As I understand it, most UK public are in favour of this bill almost Pavlovianly. There is a clear disconnect between us, the tech know-how, and the general public.
In the UK there’s a concept of the “Westminster bubble”. Politicians believe that people care deeply about “online safety”, which is all that matters really.
The public tend to believe what they've been informed and the press tend to be inept when it comes to Gov surveillance.
The history of editors and journalists is 1) they reprint Gov Natsec claims w/o analysis or a single thought about Gov's history and 2) will only report surveillance wrongdoing when their nose has been dragged to it and they've been booted from behind.
And to clarify here, NatSec and Child Safety are just different food colors in the same poisonous water.
This letter is a "nice try", but pretty late and lacking media-awareness. People certainly won't read a 4-page PDF. They should have led with:
> There is no technological solution to the contradiction inherent in both keeping information confidential from third parties and sharing that same information with third parties.
But would that be a part of the population that actually partakes in the discussion to begin with?
If you cannot say something more simple without making a mess of it, don't.
Cleland lost three limbs in Vietnam. None of his opponents had ever served.
>...On October 25, the Act passed the Senate with a vote of 98–1. Russ Feingold (D-WI) voted "no"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriot_Act#:~:text=The%20thre....
https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a38201636/max...
The public have largely been sold nothing and are completely, blissfully, ignorant of this legislation. The legislation is being pushed through by politicians who have been sold two lies:
1. The legislation, and 2. the idea that the public care.
The people are always sold a lie. But in a democracy, it is the responsibility of the voter to identify when they are being lied to and to search for the truth.
As much as you claim that media isn’t free and isn’t good, I look around and see the opposite. Now is the best time in the history of the world to get amazing journalism. You are just too focused on the media you dislike to admit that with selection comes lots of terrible choices.
The fact that people don't pay attention means that they're vulnerable to accepting the framing that they get the first time they're forced to hear about it.
In this case it will be from slightly rewritten press releases sent from the people pushing the bill to the kind of UK papers and TV stations that can't find a single journalist who objects to censorship or surveillance.
Do you understand this from polling? Can't trust UK media outlets on public opinion, they push, they don't pull. If the public doesn't agree with them, they all will run variations of the same story, aimed at the same targets, for years until they do.
And I think those who are proposing these kinds of bills know this, and are protected by how unlikely it would be to reach any kind of critical mass organically.
I'm sure there are laws against the encouragement of others to commit a crime, but ... wink wink.
Should — but based on what else this particular group have demonstrated about understanding cause and effect, won't.
You can discuss how high that cost should be, but there is a cost to state surveillance as well.
The Conservatives (aka Tories) are conservatives. The Labour party are also conservatives as much of the voting public in the uk is small-c conservative and also authoritarian.
But like I said, I’m not a political historian just an idiot with a half baked opinion.
All political movements and all politicians are convinced that their power is 100% legitimate and they should therefore be able to have 100% control of and visibility into everything that's going on.
The idea is compatible with most peoples' definition of democracy. You don't need to support other aspects of authoritarianism usually associated with right or left wing dictatorships.
As to your question: yes, most authoritarians are conservative in nature, given that the world has mostly been moving away from authoritarianism over the past few decades.
Also, I completely disagree that the world has mostly been moving away from authoritarianism. On the contrary. There was a time when at least the direction of travel seemed assured. Now I'm no longer so sure.
[Edit] Just so you know where I'm coming from. As someone who would never remotely associate himself with anything "conservative", I wish I could just blame conservatism or right wing authoritarians for this surveillance drive. But I can't honestly do that, and I have to accept that it is not just a right wing idea historically.
So please, debate policies on their content, not on their label. Reducing everything to a binary decision only serves authoritarian agendas.
But the Labour party have never been especially liberal. They're just as likely to enact controlling social policy. And, again, the press are extremely illiberal, they're likely to campaign for more surveillance.
(Don't try to jam the American two-party lens onto UK four-plus party politics, it will not help you make sense of the actual situation).
Because the UK has FPTP elections, in practice it's a two party system but which two parties varies by locale, resulting in some weird interactions that aren't really seen in the US.
You aren't going to get elaborate rainbow coalitions under that model, as you might in say Germany.
Labour are the party who passed that very nasty "Tell us your password or go to prison" law under "If you've done nothing wrong, you've got nothing to hide from law enforcement or the government." mentality.
Red Tories are still Tories.
This leaves the Lib Dems, who sadly have zero interest in repealing the Online Safety Bill if it passes.
While conservative news sources historically act in bad faith here, non-conservative news sources lose all reasoning ability, when it comes to Gov surveillance. They rarely hold Gov accountable unless they have little choice.
The latter probably happens because the public endlessly gives news orgs a pass about it.
Same thing happened in many countries with terrorism and loss of rights/super authoritarian/inconstitucional powers for govs, and it was fine... Because the risk is too great and "are you a <insert label here, such as terrorist sympathdizer, grandma killer, etc>
Let's not pretend the UK is particularly bad. Many countries are pushing the same old "destroy encryption" because I need to "tap the bad guys" and people are always fine when given the flimsiest of excuses/narrative.
Yes, HN "tech crowd" too.
https://www.institutmontaigne.org/en/expressions/past-virus-...
A telling thing is that you said people who have diseases and here it was prevent movement from everyone. Prevent the movement of the non sick. Remove human rights and civil rights. Implement inconsistent security theater and censor debate, and a long etc you don't care for because you just answered in the laziest of ways.
> Most of the populations around the world were in favor of locking people down
These were common sense measures known by people in the 500s
From the article about what happened centuries ago:
> He imposed isolation for both travelers and food coming to Constantinople from North Africa, hit by the terrible plague outbreak (541-542 A.D).
> Freedom of movement was only granted to those who obtained "a sanitary certification" from the authorities. In Venice, foreigners and passengers coming on ships needed to show a "certificate", to prove that they came from contagion-free places. In times of plague or cholera those who entered the cities were obliged to present a "health certificate" ("Patente di sanità")
But the same people were arguing right here on HN about studies showing that preschoolers in day care spread Covid even though every parent knows that preschoolers in day care have always been walking Petri dishes that spread diseases like a hooker on a crack.
Heck, since many of the people who were complaining about masks are self proclaimed “Christians”, even the Bible had “mask mandates”
https://web.mit.edu/jywang/www/cef/Bible/NIV/NIV_Bible/LEV+1....
>The person with such an infectious disease must wear torn clothes, let his hair be unkempt, [4] cover the lower part of his face and cry out, `Unclean! Unclean!' As long as he has the infection he remains unclean. He must live alone; he must live outside the camp.