The U.K. Parliament is pushing ahead with a sprawling internet regulation bill that will, among other things, undermine the privacy of people around the world. The Online Safety Bill, now at the final stage before passage in the House of Lords, gives the British government the ability to force backdoors into messaging services, which will destroy end-to-end encryption. No amendments have been accepted that would mitigate the bill’s most dangerous elements. If it passes, the Online Safety Bill will be a huge step backwards for global privacy, and democracy itself.
I think we could resolve this fairly quickly by totally cutting England off from the global internet. Kind of like North Korea, really. No online banking, no email, no online gaming, no streaming video services. No online maps. No voice chatting, or even general chatting. All of this requires encryption, non-negotiably.
They’ll break fast. It will look worse historically than Brexit and do more long term trade damage than the damned Austrian diethylene glycol wine scandal.
Unfortunately the mission to regain control of information flow is a top-down policy and the UK government is just swimming in the direction everybody is being steered to. There are several countries all implementing their own versions of this, for example India recently banning some e2ee apps. Also the EU has approved a law which requires that companies be able to scan content of user messages.
I don’t know any specifics about the laws being considered in North America, or what’s happening in South America, Africa or the rest of Asia at all, but I’d imagine any banned list would be pretty long by the time the dust settles. In the meantime it’ll be more than a little cringe worthy watching the politicians in different countries trying to take credit for the trickle down policies they sell.
Perhaps a technical solution could be apps with backdoored encryption exposing an interface for other apps to pass and receive encrypted messages. Dividing themselves in two even. A custom text editor isn’t a messaging app.
Shit, man, seems like it’s always something. There have been a number of attempts at that in the USA, but they’ve almost all been shot down as blatantly unconstitutional or were severely weakened in their scope. You aren’t stuck in an affected area, are you?
It looks like the US is still gunning for it, which is expected with top-down globalist policy. Yes, I’m in the UK where the last few leaders haven’t been elected by the people. All perfectly normal stuff.
I read that article but I’m failing to see how it relates to our conversation? We’ve always had biometric data on both criminal suspects and also state employees and contractors. There doesn’t seem to be anything here on explicitly fighting private encryption?
It’s the section “Access to electronic evidence” and the talk of encryption there, with delegates pressing “lawful access by design”. They aren’t dreaming of lawful access to encrypted byte streams and when there’s a backdoor for lawful access today, it’s available for different laws tomorrow. They do seem like they are on the same page on this, which isn’t surprising since it was floated onto the G7 agenda from wherever globalist policy originates from.
That would literally mean after the acquisition of a search warrant in America, which are generally not easy to get; so I’m still not terribly worried about it. The US isn’t the EU.
I’m too cynical. I hope to once again share some faith in the system again. All the best!