Surveillance Is Not Safety: A statement on the UK's latest threat to privacy [pdf]

I sometimes wonder whether the people in the tech industry who worked on things like secure boot, attestation, and DRM saw this as the inevitability open source advocates always saw it as.

Did they think, as they worked to transfer final say from users to corporations, by technical means, that politicians couldn't transfer that control to themselves by political means?

Did they think they could lock things down to extract their 30% app store fee while enforcing rules through app review (and demonstrating censorship of sites like Tumblr) that politicians wouldn't want that same rule-setting, censoring power?

Did they think their employers were going to prevent that transfer, that the trillion-dollar companies would become some sort of Che Guevara style insurgents, running a guerrilla campaign to overthrow the very system that made them trillion-dollar companies?

So, in this order:

1. You need a camera on your computer to allow a third party to verify your age before viewing adult content

2. It applies to social media too

3. It applies to your operating system too

4. Unless you age verify, the law demands your computer must be powerful enough to run an AI, or be internet-equipped and send your private photos to a third party, to detect and prohibit nudity. It must be capable of running in real-time, presumably, to work on Facetime calls and such.

Next step, certainly to outlaw most operating systems and older devices. Excellent news for Google, Apple, and Microsoft, bad for Linux and alternative operating systems. Remember when schools handed out Raspberry Pis?

Edit: And they are asking for this to be implemented for free in three months, because nobody knows how software engineering works. Great job

Signal should come out swinging. Here's a pitch.

The Government is going to put a snitch on every phone, tape every bedroom, and listen in every evening on every home. Every doctor's visit. Every therapy session. Every pub. Every street. Every store.

When the snitches phone home, what you type to your lover may get the cops sent to your home.

Artificial stasi in every desktop, laptop, tablet, camera, and phone. Around every corner. In every living room. No one will be exempt from their gaze.

Are you ready for your vacuum cleaner to phone home?

The ratchet ratcheting: client side scanning, then remote attestation to ensure client side scanning works, digital identity verification, etc etc.

I didn’t mind Starmer but this is finally giving me the leg up onto the anti-Starmer bandwagon.

What a dreadful legacy to leave - a sad attempt to get the biggest possible bang for the smallest possible buck. Also, 3 months? Perhaps that is as long as he expects to be pm.

How long until we find out the politicians have written in an exemption for themselves and the security apparatus? I hope my pessimism is unwarranted in this case, but it certainly isn't unfounded.

Surveillance is not education, and it is education that will reap long term improvement.

Education is hard but effective whilst surveillance is easy and ineffective. Guess which option politicians take?

Kudos to signal for coming out on side with this, and quickly. I only hope that this stance is quickly picked up as a counterpoint to the ever-so-strong narrative that more hastily concocted sledge-hammer legislation is the best step forward.

This step forward is instead of building understanding of, and solutions for, the erosion of communities, trust and empathy for others. I feel these things might (MIGHT!) be overlooked symptoms of poor investment, policies and governance for healthy society. Crikey, perhaps I shouldn't try and call that into account, it sounds like I might be cynical about politics. Oh dear...

Signal refuses to answer: Why won't they release/open source all of their backend infra automation scripts/tools/etc...

There's no reasonable reason why a 501(c)(3) won't put this out there to make sure there's redundancy so we could built an alternate network if they're compromised by some gag order.

> Surveillance Is Not Safety

Maybe not, but as long as the average person thinks it is, it may as well be.

I am ready to receive Apple's or Microsoft's AI buttplug with government spying software installed.

They know. That's not why they are doing it.

The UK gov is just getting worse and worse at law making

What the UK is trying to do here is evil and authoritarian. Its the sort of thing people brushed off as conspiracy theories not long ago. It is completely and utterly unacceptable.

Yes, but this is preaching to the choir.

The counter must be as visceral is the claim. They make an emotional pitch:your children are in danger, surveillance is the solution. The counter must show the dangers in visceral, emotionally relevant way. This surveillance is actually a risk to parents and children as well - that by the accusation of an opaque, unaccountable system, you will be labelled a pedophile, and your kids taken away. That when sharing a picture of your own child with your own mother, you will have to worry about what the electronic bureaucracy will label your picture as.

Abstractions like privacy,and categorical claims, aren't going to reverse this. A properly pitched campaign could do. Sure, complain that politicians and the public are dumb. That may make you feel better but it won't change this an iota. Talking to people in the terms they care about might.

Signal is on the right side here. I think it's time for us techies to fight back by developing the future. I'm trying to do my part - https://mediaden.ca

Also looking to get involved with the meshtastic project.

At least we all know who western politicians are controlled by now and why they are really doing this.

Same people screaming 1984 have five authenticator apps installed on their fingerprinted tracking device and 2fa with their phone number, and have no idea what 'sensors off' does.

Palpable irony present when a chat provider whom requires personally identifiable information to use their service complains about privacy...

Praise

Won't somebody think of the children appears to be the world's most effective method of bringing in restrictive and privacy destroying laws, yet they just don't work.

Have they never heard of "the boy who cried wolf"?

First of all, age verification is not mass surveillance, it is possible to verify your age without disclosing who you are to the site you're visiting, and without disclosing what site you visited to the government. There are even age verification services (and I do despise them fully, this should be a government provided service!) that use only facial features to determine your age (you can call it surveillance, but not "mass").

See, the thing is, no matter how good your intent is, no matter how noble your cause, if you use lies and half-truths to further your argument or resist change, it only serves to undermine it all. For example "They do not deserve surveillance," is so disingenuous, if a site is required to verify age, the only children whose age might be verified are those who might have been exposed to that harmful content otherwise anyways, they're not being selected for surveillance, no one is trying to spy on children (or could possibly benefit from doing so using this method, since it is so unreliable), but they're framing it as it is so.

This isn't like "DRM" or "the nsa is spying on everyone", and there is a big difference between Signal (how are they involved in all this? is this just opportunistic politicking?) being required to verify peer-to-peer messaging from a porn site or or a live-cam site for sex workers requiring both parties to be age verified (where children do get trafficked!!).

Don't get me wrong, I don't like the idea, i really hate it but the prevailing positions in areas of the internet like here is so irrational and unreasonable.

You can't flash your private parts at children, you can't take children to a strip club, they're required by law to check IDs (even night clubs are!!). if that same interaction happens on the internet, suddenly no age verification is needed?

Is it because this problem has been left unaddressed for so long that so many are just too used to "the old way of doing things" despite the ever increasing human suffering caused by lack of regulations and laws like this?

I hope legislators grow a pair and stand up to these tech-crusaders who will burn down the world so long as they feel their corner is safe and secure.

Shame on everyone who refuses to have a nuanced discussion on this and instead takes an all-or-nothing position against any sort of legislature that would reduce (not eliminate) the harm being done. To mean, such people are no different than catholics, teachers, administrators, and anyone else in a position to do something about harm against children but turned the other way because their little world would be too shaken otherwise. Hiding behind "mah privacy!!" doesn't absolve you of the responsibility to at least attempt to be nuanced about it, at least propose an actual solution instead of just "I don't what the solution is, but not this" or "parents are at fault, I don't care" or something lazy like that. I wish I didn't know that when it comes to their own interests, wannabe technocrats like these are ingenious in developing tech like homomorphic encryption, differential privacy and zero-knowledge-proofs; this isn't about anyone's privacy or mass surveillance, it's about preservation of the status quo, apathy and faulty slippery-slope fallacy thinking.

Being anti-surveillance is the same thing as being pro-crime unless you provide an alternative solution to reduce crime.