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Comment by bostik | Hacker News Reader

> absurd libel laws and take any and every opportunity to cry "regulate the internet"

You do realise there's a very consistent theme here?

It's not about terrorism. It's not about the media. It's not even about internet. The underlying narrative is a systematic need to be able to control the messengers. Why impose hard propaganda when you can have unlimited pressure points available to influence what is being relayed to the public at large?

For some reason, the UK government (regardless of parties in power) seems to be fundamentally attracted to autocracy.

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Yes, I see the connection, but I have difficulty seeing how politicians think that even with such measures, they can actually control discourse (apart from going full China on the matter).

I have always found it interesting that the great dystopian fiction is always set in the UK: 1984, V for Vendetta, etc. And yet, UK politicians regularly make statements about surveillance that would immediately invoke those associations in the US, but UK residents, seen from the outside at least, don't bat an eye. In the US, we have a great deal of surveillance as well, but the government at least feels the need to hide it rather than flaunt it.

In other words, perhaps those authors also recognized this autocratic tendency (assuming it exists).

I don't think there's anything new about it. The concept and legal framework for D-Notice (essentially: "soft" media gag order)[0] is more than 100 years old.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DSMA-Notice

I consider the occasional need of the government to tell the media "you can't publish this for national security reasons" to be in a different category. This has legitimate use-cases, and with proper oversight can be done correctly. Surely we would not have wanted the media to publish about the Manhattan Project or Ultra during WWII. The US has NSLs which seem much the same thing.

Specific, targeted actions like this are a far cry from dragnet responses like the snooper's charter or calls for banning encryption (at least any kind that can't be decrypted by the government). The danger of dragnets is that they pick up incidental thought-crime. It's why warrants exist.

Although certainly a case could be made that the media is in a better position than the government to decide what should be made public.

> apart from going full China on the matter

I think that there is a substantial minority of both politicians and public who would have no problem with that at all. just read the Daily Mail comments on such stories; they are full of 'nothing to hide, nothing to fear'.

For some reason, the UK government (regardless of parties in power) seems to be fundamentally attracted to autocracy.

Theresa May served as Home Secretary for about six years before becoming Prime Minister. Throughout that time, on most days she probably spent several hours just reviewing cases where the police and security services wanted to do something that required explicit authorisation at that level.

It's reasonable to assume that many, even most, of those cases really did relate to the worst in our society. It also seems reasonable to assume that in at least some of those cases someone known to be very bad could not easily be brought to justice through our normal legal processes without undermining some other ongoing investigation. In addition, she was presumably given information and advice primarily by the police and security services, and those same organisations and the officials representing them would be the people either enabled or limited by her decisions.

It isn't hard to see how someone exposed to that pressure for such a sustained period of time would become extremely authoritarian. I don't know how anyone's view of society after such an experience could not be so biased that it would be hard to see what normal life looks like any more. Just about everyone who has become Home Secretary in my adult life has moved in that direction during their time in office.

The only difference here is that by a quirk of political fate Theresa May then became the most senior politician in the UK, with a majority government that gave her the power to drive through almost any legislation if she wanted it strongly enough. She achieved that position without anyone actually voting for that outcome in the first place. Until very recently, she also had little significant opposition to challenge her.

And so here we are, with the Investigatory Powers Act on the books and a government whose most senior representatives don't seem to understand even the basics of modern technologies and their implications yet have little hesitation about proposing regulation or outright bans of some of that same technology if it makes them look strong to enough voters in the week before a general election.

> Just about everyone who has become Home Secretary in my adult life has moved in that direction

The Home Sec position is a revolving seat used as a political parking lot, so the only people who stayed more than a year and had time to move in any direction in this century were T. May and Blunkett. And the latter started in a position where he regarded civil liberties as "airy fair" and expressed the aim to make the previous law&order hard liner "seem liberal".

It seems to me that the causation is the other way around - the only people really really craving that sort of position with immense secret powers but little public spotlight are those who are intrinsically authoritarian and power hungry.

Thanks for this, really puts a relatable human swing on a politician most see as a cold hearted robot. I just hope the tory majority doesn't widen, and enable her to act even more freely.

I can understand this, but there are plenty of police chiefs, district attorneys, federal prosecutors, and intelligence folks who later go into politics and don't become authoritarian. George H.W. Bush was Director of the CIA before becoming President, a job that would make anyone paranoid if anything would (perhaps a close equivalent to Home Secretary?). Yet he did not become excessively authoritarian.

Since most politicians start out as lawyers, many will inevitably have exposure to crime. So I too appreciate the humanization of May but don't see it as an excuse for authoritarianism. In fact, these people more than any should know about the delicate balance between liberty and security.

I suspect the difference between a UK Home Secretary and many of the other roles involved in policing, security and the legal system is that the HS is probably only getting involved in the most serious cases, where there are already sufficient grounds for thinking someone is a very bad person to want to take things to a level that requires such high-level approval. If you're a lawyer who practices in court or a senior police officer overseeing a whole area, you see the bad people but you also see people getting found not guilty or people being arrested on suspicion but then released when the evidence points elsewhere. I claim no special knowledge of whatever sensitive matters the HS sees on a daily basis, but I'm guessing with the filtering that must surely happen before any particular individual comes to the Home Secretary's attention, they see a much higher ratio of actually very bad people to suspected very bad people than most.

Just to be clear, I'm not defending May's policies as either HS or PM here. I think she demonstrates both a lack of technical knowledge and a biased perspective that make her very dangerous to the public good, and as such I believe she is not the right person to serve as PM. I just think that those flaws are somewhat understandable and probably something that would affect any human being who had served in her former post for as long as she did, unless perhaps they came from a background particularly relevant to these kinds of issues. The real problem may be expecting any single individual to do what is currently required of a Home Secretary for an extended period, certainly without some sort of mandatory recovery period after they leave the post before they take any other high-level position within the government.

>Since most politicians start out as lawyers

Do they? I guess you’re talking from a US point of view maybe.

It used to be common in the UK. Now they are mostly career politicians

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