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Make no mistake: the Online Safety Bill has absolutely nothing to do with protecting children. End-to-end encryption is the first line of defence against government approved mass surveillance. If it falls, the rest will follow. It will only be a short period until the operation is expanded under the guise of additional "protections" against the citizens.

The "children" excuse + most of the population saying "I don't need privacy, I have nothing to hide" is a double whammy against any form of encryption and it's just a matter of time before our Internet privacy rights are completely stripped away.

A huge educational campaign is necessary to convince people and the average politician that being pro-encryption doesn't mean being criminals or pedophiles. So it's a lost battle already, and the intelligence services everywhere know it's just a matter of time.

Eventually a pro-privacy activist will be found with child pornography and everybody will cheer and applaud any form of privacy-stripping law.

The children angle is insidious, and where the discussion keep devolving even in tech-savvy forums like this one, instead if seeing it's convenient and very effective marketing to hide anti-privacy goals.

Easy to frame a headline against it. "New bill to allow Jeremy Corbyn to read your secret messages and Tories WONT FIGHT IT"

The poor man’s not even in labour anymore, let him rest!

Nitpick: he is a Labour member but not a member of the Parliamentary Labour Party, so he sits in the Commons as an independent.

He'll stand as independent at the next election, hence getting automatically expelled from the party.

> The children angle is insidious...

The entire rhetorical position is difficult. One of the (somewhat implicit) rules of public discourse seems to be "assume good faith". To make the argument that people should have freedom from government requires an acknowledgement that government officials regularly do more harm than good. It is insanely challenging to carry that position in a debate. Keep your eye out for the handful of people who manage to do it without being tarred as crazy. That rhetorical imbalance makes it safe and straightforward for power politicians and police to argue that they should get to read everyone's emails.

It is tricky to understand why centralised power is a terrible thing that will lead to corruption and injustice. Implementing a system that tolerates privacy requires the bureaucracy to not grasp power. We've always been lucky in a sense that a critical mass of people learned they need to fight to protect freedom as an ideal, even if they can't exactly explain why or if the details seem to lead to bad outcomes (see also "fight for your right to say it"). It may be the only defence against a Stalinist- or Maoist-style collapse.

> requires an acknowledgement that government officials regularly do more harm than good

I don't think it's that. The argument should be similar to the Veil of Ignorance: do you want every conceivable future government to have these powers?

Well, hypothetically, if the government on average does more good than harm why would you not want that? Sure you'd get Hitler-lite on occasion, but that would be balanced out by anti-Hitler-lite doing good.

Of course, the damage the bad apples do far outweighs the benefits of the good so that argument doesn't hold. A century of good governance with global assistance barely balanced out the damage Hitler triggered in 5 years. Destruction is easy and creation is hard. And that plays out on the small scale too with small numbers of corrupt officials undoing huge amounts of work by good people.

If we had perfect information, we'd find that the spying apparatus of the 5 Eyes has done far more bad than good to the general welfare. The political corruption that must be causing is immense, we already know that every president since Obama has been targeted by the intelligence apparatus in some form. It is unlikely it ends there.

I'm less sure about the situation in the UK, but they generally follow the US trend.

> That rhetorical imbalance makes it safe and straightforward for power politicians and police to argue that they should get to read everyone's emails.

The fundamental problem is that given any permission (an extension of trust), individuals will--100% of the time--abuse it in the absence of oversight.

It's not a matter of if/when, only a matter of to what degree. But being individuals, we are empowered to choose how we grant or revoke such permissions to other individuals. If you stop trusting your spouse, you can revoke their access to your email.

Government is a superset of Individuals. There is no greater clique they are accountable to. Any permission extended (surrendered) to it is an implicit conversion of ownership. If you stop trusting your government to act responsibly with surveillance, you can't revoke that permission. It's no longer yours.

...like the toy you hand over to the playground bully because he "just wants to see it for a second." He was polite enough to state the conditions of release upfront-- but nothing on the playground compelled him to actually abide by his own terms. You find out too late he's a liar, and if you're lucky, you'll get your toy back, when he's done with it, and likely in pieces.

It's frustrating trying to protect children from amorphous threats whose access methods are abstract, virtual and obfuscated by incomprehensible technology and encryption. The question is always whether we maintain absolute anarchy or accept nanny-state dystopia.

Maybe it's time we consider kicking kids off the internet altogether before surrendering any more personal rights to a bully with the weight-class of an entire institution.

100%

I see you posting an opinion I agree strongly with here often. Glad you’re still at it.

I will offer a positive side to this situation. Their war against math proves the math works and they don’t have an internal workaround. Since a war against math is bound to fail in long term (just like the war on vegetables aka “war on drugs”), short term victories of oppression won’t shut down the future.

The children angle is insidious, especially when whistle blowers, reporters, and power players in revealing high up people involved in pedophilia seem to all magically have unfortunate accidents. It is a tool to emotionally manipulate a population which is ravenous against pedophilia. A very effective one. I look forward to the day these people are all held accountable.

There is already a more subtle problem here, at least in countries with case law. The people who end up on trial trying to defend encryption are typically guilty (as very roughly 90% of people who go to trial are). Many of them are guilty of things that most of us look very strongly down upon, like possessing and sharing child sexual abuse material. Thus if you want to set a strong precedent for protection of encryption, you end up defending exactly this sort of person.

[citation needed]

> the Online Safety Bill has absolutely nothing to do with protecting children.

I wish people would acknowledge both sides of the coin instead of simply pretending the other side doesn't exist.

Yes society uses surveillance to identify and prosecute criminals (of various ilks, including those who abuse children). If you render that surveillance impossible by construction then people who might previously have been caught will not be.

Instead you pretend that the only goal here is am authoritarian state straight from 1984.

The risk of the second is one reason not to do it. IMO it's easier to think what happens when you make it easier for people to be blackmailed, manipulated, impersonated, defrauded. But again, that's just an opinion.

I remember the UK using its anti-terrorist laws to freeze Icelandic banks assets during the financial crisis. There is a probability 1.00 that this will be used for purposes that have absolutely nothing to do with the pretext used to pass the bill. So it's a pointless exercise to debate about that pretext. The only thing that matters is what right does that give the government?

Do you think pervasive spying would have made it more or less likely that the Jeffrey Epstein case made it to the public eye? Running a paedophile ring is not some small thing that is easy to hide. In all the cases I've taken note of (in churches, schools, local clubs, etc) the problem is almost never that the crime is unknown, it is that the perpetrators have too many tools to shield themselves from consequences and discredit the victims. In the future, maybe tools like going through people's internet history or planting fake evidence using their online accounts.

Society shouldn't use surveillance to identify criminals. We'd look back at dragnets to catch runaway slaves or hunt down the homosexuals with horror (as, indeed, we generally do in states that successfully institute mass surveillance to catch criminals). As recently as a few years ago, 'criminals' were people found outside their own homes and places like China were successfully catching them much to the net loss for everyone. There is a strong - indeed, overwhelming - link between places with good privacy, good protection of freedoms and citizens living happy prosperous lives.

The people pushing mass surveillance know all this. It has been bought up every time some bright spark comes up with the idea of rolling out mass surveillance. These people understand the societal consequences that they are ushering in. Too many of them understand what they are doing to pretend they have pure motives. This is empowering the worst of the authoritarians.

If this is the case, why is the issue of child _privacy_ (and the effect of losing it upon passing of this bill) not considered as part of the "concerns" for online safety (and carefully omitted as part of the risk assessment)?

This is not some spectrum with safety (but loss of freedom) and danger (with freedom) on each end. The results of this bill will be both less freedom and less safety.

30% of child sexual abuse is done by family members. 60% of child sexual abuse is done by acquaintances. 10% is done by strangers, and I am willing to bet that a good fraction is of that is done offline.

If we want to protect children, why are we completely ignoring those 90%? Where are the bills mandating installation of cameras in all households with children?

If you want to protect children from strangers on the internet, perhaps fund schools so they can properly teach children that the internet can be a dangerous place. Bills like this aren't going to do shit to protect children.

It's just like gun control. They're barely enforcing existing laws because of political sensitivities and asking for more power because...?

>Make no mistake: the Online Safety Bill has absolutely nothing to do with protecting children.

I don't think that's entirely true.

I am sure many MPs, charities, and campaigners do only see this as an issue of child (and more generally, public) safety.

I think the difficulty has always been explaining to laypeople that allowing any kind of monitoring or surveillance significantly weakens the security of encrypted messaging.

I think of it another way. The bill itself isn’t anything to do with protecting children - but lots of people (MPs, charities, campaigners) have been misled into supporting it. It’s what makes “think of the children” the best way to pass bad legislation. Not only does it make it very hard to object to a bill that won’t actually help children, but you get lots of free support from well-meaning people who don’t understand the implications of the bad legislation they’ve been conned into fighting for!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3jFqhjaGh30

>Make no mistake: the Online Safety Bill has absolutely nothing to do with protecting children

Exactly, they could start teaching law in a concept understandable manner from primary school age, concentrating on what can cause the damage mentally and physically, like the spread of germs from a young age. But they dont, so kids cant even protect themselves in an offline world and the state gets to maintain its air of pseudo respectability whilst most people dont understand how the state is causing lifelong trouble.

> encryption hinders efforts to combat online child abuse

So do opaque walls and the absence of surveillance cameras in cars and homes. Oh don't worry - the recordings will be securely stored, and only available with a court order, only issued for "serious" crime!

It's strange that as surveillance proliferates, the shrinking scraps of privacy we have left are deemed a growing problem, not a vanishing one.

I don't think breaking encryption is a good idea, but I will say that until recently law enforcement could tap phones, rip open envelopes, and get a court order to break into your house and search it. There was never the level of privacy against law enforcement that encryption offers.

> rip open envelopes, and get a court order to break into your house and search it

One limiting factor was that this wasn't scalable - so a lot of people would be comfortable with it because there is little potential for widespread abuse - there just aren't enough resources to search & monitor everyone's mail and houses at all times.

There are no such limitations online, so better protections such as encryption are required to counterbalance it.

I agree, but that still isn't a net loss in privacy. We can still communicate the way we could, except now we also would like an unbreakable way of communicating online.

I understand of course that scale is an issue online, but that doesn't affect the idea that encryption gives us basically unbreakable communication over a distance, and removing it is not eroding our last vestiges of privacy.

The fact that most communication has moved online means that there's significantly less physical mail traffic than back in the day, so maybe physical mail is not secure either if total capacity is now below what the government can monitor?

It's making privacy more expensive and rare, while making surveillance cheaper and more common. Do we have to wait until it is literally impossible to share a single word in private before we start to worry?

> Do we have to wait until it is literally impossible to share a single word in private before we start to worry?

No one is saying anything like that.

Active effort. It also can't just be done passively or archived for later optional analysis by computers or humans.

Further, usually, a judge has to approve. There's at least some oversight and reasonable cause involved.

> One limiting factor was that this wasn't scalable - so a lot of people would be comfortable with it because there is little potential for widespread abuse - there just aren't enough resources to search & monitor everyone's mail and houses at all times.

It's recently started to emerge that US opened and censored all international mail 1950-1989. We're talking millions of letters a week. It started as a measure to remove all reference to US use of biological weapons in the Korean War and grew from there. (the third season of the Blowback Podcast did a couple of interviews which covered it really well.)

That’s rubbish. Two people could go somewhere they wouldn’t be heard and have a private conversation. Encryption provides no more challenge to investigation than that option that has existed forever…

> Two people could go somewhere they wouldn’t be heard and have a private conversation

This is still the case. That's not a good example of privacy being eroded.

It is, because this used to apply to most conversations. Even when overheard, they would likely be forgotten by who heard them, not have heard everything, not known who was talking, etc. If the conversation became interesting for an investigation, simply finding a witness would take significant time from limited police officers, the witness may not wish to cooperate, their memory would be imperfect, and perhaps most importantly, it would quickly become common knowledge, via gossip, what the police is snooping for.

Now most conversations have moved online, and a secret record can be cheaply created of exactly who is talking to who, when, how often, and in the absence of encryption, even what they are saying. Phones we all carry, even without spyware apps, can be located through signal triangulation, before we even get to facial recognition and omnipresent cameras, smartphone or otherwise.

That, theoretically, we can recover some of the privacy we used to have (so long as we don't get targeted surveillance, which has become so effective defeating it is nearly hopeless), does not mean that, in practice, privacy has been massively eroded for the average person.

You could always just not write things down. The government is prohibited from torturing information out of people.

The numerous people tortured by the government at GITMO and at CIA black sites around the world will be comforted in knowing this.

"Think of the children" is one of the 4 horsemen of the infocalypse. It was never about stopping CP. It's about justifying laws that take away privacy, no matter how flimsily.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Infocalyp...

Really hard to imagine a sane and rational policy maker naming encryption as something that compromises safety. If anything, it facilitates it. But then again, this isn’t about policy, it’s about control and surveillance.

> So take using a sledgehammer to crack a nut.

It is worse. Encryption does protect children instead of endangering them. So these "charities" aren't even doing their job.

Indeed: it is worthwhile to note the nefarious absence of the role of privacy in the laid out "risk assessment" of children's usage of a service, in part 3, chapter 2, point (6) of the bill.

https://bills.parliament.uk/publications/49376/documents/282...

These “charities” are all funded by government grants anyway. You can safely claim they are both the same entity: the government.

Yes. I don't want to live in a world where my kid sends someone a picture of immigrants on a boat and gets a criminal record. It's just a step between abolishing encryption and this.

And the next step is wide scope censorship like that instituted by the CCP. The ideas that we should censor politically inconvenient truths like the migrant crisis are already in the UK.

I agree. Next step. Majority of CP is filmed in homes where children live. To protect the children every home must have a government monitored camera in it so that the safety of the children can be insured. You don't have anything to hide do you? No criminal activity going on?

There is no way this doesn't quickly turn into full government monitoring of everything being sent over technology. Before that even, I assume the search for CP will be done via image hashes provided by a government database. Whats to stop the government from simply putting a hash of information it does not want public? The snowden files or something similar. Quickly identify and remove leakers.

Its a very slippery slope.

> So take using a sledgehammer to crack a nut.

It's less of a sledgehammer and more of a ballistic missile. With nuclear payload.