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Comment by FerretFred | Hacker News Reader

> There is a bill moving rapidly through the U.K. Parliament that poses a significant threat to data security and privacy in the U.K. and beyond. It is ill considered and should be amended substantially before it moves forward. The bill is flawed in several respects

UK citizen (person of interest?) here.. sadly, this summarises what passes for the New Normal here in Britain. Contentious bills are always "rushed", and will only be considered by the people it will ultimately affect. These bills are always flawed in some way, but somehow, the Oppositin never seems to oppose. I'm not surprised.

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It doesn’t matter what the opposition does, Conservatives have a massive majority.

This explains why the distraction is going on - just like last time when they got the last bill through.

I hate them with all my heart - not very HN of me, I know.

Labour are on course to win a landslide of their own in the election expected to be held this year.

Expect more of the same regardless of which party are in power.

IMHO in order to stop an oppression, people need to withdraw there support of said system by organizing directly and withdrawing from party politics because party systems create polar opposites that keep the status quo going.

Look, I get what you are trying to say. But in a democracy, do what you can with what you have. Not voting or not participating leaves the entire game board to whoever pissed you off this much.

Yes thats true, but the end goal is to remove all value from that system that it no longer has any support. It's the long game that nobody wants to play. I think Gandhi had the right idea. They lost in the battle of oppression, but eventual won the war of having a country free from colonialism which eventual got them what they wanted.

I don’t think there’s a massive majority next time.

The jury is still out on whether this is 1992 again or 1997 again, but their ducks are still not in a row, and many of their ducks are retiring from the pond this time around.

There is a thing you can do, though. Persuade people to get voter ID and vote.

Unfortunately Labour (with the exception of when they had Corbyn in charge) are habitually authoritarian. The mark of a party of lawyers, perhaps. So, no real opposition.

The conservative party bears the mark of a party of the uneducated and unemployed.

As little as laywers bring to the table, its at least something.

No, they have always been the party of the elite. They pander to the "bread and circuses" crowd because they'd never get elected otherwise.

The ingress into politics has a vicious filter that works against working class people. I've been in the Labour Party and seen it in action. The tories have a native contempt for them too. It is a pretty grim thing that only the left most constituencies choose to field candidates whose lives are recognisable to the average person: Nadia Whittome is a great example of that.

Even if that were true (its not IMO), its not the educated and unemployed who like this sort of legislation.

It is the security services, police, and civil service.

At the moment the weak leadership (useless PM) is giving them an opportunity to rush the politicians into stiff like this.

Back in the day this stuff was recognised. In 1983 Labour's manifesto pledged to abolish the secret services and that was part of the reasoning.

I the Labour party were more like they were in 1983 I would vote for them! Not to the extent of abolishing the secret services, maybe, but definitely more control.

I there has also been a change of mindset. Politicians (correctly) recognize that these people are the experts, but they seem to forget that their job is to weight up these opinions, ask questions, consult other experts, and apply the subjective judgements required to make trade offs (in this case security against privacy).

Same, it was a good era of Labour policy, regardless of what people say.

I don't think "experts" are always what they're cracked up to be. Partisan writers funded by anonymous third parties etc try to put themselves on a par with eg, university professors. Both groups like to ignore people's actual experiences too, preferring abstraction that misses key things.

Ultimately experts can't answer the question of what a good society looks like. Their job is to make it happen - if they're intellectually honest enough to try even when they don't agree with the starting point the politicians and electorate come up with.

The original Investigatory Powers Act and Brexit were the two reasons I left the UK; the latter hit me harder than I expected even by the immediate aftermath of the poll results, but the former was so obviously broken even at the time that I'm surprised the UK even has a tech sector any more… though I suppose, like GDPR, everyone who is being forced to comply is trying to do the least effort version of compliance, and the inherent secrecy is combining with cluelessness about who has exactly what capability to make "do very little" a much easier path than I was expecting.

I went to actual Portcullis House to talk to my local MP in person about the IP Bill and try to convince her to at least limit the worse parts. Nada.

Unfortunately most people outside tech circles either don’t care or don’t understand the danger of unchecked surveillance. By the time negative effects will be visible it will be too late.

It would be good to hear what was said, if you don't mind sharing.

The in-person meeting wasn't recorded, but I do have some emails and my MP did suggest I write to John Hayes with a 1-page summary.

All the emails together may be a bit much to read, but as a general sense I figured that it would be a mistake to say "surveil absolutely nothing absolutely ever" as that would seem like petulance to a non-technical MP and thus get ignored; also, as I think criminal gangs are just as capable of digital attacks and surveillance as governments, I'm not so much worried about the surveillance itself as I am about the social damage from how this enables blackmail (which requires social rather than technical solutions) and the security damage from deliberately created weak points (which leads to "use a different method for the surveillance you're going to insist on doing anyway no matter what I say and will continue to do even if we remove all the laws supporting you").

In retrospect, and as I'm not a lawyer, I suspect I also thoroughly misunderstood some of the parts of the bill I was reading and objecting to.

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