A few people mention EU. Let me remind you: > European Commission Revives Push for Encryption Backdoors in ProtectEU Strategy, Framing Mass Surveillance as “Lawful Access” https://reclaimthenet.org/eu-protecteu-strategy-encryption-b...
(2025)
Brits would quite like their private messages to stay private
281–290 of 292 posts
Re: Brits would quite like their private messages to stay private
#282Earlier quoted context omitted.
Did they even have a referendum on joining the EU? Just skimming through, it looks like [0] they only had a referendum on EEC membership which sounds like it would predate the EU. It is a bit of an unfair ratchet where people can sidle in to the EU but require strong consensuses to leave. It should be symmetrical. Particularly when the scope of the EU seems to be a bit vague and regularly expanding to micromanage var…
This brings to mind the government set up in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress: it takes 2/3rds to pass a law, but only 1/3rd to repeal it. The thinking being if a law isn't good/useful enough to garner 2/3rd support, it shouldn't be law. And if a law is so bad that it can't even get more than 1/3rd the people to support it, it should no longer be a law. Sadly, I don't think it'd work today. People are too divided, it's t…
>Sadly, I don't think it'd work today. People are too divided, it's too easy to import the votes you need, and people are too lazy to understand a law beyond the headline or what the news tells them about it.
And who and from where might folks "import" such votes? I don't understand what that means. Please do elucidate.
Re: Brits would quite like their private messages to stay private
#283Earlier quoted context omitted.
Britain leaving the EU purely because a majority voted for it in a popular vote is a pretty bad example to use in support of the claim that democracy isn't real. It's probably this sort of vague cynicism about democracy that led Cameron to call the referendum in the first place, only to discover that people can actually vote however they like!
It happened because it was voted for and the elite wanted it . Several counterfactuals are plausible: either the elite only allowed the vote because they knew how it would go, or they would've brexited even if remain won, or they don't care either way. What is not possible is that the elites wanted to remain but were forced to leave by the vote, because in that case they simply wouldn't have left.
That can only be true for a definition of 'elite' that excludes the Eton and Oxford educated Prime Minister of the day and the majority of his government. So I mean, yeah, some people wanted Brexit. If those people had some sort of sinister behind-the-scenes power to bring it about, you have to wonder why Brexit only actually happened after the referendum vote and not in the decades prior, during which those very same people had been continually agitating for it.
>the elite only allowed the vote because they knew how it would go
Clearly not, in this case. Remain was forecasted to win, and David Cameron called the referendum because he felt confident that remain would win.
>they would've brexited even if remain won
This also is obviously not the case. David Cameron would have remained Prime Minister. He was always in favor of EU membership, remaining in the EU was part of the policy platform of his party, and he would have been under much less pressure from Brexiteers than he was before the referendum.
>What is not possible is that the elites wanted to remain but were forced to leave by the vote
This is in fact what happened. David Cameron resigned after losing the vote and was replaced by someone committed to implementing Brexit.
Re: Brits would quite like their private messages to stay private
#284Why don't Brits then vote for a government that is less obsessed with total surveillance? As far as I can tell, Britain is one of the most surveillance-crazy regions on earth.
Re: Brits would quite like their private messages to stay private
#285Earlier quoted context omitted.
60 year old people are better informed compared to 20-30 year olds and more involved and vote more often. Your ageism lacks logic.
As a middle-aged person, I can't agree with that. Declining social interaction as one settles into a narrower world of job and family, and less free time for activism and engagement, means that my peers and myself have less clue than we used to about how to vote; the general feeling about politics when it comes up at get-togethers with friends, is aporia. Also, part of getting older and wiser, and becoming more aware…
That case can be made for anyone over 35+ and rebounds for the 60+ group who have time for activism and political conversations. Take the vote away from 35-60 year olds?
Re: Brits would quite like their private messages to stay private
#286Earlier quoted context omitted.
You keep saying "potential evidence." What does that even mean? If I factory reset my phone right now, am I guilty of destroying "potential evidence?" Do you have "potential evidence" on any of your devices? Let's not make up phrases to help justify what they were doing. There was either an actual crime committed, and wiping the phone destroyed real evidence. Or there was not. You can't just consider all data everywh…
The implication they are making is that the person _intended_ to destroy potential evidence on the phone. That the person felt there was evidence on it that needed to be destroyed to hide a crime. IMO, even if that's actually illegal, there's zero way to prove it that the fifth amendment doesn't address.
The 5th has been distorted by the courts so much, that I wouldn't assume any novel interpretation would stand (and wiping data to avoid self-implicating is novel).
For instance, apparently answering questions up until a point at which you don't severely threatens your legal ability to invoke the 5th.
Re: Brits would quite like their private messages to stay private
#287Earlier quoted context omitted.
The sad thing of course was that the people coming across on boats or clinging to the underside of lorries etc are not EU citizens arriving legally. Plus it's not like EU is the only source of migration (hellow commonwealth). I think that the Brexit vote landed at a time when there was increasing general alienation within society, a general feeling of growing wealth inequality, of social injustice etc. We saw it with…
> I think that the Brexit vote landed at a time when there was increasing general alienation within society, a general feeling of growing wealth inequality, of social injustice etc Hmm GDP was growing well, inflation was down, real household income was on the rise, annual wage growth was on the up, it was a long time since the great financial crash, unemployment was crashing in 2013/2014, and things comparatively wer…
While the economy may have been doing ok and all that, I think its still a lot to do with the feeling that everyone around you is doing _better_, and the increasingly prevalent need for instant-gratification.
A lot of this probably comes down to cheap-credit. I am by rights in the top 1% of national income in my senior-ish BigCo job, yet I look around at the traffic lights and I am surrounded by Range Rovers, Teslas, Porches SUVs etc. I dont think I could afford one of those (I tend to buy 3 or 4 year old cars outright), yet the stats say I earn more than 99% of people ... either most days I am surrounded by the 0.1% club, or people are spending a lot of their income in PCP etc.
Is it a matter of "keeping up with the jonses"? Are people thinking "Well these people around me are driving nice cars and I am not, so clearly I am getting dicked over here somehow and everyone else is earning boatloads and I am not." Replace nice cars with expensive holidays, house renovations, latest iphone, latest shoes/handbag or whatever. And all amplified and magnified by social media. Its all the same: conspicuous status baubles making people feel like they're on the loser end of the spectrum.
See enough of that over and over (and you will if you use social media) and it'll shift your world views.
Re: Brits would quite like their private messages to stay private
#288Earlier quoted context omitted.
> You could make it even more robust if you required a cellphone store employee And you would accept a device that would require a third party for setup?!?!?! That is what I meant with "either proving identity or lunatic workarounds"... That "robust enough" is full grounds to have a population rise, given that an expectable combination of stupidity as ineptitude and stupidity as radical psychosis from the state can s…
Yes I accept that every device requires a third party for setup. That setup being namely putting the device in my hands and giving me legal ownership of the device.
> That setup being namely putting the device in my hands and giving me legal ownership of the device
You implied in your parent post that «requir[ing] a cellphone store employee to [set the age of an owner on the device]» would be acceptable. We refuse radically to have devices that require third parties («cellphone store employee[s]» to finalize setup.
Re: Brits would quite like their private messages to stay private
#289Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not clear. What would be the good thing. And what is "we", what is that silence: I denounce that of the britons as a set. We are pretty vocal. The good thing to push is demanding decent administrations and operators (e.g. in information systems), selected from and evaluated by decent neighborhoods.
sorry that's not a coherent thought
I said that your statement «If we want a good thing we should push for the good thing instead of remaining silent while worse people push for the worse thing» is not clear. I specified that it is not clear what you mean with «good thing», who do you mean with «we» and what do you mean with «silence» - I remarked that the "we" I am part of is pretty vocal.
I also said that if we should "want a good thing" and push for it, that would be a decent society of capable people from which capable administrators (and journalists and communicators all the interfaces from decision makers to public) are selected: decent societies would vocally demand what is due and decent administrations would provide it, and that would radically avoid the horrible mess and subsequent terror that incompetence and feeblemindedness and twisted incentives are instead currently generating.
Re: Brits would quite like their private messages to stay private
#290Earlier quoted context omitted.
Those are the ulterior motives people I referred to. Asking on installation is robust enough because parents buy devices for their children and set them up. You could make it even more robust if you required a cellphone store employee to do it. Whatever way someone is authenticated as a cellphone store employee would surely leak, but again: robust enough . An example of something not robust is asking the child upon a…
> You could make it even more robust if you required a cellphone store employee And you would accept a device that would require a third party for setup?!?!?! That is what I meant with "either proving identity or lunatic workarounds"... That "robust enough" is full grounds to have a population rise, given that an expectable combination of stupidity as ineptitude and stupidity as radical psychosis from the state can s…
> Have they (the keir starmer bunch) or have they not issued a law without the crucial details - how to do it, the whole matter is absurd without full clarity on "how to do it"?
This (a law with a separate binding statutory instrument to implement it) is actually a pretty normal formulation of British law. It's not unique to this situation, nor is it a sign of malfeasance. It's worked pretty well before, it is far from unscrutinised (the statutory instruments pass through at least one cross-party committee) and they save us from the absurdity of massive, fully complete legislation written by lobbyists that representatives cannot meaningfully read and end up stuffed with pork barrel, special interest and unrelated legislation.
The law is voted on in the Commons on the basis that a statutory instrument will not exceed its reach. Committees make sure they don't; laws get amended if they do. (Cross-party committees work better in the UK than in the USA)
Again: we do law a bit differently here. I do not think it necessarily inferior to US law.