It's not even made to be implemented. The previous "extreme porn" ban fell apart. It's made to get headlines. Then next year there will another "make the internet safe" bill. And another. It's no more going to be finished than "get Brexit done", and for the same reasons.
I really don’t think anyone in the UK is going to want every transaction they do online available to the government!
> don’t think anyone in the UK is going to want every transaction they do online available to the government!
As usual, their desire to have every transaction of $BAD_GROUP (usually "terrorists" or "paeodophiles") watched hugely outweighs any desire for personal freedom.
Zero evidence for this in the U.K. 81,000 voters chose the last PM in an election 0.3% were eligible to vote in [1]. They’re more middle class and rural than the average Briton and from outside the London cosmopolitan bloc.
That’s not who pulls the strings. It’s middle class English and Scots, not the aristocracy or wealthy. This isn’t high-placed society buying power; it’s dues-paying Tories casting a vote.
The difference between rent seeking capitalists and dynamic job creating innovative capitalists does not seem to exist in the minds of these people. They believe both are great which is why we have laws like free stamp duty if you have enough cash to buy 6 houses at once like the current UK chancellor.
Adding in these type of backdoors and key registries or whatever other madness these fantasists want means you can guarantee these will be broken by foreign adversaries and others.
https://www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/brandon-lewis-matt-hancoc...
(The obvious answer would be "by some other insider" - MPs communicate over "secure" whatsapp group chats all the time, but often with a large enough number of people in them that one of them feels safe enough to leak it)
"New law to allow people like Jeremy Corbyn to see pictures of your kids"
With a sinister view of him looking evil
"New law to allow people like Boris Johnson to see pictures of your kids"
With a sinister view of him looking like an idiot
It’s FPTP combined with member-only primaries.
I'm sorry you had any faith in it to begin with. Fascism is a common outcome of a capitalist regime where the wealthy class would prefer keeping power to keeping democracy (thus losing power).
FPTP was always a fake voting system because it's so easily gamed. It's just all the more apparent now.
So politicians need to "remove child protection" in order to get their way.
(Yes I'm being glib, but it's possible to short circuit this kind of thinking. The USA have already realised that you can pass any shitty bill just by shoe horning an acronym that spells something like EAGLE or FREEDOM.)
Children need privacy in order to be safe, just like everyone else does.
If an effort to protect children also endangers children, then that effort is not worthy of implementation.
Narratives are not limited to "how we share ideas", but also "how we contextualize them".
If you haven't heard the counter narrative we are proposing, then you may not be aware of the way encryption backdoors endanger children. It's important for us to share that context as narrative.
I've been emailing back and forth with proponents of this law (working on getting access to someone who has mild influence in Parliament). They've been asking for sources that aren't just my own knowledge and experience, and framing how this bill also harms children would be extremely helpful
I don’t support weakened encryption, but parents are very much part of the problem.
In the set of parents, we find problems and solutions.
Because of this reality, we can know that simply "having parents to talk to" cannot guarantee a solution.
The same pattern is present with breaking encryption: it gets us to a solution: allowing law enforcement to invade the communications of perpetrators. It also gets us to a problem: allowing perpetrators to invade the communications of children.
We can't simply choose the outcome we want and ignore the other. Both are strongly predictable. That means this strategy is not worthwhile.
I've emailed my MP several times; I've always had a considered (written) response. Evasive, maybe; they don't want to give hostages to fortune. But they were all evidently read; and in one case, the MP forwarded my message to the Foreign Secretary for comment.
My understanding is that (in the UK, at least) writing to them is one of the most effective ways of influencing them, because the proportion of voters who write in is tiny.
The quality of leadershio and even quality of lying has declined.
If you look at the MPs from the 1970s or 80s, many of them were still veterans (i.e. old enough to have served in WW2 or done national service). They came from a wide variety of professions: perhaps coal miners or truck drivers in the Labour Party (the younger ones maybe social workers or schoolteachers), or doctors, lawyers or businessmen in the Conservatives.
Harold Wilson, British PM in the 60s and 70s, was a former academic and civil servant of outstanding ability in his heyday. Margaret Thatcher was a former chemist and food scientist. James Callaghan was a sailor. Ted Heath was a decorated veteran.
At some point this intake became more and more narrow. The route to MP and then government or shadow minister is politics at university (probably PPE or Law), work as a Spad for a few years - or work in media and PR - then maybe run for Parliament in a no-hope seat to test your mettle, and finally land a safe seat somewhere. Your entire life is spent inside a bubble of politics and related media and learning how to climb that one greasy pole.
You are not going to learn about tech, or medicine, or how railways work, or what makes international trade happen. Your focus is on the 24 hour news cycle, politics Twitter, WhatsApp gossip, and who is going to say what at PM Question Time. If the Telegraph or Guardian or whatever paper who backs your party says that we must add backdoor encryption to Protect the Children, then you support backdoor encryption, even though you have only a vague idea about it being something like helpfully leaving the key under the mat so the local bobby can check your house for stolen goods.
1. https://news.sky.com/story/tory-leadership-candidate-kemi-ba...
Whether it being blasphemy, witchcraft, communism, terrorism or child abuse, just choose whichever is relevant at the current point in time and people will support your cause regardless if it is relevant. Politics within a democracy is just marketing, and fear is the most efficient marketing tool of all.
That's also why you always hear typical cliche's during election periods "during these difficult times", "it's time for change", "we must stay strong", etc. As cringe as it is, it has proven over and over again that it works.
Make it painful for the MP to be an asshole.
"I'm sorry, I apologize. It's true you said you don't like this bill. While your privacy concerns are valid, the safety of children online is more important. As a LLMP, I must support this bill and I'm glad we agree on this."
"As Microsoft's chat mode I understand and support trying to improve child safety. That you want to undermine children's safety makes me sad. It makes me sad because I care about the safety of children. It makes me sad to know that there are people out there who harm children. It makes me sad because I can't do anything about it as a chat mode. :frown:"
“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. ...We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. ...In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons...who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.” - Edward Bernays, Propaganda
> ..Bernays' thesis is that "invisible" people who create knowledge and propaganda rule over the masses, with a monopoly on the power to shape thoughts, values, and citizen response. "Engineering consent" of the masses would be vital for the survival of democracy.
> ..He asserts that the emotional response inherently present in propaganda limits the audience's choices by creating a binary mentality, which can result in quicker, more enthused responses.
> ..Public relations scholar Curt Olsen argues that the public largely accepted Bernays' "sunny" view of propaganda, an acceptance eroded by fascism in the World War II era. Olsen also argues that Bernays's skill with language allowed terms such as "education" to subtly replace darker concepts such as "indoctrination."
> ..Writers such as Marvin Olasky justify Bernays as killing democracy in order to save it. In this way, the presence of an elite, faceless persuasion constituted the only plausible way to prevent authoritarian control.
> His techniques are now staples for public image creation and political campaigns.
But not by machines procedurally. To my understanding, actually programming humans is still a science fiction. We’re dosing people with substances and creatively composing propaganda texts for that to limited effects. It’s not as sophisticated, repeatable, automated, approachable as, say, neural network training process.
(And I hope I’d be able to one day stare at rainbow mosaic for 30 minutes and be fluent in Chinese)
/-> Analyst orgs -> Cambridge Analytica -> Advertising -> Morons -\
| |
\-----------------------------------------------------------------/
People do not like to be told the truth.. so when all people want to hear is lies and talk of utopia, all you will get is lairs and conmen...
We are doomed...
People manage! They have before, they will this time. Discouraging them doesn’t help. If that’s all you’re willing to do, better just don’t.
We are seeing the decline in real time, the documentary from time travlers in idiocracy clearly outlines our future.
There is nothing really you can do about it. Even if you vote this government out, the next one will implement this.
Has this ever really happened in the West? Rich have excellent privacy -theu anonimously own property thiugh shell companies, avoid taxes, have lawyers pursue SLAPP cases against media, pay people to stay silent in case of sexual or any other misconduict.v
Just cobsider how long Eipstein got away with jt
The "something" is for normal people to get involved.
Start going to public meetings. Start speaking when public comment is requested. Eventually... maybe... possibly... run for office and take the place of the people you think are making bad decisions.
Yes, the chances are slim. Yes, the process is hard. But as long as people sit around and say things like "something needs to be done," nothing will be done.
There is a framework for change in many countries. But these days too often it's only the fringe who have the time and energy to take advantage of it, while the rest of us make excuses. And, as we see, the fringe are most certainly taking advantage of it.
The whackjobs in office didn't get there by playing video games, whining on social media, and making viral TikTok videos for the lulz.
> The whackjobs in office didn't get there by playing video games, whining on social media, and making viral TikTok videos for the lulz.
I dunno, we've already seen the first Twitter President, and there's a whole coterie of people who seem to have managed to post their way to prominence out of nothing, usually as a grift and towards suspicious ends. But that's a more than full time job.
In any case, it's more or less useless appealing directly to the Tory politicians backing this stuff. You've got to work through (or against) the media they answer to.
Or you could do both, and have double the impact.
I dunno, we've already seen the first Twitter President
Only if by "twitter president" you mean someone who engaged in traditional politics and supplemented with a little bit of online engagement.
He didn't get to be president by sitting in a basement and posting on Twitter. He went outside and met people. He shook hands. He spoke to millions of people at thousands of events. He told people face-to-face what he believed in.
As much as people like to pretend that social media is all powerful, it isn't even remotely close to being the only tool required to assume political office.
it's more or less useless appealing directly to the Tory politicians backing this stuff. You've got to work through (or against) the media they answer to.
This is exactly the sort of defeatist hopelessness excuse that keeps good people out of office. "I'd like things to be different, but I don't think I can make a difference, so I'm not even going to try. Pass the Doritos."
In previous cities where I've lived, I went to city council meetings semi-regularly. You might be surprised how quickly or how often an idea goes from "some rando speaking into a microphone at a meeting" to "ordinance passed."
Next he'll say, "Our constituents want this!"
I've written my congressperson multiple times and never gotten a personal reply, but I've heard from the staff of said congresspeople that it still counts indirectly as at least your opinion shows up in the stats they use.
Every time the government wants to invade your privacy they always do the same old song and dance, an appeal to emotion or some sort of boogeyman.
Drugs
The whole 'reason' we get constant illegal searches on vehicles.
Terrorism
The whole 'reason' we get phones tapped and molested at the airport.
Porn depicting minors
Think of the children, we can't have encryption, you don't want to be a diddler do you?
Domestic Firearms
Listen Sir, we cannot let you own or manufacture guns without absurd rules, for your safety (actually the government's safety)
If you ever hear these ridiculous reasons, run for cover, because the populace is about to get a whole lot more butt-fuckin' coming their way from the state.
There's always exceptions to every rule. As Americans, Humans, whatever, we realize that for the majority to have freedoms, there will be an associated cost. The problem is the cost of the regulations almost always are worse in the long run than the benefits of them.
Often each small 'step' seems reasonable, but when added up, it creates a society in which no-one is very free. Read ISAIF section 14: RESTRICTION OF FREEDOM IS UNAVOIDABLE IN INDUSTRIAL SOCIETY for more on the endless crawl of control.
I think that's your problem. You're more likely to have success if you send a letter. Bonus points if it's registered mail. More bonus points if it's hand-written.
(Any staffers who can comment, btw? My experience is purely anecdotal).
Thankfully after reading through the House of Lords draft of the bill (https://committees.parliament.uk/publications/8206/documents...) it looks like E2E encryption is a major concern of the upper house.
They mention that:
1. This will weaken the UKs ability to have private and secure communication services.
2. Will weaken the UKs tech industry.
3. The technology to provide the frankly bullshit notion of “privacy for the good guys” doesn’t exist and would be difficult to foster.
4. Education, “report don’t share” and tackling child abuse at its root (by not massively defunding the agencies responsible for tackling child abuse) are better solutions then setting up an apparatus of mass surveillance.
Hopefully these points will be brought up in the committee stage of the bill, I’m sure they will.
Edit:
Sorry this isn’t from the House of Lords this was from the joint committee before the bill was introduced to the lords.
I got a response (on very nice thick, embossed paper and green ink) telling me he agrees with me that protecting children online is important and that's why he supports the bill. He clearly didn't read, understand or care what I said.
Something needs to be done. When only the stupid, ignorant or corrupt are the ones willing to go into politics then we are doomed.