171–180 of 320 posts
The real question is will Signal, WhatsApp, Apples, etc stick to their principals and withdraw UK service if the Bill passes in its current form? Or will they decide to believe that the powers will not be used, and keep their service in operation?
Unpopular puffin opinion ahead, for the sake of argument only. Pls respond with arguments vs just downvoting. Throughout history, encryption has always been a government privilege. Only very recently, and then only in the West, practically speaking, is encryption that is safe from the eyes of government available. The liberalization of encryption has been concomitant with a naive "end of history" belief that once eve…
> And so my prediction is that we will see a reversal to the mean of history, and cryptography become again a govt granted privilege with conditions attached. Electronic financial transactions (banking, e-commerce,...) and commercial communications are two main reasons we won't see this. Too much impact on the economic levels and the government already have access to this data, so it will be just cons, no pro. You wo…
The whole UK government is run via WhatsApp. The threat to withdraw service should have concentrated minds.
This isn't true, is it? If so that's slightly terrifying.
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Or too busy? In plenty of families both parents have to work hard to make ends meet. Not helped by the fact that children are growing up in a completely different environment to the one their parents remember. Familiarizing myself with TikTok or whatever the kids are into these days would fill me with dread. And the way platforms work means my experience of them would differ dramatically from a child's anyway.
Wish I could upvote this harder lol. Parents really dont have enough time/energy to do this better than people who are trained in software/legislation. Especially if they have more than 2 kids/are single parents
It's a little unclear, but my reading of this is that the power to do it will still be in the law, requiring at most secondary legislation to put into effect (perhaps not even that) if they think they ever have enough leverage over messaging providers, or are willing to spend the political capital. Not a great place to be in really, but better than it actually being deployed.
Maybe that's why they want to keep a provision for it in the law, but develop the technology to break (current) public-key encryption schemes themselves?
But then they'll always be chasing, as the world moves to post-quantum encryption and they won't be able to break it anymore. So it'll always remain technically unfeasible.
Its likely that from a political standpoint, it was easier to deem the bill as technically unfeasible now rather than kill it completely.
The whole UK government is run via WhatsApp. The threat to withdraw service should have concentrated minds.
It's a little unclear, but my reading of this is that the power to do it will still be in the law, requiring at most secondary legislation to put into effect (perhaps not even that) if they think they ever have enough leverage over messaging providers, or are willing to spend the political capital. Not a great place to be in really, but better than it actually being deployed.
I’d bet my life we start to see a massive influx of bad press aimed at messaging providers, focusing on how criminals are using their services, over the next few years. When the general sentiment of the average Dave is ‘encryption === bad’ this BS will rear its head again. Seems to have been the standard play for governments of this country for decades now.
Most of the people I talk to are brainwashed anyway and will happily accept it - just give it time. The discussions over privacy always end-up with something like "I have nothing to hide anyway".
The real question is will Signal, WhatsApp, Apples, etc stick to their principals and withdraw UK service if the Bill passes in its current form? Or will they decide to believe that the powers will not be used, and keep their service in operation?
It’s really upto a few execs at tech giants betting how much money is at risk.
For UK and Canada, the state isn’t competent at building a clone of social networks with wide adoption.
China can throw insane money, regulation and Human Resources until they get what they want.
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There's no way bad actors will adhere to these restrictions anymore. Unless one's view of government is a very cynical one (they only care about controlling the general population vs actually fighting crime), tightly controlling cryptography is just not the effective tool anymore that it had been in the 90s.
Is this the same argument as "bad people will always flout rules, might as well give every person a machine gun so the good guys can have an even fight"? Looking at China, I think that it is very possible to make it least very uncomfortable, so uncomfortable as to be an effective deterrent.
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The UK has a recent history of sweeping child abuse under the rug when it involves minorities or famous personalities. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotherham_child_sexual_exploit... or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_Savile_sexual_abuse_scan... for two examples.