Live data from Hacker News

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

zdnet.com

21–30 of 302 posts

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

#21
post #18
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah right, because using PIA==privacy.

How about we refer people to actual privacy tools like Tor instead?

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

#22
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…

Quite old, but there was an article on the BBC: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-34713435

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

#23

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…

Quite a lot of them would be in favour of it as a means of "fighting terrorism". It's not so much what is reported as how it's spun.

The really big thing is the "internet connection record": every TCP connection you make is supposed to be logged by the ISP: https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachm...

(just look at that list of justifications. Of course! It's about catching paedos! The all purpose justification for everything.)

Besides, it's been buried under the bigger politics news of the moment - Trump and the continuing mystery of Brexit.

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

#26

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

I just feel like using a VPN, while legal, might already put you on some list of "suspicious" users. Surely, if you have something to hide, then you are worth investigating closely.

What you are trying to avoid is mass surveillance.

Targeted attacks by intelligence agencies and police forces are probably a lost battle anyway.

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

#27
post #21
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yeah right, because using PIA==privacy. How about we refer people to actual privacy tools like Tor instead?

Tor has zero to do with privacy and everything to do with anonymity.

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

#30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just feel like using a VPN, while legal, might already put you on some list of "suspicious" users. Surely, if you have something to hide, then you are worth investigating closely.

Which is why we need to push as many people as possible to use VPN's, they already have too much straw and too few needles so lets give them even more straw. The reality is that no one in the know thinks this has anything to do with terrorism and everything to do with political control. If you don't have the right to privacy then all other rights are subverted, previous governments have used the state security appara…

The surveillance state has always been about political control. Terrorism is merely the justification.
Post reply on HN