> Theresa May says there should be no "means of communication" which "we cannot read"
The article focuses largely on the technical difficulties and implementation risks that make this goal impractical. I would like to point out that the goal in question is explicitly Orwell-style surveillance.
There's another angle to this. In her previous role, Theresa May presided over record police cuts with utmost arrogance. It turns out that even if we had everything in plaintext, that there almost certainly isn't the manpower to follow up leads generated from a mass surveillance programme.
If we assume that May is competent and not exploiting a tragic attack to engage in jingoistic gesture politics for the election on Thursday, then this can only be about making sure that law-abiding dissidents cannot communicate with each other in secret to hold the powerful to account.
I think the competency of most politicians right now is seriously suspect; but then the general population is, to me, sounding increasingly tired of democracy and just wants an autocrat to make all their life choices for them. (Not necessarily a majority of society, but perhaps a significant minority).
The rational response is, more people die from falling off ladders than domestic terrorism. Can we look at this problem seriously in a way that includes the economics, without insisting that people be scared little bunny rabbits? Apparently we're not so inclined toward Vulcan logic, this silly primate species.
Terrorism is the current justification for military operations abroad. Likewise, there are some who believe terrorism to be an externality of our operations abroad, in which case there is positive feedback. We are told by our leaders as the justification for war that it will cause negative feedback, though the recurrence of terrorism would suggest this is not the case. Even without any feedback, to look at this economically you would have to take into account the news, the journalists, the wars, the arms sales, the rebuilding, the cable-laying that comes from war and the attempt at peace.
Consider two countries at war with the other. Now imagine that both are part of the same territory but the planes still fly and the bombs still fall on the same places. It is clear that this is economic and political madness. So as a combined system, the two warring countries are better off not engaging in war. But if one country can make money from war then it is beneficial for it to be at war.
The answer is for those who govern to think in terms of the whole system, i.e. both countries. That is unpopular with patriotic voters who accuse such leaders of being traitors.
>Terrorism is the current justification for military operations abroad.
It seems to me more and more that people are living in some kind of lala land today.
They seem to believe that military action against some group of people will not result in some kind of recoil. Especially when part of the group they are engaging military action against is living among them or has free access to enter the country.
I think that this is pretty disconnected thinking.
Asking intelligence agency to do better job feels is kind of ridiculous. They just have to follow too many people to be 100% effective.
We're literally at war. In a war, it's not just "their" guys that get killed. It's a two-way thing. It's amazing how many people don't seem to get this.
We're fighting an insurgency that is distributed across organizations and borders. Historical precedent would suggest this will not end with the annihilation of the insurgency, some of whom will currently be civilians, but with some kind of peace process.
The problem with calling this a war is that the right-wing press are calling this a war. This is not an existential threat to us in the way, say, WW2 was to the Soviet Union or to the UK once we had engaged militarily. We could withdraw from bombing campaigns in the middle east tomorrow and see almost no immediate detrimental domestic repercussions. That is probably a sign that this is not so much a war but something else. If it was domestic we would call it a massacre.
The more we go down the road of annihilation, the more costly that peace process will be and the more people will die purely for war. That includes our own.
WW2 was an existential threat to the Soviet Union. It was so existential that this became the largest part of the identity of Russians.
But WW2 was not an existential threat to UK. UK could have exited from the war at any time. No battle took place on the soil of UK mainland.
I am not saying the people in UK did not suffer - they just did not suffer comparably to the people in the middle of the conflict. In a way the war was rather distant to the people living in UK.
> No battle took place on the soil of UK mainland.
Well, that's because the battle eventually took place in (mostly) France. But it's not as if that battle would not have eventually happened in the UK if the Germans had managed to gain air supremacy over the UK or if they had managed to pull a reverse Normandy. The UK could not have exited from the war at any time at all, their shipping would have been sunk and they would have been under siege from the moment they did so.
The larger cities were receiving a good number of aerial bombardments and V2's (ok, also a form of aerial bombardment). And then there was the shipping tonnage sunk with all hands.
War very much came to the UK, even if the eventual battle took place in France, Belgium, NL and eventually Germany (where whole cities had been obliterated).
UK could have negotiated unilateral peace with Germany, and it's likely that such negotiations would have succeeded. Hitler didn't actually want to fight the Brits - indeed, in "Mein Kampf" it's clear that he saw them with somewhat akin to an admiration, and a potential ally.
Not so for the USSR, since it had been designated as "Lebensraum".
I blame the media. They've conditioned two generations of voters that war is something that you see on TV or read about online, not something that involves you or your neighborhood, you 'go to war', it never comes to you.
This kind of verbal white-washing causes all kinds of problems when the inevitable adjustment happens which shows that we can play word games all we want but it won't make an actual difference.
The media is reporting what it is, which is a war that happens elsewhere. It's verbal white washing because it is socio-economically and politically white washed.
A draft would change this. But the military is a product like anything else. It's not civil service. It's not something that every family suffers from. The U.S. professional military is overwhelmingly middle and lower class. There's no meaningful representation of aristocratic families in the military. They have nothing to lose by supporting politicians who in turn support interventionist policies abroad.
When discussing foreign policy on an internatioal medium it would be helpful to formulate your responses by specifying the hypothetical combatants and coalitions explicitly rather than implicitly (i.e 'we' is an ambiguous definition in this context).
Now imagine that both are part of the same territory but the planes still fly and the bombs still fall on the same places. It is clear that this is economic and political madness.
For example, China/Taiwan, North Korea/South Korea, which no longer fight.
The problem is not that more people die from ladders or cars for that matter, it's that in a polictical landscape: "no tragedy shall go to waste."
We saw similar pushes for strengthening Canada's Surveillance State when they had two terrorist acts. Canada's PM didn't even hesitate.
When an attack or an event happens that puts people in a state of shock and fear, politicians know their nefarious ideas have a higher probability of slipping through the public's filter. UK's PM is doing what has now become an automatic response to any kind of act. Expand government's power at all cost.
...falling on deaf ears. I have been saying for years that hacker culture needs to develop greater emotional intelligence and meet people where they are instead of lecturing them with arguments that make their eyes glaze over. Politics is not a function of logic.
Your best option, if you live in the UK, is to roll your eyes eyes and vote for the beardy communist despite his obvious faults. Logical arguments are not compelling to people in the grip of an emotional rush. The inability to assess and adjust to peoples' emotional states is a kind of social stupidity.
People have stopped rolling their eyes at the "beardy communist". At least one favourability poll now shows Corbyn being seen more favourable than May, and he's closing the gap rapidly in every one of them. At the same time Labour is closing the gap as well (with one poll showing Labour down to 1% behind). Whether it will close it enough by polling day is the big question, but what seems clear is that the Tories relentless personal attacks on Corbyn no longer work very well.
Those same polls predicted brexit would not happen and Clinton would win. I fear May will get the majority yet again. For a lot of people, her calls to essentially end cryptography will be seen as "doing something", and they will blindly vote for her.
> Those same polls predicted brexit would not happen and Clinton would win
You say it like it's a major indictment - people just don't understand probability and low probability events occur all the damn time. On the flip-side people also play the lottery.
A lot of factors contribute to poll errors: sample group is never perfectly representative of actual voters, people lying on their voting intention if they feel it's not socially accepted, &tc. That does not make polls worthless.
I too fear she will win again, but the poll improvements for Corbyn are several times the margin of error, while as others have pointed out, the Clinton/Trump result was within the margin of error.
No that's not true. The polls were within the margin of error. The polls were exactly right. The problem is the result landed within the margin of error, that the predicted error itself meant it wasn't possible to know with any certainty what was going to happen.
No. Their goal is simply to go back to the previous status quo. Which was when communication was capable of being monitored when there was a reasonable suspicion of a crime about to be committed.
Now I don't believe this makes any sense in this era (criminals will have crypto, ordinary people/dissidents/journalists etc will not) but I can very much appreciate where they are coming from. It's not a simple issue.
Thank you for pointing this out. It's a key point to make that it's kind of a complex issue.
It's obvious to me that cryptography shouldn't and realistically cannot be outlawed. That doesn't make any sense. On the flip side, I think that most people would accept that targeted surveillance of criminal suspects is a reasonable tool.
The thing is, if it becomes the default for all messages to be encrypted end-to-end – obviously a good thing – then this effective tool becomes useless.
I think any proposals to restrict cryptographic software are obviously wrong and doomed to failure, and I will continue using such software regardless of what laws are passed in the UK. But it is a complex issue, and I wish there was some more acknowledgement of how the field of surveillance has changed.
The Manchester attacker was reported many times as an extremist, and had the ISIS flag on his car. To suggest that he would have been caught if only the Food Standards Authority has constant read-access to your drunk teenage loveletters is ridiculous.
We need more actual police officers to do more actual police work.
Isn't it more a question of what instructions those existing police officers are given? Currently their activities always come a bit late for the innocent dead and injured. A positive check about someone hiring a van is not prima facie evidence of intent to mow down pedestrians.
- Running investigations, police officers being known and trusted "faces" in their community, and surveilling people in meatspace
To
- Running grep on every TCP packet of 65 million people, then asking a relatively small number of LEOs to "do something" when analysts see something that could be suspicious
Yes, but that would require rolling back some of those cuts. Another thing that would really help is if police officers would make a half decent salary. That would also cut back significantly on corruption.
Is it complex? Even with crypto authorities have more ability to surveil us than any other time in human history. Crypto seems like a very small loss when looking at the way things have trended the last 10 years, much less 100.
Even with end to end encryption they can still hack any current OS. We're a long way from having provably secure operating systems for current devices.
That's not an honest representation of the argument given there is no parallel you can make between today's world of electronic communication passing over centralized infrastructure to however people communicated before.
There was no ability for the government to read everyone's (or anyone's) mail at once in the past.
Intelligence services absolutely had the ability to read people's postal mail and intercept their phone calls. For example, the CIA in a declassified report from 1976 opened over 215,000 physical letters:
> capable of being monitored when there was a reasonable
> suspicion of a crime about to be committed.
The thing is: they knew about the Manchester attacker, and today on BBC was also a report that law enforcement was informed about one of the London attackers.
If they cannot act on the intelligence they already have what's the point of diluting it with even more data?
yea, its a rejection (a lack of understanding) of the technology of internet.
It clearly states in their manifesto that they want to treat the internet the same as the physical world without appreciating that this is impossible.
I look forward to whenever politicians work out that people not under their legal jurisdiction can muck about on their internet thereby making their intent of constraint irrelevant.
> Because that's the only politically correct thing they can do
This is not even wrong. There is a long list of 'politically correct' things the government could do which are inconvenient (timing-wise) as they would highlight their fallibility/incompetence. First on the list is to stop the drastic cuts[1] they instituted to the police force. A close second is to stop exporting jihadists (that's right: exporting civilian British nationals[2]) to wage war in Islamic countries. It is unfortunate that saving face in light of the impending snap-elections is preventing real solutions from being implemented; instead, we get security theatre that sounds good to the electorate but wouldn't even have prevented the previous attacks - a necessary factor for the action to be considered as an improvement at the very least. Right now the issues are totally unrelated; just opportunistic legislation.
The article focuses largely on the technical difficulties and implementation risks that make this goal impractical. I would like to point out that the goal in question is explicitly Orwell-style surveillance.