UK intelligence recycles “think of the children” argument for borking encryption
theregister.com
theregister.com
I don't know how true this is outside the UK, but here people are generally happy for the government to monitor their internet and mobile communications, they're happy for supermarkets to use facial recognition cameras to identify them at checkout, they're happy for CCTV to monitor their every move, but if Google tracks your search results, that's going too far.
Even on the topic of encryption, most people don't really care as long as it's not Facebook or Google reading their messages. If you're any other business or the government, then go on ahead... Collect our biometric data, read our emails, track our movements. No need for consent.
I’d love to hear more.
Thanks for engaging with me!
But China has something to learn from the West too. We've already lifted the vast majority of our people out of poverty. It is harder to continually improve peoples' lives when you have to invent new things rather than play catch up. Hyper-growth is unsustainable and eventually China will have the same slower growth as the West (be that 5 years or 50 years). People get used to whatever situation they are in and expect different things. People in the West don't have as much trust for their governments and are more afraid of turnkey tyranny than they are of gaining a better life. In other words, they are more afraid of losing their good lives.
With the West I think we can see the connection between governments and companies. We were fine with those companies taking our data because they made our lives better. But things have stagnated now and the bad outweighs the good. We've seen these companies abuse their power, but in many ways we still trust the governments to reign them in. But you're right, governments are also capable of the same abuse, or even more. That's the danger of turnkey tyranny though, that it is the actions you give to leaders you trust that are abused. It flies under the radar and those powers are given with good intentions.
I also think tech illiteracy plays a major role here, but I've already written a lot (and barely broached the subject)
Who said they weren't? My discussion is why the _average_ Chinese citizen doesn't care. You're talking about a minority group, which by definition is not average.
> life getting better for the layperson has nothing to do with China's strong surveillance and media control policy.
It actually does. The reason being that the government can do this without the layperson getting upset. Why isn't the layperson getting upset? See my above comments.
> Chinese people trust their government due to a strong culture of nationalism.
Which doesn't appear out of nowhere. It isn't happening because race. There are plenty of Asians that live in democracies. It isn't just historical culture. There are plenty of Asian countries that were previously ruled by... China itself.
I'm fine introducing new topics to the discussion but please don't put words in my mouth. I'd take your own advice and not make a lot of bold generalizations. I happily noted that there was far more nuance than what I wrote, but let's recognize the constraints of our platform. I can't discuss everything nor can I know everything. But if you're going to come at me and complain about a lack of nuance you shouldn't make the same error. You should also participate in good faith otherwise we're just going to end up in a fight, which is unproductive.
Hong Kong is a great example of what happens when people living in a surveillance society speak out. The Hong Kong people have been silence, as have the people in Taiwan. They aren't happy to be ruled by China. There's nothing democratic about what happened there.
I didn't make generalizations, I gave you concrete examples. I also just pointed out the poor conclusions you are jumping to. I apologize if that felt personally, that was not my intention at all. Having a strong surveillance policy makes the layperson feel worse about the society they live in, I urge you to read 1984 by George Orwell if you haven't.
The nationalism in China has its roots in how the government propaganda painted themselves and the Chinese people compared with "outsiders". It is a direct consequence of historical events and culture. It is not a new thing that came forward with the advent of technology and a feeling of security due to living in a surveillance state.
The West isn't okay with neither the government nor corporations taking our data. Overall the west still has some of the best civil rights protections, due to the rights being codified in law. Facebook is being tried in court in multiple countries. Zuckerburg is going to be deposed in court due to Facebook's relationship to the privacy violations by Cambridge Analytica. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-07-20/zuckerber...
I don't believe good faith discussions include considering stripping of the basic human right to privacy. It's not a binary choice between the government having that information vs corporations having it. For a while the layperson in the west didn't know it was happening. But now we're seeing the consequences of what will happen now that they do. China doesn't give people that same kind of choice on the right to privacy.
Saying the average Chinese citizen doesn't care is a generalization without any backing. Silence isn't the same as agreement.
I have several close Chinese friends who have argued with me that reeducation camps are different from concentration camps and that there is nothing wrong with them. That "they're just taking the children away temporarily." (a claim made and literally every non-Chinese person in the group stopped and then called them out on it)
> The layperson doesn't have room or a voice to be able to question and doubt government policy.
I disagree. Criticizing the government is popular past time in the West, especially America. So I don't really agree with this premise. I do agree that things are different in China, but I disagree that one can't speak out, especially when one is overseas and not surrounded by other countrymen.
> I didn't make generalizations, I gave you concrete examples.
The generalization complaint was about your generalization of my comment and assuming I had taken a position I didn't. Honestly, I think you and I agree on more things than we disagree. I just think we work in different bubbles.
O RLY?
> unless they are doing something wrong
The thing about the law in most countries is, the government can usually find you to be doing something wrong, if it wants to.
> They directly see how surveillance has reduced child trafficking, theft, and other such hard to trace crimes
Interesting that they can "see" what is at best a conclusion of multiple long-term comparative studies, and at worst an unsubstantiated claim.
> They can [etc. etc.]
Well, the Chinese people can apparently make many poorly-supported over-generalizations about themselves! Oh wait, that's _posts_ about the Chinese people.
> We've already lifted the vast majority of our people out of poverty
Hmm. Tell that to hundreds of thousands of homeless people in the US. Or anyone who tries to get medical treatment and asked to shell out tens of thousands of USD.
Whether this is an empirically correct attitude or not is not the topic of conversation, the fact is that average Chinese citizens are overwhelmingly in support of a surveillance culture because they feel the benefits are obvious and bring meaningful quality of life improvements while the downsides are acknowledged and not regarded as serious enough to outweigh the benefits. Even citizens who are quite critical of the Chinese government in other respects rarely bring up surveillance as a gripe they have.
I doubt China has really reduced those crimes that much. It's very hard for an individual to gauge that when all media sources you have are government controlled propaganda. Most people are not directly affected by things like human trafficking. So how do they know it's been reduced other than those propaganda sources?
I'm pretty sure the only thing they really care about in terms of surveillance is organised political opposition.
A lot of fraud and scams come from China, I think it's safe to say that they don't care, at least when it affects people in other countries.
I have no idea. But the point I was trying to make is that people believe that the crime has been reduced. This is probably a more important metric when it comes to determining why people would or would not trust a government. It is important to realize that peoples' perspectives are often not rooted in reality. I bring this up because people responding to me are not operating under the assumption that this is possible. Is this not understood? Do I need to provide evidence? I can. But it seems you do understand since your next sentence is talking about propaganda. So I'm a bit confused at how to respond to your comment. I don't know if you're agreeing, disagreeing (this is what it sounds like), or just adding more information. As to propaganda, I'm not sure the average person is acutely aware of it, since this is the literal purpose. I mean it is easier to see on the outside (propaganda of another country vs propaganda from your own country) and I think we often pretend propaganda is more "Uncle Sam needs you" vs "What's your carbon footprint?"[0] Because propaganda is aimed at specific people it is generally unnoticed when you are the actual target.
[0] This isn't anti-climate change rhetoric, this is a campaign started by BP to shift fault from corporations to individuals.
However I disagree that this is a good reason for surveillance. Because I don't think it actually improves quality of life. Also, I really abhor the Chinese confucian values of "society first". I really value our freedom and individuality.
Luckily it seems the corona crisis seems to be lifting that veil of propaganda a bit. I hear a lot of Chinese are really getting sick of the heavy-handed manner in which it is controlled. I can only hope that they will revolt, however I doubt it will be successful because the surveillance machine is primed to detect early outbursts of revolution and nip it in the bud. Kinda ironic since the current regime in China ascended to power through revolution.
To be clear, I never made this argument.
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/revealed-u... (Jan 2022)
This kind narrative is being pushed by the US, UK, and Australia right now. Unfortunately for the people in Australia, some dangerous bills have already been passed.
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/aug/25/austr...
I don't like either myself. I think the UK has long been a hotspot of surveillance and CCTV and people have got used to it. But I never will. Luckily I don't live in the UK and I avoid visiting it.
When the police rapidly catch murderers, you really get to appreciate the usefulness of those CCTV cameras.
The anti-encryption attitude is mainly a Tory thing and most people in general just don't understand encryption.
It’s wild how these junk arguments just keep happening. What governments want is understandable (unreadable online conversations are scary) but impossible without dire consequences
Why are they scary? Are people's private conversations in their homes scary, too? Are private meetups scary?
I feel like people have by default fallen for the government propaganda and they don't even realize it.
What's next? Putting a chip that can monitor everyone's thoughts in real-time to prevent school shootings? Would the cops even be able to filter through thousands of such thoughts on a daily basis and take action against the most "real" thought? Or would they be flooded by data and not know what to do with it and how to act, and only act after the fact anyway?
Remember for virtually all of the terrorist attacks in the past 15 years, the authorities were already well aware of the attackers' history. Some had even been arrested before and released.
None of these surveillance laws is the right solution to those types of problems. Those problems have other fundamental causes that create them (economic policy, education policy, healthcare policy, etc).
And the governments know that, too. But such laws have other much bigger benefits for them, such as the ability to spy on any single person that they feel has slighted them in some way at will, so they can destroy that person's life. They care about passing surveillance laws for this reason way more than what they say the reason is in public. Another benefit is spying on individuals for economic benefits, too, such as stealing other countries' or foreign company's trade secrets, etc. But of course you're never going to hear them preach new surveillance laws for those reasons.
Funny, that: school shootings seems to share two traits with CSAM: they are salient (horrible, traumatic, publicised…), but they are also fairly rare. I admit that for CSAM I only suspect it, but school shooting represents a very small fraction of all gun deaths in the US. Which represent only a fraction of violent deaths. Which represent only a (small?) fraction of all deaths. Making a priority of reducing school shootings at the expense of other death reduction policies sounds… somewhere between irrational and dishonest.
It seems to me that trying to ban guns in the name of reducing school shootings is like trying to ban encryption to reduce CSAM: it's fundamental rights (self defence, privacy) vs greater good (school shootings, CSAM). And while many "greater good" people clearly mean well (heck, some even have a point), for others it really is about power and control.
Unsure what point you're trying to make about them being a fraction of all gun deaths, a ban would obviously reduce those as well.
Yes, banning guns would reduce gun deaths. However, the problem is not gun death here, it's violent death: suicides & murders mostly. It's not clear to me that banning guns would reduce those deaths. People can use ropes, clubs, and knives instead. And while mass shootings would no longer happen, we need to remember that they only represent about 0.1% of all gun deaths. They almost don't matter in the grand scheme of things.
Finally there are two little snags: first, can we even ban guns for real? Black markets are a thing. Second, taking guns away from people could be a risky business if not handled with extreme care, especially in the US where second amendment advocacy resonates with so many people.
Must have been a rough time before online networks existed.
The internet provides a huge paradigm shift: a while ago the printing press allowed people to read. That spurred the renaissance. Now the internet is allowing people to write.
Before the internet we wouldn't even have this conversation. It's a much more isolated world, where knowledge and propaganda comes mostly top down. Compared to today, rough times indeed.
This is a great quote. I'm gonna steal it from now on :)
This is why this development is so dangerous in the digital realm. Because there is no longer any limit to how much data can be collected and processed.
And I can't blame them. So they will use whatever argument gets Joe Average to vote for an MP that will then enact these measures.
That said, police gained powers on the back of `terrorisim` so can see why GCHQ would want to push thru some changes on the back of the police scope of work.
What irks is the premise that it is using the minority of people to penalise the majority of people. That and the issue of challanging anything that uses the "think of the children" angle is often countered with "why do you hate children, why you defenfing peodos...." and that kinda see's many who would speak out, very much put off.
Shame leasons not learned though as weakening encryption or removing it only aids and helps criminals who cover a large percentage than the child abuse numbers.
For example when digital mobiles came about, GCHQ and others pushed to weaken the enryption and saw a certain amount of the digits in the encyrption fixed as 0, so whilst it was advertised as 56bit encryption at the time, it was in reality 48bit (ogoing from memory on this one so maybe a bit off here or there). But crux being handicapping encryption enables a wider array of criminal activity above and beyond the scope of children being purported to protect.
One aspect overlooked, this will only enable identification of some child abuse, it won't prevent it as by time digital media of the abuse is made, the child is already abused. That in itself is sad and tragic and focusing upon the aftermath over prevention at source is perhaps an area that should be addressed as I worry that things like this, if they came to pass to weaken encryption per-say will be seen as a magic solution that misses the root causes of such crimes.
It prevents another child being abused.
Pre-crime prevention would be better. But clearly our social structures are imperfect at doing that (although may be improved), and prediction (Minority Report, profiling) is dangerous.
Note, I’m not supporting government invasion of privacy, nor child abuse.
I wouldn't be so sure. Their mandate includes combating organized crime. If it's a trafficking ring, there's your justification.
>Not that I wouldn't love GCHQ to tackle child abuse ...
Seconded. Add ransomware authors to that list.
I recall hearing of NSA analysts who, upon incidentally encountering terrible things, would tip off relevant law enforcement.
>... drug dealers and lots of crimes that the police seem unable or capable of dealing with to noticable effect.
Cartels? Sure. Signals intelligence capability is already deployed against them anyways. Street dealers and random crimes? That's going too far.
Of course, the crux of the debate is where do you draw the line. It admittedly gets fairly murky, and the existence of a line in the first place is worth questioning.
I think in the future there will be more technological options to hopefully satisfy both sides of the debate. People unable to do horrible shit while otherwise retaining full privacy.
Yes, initially you might be able to catch a few bad guys who don't switch to the new service quick enough, but soon enough, all that is left is the ability for police & co. to read private messages of a population that is mostly innocent.
The goal has never been to catch the bad guys.
The line of argument that criminals would be too smart to stay on commercial services is not really robust, as catching just the not so smart ones would be good enough for politicians. There are better arguments.
(The upcoming EU "chat control" mechanism is about similar remotely triggerable client-side fuzzy searching ).
Look at tor and people running illegal companies through our, some get away with it, but a bunch did get caught eventually.
But that a ban must fail doesn't follow. E.g., requiring passports for travel was a WWI development, and supposed to be a temporary restriction on freedom; the practice was supposed to end after the war, and they had some kind of international meetings about it, and nothing ever happened. Now this has become obscure history that people hardly ever think about.
See also medical data sharing with for profit companies (NHS/palantir).
You could have ended your first sentence there.
There hasn't really been a point at which they weren't.
Can we somehow effectively, assuredly, in a way that citizens can trust, limit the surveillance activities to legitimate national security and lifesaving actions?
Because the only alternative, to me, seems worse: a world in which our adversaries maintain the advantage in information asymmetry against us, knowing more about our own society than we do, and thereby maintaining an ability to act against our society in ways we cannot detect or attribute.
Unlikely, every system of checks and balances requires someone to set up and enforce those checks and balances so that person can then circumvent them.
It's the classic "How do you protect yourself from a rogue admin"
There are steps you can take (use a quorum etc) but against a malicious actor with sufficient power there isn't much of a defence.
The best situation to be in is never put yourself in a position where you can be made to do this or have it normalised.
If people refuse to work for surveillance and tracking companies then they would not exist. But some people are attracted to power. And they are the people who shouldn't be allowed to work for them.
How about, giving the public access to the data as well? You want to see my messages and pictures? OK, then I want to see the politicians' and the police ones too.
If i am inverstigated and delete messages from my phone it is obstruction of justice. If i am a politician doing this (US, Germany, EU) then it is in the interest of my fellow citizens.
They didn't say that's how it works. They were proposing a potential solution to achieve better balance, per the GPs question.
Easily affordable for genuine ticking time-bombs and terror threats - but too expensive for spies to stalk their ex-girlfriends or track everyone at a large protest.
It's obvious they don't when you look at even the citizens in their own countries. Which country has a handle on their people and can manipulate them at will? None of them. I wouldn't worry so much that they're capable of manipulating other countries. When you stop worrying about the boogeyman you can start considering that people should have liberties and freedoms, most of which are dangerous and require a great deal of personal responsibility.
It scares me how little people seem to value freedoms as if they were some relic of the past with waning value. History was not advanced on the backs of central planners taking as much control as they could. If you want people to thrive, you empower them, you don't spy on them.
Yes, they undoubtedly do. Russia, China, North Korea, Iran, and many other nations run active cyber campaigns against the US with varying degrees of success, but often absolutely stunning scope and scale. Their purposes in doing this are to advantage themselves and disadvantage us.
This sort of social engineering can be very subtle, and very effective:
https://www.newsweek.com/putin-funding-green-groups-discredi...
>It scares me how little people seem to value freedoms as if they were some relic of the past with waning value.
I realize you don't know me, and that as you say this you have no way to know that I'm someone who values freedom far more than most people do, to the extent that I've spent much of my life studying civics and law and their intersection with technology. Freedom is what makes life worth living.
But maximizing freedom sometimes means taking non-intuitive actions. For instance, imagine a world where China's government instantly knew everything that was said on Twitter, who said it, where they were, etc... but the US government did not. Imagine what an advantage that would constitute. Is that likely to lead to a world, or a personal experience for me and my loved ones, of greater freedom? No way.
and which of these countries have successfully controlled their own citizens? If you successfully control your citizens you don't end up in economic shambles, you simply manipulate lay-people to act in accordance with the most educated economists.
Were talking about countries that can't even prevent terrorist attacks from incredibly low-tech enemies like ISIS, but we're worried that they're capable of understanding the human condition well enough to control entire foreign populations?
I mean the proposed threat is something of sci-fi levels of fantastic and just doesn't warrant reasonable concern. Modern science can't even cure depression, much less brainwash people. Sure you can negligibly alter behavior with ads and propaganda, but you can't use that to affect peoples self-interest.
Maybe someone will spend 20% more on some inconsequential consumer item, but if someones family or friends come into question, all bets are off.
Sure you might see fantastical representations of things like the Hitlers youth, but look at the reality. It didn't take hold, compulsory attendance was frequently ignored and discontent and boredom set in quickly. Now if you read the newspaper in the west, you'd think they turned those children into little hitler robots, but nothing could be further from the truth.
So at best, you can amass loads of power and authority and destroy your own country and spend all your political capital attempting to do so, but the threat of someone like hitler implementing hitlers youth or something on foreign soil is just detached from reality.
Some politicians also kill their political opponents in order to secure their own political positions of power. This is also a political advantage. How far exactly should we cross ethical boundaries in order to secure these perceived advantages?
I don't see any evidence that spying on people is a battlefield advantage. We already spy on people and we couldn't even stop 9/11. Further these low-tech ISIS-like groups have been successful all around the world even on high alert.
So again, these theoretical advantages aren't amounting to anything, but the consequences couldn't be more apparent. The lack of trust between the governing and governed classes is abysmal. It's damn near impossible to do anything consequential in politics because no one trusts each other. These consequences are astoundingly more real to me than these shadowy threats that somehow are so advanced, yet the real-world attacks are nothing more than low-tech extremists hijacking airplanes with razor blades.
That's a semantic debate that's neither here nor there. If that's what you consider brainwashing, fine, but that's here today and it's happening every day. Do you have any idea what credit reporting agencies know about you, your purchasing habits, your media consumption preferences, your politics, your medical history, your sex life?
>I don't see any evidence that spying on people is a battlefield advantage.
You don't? Well let me give you an example. Let's say there is a movement of individuals within a nation who are discontent about some specific policy or behavior of their government. First, intelligence would allow you to discover this fact. Then it would allow you to research and profile the individuals who you've identified in this group, and refine your search parameters to identify likely candidates to recruit. It would also help you to refine messaging, giving you instant feedback about the virality of trial balloons you floated.
Using these tools, you don't see how domestic unrest could be created?
Instead, what do we actually see? We see people claiming for years that Russia has been influencing US politics, yes the US has contributed more than the entirety of the european union combined to aid Ukraine in war efforts. In fact, some accounting suggests the US has donated more to Ukraine than Russia has spent on the war itself.
So where are these examples of successful spying/data turned into action or battlefield advantages? There's certainly no shortage of spying.
Further, we already spy on our own people and we can't even stop low-tech orchestrated attacks that involved men who trained to fly, but skipped landing lessons and hijacked planes with box cutters.
Well now that doesn't make any sense. If you spy on the other side, and they spy on you, but you don't spy on you, then how do you know what they know? Or what they want to know but don't yet?
Information is the currency of warfare. If the other side is in our OODA loop, they're going to shape our decisions at a tempo we can't respond to.
So I kinda think the boogeymen exist but, to your point, they are not necessarily as effective as they would like to be.
Why shoot up schools if you have a happy and fulfilling life?
Because I don't know, and I don't think anyone else knows, how to better society in a way that wipes out all the dictatorships and malign powers of the world that mean to do us harm merely for their own gain. Ultimately the world is not always a friendly place, and sometimes if you aren't the shark at the table, you're the fish.
There appears to be a genetic component to this, so it seems like no matter how nice we make society we're still going to have to deal with these kinds of people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisocial_personality_disorde...
“Balance” gets you to “Well, we would put the cameras in every room of your house, streaming back to law enforcement, but we’re willing to find a balance between privacy and security so we won’t put them in your bathrooms”. Whereas of course, assessing whether it’s necessary or proportional, putting streaming surveillance cameras in people’s houses would fail both tests.
What worries me is the criminalisation of the workarounds. Obligations on providers are one thing, but the UK already has a mandatory minimum sentence of two years for not surrendering keys when there's an order. Expanding that power would be terrible, and is, I suspect, not far away.
The right to encrypted texts means the safety from persecution from the government for being who you are. If people really thought about the difficulties the new generation of children will face growing up, the right to encrypted chat and privacy so they can grow and make mistake and learn without being vilified by society, is protecting them.
And make no mistake, CSAM producers and consumers will move to networks that aren't under UK jurisdiction. This law will change nothing. It's pure virtue signalling, and you're falling for it.
And the cost of this big heap of nothing? Weakened encryption and mass surveillance, which will enable other, different kinds of abuse (mostly not on children so of course it's not the same).
Are you sure this is an appropriate price to pay?
Of course, this is also very intrusive, but if your threshold is "it's okay unless it's worse than the child abuse that it is likely to prevent", then it would seem to pass that. Unless you have other criteria?
Consequently, I don't know that they are persuaded by principle or reason. They understand power, but that's about it. The main thing that comes out of laws that sabotage encryption is they shift the burden of proof of innocence onto the accused, because if there are encrypted files involved, there is no legal presumption of innocence.
This is the most serious crux of the issue: anti-encryption laws violate the presumption of innocence that underpins the western legal system, and that's what makes them so desirable to certain establishments. Encryption isn't about hiding anything, it's about whether there is a physical/logical limit to the discretion of the state, and whether the presumption of innocence of the accused is an inalienable right or just a convention.
This is really the problem of the "nothing to hide" arguments. It isn't that you have anything to hide so much as people can use the information against you by interpreting it wrong, removing necessary context, bringing up old information that is no longer relevant today (e.g. youthful indiscretions), etc.
To you both, that’s just a funny running joke, but it could be taken out of context and shared with the world to make you look like a creep. If someone has a record of that, they can cut out the part right afterwards where you laugh and hug.
Will it be used against you? Probably not. But what a powerful weapon for someone to have hanging over your head.
It's a much better framing than encryption as freedom of speech or uncodified notions of privacy - this is a straight up challenge to whether individuals have any inaliable rights in your society, or, as mere subjects of the crown in the UK and commonwealth, the discretion of the sovereign is absolute.
America's bill of rights is unique in the world, but the next order question if the presumption of innocence isn't defined as a right is, has it been defined in precedent - which it certainly has. IANAL or a legalist at all, but I have done a great deal of work related to encryption policy and privacy within government (infosec and privacy in the public sector is essentially government governance), and encryption and privacy are a forcing functions for a lot of very important questions about sovereignty and state.
As for the UK, the discretion of the sovereign hasn't been absolute for many many centuries.
Even the American "papers and effects," doctrine is using their 4A framework is a weaker argument than presumption of innocence question stated above. Regarding non-discriminating security measures at airports, oppressing and degrading everyone doesn't make it justified or fair, and on this forum we all know what "random" means, but the way random is applied in airports is really just covert, it is not random.
The only legitimate random search I would concievably accept would be if the officer chose a number, and I rolled my own 20-sided dice and if the number came up, I would consider submitting to a random search - but anything else is demonstrable bullshit. How do the authorities trust my dice? They pick a random number.
In the UK, the sovereign is the crown and its agents, and indeed, the Queen doesn't have discretion, but without a constitution with inaliable rights, agents acting with the authority of the crown do have unlimited discretion. Canada has a "notwithstanding" clause in its charter and a bunch of mealy mouthed language about reasonableness elsewhere that has produced some astonishingly derisible results.
It is a power you give them, and if you don't give it to them, they are taking it, and my argument is that this is a question of whether compelling people to sabotage algorithms as a means to surveil them a legitimate allocation of powers. In a state with inaliable rights, it's not, but in these other places, we should just call it what it is.
Total BS.
First - government can't really "keep them safe". We see it all over.
Second - it is simply not their friggin' business what is on my computer and what I and my friends send to each other. We are so eager criticizing "bad" countries and how they infringe on freedom. Well do not fucking take a road to the same direction.
They won't stop until every room in every home has mandatory cameras installed.
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/03/the-rap...
And 'they' get smarter too - if you watch Skyfall, one of the better recent Bond movies, there is a nice speech about why MI 6 needs more and more surveillance, powers and budget in front of government officials, because of boogeymen and so on. Of course the whole meeting is attacked by the main adversary. Its exactly kind of glorifying speech that CIA (or FBI, army, air force etc.) likes to sneak to Hollywood movies to purport the image of good guys fighting to save democracy and little children (when we know thanx to Snowden how things look like in real life). Hollywood in exchange at least gets access to special places like aircraft carriers or military bases, not sure what they got in UK, maybe just extra budget.
Firstly the stabbings are fairly infrequent and mostly isolated to territorial disputes between idiots and the odd psycho. You can walk past the perpetrators up to the eyeballs in Apple kit at midnight and say hello and they are fine and they actually help people in the local community. Just don't sell crack on their territory and you won't end up with any extra holes. I feel completely safe here unlike when I travel to the US.
Secondly most of the surveillance is broken or ineffective or unmanned so the possibility of a conviction or an issue from it is fairly low. Really no one is that bothered about it. That is amplified by the constant tales of incompetence in this area and anyone who's had any direct experience with it.
Realistically we do live in a bit of a pit of apathy but that's because it doesn't really have any detrimental effects on our lives on a daily basis. If it does then we tend to flip our shit rather rapidly and deal with it. Case in point a box junction camera was recently added to a very difficult to cross obscured junction. Bad decision by the council just to make money. After about a week someone burned the camera down. They replaced it. It lasted another week before it was burned again and they got the point.
The council never reinvests in infra that is destroyed. They don't work like you think they do.
Personally, I'd never stand with something like a Nintendo Switch out in public in "London", but it honestly depends on the area of London. Some are much worse than others for crime.
I think the point is that whilst stabbings might not be high, the use of knives as a weapon to intimidate and mug people (going beyond just purse snatchers) is very effective, and much more common than you might imagine, nobody wants to get cut, and nobody really wants to stab anybody over a few hundred quid of electronics.
There are not frequent stabbings. They are reported on because they are so rare.
There were 235 homicides with a sharp object in the entire country of 60+ million people in 2021, which is about one third to half of all of them (which makes sense, without a gun, your options are limited). That makes fewer than single cities elsewhere.
If you think the UK is a specific violent crime hotspot, consider what angle whoever is telling you that is trying to push.
I presume the reference to gun violence means you're comparing the UK to to US. This is nonsense, gun violence hasn't been "replaced" with stabbings - the UK homicide rate (by any means) is a sixth of the US's - 1.2 per 100,000 people for the UK vs 6.3 per 100,000 people for the US. [0]
Not only that but the US has a higher rate of knife murders than the UK. The US had 1739 homicides by knife or other cutting implement in 2020 [1], or 0.52 per 100,000. The UK had 235 knife murders in the year ending in March 2021 [2], or 0.35 per 100,000.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention...
[1]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/195325/murder-victims-in...
[2]: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/crimeand...
If you look at knife crime in the UK, especially in deprived areas, it's been a growing problem for a long time.
For example, there was over 15 thousand knife crimes reported in London alone in 2019/20, many of which are armed muggings etc.
Knife crime in the UK is a red herring.
Year beginning April 2020 to March 2021:
– Fatal Injury – 223
– Injury with intent to cause serious harm – 21,421
– Threat to kill – 4,984
– Attempted murder – 465
Yes stop and search affects knife crimes, but there is still a lot of violence, and overall rates of violent knife crime have risen notably faster than the population has grown in London over past 10 years.
> instead of gun violence, there are frequent stabbings
According to [1], in 2020/21 there were 235 homicides involving a knife or other sharp instrument in England and Wales. Because of the ability of COVID lockdowns to influence those numbers, let's wind back to 2017/18* - incidentally the highest recorded - at 281.
By contrast, per the FBI [2], 72.6% of the 15129 recorded homicides used a firearm - that is approximately 10983.
Per Wolfram Alpha, the population of England and Wales in 2017 was 58.3 million, and the population of the USA in 2017 was 325 million - meaning the UK had approximately 18% of the US population.
Clearly, you are _VASTLY_ more likely to be murdered by gun violence in the US than by knife crime in England or Wales.
Notice this only covers gun violence and not other types of homicide - even the rate of knife crime in the US is higher than the UK, as others have subsequently pointed out.
[1]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/978830/knife-homicides-i... [2]: https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2017/crime-in-the-u.s.-...
* The UK records April->March for such figures, the US seems to report calendar year. 2017 was a high water mark for both countries.
Here's the thing first off the US is more multicultural than any other nation on earth, most other countries have had one ethnicity/nationality in it for 100s of year. The US by contrast has always has a mix of different cultures and backgrounds coming into it, from the Irish to the Italians, from the Slavic people's to the current influx of Latin America migration. This may not seem like a big deal but there are differences between cultures and having a heterogeneous cultures results in places where they will come in conflict.
2nd the United States is a group of states that are united. This isn't like simply administrative divisions, there are clear and distinct separations and lines of authority between different levels of administration, so much so that going from Illinois to Florida has such a wide gulf in laws, policies and enforcement that it is more like comparing France and the UK than Scotland and Wales.
Finally the size, the US is big, huge in fact. It's so big that there are numerous states within the US that could fit multiple European countries in them with room left over.
All in all this comparison on gun deaths or really any other metric between the US and any other country except from Russia or the EU is like comparing an SMBs closet "data center" to an AWS data center, they are totally different discussions.
Thank you for coming to my ted talk.
Let's take a single state: Texas. Population in 2017 was 28.29 million. Per the CDC [1], there were 3513 gun deaths in Texas that year. I believe this includes suicides, so let's take a conservative rate here and assume that 40% were homicides and 60% were suicide (I believe that this is over-estimating suicide).
So, 1405 gun-related homicides in Texas that year. But, Texas only has around half the population of England and Wales. I'm sure you can do the rest of the math yourself.
But, maybe Texas isn't to your liking because it's so big by land area - so let's also look at Alabama, which is approximately the same size. 1124 gun related deaths there per [1] in 2017, and conservatively assuming 40% of those were homicides, that is approximately 450. However, the population of Alabama was less than _just Greater London_ - only 4.87 million people.
But, maybe Alabama isn't to your liking either because it's conservative. So let's look at New Jersey - only just larger than Wales by land area, and substantially smaller than England, but trending "liberal" by US standards.
In NJ, there were 478 firearm-related deaths in 2017. Again if we conservatively assume 40% homicide, that's around 191 - finally a state where the absolute number is less than knife-related deaths in England and Wales! But, one where the population was only 8.8 million...
None of these include knife crime in the US, either. While you can make all the excuses you like for this, the numbers don't look very good regardless of how you cut (or shoot) it.
[1]: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/firearm_mortality/...
I’m a bit baffled by the way you calculate gun murders. You get a number of gun deaths and guess the number that were murders.
I tried searching and could only find the combined value that you have used. Why is this?
The way I estimated gun murders was by taking a guess at around 40%, on the basis that conservatives (likely to be pro-gun) claim that 6 in 10 gun deaths are suicides, and they likely over-count.
By a "combined" value do you mean for England and Wales (which is because that is the reporting authority), or for gun deaths overall (which is because that is what is reported by the CDC - I'm sure this is broken down elsewhere but I only had a few minutes)?
I don’t understand really why the gun homicide rate does not appear to be available - it’s certainly surprising to me that it’s not easy to find.
Every state except New Hampshire (0.9) has a rate substantially above the UK (1.2). And NH was 2.4 the year before. Next best is Maine (1.6). So even taken individually, it's not good.
> policies and enforcement that it is more like comparing France and the UK than Scotland and Wales.
The UK and France are almost exactly the same (both 1.2).
This is a new angle I haven’t heard. Having multiple cultures doesn’t need to mean they murder each other. But let’s say that there is something special about the US cultural makeup that causes a higher level of violence.
The murder rate has been declining. Why?
But that's no different than a random photographer taking your picture, or a grandmother noticing you come and go through a window?
I agree "privacy" isn't the perfect word, but seems to be the best one we have to describe what we're losing as surveillance expands.
You are sitting on a park bench. It would be considered an invasion of privacy if someone opened your bag and took out a diary or note book and started reading it.
If you were meeting a friend in a public space and someone later confronted you about something you had said and produced a recording, it would probably make some portion of people uncomfortable.
But pointing it directly across the street at a particular house and leaving it there for days, weeks, months on end would probably attract some kind of negative attention from the homeowner, especially if you told them you were live-streaming to the internet (password-protected/encrypted or not).
I'm no lawyer, but, to me, that feels closer to sitting outside their house for days like a detective in an 80's movie than photographing public happenings.
And we will happily implement the APIs and integrate the databases they need to do it so long as they tell us they're gonna use it to prosecute our neighbor's cash landscaper for tax evasion, fine the teenager with a loud exhaust on his car and find our stolen packages (as if that ever happens when the less equal animals are victim).
People have such short sighted and infantile attraction toward seeing the surveillance state as being used "optimize society" by enforcing whatever their pet issue is that they fail to see the average or median case it will be used to enforce something they don't care about at all and will frequently be used to enforce things they don't really want enforced that hard.
I've read so many accounts of people with Ring footage of a theft who tried to give it to the police and they refused to even look at it. I don't think I've ever heard of someone actually getting stolen property back outside of a Mark Rober video.
The police surveillance state isn't there for you, and people need to realize that. <stage whisper>It's there to serve the interests of Capital</stage whisper>
It’s even worse than that. I showed them two sets of camera footage of staff in my retail shop stealing from the cash register, and tallied it up my accounts to prove the amount…and CPS said “not enough evidence”. The camera footage was so clear you could see the 20 on the notes.
I couldn't believe how mostly-positive the comments on this story[1] were! I get that loud cars at night suck ass. I've been there. I currently have a related problem of neighbors randomly lighting of fireworks at night, so I'm not unsympathetic to these quality-of-life issues.
But there's something heartbreaking to see the hacker community—which was once overwhelmingly opposed to mass surveillance—starting to beg for it instead. Yeah, yeah, I know that HN is not a monolithic group; viewpoints do vary. But I can't shake the feeling that if the story below was posted to HN 10 years ago (or Slashdot 20 years ago), the comments would not have been so fawning.