It's going to drive the people who have the know how underground, and anyone engaging in protecting their privacy will be considered a criminal. We're already creeping toward that IMO.
In fact, I very see the opposite. Passing this kind of legislation will kill e-commerce for sure, so it will never happen.
It would be a return to the pre internet era, so probably is the will of the people and on form for the UK. I kind of hope they pass it then realise what it actually means.
Honestly, it kind of needs to happen properly, otherwise people will never learn. Allowing these half baked pieces of legislation to pass and then not implementing them except for some edge case allows the idiots who write it and promote it to claim they were right all along.
And this is a silly law. Everyone will break it, every time they use an encrypted communication, which is pretty-much every single thing one does on the internet these days. It's a perfect recipe for the authorities to let everyone carry on as normal, then when they want to crush someone they're certain to find some law that they have broken like this one.
We should be throwing out such laws.
The will get a prosecution after catching red-handed a mass murdering terrorist or a pedo with kids locked in their basement because they did an online shop which "used encryption". The authors will claim victory, without these protections we couldnt lock these people up, the Sun and the Mail readers will lap it up. 5 counts of murder and 1 count of doing an online tesco shop.
Remember that Al Capone was jailed for tax evasion.
Carlinhos: so I want you do vote in favor of [law X, which toughened restrictions on the kind of gambling Carlinhos promoted]
Demóstenes (naively): but, professor, that will make things harder for you, won't it?
Carlinhos: oh, don't worry, it's not going to be used against me.
Has anyone checked if the legislation has the special clause for "prosecutions require permission from the Attorney General"? (i.e. politically motivated prosecutions only - this has been seen before)
Hold on! Kill all HTTPS? Biometric passports? I haven't tried to read the bill, but AFAIK there are no provisions in the bill that attack HTPPS, and given that biometric passports are not a communications technology, I don't see how they could be impacted.
I don't see how the bill impacts email at all; opportunistic SMTP encryption isn't E2E in the first place, and PGP is rarely used in email. And when it is used, it's usually to sign rather than to encrypt.
TLS / HTTPS would be included in my definition; the purpose of which is that the two parties are the only ones that can see the traffic.
My money is on Canada. The Trudeau Liberals passed their first of three internet control and censorship bills, C-18, and it has already backfired stupendously. It's quite similiar to Australia's similiar bill to force some companies to pay for linking to news content, but the Liberals saw that and thought "we should try it too!". Same result, Google basically said "no problem, we won't link to news in Canada".
However, unlike Australia, the Canadian Liberals are doubling down. New tax payer-funded subsidies for Canadian news are already being discussed to make up for the lost revenue the legislation caused. The Liberal-funded media is also trying to paint this as evil greedy foreign capitalist technology companies refusing to pay their fair share for exploiting Canadian news companies.
But that's why my money is on Canada. It has the perfect blend of incompetent leadership, empowered by another party that helps them pass any legislation no matter what, and constituents that are largely apathetic to anything that happens.
Raid warrants are already being signed off based on the tiny window into an IP address' life provided by legislated metadata retention. And no further actual police work is done on backgrounding the persons or households involved before choosing to suspend their rights.
It's going to be no different at all from the current situation.
That's not true at all. If OSB is passed, things will be quite different in the UK afterward.
For everything else there are foreign agencies who are not limited by uk legislation.
Encryption can hide web browsing and a lot more, which they don't like.
- All online messenger providers (Whatsapp, Signal, Telegram) e.g. withdraw from the UK market. Meta and Google gave a taste for this after Canadian link law.
- UK needs to come up with a crappy homebrew messenger ecosystem no one uses. Maybe a messenger.gov.uk?
- People download applications with privacy and sideload them to their mobile phones, keep going with their business as usual
- The number of childs protected or caught pedophiles stays unchanged
- UK parliament members who proposed the bill will look like idiots, not getting re-elected
- The "compliance" companies who promoted these solutions, as it's driven by commercial interest that guides the political discussion, go bankcrupt
However I remain doubtful if we have this ideal scenario.
Some things never change.
No one will lose re-election over a technical or scientific issue such as this. 99.9% of the public can't understand the position, the discussion, and will only listen to what fluff websites, and the parties tell them.
Now, is any party going to take up a "soft on pedophiles!" position? Because that's how it will be played...
It's already a nonissue on the most popular device.
Eventually the sale of devices that don't include cryptographic controls to prevent terrorists from misusing them to evade terrorist surveillance will be outlawed.
*If you choose to fact-check this, be aware that technically the European Commission will be designating Alphabet, Google’s parent company, rather than one of the multiple subsidiaries with Google in its name. So the official EU communications about this may not mention the word Google.
This law doesn't just apply to messenger apps. It applies to almost every single act you perform on the internet. Everything will be mandated to be broken, including your browser. If you run a web server using https, you'll be breaking the law. If you ssh to another computer over the internet, you'll be breaking the law. If you connect to a VPN to access a work/university/school network or indeed a commercial VPN, you'll be breaking the law.