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

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

#201
post #63

What is the easiest way to explain to the average citizen that the "Nothing to hide, nothing to fear" argument is not a good reason to let the Government keep tabs on your online activities? Most people don't give any thought to online privacy that it truly scares me.

"Arguing that you don't care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say." - Edward Snowden

That argument isn't good enough, unfortunately. As many people will respond with "well, yeah, I don't have anything important to say."

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

#202

As a UK resident, this irks me beyond belief. It's a sickening invasion of human rights[1]. To echo u/rubberstamps sentiments, it's such that there's been little to no coverage of this in the media. But it's the same everywhere, introduce an encroaching bill, have uproar from those with the heads screwed on (the minority). Let it grow a little stale in the publics eye and keep reintroducing with slight alterations it…

"A new leader will be elected, they'll flip the switch, say that because of the crisis, because of the dangers that we face in the world - some new and unpredicted threat - we need more authority, we need more power. And there will be nothing the people can do at that point to oppose it. It will be turnkey tyranny." - Edward Snowden (June 2013)

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

#203
post #58

The new Prime Minister Theresa May does not hold any principles that would place limits on the powers of the government. She was a well known "champion of the snoopers charter," (wiki) when she was home secretary. There is a british tendency to be overbearing authoritarians that provides fuel to their various secession movements. Britain is unlikely to maintain its current borders for many years after Brexit.

>There is a british tendency to be overbearing authoritarians

It's not IMO a British tendency but instead a tendency of the British upper classes as they feel they are superior in every way to the lower classes and so deserve superior rights and freedoms .. and once the EU is out of the way they'll be able to get rid of the convention on human rights and return things to their former glory.

Next year I hear May is going to bring in a child tax where if you have more than one child and don't sell the extra ones in to serfdom you have to pay an additional 50% income tax on income up to the first £32k. /s

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

#205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

just setup own vps with vpn and use encryption

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karma_Police_(surveillance_pro... The GCHQ sit on the internet infrastructure, decrypt TLS sessions, and correlate accounts and activity to individual granularity. The backbone of the internet is tapped, including from the termination of IPSEC/IKE into your VPN out to the internet again. Giving the advice to people to "use encryption" and "use VPN" is going to get people killed. Please,…

Decrypt tls sessions? Please fuck off.

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

#206
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This sounds like a potential (new?) attack type though. Just have software that pings certain illegal websites and bam - the target is now a paedo or whatever the attacker wishes.

Generating fake evidence to blackmail someone? No one would do that. They are too busy chasing terrorists.

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

#207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah your the third person today to say that to us. We checked it was working outside with direct download link at https://secfirst.org/fdroid/repo/umbrella.apk . As far as we can tell there is an issue with F-Droid build but our devs are looking at it at the moment to see can we solve from our side.

Actually, as a temporary fix its working if you go to F-Droid and then add our repo " https://secfirst.org/fdroid/repo/umbrella.apk"

Thank you :)

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

#208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

its all misuse of language. a spade should be called spade. Here is a situation, the people staying in their own country and fighting against outside forces. Who is real terrorist? Those outside forces that have no business being there in the first place are the ones doing real terrorizing. The war on terrorism is just a double speak. Its war for profits for political and monetary gains. If as much as 10% of the ener…

I accepted long time ago I will never be let into the US because of those HN comments, so... If you regularly kill civilians at random with high explosives, with no way for them to even know something bad will happen, to the point you instill in them the fear of a clear blue sky , isn't that terrorism? Hello drone strikes in Pakistan...

One fighting man is a terrorist. Thousand fighting men makes an army.

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

#209

Protect your privacy with a VPN, either run your own or use one of the available providers. It's a shame you need to do this, but that's just the state of things. Run your own with OpenVPN: https://openvpn.net VPN providers(not affiliated, just ones myself or colleagues use): https://www.expressvpn.com https://www.goldenfrog.com/vyprvpn https://nordvpn.com

I use https://ipredator.se.

"IPredator was launched in 2009 as a response to a growing trend of Internet censorship, in restrictive regimes as well as so-called open societies. Our main goal is to provide a seriously non-discriminating access flatrate for the Internet."

I may be mistaken, but I believe it was built by or connected somehow with The Pirate Bay.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPredator

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

#210
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.

>Worthless bastards, one and all. Why write this crap? The labour party is the biggest left wing party in Europe, are you saying everyone inside it is worthless?

The Labour Party's abstention on this bill is unforgivable. We need to hold the Conservative government to account for their deceit and utter incompetence. We need a strong opposition party now more than ever. But Labour have completely failed in that regard.

Yes, I realise Labour is up against our mostly Labour-hating right-wing national press who seem as culpable as our politicians in perpetuating lies and untruths to push their own agenda. (Is there any country in Europe that has a national press as vile, racist, and nasty as our national press in the UK?)

Labour should be pummelling the Conservative party for their endless lies and dishonesty. They should have ripped the Conservatives to shreds over this bill (as they should have for Brexit too).

Politics in the UK has never felt so oppressive, depressing and dysfunctional in recent memory than it is now. And it's probably only going to get worse.

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