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Signal president says company will not comply with U.K. ‘mass surveillance’ law

fortune.com

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Re: Signal president says company will not comply with U.K. ‘mass surveillance’ law

#141

Post by PartiallyTyped »

vasco wrote: post #50
PartiallyTyped wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you say those words people think you are a building-burning store-looting far left hooligan, they call you a commie and shove their head into the ground like an ostrich, as if the last N or so years have not been an endless class war.

I don't even know what my class is! Where do I check? How do you know what class you are? I want to know who to help!

Unless you are born into generational wealth, you are by construction a Prole.

If you need to or had to work for a living until you could afford not to, then you are a Prole.

Whether you choose to "betray" this class - and fight in support of the people who make the rules, the slave owners, those who play god without permission - is a different thing.

Re: Signal president says company will not comply with U.K. ‘mass surveillance’ law

#142

Post by PartiallyTyped »

dontlaugh wrote: post #51
PartiallyTyped wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you say those words people think you are a building-burning store-looting far left hooligan, they call you a commie and shove their head into the ground like an ostrich, as if the last N or so years have not been an endless class war.

The obvious response is to own it and be an actual commie. Join a revolutionary party, organise in a trade union, set up mutual aid, learn self defence, etc.

I am all for this, the problem is that that behaviour on their end shuts down any discussion and mutual aid becomes harder.

Re: Signal president says company will not comply with U.K. ‘mass surveillance’ law

#143

Post by consumer451 »

Teckentrup wrote: post #130

What does exit the UK market mean here though? Presumably that it won't appear in the Apple App Store or Google Play? Presumably that's more of an issue for the iOS ecosystem... But for android you just switch from using play to FDroid or an APK, right? I presume a sufficiently irked UK wouldn't be able to do anything more, as Signal already as ways of circumventing traffic blocking within specific states? Doesn't th…

> What does exit the UK market mean here though?

Maybe just disable all accounts registered with +44 telephone numbers?

Re: Signal president says company will not comply with U.K. ‘mass surveillance’ law

#144

Post by verisimi »

derefr wrote: post #133
verisimi wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What fantasy are you living in? Have you seen the formation of any countries? Even one? Have you ever seen representative anarchy? Please tell me where - I'll be there like a shot! > embedded journalism to figure out what issues "the people" are beginning to care about Afaik, journalists are there to tell the people what to think - what do you think propaganda is? Do you think that propaganda is something the Russian…

> Have you ever seen representative anarchy? Please tell me where - I'll be there like a shot! "Representative anarchy" was my shorthand for the concept of "whoever can stand up with a megaphone and get the largest mob behind them wins." To do this, the person with the megaphone needs to understand what hot-button issues will make the mob follow them in their coup or secession attempt. In that sense of understanding…

I think we have had royalty and "democracy".

I think you have been watching too many films. I don't think people act as a mob, overthrowing anyone.

The governance structure doesn't really accept any real inputs from you and I. They are a bloodline.

You get to vote in a 'representative democracy' where your vote every 5 years is aggregated with 100k+ of other to choose one of 2 candidates, who then purports to represent you in the thousands of decisions he makes over his term.

Re: Signal president says company will not comply with U.K. ‘mass surveillance’ law

#145

Post by Zpalmtree »

crossroadsguy wrote: post #19
motohagiography wrote: post #7

Her television interview with the former(?) minister responsible for this abomination of a law was urgent and necessary. These legislators know what they are doing, and that it is unethical. Let Signal leave the UK market. If the people want freedom, let them take it themselves. Perhaps before this generation of young men are rounded up for another one of history's meat grinders in Ukraine, as a means to further redu…

[flagged]

What country doesn't have a 'heinous and disgusting past'? Why so focused on the sins of the father?

Re: Signal president says company will not comply with U.K. ‘mass surveillance’ law

#146

Post by avianlyric »

hammock wrote: post #115
varenc wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would the Romans, or anyone else, have implemented practical tracking for every day transactions? Is there a single historical example of this being done in the pre-digital world? The Census is a survey of people/household/assets, but logging all exchanges of currency is several orders of magnitude more records. I can’t really think of any practical way this could have been done, especially when assuming some peo…

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

A tally stick is anonymous. There’s nothing about a Tally stick that links it to any particular individual.

To argue that a tally stick can be used as an effective way to track people is to also argue that any physical key can be used to track people. After all a key and Tally Stick operate on the same principle, and yet I don’t think anyone is worried about a government tracking them by their dumb metal house keys.

Re: Signal president says company will not comply with U.K. ‘mass surveillance’ law

#147

Post by leesalminen »

Teckentrup wrote: post #130

What does exit the UK market mean here though? Presumably that it won't appear in the Apple App Store or Google Play? Presumably that's more of an issue for the iOS ecosystem... But for android you just switch from using play to FDroid or an APK, right? I presume a sufficiently irked UK wouldn't be able to do anything more, as Signal already as ways of circumventing traffic blocking within specific states? Doesn't th…

Signal could block all UK IP addresses from accessing its messaging server. UK could require ISPs to block access to Signal messaging servers. Both of these are fairly trivial (my understanding is that UK already forces filtering on ISPs for e.g. pornography).

Of course you are correct that anyone motivated and/or technical enough could still access Signal. However, their less motivated/less technical contacts won't be using it any longer.

The government is basically asking the bad actors to self-identify through their continued use of Signal.

Re: Signal president says company will not comply with U.K. ‘mass surveillance’ law

#148

Post by avianlyric »

mcpackieh wrote: post #109
avianlyric wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What makes you say that anonymity wasn’t a concern? I have a hard time believing that claim without any substantiation. Because the inverse claim, “people using gold coins thousands of years ago for common exchange were worried about the anonymity of their transactions”, is absurd. It’s not like the alternative to gold coins two millennia ago was a traceable currency, the technology for tracking a large population…

> It’s not like the alternative to gold coins two millennia ago was a traceable currency There actually was, predating gold coins in fact. What people did was carve notches representing quantities into sticks. The sticks were then split down the middle such that they could be lined back up to verify that both came from the original stick and the notches lined up. One of these halves would then often be entrusted to l…

I don’t see how a Tally stick results in non-anonymous transactions. It’s just a basic way to create an arbitrary non-fungible physical token, just like a door key.

Re: Signal president says company will not comply with U.K. ‘mass surveillance’ law

#149

Post by notahacker »

norir wrote: post #86
derefr wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There seems to be a function missing from government. All governments, AFAICT. Legislators change the law (including, rarely, the constitution) — effectively by applying a hierarchy of "countermanding orders" — to suit the changing interests of the public. Courts interpret the law, but only downstream of legislation. The executive can make regulation and executive orders, but only in agreement with the law. But at th…

I like this idea. A somewhat related idea I've had is that instead of giving the supreme court ultimate power to overrule and/or reinterpret existing legislation they instead would be given power to call a referendum. Each justice would have the ability to attach their own revised version of the law to the referendum and there would be a voting process to determine which version of the law to accept as canonical. Thi…

The problem with referenda that the function of the Supreme Court isn't writing new laws but settling individual cases according to existing law. The reason why this has wide reaching implications is because other courts are bound to follow its legal arguments as precedents with other cases (and because Supreme Court justices can sometimes rule that a particular law is inconsistent with the constitution, which they do at least in theory with the intent of preserving the constitution rather than creating a new law)

The public is clearly not bound to even attempt to be consistent in its opinions from case to case, and if it's all over the place in its verdicts and might well be accepting or rejecting a verdicts for different reasons from the justices (maybe they think the legal arguments about privacy in the original Roe vs Wade were weak but also think women should have an inherent right to abortion that legislators haven't provided them with), it'ś difficult to see how lower courts can be bound by it.

There's also a big question of who gets to vote, particularly for the cases where a state law is argued to be in violation of the federal constitution, which tends to be the more controversial ones...

Re: Signal president says company will not comply with U.K. ‘mass surveillance’ law

#150

Post by kelnos »

AmericanChopper wrote: post #70
semiquaver wrote: post #4

Governments seem to want to have it both ways. As new technologies are introduced they assume that capabilities and practices available to analogous predecessors must remain available to them (e.g. wire-tapping phones => undermining cryptography) but they don’t feel the same way about public benefits or rights associated with other technology that is being replaced (anonymous cash transactions => ???) It also seems l…

All governments will trend towards tyranny if left unsupervised. Imo western democracies have been entirely subverted by an imaginary left/right conflict, where you end up with exactly the same thing no matter who you elect. The voting population is so completely engrossed with their contempt for either the detestable “left wing” tyrants, or the detestable “right wing” tyrants that they can’t see the side they end up…

I think that's demonstrably false. I don't have much experience or knowledge of politics outside the US, so I can only speak to US politics.

The American right and left are very different when it comes to policy platform, and electing one or the other actually does have a measurable difference on what ends up happening to people in the country. This is especially true when we consider minority groups.

I agree that both sides are mainly interested in consolidating power and increasing the scope of government's oversight of people's lives. But even if I use your terminology, the "left wing tyrants" and "right wing tyrants", if one or the other were given complete control of the country... well, the country would look very different after some time, depending on which side were given control.

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