The U.K. Parliament is close to passing the Online Safety Bill, which threatens global privacy by allowing backdoors into messaging services, compromising end-to-end encryption. Despite objections, no amendments were accepted. The bill also includes content filtering and surveillance measures. There’s still a chance for lawmakers to protect privacy with an amendment preserving encryption. A recent survey shows the majority of U.K. citizens want strong privacy on messaging apps.
People glady give up privacy under the guise of helping children, while nothing is actually done to protect children. More at 11.
Actually, politicians give up public privacy under the fiction of helping children, repeatedly.
I cringe every time “online” and “children” are uttered in the same breath.
Indeed, Prince Andrew is still roaming around Pizza Express in Woking.
I’m expecting this weakening of encryption / surveillance is to protect rich people by preemptively punishing dissidents who are organizing against them. It’s the step that authoritarian countries like China, Saudi, etc have been using against their own people, either with sweeping regulations, or just straight up buying pegasus spyware.
U.K. civil society groups have condemned the bill, as have technical experts and human rights groups around the world.
Has there been pushback from banks and other big businesses whose activity fundamentally depends on secure encrypted communications? Has there not been pushback from the intelligence services? Or would they be exempt?
Who do you think has been pushing for the back doors? The intelligence community and law enforcement. They want EASY access to everything so they don’t have to take the effort to break encryption after getting a warrant (if they even both with a warrant). You can bet your bottom dollar they are exempt from this law for “public safety.”
At least Apple, Signal, and Whatsapp. https://techcrunch.com/2023/06/27/an-encryption-exodus-looms-over-uks-online-safety-bill/
I doubt that E2E services will care. Matrix will not change. Just like many other services. They are just insane. You can’t also just break TLS in UK only. haha they are crazy.
Current world politicians are so tech illitirare it’s bewildering. Supposedly they have experts and think tanks at their disposal to help them in these sorts of endeavours, for what? It’s insane how much survailance has been ranked up in the past decade.
Supposedly they have experts and think tanks at their disposal to help them in these sorts of endeavours, for what?
Experts aren’t hired to craft or guide legislation. They’re hired to give a pathway to a destination.
In other words, politicians already know what they want and what they’re going to do, they need a way to make it accepted by society and to force corporations to play ball. “Experts” and “think tanks” will always align with that agenda.
It’s not just politicians, it’s so many of the older people running the companies and pulling the strings.
My own boss is an absolute nightmare for not understanding that technology that could make our jobs here so, so much easier - and crucially much much more efficient. And yeah, I get that we could endlessly chase the promises of tech, but I’m forever being told to wind back my reliance on online tech because the boss won’t spend the money needed on some computers and would rather do things on paper. I just nod, agree, then carry on doing things my way, because it has proven results. There’s a bunch of us here who rely on Google Docs for collaboration software, because the boss refuses to spend any money on anything better suited. He didn’t need it back when he set up the company 20 years ago, so he doesn’t need it now!
Drives me fucking mad.
As to your point on experts; our government ministers actively reject experts who actually know about the issues, choosing instead to listen to people who’ll tell them what they want to hear.
I mean, imagine if non-british companies just went “well, no encryption for you, then.”
And disabled TLS too.
Online Banking would probably just have to… stop.
And a lot of other pages wouldn’t load on most browsers requiring https
Online Banking would probably just have to… stop.
What will happen is usually what happens when the UK government introduces a brain melting stupid law (basically any time they do or say anything).
The government will suddenly find out that all the people that said that their stupid law won’t work, were right, and that it doesn’t work. Shockingly.
Then it will end up getting hastily revised into something moderately functional which will necessitate modifying it to the point at which it effectively doesn’t exist, and we all get on with our lives. Repeat process ad nauseum.
See the porn age verification law. Which never ended up happening.
