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Comment by randomsearch | Hacker News Reader

Response as a Brit: “yes! That’s great news. Idiot/sinister police forces have already been trialling this, fantastic. Thank god for the EU.”

(Pause)

“Oh shit, I forgot.”

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I don't know how big a factor it was, but I suspect the desire of the security services to violate privacy let them to support Brexit. Certainly Richard Dearlove (former head of MI6 "C") was out there campaigning for it.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/sep/13/gchq-data-co...

As some that lives in a part of the country that voted for Brexit and actually knows a lot of people who voted Brexit: I can guarantee that nobody who voted for it did so because they wanted more privacy violations.

Your link is inserted in such a way that it looks like it should support the assertion that the security services supported Brexit, but it does not. Do you have a source for that?

Nobody — almost nobody — is a moustache-twirling villain who wants to eliminate privacy for its own sake. I doubt many people voted for a 10% devaluation of the pound either, yet since then I’ve seen different people looking at the same graph saying “it’s gone back up” and “going down is good”.

But…

…one of the big bug-bears of the newspaper and politicians whom I associate with Brexit is how the Human Rights Act stops the British criminal justice system from doing whatever it wants, including violating the privacy of anyone suspected of Being A Wrong’n.

I know Human Rights Act/European Convention on Human Rights/European Court of Human Rights are different things from the EU. I bet you know that too. Do your neighbours know it? Do they even know what the HRA says or do they say something about Abu Hamza?

Everyone I’ve seen who supports Brexit sees the EU as somewhere between “greedy and incompetent” on the low end and “the unholy spawn of Hitler and Stalin” on the high end (paraphrasing). I am aware that could be Nut Picking on my part, so I’m open minded about how wrong I could be about how other people think.

There are many ways to profit from the devaluation of your currency, if you know it's going to happen (enough) in advance. I'd be surprised if there weren't some people who campaigned and voted for Brexit for this reason, though I doubt it was a motivating factor for many.

It sounds like we agree.

Here's Dearlove on Brexit: https://briefingsforbrexit.com/jeremy-corbyn-and-national-se... ; he's retired, which allows him to speak on the subject.

The security services are supposed to be both secret and impartial, which makes it difficult to directly find out what they want, but campaigning against ECHR has been a common theme of Home Secretaries for years and Brexit is a necessary precondition for leaving ECHR.

And of course, what people wanted from Brexit and what they're going to get are two almost completely unrelated things.

As an EU citizen in the UK having to often go around that private development north of King's Cross that used facial recognition tech[0] I also would welcome this so that it wouldn't become normalised. Oh well.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/oct/04/facial-re...

I thought it was already normalized across London, at least for the MET ? Agreed, private case is different.

https://www.met.police.uk/live-facial-recognition-trial/

Yeah, sorry to not be specific. I meant the private use without the (assumed, possibly only theoretical) public body oversight.

That Victoria greeter situation sounds terrifying

I have to walk through Cardinal Place in Victoria (a shopping area) to get to work and they have "greeters" with cameras strapped to their chest. Feels a bit inhuman for those poor workers and uncomfortable for people walking by.

Amusing, but also as a Brit, I still think it's good news and that it adds weight to making the same arguments in the UK.

Except that the UK tends to like emulating the US ways rather than the EU ones.

UK ranks much worse than most countries in the world wrt privacy. ironic considering their traditional values

Good thing the UK are able to pass their own laws.

Yes, indeed. Laws like the Investigatory Powers Act (2016) a.k.a. "the Snoopers Charter".

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