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/
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.
“Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.” —Benjamin Franklin
For those who care, here’s the actual context of that quote, which has everything to do with taxes and nothing to do with privacy or safety from the government.
The “Safety” he’s referring to are bribes paid from certain landowners in order to be exempt from having their land be used defensively by the then-British colonies of America during the French and Indian War. So, literally paying for their physical safety.
If anything, it was very pro-government control, and an example of the shit modern politicians do as well because he was speaking about the these actions being for the “greater good” of the people.
But quotes gonna quote, I guess. I assume the tech-libertarians picked it up at some point and it spread from there. Feels very much like something from the “don’t tread on me” mid-2000s Tea Party era.
Not that I think the modern sentiment is wrong, to be fair, but the meaning of the quote has changed so much that I think it’s kind of pointless to attribute it to Franklin now unless we’re talking about taxing private land for military purposes.
This quote has been popular since long before tech-libertarians were a thing.
Of course, otherwise we wouldn’t still be using it.
But in the context of internet privacy, specifically, my guess is it was initially popularized by tech-libertarians or those who hung around on the conspiracy theory areas of the internet (Venn diagram overlaps a bit there, though not entirely).
There’s no doubt it was used as a quote for privacy in general before that.
I should hold back on my assumptions, though, so thanks for reminding me of that. Could obviously be very wrong.
I think they were referring specifically to the use of the quote in the context of privacy in tech.
At least, that was the whole reason they pointed out the discrepancy to begin with.
Edit: had the comments loaded up an hour ago, finally had time to read and respond, and then immediately saw their response to you from 49 minutes ago… rip.
You’d need Microsoft/Apple/Google to agree to this to get these client side message scrapers on devices.
You’d need commercial/closed source e2e messaging services to agree to add a backdoor.
Why would they? Not that they care about end users, but corporate interests will take issue with it too. And it’s a bad look. UK is just one market for these global companies. I’m not an expert in such things so I’m basically talking out of my ass, but I think it makes sense.
But even if they somehow manage it, people will learn how to circumvent it. And then there’s open source operating systems and e2e messaging which are immune to this.
Edit: grammar.
Several players have said they’ll exit the UK rather than exit encryption.
Several players have said they’ll exit the UK rather than exit encryption.
rightly so.
I’d assume any worldwide player couldn’t be caught in compliance with this, as long as alternatives exist that don’t.
This might have been enough to push EU people away from WhatsApp for example.
