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Britain passed the “most extreme surveillance law ever passed in a democracy”

zdnet.com

11–20 of 302 posts

Re: Britain passed the “most extreme surveillance law ever passed in a democracy”

#11
post #7

Oddly I can't find any other sources reporting this. I'd have expected it to show up in at least one other place else (e.g. BBC news for example). I'm not trying to imply that it's not accurate, I'm just confused by the lack of info. And the article doesn't really reference anything other than other zdnet articles, so it's really hard to tell exactly what form of the act got passed - did all the really controversial…

And another from techcrunch: https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/17/uk-parliament-rubberstamps...

Re: Britain passed the “most extreme surveillance law ever passed in a democracy”

#12
> Despite the uproar, the government's opposition failed to scrutinize any significant amendments and abstained from the final vote. Killock said recently that the opposition Labour party spent its time "simply failing to hold the government to account".

What the hell is the point of the Labour party these days? They are absolutely not an effective opposition. Worthless bastards, one and all.

Re: Britain passed the “most extreme surveillance law ever passed in a democracy”

#14

When this was originally proposed I thought it would never get passed because it sounded like something right out of 1984. Amazing. I thought the ridiculous 'Agree to this cookie' nonsense was stupid but this is now just very creepy. National database for keylogging next?

Don't worry, the 'Agree to this cookie' thing is an EU directive. So that's what the UK is currently destroying their economy in order to be free from.

Re: Britain passed the “most extreme surveillance law ever passed in a democracy”

#15
post #12

> Despite the uproar, the government's opposition failed to scrutinize any significant amendments and abstained from the final vote. Killock said recently that the opposition Labour party spent its time "simply failing to hold the government to account". What the hell is the point of the Labour party these days? They are absolutely not an effective opposition. Worthless bastards, one and all.

Yes, that's the correct response, blame Labour for all of this.

Re: Britain passed the “most extreme surveillance law ever passed in a democracy”

#16
post #12

> Despite the uproar, the government's opposition failed to scrutinize any significant amendments and abstained from the final vote. Killock said recently that the opposition Labour party spent its time "simply failing to hold the government to account". What the hell is the point of the Labour party these days? They are absolutely not an effective opposition. Worthless bastards, one and all.

The value of the £ has been the official opposition since Brexit.

Re: Britain passed the “most extreme surveillance law ever passed in a democracy”

#17
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Until VPNs become illegal...

That would be a very hard fight for them since enforcing it without fundamentally breaking the way the internet works would be very expensive to a lot of very wealthy companies and sadly in this 'democracy' the people with the money are heard the loudest.

> That would be a very hard fight

Not at all. It's enough to point the finger at commercial VPN providers and claim the the users are doing suspicious things including filesharing, and encourage ISPs to block VPN providers by address block.

Many ISPs would love to do that because they want to inspect cleartext traffic and sell metadata.

Of course corporate VPNs would be left untouched. There.

Re: Britain passed the “most extreme surveillance law ever passed in a democracy”

#18
post #13

I will just leave this here: https://www.privateinternetaccess.com

How is that supposed to help? Go sell snake oil elsewhere, recommending this stuff actually puts peoples lives at risk.

The only thing putting people at risk is portraying privacy as suspicious. Everyone should use a VPN.

Re: Britain passed the “most extreme surveillance law ever passed in a democracy”

#19
Will the citizens allow it to be passed if they knew about it via some news source? Of course "news" now a days is about kardarshians or justin beiber than about things that requires serious attention. This may have hardly got tiny little square cm area in newspapers or 30 seconds air time. Thus sinks democracy. People who are informed are way less in number than non-informed people, but all get to vote thus diluting the vote of well informed people(whose size smaller and smaller as quality of news sources declines). I think there needs to be a law that punishes false information, but at the same time protects journalism.

Re: Britain passed the “most extreme surveillance law ever passed in a democracy”

#20
Not true. The USA, a Republic, has something worse. The surveillance policy is secret & the ISPs in the USA are already providing access to every bit of data that travels through our wires and wireless. Any 3 letter agency has unlimited access to this information & it doesn't require approval, only when they get caught. Plus the companies now have immunity from being prosecuted.
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