Companies to face criminal offence if they tip off U.K. users about snooping
telegraph.co.uk
telegraph.co.uk
No one is interested in you the individual, but they are certainly interested in building the capability to track all individuals and preempt anything that threatens any entrenched status quo.
We are not currently a police state but we are certainly building the capability and the cultural language to justify it. The moral high ground and the entire framework of values that powered it have shown to be near meaningless by the alarming ease with which they have been discarded in favour of the language of security and paranoia. Everyone is safe in a cage. It will be naive to believe in the context of how modern states operate that a cluster of extreme right wing medievalists in the ME are bringing on this state of affairs, the bulk and most powerful of whom are paradoxically our best friends in the region.
Surveillance states are not a on/off thing, you don't suddenly wake one day to a surveillance state. These capabilities take time to build, but once the infrastructure is in place it will inevitably get used.
In this case we can see all the pieces being put in place methodically with language that makes George Orwell look astonishingly prescient. And its the self absorption of this generation who have inherited and enjoyed a relatively 'free' and equal state with 'hope for improvement' but are going to willfully pass on something more ominous.
- blow a whistle and be on the run like snowden?
- put their name on a petition which also acts as a watch list?
- publicly protest and hoping to be covered by mainstream media which basically means quitting their job abd taking a < 10% risk of success
- start a viral shame campaign which both google abd facebook have attempted multiple times only to have cisa pass and this sort pf thing to become the "status quot"
Really, what is there to do but watch the future unfold into dystopia? Really, tell me? In reality we are tools turning the coorperate machine. Individuals freedom is not more important the economic evolution. Online communities are unaminously against evil but in reality, they are made up of fattened happy pigs that do very little but talk to one another and hope to get their oen lives a little more perfect.
Governments have been corrupt for more than a mellenia. Recent attempts at being humane should be taken with a grain of salt
If your friends questions you why they should do this, then ask them this:
> Can I see a list of the porn you like to watch?
No, really mate! The British government believes that it should know that you have a penchant for large heavily endowed older ladies servicing three men at a time. The British government isn't being very specific about who can actually access that lust list of yours either. And funnily enough you can't get a list of the Home Secretary, Theresa May's internet history, because "people might use it against her". Someone already tried an FOI request and got denied!
Once I start quietly loading ISIS websites in hidden iframes on my blog, you'll all be on the list of people who'll be getting a knock knock dawn raid.
The business model of both Google and Facebook is based on intensive user (and non-user) surveillance. They don't and never will "campaign against" a dystopian surveillance state because they very much are that dystopia. As Eric Schmidt from Google says: “We know where you are. We know where you've been. We can more or less know what you're thinking about.”
http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Eric-Schmidt-We-Know-Wher...
The lack of that sort of courage is why the world is going to hell. Today's attitudes of prioritising personal 'comfort' over what's right is why this sort of crap is being allowed to happen.
The best solution for a company in this situation (especially a large one) is to blow the whistle to the media and watch the fallout. Oh sure, you might not come out alright, but the media and internet reaction would certainly be fierce, and the reputation of any government involved would go to hell extremely quickly.
More the reputation goes, the harder it is to stay 'legitimate' and keep in power. Same thing goes for companies trying to shut down smaller ones and individuals through threats.
Here was your turn to do your bit, something meaningful and what we get instead is a complete co-option into the system. No activism, no protest, very few whistle blowers, especially since you of all other groups would be alert to the possibilities, where is the movement? There has been real sacrifice and sustained, persistent struggle to get here, values have a cost to the individual, if one balks if there is a cost then its just empty words and mass delusion.
And thus there is no shame, no movement, no activism, no code of conduct, no moral pressure to dissociate with these kind of activities or to call out all these people in any technology fora, even today when its out in the open.
And it's just not their failing. Modern populations seem to be completely unequal to any kind of meaningful activism and change. There is such a debilitating focus on individualism, and the completely irrelevance of wider community and other interests that the only real thing left is self interest and self interest has no 'values' or value, beyond expediency and survival.
An open discussion of government corruption and oppression is essentially impossible here.
But from what i understand, the nsa chooses to train individuals in part based on psychological aspects. I wish i could find where i read that
As much as feasible, avoid buying into technology that prioritizes shiny bells and whistles over privacy and security.
And perhaps try to practice and spread greater tolerance for personal lifestyle differences, hopefully to reduce the amount of persecution in the event that nothing can prevent the surveillance state from emerging.
Don't incorporate in the UK.
From the adoption of printing by Europeans in the 15th century we began to be concerned primarily with access to printed material.
The right to read, and the right to publish were the central subject of our struggle for freedom of thought for most of the last half millennium.
The basic concern was for the right to read in private and to think and speak and act on the basis of a free and uncensored will.
[...]
By the end of the 19th century, that struggle for the freedom of reading had begun to attack the substance of Christianity itself and European world trembled on the brink of the first great revolution of the mind it spoke of "liberté égalité fraternité" but actually it meant freedom to think differently.
The "Ancien Régime" begun to struggle against thinking and we moved into the next phase of the struggle for freedom of thought which presumed the possibility of unorthodox thinking and revolutionary acting.
And for 200 years we struggled with the consequences of those changes.
That was then and this is now.
Now we begin a new phase in the history of the human race. We are building a single nervous system which will embrace every human mind.
https://benjamin.sonntag.fr/Moglen-at-Re-Publica-Freedom-of-...
This is exactly what happened in China when Google left - Baidu exploded in popularity and now dominates the market so completely that it would be nearly impossible for Google to unseat it.
The Chinese government does this on purpose to facilitate the growth of its own domestic companies. The Great Firewall serves as much of an economic purpose as a political one. By degrading service quality of foreign companies, it opens space in the market for domestic companies to establish themselves and gain market share. It would be impossible for any one of those companies to bootstrap its initial userbase if a giant American corporation already cornered its market.
http://www.forbes.com/2009/12/21/google-baidu-internet-intel...
I agree in this case, the law isn't a good one, the snoopers charter generally is a problem.
But I don't want companies throwing their weight around more than they already do (and they do, but in a largely predictable capitalistic, profit maximising way). The road to companies becoming de-facto governments is paved with good intentions.
Initially you invite the Roman Empire in to help secure your borders against regional powers, then before you know it you're a vassal state, then a prefecture, then Jerusalem is burning, and your country is gone for 1900 years.
Or, to put it another way, you arm the Mujahadeen to help you fight the Russians, and then...
"Arrogant American tax-dodgers refuse to abide by the law... and take it out on you!",
or, "Facebook choosing terrorists over us!"
Promptly follow that up with reports about the number of UK jobs at risk.
All the focus would end up being on the social and economic consequences rather than the cause, and eventually the sheep would turn on you as well... or, worse, just learn to live without you while still being apathetic to the Governments assault on their liberty.
I wonder at what point do we just decide they don't deserve those liberties and work to try to ensure we are part of the haves and not the have nots. It is a shame for the children who won't get a choice, but for the adults who choose this, at what point do we stop them from getting what they want?
I wonder how it would work the opposite way: Start redirecting google.co.uk to uk.google.com, hosted and operated by a non-UK corporate entity outside of UK jurisdiction. Make them block you. China would do it; would Britain?
If not reissuing a warrant canary will let a company's customers know that they are under surveillance, the proposed law will require that company to publish the warrant canary. It's a simple as that. And it is perfectly possible to prosecute someone for "acts of omission". As Wikipedia puts it:
> In the criminal law, an omission, or failure to act, will constitute an actus reus (Latin for "guilty act") and give rise to liability only when the law imposes a duty to act and the defendant is in breach of that duty.
Why do you expect a court to experience sympathy about the fact that you set out to break the law (by communicating this information that you are forbidden to communicate) and set yourself up so that you have to choose between making a false statement or going to jail?
Also, your argument style is very aggressive, adressing me personally, saying “You did it to yourself.”, despite the fact that I have not claimed to have published a warrant canary.
I know that a law has been proposed which would effectively make them illegal.
> Despite this, others seem to be using warrant canaries.
I believe that the source of your confusion is that we are presently discussing a proposed law which may come into effect in the future, while you are examining the past when that law was not in effect.
If I understand you correctly, your main points are:
1. The law can never compel you to make a false statement.
2. Lots of firms are doing it, and they probably know what they're doing.
For point 1, if you can show me a credible legal authority arguing that British law can never, under any circumstances, compel a person to lie, I'll accept that I was wrong, and I'll thank you for teaching me something new this day.
But rather than do that, you've suggested that I should try to disprove your claim. Well, I admit that I can't offer a rigorous disproof, but that's to be expected: disproof is always hard. (Can you disprove the existence of sasquatches?)
So let's put that aside, at least until a real lawyer gets involved, and move on to point 2.
And for 2, I don't think you'd say that if you'd seen as much legal bullshit in your time as I have.
Do you remember, back in the 90s, envelopes that said, "By opening this envelope, you agree to the Terms & Conditions enclosed." Or more recently, have you seen online services whose Terms & Conditions say something like, "We can change these Terms & Conditions at any time, without telling you." They're both obvious bullshit, and yet in both cases lawyers kept pushing them onto their clients until a court ruled against the practices.
So I believe that the warrant canary is another piece of obvious bullshit, which will die a quick death when a court examines it. In fact, it's possible that a court already HAS ruled against the idea, but we just don't know about it. Or, to put it another way, I think there's every chance that some of the warrant canaries we are seeing published now are lies. That would certainly explain why we've yet to see the non-renewal of a warrant canary!
1. I actually never claimed anything about what the law says, I said the the concept of a warrant canary assumes that the law cannot do a particular thing.
2. I thought that the types of organizations which would use a warrant canary would be slightly more resistant to legal superstitions and overreach.
I.e. my answer to number 2 above led me to begin with the proposition that warrant canaries were probably legal, and therefore I wanted a disproof. Also, a disproof should in theory be easy; a single example where the law can compel anyone to make a false statement would suffice. It would be wholly impractical for me to try to prove that there are no such rules anywhere in the law, and I am not a lawyer, so I couldn’t do that even if I wanted to.
I also checked canarywatch.org and noticed that Adobe have a warrant canary and, yes, I'd like to believe that Adobe's lawyers know what they're doing.
And after giving this some thought, I think you've persuaded me, but with one important caveat: it's different in Britain. American warrant canaries might work, but British ones are bullshit.
It's all about freedom of speech. As far as I can tell, all the legal theories about compelled speech come down to this: freedom of speech implies freedom from compelled speech. But in the UK there is no constitutional guarantee of freedom of speech so, while I'm not aware of any law compelling people to lie, neither am I aware of there being anything to prevent such a law from existing.
Thanks for the interesting discussion. I've learned something today. :)
I think there's a case for having a time-limit after which the surveillance must be disclosed, unless a judge thinks there's a very good reason not to for a specific case. I believe that's how this works in the US. Unfortunately, the UK's version of surveillance oversight is typically ministerial oversight, which is not very encouraging.
No one would have a problem with this if there were even the vaguest semblance of due process. There isn't.
However, the company asserting it's not the surveillance branch of the government where it does business, is legitimate. Whether it'll make any difference is a separate question.
Whereas from the outset there was a concept of citizens in the U.S. under the written constitutions (both of them).
https://www.runnymede.gov.uk/magnacarta
https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/education/medieval/magna...