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Surveillance is not safety: A statement on the UK's latest threat to privacy [pdf]

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Re: Surveillance is not safety: A statement on the UK's latest threat to privacy [pdf]

#191

Post by verisimi »

michaelt wrote: post #18

I sometimes wonder whether the people in the tech industry who worked on things like secure boot, attestation, and DRM saw this as the inevitability open source advocates always saw it as. Did they think, as they worked to transfer final say from users to corporations, by technical means, that politicians couldn't transfer that control to themselves by political means? Did they think they could lock things down to ex…

They (developers) did what they did for money. Just like everyone else. And they would do it all again.

At a corporate level, no one cares about lots of freedoms, except if it is a selling point.

If 'keeping freedoms' is a selling point then the ideal position is to gain the kudos of appearing to support this whilst also getting the benefits of the loss of freedoms. Why not get both?

Re: Surveillance is not safety: A statement on the UK's latest threat to privacy [pdf]

#192

Post by raverbashing »

cryptonector wrote: post #182
michaelt wrote: post #18

I sometimes wonder whether the people in the tech industry who worked on things like secure boot, attestation, and DRM saw this as the inevitability open source advocates always saw it as. Did they think, as they worked to transfer final say from users to corporations, by technical means, that politicians couldn't transfer that control to themselves by political means? Did they think they could lock things down to ex…

It isn't TPMs nor attestation nor DRM making this possible. It isn't secure boot either. It's walled gardens with secure boot -yes, secure boot- that the consumer can't bypass. Secure booting isn't the problem in an enterprise setting -- of course we _want secure booting_ in the enterprise. It's consumer devices that can't be jail-broken that are the problem. Although even then, the silly age verification laws and th…

And yet you can secure boot Linux

Re: Surveillance is not safety: A statement on the UK's latest threat to privacy [pdf]

#193

Post by skynotblue »

pesus wrote: post #73
skynotblue wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every account is new at some point.

I noticed you skipped over every other part of my comment to focus on an irrelevant one. Is that an admission that you don't actually stand by what you say?

"This isn't true" - not an argument

"Privacy is dangerous" - i never said that.

Internet pseudonymity from other strangers on a public forum is very different from being anti-surveillance. I am not sure how you could equate the two.

I would have absolutely no problem if the state contacted HN to obtain my IP access logs and other identifying information if I were to post something illegal here. Expecting privacy from random internet users is not the same thing as demanding immunity from law enforcement.

Re: Surveillance is not safety: A statement on the UK's latest threat to privacy [pdf]

#194

Post by vasco »

trumpdong wrote: post #155
vasco wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of harm would be prevented if people didn't do bad shit under the assumption the next guy will do it if they don't. You're the next guy.

But they're right. The next guy will do it if you don't. And you'll be fired meaning you won't have any power any more, and the person who thinks DRM is good will be hired and become powerful in your stead. How does that help?

> You are the next guy

If you don't understand this, then you just don't understand.

Re: Surveillance is not safety: A statement on the UK's latest threat to privacy [pdf]

#195

Post by gambiting »

briandear wrote: post #116

This is a country that has arrested people for social media posts. It’s also a crime in the UK to offend someone. Orwell identified the genetic defect in the British genome 80 years ago.

>>This is a country that has arrested people for social media posts

And if you saw these media posts, I'm sure you'd agree with those arrests in majority of the cases.

>>It’s also a crime in the UK to offend someone.

Is that what American "news" tell you? Because it's absolutely not true.

Re: Surveillance is not safety: A statement on the UK's latest threat to privacy [pdf]

#196

Post by skynotblue »

big85 wrote: post #102
skynotblue wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We already have warrants, judicial oversight and public audits to prevent abuse of power. Not sure what's authoritarian about standard overt surveillance.

No, not in the UK. XKEYSCORE surveillance tools are used without a warrant signed by a judge (the police grant themselves "warrants" covering unlimited uses for a period pending renewal, which I would have assumed constituted a "general warrant", something prohibited in UK constitutional law... but I am not a UK lawyer). MI5, MI6, and NCA are immune to Freedom of Information, and you cannot sue in open court; you can…

Everything you said is true and inteligence agencies should not be above the law. But the logical response to that is to fight for strict oversight, judicial reform, and to disallow the misuse of those tools, not to abolish surveillance entirely. A broken system should be fixed, not thrown away (unless there is an alternative better system which is not plagued with these issues).

Re: Surveillance is not safety: A statement on the UK's latest threat to privacy [pdf]

#197

Post by subscribed »

londons_explore wrote: post #60
madaxe_again wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn’t just your photos. This is all content displayed on the device, all content captured by the camera - everything. Full take. GCHQ must be wetting themselves.

We all know this is the first political position. They'll walk back half of it, and what remains will appear to be a compromise, but was what was intended all along.

We all also know they know they will be absolutely ravaged in the next GE, at the scale of the Tories.

The question - why hand that to Farage and his far right? Is Keir Starmer a far right operative in Labour? His track revord would suggest so, but do we have any receipts?

Re: Surveillance is not safety: A statement on the UK's latest threat to privacy [pdf]

#198

Post by skynotblue »

stodor89 wrote: post #179
skynotblue wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We already have warrants, judicial oversight and public audits to prevent abuse of power. Not sure what's authoritarian about standard overt surveillance.

I, for one, totally believe the government will prevent the government from abusing the government's power. /s

This was so profound. Now that I think of it there is nobody to watch the watcher and we should just dismantle society and let the local warlords sort out the crime rate. /s

Re: Surveillance is not safety: A statement on the UK's latest threat to privacy [pdf]

#199

Post by ajb »

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #74
ajb wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's all very well, but we just plain don't have a legal, economic, or technical system which will allow separation of the good uses from the bad uses. Once data is in someone else's possession, there's f-all way to prevent it being used to do whatever the possessor wants. Even if there is a legal agreement, it's easily abrogated, or overridden by insolvency law, or by a company having a "we can update our terms" c…

It’s hard to enforce a law so we should not have the law seems a poor argument. Let’s say we define personal data about, generated by or inferred from the actions of a natural person as owned by the society as a whole. And misuse is liable to 5% of annual turnover. It’s more or less GDPR. That seems viable - and I am sure an army of class action lawyers will be happy to help out (Ok I need to work on a better proposa…

I don't think we necessarily disagree. I am pessimistic about laws being effective in this case, but that doesn't mean we should not try to find ones that are. I like your idea. Thinking and trials in that direction would be good.

Data using organisations often seem to prefer fig-leaf laws that aren't effective, and lobby against ones that might be effective. "My data use is a good use, therefore I should not be subject to restrictions and oversight". Instead, anyone with a use of data which is valuable to the public should not see themselves as on the same side as the advertisers and surveillance vendors. They should see themselves as on the opposite side.

Re: Surveillance is not safety: A statement on the UK's latest threat to privacy [pdf]

#200

Post by madaxe_again »

subscribed wrote: post #197
londons_explore wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We all know this is the first political position. They'll walk back half of it, and what remains will appear to be a compromise, but was what was intended all along.

We all also know they know they will be absolutely ravaged in the next GE, at the scale of the Tories. The question - why hand that to Farage and his far right? Is Keir Starmer a far right operative in Labour? His track revord would suggest so, but do we have any receipts?

Incompetence. I don’t remember when there was last a competent PM or government - not in my lifetime, certainly, and I am no spring chicken.
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