101–110 of 273 posts
Honestly, after so many things turning into "they'll just come back and try again in two years", it's a little reassuring to see some longer term roadblocks being put in place against these anti-E2EE proposals.
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> the UK Online Safety Bill will be overturned by domestic courts (or the European Court) on the basis of this ruling. The UK wants to leave the ECHR[0], so they might be able to get around it — unfortunately. — [0]: https://www.chathamhouse.org/2023/03/uk-must-not-sleepwalk-l...
The UK DOES NOT WANT TO LEAVE THE ECHR. Select people in the government want to, not the whole of UK.
For a better understanding: The Court held (in the circumstances of this case) that a legal obligation to decrypt E2E communications is a disproportionate interference with the right to privacy. The law in question specifically obligated messengers such as Telegram to hand over communications alongside the "information necessary to decrypt electronic messages if they were encrypted". To come to that conclusion, it re…
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The only constitution that the UK has consists of Acts of Parliament. So I don't know why it should seem odd; the US courts can't strike clauses of the US Constitution, and the UK courts can't strike Acts. Amusingly, the UK government is currently trying to pass an Act to the effect that black is equivalent to white, i.e. that Rwanda is a safe country to which asylum seekers can be sent. This is analogous to the Stat…
In the US, it's quite hard to change the constitution. It requires agreement from 2/3rds of Congress followed by ratification by the individual legislatures of 3/4ths of the states. Such a thing has not been done since 1992, and not on a politically charged question since 1971.
It's nice to know this also applies to the UK even after Brexit (still a member of the ECHR).
Azerbaijan is in the ECHR too; doesn't stop them from imprisoning political dissidents, employing slave labor, committing war crimes, attacking other ECHR members, or performing ethnic cleansing.
But ECHR rulings are binding to EU members (and the the various organs of the EU including the ECJ have way to enforce them).
ECHR are also still binding in the UK because legislation that says otherwise hasn't been passed yet.
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Yes, this was a problem all along with arguments against surveillance (/encryption weakening) based on "it can be abused by bad actors" - it implies that one would be ok with surveillance if it could not be abused by bad actors. While it's tempting to use such arguments (it looks like they had effect in this case at least) it remains necessary to emphasize the true reasons one takes a stand against surveillance e.g.…
Do you think that phone taps and mail-opening warrants, issued by judges, based on evidence submitted to the court that such warrants are appropriately targetted and based on existing evidence and reasonable suspicion, are intrinsically "authoritarian overreach"?
If you want the data from an E2EE protocol, serve an appropriately targeted and scoped warrant to one of the endpoints. This also provides an opportunity for legal challenge (e.g. for scope overreach).
Man, Europe is really setting an example lately for how it's possible to roll out sensible technology regulations.
This decision was needed because the EU was about to ban end-to-end encryption. It’s not the EU commission, but a judge that ruled. AFAIK Commission can still ignore this.
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The UK DOES NOT WANT TO LEAVE THE ECHR. Select people in the government want to, not the whole of UK.
I think it is more correct to use 'UK' (or any other country) just for government and its institutions than for the body of its citizens.
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> It's worth noting that UK courts can't overturn Acts of Parliament. Interesting. I didn't know this, and as an American, it seems quite odd. Decisions by the parliament are treated as immutable there? Here, if a bill passed by Congress is deemed unconstitutional, it can be struck down by the Supreme Court.
The only constitution that the UK has consists of Acts of Parliament. So I don't know why it should seem odd; the US courts can't strike clauses of the US Constitution, and the UK courts can't strike Acts. Amusingly, the UK government is currently trying to pass an Act to the effect that black is equivalent to white, i.e. that Rwanda is a safe country to which asylum seekers can be sent. This is analogous to the Stat…
Take Canada. Canada has a Supreme Court and no written constitution. The formal divorce between Canada and the UK was not long ago so we inherited the same legal framework (modulo Quebec but it doesn't play a role here). Yet the Canadian Supreme Court can and does strike down federal laws! Actually, provincial courts can too, and then the federal government gets to appeal to them to the Supreme Court if it wishes.
Take Israel. There's no written constitution. Just the Basic Laws. They're just laws, they can be amended at any time. Yet, the Supreme Court can and does strike down laws. It's even striking down changes to the Basic Laws. That's part of the current political strife.
There is a worldwide movement for judicial review. Usually, supreme courts start with conservative powers and then grow them. Judicial review is not explicitly called out in the US constitution either. The US Supreme Court had to assert that it can strike down unconstitutional laws. This took about 15 years and some careful wrangling. The particular argument of Marbury v. Madison doesn't apply to the UKSC of course.
But there are already law review articles spelling out other legal theories that could be used to assert that the UKSC has the power to strike down Acts. I suspect the UKSC will follow other supreme courts and free themselves of Parliament in the coming decades.