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Comment by bananapub | Hacker News Reader

>they are trying to get the law passed

they did pass the law through the lower house. the upper house can demand amendments and stall things a bit, but it can also just be completely ignored given enough time.

> despite the obvious objection that message filtering is impossible

it's not impossible, it's just a horrificly bad idea, and why would being impossible affect if it gets passed or not?

> by saying "we know it's impossible but we would like to have the legal right to do it in case it becomes possible in the future"?

no, they issued a press statement saying they won't implement the thing they passed until it's "practical".

lots of governments pass lots of laws and regulations and are untruthful about what they'll do later.

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I'm slowly becoming of the opinion that legislators should be punished for creating laws that are nakedly illegal (against the constitution/human rights that have been agreed upon). I don't know what can of worms it would open, but it's getting tiring when politicians just ignore the public and push forward with laws that then spend 5 years in court battles to eventually be struck down. But for those 5 years their bullshit law is active. Eg EU data retention act.

In a country that doesn't have a written constitution [0] (per se), and is continually trying to renege on what human rights have been agreed [1], what would there be to punish against?

0: https://www.bl.uk/magna-carta/articles/britains-unwritten-co...

1: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/feb/05/tory-mps-to...

exactly, there's a lot of very weird "Everywhere Is Like The US, Presumably" commenting in this thread

Presumably the proposal is for the UK and such places to adopt a written constitution guaranteeing certain rights to the population, and then punish government officials for violating it.

The most effective version is probably not the ability to sue for damages, but rather that if the highest court rules a law unconstitutional, anyone who voted in favor of it is ineligible to run for reelection. This would both get the perpetrators out of office and make them much more cautious about violating the rights of the population.

This issue doesn't only happen in the UK though. And for now the UK is bound by the ECHR.

That’s a dumb way to run things, though. Lawmakers should be punished according to the most expansive definition of human rights that is plausible under the system. If the sort of constitutional/basic laws are ill defined and constantly changing, that’s problem #1 and they should be heavily incentivized to fix it.

There is no such thing as an illegal Act of Parliament in the UK. Parliament has unfettered power to pass whatever laws it sees fit, regardless of existing laws, treaties, or whatever.

(At least, that's the standard interpretation, though some authorities have suggested it's not quite as simple as that: see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parliamentary_sovereignty_in_t... for details.)

To take this to an extreme, are you saying that under UK law, it would be legal for Parliament to legalize slavery or permit other activities that would unconscionable and illegal without such action?

> To take this to an extreme, are you saying that under UK law, it would be legal for Parliament to legalize slavery or permit other activities that would unconscionable and illegal without such action?

definitely. why is this surprising? countries permit all sorts of unconscionable things (the US had slavery and only banned it "except as a punishment for crime", literally has the death penalty right now) and by definition legislatures turn things from "illegal" to "legal" and vice versa constantly. the US could re-legalise slavery via a constitutional amendment any time it wanted, Ireland could ban divorce again, Australia could un-repeal Section 127, etc etc.

the only difference in the UK is that there's no "basic law" / "constitution" that's harder to change than regular laws.

Yes to my understanding. Parliament makes the laws. No court can override Parliament. No existing law binds Parliament. The only thing stopping this is how incredibly embarrassing it would be and individual MPs might lose their next election.

https://www.parliament.uk/site-information/glossary/parliame...

Yes. The Supreme Court might declare such a law incompatible with the European Convention on Human Rights (incorporated into UK law under the Human Rights Act), but that does not in itself invalidate the law: it would remain the law until Parliament amended it or repealed it (if it ever did).

> legislators should be punished for creating laws that are nakedly illegal (against the constitution/human rights that have been agreed upon)

Unfortunately, this cuts both ways.

this narrative sounds like an acceptance of a cat n mouse game that has barely got started

it's not very secret. a bunch of western governments want to be able to spy on the comms of their citizens and lazy terrorists/pedophiles/whatever with poor opsec. basically everyone including normies moving to well-encrypted chat systems makes this very hard (requires court-ordering/NSL/coercing software companies to 0wn their own customers), so instead they want to standardise making it easy for governments.

the UK happens to 1) not have a proper constitution with any encoded human rights and also poor judicial review and 2) an inherently authoritarian currently-ruling party and media ecosystem and culture 3) be a UN SC member, Five Eyes member, G7 member, reasonably big economy etc so it's government is in a good spot to push hard on this and see if it can break the will of tech companies, which would be a great technical and social precedent to help other governments achieve the same goal. Australia is also a battleground for this for similar cultural and political and legal reasons.

what is less clear is why Signal is saying this is a victory, unless they really are so cynical that saving face while losing is more important than standing up on this point of principle that their company was supposedly founded on.

Casual spying on citizens is new to Western governments (unless you count East Germany as Western).

However in some countries your phone must have mandatory government spyware on your mobile phone and PC:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Dam_Youth_Escort

> Casual spying on citizens is new to Western governments (unless you count East Germany as Western).

depends on "casual" and "new" I guess? Echelon is a dragnet from the 70s, and at least the US, UK and Australian governments spied lots on anti-war protestors and environmentalists and civil rights campaigners and trade unionists. Some Australians wrote a book called "Our ASIO Files" (ASIO is the Australian internal spy/security agency) based on being surveilled during the 80s.

> https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Dam_Youth_Escort

did you not read the article you've linked? this was never deplpoyed.

> Casual spying on citizens is new to Western governments

Five Eyes are old hands at spying on their citizens. [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON

"New" is very relative. GSM phone communication protocol from late 80s was intentionally sabotaged to have 54-bit crypto keys so it could be easily attacked.

(And it was only used over radio so base station traffic could be wiretapped even more easily.)

HMRC can do the most unrestricted spy on the British population, and there is a lot of data sharing between all the different parts of the state, ie HMRC, Police, NHS etc etc.

Any employee of the state can spy on you and the press also do a fair bit of spying on the population.

Its a national past time when thinking of curtain twitchers and neighbourhood watch schemes.

> Any employee of the state can spy on you

come on mate, get your head straight.

You really dont have a clue do you! Every part of the state you interact with takes notes, and the security services have access to it when they want it, bent judges do exist you know, and then they via Special Branch direct the Police.

When is an anonymous tip off by the public, just a cover for the state. They cant do it to everyone as the game would be up, but there is much more surveillance than you realise.

Alot of my relatives worked for the state, and as a kid I over heard alot!

They said nothing about it being practical. Specifically from the Reuters article:

> Junior minister Stephen Parkinson appeared to concede ground to the tech companies' arguments on Wednesday, saying in parliament's upper chamber that the Ofcom communications regulator would only require them to scan content where "technically feasible".

What this means is any chat system that isn't using end-to-end encryption is subject to these laws. Anything using end-to-end encryption is considered unfeasible to scan.

> What this means is any chat system that isn't using end-to-end encryption is subject to these laws. Anything using end-to-end encryption is considered unfeasible to scan.

Why are you asserting this is true?

Adding a backdoor to an e2e system is technically feasible, what makes you imagine that is excluded?

That is what the press release was specifically about.

Additionally, I strongly disagree with your assertion. Adding any kind of scanning system like that is technically infeasible unless you sacrifice some measure of security. The government and many nation states have been trying to argue against encryption of various levels (even less than end-to-end encryption) and the ultimate outcome is it being rejected because all of those measures _meaningfully weaken the security of the system_.

> he ultimate outcome is it being rejected because all of those measures _meaningfully weaken the security of the system_.

this is beyond naive.

the reason these measures have been rejected is due to public outcry and bad press for the governments trying it. the US banned exporting functional encryption for a long time, Australia passed it's you-must-assist-security-services bill, every country has LI systems embedded in etc etc. the LI systems hugely reduce security, up to and including mass infiltration by the US of an ally: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_wiretapping_case_2004–05

if you think "that'll make things less secure" is actually going to stop these constant attempts to eliminate private communications, you're going to be hugely disappointed by the next ten years.

>lots of governments pass lots of laws and regulations and are untruthful about what they'll do later.

If I was giving them the benefit of the doubt I would say they are trying to avoid losing face.

what on earth does that mean?

the bill passed: https://bills.parliament.uk/bills/3137

the entire thing that happened yesterday is a nobody minister (not the actual person in charge of any of this) said they wouldn't do a thing the law allows them to do. they didn't change the law, or pass a regulation or anything, they just did a speech.

>they are trying to avoid losing face.

After boris johnson, liz truss, not achieving much after 13 years etc, etc, etc I rather suspect saving face is the least of a Tory worry.

That’s not how you save face. Genuinely, if nobody said anything about this anymore, basically everyone would forget about it. The privacy nerds that would remember this 6 months from now would be utterly politically immaterially few

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