Governments seem to want to have it both ways. As new technologies are introduced they assume that capabilities and practices available to analogous predecessors must remain available to them (e.g. wire-tapping phones => undermining cryptography) but they don’t feel the same way about public benefits or rights associated with other technology that is being replaced (anonymous cash transactions => ???)
It also seems like there’s a tendency to relitigate battles that are lost. I assume the UK had some equivalent to the 90s crypto wars in the US where attempts to weaken and backdoor crypto by legal means were pretty decisively defeated.
It’s sad that precedents should only accrue to one side’s benefit.
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.
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.
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":
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.
I fail to understand what the uk is trying to achieve with its current ubiquitous surveillance. Crime in london is rampant, theft is nearly decriminalised in some areas, and now they want to monitor what people do on the internet? Other than docile tax payers what other potential goal is there? Services are steadily degrading, cost of living is out of control, quality of life dropping. Do they just want obedience, and apathetic population and nothing else?
Brexit means that doing business with the UK is suddenly much more complex and expensive. Mandatory backdoors would break many products, and then products which rely on those products. The UK has 67 million people, or just under 1% of the world.
What's cheaper:
- Compliance (especially with unethical laws like this one); or
- Dumping 1% of your customers?
The flip side is that if I'm opening up a branch somewhere, will I do it somewhere where:
- A bunch of my tools don't work, and I need to jump through a whole bunch of hoops? or
- Just over the canal in France, across the Pacific in the US, or better yet, a little further over in some place like Czechia?
As with many isolationist regimes, England is also among the most despised countries in the world. Ever seen the Clockwork Orange? England has done some nasty shit to a lot of people around the world. It has no shortage of enemies, but it seems to be isolating itself from its former friends....
I'm waiting to see how this whole thing plays out, but I'm not bullish on the UK. If things go the way I think, I'd feel bad for Scotland. They'll have zero percent of the fault, and fully share in the consequences.
When people describe the UK situation like these, they are cancelled, downvoted to hell and called right wing extremists. I am positively surprised you were not downvoted or flagged.
What is UK trying to achieve? To maintain, as much as possible, a pretty controlling state in power. It is a country with no free speech, no significant human rights of any sort, population is at the mercy of the govern and they want to keep it that way. Apps like Signal give people some free speech - you cannot publicly say what you want to say, but at least you can say it to others without being cancelled or arrested for opinions that are not liked by the govern.
This is the lasting legacy of Apple’s CSAM photo scanning debacle. Apple mainstreamed the concept, demoed the dystopian tool, and legitimized the discourse of this dystopian insanity.
Apple executives should be ashamed of their direct role in this.
Dropbox scans your images in the cloud for CSAM.
Google scans your images in the cloud for CSAM.
Meta scans your images in the cloud for CSAM.
Microsoft scans your images in the cloud for CSAM.
Apple did not (and still does not) scan your images in the cloud for CSAM.
Notice anything different here? The privacy company wanted to do what everyone else was already doing in a privacy-preserving way. They made a press release about it, and everyone got mad. But the same people are just fine using Google and MSFT which actively scans their data for the same images?
I seriously do not understand your logic behind this.
Perverts will distribute this content on those or other platforms pre-encrypted and we all will be left with mass surveillance and state control. Cool. It is sad that so many people still don't understand that this surveillance won't solve anything and is just net negative for everyone. :( Soon West will become China-like totalitarian countries.
This has been a fight going back to the 90s at least when consumers first got their hands on high-grade encryption and the US government tried to backdoor it. It failed. And it has consistently failed whenever the alphabets try to bring it back up here.
I'm assuming the Brits just don't care as much about privacy.
Who persuades politicians it’s a good idea for the security services to be able to scan all their messages? I am absolutely certain that the politicians have absolutely no clue what they’re being asked to implement.
Oh, politicians' messages won't be scanned. They'll make sure of that. Only the peons will have their messages scanned.
The French law that makes it legal for the government to hack your phone has a bunch of exceptions so it's not legal for the government to hack important people's phones.
Most of them are what the majority of non-politicians would consider “evil”.
Those who go into that profession are longing to control other people by means of the monopoly of violence that the government has.
That MP in the interview is what happens when you give the power to knock down doors and arrest people to somone who likes to get into argument about ethics with people in the news site comment section.
It’s good that Whittaker is taking a stand, but it would be nice to not have to take her word for it. Reproducible builds would help, but I don’t think we have those on iOS yet?:
> “I think what has happened over the you know, handful of decades in which the surveillance business model has interpolated our core infrastructure — to the point that we’re surveilled in to an extent we don’t have a sense of — is that that choice has been made for us,” Whittaker said.
This is an honest question: did she mean to say "infiltrated", or is this usage of "interpolated" a valid one that I just don't understand? I expected a [sic] or an edit from the article.
That’s a less common meaning of the word interpolated, meaning to change, usually with the connotation of corrupting. Typically I see it used to describe text, but it makes sense here too.
The water flowed under this bridge 20 years ago. This whole discussion seems like it’s happening in the wrong decade.
The issue now is that it’s so easy to collect circumstantial information that is constantly leaked by GPS-enabled apps, searches, card purchases, clicks, cell phone tower data, etc. that governments don’t really need the actual contents of messages any more.
I’m still glad Signal exists, but it’s part of a very complex world of privacy and not magical armor.
I'm still banking on the hope that governments incompetence at dealing with other issues transfers to this one and delays it long enough for someone with some sense to come into office and rip it up. You'd hope that they'd at least try to deal with the cost of living crisis and the war in Ukraine first.
Then again, Labour and almost all the major opposition parties have been quiet on this, not really doing the job of opposition, so even with that delay I'm not sure how much will change.
It's a strange thing, today's world. There exists, right now, a realized panopticon in suspension. The only reason we don't have one is that we don't want one.
Sometimes I think that politicians wait for a time when weighty things are on the table to erode our rights. Who is going to be a one-issue voter for something barely understood? And yet, in terms of governance, what issue is more important than this?
Presumably that it won't appear in the Apple App Store or Google Play?
Presumably that's more of an issue for the iOS ecosystem... But for android you just switch from using play to FDroid or an APK, right?
I presume a sufficiently irked UK wouldn't be able to do anything more, as Signal already as ways of circumventing traffic blocking within specific states?
Doesn't this just stop less motivated or technical folk getting signal... But for anyone motivated, or with nefarious intent, I don't see how this prevents anything the bill targets as a harm.
It's more symbolic than anything else. The Signal folks don't really care how effective this action would be. Sure, they can pull the app from the app stores for the UK region, disable any accounts registered with a UK phone number and/or block connection attempts from UK IP addresses. Some people will work around it, but many won't have the technical know-how to do so. The end result that's important, though, is that the Signal Foundation will be able to announce "due to anti-privacy laws enacted in the UK, Signal can no longer provide service in the UK".
Signal could block all UK IP addresses from accessing its messaging server. UK could require ISPs to block access to Signal messaging servers. Both of these are fairly trivial (my understanding is that UK already forces filtering on ISPs for e.g. pornography).
Of course you are correct that anyone motivated and/or technical enough could still access Signal. However, their less motivated/less technical contacts won't be using it any longer.
The government is basically asking the bad actors to self-identify through their continued use of Signal.
Hasn’t Apple already shown it’s possible to add another party silently to an encrypted exchange?
> Passwords: Users can now create a group to share a set of passwords. Everyone in a group can add and edit passwords to keep them up to date, and since sharing is through iCloud Keychain, it’s end-to-end encrypted.
So there goes the backdoor encryption argument, it’s possible to add another member to a group of people with on device access?
I wonder if the Signal app would be automatically uninstalled from existing iOS and Android devices?
Hopefully the signal ban will demonstrate to enough people that they don't really own the phone in their pocket - if they don't control what's on it, they are just renting it.
[+] [-] semiquaver|2 years ago|reply
It also seems like there’s a tendency to relitigate battles that are lost. I assume the UK had some equivalent to the 90s crypto wars in the US where attempts to weaken and backdoor crypto by legal means were pretty decisively defeated.
It’s sad that precedents should only accrue to one side’s benefit.
[+] [-] motohagiography|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ahzhou|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throw0101a|2 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] immibis|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] frabbit|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] crossroadsguy|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] gumballindie|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blagie|2 years ago|reply
Brexit means that doing business with the UK is suddenly much more complex and expensive. Mandatory backdoors would break many products, and then products which rely on those products. The UK has 67 million people, or just under 1% of the world.
What's cheaper:
- Compliance (especially with unethical laws like this one); or
- Dumping 1% of your customers?
The flip side is that if I'm opening up a branch somewhere, will I do it somewhere where:
- A bunch of my tools don't work, and I need to jump through a whole bunch of hoops? or
- Just over the canal in France, across the Pacific in the US, or better yet, a little further over in some place like Czechia?
As with many isolationist regimes, England is also among the most despised countries in the world. Ever seen the Clockwork Orange? England has done some nasty shit to a lot of people around the world. It has no shortage of enemies, but it seems to be isolating itself from its former friends....
I'm waiting to see how this whole thing plays out, but I'm not bullish on the UK. If things go the way I think, I'd feel bad for Scotland. They'll have zero percent of the fault, and fully share in the consequences.
[+] [-] AdrianB1|2 years ago|reply
What is UK trying to achieve? To maintain, as much as possible, a pretty controlling state in power. It is a country with no free speech, no significant human rights of any sort, population is at the mercy of the govern and they want to keep it that way. Apps like Signal give people some free speech - you cannot publicly say what you want to say, but at least you can say it to others without being cancelled or arrested for opinions that are not liked by the govern.
[+] [-] ipv6ipv4|2 years ago|reply
Apple executives should be ashamed of their direct role in this.
[+] [-] disgruntledphd2|2 years ago|reply
Note that similar laws are being proposed in the UK, EU Australia and Canada (not sure of the latter two tbh).
[+] [-] nerdbert|2 years ago|reply
That was an attempt to get out ahead of it and neuter the pressure for those laws. But there was so much opposition that Apple's strategy failed.
[+] [-] s3p|2 years ago|reply
Dropbox scans your images in the cloud for CSAM. Google scans your images in the cloud for CSAM. Meta scans your images in the cloud for CSAM. Microsoft scans your images in the cloud for CSAM. Apple did not (and still does not) scan your images in the cloud for CSAM.
Notice anything different here? The privacy company wanted to do what everyone else was already doing in a privacy-preserving way. They made a press release about it, and everyone got mad. But the same people are just fine using Google and MSFT which actively scans their data for the same images?
I seriously do not understand your logic behind this.
[+] [-] neop1x|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Longlius|2 years ago|reply
I'm assuming the Brits just don't care as much about privacy.
[+] [-] deergomoo|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stjohnswarts|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] veeti|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anigbrowl|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andy_ppp|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] martin8412|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] immibis|2 years ago|reply
The French law that makes it legal for the government to hack your phone has a bunch of exceptions so it's not legal for the government to hack important people's phones.
[+] [-] wellthisisgreat|2 years ago|reply
Those who go into that profession are longing to control other people by means of the monopoly of violence that the government has.
That MP in the interview is what happens when you give the power to knock down doors and arrest people to somone who likes to get into argument about ethics with people in the news site comment section.
[+] [-] Xarodon|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rjsw|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ciwolsey|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gorgoiler|2 years ago|reply
https://community.signalusers.org/t/add-reproducible-builds-...
[+] [-] karaterobot|2 years ago|reply
This is an honest question: did she mean to say "infiltrated", or is this usage of "interpolated" a valid one that I just don't understand? I expected a [sic] or an edit from the article.
[+] [-] phdelightful|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tomtheelder|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mock-possum|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chmod600|2 years ago|reply
The issue now is that it’s so easy to collect circumstantial information that is constantly leaked by GPS-enabled apps, searches, card purchases, clicks, cell phone tower data, etc. that governments don’t really need the actual contents of messages any more.
I’m still glad Signal exists, but it’s part of a very complex world of privacy and not magical armor.
[+] [-] bodge5000|2 years ago|reply
Then again, Labour and almost all the major opposition parties have been quiet on this, not really doing the job of opposition, so even with that delay I'm not sure how much will change.
[+] [-] clcaev|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bertman|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] javajosh|2 years ago|reply
Sometimes I think that politicians wait for a time when weighty things are on the table to erode our rights. Who is going to be a one-issue voter for something barely understood? And yet, in terms of governance, what issue is more important than this?
[+] [-] Jigsy|2 years ago|reply
But good on her for sticking with her principles.
I did decide to use Session as a result of this bill, though, since that routes through a Tor-like system.
[+] [-] pstuart|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] honeybadger1|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Teckentrup|2 years ago|reply
Presumably that it won't appear in the Apple App Store or Google Play?
Presumably that's more of an issue for the iOS ecosystem... But for android you just switch from using play to FDroid or an APK, right?
I presume a sufficiently irked UK wouldn't be able to do anything more, as Signal already as ways of circumventing traffic blocking within specific states?
Doesn't this just stop less motivated or technical folk getting signal... But for anyone motivated, or with nefarious intent, I don't see how this prevents anything the bill targets as a harm.
[+] [-] kelnos|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] leesalminen|2 years ago|reply
Of course you are correct that anyone motivated and/or technical enough could still access Signal. However, their less motivated/less technical contacts won't be using it any longer.
The government is basically asking the bad actors to self-identify through their continued use of Signal.
[+] [-] consumer451|2 years ago|reply
Maybe just disable all accounts registered with +44 telephone numbers?
[+] [-] pacifika|2 years ago|reply
> Passwords: Users can now create a group to share a set of passwords. Everyone in a group can add and edit passwords to keep them up to date, and since sharing is through iCloud Keychain, it’s end-to-end encrypted.
So there goes the backdoor encryption argument, it’s possible to add another member to a group of people with on device access?
[+] [-] dreamcompiler|2 years ago|reply
What's also impossible is ensuring the good guys don't abuse their backdoors and thus become bad guys.
[+] [-] enigmurl|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tcfhgj|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cwales95|2 years ago|reply
TL;DR: UK government wants to degrade public's right to privacy / encryption under the guise of "but think of the children!"
[+] [-] b1n|2 years ago|reply
Hopefully the signal ban will demonstrate to enough people that they don't really own the phone in their pocket - if they don't control what's on it, they are just renting it.