Maybe brexit has it right - Europe isn't a good place to be a member of.
Of course that's not how they portray it, but doublespeak has been strong around Brexit and still is.
It never made much sense to Brexit if you were in the UK and favoured personal, family or human rights. Including rights like privacy and a protected private life, and freedom to make open source software (EU is against software patents, UK is not).
I have a similar view on federal laws in the United States - they don't tend to repeal federal surveillance laws without violence.
No, most EU legislation is decided on by ordinary legislative procedure, using qualified majority voting rules in council of EU ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_in_the_Council_of_the_E... ).
If Country A wanted strong privacy laws and Country B wanted strong surveillance laws, and both have a veto, then you’ll get paralysis or a compromise.
Right now it seems the EU has neither strong encryption as the norm nor a massive surveillance system. Just what one would expect when any nation can veto a law.
Now that the UK is independent, it no longer has the paralysis/compromise/status quo dilemma.
...so they can now pass all the strong surveillance laws they want without being hindered by the EU?
My point: "paralysis" can be good if it prevents you from doing something bad. Perhaps forcing a "compromise" actually leads to (better) solutions that account for everyone's concerns?
Overall, it is not clear to me that the UK becoming independent from EU is going to necessarily lead to better laws. Are they going to be easier and faster to pass? Sure. Are they going to be better? Not so sure.
In the early 2000s the UK Supreme Court was granted a great deal of institutional autonomy. During the Brexit fiasco, it had no problem flexing its muscles.
The House of Lords had likewise been reformed and is much stronger and meritocratic (there’s still work to go on it).
Likewise subsidiary nations and municipalities have an increasingly large amount of independence. If Westminster passed surveillance laws unpopular in Scotland, they likely wouldn’t be implemented in Scotland.
The best example is probably Northern Ireland. There’s much greater support for surveillance powers in NI. But those expanded powers are combined with much greater accountability and oversight of security services.
Some parts of the British Home territory have too little surveillance. Both the City of London and Jersey have a reputation for laundering dirty money - something unthinkable in Northern Ireland.
Nothing about the UKs future is clear.
But I don’t think they need the EU to prevent them from passing overly broad or weak surveillance laws.