101–110 of 205 posts
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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.
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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…
This is not some spectrum with safety (but loss of freedom) and danger (with freedom) on each end. The results of this bill will be both less freedom and less safety.
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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 me…
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> 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?
Of course, the damage the bad apples do far outweighs the benefits of the good so that argument doesn't hold. A century of good governance with global assistance barely balanced out the damage Hitler triggered in 5 years. Destruction is easy and creation is hard. And that plays out on the small scale too with small numbers of corrupt officials undoing huge amounts of work by good people.
If we had perfect information, we'd find that the spying apparatus of the 5 Eyes has done far more bad than good to the general welfare. The political corruption that must be causing is immense, we already know that every president since Obama has been targeted by the intelligence apparatus in some form. It is unlikely it ends there.
I'm less sure about the situation in the UK, but they generally follow the US trend.
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?
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It was widely reported that the Conservative party moved their internal communications to Signal in 2019. I wonder if they still use it?
If yes, I hope that means the bill is unlikely to pass
They don’t want to - or have to - live under their own rules.
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> encryption hinders efforts to combat online child abuse So do opaque walls and the absence of surveillance cameras in cars and homes. Oh don't worry - the recordings will be securely stored, and only available with a court order, only issued for "serious" crime! It's strange that as surveillance proliferates, the shrinking scraps of privacy we have left are deemed a growing problem, not a vanishing one.
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.
One limiting factor was that this wasn't scalable - so a lot of people would be comfortable with it because there is little potential for widespread abuse - there just aren't enough resources to search & monitor everyone's mail and houses at all times.
There are no such limitations online, so better protections such as encryption are required to counterbalance it.
> "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.
But TBF signal is end to end encrypted which means at least the content if your chats are safe. This is in my opinion safe enough, but YMMV I guess
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> encryption hinders efforts to combat online child abuse So do opaque walls and the absence of surveillance cameras in cars and homes. Oh don't worry - the recordings will be securely stored, and only available with a court order, only issued for "serious" crime! It's strange that as surveillance proliferates, the shrinking scraps of privacy we have left are deemed a growing problem, not a vanishing one.
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.
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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…
If we want to protect children, why are we completely ignoring those 90%? Where are the bills mandating installation of cameras in all households with children?
If you want to protect children from strangers on the internet, perhaps fund schools so they can properly teach children that the internet can be a dangerous place. Bills like this aren't going to do shit to protect children.