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Comment by dataduck | Hacker News Reader

Is there any co-ordinated political response to this in the UK? Where do I sign up?

I don't want to be "blackpilled" about it. But there is literally nothing that can be done about it. None of the politicians in the UK seem to care about freedom of speech, right to privacy or anything else that is classically liberal. Everyone in the UK either supports it or is resigned to it. Also almost nobody in the IT industry seems to care about it either (I've worked at quite a few places as a consultant).

There is nothing that you can do about it, so people are just apathetic. Only way to change something is by voting, but there is no party that would have a chance of winning that would support freedom of speech. People literally think that if you have nothing to hide, then you have nothing to worry about. When I tried to move some of my friends to Signal and told them that someone can read our messages, they just said so what. You also have this propaganda about being open, transparent with everything that you do and people share things themselves and they find it enjoyable.

Getting people to move from something like Whatsapp to Signal is almost impossible. I have no intention of even living in the UK in the next few years to probably one of the overseas territories again (they are starting to tax the hell out of the things I make a living on).

>Only way to change something is by voting

Any party with a chance of winning gets coopted.

The only real way to change is to participate in internal party politics machinery, and be prepared to play dirty, because they certainly will.

> There is nothing that you can do about it, so people are just apathetic.

Just to expand on this. It is just recognising the state of current situation. A lot of people in the UK support the state in some form or another and if the state tells you encryption is for terrorists or criminals then as far as they are concerned it it is for terrorists and criminals. Almost everyone in IT *might* grumble about it but that is as far as it goes.

People outside of that view point are seen as eccentric, crazy or "conspiracy theorists" even after you point to real abuses of the current snooping from GCGQ (e.g. people spying on their former spouses) that has rock solid evidence.

There is no political will in any mainstream party, even the non-mainstream ones don't care. The citizenry is apathetic, the professionals in the industry that work here are apathetic. In fact the very opposite exists, people seem to love it when the politicians do tyrannical things. There is also no real difference in the mainstream parties. I haven't voted in years because there is nobody to vote for who is worth a damn.

I am so fed up of fellow citizens. I am moving once the COVID situation is resolved as mentioned in another comment.

Try The Open Rights Group -- https://www.openrightsgroup.org/ -- I'm a member and they do lobby, but much less than e.g. the EFF

Vote libertarian. Governments will do what they can to make their jobs easier, to show off success. I know left leaning people are going to dislike that, but it's a double edged sword - if you want eg a national health system, you're going to end up with the government telling you to eat your five vegetables each day.

With private healthcare system, the difference will be that private company will be telling you to eat 5 vegs a day, then they will require that you take a photo each time you eat a veg and so on and if you don't you'll be left with nowhere to go for help. No thank you. I get that national health service is mostly rubbish, but it's better than nothing and if you are poor, it's your only chance and you can always have an option to go private.

If health care was properly private (not pseudo private) it would be really cheap. I had private health care in Spain / Gibraltar and it was relatively quite cheap.

The NHS is a massive money sink that always requires more money to keep on operating. I've heard the chant of "Save the NHS" since I was a child. As someone who parents are Labour voters (my ancestors used to work in the mines) even they are starting to think it might not be worth it.

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