> Apple did not respond to a request for comment. “We have never built a back door or master key to any of our products, and we never will,” Apple said in February.
This must be some "technically correct" weasel words bullcrap, as without at least equivalent access there is no chance Apple would be operating in China.
Basically, there is no backdoor. The front door is wide open, the government just needs to ask. Or not even that -- just take whatever they need themselves.
> On December 7, 2022, Apple announced Advanced Data Protection for iCloud, an option to enable end-to-end encryption for almost all iCloud data including Backups, Notes, Photos, and more. The only data classes that are ineligible for Advanced Data Protection are Mail, Contacts, and Calendars, in order to preserve the ability to sync third-party clients with IMAP, CardDAV or CalDAV.
All the in-transit encryption in the world won't matter if they've pwned the decrypted client device.
Every company from your device's manufacturer, OS vendor, telecom carrier, app distributors and 3rd party software providers can be compelled to help make that happen.
If you want a deeper dive into the security engineering of iCloud Keychain, the second half of this Blackhat talk by Apple's head of Security Engineering & Architecture (SEAR) is really great:
Does all of that matter if an attacker has access to your device and can take screenshots of your conversations, or read those conversations out of memory in their unencrypted state?
No it doesn't — that's a totally different threat model.
Advanced Data Protection is mostly concerned with protecting data from attackers on the server and in transit.
If you're interested in protections when an attacker has physical access to your device, you should read the "Encryption and Data Protection" section of Apple's Platform Security Guide.
The difference is that if the NSA has physical access to my phone, I'm probably aware of it. It makes routine fishing expeditions across broad populations much harder and more expensive, as well as easier to oppose.
If they can fish remotely and automatically, accountability goes completely out the window.
>all the encryption in the world does not matter if either end of the conversation is confiscated or pwned by adversaries.
Yes of course, but it's not so simple to bypass the hardware-enforced protections that exist both device side and server side. As far as I can tell, it seems effort was made to design/architect everything in such a way such that the protections can't be retroactively circumvented even under legal compulsion.
Disclosure: I previously worked for Apple, but not on the design/implementation of any of this stuff and this is all my own opinions, not those of Apple.
You thinking way too deep when the whole OS including implementation of the E2EE is proprietary and could be silently and targeted exchanged for a backdoored variant if it's not by default.
A good portion of HN believes Apple would never do that so I wasn't going to bother with that angle because of the inevitable defensive posts it would generate in response.
It's been used by state actors for years. May as well publish the API for it. These aren't rare and special flowers that are each artisanally discovered after searching for a million hours. And it is nicely packaged in an app that is used for something simple like text messages.
"An Israeli spyware company has reportedly cut access to its clients in Italy following allegations that its product was used to target critics of the Italian government.
"The move comes after WhatsApp alleged last week that spyware made by Paragon Solutions was used to target 90 WhatsApp users in two dozen countries, including journalists and civil society members.
"Italy's government confirmed in a statement on Wednesday that seven mobile phone users in the country had been targeted by spyware on WhatsApp, calling the incident "particularly serious"."
Why are you quoting an article about WhatsApp after making a claim about iMessage and what Apple builds in?
(Not that the article has any evidence supporting the same claim about WhatsApp, either. In fact, the article describes WhatsApp/Meta claiming to have "disrupted" the spying and reporting it to the Italian government.)
Is it a big deal though? Context matters. Everyone knows you don't do business in China without bending a knee to the government in all things. If you don't you are shut down completely if you're lucky, imprisoned if not. Of course CCP has access to every device in China approaching very close to 100%
What are you saying, I'm in China it's completely false. There is very lax enforcement, and if there is enforcement, there's always an opportunity to bribe.
The communist party doesn't have "access" to a billion phones: what would they even do with all that garbage. They can ask Wechat what you send your friends, sure, and that's enough to police most crimes.
We don't have the budget or organizational acumen of the NSA.
Access != "saving it all, all the time" . If they determine you are an anti-CCP agent then they will get access to everything in your life, no warrants or requests involved.
> This must be some "technically correct" weasel words bullcrap
Is that even necessary? A gag order means they can't reveal backdoors, and their entire stack is so locked down that discovering them is hard and unlikely.
Gag order cannot force them to lie. A lie like that can be illegal even.
If there's a gag order, then companies say "we have a gag order". Like Google and Twitter did back in the day when asked. And then immediately started releasing Transparency Report to show how many of the gag orders they receive, so gov't couldn't say "we don't request anything".
I don't think this is true. There was the whole fiasco around the EULA canary that a company had that, if it was removed, was supposed to indicate that the company had received a gag order. I don't believe it had been actually tested in court. I believe it had to do with the FISA court system. I can't find a link but there are definitely cases of gray area where courts have required entities to lie.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warrant_canary
This is absolutely a thing. For comparison, banking regulation basically makes banks extensions of the intelligence services and forces them to tell off law enforcement in case "suspicious" account activities are detected. Usually banks will also close the account, but the regulations ensure the customer will never find out why because the bank will stonewall them to ensure they don't accidentally tattle.
Even if no formal regulation to that effect exists for social media companies, intelligence agencies presumably have sufficient leverage to ensure similar access.
They can "No comments" all the way, but there's no way to legally forcing a commercial company to lie. The company can lie, of course, but it's their choice, not an order.
I mean they just disabled advanced data protection which allowed normal law enforcement requests to access the data since they are not e2e encrypted if you don't use advanced data protection. I really don't think they needed to implement a new backdoor. They would just need implement a procedure that would fast track UK requests.
That didn’t placate the UK government, because it didn’t just want access to British users’ data – it wanted access to any Apple user’s data from anywhere in the world.
I suspect that disabling advanced data protection in the UK was meant to let Apple say it was complying as far as it could while fighting the main order.
Apple didn't disable advanced data protection for those who had enabled it. Rather they removed the ability for new users to turn it on in the first place.
A future update was going to ask users themselves to disable it in order to continue backing up their phones to iCloud.
AKA "fuckin...england fucking chill, don't blow this. You're FVEY mate, why you go scaring everyone when you know I got this. Just relax, you really think TAO don't got this? The Equation Group? We got this, in there like swimwear."
I don't get why the UK always does this. it's like GSM encryption all over again. Is it a particularly snoop-ey culture stemming from GCHQ or something?
UK citizens don't have a constitutional right to free speech, which tends to bleed over in unhealthy ways to the government prioritizing its own interests over citizens'.
There is freedom of speech if you are a MP speaking in Parliament (Parliamentary privilege) but outside of there, things have been on a steady decline since the 1980s.
You are supposed to have a 4th & 5th Amendment rights in the US. However a Judge can order you to decrypt a drive given probable cause IIRC. There have been cases where Judges have jailed people for disobeying an order to decrypt a drive.
We do not. There are so many caveats in relevant part of the human rights act.
> The exercise of these freedoms, since it carries with it duties and responsibilities, may be subject to such formalities, conditions, restrictions or penalties as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society, in the interests of national security, territorial integrity or public safety, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, for the protection of the reputation or rights of others, for preventing the disclosure of information received in confidence, or for maintaining the authority and impartiality of the judiciary.
While the US has restrictions on speech, there are far far fewer restrictions.
The "uncodified constitution" that we have doesn't guarantee you "Freedom of Speech" either. I've read the relevant parts of the constitution in the UK. It gives Parliamentarians the right to unlimited speech.
Finally "Freedom of Expression" and "Freedom of Speech" are not the same thing.
Speech is a form of expression; freedom of expression encompasses freedom of speech. To quote from the link you provided:
"This right shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers."
As you point out, all countries have some restrictions on speech. We can obviously agree that somewhere like North Korea has no freedom of speech, in the same way we can agree the Moon is clearly outside our atmosphere. But in the margins it comes down to where you draw the line.
There's also a difference when it comes to theory and practice. In theory the US is more permissive; it lacks the ECHR's caveats that permit restricting speech to protect health, morals and territorial integrity. But in practice the US is rated as coming below the UK in the World Press Freedom Index and the Freedom of Expression Index. The US government has a lot of power to lean on organisations and individuals to stifle speech, which of course it's currently doing.
Neither the World Press Freedom Index nor the Freedom of Expression Index are particularly good measures of government restrictions on individual's speech.
The former includes things like how much editorial control journalists are subjected to, the right of journalists to unionize, the cost to print/distribute newspapers, whether journalists are subject to economic constraints (like being dependent on advertising money), etc.
The later is not only far more opaque in how it measures things, relying on a panel of country-specific experts, but it also more press/media related and includes things like media bias and print/media perspectives which is more about diversity of press opinion than freedom of expression (arguably, media bias shouldn't negative affect a freedom of expression index unless it is government imposed).
A more objective comparison of freedom of expression/speech would rate how the government would respond to specific instances of public and private speech - like say calling for the king/president/prime minister/etc. to be replaced, posting nudes (or going nude), blaspheme a particular religion, publishing embarrassing and reputation harming information about a celebrity/someone powerful/a judge/a religious figure, playing loud music outside, refusing to speak when ordered to by a police/judge/legislature/ruler, wearing the clothes various sexes, etc.
It might be difficult to create perfectly equivalent speech across countries, but I think one could get close enough.
I'm not sure I buy that we can entirely separate the freedoms of journalists from the freedoms of individuals; but I do like your idea of coming up with a list of criteria for measuring the freedom of speech for individuals. It seems a useful point of comparison. Where I think you'd need to be careful is in weighting the criteria.
These Indexes exist so that people (that may have an agenda) can point to it and say "well we aren't as bad as these other places" and can dismiss the actual issues that exist.
No freedom of expression is a nebulous term that was invented obfuscate the very discussion we are having. It consider it to be nothing more than weasel words.
Pointing at extreme examples like North Korea and pretending their isn't an issue because we are better them is classic whataboutism.
I also don't care about what some random index that people pull out of their backsides. I care about the legality. Freedom of Speech in the US is enshrined in the constitution. It is not enshrined anywhere in UK law.
As for the section you quoted, that is made effectively moot by the exceptions that I originally quoted.
Generally I am pretty tired of people engaging in apologia for the British state.
So your argument is that if we define freedom of speech according to US law, then only the US has freedom of speech?
I mean, I agree with you on that, but it's a circular argument.
My comparison to North Korea wasn't whataboutism; it was intended to illustrate that while there are obvious points for agreement (i.e. that the DPRK obviously has no freedom of speech), for many countries the comparison is less black and white. Which restrictions on free speech can you accept and still call it free speech?
I also respectfully disagree with you that only legality matters. If a government is actively punishing those who speak against it, even if it is strictly legal for them to do so, then I'd question whether that country is has freer speech in practice. Few developed countries have a government as hostile to the press as the current US administration!
I certainly don't align with the British government on many issues, encryption backdoors being one of them, but framing free speech as a binary is, I think, ultimately unhelpful. All countries have restrictions on speech, and drawing a line upon what is in reality a gradient over-simplifies the issue.
I personally agree that morality and territorial integrity aren't adequate reasons to restrict speech, and I'd say that a country without those restrictions has freer speech (from a legal perspective) than those with them. But again, it's a relative comparison; I wouldn't say that a country had no free speech if they did have those restrictions.
> So your argument is that if we define freedom of speech according to US law, then only the US has freedom of speech?
No. My point is that in the UK we do not have freedom of speech enshrined in constitution or law.
I believe Freedom of Expression is weasel words to obfuscate the conversation as now you have an additional legal concept in the mix, with some nebulous definition that reads like a Terms and Conditions from one of the big tech players.
That is it.
> My comparison to North Korea wasn't whataboutism; it was intended to illustrate that while there are obvious points for agreement (i.e. that the DPRK obviously has no freedom of speech), for many countries the comparison is less black and white. Which restrictions on free speech can you accept and still call it free speech?
It is the fact that it is brought up at all is engaging in whataboutism.
Why are you even mentioning NK? Why do you care what old Kim Jong does? Really think about why you are even mentioning North Korea. I don't expect or want an answer BTW.
> I also respectfully disagree with you that only legality matters. If a government is actively punishing those who speak against it, even if it is strictly legal for them to do so, then I'd question whether that country is has freer speech in practice. Few developed countries have a government as hostile to the press as the current US administration!
I don't care about the left/right slop politics. I don't care who the "villian of the week" is. Most politics is presented to you in the same way as Scooby Doo.
Why do you care about what Donald Trump is doing in the US? Please actually think about why you are even mentioning it. I don't expect (or want) an answer BTW.
> I certainly don't align with the British government on many issues, encryption backdoors being one of them, but framing free speech as a binary is, I think, ultimately unhelpful. All countries have restrictions on speech, and drawing a line upon what is in reality a gradient over-simplifies the issue
The very fact that you are making this argument about gradients of freedom, and everyone has restrictions etc. Is literally the issue. The conversation about it has been obfuscated deliberately.
I don't care what restrictions they have in France, NK, China or anywhere else. That is their business.
I care about the restrictions in the UK, why they exist and whether they are valid.
As for the encryption back-doors, why do you think they actually want to do it? GCHQ just happens to be looking for more developers BTW! I know this for a fact because I had one of their recruiters phone me. I told him what I thought about the British state and not to ever call me again.
> No. My point is that in the UK we do not have freedom of speech enshrined in constitution or law.
We do, in the Human Rights Act 1998.
Now, you've said you don't believe that the definition of freedom of expression in the HRA and ECHR lines up with your definition of free speech. That's fine. You are of course welcome to that opinion.
But you act as though your definition of free speech is authoritative, and yet you also have not defined it. When I've prompted you to narrow it down, you avoid the question.
So let me ask you extremely directly: what's your definition of "free speech"? Or to be more precise: which restrictions on speech are allowed, and which are forbidden, in order for a country to have "free speech" in your book?
No we don't. I've explained why. It even says in the text of the law the caveats it carves out.
But you can believe whatever fantasy you like. I am tired of trying to convince the fish that they are indeed swimming in water. The funniest thing is that until you've had it affect something/someone you like or respect, you won't change your mind.
BTW, I used to make all of the same arguments as you do btw about the Human Rights act and the ECHR etc. I realised after actually reading them, and seeing what actually happened and how the state operates, that what I believe was all bollox and I had been deceived.
> Now, you've said you don't believe that the definition of freedom of expression in the HRA and ECHR lines up with your definition of free speech. That's fine. You are of course welcome to that opinion.
It doesn't line up with any definition of free speech because it is a separate legal concept. I've already explained why they are different.
I happen to believe that legal concept is done deliberately so people like yourself will engage in this time wasting discussions about what is and isn't free expression. That is evidenced in this very discussion.
Ask yourself. If you happen to support Palestinian Action and do so publicly how long until police visit you or you are put on a watch list? Probably not long.
> But you act as though your definition of free speech is authoritative, and yet you also have not defined it. When I've prompted you to narrow it down, you avoid the question.
If I provide you with any sort of definition someone else will say "well that definition isn't correct", all of which ultimately deflects from the issue and is another waste of time.
The issue is that speech is restricted in the UK. It is done selectively. Some viewpoints are allowed by the British state and other aren't. Some of this is done directly, some of this is done indirectly.
e.g. There was a super injunction granted sometime last year to hide information about a large number of Afghan migrants / refugees / nationals being resettled after the Taliban took back control. Therefore the public, the press (little good they are) and presumably oppositional political parties couldn't scrutinise these plans. These types of super injunctions happen all the time.
What good is it that someone it is written on a piece of paper that you are legally able to have opposing view (as long as they fit inside the Overton window), when they literally hide information that is important for you to have any sort of informed view from you?
I asked you in my previous reply to go away and think about why certain narratives are presented to you. I never mentioned Trump, yet you seemed to want to talk about him without explicitly saying his name.
Someone somewhere wants you to worry about the press freedoms in the US. This is likely to distract you from more important things like the US have just landed some strategic nuclear bombers in the UK ahead of peace talks between Ukraine/Russia.
> So let me ask you extremely directly: what's your definition of "free speech"? Or to be more precise: which restrictions on speech are allowed, and which are forbidden, in order for a country to have "free speech" in your book?
It is irrelevant, I've explained why above. Any nation state will suppress your speech when it deems it to be necessary and will invent excuses as why it has to do it. That is the reality of it. How you choose to deal with that reality is your own choosing.
You believe that the HRA does not grant "free speech" due to some, or all, of the exceptions.
You refuse to define which specific exceptions you have a problem with, or define what you mean by "free speech", because if you did, people could argue against you.
That's all fine, but I wish you'd led with that. Next time write something like:
"I have my own definition of 'free speech' which I will not share, and according to this definition the UK has no freedom of speech."
In practice there isn't freedom of speech. The UK government violates that all the time. Their agencies operate in secrecy and they have raided newspapers offices and destroyed data, arrested journalists and taken people's private information at borders.
I would not hold up any country because there are flaws everywhere; and I don't like writing about free speech because it has different meanings for everyone. But even in our puny Slovakia raiding newspaper offices and taking peoples private data at the border is not something that would happen and didn't happen for at least the last 25 years or so, even though we had and currently have horribly bad governments.
The situation in the UK is particularly bad I think because the legal situation is a hodgepodge of a missing written constitution, interweaving of the government branches (as I understand, the government can sometimes ignore the courts or is above them), the libel laws, and while still (for now) a member of the ECHR which gives some guarantees, it's rulings are always (many years) after the fact. Crucially, the UK is a very class-based society. The ruling class gets what it wants and it does not want free speech.
There's some truth in what you say, but it's filtered through a distorted lens.
Like many countries, the UK government makes the laws and the courts interpret them. The government can't ignore the courts, but can introduce new legislation.
The UK population leans more conservative than many other European countries, but free speech, for the most part, has broad public support. There's a lot of discussion around where the line should be drawn, however, and the government tends toward a more restrictive interpretation, while the opposition tends to oppose censorship.
There is a strong element of class in the UK, but this is often misinterpreted. Class in the UK is not particularly fluid. You can have power and wealth, and still not be considered upper class. In the current government, only a minority of MPs are upper class, and of the current cabinet, only one attended a private school (a typical indicator of being upper-class).
The raiding of the Guardian over the Snowden leaks was justified as recovering stolen national security information, and was widely (and rightly) criticised by the press at the time. It's not a common occurrence.
Now, I don't mean to justify the UK government's behaviour. The government bows to the whims of GHCQ far more than it should do, particularly on any technological issue, where it seems GHCQ is the only one ever consulted. Obviously putting backdoors in messaging software, or raiding newpapers, is both incredible stupid and has ultimately lead to the UK government backing down.
But that, I think, is the important part - that it backed down. The UK has a lot of flaws, and certainly isn't at the top of the press freedom list, but it's also consistently in the upper quartile (and notably above Slovakia, if you want a reference point). Looking from the outside, you see the exceptions and controversies - the parts where the system fails - which makes it easy to get a distorted picture of the situation.
> In the current government, only a minority of MPs are upper class
And yet their policies are broadly right-wing conservative. Point is the government itself does not have to consist of upper-class people for the class to steer and benefit from the policies. Why is that? Well...
> The UK population leans more conservative than many other European countries
We really don't know that because the population has been massaged by right-wing propaganda for (at least) decades. I remember even in the 90's reading Financial Times or something like that and the opinion articles about the EU were quite simply lying. Can imagine it was even worse in the Daily Mail etc. The result regarding the EU is well known, but I think this applies to everything; the population seems to lean conservative because the ruling class prefers it like that and the media owners oblige.
To return to the free speech/press freedom issue, it's the same again: it only works as far as the ruling class allows that. One obvious example are the past climate and current anti-genocide protests, where the government heavily abuses anti-terrorism laws to limit free speech.
You're using the word "class" in two different contexts here. The "class" in "upper class" is not the same as the "class" in "ruling class". This may seem pedantic, but when people say that the UK is a class-based society they're explicitly talking about the former. That's not to say there isn't overlap, but they're still two distinct sets.
I'm not going to defend the actions of the UK government, but I will ask that you give time for the courts to do their work before passing final judgement. In the case of the article you linked, for example, the man was arrested but not charged, and in the case of Palestine Action as a whole, there's an ongoing court case against the government's ban, which seems likely to succeed.
Obviously these incidents shouldn't have occurred in the first place, and I fully agree that the government is abusing the law to get its way. But the actions of the home office don't necessarily reflect the country as a whole. They don't even necessarily reflect the Labour Party as a whole.
> I'm not going to defend the actions of the UK government, but I will ask that you give time for the courts to do their work before passing final judgement. In the case of the article you linked, for example, the man was arrested but not charged, and in the case of Palestine Action as a whole, there's an ongoing court case against the government's ban, which seems likely to succeed.
Yes but the issue is already the government acting like this. They most probably know they are in the wrong and are acting anyway, because they want to quell the dissent. The damage is already done.
> They don't even necessarily reflect the Labour Party as a whole.
Of course. I still think about the Labour as 'the good ones', compared with the Tories (or Reform) anyway. OTOH I think this does reflect the country as a whole and not only the current government. That is my feeling from living in the UK some time ago.
I will end this saying that IMO the main difference in speech/press freedom between the UK and say Slovakia is that the UK imagines itself a powerful country fully in control of its destiny, and this illusion enables executive overreach. While Slovakia is a small country thrown around by external forces so much that only the dumbest politicians waste their energy trying to limit press freedom.
That's fair. The government certainly shouldn't be acting like this, and if Slovakia is better in this area, then that's certainly something the UK should seek to emulate.
It may be that I'm conditioned to expect the Home Office to be authoritarian screw-ups that need to be babysat by the courts and principled backbenchers. But you're right that, ideally, the government shouldn't be doing this in the first place.
However, it seems to be the case that, even amongst conservatives, the view in the UK is that the government is infringing on free speech.
Well now's your chance to familiarize yourself with the pop culture of 20 years ago. There's this other great book about UK authoritarianism, it's called 1984 by this little known author George Orwell.
Okay, just to answer the damned question because apparently no one else felt like doing the decent thing and just saying it: the "Moore" mentioned is Alan Moore. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Moore
particularly snoopy culture, yes, stemming from GCHQ, no idea. our government has always felt entitled to breach our privacy and we are equal parts spineless and stupid. average take on this is either "why would you care unless you have something to hide" or "that's a shame, but there's nothing we can do about anything ever."
regrettably the latter one may be correct but it'd be nice to see at least some pushback every time this happens.
> The UK official added, this “limits what we’re able to do in the future, particularly in relation to AI regulation.” The Labour government has delayed plans for AI legislation until after May next year.
They’re closely related for some use cases, like client-side content screening. If they can’t have a backdoor then maybe they’ll push for a local LLM to spy on the user’s activity and phone home when it sees something bad.
I suspect the steel man version of the argument is that AI is capable of producing images indistinguishable from child and revenge porn, so it must be regulated, and that means they need a way to reach into your zeros and ones to check. Maybe they want to know you're not asking it how to terrorize people, too.
I assumed they’d only have asked for it if they’d already OKed it with the US, and that it was probably part of a plan to give US access too via 5-eyes sharing.
I think if we'd had a "normal" administration, this probably would have been pushed by the US government. The US services have been gunning for this for decades. But we have an administration that seems extremely disjointed in what it wants to do and why it wants to do it. I'm kind of curious about the internal conversations that must be happening on the other side of 5-eyes nations services as they're trying to accomplish their ends with such an unpredictable ally.
For better or for worse, JD Vance is extremely online, and no one in his cryptocurrency-hoarding right-libertarian tweetsphere thinks government backdoors are a good idea.
I don't think there is much disjoint if you see Trump as a fairly clean break with the cold-war era GOP. The thing is that no one in the US remembers the cold war with pride. The left thinks the cold war was US imperialism. The right kind of agrees, and has moved on to other issues anyways. And Europe nudges, saying: "Hey, you're America. You love fighting cold wars! Remember?"
Too many Europeans are Chomsky-brained and believe that US foreign policy is controlled by the CIA. The reality is that US grand strategy is incoherent and has been for decades. The US doesn't have any actual strategic imperatives at the moment, and it's being pulled in too many different directions. I believe George Friedman argues that this is a recurring pattern in US history, where US foreign policy alternates between listlessness, and maniac focus on some objective (most recently in the wake of 9/11).
For me it's not so much a conspiracy as the natural flow as a society becomes more fascist (as most Western government are leaning) and more "police state". It's inevitable, they want to be able to spy on every aspect of our lives and keep it recorded indefinitely as technology and public sentiment will allow. Cops want to make their jobs as easy as possible, politicians want to be able to get as much dirt on everyone as they can.
That’s just run of the mill authoritarianism, calling it fascism glosses over how it has proponents in every political persuasion.
Authoritarianism has become very popular online these days for some reason. Giving in to fear and wanting total control are always going to be traits that pop up again and then humans have to relearn from history about why freedoms are important.
Yes, although fascism is probably a proper word to use here -- it comes from Roman "fasces", symbolizes power to punish king's subjects (i.e. it's not about other states and kings, but about internal affairs).
You chose to use fascist technology. If you're scared by the potential for your state to exercise the same power your OEM has, then stop buying from that OEM. Regulate shitty security models, demand transparency for opaque systems. Switch to honest and open alternatives that trust you with freedom and power.
Or, reap your fascist just deserts. Why the hell should I waste my time calling Apple a fascist if I haven't daily-driven one of their devices in a decade? You want us to protest, standing arm-in-arm with you against Apple? You wanted this, you told yourself Apple was a secure business.
The only person who insists on using technology that coddles it's user is you.
For example, Nazi Party didn't come to power democratically. Hitler lost 1932 elections to Hindenburg, and didn't get any position. But in two months, Hindenburg appointed him to Chancellor position, opening way to big money. And there was no democracy after that: in about a month they organize the Reichstag fire and issue a lot of consecutive "emergency" decrees, kill political opponents etc.
> they have neither leverage nor negotiating talent.
The Brexit negotiations proved to me that the UK government will simply assume they have leverage and try to assert it even when they have none. Combined with the lack of negotiating talent during a high stakes deal created a perfect storm.
I really sort of expected that by the time I reached my age that we'd have more policy makers that understood tech a little better. I feel like in the last say 25 or more years ... the needle hasn't moved.
This article is explicitly about how J.D. Vance (age 40) & others at the White House are forcefully advocating for preserving E2E encryption. Arguably not for the right reasons, but still.
I'm not sure what you mean by "more" but what you are asking for is in fact happening.
The U.S. also attempted to force Apple to add a back door just a decade ago.
> Tim Cook, the C.E.O. of Apple, which has been ordered to help the F.B.I. get into the cell phone of the San Bernardino shooters, wrote in an angry open letter this week that "the U.S. government has asked us for something we simply do not have, and something we consider too dangerous to create." The second part of that formulation has rightly received a great deal of attention: Should a back door be built into devices that are used for encrypted communications?
Apple has since confirmed in a statement provided to Ars that the US federal government "prohibited" the company "from sharing any information," but now that Wyden has outed the feds, Apple has updated its transparency reporting and will "detail these kinds of requests" in a separate section on push notifications in its next report.
Apple's hidden at least one warrantless backdoor in their systems for the purpose of federal surveillance. I have no reason to believe the exploitation stops there.
Apple and Google had no choice but to comply with the National Security Letters demanding access to user's push notification data.
They also can't refuse to comply with warrants demanding any such unencrypted data that is stored on their servers.
That's not the same thing as adding a back door to allow access to encrypted user data that is stored on the user's device.
It's also different than storing encrypted user data on your server, when you have purposefully designed a system where you don't have access to the user's encryption key.
Encrypted user data backup is the feature that Apple disabled access to in the UK rather than comply with the order to insert a back door in the OS.
To clarify: When you get an NSL, not only is it impossible to refuse and stay in business, it is also impossible to talk about it. That's the scary bit.
Certainly. At least with a normal warrant you can publicly speak out and notify the user(s) involved.
I would also point out that it was Senator Wyden who initially informed the public of how much the government was already spying on their unencrypted communications.
You'd better hope you're right. Nobody is auditing Apple who can hold them accountable. The lack of transparency is how we ended up on this slippery slope in the first place.
Good security models typically don't hinge on being lucky.
You need to think about what they don’t say with these matters.
He said Apple does not have and won’t create a backdoor. That was well crafted and means exactly what he said, any implicit meaning is an artifact of your brain.
I might postulate that while Rhubarb LTD absolutely doesn't hold and will never create a backdoor, Celery Inc does. Ignore the fact that Celery is staffed by some of Rhubarb's senior engineers working part time. Ignore the fact Celery are contracted to do security assessments so have access to all the source code, radio firmware and schematics...
I absolutely don't actually know anything about Apple, but I've seen some of the ways even small companies legally split themselves up to avoid tax or various forms of liability. Multiple phone numbers to the same phone, multiple domains and email providers to the same laptop. Multiple denials that you've ever heard of the other company let alone happen to share the same office space...
There's a massive difference between a truthful statement and an honest one; anyone that works with code should understand that.
The position of the US executive on encryption can easily shift depending on who holds the presidency and certain cabinet positions. I'm not sure the Trump administration actually has a coherent position on the subject.
> I'm not sure the Trump administration actually has a coherent position
That seems to be the most salient property of his presidency. His position on any issue is whatever he just said, with no regard to what it might have been yesterday.
For anyone that wants a good (and fair) example of this, check out his positions on the debt ceiling going back to 2012 (and then on every time it's come up since). When he isn't in power raising the debt ceiling is Unamerican, a political ploy and bad. When he is in power, it should be scrapped entirely and should be above politics. He was remarkably frank about it in an interview a year or two ago when he was running for president when he was pressed by the interviewer about the flip-flop, he smiled and said approximately "I wasn't running for president back then"
> When he isn't in power raising the debt ceiling is Unamerican, a political ploy and bad. When he is in power, it should be scrapped entirely and should be above politics.
It's too bad that when he is in power he does not actually make the latter happen, because it should be scrapped entirely.
The only other country with a debt limit set in an absolute amount rather than as a percentage of GDP is Denmark, and they sensibly have set theirs far above their actual debt so it becomes just a legal formality rather than a policy tool.
The problem with it in the US is that the debt ceiling limits government borrowing to pay for debts that have already been incurred. It doesn't control the amount of spending or the deficit--that is controlled by the budget that Congress and the President approve.
If we can't just scrap it completely, then at least the budget process should be changed so every budget bill must be accompanied by a raise of the debt ceiling by enough to cover whatever extra debt that budget will be adding.
Having observed this for a lifetime, and simultaneously watching the democrats be unable to call out the switch is so incredibly disheartening. It's like watching a cat playing with a mouse before it kills it.
Hey, even the worst person in the world is owed their right to privacy. Determining if someone is doing evil with their right necessarily undermines privacy for everyone.
I'm sure the police can catch child abusers the old fashioned way: by infiltrating cp networks and posing as kids online. This snooper's charter is in fact overreach and an invitation to build something like the Stasi.
If devoted half the resources to catching child abusers as we do to stop people from getting high after work, we'd have a whole hell of a lot fewer abused children. But, priorities!
> If devoted half the resources to catching child abusers as we do to stop people from getting high after work, we'd have a whole hell of a lot fewer abused children.
There are two problems here:
(1) We devote more resources to catching child abusers. There are all kinds of legal "if you see something, say something" requirements that make every doctor, nurse, and schoolteacher in the country part of the effort to do this.
(2) I see no particular reason to believe that additional resources would lead to a noticeable increase in detections. There are many, many circumstances where you're free to devote double the resources to something, but you'll see at best a trivial improvement in results.
> We devote more resources to catching child abusers.
You make this statement but provide no evidence. Because there's laws on the books, we "devote more resource" than, say the entire DEA, which unlike these laws has a gargantuan budget? That's nonsense.
> I see no particular reason to believe that additional resources would lead to a noticeable increase in detections.
Look harder? Read up on the topic? String operations work. More would work more often and catch more abusers.
Let alone the resources we could be pouring into children's mental health services (instead of kicking families off health insurance like the current administration has accomplished).
> In a combative speech at the Munich Security Conference in February, Vance argued that free speech and democracy were threatened by European elites.
> Trump has also been critical of the UK stance on encryption. The US president has likened the UK’s order to Apple to “something... that you hear about with China,” saying in February that he had told Starmer: “You can’t do this.”
> US Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard has also suggested the order would be an “egregious violation” of Americans’ privacy that risked breaching the two countries’ data agreement.
UK has a hx of pushing this - OP probably referring to efforts by the brits to put backdoors in comm standards like GSM and others back in the 80's and 90's
It's possible that their advocacy is well thought out but not based on the stated reasons. Say, Apple is actually under the control of the NSA and there are hidden back doors in the form of exploitable weaknesses as per Crypto AG. Then preventing the introduction of public backdoors would preserve the value of the current setup where Apple is widely considered trustworthy with respect to their customers.
He's proven himself to be more of an asshat than I'd hoped (see the Zelenskyy meeting), but he did come up in Silicon Valley venture capital. There's a lot about this administration that causes concern, but I'm glad to see him on the right side of encryption.
because Vance and his colleagues are breaking federal law for the retention of government records and as long as they don’t invite anymore journalists into the group chat they will get away with it
They're arguing with foreign countries. Meanwhile the federal government continuously working consolidate all data available under groups like DODGE or ICE or Palantir. Arguing to preserve a tech in a given situation but with other goals ... not sure the first part matters at that point.
Perhaps he likes the idea of E2E, but just for himself and his friends. I duno, but whatever it is, it's not about the important things after the fact.
While Palantir is a private company and shouldn’t have access to government data, why shouldn’t in theory all government data be accessible to the government?
DOGE is clearly operating illegally for other reasons - not distributions funds that were appropriated by Congress for instance. But data sharing isn’t the root issue. It’s spineless Republicans in Congress and a sycophantic Supreme Court.
And it’s possible to say both that if you are here illegally you should be deported and that it’s currently being driven by animus, cruelty and it should be easier to obtain legal residency especially in areas where we do need more workers and implement another program like Reagan did in the 80s
Different data requires different access controls, and government agencies that collect / deal with a given piece of data on a regular basis are equipped to enforce those access controls.
You don't want your local dog catcher to be able to look at your medicare records just because "he's the government, and medicare records are government data".
> While Palantir is a private company and shouldn’t have access to government data, why shouldn’t in theory all government data be accessible to the government?
Shouldn't everybody have access to government data, with a few exceptions?
I feel like you answered much of your own questions.
Beyond that many of the departments that this data is being extracted from have rules about who can access (no not everyone in the IRS has free reign) and what they can do with it. For good reason, IRS's job is to focus on what the law says they should do, not say punish political enemies and so on.
But transfer it to DODGE, ICE, Palantir, there are no laws at all regarding what they can do with that data.
I think this is a very dangerous deception. They understand.
When politicians say "we need a special key for police to stop child abuse" it's not that they don't know this means "a backdoor with no technological way to limit its use". On the contrary, they know it very well and it's exactly what they want to achieve under the guise of children protection. It's the public at large that don't understand it -- or so they hope.
Sadly, UK Parliament is made up of political careerists and art students, which is probably similar to most Western democracies. There's a saying 'those who can do, those who can't teach', it probably needs a final 'and those that can't teach, go into politics'.
Every time ukgov tries to make some sort of tech policy, it's embarassingly wrong, or naive, or both.
This comes from a country that effectively gave away ARM.
I'm a principal software engineer with a degree in history. You don't need a science degree to understand most of these issues sufficiently to legislate them. But you need humility and a willingness to learn. That, sadly, is lacking in too many governments and civil services.
Also, the people pushing for these measure (e.g., the U.K's equivalent of the NSA, GCHQ and most national-level police departments) understand these issues perfectly well.
Also, the people pushing for these measure (e.g., the U.K's equivalent of the NSA, GCHQ and most national-level police departments) understand these issues perfectly well.
Surely some of them understand the technical details. That doesn't necessarily mean they understand or respect the wider implications of a policy. This is why it's important to have a government that sets policy - taking into account all of the competing influences and potential consequences - and politically neutral technicians who then implement government policy.
No-one would dispute that if the government could examine every communication everyone ever sends then it could catch more very bad people and prevent more harm to innocent people. The problem is all the other stuff that also happens if you give a government that kind of power over its own people.
The leader of the opposition studied computer engineering (before going on to law). Sadly she used the knowledge gained to hack the website of the deputy leader of Labour Party.
I don't think it is a matter of really understanding the tech. It has to do more about how you envision the society regarding privacy and individual rights. It is indeed a political point of view on how much you want to control everything.
The people in office now were already old by the time the Internet and especially Mobile took off.
But it’s not like many young adults today who grew up with mobile phones understand computers either. At 51 growing up with computers in the 80s, I find myself explaining what I think should be simple computer concepts to both my parents generation and my adult children.
My 80 year old mom is not a stereotypical old person who doesn’t know how to use a computer. She is a retired math teacher and has actively been using computers since we had an Apple //e in the house running AppleWorks in the mid 80s.
When she was tutoring teenagers mostly as volunteer work after she retired, she had to teach them how to use Office/Gsuite.
There was a very idealistic move in education to believe that younger students would be "digital natives" and self taught on typing, computer programs, etc. So we deemphasized classes on this, and now kids grow up on consumption oriented devices and can't type again. So it goes in circles I guess
Optimistic is probably the kindest, yeah. I don't think it was strictly a bad argument - it was easy to think of the classes as outdated and taught by a generation who knew less than the students. It just turned out to be a very short state of affairs. Hard to expect schools to have predicted the iPhone, right?
Sure he can. In an ideal world (from the US gov't's perspective), all communications everywhere would be encrypted, and only they'd have the workarounds to access the data anyway.
I'm not being sarcastic. For real, what major government wouldn't want that in their favor?
They care about maybe a maximum of five having that access, and I'm sure they realize that #1 on that list (PRC) won't need much time to become a peer on any given technology.
They're just against EU asserting any kind of control over American companies.
Reminder that he's funded by Thiel and friends with Curtis Yarvin, which goals include the end of democracy and the federal state and replace the system with tech CEO kings over feudal states.
I feel like the federal government continuously consolidating all data available under groups like DODGE or ICE or Palantir is about as anti privacy as it gets.
I don't think it's that nefarious. I mean, for some of them it might be, but for MOST of them they see a "law & order" issue that will resonate with stupid people ("cops can't get access to terrorist data / child molester info / human trafficking communications!"), and they just run with it without regard to downstream effects.
It has always been politics, not technology. Politicians and bureaucratic always want more power, and they rarely relinquish power they gained temporarily.
It has nothing to do with their technical knowledge. It has everything to do with human nature.
If you want to push back, the law is not on your side.
We've had a serious problem with policy-making in this country for a loooooong time, stretching right back to when RIPA was drafted, nearly three decades ago.
I think the ironic thing is that although everyone uses powerful technology on a practically constant basis, it is sooooo much more complicated that less and less people have even a clue. How many adults would know how to change their oil today versus back in the 70s? Changing spark plugs used to be a 30 minute task but now you have to take apart half the engine just to even gain access. Even though of us who make our living in tech are not immune. How would we verify that there isn't spyware or similar in the firmware or hardware on the computer we use daily?
I thought this too, but I think we misunderstood the extent to which various calls for censoring and regulating the internet where driven by a lack of understanding of the technology...
The scary thing about the UK regulators is that they seem to understand the stupidity of what they're doing, but believe it's worth it. You see this attitude everywhere in the UK – in our hate speech laws, our blasphemy laws, mass surveillance – the argument isn't that these things don't limit freedom and personal privacy. They'll agree that they do, their argument is that you shouldn't care.
With this encryption backdoor most wouldn't deny that it could be compromised, they just didn't think you should worry about it because they thought the benefits were worth it.
I think people on the internet in the 90s and early 00s were just weird people to be honest. We're very libertarian for whatever reason, and we wrongly assumed people our age were all as pro-freedom as us.
Policy makers change frequently and often radically. Federal lawmakers less so, but lawmakers are a small subset of policymakers, and not the ones who create international pressure; those are political appointees in the executive branch, and they change frequently.
> before we started getting people who know tech
reply
The politicians might not know tech, but the NSA, GHCQ, etc. that push for these anti-encryption laws most definitely do know technology, and is the main lobby against encryption.
It goes beyond just getting politicians that understand tech. We need politicians willing to rein in the intelligence apparatus put in safeguards, and checks and balances on their power.
I mean, yes many policymakers still struggle with the nuances of modern tech, but claiming that "the needle hasn't moved" in 25 years is an exaggeration. In the late 90s/early 2000s, encryption debates featured lawmakers who barely understood email. Since then, there are committees focused specifically on tech policy, even some lawmakers with backgrounds in CS or cybersecurity... and far more nuanced public debates about encryption, surveillance, and privacy.
I recently listened to some clips from a hearing with questions about zero-knowledge proofs, algorithmic transparency, etc...this was pretty unthinkable two decades ago. Some agencies and legislative bodies also now have technical staffers and some advisory boards with technologists. So, yeah it it slow and sometimes frustrating, but it's not static.
They understand the tech and so their advisers. You are assuming they want to do some do gooding in some sorts of naive and clumsy matter. No. They want control and they know perfectly well the implications.
I don't see why you think they don't understand the tech.
This is going to be heresy here, but honestly I think it's a reasonable position. Not one I would take, but reasonable.
For the first time in human history there can be large scale communication it is mathematically impossible for governments to have any access to. If you believe that governments are doing the job of protecting their citizens (and many do), it's entirely reasonable for them to want this type of access.
They have it with the postal service, and analogue phones and the world didn't collapse, and many criminals got caught.
But also for the first time in human history, it's possible to do large-scale surveillance without large-scale human effort. The power of the network goes both ways.
Phone wiretapping (until recently I suppose) and mail inspection required a human to take some action to listen in; you couldn't just monitor everyone's communications. Now you can.
I agree, there are many complex issues involved here. But I get annoyed at tech people (not saying you!) that it is self-evident that any kind of law enforcement methods of access is obviously wrong.
> I get annoyed at tech people (not saying you!) that it is self-evident that any kind of law enforcement methods of access is obviously wrong.
I don't think anybody is saying that the motivations are bad. We all want safety, right?
The closest thing I hear is, they feel that the cons often outweigh the pros. I think this correlates with their trust in authorities, given the countless abuses we see authorities perpetrating when granted power.
There's a reason "think of the children!" is literally a joke mocking safety-based pretexts for reductions in rights.
The analogue systems had fundamental limits on how many people could be surveilled, and still we had abuses of the system. The digital system makes you choose between "surveil absolutely everyone all of the time" and "surveil nobody".
Note that you mention the postal service. Remember the Horizon Post Office scandal, where there was a huge swathe of wrongful prosecutions?
Your subtle idea that the comprehension and understanding is the shortcoming of political apparatus is overlooks the million issues as basic healthcare not being addressed. The problem is not understanding, I can assure you of that.
In the distant past technical skill and knowledge was increasing as more and more people used personal computers. Then Steve Jobs invented the smartphone. This caused the world to get dumber and dumber.
>Then Steve Jobs invented the smartphone. This caused the world to get dumber and dumber.
Preposterous. Did the invention of the calculator make people dumber? A smartphone is another tool. Not Steve Jobs's fault people use it for TikTok or gooning instead of studying programming, math, medicine or whatever. Stupid people are gonna be stupid with or without smartphones.
Plus, we already had smartphones before Jobs, they were Pal OS, Windows Mobile or Symbian based.
It’s a difference in kind I think. Creation of any type of work - art, writing, programming, modeling, deep research, etc is much more accessible on a PC than on a smartphone. Not only because of the input devices available, but also the restrictions of the platform and OS.
Maybe it wasn’t intentional, but the form factor of the modern smartphone discourages creation.
When I was a young child me and all my friends would “use the PC together” just to open MSPaint and create shitty drawings. I don’t see anything similar today.
Sitting around in a room taking photos and videos is a lot less creative than drawing. It's possible to do strongly creative photo/video things with a phone but it's not most of the use.
If you make a list of creative activities that can be done on a computer or phone, a big majority are notably harder to do on a phone.
Imagining something that you to create is something anyone can (and does) do all the time.
Spending time learning how to actually create it, and then actually creating it is what makes someone an artist.
The children's "own way of creation", in your own words is to imagine what they want to create, and then ask something else to try doing what they want. If it's not what they want they complain and ask the system to try again.
I wouldn't be called an artist if I imagined a picture of myself riding a dragon, and then proceeded to commission a painting of that. Asking someone else to do the thing for you isn't being creative. It's being lazy. It's not making art "accessible". They couldn't do art before, and they still can't now. They just believe they can, just because they can "bark out an order at a slave".
>Spending time learning how to actually create it, and then actually creating it is what makes someone an artist.
Says who? Someone sold a white canvas with a banana taped to it, that a toddler could have done in 3 minutes. What's there to learn to do something like that?
>I wouldn't be called an artist
Pretty sure people do whatever they enjoy doing, and they don't give a f if some pretentious people call them artists or not.
This comment is a very narrow and elitist PoV, focusing on art specifically, which is a thing a lot of people would struggle to define, and also has nothing to do with the topic of using computers, since most people don't use computers for art but to make their lives easier, more efficent and more fun.
I wonder how this clash is going to turn up. I would hate this development. This proposal is worthy of the Chinese Communist Party, and I am aghast just how many member states are fine with the concept of a preemptive surveillance state and breaking privacy left and right.
Of course, that is what we get for giving Ursula von der Leyen a second term (why??) She already has a reputation from her career in German politics, having earned the nickname Zensursula (censoring Ursula).
Things got so out of control because the UK doesn't have heavily muscled tech emporiums that can spend time in bed with their politicians. US does. But it's a sad world the one where citizens are so helpless against their governments and the corporations.
> But it's a sad world the one where citizens are so helpless against their governments and the corporations.
Helpless indeed - but, government still requires the consent of the governed. It's just that we are all very comfortable, with a lot to lose and easily distracted, so that consent to be governed is too easily given nowadays.
If we do anything together as a society it should be making sure to preserve E2E Encryption as it's one of the most important tools to organize a resistance should we wish to revoke our consent to be governed.
I am always surprised by just how much of the population is still swayed by the 'think of the children' arguments put forward by governements to justify certain curbing of freedoms.
Say what you will about JD Vance but he has passionately confronted the European elites on their surveillance overreach and clearly it's had an impact.
We may not like everything about the current American administration, but credit where due.
> he has passionately confronted the European elites on their surveillance overreach
passionately lol hes a role player. Americans are so easily tricked by bullshit its unreal
I didn't, but since he made his freedom of speech complaints, I've seen some utterly horrendous overreaches from the UK government that makes it clear as day he is correct.
He may be a broken clock but he is striking right this time.
>> I've seen some utterly horrendous overreaches from the UK government
This is the propaganda I'm talking about. We had a summer of race riots and people were held accountable for inciting violence. Vance doesn't like that. Meanwhile his own government is deporting people for peaceful protest, cracking down on free speech at Universities, and banning journalists that it doesn't like.
Finally people can breathe easy again and pretend a proprietary walled garden which was already part of prism over a decade ago is actually private and secure.
If the UK wants to snoop they better grovel before US feds like everybody else to get access.
Ok, as a frequent UK traveler I would prefer that the UK government has to growel at the US feet than having immediate access to all data on my iCloud.
I’m by no means a Trump fan. But I thought it was negligent how the Biden administration didn’t fight for American tech companies internationally and how the prior administration was actively hostile to them.
This is my fundamental problem with Elizabeth Warren et. al..
They act like the choices are omni-powerful US tech companies, or a plethora of small companies building utopia. They say "we need to hamstring our most successful companies to make space in the market for smaller players."
The problem is that it isn't making space for smaller players; it's making space for countries with worse perspectives on human rights to try to catch up/fill the void. The world isn't a better place if we replace Google and Meta with ByteDance and Yandex. It's not even that those are bad companies (from what I hear, they're pretty similar internally to their US counterparts); it's that they are under the jurisdiction of administrations that are hostile to human rights.
Did this approach ever actually work out in the history of humanity? Like, we're fine with massive corporations spying on us because otherwise the Chinese/Russian/Aliens might? In the name of protecting freedom, we're violating it ourselves and we brag about it?
> The problem is that it isn't making space for smaller players; it's making space for countries with worse perspectives on human rights to try to catch up/fill the void. The world isn't a better place if we replace Google and Meta with ByteDance and Yandex.
I mean, the foreign companies taking that space can be solved with sanctions, or digital services taxes, etc.
What would you propose? Maybe Google, Apple, Meta, etc. are the lesser of the big evils but we definitely have a monopoly problem in the US, and there is very little space for competition, which only continues to harm consumers.
Trump will do a lot more harm to US tech companies than Biden. A lot of us here in Europe are moving away from US tech, and as we are building more of our own it's very unlikely we will come back.
Right now there aren't too many EU alternatives yet which is why you don't really notice yet. But the damaged trust in the US as a 'partner' will outlive Trump for decades. As they say "trust arrives on foot and leaves on horseback".
The US was never a trusted partner, Europeans just didn’t have a choice. No one company was able to spend the amount of money required to compete with American technology, so nobody did.
Don’t anthropomorphize the lawnmower, the “friendship” is nothing more than economic interdependency. French aircraft carriers are not using Windows because they trust the US government, their diagnostic software just doesn’t work on anything else.
Again no Trump fan. But I’m glad that Trump policies have made at least the EU not to be so dependent on the US military itself and US military contractors. There is no private company monopoly including BigTech that I can’t extricate myself away from quite easily.
It’s much harder to extricate yourself from the US influence on the world stage.
Not that I’m not seriously looking at a Plan B outside of the US after I retire. We are already planning to spend a few months a year between Costa Rica snd Panama City next year - warm, safe countries in US time zones.
That dependence on the US was by design of the US however. With all the military assistance they provided they also bought influence (which they will lose now of course). This paid itself back in many ways, like the dollar being the world reserve currency, having bases all over the world, being free to invade countries like Iraq etc.
Personally I hope the EU works more on the nuclear umbrella. It was the US that didn't really want us to have much of our own to establish dependency on them, but now that the US has become an unreliable partner we'll have to. France and perhaps the UK will have to scale theirs up. It's the only thing where we really need the US militarily, as any regular military is not sufficient to deter enemies like Russia and China, no matter how much we have.
But Big Tech is very hard to cut until the EU clouds step up a lot more. Maybe not for you yourself personally but for industry.
The EU is not going to build its own Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, AWS etc.
Anytime the lack of “influential European tech companies” come up, the best anyone can do is money losing/barely profitable Spotify.
And the data doesn’t back your idea up that Europe is moving away from any of those companies. The EU is moving its dependence away from the US military industrial complex admittedly.
I guess not no, but we don't need those, really. We definitely don't want carbon copies of those companies because they are causing a lot of what's wrong with this world. What we need is more ethical companies that understand the EU market. No paying with our data, no manipulative algorithms. We've been pushing for that for years but Trump has been the turning point, now people are really on board with the idea that leaving US services is better.
It will take time to build local alternatives but I'm sure they will come. We have time. You can see that companies like Microsoft are really shaken up when they're starting appeasement projects like those vows to actually protect our data (though those promises are weak because they remain bound to US law)
And this goes hand in hand with the defense initiatives. IT is important though to society to be considered a critical asset.
I agree that no one needs Facebook and if it disappeared off of the face of the earth, nothing of value would be lost.
And even a simplified version of AWS shouldn’t be impossible to build that’s “good enough” [1] or another search engine that’s good enough (Google) and Google search sucks these days anyway.
But Europe is not going to be able to replicate the ecosystem of Android like China did and definitely not Apple on the high end or MS for operating systems.
[1] before anyone replies that I don’t understand the complexity of AWS, I have been working with AWS technologies exclusively for over 7 years including a former 3+ year stint at AWS.
> I agree that no one needs Facebook and if it disappeared off of the face of the earth, nothing of value would be lost.
Well yes and no. Facebook, no. The concept of facebook as it was when it was first released was an interesting one to me. Staying in touch with your friends, I've lived in several countries so I have friends all over the world. This is nice. However they perverted it when they dropped the old timeline and moved to the algorithmic feed. It became useless to me then.
I do see a benefit to facebook-like services though, just ethical ones.
But what I do like about facebook, or rather meta now, is the investment they have done in VR. It's still full of data collection I'm sure, but to me VR is a very interesting tech and it really needed that to get off the ground. Right now it's not really moving along because "AI" stole all the hype limelight but it will come again, just like AI has had some false starts itself.
Subsidy in this context was meant to convey that all the bandwidth and infrastructure that allows for global communication for billions of people is paid for by the advertising Meta sells, money that obviously disappears if Meta disappears.
That doesn't mean we won't have money to pay for it though. All that advertiser money comes from the consumer too. Companies pay it to sell things, and to make a profit they factor it into the price. We're paying for it, we just don't pay Meta directly.
If meta would disappear we would either buy less and have more money to pay for communication (and doing more towards saving the planet as well!). We'd probably choose things to buy more on actual need and quality rather than marketing BS.
What I am wondering is if the complexity of AWS is required for 99 percentile. There are a lot of niche services and duplicated ones on AWS and a targeted replacement for the most popular ones would be enough for most.
You only require AWS if you build something to run on AWS. That's the thing. You can easily run it on something else, just build it for that specifically. Now, AWS-style services have become somewhat of an industry standard (e.g. S3 offered by countless operators). But still, I think offering AWS style services is a weakness because you can never become better than the original.
And cloud is only really cost-effective when it comes to startups that have not much cash flow but expect/hope to explode rapidly by going viral. Cloud gives them that kind of infinite scaling and the ability to pay as they go (the uptick in clients will pay for the increased hosting when they do make it).
In Europe this kind of business model is very rare though. We don't just spin stuff up like a weather balloon and hope it floats.
Netflix as the canonical example would beg to differ as would Apple who hosts plenty of its services between AWS, GCP and I believe Azure. I only know first hand about AWS since Apple talked about it during ReInvent.
There are plenty of large private corporations and governments who host on AWS. Maybe they didn’t do it naively?
Netflix mainly runs from caching boxes at ISPs though. Most of their content comes from there. AWS is way too expensive to serve all that content from.
I see a lot of dumb implementations. At work we're picking up all our physical servers and moving them to AWS compute boxes that run 24/7. Purely statically, just because our idiot CIO wants to be a "cloud-driven company" so he can spout the buzzwords. We're spending a lot more money to get the same only on someone else's computers and get none of the actual benefits that cloud can offer.
Yes. But Netflix is by far AWS’s largest customer. The distribution happens on caching boxes. But there is a lot of processing that happens on AWS. You can look at any of the numerous reinvent videos or even Netflix’s own blog.
Just because your company has a brain dead lift and shift implementation (don’t do that), doesn’t mean every company does.
As a former employee of AWS ProServe (Amazon’s internal cloud consulting department - full time direct hire employee) and now and outside consultant, I’ve seen and been involved in a lot of large scale implementations.
I have no love lost for AWS the company (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44607821) , but let’s not pretend it’s a bunch of startups and naive enterprise corporations that don’t know tech.
I’m not trying to wear “I worked at AWS” on my chest like a 22 year old posting on Blind. But my experience working at AWS ProServe before working at 3rd partner consulting company I’ve seen a lot of different implementations even though my focus was on cloud native applications.
Just seems very unrealistic wishful thinking that Europe would suddenly become good at these kinds of software after spending the last few decades being bad at it.
It's a lot easier now because there's a huge demand all of a sudden for local services.
Previously it was hard to compete with the US because the lack of regulation there and investors in the EU having more expectations rather than just throwing money at the wall and hoping it sticks.
But with the exploitative business models like Google's consumer tracking and now with Trump and his trade wars the US is no longer viewed as a friend or a country to look up to. I think it will only increase the EU's push for more privacy and ethical business models.
There's a big grassroots movement like "BuyFromEU" to cut US products and services out of our lives. I think that trade balance is only going to get worse. And really it was actually not bad at all, the problem is that Trump was only counting products not services when looking at the trade balance. I guess because his voters are primarily blue collar workers.
After the local EU services/products all have Brussels Mandated encryption back-doors and permit free decrypting of your private data, I will bet there will be a surge back to non-EU services.
Yes, this is a big worry indeed, though not really something the US doesn't have (but they are more secretive about it). Snowden made that very clear. We just have more government transparency here.
You think that the EU, which is also pushing for a backdoor just like the UK, is somehow actually against tracking and data collection? You gotta pick one or the other.
This is not the same thing. They trust themselves to track and monitor us, but not commercial parties.
I of course trust neither, but I do have to say they are doing good stuff limiting bad actors like Google and Microsoft. I just wish they would do more (e.g. ban third party cookies and tracking outright rather than forcing us to choose every time).
> It's a lot easier now because there's a huge demand all of a sudden for local services.
Talk is cheap. People say they want local services up to the point someone offers local services and no one will buy them because they are not the same as what "BigTech" offers.
Too many people here going on about UK politicians which, while problematic, seem mostly powerless in the face of a completely toxic department in the Home Office.
This sort of shit is pure Home Office authoritarian bullshit and the culture there is such that it perpetuates. They seem to be particularly skilled in getting MPs to side with their world view, but it is the Home Office leading this, not the MPs.
See the proscription of Palestine Action for a textbook example of Home Office bullshit.
"Last month, Meta-owned WhatsApp said it would join Apple’s legal challenge, in a rare collaboration between the Silicon Valley rivals".
Apple makes home computers, mobile devices, AV equipment and productivity/multimedia software.
Meta makes social media platforms, and vr headsets. What exactly makes them "rivals"? WhatsApp vs iMessage? They're two big companies in the same sector, sure, but do they really compete against each other in a major way?
The UK is the same country that arrests 12,000 people a year for posting online.
> Now every force in the country has a team sifting through people’s posts trying to determine what crosses an undefined threshold. “It is a complete nightmare,” one officer admits
[citation needed], your Economist article [0] quotes 30 a day (which would be <11k a year) but muddies the water pretty significantly:
> Under these laws, British police arrest more than 30 people a day for online posts, double the rate in 2017. Some are serious offenders, such as stalkers.
How many of those 30 were for "online posts" (and of which nature - Lucy Connolly is a favourite example cited by the likes of Vance, but she was arrested for trying to stir up racial tension when there were already race riots going on)? Who can tell, because the article didn't seem to bother asking.
> How many of those 30 were for "online posts" (and of which nature - Lucy Connolly is a favourite example cited by the likes of Vance, but she was arrested for trying to stir up racial tension when there were already race riots going on)? Who can tell, because the article didn't seem to bother asking.
I googled Lucy Connolly out of curiosity. It indeed appears that she got 31 month of jail for a single tweet? You don't think this counts as "arrested for online posts"?
> You don't think this counts as "arrested for online posts"?
You've definitely missed some context. For example, and fairly significantly:
> Connolly previously admitted intending to stir up racial hatred.
If you plead guilty to a charge, there's not much defense left.
The offence she admitted to doesn't even take account of whether it's committed online - it's law that was passed in 1986. An aggravating factor that led to the sentence she got was that she had in fact posted multiple times in the same sort of way.
So the context: she posted similar things online multiple times, she pleaded guilty, and the law in question can apply to offline activity as well -- all right, but all this still literally translates into "arrested for online posts".
She didn't throw rocks, she didn't set things on fire, she didn't stab anyone -- it was her speech that got her a multi-year jail term.
This alone makes free speech proponents upset, regardless of whether there were riots ongoing or not, or whether they agree or disagree with her political position.
I wasn't saying the context I gave was an exhaustive list, I was suggesting that having Googled her name and maybe skimmed a couple of news articles, you might need to do some more reading before forming too much of an opinion.
> She didn't throw rocks, she didn't set things on fire, she didn't stab anyone -- it was her speech that got her a multi-year jail term.
Your contention seems to be that incitement shouldn't be an offence?
That's at odds with legal systems all over the world, including the US, where Brandenburg v Ohio [0] holds that if inflammatory speech is "directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action" that is an exception to the First Amendment and can be prosecuted, which seems to be at odds with "regardless of whether there were riots ongoing or not".
The original point of my first post in this thread was that lumping together arrests for stalking, incitement to violence and other forms of harassment to produce a big scary number makes the argument seem utterly dishonest. The fact that so many "free speech proponents" fixate on one example when, if the stated number is true, there should be thousands of examples every year is a good demonstration of that.
- Posted that three federal judges "deserve to die" with their photos and addresses
- Result: Conviction overturned as protected political hyperbole
Connolly's "set fire to all the hotels" would likely be viewed as angry hyperbole in the United States, not meeting Brandenburg's strict standard.
The distinction: The US prosecutes actual incitement (directing a mob to attack a building RIGHT NOW). The UK prosecutes offensive speech that merely might inspire someone, somewhere, someday. Your Brandenburg citation actually proves this difference rather than refutes it.
You want thousands of examples? Check Twitter during any US political crisis - they're not prosecuted precisely because Brandenburg protects them.
Point taken, but incitement is still an offence in other countries. That the US has specific, and particularly permissive, laws around what constitutes speech is neither here nor there.
> You want thousands of examples?
Of people people prosecuted for innocuous speech in the UK, the original claim in this thread. Brandenburg doesn't apply there.
I misunderstood what you were trying to imply but still think your premise is mistaken. My reply is merely directed at anyone implying the US's free speech-laws are somehow comparable to the authoritarian anti-free-speech laws the UK has.
Edit: If I remove the reference to Brandenburg, I'm not sure my point substantially changes:
Incitement is an offence in the UK and also in other countries. You can argue whether that should be the case or not but that's completely orthogonal.
Gathering a whole lot of offenses which happened to include online activity to produce a big number of people who you can claim were prosecuted for something that you can claim is as innocuous as "online posts" is dishonest.
You're playing a shell game with definitions to justify authoritarian speech laws.
> lumping together arrests for stalking, incitement to violence and other forms of harassment to produce a big scary number
But that's exactly the problem - the UK defines "incitement" and "harassment" so broadly that ordinary political speech becomes criminal:
UK "Harassment" includes:
- Misgendering someone online
- Posting offensive jokes
- Retweeting protest footage
- Criticizing immigration policy "grossly"
UK "Incitement" includes:
- Lucy Connolly's Facebook post (31 months)
- Jordan Parlour's "every man and their dog should smash [hotel] up" (20 months)
- Tyler Kay's "set fire to all the hotels" retweet (38 months)
NONE of these would meet Brandenburg's standard in the US. They lack:
- Directed at specific individuals
- Imminent timeframe
- Likelihood of producing immediate action
> if the stated number is true, there should be thousands of examples every year
There ARE thousands. In 2023:
- 3,537 arrested for online speech
- 1,991 convicted under Section 127 Communications Act
- Hundreds more under Public Order Act
You don't hear about most because "UK citizen arrested for offensive tweet" stopped being newsworthy years ago.
You're using the word "incitement" to equate UK thought policing with legitimate US restrictions on speech that creates immediate danger. That's like defending China's censorship because "every country bans fraud."
The definitions matter. The UK criminalizes hurt feelings. The US criminalizes immediate threats to public safety.
How many of those were examples of "hurt feelings" and not "put a whole lot of foreigners at risk of their lives" or any of the other classes of "online posts"? We don't know because in their rush to say "the UK's arresting 30 people a day for posting things online", the Economist didn't bother breaking that down.
> NONE of these would meet Brandenburg's standard in the US.
None of them happened in the US so that's irrelevant. My misunderstanding of the precedent around incitement isn't central to my point.
If I post "I'm going to kill the president, at $location tomorrow at $time" and I get arrested, was I arrested for "an online post", or was I arrested for "threatening to assassinate the president"?
Both are technically correct. People who want to threaten to assassinate the president more often will call it "arrested for an online post". People who think assassination threats are bad and think it should happen less often call it "arrested for threatening assassination". The former group are currently much louder and their propaganda has worked.
Muddying the "simple argument" would be lumping stalkers in with people inciting violence against foreigners and posting nasty comments about the Prime Minister, to make some kind of point about the police. That would be ridiculous.
It's slightly more nuanced. Attacking people for protected characteristics such as race, religion, disability, gender, sexuality, is also an offence.
You can be a cunt all you want, just make sure you're being nasty about them as a person not their religion or race or whatever group you might feel they belong to
All cases I've seen have been cut and dry in this regard. Racist or homophobic usually.
Indeed, I didn't mean to imply those three were the only categories of things within "online posts"! Rather, that it's disingenous to lump all of that under one umbrella and suggest great swathes of people are being arrested for a tweet.
Except, in some countries, it is a crime. Why do you think it's not one? Are you familiar with UK law?
In Germany there are even stricter laws. Insulting someone is a crime, even if the things you say are factually true.
And then you have repressive dictatorships, like the UAE, USA and China, where you can't disagree with the government on anything. It's definitely a crime there, to say the president looks like Winnie the Pooh.
I am sorry to disappoint you, but posting nasty comments is a crime in the UK under the 2003 Communications Act, which means it has been a crime for decades.
Section 127(1) makes it an offence to:
"Send by means of a public electronic communications network a message that is a -
(a) grossly offensive,
(b) indecent, obscene, or menacing, or
(c) false, known to be false, for causing annoyance, inconvenience, or needless anxiety."
Section 127(2) adds that: "A person is also guilty of an offence if they cause a message or other matter to be sent that is similarly offensive or menancing.
Online Communication Offence Arrests
Volume 847: debated on Thursday 17 July 2025
> The tendency to police—literally—what people are saying has been encouraged and enabled by not just this Government but their predecessors. The Malicious Communications Act 1988 and the Communications Act 2003, specifically Sections 1 and 127, give the police the power to arrest individuals for what they say online. On average, 30 people are arrested daily. In 2014, under the coalition Government, something called non-crime hate incidents were introduced—words uttered that are not yet criminal in themselves but which the police should officially record none the less and hold against people. Since 2014, more than 133,000 such incidents have been recorded; that is more than 13,000 each year. Some of those who have had their names recorded in police files are children whose words were taken down when they were below the age of criminal responsibility and may be held against them for the rest of their lives. The innocence of youth has been replaced with the presumption of guilt.
https://hansard.parliament.uk/lords/2025-07-17/debates/F807C...
12k a year?!? That is a staggering number. I wonder what the stats were in East Germany (though they may have had harsher punishments.. that can be ratcheted up later though once the system is in place)
It's mostly far-right shit-stirring because it's a much broader set of crimes than you are being led to believe. It's basically every possible crime "by communication":
"A spokeswoman for Leicestershire police said crimes under Section 127 and Section 1 include “any form of communication” such as phone calls, letters, emails and hoax calls to emergency services."
I expect it's mostly domestic abuse cases because what was once screamed through a closed door is now messaged online.
When a family member starts threatening others, an arrest is probably the necessary intervention to prevent actual violence. It's a similar story in cases like e.g. community racial tensions and gang violence. Once the threats are happening online, real violence is imminent and action warranted.
Per gpt:
Estimates vary, but roughly 250,000–300,000 people were imprisoned for political reasons over the GDR’s 41-year existence—an average of ~6,000–7,000 annually.
Just wow. I wonder if we will study this in history textbooks about downfall of UK
To ask His Majesty’s Government what estimate they have made of the number of people arrested daily for non-threatening, online communication offences, and what assessment they have made of the implications of such arrests for freedom of speech.
It depends what you count as political reasons. Plausible bullshit could be generated to support the idea that arrest for any particular crime is political, or just as easily, to oppose that idea.
I draw the bar for "political arrest" at somewhere like "arrested for opposing the incumbent in an election". I don't think "arrested for saying it's time to gas the muslims" - which is the sort of thing happening in the UK and getting counted in these numbers - should be called "political arrest". That's just called committing a crime. That would only become a "political arrest" if gassing the muslims was a politically acceptable viewpoint, equal in value to not gassing them.
(i think OP might be speedrunning a "what opinions, mfer?" goose meme thing. i bet the reason is "for posting right-wing nationalistic garbage likely to incite hatred", or similar)
Is it surprising that 12,000 out of 60,000,000 post illegal things like calls for violence (burn migrants to death, etc) per year?
Reminder that incitement is a crime in the USA too and there's nothing in the constitution that says it's okay just because it's on twitter not irl.
So far every story ive seen about arrest has been pretty cut and dry, they were blatantly hitler level racist, homophobic, or calling for others to attack people for their protected characteristics (eg race or sex).
A spokeswoman for Leicestershire police said crimes under Section 127 and Section 1 include “any form of communication” such as phone calls, letters, emails and hoax calls to emergency services.
“They may also be serious domestic abuse-related crimes. Our staff must assess all of the information to determine if the threshold to record a crime has been met.
“Where a malicious communications offence is believed to have taken place, appropriate action will be taken. Our staff must consider whether the communication may be an expression which would be considered to be freedom of speech. While it may be unacceptable to be rude or offensive it is not unlawful — unless the communication is ‘grossly offensive’.
In Europe we don't value free speech as high as the US.
There is "forbidden speech" (around lying about Holocaust related topics and insulting people online) and I think it's a good thing in total. You spew out the worst of the worst on the internet you should be able to be held accountable
US has plenty of arrests for terroristic threats and similar. Many of these are online now. 12k arrests per year related to online posts doesn't sound all that high.
Making terrorist threats are different than insulting some's religion, complaining about illegal immigrant crimes or shitting on politicians online. It's disingenuous to argue they're in the same ballpark that EU and US speech is similarly policed because it's not.
Not terrorist threats - terroristic threats. This includes anything that someone might think is threatening. Do you have examples of non-threatening language resulting in arrest in the UK?
I would bet the US arrests a similar number for online posts. A common one that comes up over here is a kid posting a picture at a shooting range, without any threat, and the police questioning/arresting the kid and/or parents. Same thing for kids talking about a video game and stuff.
Very much a matter of defining 'themselves'. Our data in their hands. How do we know these people aren't the same incompetents who emailed a spreadsheet containing the personal information of nearly 19,000 Afghan asylum applicants (who had risked their lives to help the Brits) to someone outside the Ministry of Defense.
The government says the individual thought they were sending a list of about 150 names, not the whole set.
> A spreadsheet containing the personal information of about 18,700 Afghans and their relatives – a total of about 33,000 people – was accidentally forwarded to the wrong recipients by email in February 2022, Healey told lawmakers in the House of Commons.
This is why authorization matters. Don't send the spreadsheet; send a link to it, because e-mail doesn't implement authorization. Then you can revoke access at any time, and even prevent accidents by setting up access rules and monitoring at the org level.
Geographically, yes. But they've made it clear they don't want anything to do with us. Also, the 3-year period after brexit with all the whining about their 'deal' (knowing that what they wanted was legally impossible) was so annoying I'm kinda done with them. Too much drama for too long.
So I've stopped buying UK products and services (eg raspberry pi) and don't consider traveling there anymore. Just like I'm doing now with the US although the latter is more difficult to do.
In the context of so-called "European elites threatening freedom and democracy", the UK is very much included in that category, as this story demonstrated.
On the other point, while you can of course boycott anything for whatever reasons you want for as long as you want, you do realise that the UK has a different government now. One that opposed Brexit, and has already signed agreements for closer cooperation with the EU. I still boycott Dyson because of his support for Brexit, but boycotting an entire country because of the actions of a former government that is now in opposition seems a bit pointless.
I know, but I don't think labour is substantially different. They're still pushing for extreme privacy invasive measures (the latest one was only withdrawn due to pressure from the US), they recently introduced mandatory visas for EU visitors.
Like I said elsewhere, it's like with the US, the trust is just gone. Besides, the tories will come back sooner or later (or worse, reform UK). They're not gone.
I'm not going to switch back and forth. Maybe if they play nice for a decade or so I'll change my mind.
I think from the point of view of the US and elsewhere, the UK is in Europe and is European. They are aware they are not in the EU, but that doesn't matter as it's inappropriate to make EU synonymous with Europe. (The distinction is much like North America vs USA; if you said the former you definitely don't mean _just_ the latter).
The specified policy aside, it’s kind of sad to see - the UK after Brexit just doesn’t carry the same weight. It would’ve been a different story if the UK as part of the EU were moving forward with a piece of legislation.
I’m struggling to square Vance and the administration’s position here with the fact that the US IC uses GCHQ to collect on US persons since they’re not allowed to do so directly. Why wouldn’t they want it to be easier for NSA to spy on Americans?
They probably already have a backdoor, and making one known and easy to access by UK provides an opening for other adversaries to spy on American iPhones.
What this type of news shows is that you really can't trust any government or company with your data. So don't give them any data -- only store data on your own hardware and set up your own servers if you really need a "cloud" for your data.
The attack on privacy does kind of make sense when your remember that it is a freaking monarchy with all the inhabitants being subjects.
Probably well deserved to them if it was not contagious in Europe at the moment.
That being said, the crazy thing about this law and the other ones similar is this:
Under the terms of the legislation, recipients of such a notice are unable to discuss the matter publicly, even with customers affected by the order, unless granted permission by the Home Secretary
They always justify everything saying that real world "procedures" should apply to the digital world. But, in most occidental countries, no one is allowed to search your home without you to be aware of it and present if you are capable to do so. Still, strangely, for digital data, the norm is that your data can be raped in your back, without you being aware about it or even in the capacity to challenge that.
I really find that stunning that it is so widely accepted.
The former german Stasi would probably have been proud of all the parlementaries in US, UK and Europe that allowed such things.
> The attack on privacy does kind of make sense when your remember that it is a freaking monarchy with all the inhabitants being subjects.
That has absolutely nothing to do with it. This was an act of parliament spearheaded by the house of commons which is entirely democratically elected. The UK has no one but themselves to blame for this.
> Apple did not respond to a request for comment. “We have never built a back door or master key to any of our products, and we never will,” Apple said in February.
This must be some "technically correct" weasel words bullcrap, as without at least equivalent access there is no chance Apple would be operating in China.
Apple stores Chinese users' iCloud data and encryption keys to that data in China in a datacenter run by a state owned firm [1].
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/technology/apple-moves-to-st...
Basically, there is no backdoor. The front door is wide open, the government just needs to ask. Or not even that -- just take whatever they need themselves.
Even in the US, even if Apple doesn’t have a backdoor, isn’t NSA linked up into the telecom companies already?
If there's a properly implemented end-to-end encryption, then NSA cannot see anything, even having full access to telco-s.
But iCloud is not fully encrypted by default.
Could you elaborate?
iCloud Advanced Data Protection (the feature that TFA is referring to) is required for E2EE, and it is not enabled by default.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICloud#Advanced_Data_Protectio...
> On December 7, 2022, Apple announced Advanced Data Protection for iCloud, an option to enable end-to-end encryption for almost all iCloud data including Backups, Notes, Photos, and more. The only data classes that are ineligible for Advanced Data Protection are Mail, Contacts, and Calendars, in order to preserve the ability to sync third-party clients with IMAP, CardDAV or CalDAV.
But they can store the traffic and decrypt it later, if feasible.
^ this and remember kids. Data processing does not require a warrant.
> if the target uses iCloud backup, the encryption keys should also be provided with content return
https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/21114562/jan-2021-fbi...
That is from before opt-in end-to-end encryption was added for iCloud backups.
Does Apple have any better proof than a whitepaper that they don't backup the keys anyways?
Several people have reverse engineered the protocol and clients. None have found any evidence that the keys are backed up anywhere as far as I know.
which you can verify because everthing is proprietary so it just there usual marketing play
The whole point of encryption in transit is that it doesn't matter if the telecom companies aren't trusted: they still can't read the data.
All the in-transit encryption in the world won't matter if they've pwned the decrypted client device.
Every company from your device's manufacturer, OS vendor, telecom carrier, app distributors and 3rd party software providers can be compelled to help make that happen.
And then there's always Cellebrite and friends.
This is not just encryption in transit or simplistic client-side encryption.
It is end-to-end encryption, where each device's key generation is handled by your phone's Secure Enclave.
This article is a decent starting point in terms of what Advanced Data Protection is:
https://support.apple.com/en-us/102651
If you want a deeper dive into the security engineering of iCloud Keychain, the second half of this Blackhat talk by Apple's head of Security Engineering & Architecture (SEAR) is really great:
Synchronizing secrets: https://youtu.be/BLGFriOKz6U?si=cY94TYo28bRj4G7y&t=1357
Does all of that matter if an attacker has access to your device and can take screenshots of your conversations, or read those conversations out of memory in their unencrypted state?
No it doesn't — that's a totally different threat model.
Advanced Data Protection is mostly concerned with protecting data from attackers on the server and in transit.
If you're interested in protections when an attacker has physical access to your device, you should read the "Encryption and Data Protection" section of Apple's Platform Security Guide.
Web: https://support.apple.com/guide/security/welcome/web
PDF: https://help.apple.com/pdf/security/en_US/apple-platform-sec...
In computer security if an adversary is having an unlimited physical access to hardware, it is considered a game over.
The difference is that if the NSA has physical access to my phone, I'm probably aware of it. It makes routine fishing expeditions across broad populations much harder and more expensive, as well as easier to oppose.
If they can fish remotely and automatically, accountability goes completely out the window.
I'm aware of what E2EE is, all the encryption in the world does not matter if either end of the conversation is confiscated or pwned by adversaries.
>all the encryption in the world does not matter if either end of the conversation is confiscated or pwned by adversaries.
Yes of course, but it's not so simple to bypass the hardware-enforced protections that exist both device side and server side. As far as I can tell, it seems effort was made to design/architect everything in such a way such that the protections can't be retroactively circumvented even under legal compulsion.
Disclosure: I previously worked for Apple, but not on the design/implementation of any of this stuff and this is all my own opinions, not those of Apple.
You thinking way too deep when the whole OS including implementation of the E2EE is proprietary and could be silently and targeted exchanged for a backdoored variant if it's not by default.
A good portion of HN believes Apple would never do that so I wasn't going to bother with that angle because of the inevitable defensive posts it would generate in response.
Presumably the data is not that relevant; former NSA director Michael Hayden said: "We kill people based on metadata."
What are the chances that the NSA has a useful zero-day on the TLS encryption standard?
Probably not on the standard itself, but practically a guarantee they have attacks on the major implementations, especially OpenSSL.
What are the chances they just have everyone's private keys?
"We have never built." ok, so then who built it?
Go further: "We have never built a back door or master key"
The feature is not named "back door" or "master key". It's a feature of iMessage with various names such as "zero click".
Also note they have created features before that provides law enforcement access to data at different stages of a pipeline.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMessage#Security_and_privacy
> It's a feature of iMessage with various names such as "zero click".
All web results for `imessage "zero click"` are about vulnerabilities/exploits. Are you claiming some of these are intentional, or what?
It's been used by state actors for years. May as well publish the API for it. These aren't rare and special flowers that are each artisanally discovered after searching for a million hours. And it is nicely packaged in an app that is used for something simple like text messages.
"An Israeli spyware company has reportedly cut access to its clients in Italy following allegations that its product was used to target critics of the Italian government.
"The move comes after WhatsApp alleged last week that spyware made by Paragon Solutions was used to target 90 WhatsApp users in two dozen countries, including journalists and civil society members.
"Italy's government confirmed in a statement on Wednesday that seven mobile phone users in the country had been targeted by spyware on WhatsApp, calling the incident "particularly serious"."
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cvgmzdjw24yo
Why are you quoting an article about WhatsApp after making a claim about iMessage and what Apple builds in?
(Not that the article has any evidence supporting the same claim about WhatsApp, either. In fact, the article describes WhatsApp/Meta claiming to have "disrupted" the spying and reporting it to the Italian government.)
Is it a big deal though? Context matters. Everyone knows you don't do business in China without bending a knee to the government in all things. If you don't you are shut down completely if you're lucky, imprisoned if not. Of course CCP has access to every device in China approaching very close to 100%
What are you saying, I'm in China it's completely false. There is very lax enforcement, and if there is enforcement, there's always an opportunity to bribe.
The communist party doesn't have "access" to a billion phones: what would they even do with all that garbage. They can ask Wechat what you send your friends, sure, and that's enough to police most crimes.
We don't have the budget or organizational acumen of the NSA.
Access != "saving it all, all the time" . If they determine you are an anti-CCP agent then they will get access to everything in your life, no warrants or requests involved.
Well, allegedly Apple could have designed, advised and tested the solution, and if a contractor builds it, then the statement is technically correct.
Apple (and many other organizations) contracts work out for liability reasons, this is not the first instance of it.
Also note the language - specifically a “back door” or “master key”. If you call it something else, literally anything else, the statement holds up.
Oops, I accidentally dropped this document on your desk marked CONFIDENTIAL. Please don't read it
> This must be some "technically correct" weasel words bullcrap
Is that even necessary? A gag order means they can't reveal backdoors, and their entire stack is so locked down that discovering them is hard and unlikely.
Gag order cannot force them to lie. A lie like that can be illegal even.
If there's a gag order, then companies say "we have a gag order". Like Google and Twitter did back in the day when asked. And then immediately started releasing Transparency Report to show how many of the gag orders they receive, so gov't couldn't say "we don't request anything".
https://transparencyreport.google.com/user-data/overview
I don't think this is true. There was the whole fiasco around the EULA canary that a company had that, if it was removed, was supposed to indicate that the company had received a gag order. I don't believe it had been actually tested in court. I believe it had to do with the FISA court system. I can't find a link but there are definitely cases of gray area where courts have required entities to lie. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warrant_canary
This is absolutely a thing. For comparison, banking regulation basically makes banks extensions of the intelligence services and forces them to tell off law enforcement in case "suspicious" account activities are detected. Usually banks will also close the account, but the regulations ensure the customer will never find out why because the bank will stonewall them to ensure they don't accidentally tattle.
https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/debanking-and-debunki...
Even if no formal regulation to that effect exists for social media companies, intelligence agencies presumably have sufficient leverage to ensure similar access.
> Gag order cannot force them to lie.
Yes it can, thats the whole point.
No, where did you get that?
They can "No comments" all the way, but there's no way to legally forcing a commercial company to lie. The company can lie, of course, but it's their choice, not an order.
Maybe it's a different type of a gag order? Subpoena prohibits to say "we have a gag order".
Most likely the spokesperson just forgot about China. They're still a US country, after all, and US-centric thinking is the default.
In China they outsource that version of the iCloud services to a Chinese company hosted in China. The rest of the world is on Apple’s.
This. Just have a demented spokesperson.
They may not have built it, but it doesn’t mean they didn’t implement something built for them.
I mean they just disabled advanced data protection which allowed normal law enforcement requests to access the data since they are not e2e encrypted if you don't use advanced data protection. I really don't think they needed to implement a new backdoor. They would just need implement a procedure that would fast track UK requests.
That didn’t placate the UK government, because it didn’t just want access to British users’ data – it wanted access to any Apple user’s data from anywhere in the world.
I suspect that disabling advanced data protection in the UK was meant to let Apple say it was complying as far as it could while fighting the main order.
You still dont know who was lobbying the UK government to ask for this.
Apple didn't disable advanced data protection for those who had enabled it. Rather they removed the ability for new users to turn it on in the first place.
A future update was going to ask users themselves to disable it in order to continue backing up their phones to iCloud.
AKA "fuckin...england fucking chill, don't blow this. You're FVEY mate, why you go scaring everyone when you know I got this. Just relax, you really think TAO don't got this? The Equation Group? We got this, in there like swimwear."
I don't get why the UK always does this. it's like GSM encryption all over again. Is it a particularly snoop-ey culture stemming from GCHQ or something?
UK citizens don't have a constitutional right to free speech, which tends to bleed over in unhealthy ways to the government prioritizing its own interests over citizens'.
There is freedom of speech if you are a MP speaking in Parliament (Parliamentary privilege) but outside of there, things have been on a steady decline since the 1980s.
How does free speech guarantee privacy?
Encryption itself is a form of speech. Therefore the govt can't force you to decrypt.
Guarantee is too strong of a word, but this is the concept.
That’s a specifically US interpretation based on US case law. It doesn’t apply in the UK or anywhere else.
US also interprets political bribes as free speech, which is nonsense.
I’d phrase it as the US recognizing that all political support (including money) is speech.
It’s difficult to decide what type of political speech is and isn’t okay, without censoring.
(Said as someone in favor of public funding only for campaigns, but who acknowledges external funding would be a nightmare to police)
You are supposed to have a 4th & 5th Amendment rights in the US. However a Judge can order you to decrypt a drive given probable cause IIRC. There have been cases where Judges have jailed people for disobeying an order to decrypt a drive.
> UK citizens don't have a constitutional right to free speech
They do.
The UK has an uncodified constitution, and this includes the Human Rights Act, which guarantees freedom of expression to UK citizens.
We do not. There are so many caveats in relevant part of the human rights act.
> The exercise of these freedoms, since it carries with it duties and responsibilities, may be subject to such formalities, conditions, restrictions or penalties as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society, in the interests of national security, territorial integrity or public safety, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, for the protection of the reputation or rights of others, for preventing the disclosure of information received in confidence, or for maintaining the authority and impartiality of the judiciary.
https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1998/42/schedule/1/part...
While the US has restrictions on speech, there are far far fewer restrictions.
The "uncodified constitution" that we have doesn't guarantee you "Freedom of Speech" either. I've read the relevant parts of the constitution in the UK. It gives Parliamentarians the right to unlimited speech.
Finally "Freedom of Expression" and "Freedom of Speech" are not the same thing.
Speech is a form of expression; freedom of expression encompasses freedom of speech. To quote from the link you provided:
"This right shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers."
As you point out, all countries have some restrictions on speech. We can obviously agree that somewhere like North Korea has no freedom of speech, in the same way we can agree the Moon is clearly outside our atmosphere. But in the margins it comes down to where you draw the line.
There's also a difference when it comes to theory and practice. In theory the US is more permissive; it lacks the ECHR's caveats that permit restricting speech to protect health, morals and territorial integrity. But in practice the US is rated as coming below the UK in the World Press Freedom Index and the Freedom of Expression Index. The US government has a lot of power to lean on organisations and individuals to stifle speech, which of course it's currently doing.
Neither the World Press Freedom Index nor the Freedom of Expression Index are particularly good measures of government restrictions on individual's speech.
The former includes things like how much editorial control journalists are subjected to, the right of journalists to unionize, the cost to print/distribute newspapers, whether journalists are subject to economic constraints (like being dependent on advertising money), etc.
The later is not only far more opaque in how it measures things, relying on a panel of country-specific experts, but it also more press/media related and includes things like media bias and print/media perspectives which is more about diversity of press opinion than freedom of expression (arguably, media bias shouldn't negative affect a freedom of expression index unless it is government imposed).
A more objective comparison of freedom of expression/speech would rate how the government would respond to specific instances of public and private speech - like say calling for the king/president/prime minister/etc. to be replaced, posting nudes (or going nude), blaspheme a particular religion, publishing embarrassing and reputation harming information about a celebrity/someone powerful/a judge/a religious figure, playing loud music outside, refusing to speak when ordered to by a police/judge/legislature/ruler, wearing the clothes various sexes, etc.
It might be difficult to create perfectly equivalent speech across countries, but I think one could get close enough.
I'm not sure I buy that we can entirely separate the freedoms of journalists from the freedoms of individuals; but I do like your idea of coming up with a list of criteria for measuring the freedom of speech for individuals. It seems a useful point of comparison. Where I think you'd need to be careful is in weighting the criteria.
These Indexes exist so that people (that may have an agenda) can point to it and say "well we aren't as bad as these other places" and can dismiss the actual issues that exist.
No freedom of expression is a nebulous term that was invented obfuscate the very discussion we are having. It consider it to be nothing more than weasel words.
Pointing at extreme examples like North Korea and pretending their isn't an issue because we are better them is classic whataboutism.
I also don't care about what some random index that people pull out of their backsides. I care about the legality. Freedom of Speech in the US is enshrined in the constitution. It is not enshrined anywhere in UK law.
As for the section you quoted, that is made effectively moot by the exceptions that I originally quoted.
Generally I am pretty tired of people engaging in apologia for the British state.
So your argument is that if we define freedom of speech according to US law, then only the US has freedom of speech?
I mean, I agree with you on that, but it's a circular argument.
My comparison to North Korea wasn't whataboutism; it was intended to illustrate that while there are obvious points for agreement (i.e. that the DPRK obviously has no freedom of speech), for many countries the comparison is less black and white. Which restrictions on free speech can you accept and still call it free speech?
I also respectfully disagree with you that only legality matters. If a government is actively punishing those who speak against it, even if it is strictly legal for them to do so, then I'd question whether that country is has freer speech in practice. Few developed countries have a government as hostile to the press as the current US administration!
I certainly don't align with the British government on many issues, encryption backdoors being one of them, but framing free speech as a binary is, I think, ultimately unhelpful. All countries have restrictions on speech, and drawing a line upon what is in reality a gradient over-simplifies the issue.
I personally agree that morality and territorial integrity aren't adequate reasons to restrict speech, and I'd say that a country without those restrictions has freer speech (from a legal perspective) than those with them. But again, it's a relative comparison; I wouldn't say that a country had no free speech if they did have those restrictions.
> So your argument is that if we define freedom of speech according to US law, then only the US has freedom of speech?
No. My point is that in the UK we do not have freedom of speech enshrined in constitution or law.
I believe Freedom of Expression is weasel words to obfuscate the conversation as now you have an additional legal concept in the mix, with some nebulous definition that reads like a Terms and Conditions from one of the big tech players.
That is it.
> My comparison to North Korea wasn't whataboutism; it was intended to illustrate that while there are obvious points for agreement (i.e. that the DPRK obviously has no freedom of speech), for many countries the comparison is less black and white. Which restrictions on free speech can you accept and still call it free speech?
It is the fact that it is brought up at all is engaging in whataboutism.
Why are you even mentioning NK? Why do you care what old Kim Jong does? Really think about why you are even mentioning North Korea. I don't expect or want an answer BTW.
> I also respectfully disagree with you that only legality matters. If a government is actively punishing those who speak against it, even if it is strictly legal for them to do so, then I'd question whether that country is has freer speech in practice. Few developed countries have a government as hostile to the press as the current US administration!
I don't care about the left/right slop politics. I don't care who the "villian of the week" is. Most politics is presented to you in the same way as Scooby Doo.
Why do you care about what Donald Trump is doing in the US? Please actually think about why you are even mentioning it. I don't expect (or want) an answer BTW.
> I certainly don't align with the British government on many issues, encryption backdoors being one of them, but framing free speech as a binary is, I think, ultimately unhelpful. All countries have restrictions on speech, and drawing a line upon what is in reality a gradient over-simplifies the issue
The very fact that you are making this argument about gradients of freedom, and everyone has restrictions etc. Is literally the issue. The conversation about it has been obfuscated deliberately.
I don't care what restrictions they have in France, NK, China or anywhere else. That is their business.
I care about the restrictions in the UK, why they exist and whether they are valid.
As for the encryption back-doors, why do you think they actually want to do it? GCHQ just happens to be looking for more developers BTW! I know this for a fact because I had one of their recruiters phone me. I told him what I thought about the British state and not to ever call me again.
> No. My point is that in the UK we do not have freedom of speech enshrined in constitution or law.
We do, in the Human Rights Act 1998.
Now, you've said you don't believe that the definition of freedom of expression in the HRA and ECHR lines up with your definition of free speech. That's fine. You are of course welcome to that opinion.
But you act as though your definition of free speech is authoritative, and yet you also have not defined it. When I've prompted you to narrow it down, you avoid the question.
So let me ask you extremely directly: what's your definition of "free speech"? Or to be more precise: which restrictions on speech are allowed, and which are forbidden, in order for a country to have "free speech" in your book?
> We do, in the Human Rights Act 1998.
No we don't. I've explained why. It even says in the text of the law the caveats it carves out.
But you can believe whatever fantasy you like. I am tired of trying to convince the fish that they are indeed swimming in water. The funniest thing is that until you've had it affect something/someone you like or respect, you won't change your mind.
BTW, I used to make all of the same arguments as you do btw about the Human Rights act and the ECHR etc. I realised after actually reading them, and seeing what actually happened and how the state operates, that what I believe was all bollox and I had been deceived.
> Now, you've said you don't believe that the definition of freedom of expression in the HRA and ECHR lines up with your definition of free speech. That's fine. You are of course welcome to that opinion.
It doesn't line up with any definition of free speech because it is a separate legal concept. I've already explained why they are different.
I happen to believe that legal concept is done deliberately so people like yourself will engage in this time wasting discussions about what is and isn't free expression. That is evidenced in this very discussion.
Ask yourself. If you happen to support Palestinian Action and do so publicly how long until police visit you or you are put on a watch list? Probably not long.
> But you act as though your definition of free speech is authoritative, and yet you also have not defined it. When I've prompted you to narrow it down, you avoid the question.
If I provide you with any sort of definition someone else will say "well that definition isn't correct", all of which ultimately deflects from the issue and is another waste of time.
The issue is that speech is restricted in the UK. It is done selectively. Some viewpoints are allowed by the British state and other aren't. Some of this is done directly, some of this is done indirectly.
e.g. There was a super injunction granted sometime last year to hide information about a large number of Afghan migrants / refugees / nationals being resettled after the Taliban took back control. Therefore the public, the press (little good they are) and presumably oppositional political parties couldn't scrutinise these plans. These types of super injunctions happen all the time.
What good is it that someone it is written on a piece of paper that you are legally able to have opposing view (as long as they fit inside the Overton window), when they literally hide information that is important for you to have any sort of informed view from you?
I asked you in my previous reply to go away and think about why certain narratives are presented to you. I never mentioned Trump, yet you seemed to want to talk about him without explicitly saying his name.
Someone somewhere wants you to worry about the press freedoms in the US. This is likely to distract you from more important things like the US have just landed some strategic nuclear bombers in the UK ahead of peace talks between Ukraine/Russia.
> So let me ask you extremely directly: what's your definition of "free speech"? Or to be more precise: which restrictions on speech are allowed, and which are forbidden, in order for a country to have "free speech" in your book?
It is irrelevant, I've explained why above. Any nation state will suppress your speech when it deems it to be necessary and will invent excuses as why it has to do it. That is the reality of it. How you choose to deal with that reality is your own choosing.
So allow me to summarize.
You believe that the HRA does not grant "free speech" due to some, or all, of the exceptions.
You refuse to define which specific exceptions you have a problem with, or define what you mean by "free speech", because if you did, people could argue against you.
That's all fine, but I wish you'd led with that. Next time write something like:
"I have my own definition of 'free speech' which I will not share, and according to this definition the UK has no freedom of speech."
To which the only response can be: "OK."
In practice there isn't freedom of speech. The UK government violates that all the time. Their agencies operate in secrecy and they have raided newspapers offices and destroyed data, arrested journalists and taken people's private information at borders.
Doesn't this apply to literally every government on earth?
No.
> they have raided newspapers offices and destroyed data, arrested journalists and taken people's private information at borders
This does not happen in many countries.
Which countries would you hold up as exemplars of free speech?
I would not hold up any country because there are flaws everywhere; and I don't like writing about free speech because it has different meanings for everyone. But even in our puny Slovakia raiding newspaper offices and taking peoples private data at the border is not something that would happen and didn't happen for at least the last 25 years or so, even though we had and currently have horribly bad governments.
The situation in the UK is particularly bad I think because the legal situation is a hodgepodge of a missing written constitution, interweaving of the government branches (as I understand, the government can sometimes ignore the courts or is above them), the libel laws, and while still (for now) a member of the ECHR which gives some guarantees, it's rulings are always (many years) after the fact. Crucially, the UK is a very class-based society. The ruling class gets what it wants and it does not want free speech.
There's some truth in what you say, but it's filtered through a distorted lens.
Like many countries, the UK government makes the laws and the courts interpret them. The government can't ignore the courts, but can introduce new legislation.
The UK population leans more conservative than many other European countries, but free speech, for the most part, has broad public support. There's a lot of discussion around where the line should be drawn, however, and the government tends toward a more restrictive interpretation, while the opposition tends to oppose censorship.
There is a strong element of class in the UK, but this is often misinterpreted. Class in the UK is not particularly fluid. You can have power and wealth, and still not be considered upper class. In the current government, only a minority of MPs are upper class, and of the current cabinet, only one attended a private school (a typical indicator of being upper-class).
The raiding of the Guardian over the Snowden leaks was justified as recovering stolen national security information, and was widely (and rightly) criticised by the press at the time. It's not a common occurrence.
Now, I don't mean to justify the UK government's behaviour. The government bows to the whims of GHCQ far more than it should do, particularly on any technological issue, where it seems GHCQ is the only one ever consulted. Obviously putting backdoors in messaging software, or raiding newpapers, is both incredible stupid and has ultimately lead to the UK government backing down.
But that, I think, is the important part - that it backed down. The UK has a lot of flaws, and certainly isn't at the top of the press freedom list, but it's also consistently in the upper quartile (and notably above Slovakia, if you want a reference point). Looking from the outside, you see the exceptions and controversies - the parts where the system fails - which makes it easy to get a distorted picture of the situation.
> In the current government, only a minority of MPs are upper class
And yet their policies are broadly right-wing conservative. Point is the government itself does not have to consist of upper-class people for the class to steer and benefit from the policies. Why is that? Well...
> The UK population leans more conservative than many other European countries
We really don't know that because the population has been massaged by right-wing propaganda for (at least) decades. I remember even in the 90's reading Financial Times or something like that and the opinion articles about the EU were quite simply lying. Can imagine it was even worse in the Daily Mail etc. The result regarding the EU is well known, but I think this applies to everything; the population seems to lean conservative because the ruling class prefers it like that and the media owners oblige.
To return to the free speech/press freedom issue, it's the same again: it only works as far as the ruling class allows that. One obvious example are the past climate and current anti-genocide protests, where the government heavily abuses anti-terrorism laws to limit free speech.
edit: from today, this: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jul/23/private-eye-ca...
Stuff like this simply does not happen here.
You're using the word "class" in two different contexts here. The "class" in "upper class" is not the same as the "class" in "ruling class". This may seem pedantic, but when people say that the UK is a class-based society they're explicitly talking about the former. That's not to say there isn't overlap, but they're still two distinct sets.
I'm not going to defend the actions of the UK government, but I will ask that you give time for the courts to do their work before passing final judgement. In the case of the article you linked, for example, the man was arrested but not charged, and in the case of Palestine Action as a whole, there's an ongoing court case against the government's ban, which seems likely to succeed.
Obviously these incidents shouldn't have occurred in the first place, and I fully agree that the government is abusing the law to get its way. But the actions of the home office don't necessarily reflect the country as a whole. They don't even necessarily reflect the Labour Party as a whole.
> I'm not going to defend the actions of the UK government, but I will ask that you give time for the courts to do their work before passing final judgement. In the case of the article you linked, for example, the man was arrested but not charged, and in the case of Palestine Action as a whole, there's an ongoing court case against the government's ban, which seems likely to succeed.
Yes but the issue is already the government acting like this. They most probably know they are in the wrong and are acting anyway, because they want to quell the dissent. The damage is already done.
> They don't even necessarily reflect the Labour Party as a whole.
Of course. I still think about the Labour as 'the good ones', compared with the Tories (or Reform) anyway. OTOH I think this does reflect the country as a whole and not only the current government. That is my feeling from living in the UK some time ago.
I will end this saying that IMO the main difference in speech/press freedom between the UK and say Slovakia is that the UK imagines itself a powerful country fully in control of its destiny, and this illusion enables executive overreach. While Slovakia is a small country thrown around by external forces so much that only the dumbest politicians waste their energy trying to limit press freedom.
That's fair. The government certainly shouldn't be acting like this, and if Slovakia is better in this area, then that's certainly something the UK should seek to emulate.
It may be that I'm conditioned to expect the Home Office to be authoritarian screw-ups that need to be babysat by the courts and principled backbenchers. But you're right that, ideally, the government shouldn't be doing this in the first place.
However, it seems to be the case that, even amongst conservatives, the view in the UK is that the government is infringing on free speech.
None of the west has a right to free speech. Even in the US, protesting against a genocide means you risk ending up in an internment camp.
The UK has always been a nanny state. Moore was writing about this decades ago.
Given how common Moore is as family name it might be helpful to specify which Moore.
Is there more than one Moore that has written authoritarian fiction set in the UK?
Consider that "moore UK authoritarianism" turned up zero relevant search results.
You shouldn't over-estimate the popularity of your favorite comic book authors.
“moore authoritarianism fiction author” is a more reasonable search and answers the question.
Your search also answered the question, in the fourth result or so.
Google tailors search results to you. When I searched up their search, it showed me nothing relevant as well.
"moore authoritarianism fiction author" worked though.
Yes and regardless the point is its some extremely niche author. The vast majority of anglophones aint gonna know him.
The author of V for Vendetta, Watchmen, 300, and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen?
Well I (as a widely-read 81 year old bookworm lol) have never heard of him
Well now's your chance to familiarize yourself with the pop culture of 20 years ago. There's this other great book about UK authoritarianism, it's called 1984 by this little known author George Orwell.
Okay, just to answer the damned question because apparently no one else felt like doing the decent thing and just saying it: the "Moore" mentioned is Alan Moore. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Moore
I did initially wonder if the reference was to Thomas Moore!
Yes lmao. You think those are literary classics in the same vein as Shakespeare or something?
No, but the films made a billion dollars in box office revenues. I know of Alan Moore's V for Vandetta because of the blockbuster movie.
Ive seen one of those movies and didnt know any of them were from books.
You realize capeshit is for children and being overly inured to the silver screen is for basement dwellers, right? Right...?
Why should US have a monopoly on intelligence?
Ideally no one should do this.
because what are you gonna do about it?
particularly snoopy culture, yes, stemming from GCHQ, no idea. our government has always felt entitled to breach our privacy and we are equal parts spineless and stupid. average take on this is either "why would you care unless you have something to hide" or "that's a shame, but there's nothing we can do about anything ever."
regrettably the latter one may be correct but it'd be nice to see at least some pushback every time this happens.
> The UK official added, this “limits what we’re able to do in the future, particularly in relation to AI regulation.” The Labour government has delayed plans for AI legislation until after May next year.
What did they mean by this
The UK AI bill included a proposal to create an AI authority, forcing third party to align with their approaches to AI.
They've been looking to use AI for consumer surveillance; AI user monitoring essentially.
"We can't have a backdoor so we can't use AI to monitor the user"
AI and encryption are technically orthogonal. But they’ll use any guise to further their agenda.
They’re closely related for some use cases, like client-side content screening. If they can’t have a backdoor then maybe they’ll push for a local LLM to spy on the user’s activity and phone home when it sees something bad.
Presumably without alerting the user and with thresholds set by the police. That's just a backdoor with extra steps.
I suspect the steel man version of the argument is that AI is capable of producing images indistinguishable from child and revenge porn, so it must be regulated, and that means they need a way to reach into your zeros and ones to check. Maybe they want to know you're not asking it how to terrorize people, too.
Hence, the confluence of AI and encryption.
Thank goodness for that - a UK citizen.
It is for your own safety! You will be safer now.
I assumed they’d only have asked for it if they’d already OKed it with the US, and that it was probably part of a plan to give US access too via 5-eyes sharing.
Turns out it was not 4D chess after all…
I think if we'd had a "normal" administration, this probably would have been pushed by the US government. The US services have been gunning for this for decades. But we have an administration that seems extremely disjointed in what it wants to do and why it wants to do it. I'm kind of curious about the internal conversations that must be happening on the other side of 5-eyes nations services as they're trying to accomplish their ends with such an unpredictable ally.
For better or for worse, JD Vance is extremely online, and no one in his cryptocurrency-hoarding right-libertarian tweetsphere thinks government backdoors are a good idea.
I don't think there is much disjoint if you see Trump as a fairly clean break with the cold-war era GOP. The thing is that no one in the US remembers the cold war with pride. The left thinks the cold war was US imperialism. The right kind of agrees, and has moved on to other issues anyways. And Europe nudges, saying: "Hey, you're America. You love fighting cold wars! Remember?"
Too many Europeans are Chomsky-brained and believe that US foreign policy is controlled by the CIA. The reality is that US grand strategy is incoherent and has been for decades. The US doesn't have any actual strategic imperatives at the moment, and it's being pulled in too many different directions. I believe George Friedman argues that this is a recurring pattern in US history, where US foreign policy alternates between listlessness, and maniac focus on some objective (most recently in the wake of 9/11).
The UK home office has really, really wanted this for decades, through all sorts of technologies. Institutional paranoia.
> Turns out it was not 4D chess after all…
It never is. I'm guilty of thinking there's a secret master plan sometimes and there never is.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor
For me it's not so much a conspiracy as the natural flow as a society becomes more fascist (as most Western government are leaning) and more "police state". It's inevitable, they want to be able to spy on every aspect of our lives and keep it recorded indefinitely as technology and public sentiment will allow. Cops want to make their jobs as easy as possible, politicians want to be able to get as much dirt on everyone as they can.
That’s just run of the mill authoritarianism, calling it fascism glosses over how it has proponents in every political persuasion.
Authoritarianism has become very popular online these days for some reason. Giving in to fear and wanting total control are always going to be traits that pop up again and then humans have to relearn from history about why freedoms are important.
Yes, although fascism is probably a proper word to use here -- it comes from Roman "fasces", symbolizes power to punish king's subjects (i.e. it's not about other states and kings, but about internal affairs).
You chose to use fascist technology. If you're scared by the potential for your state to exercise the same power your OEM has, then stop buying from that OEM. Regulate shitty security models, demand transparency for opaque systems. Switch to honest and open alternatives that trust you with freedom and power.
Or, reap your fascist just deserts. Why the hell should I waste my time calling Apple a fascist if I haven't daily-driven one of their devices in a decade? You want us to protest, standing arm-in-arm with you against Apple? You wanted this, you told yourself Apple was a secure business.
The only person who insists on using technology that coddles it's user is you.
So rollover and accept it and try to silo my life to please fascists and not complain and vote against it (where possible)? No thank you.
Apple told you that you don't have a choice. Why is that so upsetting now but not when you bought their products?
Sometimes just voting is not enough.
For example, Nazi Party didn't come to power democratically. Hitler lost 1932 elections to Hindenburg, and didn't get any position. But in two months, Hindenburg appointed him to Chancellor position, opening way to big money. And there was no democracy after that: in about a month they organize the Reichstag fire and issue a lot of consecutive "emergency" decrees, kill political opponents etc.
That surprises me, honestly. Makes you wonder what the British government got in return for forgetting about the encryption loicence idea.
Probably nothing. they have neither leverage nor negotiating talent.
It reminds me of when a UK news anchor questioned a Chinese diplomat on the general mistrust of the Chinese government by British politicians.
The response was essentially: "Why? You are nothing". Britbongs stay losing.
> they have neither leverage nor negotiating talent.
The Brexit negotiations proved to me that the UK government will simply assume they have leverage and try to assert it even when they have none. Combined with the lack of negotiating talent during a high stakes deal created a perfect storm.
That's my thinking. With all the people who are a part of this story why would the UK government back off and no longer want to spy on iPhone users.
I really sort of expected that by the time I reached my age that we'd have more policy makers that understood tech a little better. I feel like in the last say 25 or more years ... the needle hasn't moved.
This article is explicitly about how J.D. Vance (age 40) & others at the White House are forcefully advocating for preserving E2E encryption. Arguably not for the right reasons, but still.
I'm not sure what you mean by "more" but what you are asking for is in fact happening.
They are forcefully pushing for whatever the position of US companies is in conflicts between US companies and EU regulators.
The position of the US executive on encryption is well summarized by the Lavabit case.
The U.S. also attempted to force Apple to add a back door just a decade ago.
> Tim Cook, the C.E.O. of Apple, which has been ordered to help the F.B.I. get into the cell phone of the San Bernardino shooters, wrote in an angry open letter this week that "the U.S. government has asked us for something we simply do not have, and something we consider too dangerous to create." The second part of that formulation has rightly received a great deal of attention: Should a back door be built into devices that are used for encrypted communications?
https://www.newyorker.com/news/amy-davidson/a-dangerous-all-...
The US succeeded, according to American lawmakers: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/12/apple-admits-to-...
Apple's hidden at least one warrantless backdoor in their systems for the purpose of federal surveillance. I have no reason to believe the exploitation stops there.Apple and Google had no choice but to comply with the National Security Letters demanding access to user's push notification data.
They also can't refuse to comply with warrants demanding any such unencrypted data that is stored on their servers.
That's not the same thing as adding a back door to allow access to encrypted user data that is stored on the user's device.
It's also different than storing encrypted user data on your server, when you have purposefully designed a system where you don't have access to the user's encryption key.
Encrypted user data backup is the feature that Apple disabled access to in the UK rather than comply with the order to insert a back door in the OS.
To clarify: When you get an NSL, not only is it impossible to refuse and stay in business, it is also impossible to talk about it. That's the scary bit.
Certainly. At least with a normal warrant you can publicly speak out and notify the user(s) involved.
I would also point out that it was Senator Wyden who initially informed the public of how much the government was already spying on their unencrypted communications.
His record on civil liberties is excellent.
You'd better hope you're right. Nobody is auditing Apple who can hold them accountable. The lack of transparency is how we ended up on this slippery slope in the first place.
Good security models typically don't hinge on being lucky.
Nobody is auditing Google to prove that they aren't selling user data to third party data brokers.
Should we disbelieve them when they say they don't do so?
You need to think about what they don’t say with these matters.
He said Apple does not have and won’t create a backdoor. That was well crafted and means exactly what he said, any implicit meaning is an artifact of your brain.
I might postulate that while Rhubarb LTD absolutely doesn't hold and will never create a backdoor, Celery Inc does. Ignore the fact that Celery is staffed by some of Rhubarb's senior engineers working part time. Ignore the fact Celery are contracted to do security assessments so have access to all the source code, radio firmware and schematics...
I absolutely don't actually know anything about Apple, but I've seen some of the ways even small companies legally split themselves up to avoid tax or various forms of liability. Multiple phone numbers to the same phone, multiple domains and email providers to the same laptop. Multiple denials that you've ever heard of the other company let alone happen to share the same office space...
There's a massive difference between a truthful statement and an honest one; anyone that works with code should understand that.
The UK is not in the EU.
The UK left the EU so we could persue a far stuipider set of regulations.
UK: "Parkour!"
Close enough :)
The position of the US executive on encryption can easily shift depending on who holds the presidency and certain cabinet positions. I'm not sure the Trump administration actually has a coherent position on the subject.
> I'm not sure the Trump administration actually has a coherent position
That seems to be the most salient property of his presidency. His position on any issue is whatever he just said, with no regard to what it might have been yesterday.
For anyone that wants a good (and fair) example of this, check out his positions on the debt ceiling going back to 2012 (and then on every time it's come up since). When he isn't in power raising the debt ceiling is Unamerican, a political ploy and bad. When he is in power, it should be scrapped entirely and should be above politics. He was remarkably frank about it in an interview a year or two ago when he was running for president when he was pressed by the interviewer about the flip-flop, he smiled and said approximately "I wasn't running for president back then"
> When he isn't in power raising the debt ceiling is Unamerican, a political ploy and bad. When he is in power, it should be scrapped entirely and should be above politics.
It's too bad that when he is in power he does not actually make the latter happen, because it should be scrapped entirely.
The only other country with a debt limit set in an absolute amount rather than as a percentage of GDP is Denmark, and they sensibly have set theirs far above their actual debt so it becomes just a legal formality rather than a policy tool.
The problem with it in the US is that the debt ceiling limits government borrowing to pay for debts that have already been incurred. It doesn't control the amount of spending or the deficit--that is controlled by the budget that Congress and the President approve.
If we can't just scrap it completely, then at least the budget process should be changed so every budget bill must be accompanied by a raise of the debt ceiling by enough to cover whatever extra debt that budget will be adding.
That's just regular old two Santas playbook republicans been running since Reagan.
Having observed this for a lifetime, and simultaneously watching the democrats be unable to call out the switch is so incredibly disheartening. It's like watching a cat playing with a mouse before it kills it.
I think we're up to the killing part now.
Hey, even the worst person in the world is owed their right to privacy. Determining if someone is doing evil with their right necessarily undermines privacy for everyone.
I'm sure the police can catch child abusers the old fashioned way: by infiltrating cp networks and posing as kids online. This snooper's charter is in fact overreach and an invitation to build something like the Stasi.
If devoted half the resources to catching child abusers as we do to stop people from getting high after work, we'd have a whole hell of a lot fewer abused children. But, priorities!
> If devoted half the resources to catching child abusers as we do to stop people from getting high after work, we'd have a whole hell of a lot fewer abused children.
There are two problems here:
(1) We devote more resources to catching child abusers. There are all kinds of legal "if you see something, say something" requirements that make every doctor, nurse, and schoolteacher in the country part of the effort to do this.
(2) I see no particular reason to believe that additional resources would lead to a noticeable increase in detections. There are many, many circumstances where you're free to devote double the resources to something, but you'll see at best a trivial improvement in results.
> We devote more resources to catching child abusers.
You make this statement but provide no evidence. Because there's laws on the books, we "devote more resource" than, say the entire DEA, which unlike these laws has a gargantuan budget? That's nonsense.
> I see no particular reason to believe that additional resources would lead to a noticeable increase in detections.
Look harder? Read up on the topic? String operations work. More would work more often and catch more abusers.
Let alone the resources we could be pouring into children's mental health services (instead of kicking families off health insurance like the current administration has accomplished).
>We devote more resources to catching child abusers.
The Epstein list proves we do more to protect child abusers.
not after we find him
> In a combative speech at the Munich Security Conference in February, Vance argued that free speech and democracy were threatened by European elites.
> Trump has also been critical of the UK stance on encryption. The US president has likened the UK’s order to Apple to “something... that you hear about with China,” saying in February that he had told Starmer: “You can’t do this.”
> US Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard has also suggested the order would be an “egregious violation” of Americans’ privacy that risked breaching the two countries’ data agreement.
I think that’s exactly why I want encryption.
UK has a hx of pushing this - OP probably referring to efforts by the brits to put backdoors in comm standards like GSM and others back in the 80's and 90's
It's possible that their advocacy is well thought out but not based on the stated reasons. Say, Apple is actually under the control of the NSA and there are hidden back doors in the form of exploitable weaknesses as per Crypto AG. Then preventing the introduction of public backdoors would preserve the value of the current setup where Apple is widely considered trustworthy with respect to their customers.
And also about who is really running the show in the UK.
And who is that?
He's proven himself to be more of an asshat than I'd hoped (see the Zelenskyy meeting), but he did come up in Silicon Valley venture capital. There's a lot about this administration that causes concern, but I'm glad to see him on the right side of encryption.
It feels like hearing Diddy advocate for various legalized recreational drugs, sadly.
Well duh how do backdoors benefit Thiel?
because Vance and his colleagues are breaking federal law for the retention of government records and as long as they don’t invite anymore journalists into the group chat they will get away with it
They're arguing with foreign countries. Meanwhile the federal government continuously working consolidate all data available under groups like DODGE or ICE or Palantir. Arguing to preserve a tech in a given situation but with other goals ... not sure the first part matters at that point.
Perhaps he likes the idea of E2E, but just for himself and his friends. I duno, but whatever it is, it's not about the important things after the fact.
While Palantir is a private company and shouldn’t have access to government data, why shouldn’t in theory all government data be accessible to the government?
DOGE is clearly operating illegally for other reasons - not distributions funds that were appropriated by Congress for instance. But data sharing isn’t the root issue. It’s spineless Republicans in Congress and a sycophantic Supreme Court.
And it’s possible to say both that if you are here illegally you should be deported and that it’s currently being driven by animus, cruelty and it should be easier to obtain legal residency especially in areas where we do need more workers and implement another program like Reagan did in the 80s
Different data requires different access controls, and government agencies that collect / deal with a given piece of data on a regular basis are equipped to enforce those access controls.
You don't want your local dog catcher to be able to look at your medicare records just because "he's the government, and medicare records are government data".
> While Palantir is a private company and shouldn’t have access to government data, why shouldn’t in theory all government data be accessible to the government?
Shouldn't everybody have access to government data, with a few exceptions?
I feel like you answered much of your own questions.
Beyond that many of the departments that this data is being extracted from have rules about who can access (no not everyone in the IRS has free reign) and what they can do with it. For good reason, IRS's job is to focus on what the law says they should do, not say punish political enemies and so on.
But transfer it to DODGE, ICE, Palantir, there are no laws at all regarding what they can do with that data.
The problem is the laws - not the data sharing.
In some countries, tax data is available to everyone. Norway, Finland and Sweden in particular. There may be others
They're not just gathering IRS data. I'm not sure you read what I wrote at all.
I think this is a very dangerous deception. They understand.
When politicians say "we need a special key for police to stop child abuse" it's not that they don't know this means "a backdoor with no technological way to limit its use". On the contrary, they know it very well and it's exactly what they want to achieve under the guise of children protection. It's the public at large that don't understand it -- or so they hope.
Sadly, UK Parliament is made up of political careerists and art students, which is probably similar to most Western democracies. There's a saying 'those who can do, those who can't teach', it probably needs a final 'and those that can't teach, go into politics'.
Every time ukgov tries to make some sort of tech policy, it's embarassingly wrong, or naive, or both.
This comes from a country that effectively gave away ARM.
https://studee.com/media/mps-and-their-degrees-media
The most popular subjects for MPs who won seats in the Dec 2019 election
I'm a principal software engineer with a degree in history. You don't need a science degree to understand most of these issues sufficiently to legislate them. But you need humility and a willingness to learn. That, sadly, is lacking in too many governments and civil services.
Also, the people pushing for these measure (e.g., the U.K's equivalent of the NSA, GCHQ and most national-level police departments) understand these issues perfectly well.
Also, the people pushing for these measure (e.g., the U.K's equivalent of the NSA, GCHQ and most national-level police departments) understand these issues perfectly well.
Surely some of them understand the technical details. That doesn't necessarily mean they understand or respect the wider implications of a policy. This is why it's important to have a government that sets policy - taking into account all of the competing influences and potential consequences - and politically neutral technicians who then implement government policy.
No-one would dispute that if the government could examine every communication everyone ever sends then it could catch more very bad people and prevent more harm to innocent people. The problem is all the other stuff that also happens if you give a government that kind of power over its own people.
The leader of the opposition studied computer engineering (before going on to law). Sadly she used the knowledge gained to hack the website of the deputy leader of Labour Party.
> Sadly she used the knowledge gained to hack the website of the deputy leader of Labour Party.
If by "hack" you mean she guessed the password, then yes.
Yeah unfortunately we live in a gerontocracy so it's the same people in charge today that were 25 years ago :(
UK not quite as bad as the US age wise, but the real issue is the media who demand all sorts of illiberal things.
Rupert Murdoch is 94.
And living on pure spite.
I think this illustrates that in the UK its that the plutocrats like Murdoch are still the same people as 25 years ago
A reason why my first vote ever (20 years ago) went to the pirate party. We needed people with digital understanding 30 years ago.
"Das Internet ist für uns alle Neuland" Angela Merkel (2013) during a press conference with Obama.
"The internet is uncharted territory for us"
I don't think it is a matter of really understanding the tech. It has to do more about how you envision the society regarding privacy and individual rights. It is indeed a political point of view on how much you want to control everything.
Larry Wllison is advocating the same invasion if privacy mechanisms or worse and he clearly understands the tech.
The people in office now were already old by the time the Internet and especially Mobile took off.
But it’s not like many young adults today who grew up with mobile phones understand computers either. At 51 growing up with computers in the 80s, I find myself explaining what I think should be simple computer concepts to both my parents generation and my adult children.
My 80 year old mom is not a stereotypical old person who doesn’t know how to use a computer. She is a retired math teacher and has actively been using computers since we had an Apple //e in the house running AppleWorks in the mid 80s.
When she was tutoring teenagers mostly as volunteer work after she retired, she had to teach them how to use Office/Gsuite.
There was a very idealistic move in education to believe that younger students would be "digital natives" and self taught on typing, computer programs, etc. So we deemphasized classes on this, and now kids grow up on consumption oriented devices and can't type again. So it goes in circles I guess
I think idealistic is the wrong wording. Maybe optimistic or naive?
Optimistic is probably the kindest, yeah. I don't think it was strictly a bad argument - it was easy to think of the classes as outdated and taught by a generation who knew less than the students. It just turned out to be a very short state of affairs. Hard to expect schools to have predicted the iPhone, right?
It does seem to me like the US Vice President is advancing a pretty tech savvy policy. He's pushing for privacy. Am I missing something?
He's associated with Palantir. He can't be pushing for privacy.
Sure he can. In an ideal world (from the US gov't's perspective), all communications everywhere would be encrypted, and only they'd have the workarounds to access the data anyway.
I'm not being sarcastic. For real, what major government wouldn't want that in their favor?
They have to know that there's no monopoly on those workarounds.
Unless they're even more hubristic than we imagined.
Even if other nations have access to the plaintext, that beats all nations having that access.
I don't think they much care about all nations.
They care about maybe a maximum of five having that access, and I'm sure they realize that #1 on that list (PRC) won't need much time to become a peer on any given technology.
> they'd have the workarounds to access the data
That is the opposite of privacy.
I can’t sneeed
I think the non tech savvy policy makers in question are the British ones.
They're just against EU asserting any kind of control over American companies.
Reminder that he's funded by Thiel and friends with Curtis Yarvin, which goals include the end of democracy and the federal state and replace the system with tech CEO kings over feudal states.
i read from this that he wants US control, nothing to do with privacy
There is a lot of reflexive anti-Americanism on Hacker News. The US is generally assumed to be the bad guy.
I feel like the federal government continuously consolidating all data available under groups like DODGE or ICE or Palantir is about as anti privacy as it gets.
They do understand the tech. They understand that allowing everyone to use E2E encryption gives them less power.
I don't think it's that nefarious. I mean, for some of them it might be, but for MOST of them they see a "law & order" issue that will resonate with stupid people ("cops can't get access to terrorist data / child molester info / human trafficking communications!"), and they just run with it without regard to downstream effects.
It has always been politics, not technology. Politicians and bureaucratic always want more power, and they rarely relinquish power they gained temporarily.
It has nothing to do with their technical knowledge. It has everything to do with human nature.
If you want to push back, the law is not on your side.
We've had a serious problem with policy-making in this country for a loooooong time, stretching right back to when RIPA was drafted, nearly three decades ago.
With a few notable exceptions, the level of knowledge, expertise and understanding amongst government advisers and policy makers is abysmally low. c.f. https://jackgavigan.com/2015/11/23/how-well-advised-was-the-...
I think the ironic thing is that although everyone uses powerful technology on a practically constant basis, it is sooooo much more complicated that less and less people have even a clue. How many adults would know how to change their oil today versus back in the 70s? Changing spark plugs used to be a 30 minute task but now you have to take apart half the engine just to even gain access. Even though of us who make our living in tech are not immune. How would we verify that there isn't spyware or similar in the firmware or hardware on the computer we use daily?
I thought this too, but I think we misunderstood the extent to which various calls for censoring and regulating the internet where driven by a lack of understanding of the technology...
The scary thing about the UK regulators is that they seem to understand the stupidity of what they're doing, but believe it's worth it. You see this attitude everywhere in the UK – in our hate speech laws, our blasphemy laws, mass surveillance – the argument isn't that these things don't limit freedom and personal privacy. They'll agree that they do, their argument is that you shouldn't care.
With this encryption backdoor most wouldn't deny that it could be compromised, they just didn't think you should worry about it because they thought the benefits were worth it.
I think people on the internet in the 90s and early 00s were just weird people to be honest. We're very libertarian for whatever reason, and we wrongly assumed people our age were all as pro-freedom as us.
Part of that is US policy makers have barely changed, they are just older now. Very troubling trend that.
Policy makers change frequently and often radically. Federal lawmakers less so, but lawmakers are a small subset of policymakers, and not the ones who create international pressure; those are political appointees in the executive branch, and they change frequently.
You'd have to convince politicians they shouldn't be trying to die of old age in office before we started getting people who know tech
> before we started getting people who know tech reply
The politicians might not know tech, but the NSA, GHCQ, etc. that push for these anti-encryption laws most definitely do know technology, and is the main lobby against encryption.
It goes beyond just getting politicians that understand tech. We need politicians willing to rein in the intelligence apparatus put in safeguards, and checks and balances on their power.
I mean, yes many policymakers still struggle with the nuances of modern tech, but claiming that "the needle hasn't moved" in 25 years is an exaggeration. In the late 90s/early 2000s, encryption debates featured lawmakers who barely understood email. Since then, there are committees focused specifically on tech policy, even some lawmakers with backgrounds in CS or cybersecurity... and far more nuanced public debates about encryption, surveillance, and privacy.
I recently listened to some clips from a hearing with questions about zero-knowledge proofs, algorithmic transparency, etc...this was pretty unthinkable two decades ago. Some agencies and legislative bodies also now have technical staffers and some advisory boards with technologists. So, yeah it it slow and sometimes frustrating, but it's not static.
They understand the tech and so their advisers. You are assuming they want to do some do gooding in some sorts of naive and clumsy matter. No. They want control and they know perfectly well the implications.
I don't see why you think they don't understand the tech.
This is going to be heresy here, but honestly I think it's a reasonable position. Not one I would take, but reasonable.
For the first time in human history there can be large scale communication it is mathematically impossible for governments to have any access to. If you believe that governments are doing the job of protecting their citizens (and many do), it's entirely reasonable for them to want this type of access.
They have it with the postal service, and analogue phones and the world didn't collapse, and many criminals got caught.
But also for the first time in human history, it's possible to do large-scale surveillance without large-scale human effort. The power of the network goes both ways.
Phone wiretapping (until recently I suppose) and mail inspection required a human to take some action to listen in; you couldn't just monitor everyone's communications. Now you can.
I agree, there are many complex issues involved here. But I get annoyed at tech people (not saying you!) that it is self-evident that any kind of law enforcement methods of access is obviously wrong.
> I get annoyed at tech people (not saying you!) that it is self-evident that any kind of law enforcement methods of access is obviously wrong.
I don't think anybody is saying that the motivations are bad. We all want safety, right?
The closest thing I hear is, they feel that the cons often outweigh the pros. I think this correlates with their trust in authorities, given the countless abuses we see authorities perpetrating when granted power.
There's a reason "think of the children!" is literally a joke mocking safety-based pretexts for reductions in rights.
The problem is that digital excludes the middle.
The analogue systems had fundamental limits on how many people could be surveilled, and still we had abuses of the system. The digital system makes you choose between "surveil absolutely everyone all of the time" and "surveil nobody".
Note that you mention the postal service. Remember the Horizon Post Office scandal, where there was a huge swathe of wrongful prosecutions?
Your subtle idea that the comprehension and understanding is the shortcoming of political apparatus is overlooks the million issues as basic healthcare not being addressed. The problem is not understanding, I can assure you of that.
In the distant past technical skill and knowledge was increasing as more and more people used personal computers. Then Steve Jobs invented the smartphone. This caused the world to get dumber and dumber.
>Then Steve Jobs invented the smartphone. This caused the world to get dumber and dumber.
Preposterous. Did the invention of the calculator make people dumber? A smartphone is another tool. Not Steve Jobs's fault people use it for TikTok or gooning instead of studying programming, math, medicine or whatever. Stupid people are gonna be stupid with or without smartphones.
Plus, we already had smartphones before Jobs, they were Pal OS, Windows Mobile or Symbian based.
It’s a difference in kind I think. Creation of any type of work - art, writing, programming, modeling, deep research, etc is much more accessible on a PC than on a smartphone. Not only because of the input devices available, but also the restrictions of the platform and OS.
Maybe it wasn’t intentional, but the form factor of the modern smartphone discourages creation.
When I was a young child me and all my friends would “use the PC together” just to open MSPaint and create shitty drawings. I don’t see anything similar today.
>the form factor of the modern smartphone discourages creation
Ever take photos or videos with your phone? Is that not creation?
>When I was a young child me and all my friends would “use the PC together”
Same, but this is more "old man yells at clouds". Children today have their own way of creation, now using AI.
Sitting around in a room taking photos and videos is a lot less creative than drawing. It's possible to do strongly creative photo/video things with a phone but it's not most of the use.
If you make a list of creative activities that can be done on a computer or phone, a big majority are notably harder to do on a phone.
Imagining something that you to create is something anyone can (and does) do all the time.
Spending time learning how to actually create it, and then actually creating it is what makes someone an artist.
The children's "own way of creation", in your own words is to imagine what they want to create, and then ask something else to try doing what they want. If it's not what they want they complain and ask the system to try again.
I wouldn't be called an artist if I imagined a picture of myself riding a dragon, and then proceeded to commission a painting of that. Asking someone else to do the thing for you isn't being creative. It's being lazy. It's not making art "accessible". They couldn't do art before, and they still can't now. They just believe they can, just because they can "bark out an order at a slave".
>Spending time learning how to actually create it, and then actually creating it is what makes someone an artist.
Says who? Someone sold a white canvas with a banana taped to it, that a toddler could have done in 3 minutes. What's there to learn to do something like that?
>I wouldn't be called an artist
Pretty sure people do whatever they enjoy doing, and they don't give a f if some pretentious people call them artists or not.
This comment is a very narrow and elitist PoV, focusing on art specifically, which is a thing a lot of people would struggle to define, and also has nothing to do with the topic of using computers, since most people don't use computers for art but to make their lives easier, more efficent and more fun.
I can't draw anything worth a damn. I'm not being elitist. I'm also talking about myself.
ORG are fundraising to have a presence at the hearing: https://action.openrightsgroup.org/make-our-voice-heard-appl...
The EU has similar nefarious plans as well, under the Orwellian name "ProtectEU".
https://www.techradar.com/pro/security/the-european-commissi...
I wonder how this clash is going to turn up. I would hate this development. This proposal is worthy of the Chinese Communist Party, and I am aghast just how many member states are fine with the concept of a preemptive surveillance state and breaking privacy left and right.
Of course, that is what we get for giving Ursula von der Leyen a second term (why??) She already has a reputation from her career in German politics, having earned the nickname Zensursula (censoring Ursula).
> Of course, that is what we get for giving Ursula von der Leyen a second term (why??)
To answer your question: because the Conservatives just couldn't be arsed to put up an alternative.
UvdL is the last remnant of Merkel's era, her only qualification for such a high job was her blind loyalty to Mutti.
IIRC current Kanzler, Friedrich Merz, is not at all her friend and will complicate things for her on purpose. So we will see.
Also because the people aren't the ones doing the voting. I doubt most citizens even know who she is.
Things got so out of control because the UK doesn't have heavily muscled tech emporiums that can spend time in bed with their politicians. US does. But it's a sad world the one where citizens are so helpless against their governments and the corporations.
> But it's a sad world the one where citizens are so helpless against their governments and the corporations.
Helpless indeed - but, government still requires the consent of the governed. It's just that we are all very comfortable, with a lot to lose and easily distracted, so that consent to be governed is too easily given nowadays.
If we do anything together as a society it should be making sure to preserve E2E Encryption as it's one of the most important tools to organize a resistance should we wish to revoke our consent to be governed.
I am always surprised by just how much of the population is still swayed by the 'think of the children' arguments put forward by governements to justify certain curbing of freedoms.
Translation: there is already a backkdoor, here, look. Ah, ok, we are backing down.
Say what you will about JD Vance but he has passionately confronted the European elites on their surveillance overreach and clearly it's had an impact.
We may not like everything about the current American administration, but credit where due.
> he has passionately confronted the European elites on their surveillance overreach passionately lol hes a role player. Americans are so easily tricked by bullshit its unreal
lol
You realise its only the UK that is the surveillance nightmare here? EU has strong privacy and data protections.
Then again im probably talking to a maga republican that just regurgitates what their media tells them
If you really believe that the propaganda is working well.
I didn't, but since he made his freedom of speech complaints, I've seen some utterly horrendous overreaches from the UK government that makes it clear as day he is correct. He may be a broken clock but he is striking right this time.
>> I've seen some utterly horrendous overreaches from the UK government
This is the propaganda I'm talking about. We had a summer of race riots and people were held accountable for inciting violence. Vance doesn't like that. Meanwhile his own government is deporting people for peaceful protest, cracking down on free speech at Universities, and banning journalists that it doesn't like.
Finally people can breathe easy again and pretend a proprietary walled garden which was already part of prism over a decade ago is actually private and secure.
If the UK wants to snoop they better grovel before US feds like everybody else to get access.
Ok, as a frequent UK traveler I would prefer that the UK government has to growel at the US feet than having immediate access to all data on my iCloud.
Long way to go but let’s celebrate the win for privacy
Just wait until Vance hears about Australia's mandatory age checks to use search engines coming in in December....
As an aussie, I am about ashamed of this and looking forward to the total circus it is going to be.
Don't they want that? Judging by the Texas ID check for pornsites?
I’m by no means a Trump fan. But I thought it was negligent how the Biden administration didn’t fight for American tech companies internationally and how the prior administration was actively hostile to them.
Then people wonder why tech embraced Trump.
This is my fundamental problem with Elizabeth Warren et. al..
They act like the choices are omni-powerful US tech companies, or a plethora of small companies building utopia. They say "we need to hamstring our most successful companies to make space in the market for smaller players."
The problem is that it isn't making space for smaller players; it's making space for countries with worse perspectives on human rights to try to catch up/fill the void. The world isn't a better place if we replace Google and Meta with ByteDance and Yandex. It's not even that those are bad companies (from what I hear, they're pretty similar internally to their US counterparts); it's that they are under the jurisdiction of administrations that are hostile to human rights.
Did this approach ever actually work out in the history of humanity? Like, we're fine with massive corporations spying on us because otherwise the Chinese/Russian/Aliens might? In the name of protecting freedom, we're violating it ourselves and we brag about it?
Facebook offered its services in the EU to people without any tracking if you paid for the service. The Eu didn’t like that either.
… is there a point you’re trying to make?
> The problem is that it isn't making space for smaller players; it's making space for countries with worse perspectives on human rights to try to catch up/fill the void. The world isn't a better place if we replace Google and Meta with ByteDance and Yandex.
I mean, the foreign companies taking that space can be solved with sanctions, or digital services taxes, etc.
What would you propose? Maybe Google, Apple, Meta, etc. are the lesser of the big evils but we definitely have a monopoly problem in the US, and there is very little space for competition, which only continues to harm consumers.
Trump will do a lot more harm to US tech companies than Biden. A lot of us here in Europe are moving away from US tech, and as we are building more of our own it's very unlikely we will come back.
Right now there aren't too many EU alternatives yet which is why you don't really notice yet. But the damaged trust in the US as a 'partner' will outlive Trump for decades. As they say "trust arrives on foot and leaves on horseback".
The US was never a trusted partner, Europeans just didn’t have a choice. No one company was able to spend the amount of money required to compete with American technology, so nobody did.
Don’t anthropomorphize the lawnmower, the “friendship” is nothing more than economic interdependency. French aircraft carriers are not using Windows because they trust the US government, their diagnostic software just doesn’t work on anything else.
Maybe not fully trusted but they were certainly fairly well aligned to our interests. Until trump obviously.
Again no Trump fan. But I’m glad that Trump policies have made at least the EU not to be so dependent on the US military itself and US military contractors. There is no private company monopoly including BigTech that I can’t extricate myself away from quite easily.
It’s much harder to extricate yourself from the US influence on the world stage.
Not that I’m not seriously looking at a Plan B outside of the US after I retire. We are already planning to spend a few months a year between Costa Rica snd Panama City next year - warm, safe countries in US time zones.
That dependence on the US was by design of the US however. With all the military assistance they provided they also bought influence (which they will lose now of course). This paid itself back in many ways, like the dollar being the world reserve currency, having bases all over the world, being free to invade countries like Iraq etc.
Personally I hope the EU works more on the nuclear umbrella. It was the US that didn't really want us to have much of our own to establish dependency on them, but now that the US has become an unreliable partner we'll have to. France and perhaps the UK will have to scale theirs up. It's the only thing where we really need the US militarily, as any regular military is not sufficient to deter enemies like Russia and China, no matter how much we have.
But Big Tech is very hard to cut until the EU clouds step up a lot more. Maybe not for you yourself personally but for industry.
The EU is not going to build its own Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, AWS etc.
Anytime the lack of “influential European tech companies” come up, the best anyone can do is money losing/barely profitable Spotify.
And the data doesn’t back your idea up that Europe is moving away from any of those companies. The EU is moving its dependence away from the US military industrial complex admittedly.
I guess not no, but we don't need those, really. We definitely don't want carbon copies of those companies because they are causing a lot of what's wrong with this world. What we need is more ethical companies that understand the EU market. No paying with our data, no manipulative algorithms. We've been pushing for that for years but Trump has been the turning point, now people are really on board with the idea that leaving US services is better.
It will take time to build local alternatives but I'm sure they will come. We have time. You can see that companies like Microsoft are really shaken up when they're starting appeasement projects like those vows to actually protect our data (though those promises are weak because they remain bound to US law)
And this goes hand in hand with the defense initiatives. IT is important though to society to be considered a critical asset.
I agree that no one needs Facebook and if it disappeared off of the face of the earth, nothing of value would be lost.
And even a simplified version of AWS shouldn’t be impossible to build that’s “good enough” [1] or another search engine that’s good enough (Google) and Google search sucks these days anyway.
But Europe is not going to be able to replicate the ecosystem of Android like China did and definitely not Apple on the high end or MS for operating systems.
[1] before anyone replies that I don’t understand the complexity of AWS, I have been working with AWS technologies exclusively for over 7 years including a former 3+ year stint at AWS.
> I agree that no one needs Facebook and if it disappeared off of the face of the earth, nothing of value would be lost.
Well yes and no. Facebook, no. The concept of facebook as it was when it was first released was an interesting one to me. Staying in touch with your friends, I've lived in several countries so I have friends all over the world. This is nice. However they perverted it when they dropped the old timeline and moved to the algorithmic feed. It became useless to me then.
I do see a benefit to facebook-like services though, just ethical ones.
But what I do like about facebook, or rather meta now, is the investment they have done in VR. It's still full of data collection I'm sure, but to me VR is a very interesting tech and it really needed that to get off the ground. Right now it's not really moving along because "AI" stole all the hype limelight but it will come again, just like AI has had some false starts itself.
Meta subsidizes a very large proportion of the world’s communication (in the form of Whatsapp/Instagram/Facebook).
Even if 98% of it is unnecessary garbage, the functionality for that last 2% has provided a ton of utility to billions of people.
Except they make money so they don't subsidise it. They get paid for it but through our data. Which is what we don't want here in Europe anyway.
Subsidy in this context was meant to convey that all the bandwidth and infrastructure that allows for global communication for billions of people is paid for by the advertising Meta sells, money that obviously disappears if Meta disappears.
That doesn't mean we won't have money to pay for it though. All that advertiser money comes from the consumer too. Companies pay it to sell things, and to make a profit they factor it into the price. We're paying for it, we just don't pay Meta directly.
If meta would disappear we would either buy less and have more money to pay for communication (and doing more towards saving the planet as well!). We'd probably choose things to buy more on actual need and quality rather than marketing BS.
With RCS being widely adopted even by Apple, do you really need WhatsApp anymore?
What I am wondering is if the complexity of AWS is required for 99 percentile. There are a lot of niche services and duplicated ones on AWS and a targeted replacement for the most popular ones would be enough for most.
You only require AWS if you build something to run on AWS. That's the thing. You can easily run it on something else, just build it for that specifically. Now, AWS-style services have become somewhat of an industry standard (e.g. S3 offered by countless operators). But still, I think offering AWS style services is a weakness because you can never become better than the original.
And cloud is only really cost-effective when it comes to startups that have not much cash flow but expect/hope to explode rapidly by going viral. Cloud gives them that kind of infinite scaling and the ability to pay as they go (the uptick in clients will pay for the increased hosting when they do make it).
In Europe this kind of business model is very rare though. We don't just spin stuff up like a weather balloon and hope it floats.
Netflix as the canonical example would beg to differ as would Apple who hosts plenty of its services between AWS, GCP and I believe Azure. I only know first hand about AWS since Apple talked about it during ReInvent.
There are plenty of large private corporations and governments who host on AWS. Maybe they didn’t do it naively?
Netflix mainly runs from caching boxes at ISPs though. Most of their content comes from there. AWS is way too expensive to serve all that content from.
I see a lot of dumb implementations. At work we're picking up all our physical servers and moving them to AWS compute boxes that run 24/7. Purely statically, just because our idiot CIO wants to be a "cloud-driven company" so he can spout the buzzwords. We're spending a lot more money to get the same only on someone else's computers and get none of the actual benefits that cloud can offer.
Yes. But Netflix is by far AWS’s largest customer. The distribution happens on caching boxes. But there is a lot of processing that happens on AWS. You can look at any of the numerous reinvent videos or even Netflix’s own blog.
Just because your company has a brain dead lift and shift implementation (don’t do that), doesn’t mean every company does.
As a former employee of AWS ProServe (Amazon’s internal cloud consulting department - full time direct hire employee) and now and outside consultant, I’ve seen and been involved in a lot of large scale implementations.
I have no love lost for AWS the company (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44607821) , but let’s not pretend it’s a bunch of startups and naive enterprise corporations that don’t know tech.
Joel Spolsky (founder of StackOverflow) talked about this almost 25 years ago.
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/03/23/strategy-letter-iv...
Everyone needs a different 90%.
I’m not trying to wear “I worked at AWS” on my chest like a 22 year old posting on Blind. But my experience working at AWS ProServe before working at 3rd partner consulting company I’ve seen a lot of different implementations even though my focus was on cloud native applications.
These are all of AWS’s named specialties.
https://aws.amazon.com/professional-services/
Large companies aren’t going to go to a smaller provider. Yes I know about “hybrid cloud”. But modt companies don’t want to go that.
> A lot of us here in Europe are moving away from US tech
Are we? My impression is the other way around so could you clarify what are we building that is going to move away from US tech?
Just seems very unrealistic wishful thinking that Europe would suddenly become good at these kinds of software after spending the last few decades being bad at it.
It's a lot easier now because there's a huge demand all of a sudden for local services.
Previously it was hard to compete with the US because the lack of regulation there and investors in the EU having more expectations rather than just throwing money at the wall and hoping it sticks.
But with the exploitative business models like Google's consumer tracking and now with Trump and his trade wars the US is no longer viewed as a friend or a country to look up to. I think it will only increase the EU's push for more privacy and ethical business models.
There's a big grassroots movement like "BuyFromEU" to cut US products and services out of our lives. I think that trade balance is only going to get worse. And really it was actually not bad at all, the problem is that Trump was only counting products not services when looking at the trade balance. I guess because his voters are primarily blue collar workers.
After the local EU services/products all have Brussels Mandated encryption back-doors and permit free decrypting of your private data, I will bet there will be a surge back to non-EU services.
https://www.bankinfosecurity.com/eu-pushes-for-backdoors-in-...
Yes, this is a big worry indeed, though not really something the US doesn't have (but they are more secretive about it). Snowden made that very clear. We just have more government transparency here.
I mean a lot of EU would prefer EU backed backdoor to US backed backdoor. EU backed backdoor still sucks but I don't get this argument
There is no such thing as an “EU backdoor”. Once you have any kind of backdoor it will be exploited by spy agencies worldwide through hacks
You think that the EU, which is also pushing for a backdoor just like the UK, is somehow actually against tracking and data collection? You gotta pick one or the other.
This is not the same thing. They trust themselves to track and monitor us, but not commercial parties.
I of course trust neither, but I do have to say they are doing good stuff limiting bad actors like Google and Microsoft. I just wish they would do more (e.g. ban third party cookies and tracking outright rather than forcing us to choose every time).
> It's a lot easier now because there's a huge demand all of a sudden for local services.
Talk is cheap. People say they want local services up to the point someone offers local services and no one will buy them because they are not the same as what "BigTech" offers.
I live in the EU and never heard about BuyFromEU.
Too many people here going on about UK politicians which, while problematic, seem mostly powerless in the face of a completely toxic department in the Home Office.
This sort of shit is pure Home Office authoritarian bullshit and the culture there is such that it perpetuates. They seem to be particularly skilled in getting MPs to side with their world view, but it is the Home Office leading this, not the MPs.
See the proscription of Palestine Action for a textbook example of Home Office bullshit.
After Citizenfour and Lavabit I always assume the “backing down” publicity means they have secured the access.
"Last month, Meta-owned WhatsApp said it would join Apple’s legal challenge, in a rare collaboration between the Silicon Valley rivals".
Apple makes home computers, mobile devices, AV equipment and productivity/multimedia software.
Meta makes social media platforms, and vr headsets. What exactly makes them "rivals"? WhatsApp vs iMessage? They're two big companies in the same sector, sure, but do they really compete against each other in a major way?
Ad networks, Apple recently launched it own smaller one and nerfed Meta's data collection ability.
This is amazing news
UK does not want to pay for US backdoor access?
Paid backdoor access is kinda risky though, make sure to do it safely!
ha should have stayed in the EU if you wanted that kind of negotiating leverage with the US
now sod off, as they might say
good define
What could go wrong?
The UK is the same country that arrests 12,000 people a year for posting online.
> Now every force in the country has a team sifting through people’s posts trying to determine what crosses an undefined threshold. “It is a complete nightmare,” one officer admits
Britain’s police are restricting speech in worrying ways https://www.economist.com/britain/2025/05/15/britains-police... From The Economist
[citation needed], your Economist article [0] quotes 30 a day (which would be <11k a year) but muddies the water pretty significantly:
> Under these laws, British police arrest more than 30 people a day for online posts, double the rate in 2017. Some are serious offenders, such as stalkers.
How many of those 30 were for "online posts" (and of which nature - Lucy Connolly is a favourite example cited by the likes of Vance, but she was arrested for trying to stir up racial tension when there were already race riots going on)? Who can tell, because the article didn't seem to bother asking.
0: For anyone curious, https://archive.ph/vaCkJ#selection-1287.0-1298.0
> How many of those 30 were for "online posts" (and of which nature - Lucy Connolly is a favourite example cited by the likes of Vance, but she was arrested for trying to stir up racial tension when there were already race riots going on)? Who can tell, because the article didn't seem to bother asking.
I googled Lucy Connolly out of curiosity. It indeed appears that she got 31 month of jail for a single tweet? You don't think this counts as "arrested for online posts"?
> You don't think this counts as "arrested for online posts"?
You've definitely missed some context. For example, and fairly significantly:
> Connolly previously admitted intending to stir up racial hatred.
If you plead guilty to a charge, there's not much defense left.
The offence she admitted to doesn't even take account of whether it's committed online - it's law that was passed in 1986. An aggravating factor that led to the sentence she got was that she had in fact posted multiple times in the same sort of way.
Details of her appealing the sentence as excessive, rejected by the appeals court https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/Lucy-Con...
So the context: she posted similar things online multiple times, she pleaded guilty, and the law in question can apply to offline activity as well -- all right, but all this still literally translates into "arrested for online posts".
She didn't throw rocks, she didn't set things on fire, she didn't stab anyone -- it was her speech that got her a multi-year jail term.
This alone makes free speech proponents upset, regardless of whether there were riots ongoing or not, or whether they agree or disagree with her political position.
I wasn't saying the context I gave was an exhaustive list, I was suggesting that having Googled her name and maybe skimmed a couple of news articles, you might need to do some more reading before forming too much of an opinion.
> She didn't throw rocks, she didn't set things on fire, she didn't stab anyone -- it was her speech that got her a multi-year jail term.
Your contention seems to be that incitement shouldn't be an offence?
That's at odds with legal systems all over the world, including the US, where Brandenburg v Ohio [0] holds that if inflammatory speech is "directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action" that is an exception to the First Amendment and can be prosecuted, which seems to be at odds with "regardless of whether there were riots ongoing or not".
The original point of my first post in this thread was that lumping together arrests for stalking, incitement to violence and other forms of harassment to produce a big scary number makes the argument seem utterly dishonest. The fact that so many "free speech proponents" fixate on one example when, if the stated number is true, there should be thousands of examples every year is a good demonstration of that.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandenburg_v._Ohio
> That's at odds with legal systems all over the world, including the US
Not true. The US has a much higher bar for prosecuting speech than the UK.
Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969) - 395 U.S. 444
- https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/107965/brandenburg-v-o...
- Speech must be "directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action"
- AND "likely to incite or produce such action"
- General statements like "burn them all" typically fail both prongs
The "imminent" requirement is key. Connolly's Facebook post lacked:
- Specific targets or locations
- Timeframe for action
- Direct instructions to specific individuals
- Any indication people were prepared to act on her words immediately
Here are cases with far more explicit threats that were protected:
United States v. Bagdasarian (2009)
- https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/221261/united-states-v...
- Citation: 652 F.3d 1113 (9th Cir. 2011)
- Posted that Obama "will have a 50 cal in the head" with racial slurs
- Result: Conviction reversed as crude political statement, not true threat
United States v. Turner (2013)
- https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/904120/united-states-v...
- Citation: 720 F.3d 411 (2d Cir. 2013)
- Posted that three federal judges "deserve to die" with their photos and addresses
- Result: Conviction overturned as protected political hyperbole
Connolly's "set fire to all the hotels" would likely be viewed as angry hyperbole in the United States, not meeting Brandenburg's strict standard.
The distinction: The US prosecutes actual incitement (directing a mob to attack a building RIGHT NOW). The UK prosecutes offensive speech that merely might inspire someone, somewhere, someday. Your Brandenburg citation actually proves this difference rather than refutes it.
You want thousands of examples? Check Twitter during any US political crisis - they're not prosecuted precisely because Brandenburg protects them.
Point taken, but incitement is still an offence in other countries. That the US has specific, and particularly permissive, laws around what constitutes speech is neither here nor there.
> You want thousands of examples?
Of people people prosecuted for innocuous speech in the UK, the original claim in this thread. Brandenburg doesn't apply there.
I misunderstood what you were trying to imply but still think your premise is mistaken. My reply is merely directed at anyone implying the US's free speech-laws are somehow comparable to the authoritarian anti-free-speech laws the UK has.
Do expand on that point then.
Edit: If I remove the reference to Brandenburg, I'm not sure my point substantially changes:
Incitement is an offence in the UK and also in other countries. You can argue whether that should be the case or not but that's completely orthogonal.
Gathering a whole lot of offenses which happened to include online activity to produce a big number of people who you can claim were prosecuted for something that you can claim is as innocuous as "online posts" is dishonest.
You're playing a shell game with definitions to justify authoritarian speech laws.
> lumping together arrests for stalking, incitement to violence and other forms of harassment to produce a big scary number
But that's exactly the problem - the UK defines "incitement" and "harassment" so broadly that ordinary political speech becomes criminal:
UK "Harassment" includes:
- Misgendering someone online
- Posting offensive jokes
- Retweeting protest footage
- Criticizing immigration policy "grossly"
UK "Incitement" includes:
- Lucy Connolly's Facebook post (31 months)
- Jordan Parlour's "every man and their dog should smash [hotel] up" (20 months)
- Tyler Kay's "set fire to all the hotels" retweet (38 months)
NONE of these would meet Brandenburg's standard in the US. They lack:
- Directed at specific individuals
- Imminent timeframe
- Likelihood of producing immediate action
> if the stated number is true, there should be thousands of examples every year
There ARE thousands. In 2023:
- 3,537 arrested for online speech
- 1,991 convicted under Section 127 Communications Act
- Hundreds more under Public Order Act
You don't hear about most because "UK citizen arrested for offensive tweet" stopped being newsworthy years ago.
You're using the word "incitement" to equate UK thought policing with legitimate US restrictions on speech that creates immediate danger. That's like defending China's censorship because "every country bans fraud."
The definitions matter. The UK criminalizes hurt feelings. The US criminalizes immediate threats to public safety.
> There ARE thousands.
And here you're getting in on the dishonesty.
How many of those were examples of "hurt feelings" and not "put a whole lot of foreigners at risk of their lives" or any of the other classes of "online posts"? We don't know because in their rush to say "the UK's arresting 30 people a day for posting things online", the Economist didn't bother breaking that down.
> NONE of these would meet Brandenburg's standard in the US.
None of them happened in the US so that's irrelevant. My misunderstanding of the precedent around incitement isn't central to my point.
'We don't arrest people for speech, we arrest them for crimes we've defined as speech' is not the defense you think it is.
The USA doesn't arrest people for speech, but for crimes it's defined as speech, right?
The US has about the most extremist speech laws on the planet. They are a significant outlier, and shouldn't be used as a benchmark.
> it was her speech that got her a multi-year jail term.
Are we really going to have to have the "shouting fire in a crowded theatre" conversation?
I think there is some nuance to the conversation about this woman - but you are avoiding it with incredible agility.
I guess no one ever claimed authoritarianism was imposed on the British unwillingly. Seems to have lots of defenders.
Out of interest, which country are you writing that from?
If I post "I'm going to kill the president, at $location tomorrow at $time" and I get arrested, was I arrested for "an online post", or was I arrested for "threatening to assassinate the president"?
Both are technically correct. People who want to threaten to assassinate the president more often will call it "arrested for an online post". People who think assassination threats are bad and think it should happen less often call it "arrested for threatening assassination". The former group are currently much louder and their propaganda has worked.
The fact it was a "single tweet" is completely irrelevant. It's the content of the tweet which is relevant.
Ridiculous thing to say when any number north of 0 is too many. But go ahead, muddy an otherwise extraordinarily simple argument.
Muddying the "simple argument" would be lumping stalkers in with people inciting violence against foreigners and posting nasty comments about the Prime Minister, to make some kind of point about the police. That would be ridiculous.
Stalking: Already a Crime
Inciting Violence: Already a Crime
Posting nasty comments: Not a crime.
Glad I could clear things up for you.
Yet implying people are being arrested for the latter, while showing examples of the first two. Clear as mud.
It's slightly more nuanced. Attacking people for protected characteristics such as race, religion, disability, gender, sexuality, is also an offence.
You can be a cunt all you want, just make sure you're being nasty about them as a person not their religion or race or whatever group you might feel they belong to
All cases I've seen have been cut and dry in this regard. Racist or homophobic usually.
Indeed, I didn't mean to imply those three were the only categories of things within "online posts"! Rather, that it's disingenous to lump all of that under one umbrella and suggest great swathes of people are being arrested for a tweet.
I think Connelly was sentenced with inciting violence, rather than nasty comments.
The medium she used to incite violence was a comment on a website. But she still incited violence, and was charged accordingly.
Except, in some countries, it is a crime. Why do you think it's not one? Are you familiar with UK law?
In Germany there are even stricter laws. Insulting someone is a crime, even if the things you say are factually true.
And then you have repressive dictatorships, like the UAE, USA and China, where you can't disagree with the government on anything. It's definitely a crime there, to say the president looks like Winnie the Pooh.
I am familiar with the UK law, and it has been a crime for decades.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44641764
I am sorry to disappoint you, but posting nasty comments is a crime in the UK under the 2003 Communications Act, which means it has been a crime for decades.
https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2003/21/section/127Online Communication Offence Arrests Volume 847: debated on Thursday 17 July 2025
> The tendency to police—literally—what people are saying has been encouraged and enabled by not just this Government but their predecessors. The Malicious Communications Act 1988 and the Communications Act 2003, specifically Sections 1 and 127, give the police the power to arrest individuals for what they say online. On average, 30 people are arrested daily. In 2014, under the coalition Government, something called non-crime hate incidents were introduced—words uttered that are not yet criminal in themselves but which the police should officially record none the less and hold against people. Since 2014, more than 133,000 such incidents have been recorded; that is more than 13,000 each year. Some of those who have had their names recorded in police files are children whose words were taken down when they were below the age of criminal responsibility and may be held against them for the rest of their lives. The innocence of youth has been replaced with the presumption of guilt. https://hansard.parliament.uk/lords/2025-07-17/debates/F807C...
Fortunately in the UK it is illegal to lie on the internet...
And I have mentioned the 2003 Communications Act.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44641764
12k a year?!? That is a staggering number. I wonder what the stats were in East Germany (though they may have had harsher punishments.. that can be ratcheted up later though once the system is in place)
It's mostly far-right shit-stirring because it's a much broader set of crimes than you are being led to believe. It's basically every possible crime "by communication":
"A spokeswoman for Leicestershire police said crimes under Section 127 and Section 1 include “any form of communication” such as phone calls, letters, emails and hoax calls to emergency services."
I expect it's mostly domestic abuse cases because what was once screamed through a closed door is now messaged online.
When a family member starts threatening others, an arrest is probably the necessary intervention to prevent actual violence. It's a similar story in cases like e.g. community racial tensions and gang violence. Once the threats are happening online, real violence is imminent and action warranted.
Per gpt: Estimates vary, but roughly 250,000–300,000 people were imprisoned for political reasons over the GDR’s 41-year existence—an average of ~6,000–7,000 annually.
Just wow. I wonder if we will study this in history textbooks about downfall of UK
As a resident of the UK I can safely say, no we will not, as we are categorically not arresting 12K people a year for simply posting things online.
I would be more likely to include some sections about the current US administration though.
To ask His Majesty’s Government what estimate they have made of the number of people arrested daily for non-threatening, online communication offences, and what assessment they have made of the implications of such arrests for freedom of speech.
https://hansard.parliament.uk/lords/2025-07-17/debates/F807C...
The population of East Germany in 1990 was 16 million, while the population of the UK today is over 4 times larger at 68 million.
(I still don't think the UK should jail people for being hateful online, though.)
It depends what you count as political reasons. Plausible bullshit could be generated to support the idea that arrest for any particular crime is political, or just as easily, to oppose that idea.
I draw the bar for "political arrest" at somewhere like "arrested for opposing the incumbent in an election". I don't think "arrested for saying it's time to gas the muslims" - which is the sort of thing happening in the UK and getting counted in these numbers - should be called "political arrest". That's just called committing a crime. That would only become a "political arrest" if gassing the muslims was a politically acceptable viewpoint, equal in value to not gassing them.
East Germany fell in 1990 - I doubt there were even 12,000 people online in East Germany at that point in time.
Nobody was online. TLD .dd was registered but no domains registered. Two universities had a small intranet.
> 12k a year?!? That is a staggering number.
(i think OP might be speedrunning a "what opinions, mfer?" goose meme thing. i bet the reason is "for posting right-wing nationalistic garbage likely to incite hatred", or similar)
Is it surprising that 12,000 out of 60,000,000 post illegal things like calls for violence (burn migrants to death, etc) per year?
Reminder that incitement is a crime in the USA too and there's nothing in the constitution that says it's okay just because it's on twitter not irl.
So far every story ive seen about arrest has been pretty cut and dry, they were blatantly hitler level racist, homophobic, or calling for others to attack people for their protected characteristics (eg race or sex).
> The UK is the same country that arrests 12,000 people a year for posting online.
I though it could not be true, but actually it is...WTF?
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/E-10-2025-0022...
Always good to peel away at least the surface layer ... and ideally more ...
https://archive.ph/xBtFI#selection-3249.145-3249.167
A spokeswoman for Leicestershire police said crimes under Section 127 and Section 1 include “any form of communication” such as phone calls, letters, emails and hoax calls to emergency services. “They may also be serious domestic abuse-related crimes. Our staff must assess all of the information to determine if the threshold to record a crime has been met. “Where a malicious communications offence is believed to have taken place, appropriate action will be taken. Our staff must consider whether the communication may be an expression which would be considered to be freedom of speech. While it may be unacceptable to be rude or offensive it is not unlawful — unless the communication is ‘grossly offensive’.
In Europe we don't value free speech as high as the US.
There is "forbidden speech" (around lying about Holocaust related topics and insulting people online) and I think it's a good thing in total. You spew out the worst of the worst on the internet you should be able to be held accountable
US has plenty of arrests for terroristic threats and similar. Many of these are online now. 12k arrests per year related to online posts doesn't sound all that high.
Making terrorist threats are different than insulting some's religion, complaining about illegal immigrant crimes or shitting on politicians online. It's disingenuous to argue they're in the same ballpark that EU and US speech is similarly policed because it's not.
Not terrorist threats - terroristic threats. This includes anything that someone might think is threatening. Do you have examples of non-threatening language resulting in arrest in the UK?
>Not terrorist threats - terroristic threats. This includes anything that someone might think is threatening
WAHAT?! Are we making up new terms for "someone offended me online and since I feel threatened I call it terroristic"?
Actual threats are already legally defined and punished. So is terrorism.
So it's either terrorism or it's not, and it's either a threat or it's not.
On the one hand, freedom of speech is great. On the other hand, you have whatever the fuck is going on in America these days, and that is not great.
So... I dunno, neither option is good.
there was twitter cancelling before, and people that aren't fine with America now were fine back then
that's normal
We need to apply sanctions, and end all intelligence sharing with the UK until they stop this nonsense.
How do you expect to spy on US citizens if you don't get the five eyes to help out?
Or we need to do a tiny bit more research before jumping to conclusions.
UK law in this regard is far from perfect but this thread is mainly uninformed knee-jerking.
I think Trump has guaranteed that European countries have ended all real intelligence sharing pretty much unilaterally.
I would bet the US arrests a similar number for online posts. A common one that comes up over here is a kid posting a picture at a shooting range, without any threat, and the police questioning/arresting the kid and/or parents. Same thing for kids talking about a video game and stuff.
Edit: why disagree?
tl,dr: "Vance argued that free speech and democracy were threatened by European elites."
edit: Don't shoot the messenger.
To be clear in this case, this is not Europe or the EU, its solely the UK government wanting a backdoor for themselves.
To be clear, the EU is also pushing for encryption and hardware backdoors.
To be clear US does not need to push for hardware backdoors and more because they already got them.
Very much a matter of defining 'themselves'. Our data in their hands. How do we know these people aren't the same incompetents who emailed a spreadsheet containing the personal information of nearly 19,000 Afghan asylum applicants (who had risked their lives to help the Brits) to someone outside the Ministry of Defense.
The government says the individual thought they were sending a list of about 150 names, not the whole set.
Meanwhile the Taliban have been taking revenge: https://pressway.org.uk/news/300408-hunt_for_tranclators_tal...
> A spreadsheet containing the personal information of about 18,700 Afghans and their relatives – a total of about 33,000 people – was accidentally forwarded to the wrong recipients by email in February 2022, Healey told lawmakers in the House of Commons.
This is why authorization matters. Don't send the spreadsheet; send a link to it, because e-mail doesn't implement authorization. Then you can revoke access at any time, and even prevent accidents by setting up access rules and monitoring at the org level.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/7/17/how-were-identities...
To be clear in this case, the UK is a country in north-western Europe.
Last I checked the UK was in Europe and what you are replying to only mentions Europe, not the EU.
Regardless, the EU is also pushing for the same stuff.
Of course because the UK isn't even in the EU anymore. They're no longer any part of EU policy.
Still European though.
Geographically, yes. But they've made it clear they don't want anything to do with us. Also, the 3-year period after brexit with all the whining about their 'deal' (knowing that what they wanted was legally impossible) was so annoying I'm kinda done with them. Too much drama for too long.
So I've stopped buying UK products and services (eg raspberry pi) and don't consider traveling there anymore. Just like I'm doing now with the US although the latter is more difficult to do.
In the context of so-called "European elites threatening freedom and democracy", the UK is very much included in that category, as this story demonstrated.
On the other point, while you can of course boycott anything for whatever reasons you want for as long as you want, you do realise that the UK has a different government now. One that opposed Brexit, and has already signed agreements for closer cooperation with the EU. I still boycott Dyson because of his support for Brexit, but boycotting an entire country because of the actions of a former government that is now in opposition seems a bit pointless.
I know, but I don't think labour is substantially different. They're still pushing for extreme privacy invasive measures (the latest one was only withdrawn due to pressure from the US), they recently introduced mandatory visas for EU visitors.
Like I said elsewhere, it's like with the US, the trust is just gone. Besides, the tories will come back sooner or later (or worse, reform UK). They're not gone.
I'm not going to switch back and forth. Maybe if they play nice for a decade or so I'll change my mind.
I think from the point of view of the US and elsewhere, the UK is in Europe and is European. They are aware they are not in the EU, but that doesn't matter as it's inappropriate to make EU synonymous with Europe. (The distinction is much like North America vs USA; if you said the former you definitely don't mean _just_ the latter).
Broken clock is right twice a day.
This tracks. Vance is probably a potential supporter of strong crypto insofar as it’s demanded of him by the VC class.
The specified policy aside, it’s kind of sad to see - the UK after Brexit just doesn’t carry the same weight. It would’ve been a different story if the UK as part of the EU were moving forward with a piece of legislation.
I’m struggling to square Vance and the administration’s position here with the fact that the US IC uses GCHQ to collect on US persons since they’re not allowed to do so directly. Why wouldn’t they want it to be easier for NSA to spy on Americans?
They probably already have a backdoor, and making one known and easy to access by UK provides an opening for other adversaries to spy on American iPhones.
Thanks, that makes sense.
What this type of news shows is that you really can't trust any government or company with your data. So don't give them any data -- only store data on your own hardware and set up your own servers if you really need a "cloud" for your data.
> US Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard has also suggested the order would be an “egregious violation” of Americans’ privacy
This is extremely ironic (“Americans’ privacy” basically does not exist), but I won't look a gift horse in the mouth.
The attack on privacy does kind of make sense when your remember that it is a freaking monarchy with all the inhabitants being subjects.
Probably well deserved to them if it was not contagious in Europe at the moment.
That being said, the crazy thing about this law and the other ones similar is this:
They always justify everything saying that real world "procedures" should apply to the digital world. But, in most occidental countries, no one is allowed to search your home without you to be aware of it and present if you are capable to do so. Still, strangely, for digital data, the norm is that your data can be raped in your back, without you being aware about it or even in the capacity to challenge that.I really find that stunning that it is so widely accepted. The former german Stasi would probably have been proud of all the parlementaries in US, UK and Europe that allowed such things.
> The attack on privacy does kind of make sense when your remember that it is a freaking monarchy with all the inhabitants being subjects.
That has absolutely nothing to do with it. This was an act of parliament spearheaded by the house of commons which is entirely democratically elected. The UK has no one but themselves to blame for this.