I'm pretty cynical about both the current and previous government, but it feels like there's been a shift since Labour came into power. Historically this overbearing surveillance has been held back. There was chatter but it was met with resistance. Now it feels like the discussion is being squashed and there are invisible forces at work.
If by some miracle the UK and EU agree on a new Youth Mobility Scheme I'm out of here.
> it feels like there's been a shift since Labour came into power. Historically this overbearing surveillance has been held back.
I had hoped Labour would roll back the anti-protest legislation, snooper's charter, internet censorship and voter ID laws.
After all, it was mostly left-wing climate protesters getting arrested, and young (more left-leaning) voters being prevented from voting.
Turns out no, quite the opposite - if anything, Labour thinks these laws didn't go far enough.
With hindsight, it was naive of me to think the former Director of Public Prosecutions would share my scepticism about expanding the powers of the system the Director of Public Prosecutions stands at the head of.
> Turns out no, quite the opposite - if anything, Labour thinks these laws didn't go far enough.
That's basically how the news, including the BBC, tend to report on these laws. "Some think they are good. Others think they don't go far enough. Experts say risk remains." Never ever do they interview the EFF.
Since Cameron threatened them, they have been much more tightly under the central gov influence.
The editorial team for news has always been full of Tories (including some that either have tried running as MPs, were in the young conservatives etc).
When the left complains about the BBC they mean its news and political coverage.
The right doesn't like the diversity in its comedy shows.
Read this around 2007ish, shocked by what the previous labour government did, so I had zero hope this lot would be any different and it's worse than I thought possible.
As Blair got most institutionalised to the world of politics he became more and more authoritarian. Starmer appears to be listening to Blair who is now even worse than he was as PM.
Labour generally has a "paternalistic authoritarianism" to they way they govern, but this is dialed to 11.
My hope was that Labour would seize the opportunity and roll back the unpopular Tory policies too. It would've been easy points to score for the next general election. Instead, as you say, they just continued with and extended them.
There's a difference between filming the public in public-spaces (which is what the mass CCTV surveillance does) and reading everyone's private messages and every image uploaded from their devices. This is a step chance (if it goes ahead) and doesn't feel very different from what the Chinese State is doing to its citizens.
You refer to CCTV for state mass surveillance, and link to Wikipedia pages but it doesn't appear that you even read them.
> The vast majority of CCTV cameras are not operated by government bodies, but by private individuals or companies, especially to monitor the interiors of shops and businesses. According to 2011 Freedom of Information Act requests, the total number of local government operated CCTV cameras was around 52,000 over the entirety of the UK.
That doesn't make the UK appear to be monitored heavier than other locations when a single city in the US approaches half their total number of cameras.
There is a Wikipedia page on surveillance in Austria, and the US. Not sure what your point is, it's not like most of the west isn't under surveillance or that the UK is more monitored than other countries.
Policymaking in general has very little to do with what most people want. It's mostly a function of power structures and influence networks.
You can sometimes infer what's going on from looking at the before and after conditions, much like how particle physicists infer events from what particles flew out, but not seeing the event itself.
I don't know what happened that the UK got to the state it is in. It's not just a war on "general computing" as someone said here. It feels like a war on the "general population".
"The concept was coined in the early 1990s by political theorist Samuel Francis. He described it as a state where the government performs its basic duty of public safety poorly (allowing "anarchy" among criminals) but creates a web of bureaucracy and surveillance to control the innocent (imposing "tyranny" on the law-abiding)."
Let's not insult the good name of anarchism by comparing it to the State, or worse, comparing it to a failing and quasi-totalitarian State, please.
It's not anarcho-tyranny. This is simply the end game of an ever-growing State that has become bloated, greedy and unaccountable to the public it is supposed to serve.
I am not trying to throw insults here, but (from what I observed) anarchism tends to only have a good name in the eyes of teenagers and other genuinely politically ignorant people allergic to reality.
There's a kind of new aristocratic class developing a broad ideology of anti-populism in power in the UK. The majority of politicians are drawn from backgrounds, or familial backgrounds, in the British news media and get careers there for themselves or their spouses after leaving government. The majority of senior news media personnel, in journalism or management, are drawn from the political establishment in the same inverted way. They organised the Tory leadership elections to install Johnson and later Truss on the belief that low-tax austerity would improve the country and then, facing a continued decline of London relative to the UAE by the policies they championed, coordinated to give Starmer the most complimentary media presence possible from mid 2023 to until the day of the election, conditioned on his continuing their policy platform.
One example of this is how the most recent interview Starmer has been given at the time of writing was to the newly-promoted politics correspondent of Sky News, the spouse of one of his most loyal Labour MPs, formerly an assistant editor of The Spectator, a popular politics magazine that promotes the abolition of inheritance tax, reductions in the age of consent, the introduction of qualified immunity from war crimes for the armed forces, the introduction of civil forfeiture, the return of the death penalty and holocaust denial. Unless an outside force compels other factions in UK politics to act, the media faction will likely replace Starmer with some other NEC loyalist who avoids flubbing line delivery on camera sometime this year. After all, the Starmer government has set a record in UK politics for the fastest decline in polling numbers and Starmer has personally put out the message in news briefings that removing him from office in 2026 would be a grave mistake for the party.
I don't presume to know the reasons. I want to believe that "leaders" just have their own misguided view as to what is "good for the country". That is, no malice, just gross incompetence. Maybe I'm naive. I don't know.
What I do know and is more and more apparent to me, is that the current systems of world relating to governance, here in the UK, no longer work. Not fit for purpose. Broken beyond repair. Scary.
Johnson and Starmer are from a "broad ideology of anti-populism"?
Utter nonsense. They are the very definition of populism. Johnson appealing to the hoi polloi with the wishful thinking of Brexit, Starmer running his government on opinion polls rather than pragmatism and a modicum of consistency, to the point of turning Labour into Tory-lite selling its soul just to capture a little more mind share, but effectively becoming hateful for both sides.
> It starts with child abuse material, because who’s going to defend not catching that?
After the recent X CSAM generation arguments and the potential for X to get blocked in the UK, it seems like more people than I expected will defend it.
There were people on HN defending it. Although I'm sure they're 99% defending Musk, and only because they reflexively jump into defense mode any time one of his companies' wrongdoing is discussed. If it were Adobe's or Microsoft's products generating CSAM, you wouldn't hear a peep out of them
I will defend absolute freedom of all speech by Musk and against Musk. By Adobe and against Adobe. My Microsoft and against Microsoft. By you and against you. By me and against me. Unlike many who merely theorize about this from their armchairs, I've lived in a place without free speech and I know what that leads to, how fast, and how hard it is to get out of that hole. There is no such thing as "let's just have a little less freedom of speech". It either exists or very quickly it does not.
Should it be legal to (1) create and (2) distribute an AI generated sexual image of a (1) 18 year old, (2) 12 year old? (In both cases without their consent.)
Unbelievable. People pretending not to understand something stated very clearly just to insult someone they don’t even know. Is this where society is now?
>>> If it were Adobe's or Microsoft's products generating CSAM, you wouldn't hear a peep out of them
>> I will defend absolute freedom of all speech by Musk [...] By Adobe [...] [B]y Microsoft
Your support of the "absolute freedom" of "all speech" is very clear. If you somehow didn't mean the words you chose, then the lack of clarity is on you, and needs no pretense on my part.
X installs went UP the in UK when the gov said "X allows you to generate child porn, lets block it". Thousands of brits go "free child porn on X better check it out"
By lying about their motives, of course. The (other) authoritarians are doing the same things but they do it for self-serving reasons as opposed to "for the children", to "fight disinformation, hate speech, organized crime, terrorism", etc.
That's only a problem for communication between UK and non-UK users. You can still offer communication services for UK users, just disable all encryption, fulfill other Ofcom requirements, and display a large red "UK UNSAFE VERSION" banner on all windows.
They do what they've been doing. Get another law passed, that gives them what they want. Thats the best part of having a parliament, you just pass new laws
Nobody voted for this.
I'm pretty cynical about both the current and previous government, but it feels like there's been a shift since Labour came into power. Historically this overbearing surveillance has been held back. There was chatter but it was met with resistance. Now it feels like the discussion is being squashed and there are invisible forces at work.
If by some miracle the UK and EU agree on a new Youth Mobility Scheme I'm out of here.
> it feels like there's been a shift since Labour came into power. Historically this overbearing surveillance has been held back.
I had hoped Labour would roll back the anti-protest legislation, snooper's charter, internet censorship and voter ID laws.
After all, it was mostly left-wing climate protesters getting arrested, and young (more left-leaning) voters being prevented from voting.
Turns out no, quite the opposite - if anything, Labour thinks these laws didn't go far enough.
With hindsight, it was naive of me to think the former Director of Public Prosecutions would share my scepticism about expanding the powers of the system the Director of Public Prosecutions stands at the head of.
> Turns out no, quite the opposite - if anything, Labour thinks these laws didn't go far enough.
That's basically how the news, including the BBC, tend to report on these laws. "Some think they are good. Others think they don't go far enough. Experts say risk remains." Never ever do they interview the EFF.
The BBC was always pretty establishment, but now they're very afraid of seeming “left wing”, and so we get this…
Since Cameron threatened them, they have been much more tightly under the central gov influence.
The editorial team for news has always been full of Tories (including some that either have tried running as MPs, were in the young conservatives etc).
When the left complains about the BBC they mean its news and political coverage.
The right doesn't like the diversity in its comedy shows.
These are two pretty different concerns.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Taking-Liberties-Chris-Atkins/dp/19...
Read this around 2007ish, shocked by what the previous labour government did, so I had zero hope this lot would be any different and it's worse than I thought possible.
As Blair got most institutionalised to the world of politics he became more and more authoritarian. Starmer appears to be listening to Blair who is now even worse than he was as PM.
Labour generally has a "paternalistic authoritarianism" to they way they govern, but this is dialed to 11.
My hope was that Labour would seize the opportunity and roll back the unpopular Tory policies too. It would've been easy points to score for the next general election. Instead, as you say, they just continued with and extended them.
People still believe the faces on the telly ate in charge.
So who pressured them?
> After all, it was mostly left-wing climate protesters getting arrested, and young (more left-leaning) voters being prevented from voting
Quite a mistake to think politicians would act to better anyone's lives, including those who helped elect them.
Labour purged pretty much everyone on the left.
>If by some miracle the UK and EU agree on a new Youth Mobility Scheme I'm out of here.
https://home-affairs.ec.europa.eu/policies/migration-and-asy...
Thank you, I'll look into it.
UK isn’t an EU member state.
That's the entire point of the EU Blue Card. From the linked website (emphasis mine):
> An EU Blue Card gives highly-qualified workers from outside the EU the opportunity to live and work in an EU Member State...
> Historically this overbearing surveillance has been held back.
That‘s not my impression at all about the UK. They are known for mass CCTV surveillance since more than a decade. There’s even a wikipedia page for it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_surveillance_in_the_Unite...
There's a difference between filming the public in public-spaces (which is what the mass CCTV surveillance does) and reading everyone's private messages and every image uploaded from their devices. This is a step chance (if it goes ahead) and doesn't feel very different from what the Chinese State is doing to its citizens.
I agree. But I'm saying is that the current mass surveillance is already overreaching as-is.
You refer to CCTV for state mass surveillance, and link to Wikipedia pages but it doesn't appear that you even read them.
> The vast majority of CCTV cameras are not operated by government bodies, but by private individuals or companies, especially to monitor the interiors of shops and businesses. According to 2011 Freedom of Information Act requests, the total number of local government operated CCTV cameras was around 52,000 over the entirety of the UK.
The NYPD alone had 18k back in 2018.
https://securitytoday.com/articles/2018/10/29/new-surveillan...
That doesn't make the UK appear to be monitored heavier than other locations when a single city in the US approaches half their total number of cameras.
> There’s even a wikipedia page for it
There is a Wikipedia page on surveillance in Austria, and the US. Not sure what your point is, it's not like most of the west isn't under surveillance or that the UK is more monitored than other countries.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_surveillance_in_the_Unite...
Or are you implying that Germany doesn't have any surveillance because it doesn't have a dedicated English Wikipedia page?
There is a lot of rhetoric aimed at the UK, and I'm not saying it's great, but there is a lot of convenient omission on other countries actions.
> Now it feels like the discussion is being squashed and there are invisible forces at work.
Hanlon's razor applies here. The truth is most people simply don't care because they don't understand, and don't care to understand.
Policymaking in general has very little to do with what most people want. It's mostly a function of power structures and influence networks.
You can sometimes infer what's going on from looking at the before and after conditions, much like how particle physicists infer events from what particles flew out, but not seeing the event itself.
> Nobody voted for this.
Lol. That's how democracy (doesn't) works. The elected people only care about the wishes of the NGO that pushed them in power.
Better luck next time.
I don't know what happened that the UK got to the state it is in. It's not just a war on "general computing" as someone said here. It feels like a war on the "general population".
A term I learnt recently:
"Anarcho-Tyranny"
From Gemini:
"The concept was coined in the early 1990s by political theorist Samuel Francis. He described it as a state where the government performs its basic duty of public safety poorly (allowing "anarchy" among criminals) but creates a web of bureaucracy and surveillance to control the innocent (imposing "tyranny" on the law-abiding)."
This is exactly I how feel.
Let's not insult the good name of anarchism by comparing it to the State, or worse, comparing it to a failing and quasi-totalitarian State, please.
It's not anarcho-tyranny. This is simply the end game of an ever-growing State that has become bloated, greedy and unaccountable to the public it is supposed to serve.
> Let's not insult the good name of anarchism
I am not trying to throw insults here, but (from what I observed) anarchism tends to only have a good name in the eyes of teenagers and other genuinely politically ignorant people allergic to reality.
There's a kind of new aristocratic class developing a broad ideology of anti-populism in power in the UK. The majority of politicians are drawn from backgrounds, or familial backgrounds, in the British news media and get careers there for themselves or their spouses after leaving government. The majority of senior news media personnel, in journalism or management, are drawn from the political establishment in the same inverted way. They organised the Tory leadership elections to install Johnson and later Truss on the belief that low-tax austerity would improve the country and then, facing a continued decline of London relative to the UAE by the policies they championed, coordinated to give Starmer the most complimentary media presence possible from mid 2023 to until the day of the election, conditioned on his continuing their policy platform.
One example of this is how the most recent interview Starmer has been given at the time of writing was to the newly-promoted politics correspondent of Sky News, the spouse of one of his most loyal Labour MPs, formerly an assistant editor of The Spectator, a popular politics magazine that promotes the abolition of inheritance tax, reductions in the age of consent, the introduction of qualified immunity from war crimes for the armed forces, the introduction of civil forfeiture, the return of the death penalty and holocaust denial. Unless an outside force compels other factions in UK politics to act, the media faction will likely replace Starmer with some other NEC loyalist who avoids flubbing line delivery on camera sometime this year. After all, the Starmer government has set a record in UK politics for the fastest decline in polling numbers and Starmer has personally put out the message in news briefings that removing him from office in 2026 would be a grave mistake for the party.
I don't presume to know the reasons. I want to believe that "leaders" just have their own misguided view as to what is "good for the country". That is, no malice, just gross incompetence. Maybe I'm naive. I don't know.
What I do know and is more and more apparent to me, is that the current systems of world relating to governance, here in the UK, no longer work. Not fit for purpose. Broken beyond repair. Scary.
Johnson and Starmer are from a "broad ideology of anti-populism"?
Utter nonsense. They are the very definition of populism. Johnson appealing to the hoi polloi with the wishful thinking of Brexit, Starmer running his government on opinion polls rather than pragmatism and a modicum of consistency, to the point of turning Labour into Tory-lite selling its soul just to capture a little more mind share, but effectively becoming hateful for both sides.
Compare the appearances and the policies, if you like.
> It starts with child abuse material, because who’s going to defend not catching that?
After the recent X CSAM generation arguments and the potential for X to get blocked in the UK, it seems like more people than I expected will defend it.
There were people on HN defending it. Although I'm sure they're 99% defending Musk, and only because they reflexively jump into defense mode any time one of his companies' wrongdoing is discussed. If it were Adobe's or Microsoft's products generating CSAM, you wouldn't hear a peep out of them
I will defend absolute freedom of all speech by Musk and against Musk. By Adobe and against Adobe. My Microsoft and against Microsoft. By you and against you. By me and against me. Unlike many who merely theorize about this from their armchairs, I've lived in a place without free speech and I know what that leads to, how fast, and how hard it is to get out of that hole. There is no such thing as "let's just have a little less freedom of speech". It either exists or very quickly it does not.
You should be explicit here;
Should it be legal to (1) create and (2) distribute an AI generated sexual image of a (1) 18 year old, (2) 12 year old? (In both cases without their consent.)
What about a real photograph?
Sexual abuse (of adults and of children) is abhorrent, illegal, and should remain so. A number cannot be illegal.
> A number cannot be illegal.
Why equivocate? Go ahead and own it, tell us what you think about AI-generated CSAM using plain language.
gp had helpfully numbered questions that you could have said yes/no to.
Unbelievable. Caping pedophelia on main - no throw-away. Is this were society is now?
About as unbelievable as electing one president.
Unbelievable. People pretending not to understand something stated very clearly just to insult someone they don’t even know. Is this where society is now?
>>> If it were Adobe's or Microsoft's products generating CSAM, you wouldn't hear a peep out of them
>> I will defend absolute freedom of all speech by Musk [...] By Adobe [...] [B]y Microsoft
Your support of the "absolute freedom" of "all speech" is very clear. If you somehow didn't mean the words you chose, then the lack of clarity is on you, and needs no pretense on my part.
The same pretext has been deployed in Australia as well. I'm not sure if the Carney government will also try.
I don't think anyone is defending it. It's all astroturf.
> After the recent X CSAM generation arguments
X installs went UP the in UK when the gov said "X allows you to generate child porn, lets block it". Thousands of brits go "free child porn on X better check it out"
How does the government seek to differentiate itself from authoritarian regimes?
They don't. Why would they?
By lying about their motives, of course. The (other) authoritarians are doing the same things but they do it for self-serving reasons as opposed to "for the children", to "fight disinformation, hate speech, organized crime, terrorism", etc.
That's only a problem for communication between UK and non-UK users. You can still offer communication services for UK users, just disable all encryption, fulfill other Ofcom requirements, and display a large red "UK UNSAFE VERSION" banner on all windows.
Wanna bet that the next day a new law will be passed making that marking illegal? :)
The war on general computing is ramping up.
What are Ofcom realistically going to do when providers refuse to comply?
We've seen the X/CSAM issue this week and both the government and regulator are clearly unwilling to stand up to American big-tech.
The next step is the National Firewall and then the VPN ban.
Royal Security Firewall*
The King’s Gate.
The Net Curtain
The Tower of London.
They do what they've been doing. Get another law passed, that gives them what they want. Thats the best part of having a parliament, you just pass new laws
For a while now traveling to the UK should be treated like visiting China or similar.
Leave your devices at home and expect zero privacy rights.
The Land of the Free is similarly unwelcoming at its borders.
https://www.cbp.gov/travel/cbp-search-authority/border-searc...
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c1dz0g2ykpeo.amp
It’s almost like there’s a war on, or something, the way these major powers are acting…
Oh, has it been six months already (… since their last attempt)
All the "GPG is unsafe" posers, watch them pull out GPG the second a government mandates their comms backdoored.