue. It's not because of the monarch themself - the position has little power over that kind of thing. The Aussie govt will be "advising" the crown on what decision to make (i.e. telling), and they could investigate if they wished to, and/or change the law in a heartbeat to allow it. I'm no royalist, I think it should be abolished. However, it is squarely at the whim of the British and Australian governments when they use this kind of legislation to hide responsibility.
governmentshill 3y ago
[flagged]
- ssmiler 3y ago
  You've switched the roles here. Government proposes solutions and public accepts or denies them.
  - governmentshill 3y ago
    [flagged]
okeuro49 3y ago
The UK Home Office has not raised an eyebrow about people shouting "jihad" on the streets of London. The UK government also gave a housing allowance to a leader of Hamas. [1] The Home Office doesn't seem to care either about child exploitation in Rotherham, Rochdale, Telford, if it is committed by a protected group. [2] One could suggest that before implementing dragnet surveillance on the public, that the UK government could first investigate what is happening in public view, but is not talked about because it is politically inconvenient. [1] https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/hamas-chief-lives-london-council-house-uk-phnpsssx5 https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/hamas-chief-lives-london-... [2] https://www.mattgoodwin.org/p/what-i-told-oxford https://www.mattgoodwin.org/p/what-i-told-oxford
- zo1 3y ago
  Sane, rational people have been calling out these double standard about all sorts of things for many years. The problem is that certain groups are not allowed to be offended because people are afraid of the backlash. So instead they target only the harmless groups. Go outside and offend a black person or a muslim. vs Go outside and offend a white person or christian. And you'll see.
  - mrd3v0 3y ago
    It is a symptom of a failing democratic system that is basically a two-party system. There are only two countries in Europe that employ FPTP: the UK....and Belarus. Labour will need to be pressured into democratic measures that might not be in its best interest as a party.
    - moffkalast 3y ago
      Tbf, having a coalition system doesn't really solve it either. You avoid some of the more egregious edge case results, but overall having a few large parties that agree on nothing eventually has them unable to form a functional government and the ones that manage to do so fall apart before their term is up. Having a system with political parties at all is the crux of the issue and we can't move forward without addressing that. We are tribal in nature, and if you give people the slightest excuse to form smaller groups they'll fight other groups forever.
jonatron 3y ago
The important thing here is the one comment by the author, linking to the bill and explanatory notes: "(NB I make no effort to read any of these at the end of a working day.)"
nonrandomstring 3y ago
Britain once led the world in computing. I am embarrassed and desolate watching us become weak, tepid imitators of comic-book backward authoritarian regimes. My country will absolutely be "left behind" in the wake of this fiasco.
- blitzar 3y ago
  This is the standard modus operandi for the UK. Yes there are some world class institutions and innovation in the UK - the remaining 99% of the country however ...
  - delian66 3y ago
    "Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way."
    - nonrandomstring 3y ago
      Sigh. I thought you'd something more to say :)
- pjc50 3y ago
  > Britain once led the world in computing. It's not really a coincidence that our computing pioneer Turing was pushed into suicide by the security services.
croisillon 3y ago
since i knew nothing about "the King's speech", outside Colin Firth's movie, here a good layout: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-32816450 https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-32816450 When OP writes "the [...] only one of Rishi Sunak’s time in office", i assume she hopes for it to be the only one.
- toyg 3y ago
  The overwhelming consensus, confirmed by polling and several byelections held while he was in office, is that the Tories will be resoundingly beaten at the next General Election. They probably won't become the third party (that would be something for the history books - I don't think it has happened for 150 years or so), but they won't produce a Prime Minister. At this point it's basically a self-fulfilling prophecy.
  - croisillon 3y ago
    i thought everybody expected the tories to lose in 2019 too ; not according to wikipedia though
    - toyg 3y ago
      Not after Johnson was made PM; and polling was never as bad as it currently is.
SilverBirch 3y ago
I'm extremely relaxed about this sort of legislation in the UK at the moment. The reason is that you need to view our government on 2 axes. The first is authoritarianism, and the second is competence. Whilst the government has been drifting more authoritarian for the last 13 years, it has also collapsed in competence. We've seen bill after bill dragged out for years and never acheived. The last lot wanted to completely re-write our human rights legislation. Needless to say that didn't go well. At this point in the political cycle there is no way serious legislation is going to get through parliament. What I really worry about is that it looks highly likely post election that the government will be replaced by a much more competent, but still highly authoritarian government. It's easy to forget that last labour party tried to introduce ID cards, and tried to introduce rules to let them lock people up for 90 days without charge. The Labour party has none of the libertarian instincts that part of the tory party has.
- Bu11etmagnet 3y ago
  Careful with those axes, Eugene.
- Maken 3y ago
  So, you are saying that the country is accelerating towards making Brazil a reality. Not a good prospect. Also, I don't get the obsession against ID cards.
  - snordgren 3y ago
    It’s a very Anglo-Saxon objection, they are not mandatory in any of the Five Eyes countries unlike the majority of Western countries. Something to do with preventing government overreach.
    - sofixa 3y ago
      > Something to do with preventing government overreach Which doesn't make any sort of sense, really, if you think about it for more than a few seconds. Any of the governments in question already has at least one, usually multiple databases of their citizens (drivers licenses, births, passports, health systems, social security, taxes etc.) which are easy to correlate for probably 99.99% of people. They wouldn't gain anything from an overreach/surveillance perspective for everyone to have an uniform ID with number and a photo, because they already have all that information anyways. But regular people would gain a ton because they would be easily able to identify themselves uniquely to whoever needs it, without useless intermediaries (like utility bills), and without any risk of identity fraud or errors.
mcv 3y ago
I saw a comment here (that I can't reply to) that brought up the inevitable point: > The problem with end-to-end encryption is that it is also used to shield from scrutiny the activities of criminals who cause serious harm, including pedophiles and terrorists. Which is true of course. But walls also are also used to shield criminals from scrutiny. And locks. Tons of things are. That in itself can't be a reason to ban it. Balancing these things against our need for walls and locks has always resulted in the need for walls and locks overriding the need to spy on potential criminals.
- bloqs 3y ago
  The police have the right with suitable warrant to break a lock and breach a wall if necessary
  - IG_Semmelweiss 3y ago
    "the police have the right" I suppose it depends on how your constitution is written ?
    - hutzlibu 3y ago
      I don't know any constitution or law that forbids the police from entering peoples home if there was a serious crime. (A warrant Btw. landlords also may do this under special circumstances, as well as a firemen. But the default is, that your home is sacred and the doors my not breached. Just as the default for communication should be, that it is private. If there is a suspect, the police may hack their computers with a warrant, but they may not hack all of our computers(by implementing backdoors), because it is more comfortable for them.
  - johngladtj 3y ago
    A wall, not every wall.
    - brabel 3y ago
      So if technology made it possible to "unlock" only a single encrypted connection from a particular suspect, then it would be fine? Because such technology is actually feasible if you accept that the police will never use that to unlock someone's connections without a judicial order (like we seem to assume is the case when the police raids a "wall" or home). That can be enforced by having a system that requires a judge's private key to sign a digital warrant which can the only be used to "unlock" a particular encrypted channel. The judge's private keys would become extremely valuable of course, making the judges high level target: though I suspect they already are.
cbeach 3y ago
Disappointing, the author spends more column inches in partisan tittle tattle than challenging the substance of these awful laws. The opposition party (soon to be our govt) want MORE authoritarian control of the Internet: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/jan/01/labour-pledges-toughen-online-safety-bill https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/jan/01/labour-pl... So let's stop indulging in red/blue point-scoring. Less ad-hominems / slurs by association. "Racism" and Trump have no bearing on any of this. Instead, let's focus on the meat and vegetables of bad lawmaking and how we can challenge it. We have an uphill battle, educating our lawmakers and the public about online civil rights issues. Let's examine the manifestos and pledged positions of the Lib Dems and Reform parties on this issue and, if their stance is sound, lend them our vote. In a FPTP system, our vote won't change the makeup of the Commons, but it will be counted, and it will help inform both Tories and Labour on the direction in which we want to drive our politics. At present the Lib Dems seem very silent on encryption: https://www.openrightsgroup.org/blog/15101/ https://www.openrightsgroup.org/blog/15101/ And it's nowhere to be found in the Reform Party manifesto either: https://www.reformparty.uk/reformisessential https://www.reformparty.uk/reformisessential Lib Dems are on 11% of the popular vote and Reform are on 7% (and growing): https://www.politico.eu/europe-poll-of-polls/united-kingdom/ https://www.politico.eu/europe-poll-of-polls/united-kingdom/ Either of them could be king-makers at the next General Election, and even if not, the two incumbent parties will be watching the swing to figure out which direction voters are travelling in. So we need to educate the smaller parties, and get this issue onto their radar. The small, new and hungry parties are more likely to engage directly with us than the old established parties IMO. Stop raging, start engaging.
aaa_aaa 3y ago
I miss times when people stated their opinions directly and concisely.
Bu11etmagnet 3y ago
I was looking for a country to escape to from mine (EU member ruled by a fascist-in-all-but-its-name government). Sadly, this means I'll have to cross out the UK from the list of potential countries to immigrate to. Since I only really speak English (my German has rusted badly), this leaves only Ireland (but it rains there all the time) and Canada (which is very far).
- circlefavshape 3y ago
  Come to Ireland! The weather is bad, but not that bad on the east coast, and there are loads of tech jobs
- boffinAudio 3y ago
  Germany wouldn't have been a smart move, but Austria might be - still a relatively sane, neutral state when it comes to human rights - admittedly surrounded by insanity. Your German will definitely improve. Ireland? Human Rights > rain. Go for it, mate.
  - sofixa 3y ago
    > neutral state when it comes to human rights Neutrality against oppression is de facto supporting oppression. Having mainstream political parties directly funded by fucking Russia is also hardly conducive to human rights.
- jemmyw 3y ago
  Denmark, you can get by without Danish in the Copenhagen tech sector.
- pjc50 3y ago
  Ireland is a pretty good option although Dublin property prices are mad.
- petercooper 3y ago
  Malta is warm and English speaking.
- deleted 3y ago
unixhero 3y ago
Some times the only way to win is by not playing.
- seanw444 3y ago
  > A strange game. The only winning move is not to play.
nonmo 3y ago
> Force technology companies to inform the Home Office in advance of security and privacy features they want to add, including encryption, and force them to disable features which the government objects to This sounds fine to me. The signals intelligence agencies don't want to be blindsided by changes that will hamper their work. Private industry needs to be willing to co-operate for the benefit of everyone, not just their bottom line.
- rangestransform 3y ago
  private industry should belligerently protect customer privacy, even against the wishes of the surveillance state, rugpulling as hard as necessary
- sandworm101 3y ago
  And when a company wants to patch a zero-day exploit being used by criminals to scam customers? What if that impacts the government's surveillance activities? And what of free/open source software? Does every linux update now need mi6 vetting? Or will we just trust His Majesty's to be nice and not do evil things to us?
  - nonmo 3y ago
    Patching an 0-day isn't the same thing as adding a new privacy or security feature. Linux is different because anyone can very clearly see the roadmap for features by following the LKML.
    - pjc50 3y ago
      > Patching an 0-day isn't the same thing as adding a new privacy or security feature You think that, but where is that written? > Linux is different because anyone can very clearly see the roadmap for features by following the LKML. If there's a requirement to inform the HO, posting on LKML is not going to meet that. Also the HO may start vetoing Linux changes.
      - 3y ago
givemeethekeys 3y ago
"Every single... developer must inform the home office of every security patch". What would happened if they did that?
- withinboredom 3y ago
  Are we talking about individual developers .... or companies? What about if I fix a security issue by accident during a refactor? How is that reported?
- quickthrower2 3y ago
  Add it to your CI pipeline it will be spamming the fuck out of then on every commit!
HenryBemis 3y ago
I watched the discussion between Musk and Sunak. And at some point they were wondering/discussing about the start-up scene in the UK. Well... "sure" (in a John Oliver tone). Ask from people to sabotage their own products, and then DO worry why things aren't going the way you want them to (have the pie AND eat it too)
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
quantum_state 3y ago
Wonder if there is an index to measure the power of government. If there is, would love to see its evolution over time.
- delian66 3y ago
  The absolute size of taxes over time?
sensanaty 3y ago
Why aren't these people championing for their own private messages to be fully open to the public to read? Maybe then I could almost take them seriously and I'd even have a bit of respect, but as-is you just know what these pricks want is unfettered access to the plebs private life, but no prying eyes into their own, thank-you-very much. Wonder how many of the people spouting "but think of the children!" are the actual pedophiles they're always going on about. Knowing politicians, I'd be amazed if 90% of them weren't diddlers themselves, sorta like anti-gay Politicians getting caught in gay scandals or anti-drug politicians getting caught doing coke.
- seanw444 3y ago
  Certainly seems like hypocrisy is the name of the game.
Brian_K_White 3y ago
Every one of these politicians should be required to replace all the locks on their homes and offices with TSA luggage locks.
linuxandrew 3y ago
Let's say this passes and the Signal Foundation and Matrix refuse to add surveillance features demanded by the UK. What effect would this have on technology as a whole? Personally I can see it going two ways. The Matrix.org Foundation operates in the UK would either be shut down, continue in another form elsewhere, or splintered with multiple custodians. I'm not entirely sure about the Signal Foundation, as, on one hand, they are an American org, but on the other hand the US is pushing comparable laws. Regardless I think that "techies" will continue to use and operate Matrix, XMPP, Mastodon, Secure Scuttlebutt and/or other decentralised (P2P/federated) infrastructure outside of the realm of regulation. The form which that takes really depends on whether further repression takes place. Techies are essentially banned from getting compensation or building a business out of providing such platforms and so it may steer towards true P2P and so-called darknets. Mainstream platforms may find a way around this, like, say, secretly MITM'ing a security number of an encrypted chat. Most of the mainstream platforms are not open source which helps in this regard - the app could even lie about the security verification code to the user. Or perhaps they will be more transparent and simply have all conversations that involve someone that is likely in the UK encrypted for two recipients, one being UK intel. We can only speculate what this might look like, if we would ever even know. I think this would be a sad outcome for the community and lead to more centralisation towards large, regulated platforms like Facebook, Apple, Google and Microsoft. It would also have a chilling and repressive effect on speech as if that wasn't an issue already. One can only dream of a P2P future but I have some doubts that this would take off without the resources that the big players have.
- freefaler 3y ago
  If that solves the problem with 95% of the cases, the government would deem that good enough I suppose. It's a much better outcome for them than a good encryption by default. With the price of enforcement going down due to the digitalization of our lives and better LLMs we'll see a lot of "enforcement" in the future.
- averageRoyalty 3y ago
  > I think this would be a sad outcome for the community and lead to more centralisation towards large, regulated platforms like Facebook, Apple, Google and Microsoft. Your comment made me think... Perhaps it would actually lead to good. If tech people all knew to avoid the 'for-profits' who can be manipulated by a hostile government, we'd all move to something that isn't company run, and drag everyone who relies on us for support along kicking and screaming. Maybe this is just the kick we need?
didibus 3y ago
I feel like legislation has a bloat problem. As people get elected, they all feel the need to "do" something. And all they can do is propose bills. Over time, doesn't that mean we just end up with more and more legislation about everything? How do we reign in legislation? How do we say, hey you were elected, but it's possible there isn't any new legislation needed, or barely any?
- Doches 3y ago
  I’ve always liked Robert Heinlein’s proposal: a two-house legislature, where the lower house only writes new laws and the upper house only repeals existing laws. > I note one proposal to make this Congress a two-house body. Excellent — the more impediments to legislation the better. But, instead of following tradition, I suggest one house of legislators, another whose single duty is to repeal laws. Let the legislators pass laws only with a two-thirds majority... while the repealers are able to cancel any law through a mere one-third minority. Preposterous? Think about it. If a bill is so poor that it cannot command two-thirds of your consents, is it not likely that it would make a poor law? And if a law is disliked by as many as one-third is it not likely that you would be better off without it?
- marcus_holmes 3y ago
  This is a specific problem with the UK and its establishment. Back before the internet, the UK Establishment (very much a cozy clique of old-school-chums, exactly as Yes Minister portrayed it) had a decent grip on the country. They could control most of what the media said, which was all of what the average Brit saw as news. Then all hell broke loose and suddenly any dirty little oik could publish whatever they liked on the internet for anyone to read. They've been trying to stuff this genie back in the bottle ever since. There's a whole plethora of controls over the internet in the UK [0] which do well for the general problem, but the bugbear is always E2E encryption - they can't read it! Any pleb can still say anything to anyone! This has to be stopped, clearly. So they keep trying. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_the_United_Kingdom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_the_Uni...
- __turbobrew__ 3y ago
  You make laws expire after X number of years, so the main function of legislature is to reevaluate past laws.
DrScientist 3y ago
Just because there isn't transport encryption does mean you can't encryption messages. Surely criminal networks will just pre-encrypt content with some side loaded app?
- seanw444 3y ago
  That's exactly what will happen. Unencrypted by default, so that the people that really need encryption (criminals) will still be able to do it, and people that are most deserving of encryption (normal citizens) will be too lazy or too uninformed to do it themselves. Now they can spy on 99.9% of the population, and they didn't actually achieve their apparent goal.
Slava_Propanei 3y ago
[dead]
Kim_Bruning 3y ago
I think this kind of thing will keep happening until we put extra safeties in our constitutions (sorry to the UK, they don't have one :-P ). Constitutions are pretty hard to change though, so one would need to find fairly broad wording that would protect encryption and ensure secrecy of phone content. Possibly we could extend and improve existing secrecy of correspondence provisions to also cover certain modern technologies?
- seanw444 3y ago
  Unless you're not talking about the US, encryption is absolutely protected multiple times over. 1A for helping to prevent government backlash on the press. 4A because they require at least a warrant to attempt to "search" anything of yours. And to some extent I'd argue 2A because it is a tool of self defense.
- daveoc64 3y ago
  The "banning of encryption" enjoys near 100% support among the political parties in the UK, so if there was a written constitution, it could simply be altered to allow this. The US constitution "works" because their political system doesn't.
guntherhermann 3y ago
193 points, 7 hours old. Removed from HN. ...Interesting dang, what's up with that?
- Izkata 3y ago
  The clickbate title? It's explicitly against the rules.
  - guntherhermann 3y ago
    It's against the rules to editoralise the title to be clickbait, it isn't against the rules to submit the literal title of the post.

225 points by Doches 3y ago

Good write up, and encompassing a lot of the frustration people that deal with this feel.

I always feel somewhat awkward reading blog articles like this. While the author is certainly fighting a good cause, their writing style is very self-righteous and shows lack of self-awareness. Is it working in politics that makes one so jaded and fond of their own prose?

namaria 3y ago
The most jaded thing about all of this was your commentary.
- narinxas 3y ago
  relax, it's just color VS colour all over again
lewispollard 3y ago
As a UK citizen, I feel jaded and bitter about this topic, as the government have been pushing to "ban encryption" in one form or another for... it feels like decades now? And each time they're advised against it or unable to get it into law, they draw up another proposal and try to sneak it in another way. It feels like one of these days, if they keep trying, they'll manage get it past the experts/lawyers somehow and it'll doom our privacy for a long time. So in the writing, I don't detect over-reaching self-righteousness or a lack of self-awareness - more, awareness of just how tiring and arduous this push for "encryption bans" is getting to everyone who understands the implications of it, and how frustrating it is to have to repeatedly deal with this kind of insidiousness in government.
- anyoneamous 3y ago
  > It feels like one of these days, if they keep trying, they'll manage get it past the experts/lawyers I felt exactly the same way about Brexit; it was clear that if we voted Remain that Nigel Farage would still be there - alongside Maxwell's Demon - to shove us towards the door at the next opportune moment. Seems like this is one of the hardest problems in modern politics - populists only have to win once, due to us having a complex system of preferential arrangements and one-way door decisions.
  - ppp_p 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - 0dayz 3y ago
      >statists Oh cry me a river with that cynical view of democracy. Just because you aren't engaged in democracy doesn't mean everyone wants to be a lame duck.
- M2Ys4U 3y ago
  To use an infamous quote: We have to be lucky every time. They only have to be lucky once.
  - robin_reala 3y ago
    (for people who don’t know the origin, it’s from the IRA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brighton_hotel_bombing#IRA_statement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brighton_hotel_bombing#IRA_sta...)
  - nonrandomstring 3y ago
    The quote is a pithy formulation of Blotto game theory, or "front analysis" [0] which I've taught in cybersecurity for some years now as an introductory concept alongside Dolev-Yeo [1]. It is obliquely connected to the "attackers advantage" (here as a business concept [2]) and "terrorists always win in the end". As the number of fronts to defend grows, in space or time, the uncertainty of how to allocate resources against novel attacks becomes overwhelming, as does the burden of hyper-vigilance. The enemy can afford to sleep and wait. Security is an essentially conservative project. One is defending existing resources, rights, powers... against an opportunistic insurgent. Security of democracy (as Franklin said, "if you can keep it") against tyrants (who are simply "terrorists" in waiting) is no different. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blotto_game https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blotto_game [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolev%E2%80%93Yao_model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolev%E2%80%93Yao_model [2] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/21413841-the-attacker-s-advantage https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/21413841-the-attacker-s-...
mrd3v0 3y ago
I understand that the writer makes a lot of presumptions about the reader, but this is to be expected it is a personal blog called "Hi, I'm Heather Burns" and from the title there is a certain narrative with context implied. There is not an inch of objectivity explicitly or implicitly expected here. Politics are "self-righteous", if you are not "self-righteous" in discussing and arguing for policies - no matter which view or policy we are talking about - you are not really making a good point, you certainly aren't trying to advocate for whatever you believe in, and you are not morally consistent. That aside, this particular issue has been beaten over and over, and for someone who is an expert and a career policy advocate: they are not going to waste effort and time by repeating the same points almost everyone reading their blog agrees upon.
- mgaunard 3y ago
  I'd argue good policy is a matter of compromise, not conviction.
  - di4na 3y ago
    You need both. As there are some things you cannot conpromise on. Like. Idk. Things factually impossible. Or Human Rights.
  - mrd3v0 3y ago
    Maybe I would tend to agree with you in a different context, but here there is no compromise: it is either backdoor communications at mass or encryption.
    - nonrandomstring 3y ago
      I agree with all the other points made here around politics; Compromise, check. Realism, check. Popular conviction, check! ... But one simply cannot go up against mathematics armed with wishful thinking. The reason this is an issue for splitting is that there really are no half-measures. One must choose a path. The confounding thing about the UK and encryption these past years is that we've had a technically uneducated government and/or advisors that are mischievous. Nowhere have I ever seen the basic humility and falliblism to say; "This is a complex issue. We don't really understand the parameters. Choosing this or that path could have terrible consequences. What do you the people think?" Of course most will say, the uneducated "people" are the last to have any useful input. At least the elected government have some political chops, if not any technical vision. But we're not asking "the people" to weigh in on the merits of key escrow or weakened PRNGs - the choice is fascism or democracy - because people have a fundamental right to privacy and democracy cannot thrive without that.
atoav 3y ago
Everything sounds silly if you read it to yourself in a silly voice. The whole thing did not come across self righteous at all to me. Maybe it is because I follow the developments in net politics enough to know that the cynical undertones here are totally warranted. Like in Germany, where the supreme court told the government twice that storing all communication data of their citicens without any cause or court order is totally illegal. Guess what: they try it again right now. The UK government demonstrated in similar fashion that they are not just incompetent, but act with incompetent mallice. Acting above them is hard to avoid, because they make it very hard not to. One could wonder why it is always the people fighting the good causes that have to act perfectly and self-aware, while the bad actors are given all the slack in the world constantly, while they lie, deceive and twist everything that comes in front of them. "Oh you naive fool, you actually want to be GOOD? Let me find a hair in your soup to validate my own fatalistic position!"
rob74 3y ago
If this blog post makes you feel awkward, then you really shouldn't read Marina Hyde's opinion pieces for the Guardian, such as this one: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/nov/03/rishi-sunak-elon-musk-prime-minister-spacex-silicon-valley https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/nov/03/rishi-... This way of making fun of politicians is more a British thing I guess...
fullarr 3y ago
It's the result of online culture rewarding snarky hot takes with increased ad revenue And it's infected the whole web so that even free blogs use the same voice
art-not 3y ago
As someone who did activism work involving working my provincial government in Canada, sorta ya. For a lot of people, you’re basically navigating the nearly kafka-esc political process, but from the perspective of a ‘normal’ person, as opposed to a politician who gets paid to do so 8 hours a day or whatever. Also surrounding oneselves with like-minded people who all believe they’re, to some extent, ‘saving the world’, does in fact make you a bit pompous(if only temporarily haha)

alex-moon 3y ago

I love this writing style. I would love to be courageous and impassioned enough about something to write this way.

toyg 3y ago
It takes no courage to write about politics, just enough rage or cynicism.
- joeblubaugh 3y ago
  Tell it to the folks in Hong Kong
- emblaegh 3y ago
  Even the most milquetoast political opinion attracts an unreasonable amount of hate online. Not everyone can handle this kind of stuff.

csmattryder 3y ago

> and while the public knows full well that the Conservatives are openly shitting the bed on their way out, knowing it will be someone else’s responsibility to change the sheets, they’re not dumb. The author really believes that Labour are gonna throw out this overreaching set of powers? They were the ones arguing that the Online Safety Bill didn't go far enough as to include VPNs...

radicalbyte 3y ago
They never have and never will.. and that is what makes this kind of legislation extremely dangerous. After all the talk from the Tories around Brexit and "public mandates" - this is controversial regulation being passed by an non-elected Prime Minister of what can only be described as a dead duck government. They should be calling a General Election not passing legislation like this.
- cbeach 3y ago
  Are you aware that Labour want to "toughen" the 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... A snap General Election would make our situation worse, not better. We need to ensure the opposition parties (all of them, not just Labour), understand our concerns about weakening encryption.
  - pimterry 3y ago
    The toughening discussed in that article entirely applies to protections for children themselves on social media - requiring limits to stop them seeing harmful content. An interesting debatable question, but not related to the encryption & communication security concerns being discussed here. Also, from a political POV, they're clearly incentivized to say that what the government is doing is wrong, in all cases - that doesn't necessarily imply that's exactly what they'd actually do in practice (when they too would have to deal with industry backlash directly). If they have publicly stated somewhere that they'd like to create tougher controls, banning or limiting security tools like encryption I'd be interested to see more information, but I haven't seen any obvious discussion of that.

narinxas 3y ago

pity the british, whose king is already so old that they don't undrestand the smartphone... no wonder the entire government institution, from that famous historical island, is so woefully unprepared to deal with a world where the smartphone is on.

cjs_ac 3y ago
The King doesn't have all that much to do with this. He reads the speech, but he doesn't write it, and he reads it in a flat monotone so that no one knows whether he personally agrees with the government's legislative agenda. It's just one of his duties, along with welcoming foreign heads of state and opening hospitals. The UK doesn't have a fixed constitution stating who may and may not do what, it has a set of documents and conventions that vaguely add up to a constitution. This has been evolving for the best part of a thousand years, mostly peacefully, and will continue to evolve for the foreseeable future.
- boffinAudio 3y ago
  The King has a lot to do with human rights issues - it is, after all, in his name that war crimes and other crimes against humanity committed by the state are kept in confidence, away from the publics' prying eyes. It is because of The King that, for example, Australians are not allowed to investigate their military - a privilege only deigned to be granted by the Sovereign at his whim, and thus rarely if ever actually given. >mostly peacefully I beg to differ. Millions of human beings have suffered immense repression from this regime. You may not be one of them, and thus disinclined to observe it, but for those outside the empires citizenship boundaries, this has not been a peaceful situation by any stretch of the imagination. What The King and his flunkies want to do to the people of the UK, they have been doing to the rest of their Empire for centuries...
  - jemmyw 3y ago
    > It is because of The King that, for example, Australians are not allowed to investigate their military - a privilege only deigned to be granted by the Sovereign at his whim, and thus rarely if ever actually given. That is blatantly untrue. It's not because of the monarch themself - the position has little power over that kind of thing. The Aussie govt will be "advising" the crown on what decision to make (i.e. telling), and they could investigate if they wished to, and/or change the law in a heartbeat to allow it. I'm no royalist, I think it should be abolished. However, it is squarely at the whim of the British and Australian governments when they use this kind of legislation to hide responsibility.

governmentshill 3y ago

[flagged]

ssmiler 3y ago
You've switched the roles here. Government proposes solutions and public accepts or denies them.
- governmentshill 3y ago
  [flagged]

okeuro49 3y ago

The UK Home Office has not raised an eyebrow about people shouting "jihad" on the streets of London. The UK government also gave a housing allowance to a leader of Hamas. [1] The Home Office doesn't seem to care either about child exploitation in Rotherham, Rochdale, Telford, if it is committed by a protected group. [2] One could suggest that before implementing dragnet surveillance on the public, that the UK government could first investigate what is happening in public view, but is not talked about because it is politically inconvenient. [1] https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/hamas-chief-lives-london-council-house-uk-phnpsssx5 https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/hamas-chief-lives-london-... [2] https://www.mattgoodwin.org/p/what-i-told-oxford https://www.mattgoodwin.org/p/what-i-told-oxford

zo1 3y ago
Sane, rational people have been calling out these double standard about all sorts of things for many years. The problem is that certain groups are not allowed to be offended because people are afraid of the backlash. So instead they target only the harmless groups. Go outside and offend a black person or a muslim. vs Go outside and offend a white person or christian. And you'll see.
- mrd3v0 3y ago
  It is a symptom of a failing democratic system that is basically a two-party system. There are only two countries in Europe that employ FPTP: the UK....and Belarus. Labour will need to be pressured into democratic measures that might not be in its best interest as a party.
  - moffkalast 3y ago
    Tbf, having a coalition system doesn't really solve it either. You avoid some of the more egregious edge case results, but overall having a few large parties that agree on nothing eventually has them unable to form a functional government and the ones that manage to do so fall apart before their term is up. Having a system with political parties at all is the crux of the issue and we can't move forward without addressing that. We are tribal in nature, and if you give people the slightest excuse to form smaller groups they'll fight other groups forever.

jonatron 3y ago

The important thing here is the one comment by the author, linking to the bill and explanatory notes: "(NB I make no effort to read any of these at the end of a working day.)"

nonrandomstring 3y ago

Britain once led the world in computing. I am embarrassed and desolate watching us become weak, tepid imitators of comic-book backward authoritarian regimes. My country will absolutely be "left behind" in the wake of this fiasco.

blitzar 3y ago
This is the standard modus operandi for the UK. Yes there are some world class institutions and innovation in the UK - the remaining 99% of the country however ...
- delian66 3y ago
  "Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way."
  - nonrandomstring 3y ago
    Sigh. I thought you'd something more to say :)
pjc50 3y ago
> Britain once led the world in computing. It's not really a coincidence that our computing pioneer Turing was pushed into suicide by the security services.

croisillon 3y ago

since i knew nothing about "the King's speech", outside Colin Firth's movie, here a good layout: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-32816450 https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-32816450 When OP writes "the [...] only one of Rishi Sunak’s time in office", i assume she hopes for it to be the only one.

toyg 3y ago
The overwhelming consensus, confirmed by polling and several byelections held while he was in office, is that the Tories will be resoundingly beaten at the next General Election. They probably won't become the third party (that would be something for the history books - I don't think it has happened for 150 years or so), but they won't produce a Prime Minister. At this point it's basically a self-fulfilling prophecy.
- croisillon 3y ago
  i thought everybody expected the tories to lose in 2019 too ; not according to wikipedia though
  - toyg 3y ago
    Not after Johnson was made PM; and polling was never as bad as it currently is.

SilverBirch 3y ago

I'm extremely relaxed about this sort of legislation in the UK at the moment. The reason is that you need to view our government on 2 axes. The first is authoritarianism, and the second is competence. Whilst the government has been drifting more authoritarian for the last 13 years, it has also collapsed in competence. We've seen bill after bill dragged out for years and never acheived. The last lot wanted to completely re-write our human rights legislation. Needless to say that didn't go well. At this point in the political cycle there is no way serious legislation is going to get through parliament. What I really worry about is that it looks highly likely post election that the government will be replaced by a much more competent, but still highly authoritarian government. It's easy to forget that last labour party tried to introduce ID cards, and tried to introduce rules to let them lock people up for 90 days without charge. The Labour party has none of the libertarian instincts that part of the tory party has.

Bu11etmagnet 3y ago
Careful with those axes, Eugene.
Maken 3y ago
So, you are saying that the country is accelerating towards making Brazil a reality. Not a good prospect. Also, I don't get the obsession against ID cards.
- snordgren 3y ago
  It’s a very Anglo-Saxon objection, they are not mandatory in any of the Five Eyes countries unlike the majority of Western countries. Something to do with preventing government overreach.
  - sofixa 3y ago
    > Something to do with preventing government overreach Which doesn't make any sort of sense, really, if you think about it for more than a few seconds. Any of the governments in question already has at least one, usually multiple databases of their citizens (drivers licenses, births, passports, health systems, social security, taxes etc.) which are easy to correlate for probably 99.99% of people. They wouldn't gain anything from an overreach/surveillance perspective for everyone to have an uniform ID with number and a photo, because they already have all that information anyways. But regular people would gain a ton because they would be easily able to identify themselves uniquely to whoever needs it, without useless intermediaries (like utility bills), and without any risk of identity fraud or errors.

mcv 3y ago

I saw a comment here (that I can't reply to) that brought up the inevitable point: > The problem with end-to-end encryption is that it is also used to shield from scrutiny the activities of criminals who cause serious harm, including pedophiles and terrorists. Which is true of course. But walls also are also used to shield criminals from scrutiny. And locks. Tons of things are. That in itself can't be a reason to ban it. Balancing these things against our need for walls and locks has always resulted in the need for walls and locks overriding the need to spy on potential criminals.

bloqs 3y ago
The police have the right with suitable warrant to break a lock and breach a wall if necessary
- IG_Semmelweiss 3y ago
  "the police have the right" I suppose it depends on how your constitution is written ?
  - hutzlibu 3y ago
    I don't know any constitution or law that forbids the police from entering peoples home if there was a serious crime. (A warrant Btw. landlords also may do this under special circumstances, as well as a firemen. But the default is, that your home is sacred and the doors my not breached. Just as the default for communication should be, that it is private. If there is a suspect, the police may hack their computers with a warrant, but they may not hack all of our computers(by implementing backdoors), because it is more comfortable for them.
- johngladtj 3y ago
  A wall, not every wall.
  - brabel 3y ago
    So if technology made it possible to "unlock" only a single encrypted connection from a particular suspect, then it would be fine? Because such technology is actually feasible if you accept that the police will never use that to unlock someone's connections without a judicial order (like we seem to assume is the case when the police raids a "wall" or home). That can be enforced by having a system that requires a judge's private key to sign a digital warrant which can the only be used to "unlock" a particular encrypted channel. The judge's private keys would become extremely valuable of course, making the judges high level target: though I suspect they already are.

cbeach 3y ago

Disappointing, the author spends more column inches in partisan tittle tattle than challenging the substance of these awful laws. The opposition party (soon to be our govt) want MORE authoritarian control of the Internet: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/jan/01/labour-pledges-toughen-online-safety-bill https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/jan/01/labour-pl... So let's stop indulging in red/blue point-scoring. Less ad-hominems / slurs by association. "Racism" and Trump have no bearing on any of this. Instead, let's focus on the meat and vegetables of bad lawmaking and how we can challenge it. We have an uphill battle, educating our lawmakers and the public about online civil rights issues. Let's examine the manifestos and pledged positions of the Lib Dems and Reform parties on this issue and, if their stance is sound, lend them our vote. In a FPTP system, our vote won't change the makeup of the Commons, but it will be counted, and it will help inform both Tories and Labour on the direction in which we want to drive our politics. At present the Lib Dems seem very silent on encryption: https://www.openrightsgroup.org/blog/15101/ https://www.openrightsgroup.org/blog/15101/ And it's nowhere to be found in the Reform Party manifesto either: https://www.reformparty.uk/reformisessential https://www.reformparty.uk/reformisessential Lib Dems are on 11% of the popular vote and Reform are on 7% (and growing): https://www.politico.eu/europe-poll-of-polls/united-kingdom/ https://www.politico.eu/europe-poll-of-polls/united-kingdom/ Either of them could be king-makers at the next General Election, and even if not, the two incumbent parties will be watching the swing to figure out which direction voters are travelling in. So we need to educate the smaller parties, and get this issue onto their radar. The small, new and hungry parties are more likely to engage directly with us than the old established parties IMO. Stop raging, start engaging.

aaa_aaa 3y ago

I miss times when people stated their opinions directly and concisely.

Bu11etmagnet 3y ago

I was looking for a country to escape to from mine (EU member ruled by a fascist-in-all-but-its-name government). Sadly, this means I'll have to cross out the UK from the list of potential countries to immigrate to. Since I only really speak English (my German has rusted badly), this leaves only Ireland (but it rains there all the time) and Canada (which is very far).

circlefavshape 3y ago
Come to Ireland! The weather is bad, but not that bad on the east coast, and there are loads of tech jobs
boffinAudio 3y ago
Germany wouldn't have been a smart move, but Austria might be - still a relatively sane, neutral state when it comes to human rights - admittedly surrounded by insanity. Your German will definitely improve. Ireland? Human Rights > rain. Go for it, mate.
- sofixa 3y ago
  > neutral state when it comes to human rights Neutrality against oppression is de facto supporting oppression. Having mainstream political parties directly funded by fucking Russia is also hardly conducive to human rights.
jemmyw 3y ago
Denmark, you can get by without Danish in the Copenhagen tech sector.
pjc50 3y ago
Ireland is a pretty good option although Dublin property prices are mad.
petercooper 3y ago
Malta is warm and English speaking.
deleted 3y ago

unixhero 3y ago

Some times the only way to win is by not playing.

seanw444 3y ago
> A strange game. The only winning move is not to play.

nonmo 3y ago

> Force technology companies to inform the Home Office in advance of security and privacy features they want to add, including encryption, and force them to disable features which the government objects to This sounds fine to me. The signals intelligence agencies don't want to be blindsided by changes that will hamper their work. Private industry needs to be willing to co-operate for the benefit of everyone, not just their bottom line.

rangestransform 3y ago
private industry should belligerently protect customer privacy, even against the wishes of the surveillance state, rugpulling as hard as necessary
sandworm101 3y ago
And when a company wants to patch a zero-day exploit being used by criminals to scam customers? What if that impacts the government's surveillance activities? And what of free/open source software? Does every linux update now need mi6 vetting? Or will we just trust His Majesty's to be nice and not do evil things to us?
- nonmo 3y ago
  Patching an 0-day isn't the same thing as adding a new privacy or security feature. Linux is different because anyone can very clearly see the roadmap for features by following the LKML.
  - pjc50 3y ago
    > Patching an 0-day isn't the same thing as adding a new privacy or security feature You think that, but where is that written? > Linux is different because anyone can very clearly see the roadmap for features by following the LKML. If there's a requirement to inform the HO, posting on LKML is not going to meet that. Also the HO may start vetoing Linux changes.
    - 3y ago

givemeethekeys 3y ago

"Every single... developer must inform the home office of every security patch". What would happened if they did that?

withinboredom 3y ago
Are we talking about individual developers .... or companies? What about if I fix a security issue by accident during a refactor? How is that reported?
quickthrower2 3y ago
Add it to your CI pipeline it will be spamming the fuck out of then on every commit!

HenryBemis 3y ago

I watched the discussion between Musk and Sunak. And at some point they were wondering/discussing about the start-up scene in the UK. Well... "sure" (in a John Oliver tone). Ask from people to sabotage their own products, and then DO worry why things aren't going the way you want them to (have the pie AND eat it too)

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

quantum_state 3y ago

Wonder if there is an index to measure the power of government. If there is, would love to see its evolution over time.

delian66 3y ago
The absolute size of taxes over time?

sensanaty 3y ago

Why aren't these people championing for their own private messages to be fully open to the public to read? Maybe then I could almost take them seriously and I'd even have a bit of respect, but as-is you just know what these pricks want is unfettered access to the plebs private life, but no prying eyes into their own, thank-you-very much. Wonder how many of the people spouting "but think of the children!" are the actual pedophiles they're always going on about. Knowing politicians, I'd be amazed if 90% of them weren't diddlers themselves, sorta like anti-gay Politicians getting caught in gay scandals or anti-drug politicians getting caught doing coke.

seanw444 3y ago
Certainly seems like hypocrisy is the name of the game.

Brian_K_White 3y ago

Every one of these politicians should be required to replace all the locks on their homes and offices with TSA luggage locks.

linuxandrew 3y ago

Let's say this passes and the Signal Foundation and Matrix refuse to add surveillance features demanded by the UK. What effect would this have on technology as a whole? Personally I can see it going two ways. The Matrix.org Foundation operates in the UK would either be shut down, continue in another form elsewhere, or splintered with multiple custodians. I'm not entirely sure about the Signal Foundation, as, on one hand, they are an American org, but on the other hand the US is pushing comparable laws. Regardless I think that "techies" will continue to use and operate Matrix, XMPP, Mastodon, Secure Scuttlebutt and/or other decentralised (P2P/federated) infrastructure outside of the realm of regulation. The form which that takes really depends on whether further repression takes place. Techies are essentially banned from getting compensation or building a business out of providing such platforms and so it may steer towards true P2P and so-called darknets. Mainstream platforms may find a way around this, like, say, secretly MITM'ing a security number of an encrypted chat. Most of the mainstream platforms are not open source which helps in this regard - the app could even lie about the security verification code to the user. Or perhaps they will be more transparent and simply have all conversations that involve someone that is likely in the UK encrypted for two recipients, one being UK intel. We can only speculate what this might look like, if we would ever even know. I think this would be a sad outcome for the community and lead to more centralisation towards large, regulated platforms like Facebook, Apple, Google and Microsoft. It would also have a chilling and repressive effect on speech as if that wasn't an issue already. One can only dream of a P2P future but I have some doubts that this would take off without the resources that the big players have.

freefaler 3y ago
If that solves the problem with 95% of the cases, the government would deem that good enough I suppose. It's a much better outcome for them than a good encryption by default. With the price of enforcement going down due to the digitalization of our lives and better LLMs we'll see a lot of "enforcement" in the future.
averageRoyalty 3y ago
> I think this would be a sad outcome for the community and lead to more centralisation towards large, regulated platforms like Facebook, Apple, Google and Microsoft. Your comment made me think... Perhaps it would actually lead to good. If tech people all knew to avoid the 'for-profits' who can be manipulated by a hostile government, we'd all move to something that isn't company run, and drag everyone who relies on us for support along kicking and screaming. Maybe this is just the kick we need?

didibus 3y ago

I feel like legislation has a bloat problem. As people get elected, they all feel the need to "do" something. And all they can do is propose bills. Over time, doesn't that mean we just end up with more and more legislation about everything? How do we reign in legislation? How do we say, hey you were elected, but it's possible there isn't any new legislation needed, or barely any?

Doches 3y ago
I’ve always liked Robert Heinlein’s proposal: a two-house legislature, where the lower house only writes new laws and the upper house only repeals existing laws. > I note one proposal to make this Congress a two-house body. Excellent — the more impediments to legislation the better. But, instead of following tradition, I suggest one house of legislators, another whose single duty is to repeal laws. Let the legislators pass laws only with a two-thirds majority... while the repealers are able to cancel any law through a mere one-third minority. Preposterous? Think about it. If a bill is so poor that it cannot command two-thirds of your consents, is it not likely that it would make a poor law? And if a law is disliked by as many as one-third is it not likely that you would be better off without it?
marcus_holmes 3y ago
This is a specific problem with the UK and its establishment. Back before the internet, the UK Establishment (very much a cozy clique of old-school-chums, exactly as Yes Minister portrayed it) had a decent grip on the country. They could control most of what the media said, which was all of what the average Brit saw as news. Then all hell broke loose and suddenly any dirty little oik could publish whatever they liked on the internet for anyone to read. They've been trying to stuff this genie back in the bottle ever since. There's a whole plethora of controls over the internet in the UK [0] which do well for the general problem, but the bugbear is always E2E encryption - they can't read it! Any pleb can still say anything to anyone! This has to be stopped, clearly. So they keep trying. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_the_United_Kingdom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_the_Uni...
__turbobrew__ 3y ago
You make laws expire after X number of years, so the main function of legislature is to reevaluate past laws.

DrScientist 3y ago

Just because there isn't transport encryption does mean you can't encryption messages. Surely criminal networks will just pre-encrypt content with some side loaded app?

seanw444 3y ago
That's exactly what will happen. Unencrypted by default, so that the people that really need encryption (criminals) will still be able to do it, and people that are most deserving of encryption (normal citizens) will be too lazy or too uninformed to do it themselves. Now they can spy on 99.9% of the population, and they didn't actually achieve their apparent goal.

Slava_Propanei 3y ago

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Kim_Bruning 3y ago

I think this kind of thing will keep happening until we put extra safeties in our constitutions (sorry to the UK, they don't have one :-P ). Constitutions are pretty hard to change though, so one would need to find fairly broad wording that would protect encryption and ensure secrecy of phone content. Possibly we could extend and improve existing secrecy of correspondence provisions to also cover certain modern technologies?

seanw444 3y ago
Unless you're not talking about the US, encryption is absolutely protected multiple times over. 1A for helping to prevent government backlash on the press. 4A because they require at least a warrant to attempt to "search" anything of yours. And to some extent I'd argue 2A because it is a tool of self defense.
daveoc64 3y ago
The "banning of encryption" enjoys near 100% support among the political parties in the UK, so if there was a written constitution, it could simply be altered to allow this. The US constitution "works" because their political system doesn't.

guntherhermann 3y ago

193 points, 7 hours old. Removed from HN. ...Interesting dang, what's up with that?

Izkata 3y ago
The clickbate title? It's explicitly against the rules.
- guntherhermann 3y ago
  It's against the rules to editoralise the title to be clickbait, it isn't against the rules to submit the literal title of the post.