Welcome on the world stage. There is not any actor here that can't be framed hostile, it's all about how the scene highlight into nice or ugly way.

Hope you'll enjoy the play.

Please provide us with:

As many personal details as possible

Yeah so that they can MITM it.

The UK is just saying the quiet part out loud. If you look at the EARN IT Act in the US or the "Chat Control" proposals in the EU, then the trajectory is identical. The UK is providing the "democratic" precedent that the rest of the Five Eyes will use as leverage. If you think the US isn't eyeing the Online Safety Act as a convenient trial run for overt or covert domestic policy, I’ve got a bridge to sell you.

EDIT: You added a lot more after I replied to your post.

Westerners never had free speech in the first place. We are free to fight amongst one another, but if we ever act in a manner that endangers the Power that be, you don't live very long.

Actually it opens them up to being phished by the government. There have been several high profile cases where because of searching for custom communication services, groups ended up being vulnerable.

It's simpler than that. OSS strong encryption tools are available than anyone can run on the command line to encrypt their messages, which can then just go as attachments via email, whatsapp, etc. No new developers required. And as you say, the general public have to suffer with weak encryption while those who really want to encrypt do so regardless.

> quickly devolving into an oversurveilled state

The UK has been heavily surveilled for several decades, if anything the pace has slowed especially in comparison to the modern US network of CCTV cameras on every doorstep available to the state and "private" survillence apparatus that has taken over.

Don't ask them on the internet because they'll be put in prison if they complain online!!!

There are a bunch of things the public doesn't seem to care about until it is too late.

Remember, remember, the fifth of November…

1984 is used as a manual

Intentions of votes for Labour went from 34% in 2019 to 17% or something now. While Reform UK is gaining voters left and right.

But it seems mostly due to a revolt against the "two tier Kharmer" policy of the current government: where normal people are jailed for online posts while others are free to break a female policer's nose at the airport and then be let to walk free by the judge and while others also get to rape hundreds of girls on an industrial scale and enjoy a nation-wide cover-up attempt (thankfully foiled) by the state...

It's always been like this. From the official secrets act where they could jail you just for revealing the date of the office Christmas party to D notices suppressing newspapers from publish stories the government thought were to sensitive. MI5 and MI6 acting totally without accountability, with the government not even acknowledging their existence. If anything, things have started to get more transparent now, with a freedom of information act, actual oversight and accountability for the intelligence services and less government. But the default position of the UK government has always been secrecy and the right to do what they want to protect the country.

Devolving? Already there. Mostly the public are ok with it because they're ignorant of the facts, believing whatever they read on Facebook, see on GB news[1], etc. and are happy with "if you've done nothing wrong, you've nothing to be afraid of?"[0]

By the time the leopards eat their faces, it's too late.

[0] Much like the people who voted for Trump and are now slated for deportation because 15 years ago they cashed a check that bounced, etc.

[1] Also the BBC has some blame here because if they weren't platforming Farage for years when it was unnecessary, it's conceivable that he wouldn't/couldn't have forced first the Tories and now Labour into their hard-right turns and we'd all be better off.

One of the original motivations for the First Amendment was the UK's surveillance and censorship of American mail; the UK has been a surveillance state for a very long time.

If anyone wants an honest answer to that question it is fairly simple. Polling has suggested - very consistently and over a long period of time - that a majority of the British public (though often a fairly slim majority) tend to support authoritarian interventions by our governments in the name of protecting the public. Most of the time our governments and government agencies do appear to use such powers responsibly and so they tend to maintain that public trust. There has always been a significant minority who were more cautious on civil liberties grounds and there has always been an issue that the supportive majority aren't always very well informed about what could happen if the laws were applied more strongly in practice.

As a personal observation - I think this might start to change over the next few years and the current positions of MPs and government might start to look very out of touch. We are seeing the fall of our long-standing "big" political parties and the rise of a very right wing populist party that is increasingly looking like it might actually win significant power at the next general election. I think awareness of the potential for abuse by the next people to run the government and agencies is growing among the general public. Whether it grows enough to stop some of these policies from becoming law in the near future is a different question of course.

The Brits are sheeple and too cowardly to push back. They are the ultimate nanny state.

> Old farts making laws about things they know nothing about.

Who's going to stop them?

baking sites, the most secure source of cookies

>>> Old farts making laws about things they know nothing about.

We should probably stop saying and believing that. This is basically the UK government making a deal to the developers they cannot refuse: cooperate (install backdoors) or get prosecuted. The French tried to do something similar not so long ago.

A decade ago politicians genuinely didn’t know much about the internet so most of the laws were terribly ill informed good ideas. The new sweep of internet legislation like chat control, age verification and banning of vpns are much more dangerous because those pushing know exactly what they are doing.

It sounds like the KC appointed to review it is doing his job, at least.

> This has got to stop. If you want to stop criminals, then focus on their illegal activites, not the streets they walk on.

That would be against everything european governments stand for.

Once again, the transparency we do have in the UK is weaponised against it.

You see this with "OMG knife-crime is out of control in London" type stories that the US love to run.

It's because we were :

  1. a decade or more ahead of the rest of the world in actually collecting knife-crime stats
  2. Include in those stats people who were simply carrying the kind of knife that wouldn't even get you noticed elsewhere, let alone recorded in the stats.

The actual rate of stabbings per capita is higher in the USA than the UK.

And that's even without considering that the weapon of choice in the USA is the firearm.

But you wouldn't beleive it from the headlines.

Back to this story, here we have legislators doing their job of scrutinising, and their open scrutiny is held up against the country.

We could instead have a system where people vote on bills without knowing their contents like the US does.

Yes! The headline here is almost reversing the sense of what is being reported.

This is the independent reviewer doing his job and pointing out how the legislation under review could have consequences we might not like.

It's not a government spokesperson supporting or endorsing those consequences.

the problem with current government protecting its citizens by collecting their private communications is the next government having access to this sensitive data.

>Btw. The https communication comparison does not hold, there is always a third party that can read what you say. E2E chats are effectively communication where evidence is instantly destroyed.

If I use a third party CA this is correct. But what third party can read communications over HTTPS between a client and a server I control with a self signed SSL cert?