Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

fortune.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 409 posts

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

#191

Post by AmericanChopper »

kelnos wrote: post #150
AmericanChopper wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bo…

> 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.

Well this is actually demonstrably false. Biden currently has the house and the senate, Trump has the house, the senate and the Supreme Court, Obama had the house and the senate… The rhetoric between these two sides is substantially different, but the governments they produce are very similar. They implement some token fraction of the policy platform they were elected on, and otherwise just plow through the same old policy agenda every time. Who’s opposing this Tory Online Safety bill in the UK? Technically Labour is, but only because they think it doesn’t go far enough…

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

#192

Post by lrem »

domador wrote: post #54
derefr wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but they don’t feel the same way about public benefits or rights associated with other technology that is being replaced When the government creates a law within recorded history — something like a wiretapping law — then the spirit of the law is well-known at time of creation. Usually, that "spirit" is that it's created to explicitly grant a capability to the government to do a thing for the benefit of the public u…

Society should require that the spirit and purpose of any law be included as a preamble to that law's text and be used in the interpretation, application, and future adaptation of that law. The spirit and purpose may be obvious at the time, but won't necessarily be that way to future generations. Laws with no explanation about their purpose or goals are like the compiled binaries of a program. Ideally, in the future…

I believe that Sweden publishes laws as both the letter and separately the spirit. The former providing the rules, the latter what thought process led to making them that way.

It might have been Norway though. One of these two.

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

#193

Post by borski »

rcarr wrote: post #185
borski wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You missed my point - on any of these 1000 or more, did they change anything or stop them? If not, then it’s largely just procedural, at least in effect. That’s my point.

Yes. > The Queen successfully lobbied the government to change a draft law in order to conceal her “embarrassing” private wealth from the public, according to documents discovered by the Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/feb/07/revealed-que...

Thank you! That’s the dumbest shit ever, lol.

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

#194

Post by guy98238710 »

leesalminen wrote: post #147
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…

So perhaps a new UK-focused app that everyone sideloads?

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

#195

Post by flir »

Brian_K_White wrote: post #174
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 kinds of advantages go to one sides benefit. Can we set up an automated monitor on all the traffic cams and licence plate readers and facial recognition systems just to catch cops and politicians breaking laws or just to track their movements and associations the way they do to everyone else? Can we access the same cam footage that the state uses to accuse you of something, to clear you instead? Only occasionally…

Ambient sousveillance. You'd have to get a critical mass of people who care enough to buy the hardware, deploy it, and release the video though.

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

#196

Post by rcarr »

staunton wrote: post #190
rcarr wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me, the law and programming seem very similar. Any time two parties go to court and a precedent is created, it seems to me like someone is taking the function of the contested law and adding an if statement somewhere in the body that alters what's returned. Having something like this would be akin to having the original ticket specification to look at which is obviously handy when the inevitable disagreements aris…

> To me, the law and programming seem very similar If that was the case, we wouldn't need lawyers or court hearings. Laws are phrased vaguely on purpose because real life is far too complicated to write down every eventuality and also it's easier to build political consensus for vague laws. That's why we have courts who interpret the law based on precedent and common sense. A succinct way to see the difference: You w…

> If that was the case, we wouldn't need lawyers or court hearings.

Er no. The law existed long before computers did.

> Laws are phrased vaguely on purpose because real life is far too complicated to write down every eventuality and also it's easier to build political consensus for vague laws.

This doesn't discount from the code comparison at all. Anyone who has worked on a codebase for a large company knows that the feature requests never stop piling in either because the computer program will never be able to handle all the complexity of what it is trying to model either. At the end of the day, you have a function myLaw which takes four arguments, plaintiff, defendant, judge and jury. The interactions between the four and the myLaw code decide what the return value is.

> A succinct way to see the difference: You want your computer to do exactly what you wrote in the code and nothing else. This is not true of legislation. You want people to do anything that's not explicitly forbidden and tolerate them doing things that are technically forbidden as a way to introduce slack into the system.

No, because you're assuming here that the law directly controls the people. I would argue that isn't the actual purpose of the law. If this were true then there would be no crime because once a law was written, everyone would abide by it as if it had telepathic mind control and there would be no crime. Instead, people are free to ignore or read the law and then to act in concordance or discordance of their own free will. The actual purpose of the law is for evaluating the actions of people after they have done something. People are run time variables that are inserted into the law function, they are not the code themselves.

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

#197

Post by Jigsy »

dijit wrote: post #125
ciwolsey wrote: post #18

For other UK citizens: https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/634725

Goodness, I hate to be this guy, but do these petitions ever actually help? I can’t think of one that I’ve followed up to the debate that has been successful in anything except getting a solid “no” from the sitting government. Direct action, enough to be villainised by the media, seems to be the only way that politicians will actually listen — though even then its a massive uphill struggle. God, I feel so unrepresent…

> Goodness, I hate to be this guy, but do these petitions ever actually help?

No. Honestly, online petitions aren't worth the paper they're written on.

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

#198

Post by matthewdgreen »

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…

What’s happening right now is much worse than the first crypto wars. In that case the government was just trying to gain occasional access to suspected criminal communications, usually with a warrant. Systems like the Clipper chip even codified mechanisms to limit access to communications. What’s happening this time around is very different: policymakers are demanding the ability to perform real-time scanning of messages, without a warrant. This is technically very different and also has very different implications for privacy down the line.

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

#200

Post by boomer918 »

E2E apps and fully encrypted phones prevent the police from executing legitimate search warrants. This has never been the case with traditional communication mechanisms, e.g. phones, mail.

I agree that privacy is important, but it's not absolute, by law. So what we're saying is E2E apps are more important than current law we have, and we want to invalidate the ability of the police to investigate crime.

How can that make sense?

Post reply on HN