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Signal would 'walk' from UK if Online Safety Bill undermined encryption

bbc.com

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Re: Signal would 'walk' from UK if Online Safety Bill undermined encryption

#81

Post by sbuk »

jojobas wrote: post #66
cnity wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Make no mistake: the Online Safety Bill has absolutely nothing to do with protecting children. End-to-end encryption is the first line of defence against government approved mass surveillance. If it falls, the rest will follow. It will only be a short period until the operation is expanded under the guise of additional "protections" against the citizens.

[flagged]

I’m sorry, but if that’s your idea of freedom, you can fucking keep it. Our police, though not saints, don’t shoot unarmed people. At least in Britain we are free from being shot in school.

Re: Signal would 'walk' from UK if Online Safety Bill undermined encryption

#82

Post by daveoc64 »

cnity wrote: post #25
jossclimb wrote: post #15

> The government, and prominent child protection charities have long argued that encryption hinders efforts to combat online child abuse - which they say is a growing problem. So take using a sledgehammer to crack a nut. What they should be doing, is rather then increase the risk of for the majority who use encryption for valid reasons (privacy, not nefarious), is invest in services to allow individuals to gain help,…

Make no mistake: the Online Safety Bill has absolutely nothing to do with protecting children. End-to-end encryption is the first line of defence against government approved mass surveillance. If it falls, the rest will follow. It will only be a short period until the operation is expanded under the guise of additional "protections" against the citizens.

>Make no mistake: the Online Safety Bill has absolutely nothing to do with protecting children.

I don't think that's entirely true.

I am sure many MPs, charities, and campaigners do only see this as an issue of child (and more generally, public) safety.

I think the difficulty has always been explaining to laypeople that allowing any kind of monitoring or surveillance significantly weakens the security of encrypted messaging.

Re: Signal would 'walk' from UK if Online Safety Bill undermined encryption

#83

Post by sgjohnson »

Thankfully the internet is (almost) entirely decentralized, so it doesn't really matter.

No matter what ban on Signal the UK puts in place, I'm relatively confident that everyone who already uses Signal will be able to find a way how to keep using it.

Re: Signal would 'walk' from UK if Online Safety Bill undermined encryption

#84

Post by jojobas »

sbuk wrote: post #81
jojobas wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

I’m sorry, but if that’s your idea of freedom, you can fucking keep it. Our police, though not saints, don’t shoot unarmed people. At least in Britain we are free from being shot in school.

Americans kill more people by non-gun means than say Australians total (per year per 100k).

Whatever their problem is it's not guns.

Re: Signal would 'walk' from UK if Online Safety Bill undermined encryption

#85

Post by sgjohnson »

limbicsystem wrote: post #65

Never mind signal, what would Apple do if the UK government forced them to compromise E2E crypt? Someone hasn't thought this thorough properly...

I'd like to think that the UK is small enough of a market for Apple to not give a single flying fuck about the govt forcing them to compromise E2E crypto.

Re: Signal would 'walk' from UK if Online Safety Bill undermined encryption

#86

Post by j-bos »

autoexec wrote: post #19

> "we would absolutely 100% walk rather than ever undermine the trust that people place in us to provide a truly private means of communication." This from the same signal that refuses to update its privacy policy to reflect the fact that they've started permanently storing sensitive user data in the cloud ( https://community.signalusers.org/t/proper-secure-value-secu... ). The same Signal that ignored the users who…

What alternatives are there to signal? Reasonable, for a lay person.

Re: Signal would 'walk' from UK if Online Safety Bill undermined encryption

#87

Post by jojobas »

daveoc64 wrote: post #69
jojobas wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

You'll find very few people in the UK that want to be able to have weapons in the way that the USA does.

You'll find very few people understand strong encryption and why it's important to have.

They thing is the Brits had a right and gave it up for no reason at all, and will give up more, without a fight.

Re: Signal would 'walk' from UK if Online Safety Bill undermined encryption

#88

Post by lotsofspots »

nabla9 wrote: post #43

Textbook case https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_of_the_children This is part of Boris Johnson's Red Meat™ tactics. Red Meat tactics means pushing clickbait/culture war bullshit ideas that are idiotic, cruel, or non-working. The goal is to stir up fight over them. Boris has build his career on running across rivers on the backs of alligators. He avoids being caught by scandals, lying, fraud, infidelity, abuse by thr…

You do know Boris hasn't been in charge since last July, right?

Re: Signal would 'walk' from UK if Online Safety Bill undermined encryption

#89

Post by robertlagrant »

roenxi wrote: post #74
sph wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "children" excuse + most of the population saying "I don't need privacy, I have nothing to hide" is a double whammy against any form of encryption and it's just a matter of time before our Internet privacy rights are completely stripped away. A huge educational campaign is necessary to convince people and the average politician that being pro-encryption doesn't mean being criminals or pedophiles. So it's a lost b…

> The children angle is insidious... The entire rhetorical position is difficult. One of the (somewhat implicit) rules of public discourse seems to be "assume good faith". To make the argument that people should have freedom from government requires an acknowledgement that government officials regularly do more harm than good. It is insanely challenging to carry that position in a debate. Keep your eye out for the ha…

> requires an acknowledgement that government officials regularly do more harm than good

I don't think it's that. The argument should be similar to the Veil of Ignorance: do you want every conceivable future government to have these powers?

Re: Signal would 'walk' from UK if Online Safety Bill undermined encryption

#90

Post by cm2187 »

Ntrails wrote: post #76
cnity wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Make no mistake: the Online Safety Bill has absolutely nothing to do with protecting children. End-to-end encryption is the first line of defence against government approved mass surveillance. If it falls, the rest will follow. It will only be a short period until the operation is expanded under the guise of additional "protections" against the citizens.

> the Online Safety Bill has absolutely nothing to do with protecting children. I wish people would acknowledge both sides of the coin instead of simply pretending the other side doesn't exist. Yes society uses surveillance to identify and prosecute criminals (of various ilks, including those who abuse children). If you render that surveillance impossible by construction then people who might previously have been cau…

I remember the UK using its anti-terrorist laws to freeze Icelandic banks assets during the financial crisis. There is a probability 1.00 that this will be used for purposes that have absolutely nothing to do with the pretext used to pass the bill. So it's a pointless exercise to debate about that pretext. The only thing that matters is what right does that give the government?
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