I don't doubt that the government can make life hell for its opponents if it wants to, I just doubt that ordinary voters will allow it to get that bad. Tories have such power right now because they're taking actions (and making signals) popular with the people, whether the rest of us agree or not. I don't buy that they've so corrupted the system that it no longer matters what the voting public think, which is why I still believe this bill is not going to be implemented or enforced in a way that removes real freedoms, once the public notice.
Besides, don't plenty of despotic countries already ban VPNs around the world, to limited effect? A large, liberal country like the UK banning them would I'm sure drive improvements to VPN protocols to make them even harder for ISPs to detect.
I think for the reasons you give this bill is never going to actually get through in its current form, or, if it does, it won't be abided by nor enforced. The reason it's gotten this far is because government ministers don't have any idea how the web works and they've adopted an attitude of ignoring experts so they won't learn. Once ordinary Tory voters start to get irritated by the implications of the law (credit card to view porn?) it'll get quietly scrapped. In any case, I know otherwise-luddite 60 year olds who know how to use VPNs to watch geoblocked TV, so getting around it will be trivial for a sizeable chunk of the population. And there's no way the UK government has the resources and political capital to police the internet on the scale required by this bill.
Something is very rotten if we came to the point where one can not express speech freely in countries like UK. If that is the case VPNs are going to be a giant market.
VPNs are still legal, but may be monitored, maybe with help of the long arm of the US.
Cameron has a warped idea of "democracy" if he thinks this is compatible with it. Citizens are entitled to know the opinions of people everywhere, even the hostile or angry ones.
Not to mention the likelihood of secret blocking of more than they're telling the public. Hopefully there will be lists of what is actually blocked, from groups in countries where such investigation can be done safely.
My first reaction to this was that VPN usage will explode, but I'm not sure how a VPN server hosted in another country would work with their desire to effectively ban encryption.
I feel like the UK is slowly goose stepping its way to a Chinese style firewall.
Given the right's obsession with what I'm ordering on Amazon, and the left being essentially unelectable right now, I'm not really sure where to put my vote at the next election.
Brit here. I'm apathetic going on mildly in favour. On the downside it limits the privacy of people who can't be bothered to turn on a VPN. On the plus it may protect kids from being bullied to suicide etc (https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11707945/Britain-wa...). I'm in favour of protecting kids and capable of clicking the VPN button.
That said I'm a bit meh as it's unclear how well it will work if at all.
Is there a possibility that this will have a positive effect of a) pushing the issue to the forefront (because it affects everyone) where it can be easily disputed in its current form; b) making services like Tor / VPNs a necessity for regular people and thus moving everyone towards a safer internet not governed by states? This has already happened with the block of thepiratebay: regular people have been pushed into a position of regularly using VPNs.
Say Cameron get this passed. Technically it is unfeasible because they can't realistically ban foreign companies from using encryption, and because some of the protocols are (for the sake of argument) unbreakable. So if you want to stay anonymous, you still can, and more people will. Furthermore, the privacy argument goes mainstream when it is WhatsApp / Google vs. the UK government, with regular people suffering immediate consequences, vs. a bunch of programmers / cypherpunks. I can't see how this would be a positive for the government in any way.
There's a few enquiries into the bill (Ofcom, parliamentary enquiry etc). I believe the current government is pretty opposed to it (Conservatives and Lib Dem both value the individuals freedom). Also since the majority of ISPs are completely opposed to it I doubt it'll ever get enforced.
Sadly there wasn't much hope of this bill not making it into law. The opposition parties if anything felt that the law wasn't strong enough and pushed to make it even more draconian. The British public at large are in favour of any law that imposes harsher penalties and regulation on the tech giants. 'Protect the children' is far more emotive than 'But we might eventually lose encryption', and the collateral damage to our freedoms is slow and insidious enough that it's not recognised or appreciated. I think given everything we have to take the governments vague concession of 'when the technology becomes available' as a win, it was the best we were going to get, no way was this bill not going to pass.
We are still in the early Wild West days of the internet, but in the decades ahead bills like this will become more commonplace as governments try to wrestle back control of what citizens can access
It's possible. Or perhaps Corybn will be pushed out and the Labour party will take a more authoritarian stance again.
And even if Labour get in, they still voted the IP Bill in. So they are pro-surveillance. So overall, I can't be convinced that "things are looking positive" from an individual liberties point of view, in the UK. Is there anywhere it's looking positive?
While I support some more measured analysis to counter the hyperbole, you're making some strong assertions about what this bill will and won't mean, and I don't think you can have any more certainty about these than those people who are assuming a far worse outcome.
Context matters, and given the context of where we are as a country at the moment, how trustworthy our current government has (not) turned out to be, and even where they are in the election cycle - currently heading for being out of office for a decade - not to mention them pushing to leave the European convention on human rights, I'm a lot more concerned about the potential dangers of this bill than I might have been in a different context.
Even if you're right and I'm wrong, this statement seems a bit naive! (with respect):
> the bill will only have the effects that the government has said it will in its press releases.
Edit: I tend to put a lot of stock into analysis put out by the EFF [0]. I think they said it well here:
> If it passes, the Online Safety Bill will be a huge step backwards for global privacy, and democracy itself. Requiring government-approved software in peoples’ messaging services is an awful precedent. If the Online Safety Bill becomes British law, the damage it causes won’t stop at the borders of the U.K.
I think it is great that David Cameron is trying to protect his country.
But, I think the implementation of anything that restricts the internet before content gets to the client will take things down a bad road, which is why similar efforts keep getting struck down in the U.S. When you give the power of restricting communication to the government or even to a contractor for the government, how will that not be abused? You may as well let them open every bit of mail and every parcel and check to see what you are wearing each morning to ensure it is appropriate.
The reason such bills get proposed and passed is because, broadly speaking, they are popular with the electorate or at least not unpopular.
The reason they are not unpopular, the root problem, is because the downsides are perceived as theoretical and in the future whereas the upsides are seen as real and in the present. Put simply the arguments against look like this:
Oppose this bill because the government COULD abuse it and PROBABLY will abuse it in future
i.e. it's all vague arguments about probabilities, and the arguments for it look like this:
Support this bill because it WILL help the fight against terrorists and paedos right now
For better or worse the British government has a relatively high level of trust amongst the British people. There is no British constitution and we can now see how a minority of the population is trying to convince Parliament to override the results of an actual referendum on the grounds that people are too stupid to rule themselves, so must be dictated to by small enclaves of their betters. That attitude is widespread, even if it is kind of dumb - MPs are just ordinary people too, after all, it's not like there's any filter on them beyond voting. But given that the governmental "elite" imposing its own morality and wisdom on the majority is practically a sexual turn-on for non-trivial numbers of voters, this kind of thing shouldn't surprise us.
We can and probably should argue that this trust is misplaced. There's plenty of evidence of that, along with the fact that surveillance is invariably paired with secrecy so it's hard for people to judge whether the government can be trusted to begin with. But that's why such bills happen.
The solution is probably not VPNs. Ultimately in a fight between internet technologists and lawmakers, sufficiently determined lawmakers will always win: China proves this. The UK's lawmakers may not be sufficiently determined but if they are the only solution is to continue making the argument to the electorate that the government cannot be trusted with such powers, and that they won't help fight terrorists and paedos anyway.
Pointing out that Trump now controls the NSA might be a good start.
This is genuinely terrible for people living in the UK who care about their privacy and freedom on the internet.
I do wonder whether this bill was caused by sincere misunderstanding of how tech works on the part of the legislators or, more cynically, a government agenda to crush privacy on the internet. Either way, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
This is genuinely terrible for people living in the UK who care about their privacy and freedom on the internet.
I do wonder whether this bill was caused by sincere misunderstanding of how tech works on the part of the legislators or, more cynically, a government agenda to crush privacy on the internet. Either way, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
I hope this causes websites to start blocking UK users. That would cause VPNs to become more common, undermining the government's enforced logging of internet use.
The problem with these systems is regardless of the efficacy, they are incredibly difficult to dismantle and easy to re-purpose with the stroke of a pen.
And these "tech-savvy" people are dreaming if they think that access to VPN services from the UK will remain legal in the UK, esp. after a naughty person or two is shown to have used one to commission a crime. It won't happen quickly, but #include frog_boiling.h.
While I think you are correct in your prediction, I also think that the UK government can simply outlaw any type of attempts at protecting ones' data, such Tor, VPN ect.
At the very least, they could make a law that would focus most of the energy in hacking those who do try to conceal and protect their privacy. They blindly believe the time trotted motto of "if you're doing nothing wrong, you have nothing to hide."
Besides, don't plenty of despotic countries already ban VPNs around the world, to limited effect? A large, liberal country like the UK banning them would I'm sure drive improvements to VPN protocols to make them even harder for ISPs to detect.
Maybe I'm too hopeful for the future...
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