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Comment by chatmasta | Hacker News Reader

It's a yearly tradition in the UK to propose some draconian law that will be the end of the internet. And yet the policies generally remain unimplemented. Is there some systemic pattern that explains this trend?

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I always wonder if it's a "look at this crazy law we might pass and definitely don't look at the money we're stealing from the NHS or the tax we forgot to pay or the "loans" we've been given in exchange for plush jobs and peerages" kind of deal.

Is there even enough engagement with these proposals for them to work as this kind of distraction?

No. There is no distraction premise going on. It's simple authoritarianism (but people would rather believe it's something else, because of what that implies).

The UK ruling class has enough resources to pursue both at the same time.

Sure, but from the last year of events in the UK, plenty of them were far more distracting than this.

Everytime there is an uproar to fight it again, so they wait and try again a year later.

They aren't giving up, they are just waiting as they "only have to get lucky once"

Meanwhile those who recognize the issue instead must live by the maximum "Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty"

The only way to stop having to constantly fight this issue is to manage to swing things back further back, to have backlash in the direction of "no and stop asking", or if necessary, "no, and your smoking crater will be a warning to the next person to try".

We should be in a world where "I want to ban encryption" results in "Of course not, and your career in politics is now over". We should be in a world where "I want to ban encryption" results in "No, in fact here are a bunch of laws enshrining the right to encryption and privacy". We should be in a world where everyone building encryption technologies is building it in a fashion not just resistant to but actively hostile to any ability to control or backdoor it.

From the UN declaration of Human Rights:

Article 12

"No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks."

Banning encryption constitutes "arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence" in my view, but it should be taken to (constitutional?) court.

That's what people kept saying about DRM in our CPUs and monitors. So far it hasn't really worked though, last time I checked both Netflix and Spotify are trivially reverse engineerable and 100% quality rips are online within hours.

maxim*

They tried for years to implement a bizarre law that would impose onerous age verification systems on porn sites, but do nothing about porn on Twitter or Reddit or whatever. Just total ineffectual nonsense, whatever you think about the principle.

I think they finally gave that one up.

As an American we have our own weird battles with technology, but UK is weird about certain stuff. I wanted to watch a show that is only available in UK, and it’s on BBC. So I downloaded BBC iPlayer with a VPN and signed up, no problem. Verified my age, I get it. Makes sense enough. Kind of dumb because there’s no way they can verify it. Then they wanted me to, on my honor, swear that I had a TV license before I could download the show, even though there was absolutely no way they could verify it. Wut. Actually now that I type it out it feels no less dumb than age verification, just a legalese checkmark

The way TV licensing works in the UK is strange. If you don't have or need one they'll regularly send threatening letters saying your under investigation, and sometimes a man will knock on your door demanding you let him search your house for a TV. They have no legal powers so you just say no and shut the door, and they'll do it again in a few months.

What happened to the van? I thought there was a van that could detect if you had a TV in your house.

Evidence from TV Licencing Vans have never been used to attempt to convict anyone who allegedly failed to pay for a TV license.

You could infer from that, that the vans were for show and a shock tactic only.

It's not impossible, I'm sure.

Back in the CRT days it was reasonably possible to detect a TV program from the intermediate frequency from UHF stations, but more difficult (but not impossible, see TEMPEST) due to direct conversion by SDRs. These side channel attacks can be found here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Eck_phreaking

Sensitivity of the equipment and picking up the signal from the roadside would have probably impossible in the 60s-80s. But again it's a capability you don't want your cold-war enemies (or allies) knowing about.

Also, being able to prove that the signal was the defendants, in a way that would convince a jury might have been difficult.

I'm sure some experienced radio hams/RF engineers will weigh in and correct me if I'm way off base here.

I think making you ‘solemnly swear I have a TV licence’ was a way to boil the frog, so to speak, from the days when no licence was required at all to use iPlayer. Jumping straight to a real verification step would have created an uproar. Guess they never went all the way (not yet at least). Still seems odd and pointless.

I reckon it’s the dire quality of our elected politicians. UK politicians don’t try to understand technology, and they feel entitled to dismiss expert opinion whenever it will win them public favour, hence the disaster with Covid lockdowns.

The main constituency of the Conservative Party is old people that want their pensions to be increased, house prices to go up and the kids to stop having fun, whatever the cost.

When their idiocy demands something that would cause the utter destruction of civilization as we know it (such as banning encryption) they back off. If it makes it harder for the old person to access porn, they back off. But when the consequences won’t manifest themselves before 2-3 years, they go ahead and then blame the EU or the Albanians. Let me know if they have chickenpox vaccines, Zoely (the contraceptive pill) and lactose free milk in your area. My stockpile of Calpol should be enough to survive the current shortage.

You think Labour wouldn't try and pull the same type of shit? The freedom loving "Lets have ID Cards" Labour party?

I think this is missing the forest for the trees. Labour have openly endorsed all the "child protection" internet laws pushed by the Tory government.

I don’t understand the British fixation with ID cards, especially if they are conservatives and want people to show an ID to vote.

This time around, we have a party that is able to push through laws as they have 1) 80 majority and 2) no qualms about hiding their facist ways.

People that understand the implications are still in some places and put the brakes on.

they keep trying, public outrage keeps it from being viewed by our ruling class as anything other than political suicide.

These policies will get implemented as soon as we are sick of being outraged.

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