UK's Investigatory Powers Bill to become law despite tech world opposition

https://www.theregister.com/2024/04/26/investigatory_powers_bill/

by rntn • 2 years ago

209 176 2 years ago

theregister.com

rasengan2• 2 years ago

King Charles has cancer so he won’t have to deal with the backlash of this.

It is truly ridiculous that this has become a law in the UK.

The internet is weakening and fracturing at intense speed - faster than it grew.

alephnerd• 2 years ago

King Charles has cancer so he won’t have to deal with the backlash of this.

What backlash? Are you going to go lobby in Westminster? Or hit the street and riot/direct action against it?

The reality is most people don't care, and complaining on a forum online does nothing.

rasengan2• 2 years ago

The reality is most people don't care, and complaining on a forum online does nothing

It has to start somewhere. Last time the King faced adversity from the people, it was due to an anonymously distributed pamphlet.

robxorb• 2 years ago

complaining on a forum online does nothing.

This probably isn't true.

Forums are voluminous online and regularly contain such complaints, partly as the anonymity gives people a feeling of being more free to express themselves, versus other types of social group interactions.

Given that cohesive and cooperative direct action from organised groups is relatively rare, it could be seen as statistically likely direct action at least sometimes resulted from a group unifying over discussion on a forum.

switch0072• 2 years ago

The monarch signing a bill in to law is just a formality. Nobody holds them accountable for it.

Agree with your other points

hgyjnbdet2• 2 years ago

Pretty sure even without cancer Charlie wouldn't be aware of any backlash, even if there was one. His role is ceremonial at best.

I agree the law is ridiculous though. I hope big internet companies boycott the UK, speaking as a UK citizen. This law won't catch anyone remotely tech sazzy.

pch00• 2 years ago

I hope big internet companies boycott the UK

So at least there's a potential bright side for people in the UK :-)

basisword2• 2 years ago

> King Charles has cancer so he won’t have to deal with the backlash of this.

It has nothing to do with him in reality. The monarch has to give ascent to new acts of parliament and by convention always does. They don't (overtly) interfere politically.

stoobs• 2 years ago

The government creates these laws, not the reining Monarch.

Royal assent is a ceremonial process at this point as the powers to refuse a bill are very, very rarely exercised.

goodcanadian• 2 years ago

Royal assent is a ceremonial process at this point as the powers to refuse a bill are very, very rarely exercised.

From Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_assent):

"The last bill that was refused assent was the Scottish Militia Bill during Queen Anne's reign in 1708."

Even that was only done on the advice of government ministers who had second thoughts after the bill was passed.

gnuser• 2 years ago

“Ceremonial” etc:

Behind Closed Doors: Oaths to the Monarch (who, by the way, was besties with necro-pedo-murderer Jimmy Saville)

Gtfo of here brits - the Irish were on the right side of history and it’s high time for a revolution and you know it’s true!

adammichaelc• 2 years ago

What you say is triggering. Triggered by the darkness. It’s okay to be afraid of the unknown.

But it’s also time to take a look within ourselves and see that we are co-creating something.

Do we want it?

Is this the best we can do as a human race?

The Irish people have a bit of luck on their side. They follow their hearts and speak up.

The ancient Celtic DNA knows. It’s a magical people, and I mean that in the sense of the Magi; enlightened men and women of knowledge who brought the sciences and the arts to humanity.

The Irish were conquered, but the power and wisdom within the DNA cannot be conquered.

It’s all within. Like an ancient quantum computer.

It sits. Waiting to be tapped by the brave one who dares to look outside the program.

dogleash• 2 years ago

The internet is weakening and fracturing at intense speed - faster than it grew.

The writing was on the wall a decade ago. You'll get Cable TV 2.0 and you'll like it. An army of sycophants and chumps are working to ensure it.

cynicalsecurity• 2 years ago

Is anyone still surprised the UK doesn't respect the privacy of their citizens?

If the UK still was in the EU, this would have never happened.

switch0072• 2 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulation_of_Investigatory_Po...

We were in the EU in 2000

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Investigatory_Powers_Act_2016

And in 2016

echelon_musk2• 2 years ago

RIPA 2016 was to legalise practices exposed by Snowden. The "regulation" part in the title is just newspeak smokescreen. They regulated themselves.

basisword2• 2 years ago

> If the UK still was in the EU, this would have never happened.

I wouldn't be so sure about that. The original act passed in 2016 and was already an abomination.

Symbiote• 2 years ago

The EU court ruled against this law in 2020:

https://www.blueprintforfreespeech.net/en/news/eu-court-rule...

ben_w8• 2 years ago

Indeed; that even the Welsh Ambulance Service was ever given nationwide no-warrant-needed access to internet connection records still irks me.

However, the 2016 act was ruled incompatible with EU law: https://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWHC/2018/975.html

duxup2• 2 years ago

Is there something about the EU that would prevent government spying?

Most privacy efforts I've seen in the EU are commercial facing legislation that I find kinda of piecemeal and naive (granted I'll take naive over nothing, sometimes...). I don't know that I've seen efforts that would seriously curtail government surveillance.

ben_w8• 2 years ago

Is there something about the EU that would prevent government spying?

Limit, rather than outright prevent.

"""Respect for private and family life

Everyone has the right to respect for his or her private and family life, home and communications."""

— Chapter II, Article 7, Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union, https://www.europarl.europa.eu/charter/pdf/text_en.pdf

Which is part of the Treaty of Lisbon.

denton-scratch5• 2 years ago

Is there something about the EU that would prevent government spying?

Presumably you mean laws and treaties; those exist. But I wouldn't expect government spies to pay excessive attention to the law.

The problem is the clauses about requiring distributors to get state clearance before deploying an update [ahem - nooo, that disables our backdoor], and increased costs and obligations on ISPs. Thwy won't ever try to enforce the law against the spooks, but for big tech companies, it's just regulatory clutter. They have staff lawyers out the wazoo, all specializing in regulatory clutter.

Not good for small ISPs and tech companies.

ethbr1• 2 years ago

If the UK still was in the EU, this would have never happened.

Why do you think people in the government wanted them to leave?

The UK has never squared the "free speech, even when it's inconvenient to those in power" circle.

hgyjnbdet2• 2 years ago

Are you aware of sone of the proposed laws the EU wants to enact?

graemep4• 2 years ago

Hardly anyone is. One of the problems with the EU is that because the media focus on national governments, and because the EU often acts indirectly (through directives, requiring national governments to pass legislation, rather than direct legislation) people really have little idea of what the EU does legislatively.

I am aware of the current attempts to push surveillance laws, although AFAIK the EU parliament did reject the worst of the legislation the commission tried to push.

chmod775• 2 years ago

The UK is still subject to the European Court of Human Rights, which is distinct from the EU.

Relevant past rulings:

https://dpglaw.co.uk/european-court-of-human-rights-declares...

https://privacyinternational.org/press-release/5120/judgment...

matthewdgreen• 2 years ago

The typical government response to European Court rulings against surveillance is just to interpret them in some favorable way, then ignore them. So if the court outlaws "mass surveillance" and you've instituted a mass surveillance system, just call it "targeted surveillance" or ignore the ruling altogether. Maybe in 6-7 years you'll get another ruling against that, but it doesn't matter.

EGreg2• 2 years ago

Lest you think it's just the UK, we have such laws in USA now making their way through Congress, and already in place around the world: https://community.qbix.com/t/the-global-war-on-end-to-end-en...

anonzzzies• 2 years ago

It’s just a matter of time for it to happen everywhere unfortunately: it’s possible, it’s easy, most people don’t know or care or understand, so keep trying and it’ll happen.

chrisfinazzo2• 2 years ago

Short of a law that forbids the math which makes encryption possible, this is noise.

Wake me up when there's an actual threat to privacy in...

(checks notes........)

OH WAIT

The heat death of the Universe will come first -- Carry on, nothing to see here...

kmeisthax2• 2 years ago

https://xkcd.com/538/

tivert2• 2 years ago

Short of a law that forbids the math which makes encryption possible, this is noise.

So your "solution" is to break the law and suffer the consequences?

I think you misunderstand law. It's not about making things impossible, it's about making possible things unappealing so you won't do them.

deadbabe2• 2 years ago

Truly, I believe we live in the medieval era of the technological adoption curve. Such laws should be seen as barbaric by future governments.

graemep4• 2 years ago

the medieval era

You mean the era in which we got things like the Magna Carta, rights of due process, habeas corpus, the gradual abolition of slavery (at least in western Europe), the gradual transfer of power from monarchs to parliaments etc.

I think our direction of travel is a lot worse now!

jjgreen• 2 years ago

... we got things like the Magna Carta

Did she die in vain?

ben_w8• 2 years ago

Magna Carta, which was about the relationship between a king and his own feudal lords, which was violated by both sides and annulled by Pope Innocent III, leading to the First Barons' War — one of the many UK civil wars besides the one commonly known by the title "The" Civil War?

the gradual abolition of slavery (at least in western Europe)

Even with that caveat, didn't that really only happen after the medieval era?

denton-scratch5• 2 years ago

things like the Magna Carta, rights of due process, habeas corpus

I think Habeas Corpus is one of the few clauses of Magna Carta that still has legal effect (the former is part of the latter).

And remember that Magna Carta was a deal between the "barons" and King John; the rights that Magna Carta purported to confer, only applied to barons (landowners, basically). In the time of King John, the law as most ordinary people encountered it was simply the local baron.

I think it wasn't until Henry II that there were royal courts set up, to deliver the same law everywhere.

bluescrn• 2 years ago

It's not just about tech. People simply don't care about freedom or privacy any more. They're happy to give it all up if it means that an ever-expanding nanny state will care for them and protect them from all harm, whether it be international terrorism, cigarettes, or insults being hurled online.

The campaign to brand freedom ('freedumb') as a far-right ideal certainly isn't helping.

ben_w8• 2 years ago

The UK's left/right split is very different to that of the US.

In particular, surveillance is extremely popular with both of the big UK parties. Well, I say "big", we'll see if the Tories even manage to win a single seat at the next election — I think they're currently expected to get just under 100 seats, but they're so dysfunctional that total disintegration is absolutely possible between now and then.

Silhouette2• 2 years ago

People simply don't care about freedom or privacy any more.

I don't believe that's true. Our younger generations are way more savvy about those things than our older ones.

What I do see is a sense of hopeless inevitability. People don't feel they can escape the surveillance and other technological dangers because everyone is at it. Both of our major political parties are generally supportive of the police and surveillance state and no-one else has any realistic prospect of forming a government at national level. Unless you give up a large part of modern life and decide not to participate in large parts of our society you have little real choice but to pick your poison from the big tech firms as well.

So people resist in less obvious ways like moving between services and creating new accounts frequently with false details. People from younger generations hardly ever commit to any single account on any service the way their parents or grandparents did. They have no time for terms and conditions that require real identities. (Or the service will do what exactly? Terminate the account they didn't really care about or expect to use for long anyway?) I imagine a lot of young people already know how to use a VPN and probably more will start doing so over time. I wonder how many phones the average teenager really has today.

Of course this attitude creates other problems of its own. With modern tech but little personal accountability we see issues like cyberbullying becoming real problems for our schoolkids for example. Unfortunately the only answer the politicians can seem to think of to deal with a problem like that is trying to be even more authoritarian. We need to do better than that.

linearrust• 2 years ago

Such laws should be seen as barbaric by future governments.

Only because future governments will have far better methods of surveillance and population control.

cjk25• 2 years ago

Oh brilliant, I am sure our utterly fucking incompetent and inept security services having more data will lead to better outcomes.

choke Salman Abedi choke.

(for anyone not in the UK, he was already well known to the security services [MI5] and managed to kill 22 people in a suicide bombing)

Akronymus• 2 years ago

If I had a buck for every time someone like that was "known to the authorities" I'd have quite a bit of money.

This is a pretty blatant power grab, rather than anything actually positive.

echelon_musk2• 2 years ago

Instead of admitting blame failures are used to increase budgets.

The simple arguments of "we didn't have enough funding" or "we weren't allowed to collect more data" will be used. More tax payer money is then spent to cement power through mass surveillance and the cycle repeats.

tgv2• 2 years ago

OTOH, new mass surveillance in combination with optimistic use of new tech will lead to ruining thousands of innocent lives. It's as if they thought that the Horizon scandal was just a bit of bad publicity for a good idea.

francis-io• 2 years ago

"Additional safeguards have been introduced – notably, in the most recent round of amendments, a 'triple-lock' authorization process for surveillance of parliamentarians ..."

Thank god, I'm glad the politicians that passed this law will be protected from it /s

kmeisthax2• 2 years ago

I bet you in 10 years there will be a scandal where the Tories spied on an opposing party MP, or vice versa. Doesn't even need malicious intent because the mere act of doing this carries the stench of malicious incompetence.

BoxOfRain• 2 years ago

It brings to mind the fact the Inner Party of Oceania had the privilege of turning their telescreens off.

causal• 2 years ago

This, and requiring tech companies to consult the government before rolling out security updates, make it seem evident that safety isn't really the motivation.

kypro2• 2 years ago

I'm a cool headed person, but reading that sentence was rage inducing for me.

There's literally no good argument to protect politicians other than corruption.

If politicians are worried these powers could be used to target them then it could be used to target literally anyone, and the concern shouldn't have been that they could be target, but that anyone could be targeted.

Plus, if this bill is only going to stop bad guys then they should have anything to worry about anyway right? I mean isn't this what we are told!? Should we be worried about these powers being abused or not!?

What a fucking joke.

hogepiyo• 2 years ago

UK leading the way on this draconian bullshit as usual.

You know its bad when your hope rests on big tech throwing down the gauntlet.

cjk25• 2 years ago

We do indeed lead the way in draconian bullshit. We also lead the way in making it utterly unworkable and useless through incompetence, cost cutting and cases getting shot down by ECHR though. Think of us as an example to the rest of the world on how to do a shitty job of consultation, legislation and implementation!

kwhitefoot• 2 years ago

cases getting shot down by ECHR though.

Weren't the Tories going to get the UK out of the European Convention on Human Rights? And thus remove the possibility of appealing the the European Court of Human Rights.

xyst• 2 years ago

USA is not too far behind. FISA was reauthorized despite outcry from many people.

https://archive.is/3vKoO

In a post-911 world, the people leading this country still leading by fear.

A_D_E_P_T3• 2 years ago

The UK government seems hell-bent on the control and micromanagement of its own population.

Their recent smoking ban -- which is sure to make cigarette smoking cool again with young people -- was a joke. This hyper-surveillance measure is a lot less funny.

simonbarker873• 2 years ago

The smoking ban is incredibly popular and supported by most people across all generations, also given we have tax payer funded healthcare this is a clear win for the nation.

trinsic22• 2 years ago

The Postmaster debacle is the biggest example of this I have ever seen. Something has dramatically changed when people are not being held accountable for their crimes.

red_admiral• 2 years ago

Cannabis is technically also banned in the UK. As is selling vapes to underage people. Where there's a market, capitalism finds a way.

denton-scratch5• 2 years ago

I smoke 40 a day. I don't want my granddaughters to do the same. I strongly support the ban. All the smokers I know agree with me.

FredPret2• 2 years ago

Sometimes, when I read the news, I can hear the theme music to Deus Ex

yoyohello13• 2 years ago

I’ve been playing cyberpunk recently and I can’t help the feeing of “this is just our current world with more biotech.”

JohnMakin• 2 years ago

I'd way rather live in the cyberpunk dystopia.

er4hn• 2 years ago

All good fiction is a statement on reality.

trinsic22• 2 years ago

I'm actually reminded of the movie Children of Men, which seems much more of a realistic view of a dystopian landscape in UK over the next 20-50 years.

logicchains• 2 years ago

Or V for Vendetta, we're practically already there.

matheusmoreira• 2 years ago

All of the dystopia but none of the sweet nanotechnological augmentations which make you an invisible unkillable superman. What a timeline.

SillyUsername• 2 years ago

Tor is about to become a lot more mainstream in the UK.

azalemeth2• 2 years ago

Honestly, although VPNs get a bad rep, there's (in my opinion) a good argument for using one here on privacy grounds. Use two or three-hop routing to frustrate correlation attacks, route your entire internet traffic to one or two other places chosen at random, use DNScrypt / DOH and have the freedom to choose who gets to slurp your data -- and the ability to change them easily. Mullvad's move towards open firmware, diskless servers, and proving verifiability to end users is something I can get towards. [C.f. https://mullvad.net/en/blog/system-transparency-future]

I'm sure nothing wrong will happen with delaying security updates if they ever actually use that clause...

Eisenstein• 2 years ago

As a bonus you get to fill out 500 captchas every day.

londons_explore• 2 years ago

I have little confidence in the security of TOR. I believe any competent adversary can do packet timing correlation attacks, and it turns out just 30 seconds of web browsing gives enough timing data to narrow down to just 1 tor user, since the tor userbase is fairly small.

I'm guessing there are ~10 nation states who can deanonymize tor, and I strongly suspect the UK is on that list.

hazeii• 2 years ago

Check out VPN's in Australia (Australian citizen currently in the UK)

Lio2• 2 years ago

As far as I can tell most UK media has hardly covered this.

It's sad but expected that the BBC have ignored this.

cjk25• 2 years ago

They probably don't want to draw attention to the fact that they use RIPA legislation to catch TV license evaders.

deepsun• 2 years ago

I don't understand, if BBC is a government agency, why cannot they be sponsored from taxes? Why the hassle of TV licences?

jasoncartwright• 2 years ago

They wrote about it last month, and in January.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-68625232

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-68128177

random9749832• 2 years ago

Well that's ok, I guess they don't have to report on it anymore.

ode• 2 years ago

I haven't seen any TV coverage of this at all.

pera• 2 years ago

Unfortunately this sort of news rarely show up in the home page though:

https://web.archive.org/web/20240322155020/https://www.bbc.c...

https://web.archive.org/web/20240323161503/https://www.bbc.c...

https://web.archive.org/web/20240129162322/https://www.bbc.c...

https://web.archive.org/web/20240130140028/https://www.bbc.c...

Maybe because they are categorised as "Technology" instead of "UK" | "Society" | "Politics"

denton-scratch5• 2 years ago

Indeed. I hadn't noticed it. I'm angry.

stranded22• 2 years ago

What are people's thoughts around vpns for select devices at home for nafarious activity?

So most traffic goes through open net, and tv (for example) goes through a privacy first vpn provider with an exit in, say, Switzerland. And Proton mail for a small amount of email with the rest via apple.

Essentially - would it be less of a flag.

And would they even care about a bit of streaming

azalemeth2• 2 years ago

I do this the other way around. All my traffic goes through a privacy-first multi-hop VPN provider, and data from things I don't trust and don't care about (set-top boxes, smart TVs [which I detest!], games consoles, house guests, etc) goes through the clearnet and provides a reasonable degree of cover. Literally everything else gets onion routed to some degree, to frustrate correlation analysis. I know that TOR users are logged specifically; I don't know about VPNs directly. All I want is for people to not spy on me. I'm not a criminal and I do nothing wrong(!) -- apparently an impossibly hard ask!

Something someone on HN might be able to answer is this: is there a reason why you couldn't try to configure Wireguard to have a constant bandwidth mode? Continually transmit UDP packets and again frustrate timing or correlation analysis -- if every client spoke to the server on one of a predetermined number of speeds continually then the burstlike connections coming from that server to a potentially identity leaking service (e.g. gmail.com) could not easily be correlated with the origin of the traffic. I imagine that would make it easier to have some stronger degree of privacy protection in aggregate.

tomxor• 2 years ago

Interesting idea. It would only be effective against timing analysis if all clients connected to the wg server use this constant bandwidth mode (otherwise your traffic could be identified through negative correlation against other connections).

It would also have to be aggressively rate limited to make it practical for anything with a battery over wifi, even a constant 2Mbit is not ideal for wifi and will cause a lot of battery drain since radios are most efficient when they can do burst communication. Or maybe it could be limited to bursts at some interval for better bandwidth, or better efficiency (but not both)... that would also make it easier to manage the traffic since it's no longer real-time.

I doubt there is any way to configure wireguard to behave like this, it has quite a specific purpose and wireguard's design focus is performance and security rather than obfuscation from traffic analysis. Maybe it's not necessary to modify WG if the traffic can be manipulated just before the WG interface...

[edit]

Talking of timing analysis, this was the side channel in specter/meltdown that was demonstrated to extract cryptographic keys from JS in the browser. Browser responded by just lowering the resolution of JS timers and introducing noise.

Maybe this would also be sufficient for a wireguard connection at the cost of slightly worse latency performance. The tricky part is how the timing resolution would be tied to activity on the WG server, i.e you would need the packets to be spread out further and further the less activity there is on the server, so you actually end up with better performance the busier the server is.

It would also come at a performance cost to routing which would be forced to hold on to packets artificially.

cjk25• 2 years ago

I actually don't care if I'm honest. I will be a good citizen, use all the normal services and blend in with the noise. Data about you looks much more suspicious if there is none.

If I wanted to do something nefarious I'd do it completely offline.

pipes3• 2 years ago

I'm thinking about ditching my VPN sub. It just looks suspicious. Sad times.

wkat4242• 2 years ago

Who cares if it looks suspicious though? You're still innocent unless proven guilty. I'm not giving up mine (and to be fair I do use it for Torrents mostly :) )

I'm not in the UK though, and I refuse to even visit it for work now since Brexit. Google had some convention there a while ago and I just refused to go. If they don't want us I don't want them.

csmattryder• 2 years ago

"These changes mean that not only will our citizens be better protected from serious dangers such as terrorism and child sexual abuse online [...]"

Sometimes you just love it when the band knock out one of their classics.

Silhouette2• 2 years ago

The Conservatives who have been in government for a long time will most likely lose a general election within a year so we should also be looking at the opposition Labour party's views on this kind of legislation.

Perhaps surprisingly given they are currently led by a former human rights lawyer the Labour side also seem to be authoritarian when it comes to technology and surveillance.

dmix• 2 years ago

Perhaps surprisingly given they are currently led by a former human rights lawyer the Labour side also seem to be authoritarian

That distinction was lost long ago in the west.

Canada's left wing liberals/NDP are doing it under the guise of hate speech and protecting kids:

https://globalnews.ca/news/10317040/online-harms-bill-canada...

Conservatives more stereotypically spin it for national security/terrorism. But it will come in some form or the other each administration like clockwork.

Generally it seems the intelligence services get a free pass from the entire political class on all sides, regardless of pretence, as we've seen in every Five Eyes countries, including Australia.

walthamstow2• 2 years ago

Additional safeguards have been introduced – notably, in the most recent round of amendments, a 'triple-lock' authorization process for surveillance of parliamentarians

Ah yes they've introduced some safeguards. Whom do they safeguard? Themselves!

chaz6• 2 years ago

I have forewarned my employer that if this bill passes I will be considering my position as I am idealogically opposed to being forced to comply with state surveillance.

kypro2• 2 years ago

I wish there were more people like you. Big respect for this.

hollow-moe• 2 years ago

Unfortunately, someone not like them will happily take the job, possibly with a lower pay as bonus.

pacifika• 2 years ago

The possibility of state surveillance, I think that is a distinction worth making.

smashah• 2 years ago

It's funny how our next PM will be the person who let off Jimmy Saville yet this bill claims to care about CSAM (signed into law by the brother of a known peadophile).

1st amendment is being killed in America, privacy rights are being killed in the UK.

Freedom? Democracy? Will of the people? Lol.

roody15• 2 years ago

The older I get the more I see these bills and trends are really based on economics. Politics is more a less a controlled narrative to maintain this style of wealth distribution.

The wealthy elite class draws most of its income by exploiting labor. This is done in a variety of ways but essentially most UK Billionaires make their money in private equity (over half.. same in US)... which really means they don't actually do much real labor.

Instead they need to extract wealth which often means creating a system where people's labor is exploited. To keep this system in check a control of the narrative is required so you can keep a lower class of workers "occupied" so they don't wise up to the reality of the situation.

One common theme is fear.. war on terror, axis of evil states.. some sort of plague..Y2K.. you can probably pull up many themes from the past.

The other theme is divide by culture.... you see this today with gender issues.. gay rights, etc. For example in most modern western states... the vast majority of citizens don't really care if people are gay .. they may or may not approve personally but honestly don't mind what people do with their private lives etc... So the narrative has to flipped and made more extreme ..it doesn't matter the issue it has to something that gets people riled up enough that they don't have much mental or emotion energy left to focus on the small group that is exploiting their labor. (So gender issue has to get extreme to the point where we talk about surgical altering children for example)

Notice both parties... somehow keep migrants flowing into Europe (and US).. Almost like pressure needs to be kept on keeping wages low.

In the US the federal reserve openly states this as the goal ..(https://canadiandimension.com/articles/view/us-federal-reser...). Little coverage is given to this and instead a strange spin is attached on how somehow the worker class will actually benefit by being paid less.

This is the same with survelliance bills. We must keep an eye on the worker class to make sure they don't organize and wise up to the reality of their situation.

My two cents

Pfhortune• 2 years ago

You're right for the most part, except for maybe the transphobia bit in the middle. No one wants to surgically alter kids.

fruth• 2 years ago

Not true. There are girls as young as twelve years old getting "gender affirming" double mastectomies because they want to be boys.

outlore• 2 years ago

Channel 5 on YouTube does a good job presenting this same view point

Whether it's the border crisis, or drug addiction, the numerous wars fought, or the polarization of society, the aim is for the ruling elite to divide and rule, and continue extracting wealth

akomtu2• 2 years ago

"Politics is a concentrated expression of economics" - Lenin. He started on a high note of freeing the labor from the capitalists, but quickly realised it's more profitable to put the labor class into cages (gulags) and extract wealth from them in a more direct fashion.

Dig1t• 2 years ago

"Additional safeguards have been introduced – notably, in the most recent round of amendments, a 'triple-lock' authorization process for surveillance of parliamentarians

What does this mean exactly? I'm not familiar with UK government terminology.

fullspectrumdev• 2 years ago

It means spying on members of parliament requires a significantly higher level of authorisation than spying on a normal citizen.

One law for them, another for us.

denton-scratch5• 2 years ago

That clause stood out to me too.

This sounds like a huge step back towards Spycatcher territory, where MI5 thought it was their job to undermine the Labour Party, because they were all communists.

BriggyDwiggs422• 2 years ago

That is utterly mindblowing. Parliamentarians should be more closely surveilled if the concern is national security.

mrandish• 2 years ago

When I was kid I read Bradbury, Asimov, Clarke and Heinlein while dreaming of how by the time I was "old", I'd for sure be living in a sci-fi future. Humans had landed on the moon only the decade before, NASA had launched Skylab (a REAL space station) and was developing a space shuttle that could go to orbit anytime. Personal computers with modems were actually a thing in stores.

Sadly, I now realize I was correct except that I was reading the wrong sci-fi authors. I should have been reading Orwell and Huxley.

cantagi• 2 years ago

UK resident here. The original version gave me the push I needed to get a rPi 2B+, subscribe to a VPN, and use it as a wifi AP that routes all traffic from my house through it.

Can you trust a VPN who say they don't log? No, but more so than an ISP who might be legally required to at any moment without you ever finding out.

Also, I will now never start a tech company in the UK, and this is because I will never put myself into a position where I am forced to add backdoors to a product.

will0• 2 years ago

Do you exit the vpn in the UK, or somewhere else?

akomtu2• 2 years ago

UK is a dying state, like the Roman empire, once mighty, now is a small tourist destination. When the good will leaves a nation to its own devices, what's left is a disorganized group of men and women held together by tyranny of a dying dragon of bureaucracy. That bureaucracy doesn't know how to keep a nation prosper, and all it cares about is self-preservation by any means possible.

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK• 2 years ago

Tourist and money laundering destination.

UK's Investigatory Powers Bill to become law despite tech world opposition

Related Stories