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Comment by motohagiography | Hacker News Reader

Her television interview with the former(?) minister responsible for this abomination of a law was urgent and necessary. These legislators know what they are doing, and that it is unethical. Let Signal leave the UK market. If the people want freedom, let them take it themselves. Perhaps before this generation of young men are rounded up for another one of history's meat grinders in Ukraine, as a means to further reduce domestic resistance to the new agenda.

What new words can be written that would suddenly enlighten the managers of that government and deter it from its course of fully atomizing its citizens? I'd suggest the greatest service Signal could do for the people of the UK is to suspend operations in the market preemptively. Turn into the torpedo. The thing about totalitarianism is that the longer people believe they are safe from it, the deeper its roots dig in.

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Your insinuation that the UK will implement a Ukraine war draft in order to advance a totalitarian agenda is weird, unnecessarily conspiratorial, and dilutes your point. I encourage you to make one point and to make it well.

As long as conscription laws remain on the books, it should never be taboo to worry about those laws being put into practice.

I had defense readiness classes in high school back when there was still debate in my country whether to phase out conscription (which eventually happened) and our teacher, a retired colonel(who was against phasing it out), told us one thing that stuck with me:

Conscripts are only good for defense - they know the area and the local language/customs. Additionally, they stand to lose their friends, family and possessions, so they're motivated to do something about that.

None of these advantages apply on the offense.

I don't think you understand anything about the British system if you think that "removing laws from the books" matters at all.

As demonstrated by COVID regulations in emergency the law can be changed very quickly.

Modern armies (like NATO members) have really got very little to gain by conscription. Being a modern soldier has very little to do with being cannon fodder.

Modern warfare against insurgents, where CNN broadcasts the night vision green victory footage.

Unfortunately, in Ukraine both sides are cannon fodder again because modern anti air defenses are so good that the fighting relies on 155mm howitzers again. Which NATO has just run out of and has no capacity to manufacture in sufficient quantities.

> Unfortunately, in Ukraine both sides are cannon fodder again because modern anti air defenses are so good that the fighting relies on 155mm howitzers again. Which NATO has just run out of and has no capacity to manufacture in sufficient quantities.

To be fair it appears that Russia is using 10x more shells then they manufacture in a year so once they run out of their old soviet stock pile things will go south for them.

> has no capacity to manufacture in sufficient quantities.

That’s scary. If 31 countries cant get their act together to manufacture basic weapons then we are in no better shape than russia. Should they win the war in ukraine and decide to attack other countries we’d be caught with our pants down.

You can easily build capacities, but it requires will and money, both are missing.

Russia constantly shares footage of their Ka-52 helicopters striking land vehicles, so clearly air vehicles are still able to operate in important areas.

I don't think the point was that it is or should be taboo to talk about the possibility that conscription laws would be used, just that the particular context in which it's been brought up makes it weird. It sounds like fringy conspiratorial silliness, especially considering the utter lack of any evidence that western countries are considering actual combat operations in Ukraine. Or maybe a bit of propaganda.

It's reasonable for people who want to seriously address the very real and legitimate problems with this kind of "wiretap" legislation to not want extraneous issues derailing the discussion, as having their concerns conflated with more conspiratorial-sounding ones makes them far easier to dismiss.

> Her television interview […]

Channel 4 News segment:

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E--bVV_eQR0

The MP, Damian Collins, "who formerly served as a junior Minister for Tech and the Digital Economy in the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport":

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damian_Collins

Reminder:

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

Thanks very much for posting that interview. I thought it was good (and honestly impressed that it was quite respectful communication all the way around, as opposed to so often what I see as "debates" on TV), but I admit I got super frustrated to the point I could only watch half of it because nobody wanted to clearly admit to the other side's quite obvious point.

I think the Signal president was making great points, but she definitely was avoiding a clear response when asked about "If people are sharing CSAM on your platform, you wouldn't know about it, correct?" and "If people are violating your ToS, how would you enforce that?"

Obviously, the clearest direct answer is "Correct, we would have no way of knowing what content is being shared on our service." She complained about "circling the drain on the issue", but the reason they were circling is that she didn't want to say that sentence. And I get it, in today's day and age news organizations love to take a quote out of context and make it the headline ("Signal president admits they can't enforce their ToS against illegal material!!")

But debates like this are a waste of time when both sides refuse to admit the obvious implications of the other side's points:

1. The Signal president was making very clear there is no "halfway" encryption, that it either works or it doesn't, and the bill required a back door. The government minister was pretending and talking loads of BS about what "options the regulator has", even while conceding the point that you can't have a backdoor that only "the good guys" can use. What an exercise in cognitive dissonance.

2. The Signal president obviously knew "Yes, people can share CSAM on our service and we can't directly know about that content", but (and I think for good reasons) didn't want to say that obvious point out loud.

This debate would make more sense if both sides would just admit there is no "halfway compromise" to this issue. I agree with another comment that Apple really fucked up by thinking their "fingerprinting" approach was technically viable, and that somewhat poisoned the well in this debate.

The marketing around this issue is problematic and it's keeping people from clearly discussing the issues. The authors of the UK bill chose to focus on CSAM _specifically_ so that they could hamstring the debate. That so much of the interview focused on "terms of service", generally understood to be something so technical that most people don't even read them and likely unenforceable in court should be a warning sign to us all.

I believe Meredith Wittaker was correct to avoid addressing the Signal TOS and how it is implemented. This would open the door to the whole "client-side CSAM scanning" (chat control) discussion which would be even more tedious.

https://www.theregister.com/2022/10/13/clientside_scanning_c...

You've said it yourself why they wouldn't want to say those things, and yet you expected them to say them. Forcing your opponent to say things that will be cherry picked by the media is a common tactic, and one very hard to defend yourself against.

Yes, I agree it would have been best if they had just agreed on some compromise to the matter. I don't believe they ever would, though.

I wasn't aware the Russian army was recruiting from the UK?

Are we just being obtuse now? Is that what we're doing?

I think he's genuinely confused, and as a citizen of the UK, so am I..

The alternative is the UK drafting people to fight in ukraine, which also makes 0 sense?

Obviously the concern is an escalation of that war which pulls NATO into the conflict fully. I don't believe that's a likely scenario, but being deliberately obtuse isn't the right way address that somebody expressing that concern.

Russia nuking NATO? What is Signal encryption supposed to have to do with it?

The argument that was made (and that was not central to the post at all, despite everyone jumping on it) is the slow erosion of freedoms that may lead to less restraint also in foreign affairs.

UK politicians have been periodically demanding NATO engagement, though this one is from 2022:

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/davis-ellwood...

Ellwood seems to be the UK equivalent of Lindsay Graham and has recently made similar noises.

Russia is having difficulty just with our donated weapons, I don't see why a nato involved war would involve conscription on the nato side.

Revealing idiocy with irony is an excellent shortcut towards refutation by absurdity.

responding to hyperbole with hyperbole is appropriate isn't it?

Wagner does.

With the recent board changes in Signal (Katherine Maher and other people highly associated with the government of the USA) it is reasonable to assume that it compromised in some way. The UK probably recognizes this and wants to make it a little bit harder for US diplomats to evade interception. Meanwhile France and Germany will use Element Matrix.

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