UK drops 'spy clause' for scanning encrypted messages, admits not 'feasible'

Post by darkclouds » Thu, Sep 07, 2023, 3:16 PM UTC

miohtama wrote: post #56

bananapub wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it's not very secret. a bunch of western governments want to be able to spy on the comms of their citizens and lazy terrorists/pedophiles/whatever with poor opsec. basically everyone including normies moving to well-encrypted chat systems makes this very hard (requires court-ordering/NSL/coercing software companies to 0wn their own customers), so instead they want to standardise making it easy for governments. the UK…

Casual spying on citizens is new to Western governments (unless you count East Germany as Western). However in some countries your phone must have mandatory government spyware on your mobile phone and PC: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Dam_Youth_Escort

Post by pydry » Thu, Sep 07, 2023, 3:29 PM UTC

PrimeMcFly wrote: post #54

pydry wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They could it would just make them very, very unpopular. This clearly isn't a hill they're prepared to die on. The fact that they tried this at all signals how weak this government is though, as well as how blithely unaware they are of it.

No, they couldn't. They could remove it from appstores and block certain domains, and that's it. They couldn't actually stop people from using it.

Post by bananapub » Thu, Sep 07, 2023, 3:32 PM UTC

darkclouds wrote: post #111

miohtama wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Casual spying on citizens is new to Western governments (unless you count East Germany as Western). However in some countries your phone must have mandatory government spyware on your mobile phone and PC: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Dam_Youth_Escort

HMRC can do the most unrestricted spy on the British population, and there is a lot of data sharing between all the different parts of the state, ie HMRC, Police, NHS etc etc. Any employee of the state can spy on you and the press also do a fair bit of spying on the population. Its a national past time when thinking of curtain twitchers and neighbourhood watch schemes.

Post by cimi_ » Thu, Sep 07, 2023, 3:43 PM UTC

bananapub wrote: post #46

pipo234 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The bigger picture of why UK is hell bent on surveilling their citizens, communities is that the number one problem is that governments are losing control over society. Off course the whole point of democracy is that governments should fear their citizens, rather than vice versa.

the UK has a weird culture of conformism and authoritarianism, and the weirdo part of the Tory party is deeply into that sort of thing, and is in power now. it's not very mysterious.

Post by marcosdumay » Thu, Sep 07, 2023, 3:46 PM UTC

eesmith wrote: post #78

gottorf wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, the GP said governments should fear their citizens, not that they do and always have done. It's an ideal end state, I guess.

I think that veers too close to the No True Scotsman fallacy. It's like saying that in a {a benevolent dictatorship, real communism, true anarchy} the citizens will not fear the government.