Hacker News Reader

Comment by k-mcgrady | Hacker News Reader

28,000 people stopped using these powers - less than 56 people charged (no specific number for that so it could be significantly less than 56 as that's the number of arrests). When the authorities are given such a powerful tool (and such a violating tool) it should have to prove significantly useful to continue to exist. Schedule 7 clearly hasn't. Also quite shocking that only 0.2% of people stopped are arrested and non-compliance == arrest. That's a lot of people just handing over data and passwords without a fight.

View on HN

>When the authorities are given such a powerful tool (and such a violating tool) it should have to prove significantly useful to continue to exist

Unfortunately, the only real constrain for it to not continue to exist would be to cost some people their political career due to media/public backlash and such.

Who is the last person (or any people, really) at this level who experienced an adverse effect on their political career due to "media/public backlash?"

When was the last time that there was an actual media/public backslash on these matters?

I think it's more that if politician A did such a thing, it would give opposing politician/party B ammo to mount a campaign to incite backlash, not that the public cares enough to backlash themselves.

> Also quite shocking that only 0.2% of people stopped are arrested and non-compliance == arrest. That's a lot of people just handing over data and passwords without a fight.

No, you've misunderstood that. The article mentions that he's been stopped previously, and asked for his passwords, and has declined before without being arrested.

So maybe that low arrest rate is a glimmer of hope: they could be arresting many more people.

It still sucks, and it clearly needs reform which is unlikely under current or future governments.

True, hard to draw a firm conclusion because of that point. Based on the 'leaflet' they provide when you are detained refusing to hand over passwords can lead to arrest so I drew the conclusion based on that. If we look at it the other way though (based on your point) it's also scary as if they are detaining people who then refuse to give passwords and they don't arrest them (which they have the right to do) why are those people being detained at all? Again, the correct answer if we don't know but it could speak to some degree of racial profiling or simply very poor/incompetent screening that's catching and inconveniencing a lot of people.

Yes, the powers are really scary, and it seems obvious to me that they're being misused.

The UK is weirdly comfortable with massive levels of surveillance.

I think most voters don't understand the issues, or feel defeated

Maybe, I mean I don't know about "most voters" to be honest. I certainly feel like we're defeated and will be walked all over for the rest of our sad existence

Selective enforcement is worse than enforcement by-the-book.

It works with traffic citations and with tax enforcement. I mean if from a behavioral perspective you're looking for a given result with minimized work, selective enforcement is a decent option.

Except for the disproportionate racial bias, which we see with both airport security and traffic citations

What exactly is working about traffic citations? As far as I can see, compliance with traffic regulations hovers around 0%, and traffic citations serve no purpose other than as an arbitrary tax falling on unlucky people.

This probably highly depends on the country and cultural attitudes.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com