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

211–220 of 409 posts

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

#211

Post by int_19h »

notahacker wrote: post #149
norir wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 d…

The problem is that existing law in many cases (that end up in SC) is simply too vague to be a meaningful expression of intent. In those cases, since the judges are still required to rule one way or another, we end up getting those tortured decisions where a big effort is made to contort the law into some interpretation that would allow for a ruling.

In my opinion, if SCOTUS is split 5/4 (or even 6/3) on anything, that should be taken as prima facie evidence that the law is unclear and needs amending. At that point we should require all the deciding judges to make a write-up for each opinion in the case detailing the requisite changes to the law that would make all judges to rule unanimously in favor of that opinion. These can then be submitted to the legislature or a referendum or whatever, but either way some decision needs to be made.

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

#212

Post by nmtag »

immibis wrote: post #186
mcpackieh wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obviously the concern is an escalation of that war which pulls NATO into the conflict fully. I don't believe that's a likely scenario, but being deliberately obtuse isn't the right way address that somebody expressing that concern.

Russia nuking NATO? What is Signal encryption supposed to have to do with it?

The argument that was made (and that was not central to the post at all, despite everyone jumping on it) is the slow erosion of freedoms that may lead to less restraint also in foreign affairs.

UK politicians have been periodically demanding NATO engagement, though this one is from 2022:

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/davis-ellwood...

Ellwood seems to be the UK equivalent of Lindsay Graham and has recently made similar noises.

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

#213

Post by flir »

semiquaver wrote: post #207
flir wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I wish that I could believe this was possible. In pretty much every government on earth such a scheme would be made illegal on some pretext well before attainment of said critical mass.

Plenty of private entities are already recording like crazy, so I assume it's the publication bit that you're thinking would be made illegal?

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

#214

Post by motohagiography »

ahzhou wrote: post #82
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…

Your insinuation that the UK will implement a Ukraine war draft in order to advance a totalitarian agenda is weird, unnecessarily conspiratorial, and dilutes your point. I encourage you to make one point and to make it well.

[flagged]

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

#215

Post by int_19h »

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…

That slack works both ways, though. It's also common to have a situation where the law is expected to be "judiciously applied" - sometimes the politicians pushing for it even make pinky promises to the effect of, "this is only for really serious crimes" - and then in practice it gets applied much more broadly.

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

#217

Post by int_19h »

derefr wrote: post #72
domador wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Okay, so what do you do with laws that already exist at the time your country is founded, which 100% of the public wants to keep, but has no justification for?

You pass a law saying that such and such existing laws remain in force temporarily and set up a commission to study them in detail, figure out what's actually important, and author new model laws as needed for the legislature to consider. This can be dialed from piecemeal replacement to a wholesale rewrite.

Something along these lines is how most modern states handled it in practice, if you look at e.g. former Warsaw Pact states.

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

#218

Post by Aachen »

Jigsy wrote: post #197
dijit wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In the Netherlands, a petition was required to force a national referendum. Online or offline doesn't matter. You needed to reach some percentage of the Dutch population in signatures, I'm not sure about the exact number, but they did and we had a referendum on mass surveillance and people voted against.

That's when the government decided these things are kind of a nuisance and abolished the whole concept of referenda, even advisory as they were

I love the ruling party

But anyway petitions aren't necessarily useless, also for media attention on a topic if it goes well

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

#219

Post by int_19h »

vasco wrote: post #66
immibis wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you get money by working (most people) or do you get money by making other people who work give you theirs (e.g. landlord, CEO, banker (not teller), politician)?

I've had a job all my life but with the proceeds from that job I've bought a house I rent to a local association, and I also have a retirement plan (as pretty much everyone else), so I'm a shareholder in almost all the biggest megacorps through the indexes my retirement account buys. So I'm both? Who do I fight for?

Where does most of your income come from?

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

#220

Post by meepmorp »

mcpackieh wrote: post #98
ahzhou wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your insinuation that the UK will implement a Ukraine war draft in order to advance a totalitarian agenda is weird, unnecessarily conspiratorial, and dilutes your point. I encourage you to make one point and to make it well.

As long as conscription laws remain on the books, it should never be taboo to worry about those laws being put into practice.

I don't think the point was that it is or should be taboo to talk about the possibility that conscription laws would be used, just that the particular context in which it's been brought up makes it weird. It sounds like fringy conspiratorial silliness, especially considering the utter lack of any evidence that western countries are considering actual combat operations in Ukraine. Or maybe a bit of propaganda.

It's reasonable for people who want to seriously address the very real and legitimate problems with this kind of "wiretap" legislation to not want extraneous issues derailing the discussion, as having their concerns conflated with more conspiratorial-sounding ones makes them far easier to dismiss.

Post reply on HN