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

Setting aside the question of whether signal are the good guys or not it's important for non-UK people to understand the political context here.

The conservative party is eating itself. They have forced 2 leaders to resign in the last year and are trailing in the polls so are terrified of the next election. They won convincingly at the last election on the basis of a "red wall" strategy that involved an appeal to traditionally labour voters who were Euroskeptic and by throwing dog-whistles about immigration to appease people on the right wing of their own party who were thinking of defecting to the UK independence party. All that support is unravelling and they ended up having to do a humilitating deal with the Unionist party in Northern Ireland which is unravelling because their policies there (the so called "Northern Ireland protocol") threaten to undo the peace process and importance of preserving the peace process is just about the only thing the two sides in Northern Ireland agree on.

There is also a cost of living crisis with strikes across multiple groups of public sector workers.

So right now there is lots of "Performance politics" with policies designed to look tough and appeal to socially conservative right-wingers in an effort to shore up a weak government. Just this week we had the policy to insist that asylum seekers fill in a questionnaire in English no matter where they came from, and now this which they can spin as being tough on crime. I would highly doubt any of the people behind this bill have any interest in the technical pros and cons.

> gave it up for no reason at all

* UK: Gun deaths per 100,000 people - 0.20

* USA: Gun deaths per 100,000 people - 12.21

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm-r...

Do you think pervasive spying would have made it more or less likely that the Jeffrey Epstein case made it to the public eye? Running a paedophile ring is not some small thing that is easy to hide. In all the cases I've taken note of (in churches, schools, local clubs, etc) the problem is almost never that the crime is unknown, it is that the perpetrators have too many tools to shield themselves from consequences and discredit the victims. In the future, maybe tools like going through people's internet history or planting fake evidence using their online accounts.

Society shouldn't use surveillance to identify criminals. We'd look back at dragnets to catch runaway slaves or hunt down the homosexuals with horror (as, indeed, we generally do in states that successfully institute mass surveillance to catch criminals). As recently as a few years ago, 'criminals' were people found outside their own homes and places like China were successfully catching them much to the net loss for everyone. There is a strong - indeed, overwhelming - link between places with good privacy, good protection of freedoms and citizens living happy prosperous lives.

The people pushing mass surveillance know all this. It has been bought up every time some bright spark comes up with the idea of rolling out mass surveillance. These people understand the societal consequences that they are ushering in. Too many of them understand what they are doing to pretend they have pure motives. This is empowering the worst of the authoritarians.

I don't think breaking encryption is a good idea, but I will say that until recently law enforcement could tap phones, rip open envelopes, and get a court order to break into your house and search it. There was never the level of privacy against law enforcement that encryption offers.

Except you can't kill someone with encryption.

Your freedoms end where my freedoms begin, and guns are just a tool to change that dynamic. They serve no other purpose, unless we're talking hunting, for which you can still get guns, after some education.

I don't get how Americans seem to think it makes sense to require a license to drive a car but not to own a gun? Who is more dangerous, a guy driving a sedan or one holding an AR?