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Has Cameron or the UK gov't actually taken actual steps to ban encryption, or is this entire article extrapolating that from the 'no safe space to communicate'

by gnoway 12y ago

Has Cameron or the UK gov't actually taken actual steps to ban encryption, or is this entire article extrapolating that from the 'no safe space to communicate' quote?

api 12y ago
Little extrapolation seems necessary. It's also important to note that enforcing such a thing will require heavy government regulation of software production and distribution.
toyg 12y ago
There is a blatant effort underway in the Lords to revive the Snoopers' Charter, spearheaded by known securocrats -- the government won't say it out loud (yet), but if this stuff finds its way into the Commons, Cameron's cronies will try to vote it into law. People are twitchy because the double-whammy of election time and mayhem in Paris gives authoritarians the perfect excuse to put all sorts of shenanigans into law, and the LibDems (the last line of defense against cyber-totalitarianism in the country, I have to give them that) will likely be annihilated at the polls (because of their blunders on, well, any policy except this).
- Silhouette 12y ago
  ...the LibDems (the last line of defense against cyber-totalitarianism in the country, I have to give them that) will likely be annihilated at the polls (because of their blunders on, well, any policy except this). I wonder how likely this really is, though. Right now both UKIP and to some extent the Greens are looking a lot like the Lib Dems did before the last election. They are potentially disruptive, rising in the polls, the parties for people who want to vote for "someone else". However, the reality at the last election was that for all the talk about TV debates and Clegg-mania, the Lib Dems didn't do much better on polling day than they had before. They wound up in government more through good luck than anything else, because unusually neither the Conservatives nor Labour managed enough support to win outright. Of course watching them in government has been like watching a slow motion train wreck almost from day one, as they've made one politically naive judgement after another and squandered much of the good will they had accumulated prior to the election. If either UKIP or the Greens form part of a coalition after the election this year, I find it hard to see anything different happening to them when their idealised and sometimes extreme policies come face to face with the reality of running a country. Ironically, the very First Past The Post electoral system that the Lib Dems so wanted to change may be the one thing that keeps them in power after the election, if the "someone else" voters split between UKIP and the Greens, but on the day a lot of people decide not to vote for those parties after all (as happened to the Lib Dems last time), the protest votes that remain cost Conservatives and Labour crucial swing votes, and ultimately the Lib Dems then manage to hold a majority in enough parliamentary seats to remain relevant. The irony of that result would keep the political pundits at the newspapers busy for weeks following the election. :-)
  - toyg 12y ago
    There are more dynamics in place (e.g. Scotland will see a SNP surge; UKIP in the North of England splits the right-wing LibDem vote, not Tory; etc), I guess we'll see.
Silhouette 12y ago
To my knowledge, there is no law on the books today that prevents encryption. There is, however, already a law requiring the disclosure of keys/passwords under certain circumstances (the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000). Remember that it's election season in the UK, and it's going to be a close one. There may literally be a greater number of distinct, plausible outcomes than we've had in the history of British politics, including a wide range of potential coalitions. On top of that, the public will be sceptical of any manifesto claim this time around. A coalition government, as we've had for the past five years, is a new thing for most voters in the UK. As an electorate, we've just seen first hand how parties in a coalition make separate agreements that have to compromise, and how that means they don't always honour the manifesto pledges that got them elected in the first place. So, the leaders of our political parties are all saying lots of things that are superficially attractive to some demographic accordingly. If the electoral strategists at Conservative HQ have already decided that geeks are unlikely to vote for them anyway, which is probably a reasonable assumption given their track record on technology issues, they have nothing to lose by completely ignoring the reality of technology and appealing to the "nothing to hide, nothing to fear" contingent who don't know any better. I suspect (though this is mere conjecture) that this is exactly what's going on here.
jackgavigan 12y ago
It's an extrapolation. If you listen to the speech[1], what Cameron is actually saying is that he believes that it should be possible to intercept the content of communications via the Internet in the same way that letters and phone calls can be intercepted (when authorised by a warrant from the Home Secretary). My interpretation is that this is aimed at companies like Facebook[2] and Twitter. There's been no specific mention (to my knowledge, at any rate) of banning encryption or forcing companies to backdoor encryption software. 1: http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/whatsapp-and-snapchat-could-be-banned-under-new-surveillance-plans-9973035.html http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/new... 2: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/terrorism-in-the-uk/11255039/Lee-Rigby-report-Facebook-still-withholding-details-of-five-accounts-held-by-Michael-Adebowale.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/terrorism-in-the-uk/1...
- anon1385 12y ago
  Yes, but it's impossible to achieve what Cameron said he wants to achieve without restricting encryption. It's hard to imagine a workable law that bans the distribution of chat apps that do end-to-end encryption that doesn't also ban setting up a web server that supports TLS and connecting to it with a web browser that supports TLS, or using a web browser that supports WebRTC. etc etc there are endless examples. Maybe some kind of licensing system where you agree to log everything in exchange for being allowed to encrypt things over the wire, but the more you think about it the more utterly unworkable it is. When he first made these comments I assumed it was either him mis-speaking, or making up policy on the fly during a speech without actually understand the implications of what he was saying (which he has a history of). But he has come out with the same line several times now and importantly it has been reported across much of the press. Normally when a politician mis-speaks or says something dumb that would shit all over an entire industry the politician's party would be desperately back-tracking by lunchtime. That has not happened. I can only assume that the Tories are at least happy for everybody to go into the next election with the impression that they want to move to restrict crypto, even if they don't actually plan to legislate on it. To my mind that is still grossly reckless. How much investment in the UK tech sector is he going to scare off with this posturing?
- nly 12y ago

by gnoway 12y ago

Has Cameron or the UK gov't actually taken actual steps to ban encryption, or is this entire article extrapolating that from the 'no safe space to communicate' quote?

api 12y ago

Little extrapolation seems necessary. It's also important to note that enforcing such a thing will require heavy government regulation of software production and distribution.

toyg 12y ago

There is a blatant effort underway in the Lords to revive the Snoopers' Charter, spearheaded by known securocrats -- the government won't say it out loud (yet), but if this stuff finds its way into the Commons, Cameron's cronies will try to vote it into law. People are twitchy because the double-whammy of election time and mayhem in Paris gives authoritarians the perfect excuse to put all sorts of shenanigans into law, and the LibDems (the last line of defense against cyber-totalitarianism in the country, I have to give them that) will likely be annihilated at the polls (because of their blunders on, well, any policy except this).

Silhouette 12y ago
...the LibDems (the last line of defense against cyber-totalitarianism in the country, I have to give them that) will likely be annihilated at the polls (because of their blunders on, well, any policy except this). I wonder how likely this really is, though. Right now both UKIP and to some extent the Greens are looking a lot like the Lib Dems did before the last election. They are potentially disruptive, rising in the polls, the parties for people who want to vote for "someone else". However, the reality at the last election was that for all the talk about TV debates and Clegg-mania, the Lib Dems didn't do much better on polling day than they had before. They wound up in government more through good luck than anything else, because unusually neither the Conservatives nor Labour managed enough support to win outright. Of course watching them in government has been like watching a slow motion train wreck almost from day one, as they've made one politically naive judgement after another and squandered much of the good will they had accumulated prior to the election. If either UKIP or the Greens form part of a coalition after the election this year, I find it hard to see anything different happening to them when their idealised and sometimes extreme policies come face to face with the reality of running a country. Ironically, the very First Past The Post electoral system that the Lib Dems so wanted to change may be the one thing that keeps them in power after the election, if the "someone else" voters split between UKIP and the Greens, but on the day a lot of people decide not to vote for those parties after all (as happened to the Lib Dems last time), the protest votes that remain cost Conservatives and Labour crucial swing votes, and ultimately the Lib Dems then manage to hold a majority in enough parliamentary seats to remain relevant. The irony of that result would keep the political pundits at the newspapers busy for weeks following the election. :-)
- toyg 12y ago
  There are more dynamics in place (e.g. Scotland will see a SNP surge; UKIP in the North of England splits the right-wing LibDem vote, not Tory; etc), I guess we'll see.

Silhouette 12y ago

To my knowledge, there is no law on the books today that prevents encryption. There is, however, already a law requiring the disclosure of keys/passwords under certain circumstances (the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000). Remember that it's election season in the UK, and it's going to be a close one. There may literally be a greater number of distinct, plausible outcomes than we've had in the history of British politics, including a wide range of potential coalitions. On top of that, the public will be sceptical of any manifesto claim this time around. A coalition government, as we've had for the past five years, is a new thing for most voters in the UK. As an electorate, we've just seen first hand how parties in a coalition make separate agreements that have to compromise, and how that means they don't always honour the manifesto pledges that got them elected in the first place. So, the leaders of our political parties are all saying lots of things that are superficially attractive to some demographic accordingly. If the electoral strategists at Conservative HQ have already decided that geeks are unlikely to vote for them anyway, which is probably a reasonable assumption given their track record on technology issues, they have nothing to lose by completely ignoring the reality of technology and appealing to the "nothing to hide, nothing to fear" contingent who don't know any better. I suspect (though this is mere conjecture) that this is exactly what's going on here.

jackgavigan 12y ago

It's an extrapolation. If you listen to the speech[1], what Cameron is actually saying is that he believes that it should be possible to intercept the content of communications via the Internet in the same way that letters and phone calls can be intercepted (when authorised by a warrant from the Home Secretary). My interpretation is that this is aimed at companies like Facebook[2] and Twitter. There's been no specific mention (to my knowledge, at any rate) of banning encryption or forcing companies to backdoor encryption software. 1: http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/whatsapp-and-snapchat-could-be-banned-under-new-surveillance-plans-9973035.html http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/new... 2: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/terrorism-in-the-uk/11255039/Lee-Rigby-report-Facebook-still-withholding-details-of-five-accounts-held-by-Michael-Adebowale.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/terrorism-in-the-uk/1...

anon1385 12y ago
Yes, but it's impossible to achieve what Cameron said he wants to achieve without restricting encryption. It's hard to imagine a workable law that bans the distribution of chat apps that do end-to-end encryption that doesn't also ban setting up a web server that supports TLS and connecting to it with a web browser that supports TLS, or using a web browser that supports WebRTC. etc etc there are endless examples. Maybe some kind of licensing system where you agree to log everything in exchange for being allowed to encrypt things over the wire, but the more you think about it the more utterly unworkable it is. When he first made these comments I assumed it was either him mis-speaking, or making up policy on the fly during a speech without actually understand the implications of what he was saying (which he has a history of). But he has come out with the same line several times now and importantly it has been reported across much of the press. Normally when a politician mis-speaks or says something dumb that would shit all over an entire industry the politician's party would be desperately back-tracking by lunchtime. That has not happened. I can only assume that the Tories are at least happy for everybody to go into the next election with the impression that they want to move to restrict crypto, even if they don't actually plan to legislate on it. To my mind that is still grossly reckless. How much investment in the UK tech sector is he going to scare off with this posturing?
nly 12y ago