UK's Investigatory Powers Bill to become law despite tech world opposition
theregister.com
theregister.com
It's sad but expected that the BBC have ignored this.
Edit: Oh, the BBC isn't a government agency, it's operationally independent. But always becoming less so, as the board is mostly appointed by the government now.
Objectively European TV licenses are just a terrible wasteful idea, basically creating an entire parallel tax collection system. Of all the important, vital things a government funds, I'm not sure why a public broadcaster should have any special insulation from the usual democratic decision making.
Now I'm in Germany, and here we have to pay for a TV license regardless of if we have a TV or not. (Also, my partner here has a TV).
The discount supermarket Lidl does 30 GB/€18.99/4 weeks.
O2 has a bunch of different "unlimited" offers with various caveats and extras at various different price points.
Now, the actual mobile network coverage? That's still all over the place, even in Berlin.
Meanwhile, mainstream TV (both state-run and privately owned) is more and more unwatchable, and more and more people just tune out - but they are still taxed.
The difference is that before it was basically opt-in, with spotty enforcement, and as a result about 30% of the population was not paying anything. Today it requires lying on an official form, making it much more serious.
How does that work? Who sets the TV license rate? If I hate the BBC and want to eliminate their funding, and I also want to be popular, what's stopping me from eliminating the license regime altogether?
Like, suppose your car comes with a subscription service for satellite radio... you're allowed to just not pay it. Owning the object associated with the service doesn't normally oblige you to subscribe to it.
Things may have changed since I left the country, but last I heard you only needed one if you owned specifically a TV or actually used iPlayer (i.e. more than merely having the capability to use it).
To your actual point, you do now need a license to use iPlayer at all, not merely for live TV -- too many people (like me) were not bothering with a license and relying on catch-up. We stopped using iPlayer as a result.
Er. Yes? : - )
And I didn't know the other one. Even then, I'd be happy with a subscription in iPlayer that I could sign up to, rather than one enforced by law.
> You have to watch live TV on iPlayer. That's the legal requirement.
You do not require a TV license if you have a TV but do not use it to watch live television (e.g. using it for YouTube/Netflix apps)
I have to pay road tax for owning a car :)
We do have Vehicle Excise Duty but it’s not a road tax.
Have they reported on it enough? No. But that’s not what was being claimed.
https://web.archive.org/web/20240322155020/https://www.bbc.c...
https://web.archive.org/web/20240323161503/https://www.bbc.c...
https://web.archive.org/web/20240129162322/https://www.bbc.c...
https://web.archive.org/web/20240130140028/https://www.bbc.c...
Maybe because they are categorised as "Technology" instead of "UK" | "Society" | "Politics"
Can you trust a VPN who say they don't log? No, but more so than an ISP who might be legally required to at any moment without you ever finding out.
Also, I will now never start a tech company in the UK, and this is because I will never put myself into a position where I am forced to add backdoors to a product.
Silver linings.
Wake me up when there's an actual threat to privacy in...
(checks notes........)
OH WAIT
The heat death of the Universe will come first -- Carry on, nothing to see here...
So your "solution" is to break the law and suffer the consequences?
I think you misunderstand law. It's not about making things impossible, it's about making possible things unappealing so you won't do them.
That’s cute.
Huh? When did I ever say it was "impossible to break laws"? My entire point was it very possible to break laws, which is why those laws exist.
The government could pass a law banning encryption tomorrow and there would be nothing besides fear of the law stopping you from continuing to use it, if you so chose to so do (just like the law against battery doesn't mean there's a physical barrier making it impossible for you punch the guy standing next you on the subway). The actual and indented effect of the law would be the technology would be driven underground, and your choice to use it illegally would carry far greater risks to you.
Also, a law against using encryption wouldn't be unenforceable. At the very least they could punish you with a sentencing enhancement or use it as an alternative charge if it successfully cloaked whatever else you were doing (e.g. like how they got Al Capone for tax evasion, not any of the other stuff he did). And anyway, computers make surveillance and enforcement easier, not harder.
There is a lot more than A's fear of the law. There is also B, C and everyone else's fear of the law, compounding and creating chilling effects, to the point where there is simply no one who will carry your message, transact with you, provide a platform, or whatever, for the type of thing you want to break the law for.
You mean the era in which we got things like the Magna Carta, rights of due process, habeas corpus, the gradual abolition of slavery (at least in western Europe), the gradual transfer of power from monarchs to parliaments etc.
I think our direction of travel is a lot worse now!
Did she die in vain?
> the gradual abolition of slavery (at least in western Europe)
Even with that caveat, didn't that really only happen after the medieval era?
Among other things. Some important bits applied more widely, such as the right to a fair trial which applied to any "free man".
It was a also a recognition of existing law that had developed earlier.
> Even with that caveat, didn't that really only happen after the medieval era?
No, slavery declined in medieval times, and was abolished in England by the Normans around the 11th/12th century. Serfdom continued but serfs were not chattel slaves (they could not be traded) and has rights.
European participation in the slave trade revived in early modern times, in and between colonies. Slaver was not revived in Europe itself.
I think Habeas Corpus is one of the few clauses of Magna Carta that still has legal effect (the former is part of the latter).
And remember that Magna Carta was a deal between the "barons" and King John; the rights that Magna Carta purported to confer, only applied to barons (landowners, basically). In the time of King John, the law as most ordinary people encountered it was simply the local baron.
I think it wasn't until Henry II that there were royal courts set up, to deliver the same law everywhere.
I am not sure if it has effect because of the Magna Carta, but right to a fair trial is another right that still exists and applied to any "free man".
> I think it wasn't until Henry II that there were royal courts set up, to deliver the same law everywhere.
Yes, but that was still medieval. Yes, it was not one huge improvement. The Magna Carta was a step in a process that started centuries earlier and went to for centuries afterwards.
The campaign to brand freedom ('freedumb') as a far-right ideal certainly isn't helping.
In particular, surveillance is extremely popular with both of the big UK parties. Well, I say "big", we'll see if the Tories even manage to win a single seat at the next election — I think they're currently expected to get just under 100 seats, but they're so dysfunctional that total disintegration is absolutely possible between now and then.
I don't believe that's true. Our younger generations are way more savvy about those things than our older ones.
What I do see is a sense of hopeless inevitability. People don't feel they can escape the surveillance and other technological dangers because everyone is at it. Both of our major political parties are generally supportive of the police and surveillance state and no-one else has any realistic prospect of forming a government at national level. Unless you give up a large part of modern life and decide not to participate in large parts of our society you have little real choice but to pick your poison from the big tech firms as well.
So people resist in less obvious ways like moving between services and creating new accounts frequently with false details. People from younger generations hardly ever commit to any single account on any service the way their parents or grandparents did. They have no time for terms and conditions that require real identities. (Or the service will do what exactly? Terminate the account they didn't really care about or expect to use for long anyway?) I imagine a lot of young people already know how to use a VPN and probably more will start doing so over time. I wonder how many phones the average teenager really has today.
Of course this attitude creates other problems of its own. With modern tech but little personal accountability we see issues like cyberbullying becoming real problems for our schoolkids for example. Unfortunately the only answer the politicians can seem to think of to deal with a problem like that is trying to be even more authoritarian. We need to do better than that.
Most people do NOT know how to use a VPN, and barely know how to use computers outside of their walled garden app based devices. I'm not sure if there's really much of a difference by age.
Only because future governments will have far better methods of surveillance and population control.
The wealthy elite class draws most of its income by exploiting labor. This is done in a variety of ways but essentially most UK Billionaires make their money in private equity (over half.. same in US)... which really means they don't actually do much real labor.
Instead they need to extract wealth which often means creating a system where people's labor is exploited. To keep this system in check a control of the narrative is required so you can keep a lower class of workers "occupied" so they don't wise up to the reality of the situation.
One common theme is fear.. war on terror, axis of evil states.. some sort of plague..Y2K.. you can probably pull up many themes from the past.
The other theme is divide by culture.... you see this today with gender issues.. gay rights, etc. For example in most modern western states... the vast majority of citizens don't really care if people are gay .. they may or may not approve personally but honestly don't mind what people do with their private lives etc... So the narrative has to flipped and made more extreme ..it doesn't matter the issue it has to something that gets people riled up enough that they don't have much mental or emotion energy left to focus on the small group that is exploiting their labor. (So gender issue has to get extreme to the point where we talk about surgical altering children for example)
Notice both parties... somehow keep migrants flowing into Europe (and US).. Almost like pressure needs to be kept on keeping wages low.
In the US the federal reserve openly states this as the goal ..(https://canadiandimension.com/articles/view/us-federal-reser...). Little coverage is given to this and instead a strange spin is attached on how somehow the worker class will actually benefit by being paid less.
This is the same with survelliance bills. We must keep an eye on the worker class to make sure they don't organize and wise up to the reality of their situation.
My two cents
Whether it's the border crisis, or drug addiction, the numerous wars fought, or the polarization of society, the aim is for the ruling elite to divide and rule, and continue extracting wealth
I'm sure nothing wrong will happen with delaying security updates if they ever actually use that clause...
I'm guessing there are ~10 nation states who can deanonymize tor, and I strongly suspect the UK is on that list.
So most traffic goes through open net, and tv (for example) goes through a privacy first vpn provider with an exit in, say, Switzerland. And Proton mail for a small amount of email with the rest via apple.
Essentially - would it be less of a flag.
And would they even care about a bit of streaming
Something someone on HN might be able to answer is this: is there a reason why you couldn't try to configure Wireguard to have a constant bandwidth mode? Continually transmit UDP packets and again frustrate timing or correlation analysis -- if every client spoke to the server on one of a predetermined number of speeds continually then the burstlike connections coming from that server to a potentially identity leaking service (e.g. gmail.com) could not easily be correlated with the origin of the traffic. I imagine that would make it easier to have some stronger degree of privacy protection in aggregate.
It would also have to be aggressively rate limited to make it practical for anything with a battery over wifi, even a constant 2Mbit is not ideal for wifi and will cause a lot of battery drain since radios are most efficient when they can do burst communication. Or maybe it could be limited to bursts at some interval for better bandwidth, or better efficiency (but not both)... that would also make it easier to manage the traffic since it's no longer real-time.
I doubt there is any way to configure wireguard to behave like this, it has quite a specific purpose and wireguard's design focus is performance and security rather than obfuscation from traffic analysis. Maybe it's not necessary to modify WG if the traffic can be manipulated just before the WG interface...
[edit]
Talking of timing analysis, this was the side channel in specter/meltdown that was demonstrated to extract cryptographic keys from JS in the browser. Browser responded by just lowering the resolution of JS timers and introducing noise.
Maybe this would also be sufficient for a wireguard connection at the cost of slightly worse latency performance. The tricky part is how the timing resolution would be tied to activity on the WG server, i.e you would need the packets to be spread out further and further the less activity there is on the server, so you actually end up with better performance the busier the server is.
It would also come at a performance cost to routing which would be forced to hold on to packets artificially.
If I wanted to do something nefarious I'd do it completely offline.
I'm not in the UK though, and I refuse to even visit it for work now since Brexit. Google had some convention there a while ago and I just refused to go. If they don't want us I don't want them.
So if they choose to (as opposed to they suspected something) they can steal from you, have you attacked and more and they just pervert the course of justice to cover it up. Such as informing the police they are not allowed to response to your calls. Forbidding you to send in police reports. I know because it happened to me. Because I lived next to someone that they wanted to fuck up and I complained.
Perhaps surprisingly given they are currently led by a former human rights lawyer the Labour side also seem to be authoritarian when it comes to technology and surveillance.
That distinction was lost long ago in the west.
Canada's left wing liberals/NDP are doing it under the guise of hate speech and protecting kids:
https://globalnews.ca/news/10317040/online-harms-bill-canada...
Conservatives more stereotypically spin it for national security/terrorism. But it will come in some form or the other each administration like clockwork.
Generally it seems the intelligence services get a free pass from the entire political class on all sides, regardless of pretence, as we've seen in every Five Eyes countries, including Australia.
What does this mean exactly? I'm not familiar with UK government terminology.
One law for them, another for us.
This sounds like a huge step back towards Spycatcher territory, where MI5 thought it was their job to undermine the Labour Party, because they were all communists.
You know its bad when your hope rests on big tech throwing down the gauntlet.
Weren't the Tories going to get the UK out of the European Convention on Human Rights? And thus remove the possibility of appealing the the European Court of Human Rights.
In a post-911 world, the people leading this country still leading by fear.
Their recent smoking ban -- which is sure to make cigarette smoking cool again with young people -- was a joke. This hyper-surveillance measure is a lot less funny.
That's about to be turned on its head. Banning smoking will make it seem edgy, transgressive, and alluring. Still worse, banning it only for people below a certain age will make it seem mature and sophisticated to those below the cutoff. The forbidden fruit.
The UK Govt couldn't possibly devise a better way to popularize cigarettes with young people. And they'll create a nice little black market, to boot.
or to put it another way --- the phenomenon you point to is real but completely swamped by the more direct impacts
In the UK, however, the way to bet is that the government enforces the ban with maniacal zeal, so smoking rates will probably go down slightly in the near term. (For better or worse -- usually worse -- the UK has more state capacity to enforce a ban than the US or indeed the vast majority of other countries.) But smoking will become, once again, a prestigious activity. All the cool kids will smoke, if only for the social signaling benefits. Over more than a decade, youth smoking rates might surpass what they were before the ban.
1st amendment is being killed in America, privacy rights are being killed in the UK.
Freedom? Democracy? Will of the people? Lol.
Thank god, I'm glad the politicians that passed this law will be protected from it /s
There's literally no good argument to protect politicians other than corruption.
If politicians are worried these powers could be used to target them then it could be used to target literally anyone, and the concern shouldn't have been that they could be target, but that anyone could be targeted.
Plus, if this bill is only going to stop bad guys then they should have anything to worry about anyway right? I mean isn't this what we are told!? Should we be worried about these powers being abused or not!?
What a fucking joke.
choke Salman Abedi choke.
(for anyone not in the UK, he was already well known to the security services [MI5] and managed to kill 22 people in a suicide bombing)
This is a pretty blatant power grab, rather than anything actually positive.
The simple arguments of "we didn't have enough funding" or "we weren't allowed to collect more data" will be used. More tax payer money is then spent to cement power through mass surveillance and the cycle repeats.
Sometimes you just love it when the band knock out one of their classics.
Sadly, I now realize I was correct except that I was reading the wrong sci-fi authors. I should have been reading Orwell and Huxley.
Ah yes they've introduced some safeguards. Whom do they safeguard? Themselves!
If the UK still was in the EU, this would have never happened.
We were in the EU in 2000
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Investigatory_Powers_Act_2016
And in 2016
I wouldn't be so sure about that. The original act passed in 2016 and was already an abomination.
https://www.blueprintforfreespeech.net/en/news/eu-court-rule...
However, the 2016 act was ruled incompatible with EU law: https://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWHC/2018/975.html
Most privacy efforts I've seen in the EU are commercial facing legislation that I find kinda of piecemeal and naive (granted I'll take naive over nothing, sometimes...). I don't know that I've seen efforts that would seriously curtail government surveillance.
Limit, rather than outright prevent.
"""Respect for private and family life
Everyone has the right to respect for his or her private and family life, home and communications."""
— Chapter II, Article 7, Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union, https://www.europarl.europa.eu/charter/pdf/text_en.pdf
Which is part of the Treaty of Lisbon.
Honest question as I really don't closely follow this area in the EU.
1) the 2016 act being ruled incompatible with EU law: https://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWHC/2018/975.html
2) all the GDPR popups people seem to hate even more than thing GDPR is trying to get under control
3) an ongoing battle over transatlantic data sharing by private corporations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Schrems
Presumably you mean laws and treaties; those exist. But I wouldn't expect government spies to pay excessive attention to the law.
The problem is the clauses about requiring distributors to get state clearance before deploying an update [ahem - nooo, that disables our backdoor], and increased costs and obligations on ISPs. Thwy won't ever try to enforce the law against the spooks, but for big tech companies, it's just regulatory clutter. They have staff lawyers out the wazoo, all specializing in regulatory clutter.
Not good for small ISPs and tech companies.
Why do you think people in the government wanted them to leave?
The UK has never squared the "free speech, even when it's inconvenient to those in power" circle.
I am aware of the current attempts to push surveillance laws, although AFAIK the EU parliament did reject the worst of the legislation the commission tried to push.
Relevant past rulings:
https://dpglaw.co.uk/european-court-of-human-rights-declares...
https://privacyinternational.org/press-release/5120/judgment...
It is truly ridiculous that this has become a law in the UK.
The internet is weakening and fracturing at intense speed - faster than it grew.
What backlash? Are you going to go lobby in Westminster? Or hit the street and riot/direct action against it?
The reality is most people don't care, and complaining on a forum online does nothing.
It has to start somewhere. Last time the King faced adversity from the people, it was due to an anonymously distributed pamphlet.
This probably isn't true.
Forums are voluminous online and regularly contain such complaints, partly as the anonymity gives people a feeling of being more free to express themselves, versus other types of social group interactions.
Given that cohesive and cooperative direct action from organised groups is relatively rare, it could be seen as statistically likely direct action at least sometimes resulted from a group unifying over discussion on a forum.
Agree with your other points
I agree the law is ridiculous though. I hope big internet companies boycott the UK, speaking as a UK citizen. This law won't catch anyone remotely tech sazzy.
So at least there's a potential bright side for people in the UK :-)
It has nothing to do with him in reality. The monarch has to give ascent to new acts of parliament and by convention always does. They don't (overtly) interfere politically.
Royal assent is a ceremonial process at this point as the powers to refuse a bill are very, very rarely exercised.
From Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_assent):
"The last bill that was refused assent was the Scottish Militia Bill during Queen Anne's reign in 1708."
Even that was only done on the advice of government ministers who had second thoughts after the bill was passed.
Behind Closed Doors: Oaths to the Monarch (who, by the way, was besties with necro-pedo-murderer Jimmy Saville)
Gtfo of here brits - the Irish were on the right side of history and it’s high time for a revolution and you know it’s true!
But it’s also time to take a look within ourselves and see that we are co-creating something.
Do we want it?
Is this the best we can do as a human race?
The Irish people have a bit of luck on their side. They follow their hearts and speak up.
The ancient Celtic DNA knows. It’s a magical people, and I mean that in the sense of the Magi; enlightened men and women of knowledge who brought the sciences and the arts to humanity.
The Irish were conquered, but the power and wisdom within the DNA cannot be conquered.
It’s all within. Like an ancient quantum computer.
It sits. Waiting to be tapped by the brave one who dares to look outside the program.
The writing was on the wall a decade ago. You'll get Cable TV 2.0 and you'll like it. An army of sycophants and chumps are working to ensure it.