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UK backing down on Apple encryption backdoor after pressure from US

arstechnica.com

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Re: UK backing down on Apple encryption backdoor after pressure from US

#221

Post by RetpolineDrama »

miohtama wrote: post #164

What could go wrong? The UK is the same country that arrests 12,000 people a year for posting online. > Now every force in the country has a team sifting through people’s posts trying to determine what crosses an undefined threshold. “It is a complete nightmare,” one officer admits Britain’s police are restricting speech in worrying ways https://www.economist.com/britain/2025/05/15/britains-police... From The Economi…

We need to apply sanctions, and end all intelligence sharing with the UK until they stop this nonsense.

Re: UK backing down on Apple encryption backdoor after pressure from US

#222

Post by Xss3 »

tolien wrote: post #211
aunty_helen wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stalking: Already a Crime Inciting Violence: Already a Crime Posting nasty comments: Not a crime. Glad I could clear things up for you.

Yet implying people are being arrested for the latter, while showing examples of the first two. Clear as mud.

It's slightly more nuanced. Attacking people for protected characteristics such as race, religion, disability, gender, sexuality, is also an offence.

You can be a cunt all you want, just make sure you're being nasty about them as a person not their religion or race or whatever group you might feel they belong to

All cases I've seen have been cut and dry in this regard. Racist or homophobic usually.

Re: UK backing down on Apple encryption backdoor after pressure from US

#223

Post by alexey-salmin »

tolien wrote: post #210
alexey-salmin wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How many of those 30 were for "online posts" (and of which nature - Lucy Connolly is a favourite example cited by the likes of Vance, but she was arrested for trying to stir up racial tension when there were already race riots going on)? Who can tell, because the article didn't seem to bother asking. I googled Lucy Connolly out of curiosity. It indeed appears that she got 31 month of jail for a single tweet? You do…

> You don't think this counts as "arrested for online posts"? You've definitely missed some context. For example, and fairly significantly: > Connolly previously admitted intending to stir up racial hatred. If you plead guilty to a charge, there's not much defense left. The offence she admitted to doesn't even take account of whether it's committed online - it's law that was passed in 1986. An aggravating factor that…

So the context: she posted similar things online multiple times, she pleaded guilty, and the law in question can apply to offline activity as well -- all right, but all this still literally translates into "arrested for online posts".

She didn't throw rocks, she didn't set things on fire, she didn't stab anyone -- it was her speech that got her a multi-year jail term.

This alone makes free speech proponents upset, regardless of whether there were riots ongoing or not, or whether they agree or disagree with her political position.

Re: UK backing down on Apple encryption backdoor after pressure from US

#224

Post by tolien »

Xss3 wrote: post #222
tolien wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet implying people are being arrested for the latter, while showing examples of the first two. Clear as mud.

It's slightly more nuanced. Attacking people for protected characteristics such as race, religion, disability, gender, sexuality, is also an offence. You can be a cunt all you want, just make sure you're being nasty about them as a person not their religion or race or whatever group you might feel they belong to All cases I've seen have been cut and dry in this regard. Racist or homophobic usually.

Indeed, I didn't mean to imply those three were the only categories of things within "online posts"! Rather, that it's disingenous to lump all of that under one umbrella and suggest great swathes of people are being arrested for a tweet.

Re: UK backing down on Apple encryption backdoor after pressure from US

#225

Post by giantg2 »

geek_at wrote: post #214
belter wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The UK is the same country that arrests 12,000 people a year for posting online. I though it could not be true, but actually it is...WTF? https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/E-10-2025-0022...

In Europe we don't value free speech as high as the US. There is "forbidden speech" (around lying about Holocaust related topics and insulting people online) and I think it's a good thing in total. You spew out the worst of the worst on the internet you should be able to be held accountable

US has plenty of arrests for terroristic threats and similar. Many of these are online now. 12k arrests per year related to online posts doesn't sound all that high.

Re: UK backing down on Apple encryption backdoor after pressure from US

#226

Post by Silhouette »

fluidcruft wrote: post #136
Silhouette wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. If you really have access to secret information of that significance and you really are under an NDA that prohibits you from talking about it then why are you casually posting innuendo about it on HN?

There are a lot of things that are publicly known but if he's signed an NDA he can't point at them or acknowledge their authenticity. Anyway Pegasus isn't even the correct ballpark lol.

Just about every confidentiality clause or NDA I've ever signed had a provision specifically excluding information independently in the public domain from its scope. I find it strange to the point of lacking credibility that someone working in a security-related field would have an NDA that required them to pretend to ignore even public domain information yet permitted them to post the kind of innuendo seen in this discussion.

Re: UK backing down on Apple encryption backdoor after pressure from US

#227

Post by jrockway »

xorcist wrote: post #202
jrockway wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think anyone's surprised by that. Our emails have literally been used to target ads at us since like 2006. Cell phone carriers are happy to mine voicemail, call logs, SMS, etc. in the hopes of finding a revenue stream that doesn't involve them having to do irritating work like running fiber to cell phone towers. This leaves contact mining as the odd one out, but given how many apps want to see your contacts,…

That's not a revenue stream at any cell phone carrier I've seen. They do what they are legally obliged to do, and while they do get paid for it, it's a fraction of the actual cost of providing the data. The state tends to drive the hell of a bargain. The service providers, such as Facebook, Google and Apple though, that's entirely different.

Verizon silently opted everyone into sharing their browser history (based on DNS I guess) with advertisers: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2021/12/veriz...

I have to imagine that the other companies are doing this as well.

Re: UK backing down on Apple encryption backdoor after pressure from US

#228

Post by shakna »

xorcist wrote: post #202
jrockway wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think anyone's surprised by that. Our emails have literally been used to target ads at us since like 2006. Cell phone carriers are happy to mine voicemail, call logs, SMS, etc. in the hopes of finding a revenue stream that doesn't involve them having to do irritating work like running fiber to cell phone towers. This leaves contact mining as the odd one out, but given how many apps want to see your contacts,…

That's not a revenue stream at any cell phone carrier I've seen. They do what they are legally obliged to do, and while they do get paid for it, it's a fraction of the actual cost of providing the data. The state tends to drive the hell of a bargain. The service providers, such as Facebook, Google and Apple though, that's entirely different.

Almost all telcos in the US sell data to brokers.

Like for example, when they got caught selling location data they were required to protect. [0]

[0] https://www.theregister.com/2024/04/29/fcc_telecom_fines/

Re: UK backing down on Apple encryption backdoor after pressure from US

#229

Post by reactordev »

jrockway wrote: post #227
xorcist wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not a revenue stream at any cell phone carrier I've seen. They do what they are legally obliged to do, and while they do get paid for it, it's a fraction of the actual cost of providing the data. The state tends to drive the hell of a bargain. The service providers, such as Facebook, Google and Apple though, that's entirely different.

Verizon silently opted everyone into sharing their browser history (based on DNS I guess) with advertisers: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2021/12/veriz... I have to imagine that the other companies are doing this as well.

Warmer, think of the other vector, from the data broker point of view…

Re: UK backing down on Apple encryption backdoor after pressure from US

#230

Post by bigfudge »

RetpolineDrama wrote: post #221
miohtama wrote: post #164

What could go wrong? The UK is the same country that arrests 12,000 people a year for posting online. > Now every force in the country has a team sifting through people’s posts trying to determine what crosses an undefined threshold. “It is a complete nightmare,” one officer admits Britain’s police are restricting speech in worrying ways https://www.economist.com/britain/2025/05/15/britains-police... From The Economi…

We need to apply sanctions, and end all intelligence sharing with the UK until they stop this nonsense.

I think Trump has guaranteed that European countries have ended all real intelligence sharing pretty much unilaterally.
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