This is so disheartening. I thought we were making progress in the anti-surveillance privacy narrative, but this says otherwise. As a UK citizen, is there anything I can do to dissuade this?
In my mind, the only way to beat these efforts for good is to win hearts and minds of the larger public. Currently because only weirdos like us care about this stuff, we have to constantly be on top of these things and writing letters making posts etc.
Overall i agree with you, it is really disheartening. That being said, i've made progress with my family on valuing privacy and the dangers of surveillance. I think people might be changing their minds slowly but still lots of work to do.
A breakthrough with my sisters was when abortion was threatened here in the states. Mentioned to them that it would be easy for authorities to enforce abortion punishments by subpoenaing data from menstruation cycle tracker apps. This kind of "clicked" for them and they became more open to the other parts (not given ratukan or whatever their purchase history, etc. etc.)
Thought experiment: let’s say that Trump said that he thinks Apple is helping hide illegal immigrants because they are communicating with each other over channels that ICE can’t decrypt, how much pressure do you think he could put on legislatures to pass a law here?
Now let’s say that some Republican Senators and Representatives were ethically opposed to but then threatened to be primaried and President Musk said he would throw all of his money behind a potential opponent, how long do you think it would take a law to be passed?
Even without a law, we already see that Cook will willingly bend a knee to Trump as will Google.
Right now in my home state the governor was trying to get a law passed banning Western Union from allowing illegal immigrants from sending money overseas.
He will just do an executive order. He is an authoritarian, basically a king. "But but but it's illegal". The system can't keep up with speed he is dismantling it.
That all it takes is the co-presidents to say that by giving up your freedom we can get rid of those “evil illegal immigrants” and enough people will give up their rights.
> I thought we were making progress in the anti-surveillance privacy narrative, but this says otherwise.
I think we are perhaps the lowest point ever in terms of anti-surveillance efforts. There seems to be bipartisan effort among many (most?) western governments that the government should have unfettered access to all data, regardless of any reasonable expectation of privacy.
Encryption seems barely tolerated these days. Governments are insisting on backdoors, they are making it illegal in some cases for companies to even discuss what is going on or that monitoring is happening.
We barely know what is going on with the programs and efforts that get leaked to the media, much less the programs that operate in total secret.
> As a UK citizen, is there anything I can do to dissuade this?
If you voted for this Tory-lite government, then you can stop voting for any future Tory-lite governments. If you did not, there's not much you can do in practice without devoting your life to it.
Wait. The Tories aren’t in power yet you want to attribute this to “Tory-lite?” It’s the Labour Party that is in charge, so why not put the blame on the actual perpetrators? Is it because you don’t want Labour getting blamed? I am confused. The Labour Party is the one jailing people for speech, so it follows that they would want backdoors into iCloud so they can better investigate ThoughtCrime.
The director of public prosecutions of England and Wales, Stephen Parkinson (appointed by the Labour Attorney General), warned against "publishing or distributing material which is insulting or abusive which is intended to or likely to start racial hatred. So, if you retweet that, then you’re republishing that and then potentially you're committing that offense [incitement to racial hatred]."
He added further, "We do have dedicated police officers who are scouring social media. Their job is to look for this material, and then follow up with identification, arrests, and so forth."
I'm very surprised that I got as many as three replies by people who interpred my comment this way! You got it right indeed.
I'm a bit confused though, surely if I call someone "Hitler-lite" this couldn't possibly be inteprered as something positive, haha. Maybe it's just tribalist reflexes, or maybe I did word things strangely.
This stuff started from the Online Safety Act 2023 passed under Rishi Sunak's Tory government.
For some reason Americans, including Musk, go all partisan and feel the need to blame speech restriction on the lefty party but it's not what happened.
You know the answer, of course with FPTP there's only two parties with a realistic chance. But why do they? Because you keep voting on them. Your votes made e.g. Corbyn lose but Starmer win. What signal does this give off? A very different signal than if both would've lost. Would another Tory government would have been even worse? In the short term, maybe. But this kind of short-termism is what has got Labour (and all of the other similar parties all over Europe) in this exact predicament. Better to make them lose for picking an awful candidate that's a Tory-lite and bite the bullet. It's not like the Tories would have kept winning for decades on end with the way things were going.
If you agree that Brexit happened under the Tories and not Labour, then we can also agree that THIS order is happening under the newly elected "Labour Party" and not the "Tories", or so-called "Tory-lite" names.
It's completely pointless trying to remove accountability of this government's illogical actions and then to immediately resort to blaming the previous government for bad decisions like this one.
Just admit that this is under the Labour government.
Huh? You completely misunderstood what I meant by that moniker. In no way at all does it absolve them of blame - quite the opposite, it's calling them nearly as bad, so close that the difference doesn't really matter.
The government is a reflection of the people. It might not be perfect, but if 80% of the country didn’t want this type of surveillance we wouldn’t see any government pushing it.
You have to change the view of the country as a whole, and for generations the U.K. has been a country of curtain twitchers.
Well, in the UK just planning a non-violent protest can get you 5 years in prison as many people have already discovered. Protesting has been pretty much made illegal by a very broad legislation that defines any protest that causes "disruption" as illegal - what "disruption" means is up to interpretation of course.
Which just means you need a large group to protest. They can arrest 10,000 people no problem, but get several million together and you have an army. Best is to get some of the actually army/police with you so that when (not if!) they try to get violent you can make it clear this is a revolution they won't win.
I hope it never reaches the above level, but always remember that remains an option.
Yeah but to get a million people together you need to plan for it first, and that's where they get you :P It's honestly shocking the state of things in the UK in that regard. I'm surprised there isn't more outrage around it, even the people I know who used to say they hate the Just Stop Oil protesters expressed shock that they've been given 5 years for just talking about a protest, not actually doing it.
I don't support the legislation you're referring to, but I think you're painting an exaggerated picture (unfortunately a common theme of these threads on HN about the UK). You can easily find examples of recent protests in London: https://news.google.com/search?q=protests%20london&hl=en-GB&...
Note how I didn't say that protests don't happen in the UK. They obviously do. But the problem is that now that effectively every protest has been made illegal due to the fluid definition of what "disruptive" means, the enforcement is arbitrary. Just stop oil protesters? Thrown in jail. Protesting in front of the Chinese embassy? Carry on. That's the problem with the broad legislation in the UK - government wants to have the power to spy on everyone, but obviously it doesn't mean everyone will be spied on. Just people who do something the government doesn't like.
I understand. However, I think your original post was very much open to being misinterpreted by people who don’t live in the UK or follow UK news. It’s obvious to us that protests still happen in the UK. But many people here only read negative news stories about the UK and would just assume from your post that protest in general was now effectively banned.
Weren’t the few JSO protestors who were jailed convicted of doing things that would be objectively illegal in more or less any country? Where are the countries that allow me to deface priceless works of art or block public highways without any legal consequences? I am not saying that these are necessarily illegitimate forms of protest, but they come under the heading of ‘civil disobedience’. The whole point of civil disobedience is that you get punished and thereby draw attention to your cause. Even in the US you can easily be jailed for protests involving blockading or trespassing: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-69003240.amp, https://www.vpm.org/news/2024-06-24/gaza-protest-interstate-...
It may well be that the new legislation is overly broad, but I don’t think the JSO protests are a great example of this.
Labour have no problem with it, just the same as the Online Safety Act which is causing chaos right now. They're fine with the legislation and have never expressed a desire to see it repealed. They didn't even do much to prevent it in the first place.
This is what the parent comment is getting at when they say "Tory-lite".
Are you still under the impression that different political parties will actually do diffrent things? It even sounds like you think Labor are 'good' and the Tories are 'bad'. I think you may change this opinion after the next 4 years.
Yeah know, at some point a historical review would suggest that the constant stream of labour led initiatives to end privacy might indicate that the problem is not just the tories.
> I thought we were making progress in the anti-surveillance privacy na[rra]tive
What lead to to believe that? The Conservatives and Conservative-Continuity governments both agree that our data simply must be in the hands of the police, DEFRA, and your local council.
RIPA will never be repealed and only strengthened.
I don't disagree with your analysis but i wouldn't be so fatalistic. This stuff _isn't_ inevitable and i think it's possible to win people over to our side. Things can change for the better, but they won't unless people who care don't give up
Ahh, I used to have that opinion, but I've encountered too many "It's fine if they want it, I've got nothing to hide" people. (They never give you their Facebook password if you ask, though. Funny, that.)
Change what you can, I say, VPN on the network device.
> When Oliver shows Snowden evidence that all typical Americans care about is whether the government can see our "dick pics," he encourages Snowden to go through a list of every government surveillance program and explain its capabilities in terms of access to "dick pics."
Probably helps if the next time they try to remove the rights of large segments of the populace based on medical choices, lock people down, track them and propose vaccine passports, that you realize where everything is headed and oppose it vocally.
It's always through the appearance of good intentions and a public that pushes for whatever narrative they're fed that they normalize this.
Let's start supporting parties that have principles.
And stop making excuses for parties that don't (i.e. Labour, Lib Dems and Conservatives).
At the moment, the UK public (and media) considers it a sport to disparage and smear parties like Reform, whose leaders want to shrink the power and over-reach of the state.
We are so concerned with appearing virtuous and internationally generous, we cannot be seen to align with a party that wants to put UK citizens first (border security? deporting dangerous criminals back to their home nation? gasp, how could we be so ghastly!)
This self-defeating attitude needs to change if we want a better future for our children.
> Let's start supporting parties that have principles.
The problem is that there are none.
The correct assessment of all these political parties is that by default, they all cannot be trusted. Especially both labour and the conservatives.
> This self-defeating attitude needs to change if we want a better future for our children.
Yes. The second problem is that the United Kingdom is incapable to changing itself historically and is fundamentally destined to never be open to change.
edit: typo