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Surveillance is not safety: A statement on the UK's latest threat to privacy [pdf]

691 points by g0xA52A2A 4mo ago

stronglikedan 4mo ago
> Surveillance Is Not Safety Maybe not, but as long as the average person thinks it is, it may as well be.
- Animats 4mo ago
  It's a great meme, though. Use it more.
- ktallett 4mo ago
  The average person doesn't have any knowledge on this system.
- rockskon 4mo ago
  Does the average person think this? Perception of what other people think doesn't always line up with what they actually think.
  - pydry 4mo ago
    I doubt the average person gives it much thought at all. This certainly isn't a result of democratic overreach by a concerned group of citizens. No demographic is demanding this. It's one of those "create the infrastructure for stasi 2.0" the epstein elite tries to periodically ram down our throats ironically using "think of the children" to manufacture consent. The last time they did this they contracted saatchi and saatchi to run an a disturbing campaign: https://londondaily.com/revealed-uk-gov-t-plans-publicity-blitz-to-undermine-privacy-of-your-chats https://londondaily.com/revealed-uk-gov-t-plans-publicity-bl...
  - cucumber3732842 4mo ago
    The average person doesn't think that far ahead. They just hear "a cause I like can be furthered by implementing 1984" and so they support it. Check out any comment section on transportation policy, environmental policy, professional licensing for trades other than software. Look at how HN, people who should know how this sausage is made, schemes about how policy and technology can be used by government to enforce it's will and preferences upon other people in ways they cannot avoid or resist. It's not a case of divide and conquer, it's a case of completely lacking principals. Nobody believes in privacy, civil rights or that the application of government (violence) should be expensive and difficult and politically fraught when it's an application that they like. Nobody is thinking far enough ahead to wonder how those systems will be used when the whims and dispositions of government and society shift. Just this morning I was reading a comment where some jerk was scheming about how the government should (the implication being that now that AI makes it easy to automate) scrape property listings and fine people for not pulling permits when there's a diff from the prior listings and that the whole thing can be automated and anyone innocent can just have the government tour their home to prove it.
    - iugtmkbdfil834 4mo ago
      There is something to be said about true believers, who will go out of their way to not 'live and let live'. I remember getting extra antsy when one such individual was flying drones over private properties looking for signs for what they believe is an issue. Tech.. it truly is a tool and something of a true reveal of character. It immediately shows what you do with power.
      - cucumber3732842 4mo ago
        I don't respect those people unless they're willing to suffer the same tactics used upon them to enforce other issues.
  - pixl97 4mo ago
    >Does the average person think this? The average person hold all kinds of conflicting views. The average middle class parent will surveil the shit out of their children, for example. Hence the title of the article is not completely correct. The outcome of surveillance is the intent of the entity surveilling. In the case of the parent, this is likely the safety of their offspring. In the case of a state entity, it's likely the safety of the people in power of the state. This second type of safety is very dangerous and does not include your safety.
    - iugtmkbdfil834 4mo ago
      I think you are onto something with intent here. By now, we effectively know that various power centers are getting away with things that normal people do not. If true, the concern is not that we are getting away with things, but that we might be thinking that maybe current arrangement is no longer suitable. In other words, they are literally preparing for a worst case scenario. And to me, this seems silly now. As in, I buy the fear of a peasant uprising and being on the wrong side of the scythe, but I sincerely doubt peasants will actually do anything.
    - trashb 4mo ago
      > The average middle class parent will surveil the shit out of their children, for example. Most of those parents will argue that they have the right to do that and are actively recommending other parents to do the same. It happens so much that a local celebrity actually said the following recently (paraphrased)"As long as you live in my house I(the parent) have the right to go through your room, your stuff and your phone whenever I want". In my country this is actually illegal as kids have a right to privacy just like the parents, though it happens so much since kids don't have the resources to sue their parents therefore people think this is normal (and kids grow up thinking it is normal).
  - madaxe_again 4mo ago
    The average person does not think anything much. They receive the meme, they transmit the meme. No processing occurs.
- cyanydeez 4mo ago
  isn't more as long as the average billionair thinks it is. It's not like it's the average person pushing it.
- circadian 4mo ago
  https://xkcd.com/610/ https://xkcd.com/610/
- cwmoore 4mo ago
  If only the average person had tools and access to all such information.
ktallett 4mo ago
Won't somebody think of the children appears to be the world's most effective method of bringing in restrictive and privacy destroying laws, yet they just don't work.
- christoph 4mo ago
  Well yes, the great cabal of people bringing in these immense rafts of surveillance are the very people who commit, or who certainly hang out with the people who commit the most heinous acts. See the Epstein files. Notice the same people will also talk during the daytime about morals and equality, while then conducting genocide in the evening.
- Lio 4mo ago
  We'll see. I can't be the only voter fed up with how Labour are handling this. I find they way that Peter Kyle and Jess Philips have dismissed privacy concerns about online surveillance particularly condescending. Come the next general election they are going to be paid back for this. (Oh, and I appreciate Signal speaking up and have just donated to them again for doing so).
  - ls612 4mo ago
    The idea is that people who have politics like yours can be “visited” by the police and asked to “voluntarily” come down to the station for an interview about “hateful rhetoric” on social media. Doesn’t matter how you vote if actual political opposition is outlawed, which is where the UK is heading rapidly aided by digital surveillance.
    - trumpdong 4mo ago
      Anyone can be visited by anyone and asked anything. Isn't that part of freedom?
budududuroiu 4mo ago
The ratchet ratcheting: client side scanning, then remote attestation to ensure client side scanning works, digital identity verification, etc etc.
- Ajedi32 4mo ago
  I'm slowly coming around to the idea that closed source software was the original sin of the modern digital surveillance state. Due to the fact that it can't easily be modified without the source, software is uniquely able to act against the interests of its owner in a way almost no other product can. Client side scanning wouldn't be viable if people could just install a mod that disables it, and remote attestation would be a much harder sell if the availability of such mods were expected. Maybe software copyright should require releasing the source and build tools just like patents require releasing the design...
ajb 4mo ago
Yes, but this is preaching to the choir. The counter must be as visceral is the claim. They make an emotional pitch:your children are in danger, surveillance is the solution. The counter must show the dangers in visceral, emotionally relevant way. This surveillance is actually a risk to parents and children as well - that by the accusation of an opaque, unaccountable system, you will be labelled a pedophile, and your kids taken away. That when sharing a picture of your own child with your own mother, you will have to worry about what the electronic bureaucracy will label your picture as. Abstractions like privacy,and categorical claims, aren't going to reverse this. A properly pitched campaign could do. Sure, complain that politicians and the public are dumb. That may make you feel better but it won't change this an iota. Talking to people in the terms they care about might.
- lifeisstillgood 4mo ago
  >>> That when sharing a picture of your own child with your own mother, you will have to worry about what the electronic bureaucracy will label your picture as. I 100% agree on the need to counter emotional fire with emotional fire. And this is the right way to combat this sort of overreach However, I do think that “the choir” need to rethink what is and is not privacy - a huge amount of the benefits of having our every waking moment monitored by the virtual world (which is going to happen) can be lost if we don’t allow epidemiology to follow our digital selves. Detecting one’s word use is slipping might signal a trip to the doctors or a thousand other digital tells that will help us improve our lives. If we have to fight against ads and digital searches for terrorism, at least let’s get the benefits too.
  - ajb 4mo ago
    That's all very well, but we just plain don't have a legal, economic, or technical system which will allow separation of the good uses from the bad uses. Once data is in someone else's possession, there's f-all way to prevent it being used to do whatever the possessor wants. Even if there is a legal agreement, it's easily abrogated, or overridden by insolvency law, or by a company having a "we can update our terms" clause. Some of this I can imagine how to address - insolvency law could be changed, for example - but in the absence of a fully robust system, promises of "we will only use your data for good" are not credible. Those who actually want to use data for good should be on the side of robust assurance of that, not just plead that they can be trusted and that no accountability is needed.
areoform 4mo ago
Signal should come out swinging. Here's a pitch. The Government is going to put a snitch on every phone, tape every bedroom, and listen in every evening on every home. Every doctor's visit. Every therapy session. Every pub. Every street. Every store. When the snitches phone home, what you type to your lover may get the cops sent to your home. Artificial stasi in every desktop, laptop, tablet, camera, and phone. Around every corner. In every living room. No one will be exempt from their gaze. Are you ready for your vacuum cleaner to phone home?
- saltwatercowboy 4mo ago
  AKA The Witness in Nick Harkaway's novel Gnomon.
- deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
- iugtmkbdfil834 4mo ago
  Shrug. If they don't, they will lose the customers who do care about privacy and they won't lose the ones that don't .. right away. However, it will near guarantee further fragmentation and circling a new solution that will be recommended to normies by their techy friends or current batch of cool kids. We have been here before. The only way to win the game is not to play. Especially with government, the moment you start playing, you lose.
- thenthenthen 4mo ago
  Signal the messaging app/platform? A funny thing is that Signal barely works (with VPN ofc) here in China. Sending media/images is impossible. Sometimes it’s blacked out weeks on end. Everything else seems to work fine ish (again with VPN ofc).
  - autoexec 4mo ago
    Signal outright lies in their privacy policy. It opens with "Signal is designed to never collect or store any sensitive information." but they collect and permanently store sensitive information in the cloud (user's name, photo, number, and contacts) and in some cases they even store the contents of messages. They've steadfastly refused to update the policy even as they introduced those features deceiving users about their risks. Signal can't really be trusted at this point.
ryanisnan 4mo ago
Signal is on the right side here. I think it's time for us techies to fight back by developing the future. I'm trying to do my part - https://mediaden.ca https://mediaden.ca Also looking to get involved with the meshtastic project.
- purpleidea 4mo ago
  Looks proprietary. Need fully open source to guarantee that right long term.
  - ryanisnan 4mo ago
    I used to agree with this, but now I don't actually think I do. Apple's app privacy report can be used to guarantee network access for any iOS app - https://support.apple.com/en-us/102188 https://support.apple.com/en-us/102188
    - Cider9986 4mo ago
      That only shows the domain eg facebook.com, not facebook.com/tracking-script. There's no reason that they can't put all the bad stuff on the same essential, first-party domain needed for the app which makes DNS blocking and viewing not effective. That's why you can't block youtube ads with DNS, only with a browser-level adblocker because the browser adblocker is able to block the specific paths. You can view the full encrypted traffic with something like mitmproxy, but there's ways apps can detect or prevent it.
      - ryanisnan 4mo ago
        Good to know - I hadn't considered the proxy bit. For me, right now, I think it's conceivably a security advantage if the source isn't public. I know security by obscurity isn't a strategy alone, but with an incredibly difficult surface area to attack, I think user's using the app are very well protected, except for against nation states.
        4mo ago
cantalopes 4mo ago
Praise
michaelt 4mo ago
I sometimes wonder whether the people in the tech industry who worked on things like secure boot, attestation, and DRM saw this as the inevitability open source advocates always saw it as. Did they think, as they worked to transfer final say from users to corporations, by technical means, that politicians couldn't transfer that control to themselves by political means? Did they think they could lock things down to extract their 30% app store fee while enforcing rules through app review (and demonstrating censorship of sites like Tumblr) that politicians wouldn't want that same rule-setting, censoring power? Did they think their employers were going to prevent that transfer, that the trillion-dollar companies would become some sort of Che Guevara style insurgents, running a guerrilla campaign to overthrow the very system that made them trillion-dollar companies?
- wmf 4mo ago
  Did they think that the trillion-dollar companies would become some sort of Che Guevara style insurgents... Arguably this plan is mostly working for Apple.
- thin_carapace 4mo ago
  [flagged]
- uniqueuid 4mo ago
  That was nicely put. I think you can learn about it most by reading clever, capable people from big tech corporations. Their framing often involves tradeoffs against a slow but inevitable societal pressure that is helped by compromising on freedom. So I don't believe they are ignorant of all your points; it's rather that they don't see a realistic way how tech, corporations, and perhaps even ordinary people can go forward (being better, or richer, or more sophisticated or whatever) without making that compromise. It's as if they saw the forking paths of the future, and none will end up without technical restraints, regardless of whether they do it or whether things just get worse and someone else then does them.
  - vasco 4mo ago
    A lot of harm would be prevented if people didn't do bad shit under the assumption the next guy will do it if they don't. You're the next guy.
circadian 4mo ago
Kudos to signal for coming out on side with this, and quickly. I only hope that this stance is quickly picked up as a counterpoint to the ever-so-strong narrative that more hastily concocted sledge-hammer legislation is the best step forward. This step forward is instead of building understanding of, and solutions for, the erosion of communities, trust and empathy for others. I feel these things might (MIGHT!) be overlooked symptoms of poor investment, policies and governance for healthy society. Crikey, perhaps I shouldn't try and call that into account, it sounds like I might be cynical about politics. Oh dear...
purpleidea 4mo ago
Signal refuses to answer: Why won't they release/open source all of their backend infra automation scripts/tools/etc... There's no reasonable reason why a 501(c)(3) won't put this out there to make sure there's redundancy so we could built an alternate network if they're compromised by some gag order.
- deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
- Chu4eeno 4mo ago
  Probably because its leadership seems to have been taken over by more politically and less technically inclined people (for better and/or worse) who don't understand why it matters. The trade is we get (hopefully) people very dedicated to keeping the org developing the stuff alive and well-funded, and gaining mainstream acceptance/attention.
  - pseudalopex 4mo ago
    Signal did such things always. They delayed years to clarify licensing to allow iOS forks. And hid server source code for a year to hide MobileCoin integration.
    - ageedizzle 4mo ago
      Is Signal compromised?
      - trumpdong 4mo ago
        Yes, but it's still better than WhatsApp if those are your options.
- autoexec 4mo ago
  Signal just can't be trusted at this point. They're probably compromised. My theory is that that's why the very first line of their privacy is a lie saying that it's designed to never collect or store sensitive data when they keep a list of your contacts forever in the cloud (and in some cases now even message contents).
big85 4mo ago
So, in this order: 1. You need a camera on your computer to allow a third party to verify your age before viewing adult content 2. It applies to social media too 3. It applies to your operating system too 4. Unless you age verify, the law demands your computer must be powerful enough to run an AI, or be internet-equipped and send your private photos to a third party, to detect and prohibit nudity. It must be capable of running in real-time, presumably, to work on Facetime calls and such. Next step, certainly to outlaw most operating systems and older devices. Excellent news for Google, Apple, and Microsoft, bad for Linux and alternative operating systems. Remember when schools handed out Raspberry Pis? Edit: And they are asking for this to be implemented for free in three months, because nobody knows how software engineering works. Great job
- Bender 4mo ago
  With just enough fascistic pressure maybe Usenet can be great again. Just have to figure out how to filter known good content from the spam which I think can be solved with OpenPGP identities. Otherwise Tor and download managers for the patient people. Static generated galleries of pictures and videos spread across thousands of small sites. Some downsides of pushing people into dark corners is that all regulation goes out the window along with some tax revenue. Loss of tax revenue may be one way to get their attention.
- ProllyInfamous 4mo ago
  >Next step, certainly to outlaw most operating systems and older devices. They won't have to. Instead, they'll just make some new essentially mandatory tech which older devices cannot run – update or stop existing, societally. ---- Phones and email already seem this way (i.e. "required") – from my perspective as an internet user whom doesn't use phone/email, personally. Nobody believes me when answering "no phone, no email" – free-est man alive - their loss is disbelief.
  - pesus 4mo ago
    I am very curious how you make it in current society without a phone or email. It does sound incredibly freeing, but I'm definitely having trouble comprehending how it works.
skynotblue 4mo ago
[flagged]
- 0xbadcafebee 4mo ago
  Being pro-surveillance is the same thing as being pro-authoritarian unless you provide an alternate solution to prevent abuse of power.
  - skynotblue 4mo ago
    We already have warrants, judicial oversight and public audits to prevent abuse of power. Not sure what's authoritarian about standard overt surveillance.
    - big85 4mo ago
      No, not in the UK. XKEYSCORE surveillance tools are used without a warrant signed by a judge (the police grant themselves "warrants" covering unlimited uses for a period pending renewal, which I would have assumed constituted a "general warrant", something prohibited in UK constitutional law... but I am not a UK lawyer). MI5, MI6, and NCA are immune to Freedom of Information, and you cannot sue in open court; you can take it to the Investigatory Powers Tribunal, who will not even let your lawyer see the relevant information to the case.
      - skynotblue 4mo ago
        Everything you said is true and inteligence agencies should not be above the law. But the logical response to that is to fight for strict oversight, judicial reform, and to disallow the misuse of those tools, not to abolish surveillance entirely. A broken system should be fixed, not thrown away (unless there is an alternative better system which is not plagued with these issues).
    - deleted 4mo ago
      [deleted]
    - 4mo ago
OnlyNoobsRunJS 4mo ago
Same people screaming 1984 have five authenticator apps installed on their fingerprinted tracking device and 2fa with their phone number, and have no idea what 'sensors off' does. Palpable irony present when a chat provider whom requires personally identifiable information to use their service complains about privacy...
- Terr_ 4mo ago
  > Same people screaming 1984 have five authenticator apps installed "Yet you participate in society. Curious!" https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha/ https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha/
  - Terr_ 4mo ago
    Follow-up/P.S.: There's a Doctorow piece [0] which I think is relevant here. It's about how individual refusal (e.g. to quit your job at an employer when they require an authenticator-app) is an inferior substitute for "real" politics on both a practical and emotional level. > It's obvious why we might prefer to substitute voting or shopping for politics: they're activities you do alone. You don't have to find anyone else to do them with you. [...] Individual consumption choices don't change the world, but if you've been convinced that the only way to change the world is by voting with your wallet then when the world stays terrible, you can only conclude that your friends and neighbors have ruined by things by voting (shopping) wrong. [... and] every political disappointment in your life is down to your friends' personal defects. [0] https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/21/purity-culture/ https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/21/purity-culture/
- pesus 4mo ago
  Personally, I only have authenticator apps because my job requires them. I don't see any contradiction in being opposed to things you're forced into.
- HiPhish 4mo ago
  What's wrong with two-factor authentication? TOTP work without any network connection and only requires synchronized clocks to work. You could even do TOTP with pend and paper if you wanted (and were fast enough), no computer needed at all.
notepad0x90 4mo ago
Have they never heard of "the boy who cried wolf"? First of all, age verification is not mass surveillance, it is possible to verify your age without disclosing who you are to the site you're visiting, and without disclosing what site you visited to the government. There are even age verification services (and I do despise them fully, this should be a government provided service!) that use only facial features to determine your age (you can call it surveillance, but not "mass"). See, the thing is, no matter how good your intent is, no matter how noble your cause, if you use lies and half-truths to further your argument or resist change, it only serves to undermine it all. For example "They do not deserve surveillance," is so disingenuous, if a site is required to verify age, the only children whose age might be verified are those who might have been exposed to that harmful content otherwise anyways, they're not being selected for surveillance, no one is trying to spy on children (or could possibly benefit from doing so using this method, since it is so unreliable), but they're framing it as it is so. This isn't like "DRM" or "the nsa is spying on everyone", and there is a big difference between Signal (how are they involved in all this? is this just opportunistic politicking?) being required to verify peer-to-peer messaging from a porn site or or a live-cam site for sex workers requiring both parties to be age verified (where children do get trafficked!!). Don't get me wrong, I don't like the idea, i really hate it but the prevailing positions in areas of the internet like here is so irrational and unreasonable. You can't flash your private parts at children, you can't take children to a strip club, they're required by law to check IDs (even night clubs are!!). if that same interaction happens on the internet, suddenly no age verification is needed? Is it because this problem has been left unaddressed for so long that so many are just too used to "the old way of doing things" despite the ever increasing human suffering caused by lack of regulations and laws like this? I hope legislators grow a pair and stand up to these tech-crusaders who will burn down the world so long as they feel their corner is safe and secure. Shame on everyone who refuses to have a nuanced discussion on this and instead takes an all-or-nothing position against any sort of legislature that would reduce (not eliminate) the harm being done. To mean, such people are no different than catholics, teachers, administrators, and anyone else in a position to do something about harm against children but turned the other way because their little world would be too shaken otherwise. Hiding behind "mah privacy!!" doesn't absolve you of the responsibility to at least attempt to be nuanced about it, at least propose an actual solution instead of just "I don't what the solution is, but not this" or "parents are at fault, I don't care" or something lazy like that. I wish I didn't know that when it comes to their own interests, wannabe technocrats like these are ingenious in developing tech like homomorphic encryption, differential privacy and zero-knowledge-proofs; this isn't about anyone's privacy or mass surveillance, it's about preservation of the status quo, apathy and faulty slippery-slope fallacy thinking.
EmbarrassedHelp 4mo ago
What the UK is trying to do here is evil and authoritarian. Its the sort of thing people brushed off as conspiracy theories not long ago. It is completely and utterly unacceptable.
- brikym 4mo ago
  100%. The public tend to get very angry when police kill innocent people. So the govt want to squash any uprising which is exactly what they've been doing by taking down any video that allows people against the status quo to coalesce and coordinate. They want people to very energetic about voting for one of a few awful options which amount to /dev/null.
- Morromist 4mo ago
  I recently talked to a brit who expressed their fear of... knives. It blew my mind. The UK has one of the lowest murder rates in the world, 5 times less than the US, but they're so incredibly afraid. They are just plain embracing a culture of paranoia, cowardice and extreme surveillance. I wouldn't care because I don't live there except the dystopian tech and business models they're developing ends up crossing the seas.
  - jjgreen 4mo ago
    There is (seriously) agitation in the UK to ban pointy kitchen knives ... first hit on DDG for example https://theconversation.com/why-stopping-knife-crime-needs-to-start-in-the-kitchen-246258 https://theconversation.com/why-stopping-knife-crime-needs-t...
    - bloak 4mo ago
      To be fair, pointy knives are unnecessary. At least I haven't found a use for them, though I stab myself with them occasionally when unloading the dishwasher. Some people will tell you that they need a pointy knife for cutting tomatoes but they should try using a serrated knife instead: it's much better.
windowliker 4mo ago
How long until we find out the politicians have written in an exemption for themselves and the security apparatus? I hope my pessimism is unwarranted in this case, but it certainly isn't unfounded.
- iugtmkbdfil834 4mo ago
  Meh, at this point it is pretty much standard clause. They are all copying each other's homework.
OhioMan2943 4mo ago
At least we all know who western politicians are controlled by now and why they are really doing this.
Havoc 4mo ago
The UK gov is just getting worse and worse at law making
- varispeed 4mo ago
  and civil service is blindly following orders.
  - ksec 4mo ago
    You should watch Yes Minister. They certainly don't.
    - varispeed 4mo ago
      They do. The tenders don't write themselves. The scale of corruption is unprecedented, yet nothing - as it seems - is being reported or even questioned by civil service.
      - ksec 4mo ago
        I can tell you they don't. They do question it when they don't agree with it. Which is to say they do agree with a lot of things being done. And that is as far as I can say.
        varispeed 4mo ago
        There is no evidence of that.
- EmbarrassedHelp 4mo ago
  The UK should just be banned from modern technology until their government has evolved socially enough to respect privacy. Companies need to pull out and stay out, because that's the only way the UK government will learn a lesson.
  - 4mo ago
BLKNSLVR 4mo ago
Surveillance is not education, and it is education that will reap long term improvement. Education is hard but effective whilst surveillance is easy and ineffective. Guess which option politicians take?
- trashb 4mo ago
  Guess which funding is getting impacted to enable this kind of law.
  - BLKNSLVR 4mo ago
    ...and the race to the bottom finds another pathway to acceleration.
greenleafone7 4mo ago
They know. That's not why they are doing it.
leavenotracks 4mo ago
I didn’t mind Starmer but this is finally giving me the leg up onto the anti-Starmer bandwagon. What a dreadful legacy to leave - a sad attempt to get the biggest possible bang for the smallest possible buck. Also, 3 months? Perhaps that is as long as he expects to be pm.
- varispeed 4mo ago
  Probably Palantir folks are giving him an offer he can't refuse. One last push before retirement into the sunset.
varispeed 4mo ago
I am ready to receive Apple's or Microsoft's AI buttplug with government spying software installed.
- doublerabbit 4mo ago
  The good news, it's inserted and installed. The bad, it doesn't bring pleasure.
coretx 4mo ago
You don't give a stranger the keys to your house but we run their code every day. This is wrong regardless of there being surveillance present. We all know where it went wrong and can't say we did not know.
briandear 4mo ago
This is a country that has arrested people for social media posts. It’s also a crime in the UK to offend someone. Orwell identified the genetic defect in the British genome 80 years ago.
- gambiting 4mo ago
  >>This is a country that has arrested people for social media posts And if you saw these media posts, I'm sure you'd agree with those arrests in majority of the cases. >>It’s also a crime in the UK to offend someone. Is that what American "news" tell you? Because it's absolutely not true.
- trumpdong 4mo ago
  What were the posts?
dgroshev 4mo ago
This is really disingenuous coming from Signal who pioneered secure compute architecture for a number of useful features [1][2]. On-device checks are no more "surveillance" than Signal's private contact discovery is, and the same slippery slope argument applies there. It's also technically incoherent: the exact same kind of "surveillance" is already applied by every single phone, because that's how the Photos app (or whatever it's called on Android) searches for cat pictures based on the text "cat". I can't recall any Signal statements about cat recognition technology leading to "reporting people to government authorities". The "cover-ups" link right in the beginning is a real mask-off moment though. This is not a measured statement informed by the reality of modern Britain. It's an American view informed by the twitter cesspool and divisive rhetoric of the far right. It's a real shame to see Signal falling so low. [1]: https://signal.org/blog/private-contact-discovery/ https://signal.org/blog/private-contact-discovery/ [2]: https://signal.org/blog/secure-value-recovery/ https://signal.org/blog/secure-value-recovery/
- pcthrowaway 4mo ago
  > It's also technically incoherent: the exact same kind of "surveillance" is already applied by every single phone, because that's how the Photos app (or whatever it's called on Android) searches for cat pictures based on the text "cat". I can't recall any Signal statements about cat recognition technology leading to "reporting people to government authorities". Are you suggesting that the automatic scanning of photos on a phone (which has led to wrongful arrests[1]) is not surveillance? [1]: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/08/googles-scans-private-photos-led-false-accusations-child-abuse https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/08/googles-scans-private-...
Nevermark 4mo ago
Surveillance replaces ostensible individual fringe threats with a clear dangerous pervasive and (for practical purposes) irreversible threat that monotonically aggregates increasing centralized leverage over every aspect our lives, direct and indirect. Knowledge is power. Forced revelation of our inner lives puts each of us in a position of vulnerability. Even when "not abused", the very real latent threat actively takes away freedoms of thought and action. It is extreme abuse. It undermines any sense that the state works for the people, when it operationally embodies a maximalized one-way threat over all citizens. AI collation exponentially compounds the threat, the passive and active damage. One of the wisest ethical/safety concepts ever: "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated." Democracy that sets up the levers of total autocracy is the greatest possible perversion and threat to democracy. Democracy only works as long as it recognizes government is the greatest threat to freedom. And that strict limitations on its power over citizens is the only defense.
TheOtherHobbes 4mo ago
Governments have been pushing surveillance since the earliest days of the consumer Internet. The earliest example I can remember is the Clipper Chip. That was dead three years after it was proposed. This current idiocy - proposed by a PM who promoted a very good friend of the most notorious paedophile in recent history to ambassador, against the recommendations of the civil service - is similarly doomed. Three months to implement huge changes to every OS on the planet? Like that's even remotely likely.
smashah 4mo ago
Not even Saudi Arabia does the kinda draconian bullshit the UK is doing nowadays. This is what happens when your government is occupied by foreign agent traitors.
vivzkestrel 4mo ago
- does anyone have actual studies or reports or arxiv papers or something that actually concludes that surveillance is not safety? - how do you know that it doesnt cut down crimes or deter criminals or make identifying criminals easier? - no seriously think of me as the stupidest person on the planet and explain to me why everyone is super duper paranoid about surveillance - what other methods do you recommend for tracking , catching criminals, terrorists and anti social elements?
themoose8 4mo ago
Is it possible the child nudity detection could be done on-device, fully private? This wouldn't amount to surveillance. The statistics on global child porngraphy rings are quite shocking. The UK is a big market consumer for these images/streams.
- trashb 4mo ago
  Detection, even if "on-device, fully private". Is meant to notify others, the person viewing the image already knows what they are viewing. I would argue that the notifying of others of what (kind of imagery/category) you are viewing, is the main violation of privacy, even if the actual imagery is withheld. Actually withholding the image may make it harder to fight the accusation (in court) if wrongly categorized. For now the category argued seems to be "nude children" but what safeguards are there that prevent another category "politically sensitive"?
  - naishoya 4mo ago
    safeguards? Are any of us expecting that there are safeguards in today's global political environment? in tomorrow's? Honestly, the only safeguards against abuse of surveillance are that the surveillance not happen in the first place. Once it has happened, the only safeguards keeping the owners of the system from using it to coerce and control the masses exist in the form of pitchforks and ropes wielded by the masses, and the days when that was a real potential for repealing any such coercion and control are fully in the distant past. These systems are made possible and installed beyond the reach of any constituent based consent - see the current condition of Ring cameras, Flock, and the many tools created by Palantir et. al and much like the boiled frog analogy the citizenry has sat in their movie theatre and restaurant seats telling each other soothing lies about how the goal was to make us even safer from ourselves and now we are steps away from the fully immersive per-person verified identity and 24-7 observation of what everything, everyone read, writes, says, and does. Exactly as the 'foil hats' have been telling them would happen if they didn't speak up sooner. Tough cookies, we all get exactly what we deserve for letting it get this far out of hand. It's no use crying over spilt milk.
- trumpdong 4mo ago
nelox 4mo ago
[flagged]
BLACKCRAB 4mo ago
[dead]
rbanffy 4mo ago
Surveillance is a tool. It's neither right nor wrong, good or evil. It can be used to create safety (as it is by police forces, when authorized by judges, in compliance with democratically voted laws), or can be misused to create terror (and, as we've seen before, it never needed cellphones for that). We should guard against the misuses and create enough legal frameworks to protect individuals' privacy (and aggressively uphold those protections). Private companies already do that - if I query a database for PII without proper approvals, or I query it outside the approval's boundaries, it'll take a couple minutes for me to receive something between a harshly worded e-mail and a visit from a couple large people who appear surgically incapable of smiling.
- trashb 4mo ago
  > Surveillance is a tool. It's neither right nor wrong, good or evil. What is it a tool for, it is a tool for observing while no person is present therefore breaking privacy. Privacy, a state in which one is not observed or disturbed by other people. Any tool is (as long as it exists) always used for right or wrong, good or evil. However what might be good or evil is very subjective. Both in the moment and looking back on the use of the tool. Therefore it might be best to consider not creating the tool at all, instead of the current we'll try it and see what happens rhetoric.
  - rbanffy 4mo ago
    > What is it a tool for, A nuclear weapon is a tool. You can use it to blast a city-killing asteroid, one you just noticed, into pieces that'd burn in the atmosphere (and miss the city). You can also use it to mass murder an entire population. > it is a tool for observing while no person is present therefore breaking privacy. The capacity exists, but it's not necessarily used all the time. We should create the legal frameworks to protect ourselves from the misuse of the technology.
    - mcurist 4mo ago
      This might make sense as some entirely abstract theoretical statement, but in real political theory it's not exactly sound to imagine a government spending a massive pile of cash to create a tool that they never use, and if it's usefulness is greater when misused it will be misused. Then it hits reality and it takes about 5 minutes for governments to start abusing it and when caught will retroactively legalise their actions https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-23769206 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-23769206
kolesnikov-arch 4mo ago
[dead]
rimeice 4mo ago
I also can't stand the privacy violation of CSS. But > Child safety looks like well-funded education, robust social services, and meaningful guardrails on the very AI technologies and platforms the current government is eagerly courting. is such a weak, unrealistic, slow and idealistic solution to the real suffering of children. I was hoping this thread might offer up some better alternatives.
ibejoeb 4mo ago
From https://www.gov.uk/government/news/new-plans-to-stop-children-taking-sharing-or-viewing-nude-images https://www.gov.uk/government/news/new-plans-to-stop-childre...: > Despite [iphone age verification] children can still take, view, share and save nude images. The government therefore wants Apple and Google to block nudity across the whole device by default, so they can only be deactivated via age assurance. We tolerate the systematic child rape and run cover for the perps, but teens sending n00dz is a bridge too far. It's time for the UK to nut up and start holding these kids accountable. This works well, too, because it's deactivated on the devices used by adults, so they can continue to view their child porn, I guess. Is there another reading of this?
toephu2 4mo ago
"One of the most prolific criminals in all of San Francisco tells @adam22 that “crime in San Francisco is over with” because of Flock cameras + drones. He complains that he can’t even do drivebys anymore. It’s simple: when the risk of getting caught is too high, crime plummets." https://x.com/rahul/status/2063984276610114001 https://x.com/rahul/status/2063984276610114001

691 points by g0xA52A2A 4mo ago

stronglikedan 4mo ago

> Surveillance Is Not Safety Maybe not, but as long as the average person thinks it is, it may as well be.

Animats 4mo ago
It's a great meme, though. Use it more.
ktallett 4mo ago
The average person doesn't have any knowledge on this system.
rockskon 4mo ago
Does the average person think this? Perception of what other people think doesn't always line up with what they actually think.
- pydry 4mo ago
  I doubt the average person gives it much thought at all. This certainly isn't a result of democratic overreach by a concerned group of citizens. No demographic is demanding this. It's one of those "create the infrastructure for stasi 2.0" the epstein elite tries to periodically ram down our throats ironically using "think of the children" to manufacture consent. The last time they did this they contracted saatchi and saatchi to run an a disturbing campaign: https://londondaily.com/revealed-uk-gov-t-plans-publicity-blitz-to-undermine-privacy-of-your-chats https://londondaily.com/revealed-uk-gov-t-plans-publicity-bl...
- cucumber3732842 4mo ago
  The average person doesn't think that far ahead. They just hear "a cause I like can be furthered by implementing 1984" and so they support it. Check out any comment section on transportation policy, environmental policy, professional licensing for trades other than software. Look at how HN, people who should know how this sausage is made, schemes about how policy and technology can be used by government to enforce it's will and preferences upon other people in ways they cannot avoid or resist. It's not a case of divide and conquer, it's a case of completely lacking principals. Nobody believes in privacy, civil rights or that the application of government (violence) should be expensive and difficult and politically fraught when it's an application that they like. Nobody is thinking far enough ahead to wonder how those systems will be used when the whims and dispositions of government and society shift. Just this morning I was reading a comment where some jerk was scheming about how the government should (the implication being that now that AI makes it easy to automate) scrape property listings and fine people for not pulling permits when there's a diff from the prior listings and that the whole thing can be automated and anyone innocent can just have the government tour their home to prove it.
  - iugtmkbdfil834 4mo ago
    There is something to be said about true believers, who will go out of their way to not 'live and let live'. I remember getting extra antsy when one such individual was flying drones over private properties looking for signs for what they believe is an issue. Tech.. it truly is a tool and something of a true reveal of character. It immediately shows what you do with power.
    - cucumber3732842 4mo ago
      I don't respect those people unless they're willing to suffer the same tactics used upon them to enforce other issues.
- pixl97 4mo ago
  >Does the average person think this? The average person hold all kinds of conflicting views. The average middle class parent will surveil the shit out of their children, for example. Hence the title of the article is not completely correct. The outcome of surveillance is the intent of the entity surveilling. In the case of the parent, this is likely the safety of their offspring. In the case of a state entity, it's likely the safety of the people in power of the state. This second type of safety is very dangerous and does not include your safety.
  - iugtmkbdfil834 4mo ago
    I think you are onto something with intent here. By now, we effectively know that various power centers are getting away with things that normal people do not. If true, the concern is not that we are getting away with things, but that we might be thinking that maybe current arrangement is no longer suitable. In other words, they are literally preparing for a worst case scenario. And to me, this seems silly now. As in, I buy the fear of a peasant uprising and being on the wrong side of the scythe, but I sincerely doubt peasants will actually do anything.
  - trashb 4mo ago
    > The average middle class parent will surveil the shit out of their children, for example. Most of those parents will argue that they have the right to do that and are actively recommending other parents to do the same. It happens so much that a local celebrity actually said the following recently (paraphrased)"As long as you live in my house I(the parent) have the right to go through your room, your stuff and your phone whenever I want". In my country this is actually illegal as kids have a right to privacy just like the parents, though it happens so much since kids don't have the resources to sue their parents therefore people think this is normal (and kids grow up thinking it is normal).
- madaxe_again 4mo ago
  The average person does not think anything much. They receive the meme, they transmit the meme. No processing occurs.
cyanydeez 4mo ago
isn't more as long as the average billionair thinks it is. It's not like it's the average person pushing it.
circadian 4mo ago
https://xkcd.com/610/ https://xkcd.com/610/
cwmoore 4mo ago
If only the average person had tools and access to all such information.

ktallett 4mo ago

Won't somebody think of the children appears to be the world's most effective method of bringing in restrictive and privacy destroying laws, yet they just don't work.

christoph 4mo ago
Well yes, the great cabal of people bringing in these immense rafts of surveillance are the very people who commit, or who certainly hang out with the people who commit the most heinous acts. See the Epstein files. Notice the same people will also talk during the daytime about morals and equality, while then conducting genocide in the evening.
Lio 4mo ago
We'll see. I can't be the only voter fed up with how Labour are handling this. I find they way that Peter Kyle and Jess Philips have dismissed privacy concerns about online surveillance particularly condescending. Come the next general election they are going to be paid back for this. (Oh, and I appreciate Signal speaking up and have just donated to them again for doing so).
- ls612 4mo ago
  The idea is that people who have politics like yours can be “visited” by the police and asked to “voluntarily” come down to the station for an interview about “hateful rhetoric” on social media. Doesn’t matter how you vote if actual political opposition is outlawed, which is where the UK is heading rapidly aided by digital surveillance.
  - trumpdong 4mo ago
    Anyone can be visited by anyone and asked anything. Isn't that part of freedom?

budududuroiu 4mo ago

The ratchet ratcheting: client side scanning, then remote attestation to ensure client side scanning works, digital identity verification, etc etc.

Ajedi32 4mo ago
I'm slowly coming around to the idea that closed source software was the original sin of the modern digital surveillance state. Due to the fact that it can't easily be modified without the source, software is uniquely able to act against the interests of its owner in a way almost no other product can. Client side scanning wouldn't be viable if people could just install a mod that disables it, and remote attestation would be a much harder sell if the availability of such mods were expected. Maybe software copyright should require releasing the source and build tools just like patents require releasing the design...

ajb 4mo ago

Yes, but this is preaching to the choir. The counter must be as visceral is the claim. They make an emotional pitch:your children are in danger, surveillance is the solution. The counter must show the dangers in visceral, emotionally relevant way. This surveillance is actually a risk to parents and children as well - that by the accusation of an opaque, unaccountable system, you will be labelled a pedophile, and your kids taken away. That when sharing a picture of your own child with your own mother, you will have to worry about what the electronic bureaucracy will label your picture as. Abstractions like privacy,and categorical claims, aren't going to reverse this. A properly pitched campaign could do. Sure, complain that politicians and the public are dumb. That may make you feel better but it won't change this an iota. Talking to people in the terms they care about might.

lifeisstillgood 4mo ago
>>> That when sharing a picture of your own child with your own mother, you will have to worry about what the electronic bureaucracy will label your picture as. I 100% agree on the need to counter emotional fire with emotional fire. And this is the right way to combat this sort of overreach However, I do think that “the choir” need to rethink what is and is not privacy - a huge amount of the benefits of having our every waking moment monitored by the virtual world (which is going to happen) can be lost if we don’t allow epidemiology to follow our digital selves. Detecting one’s word use is slipping might signal a trip to the doctors or a thousand other digital tells that will help us improve our lives. If we have to fight against ads and digital searches for terrorism, at least let’s get the benefits too.
- ajb 4mo ago
  That's all very well, but we just plain don't have a legal, economic, or technical system which will allow separation of the good uses from the bad uses. Once data is in someone else's possession, there's f-all way to prevent it being used to do whatever the possessor wants. Even if there is a legal agreement, it's easily abrogated, or overridden by insolvency law, or by a company having a "we can update our terms" clause. Some of this I can imagine how to address - insolvency law could be changed, for example - but in the absence of a fully robust system, promises of "we will only use your data for good" are not credible. Those who actually want to use data for good should be on the side of robust assurance of that, not just plead that they can be trusted and that no accountability is needed.

areoform 4mo ago

Signal should come out swinging. Here's a pitch. The Government is going to put a snitch on every phone, tape every bedroom, and listen in every evening on every home. Every doctor's visit. Every therapy session. Every pub. Every street. Every store. When the snitches phone home, what you type to your lover may get the cops sent to your home. Artificial stasi in every desktop, laptop, tablet, camera, and phone. Around every corner. In every living room. No one will be exempt from their gaze. Are you ready for your vacuum cleaner to phone home?

saltwatercowboy 4mo ago
AKA The Witness in Nick Harkaway's novel Gnomon.
deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]
iugtmkbdfil834 4mo ago
Shrug. If they don't, they will lose the customers who do care about privacy and they won't lose the ones that don't .. right away. However, it will near guarantee further fragmentation and circling a new solution that will be recommended to normies by their techy friends or current batch of cool kids. We have been here before. The only way to win the game is not to play. Especially with government, the moment you start playing, you lose.
thenthenthen 4mo ago
Signal the messaging app/platform? A funny thing is that Signal barely works (with VPN ofc) here in China. Sending media/images is impossible. Sometimes it’s blacked out weeks on end. Everything else seems to work fine ish (again with VPN ofc).
- autoexec 4mo ago
  Signal outright lies in their privacy policy. It opens with "Signal is designed to never collect or store any sensitive information." but they collect and permanently store sensitive information in the cloud (user's name, photo, number, and contacts) and in some cases they even store the contents of messages. They've steadfastly refused to update the policy even as they introduced those features deceiving users about their risks. Signal can't really be trusted at this point.

ryanisnan 4mo ago

Signal is on the right side here. I think it's time for us techies to fight back by developing the future. I'm trying to do my part - https://mediaden.ca https://mediaden.ca Also looking to get involved with the meshtastic project.

purpleidea 4mo ago
Looks proprietary. Need fully open source to guarantee that right long term.
- ryanisnan 4mo ago
  I used to agree with this, but now I don't actually think I do. Apple's app privacy report can be used to guarantee network access for any iOS app - https://support.apple.com/en-us/102188 https://support.apple.com/en-us/102188
  - Cider9986 4mo ago
    That only shows the domain eg facebook.com, not facebook.com/tracking-script. There's no reason that they can't put all the bad stuff on the same essential, first-party domain needed for the app which makes DNS blocking and viewing not effective. That's why you can't block youtube ads with DNS, only with a browser-level adblocker because the browser adblocker is able to block the specific paths. You can view the full encrypted traffic with something like mitmproxy, but there's ways apps can detect or prevent it.
    - ryanisnan 4mo ago
      Good to know - I hadn't considered the proxy bit. For me, right now, I think it's conceivably a security advantage if the source isn't public. I know security by obscurity isn't a strategy alone, but with an incredibly difficult surface area to attack, I think user's using the app are very well protected, except for against nation states.
      - 4mo ago

cantalopes 4mo ago

Praise

michaelt 4mo ago

I sometimes wonder whether the people in the tech industry who worked on things like secure boot, attestation, and DRM saw this as the inevitability open source advocates always saw it as. Did they think, as they worked to transfer final say from users to corporations, by technical means, that politicians couldn't transfer that control to themselves by political means? Did they think they could lock things down to extract their 30% app store fee while enforcing rules through app review (and demonstrating censorship of sites like Tumblr) that politicians wouldn't want that same rule-setting, censoring power? Did they think their employers were going to prevent that transfer, that the trillion-dollar companies would become some sort of Che Guevara style insurgents, running a guerrilla campaign to overthrow the very system that made them trillion-dollar companies?

wmf 4mo ago
Did they think that the trillion-dollar companies would become some sort of Che Guevara style insurgents... Arguably this plan is mostly working for Apple.
thin_carapace 4mo ago
[flagged]
uniqueuid 4mo ago
That was nicely put. I think you can learn about it most by reading clever, capable people from big tech corporations. Their framing often involves tradeoffs against a slow but inevitable societal pressure that is helped by compromising on freedom. So I don't believe they are ignorant of all your points; it's rather that they don't see a realistic way how tech, corporations, and perhaps even ordinary people can go forward (being better, or richer, or more sophisticated or whatever) without making that compromise. It's as if they saw the forking paths of the future, and none will end up without technical restraints, regardless of whether they do it or whether things just get worse and someone else then does them.
- vasco 4mo ago
  A lot of harm would be prevented if people didn't do bad shit under the assumption the next guy will do it if they don't. You're the next guy.

circadian 4mo ago

Kudos to signal for coming out on side with this, and quickly. I only hope that this stance is quickly picked up as a counterpoint to the ever-so-strong narrative that more hastily concocted sledge-hammer legislation is the best step forward. This step forward is instead of building understanding of, and solutions for, the erosion of communities, trust and empathy for others. I feel these things might (MIGHT!) be overlooked symptoms of poor investment, policies and governance for healthy society. Crikey, perhaps I shouldn't try and call that into account, it sounds like I might be cynical about politics. Oh dear...

purpleidea 4mo ago

Signal refuses to answer: Why won't they release/open source all of their backend infra automation scripts/tools/etc... There's no reasonable reason why a 501(c)(3) won't put this out there to make sure there's redundancy so we could built an alternate network if they're compromised by some gag order.

deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]
Chu4eeno 4mo ago
Probably because its leadership seems to have been taken over by more politically and less technically inclined people (for better and/or worse) who don't understand why it matters. The trade is we get (hopefully) people very dedicated to keeping the org developing the stuff alive and well-funded, and gaining mainstream acceptance/attention.
- pseudalopex 4mo ago
  Signal did such things always. They delayed years to clarify licensing to allow iOS forks. And hid server source code for a year to hide MobileCoin integration.
  - ageedizzle 4mo ago
    Is Signal compromised?
    - trumpdong 4mo ago
      Yes, but it's still better than WhatsApp if those are your options.
autoexec 4mo ago
Signal just can't be trusted at this point. They're probably compromised. My theory is that that's why the very first line of their privacy is a lie saying that it's designed to never collect or store sensitive data when they keep a list of your contacts forever in the cloud (and in some cases now even message contents).

big85 4mo ago

So, in this order: 1. You need a camera on your computer to allow a third party to verify your age before viewing adult content 2. It applies to social media too 3. It applies to your operating system too 4. Unless you age verify, the law demands your computer must be powerful enough to run an AI, or be internet-equipped and send your private photos to a third party, to detect and prohibit nudity. It must be capable of running in real-time, presumably, to work on Facetime calls and such. Next step, certainly to outlaw most operating systems and older devices. Excellent news for Google, Apple, and Microsoft, bad for Linux and alternative operating systems. Remember when schools handed out Raspberry Pis? Edit: And they are asking for this to be implemented for free in three months, because nobody knows how software engineering works. Great job

Bender 4mo ago
With just enough fascistic pressure maybe Usenet can be great again. Just have to figure out how to filter known good content from the spam which I think can be solved with OpenPGP identities. Otherwise Tor and download managers for the patient people. Static generated galleries of pictures and videos spread across thousands of small sites. Some downsides of pushing people into dark corners is that all regulation goes out the window along with some tax revenue. Loss of tax revenue may be one way to get their attention.
ProllyInfamous 4mo ago
>Next step, certainly to outlaw most operating systems and older devices. They won't have to. Instead, they'll just make some new essentially mandatory tech which older devices cannot run – update or stop existing, societally. ---- Phones and email already seem this way (i.e. "required") – from my perspective as an internet user whom doesn't use phone/email, personally. Nobody believes me when answering "no phone, no email" – free-est man alive - their loss is disbelief.
- pesus 4mo ago
  I am very curious how you make it in current society without a phone or email. It does sound incredibly freeing, but I'm definitely having trouble comprehending how it works.

skynotblue 4mo ago

[flagged]

0xbadcafebee 4mo ago
Being pro-surveillance is the same thing as being pro-authoritarian unless you provide an alternate solution to prevent abuse of power.
- skynotblue 4mo ago
  We already have warrants, judicial oversight and public audits to prevent abuse of power. Not sure what's authoritarian about standard overt surveillance.
  - big85 4mo ago
    No, not in the UK. XKEYSCORE surveillance tools are used without a warrant signed by a judge (the police grant themselves "warrants" covering unlimited uses for a period pending renewal, which I would have assumed constituted a "general warrant", something prohibited in UK constitutional law... but I am not a UK lawyer). MI5, MI6, and NCA are immune to Freedom of Information, and you cannot sue in open court; you can take it to the Investigatory Powers Tribunal, who will not even let your lawyer see the relevant information to the case.
    - skynotblue 4mo ago
      Everything you said is true and inteligence agencies should not be above the law. But the logical response to that is to fight for strict oversight, judicial reform, and to disallow the misuse of those tools, not to abolish surveillance entirely. A broken system should be fixed, not thrown away (unless there is an alternative better system which is not plagued with these issues).
  - deleted 4mo ago
    [deleted]
  - 4mo ago

OnlyNoobsRunJS 4mo ago

Same people screaming 1984 have five authenticator apps installed on their fingerprinted tracking device and 2fa with their phone number, and have no idea what 'sensors off' does. Palpable irony present when a chat provider whom requires personally identifiable information to use their service complains about privacy...

Terr_ 4mo ago
> Same people screaming 1984 have five authenticator apps installed "Yet you participate in society. Curious!" https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha/ https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha/
- Terr_ 4mo ago
  Follow-up/P.S.: There's a Doctorow piece [0] which I think is relevant here. It's about how individual refusal (e.g. to quit your job at an employer when they require an authenticator-app) is an inferior substitute for "real" politics on both a practical and emotional level. > It's obvious why we might prefer to substitute voting or shopping for politics: they're activities you do alone. You don't have to find anyone else to do them with you. [...] Individual consumption choices don't change the world, but if you've been convinced that the only way to change the world is by voting with your wallet then when the world stays terrible, you can only conclude that your friends and neighbors have ruined by things by voting (shopping) wrong. [... and] every political disappointment in your life is down to your friends' personal defects. [0] https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/21/purity-culture/ https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/21/purity-culture/
pesus 4mo ago
Personally, I only have authenticator apps because my job requires them. I don't see any contradiction in being opposed to things you're forced into.
HiPhish 4mo ago
What's wrong with two-factor authentication? TOTP work without any network connection and only requires synchronized clocks to work. You could even do TOTP with pend and paper if you wanted (and were fast enough), no computer needed at all.

notepad0x90 4mo ago

Have they never heard of "the boy who cried wolf"? First of all, age verification is not mass surveillance, it is possible to verify your age without disclosing who you are to the site you're visiting, and without disclosing what site you visited to the government. There are even age verification services (and I do despise them fully, this should be a government provided service!) that use only facial features to determine your age (you can call it surveillance, but not "mass"). See, the thing is, no matter how good your intent is, no matter how noble your cause, if you use lies and half-truths to further your argument or resist change, it only serves to undermine it all. For example "They do not deserve surveillance," is so disingenuous, if a site is required to verify age, the only children whose age might be verified are those who might have been exposed to that harmful content otherwise anyways, they're not being selected for surveillance, no one is trying to spy on children (or could possibly benefit from doing so using this method, since it is so unreliable), but they're framing it as it is so. This isn't like "DRM" or "the nsa is spying on everyone", and there is a big difference between Signal (how are they involved in all this? is this just opportunistic politicking?) being required to verify peer-to-peer messaging from a porn site or or a live-cam site for sex workers requiring both parties to be age verified (where children do get trafficked!!). Don't get me wrong, I don't like the idea, i really hate it but the prevailing positions in areas of the internet like here is so irrational and unreasonable. You can't flash your private parts at children, you can't take children to a strip club, they're required by law to check IDs (even night clubs are!!). if that same interaction happens on the internet, suddenly no age verification is needed? Is it because this problem has been left unaddressed for so long that so many are just too used to "the old way of doing things" despite the ever increasing human suffering caused by lack of regulations and laws like this? I hope legislators grow a pair and stand up to these tech-crusaders who will burn down the world so long as they feel their corner is safe and secure. Shame on everyone who refuses to have a nuanced discussion on this and instead takes an all-or-nothing position against any sort of legislature that would reduce (not eliminate) the harm being done. To mean, such people are no different than catholics, teachers, administrators, and anyone else in a position to do something about harm against children but turned the other way because their little world would be too shaken otherwise. Hiding behind "mah privacy!!" doesn't absolve you of the responsibility to at least attempt to be nuanced about it, at least propose an actual solution instead of just "I don't what the solution is, but not this" or "parents are at fault, I don't care" or something lazy like that. I wish I didn't know that when it comes to their own interests, wannabe technocrats like these are ingenious in developing tech like homomorphic encryption, differential privacy and zero-knowledge-proofs; this isn't about anyone's privacy or mass surveillance, it's about preservation of the status quo, apathy and faulty slippery-slope fallacy thinking.

EmbarrassedHelp 4mo ago

What the UK is trying to do here is evil and authoritarian. Its the sort of thing people brushed off as conspiracy theories not long ago. It is completely and utterly unacceptable.

brikym 4mo ago
100%. The public tend to get very angry when police kill innocent people. So the govt want to squash any uprising which is exactly what they've been doing by taking down any video that allows people against the status quo to coalesce and coordinate. They want people to very energetic about voting for one of a few awful options which amount to /dev/null.
Morromist 4mo ago
I recently talked to a brit who expressed their fear of... knives. It blew my mind. The UK has one of the lowest murder rates in the world, 5 times less than the US, but they're so incredibly afraid. They are just plain embracing a culture of paranoia, cowardice and extreme surveillance. I wouldn't care because I don't live there except the dystopian tech and business models they're developing ends up crossing the seas.
- jjgreen 4mo ago
  There is (seriously) agitation in the UK to ban pointy kitchen knives ... first hit on DDG for example https://theconversation.com/why-stopping-knife-crime-needs-to-start-in-the-kitchen-246258 https://theconversation.com/why-stopping-knife-crime-needs-t...
  - bloak 4mo ago
    To be fair, pointy knives are unnecessary. At least I haven't found a use for them, though I stab myself with them occasionally when unloading the dishwasher. Some people will tell you that they need a pointy knife for cutting tomatoes but they should try using a serrated knife instead: it's much better.

windowliker 4mo ago

How long until we find out the politicians have written in an exemption for themselves and the security apparatus? I hope my pessimism is unwarranted in this case, but it certainly isn't unfounded.

iugtmkbdfil834 4mo ago
Meh, at this point it is pretty much standard clause. They are all copying each other's homework.

OhioMan2943 4mo ago

At least we all know who western politicians are controlled by now and why they are really doing this.

Havoc 4mo ago

The UK gov is just getting worse and worse at law making

varispeed 4mo ago
and civil service is blindly following orders.
- ksec 4mo ago
  You should watch Yes Minister. They certainly don't.
  - varispeed 4mo ago
    They do. The tenders don't write themselves. The scale of corruption is unprecedented, yet nothing - as it seems - is being reported or even questioned by civil service.
    - ksec 4mo ago
      I can tell you they don't. They do question it when they don't agree with it. Which is to say they do agree with a lot of things being done. And that is as far as I can say.
      - varispeed 4mo ago
        There is no evidence of that.
EmbarrassedHelp 4mo ago
The UK should just be banned from modern technology until their government has evolved socially enough to respect privacy. Companies need to pull out and stay out, because that's the only way the UK government will learn a lesson.
- 4mo ago

BLKNSLVR 4mo ago

Surveillance is not education, and it is education that will reap long term improvement. Education is hard but effective whilst surveillance is easy and ineffective. Guess which option politicians take?

trashb 4mo ago
Guess which funding is getting impacted to enable this kind of law.
- BLKNSLVR 4mo ago
  ...and the race to the bottom finds another pathway to acceleration.

greenleafone7 4mo ago

They know. That's not why they are doing it.

leavenotracks 4mo ago

I didn’t mind Starmer but this is finally giving me the leg up onto the anti-Starmer bandwagon. What a dreadful legacy to leave - a sad attempt to get the biggest possible bang for the smallest possible buck. Also, 3 months? Perhaps that is as long as he expects to be pm.

varispeed 4mo ago
Probably Palantir folks are giving him an offer he can't refuse. One last push before retirement into the sunset.

varispeed 4mo ago

I am ready to receive Apple's or Microsoft's AI buttplug with government spying software installed.

doublerabbit 4mo ago
The good news, it's inserted and installed. The bad, it doesn't bring pleasure.

coretx 4mo ago

You don't give a stranger the keys to your house but we run their code every day. This is wrong regardless of there being surveillance present. We all know where it went wrong and can't say we did not know.

briandear 4mo ago

This is a country that has arrested people for social media posts. It’s also a crime in the UK to offend someone. Orwell identified the genetic defect in the British genome 80 years ago.

gambiting 4mo ago
>>This is a country that has arrested people for social media posts And if you saw these media posts, I'm sure you'd agree with those arrests in majority of the cases. >>It’s also a crime in the UK to offend someone. Is that what American "news" tell you? Because it's absolutely not true.
trumpdong 4mo ago
What were the posts?

dgroshev 4mo ago

This is really disingenuous coming from Signal who pioneered secure compute architecture for a number of useful features [1][2]. On-device checks are no more "surveillance" than Signal's private contact discovery is, and the same slippery slope argument applies there. It's also technically incoherent: the exact same kind of "surveillance" is already applied by every single phone, because that's how the Photos app (or whatever it's called on Android) searches for cat pictures based on the text "cat". I can't recall any Signal statements about cat recognition technology leading to "reporting people to government authorities". The "cover-ups" link right in the beginning is a real mask-off moment though. This is not a measured statement informed by the reality of modern Britain. It's an American view informed by the twitter cesspool and divisive rhetoric of the far right. It's a real shame to see Signal falling so low. [1]: https://signal.org/blog/private-contact-discovery/ https://signal.org/blog/private-contact-discovery/ [2]: https://signal.org/blog/secure-value-recovery/ https://signal.org/blog/secure-value-recovery/

pcthrowaway 4mo ago
> It's also technically incoherent: the exact same kind of "surveillance" is already applied by every single phone, because that's how the Photos app (or whatever it's called on Android) searches for cat pictures based on the text "cat". I can't recall any Signal statements about cat recognition technology leading to "reporting people to government authorities". Are you suggesting that the automatic scanning of photos on a phone (which has led to wrongful arrests[1]) is not surveillance? [1]: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/08/googles-scans-private-photos-led-false-accusations-child-abuse https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/08/googles-scans-private-...

Nevermark 4mo ago

Surveillance replaces ostensible individual fringe threats with a clear dangerous pervasive and (for practical purposes) irreversible threat that monotonically aggregates increasing centralized leverage over every aspect our lives, direct and indirect. Knowledge is power. Forced revelation of our inner lives puts each of us in a position of vulnerability. Even when "not abused", the very real latent threat actively takes away freedoms of thought and action. It is extreme abuse. It undermines any sense that the state works for the people, when it operationally embodies a maximalized one-way threat over all citizens. AI collation exponentially compounds the threat, the passive and active damage. One of the wisest ethical/safety concepts ever: "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated." Democracy that sets up the levers of total autocracy is the greatest possible perversion and threat to democracy. Democracy only works as long as it recognizes government is the greatest threat to freedom. And that strict limitations on its power over citizens is the only defense.

TheOtherHobbes 4mo ago

Governments have been pushing surveillance since the earliest days of the consumer Internet. The earliest example I can remember is the Clipper Chip. That was dead three years after it was proposed. This current idiocy - proposed by a PM who promoted a very good friend of the most notorious paedophile in recent history to ambassador, against the recommendations of the civil service - is similarly doomed. Three months to implement huge changes to every OS on the planet? Like that's even remotely likely.

smashah 4mo ago

Not even Saudi Arabia does the kinda draconian bullshit the UK is doing nowadays. This is what happens when your government is occupied by foreign agent traitors.

vivzkestrel 4mo ago

- does anyone have actual studies or reports or arxiv papers or something that actually concludes that surveillance is not safety? - how do you know that it doesnt cut down crimes or deter criminals or make identifying criminals easier? - no seriously think of me as the stupidest person on the planet and explain to me why everyone is super duper paranoid about surveillance - what other methods do you recommend for tracking , catching criminals, terrorists and anti social elements?

themoose8 4mo ago

Is it possible the child nudity detection could be done on-device, fully private? This wouldn't amount to surveillance. The statistics on global child porngraphy rings are quite shocking. The UK is a big market consumer for these images/streams.

trashb 4mo ago
Detection, even if "on-device, fully private". Is meant to notify others, the person viewing the image already knows what they are viewing. I would argue that the notifying of others of what (kind of imagery/category) you are viewing, is the main violation of privacy, even if the actual imagery is withheld. Actually withholding the image may make it harder to fight the accusation (in court) if wrongly categorized. For now the category argued seems to be "nude children" but what safeguards are there that prevent another category "politically sensitive"?
- naishoya 4mo ago
  safeguards? Are any of us expecting that there are safeguards in today's global political environment? in tomorrow's? Honestly, the only safeguards against abuse of surveillance are that the surveillance not happen in the first place. Once it has happened, the only safeguards keeping the owners of the system from using it to coerce and control the masses exist in the form of pitchforks and ropes wielded by the masses, and the days when that was a real potential for repealing any such coercion and control are fully in the distant past. These systems are made possible and installed beyond the reach of any constituent based consent - see the current condition of Ring cameras, Flock, and the many tools created by Palantir et. al and much like the boiled frog analogy the citizenry has sat in their movie theatre and restaurant seats telling each other soothing lies about how the goal was to make us even safer from ourselves and now we are steps away from the fully immersive per-person verified identity and 24-7 observation of what everything, everyone read, writes, says, and does. Exactly as the 'foil hats' have been telling them would happen if they didn't speak up sooner. Tough cookies, we all get exactly what we deserve for letting it get this far out of hand. It's no use crying over spilt milk.
trumpdong 4mo ago

nelox 4mo ago

[flagged]

BLACKCRAB 4mo ago

[dead]

rbanffy 4mo ago

Surveillance is a tool. It's neither right nor wrong, good or evil. It can be used to create safety (as it is by police forces, when authorized by judges, in compliance with democratically voted laws), or can be misused to create terror (and, as we've seen before, it never needed cellphones for that). We should guard against the misuses and create enough legal frameworks to protect individuals' privacy (and aggressively uphold those protections). Private companies already do that - if I query a database for PII without proper approvals, or I query it outside the approval's boundaries, it'll take a couple minutes for me to receive something between a harshly worded e-mail and a visit from a couple large people who appear surgically incapable of smiling.

trashb 4mo ago
> Surveillance is a tool. It's neither right nor wrong, good or evil. What is it a tool for, it is a tool for observing while no person is present therefore breaking privacy. Privacy, a state in which one is not observed or disturbed by other people. Any tool is (as long as it exists) always used for right or wrong, good or evil. However what might be good or evil is very subjective. Both in the moment and looking back on the use of the tool. Therefore it might be best to consider not creating the tool at all, instead of the current we'll try it and see what happens rhetoric.
- rbanffy 4mo ago
  > What is it a tool for, A nuclear weapon is a tool. You can use it to blast a city-killing asteroid, one you just noticed, into pieces that'd burn in the atmosphere (and miss the city). You can also use it to mass murder an entire population. > it is a tool for observing while no person is present therefore breaking privacy. The capacity exists, but it's not necessarily used all the time. We should create the legal frameworks to protect ourselves from the misuse of the technology.
  - mcurist 4mo ago
    This might make sense as some entirely abstract theoretical statement, but in real political theory it's not exactly sound to imagine a government spending a massive pile of cash to create a tool that they never use, and if it's usefulness is greater when misused it will be misused. Then it hits reality and it takes about 5 minutes for governments to start abusing it and when caught will retroactively legalise their actions https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-23769206 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-23769206

kolesnikov-arch 4mo ago

[dead]

rimeice 4mo ago

I also can't stand the privacy violation of CSS. But > Child safety looks like well-funded education, robust social services, and meaningful guardrails on the very AI technologies and platforms the current government is eagerly courting. is such a weak, unrealistic, slow and idealistic solution to the real suffering of children. I was hoping this thread might offer up some better alternatives.

ibejoeb 4mo ago

From https://www.gov.uk/government/news/new-plans-to-stop-children-taking-sharing-or-viewing-nude-images https://www.gov.uk/government/news/new-plans-to-stop-childre...: > Despite [iphone age verification] children can still take, view, share and save nude images. The government therefore wants Apple and Google to block nudity across the whole device by default, so they can only be deactivated via age assurance. We tolerate the systematic child rape and run cover for the perps, but teens sending n00dz is a bridge too far. It's time for the UK to nut up and start holding these kids accountable. This works well, too, because it's deactivated on the devices used by adults, so they can continue to view their child porn, I guess. Is there another reading of this?

toephu2 4mo ago

"One of the most prolific criminals in all of San Francisco tells @adam22 that “crime in San Francisco is over with” because of Flock cameras + drones. He complains that he can’t even do drivebys anymore. It’s simple: when the risk of getting caught is too high, crime plummets." https://x.com/rahul/status/2063984276610114001 https://x.com/rahul/status/2063984276610114001