This is so disheartening. I thought we were making progress in the anti-surveillance privacy narrative, but this says otherwise. As a UK citizen, is there anything I can do to dissuade this?
edit: typo
edit: typo
Overall i agree with you, it is really disheartening. That being said, i've made progress with my family on valuing privacy and the dangers of surveillance. I think people might be changing their minds slowly but still lots of work to do.
A breakthrough with my sisters was when abortion was threatened here in the states. Mentioned to them that it would be easy for authorities to enforce abortion punishments by subpoenaing data from menstruation cycle tracker apps. This kind of "clicked" for them and they became more open to the other parts (not given ratukan or whatever their purchase history, etc. etc.)
Now let’s say that some Republican Senators and Representatives were ethically opposed to but then threatened to be primaried and President Musk said he would throw all of his money behind a potential opponent, how long do you think it would take a law to be passed?
Even without a law, we already see that Cook will willingly bend a knee to Trump as will Google.
Right now in my home state the governor was trying to get a law passed banning Western Union from allowing illegal immigrants from sending money overseas.
And the only implication that they exist is about them seeing publicity campaigns of senators.
He will just do an executive order. He is an authoritarian, basically a king. "But but but it's illegal". The system can't keep up with speed he is dismantling it.
I think we are perhaps the lowest point ever in terms of anti-surveillance efforts. There seems to be bipartisan effort among many (most?) western governments that the government should have unfettered access to all data, regardless of any reasonable expectation of privacy.
Encryption seems barely tolerated these days. Governments are insisting on backdoors, they are making it illegal in some cases for companies to even discuss what is going on or that monitoring is happening.
We barely know what is going on with the programs and efforts that get leaked to the media, much less the programs that operate in total secret.
If you voted for this Tory-lite government, then you can stop voting for any future Tory-lite governments. If you did not, there's not much you can do in practice without devoting your life to it.
I hope it never reaches the above level, but always remember that remains an option.
Weren’t the few JSO protestors who were jailed convicted of doing things that would be objectively illegal in more or less any country? Where are the countries that allow me to deface priceless works of art or block public highways without any legal consequences? I am not saying that these are necessarily illegitimate forms of protest, but they come under the heading of ‘civil disobedience’. The whole point of civil disobedience is that you get punished and thereby draw attention to your cause. Even in the US you can easily be jailed for protests involving blockading or trespassing: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-69003240.amp, https://www.vpm.org/news/2024-06-24/gaza-protest-interstate-...
It may well be that the new legislation is overly broad, but I don’t think the JSO protests are a great example of this.
This is what the parent comment is getting at when they say "Tory-lite".
(I very much agree with the sentiment...)
(Hint: It certainly isn't Tory.)
It's also one of the reasons why I will never vote Labour as long as I live.
Same thing happens in many other countries no matter how strongly HN users want to tell you A is literally hitler and B is great.
The director of public prosecutions of England and Wales, Stephen Parkinson (appointed by the Labour Attorney General), warned against "publishing or distributing material which is insulting or abusive which is intended to or likely to start racial hatred. So, if you retweet that, then you’re republishing that and then potentially you're committing that offense [incitement to racial hatred]."
He added further, "We do have dedicated police officers who are scouring social media. Their job is to look for this material, and then follow up with identification, arrests, and so forth."
This isn’t “Tory-lite,” this is Labour.
Sources: https://freespeechunion.org/labours-war-on-free-speech/
I'm a bit confused though, surely if I call someone "Hitler-lite" this couldn't possibly be inteprered as something positive, haha. Maybe it's just tribalist reflexes, or maybe I did word things strangely.
For some reason Americans, including Musk, go all partisan and feel the need to blame speech restriction on the lefty party but it's not what happened.
I'll skip the same extreme partisan rant, but replacing Musk with Soros or whoever.
This is Hobson's choice as far as I can see.
I don't think there's anyone you could currently vote for that wouldn't do this.
He was unelectable for a variety of reasons.
Here’s three:
Wanting to pull out of NATO and instead appease Putin.
Lying about being forced to sit on the floor of what was later shown to be an empty train.
Basically doing nothing during the Brexit fiasco.
He was just gaff after gaff.
If you agree that Brexit happened under the Tories and not Labour, then we can also agree that THIS order is happening under the newly elected "Labour Party" and not the "Tories", or so-called "Tory-lite" names.
It's completely pointless trying to remove accountability of this government's illogical actions and then to immediately resort to blaming the previous government for bad decisions like this one.
Just admit that this is under the Labour government.
You have to change the view of the country as a whole, and for generations the U.K. has been a country of curtain twitchers.
What lead to to believe that? The Conservatives and Conservative-Continuity governments both agree that our data simply must be in the hands of the police, DEFRA, and your local council.
RIPA will never be repealed and only strengthened.
Change what you can, I say, VPN on the network device.
https://www.wired.com/2015/04/john-oliver-edward-snowden-dic...
> When Oliver shows Snowden evidence that all typical Americans care about is whether the government can see our "dick pics," he encourages Snowden to go through a list of every government surveillance program and explain its capabilities in terms of access to "dick pics."
It's always through the appearance of good intentions and a public that pushes for whatever narrative they're fed that they normalize this.
People love and want more of this, not less.
And stop making excuses for parties that don't (i.e. Labour, Lib Dems and Conservatives).
At the moment, the UK public (and media) considers it a sport to disparage and smear parties like Reform, whose leaders want to shrink the power and over-reach of the state.
We are so concerned with appearing virtuous and internationally generous, we cannot be seen to align with a party that wants to put UK citizens first (border security? deporting dangerous criminals back to their home nation? gasp, how could we be so ghastly!)
This self-defeating attitude needs to change if we want a better future for our children.
The problem is that there are none.
The correct assessment of all these political parties is that by default, they all cannot be trusted. Especially both labour and the conservatives.
> This self-defeating attitude needs to change if we want a better future for our children.
Yes. The second problem is that the United Kingdom is incapable to changing itself historically and is fundamentally destined to never be open to change.